Zombicorns Part 1

ZOMBICORNS.

John Green.

Chapter 1.

Pre-zombification, my father was already obsessed with corn. He told me almost every day that corn was in control of us. Corn wants the world to contain more corn, so corn evolves us to agree with it: Corn tells us that we could make sugar out of corn, or fuel out of corn, or plastic out of corn, etc. The flu makes us cough, which spreads the flu. Corn makes us corn-hungry, which spreads corn. He got this idea from a book, and he never ceased to be amazed by it. For years, he would talk about it. We'd be eating mashed potatoes or something, and he'd say, "You know, potatoes are impossible without corn. That corn, it's everywhere." (He meant this metaphorically, although it is now nearly true literally.) I think my dad was so fascinated by this idea because he realized on some fundamental level that he was not in control of his desires: I think he woke up every morning in his nice house with hardwood floors and granite countertops and wondered why he desired granite countertops and hardwood floors, wondered who precisely was running his life. Most people never stop to wonder why they like Pop Tarts or rainflow showerheads or skinny girls or whatever it is they like. Although my father never abandoned the narrowly circ.u.mscribed suburban life he was fated to desire, the why of it all nagged at him. I inherited that penchant for intellectualism, a character flaw that these days can only be thoroughly eradicated by getting Z'ed up.

Anyway, I have been thinking about the old man because it was a year ago today that I shot him in the chest with a hollow-point .45 caliber bullet. He kind of smiled as he fell backwards onto the overstuffed living room couch. He took a minute to die, and it was the smilingest minute I'd ever seen from him.

A lot of the Z'ed up smile when you kill them. I don't know if they're grateful or amused or what, but it helps with the guilt, which quite a lot of people feel. I knew a kid once who was the kind of sentimentalist who found it troubling to think of himself as a murderer, so he called killing Zs completing them. I liked that.

That kid-his name was Marcos Marcos-got Z'ed up somehow. We were living in a very nice heavily chandeliered Lincoln Park townhouse with a few other humanoid types, and then one morning Marcos Marcos made a go at my puppy, Mr. President, and I had to complete him. I completed his head all over the dining room credenza of that townhouse and then me and Mr. President bolted for the proverbial higher ground.

Newzies go for dogs and cats and cows first, when they've still got enough of a moral compa.s.s to recognize that separating human beings from their vital organs-aside from being ethically troubling-is cannibalistic.

It is my own moral compa.s.s that has done me in now, working through the last few gallons of the gas that runs the generator that pumps the putrid z'ed out air down here into my Lincoln Square cellar, eating through the last rusted cans of diced tomatoes and Spam, drinking very expensive wine at the rate of precisely one bottle per day, watching the shelves empty out, wondering-as my father did-what terrible monster lurking inside of me forces me to go on rowing against the current when I could just walk up a staircase, unlock this cellar door, and get Z'ed up like a normal person.

Chapter 2.

I wonder a lot about Africa.

There were a few months when immigration was possible, if you could survive a 90-day maritime quarantine, if you could get a boat. I a.s.sume the virus made it there eventually, that the borders proved permeable. (Borders do, generally. I have seen mice flatten themselves to squirm through inch-high cracks in a wall. And mice have nothing on desperate men.) But the last I heard, Africa was still clean, and the thought that it might contain human beings doing human being stuff-serving an older, more complicated master than the Z'ed serve-used to fill me with a kind of hope. I know I can't get to Africa, of course, but even now I find myself thinking sometimes that maybe this ma.n.u.script will be found in a thousand years when things are resettled, that my re/accounting will be read, that we will be remembered. Surely among the many outlandish successes of AMRV is that it has eradicated from human beings our original sin: hope. But I don't have AMRV, which means I still suffer from the cruelest disease of our species, terminal aspiration.

I'll tell ya: Some days I wouldn't mind being infected. But then I'll pa.s.s up a perfectly good opportunity: For instance, just this morning I left Mr. President and went out for a while-the smell seems infinitely bad and yet somehow manages to get worse each day-and found a couple dozen Zs planting in a ditch alongside the expressway.

They don't plant in rows because they're idiots, and they don't use farm equipment because they're idiots, and they don't plant in spring because they're idiots, so they were just there on their hands and knees, in the rippling Chicago heat of August, their pointed Z sticks digging into the dirt so they could plant more and more and more, prototypical Zs, hunched and slow with skin like a sunless winter sky, and I honestly was going to just let them be but one of them heard the car and looked back at me, and then the others looked back at me, and then one of them stood up and I had to roll down the window and mow them down in a line with my AR-15. Perfectly good opportunity for infection, and what do I do? I complete them.

Now, I'm not going to pretend my stubborness has been universal among my species. I've known plenty of Zuicides; they walk out into a group of Zs and just let it happen. It's a sad and beautiful thing to watch, let me tell you-all ritualized and elegiac, so that you can almost hear the choral music as the Zs descend upon the convert and stuff its mouth with a shucked ear of Devotion131Y, the magic maize through which all Zness is possible.

The Zification came so fast and so completely that I only found out about Devotion131Y months later, in a newspaper that was being used to block out the light (light attracts Zs) in a high rise on Michigan Avenue. The place's windows were covered with layer upon layer of late-stage newspapers, but even so on sunny mornings the light shone through, giving the newspaper stories a layered glow, which is how I discovered one morning a story one layer behind an advertis.e.m.e.nt for a sporting goods store: 100% of sampled people with AMRV (as it was then known, back when the world contained science, and initialisms) had been exposed to a specific bicolored maize varietal known as Devotion131Y, which, these days, is pretty much the sole product of the American economy. D131Y gives you the Zs, which you survive thanks to D131Y, which makes you feel indebted to D131Y in the way that makes you want to eat anyone who disagrees with you.

This is not a new phenomenon, by the way. The Romans knew it: quod me alit me extinguit, they said: That which nourishes me, extinguishes me. The longer one hangs around this pestilent planet, the more one is confronted with the reality that the line between people and zombies is not so clearly defined as we might wish.

[Off topic, but I hate the word zombie, if for no other reason than its lack of specificity. The Z'ed up are not zombies anymore than the Spanish flu was Spanish. They are people-or at the very least former people-suffering from a real and specific disease, AMRV, but whenever I came across the uninfected and said AMRV, no one knew what I was talking about, so on occasion once has to give in to convention and say the z-word itself, although all in all, I prefer the colloquially popular "z'ed up" or "z'ed out" or "z'd," all of which have a certain multivalence than zombie lacks.]

Anyway, one of the reasons it is important not to call Z's zombies is because they aren't zombies. AMRV is a disease, or at least it was a disease before it became ubiquitous (i.e., at this point one could make a pretty compelling argument that those of us without AMRV are the diseased ones), and very little of the zombie apocalypse canon has proven relevant to the world in which I find myself: It doesn't matter if I shoot a zombie in the head or the stomach as long as I kill it. Zombies will eat my brains, but they'll also happily eat the rest of me. They'll also eat anything else, except for Devotion131Y. It is consumption of the corn that infects you, but once you get infected, you don't want to eat it, because you're too busy loving it. (I hypothesize, although I can't be sure, that early victims of AMRV got it from canned corn, because I was the only member of my family who didn't like canned corn.) Anyway, eating anything other than D131Y proves a bit problematic for Z's, because they don't do anything other than plant and water and tend Devotion131Y. (They are stupid. That much has proven canonical. They also move quite slowly, although I'm not sure if it's due to malnourishment or some kind of actual brain damage.) The mechanics of infection are pretty simple. From what I can surmise, you eat a little Devotion131Y, and you're infected, and thereafter, you never want to eat Devotion131Y ever again, because you just want it to be safe and happy and plentiful.

Which is more or less how we used to feel about ourselves.

Chapter 3.

Because it is exceptionally difficult to distinguish the newzie from the uninfected, the virus led to a certain discomfort in social situations. Everybody's got a different test, but mine is only one question long: What was the name of the first person you ever loved? Even the newest Z will struggle, because you lose those emotion-based memories first.

(How I learned this: Me, 358 days ago: "Mom, remember how Dad always laughed like he was choking or something, like there was something desperate about the laugh? I loved that." Mom: "Your father was very tall." Not knowing then what I know now, I waited six more entire days before offing her. I woke up with her straddling me, and she said, "Are you hungry?" And I said, "Mom, I'm sleeping," and she raised up this ear of corn over her head preparing to shove it down my throat, whereupon I threw her off of me and ran to my little sister Holly's room, who said, "Vut's Vong?"

She was speaking with her mouth full. Of corn.

I threw open the door, smacking Mom in the face with it, ran into the living room, grabbed the shotgun I'd used to complete dad from underneath the sofa, lured Mom outside, and completed the h.e.l.l out of her all over this holly bush she'd clipped weekly so it would always be perfectly rectangular, and she kind of staggered backwards into the bush, which totally ruined all the work she'd done, and then I shot her again because I was p.i.s.sed off about my sister. Anyway, I learned an important lesson from all of this: While gun owners.h.i.+p is morally reprehensible in the civilized world, firepower is more or less de rigeur in a zombie apocalypse.) Right but anyway the first person Marcos Marcos ever loved was a Puerto Rican neighbor of his in Pilsen named Angela. The first person my long-time compatriot Caroline ever loved was named Jackson, an early Hunter who'd been imprisoned for murder back when things still functioned, where-like all early Hunters-he got Z'ed up in short order when the virus tore through the prison system in the last awful weeks of functioning.

And my own answer to the question? No one ever asks, but it hasn't happened yet. (See how the hope creeps in? Me and my yets. My ridiculous, quixotic yets.) I lost my virginity in spectacular fas.h.i.+on in the weeks after the fall on the gla.s.s observation deck of the Sears Tower, the tallest building in the United States, in the heat of a September twilight, with four inches of plate gla.s.s beneath us and nothing but a cloudy sky above, the boy-his name was Silas Marren-also a virgin, the s.e.x itself utterly uninspiring except for the view beneath him, a thousand feet of air cus.h.i.+oning us, all totally hot and exhilarating. I was sixteen at the time, which is probably too young for a girl to be separating herself from her one and only maidenhead or whatever, but, you know, the frakking world was ending. (Also, Silas Marren was smoking hot, his face all hard edges and his hands rough and strong. I bet his hands are still rough and strong because somewhere he plies his trade in the dirt these days, planting d131y like the rest of 'em. He committed zuicide after I broke up with him. He clung. He never let me breathe. He threatened to get z'ed up if I ever left him. The pressure was too much. So I left him. So he got Ze'd up. Quod me nutrit and everything.) While we were up there, incidentally, we learned that you cannot kill a Z by dropping pennies from atop a skysc.r.a.per. Alas.

For a long time I thought I loved Silas Marren. But I don't think I did. If I'd loved him, I would've killed him when I had the chance. I loved my parents. But a boy? Not yet.

I kept a count up to a thousand. Killing Z's is easy, but killing a thousand of them without getting z'ed up yourself is widely considered a marker of "success;" i.e., if only 30,000 people were as good at completing Z's as I am, our stupid species would have survived.

The main reason I do it now is not for humans-we're finished-but for other mammals, which are getting decimated by hungry Z's. Z's are too stupid to trap or hunt with guns, but they're numerous and highly motivated, and every day I find the skeletons of dogs and cats and rats and often even deer on the empty streets of the great city of Chicago. But of course the worst part is that animals eat d131y because there is nothing else around to eat, and then they get Z'ed up, and then they become cannibalistic corn evangelists, too.

(I never thought before all this that evangelism was itself memetic, but it turns out that existence is just a sort of species-wide battle over who will define your desires, so that evangelism is inherent to the definition of humanness, and when there are no more humans left to convince that you are right, you will turn to the animals, and when there are no more animals, you will turn to the trees, and I do not doubt when there is nothing left on this planet but Zs and d131y, the Z's will be smearing the rocks with corn, trying to teach the scorched earth itself to love corn. The whole AMRV thing turns out to have been entirely predictable. If it hadn't been d131y corn, it would've been some other virus, or some viral idea. Hope or Jesus or the sacrifice of 14-year-old virgins or something. The problem, I would argue, is not that we got obsessed with something, but that we got obsessed with d131y, which turns out to be a disastrous obsession.) I have six bottles of wine left, and not a ton of water. This morning Mr. President went into the back room of this root cellar, which he and I have established as the bathroom. (Sure, it smells bad, but raw sewage smells 1,000,000% better than the current surface of the United States). Anyway, Mr. President waddled into the bathroom-he is a beaglish mutt who was once overweight. The fat is gone, but the waddle endures-and I heard him peeing, and then he waddled back into the main room and nosed my leg while I was trying to write. I looked down at him and he stared back at me, thick-lidded, and stuck out his tongue, the universal Mr. President sign for "I am thirsty." (He takes care of his hunger by eating mice.) And it occurred to me: We use this valuable and rare uncontaminated water, Mr. President and I. And then we just pee it out. This water, so sacred, just turns into pee.

I've decided I'll make a decision when I run out of wine. I'd hate to leave Mr. President, is the thing. He couldn't make it without me. And between now and then, I will just write. I will tell what I know of the awful disease the Z's contracted and the awful disease it replaced.

Chapter 5.

I met Caroline in Millennium Park. I'd walked down to see the Bean, this mirrored sculpture in which you can see a distorted reflection of yourself (you can also see other things-the Chicago skyline, the lake, the sky-but people only looked at themselves). The Bean was kind of drenched in bird s.h.i.+t since people had stopped cleaning it, but it still looked great. A gaggle of Zs hauling water from the lake in plastic trash bins walked right past Mr. President and me on their way to the struggling unrowed corn field that had been planted where the lawn stretching back from Frank Gehry's amphitheater had once been.

Z's can be aggressive, certainly, but when they're focused on planting or irrigating or harvesting, they'll generally leave you alone. I am more reckless these days, but back then, my policy when encountering gaggles in public s.p.a.ces was to save my ammunition. So I just walked along, AR-15 at my side, finger on the safety, Mr. President straining at the leash. We walked away from the Bean and toward the lake, because for some reason I wanted to see the lake.

I hit the ground instinctually when I heard the gunfire, tugging Mr. President close on the leash as he barked furiously as a response to the noise. The echo off the buildings was such that it sounded like a full-fledged platoon attacking, which briefly filled me with hope that the military might still be a going concern, but in fact when my ears were finally able to track the sound, I saw a single tiny girl seated on a low branch of a tree, her back against the trunk, an M-16 in each arm, Rambo-like, slowly waving the guns back and forth, spraying fire across the corn field. The way the guns danced in her arms, it almost looked like she was conducting an orchestra or something.

I stayed down. Overeager hunters, in my experience, are almost as dangerous as Z's themselves, but Mr. President wouldn't shut up. I reached to grab him and momentarily let go of the leash, whereupon he took off. I scampered after him, the gunfire still raining down on me, but he was gone.

I watched the girl hop down from the tree and walk out into the field to survey her success, which was total. I stood up, then, and backed away as quietly as I could. I was entirely silent, but still she spun around and raised the gun to me. I raised mine back, an established way (at least in these parts) of stating, "I am also uninfected. Furthermore, if you kill me, I will kill you back."

"HUMAN?" she shouted.

"Yup," I answered, fighting the urge to back away. Zs will often back down from confrontation, unless there is a corn field they think they're protecting.

The girl lowered her gun slowly, and I lowered mine in turn. She walked up to me. Five two, maybe a hundred pounds, wearing new designer jeans and a black scoop-necked t-s.h.i.+rt. It was May, I think. Spring in the city and whatnot.

She walked up a staircase. I was confident she wasn't a Z; one of the first symptoms of the virus is that you lose your desire to off them. I would've been happy to pop a Z to prove my disinfection, but she'd eliminated all the ones in view. She got close enough to me to see the whites of my eyes (which, in the Z'ed up, eventually go yellow).

She leveled both guns at my chest. "Do you miss your mother?" she asked, the gun leveled at my chest.

"I miss being able to miss people," I answered.

"Z!" she shouted. "That's a newzie answer!" I saw her flip the safety off and waited for her to shoot me. But right then Mr. President returned, pawing at my thighs, and she put the guns down, because no Z would keep a pet, and she whispered, "Sorry. Sorry. Are you okay?"

I was crying. I wanted to miss my mom. I was thinking that maybe I was a Z.

"I'm Caroline," she said.

"Mia," I whispered.

Chapter 6.

Caroline lived at the Harold Was.h.i.+ngton branch of the Chicago Public Library, a gray stone behemoth downtown. She'd dragged a king-sized mattress into a windowless cinderblock walled dressing room attached to the huge auditorium where the library once hosted readings.

(In the Beez[1], I'd been a member of the CPL's Teen Advisory Board in my neighborhood, and we would sometimes come downtown together to have pizza with the other Chicago book nerds, and we would meet in this very auditorium. Like everyone I knew, I'd made a point of leaving my Beez life, but I could not leave Chicago, so I mostly just avoided my neighborhood, because Chicago is a city of many discrete neighborhoods, a place where the Venn diagrams do not much overlap. Having minimized my interactions with my past, walking down into that auditorium-which to me still smelled like pizza-was disconcerting.) Caroline had set up a battery-powered baby video monitor in the auditorium, in the center of the stage, and since her bedroom had only the one door, she could see and hear anyone coming. It was pretty brilliant, really.

We walked back into the dressing room, rectangular, low-ceilinged. "It ain't much," she said, "but it's home."

On the linoleum floor beside her bed were hundreds of books. I looked at them.

"Corn," she said.

"Huh?" I asked.

"I'm reading every book the library has about corn."

"There are that many?"

She knelt down and picked up some t.i.tles, speaking excitedly, the evangelism of the convinced. "Yeah we were totally obsessed with corn even in the Beez. Like, I mean this one: Glorious Maize. You don't see books about, like eggplants called All Hail the Magnificent Eggplant. But that's how the books talk about corn. Zealously. Did you know that even in the Beez, more than 20% of farmland in America was planted with corn? Did you know in fact that of the total surface of the American continents, more than 1% was corn field?"

"Is that a lot?" I asked.

"Well by comparison the houses of every human being on the continents occupied less than one one hundredth of a percent of land. So, like, even before, corn took up a thousand times more s.p.a.ce than we did."

"Yeah," I said. "My dad used to talk about that."

"Z'ed up?"

I nodded. "Yeah, everybody." Everybody. Every. Body.

She shrugged. "Yeah well I'm from Iowa City. Corn central. We were among the first."

"How'd you..." I asked. We'd both had these conversations so many times with so many survivors that the actual finis.h.i.+ng of the questions was unnecessary.

"No idea," she said. "I think I just happened to avoid that particular varietal until it became clear that corn was the cause. Luck of the draw." Most people had some convoluted theory that amounted to "luck of the draw," but Caroline was the first person I'd met who could admit it. Personally, I'd never seen anyone get infected any way other than having d131y stuffed directly into their mouths.

Mr. President, still half-fat in those days, waddled over to her and curled up on the bed. "Cute dog," she said. "He from the Beez?"

"Nah, he's a stray," I said.

"I had a dog. My cousin ate him alive."

"Z's are cla.s.sy that way," I said.

She laughed a little. "So where are you from?"

"Here," I said.

"Here? I never meet anyone from here," she said. "No one stays." I didn't say anything, even though she was asking a question. I looked over at the baby monitor resting atop the mattress next to some rumpled covers. There were these lights beneath the video picture. If anything made noise, the lights lit up depending on the volume of the sound: A mouse's peep might blink green; A clumsy hungry desperate Z thudding through the auditorium would have sent the monitor into the red.

Right now, it was green. Silent. Safe. I hadn't felt like this in a long time.

"I have a sister," I said finally. "I stay here to check up on her." Caroline squinted at me, not getting it. "She's Z'ed up," I said. "My sister. Runs with a planting crew on the northwest side. She's nine. I just...I just check up on her or whatever. Make sure she has enough to eat and everything. You know how they are with the little ones."

"Sorry," Caroline said, which was the only perfect thing to say.

"Yeah, well," I said. "I know she's not her anymore. I just-whatever. I'm a sentimentalist, you know?"

Caroline invited me to spend the night. She stood in a corner facing away from me when she changed into her pajamas-a black tank top and pajama pants-and then she turned back around and I saw the blueblack bruises inside both her shoulders, where the guns had pounded against her tiny frame. Her curly brown hair fell over her face. I slept in my clothes, gun by the mattress, as I always did, curled up in the corner of the bed, not wanting to invade Caroline's s.p.a.ce, because I wanted her to let me stay here, in the safe room with the baby monitor, as long as humanly possible.

Chapter 7.

Here's how it worked: Every morning, I drove[2] up to Lincoln Square, my old neighborhood, where I'd lived in a narrow house across the street from the Brauhaus, this crazy German beer hall where old men put on leiderhosen and danced with their ancient, hip-replacemented wives atop long wooden tables. You could drink beer out of big gla.s.s boots at this place, and my parents loved going there, because they both spoke German, and the people at the Brauhaus really appreciated it when you spoke German, because generally the neighborhood was becoming so gentrified and WASPy.

So at the Brauhaus, they kind of hated kids. But because mom and dad spoke German, and because Holly and I knew a little German, they loved us. They made us special grilled cheese sandwiches off-menu because Holly and I hated sausages and schnitzel. And the old guys would come up to us while we were eating and ask us to dance, and we'd get on top of the tables with them, right near our plates, and dance with our feet on their huge black clunky old German guy shoes, and my parents would laugh. I could see them holding hands under the table even though they were trying to be sneaky about it.

Right. So every morning, I put Mr. President in the pa.s.senger seat and rolled down the window just enough for him to get his nose outside and then drove the Corvette up to Lincoln Square, and precisely at 9 AM, I came to a tires-squealing halt outside the Brauhaus, and then I reached into the Corvette's tiny backseat, grabbed a pinata, and tossed it out of the window toward the perpetually dark doorway of the Brauhaus.

Different pinata every day. A sombrero, a pony, a unicorn, whatever. I kept a huge collection of them in an apartment building on Giddings Street, in the bas.e.m.e.nt apartment that had once been occupied by an old lady who stared at Holly and me whenever we'd walk by on our way to the park.