Love in the Time of Zombies (3 page)

“Is the maximum-security prison the one where they give you the cute orange jumpsuits? Because I look surprisingly good in orange.”

Cammie lets out a sigh so hefty I worry for her lungs. She throws her hand up into the air as she shifts again in her seat. Now her sneakers are on the armrest. “You know what? I'm not worried. I'm not worried. There's no way you're going to get past that front gate. You can't beat the retina scan, and you can't climb the fence because it's ten feet high and covered with barbed wire. So at worst you'll get a loitering fine, which is only a misdemeanor.”

While she talks, a black SUV emerges from the depths of the parking lot and I catch a glimpse of a bearded man in the back seat before the dark-tinted windows erase him completely.

A plan begins to percolate.

“I don't have to beat the retina scan. You see that SUV?” I point at the dark vehicle as the gate rises to let it pass. “That's how the sperm donors get in and out of the facility. In those black SUVs that have been arriving every twenty minutes. So if I can steal my way into the back of one of those, the Provisional Government Authority will drive me right through the gate. Once in the parking garage, I'll sneak in the front door. All I need is a white lab coat to blend in. Do you have one I could borrow?” I ask Cammie, but she's too busy staring out her window to respond. “Never mind. I can pick one up at a medical supply store or off the Internet. Then all I have to do is find a human male, convince him not to call security, charm him into having a date, snap a few selfies of us sharing rice pudding in the cafeteria, sneak out of the building, and creep back into the SUV without anyone being the wiser.”

“Yeah, you could do that,” Cammie says, her eyes still focused on the window, which she taps lightly with her knuckles. “Or you could just go into that restaurant across the street and have lunch.”

With a sharp turn of my head, I follow her gaze. The black SUV, whose movements I had been following so closely, was now parked in front of the trattoria. Two women in standard PGA guard uniforms are escorting the bearded man into the building.

I squeal with excitement. “Omigod! Omigod! I love you, Cammie. I will love you until the day I die.”

She shrugs.

The unzombified human male is beautiful. His cheeks are so non-mottled, his forehead so non-rotted, his chin not even a bit rancid. It's almost as if I'm looking at a mannequin. He has skin that stretches smoothly from ear to ear. He can't be real. In addition to having all his skin, this human male specimen has a close-cropped beard, blue eyes, a square jaw, and a rangy build. His hair is brown with a liberal sprinkling of gray, but it's all there, attached to his scalp, which is still attached to his skull, which is still protecting his brain, which isn't sliding greasily down his forehead.

Mankind is amazing.

As soon as the human male spots us in the doorway, he jumps. Then he holds the menu in front of his face and slides down in his chair.

Gio's Trattoria is small, with a dozen tables in the center and the same number of booths lining the walls. The décor is old school—wood paneling, white linoleum, red-checked tablecloths, incandescent chandeliers. Duckbill Platypussies' cover of “Wannabe” by the Spice Girls plays softly over the speakers while a waitress in a pristine white apron pours Pellegrino for the human male, who doesn't acknowledge her.

Off to the side, sitting at a booth rather than a table like their charge, are the two guards who escorted him in. According to the white stitching on their uniforms, they are Officers Ritchie and Cantor. The former has smooth blond hair pulled into a utilitarian ponytail; the latter, pixie-red hair held back with colorful clips.

Neither one bothers to look up when we enter.

“Well, there's your dreamboat,” Cammie says softly, as she gives me a gentle shove. “Go get him, tiger.”

I appreciate the push because I'm too shocked by this turn of events to react. I can't believe that my madcap scheme to meet a man to get into Whirligig has actually resulted in me meeting a man to get into Whirligig. A plan that insane never works out.

With a darting glance at the officers, who are too busy chatting about their weekend plans (skiing, couch shopping) to notice me, I stride purposefully to the human male and hold out my hand. “Hi,” I say, with my brightest smile. “I'm Hattie Cross.”

The unzombified human male shrieks and cowers in his seat; the menu falls to the floor. “Help, I'm being attacked. Help! Help!”

At the word
attack,
my heart kicks up, my muscles tense and I turn quickly to fend off the assailant he's so terrified of. She isn't on my right. She isn't on my left. I look back and forth again and again. No one is there.

Nobody else reacts. The guards continue their discussion without pause (“I don't know. I mean, red? It's so bold. Maybe you should go more brownish. Like a burnt sienna”), as the server places a basket of bread on their table.

I look at Cammie in the doorway. She waves.

The man cries out again for help and curls up in his chair, his shoulders hunched over as if expecting a blow. With dawning horror, I realize that he's afraid of me. I'm the assailant. I'm the one who's attacking him.

“Omigod, no, no, no,” I say, stepping forward to offer reassurance. “I'm not going to hurt you. I was just introducing myself. I'm Hattie Cross.”

My perfectly reasonable explanation unsettles the human male even more, and he knocks over his chair and takes shelter behind it. “Don't touch it. Please don't touch it.”

Now the guards stop talking and look over to us. “She doesn't want to touch it, Larry,” Ritchie says matter-of-factly.

“She does. She does, I just know it,” Larry insists. “Please help me. You're supposed to protect me from danger.”

Cantor breaks off a piece of bread. “You're not in danger, Larry, so chill. Have the minestrone. You know you love the minestrone.”

Larry peeks over the edge of the chair, looking far from comforted by his guards' blasé attitude, but he doesn't argue when the waitresses announces, “One minestrone coming right up.”

Not that he gets up off the floor.

“What's wrong with him?” Cammie asks.

It's a good question, exactly the sort that I, the journalist, should be asking. But I'm too confused by what's going on to ask good questions. All I can do is stand over the huddled man with my hand out.

“He thinks she wants to touch his dick,” one of the officers says, as she dips bread into a small ceramic bowl of olive oil.

Appalled, I take several steps back and look at the woman. “
What?
”

The other guard smiles. “Don't take it personally. It's just the way men are these days. After seventeen years of being hounded and chased and pampered and petted as an exotic rarity, they've lost perspective. They think all women want to touch their privates, all women are after them for sex.”

“OMG.” Cammie giggles. “That's insane.”

“The condition is called PNZSD,” Cantor explains, “Post Nonzombification Stress Disorder. An unsettling number of UHMs suffer from it.”

“Therapy helps but it works much better if the therapist is a man, and there are only a dozen of those in the world still practicing,” says Ritchie. “Geyser & Meiser is working on a drug for it.”

Cammie walks over to the booth and points to the bread. “May I?”

Cantor slides over to make room and Cammie sits down. “So working security for the PGA. What's that like?”

“It's a good gig,” Ritchie says. “Reliable, interesting, great benefits.”

“Yeah, the health plan is to die for.”

“I'm studying at the police academy,” Cammie says.

“Cool,” Cantor says. “Are you thinking urban security or maybe Zombie Investigation Bureau?”

The server emerges with the minestrone soup for Larry, who, still quivering on the floor, peeks out from behind his chair and looks at me accusingly. I take another step back.

“Not really sure,” Cammie says with a shrug. “Maybe urban security for the first year, then transfer to the ZIB.”

“You should do it,” Ritchie says. “I'm taking the ZIB test next month. It's where the best opportunities for leadership are.”

Cammie nods. “Everyone says that.”

Cantor tears off another piece of bread. “It's the truth.”

“Totally,” agrees Ritchie. “Security is a good gig if you want to stability, but if you're ambitious you should go into the ZIB.”

“I
am
ambitious,” Cammie says.

Cantor asks Cammie how ambitious, Cammie says very, and I realize that it could go on forever—their trivial, mildly banal conversation could continue and continue until the world finally ends.

“Stop,” I say, practically shaking from the madness of it all—their irrelevant chatter, the restaurant's impeccable service, the human male's quivering body, still on the floor in a lump. “Just stop.”

Cammie and the two guards look at me like
I'm
the crazy one, but they stop. I look at Cantor, then Ritchie. “Are you telling me that all men are sniveling idiots?”

Ritchie laughs and shakes her head. “Not at all. Some men are non-sniveling idiots.”

Her colleague nods emphatically. “But trust us. You're much better off with the sniveling variety because they at least keep their dicks in their pants. Non-snivelers take it out every chance they get.”

“Remember Commando Carlos?” Ritchie says, giggling. “Pathological.”

Cammie leans forward. “Seriously?”

Cantor nods. “Oh, yeah. He'd whip it out thinking that it was the neatest trick in the world. We had to keep telling him to put it away.” Cantor shrugs. “Of course, the older ones are easier to handle. They remember what things were like before the plague so they have some perspective. But the younger ones? They've known nothing but worship from women their whole lives and it has warped them.”

Cammie, wide-eyed, continues to grill them. Slowly, it dawns on me that it's not their trivial chatter that's misplaced; it's my concern. The three of them don't care about the horrifying state of contemporary manhood because they've been aware of it all along. They've grasped the essential truth of our age: Men don't exist. A species that lives only in captivity isn't truly alive.

Somehow, I'd missed this revelation. Until now, I never let myself face the simple fact that men are gone. They're never coming back. A wonder pill isn't going to miraculously restore everything to the way it was. My father isn't going to one day stumble out of the woods he disappeared into all those years ago.

Mankind is over.

It has been over for 17 years.

I drop into a chair at a vacant table. The waitress appears with a basket of bread and a glass of water.

Cammie laughs as Cantor describes the dress one of her regular charges wears to avoid detection. “Dresses and wigs are hugely popular among UHMs so they can fit in,” she laughs. “Some really commit and shave their arms and legs and everything.”

“Yeah, you probably see them all the time in Starbucks. You just don't know it. The world isn't the place you think it is,” says Ritchie.

No, it isn't
, I think to myself.
It's so much worse
.

And yet.

The sense of despair I expect to feel at the loss of my cherished illusion doesn't come. I don't feel hopeless. For so many years, I fought the truth, telling myself that it wasn't too late for the world to be saved.

Maybe now, I'd think. Maybe now.

But knowing that the “maybe now” moment will never come releases me from the obligation of wishing for it. It liberates me from wanting and waiting and hoping, from devoting my time and energy to a false reality. It finally lets me see the world as it is, with a clarity so crystalline, it almost hurts my eyes. In that moment, everything is beautiful, even the grotesque hordes of rotting flesh, and I realize that the ability to look at the truth without flinching is a superpower.

Not everyone has it. Cammie, Ritchie, and Cantor do. Also Mehta, with her merciless accounting of every seal in New York Harbor. Katya Yusenoff, on the other hand, doesn't come close. She stuck a zombie doll in a cheerful domestic scene and acted out an obsolete tradition like a child playing with puppets. She set the stage just right so that when she squinted her eyes, that blob of rotting flesh slurping up cow's brain in the candlelight would look like the man of her dreams.

And yet , until now, she rated higher than me on the honesty scale because she only squinted; I closed my eyes and shut out the world.

Cammie squeezes my arm and I stare at her blankly for a moment before seeing the question in her eyes. “I said, Are we staying for lunch?”

Ritchie slides over to make room for me at the booth. “Come on. The Provisional Government Authority thinks you deserve a free meal after the crappy day you've had.”

I look at Cammie, wondering what exactly she'd told these two. The waitress hands me a menu, and I decide I don't care.

Have I had a crappy day?

My hopes for a Whirligig debut are dashed, my romantic dreams are crushed, I'm out the cost of the car rental, and I've met one of the estimated 344,923 men left on the planet, so my chances of having my spleen eaten by a saber-toothed tiger just went up eightfold.

But in the win column, I gained a superpower.

All in all, a pretty good day.

1. What do you think of Hattie's decision to date zombies? Do you think there might be some advantages to dating a zombie (for example, he wouldn't mind if you got held up at work and missed dinner)? Would you try dating a zombie if 99.9999 percent of the men on Earth were zombified?

2. What's the best piece of dating advice you've ever gotten? What kind of tips do you give to your friends? Would any apply to dating a zombie? Do you identify with Hattie? Do you feel that men are elusive and hard to meet?

3. In her research on how to meet a man, Hattie references several clichés of romantic comedy, including “meet cute” and female klutziness. How do you feel when you see movies and read books with these conventions? Do you think they accurately reflect your experience?