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.’