Zombies vs. Unicorns Read Online Free PDF Page A

street do you live on again?” you ask.
    “It’s off of Boward. I just like to cut through here sometimes. ‘I took the one less traveled by, / And that has made all the difference.’”
    “Dylan?” you guess.
    He stops abruptly in between two trees that still have about half their leaves. His smile is sort of sad. “Robert Frost,” he says, and you don’t think this is a good time to mention that you’ve never heard of him. Probably some emo folkie like Sufjan Stevens.
    “Grayson,” he says, his hands deep in his pockets. With anyone else it’d be fidgeting, but with Jack right now, the gesture is more like
Please fuck me
.
    “Yeah?”
    Your voice is sort of a squeak. You can smell the impending sex like it’s a bum in the park.
    Then Jack goes and starts laughing again, and takes his hands out of his pockets. “It’s funny. Everyone thinks you’re weird,” he says. “But you’re all right, Grayson.”
    “Hey, you, too.”
    And you think, okay, a fuck would have been better, but you sort of like the idea of listening to this Nipponese acid trip album with him. He still smells like the best meal you’ve never tasted.
    2. Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving with a Pict
    The sad tale of how I, Philip A. Grayson, became infected with a brain-devouring prion and was subsequently partially cured.
    Part the first. I don’t know who I was. I don’t know how I caught it. The prion, I mean—this twisted, misshapen little bit of protein with even less autonomy than a virus, but onehell of a bigger punch. Ever heard of mad cow disease? They told me my prions are only found in bacteria that gestate at the bottom of landfills at high temperatures. It has to enter the host through the mucus membranes. That means it has to be drunk, snorted, dripped, or anally inserted. Yeah, I don’t want to know what the fuck I was doing either. It’s too bad, really, that I remember my name.
    Part the second. I’ve killed a lot of people. I ate all of them, brains first. Not because I live off of gray matter or something, but because that’s the best part. Don’t believe me? Just ask the Fore tribe of Papua New Guinea. They loved brains so much they nearly killed themselves with this other prion: transmissible spongiform encephalopathy. They called it kuru. Laughing sickness. Talk about dying happy.
    Part the third. My prion is too rare to have a name. Like kuru, it mods my behavior in a major way. Well, I don’t know if you noticed, but it makes me want to eat people. Most of the time it gets rid of all of its host’s higher brain functions to make the whole devouring people compulsion work better. Frontal lobes and Joy Division obsessions tend to be pretty incompatible with the sudden overpowering urge to eat your girlfriend’s eyeballs.
    Part the fourth. These scientists got to me before the mad proteins had a chance to do more than nibble. They gave me this drug that half-worked. My prions can’t reproduce, andthey can’t devour my brain, but they still rattle around in there, jumping up and down on my amygdala every time I smell a human. The prions gave me these hyperactive pheromones, so I can do this thing where I lean in and smile and people go all bug-eyed and it’s like they turn into zombies or something. Well, until I start to eat them. You’re probably wondering why these benevolent scientists would part-cure me and then let me go into the world to seduce/eat people with my mostly intact brain functions. Don’t be stupid—of course they didn’t. When they figured out what had happened, they locked me in some padded cell. I ate the security guard and escaped.
    The End
    One last thing: About that frontal lobe the parasite didn’t quite devour? I lost enough that I don’t feel too bad about killing people. The way of the jungle and all that. It only bothers me sometimes. Like when they love Joy Division. Like when they laugh.
    3. Behind Blue Eyes
    Jack’s