Yeah, when I was in high school, I went downtown one time, on a Friday or Saturday. With my friends. I think everyone tries it once. Maybe it's cruel, I don't know. You find a bunch of them huddled in an abandoned car on some rusted tracks in an old shipyard or something. You tease them, let them chase you... they're so damned slow, it's funny. We got drunk, maybe somebody's dad keeps more beer around then he can keep track of and one or two of them is all it takes. One guy trips, the zombie is on top of him, and it's not a game anymore, you can smell them, and their milky eyes, no pupils, it's looking through you not at you, and you go a little bit crazy, and your friends jump on it, and kick it and beat it with sticks and it doesn't care and you sort of lose control and rip off an arm or a leg, all dry like paper, and get up and just beat it and hit it and finally you have to burn it because they don't stop moving no matter what, and you figure in for a penny, burn the rest of them. They go up like haystacks.

Just the once. There where other guys who did it more often. Like every week, but just in the summer because they where harder to find in the winter. I got cousins who tip cows, same thing. Or taking a magnifying glass to ants on the sidewalks. So what.

This one gal down at the office, though. You'd think the zombies where some kind of rare species of butterfly or something. Save the whales, save the owls, save the freakin' zombies. What's to save? They're not natural, I don't think. It's not like they're part of the ecosystem or anything. I'm no tree hugger, sure, but if they need to reserve a couple of trees so some caterpillar doesn't go extinct, that's fine. But don't go putting spikes in tree trunks and dumping sand in the bulldozers' gas tanks. Obey the damn law, get your writs or torts or whatever.

I always thought she was cute, maybe kind of quiet, but when you're the only girl in an office full of jerks, quiet's pretty much all you can be. Quiet, or a cock tease, those are your choices around these morons. I figured I'd play it cool, be nice to her, maybe look her in the eye instead of at her chest when I asked her for access to the field reports. Ask her out. But I don't know. She came in with one of those buttons.

Fine, I guess, I mean, some liberal bleeding heart daddy's girl gets bored with her Porsche and her tennis lessons and figures the only way she can prove she's got a soul is to help the unfortunate, whatever. The rest of us work for a living. She wants to pass out flyers and start rallies, that's her business. Same thing always happens. They get a bunch of dumb-asses all sympathetic for the zombies, try to protect them, the Dian Fossey of the Undead. Then one gets in too close to a group of 'em, gets ripped limb from limb, brain sucked out through her crushed skull, and it's the Sanitation Team down with the fire hoses and the machetes and the matches. Happens every few years.

But this gal. She's working class like the rest of us,. I've seen her down at Kelly's, she drinks her beer from the bottle like the rest of us. Dad's probably a union man, mom probably stayed at home and fried up pork chops every Thursday. What does she care about zombies? I figure, maybe it's a boyfriend. He's some student at the U, workin' on his BA in Snob, dating the blue collar girl cause he's a man of the people, and it's his idea, and she wears the button cause her dad raised her right, you got to be loyal to your man.

I figure, if she's wearing the button cause of her boyfriend, that's no dice on asking her out, or if it's her own idea, I don't want to get mixed up with no zombie lover.

I hafta admit it, it sorta gave me the blues. I mean, we'd exchanged all of ten words in the two months she'd been there. I guess I got my hopes up, though. I go walking to her desk, all ready to ask her for a form J-17 and make some small talk about Law and Order or some such BS, ask her if she wants to grab one at Kelly's, and I see that button. "Zombies Where People Too."

What in the hell? "Hey. I need a J-17."

"Just the one? You can take a stack if you want."

"Nah, just the one." There goes my plan anyway, the button's on her chest, and I'm staring at it. "So what's with the button."

"I dunno." She just sorta shrugs. "Gotta believe in something."

Back at my desk, I'm thinking; how about believe in Jesus Christ and apple pie and pork chops and raising fat little kids? Half our damn taxes go to keeping the churches standing, how about believing in an honest days' work and an honest days' pay?

See, that's what I always hated about those arty types, with their soul-searching and philosophy and, to be honest, bull-fucking shit. You get up, you go to work, you file a few J-17s, a few MT-92s, maybe if it's a good week a 90-H11, you knock off at five, you grab a cold one at Kelly's, you go home and watch some Law and Order re-runs, if it's Friday you take your chits down to the Parish and drop them in the plate. That's life, it's productive, it's simple, it keeps you busy all day and warm all night and who the fuck needs anything else?

Yeah, like I said, it got to me. I felt dumb. Passed up the Arrangement when I was 22 cause I figured I'd meet a girl on my own, right? And here's one, and it turns out she's already taken. I left work early, skipped Kelly's cause my boss was probably already there, went a little further downtown, a place my dad used to go, a hole but they didn't bother with crap like asking you what you wanted. You sit down, they put a bottle in front of you, you put some bills on the bar and keep yourself to yourself.

I thought about that time, in high school. You want some philosophy? You want some Sigmund damn-it Freud? We burned 'em, we burned about eight or nine of them, and the next day I didn't feel any guilt. None at all. A headache from cheap beer, an awful stink from the one that was on top of me, but no guilt whatsoever. And they tell us, every Friday, how we've got souls, and our souls tell us what's right from wrong? That's morality, right? So if I can sit there and watch the Sanitation burn another nest of 'em and yawn and wonder if the Coca-Cola Tigers are still three games up, and not give a damn, then my soul doesn't give a damn either, right?

That was one beer. And the second beer was Dave, three desks away from me. Honest schmuck. Grabbed the Arrangement when he was 20, two years early. 2 kids, pictures on his desk. I saw him, every day, she'd walk by his desk and he'd stare at her tits, like you stare at a bus full of retards, like they where so rare and out of place, he wasn't the one doing anything wrong staring at them. You think he gave two shits about zombies? I'm single, I got it easy, I give my chits to the parish but I got something left, maybe a steak on Sundays, but Dave's got a wife and 2 kids, makes the same money as me, you think he wants folks wasting time and money on goddamn zombies?

The third beer was just out of habit and that was that until I hit the city limit at 6. So I went outside and started walking around.

They lifted curfew when I was, like nineteen. You know, when you grow up with something, you get used to it. Right or wrong, if it's something you're born with, you don't give a damn. I learned that one from my dad, too. We'd see some kid with one leg or a water head, drooling around the playground, and I ask him if it hurt, and he'd say nah, nothing you're born with hurts, its everything that happens to you after. So, I don't know what time it was, but I was feeling jumpy, like I was out after curfew, even though there wasn't one and hadn't been for like 13 years.

I got lost. That's what I like about Kelly's, and my Parish, and work; I could get blitzed, or struck blind, or just be dog-ass tired pulling some OT on the quarter-end form reconciliations, and I'd find my way home like one of those pigeons from the world war one documentaries. But I was at dad's old place, and he'd been dead since before curfew, and I didn't know where the hell I was.

Got tired after a while. Just sat down. Loading dock, abandoned, I guess. The oil stains where dusty and the rust on the loading doors was flaky. I'm an office stiff, right? I file forms and push a pencil, or a ball point blue for the government and church forms. But I still saw things the way my dad saw them. It was a waste of space, but maybe there weren't enough people left any more to fill them all up. Save the Zombies? Fuck that, save the Humans.

So I'm sitting there, trying to decide if I should wander around some more, or maybe sober up some first, and this cardboard box next to me sort of starts to move, and I'm thinking, what in the hell? I hear some noises, I don't know what, and then this leg pokes out.

Well there you go. A goddamn zombie. Sleeping or feeding on a dead rat or something. I stand up. Fucking zombies. We gotta save these? I gotta sit alone on a Thurday, watch TV by myself, because some gal down at work wants to where a button, needs something to believe in? I kicked the box. "Get up, ya shredder." And it just sort of moved around in there, so I kicked the box again. "Get out here, ya god damn zomb."

But he ain't going for it, and that's really pissing me off. I feel stupid, mostly, because no one ever talks to them, it's not like they can speak anything except those weird stupid moans that make your flesh crawl. And the more stupid I feel the more angry I get so I kick the box some more. There's a length of pole on the ground, so I pick it up and give the box a whack.

His head comes out, he's got some kinda grimy stocking cap on, and here's some more psychology for you, that really put me over the edge, this fucker wearing a hat like he's going to get cold or something? Like he's one of us? Shuffling around all day, looking for some poor dead animal so he can suck on its bones and chew its brains out? While I'm working in an office, giving away half of every dollar so the Parish can stay open, this goddamn shredder's just wandering around, free an easy? Fuck that. I brought the pole around, hard and fast, and laid right into his head.

It felt good. It felt real good. There can't be no wrong in something that feels that good. So I did it again. You wanna save some zombies? I'll show you how to save some zombies. I hit him again, and now he's trying to roll out of the box, but I won't let him, another whack on his head, and yeah, that's right you god damn brain sucker, here comes the moaning, I got your moaning right here. He's half way out of the box, I go to work on his back, pound on it, I can feel that length of pipe bounce, every hit a solid hit, one across his ribs, that crunching sound, and now blood out of his head, it's all over the goddamn place. You wanna save some goddamn zombies? Put 'em out of my goddamn misery, that's how you save the goddamn zombies.

He stops moving, just lays there. I ain't dumb though. I wait for a minute, catch my breath. Yeah, my arms are going to ache in the morning. Whatever. I'll pop into the Parish, fill out a voucher for some Percs, tell 'em I'm feeling doubts about my faith, whatever, they don't care. I fish my lighter out of my pocket, Find some trash, shove the shred back into the box, light it on fire.

It doesn't start to burn for a long time. Takes a while, but I get him burned.