Eat her, eat her, EAT HER BRAINS!

Dear God. Could a monster like me even have a mate?

Her hand was extended in a gesture of friendship. I noticed, for the first time, that she had a severe overbite, more than an overbite; her teeth were buck and coated with slimy plaque. I wondered what that plaque tasted like. When she opened her mouth, a string of saliva connected her bottom and top teeth. Little gobs of spittle collected in the corners of her lips when she spoke.

“Can I help you?” she asked. “You look, I don’t know, scared or something.”

Inarticulate brute that I am, I yowled in response. I sounded like Chewbacca.

“You can, like, write? Can all of you?”

She leaned closer to me and her hand, so transparent and thin I could see the blue veins underneath, touched the spiral binding of my notebook.

I moaned and bit that hand clean off.

Her bone stared up at me. Yellowish white but pure nonetheless. Blood gushed from her veins. I scuttled over to the cash registers and watched her as I ate her hand, which was ropy and bony. Far too scant for anything more than an appetizer.

Finger food is the punch line to this joke.

At least, I reasoned, if reason one can when crouched on the floor munching on a pinky, she would die and be resurrected sooner this way.

Her wrist was a geyser of blood, Old Faithful spilling onto the oily floor.

Soon the virus would staunch the blood flow, and by nightfall, the transformation would be complete. My bride and I could get on the road-two homeless zombies on a spiritual quest. Searching for our maker.

EVE WAS IN her final stages, incoherent, rolling on the floor, vomiting up her soul. The virus had devoured enough healthy cells to render her unfit for consumption. Utterly inedible.

My question: Why do I write? To be more precise, how am I able to write? I can’t talk, I can hardly walk, and I certainly can’t play the guitar. And yet I can hold a pencil, I can string letters and words and sentences together in a way that makes sense. This must be how the first caveman artist felt when his clan finally understood his hieroglyph meant water or hunter or sex or God. Are those not the basics? Man, woman, water, God.

And now add brains to the list.

If the virus melts the brain as they say it does, shutting down the frontal lobe, then part of my cognitive function is unaffected, uninfected. I either possess an innate resistance to some aspects of the virus or I am Zombie Adam, a bona fide mutation, the founding member of a new race.

In life, I wrote daily. I made my living writing articles, editorials, and books. I composed e-mails and PowerPoint presentations for my classes and colleagues. I occasionally blogged. Perhaps it’s muscle memory. Is Stephen King still writing? Is Joyce Carol Oates? And the poets who squeeze out three lines a day-where is our Rimbaud?

History needed a zombie to record his experience. Call it creative nonliving fiction. We needed Ovid, Shakespeare, Herodotus. A poet to tell our side of the story. And since Johnny Cash wasn’t coming back from the dead, it was up to me. Luckily, I was made for the job.

I felt expansive that night, filled with purpose. I forgave the humans for hunting me, as I forgave myself for eating them. Like Anne Frank, in spite of everything, I still believed we are all really good at heart.

AS I WATCHED Eve turn, I thought of Lucy. My human wife. The dam burst, and I remembered what happened to her. What I’d done. No wonder I repressed the memory; it was as painful to relive as an alien abduction.

Wretch that I am, I’d eaten her. All of her too. I can’t believe I ate the whole thing. Every single morsel. She was good to the last drop.

Pass me a Tums, please; I’ve got indigestion.

We were sitting with the boxes of Christmas decorations-no Hanukkah junk, mind you, no menorah, nothing Hebrew in sight-next to the never-used tent and Lucy’s treadmill, also never used. We were in the basement with our life’s detritus around us and my cheek was on the concrete and Lucy’s hand was in my hair and I closed my eyes and I died.

Let that sink in: I died.

There was a moment of suspension when I was no longer human and not yet zombie. My body was nothing, was as good as a couch cushion or a blow-up doll or the giant plastic Santa mocking us in the corner. Walt Disney cryogenically frozen. Pinocchio before the breath of life, hanging limp from his strings.

It’s true what they say about viewing your corpse from above. I floated near the ceiling, gazing at Lucy and what used to be me, and in that moment, I was as content as one of the Lord’s sheep, a member of His flock. The zombie horde seemed far away; I could barely hear them pounding at the cellar door. My ears were flooded with celestial music, the singing of the spheres. It sounded like twee Britpop. Was it angels with harps? Maybe. Belle & Sebastian? Perhaps. Was it Jesus strumming an acoustic guitar like some traveling barefoot hippie? In my dreams.

Because let’s rationalize: The whole “near-death experience,” the whole light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel trip, is a trick of the brain, a hallucination. It is not a supernatural event but one last fantasy brought to you by your endorphins to mitigate the absolute terror of death. To inspire hope against the nothingness we all fear. The whole cessation-of-ego-and-selfhood business. The loss of the world. Because everyone wants to exist, right? And we all die in the end.

Unless we’re undead.

But then there are the suicides. Hanging themselves on reinforced beams in their empty Seattle apartments; overdosing on pills in their mothers’ bedrooms; blowing their brains out with rifles or shotguns or pistols; starting cars in garages and reading Dostoyevsky until they fall asleep; driving minivans off cliffs with their children strapped in the backseat. They screw existence. In the ass.

Bear in mind, this is a zombie talking-a supernatural being. What do I know? I might not even be real.

Oh, ontology.

Regardless of religion or science, there I was, floating near the ceiling and at peace, when the heavenly music turned into Norwegian death metal and I was ripped away from the fuzzy blankets of cloudland and confronted with demons and devils and a descent into hell. I was whisked into some sort of meat tube, like a large intestine, where trapped souls screamed at me from polyp walls and everything was flaming orange and too hot. The guy from Munch’s The Scream was there with his hands on the sides of his face. A child tattooed with the mark of the beast morphed into a stampede of wild horses running away from a gothic mansion that morphed into a laughing fat lady in pearls. The typical horror-movie shtick. Cliché, but true.

And then I was reborn.

Chew on that for a while.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil. For I am evil. And I am the shadow. And I am death.

Not just zombie but archetype. Not just villain but hero. Jungian shadow, id and ego. Man is woman. Ovaries are testes. Cats are dogs.

Mr. Hyde was inside me clawing his way out. Dr. Jekyll was nowhere in sight.

I opened my eyes. And Lucy screamed. The zombie horde broke through the door and I lunged at my wife and my wife was lunch.

Heavens, she was tasty. We ate her communally: the fresh-faced blond zombette from next door; the nuclear family from across the street, which, as a result of decay, truly did have 2.5 kids; the haggard waitress zombie from Denny’s, varicose veins now black and inky; the suspicious loner zombie who never gave out Halloween candy; the teenage geek zombie with his pimples and Lord of the Rings T-shirt; and me, the professor zombie, with my tortoiseshell glasses and robin’s-egg-blue shirt.