Robin Becker: Brains: A Zombie Memoir

Lucy put her chin on her knees and wrapped her arms around her shins. “I can’t do this,” she said to the floor.

“Can’t do what?”

“We’ve got a real problem here, Jack,” she whispered. Her eyes had a surprised look about them, round and alert, the eyebrows high on her forehead and plucked to a thin arch. “In a few hours, you’re going to be a zombie. And I’m either going to be devoured by you or else bitten and turned into a zombie myself. At the very least I’ll be a widow.” She paused and cocked her head to one side. “But if you join the ranks of the undead,” she continued, placing a finger on her lips, “and I manage to escape unharmed and survive as a human, would I be a widow then? Technically speaking, I mean. Is there a word yet for that relationship?”

“Hmmm, it’s thorny. I couldn’t say. Language doesn’t evolve that quickly. Or does it? These are the most extenuating of circumstances and I’m sure future cunning linguists will have a field day with the zombie-related lexicon, orthography, neologisms, what have you.”

A rat scurried in the corner. Death kept knocking on the door.

Every child’s fear of the dark is justified. There is a monster hiding under your bed.

In our collective imagination, the babysitter’s phone rings: “Get out!” we yell at her. “He’s in the house!”

“The best option,” I continued, “is to kill myself before I die, or you could kill me, whichever, so you could escape.”

“How?”

“Slit my wrists, maybe. There’s got to be a sharp implement around here somewhere. Or you could run the rake over my face. Then use me as a shield. Hold me in front of you, if I’m not too heavy. Conjure your superhuman strength. Pretend you’re a mother lifting a Volkswagen off her kids. The zombies will fall upon me in an eating frenzy and you run, Lucy, you run to the hills. Run for your life.”

“You’re forgetting about your brain,” Lucy said. “We have to destroy your brain or else you’ll just be a half-eaten zombie. Unless they eat all of you and you disappear. Poof. No more Jack.”

“Plus, I’m not quite sure I want to die.” I lay down. I couldn’t feel my extremities and I’d never been hotter. I took off my glasses and pressed my cheek to the cool concrete. The door was holding, but barely. Zombies would be in our sanctuary soon-either me or the ones at the top of the stairs.

“What if being undead is better than death itself?” I asked, and closed my eyes.

That’s the last thing I remember of my human life. Resting my head on the soothing concrete, Lucy’s hand stroking my hair. The ground smelled like dirt, must, mold, and gasoline. I smelled like Beethoven decomposing.

“Don’t eat me, Jack,” Lucy said from a great distance. “Don’t you dare eat me.”

OH, THE HUNGER. So hungry. Waking up, my body was in flames. A human torch. A burning man. The all-consuming fires of hell. As in Dante’s Inferno. As in eternal damnation. You can stop, drop, and roll all you want, there’s no putting out this blaze.

Cognitive function was minimal. At first. Brain turning to mashed potatoes. Body falling to pieces…leprous leprosy. Leper, I was. Leper, I still am.

Upstairs, a noise. Some part of my mind registered: dog. Fluffy. Must go, stumble, waddle, traipse like the Mummy, follow the whimper. I stopped in our conjugal bathroom and stared at my reflection. Jonesing for flesh, manic for meat, I scribbled letters on the mirror with my finger. Inscription, graphomania. The first hint of my sentience.

This is what I wrote: Brains!

Fluffy was Lucy’s dog. A damn toy poodle. I ate her. She was very funny. I mean furry. Why did I write funny? Furry. Or fury. I ate her in a funny furry fury. There was little meat on Fluffy. Tiny brain. The fluffy white fur of Fluffy fell on the bedroom carpet and I learned: In a pinch, any meat will suffice.

When empty, my stomach is a pit of burning coals; every muscle is tearing apart and my tendons are eaten by wolves, my liver chewed up like the liver of Prometheus.

The needle and the damage done.

Dear God, where was my Lucy?

I walked outside and stood at the end of the driveway. Our modest suburban street had been transformed into a Japanese monster movie. Humans ran like B-movie extras, like people running from an alien attack or a blitzkrieg, looking over their shoulders at Armageddon.

Cars screeched out of driveways and smashed into telephone poles and each other, going nowhere. Grandmas and children were left trapped inside SUVs and minivans, staring at the disaster through the windows like they were on a drive-thru safari, looking for the lions.

And chasing them all, the cause of their terror: me.

The old lady from next door ran by in her house slippers. In one hand she wielded a spatula, in the other kitchen shears. “Jack!” she cried when she saw me. “Not you too!”

Lucy and I had hated the biddy. She was the kind of anal-retentive shrew who brought out the leaf blower for one lousy leaf. Once, when Fluffy accidentally crapped in her yard, she picked up his poo and threw it over the fence like a monkey at the zoo.

I grabbed her wrinkly elbow and bit into her arm. She hit me over the head with the spatula as if I were a pancake she wanted to flatten. I didn’t even flinch.

Another zombie moved in and bit the back of her neck, then another and another, until she was surrounded. I stepped away from the group; the old bitch’s arms were over her head like someone bobbing in deep water. Not waving, but drowning. Her utensils fell to the ground.

A young mother ran toward me, clutching her baby to her breast. Every evening as Lucy and I sat on the couch watching Brian Williams, this woman power-walked past our picture window. We didn’t know her name or which house she lived in, but she’d become a fixture in our lives, as reliable as the evening news and David Letterman.

I reached out and snatched the baby from her as she powered by; Mama fell to her knees.

“Please,” she pleaded. “Not the baby.”

Oh, the melodrama. I clutched the baby by its arms, shaking it. I bared my teeth, drooling like Grendel over a virgin sacrifice.

“Mooooaaah!” I roared.

The baby’s face was scrunched up, its eyes squeezed shut. It was utterly helpless. Defenseless. Fay Wray in the arms of King Kong, as tender and juicy as veal.

The need to feed grew within me. It was monumental, rivaling the needs of Michael Jackson, Adolf Hitler, Barbra Streisand, Henry VIII, and King Tut…combined. I was a practical joke played by Mother Nature.

Can a being with infinite desire ever be sated?

I opened my mouth as wide as I could, a circus geek with his chicken, Ozzy Osbourne with his bat.

“No!” Mama sobbed and plunged a knitting needle into my forearm.

The needle stuck out like I was a voodoo doll. I dropped the infant and Mama scooped her child up and cradled it. Baby pulled at Mother’s shirt, exposing a milky expanse of swollen breast. I understood its hunger. Mama turned tail and took off, dodging zombies like a running back, baby tucked under her arm like a football.

I pulled the needle out and walked toward the house. Behind me, I heard screams and moans, teeth crunching bones. The sounds of civilization coming to an end.

ZOMBIES DON’T SLEEP. I wandered the house looking for Lucy, half afraid I would find her and eat her, more afraid I already had. I left messages for her in the furniture’s dust, scrawled a letter on the dry-erase board in the kitchen, stuck Post-it notes on the walls of our bedroom. They all said the same thing: Forgive me, Lucy, for being a monster.

I might have spent hours or days walking from room to room. I couldn’t tell anymore. Time meant nothing. The past and the future no longer existed. The present was the only thing that felt real.