Free Contaminated by Em Garner

like she’d told him she’d stepped in dog crap and wiped her feet on his living room sofa. What difference did Jesus make just then? Still, it was his wife who shushed him and brought us cold cans of soda to drink while Garry went around to all the windows and boarded them up.
    Craig didn’t come across the street. I don’t know what happened to him. We never saw him again. I do know, though, what happened to my dad.
    We watched the local news team filming a riot in downtown Lebanon. The street by my dad’s office. I caught a glimpse of red hair in the crowd, which was surging like some vicious, wild sea into a storefront, bodies crashing like waves into the glass windows. It might have been anyone, could have been anyone. But I knew it was him.
    Stores had been broken into—and the people who were trying to run away with whatever they could carry, armfuls of clothes and iPods and watches, they weren’t Contaminated. Connies don’t care about stuff like that. The people who were looting the stores weren’t sick, just greedy and awful.
    “What we seem to have here,” said the wild-eyed local police chief, “is a genuine zombie outbreak!”
    He sounded more excited than worried. In thebackground, Connies staggered around, their clothes sometimes ripped, their bodies bruised and bleeding because nothing seemed to faze them. They’d walk into a brick wall, fall down, and get back up again with bone showing through the cuts on their heads. That was why everyone assumed they were the walking undead, just like in the movies. That’s why the police gunned them down without warning, or ran them over with their cars. That’s why they tossed them by the dozens into the back of trucks and drove them to fields outside of town, where they dug giant ditches and poured the bodies in, covered them with concrete, and pushed dirt over them. They didn’t burn them because they feared “airborne contagion,” but nobody seemed to think about what an undead corpse virus might do to the environment, encased in concrete in a farmer’s field.
    People are really, really stupid.
    Eventually they’ll make memorials out of those ditches, the ones filled with concrete and bodies. Nothing too fancy. There’s supposed to be money coming, sometime, for that. But for now they built metal rail fences around them and planted flowers on top. Plaques without names on them. Nobody’s really sure who’s in there, and while there’s been a lot of noise about digging them up, nobody’s managed to get the authority to do it yet.
    It seems people don’t like the fact their loved ones were dumped in ditches, even if they did try to bite off their faces.
    We never got official documentation saying my dad was one of those people killed in the first wave, the one that stretched on through those awful summer months and turned parts of the world into a George A. Romero movie. He never came home. My mom was finally able to get to us the day after Craig slammed himself into the glass door. She took us home from Garry and Hope’s house. She told us not to worry. She told us everything would be okay, and I don’t think she was lying. She didn’t know any better.
    My mom was lucky. By the time she fell sick, they’d figured out what was causing the disease. They weren’t automatically killing all the Connies, just capturing them to deal with them the best they could.
    We never saw my dad again.

SEVEN
    NOW THAT I’M GOING TO GET MY MOM, I SEE them everywhere. Neutralized Connies, with their collars. Regular lobotomies make people calm, but the collars do more than that. Blank faces, slack jaws, dead eyes. There’s one in the grocery store, shuffling along behind a grim-faced woman who must be his wife, their cart stacked high with jars of baby food and adult diapers. One at the post office where I go to pick up the assistance check, standing in front of the display of free shipping boxes and waiting patiently while the man with her buys stamps.