The red polyfiber carpet traced a path through the forest of impossibly ancient redwoods. Neethan F. Jordan, his beard almost completely filled in, hiked with walking stick in hand, his clothes soaked through with sweat, his necktie now tied around his head as if he’d stepped out of a commercial in which office workers comically erupt in a Lord of the Flies–style social conflagration. His breath banged its tin cup against the insides of his ribs. Up ahead, hovering about eight feet above the carpet, glowed an incandescent heart about the size of three basketballs put together into a really big basketball. The heart thudded, bobbed a bit in the air, and radiated shimmery rays of light like one of those Mexican El Corazon tattoos. Neethan approached the glowing object and positioned himself beneath it, then jumped, his head getting swallowed momentarily in the hologram-like whatever-it-was. There was a noise, a pleasant chime in his ears, after which he understood that he had been granted an extra life.
Up ahead floated a Nike Air sawed-off shotgun. Neethan jogged to it, jumped, and made contact with the holographic weapon. In an instant he heard the chime and looked down to find the shotgun in his hands. Why the hell did he need a gun? He pressed on through the trees, watching the sky through the pixelly boughs.
They appeared in short order: undead folks in shabby clothes. Coming out from behind trees and bushes, ambling toward him wielding little more than chunks of wood, moaning, attempting some kind of slow-motion attack. Neethan pumped the shotgun and aimed for the head of the closest one. The undead guy’s cranium exploded in a confetti-like atomization of brain and skull fragments, leaving the spurting stump of a spine protruding from the neck. It fell to its knees and then the body simply vanished. A lady zombie, looked like an ex-receptionist, lurched at him with a bad limp. He shot this one in the chest, and for a moment glimpsed the path ahead through the gaping hole his buckshot had created. This zombie vanished, too. A demographically balanced array of flesh-eating zombies began to appear on the trail in greater frequency, shuffling, arms outstretched, mouths hanging open, skin falling off bones, eyeballs missing, hair slimy and thin and black over their green faces. Neethan spied a box of ammunition sitting on a tree stump and aimed for it. When the blast hit, the shotgun automatically reloaded. The zombies started coming faster, more frantically, more enthused about feasting on his brain. The quicker he could pump the shotgun and squeeze off a shell, the quicker they seemed to come, until at last one of them was able to take a swipe at his face at close range.
A curtain of red fell over Neethan’s vision.
For a sliver of a moment, passing so quickly he didn’t register what was happening until much later, all was darkness and silence. As dark and silent as if he had spelunked the depths of a cave and then, reaching the deepest, darkest place in the cave, stuck his head down his own throat and disappeared inside his own body. A darkness final and unremitting, a darkness that offered no acknowledgment that there could ever be any illumination, an absolute black, a blackness so extreme it coated him and penetrated his skin, rendering everything that might have color when exposed to light completely transparent and thus now only a vessel for this categorically absolute absence of light.
Then he regained consciousness, if one wanted to call it that, standing again on the trail with the shotgun in hand, a few paces back from where he’d last fallen, and as he progressed the same zombies came out from the same hiding places and he blasted them again, sweeping the weapon back and forth. The path took a turn to the right and around the corner floated a new gun, looked like a machine gun manufactured by Dell. He shot this gun with his current gun and the new gun materialized in his hands. Turning this gun on the zombie onslaught, he trudged toward the tree line to a bluff overlooking the vast Pacific. When he felt confident that all the zombies had been vanquished and none would sneak up behind him, he sat on the forest floor and gazed out to the sea, a masterpiece of color and texture. Waves individually curled and dissolved, each one bound up in vast equations, sunlight bouncing off the rippling and roiling surfaces. Who had spent the insane amount of time it took to code all these waves? Who but those few who interfaced with the qputers could pull off something as magnificent as a to-scale simulation of an entire ocean?
The red carpet slithered down a path demarcated by a driftwood hand rail, then veered north. From where he stood on the bluff, Neethan saw the carpet stretch for miles along the beach. Gulls dotted the backdrop amid clouds migrating eastward. In the woods at his back, the zombies stirred, lurching from their hiding places to confront some new armed interloper. Neethan made his way down the path to the beach. It certainly smelled like the Pacific Ocean, an olfactory hallucination of decaying kelp and expired crustaceans. He followed the path, a red wound slicing along the western border between California and the rest of the planet. After a couple miles of this he grew weary and lay down to rest his head on a log. He closed his eyes and with the static hiss of ocean waves surrounding him, fell into a nap.
Sometime later, sensing he was being watched, he opened his eyes to see a man’s face hovering over him. More specifically it hovered high in the air, peering out of clouds. The face was as massive as a mountain, each stubbly whisker the size of a stump in a clear-cut. The face looked to be in its midthirties, Caucasian, a little heavy around the jowls but with a strong, angular jaw. Brown hair messed up with some sort of beauty product, blackheads clustered around the nose.
Neethan raised himself up on his elbows. “Who are you?”
The face didn’t respond, maintaining its placid expression. Neethan realized the hot blasts of wind he was feeling every few seconds were breaths from this giant’s nostrils.
“Who are you!” he repeated. Still no answer. Unnerved, Neethan stood and continued walking, with the giant, celestial head at his back. He’d never been stared at so intensely. It felt as though dental drills were boring into his shoulder blades.
“Leave me alone!” Neethan cried out.
Still the head persisted, following along it seemed, his eyes trained on Neethan’s path. Frustrated, Neethan fired a couple blasts in the head’s direction, but the buckshot fell far short. What could the head want? Maybe it just wanted him to continue his walk along the red carpet, which Neethan would have done regardless. Maybe it had appeared in a supervisory capacity, to ensure his safe travel to the Pacific Northwest. Or maybe it was simply a spectator, a curious entity observing his choices. Whatever it was, it made Neethan’s skin crawl.
The head belched and the sky was overcome with the stench of garlic.
“Jesus Christ!” Neethan yelled, shaking his gun. The head appeared to smile slightly, amused at the pip-squeak anger of this minuscule being trudging along a red carpet on a beach with the paparazzi nowhere in sight. Soon it eclipsed the sun and became an indistinct black mass. When night came completely, the moon cast the head in a blue glow. It appeared to close its eyes and drift into sleep.
Neethan couldn’t tell how far he’d traveled on the beach but his body told him it was time to find a place to stay for the night. He struggled toward a concentration of lights in the distance and came upon a charming seaside town where a motel, the Lamplight Inn, flickered its VACANCY sign. Veering off the carpet, he stumbled across the parking lot to the motel’s office, where a balding, middle-aged, heavyset man in a white T-shirt sat scribbling something in a notebook. Neethan pushed open the door and asked if there were rooms available. The man’s voice came out filled with static, like there was something wrong with his audio. About every third word he spoke cut out.
“… have… -ble… looking for… view room?”
“I’m sorry,” Neethan said, “you’re cutting out. I’ll take whatever room you think is best.”
The man nodded, then looked out the window to the beach, craning his neck to observe the giant, sleeping head hovering in the sky.
“… that head… to… ?”
“Come again?”
“Does… belong… you?”
“Oh,” Neethan said, “I guess it does belong to me. It showed up after I came out of the redwoods, after I killed all those zombies.”
“Who… he?”
“Who is he? I don’t know. He’s just some guy who’s been following me. Right now he appears to be asleep. I have no idea what he wants. He won’t speak. He just watches me. I don’t care for it, if you want to know the truth. I feel like there’s a built-in expectation involved with being watched like this. Why would he watch me if he didn’t want or expect me to do something? Like a scientist, you know? A scientist doesn’t observe something unless he has a hypothesis about it, right? So what’s this gigantic head’s hypothesis about me? What’s it think I’m going to do? My path has been predetermined. I almost died in Death Valley. Fought zombies in the redwoods. Answered questions from the press in a thoughtful and polite manner. I can’t tell what life this is, whether it belongs to me or is just being played for laughs by somebody else. I don’t really care one way or the other, though. I’ve got my mission and I’m going to fulfill it.”
The man behind the counter seemed to have stopped listening to him. He slid a room key across the fake-wood-grain counter and returned to his scribbled lorem ipsums. Neethan could have gone on for hours with this guy, chatting him up about music made by mentally handicapped people and the myriad challenges of international aid organizations, but this was a person programmed to hand out room keys and swipe credit cards and engage in only the amount of conversation needed to keep such transactions rolling along smoothly. If that meant asking about a guest’s gigantic celestial head, then that’s just what good customer service was all about.
Lonely and tired, Neethan slung his weapon over his shoulder and shuffled across the parking lot to his room, casting a quick glance at the head drooling into the sea as it slumbered. He opened the door to find the room illuminated by a gold coin the size of a medium pizza floating above one of the two twin beds. More money—just what he needed. He positioned himself under the glowing currency and poked his head up into it, hearing the familiar chime. How much money had he earned in this manner? How many extra lives had he racked up? He’d lost track. A few million bucks, maybe? Enough lives to sustain him through a variety of zombie attacks, if it came to that? Neethan smiled at the television waiting for him at the foot of the bed. He clicked it on with the remote, set his weapon on the nightstand, and stripped out of his clothes for some quality underwear-clad TV viewing/ball-cupping. He settled after a while on a show about the space elevator some dudes had constructed off Maui. (A commercial for condoms, a commercial for legal services, a commercial for coffee in a can.) Here was an interview with an official spokesman for the project, a wind-whipped fellow in a rain suit, who said, “We really had a pisser of a time contending with the Van der Waals forces, but hey, thanks to some heavy lifting brain-wise, we’re all good,” and, “It’s a freaking space elevator, man! Can you believe it?”
“What’s the fuckin’ point of this giant, like, space station you dudes are building up there?” the interviewer lady person asked the spokesman on the deck of the sea platform.
“What we’re building is nothing short of the first extraterrestrial terrarium, an O’Neil cylinder that’ll rotate on its axis to simulate gravity and contain a sustainable fuckin’ ecosystem, with a filament core providing energy and illumination and shit like that.”
“So people are going to fuckin’ live in it and shit?”
“People, or, you know, maybe just, like, fuckin’ plants and shit like that at this point. It’s actually not up to my group to determine how the interior is going to look, what’s going to be on the inner surface. We’re just building the shell right now. It’s pretty fuckin’ kick-ass, though.”
As the spokesman fielded questions and spat chewing-tobacco-related saliva into a paper cup, a climber platform slid down the carbon nanotube ribbon and docked with a great hissing of steam. The camera cut away for a close-up of the platform, from which a trio of technicians who were suited up in orange astronaut gear waved and thumbs-upped to indicate another successful delivery of payload.
Neethan surfed and happened upon one of his own movies, Cop vs. Cop. He’d played one of the cops, the second one. Cop vs. Cop had macho written all over it, full of blood and scorn and torture, cattle prods, a burlesque of profanities. Onscreen and armed, he turned the squib-studded trunks of baddies into hamburger. Off-screen he fell asleep.
The next morning, the giant head was still sleeping when Neethan rejoined the red carpet and continued walking north along the coast. Seagulls had begun nesting in the head’s eyebrows, pecking at its chapped lips. The clouds surrounding it had begun to rain, slickening its hair. Occasionally Neethan turned to see if it was awake yet but at noon its eyes were still closed. Neethan positioned himself under the nostrils, craning his neck to view the two hair-lined caverns. It took him a minute to realize he couldn’t feel its breath anymore. The head was dead. Yet still it followed him, maintaining the same few hundred yards or so of distance. What could this possibly mean? Neethan wished it would go away. Maybe it could nod off into the ocean, sink to the bottom to be feasted upon by crabs, gazing up at the distant surface with eyes the size of sports stadiums.
If the mere fact of a gigantic head hanging behind him was upsetting, Neethan was even more upset that the head was now deceased. He found himself, as he crossed the border into Oregon, wishing the head was still alive, even though it hadn’t said a word to him. At least when it was alive he could believe it had some purpose for being. What purpose could it possibly have now? He stopped occasionally to gaze up at the graying flesh, trying to remember if he’d seen this face before. Was this some kind of punishment for something he’d done? Was the head’s existence meant to be some kind of sign? He walked, it followed, its neck wreathed in clouds. At times the red carpet took him into the forests and hills along the coast but he could still see the head hanging there above the trees. It was in Oregon that the head began to smell. This attracted more than the usual number of gulls, who started snacking on the flesh. The sight disgusted Neethan. Meanwhile, he continued to pick up the occasional extra life and offed the odd zombie here and there. In the town of Tillamook he took on a pack of vampire/werewolf hybrids with a nail gun, dying a couple times in the process. No biggie.
When the carpet brought him to Cannon Beach, Neethan tumbled into a brew pub and ordered a pint of the local IPA. The bartender, a stout man with a head of curly gray hair who couldn’t stop polishing the bar with a rag, cocked his head toward the window. “That head out there belong to you?”
“You could say that,” Neethan said. “I don’t know why it’s following me. Don’t worry. I’ll soon be on my way, with the head behind me.”
“Causing quite a stench,” the bartender said.
“I’m really sorry. I would get rid of it if I could.”
The bartender stopped his polishing. “Say, wait—I recognize you. Don’t tell me—” He uttered a few names of movie stars before he got it right. “You were in that gladiator movie.”
“Gladiator Graduate School.”
“Right. Great death scene. So what brings you to Cannon Beach?”
“I’m following the red carpet hoping it leads to me to some answers about my heritage. Apparently I’m an Indian. What’s your name, by the way?”
“Axl Lautenschlager.”
“This your family business?
“It’s been in the Lautenschlagers going on five generations.”
“Since the FUS, then.”
“We survived three tsunamis and a plague of human-headed locusts.”
“Nuts, man. Nuts.”
“What do you think that head is up there for, anyway?”
Neethan shrugged. “When it was alive I kept trying to ask it, but it wouldn’t answer. Then it died and now it’s never going to tell me. But that doesn’t negate the fact that it’s still up there, blotting out the sun, rotting.”
“Eventually it’s going to just be a skull.”
“Yeah, I guess. Then the wind will erode it and a couple thousand years from now there won’t be anything up there at all.”
Axl cracked his neck. “But if it really does stay up there that long, centuries after your death, folks will still be debating why it appeared.”
“Not that I’m dying anytime soon. I’ve racked up 378 lives.”
“Must’ve exterminated a lot of zombies on your way up here.”
“You know it. What level am I on?”
“Forty-seventh.”
“How many levels are there to go?”
“I don’t know. Some say a hundred. Some say fifty. Hard to tell. I’ve never left the forty-seventh myself. No reason to. I have everything I need in this town. Great food, a well-stocked video store, spectacular views. Can I interest you in another IPA?”
“Why not.”
Axl Lautenschlager poured Neethan another pilsner glass of beer. Neethan slurped off the foam. He could stay here, too, he supposed. Buy a cabin on the beach, live off savings, learn a handicraft. Meet a local girl, have babies. He let the fantasy grow to encompass his whole stream of consciousness. For a while he sat idly sipping his drink, eyes glazed, speculating about a life parallel to this one. Neethan Jordan, school board member. Pillar of the community. Volunteer director of the local theater troupe.
A couple zombies ambled in and settled into a corner booth, putting an end to Neethan’s daydream.
“I guess I gotta terminate these mofos,” Neethan said, slapping down a twenty. “Keep the change.”
Some zombie kung-fu action went down.
It was badass.