Three days is a long time to sit in that little death-cottage, waiting to unleash some mayhem. To stave off boredom, we talked about all the real food we would eat when we got to the house, rigging the shower timer so we got more than two minutes of hot water, and the biggest game, what we would do when ‘it’ was all over. That morning, it was more of the same.
“I’ll tell you what, Brother. I’m gonna head for the mountains, get one o’ those cabins, put a fookin’ rocking chair on the porch and just sit. Hell, I may even rock in it after awhile,” Sean was saying to his twin brother Patrick. The Flaherty brothers were, improbably enough, Irish college exchange students Mom had agreed to house for the year, the last year that something like higher education mattered. When the outbreak started, she had convinced them with her typical, kindly forcefulness, that returning to Ireland was no longer in the cards. The brothers had called their parents in County Cork, told them they were staying for another year, and hung up, sobbing. They took to their roles well enough, and proved to be excellent shots with the big machine guns and assault rifles alike. They wouldn’t stay silent long enough to get the twenty feet from the pillbox to the cot area though, so external work was out. Fucking Irish, I thought. They sing sad songs and fight happy wars.
“That’s all well an’ good, Brother. But what about ma’ and da’?” Patrick wanted to know.
“Come off it, now! You know well as me that they’re fookin’ zombies. Ain’t nothin’ ta be done about it.”
“What do you think, Brandon? D’you think our ma’ and da’re fookin’ zombies?” Patrick asked me.
“First off, how many times do I have to tell you guys, the Beloved are not zombies. Zombies are animated corpses- a bullshit, supernatural figment of fiction. The “undead.” There’s nothing ‘dead’ about the Beloved except their ability to control their hunger,” I explained for the umpteenth time.
The Flaherty boys looked at each other. “Fine, fine. So they’re alive Beloved zombies? Is that any better than bein’ a dead fookin’ zombie?” Sean inquired.
“For fuck’s sake, guys, it doesn’t matter what you call them, your parents are most likely lost!” I snapped angrily.
“Well, why didn’t ya say tha’ in ta first place, boyo?” Patrcik chided. Jesus, what a pair.
“My mistake. All right, back on track. When this is all over, I’m going to read all the books I’ve been meaning to read in the biggest armchair I can find, and I’ll only leave to eat, go to the bathroom, and stand long enough to keep the blood from pooling in my legs.”
“Ha! Y’hear tha’ Paddy? Brandon Archer, a fookin’ bookworm!” Sean slapped his knee, cackling. I rubbed my temples which had started throbbing in the last couple minutes. I increasingly felt like I was living in a poorly-acted movie. “Give over, Archer. What would ya really do?”
No comments:
Post a Comment