Brains: A Zombie Memoir - By Becker Page 0,1

the Dead—was prescient in the grand tradition of science fiction becoming fact. First you have to imagine a man on the moon, then you can put one there. Imagine an atom-splitting bomb, and then build one. Imagine a virus that turns corpses into the walking dead, and someone, somewhere, will develop that virus.

And now let us bow our heads in honor of Dr. Howard Stein, my creator. Our father. Mad Scientist Extraordinaire. God in the Garden of Evil. Daddy of the Undead. Cue maniacal laughter.

There was a crashing sound as zombies broke the living room picture window and stumbled in. I threw the remote at them. Nothing. Then the TV Guide. Nothing. A vintage 1950s kidney-shaped ashtray bounced off of one like a rubber ball. Finally, my copy of the The Da Vinci Code, never read. The ghouls kept coming.

“Their heads,” Lucy yelled. “The news said you have to injure their heads!”

“You think I don’t know that? It’s a trope of the genre.”

“Don’t talk to me like I’m one of your students, Jack. It’s demeaning.”

As I bickered with my wife, my neighbor reached me. He was in his bathrobe and boxers and his feet were bare, the veins and bones bulging. The whites of his eyes were yellow and watery, and his arms were open wide for a hug. He leaned forward as if to tell me a secret.

And bit me. Just like that. Right on top of my shoulder, deep in the muscle.

It felt like a hot poker on my flesh, a rabid squirrel attack, the blinding light of a comet. It felt, in short, like sharp human teeth ripping me apart. How’s that for metaphor? Nothing like the real thing.

He chewed on my shoulder, working through the muscle like a dog chewing gristle. I kneed him in the groin and shoved him off me; a chunk of my shoulder remained in his mouth like a meatball.

More zombies streamed in. Lucy fought them off with our Peruvian rain stick, the annoying rain sound harmonizing with the living dead’s moans until the stick broke and dried beans spilled onto the hardwood floor. Lucy grabbed my elbow and pulled me down to the basement, where we were safe, at least temporarily. There was only one entrance, through the kitchen. We locked the deadbolt behind us, dragged flattened cardboard boxes up the stairs, and duct-taped them over the doorway.

It was classic victim behavior, actually, seen in dozens of horror movies: Grab whatever you can, stupid humans, and throw it at the door. Hell, use a solid granite tombstone if you’ve got it. Doesn’t matter. If you lock yourself in a room, eventually the monsters will get in.

Lucy and I huddled between a giant plastic Santa and the LL Bean tent we used just once—and then in the backyard. Now we’d never go to Yosemite.

“What should I do?” I asked her, gripping my shoulder.

“What are your options?”

“As I see it, suicide or zombification.”

“Don’t focus on the negative, Jack. Think! How can we fix this?”

I made my jaw go slack and drooled. “Brains. I could eat your brains!” I held out my arms like Boris Karloff in Frankenstein, a film that disgraces monsters everywhere.

In Mary Shelley’s original novel, the creature is sympathetic, a victim of human hatred and intolerance; he speaks French, reads Milton, and loves flowers. He is not a natural-born killer; society turns him into one.

Karloff’s mute brute, on the other hand, yearns for flesh and blood from the get-go. He turns crowds into mobs and creates fear and loathing, yet his version is the one that lives in our imagination, not Shelley’s.

To pervert Rodney Dangerfield: Monsters can’t get no respect.

Lucy slapped my forearm. “That’s not funny,” she said, and started to cry.

“You cry because there’s truth in my jest,” I said. “Which is the goal of all effective humor, exposing the hidden pain in pleasure. The sorrow underneath all we do. The tragedy of our lives. I will be one of them soon, my dear, and I may indeed want to eat your brains. I have a decision to make. To be dead or undead. That is the question.”

“Let me look at your shoulder.”

The area surrounding the bite was plum purple and gashed open, the blood already coagulated. I felt beatific, angelic, but my failure to bleed was no miracle; it was the virus congealing my blood, freezing it, stopping it in its tracks and turning me into something both sub- and über-human. If the news reports and movies were true,