The referees lured the undead off the field and into the confines of an electric fence with hunks of fresh meat skewered on long, sharp poles. Two men in blue uniforms carried the latest corpse off the field in a canvas bag. Armed with cattle prods, the refs urged the swaggering, shuffling forms back onto the field.
Burke sighed and put his helmet on. As he jogged onto the field he froze.
Johanson.
Goddamn. Johanson. He knew he’d show up sooner or later, but how can you really be prepared to see your best friend on the opposing team?
He’d been the best running back Burke had ever played with. Now there he was, hunkered down across the line of scrimmage staring at Burke with lifeless eyes. Shit, they’d been roommates in college, and now…
There he was. Listless. Crazed. Hungry for flesh.
There was a flash of light up in the stadium. Burke looked up. A woman ran toward the cage of the undead with a Molotov cocktail. She lobbed it and it exploded on the outside of the cage walls, spewing a rain of fire both inside and outside the cage. A security guard grabbed the woman from behind and hauled her away as humans and non-humans alike shrieked and slapped at each others burning clothes. Smoke accompanied by the smell of burnt flesh poured out from the cage. Outside the cage, the fire was quickly subdued, but inside the burning creatures tried scrambling up the cage walls, only to fall screaming back onto the others. More security guards appeared, this time with a hose. They sprayed at the cage until the fire was out. Only a few of the undead lay twitching on the ground, smoldering, but they soon arose, pieces of charred bone protruding from their parchment-like flesh.
“It’s no different than our sex drive,” Johanson had once said. “An unavoidable biological urge to propagate the species.”
“But why? What kind of a god…”
…and they’d stay up late some nights talking about it over beer and pizza, their wives trying to hide their fear behind the normalcy of chit-chat and wine.
“Why do we do this, Burke?”
Burke shook his head. Couldn’t say it but remembered—
His son Julian, his daughter Calley. They’d become infected. They’d become craving slobbering things he’d been forced to destroy. He almost didn’t. Almost let them eat him.
Wouldn’t that have been better? Wouldn’t that have been the right thing to do in the end?
“I don’t know,” Burke said, the words in his head, the thoughts too much to get out without jumping up from the table and smashing everything within sight.
How many of them would he have to destroy before becoming satiated?
All of them.
That was the unfortunate answer.
Every goddamn one of them.
And still he’d want to hurt something, someone, for what they made him do.
Concentrate, Burke told himself. It’s not Johanson. Not anymore. Johanson is gone.
Easier to say than to believe. There were rumors of cures just around the corner. Rumors of antidotes that could reverse the process, restore the tissue, the brain. But what about the soul?
“Hike!”
The center snapped the ball. Burke took it and dropped back to pass. Tidwell hurtled down the field, knocking aside two zombies with his large, powerful shoulders. He turned back. Burke threw a long bomb. It hung in the air. The crowd, the living and undead alike, became silent as the ball descended toward Tidwell. Tidwell sprinted past the fifty, the forty-five, Johanson matching him stride for stride, the apex of the ball’s trajectory and Tidwell coming to a point. It landed in his hands perfectly. But at the forty-two yard line, Johanson reached out his long tooth marked arm. Grabbed Tidwell’s face mask, and with one swift jerk, tore Tidwell’s head off.
Tidwell’s body twisted and fell forward. Good enough for a first down. Johanson reached into Tidwell’s helmet, and with strong bony fingers, scooped out handfuls of brain and ate. He ambled off to the sideline with his meal.
Jesus, Burke thought. He had drive before, but what drove him now?
The refs came in with their cattle prods and got the undead back in line. They shifted jerkily on the new line of scrimmage. The seconds ticked away.
They had discussed it over beers many times. Was the urge of the living to stay alive as great as the urge of the undead to feed?
“Depends on the individual,” Johanson said. “Some of us would do anything to stay alive. But then we’ve both seen players who just all of a sudden sit down in the middle of a play, take off their helmets, and let the feeding frenzy begin.”
“Why would somebody do that?”
“Cause they’re tired.”
“I’d never do that.”
“Some people just get sick of the way the world’s turned out. Maybe all their friends and family are gone. Maybe they think it’s inevitable, so better submit to fate rather than waste all that energy fighting a lost cause.”
At least Tidwell had gotten them a first down.
Burke looked up into the stadium seats, his eye landing on Tidwell’s widow. Her face was in her hands as she rocked back and forth. A woman next to her patted her on the back, talking to her, words that Burke knew would never matter.
The center snapped the ball. One of the undead, number fifty-three, leapt over the center as Burke scrambled backward. Fifty-three was on him in an instant, trying to twist his head around, trying to snap Burke’s neck. Burke landed on his back, number fifty-three on top of him, his brown ugly teeth gnashing around his face mask. The refs blew the whistle. Fifty-three continued to pummel Burke with rot-purple fists. When a ref zapped the thing with a cattle prod, the electricity flowed into Burke as well, causing him to bite down hard on his mouthpiece, streaks of black light crossing his vision. His body went rigid for a moment. Fifty-three rolled off of him. Burke took a deep breath and looked at the gray sky. Spence, a running back, helped him up.
“You okay, man?”
Burke nodded.
“You sure?”
“I’m fine. Huddle up.”
In the huddle, Aidan Carter, as much of a veteran as Burke, rubbed his hands quickly together.
“We’re coming down to the wire. This is way too close.”
“We’ll get ’em,” Tyrone Bishop said, his voice surly and deep beneath his helmet.
“I don’t like it this close.”
“We’ve done it before.”
“What if we don’t.”
“Don’t talk like that, bro. We’ll get it together.”
“We better. We better do it now.”
Second down. Still at the forty.
They lined up. It seemed as if there were sparks in the eyes of the undead, their ferocity, their hunger so great it seemed to animate them in a way Burke had never seen before. They drooled a green and yellow slime from the corners of their torn, misshapen lips. The humans in the stands got quiet while the undead in the giant cage beyond the goalposts howled and shook the large metal strips.
“Hike!” Burke yelled. The ball hit his hands like a bullet. He dropped back, handed off to Paine. But Paine’s grip was off. He grabbed it too far forward and it slipped from his hands. It bounced on the grass. Paine dove on it and clutched it to his chest.
The whistle blew. The clock ticked down.
Forty seconds left.
Aidan Carter’s eyes were wild. “How could you fuckin’ miss that? You know what this means?”
Paine wouldn’t look at Carter.
Carter punched him hard on the shoulder. “This is our life you’re fooling with. Don’t you know that?”