A Sea of Broken Mirrors

The man I came to know as Alejandro had built his refuge out of the wreckage of a liquor store on the far end of a small strip mall in Garrote, New Hampshire, about fifty miles north of Lake Winnipesaukee. It sat next to a pizza joint whose sign had mostly fallen down and sat shattered in pieces on the overgrown parking lot; all that remained still hanging was a faded logo of a jolly, rotund man in a crown and robe holding a slice and beaming widely. As far as I could see, apart from a few tables and benches and overturned chairs, it was empty of anyone living or dead.

Not so the nail salon on the other side. Just how many corpses that place held I couldn’t be sure; they’d all been hacked apart so thoroughly that what remained amounted to little more than piles of dark brown viscera and tattered clothing, with the occasional recognizable limb sticking out. On one of the chairs, I saw half a head; on the doorway hung a rope of intestines.

The only full corpse I saw sat slumped in front of the packie with its head drooping over, as though drunk. Whoever it belonged to obviously died long ago. In winter, judging by the puffy blue jacket and long pants it wore, made anachronistic by the lingering heat of the evening. It barely moved at all, stirring slightly when the breeze picked up enough strength to kick an empty Pepsi can down the sidewalk. The face I saw when it glanced up could have been young or old, man or woman, white or black or Asian or Native American before the rotting began.

Alejandro had tied the front door shut with a thick chain and boarded up the windows several times over. First with a couple sheets of plywood, hung at a slant that left several large triangular gaps, then with two-by-fours over that, minimizing but not eliminating the openings. The strip mall faced west, and the sun – soon to set – sent streaks of light inside, illuminating the dust in the air and little else.

A carpenter Alejandro was not, but his handiwork had kept the corpses out.

So far.

Little about the strip mall struck me as unique. Even the survival shack was nothing I hadn’t seen a hundred times before since my wandering began. I used to investigate them, back in the beginning. In Des Moines I’d found one someone had made out of an old bus station, barricading the doors with a giant pile of folding chairs and broken-up pieces of the ticket taker’s desk. I found no one inside, but I waited around for hours before I thought to check the bathrooms. All empty stalls except for one, in the men’s room, where the former survivor had bolted himself in before blowing his brains out. His corpse, lifeless, motionless, still clutched the handgun he’d used to do himself in, and I wondered how long I’d missed him by.

I found a bigger one in a tiny suburb of Duluth, but I didn’t stay there nearly as long. From what I found there, a small family or group of friends – or maybe even strangers, for all I knew – had barricaded themselves into the First Episcopal Church, and from the way they dug in they never intended to leave. I found nearly a lifetime supply of canned goods – soups and beans and fruit and even catfood, for if they got desperate. I found enough bottled water to fill a swimming pool beside a tarp they must have figured they’d use to collect rainwater once they ran dry.

I also found their corpses, and though they’d mostly been torn completely apart I counted seventeen nearly skeletal hands amongst the mix. Standing over them I found four additional corpses, these ones intact and milling about, trapped inside. My best guess? This group had brought with them at least one mortally wounded would-be survivor, locked themselves up tight, and then suffered the consequences of their own good intentions when their friend died and then killed them all.

So I wasn’t very hopeful to find the man I would come to know as Alejandro alive and well inside his survival shack. I almost passed it by, kept walking on through to… where? Continue north, to Canada maybe? Turn eastward and head up to Maine, then follow the coastline back down south again? Try to find my way through Florida and over the ocean, spend a few weeks on one of the Keys? I had time and I had options, but what I didn’t have were good options, or at least any that appealed to me. Nor did I have any real hope of finding anyone left alive.

How long had it been? I had no idea. I had no calendar, no watch, no internet or television to track these things for me. Not even a piece of chalk to strike tally marks to track the days, like a prisoner in an old cartoon.

By then, I’d even given up looking for ghosts.

The corpse in the winter jacket stirred in front of me, so suddenly that for one sublime instant I forgot it couldn’t see me, couldn’t smell me or hear me, and I felt something I’d almost forgotten. Fear. It lasted less than a second but I welcomed it and missed it immediately when it passed. A bittersweet reminder of when I was still alive and still had reasons to be afraid. The corpse rose to its feet, clumsy and unsteady, its dead eyes looking right through me at the man – boy, really – behind me, the one I hadn’t even realized was there.

Alejandro wore a filthy, tattered pair of khaki cutoffs, a t-shirt with a cartoon character I couldn’t recognize underneath all the bloodstains, and a grim expression of resignation. Slung over his shoulder, he carried a black plastic trash bag filled with something heavy. His other hand held a hatchet with a wooden handle and black rubber grip around which his fingers tightened as the corpse shambled right through me and towards him.

By the time I turned around to watch, he’d already split its skull. It fell in an inelegant pile of twitching decomposition at his feet. He barely seemed to notice, sidestepping the mess and dropping his bundle on the sidewalk in front of the entrance to the liquor store just long enough to undo the chain and let himself inside.

After he closed it again, I followed him in.

The inside was neither comfortable nor cozy nor clean. A few of the shelves had been pushed over to block either the front window or a small door in the back which lead to the redemption room. The rest still stood, mostly dusty and intact, though I couldn’t help but notice the shelf labelled TEQUILA looking a little bare. Against the far corner I saw a crumpled green blanket beside a pillowcase too lumpy and lopsided to contain a pillow. Next to that, a paperback book sitting open, though it was too far away for me to read the title.

I used to love to read. Since I died, though, I’d been avoiding books. Even looking at them frustrated me, especially whenever I found a title I’d been meaning to read, or an old favorite I’d never read again. In Omaha, I spent at least a week but probably longer trying again and again through sheer force of will to knock a copy of The Catcher in the Rye off its library shelf. I’d convinced myself that if I could just focus long enough or hard enough I might make something happen, and if I could get that far maybe I could teach myself to do something that involved more finesse, a delicate touch. Like turning pages. And if I could do that, I’d never need to leave. I could spend an eternity there, reading and re-reading everything I found until I’d committed it all to my spectral memory and the books themselves crumbled into dust.

It didn’t work.

I felt a flash of jealousy then, and I smiled to myself, relishing the feeling. I couldn’t remember the last time I felt jealous, until I did. When I was alive and back at college, when my roommate Stan Moody would text me to let me know he was bringing home some drunk sorority chick, and could I please give the two of them some privacy.

I try not to think about Stan too much, these days. And when I do, the emotion that I feel is never jealousy.

Over by the cash register Alejandro had stuck about a dozen photographs to the wall above a mostly melted candle. Against the register itself leaned a fancy package the size of a shoebox torn open from the top. The transparent plastic wrap, through the smudges of caked on dust and sweat, displayed the remains of a ravaged gift set containing a bottle of something amber colored and an indentation for two glasses. One missing and one still tucked in.

Before I could even bother to wonder where the missing glass ended up, Alejandro showed me. He pulled it out from behind the register, absently wiped it clean. “Just one today, Javier,” he muttered under his breath, holding it up and gently swirling it to catch what little light still streamed in through the front wall. Through it, he caught a glimpse of the door and sighed. “First things first.”     Another thick chain sat in a coiled pile beside the front door, and as if by route Alejandro wrapped it around the handle three times. He returned to his drink, downed it in one gulp, and before long settled down to sleep.

I miss sleep. I really do. I know that it’s not really something I ever experienced consciously, the way I both experienced and missed eating a burger or riding a roller coaster or meeting an amazing girl for the first time and hoping that she might eventually have sex with me. But I couldn’t leave the liquor store, no matter how crappy it made me feel. Alejandro was the first living, breathing human being I’d seen in a very long time, and I needed to know that he would end up okay. Maybe he’d find other survivors, a woman perhaps, and maybe together they would start working on repopulating the human race.

A stupid, improbable hope, sure. But even if that didn’t happen, at least spending time watching this boy could provide me with, if not hope for the future than at least an interesting diversion.

I spent the night reading the labels of the bottles on the standing shelves, and waiting for him to wake up.

 

*

 

The next day began, and though I didn’t realize it at the time a new routine began with it, one that would last the next three weeks or so with only a little variety from day to day. Alejandro awoke slowly, groggily, making his way over to the makeshift fireplace behind the counter. He pulled a green lighter from his pocket and struck up a small blaze just big enough to heat a can of SpaghettiOs for breakfast. Some days it was beans, some days chili, but always from a can over his little fire. He ate slowly – not leisurely or lazily but with the apathetic sluggishness of someone in no rush to move on with the rest of his day. When he finally finished he walked the can down to the redemption center in the back, a cramped and unlit room dominated by the imposing shadows of tall, overflowing bins of cans and bottles, none of which of course would ever be recycled. But he had to throw them somewhere, I guess.

After breakfast he spent some time reading from his book, or from one of the others that I hadn’t noticed the previous night. A hope spot, at least initially for me, until I realized that it was in Spanish. The first week or so I harbored a vague delusion that I might teach myself at least the basics of the language by studying the book, reading over his shoulder, but I didn’t even know where to start. The time he spent reading I would spend silently cursing myself for picking French in high school.

He went out every afternoon, whether he needed to or not; he’d collect his hatchet and his cigarettes and one of his black plastic trash bags and unchain the front door from the inside, rechain it on the outside, and trudge into town to scavenge up some supplies – or maybe just to stave off the boredom incurred by simply sitting safely in his shelter. Sometimes he’d turn left out of the strip mall and head up the hill that lead towards downtown Garrote to pillage the crumbling supermarkets and convenience stores; other times, more often it seemed to me, he’d turn right and through the twisting mazelike residential areas and explore one house at a time, taking what he could and putting down any corpses that still wandered the neighborhoods or lurked, forgotten, indoors.

And every evening he would return around dusk, put away his hatchet and whatever canned goods he’d scraped together that particular day, chain himself in for the evening, and share a drink with the photo of who I assumed to be his brother stuck to the wall.

 

 

*

 

The next few weeks passed thusly.

 

*

 

Three days before he died, Alejandro became careless.

“Three today,” he muttered under his breath as he poured his usual tequila, measuring three fingers and then gulping it down in a single swallow. “And who knows? Maybe three more tomorrow?”

“Careful,” I whispered silently as he poured himself his second drink.

He drank this one just as quickly. “And who fucking knows what comes after that? Maybe another three? Maybe four or seven or fucking seventeen?” Without even bothering to measure this time, he poured again. Sloppily enough to leave a small boozy puddle on the checkout counter. He downed most of this one, stopping to cough before he finished. The glass and the rest of his drink slid from his hand, and before he could even try to grab for it, it shattered on the floor.

Alejandro lifted his head back and gave the greatest cry of rage and desperation I have ever heard in my life or the time I’ve spent since. “Fuck!” he yelled, but by the time he finished that single word his scream had turned into hollow, mirthless laughter. It lasted a long time, and when he finished, he wiped his hands on his pants and glanced at one of the photos he’d stapled to the wall, the one of the bearded man. “Lo siento, mi hermano, but I’m gonna have to use your glass from now on.”

He ripped open the packaging of the gift pack on the register, ignoring the fact that it was already open from the top, and pulled out the second glass, the twin of the one he’d been using as long as I’d known him. “Where was I?” he mumbled, as the drink hit him harder and harder. “Oh yeah. Tonight, I killed four. Or was it five? Better drink five, just in case.”

And he proceeded to do just that.

 

*

 

That evening was peaceful, cool, and when Alejandro unchained the door to step outside for his usual Newport Light I enjoyed following him. Tonight he took the bottle of tequila with him, grasping it by the neck of his left hand, holding the hatchet as always in his right.

Alejandro kept his eyes on the horizon, and before long I realized why. The high-sloping road that lead from here into downtown Garrote crested a small hill, and against that dark blue skyline I saw three silhouettes, barely moving but definitely standing with the moon and at least a few stars behind them.

At first I thought he was watching them out of concern. That misconception shattered when he spoke.

“Hey!” he yelled, maybe as loud as he could. “Hey you! You three dead motherfuckers! Are you gonna come down here or what?”

Maybe the three corpses hadn’t seen him before then. It’s possible. Likely, even. But they did move when Alejandro called to them. They turned all at once and descended down the hill into the suburban darkness between there and here.

“You dumb motherfucker!” I wanted to yell at him, in the darkness of the parking lot. “You stupid, sick idiot! What the goddamn CRAP do you think you’re doing?” I stood there beside him, trying to say those words or any others, but instead just blowing cold air in his face.

To his credit, he didn’t flinch at all. Didn’t even shiver. He just stood there, feet splayed wide, with one hand holding his hatchet and the other clutching his tequila bottle, cigarette dangling from his lip, and both eyes fixed on the bottom hill.

And the time, it passed.

For a while the only sounds I heard were the crickets and the toads from behind us, down the embankment that lead to a small stream that ran too shallow to make a sound. Alejandro took a swig or two before spitting out the butt end of his all but extinguished cigarette. I silently implored him to go back inside, to let the corpses he’d called down here break themselves against the boarded up windows of his survival shack. In the morning he’d be hung over, but he’d be alive and sober enough to deal with the mess he’d made.

Then, at the edges of the strip mall parking lot, they appeared.

They appeared just as Alejandro pulled another Newport Light from the pack and turned away, putting his back to the wind, dropping the hatchet but not the bottle to free up a hand for his lighter. He flicked it but failed to produce a flame, muttering what I assumed to be curses in a language I did not understand under his breath after a few more failed attempts.

Unseen by living eyes, the corpses crept closer.

And by the time he turned back around, they were almost upon him.

“Oh,” he uttered, more awkwardly than frightened. Almost embarrassed. “There you are.”

Alejandro took one last swig from the bottle. It was still more than half full, but he didn’t care. He threw it at the closest corpse – a short one, a boy, still dressed in the remains of a little league uniform but with most of his face missing – and caught him impossibly square on the head. The bottle exploded like a soggy glass firework, and Alejandro threw back his head and barked a dismal laugh as the dead athlete toppled.

And the other two continued their advance. Both taller than the dead child had been, both adults, but beyond that any clue as to the nature of their lost lives had been destroyed by time. Their all but skeletal bodies stumbled forward slowly. “I’ll fuck you up, too!” he shouted at them, barehanded now, hands balled up into fists of rage. “I’ll fuck you right up, too!”

He threw a punch at the first to reach him, almost missing, just grazing it across what remained of its nose. Dried bits of skin fell from its face like grated cheese and landed at my feet. “Get the axe, you idiot! It’s right behind you!” But even if he could have heard me, I doubt he would have heeded me. Blinded by rage and determination and tequila he launched another punch, an awkward left that connected to the jaw, knocking it clean off and to the pavement. Alejandro hooted with laughter, but the damage was superficial and the corpse kept right on coming. At last, my friend landed a kick powerful enough to knock the thing over backwards with a thud as it landed on the ground and flailed like an upside down turtle.

Now, as the third and final corpse drew nearer, Alejandro turned and grabbed the hatchet. “Finally!” I hissed silently in his ear. “It’s about freaking time.” He lunged forward, burying his weapon deep in the corpse’ skull… but tripping over his own feet in the process, sending him tumbling forward, barreling into the corpse’ chest and tackling it inadvertently to the pavement. With a grunt he sat back up and tried to pull the hatchet out, but it was stuck fast. With another, louder grunt he tried again, but it wasn’t until his third attempt that he succeeded. Satisfied, he stood, mopped his brow, and stepped back… right into the second corpse.

Not even I had noticed as it had found its way back to its feet and rejoined the fight. With the element of surprise and my friend’s inebriation on its side it got the drop on him, tearing a long, deep strip of flesh from his right arm with its teeth before Alejandro brained it.

I never found out for sure, but I still believe that the reason he drunkenly egged those corpses on that night had to do with a promise he made, long before I showed up. A promise he turned into a ritual. One drink for each walking corpse put down.

Once all three corpses were dead again he spent a moment or two to catch his breath. Nothing in his expression betrayed any fear or concern or even pain. Between the alcohol and the adrenaline in his system, I’m not sure he even realized he’d been bitten.

He dragged his hatchet back inside, barely clutching it between limp fingers, and chained the door shut for the last time. I never saw him outside ever again.

 

*

 

He slept through the next morning and awoke in the afternoon with skin the color of chalk and a persistent shiver despite the warm, stagnant air. He didn’t crawl out of bed until the evening, when he made his way over to his makeshift fireplace and struggled for the better part of twenty minutes with the lighter in his trembling, unsteady hands.

As I watched him try I struggled with a dilemma of my own. I couldn’t decide whether to leave him now or stick it out the two more days that I knew from experience it would take him to die.

The past few weeks had given me a certain affection for Alejandro that I hadn’t expected but which didn’t surprise me. More than just my only hope for the continued survival of the human race, the boy had become an unwitting friend, in the vein of a favorite television character on an otherwise terrible show you just can’t seem to stop watching. I’d known from the beginning that Alejandro’s days were numbered, but I hadn’t been ready for this conflict.

I didn’t want to abandon him now.

But I didn’t want to watch him die.

So I did the same thing I did in my life as a college student. I procrastinated. I put off the decision one more day. In the meantime Alejandro lit his fire, cooked his can of beans, but couldn’t manage to force down more than a few spoonfuls. He fell asleep in a crumpled pile of person on the floor just inches away from where he spilled the rest of the beans, and I told myself I’d stay just one more night and make my decision in the morning.

The second day was even worse.

I’d forgotten about the vomiting.

I couldn’t leave him, though. I knew he didn’t even know I was there but I couldn’t leave him by himself, to endure what was to come.

“Shhhh,” I whispered in his ear as he puked up last night’s beans. “It’ll get better,” I lied. “It’ll get easier.” I couldn’t even imagine that he heard me, but it felt good to pretend, just to say the words aloud, even if only I could hear them. By the afternoon he’d thrown up so much that he crawled back to the cold can he’d cooked and abandoned and spooned into his mouth what little he could.

I remembered that desperation.

After my bite, by the time I got in my car – a crappy golden Volvo I’d bought used from my cousin for $500 – I had so thoroughly puked my guts out I would have eaten anything, no matter how cold and gross. Despite my eagerness to get back home I had pulled over off the highway at the first rest stop I saw and ordered more fast food from the McDonald’s there than I possibly could have eaten or even wanted.

I ate it slowly as I texted my family that something had happened, that I was sick and coming home for the rest of the semester. Instead of texting me back my mother called me instead, the old fashioned way, a few minutes later after I’d gotten back on the road. She’d already heard of this mysterious flu that had been sweeping through the Pacific Northwest, and could I possibly have that?

I poked at my Big Mac. I’d lost my appetite. In fact, I’d regretted eating what little I already had. I could feel the fries and the Chicken McNuggets squirming around like worms in my stomach, trying desperately to climb up my gullet and out my mouth to see the sun once more. For the sake of cutting the conversation short I told her no, couldn’t possibly be that, but I only got half the words out before the vomiting started again.

 

*

 

The last thing Alejandro did before he died was to try and unchain the front door. I watched as he pulled himself to his feet for the final time, and if I hadn’t known better I’d have thought he died already. He walked like a corpse or a drunk, but less ambitiously than either, as though uncertain whether each next step would hold his weight. His hands trembled; his fingers, drenched in sweat and slippery in their unsteadiness, had trouble performing a task I’d seen them do dozens of times before.

 

*

 

I still remember the exact moment Alejandro died. Not just because I saw his body freeze in place, watched the light go out in his eyes, witnessed his skin turn from pale powder white to ashen grey. No, the moment I knew Alejandro died was when he left his corpse behind and rose up out of it, a ghost like me. I hadn’t expected that, but I took it in stride. The first I’d seen, in all my travels. Why? I don’t like to think about that anymore. Impossible questions no one will ever answer.

He stood fully upright for the first time since his drunken rampage, a sober expression of resigned confusion across his face. He looked down to his still dead body for as long as he dared, and then looked up and met my eye with dignity.

“Are you Death?” he asked.

“No,” I answered, shaking my head. “I’m just dead, like you. My name is Jameson. Jameson Martin.”

“I’m Alejandro,” he told me, and at last I had a name to match the face. I couldn’t help but flash him a bittersweet smile, after all we’d been through together without him even realizing. “And I’m dead now?” he asked, glancing down towards his motionless body.

“Don’t look at it!” I snapped without meaning to. “Never look at it! In fact, we should leave this place. Right now.”

His body, the corpse of Alejandro, had not yet started to move. But it would. It was just a matter of time. A matter of hours.

“Why?” he asked, honestly perplexed. He still hadn’t looked away. “Do I need to… to walk into a light, or something?”

“No,” I answered. “At least, I never saw one. I stayed with my corpse for a very, very long time, and I never saw anything like a light. If you do, please let me know.”

He didn’t.

“Don’t look at it,” I repeated after a moment, a moment in which he’d done nothing but just that. I tried to keep my tone gentler this time, for what little it was worth. I don’t think he even heard me.

“I shouldn’t have come here,” he whispered, as much to himself or his own corpse as to me. “I shouldn’t have stayed here. I shouldn’t have kept coming back here. Or if I did,” he added, turning his attention to the rows and rows of shelves and bottles with particular attention to those few remaining splotches of caramel color just below the Tequila sign, “or if I did, I should have smashed every fucking bottle in this place the second I got it all locked up.”

I nodded, torn between patient and gentle understanding of my friend’s situation and the understated urgency of my need to get him the hell out of this place before he had to go through what I went through. “Hindsight is twenty twenty, I guess,” was all I could think of to say.

“I was drunk,” he remembered aloud. “I was drunk, and I got bitten.” He stepped closer to his corpse, just like I’d hoped he wouldn’t. His left arm lay at an awkward angle away from his torso, palm up, the wound that had killed him mostly hidden against the carpet. Mostly. The infection spread just enough that I… that we both could see where it started to creep up from his wrist and down his arm, turning the skin black, leaking pus.

He reached out to it, and before I could say something like, “I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” he tried to turn his arm over, to turn the bite upright, to… look at it, I guess. Of course, he couldn’t. His spectral fingers passed through his mortal arm like smoke through a screen door, and the same thing happened the next few times he tried, too.

I resisted the urge to chuckle and say, “Frustrating, isn’t it?” and regale him with my many tales of failure to open or even touch the books in the Omaha Public Library, or my one single attempt to caress Colleen’s face after… after what happened. But, I decided, we didn’t quite have the level of camaraderie for that. “It won’t work,” I stated simply.

“And how do you know?” he yelled over his shoulder, trying again and again to lift his arm, to see and stare at the wound that had done him in. A stupid question, of course, and I could see that he realized that without caring as soon as the words escaped his lips.

I didn’t call him out on it.

“It was the bite that killed me, right?” he asked finally, rising back to his feet.

I nodded. “The bite gave you the disease. The disease killed you.”

He nodded, slowly and numbly. “I shouldn’t have stayed here,” he repeated. “I should have stayed at Royal’s. Or gone back home. Or left the town. Left the state.”

“That wouldn’t have helped. I’ve been all over the country. It all looks like this.”

He ignored me. “I TRIED, though! I fought my way back home but they were already dead! Everyone but Javier, and I tried to help him. I TRIED!” he repeated, with a glance towards the wall of photos beneath the cash register and towards one in particular, of the smiling man who looked just like him but older. He spoke in a tone so anguished that for a moment I actually felt more sympathy for him for the loss of his brother than I did for the loss of his own life.

“I had to kill them,” he continued. “To protect Javier. I had to kill the others, the dead ones. All seven of them. My mother. Both our parents. My grandmother and uncle, and my uncle’s girlfriend. I didn’t recognize the other two, but I killed them just the same.”

I considered telling him that he didn’t kill anyone, that all he did was return the dead to death and that he could take some comfort in that. But his was a story, though, that he’d held inside him for years without telling anyone, without the chance to tell anyone who could actually listen. The greatest comfort I could give him was to just let it out.

“By the time I reached Javier, he was so close to death that all he wanted was to share one last drink before he passed. Instead we shared seven. We drank to our parents, our grandmother, our uncle… Javier hated Maria, our uncle’s girlfriend, but when I told him how I chopped her head in two just above the nose he wanted to drink to her, too.

“Even the two dead strangers in our house. By that point I was falling down drunk, but he insisted. So I drank, twice more.

“The last thing I remember from that night was Javier throwing up, and telling me to drink for him, once I had to kill him too. And I told him, I’m not going to kill you. I can’t. I’m going to die here, with you.

“But the next morning I woke up, covered in my brother’s blood, and I couldn’t remember but I guess… I guess he convinced me.”

A few feet away his corpse’s fingers began to twitch.

“We need to leave,” I whispered.

“Why!?” he demanded, turning to look me in the eye for the first time, cramming every emotion he had right now – fear, sorrow, regret, distrust – into that single explosive syllable. “You keep saying that! Why? What’s the big fucking rush? I’m already dead! What else is gonna happen to me here?”

I suppressed a sigh. I hadn’t wanted to spell this out for him. “If you stay here,” I answered, as calmly and evenly as I knew how, “you’ll have to watch THAT wake up.”

I hadn’t pointed at the corpse, or even acknowledge it at all beyond a gentle nod in its direction, but I could tell Alejandro got my point. His dark eyes grew from narrow pinpricks beneath a furrowed olive brow to black orbs the size of apples. His jaw fell open, and moments later whatever ghostly mechanism did the job his leg muscles once did gave out and he slumped down and backwards against the desk that held the register and the collection of photos he’d stapled against it. The pictures formed a sort of aura around him, encircling his crumpled form as he processed the implications of what I’d just told him.

“I’m going to turn into one of them,” he whispered. Not a question. He must have known it already, known it as a consequence of death back when he was alive, but until just now it hadn’t hit him for real. “I’m going to turn into a zombie.”

“No,” I corrected him. “You’re a ghost now. That’s what you are. That’s what you’ve turned into, and that’s what you’re going to be from now on. You’re not becoming a zombie. That thing is. Do you understand? Not you. The meat you left behind.”

If he did understand, if he even heard me, he gave no sign. He sat almost still with his face in his hands, not sobbing but simply despondent. While I wanted to say more I held back, allowing him the luxury of mourning for himself in silence.

Besides, I didn’t know what to say. Or how to say it.

And while he sat catatonic, his corpse kept moving. Little by little. Its right foot. Then, its left leg.

“Look,” I said, eventually, “the time has come. Let’s get out of here.”

“Why?” he asked, without moving.

“I told you,” I snapped, before I could think to soften my tone. “Your corpse is going to stand up. It’s going to claw its way to its feet, very very slowly. It’s going to take a while, but it will get there. And we need to leave before that happens.”

“Why?” he repeated. Again, he didn’t move.

Would I ever get through to him? “Because,” I answered, through gritted ghostly teeth, “when your corpse stands up, it is going to find its way out of here. It’ll take a while. A very long while, maybe, or maybe not. The thing is, right before you died, you almost finished unchaining the doors to this place. Almost. And the other thing is, once corpses stand up, they lose most of their problem-solving intelligence. The key word there, though, is ‘most.’ It might take a while – hours, days, or weeks, who knows – but eventually your corpse will escape.

“Let’s get out of here before it does. You and me.”

He didn’t even shrug. “Why?”

A third time.

Alright, I’d tell him the truth.

“Because if your corpse gets out, if it finds its way free and starts roaming the countryside, you aren’t gonna want to stay here any longer. You are going to follow it. You will be with it every day and every night from here on out because, I’ll tell you right now, you don’t need to sleep anymore. And neither does it. Sleep is for the living.

“So you’ll follow it, and you’ll watch it do everything it does. Every person it kills, every dead body that it eats… you’ll watch as your own face grows red, caked and dripping with blood and then you’ll watch as that blood turns brown and begins to crust on your own dead lips because your hand won’t ever rise to wipe it off.

“And even after the atrocities end, you’ll have to watch yourself rot.”

For the first time since I’d started speaking, Alejandro moved. And for the first time since I’d seen him bit, Alejandro took out a green pack of menthol cigarettes – his Newport Lights – and lit one up. I saw that he had four left in the pack, the pack he’d carried in the pants he died in. I wondered whether his ghost would always have four left, as long as he roamed the earth.

“You don’t want that,” I assured him, as he took his first deathly drag. “You don’t want to follow it. Trust me.”

One more time, Alejandro asked: “Why?”

“Because that’s what I did!” I exploded at him.

All my anger – not just at him for refusing to listen but at him for dying, too, for refusing to follow through on all the hope I’d had for him when I first saw him alive. At the world, for being what it was, and at Stan Moody, my old college roommate, for being who he was and doing what his corpse did, and at myself for all the mistakes I’d made when I was alive and all the time I’d wasted when I was alive and at all my regrets, all of them all at once, balled up into a single sentence I shot out at an unfortunate newborn ghost who deserved if anything a small fragment of my wrath but certainly not all of it.

At least now, Alejandro was listening.

“When I was bitten,” I told him, “I didn’t have a place like this to fall back on. The world was different, then. I don’t know how long it’s been. I don’t know what you remember. But when I was bitten, up until a few minutes before, I remember a world that was safe.”

I took a moment to relish that memory, but before Alejandro could interrupt me, I continued. “When I was alive, the world WAS safe, and I never dreamed I would be otherwise until I came back one night and the corpse of Stan Moody lunged forward and took a big chunk out of my arm with its teeth.”

(That corpse lies there still. That fragment of arm was the last thing it ever ate before I reached out with my other arm and brained it with the textbook, “Intro to Art History,” from which I’d been studying. I left that book right where it fell, atop that shattered skull, where no one will ever read it again.”)

I told Alejandro everything. My wild flight from campus, the McDonald’s visit, the phone calls to my family, and the vomiting. “I was almost to my house when I grew weak at the wheel, and I knew I had to puke again. I tried to pull over, but it came too fast. I threw up all over myself, all over the car, and… and I’m not sure quite when I died, but the first thing I remember after everything happened was standing up over the wreckage of my car right next to the tree I hit right off Old Mill Road. Watching my corpse.

“I didn’t know what to do. There was no bright light to walk into, no spirit guide to tell me what to do. So I waited. And watched.

“I watched as my broken and mangled corpse twitched itself back to life, struggled against the seatbelt that had done nothing to save it, and figured out how to unbuckle it. I watched it crawl out through the broken windshield, leaving behind most of the skin on my face. I watched it stumble to its feet, lurch forward, and continue on home.

“It was only a couple of miles, but my corpse moved so slowly it took hours. I followed it the whole time.” Even back then, I knew it was a bad idea. I knew where it was going. I knew I couldn’t stop it. And even if I didn’t know for a fact what it would do when it got there, the behavior of Stan Moody’s corpse had already given me a pretty big hint.

 

*

 

As I talked, Alejandro’s corpse had found its way to its feet. At first it did so little beyond that neither of us even noticed, but then it opened its mouth and groaned just enough to spatter the air with the traces of vomit that remained upon its lips. We watched in silence as it stumbled forward, relearning how to walk on rigid, dead legs.

“There’s something of me left in him.”

“It,” I corrected. “There’s something of you left in ‘it.’ And yeah, there is, but it’s the same way there’s something left of you in a photograph, or a footprint. That doesn’t make it you, and that doesn’t make you part of it.”

We watched a little longer in silence, as it struggled with the chain that imprisoned it. Just as I cleared my throat to repeat the advice that had become almost a mantra one last time before giving up, he cut me off with just three words:   “I’m not leaving.”

This time, I didn’t argue. He’d made up his mind.

He continued anyway. “I won’t have to watch it hurt my family. It can’t hurt my family. They’re already gone. Everyone’s gone. There’s no one left for it to hurt. Not anymore. Besides,” he added ruefully, “it’s the only thing I have left.”

So I left them there, he and his corpse, and I resumed my wanderings. I headed straight south, avoiding the places around town I’d visited with him while he was still alive. I found my way to 95 and began following it all the way down the coast. The more I thought about it, the Keys were sounding better and better to me.

 

*

 

What Alejandro didn’t understand, couldn’t understand even if I tried to explain it to him, was that watching the monster that wore my face butcher my family only began the horror that I would endure as I followed my own corpse through the weeks and months and years that followed. It killed again, of course. I remember a small boy with blonde hair in a Pokemon t-shirt in the middle of the road south of Portland, a young woman sleeping in a tent one night soon after, whose face I never saw in the darkness but whose gurgled screams died out long before my corpse was done with her. It killed again and again and again and every time I hoped that someone would put it down finally, the way that Alejandro put down his family and the things that had killed them.

But that never happened, and eventually my dead body ran out of people to kill. When it did, it wandered still.

And still I followed it.

And I watched it rot.

I watched as it shambled from place to place, aimless and slow. I watched it stop bleeding once it had bleed all the blood I had and as my own grey skin began to peel away from the wounds I’d sustained both in life and since, those jagged gashes now blackened and empty. I watched as the smog of flies hatched from the maggots under its skin and grew so thick most days I could hardly bare to look at them crawling all over its face, triggering in me a phantom itch I could never scratch.

I watched that face, my own face, change from something I recognized into something I didn’t, like a deranged and broken funhouse mirror, until finally I didn’t recognize it at all. The face I’d seen thousands upon thousands of times before, in mirrors and in photographs either laughing or smiling or scowling or crying, sleepy or sweaty or damp from the shower or covered in shaving cream, now only wore one expression, that of slack-jawed utter disinterest.

I wish I could say I eventually took the advice I’d been giving Alejandro since he died, that I eventually gave up on chasing myself from town to town, carrying with me the twin burdens of guilt at its actions and disgust at its transformation.

But I never did. I simply lost track of it.

Sometime around the point where we hit the outskirts of Las Vegas and my wandering corpse ran out of people to kill, we ran into a horde, a greater concentration of the undead than we’d ever come across before. A sea of rotting limbs and broken faces just like my own, milling about as lost as I felt. All along Main Street they meandered from sidewalk to sidewalk, in and out of the shattered storefronts, lacking now even the lung capacity to so much as moan. Their movements random and unmotivated, clumsy and uneven. Some tripped and fell and lay there, trampled lazily by their brethren, crawling forward if they could but mostly unable.

I took my eyes of my corpse for… how long? A minute or two, at most. Maybe less. By the time I looked back to try and find it again I couldn’t. My clothes, the clothes it wore, had grown so dirty and tattered I couldn’t tell them apart from the rest; rigor mortis had twisted its posture so that I couldn’t even really be certain how tall it was anymore.

To my credit, I only spent an hour or so there, gliding bodilessly amongst the corpses, searching each blackened husk of a face for any hint of similarity to my own. And that initial sense of panic that set in once I lost myself quickly faded into relief that I didn’t dare acknowledge until later, until I’d given up. Until I’d grown so tired of staring at dead faces that I turned and climbed back up the hill we’d taken to get here.

It was gone, gone, finally gone.

And I was free of it forever.

I took one last look back over my shoulder and then made up my mind to head north.