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\ understand, lunching in the sci-fi shadow of the Space Needle, amid a Logan's Run cluster of white futuristic meeting halls and splashing fountains. Here the Women of Faith (henceforth WOF) are seated primly on outdoor benches, tucking their skirted thighs together, balancing pastel-colored box lunches on their laps and nibbling sandwiches as they try to ignore a dead girl covered in blood walking past.

The sky is blue. The air, chilly. The girl, wearing a red dress, her face bruised purple and mangled with scars, is dragging a dead infant still attached to the umbilical cord that dangles from between her gore-smeared knees. Moan­ing softly, she's tough to overlook. Nor is hers the only dead infant on parade. Another dead woman, her own white ensemble clutched with bloody handprints, stag­gers past with an inert baby—anoxic blue-white, touched with crimson blood—strapped to her side in a baby har­ness. In contrast, a pair of kissing, hugging, clearly in-love walking-dead lesbians carry a live baby, albeit daubed with corn-syrupy red. They also carry a picket sign that says heather has two zombies. It's hard to tell what aspect of their tableau most pisses off the WOF. Clearly this nice luncheon has been spoiled by an apocalypse.

Welcome to ZomBcon, the world's first zombie culture convention. Time: Halloween weekend. Place: "The Zombie Capital of the World" as decreed this morning at nine a.m. by no less a personage than Seattle mayor Mike McGinn. What's now called Seattle Center was built in 1962 to pre­sent "a glittering projection of life in the year 2000." Friday, October 29, some 50 years later, this optimistic world is overrun with 20,000 scabrous, foot-dragging undead corpses. Officially, the zombies are here because their god i is here, George Romero, director of 1968's classic Night of t the Living Dead, the most successful father of a monster 4 since Bram Stoker. The actor Bruce Campbell, star of the

cult film The Evil Dead, is also a big draw. Representing the book side of zombie culture is Max Brooks, author of The Zombie Survival Guide and World War Z. Because the Big Names have lured these legions of undead consumers, the zombie merchandisers have rented space in the exhibition hall in order to exploit them. Or so it would seem. There's Zombie Flesh Jerky ("Free Body Part in Every Bag!"), where the man in the booth asks passersby, "Free sample? Spicy or teriyaki?" There's a display for Zombie Tools ("Fuck the Revolution, Bring on the Apocalypse!"), which look like very elaborately customized machetes. There a salesman recruits a volunteer from the crowd and demonstrates the finer points of cutting throats and disemboweling. Else­where, zombie cartoonists are sketching quick caricatures. Zombie tattoo artists are inking zombies with pictures of zombies. For slow-moving zombies who partied especially hard at the VIP Zombie Cocktail Reception the previous evening, a booth sells Zombie Blast Energy Shot ("Six Hour Energy in a Two-Ounce Shotgun Shell"). At the rear of the exhibition hall, behind the displays of zombie toys and T-shirts and publishers, a small stage faces an audience seated in folding chairs. On stage, microphoned to com­pete with the undying din of milling, moaning, shopping zombies, a man named Stephen Lindsay (author of Jesus Hates Zombies) shouts indignantly, "Jesus was not a zom­bie because Jesus was resurrected with his soul!"

Most of the zombie action happens here in the Seattle Center Exhibition Hall (SC in ZomBcon lingo). Zombie culture lectures take place in the quieter Northwest Con­ference Rooms (NWR). Films are screened at the SIFF. Prom Night of the Living Dead happens in NM. However, the printed, stapled ZomBcon program is not always correct; typos abound, but it's hard to expect a kind of clockwork precision from people who appear to have their abdomens sliced open and their intestines spilling out. To keep from tripping, most staggering corpses pinch at their own sloppy entrails and carry them, daintily, much like the Jane Austen zombies do their (continued on page 122)

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ZOMBIES

(continued from page 88) hoopskirts (more on them later). The zombie mom mentioned earlier, for example, is con­stantly stumbling over her dead kid's dangly umbilical cord (no more on her, I promise).

A lecture by Max Brooks is moved from the quiet NWR to the cacophonous SC, but Brooks refuses to compete with the steady chain-saw-level roar. He leads his audience back to the original venue, saying, "My father always says, 'If you can't flaunt it, hide it.'" Brooks is, of course, the only son of Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft, as well as a child of the 1970s, and for him the zom­bie craze represents the constant nature of chaos and threat he's lived with his entire life, from swine flu to the ozone hole and Y2K, climate change to SARS and 9/11. "In the past," he says, "you had to make a mis­take to invite trouble. You had to violate a tomb or invite a vampire into your home. Now, no matter how careful you are, the monsters arrive right at your doorstep." The zombie metaphor wraps all of those real-world threats into one concept that young people can grasp, and it gives them a fic­tional excuse to learn skills that might save their lives in an actual catastrophe.

Brooks's survival guide was inspired by his mother, who gardened and canned food and once looked down at the family dog and said they—Anne, Mel and Max—could butcher their beloved pit bull for meat if circum­stances required. "She really had the heart of an Italian peasant woman. She would've

eaten the carp out of the pond in our yard if she had to." His oral history about a world war of zombies against humans, an unrelent­ing story of national governments claiming to have control and answers but ultimately failing, was inspired by all the experts who treated Anne Bancroft for cancer before her death, in 2005. He says, "They [zom­bie fans] don't wish so much for a zombie apocalypse—they would like for their par­ents and family to be alive—but what appeals to them is the idea of attaining their own independent and autonomous lives." For all their gore and slaughter, zombie sto­ries depict people accepting responsibility for their own fate. Citing 9/11 and Hurri­cane Katrina, Brooks says people are losing faith in the idea that governments can rescue them, and they're rejecting victimhood.

In college, Brooks joined the ROTC but didn't do military service. "Look," he says, sit­ting onstage as he extends both legs straight in front and pulls up his jeans to show hairy gams more like a werewolf's than a ghoul's. "My knees are pronated. They point together." After enough drilling in Army boots, he walks like a zombie.... A dog tore away the side of his neck when Brooks was a child.... All of that added to his formative zombie background. A living-dead member of the audience asks if he could bring himself to kill a family member if he or she became an undead cannibal, and Brooks says, "That would depend on which family member it was—and if they owed me money."

Hereabouts, zombies are a fact. Never for­get that. And to dis them or dissect them

by suggesting that the Reanimated Walking Dead are a symbol is to take a big steaming crap in the collective zombie punch bowl. No matter how you couch your proposal—that zombies represent Muslims or gays or WOF in nice floral-print skirt-and-sweater sets— a thousand earnest faces will stare at you with bloodied puppy dog eyes. A thousand sincere, oozing corpses wearing pink lapel buttons that say zombies were people, too will fidget uncomfortably until one young hero will take us back to the literal by shouting, "But what if the flesh-eating bastards were crash­ing into this room right now!?.'"

Yes, to suggest that zombies are a metaphor amounts to a sacrilege. Here is a theology slowly taking shape. A catechism is being taught and proto-rituals are conducted.

Saturday: Nothing is sadder than a zombie in the rain. It's the clown white of necrotic skin mixing with the runny black of gan­grene and the red of dissolving blood. Likewise, the scowling WOF in their Tammy Faye Bakker cosmetics have become finger paintings, and it's getting more difficult to tell the two groups apart. Some of the most comely zombies (granted, their throats are slashed messily and their eyes gouged out) are the sub-category of Jane Austen zom­bies swirling in satin hoopskirts, their hair swept into elegant updos. In a culture pre­viously dominated by males—zombies are for boys, vampires for girls—the book Pride and Prejudice and Zombies has given female readers the perfect formula of romance, dress-up and bloody hand-to-hand com­bat. A zombie John Wayne Gacy dressed as his clown alter ego Pogo socializes with a zombie Hannibal Lecter. A zombie Osama bin Laden shoots the breeze with a zombie Dan Aykroyd who eats french fries with the zombie pitchman Billy Mays in his blue Oxi-Clean shirt and a knockout Ann-Margret zombie who wears a curve-hugging gown pieced together entirely from leering, hid­eous latex masks. A sexy zombie Cinderella competes for attention with a sexy zombie martian. Hourglass waists, exposed midriffs abound. Perfect breasts hover braless within cropped tops. But even the ready miles of exposed thongs are negated by the barbe­cue forks and bloody hatchets that emerge from the pretty heads of these same girls. Zombie hunters fairly bristle with plas­tic machine guns and real baseball bats strapped across their backs. One zombie, wearing a blousy linen poet's shirt and a black leather cowboy hat, shouts at a zombie priest, "I'm not a zombie Zorro! I'm a zom­bie Stalker!" The priest promenades with a zombie nun whose habit is slashed across the waist to reveal a torrent of cascading viscera. Everyone agrees that the previous night's Prom Night of the Living Dead, fea­turing retro 1980s dance hits and zombie burlesque performers, was a success.

On the SC floor, cage fighting champion Nate "Rock" Quarry is building his brand, including a video game called Zombie Cage Fighter in which he appears as a character. In real life he's smiling, and the undead aren't his enemy as he uses his phone to show them Grand Guignol postfight pictures of his face, the right side perfect, while the left is battered

into a cubist nightmare, his left eye sunken into a dark pit. On the telephone the blood is real, and his audience of stitched monsters nod and murmur their admiration.

Not a machete swing away, someone has spilled a sizable puddle of blood on the white SC linoleum, and subsequent passersby are tracking bloody footprints in every direc­tion. It's a clear slip-and-fall hazard that a living-alive, grumbling non-zombie janitor is working to resolve with a mop and bucket.

Popular metaphors shape how we see the world; for example, the housewife will always carry the taint of the Stepford wife, and ZomBcon is no different. In the FC (Founder's Court), it's impossible to tell who's a zombie and who's simply ugly, old, poor or schizophrenic. Seattle's muttering homeless recede into the landscape. Is that a Ted Raimi zombie? Or is it the real Raimi, still hungover from Prom Night of the Living Dead? Regardless, in the NWR the members of the Zombie Research Society (identifiable by their matching navy blue blazers and their distinct lack of blood and putrescent sores) are discussing different aspects of the inev­itable global zombie invasion. Dr. Steven Schlozman (co-director of medical student education in psychiatry, Harvard Medical School) is lecturing on brain physiology. Daniel Drezner (professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University) is lecturing on how differing political ideologies will deal with that invasion. "My concern is that Marxists and feminists would be okay with a dead uprising," says Drezner. "Marxists would perceive it as the downtrodden pro­letariat masses rising against their wealthy oppressors. Feminists—unless all the walking dead are white heterosexual males—would be likely to practice inclusivity and offer the undead full political suffrage."

Listening in the audience are zombie angels, their feathery wings spattered with red. Zombie surgeons and nurses sit in bloody scrubs, listening while Schlozman explains the inevitable stages of a zombie narrative, how the trapped humans find themselves inside a shopping mall or supermarket, sur­rounded by desirable consumer goods they soon discover are of no real value. Then he explains why those survivors begin to batde

one another. That in-fighting, a second-act staple of all zombie stories, demonstrates what Schlozman calls neural mirroring, the idea that when humans interact they mir­ror or echo one another's emotional states. Humans get none of this mirroring while fighting zombies; the undead operate with a completely flattened affect, so humans pick fights with other humans just for the need to produce an emotional effect. Schlozman uses a PowerPoint presentation to teach the finer points of brain imaging and neural pathways. What's amazing is that hundreds of young people (granted, they're blood-soaked and putrid) are sitting bolt upright and Paying Attention. They're jotting notes and asking questions about the amygdalae, the hypothalamus, prions and international foreign policy.

By Saturday evening the WOF are replaced by the bejeweled and tuxedoed patrons of the Seattle ballet, symphony and opera, who are no happier than their day­time brethren to find themselves dining in swanky Asian-fusion bistros seated next to decayed graveyard escapees wearing their diseased lungs on the outside.

In the street, rain pelts the lucky 200 dead folks who're hurrying to attend a zombie wedding in the EMP (the Sky Church above the Science Fiction Museum). There Bruce Campbell officiates wearing a red tuxedo, a red necktie and a black shirt while the zom­bie families of the zombie bride and groom stagger and moan. The space is cavern­ous, dark but lit with red floodlights, and the booming sound system plays Michael Jackson's "Thriller" while the zombie brides­maids re-create the dance from the music video. A tiny zombie child plays the flower girl with a basket of rose petals. A guest chews the rancid stump of a severed leg. The bride appears on the arm of her deceased father—he's stabbed through the gut with a wooden stake that juts out of him in both directions; she's so pregnant that her gown has split and an unborn, undead baby pro­trudes from her bursting belly. At the head of the room, Campbell entertains the crowd with a steady patter: "This wedding march is going to take them a little longer—because they're dead! I've heard of the best man, but this is the worst man!"

Then, disaster strikes. Here in the sight of God and Bruce Campbell, during the sacrament of holy matrimony, armies of liv­ing-alive photographers flood into the EMP and set upon the rotting guests from every direction. The evil camera-faced hordes advance in a seemingly endless piranha stream, clicking and flashing, assailing the poor stunned zombies with huge tele-photo lenses. In the church's intense red lighting, the zombies' bloody camouflage vanishes, leaving them as more or less ordi­nary people dressed in somewhat shabby formalwear. The overwhelmed undead, far outnumbered, retreat in terror, herded and surrounded, battling the shutterbugs for their undead lives.

Sunday: In the Exhibition Hall, a master of ceremonies leads the audience of zombies in a sing-along of "A Zombified Rhapsody"— sung to the tune of Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" but with new lyrics supplied on orange-colored sheets. "Mama, just killed a zom," everyone sings. "Put a gun against its head. Pulled my trigger, it's re-dead...." In place of the Queen line "Mama mia, mama mia..." just as the WOF sing their hymns, the zombies sing, "George Romero, George Romero, George Romero movie show."

It's impossible to overstate Romero's effect on his fans. Imagine if you threw a National Baptist Convention and invited Jesus Christ and Jesus actually showed up and he was smiling and affable and walked among his

devotees, and he gave everyone his autograph

With his gray ponytail and thick-framed glasses—squarish Goliath-brand frames he finds in vintage shops, each lens so large it suggests a television screen filled with a gray eye—Romero stands head-and-shoulders tall above the zombie hordes who trail every­where in his wake. Taking several hurried steps to keep pace with each of his big, sham­bling strides, they reach their leprous fingers to touch the hem of his untucked shirt.

His 1968 film, Night of the Living Dead, is the proof of continuing life after death after death after death. The film's dis­tributor removed the copyright notice by accident, and the work quickly lapsed into public domain. Independent theaters

nationwide showed it as a midnight movie and kept it alive for a decade. Next, vid-eocassette recorders came to market and every household needed tapes. In the third decade of its undying life, Romero says, gamers picked up the zombie torch and made it burn even brighter.

Sitting in a quiet break room reserved for vendors (the VRR), a locked door separat­ing him from the endless groaning, adoring hordes, Romero removes his glasses and rubs his eyes. "I don't understand it," he says. "I really don't quite get why so many people are willing to dress up and jump on the bandwagon...."

It seems sad that Romero and the WOF don't understand: ZomBcon is a religious pilgrimage. A Field Trip to Hell. To be more accurate, here is a generation serving their apprenticeship to Death. In the same way they played dress-up or soldiers as chil­dren, pretending to be adults, these young women and men are adopting the obvious traits of a worst-case, albeit inevitable, fate. They're "trying on" the infirmities of old age. They're carefully road testing the scars and lesions of future accidents and disease. Tonight they'll scrub away their gangrene under a hot shower, and on Monday morn­ing they'll return to a job or a classroom, and when anyone asks, "What did you do over the weekend?" they'll say, "I died. My skin turned black with rot and hung in tatters. My bowels prolapsed from my anus. I lost my eternal soul and mingled with 20,000 folks in largely the same condition...."

"We made a little film," Romero says, and he shrugs. "We thought we were making an angry film about what was going on in the late 1960s. We focused more on the destruc­tion of the family unit, the angry mob."

Beyond the locked doors of the VRR the zombies are organizing their ranks. Several thousand are gathering not a shroud's length away to march through downtown Seattle. An undead army of young corpses collects on Mercer Street, facing west toward the sunset. To lure them along, a ZomBcon organizer hefts a long pole, and dangling from the end on a length of string is a human brain of plas­tic. It's bait. A Communion wafer. The leader shouts, "What do we want?"

The zombie army shouts, "Brains!"

"When do we want them?" shouts the leader.

The zombies shout, "Now!" And slowly the entire enterprise lurches forward a tentative step. In unison, the zombies reach toward it, their grail object, repeating their call and response. And even on this joke-shop brain, this plastic prank, there they are: the hypo-thalamus...the amygdalae...the occipital gyri. Here are international crisis manage­ment and pandemic disease protocols. This cathartic weekend is about the threat of global climate change, religious unrest and the stalled economy. And it might look like a big party, but the unreasoning, unfeeling undead of a generation have learned something, and they want something as they stagger en masse another faltering step toward the horizon.

ZomBcon 201 lxvillbe held in Seattle October 21 to 23. For more information, go to zombcon.com.