He looked up as if he’d forgotten I was there. “Yeah, yeah, but I think we should go for a little walk. Do you feel up to it?” I nodded before realizing he was talking to my mom. She just waved us on, one hand over her mouth, unable to speak.

We left her in her chair and started slowly walking around the deserted little town. Dad seemed especially vigilant, looking left and right before we went anywhere. I assumed he was just more worried than usual about my safety. There were few lights out, and we almost missed a dim path that led up some stone steps and down into the auditorium of some tree-filled city park. He silently strolled around the auditorium, and I followed, figuring he’d start speaking when he felt like it. At the top of a small hill, he found a bench that was mostly in the dark. He sat down and pulled out a pack of Camels. He hadn’t smoked since I was a toddler.

“So, this outbreak – as they’re calling it now, especially the conspiracy types – got bad quickly. The hospitals started filling up before anyone realized it, and no one thought to talk to each other, not that earlier detection of the spread of the sickness would have done much. By the time you realized it was time to get out of the country all the flights were overbooked and beginning to get canceled. Luckily, you thought early enough to try to go to the embassy, and ended up in an American-run quarantine. If you had been sent to one of the hospitals down there, what, with the complete lack of communication, especially after the military took control… we’d have never heard from you again.

“We had gotten in contact with the section of the State Department handling the situation by that point, and were able to keep track of you. At first they told us that you’d been screened and were considered clean, and would only be held down there with others who’d passed their exams until they were clear to fly you out of one of the air bases outside the city.

“But as these things go – fuck, the hospitals had it so much worse – whatever screening they’d done wasn’t fully accurate. We kept getting conflicting information until finally one kind soul had the balls enough to tell us the truth. Once again, no one’s sure how it happened, but someone slipped through and infected all of you. When that happened, everything was written off as a loss. But still, leaving American citizens on foreign soil doesn’t sit well with some people, so those down there did their best to ‘neutralize’ the situation before sealing you all up tight and sending you back here.

I couldn’t remember anything that he was talking about, but I started to get that nervous feeling in my gut, like when you know you’re going to the principal’s office as a kid, and I knew there was something there. I began to recall little flashes, small reports on the news, that kind of stuff. Then it hit me, a scene from somewhere that seemed exactly like the movies depict it: lights in my eyes, faceless men in haz-mat suits, being brusquely herded down sealed corridors in nothing but a hospital gown. It had to have been true. “Okay, I think I’m starting to remember it, but I’m still confused. If I got sick, how am I here, on my own? What do they mean ‘neutralize’? Don’t you mean cured?”

“Well, Tim, not exactly. You’re not cured. You’re dead.”

Now, having your own teary-eyed father tell you that you’re no longer living is less of a shock than you’d expect. At the very least it answered the question of why my poor parents were so sad to see me, something I generally do my best to not have happen. And shit, with all of this drama, and one hell of a backstory, it’s not like I was going to dispute it. Might as well nod and move on.

“So, sure, they sent my corpse back here in a ziplock baggie, I’ll run with that. How did we get here? And what do we do now?” I tried to add some levity to the situation, mostly because I was tired of seeing my dad cry over the fact that his son was some sort of zombie.

Both of my parents have always been able to laugh in the worst of situations, which is a trait I’m glad to have pick up. He gave me a half smile and continued. “Well, all of you guys were supposed to be sent off to a lab somewhere to be hacked apart before presumably being tossed in a big pit and burned. But you dear old dad here wouldn’t put up with his undead son being some sort of cheap lab experiment, so I tracked down base you guys flew into and found a guy who was willing to part with one drugged-up body for some old baseball cards.” This was one of our oldest jokes. Paying for things with baseball cards, I mean.