Robin Becker: Brains: A Zombie Memoir

“Just take your time and aim, Bobby. He ain’t going nowhere in a hurry.”

I felt another sting at the site of my neighbor’s bite. I fell down and moaned.

“That time I got ’im for sure.”

“Don’t get cocky. It’s best to check your kill, make sure it’s dead. Just like you do with a deer.”

“Did you hear him though?”

“Sounded damn-near human.”

“I don’t like this one. Gives me the creeps.”

“More creeps than the others? You are a piece of work, Bobby. Grow some balls, why dontcha? Now go finish the job. Put that stench down for good.”

I crawled away, elbow over elbow, and hid in a stand of corn. I took out the only weapons I had: my notebook and pen.

Help me, Bobby, I wrote. Spare me.

The letters were shaky and the pen strokes thin; it looked like it was written by a child.

Bobby rustled through the stalks.

“Hurry up,” his comrades yelled. “There’s another group on the horizon.”

With my head down, not daring to look young Bobby in the eye for fear I’d attack, I held up the paper.

“Holy shit,” Bobby said. “What are you?”

Gunshots rang out from another part of the field.

“Bobby!” they called. “What’s going on?”

I cradled my head in my arms, protecting it, supplicating before this farm boy. Bobby shot the ground next to me.

“Got ’im!” he yelled as he ran off.

Thank you, Bobby, child of the corn. I owe you my life.

THE HIGHWAY WAS littered with abandoned vehicles. A traffic jam without road ragers shouting into cell phones. The grass was yellow and brown, scorched by the sun. The crops were dry and neglected.

For breakfast I veered into the trees and found a rabbit’s nest. The mother and her five bunnies screamed as I bit into them. The sound was unexpected, as piercing and angry as the cry of a newborn stuffed in a trash can at prom. The rabbits’ brains were small, their intestines filled with hard pellets like Skittles. I stored a foot in my pocket for luck.

Still hungry, I shuffled back to the highway.

The dead walked with me, wobbling like newly birthed calves, bumper-car zombies going nowhere. The ratio, Blake called it. Hamster wheels within hamster wheels.

The bullet holes in my back, the bite on my shoulder…it occurred to me that if I stopped the decay, I could escape the grave, live forever.

A Hummer drove down the highway, tearing through the zombie throng like Moses parting a Red Sea of bloody corpses.

The driver barely slowed down; he knocked over the walking dead as if they were bowling pins and he was going for a perfect game. I stepped out of the way and called out to the others to do the same.

“Mmoohhhaaa. Oooaaahhh!” I cried. Pathetic. My lips barely parted and my mouth felt like a crawfish castle-dry and full of mud. I was stuck in a body that would not obey me. A stroke victim, I was locked in. A rotting portable prison.

A walking putrefying metaphor.

I, Robot.

I, Zombie.

And, oh, those silly zombies. Letting themselves be run over like skunks and possum. And then worse, picking themselves back up afterward, maimed but mobile. Resurrected roadkill. The tenacity of the undead. Their blind stupidity. A teenage zombette still wearing her soccer uniform, her legs were crushed by the Hummer’s tires. That didn’t stop her, however. She sprang back up like one of the Hydra’s heads and continued forward on those flattened legs, her red braids and braces gleaming. She was damn near perky.

As the vehicle passed me, I peered into the windows. Inside was a nuclear family-mom, dad, two girls, and a boy. Even a dog-some kind of terrier yapping away, its nose and paws pressed against the glass. The mother, a ponytailed blonde in a pink yoga outfit, stared back at me. We made eye contact and I flashed her the peace sign and grinned, dislodging a clump of crust in the corner of my mouth. The woman put her hand to her throat and in that instant, I felt known. Understood. My sentience was acknowledged by another thinking being. And then they were gone, hightailing it down the highway, crashing into parked cars and catatonic zombies.

I was even lonelier after that brief connection. Like Orestes or Princess Di, I was chased by demons both real and imagined. I needed a companion. I’d have taken Lilith if Eve was unavailable, but I preferred Eve. More compliant, made from my rib. Except for that apple thing, Eve would be perfect.

THE DEAD WALK at a snail’s pace, complete with trails of slime. At the rate I was going, I’d decompose before reaching Chicago and finding Stein. A pickup truck cruised down the road, picking off members of the horde at random. When it stopped, the driver bending down to retrieve something from the floor-a plug of chaw, no doubt-and his passenger reloading, I acted.

Climbing in was an effort. My joints were stiff with rigor mortis. I lay down between a spare tire and a tool case. Empty beer cans and shotgun shells rattled around me and a gun rack loomed above. I covered myself with a blue tarp.

In life, I wouldn’t have looked twice at these men. They were large and one wore an oversized T-shirt advertising Pepsi. Both had on NASCAR ball caps.

The only Homer they knew was Simpson; their favorite beer was Bud Light. Their idea of an art film was The Shawshank Redemption and their wives collected Precious Moments figurines. What could I possibly talk about with them? The weather?

It was all I could do not to eat them.

“That one over there is almost pretty,” one said.

“Shoot her!”

“Now hold on a minute. She looks recently turned-probably still warm inside there. Fresh.”

“You ain’t never tried that, have you?”

“Screwing a zombie? Hell no!”

“But you’ve thought about it?”

“It’s crossed my mind. I suppose you’d have to tie her up first and gag her, or cover her whole head with something to protect yourself. Like a Wal-Mart bag maybe. Or a catcher’s mask. Then I guess you could just do it regular.”

“You are one sick fuck, Earl.”

“On second thought, doggy-style might be the safest bet.”

“I’m gonna pretend I didn’t hear that.”

There was a shotgun blast.

“Got her!” Earl said.

“Good shot. Right in the head.”

“Kind of seems like a waste though.”

“She did look like your wife.” He laughed.

“That ain’t funny. My wife is one of ’em.”

Poor man. The title of his life’s movie? I Married a Zombie Bitch.

The men rolled up their windows and the truck picked up speed. Hidden under my tarp, I exercised self-control. Mindful restraint.

Denying my instincts, displaying the discipline of an ascetic monk, I took out my affirmation journal.

This is what I wrote:

A To-Not-Do List

Do not smash the back window and attack the driver.

Do not climb on top of the cab and slap your bloody hand on the windshield.

Do not press your face against the glass and bare your teeth at Earl.

Do not eat the rednecks.

Oh, but their dull stupid brains. I reckon they’re tasty.

WE DROVE ALL night through the cornfields of the Midwest. Lying on my back, I peeked out of the tarp and up at the stars. Amazingly, they were still there.

I may have prayed. If I believed in God I would have, but I was raised an atheist.

“God was wounded during World War One,” my father taught me, “and died in the gas chambers of the Holocaust. Don’t believe any of that supernatural mumbo-jumbo.”

My paternal grandparents were wealthy Jewish doctors who fled the Nazis in 1937. My grandmother was the first woman to graduate from the University of Vienna. When they arrived in America, they had a strongbox full of diamonds and identification papers. They had money tucked away in a Swiss bank account. And they had their lives and their children by the hand.