ANNIE AND I—our bellies full for the time being, content, the top of her brain glistening like Jell-O in the dawn’s early light—together we figured out how to start up the touring boat, and we hauled ass out of Chicago. Any minute, they’d come looking for Stein, but they wouldn’t find him. He’s in me. He’s in you, too, if you accept him. He’s in all of us.

We traveled north just as Ros had broadcast from the Garden of Eden, a couple of fresh corpses in the boat with us for snacks. Stein said there were others like Annie and me, and I believed him.

Professor Zombie finally had a viable plan: Find the others and work together to build a community. A resistance movement. A zombie underground in the cold, where it was dry as a morgue, where we’d be preserved.

I imagined we might travel to the desert one day, after the war was officially over and the humans felt safe again. After we ran out of food up in Canada or Alaska. I liked the sound of Death Valley, drier than dust. We could go anywhere we wanted. Once you accept your destiny, once you make peace with your nature, anything is possible.

Annie grabbed my arm and pointed to the east. Something was bobbing on top of the water and we headed for it, following a sun-beam. As we drew closer my heart swelled, almost started beating again; hope lodged in my throat like a large intestine.

It was Isaac, of course. The little Moses, floating on top of the lake like a rubber duck. We fished him out and unwrapped his waterproof covering and he was perfect, no worse for the wear, intact from head to toe. Like all babies, he was a tiny miracle. He squealed, gurgled, cooed. I brought him to my chest and Annie danced with her guns like Yosemite Sam.

I placed Isaac on one of the bodies and he dug in, using his sharp teeth and nails to peel back the skin. He must have been starving; he opened up the soldier’s stomach and crawled in, then ate his way out like a maggot.

Annie took the wheel and redirected us north. I put my arm around her and with my other hand made a fist and raised it over my head, sounding my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

The fish answered. And Annie and Isaac and the vultures and the flies, all of God’s creatures together in one mad, inarticulate cry: brains.