Aleksandar Hemon - The Making of Zombie Wars

“The cat?” Janet turned to look out the windshield at a winter-exhausted squirrel that froze halfway up a tree.

“Curiosity didn’t kill the cat. It was Ana’s crazy husband,” Stagger said, and Alma giggled. She was a little patient, Joshua thought, growing up to be a very big one.

The squirrel spiraled speedily around the tree trunk, first down, then up, as if remembering something important — it must have been the absence of the cat, the gratuitous freedom. Janet started slamming the steering wheel with the palms of her hands. Many years ago, during an apocalyptic teenage tantrum, she’d smacked Joshua’s aquarium with a soup ladle, then proceeded to crush with her foot the tropical little fish flapping on the floor.

“What is it with you people!?” she hollered. “Why is every single man in my life a fucking idiot? Why can’t you just quietly go about ruining your life without getting me involved? I don’t want to deal with your dead goddamn cat in the middle of my fucking separation!”

She pounded at the steering wheel with terrifying fury, the SUV shaking. When she stopped, the soundless aftermath was even more terrifying.

“Okay,” Janet whispered. “Everybody out.”

Alma opened the door and stepped out instantly, as if she’d been waiting for the command all along. Stagger had a hard time getting out, what with his broken arm, but Alma helped him. Joshua stored away the weirdness of their quickie friendship for a future better understanding.

“Thank you for the pie, ma’am!” Stagger said.

“You’re welcome,” Janet said. “Should’ve poisoned it.”

The backseat was covered with pie debris. Joshua was reluctant to leave the car, because he didn’t want to be outside, exposed. At some point in human history, someone somewhere thought of making rhubarb pie. How does humanity arrive at such decisions? If there is no God, who made the first rhubarb pie? Mom nodded understandingly, approving of Janet’s instructions. Back in their adolescence, Janet and Joshua had conducted long debates trying to determine which one of them had been better loved and understood by their mother. In the end, they split the difference: Joshua had been better loved and Janet better understood.

“Out. All of you. Get out,” Janet repeated.

“Janet!” Mom pleaded. Ana opened the door and stepped out.

“Enjoy rest of your day,” Ana said, unsarcastically. She was hard to hurt, Joshua realized, because she must’ve been hurt hard. It was then that he recognized that what happened between them couldn’t just be about sex. She was right: the transaction had not been completed. There was more.

“You too, Rachel! Get the hell out,” Janet barked.

Joshua still could not move, but Ana held on to the door handle, keeping it open for him, and he followed her out.

“Out, Rachel!”

Mom got out, grunting. Stagger offered his broken hand to help her descend from the SUV’s high step. The moment she landed back on earth, Mom turned to Joshua and gave him a scolding look — many years ago, that look would’ve meant no movies for the rest of the school year. Janet shifted into gear and drove away.

“Janet did it again,” Joshua said.

“Oh no, Joshua Levin, you did it again,” Mom said. “And it’s the best one so far.”

“Fuck off, Mom,” Joshua said.

She was just about to roll her eyes when Kimmy’s screams arrived from the house to bang on everyone’s eardrums. She must have discovered the most valuable thing in the world.

INT. BASEMENT LAB — NIGHT

Woman, wearing latex gloves, prepares a syringe. She sucks something out of a petri dish with it. She pushes the air out of the syringe, taps on it. She turns around to face a cage, with Boy in it, obviously zombified, MOANING with hunger. Major Klopstock sleeps in the other cage, but its door is open. Woman approaches Boy’s cage. When he reaches for her between the bars, she grabs his hand at the wrist to avoid his long nails and plunges the needle into his forearm. Boy HOWLS as she empties the syringe, thrashing around in horrible pain. Then he stops. Woman watches him. The undead Boy looks pretty dead, his overgrown hair spread around his head like a halo. Woman closes her eyes in defeat and takes off her latex gloves. She looks over to Major K’s cage. His sleep is so deep it looks like he might never wake up.

Joshua was in the dark at the bottom of the stairs; up at the top there was light. He needed to climb toward it, but Bushy dug his claws in his calf, clinging to it as he stepped on the next stair. Joshua smacked him to shake him off, but Bushy kept clawing up his leg, progressing toward his eyes with the intention of scratching them out. If Joshua could reach the light, Bushy would be burned by it like a louse with a cigarette, and Joshua would be safe. But he also didn’t want to kill Bushy. The only thing he could do, scared and angry, was ascend in the hope that the situation would resolve itself. Before it did, he woke up.

* * *

His first fully conscious thought was of Kimmy, and the plain truth presented itself to him: he hurt her, callously. She put her love and trust in him, and he wagged his dick at it all, betraying her. From here on in, whenever she thought or spoke of him she’d have a gut-tearing feeling in her stomach; like a memory of food poisoning, he’d be to her. Where there had been love, now there would be hatred, and hideous stomach cramps. She would have no compunction telling all of their friends — her friends, really — about the sordid magnitude of Joshua’s assholeness. For as long as she lived, there would be at least one person in the world — and likely many more — considering Joshua lesser than a salmonella bug. It was a problem: the goyter of her judgment would forever bulge out of his neck, forcing his head to bow.

Then he thought of Bernie and his evil cells; but then, he couldn’t think about that right now. There was nothing he could do now; not even call Janet. Bernie was a big boy, able to fend for himself until Joshua recovered.

He heard the bedroom door opening; the toes on the floor, the pee twinkle in the toilet. He could tell it was Ana: the self-effacing care not to wake him up; the discomfort in her step; the grace. She was hurt too. With how many layers of hurt has the Lord encrusted us?

In one of Joshua’s half-ass scripts a scientist, Dr. Oldenburg, discovered gateways between many parallel universes, where the same events took place, only with slight delays. Dr. Oldenburg figured out how to transport himself between the universes, effectively traveling in time, which came in handy when he had to prevent the death of the woman he loved. But then he discovered that the number of universes was infinite, as was the number of differences among them. Dr. Oldenburg was a superhero in one universe and helpless in another — to save his beloved he had to find the right universe. The Right Life , the script was called. It didn’t work because all of the worlds were tediously confusing, the differences among them obsessively minimal and thus boring. Also, he never got anywhere near finishing it. But now, who knows?

He pretended to be sleeping as she was making her way back to the bedroom.

He heard her stop and he knew she was looking at him, perhaps hoping he’d be awake. What did she see? A salmonella man in his thirties, sleeping on a sofa in a T-shirt and underwear. There was at least one way to measure the quality of a life: if you slept on a sofa in your own apartment at the age of thirty-three, things were not going well. She stood there (where, exactly?) for a while and Joshua made himself stay so still that he endured a beastly itch spreading all over his scalp down to his spine, or whatever was left of it. Just as he gave in and decided to scratch his dandruff off to the point of bleeding, she slipped back into the bedroom. He’d once seen a hair-care commercial in which one of the ecstatic shampoo users was identified as a dandruff survivor.