6. War and Butter

It was late summer. Each morning, an alien-looking sun clambered into clouds that more and more resembled toothpaste smeared across a bathroom mirror. If it rained, it did so as light showers that brought a brief fog and a sickly petrichor. At sunset, the sky was a putrid purple and the world smelled of potato pancakes at a fair. It had been weeks since we had seen any zombies, but none of us dared to hope. “Yeah, just wait,” is what we told ourselves whenever we were tempted to celebrate the absence of monsters.

Things were changing.

That morning — a Thursday in August — I was in no mood to see the strange dawn. Instead of sitting on my front porch, I brought my morning coffee to the back yard where I found a mantis praying on my patio table, “Ave, María, grátia plena, Dóminus tecum. Benedicta tu in muliéribus, et benedíctus fructus ventris tui, Iesus.”

I sat at the table and cleared my throat, “What are you praying for?”

“Mercy,” the insect answered.

“How will you know when it comes?” I asked.

He hissed and cocked his head. “Don’t you believe?” he pointed at me. “Don’t you have faith?”

I sipped my coffee and lit a cigarette. “Have you been out here long? I’ve never seen you before.”

“For some time, yes,” the mantis said. “I was praying near your tomato plants over there, but then I remembered: in the Bible, God hates tomato plants.”

My back yard had no tomato plants. Curious. But I asked, “You’ve read the Bible?”

“Deceiver! You have no tomato plants!” the mantis growled. “Your words are meaningless!” He ambled across the table a few feet and continued, “Sancta María, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus nunc et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen.”

A crow dropped from the sky and crushed the mantis beneath her talons. Then she prayed, “Bless us, Oh Lord, and these thy gifts which we are about to receive from thy bounty, through Christ, Our Lord. Amen.”

The crow ripped off the mantis’ head, crunched it in her beak, and swallowed. She did the same with each limb before shredding the thorax and the abdomen into manageable portions. When she finished, she cawed at me, “Good morning. How are you today? I’d wipe down your table, but I’m a bird.”

The crow flew away. I lit another cigarette.

A moment later, my wife joined me with her own coffee. She was in her pajamas and her blue hair was bound with hot pink curlers.

“Lazy morning?” I smiled.

Betty shrugged, “It’s Saturday.”

“It’s Thursday,” I said.

“Whatever,” she sighed. She placed her mug on the table and noticed the tiny puddle of insect guts. “What’s going on?”

“The insects are talking now,” I answered. “The birds, too. And they’re Catholic.”

“No shit,” Betty grumbled. “Well, I was planning on killing a chicken today. I’ll let you know if it starts begging for its life or praying in Latin.”

We sipped our coffee.

“Do you remember Sayre?” I asked.

“Yeah, I think so,” Betty nodded. “Wasn’t he the old hippie that used to attend your auctions? The one that always wore flip-flops? He’d spout off with his fortune cookie philosophy? Smelled like a litter box?”

“That was him,” I confirmed. “One time he said to me, ‘Jack, do you understand that food is better than sex? Both can be pleasurable. Both can be debilitating. Both can make you feel guilty. And both can be obtained through transaction or transgression. But only one has the prerogative to deny you. In other words, food never says no.’ It’s funny how the apocalypse has posthumously made him — and many others — wrong about almost everything.”

The radio on my hip squawked, “All Ears; Sentry North... Um... You know what? Everyone go outside and look in the street. I ain’t trying to explain this one. Fuck it. Someone come relieve me.”

Betty and I went back into the house. She grabbed her shotgun and I retrieved my rifle before we both went out onto the front porch. We looked up the street. Hobbling toward us was an emaciated old man. He was tall but hunched over. His silver hair fell in greasy clumps. It was hard to tell where his locks ended and his beard began. What remained of his clothes were tattered and blood-stained. He pulled an antique red wagon upon which sat a cartoonishly large plush cow. And he carried a sign. Affixed to a hickory pole that rested upon his shoulder was a placard that read, “War is come; buy butter.”

When he arrived in front of my house, I yelled, “You, there in the street! Good morning! I applaud the use of the semicolon.”

He stopped and straightened up, dropped the wagon handle, and faced me. “Thank you!” he wept. “Thank you for your punctuational awareness. You are the only one. The only one!”

He walked toward my porch, gripping pole and placard as if he were relinquishing a sword. When he reached the railing, he bowed his head and said, “For you. Please take it and accept my capitulation. You are the one who has earned it.”

I took the sign. The old man backed away. When he returned to his wagon, he reached inside it — beneath the cow — and produced a hand grenade. He pulled the pin and held the device against his chest.

“Cover!” Betty yelled as she dragged me down to the decking. The blast was muffled and wet, as though it had gone off in a bucket of stew. The smoke cleared quickly. More of the old man remained than I would have anticipated.

Neighbors gathered around the mangled corpse. Betty and I answered the many inquiries into our condition, “No, we’re fine. Yes, we’re okay. Thank you, we’re unharmed.”

Betty picked up her shotgun and said, “I’m going to go crochet some hats.”

Betty went inside. I sat down in one of the wicker rockers and lit a cigarette. Kyle crossed my driveway and joined me.

“I saw the whole thing from my bathroom window,” Kyle said as he plopped into the other rocker. “You guys okay?”

I nodded.

“Shit, dude,” Kyle laughed. “I mean, what the fuck was that all about?”