Waiting for the Great Leap Forward (Cities of the Dead)

by William Young

a week earlier, convinced they were safe because they were inside a building.

  “I wonder where we can sleep,” Remy said.

  “Thierry said there’s a hotel just up the road a hundred or so meters,” Yvette said. “The Two Keys Inn.”

  “He also said there are sticks with white strips of fabric tied to them in front of empty houses and apartment buildings with unoccupied units. He said the owners are either dead or undead and won’t mind if we move in,” Syrah said.

  Remy and the girls got up and began walking down Rue de Saint Antoine, looking for an open house. None were available. Inside many, the flicker of candlelight could be seen, reminding Remy that once not too long ago, that flicker would have been the blue of a television screen, numbing the occupants with mindless programming and blinding them to the realities of life. Now, finally, people were forced to live life in a genuine manner and in some harmony with nature.

  They turned left onto Rue du Chalmont when Remy realized that if they didn’t find a place soon, they’d be walking around in complete darkness. This unnerved him, but not so much because of the possibility of a stray zombie coming across them but rather because of the large amount of people wandering around with firearms. He wondered who had trained any of them to use them?

  “Hey, here’s one with a flag in front of it,” Yvette said.

  They had been walking in silence since leaving the courtyard behind the boys school, and the sudden sound of Yvette’s voice had startled Remy. He had been lost in thoughts about the new order of things to come, how the property of the world would be re-distributed among the living after the undead had been dealt with. Finally, there was a way to make the modern world fair, now that there was more than enough for everyone now that there were fewer people. They were suddenly doused in a powerful white light, the beam playing across each of their faces as each reflexively lifted an arm to block the ray.

  “You’re the living?” a voice asked, gruff and tinged with anger.

  “Are we alive?” Remy asked, “is that what you’re asking? Yes, yes, we are very much the living.”

  The beam dipped down to their kneecaps, but the damage to Remy’s night vision had been done, and he could make nothing out in the crepuscular gray of twilight.

  “Walking around in the dark without any weapons isn’t exactly the smartest thing to do these days,” the voice said, the tone pained obviousness, a bored elementary teacher lecturing a child.

  “We’re looking for a house with a white flag in front of it,” Syrah said. “This one has such a tag.”

  The beam swerved across the ground and bobbed around the front yard of the house before settling on a small stake with a length of torn white sheet attached to it. The beam lingered a moment, played across the façade of the house, then meandered down and across the ground to a spot in the street between Remy’s group and the speaker.

  “Well, you should get inside,” the man’s voice said. “Lock up and take shifts through the night on guard. It’s pretty safe around here, but we still get the occasional zombie that makes it through the perimeter.”

  The beam switched off and the sounds of several pairs of boots crunching on gravel receded into the darkness. Remy turned and looked at the girls, who by their looks had been staring at him, waiting for him to decide something.

  “Let’s get inside,” Remy said.

  The pounding on the front door at dawn was so sudden and furious that Remy startled awake on the couch in the front room of the house, sliding off it and onto the floor as he sat up and twisted to orient himself on the origin of the banging. Yvette was sitting on a rocking chair on the opposite side of the room, reading a book she must have chosen from the bookshelf in the room, and laughed briefly at the sight of Remy on the floor. The noise had caused her to drop her book in shock, too, but Remy hated being laughed at and scowled for a half-moment before gathering his wits.

  Remy pulled the door open and beheld Thierry, smiling broadly and armed with a shotgun held idly at his side. Three other men and a woman – all of them armed in some manner – stood in the background by the edge of the road, chatting amongst themselves.

  “Good morning, my new friends, I trust you slept well and safely last night,” Thierry said, “but the day is young and there is much to be done.”

  “Done?” Remy said.

  “Oh, yes,” Thierry said. “Meals to be made, children to be cared for, fences to be made stronger. Come over to the courtyard behind the boys school in twenty minutes for breakfast and assignment to a work detail. Lots to be done before sunset.”

  Thierry turned and walked off with his group down the road, not looking back. Remy stood in the door and watched them until they turned a corner, then slowly turned on his heels and regarded Yvette and Syrah, who were both standing in the middle of the room, watching him.

  “Jesus. They want us to start working for a living already,” Remy said, trying to figure out what alternatives there might be. Continue on the road to Strasbourg and risk the zombies? They had no weapons and had probably been incredibly lucky to have not all been killed or infected since leaving the dormitory.

  Yvette motioned to the kitchen behind her, through an arch from the living room. “Well, there’s no food in there or the basement pantry. My guess is everything was collected from all the houses and stored somewhere else. There’s nothing for mice to nibble.”

  After a breakfast of passable pancakes and a tolerable home-made berry-syrup, Remy had been assigned to a group heading to the farms around Saint-Hippolyte, a small town about eleven kilometers to the southeast. It would take a little more than two hours to get there on foot, pulling wagons. Remy had protested, not wanting to walk through the wooded hills.

  “Why can’t we just drive there?” Remy had asked.

  “You brought gasoline with you, did you?” Thierry asked and laughed. “We haven’t had any gasoline for weeks, now. Maybe we can siphon some from an automobile while we’re down there, should we get lucky that way.”

  Syrah and Yvette had both been assigned to the kitchen in the boys school, and Remy waved slightly to them as he trooped out of the town with Thierry and seven others – three men, four women. Everyone except Remy was armed, although two of the women carried large knives instead of firearms. The day was spent scavenging through fields and abandoned houses for anything that could be eaten. They saw nobody, neither alive nor dead, which Remy thought both odd and comforting.

  At twilight, back in the house, Yvette opened a bottle from a local winery while Syrah lit a candle and set it on the coffee table in the living room. Remy had nothing to show for his day, having turned over his collection of turnips and onions to the boys school before dinner. He did, however, possess a small pike he found in a work shed on one of the farms, which gave him some sense of comfort that he could now, at least, try to defend himself should he need to.

  “Another Riesling,” Remy said. “Not bad.”

  “It’s from somewhere outside Selestat,” Yvette said. “They’ve got hundreds of bottles of wines stored in the basement of the school.”

  “And who-knows-how-much canned food and bulk flour and whatnot larded away in the classrooms,” Syrah added. “After the town closed itself off when the quarantines began, everyone pooled everything together so it wouldn’t be left to spoil in individual homes. Then they divided into teams to spread the workload around. We spent all day washing the morning dishes and then making the beans for dinner.”

  Remy gave the girls a look of compassion, indicating that he felt their pain, and took another small swallow of the wine.

  “It beats sitting around in the dorm all day playing cards,” Yvette said, finally, after they had been quiet a while, each contemplating the flame on the candle.

  Remy thought about that for a moment, already knowing he’d be doing more scavenging the next morning as his group continued to work through the farmland for food, fuel and other useful items from before the zombies. Fucking zombies. Nobody had any
idea where they had come from, how they were made, or why they existed. One day, life had been complex and filled with a million struggles, a constant sense of trying to find dignity and justice in the modern world of nameless, faceless men and the vast machinery of Western life and its total indifference to the individual. Now, most of those people were walking dead, and those that were alive were struggling to figure out what the new rules were.

  On the walk back from Saint-Hippolyte, Remy had figured the new rules should be obvious to those that remained alive: kill the undead, redistribute the property equally, limit the amount of new children brought into the world, and ensure everyone understood their part in a harmonious and cooperative society. Only nobody wanted to talk about how to restructure society on the walk back home from the farms, although everyone had agreed that killing the undead should be a top priority.

  Remy took another sip of the wine and stared at Yvette for a moment: she had said she was glad for the labor, the security of the town, the opportunity to live rather than survive. So was he, he realized. And, yet, he missed his cell phone, reading blogs on the Internet, picking up girls at the discos for one night stands, sitting at a table on a sidewalk and sipping coffee, listening to his iPod, and all of the other things that had been his life just a few months ago.

  Modern life