The Army helicopter exploded over the zocalo, wiping out half the population below, but that turned out to be okay. The experimental fuel, combined with an alloy in the special ops chopper, created a molten shrapnel which solved the problem consuming the greatest scientific minds for months—a weapon to kill the Upsilon Variant Zombies. But no one knew that yet.
The explosion sent Sargent Maria Villanueva rolling for cover behind a water tank on the rooftop, where she had fixed her laser scope on a pendejo zombie, her ex-boyfriend who left her for that big-breasted puta from Michoacan. The exploding bullet wouldn’t end his vida, but it would take him apart for a while. Payback.
By the time she returned to position, the sky was clear, but smoke billowed throughout the zocalo. Zombie parts melted in the flames, her ex-boyfriend nowhere in sight.
Cheers from officers and soldiers on surrounding rooftops went up. What for? The zombies would reassemble and rise again. They had them contained in el zocalo, los calles sealed off with robotic bulldozers and tanks, but some always slipped out, found new victims—las idiotas who refused to evacuate, los machismos who thought they could fight them off. And then another epidemic would erupt.
The big gangs went up against them. They had as much firepower as the government, more with all the military and police on their payroll. It decimated the gangs, but now those cabrons were unkillable.
Still, none of the fallen moved. Que esta pasando? Her radio crackled. Commands to keep rifles aimed at those still standing. Robot probes were being sent to investigate. Fire only if they were attacked. A few dead soldiers was one thing, but those robots were muy caro.
Sargent Villanueva scanned the charred and slashed zombies for her boyfriend. Ex-boyfriend. Half of them looked like burnt match sticks, like that el coyote in the cartoon she watched as a kid, after that bird, el correcaminos, tricked him yet again and the bomb exploded in his face.
She was exhausted, sick of this stupid zombie pandemic. It started in El Norte, a state called Michigan, with a bunch of Trump militia. They refused to wear masks or get vaccinated, then ate some tainted beef from one of those industrial feedlots. The e. coli killed them, but the Upsilon Covid variant was so potent it took over their bodies and turned them into los muertos vivientes. They were well armed, and the Upsilon infected everyone in their path with the fatheads’ ideología as well as zombieness. They started attacking statehouses down through the Midwest, demanding recounts of the stolen election.
That’s how her boyfriend got it. Ex-boyfriend. Miguel was at la frontera covering the story when they started crossing south. Why she ever fell for a Marxist journalist, she couldn’t imagine. They were through, but she texted him, begging him to leave. Don’t worry, I’m vaccinated, he replied. He was hunting for DeSantis, Giuliani, Marjorie Taylor Greene. They’d been spotted among the hordes, but if they were zombies, no one could confirm the difference. He got too close and was trampled. The Wall couldn’t hold them, climbing over each other’s backs like a bunch of roaches. Those gringo zombies, a bunch of rapists and murderers, pouring over the border. Fox News praised them as patriots, said the whole zombie thing was a Democrat hoax. They were just Americans exercising their God-given rights to freedom and cheap souvenirs.
And now here she was, eighteen-hour shifts, picking off zombies, watching them explode into pieces, their body parts slithering back together. Yet the ones the helicopter hit, blue-green flames dancing across them, were dissolving.
The robots rolled out from the west end of the zocalo, scooping up bits of burning flesh and charred bone with their mini-backhoe appendages and stuffing them into their trash compactor maws. More tests in P4 labs, deep under the desert somewhere. And then more zombie scientists digging their way out of those supposed impenetrable bunkers.
A half-toasted zombie staggered toward a robot, within her range. She peered through her scope and fixed her laser on its head. “Chinga, es Miguel,” Sargent Villanueva swore quietly. His gorgeous curls were reduced to black ash and his face half charred, but she would recognize that green eye still in its socket, the dimple on the remaining cheek, anywhere. Her heart skipped a beat.
Her boyfriend, ex-boyfriend, grabbed a robot appendage that was pulling a furry Viking helmet from a zombie corpse. Her belly tightened, a trembling ran through her. His dreams of a neuvo Mexico free of corruption, los ejidos that Cardénas dreamed of restored, las fabricas controlled by the workers. She recalled the summer day before these pendejo pandemics, before that puta revolucionista stole Miguel from her. He took her to Rivera’s murals al Palacio Nacional, preaching this was the real Mexico. She teased him, called him naïve, but that night when they made love, she orgasmed to visions of men with arms of steel hammering bridges across great divides, women ripe as melons sowing fields of corn to feed the children.
Poor Miguel, full of dreams and faith in people, turned into a magasaur zombie. She just wanted to put him out of misery. As her finger tightened on the trigger, his eye looked up at her, magnified through the scope. His lips moved. Maria, help me.
“Dios mio.” She lowered her rifle. Did he really…? Sargent Villanueva grabbed the escape cable coiled by her side. She could throw it to him, they could—
Miguel’s head exploded, his body vaporizing as it fell into molten helicopter debris. Twisting as if stabbed in the gut, she scanned the rooftops. Chinga, even covered in hazmat gear, those giant chichotas—her. “You killed Miguel!”
“More than you’d do for him, fascista!” That pájara revolucionista gave her the finger and dashed across the rooftop.
“You’d better run, puta!” Sargent Villanueva cried. “If I catch you, you’re through!”
Kirk Glaser is a poet and fiction writer who lives in Santa Cruz, California, where he and his family have lived through two homes burning to the ground due to arson and wildfire. His long-term Vipassana meditation practice helped him survive both events, but the fires may account for the macabre humor his stories sometimes take on.