Finally back in the kitchen...
The banquet was carefully laid out, and Kaveh had his first draft of a brain eater's prix fixe menu, finger foods of language center, brain stem soup served fresh in the skull, a garden salad topped with crumbled picnic memories and Roquefort cheese dressing, potatoes au gratin layered with succulent cuts of right hemisphere, spicy peppers and kale topped with tender brain fillet, and for desert, a slice of chocolate cake from the fridge. Some things never went out of style. Now it was just a matter of waiting for his friend to come back.
Kaveh sat on the stool next to where the kitchen island had been and ran his right hand over his injured left shoulder. His arm was moving better than it had that afternoon, even as the bite that had made him a zombie continued to rot. He was tempted to pick at the wound, but there was a noise. The dead body on the floor was moving.
Speedy's limbs stretched out in all directions like an angry starfish. His arms flailed convulsively until one palm then the other found the floor with a smack. They pushed off, and his rigid torso lifted off the ground. His eyes opened, showing the cold stare of a creature from beyond the grave returning to slaughter and feed on the living.
It was time. "Time for breakfast," said Kaveh, forcing his best waiter smile. He picked up the first tray from the counter and waved it under Speedy's nose.
Speedy's vacant eyes locked onto the bite-sized cuts of brain spread amongst the garnish of green onions.
"This is the appetizer," said Kaveh, knowing his friend would digest the memory of learning English from one of those cuts. By starting with this, he could spare his new zombie friend the frustrating combination of internal awareness without the ability to communicate.
Speedy snatched at the food and stuffed his mouth with handfuls of pink and gray matter from the tray. He ate ravenously, zombie style, and within a minute, all but the garnish was consumed.
"Good work," said Kaveh. He stood back to watch for his friend's first signs of awareness. "Do you remember anything?" he asked.
Speedy stood up without acknowledgment and turned his head slowly to scan the room. He didn't know what was happening.
"It's Farah's kitchen, Speedy," Kaveh tried to explain. "I mean Fidel. You died about an hour ago, but it's okay. I cooked all this."
Speedy spotted the rest of the meal on the counter and stumbled rigidly in its direction, his hands clawing the air in front of him, his head bobbing randomly off to the sides.
Kaveh followed him. There was a lot to take in, but Speedy had always been a good listener.
Maybe he didn't remember English yet. Kaveh thought back to the words he'd picked up during their years working side by side. "Recuerdas?" he asked, appealing in Speedy's native tongue, but the fresh corpse kept his focus on reaching the counter, groping for the piles of food. Kaveh intercepted him. "No, here. The soup is next."
He turned Speedy by the shoulders to face the severed head looking out from the counter. Its insides had been hollowed out like a jack-o-lantern to make room for soup. With a clean removal of the crown, the remains of this random victim had become a strangely appropriate serving dish. Speedy had used to criticize Kaveh's recipes for their lack of presentation, but in preparing this meal, ideas like that had come to him from somewhere.
The spoon was right next to it, but Kaveh wasn't surprised when Speedy lifted the skull to his lips and drank the soup in gulps. Maybe it'd been greedy of Kaveh to expect a conversion right away, but the brains in that soup would give the monster sense again.
The thick broth dribbled down the victim's forehead and soaked Speedy's chin as he drank, but the first batch of an original recipe deserved to be savored. "Slow down," said Kaveh. "Think for a second." The amount of brains in these first two courses should have been flooding Speedy's mind with awareness and thought, but no insight appeared in his dead eyes.
Like the tray of finger foods, the soup didn't last long, but as the last drops fell down his chin, Speedy lifted the empty head to look it in the eyes.
That was it. He understood what had happened. Kaveh waited for the light of consciousness to dawn on his friend. He looked closer, but the final empty expression from the serving dish too closely mirrored Speedy's hollow gaze. Speedy turned the head to the side and bit off its nose.
"No," said Kaveh. Mister Shankly had done the same thing earlier and never gained any awareness. He snatched the head from his friend. "You'll ruin your appetite."
Speedy barely chewed before he swallowed. He should have been different from the other zombies. Where was his loyal sous chef, the master of cuisine assembling a dozen entrees a minute with every portion exactly the same? This wasn't working. Where was the next course? Kaveh searched the counter for the salad. He lifted it delicately and turned back. Speedy glanced at the salad, but the former cook had already discovered something he found more appetizing, the leftover ingredients.
He'd always appreciated good cooking before, but things were different now. He followed his zombie instincts, eating whatever was closest to breathing. To that mindset, the suitcase full of raw severed heads was all anyone would ever need.
Kaveh leaned against the counter and sank to the floor, his back against the shelves of pots. All his preparations, his attempts at cuisine, and it hadn't worked. Speedy had gone straight for the plainest food in the room. Maybe zombies weren't meant to eat nice things.
He set the salad on the floor to his right. He reached out and ate some of it with his hand, savoring each bite as Speedy had failed to do.
The chunks of brain had thoughts of parks and spring days, along with a bunch of other things, but this finely cut, the memories had no context. At least from the suitcase, Speedy would be eating the same artless meal that had given Kaveh new life. It had to work, to bring back his friend so they could pick up where they left off.
He took another bite of salad. It was beautiful and elaborate, built on a foundation of escarole and arugula. They were premium ingredients, but they didn't have the taste he'd expected. Garden salad with brains should have danced across his tongue and created exciting entirely new flavor notes, but only the brains brought any life to his mind and taste buds.
No wonder Speedy had ignored his cooking. They didn't have the palates anymore for human food, just humans themselves. They couldn't pick up where they left off, could they? That would have been the restaurant.
Through everything, some part of Kaveh's mind had been able to hold onto his old plans for the future. Speedy could have helped him with that, but now Kaveh realized it wouldn't work. Who would there be to eat his cooking, other zombies? They couldn't. He knew that now. Zombies had no use for chefs.
Far away, under the sound of Speedy's feeding frenzy, an automatic rifle went off.
Lisa definitely heard it that time, the sound of gunfire echoing in the distance ahead as they made their way down the mountain back to town. She didn't know if the National Guard was really on the way, but somebody was down there, and they were fighting back.
"Stay together," said Helen, repeating Lisa's earlier instructions to the dawdling Doctor Neil. Four unarmed humans moving at night through a forest infested with zombies wasn't the time to get separated.
Lisa marched at the head of the group, not to lead the way but to avoid looking the others in the eyes. Moonlight checkered the woods with shadows. She tried to focus, to scan their path for any potential threat, but the cover of trees weren't their only source of danger. She'd had a seizure, the worst she could remember. Her medicine was gone, and another attack could strike at any time.
She missed her medicine. She wanted its familiar safe feelings to replace these knots in her stomach, but she was surrounded by so much danger. She might never get the chance to feel safe again.
Even work had been better than this. Her life had been boring there, but she'd never had to be this afraid. She'd put a snow globe on her desk and stared into it when things got slow. Now she would have given anything to be sitting in that little house inside the globe or standing between those two tiny snow men.
Her concentration had slipped. She couldn't do that. She needed to be in the here and now, focused on the threat of death that could come from anywhere around her.
Her job, her secret, her whole life as she'd known it was gone, but here she was, still breathing. Survival was the only thing she had to fight for anymore.
Finally, the trees spread out, and Lisa's feet hit asphalt. They were back in civilization.
There were buildings up ahead, but she couldn't see any streetlights. Like the woods, there was no light but the moon. Were they walking into the same swarm of zombies from that afternoon? Would they even know it if they were? Things should have made more sense down here, but this place was more foreign than the haunted woods they'd just left.
Helen spoke up. "We're here. Now what?"
The question was to Lisa, but that didn't stop Farah from speaking. "Now we find a hotel," she yawned, "someplace safe to wait out."
Lisa said nothing. She was tired, too, and she didn't want to argue. Life as she'd known it was gone. Her snow globe had shattered in the first wave of the attack. As she struggled for a reason to keep fighting the zombies, it was even harder to fight the other humans, no matter how bad things looked.
They couldn't keep running forever. The attack was too big. Even if they found whoever had fired that gun, the best it would do was buy some time. Lisa could be the smartest human around, use every trick from every zombie movie to stay alive, but someday she'd mess up again. The zombies would get her, and she'd be gone. If they ate her in an hour or a week, it'd be the same. She put no faith in the National Guard.
The four of them wandered into town, looking for a hotel. The buildings around them could hide hundreds of zombies, and they'd never know. Lisa stopped looking.
Helen walked closer to her. She said, "I won't let them change me."
Lisa climbed out of her own thoughts. "What?"
"I wanted to tell you." Helen was pale, and her voice was weak. "You said Logan wasn't himself anymore. If the zombies get us, we won't be us anymore either. We'll be like them, come back and kill other people. I don't want to turn into that, Lisa. I'd rather," Helen squinted, halfway between determination and tears. "I'd rather stay dead."
Lisa didn't know what to say. She couldn't explain to Helen that she might be wrong, that Kaveh had spoken to her. Christ, it didn't make any sense to her either. Helen's eyes tilted away from determination into tears. Lisa walked shoulder to shoulder with the former bank teller. "What do you want me to say?" she asked.
Lisa couldn't help thinking about what had happened in the kitchen, that feeling for just a second in Kaveh's arms. With everything else so wrong, there'd been that one little moment where none of it mattered. More than the snow globe, she missed that feeling, but thinking about it again just brought up pain in her chest.
This was crazy. Kaveh was dead. Survival trumped everything, Lisa told herself. Friendship, love, whatever that meant, sentiment, none of them mattered. You didn't have to outrun the bear, just your friend. Running for your life, caring only slowed you down.
Under the chest pain, Lisa could feel the memory of her feeling for Kaveh. She wanted to tear it out and be rid of the whole thing.
"Tell me I won't be empty like they are," said Helen over her tears. She tapped her chest. "I don't want to lose this."
Lisa felt her cheeks get cold. Her feet veered away from her old coworker and walked on the other side of Farah and Neil.
She'd never had a feeling before like the one in the kitchen, but she wanted it gone. She wasn't empty, was she? Life as she'd known it was over, but she was still walking around, following her old habits, spouting strategies and doing whatever she needed to survive. How did that make her any better than a zombie?
Gunfire stopped her train of thought. The noise was close now, within a block, she guessed. The gunfire stopped, and footsteps echoed off the walls.
Lisa moved towards the sound. Death would come soon enough, but it hadn't taken her yet. Even if this was only survival, it was better than the alternative. There were guns now, and she'd be ready for what came out of the shadows.
Four men with guns came around the corner in tight formation. "Four more of them, sir," shouted one of the men, and they aimed their guns at Lisa, Helen, Farah and Neil.
Kaveh sat on the floor of the kitchen and watched the remains of his best friend eat brains. Melting ice from the suitcase made a pool on his sister's kitchen tiles, but there was nothing for the ice to keep cold anymore. Somewhere, the guns fired again, killing more of his people, but Kaveh had a different problem on his mind.
Speedy wasn't any smarter. With each head he emptied out, Kaveh had waited for something to sink in. By now, Speedy had eaten more brains than Kaveh, but he didn't even know who he was.
Why was Kaveh so different? Other zombies weren't becoming like him by eating brains. He thought it might have been the lifetime he'd spent savoring his meals, but he and Speedy had been best friends, bonded over their mutual love of food. There was nobody in America he'd had so much in common with, but Speedy had followed an identical diet, and nothing had happened. It looked like Speedy would be a mindless zombie forever. Everything that had made him unique or interesting, everything that had made the two of them friends was gone. He was really dead.
It was strange. After the first time Speedy died, Lisa had asked Kaveh how he felt, but he'd only waited for his friend to wake up. Knowing that would never happen, he should have been devastated, but he still felt nothing but hunger.
All his plans had failed. First his dreams of opening a restaurant had become impossible, now he couldn't bring back his friend. Everything was gone, even his sense of loss. Without emotion, their friendship meant nothing to him. Lisa had known more about zombies than he realized.
Kaveh tried to recall the life of his lost friend, but the lives of every person whose brains he'd eaten crowded his mind. Kaveh too clearly remembered his meals, and it was getting harder to distinguish one life from another. Even his own life was getting lost in the noise.
He stood up and looked for reminders of his own past, but his sister's high-tech kitchen was nothing like the home where they'd grown up. Kaveh had left Iran to be with the last member of his immediate family, but Farah was different here. She'd forgotten their homeland, and Kaveh had sworn that would never happen to him. He'd worked so hard to hold onto himself and build a restaurant where he could bring his own culture to America with him. Now there was no way for him to share the fragments that were left of himself.
Speedy pulled the final head from the bag and started eating. In life, he'd always told Kaveh to keep his head down and blend into the crowd. If only Kaveh could explain that the other zombies were exactly like him, that he would finally fit in.
In the end, Speedy's first loyalty had always been to his family. Now there was a whole new family out there for him. In a strange way, Speedy had what he'd always wanted. The people who'd looked down their noses at them would finally accept him, and he could join the crowd as an equal.
But Kaveh was more alone than ever. If Speedy couldn't do it, nobody else would be like him. It was time to stop holding on so tightly. He had all these thoughts, but they didn't do him any good. Maybe his friend had the right idea after all.
Human skulls littered the floor, but Kaveh felt no remorse. The Americans had always thought of him as a monster, even before. If that's what they were going to think anyway, he didn't have to work anymore to prove them wrong.
As Speedy devoured the last of the brains it had taken him hours to gather, Kaveh watched the opportunity to eat them slip away.
If he stopped consuming other people's memories, would he stop having all these thoughts he couldn't share? He might become the creature everyone expected him to be. You could only treat someone like a monster for so long before they rose to your expectations.
Kaveh and Speedy still wore the remains of their suits. They'd put them on that morning, optimistic for some reason about the loan they'd somehow believed they could get. The apron Kaveh had taken from the Taco Shack was soaked from the inside with blood. He was a zombie now, not a cook. He pulled it off, and a pile of undigested brains fell on the floor. There was a hole in his stomach where a zombie had tried to eat his intestines before he died.
When he'd woken up after that, he'd been as confused as Speedy, stumbling around, groping for food. Maybe he never should have taken that first bite of brains. The potatoes and the fillet were still on the counter, but he didn't want the insights they would bring him. The hunger Kaveh had felt since becoming a zombie was as powerful as ever. There had to be something else out there he could fill it with.
The confusion of all those lives parted, and Kaveh remembered something important, his pickup. He'd walked past it in the driveway without thinking, but he had no memory of driving it here from the bank.
Speedy finished the last head and dropped it on the ground with the others. He looked around with the same glassy stare as before, searching for some fresh victim.
Kaveh would find some human out there and unleash his mindless hunger. "Speedy," he said. "Did you drive my truck?" Speedy said nothing, but Kaveh found the keys in his pocket. "Let's get something to eat."
Was there anybody left to eat? Somebody must have fired those guns. That was it, Kaveh would find the source of the gunfire and eat them. He would go back to being a regular zombie.
The big fight's coming up in Chapter Ten - A Great Day to be Alive
Remember, you're not really dead until you're brain dead, at least not since 1968, and this story's been progressing for over a year, so I took a moment to reflect on serialization.
