Zombie Mex Diaries | latinopia.com

MOTHER DAY REDUX.

“All aboard!”

The van was running and ready to leave for the Mother’s Day picnic. The other zombies quartered at the secret Joshua Tree military training camp who were going to meet with their families had already boarded the van. It was just me and Pearl standing by the open door to the van. Vida, the vegetarian zombie dog who had adopted me, was sitting at my side, intently reading the emotions between Pearl and I.

“You sure you don’t want to come and meet my mom and dad?” Pearl asked for the third time.

“Pearl, I told you–I can’t.” I replied. “The mood I’m in I’d just bummer everyone out.”

“Lazaro, I’m real sorry about your loss.”

Pearl leaned over and kissed me. Vida whimpered. Then there was a honk from the van driver.

“Go on Pearl, have fun.” I said, ushering her to the van door. “I’ll meet your folks next time. Hey, I got Vida here to keep me company!”

Pearl boarded the van and it drove off. I was left alone with Vida on the dusty parking area in the secret cul de sac hidden deep in the Joshua Tree wilderness.

It was Mother’s Day and Mr. Nez had decided to bring out the parents of the zombies training for the assault on the Oñate compound for a Mother’s Day picnic. The van would take the zombie trainees to meet their folks at the Jumbo Rocks campground where La Señora Falcón had reserved a space far enough from the other camp sites to assure privacy for our group. It was too dangerous to bring anyone near our secret hideout.

Our cook, Prudencio Ortíz, had prepared special cow brain sandwiches, spicy cat entrail canapes, and a cilantro garlic rabbit eyeball salad he had garnered from the local traps she had set. It would be a great picnic for my friends and their moms.

I felt a hand on my shoulder. I turned to see it was Mr. Nez who had remained behind along with some of the camp staff.

“Mijo, your mom’s not gone,” he said. “You’ll always carry her here,” he said. He tapped his chest. “Aqui, en el corazón.”

I nodded.

“I’m going on a hike.” I said.

He gave my shoulder a firm squeeze and turned back to the main camp building. I walked back to the barracks where I picked up a hat and the canteen that had been assigned to each trainee and headed out into the desert. Vida ran ahead, wagging her tail, eager for an adventure.

After an hour of hiking I found myself at a large mountain of boulders. I climbed on one of the rocks, Vida managed to scramble up the rock with me. We sat together in the shade the adjoining rock, looking out into the empty desert landscape. I welcomed being alone. I needed to reflect on all that had happened to me in the past year.

Mother’s Day is what had set it off.

It was only a year ago, on Mother’s Day, that I began this journal I am keeping, my Zombie Mex Diaries. In the past year, I realized my whole sense of self and my understanding of the world had changed radically.

Instead of believing that my resurrection as a zombie was due to some special magic my mother had secured from a mysterious bruja named La Señora Falcón, I now know that I was born as a human being with a unique zombie gene. My resurrection from the dead had resulted when the zombie gene was triggered on my death at age five.

La Senora Falcón was not a bruja, but a watchful zombie emissary of La Familia, a underground society of zombies that had co-existed with human beings for the past five hundred years. She had been assigned to safeguard my childhood until the zombie metamorphosis took placed as I entered puberty.

I now know that the underground zombies are divided into two camps. La Familia is bent on unraveling the mysteries of the mutant zombie gene for the benefit of human kind. The Oñate clan of zombies, headed by the resurrected Spanish conquistador Juan de Oñate, is committed to enslaving human beings and breeding them for food.

And I was now smack in the middle of this zombie war–a war I had not asked for! And so far all I could show for it was that the person I loved the most in my life, my human mother was dead. The Oñate zombies had killed her a week ago in a concerted attack on the La Familia meeting hall.

I poured Vida some water in styrofoam cup I had borrowed form the commissary. She quickly lapped it up, zombie dog or not, she was thirsty. I sipped from the canteen and recalled the cold glass of cow blood my mom always had for me at bedtime during my childhood.

I sure missed my ‘ama. I longed to visit her grave. I was told by Mr. Nez that she had been buried at Rose Hills cemetery but that it was too dangerous for me to visit her now. The Oñate zombies wanted me dead fearing that the secret contained in my mutant gene might help humanity–they would surely be keeping an eye on my other’s grave, waiting for me to show up.

I thought also about the other person that I loved, Pearl González. Like me, she possessed a special mutant zombie gene. Because of this she was also in danger of being killed any time by the Oñate zombies. At any time she, too, might be taken from me. At that moment I wished with all my heart that I was not a zombie, that was a normal person. A normal person whose loved ones weren’t in danger of being killed, a normal person who could enjoy life. It just seemed so unfair!

I don’t know how long I stayed on that rock thinking about my mom, Pearl, my life and the zombie war ahead of me. Time enough to come to some conclusions about who I was and what I needed to do.

The sun was low in the sky when I felt Vida licking the tears off my cheek.

On the trek back to base camp, I reviewed the conclusions I had come to during my afternoon of reflection and meditation. I wasn’t sure if I would be able to pull off all the plans I had come up with, but there was one thing I had resolved that I knew I would do at first opportunity.

I would lay flowers on my mother’s grave.

CAMP HASCAWALLA

“Listen up! Everything you are going to learn in the next few weeks is a matter of life and death. YOUR life and death. We’ll soon be heading for the Oñate compound –pay attention and you might come out of the raid alive!”

Pearl looked to me and I looked right back. I could see she was stifling a giggle and I had to turn away or I knew I’d lose it. Part of me wanted to laugh so hard! This guy, Filomino Brancos was right out of one of those World War Two war movies where the drill instructor trains the young recruits and they hate him and at the end of the movie they realize they owe him their lives.

Except this wasn’t an old war movie. Pearl and I and two dozen young zombies from La Familia were beginning our first day of training in a secret zombie training camp in the Joshua Tree National Park. And Filomino, who looked about forty years of age, was 150 pounds of trim muscle, profuse sweat and unrelenting determination was going to make sure we learned all we needed to survive the assault on the Oñate camp.

Filomino was right. We WERE into a life and death struggle and the sooner Pearl and I wiped the smirks off our faces, the better chance for survival we would have. I nudged her and gave her a reprimanding look.

“This is serious shit.”

“Yes, I know.” she replied equally seriously. And then she caught my eye and that was it.

We lost it. We broke out into hysterical laughter which we simply could not contain.

The drill Sergeant was not amused.

“You two think there’s something funny about trying to stay alive? Maybe it should have been you two at that cluster bomb explosion. Each of you. One hundred push-ups! And I don’t want to hear I can’t do them. You WILL do them, however sloppily, one hundred full! ”

Pearl and I settled onto our hands and feet and began to do the push-ups. I gave me time to think about what had occurred lately.

We had arrived the secret training camp that morning after a three hour drive from Los Angeles. The three passenger vans, with a banners on either side proclaiming CAMP HASCAWALLA RELIGIOUS RETREAT, had made only two stops. A pee break at the Cabazon Indian Reservation off Interstate 10 and a stop at the Joshua Tree Visitor’s Center on Park Blvd off of the Twenty-Nine Palms Highway. That’s when we had hit a roadblock.

The delay at the park entrance had to do with our contact at the office, a member of La Familia named Jerry, who was supposed to meet us and usher us through the permit for outdoor camping without raising anyone’s suspicions. But, we discovered, Jerry had gone out to lunch. The banner painted on the sides of the vans made it clear we were a throughly legitimate enterprise. By making it a religious retreat we figured we’d attract less attention. Still we had to wait an hour before Jerry returned. He arrived reeking of roadkill–I had wondered how a zombie might manage lunch around here.

A very chagrined Jerry quickly filled out the paperwork and ushered outside. Then he spoke in whispers with La Señora Falcón who had been assigned to get us to the training camp.

“Get the van drivers to take you on to the main road that runs through Joshua Tree. You’ll pass Hidden Valley and Ryan Campgrounds. A quarter mile beyond Ryan you’ll see a Joshua Tree with a tumbleweed caught in its arms. That’s where you’re to make a right turn into the desert and head due west.”

“Won’t the road give the camp away and invite unwanted guests?” La Señora Falcón asked.

“There is no road there. You’ll be heading out into wild desert. Be sure to cover the van tracks for at least forty feet from the road. Within a quarter mile you’ll run into a makeshift gravel road that will take you to the hidden camp.”

True to his word, an hour after turning off the highway that runs through Joshua Tree, we had found the hidden gravel road and soon had arrived at the secret training camp.

It was not much of a camp. Three sturdy wooden cabins, each about 40 by 60 feet elevated on cement blocks, were surrounded on all sides by giant boulders. A perfect hideout. A narrow crevice between one set of boulders was just big enough to allow the vans through. We camouflaged the entrance it with dead Joshua trees once the vans were in.

One of the cabins would be our kitchen. It was equipped with a sink, stove, a refrigerator powered by an outdoor gas generator and mess tables. A second building contained cots, arranged barracks style on either side of the interior–this would be our sleeping quarters. The third cabin would be our training center. I noted that in addition to the large meeting room, there were two other rooms, heavily fortified with metal braced doors. Completing the camp were two portable toilets, the kind with a sink, mirror and running water.

“That’s it, one hundred!” It was the voice of Filomino, the training coach, snapping me out of my reverie.

I stopped the push-ups but I saw that Pearl was continuing. The other recruits also saw this and started chanting numbers in support. “One hundred-and-two, one-hundred-and-three, one hundred-and-four!”

Pearl stopped at one hundred and twenty five, rose up and gave Filomino a look that said, “so there!”

After settling what few clothes and personal belongings we had into the barracks, we spent the rest of the morning doing a lot of physical exercises–jumping jacks, sit-ups, running in circles around the camp enclosure. Not much fun in the desert sun but I gathered that was why we were out here. Filomino made it no secret that he was there to harden us up.

“I’m going to work you till you can’t walk!” He threatened. “Like it or not you’re gonna be in great shape for the attack.”

Lunch was decaying cat entrails, raw sheep eyeballs and pitchers of cow blood with which to wash it down. Pearl and I sat at a large table in the mess hall cabin with some of our new-found friends.

Marcos García was a twenty-something zombie from El Paso, Texas who could have passed for twelve. The Gómez twins, Maria and Isabel, were two identical sisters who looked about eighteen but, they told us, were really thirty-five years old. All three were descendants of Mr. Nez’s zombie bloodline.

Jimmy Yazzie was Navajo. Living up to his last name (Yazzie means “little” in Navajo) he was short and slight, but possessed limitless energy and had a determined look about him. He too looked like a teenager, but was almost forty. It seemed that Pearl and I and the Caucasian-looking kid I had seen in the alley, who name I learned was Joshua, were the only three bonafide teenagers in the group. All the others were adults.

The anti-aging effects of the zombie mutant gene was clearly evident.

“What about this Filomino guy, eh?” Maria Gómez ventured amid gulps of cow blood. “He’s really something, eh?”

“I’m glad we have him,” said Marcos, his head cocked up as he lowered a cat entrail into his open mouth. “Rumor is,” he continued amid noisy chewing, “that he saw action in World War Two, Korea, Vietnam, AND Iraq! He’s supposed be more than two hundred years old.”

“Well, we’ll need all his expertise, that’s for sure,” said Pearl.

“I just want him to teach us how to kill those Oñate zombies!” Marcos said angrily. “I want revenge for what they did to us!”

Marcos’s anger made me think of what I had avoided thinking about all day, the death of my mother at the hands of the Oñate zombies. I had tried all day to block the image of her mangled body on the floor of the La Familia meeting hall, lying alongside wounded and dying zombies.

I realized that if I had to describe my feelings, I was felt more sad than angry. I was really missing her. The thought of revenge was certainly on my mind. But I wondered if I was really up to killing other zombies. I recalled the closest thing I had ever come to killing something was the mouse caught in the kitchen trap so long ago. I had set the mouse free.

“I hope we’ll all be up to the killing when the time comes,” I said out loud, as much to the group as to myself. They all looked at me, several nodding understanding. I guess they had been thinking same thing. We finished our meal in silence.

THE WORSE DAY OF MY LIFE.

At seven on the dot there was a group of about eight of us sitting around a large conference table in room 27 of the secret Mano Poderosa underground laboratory under the General Hospital. I recognized the teenager who I had seen months ago in the downtown alley, and one of the younger kids that had been introduced to us at the La Familia meeting as coming from San Antonio. No one said much. We just sat and waited.

Vida, the vegetarian zombie dog who followed me around everywhere I went, was on her back, demanding that I scratch her tummy. I complied. Pearl caught my eye and smiled.

Finally Mr. Nez walked in, looking gaunt and tired.

“Thank you for coming,” he said. He sat down at the table and I could see a sense of relief spread over him as he took a long breath.

“As you know.” he said, “ we have been at war with the Oñate zombies for over a hundred years. We split with them at the time of the Mexican Revolution. Until now there have been occasional assaults on individual members of La Familia.”

He nodded to me. “Like the ransacking of your apartment, Lazaro,¨ he said.

“But these have been individual cases, isolated. The Oñates have been busy with their prime goal, the acquisition of freshly killed humans… or living humans. They’ve been so intent on conquering humankind, they’ve pretty left us alone. And this is good. It has allowed us to continue our research uninterrupted.”

“But,” I interrupted, “how can they kill humans and not be found out after all of these years? Surely people must miss relatives or loved ones who have been killed by the Oñate zombies?”

“You would think. But they haven´t stayed below the radar for long by being stupid.” Mr. Nez continued. “They wait for natural calamities and…war. They move in and kill and ravage and then cover it all up by whatever earthquake, fire or battle has occurred.”

There was a moment as this news sunk in.

“Yes,” Mr Nez continued, reading our expressions, “it´s a little hard to believe. But they have developed a sophisticated way of moving around the world. They have key individuals in law enforcement, travel, government. They hear of impending conflict and they move their members to the region where their local counterparts facilitate their murders and abductions.”

“Abductions?” Someone asked.

“They recently taken to kidnapping humans and keeping them imprisoned until its time for them to be…eaten.¨

“And this war with the Oñate zombies has been going on for a hundred years?” Pearl wanted
to know.

“Since the time of Porfirio Diaz,” Mr. Nez concurred.

“Oñate saw that a revolution in Mexico was inevitable and positioned several zombies to push events forward. He had zombies in the ranks of Villa, Carranza, Huerta….Every battle of the revolution was an opportunity for human flesh. Soon, their numbers began to grow.”

“They can procreate then?”

“Just like us. Except they have a have a full scale proliferation plan. They kidnap human females and use them to breed more zombies. When they are finished with them, they are killed. The children are raised in zombie youth camps. We think we´ve located one of these camps out in the mountains near Big Bear.”

“What about tonight´s explosion?” Someone asked.

“Tonight was the first direct assault on us at our home base. It was brazen but it reflects their keen surveillance of our own activities, where we meet, what we do, and of course…this lab.”

“Do they know where this lab is located? Pearl asked.

Mr. Nez shook his head. “If they knew they would have hit us here long ago. But they do know about our experiments and research and eventual goals for human kind.”

“I wanted you newcomers to know about all of this. In the future things are likely to get rough. We may have to move the lab. For now we´ll be planning a counter attack, were going to hit this youth camp we’ve discovered. See if we can salvage these kids before they turn flesh eaters. If we can put Oñate on the defensive that will buy us the time we need to move the lab to another location and bolster our security.”

There was silence as we considered what Mr. Nez had told us. He looked thoughtfully from one person to another.

“I had hoped we´d have more time to integrate you all into the group. I had hoped many of you could become involved in the work of the lab. But it´s clear we´re at war now. We need you do your part.”

Signaling that the meeting was over, Mr. Nez got to his feet.

“Tomorrow we move out. We saw this day coming and have set up a training camp in the desert near Joshua Tree. You’ll start your combat training there. You´ll be part of the our attack team on Oñate youth camp. That is all.¨

The group slowly started to dissipate. Everyone discussing the significance of the attack and our new role. Mr. Nez came up to me.

“Lazo,” I need a moment with you. He gave Pearl a “leave us” look. Pearl got the hint and walked away. Mr. Nez took me into a corner of the room. Suddenly I was afraid. What did he have to tell me? The look on his face was somber and serious.

“Lazo” he said, placing his hand on my shoulder. “I don´t know any other way to tell you this.” He paused and looked deep into my eyes.

“You´re mother was with La Señora Falcón at this night´s meeting. She asked to be there, she told La Señora Falcón she wanted to know your world better, so she could be supportive. Lazo, your mom was standing next to the cluster bomb when it went off.”

I could feel tears welling in my eyes.

The look on Mr. Nez’s face left to doubt.

“She died instantly,” he said. “I´m sorry.”

ATTACK OF THE RED SASH.

I was awakened by the blaring of a loud and persistent wailing alarm. I stumbled out of bed and made my way to the door. Alarm? What was going on here? I could hear footsteps racing outside my apartment door. A distant voice yelled, “Triage, triage!” Where was I? Then suddenly it all came back to me. I was several floors underneath the General Hospital in East Los Angeles in a secret laboratory run by the La Familia zombies. I was here to be tutored on the history of the zombie race.

Vida, the zombie dog, had adopted me and had taken to sleeping in my quarters. She was now urgently whining and scratching at the door to get out.

I opened the door and we ran out. The hallway was full of techs and medics racing toward the entrance to the Mano Poderosa lab.

Then, suddenly, Pearl was at my side, still dressed in pajamas.

“Lazo, What the hell´s going on?” she asked.

“I don´t know, heck I didn’t even know this place had alarms.”

Just then Mr. Nez came hurrying by, followed by a team of medics with grim faces. He turned to us as he hurried passed.

“We´ve been hit! Come along we need all the help we can muster.”

Pearl and I quickly fell into step behind Mr. Nez and his team. We looked at one another, silently mouthing our questions. We´d been hit? By whom? And where? Suddenly a loudspeaker blared through out the lab.

“Attention, attention. Oñate victims now arriving at the Northeast entrance.”

Then it all fell into place. The Oñate zombies, of course!

“The Friday meeting of La Familia.” Mr Nez barked over his shoulder, keeping us all jogging at a brisk pace. “Someone detonated a bomb of projectiles at head level. Lots of our people were hit.”

We reached the main entrance to the lab and I could see that a makeshift emergency ward had been set up. Bodies of zombies were laid out on cots and stretchers, but they were alive. Moaning from their wounds, but still alive.

Off to the far end of the room I could see a large mound of bodies that were NOT moving. These bodies were ghastly pallid and motionless. I could see that each one had been hit once or more in the head by metal projectile, similar to the metal darts with which Pearl and I had been targeted at Olvera Street.

I walked up to the mound of zombie carcasses. Mr. Nez and his group were busy examining the survivors. As I approached the death mound, my stomach wrenched. These were the first “dead” zombies I had ever seen. It made me shudder. It sank into me just how deadly the Oñate threat really was.

“My god, they’re actually dead.” Pearl said quietly joining me. “And I thought we were invincible.”

“Report!” I heard Mr. Nez call out behind us.

We turned to see he was addressing La Señora Falcón who was covered with the grey mucous fluid that passed as zombie blood and looking like she was still in shock. But she appeared otherwise unhurt. She took a deep breath and spoke.

“They hit us this evening at the beginning of the meeting,” she said. “There was an infiltrator who positioned a bomb device on one of the credenzas in the main meeting hall, making sure it was a head level. When the bomb went off, the blast sent these metal darts right into the crowd. “

“Did you catch him?”

“It was a her. We did but she pulled out a handgun and blew her brains out in front of us.”

“Oñate.” Mr. Nex said grimly, decisively.

“Yes, I´m sure of it,” La Señora Falcón replied.

She reached into a side bag slung over her shoulder. She pulled out a piece of a red sash, partially burned and covered with soot.

“Mr. Nez nodded. “The Oñate scarlet sash.”

“Scarlet sash?” Pearl asked.

“It’s the scarlet sash Juan de Oñate wore as a conquistador. He now uses it to identify members of the Oñate clan.”

Mr. Nex turned to the medics. “Let´s finish triage. Sandoval, Melendez, get the injured into the medical ward and see to their wounds. He turned to several techs working nearby. He nodded toward the pile of bodies in the corner.

“Use the tunnel. The furnace is scheduled for six this morning.”

The men moved to the bodies and started loading them onto hospital gurneys.. Mr. Nez saw me staring at the bodies.

“We have a tunnel that connects this facility to the county morgue,” he explained. “Its right around the corner at Main Street and Mission. We selected this locale because when we do get to the point where we´re ready to experiment with the mutant gene, we´ll need a ready source of cadavers. There are several thousand cadavers there now.”

“And these bodies?” I asked.

“The county periodically burns unclaimed cadavers that have been processed on alternate mornings at 6AM. Several workers there are members of La Familia. ”

The medics soon were moving the wounded zombies into an emergency sick bay that had been set up in the hospital wing of the lab. Before long Pearl and I were helping push gurneys down the hall and into the emergency room. It was clear that all of our resources would be devoted to helping out our injured comrades and that the research at the lab would be on hold for a while.

After we had helped settle the wounded, Pearl and I went from bed to bed asking if there was anything they wanted. We spent the rest of morning helping out as best we could.

By dinner things had quieted down. Pearl and I were having supper in the commissary. Vida, never far from me, was asleep under the table, when Mrs. Gonzalez came up to us. She looked haggard and tired. The smile I ordinarily associated with her was gone.

“Lazo, Pearl you´re to go to room 27 in the hospital wing at 7Pm tonight.”

“What´s up?” I asked.

“We’re at war now,” Mrs. Gonzalez said with gravity. “And it’s time you all grew up.”

KING OF TEXCOCO.

The news that Mr. Nez, leader of the La Familia band of zombies, was indeed the legendary Aztec poet King Nezahualcoyotl was stunning. It made Pearl and I devoted students of “The Book of Life and Death,” the ancient Aztec manuscript archived at the Mano Poderosa laboratory library

As Mrs. Gonzalez, our new found teacher, had indicated, the English translation of the Nahuatl text as the end of the manuscript made our daily “lessons” if not easy at least manageable.

We spent the next several days totally immersed in a time and place six hundreds in the past. The first passage of the manuscript set down the tone and direction.

“In the year of 3 Rabbit, in the Valley of the Sun, the poet King ruled. Texcoco was his kingdom, the poet King ruled in Texcoco. Nezalhualcoyotl, builder of roads and aqueducts, builder of palaces and gardens, creator of song and flowers. And the great Nezalhualcoyotl did rule with wisdom and justice. Wisdom and justice was the rule of the king of Texcoco.”

Yeah, lot of repetitions. We discovered that 3-Rabbit translated to the year 1430 A.D.

Before long Pearl and I got into a pattern. We would breakfast together in the commissary. Then head for the library where Mrs. Gonzalez would give us our daily assignment and be on hand to answer any question we might have. Then we’d plow through the English translation of the ancient Nahuatl text. We took turns reading outloud to one another.

A week after we started I found myself reading outloud to Pearl from the Book of Life and Death. I had just read several pages extolling the grandeur of King Nezalhualcoyotl.

Then the manuscript translation gave a kind of bio of Nezalhualcoyotl. Turns out when he was only sixteen, he saw his father, then King of Texcoco, assassinated before his very eyes by the forces of neighboring Azcapotzalco. Thanks to the help of a servant, he barely escaped with his life and went into exile until he grew to be a man. Then he organized neighboring cities and went to war with the people of Azcapotzalco. He managed to defeat them and regained the kingdom of Texcoco. He ruled it for the next forty years until he was 71. That’s when he died.

Then the manuscript took a turn. The handwriting shifted from the careful hand of an abstract historian scholar to the uneven and labored scrawl of an old person. It was the voice of Nezahualcoyotl himself, on his death bed.

“Followers and friends, on my beloved family, I lie before you on the eve of my journey to Mixtlan, the Land of the Dead. Hear this and listen, listen and learn. In my living life I wondered about the afterlife. Are we not mortals? Humans within and without? We must all go away, we all have only a small time on earth. I welcome my journey to Mixtlan and look forward to meeting the Lord of the Near and Close. May I rest and may you join me someday.”

And then the narration really took a flip. I skimmed back to the original and saw that the parchment had changed, and the handwriting as well. This was a new document entirely. Now the writing was precise and determined, the handwriting of someone young and energetic.

“Oh calamity, oh lamentations! Did I not die? Was I not buried? And whence do I come forth anew? I am intoxicated. I weep of my life before. I wonder at this new life ahead. Am I mad? How I can be alive anew? And what of this young body? Where has age gone? What has the Giver of life given to me? And why? Indeed, I shall never die, indeed, I shall never disappear. I am now where death is overcome. By the most Powerful Hand of the Giver of Life.”

When we got to that part, Pearl stopped my reading.

“Oh my God, Lazaro, ‘Most powerful hand of the giver of life,’ that’s where Mano Poderosa must come from!”

“Of course,” I said. This was really neat getting to know the back story of our zombie ancestors. Wow!

The rest of the manuscript was all in the new handwriting. It went on to describe how Nezalhuacoyotl had gone temporarily insane after his resurrection from the dead. In a methodical and reasoned manner, the narrative described how he lived for years as a begger, hiding from his family or anyone who might know him. How he was so despondent that he tried unsuccessfully to kill himself several times. Then he finally came back to his senses and figured out that if he was alive there must be a reason for it.

“Gone is the smell of flowers only that of death abides with me now. Gone is the color of my father and mother on my skin, only the pale whiteness of death now. But is there not a purpose for me to exist? What task has the Giver of Life set before me?”

And then Nezalhuacoyotl wrote about how his appetite had changed.

“Do I not lust for the taste of human flesh? Yes, it is true. But what of the flower and song that gives to life so much meaning? Can this be only chimera? No! It is flower and song that sustains us all. Shall I eat then of human flesh? No, truly now rotting beasts shall fill my stomach, truly rotting beast shall give me sustenance. Would the Giver of Life not want it this way?”

This passage, of course, hit home to me in a special way.

I still remembered the thrill I felt when I tasted the human blood that had been used to write “Die Mutant!” on my apartment wall. There was no denying it. And yet, throughout my association with the La Familia zombies, no one had ever made mention of wanting to eat humans. Yet I knew that this was the driving force behind the Juan de Oñate zombies. And of course I had never even dared speak to Pearl about this.

But I decided that I must.

And so I finally did.

That afternoon, after reading the passage on Nezalhualcoyotl’s resurrection and his declared lust for human flesh, Pearl and I were getting ready to go back to our bedrooms to clean up before dinner. The library was almost completely empty so I took the opportunity.

“Pearl,” I said, “Can I ask you personal questions?

“Lazo, by now you should know that I have no secrets from you. Geez, Lazo, we’re in this together. And it is life or death, you know. What is it?”

“Human flesh,” I said boldly. I figured I might as well get it out there. “Have you ever…wanted to …eat human flesh?”

Pearl was silent for a long moment. She turn her eyes away from me. Was she embarrassed? Finally she looked back and made eye contact.

“Yes, of course. All of us zombies want to eat humans. That’s part of who were are.”

“But no one talks about it,” I said.”Mr.Nez badmouths the Oñate clan for eating human flesh but no one owns up the desires they have for it!”

“You’re right, Lazo, it’s the proverbial elephant in the room. Even though we have gone through the zombie transformation, we are all human being at heart. We know it’s wrong and we, what‘s the word, we sublimate it by eating other things. That’s why Mr. Nez is so adamant about fighting the Oñates. They’ve given in to this dark urge.”

Then I decided to really take bold step. As long as we were all getting it all out in the open.

“So why not eat human beings?” I asked her point blank.

“Lazo,” Pearl said looking into my eyes, “that would make us animals. We may be zombies, but we’re still human! We’re still part of the human race and we have a gift, the zombie gene that resurrected us can perhaps prolong human life. What Mr. Nez said six hundred years ago still holds true. Remember, “What task has The Giver of Life set before me?” The task is here in the Mano Poderosa lab and in our lives. The task is to protect the human race.”

SCHOOL AGAIN?

It was first good sleep I’d had in several days. I awoke to the sound of someone jamming a piece of paper, loudly and persistently, under the sill of my bedroom door. For a moment I was at a loss, where was I? Then instantly it all came back. I was in my bedroom at the secret laboratories of La Mano Poderosa zombie laboratory. The lab was located under the General Hospital in East Los Angeles. I picked up the scrap of paper as I glance at the radio clock on the end table next to my bed. It read 6AM.

The note read: “Breakfast is in the dining area at 8AM. Be in the library at 9AM for your first lesson. N.”

Lesson?

I showered in the tiny but serviceable private shower adjacent to my bedroom, and then dressed in the only other set of jeans and t-shirt I owned. I had hastily thrown the clothes into a bag at my apartment in what seemed as a lifetime ago but was actually only three days. For a moment I thought of the attack on our modest El Sereno apartment by the Oñate death squad and then my ‘ama being taken away for her own safety. Mr. Nez had assured me that she was safe, that was all that mattered for now.

I met Pearl at the cafeteria. She was already seated and downing what looked like scrumptious cat entrails.

“Looks good,” I said.

“Oh Lazaro, the food here is great! Try the cat entrails with cow brain waffles! And don’t miss the tripa syrup for the waffles! “

I made my selections from the breakfast buffet and joined Pearl at a long cafeteria table where lab techs, doctors and computer nerds were all eating full blown zombie breakfasts and engaging in lively conversation on a wide variety of topics.

“…the chromosome factor only applies when the body is already dead…”

“…I still think the mice can work as a model…before we move on to cats.”

“…whether we apply binary or traditional, we still have to create a language that can be migrated to new developments–string theory for example.”

For the first time in years I felt truly at home.

“Did you get a note…” I began.

“…about the 9AM first lesson,. Yeah,” Pearl responded. “Wonder what they have in store for us.”

“Beats me,” I replied. We munched in silence for a while.

As I looked at Pearl eating breakfast. I realized how much I really was in love with her. She ate quietly, skimming the front page of the LA Times which she had pilfered from a stack of papers at the front entrance to the commissary. She was really absorbed in her reading and it allowed me to study here and appreciate how really beautiful she was.

I wondered about our future together, as I had several times since Mr. Nez had told us about how we were the progenitors of two distinct zombie bloodlines. Did that mean that my love for Pearl was precluded? Could we ever have a normal romance? Heck, I didn’t even know for sure how she felt about me.

For a moment I wished that neither of us were zombies. I wished that we were not being hunted by the Juan de Oñate clan of zombies and that we didn’t possess the special gene that neither of us really cared about or had even asked for.

For a long moment all I wanted was for Pearl and I to be just to normal human-being-teenagers. So that I could tell her how much I loved her. And so that perhaps some day we might be able to fall in love the way normal humans do. And even…get married.

“That’s not going to happen,” Pearl said abruptly.

“Huh?” I replied. Had she been reading my mind?

“Sez here, in the paper, that the city council is considering an ordinance that would set up drunk driver sobriety check points randomly at undisclosed intersections in the city three times a week.”

“ Oh” I said, catching my breath. “Why do they want to do that?”

“Those fatal accidents last month. Too many drunk drivers. What bothers me is what if one of us gets stopped.”

I got her point immediately.

“The smell,” I said.

“Right, “ Pearl said, “nothing like the smell of death on the breathalizer to let you know this driver is impaired.”

We both laughed at that.

“Lazaro, what do you suppose this “Lesson “is all about?”

“I don’t know, ” I replied. “But I guess we’ll soon find out.”

And a few minutes later we walked into the library and did find out.

The room was really large. Obviously the site of a lot of research. One whole wall was dedicated to computer stations with monitors and on the wall was a giant size super rectangular screen, perhaps twelve by twenty feet. In the middle of the room were numerous wooden tables with chairs, like you might find in any library. Against the other three walls were floor to ceiling bookshelves and large computer storage structures– a lot data was being mined in this room. From the covers of the books on the shelves, it looked like some were really old.

“Right on time for your first lesson,” I heard someone say behind us. We turned to find it was Mrs. Gonzalez, my librarian friend from the Lincoln Heights library. Standing at the doorway with an armload of books and a computer in her arms.

“Mrs. Gonzalez!” I said with a smile. I was really glad to see her.

“And I’m happy to see you, Lazaro, and you, Pearl. I’m even happier to say we’re going to be seeing a lot of each other in the next few weeks. Mr. Nez has assigned me to be your…I guess you would call me your teacher.”

“What exactly are you going to be teaching us?” Pearl wanted to know.

“Well, we don’t want you to get behind on your regular classes–Algebra, History, English–the classes you might be taking if you were back at Wilson. But there’s also a lot of information you need to know about that I think you will only find here.”

“Like what?” I asked.

“Well, let’s start with the this.” She deposited her armload on a table and then walked over to one of the shelves and pulled out an ancient looking manuscript. She brought it back to the table. It was big and thick, about a foot wide and a foot and half long. The pages, I could see, were not made of regular paper. They looked like heavy parchment, each page about sewn to the binding with thick leather thread. The writing on the cover of the “book” was in some language I didn’t recognize.

“It’s called a codice,” Mrs. Gonzalez explained. “It’s one of the ancient books written by the Aztecs.”

“Right,” said Pearl beginning to leaf through the pages. “I’ve heard of this.”

“This one is titled “Teomoxtli nemiliztli miquitli,” Mrs. Gonzales continued. “I guess you could translate it as “The Book of Life and Death.”

“Life and death, wow!” I said. “Nothing light weight about this, eh.”

“What? Are we supposed to read this,” Pearl asked. “And if so, why? And how?”

“This book was originally written in Aztec hieroglyphic writings about 700 years ago. It was written by the very first human being to be born with the mutant zombie gene that resurrects you when you die. It has since been translated into Spanish.”

She indicated the center portion of the manuscript which was also in parchment but I could see Spanish scrawling on the pages.

“And then…” She indicated the back part of the manuscript where I could see normal pages were attached.”…into modern English. We make it easy for you.”

“Who wrote this?” Pearl asked.

“He was a very gifted poet and king of the Mexica people,” Mrs. Gonzalez replied. “His name was Nezahualcoyotl

“Nezalhualcoyotl. We’ve heard that name before, from Mr. Nez.”

Mrs. Gonzalez gave Pearl a quizzical look. Then she smiled broadly and chuckled.

“I guess you guys don’t get it, eh?’

“Get what?”

“Lazaro, Pearl,” Mrs. Gonzalez said patiently. “Mr. Nez IS the ancient Aztec king Nezahualcoyotl. He is the very very first zombie. And this book is a record of our zombie people.”

GENETIC RIDDLES.

“A zombie dog?” I asked.

It was a few minutes after our arrival at the underground chambers of the Mano Poderosa laboratory, secretly situated underneath the Los Angeles County USC Medical Facility. Mr. Nez and Mr. Brown had gone off to confer with security concerning the vicious attack on us by the Juan De Oñate zombies. Dr. Martínez had volunteered to show us around the lab and to our living quarters. Vida, the pit bull mix, followed close behind us, wagging her tail and seeming totally in charge of the situation.

“Yes, Vida is our first successful resurrection,” Dr. Martínez explained as she led Pearl and I through swinging double doors into a vast laboratory complex. We walked past lab technicians busy at pristine white tables. Some pored over electronic microscopes, others adjusted centrifuge settings, still others conducted tests with rows and rows of petri dishes. I could see this was really a full blown operation.

“As you know the Mano Podreosa project is dedicated to finding a viable way of utilizing the mutant zombie gene that both of you, and the five progenitors, possess. We hope to convert it into a way of bringing human beings back to life, ending human mortality.”

“And you’re starting with dogs?” Pearl asked.

“Not exactly,” Dr. Martínez replied with a smile. “Let me backtrack. In the early 1980s we were able to isolate the mutant zombie gene that you two and a few others were naturally born with. This mutant gene that is part of your DNA, it’s unique to you.”

We continued walking among the lab technicians.

“When you die,” Dr. Martínez went on, “that gene contains a “trigger” that goes off and reboots your dead body, bringing it back to life. Of course that comes with the unique zombie properties we’re all familiar with–no heartbeat, the residual odor of death, the ghastly white pallor. Till what we call the “puberty” phase passes. Then you begin to look more and more human.

“Like you,” I said. I kinda of wanted to state the obvious, just to be sure. Dr. Martinez instantly understand what I was asking.

“Yes, Lazaro,” all of us here are zombies. I am a zombie.”

“But you look so human!” Pearl blurted out.

“Yes, but we’re all descendant from one or another of the five family bloodlines. You two are the only ones that have a distinct and unique bloodline of your own. That’s one of the reasons we want you here. To help us solve our puzzle.”

“The puzzle being how to isolate the ”trigger”effect that rises us from the dead.” I ventured.

“How to isolate it, and apply it so it works on human beings who have died by natural causes and have regular DNA.”

“So it can work on just anybody. Right?” Pearl asked.

“That’s our goal,” Dr. Martínez replied.

We had moved from the lab area, through another set of swinging doors, and into what was obviously living quarters. We came into a large living room. It was comfortably furnished with couches, chairs and tables and even a pool table. A few zombies were seated watching TV while others played a game of chess.

“We started experimenting with the usual lab subjects…mice,” Dr. Martínez continued.

“In this case it was dead mice. We tried unsuccessfully for more than a decade. Oh we thought we had early successes. But the mice that came back to life didn’t last very long. A day at most. Their bodies seemed to overheat inexplicably. They died again and there was no further resurrecting them. Some of them seemed to be in terrible pain before they died again. It made us really consider what we were up against. We didn’t want to try that on humans till we knew for certain all the parameters of the effects of the genetic material we were using.”

There was a moment of silence as we took this in. The idea of bringing dead people back to life only to suffer terrible pain before dying again was unsettling to say the least.

We had now moved into a hallway of what appeared to be a dorm. Each door had a name on the door and some were even decorated with clippings and photos.

“This is what we call the hotel. We all have a room here. We even get a private shower and bathroom.”

“But what about Vida?” I asked, scratching the dog under her ear. She had obviously taken quite a liking to me.

“Vida was a fortuitous accident,” Dr. Martinez replied, leading us further down the hallway.

“Accident?” Pearl and I said in union.

“Her original name was Lucy. She was my dog and I would bring here to the lab to keep me company on days I worked late. One day, she wandered into one of the sample rooms–that’s where we keep various genetic extracts of the zombie gene. She seems to have made a meal of some of the petri dishes. By the time I discovered her, she was dead. I examined her and as near as I could tell it was a heart attack–the effect of the alien material in her system. Of course, I was heartbroken. I thought that was the end of her. And then, an hour after I had pronounced her dead, she popped back to life. As you see her now, a zombie dog. That’s why I renamed her Vida.”

“So now you know how to bring people back to life, right?” I asked.

“Not so easy,” Dr. Martínez replied as she opened a door revealing a modest but quite attractive bedroom. “This one’s for you, Lazaro.”

She indicated the next room down the hall, “That one is your room Pearl.” Then she remembered what we were talking about.

“We don’t know exactly what it was that Vida consumed that night. There were several experiments in the works at the time and we don’t know how much of whatever she may have drunk. For the past few months we’ve been retracing our steps, trying to figure out what the combination of genetic material may have been that brought her back to life.”

“But eventually you’ll know, right?” Pearl asked.

“We can only hope. The good news is that Vida is living proof that our eventual goal is obtainable. The bad news is it may take us many years before we rediscover the particular combination that makes it work, at least for dogs. Then the much larger question remains, how to make it work for humans.”

Dr. Martínez glanced at her watch and a concerned look came over her face.

“I have to go now,” Dr. Martínez said, “late for a meeting. Dinner is at six–I hear we’re having fresh roadkill. Explore. There’s a swimming pool and exercise room at the end of the hall. And if you have any questions just ask anyone. We’ve all been briefed about you two and how important you are to the project.”

She started to leave and then noticed that Vida had other plans. She plopped down on the bed in my bedroom.

“I guess you have a new roommate,” Dr. Martínez said. “Just don’t offer her any meat.”

“Huh,” I said. This sounded strange.

“Vida is a vegetarian. We’re not sure if it is particular to her or something that applies to any animal resurrected by the mutant zombie gene.”

VIDA.

“Just remember, you’re here to visit a sick relative. If anyone asks, it’s your uncle José on your mother’s side.”

Having narrowly escaped the bombarding metal darts of the Oñate zombie clan only an hour before, we were walking briskly down a hallway on the first floor of the County/USC Medical Center (everyone in the barrio knew simply as The General Hospital). Mr. Nez was in the lead, followed by me, Pearl Gonzalez and Mr. Brown, the driver of the fake ice cream truck that had rescued us from the marauding zombies. He had driven us to the Eastside medical facility which, I had just been told, was the site of Mission Poderosa. The laboratory conducted experiments on the mutant zombie gene which someday might end mortality and give human beings eternal life.

Hey work with me on this. Just go with it–I had to!

We arrived at the bank of elevators and saw we were in a for a long wait–along with the collection of humanity that accumulates in front of the four elevator doors at the General Hospital. A teenage boy in baseball uniform nursing a broken arm, two pregnant mothers on their way to prenatal care, a tattooed ruquito in a wheel chair, showing the battle scars of years of barrio warfare, and a day laborer, the grime still on his worn Dickies with a very worried expression on his face. But everyone was quiet and polite, all waiting for the elevator that would wisk them to their respective medical destinies.

When the elevator finally showed up, our group quickly crammed in, along with the pregnant moms, the teenage Fernando Valenzuela, the veteran ruco and the harried construction worker. Before anyone could say anything, however, Mr. Nez pushed a button to the basement floor.

“Going down” he announced emphatically.

I could tell everyone was pissed. They were all going up. They looked at each other and decided they’d get out and wait for another elevator. When they were all out, the elevator door closed on our small group as we descended to the basement floor. Mr. Nez, meanwhile, reached into the bag he had been carrying.

“Here,” he said as he handed out cotton face masks. “Put these on.”

Pearl and I looked at each other, nodded our heads. Hey, just go with it remember.

When the elevator door opened on the basement floor we all started get out, but Mr. Nez motioned us back. He pulled a credit card out of his pocket and slid it along the elevator control box. Suddenly a new floor appeared on the elevator gauge.”Lower basement” The damn thing hadn’t been there before. Now all of a sudden a “Lower Basement” floor existed.

Within moments the elevator had descended again and this time when the door opened we found ourselves in an empty sterile hallway with white walls. Adjacent to the elevator a sign with an arrow indicated: “Contagious Diseases- Permit Required.”

Mr. Nez was in the lead again, Pearl and I and Mr. Brown following along. We came to the entrance to a hospital wing. The double doors were closed. Sitting at a desk adjacent to the entrance was a guard wearing a face mask and thumbing through a boxing magazine.

“Excuse me,” Mr. Nez said,” We’re here to visit a relative, Mr. José Buendia.”

The guard looked at us with suspicion. Then he examined the clipboard he held. I could see a long string of names on it. His finger went down and then stopped on a particular name.

“Yes, Mr. José Buendia is here. Go right in.” He looked up at Mr. Nez and winked.

We followed Mr.Nez as he plowed through the double doors and into the hospital wing. Or so it seemed. There was a nurse’s station with two nurses chatting away, a small waiting area with chairs but no visitors, and beyond we could see another set of closed double doors. For all appearances, a typical hospital waiting room.

And then the entire floor began to move.

I suddenly realized that we were not in a waiting room at all, we were in yet another elevator! Except this time, the entire waiting room was the elevator and we were descending once more.

After what seemed like an eternity but was probably not more than three or four minutes, the room stopped moving and came to a stop with a slight jolt.

One of the doors at the end of the hallway opened and what looked like a medium sized pit bull and German Shepard mix came bounding through the door. The short haired dog looked pretty menacing and Pearl and I took a step back. The dog seemed to single me out. She came directly to me jumped up and immediately started licking my face. In a second I was busy scratching the back of his ears, and then, as she slid on her back, scratching her belly. She was hardly menacing, just a delightful little pup.

“She seems to have taken a liking to you,” someone said.

I looked up to see that a twenty-something woman had entered the fake waiting room. She wore black eyeglasses and was dressed in a doctor’s smock.

“I’m Dr. Martínez,” she said, “and welcome to Mission Poderosa. You must be Pearl and Lazaro.”

“Yeah, that us.” Pearl replied

“Well I’m so glad to see you. Especially after the fright you had today. You’re safe here. Consider this your new home.”

“Such a cute dog,” Pearl said, joining me in scratching the dog’s belly.

“She’s a very special dog.” Mr. Nez, interjected, giving Dr. Martínez a knowing look.

“Yes, that she is.” Dr. Martinez replied. “Her name is Vida…Life! And I’ll bet she’s the first zombie dog you’ve ever met!”

ESCAPE!

We had been walking steadily for about a half hour. Lazaro De La Tierra, boy zombie, Pearl Gonzalez, the most beautiful zombie woman in the world, were being led by the mysterious Mr. Nez through a secret lit tunnel in the catacombs of the Los Angeles River drainage system. It all had a sense of unreality to me. Finally we came to halt before a metal door.

“Now that wasn’t such a bad walk was it?” Mr. Nez asked.

Neither Pearl nor I were in much of a mood to say anything.

He fiddled with the security box next to the metallic door and once again fed a code into the touch pad screen. The door opened, reveling a hallway leading to the main room of the zombie safe house.

“Which by a comodius vicus of recirculation brings us back to the safe house under Olvera Street!” he said, motioning us in.

“What do we do now?” I asked, taking a seat inside the large room.

“The Juan de Oñate thugs were waiting for you outside the Olvera Street shop. That means we were followed last night.” Mr. Nez replied as he began to hurriedly shuffle documents from a desk in the room into a large leather bag.

“They may not know about the safe house, but they probably suspect it. In any case it’s too dangerous to stay here. It’ll take me a few minutes to close up shop here.”

“Where are we going?” Pearl asked.

“The lab. Its safe. But we’ll have to make sure we’re not followed.”

After a few minutes he had filled the leather bag with all the documents he needed. Mr. Nez then went to the center of the room, moved aside a rug with his foot, and revealed a trapdoor in the floor. He lifted the trapdoor. Inside I could see another control panel.

“Step to the center of the room,” he commanded.

Pearl and I complied. Mr. Nez pushed some buttons on the control panel and then a remarkable thing happened.

The walls in the room began to move!

The walls seemed slide back into a recessed area behind them. Simultaneously, from the sides of the recessed area other walls slid in to take the place of the original walls. Within moments the antique and high tech gear of the safe house were gone, replaced by walls and artifacts that made the room look like an abandoned storage area, complete with spider webs and dust.

“Wow!” Pearl said, “pretty cool!” Mr. Nez smiled as he saw our reaction to the unexpected transformation.

“ If they’re determined they’ll eventually find out this safe house. But if they’re in a hurry, when they come down from the shop upstairs and open this door they may just think it’s a basement storage.”

“Let’s go!” he said.

I started toward the door leading to the upstairs shop on Olvera Street.

“No, not that way.” Mr. Nez said. He pointed to the hallway leading to the Los Angels River tunnels. “We’ll go back through the storm drains.”

I went back to the door that led to the tunnel that had brought us to the safehouse.

“Not that way either,” Mr. Nez said. “We’re going back through a different tunnel.”

He led Pearl and I to another door which opened into yet another lit tunnel, similar to the one we had just been in.

We began walking.

Before long we came to another junction of the storm drains. When we go there Mr. Nez sealed the large metal door behind us and motioned us toward another passage.

“This storm drain will take us back outside but upriver, we come out in a hidden area covered by trees. Even if they are still waiting for us, we should be able to give them the slip.”

We entered the storm drain. This one was bigger than the one we had been in before, we could actually walk on our feet instead of hands and knees. But we still had to hunch our shoulders. It didn’t take us long to come to where the pipe emptied out into the Los Angeles concrete riverbed. As Mr. Nez had said, the opening was covered by overgrown bushes and trees that had taken root. The helicopter that had been raining deadly metal darts at us was nowhere in sight. We scurried down the cement slope to the riverbed below.

After a short walk, we found ourselves under another bridge. We hiked up the slope to a cement path leading to the street above.

When we reached the street level, I could see where we were. This was the Broadway Street bridge that connected my old neighborhood of Lincoln Heights with downtown Los Angeles!
An ice cream vendor’s truck parked on the street near us. Mr. Nez went directly to the back door and knocked. In a moment the door opened, revealing none other than Mr. Brown, my old Boy Scout leader!

“What took you so long,” he said.

“Thanks for coming, “ Mr. Nez replied.

“Lazaro, Pearl, good to see you guys! Mr. Brown said. “I heard about your close call. Get in the cab.”

“Mr. Brown to the rescue!” I said.

“A scout is always prepared,” he replied, indicating the ice cream truck.

The three of us joined Mr. Brown inside the cab of the ice truck. He went to the driver’s seat and started up the engine. Within a few minutes we were traveling north on Broadway, back into Lincoln Heights.

As we drove along I could see the relief in Mr. Nez’s face.

“You can relax,” he said to us.

“Is this lab far from here?” Pearl asked.

“We’ll be there in just a few minutes,” he replied.

Mr. Brown drove the ice cream truck east along Daly Street. Soon we were passing Mission and Daly where the County Morgue was located. Then we continued to Zonal, and suddenly Mr. Brown took a left and headed up Zonal to the USC/County General Hospital.

I knew this hospital well. My mom’s friends were often convalescing here because it catered to the poor. I remember many times accompanying my ‘ama to visit La Señora This and La Señora That. Twenty stories high, it was the highest building visible from Boyle Heights where I had grown up. But what were we doing here?

Within a few moments, Mr. Brown stopped the ice cream truck in from of the main hospital entrance. A series of rising wide cement steps led to the hospital entrance.

It took a moment for it to sink in.

“Mr. Nez,” I asked increduously, “the lab is located here? At the County/USC General Hospital?

“Pretty nifty cover, eh?” he replied. “It’s convenient for us in many ways. Not the least of which is the proximity of a never ending source of cadavers for our resuscitation experiments.”

“You mean…” I began.

“Of course,” Pearl exclaimed, “the county morgue!”

HUNTED!

We were at the corner of Cesar Chavez Blvd and Main Street. I heard another thunk hit the trash container that sheltered Pearl Gonzalez and me. I could see the sharp edge of the metal dart protrude inches away from my face. We were under attack by the Oñate zombies who were hell bent on subjugating humans and breeding them for food. I looked all around. No sign of where the darts were coming from.

“Lazaro,’ Pearl whispered to me, “what’re we gonna do?”

Then suddenly, a screech of tires and Mr. Nez’s car was pulling up beside us. “Quick! Get in the car!” Mr Nez called out.

I opened the car’s back door, pushed Pearl in ahead of me, jumped in on top of her. As soon as I slammed the car door shut Mr. Nez floored it and we careened around the corner onto Cesar Chavez Boulevard. Then another right turn and we were heading down Alameda Street, past the Union Train depot. It was a Saturday morning so traffic was relatively light.

And then I heard it. A helicopter.

That must be where the darts were coming from! As we sped along Alameda, I could hear the copter racing in the sky above us. Thunk, thunk! Two darts pierced through the roof of the car.

“Get down! Mr. Nez cried out.

Hey, we were already down and in no mood to get up, let me tell you!

“Listen up!” he said. “We’ll go by the First Street Bridge. When we get there, we’ll abandon the car. We’ll make a run for it but you must keep up with me. Your lives depend on it!”

Duh!

Mr. Nez turned left onto First Street and headed toward the First Street Bridge. Meanwhile, the helicopter was not letting us go. Thunk, thunk, thunk. More darts through the roof. One had narrowly missed Mr. Nez’s head. We had to get to cover, and do it soon!

Suddenly we were at the entry to the First Street Bridge. Ahead the bridge rose up to go over the Los Angeles river. Mr. Nez changed lanes and brought the car to a screeching halt on at the corner of Vignes street.

“Let’s go!” he yelled.

Thunk! A dart penetrated the car hood. We scrambled out of the car and Mr. Nez motioned us to follow him. We ran down a narrow walkway in the shadow of a large red brick building. The helicopter was locked onto our route. But telephone wires forced it to circle the bridge to give whoever was shooting darts at a better shot. As it circled around, we made a run for it.

Mr. Nez led us running down a ramp, across Sante Fe Street and under the bridge.

“Keep under the bridge!” He yelled.

As long as we kept under the bridge, it was difficult for the zombies in the helicopter to have a clear shot at us. Where was Mr. Nez taking us? We came to a chained link fence, beyond I could see railroad tracks and then the cement slope that marked the concrete bed of the Los Angeles river.

And then I saw something extraordinary. Mr. Nez went up to the fence, examined it for a moment, and then deftly touched one of the links. In a second, an entire section of the fence collapsed as if it were made of pick-up sticks. Mr. Nex stepped over the collapsed fencing and turned to us.

“Come on!”

Pearl and I shared a moment. What the hell? She mouthed at me. Then we were running to catch up. We stumbled across six sets of railroad tracks before we came to the lip of the cement river bank. We followed Mr. Nez down the slope, half running and half falling. When we reached the bottom, the helicopter appeared again–barreling down on us.

Mr. Nez pointed to a place on the sloping cement riverbed where there was a was an opening visible. It was a circular drainage channel perhaps four feet in circumference.

“In there!” He yelled.

By now the zombies in the hovering helicopter had spotted us. The pilot began to lower it down into the riverbed.

“Hurry!” Mr. Nez called out.

He was now at the entrance to the circular tunnel. A steady trickle of water poured from the tunnel entrance, ran down the slope and emptied into the Los Angeles River. Mr. Nez dropped down in his hands and knees. Pearl and I looked at each other and then at the scuzzy, water drenched interior of the tunnel. A terrible stench came from within.

“We’re going in there?” Pearl asked.

“Don’t be frightened,” he replied. “These are storm tunnels that siphon rain water into the river. It’s a complex system but I knew how to get us through it. Follow me and don’t look back!” With that he crawled into the tunnel.

Ping! Ping! Metallic darts bounced off the cement slope near the tunnel entrance.

“Go! Go!” Pearl yelled at me.

In a moment she was on her hands and knees and into the tunnel. I wasted no time in following her. Behind me I could hear more darts bouncing off the tunnel entrance.

We crawled along for a few minutes in the darkness. The water streaming from the tunnel made the going slippery and the stench was really powerful.

We crawled along the watery floor in pitch darkness. Now and then I touched the back of Pearl shoe as she crawled ahead of me. Suddenly a flashlight came on. It was in Mr. Nez’s hand! And he was standing up in the tunnel!

“You can stand up now.”

We had arrived at a room-like structure where several of the circular drainage tunnels converged. The ceiling was perhaps ten feet tall here. The concrete walls glistened with water.

Mr. Nez indicated the flashlight. “I planted this as an escape route many years ago. Never thought I’d be using it as a back door.

“Back door?” I asked. “To where?”

“To the safe house under Olvera Street.”

Mr. Nez walked up to a metallic door similar to the entrance I had seen at the Olvera Street safe house. He placed his hand on the top of the key box and it opened and he fed the code into the touch pad screen. The door opened, revealing a long narrow hallway lit with modern LED lighting.

Pearl and I shared looks of amazement.

“Mr Nez,” Pearl said, “you sure seem to know your way around here.”

“I ought to. I was part of the Army Corp of Engineers that created the city’s storm drain system back in 1938. Come on we got a bit of a walk ahead of us.”

THE REAL MR. NEZ

“Yes, the Fountain of Youth,” a voice behind us said. “And a world where humans and zombies can live peacefully together.”

I turned to see that Mr. Nez had returned to the main room of the zombie hide-out under Olvera Street. He had evidently heard the last of Pearl’s explanation to me about the purpose of Mission Poderosa.

“And that is why we keep it secret,” he continued. “If the Oñate group were to find out about Mission Poderosa, they’d make it a priority to stop us.”

“I guess that would get in the way of their plan to breed humans for food, “ I said, putting it together in my head. This new zombie world that I was now a part of seemed to have surprises galore for me.

“Come on,” Mr. Nez said turning out the lights in the room. “Time to get to bed.”

Mr. Nez led us down the steps into a the corridor I had seen before. We walked past several open-door offices and then to two small rooms at the end of the hall. Each room contained a small cot with a blanket and towels on top, a table and chair, and a stand-up lamp.

“This one’s for you, Pearl,” Mr. Nez said indicating one of the rooms. “And this one’s for you Lazaro,” he said pointing to the another room across the corridor. “Sorry it looks so much like prison cell but I wasn’t really expecting company. There’s a bathroom right around the corner. It has a shower but you’ll have to wait a few minutes for the hot water to kick in. Sorry.”

“Is this going to be our new home?” I asked.

“Goodness no!” Mr. Nez replied, sounding a little offended. “We have an early start tomorrow. I’m hoping I can get you over to the lab without anyone following us. I’m hoping that will become your permanent home.”

“The lab?” I asked. This sounded interesting.

“That’s where we carry out the research for Mission Poderosa. You’ll meet some of the scientists working on the project.”

An hour later I was lying with my eyes wide open, unable to sleep in the cot of my cramped bedroom.

It was not really surprising.

In the past twenty-four hours I had been bombarded with a lot. I had discovered that there were thousands of zombies living in the world, all of them having one thing in common–Native American ancestry. I had been welcomed into the inner circle of La Familia, a secret zombie society that had existed for more than five hundred years, and had learned that was I born with a mutant zombie gene that had made me a zombie when I died at age five.

I had also learned of an on-going war between the Juan de Onate zombies, bent on subjugating the human race and breeding humans for food. And, on the other side, was La Familia, led by Mr Nez, who were working to unlock the secret of the zombie gene to benefit humankind.

The apartment where I lived with my mother had been broken into and ransacked, and I had been threatened with a sign written in human blood that said “Die Mutant!” Mr. Nez had whisked away my mom–who knows where–for her own protection. And now I was trying to go to sleep in a secret zombie hideout under Olvera Street, a hideout that had existed since the 1870s.

No wonder I couldn’t sleep!

**********

The next morning, as promised, Mr. Nez rousted us early. I let Pearl have the bathroom first. She knocked on my door when she was done and I went into the bathroom, showered and was putting on my clothes when I noticed my skin color. The pasty whiteness was almost completely gone. I was beginning to look more and more like a real Mexican kid, without any of the make-up I had been forced to use to cover my ghastly zombie pallor for so many years. I made a mental note to ask Mr. Nez about this zombie puberty thing.

I found Mr. Nez and Pearl having breakfast in the main room of the underground safe-house. Raw cow eyeballs and cat gut. My favorite combination!

“I’ll let you out the front door of the Olvera Street shop I use as a cover,” Mr. Nez explained over breakfast. “I’ll go for my car and you can wait for me at the corner. Don’t speak to anyone. I’m pretty sure this place is safe, but you can never tell. Oñate is a clever zombie, remember he’s been around almost as long as I have.”

At this Pearl gave me a questioning look. I realized this was a good time to bring up a question that Pearl and I wondered about.

“Mr. Nez,” I said, washing down my food with a glass of cat blood. “Pearl and I were wondering, how old, exactly, are you?”

Mr. Nez was quiet for a moment. His eyes acquired a far away look. He was remembering something. Something that I could tell was painful.

“I was born in what we know today as 1402. April 28th to be exact. My parents were of the Alcolhua people who lived in the Valley of Mexico. I grew to be a powerful king of the Aztecs. I was known as Nezahualcoyotl,” in our language, “the coyote who fasts.”

“Oh my god!” Pearl gasped. “THE Nezahualcoatl?”

“El mismo.” Mr.Nez replied matter-of-factly.

I didn’t get why Pearl was so worked up. Evidently she knew more about this Nezahualcoatl guy than I certainly did. I had never heard of Nezahualcoatl, and wouldn’t even attempt to pronounce his name the way Mr. Nez had.

I made another note to myself to look up Nezahualcoatl. Then, just as quickly as the revery had come, it was suddenly over. Mr. Nez was back to his business-as-usual self.

“Come on, let’s get going!”

A few minutes later. Pearl and I were standing on the corner of Main Street and Cesar Chavez Boulevard waiting for Mr. Nez to pick us up.

And then all hell broke lose.

One moment, we were joking about how surprised the people of Los Angeles would be to discover there was a secret zombie hideout under Olvera Street when I suddenly heard a sharp zing go past my ear and a thunk on the telephone pole next to me. A metal dart, a foot long and about an inch in circumference, was embedded in the telephone pole. It had missed my head by only inches!

“Lazaro!” Pearl cried out.

I looked all around. Where had the dart come from?

“Duck!” Pearl cried.

She dragged me to the ground next to a city trash container. I landed next to her just in time. Another metal dart hit the telephone pole, landing exactly where my head had been. Thump, thump, two more metal darts hit the trash can we were hiding behind. Pearl and I looked at each other.

We were under attack!

OLVERA UNDERGROUND.

No sooner had I stepped through the doorway into Mr. Nez’s cavernous zombie hide-out hidden under Olvera Street than I heard a familiar voice.

“Lazaro!”

It was Pearl Gonzalez! She rose from a table in the middle of the room where she had been sitting, ran to me, and gave me a warm hug. I turned and directed a questioning look to Mr. Nez.

“The other night at the Familia meeting you heard about young zombies being identified in Texas and New Mexico. You and Pearl appear to be part of a cluster of mutant births. We’ve identified seven mutant births, all within the last twenty-five years or so. Seven children with the ability to reproduce other zombies and create new zombie bloodlines.”

“What?”

This was a double whammy for me. Finding out I was part of a so-called “cluster” of zombie births made me feel somehow less special. But discovering that Pearl was also a mutant zombie, capable of initiating a whole bloodline of zombies, was a real shocker. That meant that…

“Yes,” Mr. Nez said, reading my thought. “Pearl is in as much danger as you. That’s why I’ve brought you both here. But this is just a temporary safe house until we secure something more permanent. I must make calls. Pearl, show him around.”

With that Mr. Nez unceremoniously exited through a side door leading down yet more steps to yet another level of rooms. How big was this place anyway?”

“Oh, Lazaro,” Pearl said, “I’m so glad you’re safe. Mr. Nez told me about the attack on your house. What happened?”

I filled Pearl in on the attack on my apartment and how my mom had gone away with La Señora Falcón. A grim look came over Pearl’s face when I told her about “Die Mutant”being written in human blood on the wall.

“The Oñate group,” she said somberly.

I nodded.

“Mr. Nez says they’re afraid each of us,” I continued. “They’re afraid we’ll start a bloodline of zombies that will be at war with them. They want to kill us now, before any of us start having children.”

“It gives me the creeps,” she said with a shiver.

During our conversation I had been walking around room, examining the thick wooden beams that held up a fourteen foot roof. Thick adobe walls encased the room and a strange combination of vintage antique furniture interspersed with high tech computers, cables, monitors and flat screens.

“What is this place , anyway?” I asked.

“Oh Lazaro, this is so cool. Check it out. This room and the others down below here were all built back in the 1700s! This was part of an original house that Mr. Nez built when the City of Los Angeles was first founded.”

“Mr. Nez has been here since then?”

“He first came to Los Angeles with the pobladores that settled the city, back in 1781. He built this house way back in the day, it was above ground then in a sunken ravine. He told me that later, he had the house buried to conceal it. The city grew up around it, over it. He’s been using it as a hideout ever since.”

I walked to the doorway through which Mr. Nez had disappeared. I could see an adobe hallway with several doors on either side. Curiously, modern lighting fixtures illuminated the hallway. Pearl joined me.

“As you can see, he’s also expanded it.”

“I guess you can do a lot of home repairs over four hundred years,” I replied. “Pearl, what’s going to happen to us?”

“I don’t know for sure. But I think it has to do with Mission Poderosa.”

“You mentioned that before. What is it, exactly?”

Pearl motioned me to a chair. “Sit down,” she said. She took a seat across the table from me.

”Here’s how Mr. Nez explained it to me,” she said. “You know that the mutant zombie gene causes a dead person to become resurrected.”

“Like what happened to you and me,” I said.

“And once resurrected, we get to go on living forever.”

“Unless…” I said. I formed my hand into a gun and mimicked shooting myself in the head.

“Right,” she agreed. ”Unless they kill your brain.”

She took a beat. I could see she was trying to find a way to tell me something complex..

“Lazaro,” she said. “You know that Mr. Nez is at least five hundred years old.”

“Right,” I said, “yet he looks only about thirty years old–tops. ”How is that possible?”

“It has to do with that zombie puberty thing I told you about. Once you’re resurrected, you go through a puberty stage–all zombies do. For adults it just takes a few hours. When the puberty phase is over, it’s like your body re-boots. Something kicks in and zombie aging begins. But now your body is on a zombie body clock. And zombies grow old at an incredibly slow rate.”

I suddenly remembered the La Familia meeting I had attended. “Pearl,” I said, “all the zombies I saw at the La Familia meeting the other night looked young–like they were in their twenties.”

“Exactly. Once we reach maturity, you and I are going to look like teenagers for a long, long time!”

“And what does all of this have to do with Mission Poderosa?”

“Lazaro, what do you suppose would happen if you could replicate the mutant gene in normal people?”

“Huh,” I said.

“Think about it.”

I took a long moment to do just that. And then it suddenly hit me. If the secret of the mutant zombie gene could be unraveled, the potential for human kind suddenly became very clear.”

“Human beings might be able to live…forever.” I said, reeling from the thought.

“Exactly. Twenty-five years ago, Mr. Nez pulled together a team of zombie geneticists, microbiologists and other scientists to work on Mission Poderosa. Its goal is to unlock the secret of the zombie gene. To see if it can be harnessed for the benefit of humankind.”

“The elimination of death,” I said with realization.

“But more than that, Lazaro, humans would virtually never age.”

“My God, Pearl. We’re talking about…”

“…The Fountain of Youth.” she said, finishing my thought.

ON THE RUN.

News that someone could actually kill a zombie by destroying the brain was a shock to me. I had always thought it was just a Hollywood story ploy that allowed the movie heroes to win. But Mr. Nez was now telling me that my life was truly in danger, that the Juan de Oñate group of zombies was after me, that I had to go into hiding.

“Why does Oñate want to kill me?” I asked.

“Oñate has five zombie bloodlines of non-human eating zombies at war with him–La Familia. You represent another, sixth, zombie mutant line. You represent the many descendants that can potentially go to war with Oñate and his army of zombies. If he kills you now, that problem is solved.”

“So it’s nothing personal,.” I said, taking it all in.

“It’s a matter of numbers,” Mr. Nez explained as we drove south on Huntington Drive. We passed Eastern Avenue and I had a memory flash of a dead cat I once found there, right after it had been hit by a car. The body was still warm. It had tasted delicious.

“The Juan de Oñate zombies number in the tens of thousands,’ Mr. Nez went on, “we don’t know how many thousand. They’re scattered about the U.S. and Latin America– a few in Europe and other continents. Zombies that don’t eat humans, like us, also number in the tens of thousands. But we think there are more of them than us. ”

“How can that be?” I asked, trying to put it together. “Aren’t there more progenitor mutants zombies in La Familia, I mean, on our side?” I asked.

“Yes,” Mr. Nez replied. “Besides myself, there are four more. Mendoza, Villa, Sandoval and Armendáriz. And yes, you’d think there would be more offspring in La Familia than the Oñate group. But Oñate was born in 1550, the other four mutants were born later in time, in a cluster: in the late 1800s. La Familia hasn’t had as much time to reproduce as Oñate has.”

We were now driving down Broadway, going through my old neighborhood of Lincoln Heights, toward downtown Los Angeles.

The numbers thing still didn’t make sense to me. I was determined to follow the logic of it all.

“But still,” I persisted, “there are five La Familia mutant bloodlines and only one Oñate mutant line. How can he have more offspring?”

“Oñate has one advantage over the rest of us.” Mr Nez said. “He doesn’t bother to get married.”

“Huh?” I said. All the time I kept thinking in conventional human terms. Now I realized that in the zombie world, things might be different.

“Since 1608, when he died, was resurrected and realized he was a zombie, he’s been kidnapping human women, raping them and fathering zombies. He kills the mothers after the zombie child born.”

“Wow!” I said. This was pretty terrible stuff he was telling me. I envisioned a mad zombie killing women and raising zombie children over four hundred years. It made me shudder.

Mr. Nez made a left turn off of Broadway and onto College Street and then drove down an alley and parked the car behind an aged two-story building.

“Come on,” he said, “we have to take a little walk .” He locked the car and we headed out on foot. Before long we were walking along Alameda street and soon arrived at Olvera Street.

“We’re here,” he said. He led me to one of the shuttered storefronts of Olvera Street–it was almost one o’clock in the morning and the street was entirely deserted. Mr. Nez opened the door to the storefront with an old style skeleton key.

Once inside, he didn’t turn on the light. He seemed to know this place quite well. In the darkness I heard him walk across the room and then I saw a door open. He flipped a switch and light suddenly appeared, coming from steps leading down into a basement.

“This way,” he said.

As I followed him down the steps, a question was still nagging at me. We came to another door, this one looking really old. I expected him to pull out another ancient key , but instead he placed the palm of his hand on the metal plate covering a small metallic box secured next to the door entrance. The metal plate clicked and swung open. Inside the metal box was a sophisticated keypad in the metal box. The pad was full of strange symbols. Mr. Nez’s finger flew over the keypad and I heard another click as the door opened.

“Welcome to your new home,” Mr. Nez said. He motioned for me to enter. But before I did I had to ask him the question that had been nagging at me.

“Mr. Nez,” I said, “WHY is Oñate doing all of this? Why is he so intent on fathering so many zombie children?”

“Lazaro,” Mr. Nez replied, “Oñate is fathering an army of zombies. When his army is ready, he intends on doing away with La Familia and then subjugate the human race.”

“Subjugate?” I asked.

“Oñate master plan is to conquer the human race and breed human beings as food for his race of zombies.”

MY NEW WORLD

“Mijo! Que has hecho?”

My mother’s anguished voice ringing through the apartment jarred me out of my thoughts on the taste of human blood I had been savoring. I ran out of my room and found ‘ama standing by the front door, two bags of groceries in her arms, looking in horror at the ransacked living room.

“Que has hecho?” she repeated accusingly. She looked me in the eye.

“Mom, “ I replied, taking the bags from her arms and placing them on the couch. “It wasn’t me that did all of this. We’ve been attacked, we’ve been ransacked!”

She walked into hallway and saw that the damage extended to the kitchen and to her bedroom. She returned in a moment, in shock.

“Quien, mijo?” She asked. “Who did this to us?”

“Don’t know, mom.”

Then her eyes focused on the writing on the living room wall

“Que es “mutant?” She asked. Then she took in the destruction of the whole apartment. Suddenly her demeanor changed.

“Lazaro!” she said with determination. “You tell me what the hell is going on right now this minute!”

I realized that, La Familia or not, I’d better ‘fess up to ‘ama and let her know what was going on.

“‘Ama,” I said, “Sientate. I have some things to tell you about.”

I spent the next half hour filling her in on the whole story about the zombie underworld. About how La Señora Falcón had been sent to resurrect me from the dead at age five. This was big news to my mom. She thought it had been HER idea. And then all about the society of Latino zombies headed by Mr. Nez. She interrupted me then.

“Only Latino zombies?”

“Only people with Native American blood in them,” I explained, “can get the mutant zombie gene. That means, Mexicans, Latin Americans, and of course Native Americans. ”

I gradually worked my way to explaining that there was a war going on between La Familia and the Juan de Oñate zombies.

“And it was one of them that did this?” She said, pointing to the living room.

“I think so, ‘ama.”

“Why do they want to hurt you, mijo?”

“Mom, I guess I’m kind of special..in a weird sort of way. I’m supposed to be an original mutant of some kind. And this Juan de Oñate group don’t like it. I think they may want to do me harm.”

“Dios mio!” She exclaimed. Then I saw that look of determined resolve I had come to recognize in her throughout my childhood.

“Mijo,” she said. “When you passed away as a little mocoso, I went to great pains to resurrect you from the dead. And all these years I have raised and protected you. I’ve kept your identity secret. No damn Juan de Oñate, or any hijo de su Juan de Oñate is going to hurt you! Not as long as your mama is here!”

I had to embrace her then, and I gave her a big kiss. Mom’s can be so cool!

But I realized then that I needed a game plan. Obviously my cover was blown. As I looked once more at the words written in human blood on the living room wall, I realized that someone wanted me dead. Juan de Oñate zombie or anyone else, it didn’t matter. But I’m already dead! I’m a zombie. So what did they mean by “die mutant?” One thing was clear, we couldn’t stay in the apartment anymore. I needed help. My mom must have read my mind.

“Mijo, we need help. Do you think this Mr. Nez can help us?”

“We’re going to find out. ‘ama,” I said. ”I’m going to make a phone call. Give me a second.”

I went into the hallway that connected the living room with the two bedrooms and the kitchen and dialed the number that Mr. Neza had given me, “in case of an emergency.”

If this wasn’t an emergency I didn’t what was.

The phone rang several times before it was finally answered. Then it was a recording.

“You have reached Worldwide Movers. Whether it’s across town or across the nation, we deliver it in tip-top shape and on time! Please leave a message and your phone number and one of our agents will return your call.”

I looked again at the number on the piece of paper. Neatly written in Mr. Neza’s hand was the exact number I had dialed. What was this? The beep prompter sounded on the answer machine.

“Er, I’m looking for Mr. Nez. This is Lazaro De La Tierra. Could you please call me back at…”

Suddenly a voice came onto the line.

“Lazaro? This is Mr. Nez.”

“I thought I had the wrong number.”

“We have that recording for security purposes. What’s wrong?”

“Oh gee, Mr. Nez.” I said, “you should see the apartment!” I explained what had happened to Mr. Nez. There was a moment of silence at the other end of the phone after I finished.

“Lazaro, you and your mother are in serious danger,” he finally said. “Here’s what you must do. First, lock the doors. Then you and your mother pack enough clothes for a week. I’ll be by in about twenty minutes with La Señora Falcón. I’m going to take you into hiding but you’ll have to be separated form your mom for a few days. Your mom will be staying with La Señora Falcón where she’ll be safe.”

With that he hung up. I didn’t waste any time explaining what we had to do to my mom. I went into the bedroom threw some underwear, socks, my toothbrush, my walkman and some classical music cds and my diary into a duffel bag. Twenty minutes later, my ‘ama and I were waiting by the front door, she with a small suitcase of clothing. In spite of myself I was hungry and was snacking on the last of cold cat entrails in the refrigerator.

“How long must we be away from the apartment,” my mom asked.

“Don’t know, ‘ama. Till it’s safe I guess.”

“Whatever I takes, mijo, anything to keep you safe. Estos cabrones!”

Suddenly it hit me that me that we were on the brink of a radical change in our lives.

“‘Ama,” I said. As much to myself as to her. “We have to act differently now. We have to change our lives completely. We’re in a new world now. Our lives depend on it.”

She stared at me for a long moment. Then she kissed me on the cheek.

“I love you, mijo.” she said. “I’ll always be here for you.”

“I love you too mom. Not to worry. We’ll get through this, don’t worry.”

Just then I heard cars pull up outside the apartment. I looked out the living room window and saw Mr. Nez standing by the open driver’s door of his car. La Señora Falcón had gotten out of her car and was walking up the stairs to the apartment. I opened the door for her.

“Lazaro!” She said, looking me over. “Are you alright?”

I nodded.

Then she look over at my mom. They stared at each other for a long moment. Then La Señora Falcón went over and embraced my mother. They held each other tightly.

“Hortencia!” My mother said. This was news to me. My mom knew her first name, something she had denied when I had asked her before.

“Becky, please forgive me,” La Señora Falcón said.

“But you said this would never happen,” my mom said. And this really threw me. What, exactly, would never happen? What had my mom been keeping from me all these years?”

“It was all for the good of the child. We have a lot to catch up on. You’ll be safe with me.”

Then suddenly, La Señora Falcón was all business. She turned to me

“You go with Mr. Nez. I’ll take care of your mom.”

I turned and hugged my mother.

“Go now!” Mrs. Falcón said urgently.

I turned and ran down the steps, taking them two at a time. I jumped into the passenger side of the car and Mr. Nez immediately started it up and drove away.

“My mom will be okay, right?” I asked him.

“Don’t worry Lazaro,” he replied. “We’ve done this before. The important thing now is to get you to a safe place. Someplace where they can’t harm you.”

“That’s what I don’t understand,” I said. “What can they do to me? I’m already dead. It’s not as if I can be killed again.”

Mr. Nez suddenly pulled the car to the side of the road. He turned to me.

“Lazaro,” Mr Nez said somberly, “listen very carefully. Yes, you CAN be killed again. Any of us can be killed. And when we die, it’s permanent. No more resurrections.”

“But how?” I asked incredulously.

“A bullet to your brain, or an axe to your skull will kill you just as it would any human being.”

“The brain!” I said. In a flash I remembered all the zombie movies I had seen.

“But I thought that was only in the zombie movies.”

“I’m afraid it’s one thing the movies got right. The Oñate group is hunting you. And if they find you they will kill you for certain.”

With that he started up the car again. We drove off in silence–into my new life as a zombie on the run.

ATTACK!

It was eleven at night when I got off the bus at the corner of Huntington Drive and Poplar Blvd and started out on the familiar five block walk to my home on Sheffield Street. My head was spinning as I considered the events of the evening. First off, meeting Mr. Nez, head of La Familia, a secret society of several thousand zombies living under the radar in the United States. Oh, they don’t eat humans like you see in the movies. As near as I can tell, these are the good guys.

Then the troubling news that there exists a human eating group of zombies, headed by the patriarch Juan de Oñate– the bad guys for sure. The Oñate human-eating zombies are at war with the La Familia group of zombies that had rescued me as a child and had safeguarded me during my childhood without me even knowing it.

Lastly, the revelations about my own identity. Apparently, there have been only six distinct zombie mutants in history, six zombie bloodlines. All the rest of the living zombies are their descendants. Oñate is one of the six, Mr. Nez another.

And then there is me.

According to La Familia, I’m supposed to be the new mutant on the block. Only the seventh human being that has been born with the zombie mutant gene. And everyone realizes that I can be the progenitor of yet another line of zombies. And they wondering, does this kid do the human-eating thing? Will he beget generations of human eating zombies or is he like us?

Hey, that’s a lot to think about for a seventeen year old Chicanito from El Sereno.

Earlier, at the La Familia meeting, after la Señora Falcón had finished her report, there were other reports to be heard. Some alluded to Mission Poderosa. From what I could gather some sort of scientific medical research that was supposed to transform the world as we know it. Pearl promised to fill me on the details the next day at Wilson High School. Mr. Nez concluded the meeting with a peculiar caution.

“Hermanos y hermanas” he had said, “be wary. Look over your shoulder. Remember that we are all potential targets.”

I was wondering about Mr. Nez’s words when I walked up the stairs to our second story duplex apartment and knew instantly something was wrong. The hand carved Mano Poderosa symbol, which ‘ama had secured to the side of the front door of everyplace we had lived, was gone.

At the top of landing I saw something else that alarmed me. The front door was ajar. When I had left for the zombie meeting earlier in the day, I had locked the door securely. The lights were on in the apartment, but whenever mom was home, she always kept the door locked. There was no reason for the door to be open.

I cautiously walked into the living room and stopped in my tracks. I felt the air suck out of me as I took in the sight before me. The living room was completely trashed. Furniture was upset, my ‘ama’s photos and ceramic bric-brac were broken and strewn about the room. The curtains had been torn down from the windows and on the wall, clumsily written in red were the words, “Die Mutant!”

Mutant! Someone knew who I was.

As if in a trance, I walked through the apartment. I checked the bathroom, my mom’s bedroom, the back washroom, the kitchen. Each room was equally ransacked. When I entered my own room I saw that all the bureau drawers were spilled onto the floor. My zombie posters and photo of César Chávez were all torn down from my wall. My school books, and rat tail collection were all scattered about the room. And on the wall, the same message in red, “Die Mutant!”

“‘Ama!” I cried, “ ‘Ama! Are you here?”

There was no response. I looked at my watch. It was 11:20 PM. My mom got off of work at 9PM. She should have been home by now. Where was she?

“‘Ama!” I cried again. I raced through the apartment and checked each room again. She was not here.

I could feel my heart pounding as I consciously forced myself to sit down and think this through. What had occurred here?

I checked the living room for the TV, it was still there. The stereo, still there. Then I checked under my ‘ama’s mattress, where she kept her emergency money. The bundle of $20 bills was still there. A simple burglar would have taken all of this. This was no burglary.

And there was the message they had left.

I walked back to my bedroom and examined the message on the wall closely. It was red because, I now saw, it was painted in blood. I brushed my finger across the “D” in “Die”and tasted it. I knew what animal blood tasted like. This was different. I looked down at the blood on my finger as it suddenly hit me that this was human blood! I ran my tongue across my lips, savoring the blood.

“No!” I screamed.

It was not the terrible trashing of the house, or the terrible intent of the message on the wall that revolted me. It was the question that Pearl had asked me earlier in the evening. “Everyone wants to know are you one of us or one of them. Will you kill human beings to satisfy your zombie urges?”

I had just tasted human blood for the first time. And I wanted more!

THE WATCH

The meeting of La Familia, the secret society of Zombies, began with Mrs. Falcón rising from her seat to address the gathering. There were two hundred of us there. She took a moment to look over several sheets of papers she held in her hand. Then she turned and smiled in my direction. She was looking directly at me.

She knew me!

“Tonight is an exciting night for me,” she said to the audience. “As you know from my weekly Watch reports, for many years we have been monitoring several younger zombies. Last year we introduced you to Pearl Gonzales and she is now an active member of La Mano Poderosa. Tonight we welcome another young person, someone The Watch has been monitoring since he was five years old. You all know him from my reports. I present to you… Lazaro de la Tierra.” She turned and smiled at me.

“Lazaro, please stand up, ” she said.

I felt a lump in my throat and couldn’t move. All these years I had been trying to find La Señora Falcón, the elusive midwife to my resurrection. And now here she was in the flesh, and introducing me to my new family of fellow zombies. My heart was thumping and my mouth dry. I couldn’t move.

Finally, Pearl pinched my arm. “Stand up, menso!”

I stood up and turned to face the room. Suddenly everyone in the room started to applaud. Soon the two hundred or more people were standing up from their seats and clapping their hands. Above the din of the applause I could hear individual voices, “Welcome Lazaro!” “Finally great to meet you!” “You’re going to love your new family!” “We’re here for you!”

I smiled and sheepishly waved to the entire room.

“You can sit down now,” Pearl said. And I did.

“What’s The Watch?

“La Familia has a team of observers who monitor all known or suspected zombies. We watch over them, make sure they don’t get into trouble. Eventually, when they die and are resurrected, we pull them into the group–like we did with you.”

“You’ll all be able to meet him after the meeting.” Mrs. Falcon continued as the applause died down. “We must proceed. First up I want to give thumbnail reports on several of the chrysalis we have been watching.

Pearl nudged me and whispered in my ear.

“Chrysalis are people who are zombies but don’t yet know it. Some are young like you and me, but others are already adults. They won’t know they’re zombies till they die. That’s when La Familia steps in.”

Mrs. Falcon proceeded to read of a list of names. After each name she commented on the status of the particular zombie.

“All of these chrysalis have been introduced to the Mano Podersa in subtle ways,” she said.. “We expect that when the time comes they will be receptive to our intervention due to this careful preconditioning.”

“The Mano Poderosa, the open palmed hand, “ Pearl whispered to me, “it’s a familiar symbol that we introduce to zombies who don’t know they are zombies yet. We get them used to the symbol. When these zombies “die” and then are resurrected it’s the first thing they see. That’s when our emissaries step in and begin the job of explaining all of this to people like you and me.

I recalled what La Señora Falcón had said to me in her letter.

“The butterfly emerges when the time is right,” I said out loud. Pearl turned to me and nodded her head knowingly.

“I am happy to report,” La Señora Falcón went on, “that we detected two new children zombies this week. One in San Antonio and one in Almagordo, New Mexico.”

Someone in the audience raised a hand to speak.

“Does this support the pattern we’ve seen emerging in younger zombies?”

“We can’t say for sure,” Mrs. Falcón replied, “It may just be an anomaly. But on the surface it does look like we’re see more resurrections among the young. The folks at the Mano Poderosa Center are doing studying this now.”

I gave Pearl a questioning look.

“The Mano Poderosa Center,” she said, “is the big project that the entire group has been working on for the past forty years. We call it Mission Poderosa.”

“What is it exactly?” I whispered back.

“Later, I’ll tell you later,” Pearl said. “It’s complicated.”

In the audience someone else raised a hand and La Señora Falcón acknowledged him.

“Señora, does this mean that there are more of us being discovered each year?

“Yes,.” she replied. “Exactly. The staff at the Mano Poderosa Center have done a statistical analysis and seem convinced that each year more and more zombies are being born and that is why we are detecting them earlier.”

The man who had spoken looked really Caucasian. He stood out among the brown skinned Latinos in the room.

I leaned over to Pearl.“I though the zombie gene pool was only Latinos?” I said.

“No,” she corrected me, “only people with Native American blood. That’s Mr. Johnson, he’s 25% Cherokee. Apparently that’s enough Native American blood to kick in the zombie gene, cause he’s one of us”

Now the question that had been bothering me all night suddenly went away. Mr, Brown, my old boy scout leader, must have Native American blood in him as well.

“Do we know how many are being born to the Oñate line?’

A hush fell over the room.

I didn’t know what was going on. What did he mean by the Oñate line? And why did it upset everyone so.

“The Oñate line,” Pearl said, seeing my confusion, “is one of the distinct zombie blood lines. It was started by Juan de Oñate when he died in Spain in 1626.”

“The conquistador?” I asked.

“Yep,” Pearl replied. “Turns out he was an original mutant. But he and his descendants have gone crazy.”

“Huh?”

“The Oñate blood line broke away from La Familia about a hundred years ago. They have become our arch enemies. We’re at war with them.”

Boy, this was news to me. There was a war between the zombies?

“Why a war?” I asked.

“Everyone in this room belongs to one or another of the five zombie family lines. Daughters, sons–all descendants from the five original mutant zombies. We all eat carrion and the raw body parts of all manner of creatures. But there is one thing we don’t do.”

“And what’s that?” I asked.

“Eat human flesh,” she said. “The Oñate line craves human flesh and their members purposefully kill people to get it,. That’s why we are at war.”

Boy that shut me up for a while.

“To answer your question,” Mrs. Falcon continued, “We don’t know how many new zombies are being born into the Oñate line. We hope that it is not many.”

“And that’s why everyone is so interested in you,” Pearl said in my ear.

“Huh?” I said turning to her.

“You are a new mutant line,. So everyone wants to know are you one of us or one of them. Will you kill human beings to placate your zombie urges?”

ZOMBIE CANAPÉS

The first thing that struck me as we walked through the wide open doors into the ancient Zombie meeting hall was the smell. An overwhelming scent of death permeated with the more subtle nuance of rotting meat. I immediately recognized the familiar aroma of cow brains and intestines, and of rotting carrion.

The meeting hall itself was enormous, the size of a large gymnasium. Large wooden arches at each corner of the rectangular room, elaborately carved with the Open Palm symbol, drew your eyes to ancient murals that had been painted on the domed ceiling. Antique cadenzas, bureaus and side tables were arranged flush against each wall. Large ancient tapestries also bearing the Open Palm symbol hung from ceiling to floor on each wall. There appeared to be no windows and the room was dark, lit only by heirloom chandeliers that hung throughout the hall.

At the far end of the hall, folding chairs were arranged in rows in an assembly area. Three folding chairs were situated on a raised dias in front of the folding chairs. At our end of the hall, there were perhaps two hundred people milling about, all talking to one another at once. Many people were standing near two large rectangular tables near the center of the room, snacking on the wide variety of finger-foods assembled on platters.

“Come this way, Lazo,” Pearl said. “The hors d’oeuvre here are really good.”

She led me over to the nearest table. It was the first time I had seen so much zombie food in one place. Bowls of deep freshly cut rat tails, canapes of marinated cow eyeballs on slices of cat tongue, trays of pigeon head kabobs, cow brain spread on mini-toasts and lots of raw liver, intestine and kidney slices. And, of course, pitchers of fresh cow, cat and pig blood.

Pearl jumped in and started piling a small canape plate with one each of the items offered. I followed her lead. Before long we were chomping on the most delicious zombie food I had ever eaten!

“Lazo, you probably don’t remember it but one time I caught you eating a cow brain taco. Remember that?”

“Sure,” I replied, “We were eight. I do remember that moment. I was so embarrassed thinking you’d think I was a savage and wouldn’t want to be my friend.”

“On the contrary! The cow brains looked so good all I wanted to do was sit down and eat them with you! But then that might have given me away. You might have guessed…”

“That you were a zombie.” I finished for her. “Did you know all along that I was a zombie?”

“Not at all. Not until you came out to me last week.”

“Life sure is funny, eh?” I said, finishing my plate of hors d’oeuvres.

Just then I heard a voice call my name from behind me.

“Lazaro!”

Who would know me here? I turned and there, walking toward me through the crowd, was Mrs. Gonzalez, the librarian from the Lincoln Heights Library!

“Mrs. Gonzalez?” I asked.

“Yes, Lazaro. It’s me.”

I couldn’t believe what this meant.

“You’re… a zombie?”

“Yes. But like you I had to keep it all secret. Remember me telling you that you were special? I couldn’t tell you anything more then. But here in La Familia, we can be open and be our true zombie selves. Welcome, mijo. Welcome to your new family!”

Then another voice joined out conversation.

“Yes, Lazaro, welcome to your new family.” I turned to see a man standing next to me.

“Remember me?”He asked. There was no mistaking it.

“Mr. Brown. From Boy Scout Troop 22!”

“That’s right, Lazaro. Now you know why I had to tell you that I was kicking you out of the Troop for stealing.”

Suddenly the memory of being kicked out of Troop 22 came rushing back to me. Mr. Brown had accused me of stealing from the Troop treasury and, of course I was innocent. But he wouldn’t believe me. I had been so traumatized that I had cried for days and had never told anyone about it.

“I never stole anything, Mr. Brown.” I said firmly.

“Oh dear Lazaro, I do owe you an apology,” Mr. Brown said, putting his hand on my shoulder and looking me in the eyes.

“You see some of the kids in the troop were beginning to suspect you were different. We in La Familia couldn’t risk you being discovered. So I made up the stealing story so I could get you out of the Troop in a plausible way that the other kids wouldn’t suspect.”

“That’s why I was kicked out, to protect my zombie identity?”

“We had to, Lazaro. I’m truly sorry. We’ve been keeping an eye on you all your life.”

“More than once we’ve saved you from being discovered, ” Mr. Gonzalez said.

“Like that phony doctor’s note your mom dreamed up.” Mr. Brown continued. “That wouldn’t have worked for a minute to keep you out of gym class had it not been for the phone calls one of our doctors made to stress that you had a serious health condition that was not outwardly apparent.”

Wow! I was overwhelmed by these revelations. Mrs. Gonzalez and Mr. Brown both zombie! All my life I thought I had been alone, keeping my zombie identity a secret through my own wits. And now it turns out I had been constantly under the watch and protection of people I didn’t even know.

This was deep.

Just then a voice came over the loudspeaker. “Pleases take your seats. We’re going got begin the meeting.”

“This way, Lazaro,’ Pearl said. “They want us up front for your introduction.” Pearl and I found seats in the front row of folding chairs. As everyone was being seated, Mr. Nez entered from a side door followed by an elderly woman and a man in his thirties. They took seats in the chairs on the dias. When the people in the room spotted Mr. Nez, everyone stopped talking and a silence fell over the room. I was impressed by the respect he commanded.

“First up,” Mr. Nez said, “we’ll have the Watch Report from Mrs. Falcón. Señora, you have the floor.”

The elderly woman who had come in with Mr. Nez rose to address the room.

La Señora Falcón! I had found her at last!

WHO AM I?

“Progenitor.”

The word spoken by the Zombie elder Mr. Nez stuck in my head. A silence fell over the large office as Mr. Nez and Pearl looked to one another.

I was desperately trying to make sense of it all. Progenitor. The seed of the zombie race that allows us to come back from the dead. And he was telling me I was one of them. So he seemed to believe. And, of course, that just opened up more questions for me.

“How do you know I am a progenitor?”

“DNA,” Mr. Nez replied.

“Huh?’

“La Familia tracks all known zombies,” he continued. “We get DNA samples and compare them to the Familia DNA pool. We know we have six distinct family lines, originating from the six progenitors we know of.”

“Six progenitors?”

“Yes, I was the first, to our knowledge. Since then we have had five more born. Two in Mexico, one in the 1500s and one at the time of the 1910 Revolution. Another in Peru, one in Chile, and another one here in the US.

“And you think I am one?”

“Perhaps. We’re puzzled by your DNA..”

“What I don’t have DNA?”

“Of course you do. But your DNA represents a seventh family line we have no record of. We’ve never encountered your DNA line before. That’s why we think you’re an original, a progenitor.”

“A human mutant?” I said, still trying struggling to get a handle on the concept.

“Yes.”

Mr. Nez was wise enough to allow me some thinking time. Pearl could see me struggling and took my hand, gave it a squeeze, and then let go. I welcomed the reassurance. Then a thought occurred to me.

“Mr. Nez. Doesn’t my father and mother enter into this in any way? I mean, DNA and all?”

“Your mom is not a zombie. Just an ordinary Mexican American. We checked that out first thing.”

“And my dad?”

“We don’t know. We’ve been looking for your dad since he left your mom. We haven’t found him.”

“Who IS my dad?’

“His name is Cesar De La Tierra. Beyond that we don’t know a whole lot. We tried background searches–we have our own private investigators. We’ve found no history. Nothing before he met your mom and once he left, he seems to have vanished from the face of this earth.”

“That can’t be. My mom never spoke much about him but…”

“We were hoping you could help us here. Perhaps you can discreetly ask your mother about how she met your dad, where he came from, where he might have gone. To our knowledge she only knew him for a few days.”

“A few days!”

Mom never wanted to talk about my dad. Whenever I asked about him, she changed the subject. I presumed it was because he had hurt her. But now I was feeling really uneasy. All this time I had just thought my mom and my dad met, fallen in love, gotten married, and after a suitable time had me. I presumed that when didn’t work out between them, my dad had left. All of this while I was still a baby. I never imagined she had just met him and then just…had me. Was my mother keeping something from me?

Damn it, who was I really, anyway?

Just then there was a knock at the door.

“Yes,” Mr. Nez said.

A man poked his head in the door.

“Mr. Nez, we’ll be ready to start soon.”

“We’ll be in–just a moment.” Mr, Nez replied. Then he turned to me.

“Lazaro, I know I’ve given you a lot to think about. But there’ll be time enough for us to discuss these things later. Now it’s time for the meeting. Let’s go going, there are members of the familia who are anxious to see you again.”

My family? All these seventeen years I had been a loner. A misfit. My only family had been my mom. Now this man was telling me I had another family, a zombie family. And who were these people that dared to call me family? And what had he said?

“Again?” I asked.

“It’ll all make sense in a minute.” he replied. Then he turned to Pearl. “You sit with Lazaro and fill him in on what’s going on during the meeting.

Pearl nodded.

“Come on, Lazo,” she said. She took my hand and looked me in the eye. “Lazo, there’s nothing to be afraid of. I’ll be here for you.”

With that she led me down the hallway and into a large meeting hall–into a future I could never have imagined.

MORE REVELATIONS.

Mr. Neza led us down a dark hallway to another door. He opened it and led Pearl and I down steep steps. At the bottom was a long corridor. But this corridor was much more fancy. Carpeted floor, photos on the hallway walls, ornate overhead lighting from another era.

He opened a door to an office.

“Come in, sit down,” he said.

Pearl and I took seats in front of a beautiful old hand-crafted wooden desk. I looked around the office and saw it was filled with lamps, books, ornaments and furniture from many different time periods. There was a moment of silence as Mr. Neza settled into the chair behind the desk and looked me over carefully. Finally he spoke.

“Lazaro,” he said, “how much do you know about who you are?”

Well, that was getting right to the point alright!

I explained to Mr. Neza how I had died at age five, how my mother had sought out la Señora Falcón who had cast some kind of spell and raised me from the dead. I went on a little about my life since then. How I’d come to grips with my zombiness, the make-up to cover my ghastly skin pallor, the deodorant and later Pachouli to mask the smell of death. I concluded with a report of the changes that I had been undergoing more recently, the changes that made me look more human, what Pearl called zombie puberty.

“Lazaro,” Mr. Neza said quietly, “you got some of that right. But there’s a lot you’re mistaken about. It’s time for you to know the truth. First off, la Señora Falcón did not “resurrect” you.”

“Huh?” This was a total surprise to me.

“But my mother said they went out to the Evergreen cemetery and La Señora Falcóm cast a spell and then they dug me up. She’s told me that all my life!”

“Yes, and she believes it. And it is true that your mother and La Señora Falcón DID dig you up. But there was no mumbo jumbo, no magic spell that brought you back to life. “

Now I was really confused.

“I don’t understand.”

“It was La Señora Falcón that sought out your mother, not the other way around. She suggested to your mother that you could be resurrected and that she could do it She did this because she knew, WE KNEW, that you would be resurrected anyway.”

“Anyway?”

“Lazaro, your resurrection was the result of who you are. You were born with a mutant gene, a zombie gene. When you died, the zombie gene kicked in and resurrected you.”

“A zombie gene?” This was weird.

“Exactly. No mumbo jumbo. It’s all scientific and empirical. We don’t believe in magic–just science.”

“And La Señora Falcón?”

“She was our emissary. From our group, La Familia. She was there to make sure you didn’t spend weeks digging yourself out of your coffin. She arranged for your transition into some semblance of a normal life. Her main job was to help your mother understand your condition and become comfortable with raising you as a zombie.”

I was having problems taking all of this in.

“Wait a minute. Zombies are mutants?”

“That’s who we are. We’re totally human until we die. Then the zombie gene gets activated and we come back to life.”

“So some zombies live to be old?”

“Many of us live out long lives before we die and come back to life. Quite a shock for most of us. You and Pearl here are among the youngest zombies we’ve seen resurrected.”

I turned to Pearl and took her in with a new appreciation. She smiled back at me.

“And you’ve known about me all this time, then?”

“Yes. We’ve been keeping a careful watch on you. Protecting you. Making sure you were never found out.”

My head was trying to understand and absorb the implications of this new information,

“How many of us are there?” I asked.

“Several hundred now. Mainly here, in Mexico and in South America.”

“There’s no zombies in the rest of the world?”

“Not that we know of. We think it has to do with the Native American gene pool that we all derive from. We’ve run tests. Scientific–no mumbo jumbo.”

Then the question I wanted confirmation on.

“How long has this been going on? How long have we been going on?”

“We think I’m the eldest zombie. At least the eldest we know. I was born in 1402.”

“But you don’t age!”

“Some of us can change our appearance. That’s why I look so young now. You’ll find out about that later. The important thing is that you are with us now. We’re your new family and we will help you adapt to your new life in many ways.”

“Why are you doing all of this for me?”

“Lazaro. You are one of us. We help each other.”

There was a moment of silence. I noticed that Pearl was giving Mr. Nez an inquiring look. Like he was leaving something out of his explanation. I took Pearl’s cue.

“Is there anything else I should know?”

I could see Mr. Nez was deciding on how much more to tell me.

“He needs to now,” Pearl said firmly.

“Yes, he does,” Mr. Nez agreed. “Lazaro, we’re also very interested in you for one other important reason. You’re a very , very special person.

“How so?” I asked.

“Once you’re a zombie, you never die. But most zombies are sterile. They can’t have offspring. But a few rare zombies CAN procreate. They can have zombie children, they can keep the race of zombies going. We call them progenitors.”

“Progenitor,” I repeated, savoring the word. “How many of these progenitors exist?”

“To our knowledge there have only been six progenitors born since 1402. I am one of them, the eldest.”

“So you’ve had zombie kids?”

“Many. Some of the people you will meet later tonight are my children. Lazaro, we’ve taken a special interested in you because we think that YOU may be a progenitor.”

MR. NEZ

After Pearl told me she was a zombie like me all I wanted to do was spend long hours with her, comparing notes, finding out about her zombiness and about my own. I had a million questions! But she had insisted that we not be seen together until the secret meeting of the zombie group. So I kept my word. And, of course, the week dragged on interminably.

Then, on Thursday, I was walking through the crowded hallway in the Four Hundred Building at Wilson High when someone bumped into me knocking my books to the floor. It was Pearl. As she helped me pick up my books she discreetly handed me a note.

“Sorry about that, ” Pearl said giving me a knowing look.

“No problem.” I replied as Pearl walked away.

I immediately went into a stall in the boy’s bathroom and read the note.

“The Mano Poderosa meeting is tomorrow night at 8PM. But Mr. Nez wants to meet with you before the meeting at 7PM. I’ll meet you at 6:30 in front of the Gazebo in Olvera Street. Pearl”

When Friday finally arrived I told my ‘ama that I was going to the downtown library and that I might be late because the buses often ran late. I had kept my promise to Pearl not to let my mom know about my discovery that there were other zombies in the world. I caught the downtown bus and got off at First and Broadway and made my way to Olvera Street.

Pearl was waiting for me the Gazebo.

“Hi, Lazo. Great to see you!” she said as I caught up with her.

“I’m really nervous.” I said.

“Nothing to be nervous about. You’ll find the other members of La Familia to be really sweet. “

“La familia?”

“Oh we kinda see ourselves as a big extended family–la familia. Come on Mr. Nez is waiting.”

“And who is he?”

“Oh, I guess if we’re a family, he could call him the papa or the boss or our fearless leader.”

“Is he the guy who started the group? I asked

“Yes.”

I remembered Pearl had said about the group.

“I thought you said the group was five hundred years old?” I asked her.

“It is.”

“Then how can this Mr. Nez have started it?”

“Lazo, Mr. Nez doesn’t look it but he is really, REALLY old. No one knows exactly how old, but he talks about events in ancient Mexican history like they happened yesterday.”

“What does he do?”

“He runs the corporation?”

“There’s a corporation?”

“We’re getting ahead of things. Just hold your questions till you meet him. He’s the one who’s supposed to tell you everything. And he’s waiting for us so we should go.”

With that she started out in the direction of City Hall. We walked for about six blocks before we came to an ally off of Spring and Fourth Street.

“It’s this way,” Pearl said, looking around to make sure no one saw us enter the alley.

The alley was empty except for trash dumpsters stacked against the brick walls of the old downtown buildings. The only other thing in the alley, not far from us, was a beat-up car with a homeless man inside.

Pearl saw me checking out the homeless guy.

“That’s Robert, our lookout. He’s not really homeless. His day job is head of Security at Twentieth Century Fox.”

We walked past the car and Pearl waved at the man in the driver’s seat. He looked up from his laptop. I peeked in and saw that the laptop was filled with images from a dozen surveillance cameras monitoring the entire area around the alley. He smiled at us.

“You can ago on in,” he said.

Pearl led me past the car to the adjacent building with a plain-looking wooden door. I noticed that a small open palmed hand was displayed at the bottom of the wooden door and a small surveillance camera discreetly placed above the door.

Before Pearl could knock on the door, it opened and a heavy-set man who looked to be about fifty years of age motioned us in.

“Mr. Nez,” Pearl said, “This Lazaro.”

The man closed the door behind us and turned to me. He took a long moment to size me up. Then he nodded and a smile crept across his face. He shook my hand warmly.“Welcome to the family, Lazaro. Come in. We have a lot to talk about.”

MORE REVELATIONS.

Pearl and I stood for a long silent moment in front of the One Hundred building at Wilson High. Around us a few students walked by, on their way to their Mexican American normal lives in normal homes in normal El Sereno. They’d do normal homework then have a normal dinner with their normal families. Afterwards would watch some normal TV. And the next day, they’d do it all over again.

But for me, my life had suddenly changed.

It just taken a very, very ABNORMAL turn. Pearl has said “us.” That meant that what I had a suspected for so long was true. There were other zombies in the world beside me.

“There are more of us?” I Asked Pearl.

“Oh, Lazo, many more.” She replied with kindness. She could see what a shock all this news was to me.

“But…you?”

“Yes, of course! Why do you think my parents didn’t want me to have any friends? They were afraid I’d be found out.”

“That story about your parents not allowing you to be my friend because I was Protestant and you were Catholic…?

“Just a cover story. I told any Protestant boy or girl who wanted to be my friend that I was Catholic, and the ones that were Catholics, I told them I was Protestant. The whole idea was not to let anyone get to know me.”

But if she was true zombie, then she must also have that smell of death about her.

“The smell?”

“That’s what first clued me into you, Lazo. When I saw you the other day for the first time in years, I smelled your Patchouli.”

“Yeah, I used it to mask the smell…”

“…of death.” She stopped then and looked around, self-conscious that someone passing by might hear us. She motioned for me over to a quiet side of the building. By now most of the students had left the area. We were alone.

“I use strong perfume to mask my death smell. When I smelled your Patchouli I could still make out a faint whiff of death. And then when you asked about the mano poderosa..

“Mano poderoso?” I interrupted her.

“That’s what we call the open palmed hand symbol. Anyway, when you asked about it I knew you must be one of us. But I didn’t know how much you knew.”

“Honestly, Pearl, I don’t know anything. I’ve been trying to track down La Señora Falcón who brought me back to life when I was five years old. But she doesn’t seem to want to be found. I thought I saw one zombie kid months ago, but that was it.”

“There’s a lot you need to know. I’m so glad I got permission to tell you.”

“Permission?”

“When I told Mr. Nez that I though you might be one of us. He said I should approach you and find out, but to be very careful. Now you can come to our meetings and he’ll explain it all to you.”

“Meetings?”

“Yes, we meet once a week. Welcome new members, report on our individual assignments, take any steps necessary to keep our secret hidden. And, of course, we work on the Mission.

“Mission?”

“Mission Poderoso.”

“What’s that?”

“Lazo, it’s bit complicated. Have you noticed some changes taking place in your body lately?

That’s when it struck me. Pearl HAD been darker skinned when I knew her as a child.

“Pearl, you were once darker skinned weren’t you?”

“Yes, of course, and so were you. But now we’re changing. I no longer have to use as much make-up to look Mexican and the smell of death is much less pronounced now.”

“What’s what’s happened to me. What’s causing it?” I asked. I really did like my earlier zombie self, make-up and all, much better than the new Lazaro.

“Oh not to worry,” Pearl replied, seeing my anxiety. “It’s normal, it’s zombie puberty. We all go through it. But you’ll be hearing all about this and so many other things at the meeting next week. In the meantime, you must promise not to say anything to anyone about this. “

“The only one I would tell is my mom. She obviously already knows I’m a zombie.”

“You can’t tell your mom about us yet. Not now. There will be a time when you can tell her everything. But for now. For now just keep all this to yourself.”

And then she unloaded a real knock-out punch to me.

“Oh, and one more thing, Lazo. For the time being, until we can come up with a good cover story. You and I must not be seen hanging out together. Just a precaution, but we haven’t remained a secret society for five hundred years by taking chances.”

The thought of not seeing Pearl for a week was devastating. I had so many questions to ask. How had Pearl died? Had she resurrected like me? How old was she when this all happened? And how did I fit into this new zombie world?

“But, I need to know more,” I told her. “I need to know who I am.”

“All in good time, Lazo. This is all that I’m allowed to tell you now. I’ll be in touch about the meeting next week. You’ll have to get there alone, but I’ll be there waiting. And I’ll introduce you to everyone.”

Then she did the unexpected. She looked around to make now one was watching and then gave me a kiss on the lips.

“Oh, Lazo, I’m so happy you are who you are! You don’t know what this means to me!”

With that Pearl turned and ran off.

I was numb. My head was reeling.

Pearl was a zombie like me and she had just given me my first kiss. And now an underground society of zombies that had existed for five hundred years? Secret meetings once a week? What was in store for me now?

12 3 »

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