Our original undead fan club started following us within twenty minutes of leaving the Suburb of the Dead, and this time they had reinforcements. It was almost like we were a magnet for anything that had died around these parts. Unfortunately these guys were not as pretty as the suburbanites we left behind.
We left Margaret behind as well. Houston told us all about their encounter while we were trudging towards the mountains, although I don’t think Dan believed a word of it. He projected all his rage onto our former companion, which was probably easier than living with the guilt that by giving his lighter to Harold, he might have caused her death. Nemesis seemed almost as hard-hearted. “I hear what you’re saying,” she told Houston, “But I won’t be happy if she catches up to us. I want her to stay in the sunset she rode off into.”
Jesse started to pass the time by naming each RB as if they were pets. KC jokingly warned her little sister that “If you name them you’ll get attached to them.”
Nemesis followed this up with, “Yeah, what are you going to tell your mom and dad when you see them? ‘It followed me home, can I keep it?”
She didn’t notice Houston and KC wince when she mentioned their parents. They must have given up on seeing them alive again, but filed that realization away until they could better deal with it. And it didn’t matter, because Jesse just went on naming the dead.
“I’m calling the guy with no flesh on his right leg ‘Peg Leg.’ You know, ‘cause his bare bones look like a pirate’s wooden leg. And I’m naming the one dragging that stuff behind her ‘The Bride’ because it’s like a really gross and dirty train.”
“That’s not a wedding train,” KC whispered in my ear. “That’s her entrails. They’ve come out of her…uh, never mind.”
“Well if you’re not going to stop doing this, I’m going to name one,” said Nemesis. “See the lady near the front with the super-frizzy, way-out-there hair? From here on out she’ll be known as ‘Afro-dite.’” This made Houston chuckle. It was funny, because she was the ugliest of the group—no teeth, one eyeball hanging out, and barely wearing the most hideous housecoat I’ve ever seen. It was made of terry cloth so it had absorbed Afro-dite’s bodily fluids disturbingly well. Hardly something you would associate with the goddess of love.
I thought about how different we were before the microorganisms invaded our minds. We used to be repulsed when we saw rotting remains walking around. But since we started sharing Parasites, we became more curious than disturbed. We were more upset with the thought of becoming one of them than the actual sight of death.
What bothered me was how much this no longer bothered me.
So Jesse and the others kept naming the members of our growing fan club and KC tried to explain the grotesqueness away.
“It looks like that guy over there still has last night’s dinner in his mouth, so I’m going to call him ‘Fratboy.’” Houston said.
“The bacteria in our bodies do not die with the person,” KC explained. “The gasses from their decay puts pressure on the stomach and squeezes its contents back up the esophagus and into the mouth.”
“I’m calling that one ‘Pop’ because his torso is so fat he looks like he’ll explode,” Mouse said.
“That’s a fresh one. I wonder where he came from? It’s very rare, but we might hear a tearing, rupturing noise when his chest explodes.”
“Hey, if there’s a Pop then there has to be a Snap and Crackle,” said Jesse, ignoring the fetid facts KC kept rolling out. And KC ignored Jesse by carrying on with them. “If you look over at that guy over there you can see he’s already popped from all the internal gas. And if you look even closer you will see viscera…”
“What’s viscera?” asked Mouse.
“The organs inside your chest and abdominal cavity.”
“Sorry I asked.”
“Hey mister!” Jesse shouted. “Your viscera is showing!”
“Well I’m calling this one ‘French Kiss,’” said Mouse as she pointed to the guy with a huge tongue bulging out of his mouth.
“Gas from the bacteria bloats the tongue and makes it cartoonishly stick out.”
“I’m naming that one ‘Trump’ because his hairpiece has slipped,” said Houston.
“That’s not a toupee. Liquid from putrification gets between layers of cells and loosens them, which causes skin slip. It’s why a lot of these RBs look like they’re wearing broken gloves. It’s why Ghost was able to scalp that Ghoul with his bare hands when we first met.”
Ah, how sweet, she remembered.
“Hey, look, a bearded lady!” said Jesse with excitement. “Can we call her ‘Circus Freak’?”
“I like ‘Bearded Lady’ better. And that’s not a beard. It’s mold. She must have been embalmed a long time ago and only recently freed from a tomb because, in spite of the beard, she’s in the best shape.”
“If she was embalmed then why does she have mold?”
“Formaldehyde will eventually break down. There are a lot of hardy bacteria that lie in wait when that happens so they can go to work.”
“How come Ghost doesn’t know all this?” asked Jesse.
“I guess I just have a weak stomach,” I replied. “Very few people can study the body without getting sick.”
“It’s too bad there’s not much call for CSI these days,” said Houston. “KC would have been a shoe-in for a detective.”
“Or a mortician,” added Nemesis.
“Maybe she could work in one of those funeral homes!” said Jesse with enthusiasm, as if there were great perks that came with being the sister of a funeral director.
Our path through the woods became more difficult to see, so we stopped talking long enough to negotiate our way in and among the brambles. We also took turns holding Danny just like last time, each of us afraid that his feverish little body would grow cold in our hands. None of us wanted to be the one holding him when he passed away.
I fell behind the others when it was my turn to hold Danny. It happened naturally the moment we passed him from one to the other. He was small for a five year old, but he was dead weight. If he had the strength to put his arms around my neck it would have been easier. It also would have been comforting, because it would mean he had enough strength to go on fighting the bacteria eating up his leg.
KC stayed behind with me to keep me company. I appreciated it until she started talking.
“Part of me wishes I could have stayed behind with Margaret.”
This surprised me. “Why would you say that?”
“Because I want to study these things too. I want to understand why they don’t rot like traditional bodies do.”
“What do you mean? Their eyeballs are either hanging out of their sockets or eaten away. Their guts are trailing behind them, their lips have pulled back from their teeth, their mouths are hanging open exposing something disgusting from their last maggoty meal! Their skin is mottled or mossy and sloughing off. And you’re telling me they’re not decomposing like normal?”
“They leave the parts they don’t need to decompose,” KC said with a tinge of exasperation in her voice, like I had missed the obvious. “But the parts they do need they preserve. Take the brain for instance.”
“Sure, let’s talk about zombies and brains,” I muttered. I knew this was going to get nauseating real fast, but I also knew that there was no one else in our group willing to have this conversation. Except Margaret. Margaret would have been happy to discuss putrification in the name of science. It made me miss her and wonder if she survived the fire.
“When you’re alive your body exercises control over your enzymes, but when you die those enzymes are let loose to digest whatever they want to. That means the same bacteria you fed on in last night’s dinner will start devouring you. The brain is one of the first things to go because it’s soft and squishy enough for the enzymes to make quick work of it.”
“Oh, right,” I said, like I should have known that all along. I was hoping she’d end the discussion right there.
“So the brain gets liquefied by enzymes and bacteria. It will then start to leak out of the ears and bubble up through the mouth…”
Danny stirred in my arms. It made me wonder if he was able to hear what KC was saying and was as repulsed as I was.
“….so the articles I read up on believe the microorganisms excrete a high concentration of formalin…”
“What’s ‘formalin’?” I asked, feeling like an idiot.
“It’s what you find in embalming fluid. The Infected are always waging a war against decomposition. Formalin, or something like it, is their weapon. A body can break down in as little as two weeks under a hot sun, yet they’re able to last months. And their ability to self-preserve is getting better and better.”
“That’s a disturbing thought. Are you telling me they could one day produce the magic formula to stop decomposition? That was the only hope we had left; the bacteria would win and they would fall apart!”
“Yeah, but if we discover what it is they’re excreting, we could come up with an antidote. We could use it to treat other conditions. We could use it to treat kids like Danny.”
I felt my stomach turning at the thought of more conversation, but KC stopped. She didn’t just stop talking, she stopped in her tracks. I followed her gaze into the distance to the stark grey outlines of high fences and barbed wire. I had never been so glad to see a prison before.
“We’re here,” KC said glumly.