Zombie Apocalypse -- Chapter 3

The day had begun with a dream, something to do with a river, a stone, and three heads of chilled iceberg lettuce...that and truth. Ineluctable, untranslatable Truth. The kind of Truth that shrugs off the frail and petty lies that are words and instead stands naked and full of glory, obliterating mortal comprehension with its impossible light. The kind of Truth that is too large, too saturated, too True, to be held in the prison of a mind constrained by the iron and concrete of language. And yet, like the virgin queen made vulnerable at last by the sincerity of a lover, this Truth had been prepared to yield. To Virgil, it would have given everything. Then Cam set off the goddamn fire alarm with the Cleaning Lady.

He didn't mean to do it. Cam never meant to do anything. That was, of course, his genius. Like a Taoist master, Cam simply was and the world bent around him, lending his non-action, his simple being, the illusion of extraordinary purpose. At four in the morning, however, understanding this did not stop Virgil from shouting great peals of profanity at his downstairs neighbor until the fire alarm was dutifully smashed into whatever smithereens the universe saw fit for it to be smashed into by the simple being of Cam's fist.

Virgil would forgive Cam. He always did. After all, today, Virgil knew, Cam had a meeting. Cam didn't like meetings. Virgil almost pitied the poor guy.

Taking stock of his surroundings, Virgil noted that his bed, once more was empty. Lady M had up and evaporated some time in the middle of the night, as she so often seemed to do. Sometimes Virgil wondered if Lady M weren't simply the elaborate fiction of his yearning mind in the post-apocalyptic Zombie wasteland that was 2050. After all, Cam claimed to have never actually seen Lady M coming and going from Virgil's apartment. Lucy, meanwhile, was convinced Lady M was a figment of Virgil's imagination. Meg, bless her heart, claimed to believe in Lady M, but it was obvious she was just being kind. Was Meg even capable of being anything else? Were those stories of her salacious life in The Time Before to be believed?

But back to Lady M.

Lady M was an elusive creature, always disappearing for hours, days, weeks at a time to grapple with her "great work" whatever the hell that was--something to do with statistics (or was it metaphysics?) Regardless, Virgil knew she was real, knew he wasn't crazy. Like Truth, Lady M may have been little more than a transient wisp in the world, always ascendant between the ground of all being and the height of all concern, never staying still long enough to be clutched, but she was nonetheless undeniable, a force so encompassing as to be entirely invisible--like love, like fear, like oxygen.

All of which reminded Virgil of zombie killing. It's true, too many things reminded Virgil of zombie killing these days, but this reminder, this notion of oxygen resonated with Virgil's lost dream. What was it the dream had been trying to tell him? Something fundamental? No. Something elemental...

That was it! Virgil practically jumped out of his robes. He could feel the tattoo of entwined circles on his back searing his spine and shoulder blades. (The tattoo was a gift from the Lady M and her elegant, long, thin, scorching, black needles--it was a magical gateway between Virgil and That Which Lies Beyond.)

Elements.

So far, Cam--in his inspired and deadly innocence--had discovered that you could kill zombies in three ways. You could flambe them, you could drown them, and you could smash their heads apart with random chunks of stone and concrete if your Cleaning Lady happened to run out of petroleum and you weren't near any bodies of water and you were feeling peevish because you'd just been asked by Dar, Captain to fill out even more paperwork, this time in triplicate. But there had to be another way. That's what Virgil had been feeling for months. There had to be another way, a better way. And here was his answer. Here it was all around. Air.

Selig Retsuc was a fan of patterns and puzzles, riddles and reversals. During their friendship in The Time Before, when Virgil had tried to convince Selig that magic, the occult and mysticism could be, nay--had to be--used for Good, they had enjoyed many a game. The games were only fun because of the rules, Selig would say. It was only by limiting your power, that you could truly expand it. Of course, what Selig was really saying was that games were only fun when you could convince everyone else to play by your rules, while you -- as the master of the game -- kept your options open. Still, there were some rules even Selig wouldn't break--not because of any moral or ethical considerations, but simply because it wouldn't be fun otherwise. No doubt, when Selig created the zombie virus and dropped it in a vial from the roof of the Empire State Building he purposely engineered natural weaknesses. Something to give his former friends and soon-to-be competitors an edge, or at least a chance. Fire, Water, Earth...and Air.

Now if only Virgil could figure out how to use that to their advantage. He wanted to run downstairs and grab Cam and tell the man his theory. While Cam never found Virgil's theories nearly as interesting as Virgil did, he would take them all in and later, somehow, convert them into the deadliest weapons yet, simply by virtue of an ill-timed belch or a seemingly random reflex. Unfortunately, Cam was in a meeting. Blast that Dar, Captain. If the Captain was standing in front of Virgil right now, Virgil'd punch him in the nose. Or rather, he would think about punching Dar in the nose, then Virgil would remember his belief in the inherent worth and dignity of all people, he'd wonder what grander spiritual purposes were served by Virgil's obstructionism, and he'd feel guilty for even thinking of violence in the first place. Cam, on the other hand, would have just knocked him out. Ah, the virtues of non-thought.

Perhaps instead, Virgil should start with Lucy Tisdale. Quirked as she was by her endless misfortunes, the girl had a fantastic capacity to imagine the unthinkable, and think the unimaginable. But in a good way. Surely she could come up with something. Or perhaps her mother Meg, that stoic, gentle-hearted warrior with the shadowy past could help.

Regardless, somehow, they would unlock the mystery together, if--that is--the poor girls could keep their hands off of Virgil. Sometimes he found it a bit disconcerting that a mother and daughter should both be so unquenchably attracted to the same man. Oh well, there was no time for such worries now. There were zombies to kill.

Thus it was that just as Virgil went out the back door of the building he shared with Cam to find the Tisdales, Cam came running in the front. Little did Cam know that Selig had been waiting for just that moment to unleash his latest creation...zombies that would no longer simply die when set alight but would instead explode like hellfire, incinerating everything in their path. Selig called them...Bombies.