Zombies vs. Unicorns (7 page)

You wish he would just shoot already. You wish he would just fucking kill you.

But the girl, trembling now, shuts the hood and opens the driver’s side of your car.

“The keys are in the ignition,” Jack says. “Drive home.”

“But the engine …”

“Go.”

She shuts the door. The car starts without a problem. She backs down the gravel drive, slowly at first, then so fast she nearly careens into a tree.

You and Jack are alone. He still holds the gun.

“Grayson … it’s true? What they said about you. What you—”

“Yeah, of course it is. Why the fuck else would I be out here?” You close your eyes. “Hurry up, will you?”

“What are you doing?”

“Waiting.”

“I’m putting the gun down.”

“So you can stick me with your samurai sword?”

“I’m not going to kill you.”

“Why the fuck not?”

“Open your damn eyes, Grayson!”

The gun is in a holster around his jeans. His hair is spiky with dried sweat, but he’s changed out of his lacrosse uniform. His face is flushed red, like he might cry.

“We’ve got to leave. I put Dad off, but he’ll be here soon.”

He turns without another word and walks deeper into the woods. He’s quiet, though you can’t see how. When you follow him, the cracking leaves and twigs sound like an earthquake. Ten minutes later you reach his car. It’s parked in the middle of a road that’s little more than two ruts of packed dirt. You get in. You’re not sure what else to do. He drives smoothly, carefully, and yet with the same steady fierceness you’ve sensed in him all along.

“Jack, if you’re not going to kill me, you have to let me go.”

“Dad’s decided to get you on his own. He’s been nuts for something like this ever since he got invalided out. It’s not safe for you.”

You have to laugh. “Safe? Do you really know what I am?”

There must have been something in your voice, some tremor, because Jack looks at you now for the first time since you got into the car. “Grayson … they said … ZSE is rare, but there’s a few cases each year.”

“ZSE?”

“Zombie Spongiform Encephalopathy.”

Zombie. That’s what Jack thinks you are.

“You should kill me. Your dad wants you to kill me, right? Isn’t that why we’re running away from him?” You don’t even recognize the road signs now. He’s gone far off the highway,
down some long country roads bounded only by soybean fields and great tubes of hay.

“Why are you so damn interested in me killing you, Grayson?”

“Why are you giving a ride to a raving cannibal?”

“Shut up!”

“Why, it isn’t true?”

“You sound just like him!”

“Then maybe he’s right.”

Jack abruptly slams his foot on the brake. The car skids a little on the deserted road before shuddering to a halt. When he turns to you now, he is crying, though you can tell he doesn’t know it.

“I watched you decide to not kill that girl.”

Is that what happened? You shrug, deliberately. “I’ve killed dozens of others.”

“Maybe you’ve changed.”

“Maybe I’m not that hungry. Maybe she smelled like brussels sprouts.”

“I don’t believe that.”

You’re very close to him now. Close to his long-sleeved T-shirt, his flushed cheek, his gun. “Why, Jack?”

“I don’t know. ‘Behind Blue Eyes’ and Harajuku pop and Ian Curtis—”

Hands and lips and teeth, and you’d forgotten—no, you’d never known—this way of knowing someone, this dissolution of self, this autophagy.

His shirt rips, but you’re careful with his skin.

8. Sounds of Silence

Ian Curtis killed himself on the eighteenth of May, 1980. You might think this ironic of the lead singer of a band called Joy Division, but actually their name is a reference to prostitution in Nazi concentration camps. (Which might explain why their iconic song is called “Love Will Tear Us Apart.”) He hung himself, a death of slow asphyxiation, of utter helplessness for long minutes until he finally, mercifully, lost consciousness. There are certain theories of suicide that propose that the more self-loathing one feels, the more violent the method one chooses.

Elliott Smith (folksinger) stabbed himself in the heart with a kitchen knife. Nick Drake (folksinger) OD’d on antidepressants.

A qualitative difference in self-loathing? Please. When you decide to check yourself out, the difference between a gun and a rope is how long it takes to tie the knot.

9. Eat the Music

You stay in motels. And not the kind with friendly signs in primary colors and “Kids Stay Free!” deals on weekends. These motels have sputtering neon spelling “vacancy” and long rows of rooms, identical as LEGOs. The bathroom floors are coated with grime spread thin by lazy efforts to wipe it away. Sheets are haphazardly laundered. The second night, you see a bloodstain that covers half the floor. It blends well enough with the carpet and you don’t tell Jack. You’re hungry and you don’t like to remind him of what you are.

Jack pays for the rooms, and no one asks questions. For a last-minute escape, he’s managed well: a few thousand in cash,
a box of emergency food supplies in the trunk, two swords, and three more of those big, black guns. You nearly vomited when he offered to let you use one. Now you just try not to look at them.

You haven’t eaten human flesh in ten days. You might have snapped before now, but Jack bought a haunch of pork from a local butcher. He couldn’t look you in the eye when he handed it to you. “Second thoughts about your charity case?” you asked, and felt the hollow reward of his silence.

Pork works. Not as well as warm human flesh, not even close, but at least you can keep away the worst of it, the insanity you remember from those first moments with the prion. Whatever madness you feel, whatever longings you have, are bound up in what you and Jack do late at night on scratchy sheets, and the only music you share is the hum of the hallway ice machine, the occasional rumble of pickup trucks speeding by on the country roads. During the day there are no lingering glances, tentative hand-holding, butterfly kisses. During the day you’re the zombie and he’s your keeper. At night he’s still afraid of his father, but at least he lets you see the fear. It descends like an army. It makes him pace up and down the room, makes him cry, sometimes vomit. You hate what he won’t tell you, and you hate knowing anyway.

The third night, his father calls. This is not the first time Jack’s cell phone has buzzed, not the first time he’s gone too still and too pale and you’ve wondered how much his ice man father did to him. But this time Jack picks up.

“I’m not coming back,” Jack says. He’s trying to sound
tough, but you can see his fears as clearly as you can see his scars in the moonlight.

“I trained you for better than this.” Jack likes his speaker volume the way he likes his music: too loud. I can hear every word his father says.

“You trained me to be a monster.”

His father is silent for a few seconds. “You’re in room 303 of Jimmy’s Truck Lodge in Osler. I’m about ten minutes away. Let me finish this, Jackson. The boys at the agency have orders to kill that creature
and
anyone with him.”

“Dad, you’re not—”

“You should let me finish this.”

The line goes dead. You wonder for a moment what he’ll do, but Jack doesn’t even hesitate. He rushes you out the door. It’s not hard to leave quickly—everything important is in the car. Jack is steady, so iced and cool that you wonder how much longer before he’s just like his father. Maybe that’s what this is really about—not loving you, not a sense of fair play, but one last, desperate ploy to not become a monster.

He gestures angrily at you. “Get in!”

“If I stay behind—”

“
And anyone with him
, remember?”

“Your dad wouldn’t …”

“Will you bet my life on it?”

“I could bite you. Make it look authentic.”

“Fuck you, Grayson.”

“Why does it matter? I’m a fucking zombie! You think even this cure they gave me will last forever? What the hell is wrong
with you? Let your ice man dad kill me, and you can run away somewhere and have a decent life with some decent people.”

Jack isn’t steady now. He punches the door—solidly, enough to hurt. “You’re the only person—Fuck. You know, don’t you? Get in the car. Please.”

You knock him out.

It’s brief and efficient, to the jaw. You know how to incapacitate people. He only has time for one wide-eyed stare before he slumps into your arms, unconscious. You carry him back into the motel room and rip his shirt. You figure the shoulder’s as good a place as any. But when you look down, the light illuminates another scar, still-pink marks from stitches running across his collarbone. You swallow back bile and rip his shirt some more. Hopefully that will be enough.

Ice man is standing in the doorway when you turn around.

“So that’s what this is about?” he says. Of course you couldn’t fool him.

“You wondered?”

“No. Not really. I guess I never … I don’t know what they’ll do to him. Not if they think you two …”

“You stopped me from feeding,” you say.

“That didn’t look like feeding.”

“What would you know about it?”

He cocks his head. Then nods. “Okay. I stopped you from feeding.”

You don’t think you’re imagining the hint of relief in his voice, the subtle loosening of tension in his arms.

Then he shoots you in the shoulder. You just want this
over with, but Jack is moaning on the bed, and you went through way too much trouble for him to ruin this now. You rush the ice man, which surprises him enough that he falls onto the concrete outside. You run past him, feeling the blood dripping down your arm, but not much else. The prions are good about pain. A few other guests have opened their doors at the noise. The ice man lets off another shot. It misses you.

You rush to a large, empty space at the edge of the lot. You don’t want to make this too obvious. It shouldn’t be much work for him to hit your head from this distance. But the next shots are so wide that you can’t even smell the lead.

“Come on,” you mutter when the ice man just stands there.

Then he falls down.

Jack stands behind him, jaw bruised, gun smoking. There’s a hole in the back of his dad’s head, and you can smell it from here.

“You okay?” Jack asks, after you jog up to him. But he’s the one who’s shaking.

Someone shrieks. The night clerk talks rapidly into his cell phone. “I think the cops are coming,” you say.

“Yeah. It’ll probably take them a while.”

You both look down at the corpse. Jack hauls him inside the room. “Hurry up,” he says.

You only have time for the brains, but that’s okay. They’re the best part.

10. Shoot Out the Lights

We live in a little cottage in Mexico now, in a village so tiny that only the residents have heard of it. There’s a beach with good
fishing, and a market once a month an hour away. Jack spoke some Spanish before, and we’re picking it up well enough. We go into town for the Internet, where Jack sells Mexican handicrafts on eBay.

I bought him a guitar for his birthday, but I ended up playing it. When I practice, he jokes about how good he’s getting. I wrote him one song, and sometimes I like it. I haven’t played it for him yet. Even now, it’s hard for me to guess what will make him go still and icy. Sometimes I think a part of him hates me.

I know Jack will kill me if I eat again. I imagine it sometimes, when I stare too long at some plump girl in a bikini and her smell reaches back into that prion part of my brain and I can feel the old hunger tearing at my skin. I imagine him playing Joy Division, Ian Curtis’s mournful voice almost scraping against the speakers, “Do you cry out in your sleep / all my failings exposed,” and Jack’s tears smear my lips, and I get just that last, ecstatic taste of him before the blade goes snicker-snack.

“Purity Test”

Holly
: The association of the unicorn with virtue is of long origin. According to legend, a young girl would be sent ahead of unicorn-hunting parties—as shown in the famous unicorn tapestries—to lure the creature with her innocence and purity. Once the unicorn rested its head in the girl’s lap, hunters would surprise the unicorn and, well, that would be that.

Some scholars have creepily suggested that unicorns are able to detect chastity, although, according to the literature, unicorns have been lured not only by women who weren’t maidens, but in at least one case, by a perfumed boy dressed in women’s clothes. Now, I don’t think, as my coeditor will no doubt suggest, that this means unicorns are dumb, but rather they are lured by essential inner goodness.

One of the things I love most about Naomi Novik’s “Purity Test” is how it takes our expectations of unicorns and maidens and turns them on their head. Plus, it’s very funny.

Justine
: “Purity Test” is funny because Naomi Novik is making fun of unicorns. That’s right, Naomi Novik is secretly on Team Zombie. Poor Team Unicorn, in such shambles from the outset. I almost pity them. (Get it? Shambles? You know, like, zombies shambling? Never mind …)