Robin Becker: Brains: A Zombie Memoir

They left their drapes and Turkish rugs, pots and pans, real estate and religion to the Nazis. For all I know, Hitler himself slept in their oak four-poster bed underneath the feather duvet and on top of the dozens of pillows Oma kept fluffed and spotless. Oma and Opa never went back to Vienna, but Oma often talked about what they left behind.

Her stories ended the same way every time: “And that, kleine Jack, is how the Boorsteins became the Barneses.”

I have Viennese property I could claim. There’s an apartment building and a house. A pea patch and some vacant lots. Lucy begged me to take her to my ancestral home for our honeymoon, but I refused.

“Too painful?” she asked.

“Too boring,” I lied.

We honeymooned in the Caribbean instead, where Lucy wore a bikini and ran into the ocean, her heels almost touching the crescent moons of her bottom. She looked over her shoulder at me and I chased after her, grabbing her by the waist and kissing her; she was meatier then and I adored her.

“Float like you’re dead,” she’d said, treading water.

I rolled face-first into the sea, my arms splayed out, my legs hanging straight down. Lucy jumped on, straddling me piggyback style.

I dove underwater then, sunken with the weight of my wife. I could hear her giggling above me and I swam as hard as I could, breaking the surface like a dolphin, Lucy riding me like a nymph.

If only Lucy were with me as the truck bounced along. She would have made a child’s game out of our concealment. Hide and Seek or Kick the Can.

Lightning flashed and it started to rain. I pulled the tarp over my head, my fingers leaving behind a thick coat of crud, sticky as glue.

Fat raindrops hit the tarp; each one sounded like a nail pounding me deeper into my coffin.

THE TRUCK STOPPED at a TA Travel Center in the middle of that godforsaken, corn-infested state. It was morning, the sky was clear, and the area appeared to be free of zombies. Humans milled about, filling up their gas tanks, gathering food and drink, exchanging information and gossip. No money changed hands, indicating a massive breakdown in the economy as well as society as a whole. Nothing is more integral to America than the accumulation of wealth. And if no one paid for anything, no one made a profit.

In the wake of the Zombie Apocalypse, humanity had gone commie. Zombie Joe McCarthy must be scratching at the walls of his crypt.

As soon as Earl and the driver went inside the truck stop, I peered over the top of the bed. Seeing no one in the immediate vicinity, I climbed out.

My stomach was a vast and empty black hole.

I lumbered from car to car, hiding behind wheels and trunks, pretending to be an injured soldier in a Vietnam War movie. Charlie got my shoulder, I radioed in. Turned it into pork for his stir-fry.

I watched the humans through the windows of the truck stop. Clustered in groups, dispensing soda from the fountain, unwrapping Snickers bars, leafing through Field and Stream. The women fondled molded plastic angels, slipping them into their purses. More for protection than decoration, I imagined. Oh, Archangel Michael, made in China, save me from the vampiric undead; end this eternal waking nightmare.

Inside the curly heads of those ladies were their brains: beautiful, bountiful, bubbly, bewitching, bedazzling brains.

I was thirteen years old again, beholding my first pair of boobs, only this longing was beyond sexual. Swelling to godlike proportions, my desire eclipsed the sun.

I shuffled past a white El Dorado tucked in the far side of the lot and my shoulder tingled. There was movement in the front seat. I looked in and there she sat, a young woman no more than twenty-five, staring back at me with eyes so large and full of fright the irises had disappeared.

What she was doing in the parking lot alone, I’ll never know. Nor do I care.

I tried the handle. Locked. She scrunched down in her seat and put her hands over her head. Not a fighter, this one. More like an ostrich. I wondered where her protector was. Undoubtedly she had one, a pretty woman like her.

I used to look at women and see hips and ass, hair and snatch. How pedestrian that seems now. Leave procreation to the living. I’ll take gray matter.

Then I thought: Don’t eat the whole thing, Jack. Bite her, just enough for a snack. Quell the riotous beast within, infect her with the virus, and take her for your mate. Your Eve.

She was pale, alabaster even, with short dark hair cut into Louise Brooks bangs. I pointed at her and she put her hand over her mouth. With her wide, terrified eyes and the French tips on her nails, she looked like a 1950s scream queen.

I scanned the area for a weapon and located a tire iron. What else? So far, my postlife had been cinematic, a travesty of a zombie movie, with the literary addition of a tragic and self-conscious hero, a misunderstood creature with which to sympathize. Of course there’d be a handy weapon to help him!

And don’t feel guilty for your empathy. You’re supposed to identify with me, causing you to question what it means to be human and moral-and to be grateful for your own miserable lot in life. So go ahead and sympathize. Construct me as the “other.”

Let me be your monster.

I grabbed the tire iron with both hands, climbed onto the hood of the car, and raised the tool over my head. At the pinnacle of the arc, the muscles in my rotten shoulder shifted, a chunk of meat detached, and my grip slipped. I tottered. Human voices drifted from around the corner. Eve stared at me, her expression a mixture of terror and fascination, attraction and repulsion. She looked, above all else, curious. As for me, I felt sublime.

I brought the tire iron down and the windshield buckled and cracked in such a way that I was able to rip it out in one piece. I had no idea that was how windshields were constructed. I expected something much more theatrical, the sound of glass shattering into a million pieces, not a muted thunk of splintered plastic.

But no matter. Either way I would have my woman.

Eve screamed as she scrambled for the door. I wish I could say I was too fast for her, but I wasn’t. We both played our parts well. She was the petrified and bumbling victim; I was the ruthless pursuer. Yawn.

“Don’t,” she said when I grabbed her by the arm. “I’m pregnant.”

I looked closely at Eve’s stomach. She was five or six months along. Showing, but not huge.

Jackpot! And baby makes three. I’d have a brand-new family and a shot at happiness.

Then Eve said she was starving and hadn’t had a bite in a while. So I bit her.

Just kidding. At least I have my sense of humor.

OH, BUT I did bite her. On the thigh. And her thigh was the fartiest of French cheeses, the briniest of anchovies. There was the thinnest layer of fat surrounding her muscle-clearly she had been a runner or tennis player-and it was enough to satisfy me. For the time being.

I chose the thigh for several reasons. First, it was firm yet still jiggly, the kind of thigh that looks good in short shorts. And I’ve always preferred the dark meat.

Second, a bite on the thigh would be out of sight. Even though my penis is as gangrenous as the rest of my extremities and sexual desire is but a dim memory, I still like to look at an attractive woman.

My final reason was Darwinian: I wanted to give Eve just a flesh wound, avoiding tendons and bones so she would have an advantage in our struggle for survival. When running from humans with guns or chasing humans with brains, every asset counts.

After the bite, I dragged Eve by her hair across the parking lot and toward a Mickey D’s. Perfectly Neanderthal, I know, but desperate times…

We huddled in the restaurant’s kitchen. It smelled greasy, repugnant. I never liked fast food as a human. That was for the obese proletariat. Let them have their Big Macs and heart attacks. I ate endive and goat cheese. All the same, there I was, scrunched under a fryer: hunted, haunted, and hungry.