Sex in the Time of Zombies

I’m so small…. I want to return to the innocence of my childhood, to a time when my biggest concern was whether I would be a refugee or a rotter. I want this emptiness in my stomach to be filled with the greasy warmth of possum and to be explaining the rules of Freshies and Rotters to some kid who’s just now old enough to learn how to play.

The rules were simple. But everything is when you’re a child. And that’s what I want to return to: a time of simplicity and ease. A time when I didn’t have to worry about where my next meal would come from or whether or not I would live to see the sun rise on another day.

Damn that Tommy Ballister. This is all his fucking fault. He may have wanted this, but not me. Not in a million years. All I ever wanted was Free Town. But I’ll never be able to feel its cool mud on my feet again and because of that, if for nothing else, I’m glad that Tommy’s dead. Looking back, I only wish I would’ve killed him myself.

III. GANGS OF FREETOWN

I had grown too old for Freshies and Rotters. At fourteen, I was nearly a man; within the next couple of years, I would be expected to move out of my parent’s tent and make my own way in Free Town. I would provide my own food, make sure the Emperor got his required share, and go about the business of being an adult. The problem was, I wasn’t quite ready for all of that responsibility. While I’d cast aside the games and toys of childhood, I needed something to take its place. Something that would exist as a buffer between the innocence of youth and the obligations of maturity. Which is where the gangs came in.

There were three major gangs within the confines of Free Town, each comprised of approximately eight teenage boys at any given time: Los Muertos, The Rotter Nation, and The Free Town Freshies. Los Muertos had way too many rules for my tastes: they dictated everything from what you could wear to who you were allowed to speak with… if I wanted to subject myself to that kind of control, then I’d just stay at the tent all day while my mom and dad barked orders at me; it was also generally agreed that The Free Town Freshies were a bunch of pansies and posers. So by default, the gang I really wanted to belong to was The Rotter Nation.

For some reason, the boys in The Nation seemed so much cooler than anyone else I knew. They all had this swagger in the way they walked, as if they were the true emperors of Free Town, and they could nick apples from someone’s basket without that person even realizing what they were up to. Which is saying a lot; the gangs are generally distrusted and people tend to keep their food close to their bosom, as my mother used to say. But somehow they pulled it off, time and time again, while members of the other gangs were routinely brought before the Emperor for punishment.

As it turned out, Tommy Ballister also wanted to join The Rotter Nation. We’d never spent much time together as kids: I was too busy playing Freshies and Rotters while he was pretending his stick was a machete and the hulks of twisted metal littering Free Town where zombies needing dispatched. But we knew each other enough to throw back our heads at one another as we passed and knew quite a few people, like Sarah Thompson, in common.

Sarah, though, wasn’t doing so well. The fever had set in a few weeks back and her condition had gradually declined with each passing day. Which, secretly, caused me to whisper prayers for her when no one was listening. See, I’d developed something of a crush on her: every time she’d look at me with those big green eyes, I’d feel this little quiver in my stomach and I wouldn’t know whether to throw up or just keep grinning until my face cracked. I’d lay on my bedroll at night, long after my mom and dad were both snoring loud enough to call the dead, and picture her long dark hair and the little smattering of freckles across her nose. I’d think of those thin lips, the swells of breasts that rounded the front of her shirt….

But I was much too worried about how I would look in front of the other guys to admit this. They all thought she was kind of weird because she’d picked up this odd little habit after her baby brother had died. At least once a day, she would walk to the walls of Free Town and place her hands against them. She would stand there and talk to the Rotters on the other side. She’d tell them little details about her morning… what she had for breakfast, how her mother was teaching her to sew, that sort of thing. And even though she couldn’t see the corpses she was talking to, she gave them names: I don’t know, Robert, but I think Anna might not be as good of a friend as I thought… I hope you’re well today, Shirley, or at least as well as possible seeing as how you’re dead and all.

The other kids called her a zombie lover and would laugh and point as she passed. The boys would find dead mice to throw at her and the girls would hold her down in the mud while long strands of spit slowly descended towards her face. She was ridiculed, mocked, beaten up, and threatened at every turn; but day after day she persisted in making her pilgrimage to the wall and talking with the dead.

When I would string together my elaborate fantasies in the dark of night, they almost always began the same way: a bunch of other kids had her surrounded and they were pushing her from one person to the next as they spat their derision in words carefully chosen to inflict maximum emotional damage. Tears streamed from her eyes and she yelled for help until her voice cracked but this just seemed to incite the kids even further and the jeers got more vicious, more personal. But then I showed up and pushed my way through the crowd; my voice boomed above their mocking chants and they all immediately lowered their eyes in shame as I scooped the trembling Sara into my arms and whispered everything will be alright, now. I’m here….

In real life, however, it was an entirely different story. Even though it left me feeling like I needed to somehow clean myself from the inside out, I was right there in the crowd. My voice might not have been the loudest and my comments may not have been the most biting, but other people were watching. I had to say something… even if it was only to call her a dirty zombie lover.

Of course it didn’t help matters any that her cousin, Carlos Thompson, was usually the one responsible for the attack in the first place. He seethed with hatred for his cousin and made no attempt at hiding it from anyone other than their family. When he looked at her, his face had this expression that seemed to encompass anger, shame, and disgust all at the same time. Spittle would fly from his snarled lips as he hurled insults at her and if she began to cry or tried to run away, his eyes would spark with cruel amusement as he doubled his efforts.

He was a real piece of work, that Carlos. He’d been before the Emperor so many times that his body was still covered with bruises from his last punishment. The usual food rations and ever increasing amounts of time in the solitary hole never seemed to have much of an effect on ’ole Carlos. So when he killed the Henderson’s prize kitten and tainted the meat by making sure that all the internal organs had ruptured, it was obvious more drastic measures were needed.

The entire Henderson family were given these long wooden dowels and Carlos had to kneel naked before them as they struck him over and over as hard as they could. The Emperor had decreed that the beating should continue for as long as the Hendersons had strength left in their arms; when all was said and done, Carlos had to be carried back to his tent and had been laid up in bed for nearly three days. His mother and aunt had stirred up quite a fuss, claiming that the evidence was all circumstantial and that everyone was just out to get their family for some reason I never quite understood.

But Carlos wore those bruises like badges of honor, rolling up the sleeves of his shirt so that everyone could clearly see the blue and green splotches covering his arms. He bragged how the entire time he’d never screamed and begged for mercy… how he’d just knelt there and took his punishment like a man.

Whether or not that was true was anyone’s guess. The entire scene had played out within the confines of the Emperor’s doublewide trailer and it was strictly forbidden for anyone to come close enough to his palace to have witnessed anything. But Carlos was one tough son of a bitch; and, as the de facto leader of The Rotter Nation, it was easy to imagine him kneeling there with an expression of grim determination as the dowels whacked his flesh again and again.

Sometimes, I think that maybe that’s why he hated Sarah with such fervor. Being related to her might have caused others to wonder if it was something in the blood; if perhaps he, too, was somehow tinged by the same madness that gripped his younger cousin. Could he also be considered a zombie lover by default? If so, how would this effect his standing within the gang? Perhaps some young upstart might see his relationship to Sarah as a sign of weakness and lay challenge to his role as leader; all it would take was a few whispered conversations, several