Brains: A Zombie Memoir - By Becker Page 0,2

I would have flulike symptoms—a fever, vomiting, chills, joint pain—then a numbing sensation, followed by a brief death culminating in my reanimation as one of the living dead. The whole process could take anywhere from six to thirty-six hours—the length of the average birth.

Lucy glanced at the wound and moved several inches away from me. “You could try electrocuting yourself with the Christmas tree lights,” she suggested.

“Why don’t we have any tools?” I asked, getting up to poke around the basement. “I can’t even find a hammer. Didn’t we ever have occasion to hammer something? A nail perhaps?”

I was already speaking in the past tense.

“A hammer would come in handy now,” Lucy said. “We could fortify the door.”

“Or rope,” I said. “Why don’t we have any rope? We don’t even have a rope to hang yourself with.”

“Or a pot to piss in.”

“Rope wouldn’t do anything anyway. I have to destroy my brain. With hanging I’d just be a zombie with a broken neck. That could prove to be a disadvantage in my search for food, I suppose.”

“But does natural selection, survival of the fittest, apply to the living dead?” Lucy asked. “I mean, does it matter at that point? Will you need to compete with other zombies for food? Or will you live, or unlive, regardless?”

My bite site stank like rotten pork shoulder. My flesh was putrefying and I felt feverish. Or maybe it was psychosomatic. I sat down on the concrete floor and looked at my wife.

“It’s a valid question,” she said, “if you decide to, you know, go the zombie route.”

Lucy wore her hair in a short, mannish cut, which I wished she would grow out into a softer style. But I never asked her to. God forbid I should appear controlling or, even worse, a card-carrying member of the patriarchy who dared suggest she assume a more traditionally feminine appearance.

She was a big-boned woman, but thin, so that her knees, elbows, and feet stuck out like knobs, almost bursting through her pale, blue-veined skin. She could have gained fifteen pounds. I could see her skeleton, the thinnest veneer of flesh covering it, with no body fat to speak of. Although I loved her dearly, sometimes, in bed, her bones ground into me and hurt.

But yum. If I could gnaw on one of those bones now as I write this. Just a strip of flesh hanging down would do. The smallest sinew is all I need.

MUFFLED BY THE cellar door, the moans of the undead sounded like an avant-garde chorus, a John Cage composition. The United States of the Undead: A Sonata in the Key of Reanimation. At the end of the cacophonous piece, the orchestra, consisting of infected musicians in tattered tuxedos, eats the audience.

It was hot; my shoulder was disintegrating. Lucy held my forehead and stroked my back while I vomited everything I’d ever ingested: Hershey’s Kisses, funnel cakes, peach pits, mother’s milk.

“You’re a regular Florence Nightingale,” I told her, wiping my lips with the back of my hand. There was a metallic taste in my mouth, like I was sucking on rusty nails or had eaten liver at a roadside diner in the rural South.

“I’d rather be Hot Lips Houlihan,” she said.

“Walt Whitman was a nurse in the Civil War.”

“I wonder what Walt would’ve thought of the living dead,” Lucy said.

“He’d drink the tasteless water of their souls.”

Lucy felt my forehead. She fought back tears, my little trouper.

“You’re burning up,” she said.

“I’m on fire for you, baby. You make me hot.”

She kissed my cheek. “Let’s make love,” she whispered. “One last time.”

Her voice was atonal and shrill, a screech owl in my ear, Yoko Ono singing. I knew it was just my senses, heightened by the fever, as well as the virus coursing through my veins, but I needed her to be quiet.

So I kissed her. She sucked in her breath and turned her head, wrinkling her nose and gagging. I must have tasted like death, but still she bent forward for another kiss.

“You need an Altoid,” she said.

“They’re curiously strong,” I said, “and I’m decaying.”

I took her in my arms and we kissed again. A violent chill overtook me and I turned my head to the side, coughing up what looked like a piece of lung.

“What I wouldn’t give for a cigarette,” I said.

“This would be an excellent time for you to start smoking. I mean, why not? At this point, you’ve got nothing to lose.”

She put her head on my shoulder, then started