As I No Longer Lay Dying (Part X)

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A moment later, after I had retrieved Renee’s Nestea and was bracing myself to reenter the deluge, I turned to meet a shambling rotted corpse.

And I have to say I froze. I stared. I stared like a staring champion who had just been given a doctorate at the Nietzchean Institute of Abyss-Staring. I had a Dr. Pepper in one hand and a Nestea in the other hand, and in front of me, in defiance of everything you or I know about the world, stood a surprisingly intact corpse, surprising because it had been forty-seven years in the grave. I can tell you that my paralysis in that moment was vertiginous, that is to say, a vertigo induced by my utter incapa-freaking-bility to explain how this was even possible: there is no documentation of insanity in my family (save, of course, for this document—I can’t argue I haven’t now gone around the bend) up to now; there is the indisputable fact that after forty-seven years in the grave, there should be nothing of William Cuthbert Faulkner left but a skeleton. So I think I can be forgiven that my first (and only) words to my hero were, “We’re the same height.”

It lurched for me with its carrion claws. I threw the bottles at it, but they bounced off harmlessly. It was clear to me from the grunting and sibilant shuffling that whatever eloquence I may have been expecting was not forthcoming.

I had neither heard nor seen the twenty-odd zombies that had accompanied it, so taken I had been by the encounter. I nearly ran into one as I circled the stairwell to head back to the room, and saw them there, muddying up the yard outside the motel. Darting here and there I avoided their morbid grasping and slid the card through the slot and slid it again the right way this time and opened the door and slammed it behind me. On the TV Shinzon was recounting his early times among the Remans, on the couch Renee had been startled by my sudden entrance, and by the door I was on the precipice of hyperventilating. Thunder rolled and the windows shook. The door absorbed a monstrous collision, nearly knocking me forward as a result. Renee parted her lips in bewilderment, her words hovering in that sensuous, timid space between them.

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