Free Don’t Eat Cat by Jess Walter

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    At night I deadbolt doors and hard-bar windows, and it’s not bad living in the city. I stay home a lot. Turn off outdoor lights, bring in garbage cans: simple, commonsense stuff. Obviously, I don’t have pets. I leave my car unlocked so they won’t break the windows looking for food and trinkets. Play music allnight to drown out the yowling. But nights aren’t bad. Daytime is when I get fed up with zombies.
    I know. I shouldn’t call them that.
    I’m not one of those reactionaries who believe they should be locked up, or sterilized, or confined to Z towns. I think there are perfectly good jobs for people with hypo-endocrinal thyro-encephalitis: day labor, night janitors. But hiringzombies for food service? I just think that’s wrong.
    That day, I’d had another doctor’s appointment and had gotten the unhappy results from a battery of invasive tests. I was already late for a sim-skype in Jakarta when I popped into the Starbucks Financial near my office. I got to the front of the line and who should greet me behind the counter but some guy in his early twenties withall the symptoms: translucent skin, rotting teeth, skim-milk eyes—the whole deal. Full zombie. (I know: we shouldn’t call them that.)
    His voice was ice in a blender. “I help you.”
    “Grande. Soy. Cran. Latte,” I said as clearly and patiently as possible.
    He said back to me in that curdled grunt: “Gramma sing con verde?”
    I stared at him. “Grande … Soy …Cran … Latte.”
    “Gramma say come hurry?” His dull eyes blinked, and he must’ve heard the impatience in my voice—“No!”—because he started humming the way they do when they get agitated. “Gran-maw!” he yelled, and the manager, standing at the drive-through banking/coffee window behind him, gave me a look like, Dude … and I looked back at the manager: you’re blaming me for this? The otherpeople in the Starbucks Financial all took a step back.
    Look, I understand the economics. I work in multinational food/finance. I know there has been some difficulty in staffing service jobs in the States since the borders were closed. More than that, I get the humanity of hiring them. Hey, my ex-girlfriend started shooting Replexen after researchers made the connection betweenhypo-ETE and the popular club drug. Marci actually chose that life. Soyes, I know how their brains work; I know abstraction and contextual language give them problems; I know they’re prone to agitation; but I also know that as long as they’re not drunk or riled up, zombies can be as peaceful as anyone. And yes, I know we’re not supposed to call them zombies.
    But come on. Gramma sing con verde? What does that even mean?
    That day, the Starbucks Financial manager came over and put a hand on the zombie’s shoulder. “You’re doing fine, Brando,” the manager said. He was in his fifties, in a headset, tie, and short sleeves, one of those sorry men who try to overcome a lack of education and breeding by working up from food service into retail finance.The manager smiled at me and then pointed to “latte” on Brando’s touchscreen sim, and they debited the sixty bucks from my iVice while I walked over to the other line. And over at the drink counter, who should be making my actual coffee but another zombie, a girl who couldn’t have been more than eighteen, standing there dead-gaze-steaming my soy milk.
    Two zombies. At morning rush hourin a Starbucks Financial. In the multinat/finance district of downtown Seattle. Really?
    The manager was watching the girl zombie steam my milk when Brando screwed up the next order, too, turning a simple double cappuccino into “Dapple cat beano,” a hungry hitch on that word cat, and you could feel the other businesspeople in the Starbucks Financial tense, and even the short-sleevedmanager knew this could be trouble, no doubt thinking back to their training (apparently they put four or five of them in a room with an actual cat and repeatedly stress