You know how to kill a zombie, yes? Just shoot them in the head, remove the brain. Easy. Easier, anyway, than offing a zombie toll road that has been lurching and moaning ever forward without the good sense to just die already.

But — and I can't believe I'm typing this — the giant Trinity River toll road may be days away from its final demise. This is not another tease. This is real. Almost surreal. For years I've taken people down to the floodway and pointed to the earthen levees and said can you freaking believe how foolish this city is for wanting to build a massive highway next to a forever-promised park and a river that's supposed to flood.

Yet some time next month, perhaps as early as Aug. 9, the Dallas City Council will finally vote on lopping off the noggin of the Trinity River toll road or the Trinity Parkway or the Underwater Zombie Tollroad or whatever you want to call that four-but-probably-six-lane, 9-mile slab of cement some folks have been wanting to plant along the river's East Levee since forever. Looks like the new City Council, a majority of whom oppose a high-speed road in the Trinity, is prepared to do what its predecessors refused to do as recently as two years ago.

On Friday, five council members — Sandy Greyson, Scott Griggs, Philip Kingston, Adam Medrano and newcomer Kevin Felder — sent Mayor Mike Rawlings and City Manager T.C. Broadnax a memo demanding they put on the next available council agenda a resolution that would once and forever reject the only version of the toll road, the so-called Alternative 3C, to receive the feds' blessings.

The next voting agenda is Aug. 9, but Rawlings — who said he "thought this would be coming, after the election and stuff" — told me Monday it may take a little longer. The city attorney's office is drafting the resolution, which, he said, the five would then have to approve before it goes to a vote.

Rawlings said the timing of the vote also depends on when he gets answers from an alphabet soup's worth of local, state and federal agencies about what a decision to reject 3C would do to the proposed park, or at least the roads and parking lots needed to access the park. He also wants to know whether anyone's even interested in funding a road of any size at this late date.

If he gets the answers he's expecting — killing 3C won't hold up the park, and no one wants to pay for 3C or the slower, smaller road pitched by urban planner Larry Beasley last year — then, Rawlings said, it is likely there will be far more than the eight votes needed to kill the thing.

"Look, my point of view is this: The road has been a dividing issue in this city for a long time, and I don't like issues that divide," he said. "I don't mind fighting through them if there is a real substantive win on the other side. But once I decided I didn't want to build out 3C all the way and make it a smaller road, the funding options don't seem to be jumping to the front, and it concerns me we might be fighting over something that doesn't have a chance to get funded, and I am not going to do that.

"I am not going to put the City Council or the city in a place where we're the Hatfields and McCoys when there is no there there."

Yeah, a little late there. But about time.

I did not call Rawlings for this column; all I did was ask his office if he planned on putting the resolution on the first voting agenda after summer break. Rawlings called from vacation because he wanted to reiterate that he's focused solely on planting a version of the park pitched in October — Michael Van Valkenburgh's sprawl of trails and bridges running over and next to a river restored to its natural meanders, funded with Annette Simmons' tens of millions, run by a Local Government Corporation.

Over two decades we've been given countless reasons why we need the road — each one eventually disproved. We were sold a lie no one wants to buy any longer, save for the suits with concrete contracts and their friends on the council whose ranks dwindle closer to zero with each election.

I can't find anyone who wants to pay for this thing: The Texas Department of Transportation says to talk to the North Texas Tollway Authority, which once thought of the parkway as a cash machine. Today: "There has been no decision made," a NTTA spokesperson said via email.

The Army Corps of Engineers, which permits what the city can do between the levees, said it's not prepared to comment on a resolution it hasn't seen. But let's not forget: Two years ago the corps OK'd a plan that would "create parkland in an urban setting with little open space."

Doug Hecox, a spokesman for the Federal Highway Administration, said killing 3C will lead to "years of delay" if the city wants to put another big road down there. But, he said Tuesday, studying and planning for access roads and parking lots wouldn't be nearly as time-consuming.

"It's not a rubber stamp," he said. But planning for a park without a parkway "could take several months," maybe a little longer. "Just depends on how complicated it gets."

Seems to me it's about to get real simple.