Zombicorns Part 2

Anyway, I'd loaded up two tote bags with beets, tomatoes, spam, bottled water, and tuna. I was walking past the magazines and wondering if you could can broccoli-I missed and continue to miss broccoli-when I heard gunfire. I ducked behind the magazine aisle-all the magazines were already four months old then-and shouted, "You okay?"

She shouted back, "Just lighting up some Z's!" and then started firing again. I zig-zagged toward her in a crouch, and joined her by the door. I saw a formerly fat Z with skin sagging off him lumbering toward Caroline from the photo section and shot him repeatedly in the stomach and head, his body opening up, almost inside out, blood everywhere, then walked over to make sure he was dead, which he was. I took his Z staff and broke it in half for no particular reason then walked back to Caroline, who'd stopped shooting.

A dozen of them lay dead on Montrose. Caroline and I walked out and shot holes into the trashcans they'd been carrying so the trash cans wouldn't hold water so the Z's who found them wouldn't be able to use them for irrigation.

Then Caroline slung the gun over her shoulder, careful not to let the still-hot barrel touch her leg, and said, "What'd ya get? Any salmon? G.o.d, I could go for some salmon. Also, why don't they can beef?"

"I was thinking of broccoli," I said. "I'd like some broccoli."

"Pizza," she said.

"Really any bread-based product would be a delight," I said. We got into the car and drove up Montrose for a couple blocks to the cemetery, which was now (it rather goes without saying) a corn field, and we sat up on top of the brick wall that surrounded the cemetery and enjoyed a lunch of sliced cheddar cheese, a half can of tuna each, and some tomato sauce.

During lunch, Caroline picked off fourteen Z's. "You have any idea of your count?" I asked.

"Thirteen thousand three hundred eighty four. Ish."

"Jesus Christ," I said. "I'm, like, just over a thousand."

She turned to me, and then looked back at the corn, growing so high that only the occasional obelisk reminded us this had been a cemetery. "Well, it's the little pleasures that keep me going: Good food, good friends, zombie murder."

"I hate that word," I said. "They're nothing like zombies. They're not undead. They're got a vi-"

"That's the difference between you and me. You think they're people. You empathize. You try to imagine what it's like to be them. Don't you get it? There's no there there. You know at funerals, wait, look, look." She pushed herself off the wall, falling into the corn, and I followed her, landing on dirt cracked and gray, the corn sucking up all the water. Caroline stomped on some corn stalks, mowing a path to a gravestone. "Here," she said, pointing. "Look." It was a knee-high rectangular slab of granite. Here Lies All That Remains of Charlotte Foster Wife, Mother, Daughter, Friend 1886-1944.

"Okay," I said.

"All that remains!" Caroline shouted, stomping a circle around the gravestone to get the corn away from it. "Not all of Charlotte Foster, but what remains. Charlotte Foster wife mother daughter friend is not in the G.o.dd.a.m.ned ground, Mia, because Charlotte Foster wife mother daughter friend had a soul. Haven't you read Descartes?"

I allowed as to how I had not. "Maybe they don't have souls," I said, thinking of Holly's empty eyes ringed in yellow. "But they used to be people."

"So did Charlotte Foster," Caroline said, "And killing her isn't murder." I followed Caroline back to the wall. we pulled ourselves up and continued lunch. "You know who else used to be people?" she asked me after a while. "We did. And they took that away from us."

Which observation has rather stuck with me. Here, in this meager root cellar, lies all that remains of Mia Featherstone, who was sixteen years old when circ.u.mstance separated her body from her soul.

I ended up reading Descartes. I stole him out of the Harold Was.h.i.+ngton Library and when I got to the cellar, I read him out loud to Mr. President, because unless I read aloud I couldn't understand a word he was saying, and there was no one left to read to except Mr. President. I am not much for philosophy, but that old Descartes, he got me thinking[8].

Here's the question: Essentially, what is the difference between the Z'ed up and me? So far as I can tell, The Zs are in the business of walking around doing whatever they have to do to continue walking around. In this respect, they are like almost all people who ever lived; i.e., you will meet the occasional Rene DesCartes who sits down and spends a lot of time thinking about the nature and meaning of his existence, although the solutions such people settle upon are inevitably inadequate, almost as if all meaning is constructed, grafted onto life and not inherent to it. But, I mean, yes, occasionally you will encounter such people, but the vast majority of people are like Caroline: Why do you shoot Z's? Because I hate them. Why do you hate them? Because they ruined everything, and if everyone had been as aggressive as me, there would still be a humanity. Why is humanity better than Zs?

And it was there that she always paused, because the only honest answer is, "Because I am human." Because humanity is us and Zinity is them.

Sure, you can answer that they're a dead end evolutionarily, that their existence spells the end of our species. But let me submit to you as someone standing on the very edge of the apocalyptic cliff our species has so long awaited: The prospect of a world that contains neither humans nor Z's is not so terrifying. Nature will take its world back. Animals will frolic and fight. There will be no lord of the manor, which is not such a bad thing, because it seems to me that people have done a pretty poor job of guiding the biosphere for the last few thousand years.

The Z's will kill us all, and then the Z's will die out and in sixty years there will be no one to remember our silly war, Caroline's wasted ammunition, my year of zombic survivalism, Rene DesCartes's musings, or Michelangelo's sculptures. And that is really only the sadness here as I drink a thousand-dollar bottle of wine down here in the cellar: We did a few things worth remembering, and I wish for someone to remember them.

We were in the stacks of the Harold Was.h.i.+ngton Library maybe two weeks later, and I was reading a zombie apocalypse novel that pretended to be this kind of anthropological study of zombies complete with diagrams and whatever, and it was pretty funny.

Caroline, meanwhile, was reading Immanuel Kant in an attempt to come up with a logical framework that would empower me to leave Chicago. She'd gotten the idea that we should leave Chicago and go north. We were sprawled out on the ground, using hardcover encyclopedia volumes as pillows. "Okay, follow my logic here," she said. "Zs like corn. Agree?"

"Agree."

"Zs don't like to be apart from corn. Agree?"

"Agree."

"Corn does poorly in cold weather. Agree?"

"Agree," I said. "I see where you're going. You want to go North. North to salvation. North like everyone else has gone."

"Correct," she said. "North to a land without corn and ergo a land without Zs."

"Let me ask you this," I said. "If there is some Z-free world up in Canada or Alaska or whatever, why don't we get their shortwave radio broadcasts? Why don't they fly airplanes over us and drop leaflets saying, 'Hey, if you can read this, you are not Z'ed up, and therefore you should come visit us in wonderful Canada, where the weather is cold and the zombies are spa.r.s.e.'"

"We don't-" Caroline started, but I continued.

"Why don't they organize armies and fight their way South to eliminate the virus? We're d.a.m.n near as cold as it gets in the Americas; why is d.a.m.n near everyone here Z'ed up already? People believe in North for the same reason Z's believe in corn, Caroline."

"You're just scared to leave your sister," she said.

I thought about it for a second. "We need to learn about them," I said. "Everybody's got a theory, but no one is ever testing their theories. We don't know anything about them, not really. For all we know, they like planting in cold weather. Maybe they prefer Canada. Maybe South would be better. We need to do some kind of anthropological survey."

"The Care and Feeding of Contemporary Zombies," Caroline said.

"What To Expect When You're Expecting a Zombie Apocalypse," I said.

"Awfully Fond of Corn: A Sociological Examination of AMRV victims," she said.

"Mostly Grunting: A Linguist Explores Zombie Communication"

We went on like that for a while before settling on a name for our anthropological zombie study: "A to Z." For some reason, we found this very funny. We laughed so hard that we woke up Mr. President and he started barking at us.

We began our sociological investigation that very afternoon. We drove over to the west side of the Chicago river, up California until we got to this old mansion my dad had always wanted to buy. It backed up to the river and Dad always dreamed that he would have a kayak lashed to the dock and every morning he would get up, put on his suit, and then kayak all the way downtown to his office building.

Because water is so vital to Z's, we figured it would be a great way to observe them, so we pulled up next to this mansion and walked around back and pushed our way through chest-high corn looking for a canoe or a kayak on the river bank. But of course the Z's had tossed them all into the river to make room for more corn, just like they'll pull out small trees by their roots in order to free up a square inch for planting. We kept walking down the river, breast-stroking through the corn.

I was so busy looking for a canoe that I did not see the Z until she was on me, an old woman with sagging skin, the yellow fingernails of her left hand choking me. I kneed her in the groin and tried to throw her off me, but she clung with the superhuman strength of a mother protecting her children. She lunged forward and bit at me with a toothless mouth, then threw me toward the river and raised her Z stick as I shouted Caroline. I spun as the old hag brought her Z staff down on me, d.a.m.n near stabbing me in the stomach. As I spun, I kicked her legs out from under her, then jumped to my feet, wrested her Z staff from her, and stabbed her through the eye. She smiled up at me and then started convulsing. I pulled the staff out of her eye socket and drove it into her chest. It went all the way through. They keep their staffs sharp, I'm telling you.

Caroline, I shouted again, and then spun around to find her standing right there. "What the h.e.l.l?"

"You had it covered."

"You could have just shot her."

"Well, sure, but sometimes one needs to be reminded of the pleasure of nearly dying. It's such a wonderful thing to watch, a human and a Z locked in mortal combat. The hypermotivated, stupid Z against the marginally suicidal but intelligent human. Such a joy to see that survival instinct kick in, see the anger in a human's eyes. Emotion, Mia. How I miss it."

"You're crazy," I said.

"I enjoy watching them die," she said. "That's not crazy. That's the least crazy thing left in the world."

"She's probably with a crew. We need to keep-" I saw a young male Z approaching Caroline from behind. She saw my eyes widen, slung her gun backwards and fired a wild burst of gunfire that nearly sliced him in two.

"Not an ideal situation," Caroline muttered. "Can't really see 'em coming when you're in the field."

"And you just alerted them to our presence," I pointed out.

"Yay! That means we get to kill a bunch of 'em!"

Caroline fired a full clip of ammunition into the field away from the river, thinning the corn stalks enough to make an easy path to a four-story yellow brick building that backed up to the river. The windows were blown out already and the back door unlocked, so we went in, climbed the stairs to the fourth floor, then walked into an unlocked apartment.

The living room was all IKEA furniture and thrift store couches, a bachelor pad that had been shared, I imagined, by a bunch of roommates just out of college, starting their lives out. On our way to the back window, I stopped off in the kitchen and grabbed two cans of tuna and a can opener. We made our way to a bedroom with a futon for a bed and sat in a blown-out window ledge right next to each other, our feet dangling from the top floor. We ate the tuna with our hands straight from the can while picking off Z's.

"So far, I'm learning nothing about them," I told Caroline.

"Ah, who are you kidding? We're not gonna write an anthropological study. We're just s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g around."

I realized it was true. I scanned around, the corn thick and high on either side of the river, and suddenly my eye settled upon a blue canoe on the far side of the river tied to a dock about two hundred feet downstream from us. I nodded the barrel of my gun toward it, and Caroline smiled. Then we returned to shooting.

I have to tell you: Z completion is a job that grows wearisome. It is surprisingly physically demanding to fire a gun, for one thing. Your shoulder gets sore and your arm muscles ache from grappling with the not-insignificant weight of the AR-15 and your head hurts because gunfire is really quite loud, and it jangles inside your skull long after you stop firing, a billion tiny concussions making your brain s.h.i.+ver, and then there is the sound of Z's in distress, their smiling blood-soaked gurgles. You don't think it's that difficult, firing a gun, but it's like trying to hold an excited puppy in your arms, and at the end of every burst of fire, you find yourself out-of-breath and sweaty. (It was hot that day, I remember, and the air stunk of course with our species's decomposition.) I know many Survivors who grew to dislike machine guns so much that they preferred hand-to-hand combat or ninja swords or pistols with silencers, but all those folks have something in common: They are no longer survivors. People like Caroline and I lived with the unpleasantness of automatic gunfire, the lame and predictable cowardice of it, because lame and predictable cowardice is precisely how you make it to the end of the species.

Right so but anyway, it felt like we were firing forever; Caroline went through at least twenty clips, pulling them out of her huge 8-bit camouflage army-issue backpack every few minutes, and there were always more Zs to complete, and I found myself thinking about the Beez, about for instance say a guy who works for the Social Security Administration or something, some boring government desk job in a cubicle where he spends all day in the same chair that he's been sitting in for twelve and a half years or whatever, all day every day in this very same chair, and the guy sometimes thinks about his relations.h.i.+p with this swiveling chair that can go up or down a total of eight inches with the aid of this polygonical lever just beneath the seat, thinks about how this chair is technically his most intimate acquaintance, about how he and the chair have shaped each other: There's an indentation forever in the chair where the guy's wallet is and the guy long ago changed his posture to meet the needs of the chair. He and the chair, they are these two symbiotic creatures locked in a decade-long love affair, and this guy with his chair and his cubicle spends every day doing the same paperwork.

Admittedly I've never had a job, but I always pictured it as filling out the same form over and over again with extremely slight variations. Right then, incidentally, my legs swinging happily from the third floor window, I literally shot a Z in both of his eyes with consecutive bullets, which I had definitely never seen before, and I was like, "Did you see that?" but Caroline didn't hear over the ringing echo of the bullets. But anyway, it occurred to me sitting up there and killing by Caroline's count some 230 Z's that my life was basically very similar to the life of my hypothetical cubicled government employee, except that instead of being in the paperwork business I was in the Z completion business, and also I didn't have a chair.

I had a Mr. President, back home in the Harold Was.h.i.+ngton Library auditorium's green room. And I had a Caroline, her tiny arms flexed beside me as she used too much ammunition, taking out Z's on the opposite sh.o.r.e of the river with her trademark sweeping arcs of gunfire. And I had a sister ten months removed from humanity. And that was all.

"Are we clear?" I asked after a minute without gunfire.

"I guess so," she said, and I turned around to find a Z walking through the abandoned bedroom toward us. I lit her up right through her middle. As the Z twitched beneath us, we stepped over her. "Call me racist, but they really do all look the same," Caroline said.

We walked through the apartment into the stairwell, where we found two more Z's and shot them up. We made it to the dock. I handed my gun to Caroline and jumped into the water feet first, then breast-stroked across, careful to keep the dirty water out of my mouth. I made it to the opposite bank, then floated downriver to the dock with the canoe attached. It was locked to the dock with a steel chain.

"c.r.a.p, it's locked," I shouted across to Caroline.

"Get out of the way," she shouted back, then took off her backpack, removed the sniper rifle tied to the back of it, and proceeded to shoot not the chain itself but the rotting wooden post the canoe was chained to. "Clear," she shouted. I walked back to the edge of the dock, jumping over the more rotted planks, and tugged on the chain until the shot-up wooden post came loose. The dock gave underneath me, falling down toward the water, and I scrambled off and into the canoe, which almost overturned. Then it was just the small matter of paddling alone upstream and across the river to Caroline, who tossed the guns and her backpack into the middle of the canoe and climbed in. I was in the back of the canoe, the steering position, while she provided the power up front.

We paddled south beneath the old Brown Line tracks, where above us Z's were walking along the tracks to get to tiny Jacob Park, which had once been a secret garden-type playground for my sister and me but was now a cornfield. We let them go as we paddled, something about the quiet and the peacefulness of the river-plus the fact that our guns weren't handy-seemed uninterruptible. I felt nervous we'd run into Holly's crew-I didn't want to have to explain to Caroline that we couldn't fire into her crew-but we didn't. We just paddled South, past Z's filling City of Chicago plastic garbage cans with water to drag to their fields, all the row houses abandoned, the gla.s.s blown out of the windows by the hooligans of the early Aze, who in the last issues of the newspapers were viewed as every bit the threat as the Z's themselves.

Caroline and I didn't talk much. The silence made me wonder if we were real friends, or if we were just if-there-were-only-two-people-left-in-the-world friends. I wondered what we had in common aside from having lived this long. Watching her exposed, deeply tanned bony shoulder blades beneath her black tanktop and her cammo pants, I realized that we certainly didn't dress alike. (By comparison, I was wearing a green Welles Park Little League t-s.h.i.+rt and $400 blue jeans for which I'd paid zero cents at a well-looted Macy's downtown.) "What were you like in the Beez?" I asked her. "Like, were you popular?"

She didn't look back at me, just kept paddling. "I thought we were supposed to be making sociological observations."

"They come to the river to get water for the corn," I said. "They're really frakking keen on corn."

"You have a good sociological eye," she said. "So you tell me what I was like in the Beez."

"I bet you were kind of a freak," I said. She stopped paddling, resting the paddle across her knees, and spun her head around to me. "Define freak."

"Like, you were probably the hot nerd girl. Every school has a nerd girl who all the nerds want to get with."

She gave me a thin-lipped smile. "You are a sociologist. I wasn't the hot nerd girl. I was just a regular nerd girl. I was a big believer in hoodies and hair in my face. Minimize the percentage of myself that could be seen."

"Yeah," I said.

"You were popular?" she asked.

"I don't know. I guess. I was kinda big, though. It wasn't like all the guys liked me."

"But you were popular."

"I don't know," I said.

"Only popular people don't know if they're popular," she observed.

"Well, they're all Z'ed up now, so whether they liked me seems rather irrelevant."

"Fair enough," she said. She raised an imaginary gla.s.s and said, "To our enemies meeting the same fate as our friends."

"If only we had something to actually drink," I said.

"Backpack," she answered. I knelt forward out of the canoe's seat and opened Caroline's backpack and amid all the M-16 clips, I found a large silver flask monographed WHG. "My dad's," she said. "There is very, very good cabernet in there." I unscrewed the cap and took a sip. It tasted like wine. I raised the flask to her. "To the Survivors," I said and took a swig. I leaned over the middle of the canoe and she leaned back toward me and took the flask. "To the dogs," she said, "for they know how to be dogs." She twisted around, handing the flask back to me, and I leaned forward again, and the canoe s.h.i.+fted to the right as I reached, and then the two of us simultaneously overcorrected left, and then overcorrected more to the right, and then we were in the water, unarmed, our guns waterlogged and useless, nine miles from our rearmament center in the Harold Was.h.i.+ngton Public Library.

"s.h.i.+t," Caroline mumbled when her head popped up from underneath the water.

Chapter 14.

There's not a lot of power in the Aze, which I realize is a metaphorically resonant observation, but it's also a practical problem in my life: Most of the ways we have of generating electricity have gone idle. There are no power plants. I knew a guy in the early days after the unraveling who built a wind-powered thing that worked well enough to power a laptop, but so far as I know, the only power source remaining in the world is the gas-powered generator. Fortunately, I've so far been able to find gas left over in car engines (if there's a way to pump gas from gas stations, I haven't discovered it), so every day or two, I go out with my tube and my five gallon bucket and suck some gas out of the tank of some old car-it works easier on older cars for some reason-and then refill my generator, which gives me plenty of power to keep my desk lamp and my ineffective air purifier and the bare overhead bulb going, giving everything an appropriately apocalyptic glow, complete with the darkened moldy cellar corners.

Anyway, I no longer have need of a computer, but for quite a while in the Aze, I used one, even though without the Internet (which died amid the Unraveling) computers always seemed to me a little like fancy cinderblocks.

But but but the computer I used when I first moved into this lovely and underlit cellar had this searchable encyclopedia preloaded onto it, which is how I came to find the provenance of Caroline's toast in the upright canoe about the dogs who know how to be dogs.

There was this sociologist Peter Berger (not known to be deceased but presumed to be Z'ed up) who once wrote this famous line: "The difference between people and dogs is that dogs know how to be dogs." I know this to be true, at least insofar as Mr. President is an exemplary dog: Even today, with three bottles of wine left and the air soaked with putrid death, Mr. President is a dog in full possession of his dogness: His pacing is not finally about the great existential questions, because the pacing goes away the moment he eats. Today, as he tried to outsmart the mouse that he has spent the day chasing from The Latrine to The Room and back again, he is perfectly content. Why are you chasing the mouse, Mr. President? Because it makes my tail wag. Why does it make your tail wag? Because if I catch the mouse, I can eat it. Why do you want to eat it? I am hungry. Why are you hungry? Because my body wants to go on, so my tail can keep wagging. It is a closed circuit for Mr. President; he is a system unto himself, and in this respect he is my hero. Dogs know how to be dogs.

And I know nothing more about how to be a person than I did in the Beez. The system of my consciousness remains open-I cannot for the life of me answer the question of why satisfactorily. One could make a case, I suppose, that the reason for our existence was to marvel at creation, to see and appreciate the beauty of the universe and indeed to contribute to that beauty in ways that aren't available to organisms without consciousness, but A. aesthetic arguments-as Caroline often pointed out to me-have the air of bulls.h.i.+t about them, and B. there is precious little beauty left to appreciate, and the mechanics of contribution have become quite a bit more complicated.

Even so, last night I decided to visit the above with Mr. President to see if the appreciation of beauty could in and of itself be sustaining. I brought: 1. A backpack with two clips of ammo, a Maglite, and a gray American Apparel hoodie in case it got cold.

2. The trusty AR-15 3. An orange five-gallon plastic bucket for gasoline acquisition.

4. Some excellent wine.