BY M. B. HOMLER
In Jesus-like effigy, the body hung impaled upon the spire atop the tallest building in town - city hall. It rested with arms sagging back, legs dangling down, torso firmly rooted in place. When the body landed, there had been a loud shuck and townsfolk in the street felt a fan of light rain - a rain not in the forecast - sprinkle down on top of them. Bespattered with red, they had to admit it was a gruesome landing, maybe a perfect ten in gruesomeness. Slivers of dried flesh floated like confetti in the streets. On a random street corner, an eyeball stared upward. No one got to see it except for a passing Chihuahua, who gobbled it down - with minimal choking and hacking - before his owner could surmise what happened. Most in this small town, unknown for providing entertainment beyond small-time gossip and the occasional affair, were transfixed by the sudden and illogical impaling.
Response on the scene was quick. Cop cars and fire-trucks roared to siren-wailing stops in front of city hall. Due to the graphic nature of the incident, they closed every nearby street to keep bystanders back. Firemen raised the fire ladder out as far as it would go and swung it over to the body, smacking the corpse and sending guts flying. Several firemen went up the ladder and stepped off onto the roof. They looked up at the spire. Walkie-talkies to their mouths, they reported what they saw in detached journalistic fashion. Desiccated body . . . mouth stripped of flesh . . . gums fully exposed . . . lips missing . . . yellow-green teeth filed down . . . a mass of bloody innards, guts and pus oozing . . . freely . . .
When the corpse on the pole twitched, everybody jumped.
They never did get it down. Oh they tried: they pulled and pushed and moved the body up and down the spire - an image reminiscent of firefighters running back and forth with a safety net trying to catch a threatening jumper - but they could not get it off. After putting in a great many hours, they gave up, let the corpse slide back down, and left it there. Thump. Their attitude was fuck it. The mayor's attitude was fuck it. Let rigor mortis and the flesh-eating maggots and buzzards of the world take care of it!
So that's what they did, and though many townsfolk claimed to have seen the body twitching, as if the crows were taking to it - their wish fulfilled - this unfortunately was not the case. The crows would go nowhere near it. They remained far away and aloof on a telephone wire.
Scared? They might have been.
Danny McDanielson worked as a short-order cook in the diner down the street from city hall. Being a short-order cook meant that no one took him seriously, and while he tried to pretend it didn't bother him, it did. A young poet, not bad looking, with Johnny Depp hair that he was always peeking out from under, he struggled to keep his burgeoning feelings of inadequacy to himself. When the corpse had fallen from the sky, Danny was one of the few people unable to rush out and gawk. His girlfriend of the last three years, Jennifer Bugles, the same one that fawned over his morbid poetry and tousled his scarecrow mane of hair to no end, had been in the process of breaking up with him. She didn't know why; it seemed like the right thing to do.
'Hey, Danny. You know that screen that appears at the end of Ms Pac Man when you die?'
'Yeah.'
'It's Game Over for us.'
'Why?'
'If you have to ask, I can't tell you.'
'What?'
'Are you trying to make this difficult?'
'Huh?'
'Oh gee, right, Danny. You know what? Screw you. I'm out of here.'
Hurt, stunned, Danny didn't know what to say. But there was not much he could say when Jennifer came back into the diner minutes later with her new beau, Trevor Moses, a dude who had patches of facial hair, piercings, and tattoos. Danny could hardly stomach the image of Jennifer standing there slightly bent at the hips while this man thumbed the G-string poking out of her jeans shorts. He would never forget the smug grin on Trevor's face either. It was as if a gold tooth were glinting at him. 'What are you looking at, geekazoid?' Danny withdrew to the kitchen and tried to let it all fade to black.
The diner was empty this early evening. Danny was feeling tired. It was hot in the kitchen and hot outside. Perspiration dripped from his face, horseshoed the pits under his T-shirt and at the small of his back. With Charlene Guttersnipe, his demanding boss, out on an errand, he decided to take a break. Normally he would go out the back door and sit on the stoop wishing that he were a smoker, but he wasn't. Instead he took his note - pad and pencil outside. He often used this notepad to draw pictures and work on turns of phrases, however unlikely they might be.
He sat on the stoop trying to think, but nothing came to him. He had heard some of the talk about the body that landed on the spire, and now that hours had passed and everyone had forgotten about it - that was how this town was - this was his opportunity to go see it. He was curious. With his apron still on, he walked the several blocks to city hall. There, he squinted up at the spire. The glare of the sun sawed his eyes. He couldn't see. He needed to get closer.
Using the emergency stairs inside city hall, he walked to the roof. When he first came through the door, his hand went to his mouth and he muttered, 'For shit sakes!' Once the initial shock passed, he took it in, drank it down like cold water. It was an amazing sight. On his notepad, he began to sketch the head, with words percolating in his own: The creature, not a person, limbs shambling and pale. The more he stared at it, the more entranced he grew. And for some ugly reason he kept seeing Jennifer's face appear in front of him. Could he not escape this girl? Even in the presence of this hideous sight, he still found himself thinking of her.
When he realized how late it was, the trance wore off. He had taken too long of a break and strayed far from the diner. He hurried, thoughts racing with his legs, and as he was departing, taking that first couple of steps, he swore he saw the body twitch. Unsure, he looked back, stared, and nothing. The wind picked up. He shook his head. It couldn't have been. Just a creepy thought.
On his hurried return, he wondered why the town seemed okay with this body up there. It didn't strike him as normal, as practical, as something everyone should be okay with. Even for them.
Charlene, a tomato-bottomed woman who often walked around with her hands on her hips, was waiting for him when he got back. Her lacquered nails tip-tapped on her hip as her tongue clucked at the top of her mouth. The frown she wore on her face was orgasm by expression but lacking all pleasure.
'Where have you been? I've got customers here trying to eat and no cook to make the food!'
'Sorry . . . I went for a walk.'
'Would that be a walk of leisure or away from your job? Next time you decide to pitter-patter off, do so on your own time. This is a business I run, not a support center for retards that can cook.'
She turned to the customers, the two people that were seated there, apologized to them for the lateness of the food, and declared that the food would be free, meaning that it would be paid for out of Danny's salary.
Danny went back into the kitchen and picked up the orders. Though he was supposed to be cooking, he couldn't get his mind off the body sitting atop city hall. Something was nagging at him, and it wasn't Charlene . . .
When he returned home that evening, all he wanted to do was relax, sit on the couch, veg out, consider the frat house-party-mess his life had become. Sitting there, eating sardines out of a can, staring at his barely reception-worthy TV, he could think of nothing more than how angry Jennifer had made him. He thought if he could get even with her, it would make him feel better, but really, he just wanted her back.
The local news was advertising top stories to come. The redheaded newscaster Terra Gerstner gave the highlights: 'Bear Mauls Teens Having Sex' and 'Toupee Injures Construction Worker in Rare Scalping' and 'Man Cooking Weiner-Dogs at County Fair Burns His Britches' and 'Airplanes Disappear in New Bermuda Triangle'.
Danny's notepad lay on the coffee table. And while watching TV like this was supposed to be the life, he spent the time pissed off. Fortuitously, his brooding abruptly ended when the doorbell rang. He didn't get visitors, didn't have friends, and there wasn't a chance that Jennifer could have dropped by - or was there? He went to the door and looked out the peephole. No one was there. Was it someone playing a game? The doorbell rang again. He looked again. No one.
'Who is it?'
He heard something in response but wasn't sure what it was. Some kind of moan or grunt. Frustrated, annoyed, he grabbed the knob and flung the door open. To his shock and surprise, Jennifer stood before him.
'Jennifer?' he said, with a sneer of disgust but also maybe a hint of hurt. 'Why are you here?'
She didn't say anything. He turned his back and went inside and left the door open. Hadn't everything been bad enough? Now he had to deal with this. Her here. Here to talk. Talk about what?
When he realized that she hadn't said anything, he turned back around. She still stood in the doorway.
'Well. Aren't you going to come in?'
For the first time, under the porch light, he noticed something was off.
'Are you okay-?'
'The plague . . . has come.' She said this almost as if she were a lizard, hissing it out.
'What the-?'
She was stooped and haggard-looking in a way he had never seen her. Sure, sometimes he thought she wasn't as pretty without the make-up, but good God, was that her upper lip curled into a rictus snarl? And her hair was standing on end as if electrified. Her face bore a grey hue to it that seemed to be darkening the closer she got. He looked at her breasts. What the hell had happened to her breasts? They had shrunk and were poking through her T-shirt like tree branches and not mounds of flesh.
'It has . . .'
She didn't finish the thought, and Danny could see why when part of her brain slid out of her nose.
She came at him moaning. He tried to reason with her, but she rammed him against the arm of the couch. He noticed the eyes - yellow, evil-looking, disturbed. And teeth - crooked, filed down to slivers. She scratched at his face. She tried to bite him. He grabbed a glass off the kitchen table and smashed it against her head. He winced, fearing that he had hurt her. She gave no reaction, came after him again. He grabbed a pen - the only thing near at hand - and made for the door, but she grabbed his foot, pulled him toward her. She lifted him into the air and held him up by his ankle. Where did she get the strength? He couldn't believe this was happening. When he glanced up her nose, he saw what looked to be vermicules crawling around inside and lost his shit. He brandished the pen, swung his body up, and drove the pen into the side of her eye with such force that it popped out through the socket of the other eye, sending the two eyeballs toppling to the floor.1
She dropped him on his head.
Then she staggered back, screeched like a Poe raven, and blood jetted, spraying indecipherable graffiti around his apartment. He started to see words in the splatterings . . . until he came to his senses and realized that he was lucky to escape with his life. Then reality hit him. He had killed his ex-girlfriend.
He threw up on the carpet.
Before the menace fell from the sky and landed in the center of town, far away in an undisclosed location worked a scientist named Dr Parkingapp. He was part of an elite team of scientists perfecting the supersoldier serum for the United States government, codenamed Project Captain America. He believed, after years of research and thousands of hours of tests - measured out in the lives of a billion mice, along with perpetual graphing and calculating at the expense of tax-payer dollars - that he had finally discovered what would make it work. This so-called working serum he had poured into a single test tube, and now he looked upon it with glee. The government, however, didn't share in his glee and was talking about cutting his funding so that they could build a rumored weapon, the Earth bomb, which no one would talk about at length except to say that it was a destroyer of worlds and could one day be used against the threat of alien invasion, in case aliens were real.
Not wanting to lose his funding, Dr Parkingapp was eager to test the formula. But since he had no more mice to destroy - he had tested the mice that had been injected with his formulas by seeing if they could withstand conditions of extreme heat, and if they could, that meant that the formula worked2 - it was time for him to use it on himself.
With his stereo cranked to full, he stood with his legs spread and pointed to an imaginary crowd while holding a liquid-filled test tube in hand. Springsteen's 'Born in the USA' rocked his loudspeakers. He sang along in a punched-testicle falsetto, using the test tube as a microphone. When he broke into a dance step, he accidentally tripped and spilled a drop of serum on the tip of his shoe. It was more acidic than he thought. It ate through his shoe and into his foot.
'Ah, shit. I fucked up. Oh, my god, I fucked up. Holy crap it burns!'
His screams of agony were drowned out by the music.
Danny grabbed his notepad and ran from the house, leaving the door wide open. He ran down the street in a state of panic. He had killed the only woman he had ever loved. It was awful, horrendous. He felt hideous.
After a while he stopped running to catch his breath and try to get hold of his emotions, which seemed to be overpowering him with grief. Despite the obvious signs that Jennifer had contracted some terrible sickness, he was convinced it was his fault. He looked around town and saw the street where they had walked hand in hand for the first time. There was part of a fuselage on the sidewalk. He didn't notice that. It was unfortunate that he focused only on his own grief, because if he had stopped to turn around before running off, he would have seen Jennifer sit back up on the floor of his home and say, 'Rreor.'
Exhausted, Danny found a light pole on a street corner to rest against. From this vantage point, he surveyed the downtown area. It seemed normal, at first glance. Then he spotted the plane wing sitting in the road. There was an alarm going off at the local bank. Screams of terror. People running. The cops were on the scene, only they didn't seem to be doing anything. They were standing around. Danny didn't know what to do. Cops? What if they were looking for him? He was a murderer now. He was trying to save his life, but was it worth it? Maybe he should have let her kill him; maybe he deserved that, but . . . what was going on? This scene didn't seem right. He moved in closer, finding some of his energy coming back to him. He looked at the back of a plane engine lying in the street. There were feet sticking out from under it.
Oh, my God!
One of the officers was swaying back and forth as if he were a leaf being pushed by the wind. When Danny got two steps closer, all of that changed. The officer turned around. He looked as if he had been buried underground for the past nine weeks and had somehow come unearthed. He let out a sound somewhere between a murmur and a roar. Danny looked past the man-thing and saw that the screaming inside the bank was no longer going on and that there were more of these moaning and groaning man-things coming out of the bank. He backed up, shaking his head in disbelief.
A bony hand fell on his shoulder, and an inhuman voice hissed in his ear: 'I likey . . . fresh . . . meeeeat.'
Danny jumped, pulled at the arm, and felt it give. Next thing he knew he was running down the street with someone's arm in his hand, the body that it belonged to far behind him. He ducked around a corner and winged the arm on the ground in disgust. When he saw it move, he stomped on it and booted it away. He was breathing hard. It wasn't just Jennifer any more. It was the entire town.
'Jesus Christ.'
He looked toward city hall, where the impaled body hung, roasting in the sinking sun. He thought he saw it twitch.
Did he? Yup. He did.
'Jesus Christ!'
Dr Parkingapp was no longer coherent. Placed in a straitjacket, he was bounding up and down and cackling like a madman, swinging his shoulders into the soldiers that had been brought in to restrain him. General Deaconheinz, a tall swarthy man with a handlebar mustache, stood there grinning wildly. His unit commander was at his side, fussing with his nose, attempting not to appear as if he was picking it, although that was exactly what he was doing.
'This is the greatest day in our nation's history.'
'Sir, I don't understand, the supersoldier serum was a failure.'
'No, it wasn't a failure. It just wasn't a supersoldier serum.'
'Sir?'
'It's classified. But let me put it to you this way: he wasn't working on a supersoldier serum. That's a load of hokum from the comic books. You'd have to be pretty stupid to believe he was working on that. That's the brilliant thing about these genius scientist types. They're smart enough to make discoveries but dumb enough to misunderstand what they're discovering. Soldier, he was developing a very dangerous biological weapon.'
'Shit from Shinola, sir. That's positively brilliant.'
'I know. I'm the one that thought of it. Now let's get him aboard the plane and get the hell out of here.'
It wasn't safe to stay, Danny knew that, but what he would do he did not know. It was just that he had to leave. First, he had to get back to the diner and warn everyone. While he didn't like the patrons of the diner, they were still people, and he was still freaking out about Jennifer. If Charlene was good for anything, it was setting him straight. He had to hurry, and then he'd flee for good. He went in through the back entrance. He wanted to get a few things from his locker. He undid the lock and took out some money and a knapsack that had water, spare clothes, and protein bars. He filled it frantically with more food from the kitchen and then slung it on his back. He walked out through the kitchen and into the diner's main room. What he beheld looked normal. The customers were seated in their booths, and Charlene was at the front of the diner looking out the window, perched on the ledge.
The television on the counter was on. The broadcast made Danny halt. Newscaster Terra Gerstner, in bobbing red curls, was giving a stunning report. She looked different from the last time he'd seen her on TV.
'Two planes heading due north appear to have disappeared over a small town. Now there is word that the planes might have been involved in a fatal midair collision that has caused the quarantine of the same town. What authorities aren't saying yet is what was on board one of those planes. One of the aircraft was believed to be military-related, and some are speculating that a biological weapon was aboard. It is believed they were transporting the carrier of this weapon before the accident. Rumors are running rampant, but the government denies knowledge that they have created a zombie plague to destroy civilizations they don't agree with. It's just preposterous . . . Well, so's taking a shit in the refrigerator, I say!'3
Was she insane? Talking like that on the news . . . And then he saw that tinted look in her eyes . . . and he knew . . . he had seen enough. He started forward to warn the customers, but his tongue caught in his throat. One of the patrons seated at a booth grabbed his arm and snarled that same rictus snarl that Jennifer had. Danny couldn't get his arm free when he tried to tug it away. And when he looked up he saw Charlene moaning toward him, all deformed-looking. He wanted to vomit.
'Charlene, no, please don't. I . . .'
He kicked the patron in the head. Twice. The patron still wouldn't let go, so he pushed with his foot against the creature's shoulder and tore himself free, pitching to the floor from the exertion. Naturally the hand came with him, detaching itself from the zombie's body. The zombie moaned. Danny jumped to his feet, took the hand, and stuffed it into the zombie's mouth. The zombie made a sound of incomprehension. He began to gnaw away at his own hand, chomping on it like tasty spare ribs. A finger fell to the ground. He stopped. Danny looked down at the finger. The zombie looked at Danny and then raced to pick up the finger in case Danny got hungry and thought to take it from him.
Charlene came down on top of Danny. He braced her with his arm, holding her off. He screamed when he saw her canine teeth flash in front of him, trying to bite and chomp through his face. He couldn't believe this. This was his boss. Yes, she was a bitch, but now she was a zombie bitch!
With a strength he didn't know he had in him, he flung her off of him, then got up and charged through the others as they tried to stop him.
He ran out of the diner.
Groups of three and four zombies were on every street corner, moaning and walking at a snail's pace. Some were people who used to come into the diner occasionally. Now they lurched in Danny's direction, sensing fresh meat. There were others huddled in a semicircle, trying to make headway somewhere and snarling angrily as they were chased back. Danny wondered what it could be. When he got there he saw a fierce Chihuahua, fending off a horde of zombies, biting and growling. They kept trying to get their hands on it, but it barked and tore at their appendages, rending them apart.
It ran through legs and arms, stopped in front of Danny. When Danny started to run, the dog ran with him, first at his side, then running ahead, showing him where to go. A kinship was instantly formed.
Butt Muncher.
Cool nickname, Danny decided, and gave it to him. He had seen the dog bite one of them in the ass. Seemed apropos.
'He broke free of his harness!'
'What?'
'He broke free of his harness!'
'What?'
'He broke free-'
'Why do you keep repeating that?'
'Well, you said, "What?"'
'Soldier, I heard you the first time. I was just expressing shock that it had happened! It's like saying "What the fuck?"'
'But-'
'What now?'
'When did you say "What the fuck"?'
'Fucking get it together, soldier! Tell me what happened!' He swallowed. 'He gnawed off part of his arm.'
'Good God.'
There was a bloodcurdling scream. General Deaconheinz looked over the soldier's shoulder and saw one of his men writhing on the floor, while the pocked and bubbling body of Dr Parkingapp huddled over him, mouth thrust against his neck, chewing away.
The plane lurched to one side, going off course.
Military units were making their way down the streets, a combination of gear-saddled soldiers on Segways with mounted machine guns and military jeeps carrying personnel. Behind that was a slow-moving tank. Danny and Butt Muncher headed in their direction. Machine-gun fire went off around them, and flecks of flesh and blood soared through the air. Danny covered his ears, and the dog barked. The soldiers obliterated the zombies that were in front of them, leaving behind bricks of shredded flesh. It was impressive stuff, all that firepower, and after the initial shock of it wore off, it got Danny to thinking about Jennifer. The explosions reminded him of the Fourth of July, so many years ago, when they had shared their first kiss - with tongue. 'Oh, God,' he said. 'She's everywhere.'
The military didn't give him time to react. Danny and Butt Muncher were hustled off the streets and pushed into a makeshift medical tent. Danny was stripped naked and prodded with sharp poles by scientists in hazmat suits to make sure he did not have the infection. Every time he was poked, he thought of how Jennifer used to tickle him when they watched TV on the couch. So he broke out in hysterical laughter, which consternated the scientists. They set him straight by burning him in a sterilizing shower, prodding him in the rectum with a stick, and then smacking him in the face with a hot water sack. Butt Muncher was shaved bare and given the same treatment. When they were done, they allowed Danny to get dressed and reunited him with his new friend. They didn't tell him what was going on.
The soldiers were constantly running about, going this way and that. It was hard to get anyone to talk. Danny tried, but everyone ignored him. He finally grabbed one soldier by the arm and asked him what was happening.
The soldier shook his head. 'You don't know?' He shouted instead of spoke, like he was always giving out orders or hard of hearing. 'Moses! They tell nobody nothing around here! Always up to me. Well, gaddammit, we don't have anyone else to do it! Look, there aren't many of you that are okay. We passed up going back to Iraq to rectify this mess - that should tell you how bad it is. It's a plague that will turn you into the living dead. It will! The only way to stop 'em is to kill 'em, but they're already dead, so you got to kill 'em like you're sending 'em to hell. There's no saving anyone. We've been instructed to use an abundance of brutal force. This is war!' He grabbed Danny's notebook from him and swatted it down on the table. 'Now what the hell is this?'
Danny looked at his book, considering.
'Please don't do that,' he said.
'Don't get upset. What's so special about it?'
'It's my poetry. I write poetry.'
The soldier laughed. 'Ah, the sensitive type. Is it epic poetry?'
Danny shook his head.
'How the fuck is poetry going to help us fight a war unless it's epic?'
'I don't know. It's a . . . lost art. And therapy.'
'Therapy? For what?'
'My girlfriend, she broke up with me.'
'You know what, I'd break up with you too if you showed me pussy shit like this.' He tagged Danny's chest with the notebook, giving it back. 'Bro, take your panties off. It doesn't matter what you do if you're not capable of changing the tide of battle.'
He headed out of the tent, checking the clip on his gun. Immediately Danny was startled by a burst of machine-gun fire. He looked to the dog, and the dog whined.
'In death one must grin like a fish.
That way you will look at home.'4
He ran through the street with Butt Muncher picking up the rear. The fighting had gone berserk. It was a war zone. Their camp had blown up, sending soldiers and Segways flying through the air like Popsicle sticks, and if Danny and the dog hadn't left when they did, they'd have been charred and then probably eaten. Zombies filled the streets, virtually every corner, sidewalk, and alleyway, moaning and groaning and in many cases on the ground on all fours, chewing tastily on unmoving soldiers and civilians. Machine guns blitzed and blazed; orders were shouted over the din, loud enough that they sounded as if they were coming over evacuation speakers. When Danny and the dog made it to the end of town, they were confronted with a roadblock. The soldiers didn't look like they were letting anyone through. One of them drew a rifle. He was also wearing a clown mask.
'Whoa!' said Danny. 'Hold on! I just want to get out.'
'Hoo-hah! Our orders are that no one, that includes you and me, is allowed to leave or enter this town.'
'But - what am I supposed to do?'
'If it were my problem, I'd care. Now go on, get out of here.'
'This is ridiculous. I'm okay. You can't shoot me.'
'Hoo-hah! If you cross that there line I will, and unfortunately everyone in my battalion will too. There'll be nothing left of you or your dog. The government doesn't want to risk anything. This is a big country - ginormous, last time I checked the map - and we have to protect it. That's our duty. Yours as well as mine.'
'Jesus. I'm just a poet.'
'As I said, my orders are to shoot anyone that tries to get past. Alive or dead. Poet or not.' He stopped and then asked, 'You a good poet?'
'I guess. Why, you want to make an exception? National Endowment for the Arts and all that.'
'Hoo-hah! No, just wanted to know if you were a fag.' He laughed hysterically. 'We don't like fags in the military. Incidentally the clown mask is to scare people off.' He removed it. 'I guess it's not working.'
'Truthfully, you look ridiculous.'
'That's what everyone's been telling me. I just don't believe them. But coming from a poet, now that's pretty hurtful.' He flipped it back down like a ballplayer's shades. 'Suck it, asshole!'
He fired into the air, and Danny fled.
Danny walked for blocks, the dog scurrying at his heels. In the streets, chaos reigned. Bullets flew. Corpses walked and then didn't. Guts spewed. Sewer drains were besieged with butchered limbs and tattered clothing. Danny's woe-is-me state held him oblivious to the danger around him. He sure missed holding Jennifer in his arms, feeling the small of her back, the sigh of her chest, the tickle of her hair against his cheek. It was unfortunate that this plague had come to town. The timing of it made the heartache of losing her that much worse. They were all suffering. At least he and this dog were okay . . . for now.
The plane was off course.
The general and the soldier didn't know it, but with the pandemonium breaking out, the pilots were nervous.
'Stand down, soldier. Put the gun down.'
General Deaconheinz didn't like the idea that one of his men was attempting to fire a gun on a military aircraft. On one hand, it was damn stupid of him, on the other, it wasn't a bad idea to execute this creature.
The soldier nervously kept the gun aimed. 'I have a shot,' he whined.
'If you miss, we're dead.'
'Tell me how it works.'
'The plague, it's pretty bad. You ever been in love, soldier? It's a lot like being in love. It starts slowly, moves through the body quickly, and soon you are overcome. It becomes a part of you, transforms your body, your emotions - everything. Then it falls apart. It's not what you first thought it was. It changes you emotionally, physically, then it's never the same again. And like a lover leaving you, it moves on to someone else. Of course, the first one infected controls the rest of them.'
'Depressing, sir.'
'Of course it is, soldier. It's like the Ebola virus . . . after it's been kicked in the nuts.'
'Sir . . .'
'What?'
'You're greatly upsetting me.'
'You wanted the truth!'
'I changed my mind!'
'Oh, my God, you're going to do it, aren't you?'
He fired the gun.
The sight was more than he could handle. Jennifer was walking dead, ambling through the streets. He couldn't believe it. And yet he was relieved, because he hadn't killed her - she was already dead! The joy of that statement lasted only a short while, once he realized she was rallying the other zombies to eat his brains. He ran, and so did the dog, but they found another herd of zombies waiting. He was thinking the worst was to come . . . when two soldiers came to his rescue. He would learn their names afterward. With M-16s they pushed the zombies back, the sheer force and number of bullets astonishing even to themselves. They ran out of ammo when it came to Jennifer. Danny couldn't bring himself to allow her to be harmed. He got down on his knees and threw his hands in the air: 'Hallelujah!' The soldiers stared. One of them took out a machete. 'No,' shouted Danny, 'for the sweet love of all that is - leave her be!' He put the machete away. Danny watched as Jennifer, the eyeless zombie, staggered around. He felt so relieved, it brought tears to his own eyes.
The first body, the one that everyone knew about, was the one that fell from the sky. Corporal Brian Massa and Sergeant Marc D. Resnick were looking for it. Danny knew where it was. They set off toward city hall together. Corporal Massa and Sergeant Resnick blasted away zombies that got in the way, and Danny and the dog followed. Between bursts of machine-gun fire, Danny scribbled down words in his notebook, feeling inspired. Darkness, fetid, yellow eyes . . . He would make these words into a poem one day. He guided the two soldiers through town. When they got to city hall, Sergeant Resnick and Corporal Massa went berserk, using up entire clips of ammo. Danny cringed at the violence. There were piles of bodies in the street, the soup of blood and guts everywhere.
They banged through the front doors and started up the steps. They hurried, huffing. As they came out of the stairwell and onto the roof, a zombie smacked Danny in the face and he went down. The zombie was on top of him. He was Trevor Moses, or what used to be Trevor Moses before he became a walking corpse that smelled like pissed pants. The dog sprang on Dead-Trevor and bit his heel. Amidst this distraction, Danny landed a hard elbow across Dead-Trevor's face, and his jaw sank, leveling forward like a shovel. Dead-Trevor moaned. It seemed as if things were frozen in time. The zombie moved his mouth around, trying to bite, but it only slackened further. Danny grabbed hold of Dead-Trevor's lower jaw, pulled it off with a manly shriek, and then catapulted it across the roof. For taking my girlfriend! The zombie looked at him, confused, and then attacked. The dog landed mouth-first on the zombie's ass, living up to his name. Dead-Trevor reeled. Danny struggled to push him away, and in the process of doing so got hold of a BIC lighter that was in Dead-Trevor's pocket and ignited it. Dead-Trevor's crotch caught fire, and he fell to the ground twitching and moaning and squealing. 'Jesus-shit-on-me, I'm sorry,' said Danny, and he sprang to his feet and tried to put the fire out by repeatedly stomping on Dead-Trevor's zombie balls. Once the fire was out, Dead- Trevor was curled up with his hands between his legs.5 The soldiers came through the door and quickly blew the zombie's head off. Face-painted with brain matter, Danny stood up like an American Indian at war. For the first time they looked across at the spire and registered shock. The zombie was still impaled, but he was moving sybaritically, not twitching as before, but dancing, waving his arms back and forth and bopping his feet up and down. He seemed to be rocking out, as if he had headphones on and was listening to music, 'Born in the USA' playing in his head.
Corporal Massa was about to fire when Danny pushed the barrel of the gun down. The sergeant and the corporal looked at him as if he had gone out of his mind. Insanity seemed a logical response to what they were dealing with. Danny walked closer to the zombie, watching it gather speed through its motions. He drew closer. And closer. Fascinated. The zombie turned his head and his arms and legs stopped moving. He stared at Danny. Then he tried to look down, and Danny did the same. The zombie began to move animatedly once more, fresh guts vomiting from the hole in his body. When Danny looked into the street below, he saw the zombies had stopped and started moving again. It clicked for him, like rocket science.
'It's controlling them. He's the one.'
'We know,' said the corporal, raising his gun. 'That's why we're here to kill it. He's a hive-ass motherfucker. Mission: kill him so bad he remembers his death for the rest of his life. With honey and fucking flies on top. Cover your ears.'
Cover your ears! Familiar words. Jennifer used to say just that before orgasm, warning him how loud she was going to scream. She knew it embarrassed him. What if this zombie were Jennifer, or someone else? It would have family, loved ones . . .
'You can't.'
'What? What am I supposed to do?'
'I don't know. I mean, he was probably like you or me at one time, and then . . . this happened . . . He crashes to Earth, and finds himself stuck on this . . . this spire . . . and he can't get free . . . So he calls in his minions to come together and free him from his suffering, but they're so stupid they can't figure out where he is. Plus, he may not be such a bad guy.'
'You make him sound almost human,' said the sergeant.
'He is kind of human.'
'So. What's his name?'
'Does he have to have a name?'
'He's got to have a name.'
'Maybe it's Dave.'
'Dave? Fuck Dave.'
'Roger?'
'Fuck him too.'
'G?'
'Whaaat?'
'Just the letter, like a rapper.'
'Stupid!'
Danny sighed. 'No Dave, no Roger, no G. Fine, you suggest.'
'How about Syphilis? He looks like a disease, and he looks like a cock. It's perfect!'
The soldiers high-fived, laughed.
'Well. I still don't think you should kill it.'
'What should we do with it, poet-boy? Hold its hand and say a prayer? They're killing the whole town. Everyone.'
He socked the zombie in the face with the butt of his gun. The dead man stopped moving, blood gushing. Then he started moving again. His nose fell off. The dog set to it and swallowed. Better than the eye he ate earlier, but not as salty. He needed salt. And water. He was dehydrated.
'He just wants to get down. Can you blame him?'
'Yeah? I think you are being a sympathizer. That's a fucking zombie. You can't sympathize with something that doesn't have any brains. Everyone in this country wants to sympathize with something. They protest the environment, animal rights . . . but I'm in the army because I don't want to protest. I want to kill people, as many as I can. I consider it a privilege. Stand aside and let me do my job.'
'Hold on. If you were impaled and were dead and still alive, you'd probably be angry about it. It's a Promethean dilemma. That's sad, don't you think?'
Corporal Massa thought on it, nodded.
'Guess . . . you have a point. I was a poor student in school and probably shouldn't be doing the thinking around here. Just from a human standpoint, I certainly wouldn't want no thing poking through my abdomen like that.'
'Dude, it's like he got stabbed with a giant phallus. Not a fun way to go.' This was Sergeant Resnick.
'What do we do when he gets off the spire?' asked Corporal Massa.
'Don't know,' said Danny. 'Let's work on getting it off first. Worry about the rest later.'
'Sounds like a plan, Douche-Nuts.'
Down in the stairwell, next to the fire extinguisher, there was an axe. The sergeant pulled it out of the glass and came back upstairs. He raised it above his head. Then he began chopping the bottom of the spire, below where the zombie was impaled. He chopped and chopped and chopped. He had to stop to wipe his brow, at which point Danny blurted out, 'Sympathy!'
'What?' the two soldiers said together. And then, 'What's he babbling about?'
'Beats me, dude.'
'You said I was being sympathetic,' said Danny, 'so let's call him Sympathy.'
The two soldiers looked at one another. Corporal Massa shrugged, took the axe from Sergeant Resnick, and then hefted it above his head. He muttered under his breath as he chopped. Finally the spire split, and with a size-fourteen boot to the pole, it tilted. The zombie flailed as the spire toppled. After a bit, he began to do his little dead dance, shimmying along the spire to release himself. When he wobbled to his feet, green gunk spewed from the hole in his midsection and his mouthless visage rocked up and down. Danny looked down to the street below. Zombie activity was slowing.
'You see, all he wanted was for someone to set him free.'
The zombie danced.
'Now what's he doing, Douche-Nuts? Moonwalking?' The zombie walked to the edge of the building, moving like he had ungainly hooves instead of feet. He fell off the roof. Whiff. The three of them stood over the edge looking down. The zombie was splayed in the street, arms and legs unmoving, brains seeping into a gutter. Danny wondered if zombies ever ran out of leaking brains. Seemed a reasonable curiosity.
After a while, an arm began to twitch and then a leg. The zombie began to move again. Shakily getting to his feet. Stumble-walking away.
The transformation was nearly complete. As his body fell through the sky, plummeting like a fallen angel, fragments of past memories drifted through his head at a rate commensurate with that of the diseased flesh peeling off his body during its rapid descent.6 This memory had to do with General Deaconheinz - that man he had bit the ear and neck flesh off of and gargled down like mouthwash before something had propelled him out of the plane - coming to visit him in his laboratory. They were shoring up details about the project he was going to be working on for the government.
'If you do this, you'll be handsomely rewarded. The government will see to that. We will provide you with whatever you need.'
'Whatever?'
'Whatever you need. It is yours.'
Dr Parkingapp looked at his pin-up calendar on the wall. Miss July was a sultry vixen from somewhere in small-town America.
'Well, sometimes, as a scientist, I get kind of lonely. Do you think you can get me Miss July?'
The general walked over to the calendar and flipped up a few pages and then let them fall. He looked at Dr Parkingapp, sizing him up.
'I'm not dragging the United States military through the muck for something as silly as a pin-up girl. You want to get one, use the money we pay you to make it happen. You can have all the whores you want. But somewhere along the way, we have to draw the line, and I'm drawing the line there. You geeky scientist types just don't know anything about women. And by the way, I've read your file, Dr Parkingapp. I know about the underage girls you smuggled in from Taiwan.'
'Okay, okay. I was just asking.'
'Do you want the job or not?'
'Oh, I want it; I definitely want it.'
He looked over at the calendar, down at the bottom where it had the facsimile signature: XXO, Jennifer Bugles.
Danny, the two soldiers, and the dog raced downstairs.
'Tell them not to shoot,' said Danny to the soldiers.
They radioed ahead on their walkie-talkies. When the soldiers stopped firing, they noticed that the zombies were all collapsing to the ground. They looked around, confused. It was puzzling.
Sympathy stumbled his way through town, the same town, which he would soon leave, taking the population along with him, dragging his dead foot and heaving his aging-beyond-reason body forward. Others followed, but what bothered Danny most, though surely this didn't bother anyone else, was that he spotted Jennifer in the street going that way too. Zombie or not, she still upset him. He ran to intercept her. He knew that she couldn't think, that she wasn't herself. What if he offered himself to her? Just a nibble, that's all it'd take, and he could be a zombie along with her. But he pulled up, watching her shamble past.
With a heavy heart, he let her go, like dropping a caught fish back into the water. What choice did he have?
The zombie fell from the sky,
Bits and pieces,
Disintegrating upon descent.
Limbs shambling and pale,
Who knew what trouble he would cause?
Only some - a dog and a Danny.
And like Jesus upon the cross,
He found his disciples.
A town rent asunder,
A young man's heart crushed,
Like dying yellow embers,
A plague had come . . .
Fetid and meat-hardy,
Promethean in disaster,
An unfeeling man's fate,
Government put- on,
And a poet with trace amounts of . . .
Sympathy . . .
For a zombie that fell from the sky.