Terra Nova: An Anthology of Contemporary Spanish Science Fiction (21 page)

“You’re kidding
me!”

“It’s true. It’s not my
case, I do it for the extra meat ration, and to get the sector boss
off my back.” The sector boss was nothing more than a bad mix of
policeman and social worker in charge of making life impossible for
those who weren’t “socially integrated,” as was the case with my
brother before he “became a zombie.” “But there are
chamacos
, the ones who
sit in the park on G Street...”

“Where the geeks and
freaks used to hang out?”

“Exactly. They use makeup
to look like zombies. The only thing they do is shamble in silence
from 23 to the Malecón and from the Malecón back to 23. Then the
police show up and yell at them to go back to their homes, and no
one complains. They all obediently get on the last bus at two in
the morning. That P2 comes here full of emos and freaks. All
silent. So silent you can hear your own breathing. Silent as a
tomb.”

“You’re
exaggerating.”

“I’m telling you, it’s the
truth. I prefer not to go out.”

In the dining room, abuela
continued to watch her new television, recently taken out of the
box. Mama was cooking something. I decided to amuse myself reading
the paper.
The Granma
is the only one we get. Those red letters make up, in this
strange font, the word for “abuelita” in English. Below, in white
letters on a black background, it reads: Official Publication of
the Communist Party of Cuba.
The
Granma
is a newspaper that continues the
now-extinct tradition of the official publications of the communist
parties, like
Pravda
in its time. Generally, they are daily papers that don’t
permit competition and only express one opinion: that of the
government.

I’ve been reading this
same newspaper for years and I don’t get tired of checking that
motto. As if it were something marvelous and exciting, as if it
were going to change overnight, as if one day below those red
letters it might read: The Official Publication of the Cuban
Republican Party. Or perhaps The Official Publication of the
Christian Democratic Party.

I read the headline: ZOMBIES, A WEAPON OF
THE REVOLUTION.

I don’t even bother to
read the article. It’s no doubt some piece of crap, like everything
in the Granma. I throw the paper aside. I don’t know what to do,
not having anything specific to do.

There’s a knock at the
door and Mama shouts a long “commmmmmming!” Panchito runs into his
room to play his role as a zombie. It was one of the mosquito
inspectors, the same one as ever. But this time he was odder than
usual, too quiet. But his skin was in good condition and though he
walked carefully, it wasn’t with the clumsiness of a zombie. He was
human, he was alive at any rate. I’ve spent enough time with
zombies to be able to tell.

“Do you have water tanks?”
he asked in a flat voice, like a telephone operator.

“Two, one on the roof and
the other below.”

Mama was right in front of
him with the
visto
in her hand. A paper that I’ve never understood its reason
for existing, despite my Master’s degree in
biochemistry.

“Do you have spirit
glasses?”

“No.”

Something strange was
happening with this man. Every time he asked a question it seemed
he was going to write down the answer, but he never did so. He
asked the same questions as ever, the same ones ever since the
“war” on mosquitos was first declared instead of recognizing the
imminent danger of an epidemic of dengue fever (we’ve always been
good at inventing enemies). Nonetheless, something was different in
this man. He asked the right questions, in a flat and atonal
language. That could be normal; in general, they aren’t the
brightest bulbs. When he was answered, he acted as if he were going
to note something down but he never did so. He didn’t pretend to
write, he just didn’t do it. As if writing was an ancient and
abstract memory buried in his subconscious.

Strange, very strange.
Especially because I’d already seen this sort of uncompleted cycle
of motor functions. I’d seen it too often at work to ignore it.
It’s a typical reaction in our experimentation subjects. But this
man didn’t look like one. He could even speak. Of course, I hadn’t
heard a single complex sentence.

“Do you have flowers with
water?” he said.

“That depends on the kind
of flowers,” I interrupted the conversation despite Mama’s killer
look.

I knew what I was doing, I
was just trying an experiment. If I was right, he couldn’t answer a
question of that sort. With all my heart, I hoped I was wrong. Mama
didn’t find my interruption funny at all, “Ricardo, what are you
saying! Our comrade is in a hurry and...”

The sentence froze in the air. Our comrade
the inspector from the campaign against the mosquito had leaped at
me like a predator. His eyes were white and his mouth was open. He
made a small whine as he moved toward me with a lost gaze.

“Panchito, get Mama out of
here,” I shouted.

My brother leapt from his
room, grabbed Mama by the shoulders and pulled her away from the
zombie. Panchito was always very capable when it was necessary, he
wasn’t the layabout everyone always said. Meanwhile, I moved out of
the zombie’s path and gave it a kick in the calf. It didn’t even
have to be a very strong kick, zombies don’t have good balance. I’d
seen the CIDEZ security forces do it. The body fell
heavily.

We didn’t have much time.
All our lives were in danger. A single bite, a single brush of its
saliva, and there’d be a new zombie in the family. Then it would
just be a question of time before there wasn’t any
family.

“Grab him, quick!” I
shouted at Panchito, “don’t let him get up!”

Mama shouted hysterically.
Panchito and I each held a shoulder in a useless attempt to
immobilize it. The zombie grunted and tried to get up. Its strength
was far greater than that of the two of us together. Little by
little, it managed to rise despite our efforts. It was winning the
battle against gravity. It was just a question of time. Mama didn’t
stop shouting.

But abuela was silent. The
television was still on but there was no longer anyone before the
Atec-panda. Abuela was always the most practical person in the
family. In silence, she got up from her beloved seat and walked,
slowly because at her age it didn’t make sense to go anywhere in a
hurry, to her room. She appeared again when the zombie was almost
standing. We hung from its shoulders in an effort to weigh it down.
We barely delayed its slow movements. The music of the Cuban
Television National News program could be heard in the dining room.
The zombie still hadn’t bit anyone.

In her hands, abuela
carried abuelo’s old, heavy cane. The terrible cane of the Old Man,
may he rest in piece. Cedar with a silver tip. The terror of the
muggers of the neighborhood when they tried to hold up a poor and
defenseless old man. A souvenir of when things came from the United
States instead of Russian or China. Mama fell silent.

The zombie continued to grunt.

Abuela gave it a blow, a
dull thud. Coagulated blood stained the floor and the walls. I felt
the crunch of those cranial bones breaking. Abuela remained
motionless, holding herself up with the cane. She looked like a
samurai in a Akira Kurosawa film. The zombie, on the floor, didn’t
groan any more, it didn’t even move.

“Close the door!” Mama
once again took control of the situation. Panchito ran to obey.
“Ricardo Miguel, you work with zombies. How is it that a living
dead can speak?”

Not only could it speak,
it could also look you in the eye and didn’t have rotting skin.
Even if its blood had coagulated. I hate when everyone looks at me
waiting for a convincing explanation. I carefully studied the body
on the floor with its smashed head. I looked over its skin, saw the
reflexes of its limbs that still moved automatically, the way the
tail of a lizard will still thrash after it’s dead. This couldn’t
be possible. It violated the principle of the increase of entropy
and I don’t know how many other laws of physics. This smooth skin,
not decayed, didn’t fit with how the Z virus behaved. Nor that
focused gaze, almost like that of a human. It could even speak
simple sentences.

“It’s evolution,” I said
aloud, but the truth was, I was speaking to release all the horror
that was in my brain. “They’re adapting to us. They’ve begun to
mimic us.”

“What’s this adapting?”
Panchito was almost hysterical. “What do you mean ‘it’s evolution’?
They can’t evolve because they’re nothing. They’re zombies, the
living dead. That’s all.”

“It’s not the zombies,
it’s the virus.”

It didn’t make much sense
to explain this to my family, they wouldn’t understand anything.
The zombies are something more than the living dead, they’re biotic
systems. The reservoir for the only life form we haven’t been able
to eradicate: the virus. No scientist knows for certain if they’re
living beings or organic automata. We can exterminate faster and
stronger predators, but we haven’t been able to destroy a minor
adversary like the influenza. Or VIH. Now the Z virus is a step
ahead of the others. It takes control of our bodies, kills them,
reorders our DNA and converts us into biting machines. In order to
thereby further disseminate the Z virus among humankind.

“It’s our fault,” I said.
And suddenly there was that horrible silence that meant that
everyone was paying attention to me. “It was our serum that helped
it adapt to us. We were wrong. We wanted to use them as slaves and
we gave the Z virus the tool it needed to adapt itself to
us.”

“But why? Why does it want
to adapt to us?”

“It’s a common trait among
animals to fight against its predators. That’s how they
survive.”

“We are the predators of
the zombie? Now you’ve lost it, hermano mío! Did you miss the news?
In other countries, people flee from zombies because they eat them
alive. They are predators on us!”

“We shoot them with
bullets, we use gas against them and we burn them with
flamethrowers. We even lock them up in places like the CIDEZ to use
them as guinea pigs. We’re their greatest threat, although it might
seem impossible. And the serum let them seem like us. I must go
back to the CIDEZ. I need to inform them... these samples must be
analyzed.”

“No one is going
anywhere!” Mama said, firmly.

Her face was serious. Her
voice had stopped everyone in their tracks, like when we were
little kids and she yelled at us. She wasn’t joking, asking, nor
begging. And this was Mama. There was no way of crossing her.
Abuela, for her part, sat down again on her seat and watched us in
silence.

“Much less you, Ricardo
Miguel. We don’t know what happened at the CIDEZ. We don’t even
know anything about that mysterious ‘biological leak.’“

“But, Mama,” Pancho said,
“we must do something, warn someone.”

“Who are you going to
warn? The president of the CDR? He’s no longer even seen any more
because a zombie bit his wife in Venezuela and he didn’t declare it
at customs. By now, he must also be one of them. With or without
serum. Are you going to warn the police? They’ve never done
anything for us. They spend all day on the road asking for
identifications to then give them back without saying anything?
Maybe inform on your friends from the neighborhood who no longer
make a racket like they used to? Not even the old gossips come to
tell me their tidbits about everyone. Kids no longer throw stones,
no one complains any more. This
cuadra
is a grave. A grave where the
cadavers still don’t know they’re dead. Now anyone could be a
zombie.”

There was nothing more to
say. She was completely correct. That guy from the FAR was also
correct. They are a Hive Mind that was much more intelligent than
we are. And now they’re adapting.

X

I’m stopped in front of the
door to Maria’s house and I feel like I did back when I had my
first girlfriend. Nervous and insecure. I hear her footsteps from
within. I’m worried because she drags her feet to open the
door.

It’s the same Maria as
ever. Only quieter. And without the shine of intelligence in her
eyes that made her so sensual. Now she’s just a common person who
drags her feet when she walks. Just like the mosquito inspector, if
one can call that puppet a person.

I’ve come to check out a
theory that occurred to me between the horror and the stress. A
scientist’s mind sometimes generates incredible things under
pressure. Where a normal human would crumble under a nervous
breakdown, the trained and organized mind of a scientist might
begin to work with extraordinary results. And thereby stay sane,
like what happened to me.

“I know everything,” I say
bluntly, and the scene seems to me like something from a Japanese B
movie. We two, there on the threshold, standing in front of one
another. Looking at one another without touching and speaking in
monosyllables.

“Define
everything.”

“The hive mind. What you
are doing?”