There is a light that never goes out. This light hangs in the wedding tower. Tomorrow, I will sleep there for the first and final time. Tomorrow, I am getting married.
I’ll make love for the first time.
The morning after, the dead people will come. They’ll cut off my head and steal my brain.
My wife, hopefully Pym, will become pregnant and give birth to a child who will never know its father, as I never knew mine.
To the dead people, male humans are only good for one child, then they are slaughtered and de-brained.
Naked, I crawl out of the dirt hole I sleep in. The hot fog eats at my flesh.
I’m damn hungry but take my time walking to the feeding troughs. Wedding season never brings anything good to eat for breakfast, only leftovers from the previous night’s celebration.
In the distance, a tumbleweed blows against the gargantuan brick wall that closes in around us like a fist squeezing an eyeball.
“Fill your belly, son,” my mother smiles. She scoots aside so that I can kneel beside her at the trough. Her face is bloody.
She sucks the meat off the severed thumb of a man.
I know the hand belonged to a man and not a woman because it is a young hand, a boy’s hand. Zombies harvest males at a young age, never females, unless the female proves infertile or dies of suicide or some natural cause.
That is because females are for making babies. From the time they are first married off, most females give birth to six or seven children, each with a different husband.
A man can fill a woman with his seed for one night and then he must die. The zombies cut off his head. The zombies want his brain.
The rest of his body? Human food.
Zombies are wasteful, inefficient farmers, but they know how to keep our gene pool diverse.
I squeeze between my mother and a ratty bitch who could very well be my wife come tomorrow.
Humans don’t choose who humans marry.
I dig around inside the trough, looking for some choice bits. My mother grabs my wrist and forces something wet and soft into my hand.
A human heart.
She tilts her neck so that I can see the bite marks lining her jugular. “A bastard nearly ripped my throat out for taking this away. However, I promised myself as a little girl that no son of mine would ever go to his wedding night without the nourishment of a heart. Eat it now so that your seed may be strong tomorrow.”
I am my mother’s fifth child. She birthed four boys be-fore me. They all went to their wedding nights before I came along, so I’ve never known the company of a brother.
“Thank you for your troubles, mother.”
I bite into the heart, savoring the brackish gravy that gushes from the inner chamber.
As I chew, savage eyes fall greedily upon me. Everyone knows that in a few days I’ll be in the trough. I meet each pair of eyes, wondering if any of these women will be my wife. I return to my hole after breakfast.
I don’t feel like talking to anyone.
I doze to stave off the hot air. Even though I’m naked and underground, the heat is overwhelming. I toss and turn, my sweat transforming the dirt floor to mud.
I’m awakened a short time later by the prodding of a shit-stained claw.
This can only be one person: Robbie, the goblin child.
“Please wake up, Grieves,” he says, speaking with a grating lisp.
Robbie came from an old mother who died giving birth to him. My mother took him in at a young age, so he is sort of like a younger brother to me. The front of his oversized head is sloped and wart-covered. Two large twisted horns jut from his forehead. From the neck down, smaller horns cover his tainted, green skin. A permanent wheeze emanates from his nostrils. His breath stinks because he’s got this nasty habit of eating his own shit. It’s why his hands are stained.
“Wake up, Grieves. Please wake up.”
“Get out of my hole, you shitting bastard.”
“But your mother told me to wake you. The bridal lottery for Bill’s wedding is about to begin. Your mother said you ought to be there, owing that your wedding is tomorrow.”
“Get on going. I’ll be there shortly,” I say.
“Right, see you there!” Robbie turns around and scuttles out of my hole.
Certain I’m alone again, I uncover the little wooden box I keep buried in the floor. I remove the box and pull out the two withered papers within. One is a letter from Pym, the only letter anyone ever wrote to me. We were crushes as children. At the age of seven, she found blood between her legs and was promptly married off to Wolf, then the oldest man, all wrinkly and gray. Wolf nearly fucked her to death on their wedding night.
Pym had given the note to me right before her wedding. In it, she promised that when I grew bigger, big enough to marry, that we would be married and unlike all the others who come together for one night only to be lost to each other, we would never part.
The other thing I keep in my box is a drawing, more recent than the letter. I drew this picture of Pym a year ago at most. Pym is thin and frail like most of the girls, except she does not resemble a diseased rat. Pym looks angelic. White hair, white skin, white eyes, white teeth, white tongue. I want nothing more than to be her husband so I can peer between her legs and see up inside her.
I bet she is full of clouds.
I bet she will be chosen as my wife tomorrow.
I will be her third husband. Some say that is the best one to be.
I return the letter and the picture to the wooden box and rebury the box in its hole, thinking I’ll give the picture to Pym as a wedding present.
Pym, be my wife.
I scamper out of my hole and off to Bill’s bridal lottery.
Bill is a good man. So good I almost consider him a friend.
He acts kindly toward everyone, even Robbie. Unlike most of us, Bill was not born on the farm. He lived as a wild man, a free man, for many years. Until the zombies captured him and brought him here. Bill is educated about the outside world and many other things as well. Upon his arrival, he took on the role of teacher. He has taught young and old alike. We know many things thanks to Bill.
He told us about this place called City, where humans live free to this day. Now it is time for Bill to get married. A good man, that Bill.
People crowd around the stage, which is situated in the exact center of our enclosed prison habitat, or farm.
Surrounded by so many people squeezing close around me, I try to forget that we’re imprisoned by brick walls a hundred feet high. I try to forget that all important things end in death. So much excitement but these bad thoughts squelch it.
The crowd parts to let the zombies through. Bill stands onstage by himself, looking dignified but solemn.
Like an army of drunken owls, the crowd chants:
“Who will be his bride? Who? Who? Who will be his bride? Who? Who?”
The zombies shamble onto the stage, maggots swimming in the flesh that falls off their bloody bones.
The zombies dress in blue overalls and yellow boots.
Some of them wear straw hats. Others are missing their faces, preventing them from wearing hats. Those faceless ones hold their eyeballs in their outstretched hands to guide them. It must be inconvenient going around like that.
Bill looks sad standing among the zombies.
For most of us men, our wedding day is the happiest day of our lives, but not for Bill. Being a wild man before the farm, he has a different sense of things.
“Who will be his bride? Who? Who? Who will be his bride? Who? Who?” the crowd chants.
A zombie onstage raises a scythe. This is the sign for everyone to shut up, so everyone shuts up.
We drop to our knees.
A second wave of zombies sweeps forward from behind. They push through the crowd, grabbing at the females, feeling them up and down, seeking potential brides for Bill.
A few minutes later, six females are dragged to the stage. Some go willingly. After all, getting married and having a child is one of the only things you can do as a farm animal. It’s a reprieve from the typical boredom and misery. Other women are dragged by their limbs or hair. Not every woman wants to get knocked up and cart around another life in a bloated belly. They know they cannot fight. Everyone’s helpless in their own way, but they fight anyhow.
I look at Bill. Will I wear a frown when I stand up there tomorrow? I doubt it. With Pym as my chosen bride, I’ll beam a golden smile and welcome her into my arms. I’ll feel like the goddamn sun itself.
And then I notice Pym standing onstage. She’s among the six candidates for bride.
The crowd picks up their chant again: “Who will be his bride? Who? Who?”
Please not Pym. Please. Please.
The crowd goes quiet as the zombies inspect the six candidates one by one. Four look pretty much alike: skin tinged brown with filth, sunken eyes, greasy hair down past slumped shoulders, decrepit muscles twitching in arms and legs as thin as carrots, and bulbous sponges of coagulated blood and grime between their legs. Only Pym and one other girl stand out. Pym because she’s beautiful.
The other girl because she looks more like a giant bird than a human being.
The zombies pass over the four look-alikes rather quickly. They sprawl them on their backs and perform routine bridal checks, shoving fingers in all their holes and worse.
They slap the bird woman around a bit. I suppose she would arouse anger in anyone, living or dead.
I close my eyes when they lay Pym down on the stage.
My gnarled fingernails dig ridges into my flesh. I feel my palms open up and start to bleed. I feel as if I’ll throw up.
The crowd cheers, signifying that the zombies have selected a bride.
When I look up at the stage, Bill and Pym are embracing.
My face a flurry of tears, I flee the bridal lottery, feeling like my heart has been gashed wide open by a colossal pitchfork. Those stupid dead people had to go and offer my bride to Bill.
Running back to my hole, I shit myself out of sadness.
How wretched! How pitiful!
What the fuck!
I throw myself down into my hole and claw at the walls, hoping to bury myself alive.
A little while later, Bill comes calling.
“Stay out of my fucking hole,” I shout up to him. I’m exhausted from digging, although I hardly made any impact on the hard-packed walls.
“Let me come down. I want a word with you.”
“Shouldn’t you be off marrying what’s-her-name? Preparing to cream her with your sausage?”
“Oh come on, don’t say that. Let me come down. I’m still the same old Bill. Good, reliable Bill. You trust me, remember?”
“Fine.”
Bill climbs down into my hole. We sit face to face. He flinches at the sight or smell of me, perhaps both, but he’s too kind to say anything and feigns indifference. I stare at him with the cold eyes of a dead person.
“My life is ruined,” I say.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “Why do you feel that way?”
“You’re not sorry. If you were sorry, you would refuse to marry her. You would kill yourself or let them kill you, whatever it took, to prevent the marriage.”
“My life is over tomorrow anyway, so—”
“So end it a day early, you selfish prig.”
“Me selfish? Consider your words, Grieves. You’re telling me I’m supposed to sacrifice my life so that you can feel a little bit happier.”
“Why should you get the angel? I’m the one who loves her. With my luck, I’ll end up with that bird girl.”
“Marriage has nothing to do with love in this prison camp. It does in the free world, it does in City, but here, marriage is an obligatory death sentence. One night of stranger-fucking and in the morning a man must march grinning to his grave. The zombies were once like you and me. They know the weaknesses and hungers that drive the living flesh. They exploit us on every front.”
“I don’t care who or what they exploit. All I want is Pym.”
“If it makes you feel any better, your love for Pym is safe. Pym means nothing to me. I’ll enjoy her body tonight, but to me she’s no different than any of the candidates. And sure as I stand here, I’ll impregnate her. If I don’t, they’ll harvest her for being infertile. I assure you, though, your love for her is safe. She may be my bride, but I do not love anything about her.”
“For her sake, I wish that you did.”
“And for yours, I wish that you didn’t. Love is unnatural for cattle. Even if Pym was chosen as your bride, your heart would be broken when you learned that she did not reciprocate your feelings. Pym, like myself and all others in this place, is incapable of loving anyone.”
“That’s not true. I love her and she loves me. We have always loved one another. Since we were children.”
“You are alone in your feelings.”
I want to show him Pym’s letter, which proves that I am not alone, but Pym and I have never spoken to anyone about our love, not since the thrashing we received from some fellow children years ago after they found us kissing.“I must be off. Should I expect to see you there tonight?”
I spit in his face and turn on my side.
“Very well,” he says. “It was good knowing you, Grieves. You’re a good person, even if you sometimes act or feel to the contrary.”
He climbs out of my hole.
Good man, that Bill.
I go to the wedding, if for no other reason than to soak up the sunbeams of Pym’s smile one last time as I offer her the picture I drew.
Before I go, I put on my only pair of clothes, the ones I intended to save for my wedding. I want Pym to see me wearing something nice. And since she’ll not be my wife, I no longer care if my clothes are dirty tomorrow.
Robbie dances circles around me as I come toward the wedding congregation. “Your mother was looking for you,” he says. “She wants you to sit beside her at the wedding feast.”
“Tell her I’m offering a gift to the bride and will meet up with her later.”
“A gift? What is it? Can I see?”
“Go away, you retard!”
I find Bill and Pym sitting at the head of a table on which zombies are stacking headless corpses specially barbecued for the occasion. The couple looks as if they are going to be sick.
“Grieves!” Bill leaps from his chair when he sees me, visibly relieved to have a center of focus that isn’t barbecued human.
Pym, however, ignores me.
“Congratulations to both of you,” I say, then narrowing my gaze on Pym, “I have a present for the bride, if she’s willing to accept.”
“Why of course she’ll accept. Won’t you my dear?” Bill says.Pym fixes a blank stare on him. “Just because we’re getting married doesn’t make me your dear.”
“Duly noted,” Bill nods.
“I’m sorry to interrupt. I won’t trouble you any further. Have a charming evening,” I say, the bitterness in my voice like splintered wood fileting bare flesh.
“What about the gift?” Pym says.
“Excuse me?”
“Unless my ears misheard, you said you had a gift for me. If it’s mine, hand it over. The least I’m due for this lousy affair is a present, though from you I shouldn’t expect much.”
“Very well,” I say, withdrawing the picture from my breast pocket, confused and heartbroken by her behavior.
She’s acting more like we’re strangers than two people who have been in love for most of our lives.
I lay the paper in her palm, trembling in fear as she eyes the tattered, folded-up picture. She unfolds it carefully. She laughs pleasantly as she holds the picture before her. Bill and I join in, dissolving the tension.
Pym likes my picture!
Without warning, she tears the picture in half, then into fourths, eights, and sixteenths. “What a dreadful little drawing,” she says. “I’m ashamed that you saw me a fit subject for your unskilled hand. You are a creepy little man.”
“Don’t you remember, Pym? We intended to marry each other. I love you and you love me. We swore to never part. We swore to go away from here someday, to live a life beyond the cattle farm.”
Pym scoffs and tilts her chin up, looking away from me.“Go sit down now,” Bill says, laying a hand on my shoulder. “You’re getting worked up.”
I slap his hand down and point a finger in his face. “I should kick your ass.”
“You’re out of line.”
“Let’s fucking fight, man. Come on.”
“Get out of here before they take you away.”
“I will punch you in the face. I will seriously punch you in the face if you threaten me again.”
“That wasn’t a threat. It was the truth.”
I look at Pym. “Come on, are you really going to marry this guy?”
“Leave Pym alone. You’re getting emotional. Nobody needs this.”
“I will beat your ass if you say her name again. Don’t talk to me about my emotions. You are not my friend. You are a motherfucker. You are a—”
Several zombies leap on me at once. They wrestle me to the ground and twist my arms behind my back.
“I warned you,” Bill says, shaking his head sadly. “You shouldn’t have caused a scene.”
“I will fuck this farm to death,” I tell him.
“I’m sure you will,” he says.
The zombies lift me to my feet and cart me away.
Everyone stares at me as the three zombies drag me from the area.
They toss me into a cage and lock the door.
I’ll never see Pym again.
I rise and grab the bars when the zombies in their helicopters rise into a sky that is dark too early, flying over the towering brick wall that encloses us, back to wherever it is that dead people live.
I only tear my eyes from the sky and become aware of the rust now caked beneath my fingernails when Mother approaches my cage.
“Is the ceremony over?” I ask her.
“No, it’s only beginning,” she says.
“What are you doing missing it?”
“I should ask the same of you.”
I lower my eyes, ashamed. I wonder if she watched them cart me off.
“Do you want to tell me what happened?” she says.
“You didn’t see it?”
“No, I had not yet arrived,” she says, shaking her head.
“It was nothing. I became hyperactive. That’s all.”
“That’s all? I heard rumors of certain confessions.”
I say nothing.
“You weren’t confessing anything, were you?” she says.
“I told Pym I love her.”
“Do you love her?”
“Yes. Pym and I have always loved each other.”
“Always?”
“Since we were children.”
She scrunches her eyebrows and a darkness clouds her eyes. “That must not be true,” she says. “That must not be true at all.”
“I think about Pym a lot. She’s always on my mind. I’ve been really excited about my marriage date since it was arranged because I’d dreamed that Pym would be my bride, that she would redeem me and give me a happy death.”
“A happy death, yes, that’s something we’re all after.”
I lower my voice and say, “I drew a picture of her.”
“Did you show it to her?”
“Yes.”
“And she laughed in your face.”
“And tore it up right in front of me. It was so humiliating. I’ve never felt so embarrassed in my life. Then words started flying out of my mouth. I must’ve sounded like a madman or a drunkard, so delirious.”
My mother smiles and nods, “Yes, you are in love.”
“Why are you smiling? It’s not a good thing. My life is over now. I’m ruined.”
“I loved your father. He’s the only husband of mine I ever loved. We were lucky enough to be paired up. Prior to our wedding night, I often slept in his hole.”
“You mean… love does exist on the farm?”
“Of course it exists.”
“Bill said it doesn’t. He said love was just what the dead people used against us.”
“Bill is a good man, but he’s also a teacher. Teachers will tell you the saddest things they know so that you won’t be disappointed later on. It’s their job. Just as it’s Pym’s job to be Bill’s bride, and that means ignoring you.”
“But she’s marrying Bill. The day before my wedding.
If she had any idea how bad this hurts me, she couldn’t possibly marry him.”
“If she really loves you, it’s hurting her just as bad.”
She shrugs. “Anyway, Bill will be decapitated by morning and lying headless in the meal trough in a week. Don’t be mad at Bill.”
“Bill is a good man. One of the best. Wise.”
“No, Bill is human like the rest of us. He’s seen more of the world, but his brain is the same size and it will end up in the same place. In fact, you and him will probably be shelf buddies in some brain market.”
“You’re not sad that I’m dying the day after tomorrow?”
“Oh, heavens no. I’m happy that my littlest lamb is finally being delivered to the slaughter. This is a cruel situation we’re born into. If I weren’t such a coward, I would have killed myself after my eldest son was born. I hate this life. I hate myself for bringing more people into it. I feel like a mean old cunt sometimes, when I think back on the life I’ve lived, then I get sad when I realize none of it’s my fault. I wish I had guts to do something bold. Maybe stick a knife in my pussy and cut a big hole. Oh, what a big hole already.”
“Mother, please…”
“Anyway, the ceremony should be almost over and I don’t want to miss the celebration. I still get a thrill watching the dead lock the bride and groom in the wedding tower. Do you have any last words for your love? I’ll impart your final message to her if you have one.”
“No,” I say, “I have nothing.”
“Very well then.”
I curl into the corner of the cage, weeping now, as my mother walks away.
I shiver on the cold floor, alone while the farm celebrates the marriage of Bill and Pym.
The smell of charred flesh carries over. My stomach grumbles, longing for some barbecue.
It is nearly dawn when the party dies down.
I awake early on account of the morning heat, the chopping roar of the zombies’ helicopters, and also the mortifying fact that it is my wedding day.
I’m still locked in the tiny cage, still heartbroken.
When I see Robbie skipping toward me, I welcome the sight of the little retard with a happy cry.
“Sorry I didn’t come sooner. I ate so much barbecue last night that I puked and passed out. I awoke bright and early to say goodbye to Bill. His head came off nice and clean. When I grow up and get married, I hope my decapitation is that neat.”
“What about Pym?”
Robbie shrugs. “I haven’t seen her.”
“She wasn’t present at Bill’s decapitation?”
“No.”
I am filled with a selfish glee by this fact. It’s a shame that she couldn’t be bothered to hang around after the wedding night to witness the slaughter of her husband.
“Want me to get you out of here?”
“It’s locked and some zombie has the key. At least I hope one of them has the key.”
“The lock is pretty big. Let me see if I can fit one of my horns in the keyhole.”
“Go for it.”
Robbie twists his head around so that his forehead presses against the bars of the cage. He sticks his tongue out in concentration, carefully aligning his little left horn with the keyhole. The horn slides into the hole. He wiggles back and forth, grinding his horn against the interior of the box-shaped lock.
A little click and the door swings open. I step out of the cage, feeling free even though I have never been free.
I thank Robbie. He smiles and asks if I’m ready for the wedding. I shrug. The lock hangs from his left horn like an ugly piece of fruit.
I retreat to my hole for a final moment by myself. Some people live aboveground in teetering shanties. Not me. I’ve lived inside this dark and crowded space my whole life. I enjoy living underground. It’s a shame I have to leave my home behind to spend my last night on earth in the wedding tower.
I think about cleaning out my hole so that somebody else can move in when I’m gone, but the layer of filth covering everything has calcified into a gray husk, like the insides of a fossilized whale.
The only thing for me to take or leave behind is the box buried in the ground. The box containing Pym’s letter and nothing else. I could give the box away or leave it to chance and time. Either possibility leaves me cold. There must be another way, something better.
Haha, of course.
I eat the letter, chewing off tiny pieces, breaking down the weathered paper with my spit. The letter tastes like dust and skin. And when my body is dumped in the trough and the cannibals pick me apart, they’ll ingest the letter.
Maybe that will muster some true love in them.
I replace the box in the floor. Some poor explorer will climb down here one day and discover it and for a moment dream of treasure. Won’t they be disappointed. An old box full of nothing.
My jaw feels sore by the time I swallow the last of the letter.
“Goodbye, hole. You were a good home.”
I leave the place behind, ready to face the most important day of my life, fighting with myself to silence the questions looming over me.
Who will be my wife?
Will I be scared or sad when the zombies come for me in the morning?
Do I want to die?
Silence!
A bell rings out, signifying breakfast time.
They let the leftovers from last night’s feast sit out all night.
Flies swarm the spoiled remains of half-eaten carcasses.
Maggots stained red by barbecue sauce noodle about in convulsive gyrations. They carry granules of meat in their tiny jaws.
I arrive early today. I sit down at an empty bench in front of a broken leg hung with meat so juicy it ripples in the breeze. After a lifetime of eating people, I stand firm in my taste: I hate eating people, except for hearts and legs. I enjoy leg meat. And barbecued leg meat is the best. They only barbecue our food for wedding feasts. It’s supposed to promote fertility. All other times we eat each other raw.
The benches quickly fill up as people come out from their homes for breakfast. Most look hung over and sleep-deprived, their eyes ringed by dark circles, a stoop in their step, but without exception they’ll be at it again tonight, pigging out on the flesh of old friends, drinking past oblivion, only to return tomorrow to do it all over again. This is the way of the wedding season.
My mother walks up holding Ronnie by the hand. The lock still hangs from his horn. They sit down, one on each side of me.
“Ready for your big day?” my mother says.
“My heart is set on tomorrow morning.”
My mother scoffs. “There’s no reason to be grim. All of my other sons got married like perfect gentlemen. Ronnie says he thinks of you as his brother. You should act properly. Set an example for the youth. For the future.”
“For what future, mother?”
“Do you mind if I move into your hole?” Ronnie asks me. “When I grow up, I want to be just like you.”
“That future,” my mother says.
I rip off a too-large bite of thigh meat with my teeth, but it’s full of maggots. I get up from the table and head for the wide-open fields. And yes, those are tears in my eyes.
I remember playing in this field by the brick wall with Pym. We played here every day for years. We made up our own games. When we were learning to count, we counted bricks in the wall. All day long for several weeks, we counted bricks. If we forgot what number came next, we made up our own numbers.
We played another game that we called Cloud Castle, where we lay on our backs in the tall grass and looked up at the sky. We pretended to be sky dragons who lived on clouds. Some days, Pym and I pretended to live on a cloud together. Our cloud castle, we said. Other days, mostly when one of us was annoyed with the other or feeling staunchly independent, we pretended to live alone on separate clouds. I remember the first time we encountered a cloudless sky after inventing this game. Does this mean we’re dead? I asked. No, Pym said, It means we’ve fallen to earth. She leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. We held hands in silence until the sun went down, shocked by the butterflies howling in our chests. On earth, as it is in the great cloud castle.
I hurry back to the farm square when the helicopters fly over-head. I push through the crowd and climb onto the stage.
People bow their heads at me in ceremonious fashion.
In the distance, zombies land helicopters in empty fields, sweeping up gusts of sizzling dirt.
The sea of sunburned sweaty human faces splits in half, forming an aisle for the dead to pass through.
The crowd picks up their chant: “Who will be his bride? Who? Who?”
They drop to their knees and sink waist-deep in dust.
“Praise be to marriage,” somebody shouts.
After the last zombie climbs onstage, the second wave of zombies, the sorting wave, sweeps from behind. They push through the human crowd, grabbing at the females, feeling them up, seeking potential brides for me.
For me this time.
I turn my eyes down, unable to handle watching the process and feeling sick from the close range of the zombies. They’re clustered all around me, breathing down my neck, smelling of fungus and rot.
A few minutes later, six females are dragged to the stage. Some go willingly. Other women are dragged by their limbs or hair.
A zombie grabs my head and forces me to look up and address my potential brides.
I fall to my knees.
My mother is among the six candidates.
The zombies grab me beneath the arms and lift me up.
They loosen their hold and I collapse again. They pick me up and maintain their hold this time, forcing me to bear witness.
“Who will be his bride? Who? Who?” the crowd chants.
“Wait, there must be some mistake!” I shout, but remain unheard.
Please not my mother. Please. Please.
The crowd goes quiet as the zombies inspect the six candidates one by one. Four look pretty much alike: skin tinged brown from filth, sunken eyes, greasy hair down past slumped shoulders, decrepit muscles twitching in arms and legs as thin as carrots, and bulbous sponges of coagulated blood and grime between their legs. Only my mother and one other girl stand out. My mother because she’s so old. The other girl because she looks more like an emaciated pig than a human being.
The dead people pass over the four lookalikes rather quickly. They sprawl them on their backs and perform routine bridal checks, shoving fingers in their holes and the like.
They slap the pig woman around a bit. For a moment I think, Yeah, slap the little pig bitch around. Kill her. Then I stop myself and feel bad. That pig might be my bride.
The crowd cheers as my mother and I are pushed together by the zombies around us. We are forced to embrace in a fashion that can only mean one thing.
Someone in the crowd laughs, then the whole crowd joins in. Ronnie is in the front row. He’s the only one who isn’t laughing. I look away from him, ashamed. I force my eyes to look beyond the crowd. Their scorn is the least of the horror. I think I see Pym parting from the crowd, walking away, but I can’t be sure it’s her.
My face a flurry of tears, I tear away from my mother and dive off the stage. People in the crowd punch me as I push through them, struggling to escape.
How wretched! How pitiful!
What the fuck!
“Is it right to marry your mother?” Ronnie asks.
“No, it isn’t right. It’s unspeakable. What did I do to deserve this?”
“And if it’s your son… by your mother… that makes your son your brother. And your brother your son.”
“Yes, Ronnie, yes it does.”
“She’s old too. This will be her last child, won’t it?
They’ll take her brains soon as the baby is out, leaving the poor boy all alone. You don’t have to worry, though. I’ll care for him real good. I’ll treat him special. As my brother and my son. Just like you would do. And if it’s a girl, well, I’ll take care of her too.”
“That’s kind of you. Now would you please mind fucking off. My life is almost up and I’ve got better things to do than make small talk with a retard.”
Ronnie runs off.
I sigh, relieved.
I try to make a list of all the people I want to say goodbye to before the zombies lock my mother and I in the wedding tower tonight. I fail to come up with a single name. Bill is dead, Pym as good as dead, and my mother my bride.
What the fuck.
In childhood I never left Pym’s side. Then after her first marriage, I spent all my time either hiding away in my hole dreaming about her, or else getting an education from Bill. It’s easy to forget how alone you are when the days pass endless and you are unwanted. Now I wish to call it all back and do my whole life over, but it’s too late.
I could hide if I wanted, but the farm is too small.
They would find me before I even had a chance to starve, so when the wedding bells ring, I get up and make my way back to the farm center, wondering if I’m strong enough to endure the torment and humiliation I’ve been dealt.
The dead fill the trough with barbecued headless humans.
They unload several barrels of fermented blood from their helicopters, then they fly off. A few zombies remain behind to make sure we’re brought to the wedding tower after the ceremony, for the wedding tower remains locked at all times. Only the dead hold the key.
My mother and I sit at the head of the trough. A mustachioed man presents me with the traditional wedding plate of brain. According to custom, every man is offered a meal of brain on his wedding day. I’ve been given brain tacos. I’ve always wanted to eat a taco. I lick my lips and pick one of them up.
“Congratulations,” the mustachioed man says, slapping me on the back and knocking the taco out of my hand.
“Thanks,” I say, stifling my irritation as I try to remember who he is.
He says, “My wedding is tomorrow, so I thought, you know, maybe you could give me some pointers.”
“Pointers on what?”
“Getting married.”
“You should ask a female about that. I’ve never been married before.”
I hope my mother will interrupt our conversation so I can eat my last meal in peace, but she’s too busy chatting with the man sitting next to her.
The mustachioed man waves his hand, dismissing me cheerfully and blushing red in the cheeks. “Oh, I don’t mean the wedding wedding. I mean after the wedding.
The good part.”
“The good part?”
“What you do, like, in the wedding tower.”
I look at him blank-faced. The man awaits my answer, twisting the corners of his mustache into hairy spirals.
“You mean sex,” I say.
“Sure, whatever you want to call it.”
A woman with lank, muddy blonde hair sidles up to us. “Oh hey, look at these fantastic tacos,” she says.
“I was thinking the same thing,” the mustachioed man says, squeezing the woman’s shoulder.
The mustachioed man lifts my tray of brain tacos. He and the muddy blonde walk away together.
I’ve always wanted to eat a taco. Now I will never know what they taste like.
I suppose even on a death farm, there is someone worth stealing tacos for, even if those tacos are a sad man’s last meal.
My mother and I follow the procession of cattle to the wedding tower, where the ceremony is set to take place.
The base of the wedding tower is lit by flaming torches. The torches flicker in the hot breeze. Up in the highest window, I see the faint glimmer of the light that never goes out.
A dead person stands against the wall of the wedding tower, which is the single permanent structure on the farm, built up against the outer wall.
The zombie’s jaw hangs slack, barely connected by two rotting tendons. A big, tattered book is open in his hands.
Dead people believe that if they don’t read out of this book at marriage ceremonies, the married couple will not produce a child with worthy brains. Like reading to plants, Bill once remarked. He never told me what he meant by that. The people in the crowd press close together despite the sweltering heat of late afternoon. They look well-fed, bleary-eyed, and contented. They’re waiting to see the happy couple off into the wedding tower before returning to feast and drink until dawn.
This is my sixteenth wedding season, my last.
The crowd pushes my mother and I forward, into an aisle that parts the crowd and leads up to the zombie with the book.
The aisle is lined with human skulls broken at the top.
My mother looks happy. She smiles and nods as she takes my arm and urges me forward.
My legs are jelly. I am shaking all over.
This is so wrong.
When we stop before the zombie with the book, he begins reading but the words are just a jumble of lisps and grunts. I cannot understand the words he is saying.
“Just repeat after me,” my mother whispers.
I repeat the words she says even though they mean nothing to me. And when she grabs my head and draws my lips into hers, I don’t fight back.
Her tongue is a cobweb in my mouth.
A second zombie stumbles up the aisle. The book-reading zombie throws the book aside and grabs my mother, restraining her arms behind her back. The other zombie grabs me in the same manner.
I think of breaking free, running into the crowd, trying to climb over the wall. I would fail, no doubt, but wouldn’t that be better than impregnating my own mother, better than suffering through the night only to be executed in the morning?
“Give us a child, give us a child,” the crowd chants.
The zombie holding my mother’s arm removes a metal key from within its dusty ribcage. The zombie shoves the key into the lock.
The heavy wooden door swings open, creaking on broken hinges.
The crowd leans forward as one big ugly creature, trying to catch a glimpse of the staircase.
Tears drip off my chin and I scream a final time, “I will fuck this farm to death.”
I hope that Pym is around to hear my final outcry.
The zombie holding my arms pushes me forward.
I step into the wedding tower for the first time.
We climb the staircase awkwardly. I stumble over every step, unable to keep my balance because of the strangle-hold the zombie has on me. My mother, who has been dragged up these stairs on numerous occasions, ascends with grace.
The zombie holding me finally grows impatient, grunts angrily, and throws me down. Unable to catch myself, I crash face-first on the sharp wedge of a stair. I feel my right cheek split wide open. I bite my tongue, severing the tip and maybe more.
The zombie drags me by the hair to the top of the wedding tower. I spit blood and teeth all the way up.
My mother is thrown down on the floor beside me.
She takes my face in her hands, inspecting the gash that has destroyed my cheek.
We both flinch when the door slams. The lock grinds into place. We are trapped in the high chamber of the wedding tower.
When I leave this place, it will be for my execution.
My mother shoves the bleeding side of my face into her tattered dress. She strokes my hair as her dress soaks up blood.
There is a slight scuffling sound on the other side of the door. My mother must feel me tense up. She says, “Don’t worry. They will not return tonight. They’re only fighting over which of them must stay behind on the farm. The one who stays will perform the execution in the morning.”
Soon the scuffle ends and we hear the loud echo of boots stomping down the staircase.
“Give us a child, give us a child,” the crowd chants outside, but their voices are nothing more than a muffled drone.
“No children,” I say, letting the world go black around me. “No children.”
The words stick like mush on my ruined tongue.
“Come on, son, it is time for us to make love.”
My mother stands up and tries to pull me after her.
I sink down beneath the window sill and place my bleeding face between my knees.
“Get the fuck away from me,” I say.
When I look up, my mother is writhing around on the bed. She begs me to please impregnate her. She throws the pillows to the floor, promising to throw herself out the window this instant if I persist in refusing to give her a child. She tries to stand up, apparently to plunge to her death, but her legs are tangled in the blanket from all the writhing. She throws her arms up as her body, wrapped in a blanket cocoon, drops to the floor with a padded thud.
“Fine, I give up,” she says. “If you won’t fuck me, then kill me.”
She wiggles out of the blanket and tears from it a long strip of fabric.
“You can strangle me with this,” she says.
I blink stupidly.
“What’s it going to be?” she says, gesturing with the shred of blanket.
“What do you mean?”
“If you’re not going to fuck me, you’re going to kill me.”
“Mother, I can’t do either of those things.”
She breaks down on the floor, crying. “Please, just kill me or give me a baby. I’m not afraid to die, but please, don’t leave me at the mercy of the dead people. If you kill me now, at least I won’t feel alone. I don’t want to die alone.”
I bite my wounded cheek by accident.
“Please,” she begs.
I get up and take the fabric from her. I twist it into a noose.
“Do it right over here,” she says. She rises and steps beneath a buzzing bulb hanging by a string from the ceiling. The light that never goes out is not that impressive.
Tears have cleared pink circles around my mother’s eyes.
The rest of her face is grimy and brown with dried barbecue sauce.
She smiles. My mother is fairly good-looking. She is not beautiful, but her body is strong and toned and her face is kind and round. She would have made a good wife a long time ago.
“This is where your father embraced me. He kissed me on the mouth, swept me off my feet, and carried me to the wedding bed.”
She gazes out the window. I stand behind her now, watching her sway back and forth gently, as if she is being held by someone
“You had better do it now,” she says.
And I know right then that the saddest things in life are always just ahead. First I lost Pym. Now I will kill my mother. Then my mother will be dead, leaving me alone until my own life ends tomorrow. Yes, the saddest things are always just ahead.
Numbly, I draw the noose around her neck and tighten it. After a few seconds, her fingers dig into the knotted sheet. Her arms swing back, trying to reach me. I tighten my hold, gritting my teeth. She slumps forward onto the sill of the window with a clunk. Her knees buckle and she slides onto the floor.
I close my eyes and look out the window to avoid the sight of her corpse. I feel filthy and violated.
Torches flicker in the distance. The cattle are feasting and drinking. I can hear the faint hum of voices carried up on the breeze. Even up here, I smell the barbecue. I feel a stab of rage, wishing that I’d had the nerve to stop that mustachioed bastard from stealing my last meal.
There are no bars across this window.
Mother could have jumped. She could have taken her own life and spared me the guilt.
I look down and remember the trouble with jumping.
It’s the cage beneath the tower window. Beneath the window, a cage made out of bones rises out of the earth.
The cage yawns like a hungry mouth, ready to swallow anyone who jumps. The bone cage is structured so that nobody who jumps dies. The cage breaks their fall, saves them so the dead people can find them alive in the morning. The dead flay jumpers. I’ve seen it happen once or twice.
I cannot blame my mother for choosing not to be flayed alive.
I glance over at my mother and feel betrayed, angry, cheated out of some unknown pleasure, but I did the right thing.
She is dead now anyway. No retarded bastard child can be born. This will not hurt anyone.
I close my eyes and conjure up Pym’s face, her smooth white skin, her little white tongue, her cool, bright eyes.
I open my eyes and close my mouth and bury my face in my hands.
The screaming continues when I close my mouth.
I lift my head and look toward the window, where the screams are coming from.
Pym is at the window, hanging from the ledge.
It’s she who’s screaming now.
I rush over to Pym and pull her into the tower. We collapse on the floor together. She’s covered in blood.
“How did you get up here? What’s happened to you?”
I ask her.
She is still screaming. I hold her tight, squeezing her as hard as I can.
I slap her face. She blinks blearily and draws a ragged breath.
“What are you doing here? How did you get here?” I ask.
“I came,” she props herself up on one elbow, shaking her head a little, “I came to rescue you and your mother.”
“What the fuck?”
“I came to rescue you and your mother.”
“I know, but how?”
She begins to hyperventilate.
After a few minutes she calms down and tells me what she has done.
She has cut off her breasts and fashioned them into suction cups in order to climb up the wedding tower and rescue me. Just as she climbed up the wedding tower, I can use her suction cup breasts to climb down and then scale the big brick wall, to enter the outside world and be free once and for all.
“Take my breasts and flee the farm,” she says. Her voice is very hoarse.
“What about you?”
“I’ll bleed to death, or else they’ll slaughter me in the morning. You can get far
enough by then if you start now.”
“Why would you do this to yourself?”
“I love you, Grieves.”
“You love me? How can you say you love me when you’re pregnant with Bill’s child?”
“I’m not pregnant. Anyway, did you really think I was going to profess my love in front of every single person on this farm, all of the dead people?”
“You’re not pregnant? Then how are you alive? Why didn’t they slaughter you this morning?”
“I found this in the feeding trough a couple days ago.”
She lifts her dress to pull something from between her legs. At first, only a tiny hand appears, dangling like a cock, then a second hand, and a blackened head. She proceeds to remove a shriveled fetus from between her legs.
“Don’t worry, it’s not mine,” she says. “I found it in the troughs, dead. I put it aside so that if I happened to be chosen as a bride this wedding season, I could put this inside myself and not be found out right away. After Wolf and the other man, I couldn’t handle the agony of taking another husband, not while you were alive, at least.”
Pym’s admittance of love brings me to tears. I reach out to draw her close to me, but she recoils.
“Why did you kill your mother?”
“She asked me to kill her, so I did.”
“Grieves. You idiot.”
“How was I supposed to know you were going to come to the rescue?”
Pym’s face looks strained and tender. Pitying, almost.
This is such a huge shift from the cruel disdain she showed me last night when I gave her my drawing.
“Anyway, there’s no time. If we meet again, I hope we live a happy life together. Right now you must go, get as far from here by morning as possible. Take my breasts and save yourself.”
“Why can’t you come with me?”
“There are only two breasts. Hurry now.”
“Wait.” I rush over to the bed and pull off the bottom sheet. I go over to Pym and crouch down behind her. I fold the sheet in half, long ways, and tie it around her midsection.
“This won’t stop the bleeding entirely, but it should help some,” I say.
“Thank you,” she says.
She takes my hands and pulls me close. I bury my face in the crook of her neck. She twists around, naked except for the sheet bandage. I’m in awe of her bravery. She scaled the wedding tower naked.
She spreads her legs.
I get down on my knees between her damp and hairy thighs.
I feel myself stiffen and take off my clothes.
I lie down on top of her. Her body is warm, her flesh is soft.
Sliding into Pym, I squeeze my eyes tighter and feel myself floating into the puffy white clouds I always dreamed were inside of her.
I pump faster and faster until I lose control and then I scream. I scream out of rage and pity and anguish and fear and sadness and horror and love, but most of all I scream out of hope. A hope that I am already dead. A hope that I was never alive. A hope that time will freeze and I’ll live right here in this beautiful moment forever. A hope that before my execution, I will perform an impossible trick and redeem everything.
I thrust one last violent time and come deep inside of Pym.I pull out. A sticky string of semen connects the tip of my penis to her crotch. Dampness trickles out from between her hairy thighs.
“I love you,” she says.
“I love you too.”
“But you must go.”
I nod and reach for my pants.
After slipping into my clothes, I pick up her severed breasts off the floor. She helps me tie the nipples, which have been elongated to serve as straps, around my wrists.
“Keep the flat, meaty side moist,” she says.
“Will you be safe here?”
“I’m still young. Even with you gone, the zombies will spare me so the child may be born.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’ve impregnated me. I can feel it.”
I catch a glance of my mother’s corpse on the floor and get an idea that just might save us.
“Pym, we can cut off my mother’s breasts and turn them into suction cups. We can escape the farm together.”
I begin scouring the room for a sharp object to severe my mother’s breasts.
“Wait,” Pym says. “I’m afraid that isn’t possible.”
I turn to face her. “Why not? Don’t you want to go with me?”
She smiles at me. There’s blood on her teeth. Now blood dribbles out of her mouth. Now I understand.
“You’re bleeding to death,” I say.
Tears roll down her cheeks. She shakes her head insistently. “No, I’ll be strong.
I’ll stay alive, Grieves. I want to have our baby. Please, believe me. I’ll stay strong. Now go.”She coughs, spraying a strand of crimson spittle, which hangs there from her mouth.
Without hands to draw her close to me, I lean in and suck the spittle rope into my mouth, bringing our mouths together. While making love we did not touch lips. This is our first kiss since childhood. She embraces me. I gently squeeze her breasts as if they are still attached. Then the moment is over. She pushes me away and collapses. She’s already too weak to stand. There’s no way she’ll survive until the zombies unlock the tower in the morning.
“I’m coming back with help,” I tell her. “I promise you, Pym, stay alive for me and I’ll return. I’ll take you to our cloud castle in the sky. I promise we’ll be happy.”
She nods, her face distorted by tears and blood.
I climb out of the window and force myself not to steal a final glance at her. The sight of her in this state destroys me. And she did this, she sacrificed herself, for me.
My hands are suctioned to the sill and my legs dangle in midair.
It is easy to underestimate the terror heights may induce, until you find yourself high as the moon itself, without any wings or cloud magic to keep you aloft, only the breasts of your one true love, who is dying and possibly pregnant.
“I love you, Pym.”
I realize, though, in peering back into the room, that I forgot to bid farewell to my mother.
“Oh, and I love you too mother. You were always kind.”
Her corpse says nothing.
“Go now. You do not know what you’ll find beyond the great wall,” Pym says, her voice hardly a whisper.
“I’m coming back for you. We’re going to make it through, Pym.”
I close my eyes and begin the long descent. For the second time in as many days, I believe I’m seeing Pym for the final time, but I told Pym I would return with help, and by the great cloud castle in the sky, I will.
Down from the window, I crouch at the tower’s base to recover my strength and determine my next course of action. With no way of knowing what lies beyond the great wall in any direction, I realize that no planning is possible.
I must scale the wall and hope to come out lucky.
I stand up, careful not to set my hands in the dirt, afraid to weaken the suction strength of Pym’s breasts.
I start toward the great wall in a semi-crouching jog, but I don’t get far before a voice calls from behind, “Hey, wait up!”
I turn and look up to the window of the tower, my heart lifted in anticipation of Pym’s face. Has she removed my mother’s breasts after all, and mustered strength to climb down and escape the farm with me?
The window is empty. Pym is not calling, nor evening watching over my escape.
I start off again, but someone tugs at my elbow. I spin around, sure that a zombie has seen me escape.
I see the outline of two little horns. I sigh, relieved. It is only Robbie.
“Robbie! What are you doing here?”
He wipes his shit-stained mouth, looking guilty. “I was just sitting in your hole by myself when a head popped down. It was Pym. When she saw me, she fled. So I followed her to see what she was up to. I watched her climb the tower. Looks like she saved you, huh?”
I nod. “I’m going over the wall.”
“Where’s Pym?” Robbie asks, cocking his flat, horned head.
“Only one of us could make it down. I’m coming back for her, though. She’ll die before morning if I don’t.”
I grab his shit-covered forearm and yank him to his feet. He jogs along, matching my pace. “Where are you going to go when you get over the wall?”
“We’re going to City, Robbie, and you’re coming with me.” I don’t know why I decide to bring him. Maybe because I don’t want to be alone. Maybe because I have no idea how I’m going to rescue Pym. Maybe because I may need someone to throw in the way of danger, or to eat if there’s no food out there. Maybe because he’s small and will be easy to bring along. Maybe I like the little retard after all.
“I don’t know…”
“You want to die here?”
“Well, who will look after your child?”
“Pym, who is carrying my child, will die before morning if we do not find a way out of here.” I’m not totally positive that she’s pregnant, but that’s beside the point at the moment.
“How are you going to climb up the wall?”
“I’ve got these. They’re from Pym.” I raise the breasts strapped to my hands.
“Oh.”
“Come on, let’s go.”
As we jog through the rows of little shacks I imagine what things would have been like if Pym had been naturally chosen as my bride. It would have been tender, sweet, loving, probably. We would have consummated our lifelong love. And then I would be dead. At least now we can aim for the impossible.
A happy ending.
Survival.
I feel like a child.
I miss my mother.
I want to go back.
I want to hold Pym’s bleeding body, kiss the bloody meat where her beautiful breasts had been.
I cannot let her down.
The farm is strangely deserted. Everyone must have passed out early from the feast. No one is wandering about and no fires are lit.
I must have spent more time in the tower than I thought.
I am kicking up dust, walking fast.
We jog along in silence for several minutes. Final y we reach the west wall. I decide that will be the best to climb because it’s on the complete opposite side of the farm as the wedding tower. It will provide the most darkness for cover.
I cringe a little as I lift Robbie up onto my back. He smells strongly of shit, and his clumpy hands stick to my flesh as he clasps hold of my shoulders.
I fumble around with the suction cup breasts for a moment. They are soft and pliable. I wonder if they will hold our weight.
I tighten my grip and press the left breast against the wall. It holds. I swing my right arm upward. The second breast slaps against the wall and holds. I pull us up slowly, not slackening my arms for fear that I won’t be able to drag us level to the breasts again.
My whole body shakes with the effort. Halfway up, a brick comes loose under my foot. It lands on a shack built against the wall. There is a loud clanking sound. For a second we hang motionless. “Oh no,” Robbie says.
“Shut up,” I snap.
If anyone is in the shack, they must be too drunk to get up and investigate.
I peel the left breast from the wall and swing it upward.
We are leaving an obvious trail of bloody breast prints.
When we get to the top of the wall, my arms feel like putty. I can barely move them. They tremble at my sides because I cannot bend my elbows, but we still have to get down the other side.
“We’re pretty high up,” Robbie says, leaning over the edge. He is holding on to one of the small steel spikes that protrude from the top of the wall. Fortunately, so many of the spikes have fallen that there are flat spaces large enough to stand in.
We stand atop the great wall, feeling small beneath a night sky more vast and dark than any we have seen in our lives.
Ringing the farm like sunrays is a network of steel girders, canals of blood and soggy carcasses, wooden buckets whose rusty-toothed jaws betray to us their purpose: debraining skulls. The decrepitude and disrepair of the slaughterhouse suggest grander days. The farm today must be a pale shadow in light of former glories. I feel sorry for what my recent ancestors must have endured.
Robbie exhales a gasp of horror. I turn to him but he’s unaware of me, his uncomprehending eyes fixed on the area beyond the immediate ring of death.
I turn to see what he’s seeing, and reiterate his noise.
Beyond, there are trees. People trees. Trees in the shape of people, or people as tall as trees.
“What are they?” Robbie says.
“Houses. The zombies live inside of them. Bill told me about these, although I never believed him.”
I know this because the tree people, or people trees, crook their arms so their palms lay flat to support a helicopter. Their hands are helicopter bays.
“Are they alive?” Robbie asks.
Green lights illuminate the eyes of some houses like hazy, dilated pupils, but most eyes are empty, lightless.
Their flesh is most perplexing of all.
These houses are made of brains.
This means two things:
1) The dead may eat our brains, but sustenance is a secondary purpose.
2) We are being farmed by the dead so they may use our brains as building material.
I keel over and vomit. Robbie gets sick himself. We puke over the wall, onto the dead side.
We live our whole lives believing we’re food. We eat people too (out of necessity, of course) and so somehow it seemed okay that one day we would end up as food ourselves. It’s the natural cycle.
Being house material is not part of the natural cycle.
Underneath the sickness, I’m enraged.
If we’d grown up knowing the complete story of death, maybe we’d get used to it by the time our turn came around.
Seeing our bodies wasted like this, though, is such a shame. If they wanted to build houses out of us, why not use our bones as well? Surely bones are more useful than brains.
Robbie and I are doomed. The brain tree people houses extend to the farthest reaches of the dark horizon.
“We’ve got one option to save Pym,” I tell him.
He rubs his tear-streaked eyes. “What’s our option?”
“We steal a chopper and fly like hell.”
In silent agreement, he climbs onto my back and we descend, marking the first successful escape from the farm ever.
Although we haven’t escaped yet.
We’ve only climbed a wall, and climbing a wall seems small in comparison to the unimaginable terror awaiting us at the bottom.
“Come on, Robbie,” I say, squishing the breasts against the wall.
With some help he clambers onto my back again and I lower us down.
I untie the nipple straps and press Pym’s breasts against my chest. They stick, secure.
“The ground is hollow,” Robbie says.
“No it’s not, you retard. We landed on something.”
It is too dark to see so I feel around on the ground. It is smooth, cold, and uneven. It feels like metal. Robbie crouches a few feet away, his pale green skin glowing in the darkness. Then he lets out a choked gasp and vanishes.
“Robbie!” I call hoarsely. I scamper to the spot where he disappeared. The metal ground drops out from under me. I am falling.
I land painfully on one leg. There is a resounding crack, probably a bone breaking. Pain shoots through my body, white hot and blinding.
Robbie lies beside me. “Are you okay, Grieves?” he rasps.
“Help me up. I think I broke my leg.
“There’s a thing here.”
“Don’t touch it.”
Of course, Robbie touches it.
A whirring hiss electrifies the air.
A single light clicks on. Fortunately, Robbie and I are alone. I breathe deeply, pull myself up against a wall, and test my leg. Blinding pain. I collapse.
Faint stars are visible through the numerous holes in the ceiling. We must have fallen through a hole in the darkness.
I look over at Robbie. He is drenched in blood.
“Where are we?” he asks.
I gesture toward a huge vat of brains.
I manage to limp over to it. Maybe my leg isn’t broken after all, but it hurts like shit.
Some of the brains have disintegrated. Others look fresh.
They are al a reddish-gray and marinating in blood. Robbie must have landed in a spilled puddle of that blood.
Past the vat, there is a giant wooden hand.
Robbie walks over to it. A trail of little red footprints follows him.
“Robbie, come over here.” I pull a pair of yellow boots and overalls from a cabinet on the wall. I slip the overalls over my tattered clothes. Robbie takes a pair of boots and overalls for himself.
I pull down another pair of overalls from the cabinet, return to the brain vat, and pile the freshest-looking brains into the overalls, then fold them up to form a sack.
“What are you doing?”
“We might need food during our escape. After we rescue Pym and make our escape, we might not come across food for a long time.”
“What if the brains turn into houses in our stomachs?”
“You retard,” I say, but I’m cut off because a zombie grabs me from behind.
Taken by surprise, I throw Robbie at the shambling dead person.
Robbie shrieks and lowers his head in fear. Rotten fangs bared, the zombie grabs for Robbie’s skull, but Robbie charges with his little horns, knocking the dead person down.
Robbie stomps on the zombie’s skull until his foot is just splashing around in a puddle of blood, brain juice, teeth, and broken skull.
I learn two things from this encounter. When zombies attack, throw Robbie at them. Also, never piss Robbie off.
That means never calling him a retard again, if I can resist.
We look around, expecting more dead people, but everything is quiet and deserted.
“Maybe he was working late,” I say.
“Maybe.”
We proceed through the inner circle, puzzling over each new strange device.
“What do you think this one is for?” Robbie asks, gesturing toward a colossal upright rock slab engraved with symbols. “Do they flatten people under it?”
“No, I don’t think this is meant to flatten people. The engravings must mean something. It could be a code of the dead.”
“A code?”
“Rules to live by.”
“The dead live by rules?”
I nod my head.
“Does that mean they’re alive like you and me?”
“Well, they’re industrious enough to farm and smart enough to utilize written language. I would say they’re a lot like you and me.”
Robbie is banging around in the shadows ahead. I try to keep my weight off my bad leg, but every step is murder.
I wonder if I should stop and try to set it, make a splint or a cast out of brains, but we need to keep moving. Who knows when all these wooden hands will come alive.
We have entered a section of the underground where the walls are lined with glass troughs. The troughs hold brains in various stages of growth. Some of the brains are shaped like people.
Robbie gags. He spits out a mouthful of brain.
“What’s wrong?” I ask.
“These brains you grabbed are bad,” he says, leaning against an empty trough covered in white dust. He drops melty, pulsing brain goop in my hand. I lick a little from my palm.
I spit it out. The brain tastes earthy and sour, like the decay that grows in the nooks and crannies of the body.
These brains are past the edible point. I try to wipe the taste off my tongue and look disgustedly at the overalls bulging with brains.
“Don’t the dead people eat these?” Robbie asks, dropping the makeshift brain sack and wiping his bloody hand on the leg of his own too-large overalls.
“There must be a difference between house quality brains and edible ones. These brains were obviously meant to be turned into houses.”
“Yeah, well they’re nasty.”
“And you eat your own shit.”
We move along.
The ground is a little lighter now that gray light is seeping in through the holes in the ceiling. It is almost dawn.
The brain pods and wooden hands appear older, greasier, and more rusted as we move along. A hairy layer of dust coats everything.
Robbie halts several feet in front of me, gazing straight up. I follow his gaze. He is peering through a hole in the ceiling. Through the hole, the head of an enormous zombie house can be seen: luminescent eyes and a gaping, glowing mouth. It is looking straight at us.
We stare up at the zombie house for a little while. The sky framing it is bluish brown.
“Look,” Robbie whispers, pointing.
A wooden arm stretches out before us. It holds several lumpy objects.
In its palm, a human brain quivers and convulses.
Bundles of red and blue cords flutter from the brainstem like tentacles. It is a half-formed circulatory system. The cord bundles are huge, huge enough to form the veins and arteries of a massive zombie.
“Is it alive?” Robbie is looking up at the zombie house again.
It hasn’t moved. “No,” I say, hoping I’m right. “Let’s move on.”
I shudder, imagining them rewiring my brain, growing it into a lifeless, gigantic
replica of myself. And there’s no way my bad brain is fit for consumption.
We search for an exit, trying to keep out of direct view of the holes in the ceiling, afraid to be seen by the zombie houses even though they might not be alive.
The factory looks desolate, as if few workers have been here in years, and yet brains are everywhere. There are brains splattered on the floor, impaled on hooks, and even brains dried to the ceiling, as if someone threw them up there and they never came down.
Finally, we discover a gap in the wall large enough to crawl through. I shove Robbie through first. The sky is pinkish now. The zombies will be opening the wedding chamber soon. They will find two dead women and no man to harvest.
Maybe they will choose some random person from the crowd to harvest instead.
I hope it’s that mustachioed bastard.
Outside the slaughterhouse, we’re surrounded by giant zombies. I can no longer see the brick wall, only giant zombies in every direction.
Something sticky touches my hand and I jerk away.
It is only Robbie, reaching for me. I let him hold one finger as we look up at the giant zombies.
Every giant is rooted to the ground by mushy brain feet. Between the feet of the nearest zombie rises a spiral staircase, leading up into a little fissure between the legs.
There are some windows in the torso, scattered haphazardly across the back of the structure. The arms of each zombie are stretched out similarly, forming a thin canopy above us. The heads are massive, some with huge black holes for eyes, some yellow circles in the distance. These zombies are taller than the wedding tower, but not as the brick wall, which explains why we could not see them from the farm. Their hands are helicopter pads.
I wonder if everything I’m seeing is true, or if what I know of the world is entirely wrong and zombies do not live inside of giant zombies, but everything I think and see and feel tells me that yes, zombies do live inside of giant zombies.
It makes me so sick.
I wonder if anyone on the farm knows where brains truly go once they are harvested.
As we stand frozen with our backs to the brain factory, a faint whirring echoes off the giant zombies. I recognize it soon enough as the sound of a helicopter.
I know what we have to do.
All my life, I have felt that everything is doomed, but Pym has always given me a little bit of hope. Now she is far from me, bleeding to death alone. Was the hope she instilled in me a monstrous illusion? Is she herself a monstrous illusion?
Would I persist in the fight for beauty, knowing that she was?
Yes.
Would I steal a helicopter for her?
Yes.
Would I give up my life?
Yes.
“Pym needs us,” I say, as a helicopter bursts into sight from above.
The giant zombies quiver in the pink and yellow light of dawn. Standing near the foot of one, I feel like a dwarf. I’m the size of the giant’s big toe. The zombies crowd together, forming a gray canopy of limbs and torsos and heads that block out the light as we proceed out of the slaughterhouse. Between the legs of each giant, a spiral staircase rises, disappearing into a black chasm that appears to give entrance into the zombie house. The staircase in the wedding tower is identical, only much tinier.
Hopefully some passage from the groin leads to the helicopter landing hands.
I yank my finger from Robbie’s grasp and limp quickly, seeking cover.
I nod my head toward the nearest ladder, letting Robbie know that’s the one we’re going to climb.
When I hit the stairs, my bad leg collapses under me.
Robbie throws one arm across my shoulders and helps me to my feet.
Halfway up, the helicopter zooms in on us, hovering at close range. Flaming orbs erupt from tubes on both sides of the cockpit. The flames melt the lower half of the staircase into bubbling black goop.
They blast another round of the flaming orbs but miss us entirely, instead destroying the staircase of the giant zombie closest to the one we’re climbing.
When we reach the top, a door made out of brains slides open and we clamber into the giant zombie, hopefully safe.
We proceed cautiously. The squishy floor muffles our footsteps.
A light switches on somewhere above us. The groan of zombies breaks out in other corridors. The groaning nears.
I look around, searching for a way out, a place to hide, anything. Our only option is to return back through the door. We barely evaded the helicopter’s attack the first time. I don’t want to chance another round, but then hands break out of the walls around us.
Zombies are climbing out of the walls!
We flee through the door, ducking to avoid the chopper blades spinning perilously close to the entrance.
Backed against the outer wall, I stab a finger into the giant zombie’s flesh. The surface breaks and my finger slides in. I pull my finger out. It is covered in brain goo.
“Hold your breath. We’re going in,” I say.
Robbie nods his head.
I throw my arms around him and dive into the inner thigh of the giant zombie.
We break through, and we swim like hell.
We pop out in the middle of the giant zombie’s back.
That’s as long as either of us could hold our breath, hopefully enough to throw our pursuers off course.
We dig our way up the backside, leaving behind a trail of gashes that heal over almost as soon as we make them.
I reach out to pull myself onto the shoulder. Now I can see the blades of a helicopter perched on the palm.
Then angry dead faces and clawed hands burst out of the brainy surface around me. The zombies have swum up and cut off our path.
I scramble onto the shoulder, kicking my feet into the folds of teeth and claws as Robbie does the same.
The zombies shout at me, but I cannot understand what they are saying. I’m not even sure if I’m meant to understand. Two hands clutch my bad leg and squeeze, breaking it if it wasn’t already broken. I cry out.
More hands grab me, dragging me into the zombie house.
I flail my arms, hoping Robbie will help, but he’s sinking as well, being dragged down. I wonder if we’ll drown before they eat us, or if our brains will be turned into houses.
Then there is a creaking and a huge hand sweeps toward us from above. Another giant zombie bends forward, its eyes glowing yellow and its head so close and big that it smothers the brightening sky.
The hand plucks Robbie and me from the hands of the zombies pulling us under. It sets us right next to the helicopter on the palm of the giant we’ve been climbing.
The house has saved us.
I wonder if all houses are friendly, or if I happened to know the owner of this one’s brain from the farm. Are you my father… my brother… Bill? I wonder.
And then the head of the friendly giant is engulfed in flames.
The house we’re on begins to move, leaning forward like it has a stomachache. All the houses near us start moving too, stretching out various limbs, trying to reach us, making obvious efforts to uproot their mushy feet and step to the aid of their fellow zombie house. Hopefully they don’t blame us for its destruction.
More fiery blasts tear apart other zombie houses.
“Get in the helicopter!” I shout.
I leap into the machine and look around.
I have no idea how to fly a helicopter.
I feel intense sensations of anxiety coupled with crippling fear and physical panic.
Four massive fingers curl up in front of us. The giant we’re on is closing its hand. Maybe this one is not a friend.
We are about to be crushed.
Robbie slaps something in front of me and the helicopter rises.
He has pressed a big green button marked GO.
I nod, feeling good about his decision. That was a good decision. GO is a good bet.
Four red arrows, one pointing up, one down, one left, and one right, encircle the GO button.
Feeling like maybe I know what those arrows mean, I punch up. And then left. The helicopter jerks in the directions indicated.
The helicopter shoots into the air.
Below us, the giant hand closes into a gelatinous fist.
Fire swirls around us. We manage to steer clear of the direct blasts. We rise higher until the brick wall appears. It looks so small from up here. Strange to think that until today, it was my lifelong jailer. We zoom full-speed toward it.
I hope Pym has not already bled to death.
The zombie forest ends several hundred yards away from the tremendous brick wall. We are high enough up that we clear the wall as if it were nothing more than a dirt clod beneath our bare feet. The ground below looks gray and blotchy. I realize the blotches are a crowd of people gathered around the wedding tower.
A fireball whizzes by and explodes in the air over the wedding tower, followed by a second and a third.
“Robbie, try to see behind us. What’s on our tail?”
“Helicopters,” he says. “Everywhere.”
I hook around the wedding tower, glimpsing a pale face in the window.
Pym.
She’s not dead!
“Robbie, find the rope ladder like the ones the zombies use.
When we fly close enough, throw the ladder out to Pym.”
Fire bombs whiz past. The crowd around the wedding tower flees. Those people were waiting to witness my execution.
Helicopters swarm us. I can make out the faces of the dead people in the other helicopters. Hopefully their closeness will prevent others from firing on us. I don’t know how zombies feel about killing their own kind.
Robbie prepares to throw the ladder.
Unsure how to get the helicopter to stop right outside the window of the tower without crashing on the bone cage, I press a whole bunch of buttons at once and scream, “Throw it now!”
Robbie throws the ladder.
Pym dives out of the window. She cranes her arms for the ladder, careening into the jaws of the cage, looking like a fallen cloud creature. A ghost.
Her hands touch the ladder.
She stops falling.
She climbs.
Before she makes it into the helicopter, another ladder swings toward her. A zombie hangs from the end of the ladder.
Pym’s mouth opens in a scream that is silenced by the helicopter’s deafening roar.
The zombie swings level to her.
Climb, Pym, climb. It’s not over yet.
The zombie punches her in the face. Her left hand loses grip of the ladder. The zombie reaches for her right hand as she struggles to regain her balance. If only she were stable, I could lift the helicopter and pull her up. Now it’s too late.
Robbie grabs my hand and squeezes tightly. He smiles and drops my hand. I want to ask him what the fuck he thinks he’s doing, but he jumps out of the helicopter before I get the chance.
Robbie plummets with his arms outspread like wings.
He crashes into the zombie attacking Pym. The undead aggressor tries to hold on but falls after Robbie, leaving two rotted arms clutching the ladder.
Robbie and the armless zombie explode in a shower of blood on impact.
I’m staring at the mess they’ve left behind when Pym puts herself into the helicopter. I smile at her and set the helicopter into motion.
My bad leg feels like it’s burning to ash on the inside.
Will she bleed to death?
Followed by countless dead in their flying machines, we head east toward the risen sun.
The zombies in their helicopters close in around us, blasting fireballs and diminishing our survival rate by the second. We clear the great wall. If we die now, at least Pym and I will die together in the free world. The flames dance under us like a field of grass in summer. The gigantic zombies loom ahead and above. I press some dials on the control panel and the helicopter veers upward in a vertical ascent. We’ll never make it. The people houses are too tall.
I grab Pym’s left hand and close my eyes, bracing myself to explode in a rain of fire and blood. “I love you,” I shout, but my voice is sucked from my mouth by the din of the helicopters.
I remember a lesson about death that Bill once taught.
“Dying feels good, studies report,” he said. When someone said they knew firsthand that dying hurt, Bill shook his head and sighed and said, “It feels good because we fear it so damn much, and then we learn in our last gasp that it’s easy. It’s getting there that’s hard and scary. That hard and scary part is only life.”
I open my eyes to a scratchy wetness against my cheek.
Pym is licking my face. I look at her questioningly. She smiles, shrugs. Seeing her smile, I no longer feel scared. I smile back at her. I guess it must be easier to get through all the hard and scary parts that make up a life if you have someone to share them with.
The zombies regulated our mating habits not only to produce the best genetic crop, but to alienate us from our essential nature, the throbbing, aching muscle that stirs our blood into a frenzied howling panic. When you have no one to turn to, no one to play games with, then you’re no better than the undead. We are all so much worse alone, and aren’t we always alone? Not me anymore. I’m in love.
Pym’s wounds appear to have healed. The bleeding has stopped, at least. I don’t want to ask her how it happened.
Prodding this miracle might ruin the magic.
The zombie giants are moving now. They swing their massive hands in our direction, blocking out the sun and pitching the bright morning into darkness. I think they are going to crush us or slap us out of the sky, but their hands go on flying by, swirling up gusts of wind that rock our helicopter off its course.
We careen end over end as gargantuan hands and faces pass by. In the fragmentary rearview glimpses I get as we flip, I see that the zombie houses are uprooting themselves entirely from the ground. They swim together as a mass bigger than the sky, and they prevent the pursuing helicopters from passing. Maybe the giants retained some memory of when they were human. Whatever the reason, they have saved us.
The zombie trees are thinning now. In the distance, tall dark forms jut out from the horizon like so many wedding towers.
“Do you think there are more giants?” Pym says. Now that the army of helicopters has fallen far behind us, we can speak and hear each other.
“No,” I say.
We’re so rattled there isn’t anything more to say, until the zombie trees vanish entirely from the ground beneath us. We’re flying over a flat gray field. The dark forms we saw in the distance rise taller in our view, rising high as the zombie trees. The dark forms do not look alive. They look like the wedding tower, only sadder and taller. These buildings are thin, wavering rusty things with broken windows.
Crashed helicopters and other broken machines lie in decaying heaps on the ground like the scars of a broken face.
A yellow circle crossed over by straight yellow lines is painted on the top of each tall building. I recognize these as helicopter landing pads from the identical markings on the hands of the giants.
I press a few buttons and take the helicopter in for a landing. My guts settle back into their proper place as the helicopter slows down and descends. Flying must be disastrous for a person’s health.
After we land, Pym and I sit still in the helicopter for a minute, silent and shocked that we have walked out on our old life, but we are here. We are alive.
We crawl out through the same side, hand in hand, afraid to part from each other for even a second. We walk to the edge of the building and look out on a dead skyline. We can see for miles, and in those miles we see nothing move.
“This must be City,” Pym says.
I pull her away from the edge, feeling cold and vaguely disappointed. She’s right.
This must be City, but where are the people? Where is the civilization Bill spoke so much about? All gone. Dead, I suppose.
Pym and I walk to the other side of the rooftop, where an open doorway leads into the building like a tight black mouth.
We walk down some stairs until we come to a red door.
We open the red door, which leads down some more dark stairs, which lead to another red door, which leads to more dark stairs, which lead to another red door, which leads to more dark stairs, which leads to a white door that looks as if it is made of clouds.
“Do you remember playing Cloud Castle?” Pym asks.
I open the cloud door and pass through the doorway first. I’m not ready to confess to her how much our little games still mean to me. I want that to be a special moment. Maybe we can play Cloud Castle again, now as adults with a real future together.
We both gasp as we look around at the things piled in the room. I’d half-expected the doors to continue leading to staircases forever, but the cloud door has led us somewhere special. We’re in a room stacked wall to wall, floor to ceiling, with magical glittery packages marked FOOD.
We will finally eat what people eat. We will finally eat a meal that isn’t made of people.
“Do you think it’s safe to eat?” Pym asks.
“Of course,” I say. “It’s food, isn’t it?”
She flashes a skeptical smile and kisses me on the cheek before moving toward the nearest wall of packaged foodstuffs. It takes us a few minutes to figure out how to open the packages, then we’re tearing them open as fast as we can manage, examining the food before casting it aside.
We’re too afraid to put any of this stuff in our mouths. The food looks so strange and unfamiliar, but the packages are so much fun to open.
“Wait,” Pym says. “This seems wasteful. For all we know, this is the last food in all of City. We can’t burn through our whole supply. Why don’t we gather up the food we think looks best and then have a feast? It will be like a wedding feast.”
“Our wedding feast?” I ask.
“Our wedding feast,” she says.
“You’re not mad at me for everything that happened?”
She smiles. “Anything you’ve done, I’ve done worse.”
We turn back to our separate scavenging, inspecting the foods we’ve already discarded, opening new packages in hopes of discovering something that looks as familiar as a human heart. After a while, we’ve stockpiled a heaping mound of foodstuffs on the floor. We’re kind of bored of searching too. And hungry.
We sit down cross-legged beside each other and examine the food pyramid. I pick up a round, spongy dark thing that smells like sweat. “Let’s both try one at the same time,” I say.
Pym nods and picks up a flat, jagged yellow thing speck-led on top with tiny crusted teardrops. We raise the human food to our mouths and bite down at the same time.
I chew the spongy dark thing, not enjoying the alien texture at all. The taste is even worse.
We spit out the horrible foodstuffs at the same time, retching and wiping our tongues with our hands.
“This shit is horrible,” Pym says.
“I agree. Hold on a moment. I think I’m going to vomit.” I stand up and stagger toward a stack of food packages that serves as a wall sectioning off a private little area of the room.
I pull down my pants out of Pym’s view. I need to shit real bad.
When I’m done with my business, I pull up my pants and look down at the pile of shit on the floor. There’s a piece of paper stuck in the shit. I bend down to see it better.
“What are you doing over there? It smells horrible,” Pym calls.
The thing sticking out of my shit is the letter she wrote to me and then chewed up and swallowed right before she was married off to Bill. I pry the letter shard out of my shit and wipe it off on the floor. When it’s clean, I read the words, curious to know what fragment of her work chanced survival. I laugh a little to myself. My heart feels good. Alone in this strange room with Pym, with no direction home, life is beautiful.
I return to where she sits beside the pile of inedible crap, wishing we had some hearts or brains to eat.
I hand her this shit-stained scrap of paper that says I love you. Rather than a desperate confession or a funny kid thing to say, it feels true this time. It feels like a new beginning.