When I was ten, I killed my dad.

****

“Hey Tommy, is your dad gonna be home tonight? I want to ask him about how in The Waking Dead Wake Again no zombies go, ‘Braiiinnnssss.’” Scott made the zombie face, stuck one arm out, and did the zombie walk. He was obsessed with zombie movies. We all were, really, but Scott more than the rest of us.

“Don’t be a tard Scott, the Waking Dead series isn’t about needing brains, it’s about hunger. Tommy’s dad said so in the commentary to Thrice Waked Dead.” Of course Scott knew this, but Mike wasn’t about to pass up the chance to say he knew it too.

“I know, idiot. But in the first movie you hear them say ‘Braiiiinsss’, but in the second movie there’s no hunger or brains. So is he going to be there Tommy?” Scott asked me that almost everyday when we walked home from school. Sometimes I thought my friends liked my dad more than me. Not that that was a bad thing, my dad was the greatest. He used to bring home props from his movies all the time, and take them out and tell me and my friends all about how they were made and how he used them. When he wasn’t around he never hired a sitter anymore – just a maid to check in on me now and then.

“Yeah,” I said full of pride. “He just got back last night.” Dad was gone for almost two weeks, working on another movie, but this one wasn’t about zombies.

“Muuuuuuuuhhhhhhh!!” Troll shuffled from around the corner up ahead, giving his best zombie face. Troll’s real name was Walcott. We called him troll because when we were younger, every time we fight he always stayed out of it at first, then jumped in on whosever side is winning. Mike used to call it ‘trolling for the win.’ Now Troll outweighed us all by fifty pounds.

“Troll, you tard, zombies don’t move that fast.” Troll shoved Mike into the bushes. “God, you fucktard!” Mike cried as he struggled free.

“Hey guys.” Troll said. “Where we goin?” Troll met up with us everyday when we passed his house – he was home schooled.

“God, I think a twig jammed in my ear. You tardball.”

“Tommy’s dad is at home tonight. I’m gonna ask him why in “Waking 2” the zombies don’t say ‘braaiiinss.’
The walk home was always filled with zombie talk, and bush-shoves, and fighting and wrestling. But today we were too excited to stall. It was Friday, and we were all staying at my house again. Scott had just got an independent zombie film from Australia, and we hadn’t seen it yet. Plus my dad was going to be there.

“Hey dad!” I yelled as we burst into the house. Mike went straight for the living room and the T.V, Troll was already gone into the bathroom. Scott looked as disappointed as I did, when we both saw the note on the refrigerator.

“So is he having pizza delivered again?”

“Yeah, it says he’ll be back late.” I wondered if Scott liked my dad so much because he didn’t have one.

We played Zombie Revenge and Mario World until the pizza came. We each took our own 2-liter of Pepsi, and sat to eat in the living room. Scott and Mike argued about old Dawn of the Dead zombies versus new Dawn of the Dead zombies. Mike bet Troll he couldn’t fit 4 pieces of pizza into his mouth at the once, and won. Troll pinned Mike to the carpet, and made like he was going to rub half chewed pizza on Mike’s face because he was sick of hearing the word “tard.” Mike called him “lard” instead. We watched Scott’s new zombie movie twice, the second time with the commentary on. Mike started calling them “zumbys” in mockery of the director’s thick Aussie accent.

“You know what I don’t get,” Whenever Scott spoke that way, we all shut up and listened. He was about to propose something – a question or something – about zombie movies, and it was always worth trying to explain. Trying to figure out how whatever it was fit into the larger world. “Why don’t zombies eat each other?”

“ Because they’re zombies,” Mike said.

“What, zombies taste different than people?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Troll almost always was the first one to pick up on Scott’s ideas. “And why do sometimes zombies completely devour a person? Why don’t they always do that, if they want to eat people?”

“You guys are tards, if you’re infected the zombies don’t want to eat you because you taste like Troll, who tastes like a zombie.” We argued about back and forth about why zombies sometimes devour a person whole, and sometimes don’t, for about an hour. Me and Mike held Troll down while Scott re-enacted how to brain a zombie with my Nerf bat. Troll demonstrated how to use a zombie as a shield when he ran me into Mike and us into the wall. We decided to settle the issue with Zombies the board game.

“If they always devoured people, there wouldn’t be any new zombies.” Scott pointed out, for the third time.
“ Yeah, but if they didn’t eat people there’d be no reason for them to come after us.” Troll said, for the second time.

“They call it the spark of life.” We all jumped; none of had heard him come in. Dad was in a black suit, with his coat slung over the arm holding his briefcase. His other hand rested on his chest, just above his belly. We all cheered and said, “Hi.” Normally we would have charged and bore him to the ground, or chased him around the house until we caught him, but he was about to impart some guru-zombie wisdom. Plus we were full of pizza.

It turns out, whenever you see a zombie or a pile of zombies completely devouring a person, it’s because that person never gave up – they still had that spark of life that zombies want to consume. When a person gives up and accepts they’re about to be eaten by zombies, the zombies stop eating. That person still dies, but they become a zombie. Most people, dad said, give up right when they die, but some people don’t. Those are the ones the zombies consume fully.

He showed us a zombie hand, a rubber model used in his first Waking Dead movie, in the scene where the girl was trapped in the tool shed, and hacked off the zombie’s arm through the door.

“Oh!” Scott yelped. “I just remembered: Why don’t the zombies in Wake Again say “braaaaaiiiiinssssss? I know about the hunger thing from three, but they say it in one and there isn’t the hunger thing in two.”

“We found out the hard way that unless there’s a reason for zombies to want to eat people, it just isn't believable, like in the second movie. Apparently “brains” is copyrighted, so we came up with ‘the hunger.’ He spoke absent mindedly while he unpacked his briefcase. “Sorry kids, I think I ate some bad sushi, I’ve got some serious heart burn. I’m going to bed kids, try and keep it down.” We gave out a collective moan any zombie hoard would have been proud of.

We spread our sleeping bags on the living room floor, but we weren’t ready for sleep. We laid there for a long time, in silence, then Scott would say, “braaaiiiins” and we would laugh and moan like the living dead. Or Troll would fart and we’d hit him with pillows. In the silence between laughters, I thought about a city full of zombies, and how we’d be the only four who could fight them.

I woke to a crash of dishes.

I sat up, dazed, and became aware of someone in the kitchen. It was morning. Scott and I exchanged a look; neither of us knew what was going on, but all we could think of was zombies. Mike nudged Troll, and we all three stood in the hallway, listening to something shuffle toward us. We edged forward slowly.

There, kneeling in his bathrobe, with one arm outstretched in an awkward diagonal, one arm clutched to his chest, and saying with hollow breath, “Tahh…”

We screeched and ran like a pack of bobble-heads back to the living room. Troll grabbed two pillows and hide behind the chair, Mike hid behind troll, I grabbed a pillow and stood behind the couch, Scott grabbed the Nerf bat and stood on the couch. We giggled and waited for the zombie attack, to barrage my dad with pillows and cushions. My dad was a master of suspense, so it didn’t seem strange that we stood waiting for ten minutes or more.

“Dude, Tommy, your Dad is awesome,” Troll whispered, but Mike cut him off with a loud, “Shoosh!”

Faint noises of the creature shuffling in the kitchen filled the silence. We smiled and shooshed and whispered in anticipation. After a few minutes, the shuffling stopped. Furtively we looked to each other for confirmation: this was the cue. We had to step, as one, into the zombie’s reach. A moment of suspense for the audience.

We crouched together in the hall. The morning sun through the window lit the particles of dust that floated in the air. We turned the corner into the kitchen, ready to fight our way out.

My dad was face down on the floor, dead of a heart attack.

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