“Over sixty years after the Romero Revolution, and some of you still want to split hairs about the definition of life?  We’re way past that, ladies and gentlemen.”  Roscoe was thankful for the microphone on the podium in front of him.  He was plenty pissed off, full of that righteous anger that had gotten him elected in the first place, but he knew that, at his age, if he started yelling, his vocal cords would just shred, tear loose, and slide down his throat.

He paused before speaking again, his eyes sweeping the room.  Unbidden, an image of the shop down in his basement came to mind.  He quickly cast it away, steeling himself against the loss of focus.  The speech was going very well.  He could tell; he could feel it.  He had them.  “I think some of you might even want to go outside and wave those signs and shamble back and forth like idiots.  I’ll tell you what: you’ll never see the great senator James P. Roscoe holding one of those ‘Humans Are People Too’ signs.  That’s just ridiculous.  Humans are food.  And except for that rare, viable two percent that have the potential to become people, that’s all they’ll ever be.”

When he said the word “ever,” Roscoe nearly lost control and slammed his fist down on the surface of the lectern, but at the last moment he stopped himself.  He’d seen it too many times.  A speaker would come up to the podium, give his opinion, and try to drive it home by pounding his fist.  Usually either the heel of the hand turned into a pulpy ruin, or the wrist broke.  Either way, that hand ended up rotting away first, far before its natural time.  Roscoe had once seen a man pound the podium so vehemently that his hand actually popped right off and bounced into the first row of the gallery.

The new amputee had looked around, embarrassed, then made his way to his seat amid a chorus of chuckles.  His motion, of course, was unanimously voted down.

Roscoe smiled at the memory, then resumed his speech.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we have got to face these issues pragmatically.  If we were to decide to give these humans any rights, what good would it do them?  They’re still meat.  They’re unable to appreciate anything.  I won’t say they don’t offer anything to our society, because they most certainly do.  They feed us.  That is their role.  Sixty years ago do you think any of them were lobbying to give cows human rights?  Of course not.  The very idea is absurd.”

Again Roscoe paused, and his tongue surreptitiously inspected a worrisome spot in his mouth while the silence of the chamber heightened the drama.  All eyes were on him.  At least, the ones whose scleras hadn’t already blackened with mold.

“With all the technological advances scientists are making every day, we’re living longer and longer.  Just last week a man here in town had an actual birthday.  Did you hear me?  A whole year.  And you know that’s just the beginning.  We are the future, and the time for humans has passed.  They’re our sustenance, our nourishment, and granting them any sort of rights based on the near-identical DNA we share is ludicrous.  Some of you would have them voting and holding office before long!”  This last was met with a few scattered grumbles.

Roscoe didn’t bother going into the details of the gentleman who had had the birthday.  The man had no eyes, very little skin, and his entire lower jaw had fallen off months before.  The only way he still lived at all was because he had attendants constantly dumping teaspoonfuls of brain down the hole in his neck.

“I know you’re going to vote with your conscience,” Roscoe said, “but don’t let that be your only guide.  Use your minds.  Giving rights to humans simply doesn’t make good sense.”

Roscoe stepped down from the podium, and gingerly made his way back to his seat.  He moved carefully, knowing that one unintended bump or scratch, even to a hidden part of his body, would eventually result in quicker decay.  His second term of office was nearly up, and he wanted to look his best for as long as he could.

The session was called to recess for the day, to resume in the morning with a vote on whether humans should be allowed any of the rights commonly afforded only to zombiekind.

Roscoe left the building from the rear entrance, avoiding most of the press.  The news reporters and photographers always hovered near the demonstrators out front, hoping to witness some kind of dramatic political confrontation.  As he shuffled slowly to his house, his respiration settled into the usual panting moan.  All around him, others making their way home moaned as well, and some of them had such deteriorated musculature that they dragged a foot, or held a hand in a twisted claw.

When he got home, he found Joyce in the kitchen.  She sat at the kitchen table, watching the news channel on the tiny, portable TV.

She looked up as he walked in, and smiled.  Her prune-colored teeth gleamed.  He leaned down and gently pressed his cold lips to hers.

“Don’t you know sitting around watching too much TV will rot your brain?” he whispered.  She chuckled politely at his tired old joke, then looked into his runny, rheumy eyes.

“Long day, huh?” she said in her gravelly voice.  She was a few days older than he, and though he’d never tell her so, it was beginning to show.  Her white skin, almost marbled with black in places, was beginning to sag more.  She’d had a tear in her cheek repaired just days ago, but the repair spot itself seemed to be disintegrating.  Sadly, Roscoe turned his mind away from her appearance.

“Very long,” he agreed.

“You going down to your shop?” she asked.

“I don’t think so.  Maybe later.”  He poured them each a mug of thick, room-temperature blood, then sat beside her at the table.  They sipped at their mugs as they watched the newscast.  Eventually, they saw the journalists’ report on today’s Senate session.

Roscoe’s oration from earlier was already being referred to as the “Good Sense” speech, and being hailed by most commentators as the most practical words uttered by a politician in years.  The views of the opposition, led by William Eggers, were getting almost no airplay.

Joyce looked at the clock on the wall, then stood.

“This new guide I picked up today says that it’s best if you open them and let them ‘breathe’ for two or three hours, instead of eating right away.  The time’s up, so I’m going to start serving.  Hope you’re hungry, darling.”

“Starving.”

She brought him the carving knife and the sharpener, and set their plates beside him.  She went back to the counter, then turned, voicing an imitation of a trumpet fanfare.  She set the platter down slowly, with great pomp and circumstance.

Nestled in a beautiful arrangement of bright green Romaine lettuce leaves, a huge brain gleamed like some mountain of pale gelatin.  The light meat, on top, was Joyce’s favorite.  It had many wrinkles and crevices, with a fat black line dividing the hemispheres.  Beneath that, barely visible, was the dark meat of the cerebellum.  Even though it was considered inferior by most, James liked that part best.  Maybe because it was juicier, usually. Trailing from beneath were a few stumps of nerves, neatly arranged in a coil around the trunk of the medulla.  As always, Joyce had set aside the covering, the dura mater, for him to snack on later.

“Wow,” he said appreciably.  “That’s a big one.”

“Isn’t it?  Like I said, I hope you’re hungry.”

“This looks great.”

“The rest of the human is in the sink.  So when you’ve had enough brain, we can dig in to the rest of it.”

Roscoe cut into the organ.  Most of it yielded easily to gentle pressure with the knife, but a few thick parts down in the center took a little sawing with the knife.  He took one dripping hemisphere and put it on Joyce’s plate with the silver cake server, then gave himself the same.  They divided the giblets, then Joyce removed the platter.

She returned to the table, and they had a whispered chat as they fed.

“What’s on your mind?” she asked.  “The big vote tomorrow?”

“No, not that.  We’ve pretty much got that one sewn up.  I’m really just concerned with getting too old to do this job anymore.  Hell, to do any job.  Two weeks ago Randolph thought he just had some mild rash on the back of his head.  Didn’t know a fly had landed on him.  Today he fell over in his chair and just ruptured.  It was awful.  Maggots everywhere.”

“Wasn’t he one of the Rights For Humans guys?”

“Yeah.  Damn New Jersey Democrats.”

“Don’t you worry about that, James.  You’ve still got several good weeks ahead of you.  Months, even.”

“But that’s the thing.  Do I really want to last for a few more months?  Hell, I’m practically falling to pieces now.”

She rolled her eyes.  The blackened veins in them looked like the legs of tiny bugs.  “You’re doing fine, honey.  I’m the one who’s getting old.”

“Today one of my teeth fell out.  The whole time I was making my speech, I could feel that extra gap in the back.  It’s unnerving.”

“Honey, that happens to everybody eventually.”

After dinner, Roscoe pushed himself away from the table, inspecting his shirtfront for escaped morsels of food.  He and Joyce put the dishes away together, then went together to the den.

Yes, the big vote was pretty much in the bag.  Still, Roscoe understood the motivation to give humans some actual rights.  He supposed everyone could understand it, to a degree.

He could remember, although dimly, his time as a human.  He’d gotten picked early, as a little kid.  They’d given him a series of tests.  When he’d passed the tests, they’d begun the thirty-year long series of instruction and indoctrination that made him into the person he was today.  When they’d judged the training complete, they’d given him the injection.

The injection that brought about evolution.

The injection that changed him from human to zombie.

There’d been horrible, intense pain, but he’d welcomed it.  Though he’d still been physically human at the time, they’d instilled in him such a feeling of self-loathing and hate for humanity that he wanted, desperately, to be done with being human.  He wanted to become a real person.  So the injection had killed off the last vestiges of his humanity, and brought him fully into the world of being a zombie.

He’d succeeded, or at least his indoctrination had.  He still had the occasional nightmare, where he sat down to dinner and realized halfway through it that the face he was slicing through for cold cuts was his own.  Others, he knew, were not so lucky.  The indoctrination process just worked differently on different people.  He guessed some of them still saw themselves as partially human, and pitied the wretched conditions they imposed on their livestock.

Dinner sat uneasily on his bloated stomach.  It had been very good, but now it seemed to sour inside him.  How, really, did they know they were right?  What if this was just some huge cosmic hiccup in the grand scheme of things?

He brooded about this for some time while Joyce sat in the recliner, reading.  They eventually got up and retired, moaning, to the bedroom.  While sleep wasn’t actually strictly necessary, some people did believe that it extended one’s life.  Others were certifiably narcophobic, terrified of sleep.  Some claimed that it was too much like being completely dead, but Roscoe suspected that the nightmares of humanity played a part in it as well.

They undressed, and crept into bed.  They briefly grasped each other, atavistically groping at each other’s cold, unresponsive flesh, then simply stopped.

Roscoe lay in the dark, listening to soft, dark gurgling as Joyce slowly decomposed beside him.  He supposed that he made those same sleep sounds.  His mind still turned, and he was unable to sleep.

At last he rose, unable to bear it any longer.  He got dressed in silence and went downstairs.  He went to the shop in the basement.

The basement was unfinished, with ancient two-by-fours exposed most of the way around the walls.  The gaps between were stuffed with pink rolls of insulation.  The floor was naked cement, the slab on which the house was laid.

They referred to it as “the shop” because one wall was a huge slab of pegboard, hung with thousands of tools.  A workbench and a bandsaw sat nearby, and the small piles of sawdust around the feet of them showed old footprints.  Using the tools was altogether absurd: such a thing was simply too dangerous.  One errant scratch could let in all sorts of bacteria, and the life-shortening results of that were a foregone conclusion.  The tools stayed in their places, gathering rust and dust over time, and Roscoe always admired them from a discreet distance.

In the center of the main basement room was a giant structure of cinderblocks; the base of the big chimney.  On one side of it was a small metal door humans used to use to reach in and shovel out leftover ashes that had fallen through the grate up on the main floor.

Roscoe had put chains whose ends were shackles around the chimney base, and now he went to visit the occupant of those chains.

His son.

His actual, biological son.

Before his transformation into a real person, Roscoe had been coerced into the procreational act many times.  In order to ensure a constant food supply, the zombies encouraged sex between humans.  Especially humans who’d been chosen to evolve.  The sex was more endured than enjoyed, and then participants were made to feel horribly dirty for the simple mechanical response of orgasm.

Roscoe now traveled in circles that allowed him certain freedoms most did not have.  Through various illicit channels, he first found out that he’d fathered a child, then where the child was kept, and then, he’d purchased him.

He couldn’t allow the young man to run loose.  According to the people who had “acquired” him for Roscoe, the seventeen-year-old was incorrigible, always attempting escape and already responsible for the killing of several of his guards.  He was smart, full of guile, and strong, both mentally and physically.  If he’d had a more “cooperative personality”–and Roscoe still wasn’t sure how to interpret that phrase–the boy would have been a perfect candidate for evolution.

Instead, Roscoe had him chained to the chimney in the basement.

Roscoe often went downstairs just to stare at the young man.  Sometimes they’d talked, sometimes they’d argued, and sometimes they’d threatened each other.  Roscoe hoped someday to help the boy evolve, but the hope was wearing thin.  He’d never told the boy of their true relationship.  What would be the point?  He shambled around the chimney.

He found the young man awake and alert, as always.

“How is it you never sleep, Ted?”  Roscoe asked.

“I sleep, you rotten bastard.  You wake me up.  You couldn’t sneak up on a rock.”

Making sure he stayed clear of the limit of the chains, Roscoe moved closer.  The young man was wearing filthy old clothes.  His jeans were torn and ragged, and the plain T-shirt he wore would never be white again.

“Why is it you hate me so fiercely?”

“Do we have to go through this shit again?  There are only two futures available to humans.  Become a ghoul like you, or become dinner for you.  Either way would be pointless.  I’d love to just kill you all!”  The young man lunged forward with his entire weight against the chains, but was unable to reach Roscoe.

“Zombies are the future,” Roscoe spoke gently.  “We are the pinnacle of evolution.  Humans are food, and humans are breeding stock.  Your anger is like a tadpole railing against the tyranny of a frog.”

“Bullshit!  If you’re so much better than humans, why is your entire society based on human achievements!  Your government, your technology, everything!  You brain-guzzling morons don’t create anything!”

Roscoe considered this.  The tools hanging on the wall mocked him.  He’s right, they sang as light from the overhead bulb winked off their dull chrome.  You can’t use us!  We’ll kill ya!

“You don’t understand, Ted.  Beyond humanity, this is what you are destined to become.  Yes, our lives are shorter, but they’re profound.  Our achievements are made that much more amazing by our own ephemeral span.  Like the book says, ‘Our frailty is become our strength.’”

“Don’t go quoting your religious zombie crap at me!  They piped that garbage into our cells day and night for years.  I can quote it just as well as you.  It’s worthless!  The fact is that you have no achievements!  Humans did it all before you even existed, and when they died, all you did was pick up all the toys they dropped.”

Roscoe thought again of all the things that humans actually did, that zombies couldn’t.  The sad, impotent pawings that he and Joyce engaged in with no passion and no satisfaction shamed him.  No love made his pulse race, no carnal excitement quickened his breathing.  They stood on the edge of the living precipice, balanced between vitality and stagnance.

Zombies huddled in the ruins of houses that real humans had built, now playing at domesticity.  Humans had made those houses into homes, and now they were nothing more than mausoleums; castles in the twilight realm of the not-quite-dead.  Every apartment building in existence was now simply a crypt.

Roscoe felt his fragile resolve crumbling.  Even that, he thought, might be a symptom of his getting old.  Perhaps the neurons that made up his brain were dying faster than he could replenish them.  This sad state they were in, the odd half-life they led, was actually quite perverse.  Was it truly a mistake?

The inability of zombies to even heal from a minor scrape shot holes in the belief that zombies were stronger than humans.  Zombies could be undone by something as simple as a bruise.

Roscoe trembled.  He looked at the young man.  Tall, wiry strong, with thin, light brown hair.  Roscoe’s hair had also been that same shade of brown, before it had all fallen out.  Although hair always grew a little after the transformation, a short time later the follicles always weakened until they no longer anchored the roots of the hair.  The young man’s eyes were dark and intense, and seemed to glow with his fervent, rabid hate.

Despite that animal ferocity, Roscoe found that in a way he’d grown to love those eyes.  The passion in the young man, a perfect negative copy of his own righteous enthusiasm, showed him who he might have been if he’d been as strong as Ted.

“Perhaps you should know something, Ted.”  Roscoe wasn’t terribly sure how to proceed.  He knew that his life and this twisted afterlife were going to end soon.  Ted might be his only chance to redeem himself.  “Before I evolved, I was human too.”

“You think I’m an idiot?  I know you were human, you putrescent bastard.”

“I’m sure you’re no idiot.  When I was human, I was made to do a lot of the things you’ve probably been made to do.  One of the things that I did…”

“Yeah?  What?”

“…resulted in your being born.”

Horror flooded Ted’s pale face.  He gasped.

“You’re my father?”

Roscoe nodded silently.

Ted held up his chains, snarling.  “And you would do this to your son?”

“I did.  I wouldn’t now.”

“You asshole!  You’re going to make me evolve, aren’t you?  A chip off the old brain-eater, right?  You twisted, rotten fuck!”

“If I don’t, and I keep you here, they’ll kill you.”

“Let them.  I’d rather die!”

Roscoe paused, then looked into the savage eyes of his son.  “What if I set you free?”

Without anger or hesitation Ted replied, “I’d kill you.”

Roscoe had known that would be the answer.  You didn’t get elected to Senate by gambling on the reactions of others. Ted would kill him and any others who stood in his path to freedom.

He also knew, now, that his son was right.  Zombies might rule the world today, but what about tomorrow?

“You wouldn’t feel any remorse at killing your father?”

“No, I don’t think so,” Ted whispered to him.  “Even if you’re not dead, you stopped living a long time ago.  A long time for you, anyway.  What’s it been, a few months?”

They sat, considering each other.  Ted watched Roscoe with sharp, calculating eyes.  Roscoe knew his own eyes looked something like bruised eggs.  He stood slowly, and reached into his pocket without worrying about being careful.  He lost a few layers of skin and a fingernail, but his hand came out of his pocket with a key.

“Son.  I’m going to bed.  If you do ever think of me, I hope you remember this night.  I hope you live a long time, and have children of your own.  Be careful.”

He tossed the key to his son, then turned to the stairs. Roscoe heard Ted fiddling with the key as he ascended to the main floor of the house, and heard the first shackle snap open.  After that, he was too far away to hear the rest.

Roscoe shambled as quickly as he could into his bedroom, and lay on his back beside Joyce.  She continued sleeping, oblivious to Roscoe’s jostling, unaware of his quick, dry kiss on her cheek.  Just as he settled into stillness, he heard the staccato drumbeat of Ted running up the stairs.

The young man opened the bedroom door.  He stood silhouetted in the gloom of night, with one of the shop tools in his hand.  He panted quietly, and approached the bed.

The sledgehammer in Ted’s hands looked like a weapon from some ancient, barbaric civilization.  Roscoe watched as Ted hefted it, one hand at the end of the handle, the other just beneath the head.  He reared back, looked down into Roscoe’s face, and sighed.

“Thank you, father.”

He lifted the sledgehammer over his head.

“I love you.”

Then he swung, and the great senator James P. Roscoe was no more.  His nightmares of humanity were over.

The End