conte [issue two - Intro to Narrative]

We did, indeed, meet at Barry’s that night. Mort was the last to arrive, so until then the rest of us just kind of milled around by candlelight, drinking beers and, I swear to God, talking about the weather. We were all thinking about Lon and Dina, but no one mentioned them. Arnold asked about Megan and I said she was fine, she just wanted to stay at home.

When Mort came in, the tension rose.

“Okay, I have news,” he said as he closed the door and came into the living room. He sat between me and Nathan on the couch. “I drove as far as I could into town today. Had to park her a few miles out. The road’s a mess for a ways out. First thing, no one’s there. No one. No state troopers, no national guard, no army, no media, nobody except the people who were there when it hit.” This had a very sobering host of meanings, I realized during his pause. “So I walked around, looking. Whatever it was, I was hoping there was some trace of it.

“It was something of ours. It was American. I found part of it. Some kind of plate with the letters ‘O-R-P period’ and ‘I-N-I-T-Y’ below that.”

“So what the fuck was it?” Arnold.

“I suspect it was military. Biochemical weapons, that’s my guess. Something designed to re-animate the wounded, the dead, I mean. From up there. I know that sounds like a whole load of crazy, like something in the movies, but here we are. You guys have seen it. Today, I saw it again. In town.” Another pause. “So this thing, I was thinking about it. It does this one thing, but what else does it do?”

“What’s it doing to us, you mean.” Nathan.

“That’s right, Nathan. If it’s radioactive, we’re already screwed. Maybe it is. But it has to be doing something to us.”

“Turning us into them?” Me.

Mort shook his head. “I don’t think so. Are any of you feeling sick?”

“Whatever it’s doing,” Mort continued, “it’s not fast-acting. It may take a few weeks, maybe months, even. Now this re-animation effect, I can’t see any way that could be a long-term thing. I wouldn’t have believed what it can do if I hadn’t seen it myself, but I have to believe that now. Okay,” he nodded and waved his hand, “but within that, it makes the most sense that it’ll lose its effect after a little while.”

That was argued for a while until Mort spoke over everyone else.

“Either way,” he said, “what happens here? Any ideas?”

“Nathan said you think we’re going to war,” I said.

“It hasn’t happened yet. We’d know if it had. Let’s hope it doesn’t.”

“You tell us, Mort. What do we do?” Barry.

“If I were you guys, I’d start preparing to see more of them. You’re about eight miles from Missionary Pine First Baptist’s graveyard.”

And that’s what led to Arnold moving in with Barry.

“What about you, David?” he asked me. “You and Megan ought to come too.”

“Won’t that be cramped?” I asked.

“Yeah, but what’s the alternative?”

Nathan and I stood our ground. Mort set the others to gathering bullets and firearms while he outlined a basic security regimen for them. I told them I needed to get back to Megan and we agreed to meet back at Barry’s the following night and Nathan and I left and as I drove down the hill and across the creek I had the strong feeling that when I said I had to get back to Megan, Mort didn’t believe me.

I honked at Nathan as he drove on past, going to his house, and I went inside, into my house, where my wife, the mother of my children, was waking up.

That night, I prayed. I had lost my wife, but maybe, just maybe, I didn’t have to lose my babies.

It quickly became hard for me not to think of my zombie wife, chained to overhead wooden beams in my basement, as something of a pet. I know how that sounds, believe me, but it is what it is. I first had this thought the following afternoon when I was trying to think of a way to feed her.

Something else I also thought about: if things went just right, and it would take a lot, but if things went just right, I would be responsible for feeding two more mouths in about seven months.

And then: one day I will be eating hamburgers and drinking beers with my two grown twins.

I felt the first stirrings of fatherhood within me, the first real stirrings and despite the horrible grey she had turned or how her wound was beginning to stink or how her eyes would roll back into her skull when she would moan, it was only then that I finally ceased seeing Megan as human and I began to see her as a mere vessel for my children.

It had been a couple of days since she had eaten. I had tried to feed her raw meat that morning, but it would just fall out of her mouth.

I realized as I stared at her that I would have to bring her something…alive.

I saw my basement filled with dead dogs and cats and blood covering the floor.

We would grill the burgers in the afternoon and drink beer and the twins would be healthy and happy and successful and they would never know about any of this, about their dead mother or me feeding her or about how after they were born I shot their zombie mother in the head.

So that’s it, I thought. I wouldn’t be able to feed her for a while longer, though. I went upstairs, not unhappy to be away from her, and got my pistol from our bedroom. Back in the basement, I fired a shot into the ceiling. Then I went outside and mourned my wife’s death and when they came, I lied. I told them she had died overnight and became a zombie and I had to put her down. They didn’t ask to see her body and I didn’t offer.

That night, I brought her chickens I found in a tiny coop in a nearby backyard. I would hold the bird’s body up to her mouth, in the dark with only one candle burning, and she would bite and tear at the flesh, feathers and all, and blood would cover her face every time, but, as I learned that first time, it wasn’t the body, but the head she wanted.

Specifically, I learned, watching her move the severed head around as I dangled it between two fingers until she had it just right, she wanted the brain.

Later, when I moved to dogs, sometimes cutting the head off for her and sometimes just cracking it open and holding the whole thing up for her, the feedings would drive her further and further into a slow-motion frenzy, her angry gestures coming in sluggish and sporadic thrusts and jerks and twists against her chains.

Summer became fall as my basement became an abattoir, my car Death’s carriage, and my children grew inside their mother’s womb.