ZA13--Let me explain...

It was while eating one of Meg Tisdale's fresh, hot caramel chip devil's food cookies and listening to that annoying song by the Killers "Are we human or are we dancers?"--an hour after Meg lost her daughter and yet seemed to stage a near complete recovery within seconds--50 minutes after Meg took Virgil to her special cookie-making hideout (yes, she had an impenetrable bunker built entirely for the purpose of making cookies--and listening to old Top 40 tunes from The Time Before)--40 minutes after Meg "stepped out" of the bunker to run back for "something" she "forgot"--25 minutes after Virgil tracked Meg to the house she'd once shared with her daughter Lucy and watched as Meg took something small but impossibly disgusting-looking from her burned daughter's charred crotch and handed it to another girl, a girl who looked vaguely like the kind of Australian who's been raised by dingoes but also kind of like a Tisdale only with frizzier hair and a smell of peppermint--10 minutes after Virgil returned to the cookie bunker, running as fast as his tired legs could carry him to get ahead of Meg, who'd laughed maniacally after handing off the short, tiny, (and did I mention "small") cylindrical package--5 minutes after Meg returned and 30 seconds after first sinking his teeth into the still-steaming caramel/chocolate gooey awesomeness that was a Meg Tisdale Original--that Virgil found God. Again.

In The Time Before, Virgil had been a minister-in-training, an aspirant to a faith that would soon be swept from the face of the earth by the broom of pandemic zombification. In that time he had believed, at the very core of his being, that God was a force of love in the universe--not an omnipotent overseer as some faiths would have it, but a shared interior spark of common good, binding all together and bending the long moral arc of humanity toward justice. When people started eating each other, this became harder to believe. Thus, for the many months that had dragged into years as the zombie wars raged on, Virgil had grown less and less convinced of that meek but omnipresent grace he called God--that still small voice.

And yet, as he bit into the cookie, enjoying its rich notes of chocolate, caramel, and blind, bewildered terror, he heard the voice again. It spoke two words, a cosmic whisper in the uncharted neuron galaxy of his left temporal lobe: arrogance, yummy. While the last word probably had more to do with the cookie than anything else, the first cut to the root of Virgil's being like a steel blade flashing the smile of his dear friend Cam.

Arrogance. For months now, Virgil had held his arrogance like a shield against those he both longed to embrace yet had to keep away, friends who encouraged in him something he could not bear in a world gone zombie. Faith. His friends, rough-and-tumble (and-then-scorch-twice-over-for-good-measure) Cam, bake-and-plot-Meg, seduce-and-distance Lady M, even whacked out Lucy Tisdale (maybe especially whacked out Lucy Tisdale)--they all called forth in him an unwilling recognition of divinity he longed to ignore. They were proof--cranky and bitter, but throbbing with life nonetheless--that beauty and truth, love and kindness, nobility and goodness could still survive in the long dark winter of a zombie apocalypse. They bore in them the wounded but inconquerable essence of God.

After finishing his cookie (and another, for good measure), Virgil set out on a mission. He would perform an act of common humanity long neglected in these unfortunate times. He would bury Lucy Tisdale. After thanking Meg (careful not to show his hand since he was now well aware that she was neck-deep in secret plots and dingo-raised Australian daughters bearing strange, comically-miniscule cylindrical packages taken from charcoaled hoochies) Virgil took his leave. He then sprinted to the old Tisdale house, lifted up Lucy's body and set out for the Plains--an empty wasteland Virgil had long sensed bore the promise of some form of resurrection--perhaps a resurrection of the human spirit, or maybe a resurrection of hope--it was fuzzy to his inner eye, but it definitely seemed resurrectiony whatever it was.

By the time he found a proper spot, the sun was on its way down. Zombie time. Virgil dug hurriedly, wishing he had more than just a spoon and those darn mantis arms of his to work with. After making a hole of about two feet by two feet, Virgil looked up and wondered if this whole burial thing really needed to be that formal. Maybe Virgil could just fold Lucy up, stuff her in the hole, put some dirt on top, and then say a prayer. The prayer was what mattered, right? Unfortunately, in looking up at Lucy's body, Virgil saw beyond it zombies, shuffling, mewling zombies lumbering toward him in the near distance.

Virgil stood. There weren't just a handful. There was an army. Not just an army. Legions. Selig Retsuc had sent his hordes. What could be so important? Surely not Virgil. Selig had had plenty of opportunities to kill Virgil and would have plenty more. No need to send this many to accomplish that simple end. Was it the girl? Was there something about her that Selig wanted? Something in her? Perhaps he had fallen for Lucy and wanted to make her his zombie queen. Suddenly, Virgil remembered one sultry afternoon with Lady M. She had been running her finger along his bare back, sighing over his Keanu-Reeves-like features (because, if you didn't know this already and you were perhaps interested in casting the movie-version of Zombie Apocalypse, and were a big-time Hollywood director, (because really, who has the time these days for B-Listers, this project is big) Virgil looked a lot like Keanu Reeves (only smarter))--anyway--Lady M was sighing over Virgil, telling him that even if she ever got mad at Virgil she would never be able to stay mad at Virgil when suddenly her eyes rolled back in her head, she shuddered epileptically and her voice dropped three registers. "I see," Lady M had said, "the One. A broken girl, pierced by an awful (if a bit shrimp-like) power, who must be shattered before she can be healed. She will turn the air into light and the light into hope for us all. She is the One." And then Lady M had spasmed twice and snapped out of it. And then they made love, because that's what people did when they weren't killing zombies. And because, even if she didn't want to admit it, Lady M totally had a thing for Virgil.

"Could Lucy be The One?" Virgil asked, speaking to no one in particular unless you counted the slavering legions of undead mutants jerking spastically toward him across the Plains. "But that would mean...that would mean, I let her die! It's my fault!" Virgil then spent a while feeling really bad in a way that was both meaningful and moving, but also strong and masculine, and handsome--but not arrogant. It was definitely not arrogant, since--as should be obvious to all you mouth-breathers, nose-pickers, and knuckle-draggers reading this entry, Virgil is NOT arrogant anymore.

After this very moving scene in which all of you gained an endless amount of sympathy for Virgil, Virgil looked back up at the hordes, who even though they'd been advancing at a threatening pace, had still not arrived and wondered how and indeed if he would survive. If he were Cam, there were even odds Virgil could have just lit up a stogie, slapped on a hero's smile and smashed his way through the legions by brute force. If he were Lady M, he could have simply gathered a monkey on either arm, snapped his fingers and disappeared. Meg, meanwhile, could have baked her way out of it, and Lucy--bless her departed soul--could have cussed her way through. Virgil, however, didn't think he could use his special talent. While sure, if he'd started talking, he would have bored at least the first wave to death, but eventually the horrible moans of the dying would have drowned out Virgil's voice and the next wave would soon enough be dining on his larynx. No, what Virgil needed was a miracle.

He waited.

No miracle. Just zombies. Goddamn, fucking zombies.

But wait, a voice--a still, small voice rose from the depths of Virgil's cortex. Maybe it would carry with it some profound truth, some secret wisdom to elevate Virgil above his circumstance, free him from his plight. He listened, even as he smelled the foul, rotting stench of the first zombies closing upon him. It was... it was... For Christ's sake, it wasn't truth, it was that frackin' pop song, that song which in 2009 made Virgil wonder if the entire radio-listening public weren't all brainless zombies. "Are we human or are we dancers?" I mean, seriously, how stupid were people back then that lyrics so profoundly moronic could perpetrate themselves not on a single listener but on an entire nation?

Of course...the song did have a good beat. He found his shoulder twitching, and then his right big toe, and then his left leg. What was this? Virgil, faced with the end of his being, with the prospect of being eaten alive by a thousand thousand foul-breathed, slime-toothed zombies, wanted to dance? Hmm. What the hey? He started dancing, dancing and singing in his high-pitched, nasal, stepped-on-baby-bird whine of a voice..."Are we human, or are we dancers?
My sign is vital, my hands are cold, and I'm on my knees looking for the answer, are we human or are we dancers?"

Little did Virgil know, but the precise pitch of his unfortunate voice was at the same precise pitch Selig Rutsec had programmed the zombie hordes to receive his commands, such that as he sang, they too began to dance. Now, if you've seen a zombie walk, you can probably imagine how badly they dance--such that as they danced they bumped into each other, turning the Plains into a giant zombie mosh pit. Strike that. A giant Bombie mosh pit. And...well...you can probably guess what happened next.