The Making of Zombie Wars Read Online Free PDF Page A

replicate the urinary lash, the plush dice bobbing with his movement. He’d clapped his hands following the punch line, his mouth open so wide for the roar that Joshua could see his tonsils. It was still funny: walking toward Magnolia after Bega dropped him off, Joshua kept chuckling to himself. So immersed in a vision of regaling someone with the joke was he that only as he stopped by Kimiko’s place did he realize his bike remained locked up outside Graham’s.
    He considered stopping by to see Kimmy before sleep. The glow in her bedroom window suggested she was reading. Kee-mee-ko. He relished the sound of her name, shaped exactly like her: the long legs, the curved hips, the long hair. He liked her confidence, the peace with which she made decisions. She was a child psychologist, specializing in divorce trauma. Also, molestation trauma. She’d been married once before, right out of college, to a self-professed guy named Haskell Something the Third. She mentioned him rarely, but whenever she did she referred to him as the Third. The Third liked three things: his Porsche, lacrosse, and Newt Gingrich . She never explained the role of the Third in her life, as though the marriage happened to someone else. She analyzed others, but not herself. She read Harry Potter because it helped her better understand her little patients better. She always referred to the kids as little patients .
    Joshua adored the way she laughed: she constricted her mouth, shook her head, then snorted, then exploded. He wanted to serenade her with the John Wayne joke, so he dialed her number from the street: perhaps she would invite him up for a triple-header of laughter, BJ, and full intercourse. But the network was down and his calls were repeatedly dropped and then her light went out. He would’ve rung her doorbell if it wasn’t for his fear of her finding the joke stupid. Moreover, the piss aspect of the joke put extra pressure on his buckling bladder, which now insisted that he quicken his step. That made something down there hurt. Could that be his prostate? By the time he reached his door, merely two blocks down Magnolia, his bladder was bulging to the point of bursting. The mind strives to imagine those things that increase the body’s power. Say, urination.
    He hastily unlocked his front door, dropped the keys and the phone on the table under the cracked mirror, and hurried on to the bathroom. Before he reached it, he noticed the billowing curtains in the living room; he heard the tiny peals of oriental chimes. He was almost sure he hadn’t left any windows open—it was, after all, the end of March. A deep memory of the way late-night ninjas sensed presences was consequently activated and like a ninja he did tiptoe. All flimsy skin and hollow bones, Joshua was practically weightless: he cast no shadow; the floor did not creak. The living room was empty, but dust balls led him, levitating, to his bedroom.
    No deep movie memory was available to help him decide what to do if indeed there was someone in the bedroom. Hence he became instantly paralyzed when he discovered a man kneeling on the floor, weeping with his face buried in what was, without a shred of a doubt, a pair of Joshua’s boxer shorts patterned with stars and stripes. He’d dropped the shorts in the dirty-laundry basket this morning, and there was indeed the wicker basket, pitilessly knocked over, and there was the rest of his dirty underwear lined up on the floor for some perverse inspection. The man’s ponytail was tightly pulled back, fluttering in concert with his sobs; he wore a sleeveless denim jacket, so that the tattoo of an eagle with the earth in its talons was blazingly visible on his sinewy biceps. I know this man, Joshua realized—for a fleeting micromoment, the realization was soothing.
    â€œStagger! What the fuck are you doing?”
    Stagger leapt to his feet and charged toward the open window, managing to wipe away