“We will cut the heads off the Americans…we will devour them,” said a 25-year-old bus driver, making eating noises as he pretended to gnaw on human bones.
“Military suicide,” he says. “Strategic theory abhors a vacuum. Tactical impasse–you kill them and they keep coming back. You’ve seen the movies! Go up against an army of zombies? Why?”
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“Like what? Oh I don’t know. Feel into it. Opposing goals–say, the will toward domination through competition and success on one hand and the Christian ideal of helping on the other. For example.”
“You just don’t get it do you? They blow this white powder in your face and you can’t get it off. Then you start seeing omens everywhere, but by then it’s too late.”
I’m not sure that’s true, I say and ask him to pass the cream. “For the lady,” he says and hands me the little tin container. A black silverfish runs out from behind the napkin dispenser to under the counter somewhere near the man’s knee. I cough coffee when I see it.
“Just whatever,” the waitress says. But the cook must know more and enters the circle of discourse.
“Linoleum”–now furtive, the man next to me whispers deeply, almost under his breath–“is laminated. Cork swab is laid with resin and then set to dry.” He says he shouldn’t be telling me all this and then asks whether or not I have clearance.
