Sex in the Time of Zombies

well-rehearsed lies, and a gaggle of gossip.

Or maybe he was just a cruel and sadistic mother fucker who didn’t have a cell of compassion within his entire body. The truth is, I’ll never really know for sure. All I know is that during that point in my life, I worshiped this man like a god. Anytime I’d filch a bit of food from some other resident of Free Town, I’d always ensure that he got a fair share of the booty.

As if he were the emperor and I a humble supplicant showing gratitude for his protection and mercy. Sometimes, but only when Carlos was in clear view, I would pick out a member of the Free Town Freshies and start a bit of trouble. The scenario I played into was always the same; some imagined disrespect the other boy had shown me, some little slight I’d dreamed up the night before. And I would beat that kid into the ground, would pummel him until his face was nothing more than a bloody mess and all the fire had gone out of his eyes.

But the entire time, I was keeping watch out of my peripheral vision. Watching Carlos and that little grin of approval that would spread across his face….

IV. HISTORY & LORE

My parents told me once that when the world was still alive, Free Town had been what used to be called a junk yard. They said it was a place that people had taken their trash and rubbish to, all the garbage leftover from their day to day existence. They also claimed that the emperor hadn’t built the walls that surrounded our little city. These had existed long before the world knew what a freshy or rotter was; the emperor, they claimed, simply saw the possibilities that the enclosure offered and began the task of transforming this place of refuse into a refuge.

The earliest residents had helped him clear away most of the wrecked cars that littered what would become Free Town; they’d drug them outside the wall and surrounded the city with these rusty hulks of metal as a kind of additional barricade against the dead.

However, the zombies, it turned out, were far more persistent than anyone had ever dreamed. They came clamoring through the doorless shells of trucks, squirmed between the tight passages of this metal labyrinth, and slowly made their way to the outer wall. Drawn by the sounds of life like ants to a crust of bread, they clustered together and clawed at the bricks, scrambled over one another as they searched for even the smallest weakness in our defenses.

So a new plan had to be put into place. I have vague memories from when I was very small of hammering and pounding as the residents of Free Town constructed a series of platforms that rose almost to the very top of our great wall. These structures looked rickety with their planks jutting off at odd angles and the rungs of ladders being nailed in at irregular intervals; but they were surprisingly sturdy. As we would come to learn, they were actually capable of supporting the combined weight of every person in Free Town without so much as even a creak or groan.

Once the platforms had been constructed, a group of men had been sent outside the wall with picks and shovels. Their first order of business had been to kill the rotters who’d surrounded our little enclave like an invading army. I don’t know how many widows were made in this undertaking or how long that battle outside raged on… I was, after all, just a small child and barely understood the events that were unfolding around me. History, however, has taught me that the mission was a success and that these men quickly set to their primary objective.

In a spot that was mostly free of wrecked vehicles, they dug out a long trench that hugged the base of the wall like an earthen shadow. Somehow, they also managed to bore a hole through the bricks just large enough to insert a metal pipe. The pipe jutted out of the wall at a forty-five degree angle and connected the safety of our life within Free Town to the savage wilderness outside.

And that, my parents said, was how The Day of Burning came to be.

V. THE DAY OF BURNING

All of Free Town was buzzing with the babble of excited conversations, the clanging of pots and pans, and the squeal of laughing children as they zig-zagged through town. And the scents… good God, the scents. Deep fried hawk mingled with the spicy aroma of batter dipped rabbit and the smell of those little wild onions that grow down by the south side of the wall was sweet and pungent, permeating the tents and shacks like the promise of heaven. Mushrooms, crispy crickets, rhubarb pie baking in rusty ovens whose sides had become blackened from the fires that crackled underneath: every household was preparing their finest dish in the hopes that the Emperor would bestow upon them the coveted title of Best in Show.

Tattered streamers had been strung between the structures of our city and the multicolored triangles and squares flapped in the breeze as if they were applauding the collective efforts of the residents. Some of the banners sparkled with large, block letters that formed words I didn’t understand: SALE!, Clearance, and Grand Opening. But these strange phrases really weren’t the point; no, the point was that a collective madness had seized the resident’s of Free Town and brought smiles to faces that otherwise were locked into deeply creased frowns and tight-lipped expressions of disapproval.

Two Finger Freddy had set himself up on the back of a flatbed truck and the strumming of his battered guitar was soft and haunting as Sadie Hoffman sang cryptic lyrics. Something about imaging there was no heaven or hell. Not normally my thing, but I, too, had been swept up in the whirlwind of cheer that made eyes sparkle like jewels in the sunlight.

I was lounging in the shade of what the older folks called a refrigerator with my eyes closed, breathing in the smells as my stomach gurgled, and listening to the music drift through the wordless drone of a dozen overlapping conversations. By the time the sun had begun its descent in the sky, the real festivities would have started: people dancing in the brightly colored costumes exclusively reserved for The Day of Burning, wrestling matches where grown men squirmed in mud in the hopes of claiming the wild pig that had been snared from the wilderness following the last Day of Burning and allowed to grow fat and round. Maybe I’d try for that pig, I thought to myself, bring it home and let my mother prepare it however she liked….

“Smitty.”

I opened my eyes and squinted at the boy who stood before me, shading my eyes with a cupped hand.

“S’up, Ballister?”

Tommy Ballister squatted down and began picking small pebbles from the ground as he cocked his head first to the left, and then to the right.

“You hear? The Emperor picked the Thompsons to be the Fire Bringers this time.”

He spat a glob of spit into the dirt and rattled his collection of small rocks in his hand as he looked up at me.

“Yeah, Skinny Tyrell said somethin’ about it earlier. He was pissed ’cause his family has never been picked and this is the second time for the Thompsons.”

Tommy leaned in so close that I could smell the rankness of his breath as he rocked back and forth on the balls of his feet. He glanced over both shoulders before dropping his voice to a whisper.

“I bet old lady Thompson is sucking his cock.”

“Whose? Skinny’s?”

Tommy laughed and shook his head as if he’d just seen a trained mouse perform an elaborate trick.

“Fuck no, rotter brain… the Emperor.”

I turned this over in my mind and tried to imagine Mrs. Thompson with her head bent over the Emperor’s lap. This time, it was my turn to laugh.

“No way, Ballister. He probably just feels sorry for them. Because of Sarah and everything.”

“Shit, man, who wouldn’t feel sorry for them? Having that little zombie lover for a daughter? Probably why she’s so sick… done caught the walking death from her little friends.

I bet she’d suck off one of the bastards if she had the chance. Probably even go all the way with the stinkin’