by Joe McKinney
She could have shut it down right then. He was the scared type. He’d back off, and nothing more would come of it.
But she didn’t have anywhere else to go, and they both knew it.
She went back to his place.
Sitting on his couch, her hand on his thigh, he actually asked if he could kiss her. That had never happened to her before. Most guys went straight for the tits. Or put a hand on the back of her head and guided her down.
“You don’t have to ask,” she’d said and eased in close to him.
Before she knew it, they were some sort of couple.
But he wasn’t wasting that kind of time now. The apocalypse, it seemed, had made him a little bolder.
Come on up. I’ve got a warm bed.
Yeah right, she thought, I bet you do.
But she’d been careless. She’d thought too long, dropped out of character.
One of the dead ones a few feet to her right had turned her way, and now his dead, vacant stare was locked on her. She tried to clear her mind, to stumble forward, but the zombie’s gaze never wavered.
He raised his hands like he was trying to take something from her and staggered after her, a moan rising above the wind and the cutting rain.
She pushed his hands away and looked around.
This wasn’t going to work. Every moment she lingered, more and more of them turned her way. She scanned the crowd, and in the dark, the only way out seemed to lead around the corner, where she had taken the stairwell once before to his apartment.
A limp hand fell on her shoulder and that was enough.
She ran for the stairs.
§
She stopped in front of 318.
Had she really sunk so low? Getting torn apart by the walking dead almost seemed a joy compared to coming to him like a penitent. She’d thought she was done with guilt, with shame. But it hurt now more than ever.
Utterly demoralized, she knocked.
§
He couldn’t sleep.
In the dark, he rose and put on his boxers and went to the kitchen to light a candle.
Enough light filled the room that he could see her sleeping in his bed. The rain had washed away a good amount of dirt and grime from her body and hair, but her breath had still been enough to turn his stomach. And even in his sleep he couldn’t quite hide his disgust. He had dreamt of a zombie forcing her face into the soft part of his neck, and when he awoke, he’d found her, pressing her cracked and ulcerous lips into the well beneath his chin.
Flinching awake, he’d recoiled from her, almost falling out of the bed before realizing that it was only a dream.
Now, fully awake, he watched her sleep and tried to hate her.
But he couldn’t. He was feeling guilty.
Who in the hell was he to judge her, anyway? She was desperate. She was lonely. She was scared. Wasn’t he all of that, and more?
In fact, the only thing he had on her was the appearance of normalcy.
But that was only appearances. The truth was he was drowning. His life was an act. His jokes, the Christmas decorations, his calendar keeping—all a terrible, useless, stupid joke. He drifted from one empty apartment to the next, from one false front to the next, like a ghost blown on the wind, and he called it a life.
Were they any different, he and Mindy?
He couldn’t answer, not truthfully anyway; and eventually, he blew out the candle and crept back to bed and reluctantly put an arm around her as he drifted off to sleep.
When he awoke the next morning, he was alone, the only sign she had been there a muddy stain on the sheets.
He sat on the side of the bed, asking himself why he even bothered.
She had left him, again, and this time it was because she knew he was the one who was faking. He was the hypocrite. He was the disgusting one.
And she had found him out.
§
Mindy stopped in the doorway as she left Kevin’s apartment building and scanned the street.
There were no dead in sight, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there. She’d seen it happen a few times over the last year. She’d be shuffling along with the others, absolutely nothing going on inside her head, and suddenly there’d be a scream. Another careless person had wandered into their midst, completely surprised by the sudden appearance of a zombie horde that, in reality, hadn’t been trying to sneak up on anybody. Most of the group’s kills were made that way, completely by accident, people caught by their own carelessness.
Without realizing it, she had assumed the awkward shuffle of the dead. Her bare feet, no longer sensitive to heat or ice or even broken glass, slid across the cracked and weedy pavement as though on autopilot.
She tried to turn off her mind as well, but she found that much harder.
She kept thinking of Kevin.
What, exactly, had happened last night?
Not what. Not really. She knew what had happened. That had actually been quite pleasant. Better than she remembered it, anyway.
No, what she really wanted to know was why. And why now? She’d seen others before him. She knew they weren’t the only ones. She suspected—and she believed this without reservation—that there were more normal people out there than she’d seen. There had to be. The world couldn’t simply be empty. That wasn’t possible.
But none of the others had managed to arouse her pity. She’d watched them die, and in some cases rise again, and she’d felt nothing.
And then...Kevin.
He’d told her his stupid jokes. He’d offered her a place to stay, all the food he had, even a warm bath. In the few days since she’d first seen him, she hadn’t been able to stop thinking about him. Before him, walking around being dead was no trouble at all. She could go days at a time without a single thought passing through her mind. The world was one unending parade of nothingness.
And then he came along, and she couldn’t take three steps without falling out of character, without thinking of the life they’d once shared.
That’s what it was, she told herself. He was a window to the world that used to be, a shipwreck from her past that had mysteriously surfaced to haunt her. There was nothing more to it than that. He was nothing but a ghost, and she was merely lonely.
But a voice at the back of her mind kept prodding, questioning.
What if this was more than just two people feeling lonely and desperate at the end of the world?
What if this was...love?
Maybe, she thought. It was Christmas day, after all. She’d seen the calendar on his wall—the days gone by dutifully crossed out with a big red X—right before she’d walked out of his apartment. Christmas had a way of warming even the coldest heart.
Wasn’t that the secret to Scrooge’s redemption? She’d never paid much attention to books in school, but she thought she remembered that much. For Scrooge, it hadn’t been fear of the grave, but fear that the heart would no longer love again, that made it possible for him to accept the spirit of Christmas into his life.
She stopped then, a sudden alarm causing her pulse to quicken.
She had fallen out of character again. She’d stopped walking like the dead. Like her mind, her feet had started to wander. If she’d happened upon one of the dead while walking like that, they’d have torn her to ribbons.
But, for now, she was alone on the street.
Turning, she happened to see her reflection in a shop window. And at first, that one quick glance threatened to send her over the edge of reason. She looked horrible. In a word, she looked dead. And she played the part well. Her hair was stiff with mud and probably blood too. Her face, which hadn’t been that bad back in the day, was discolored with God knows what; attractive, it seemed, only to flies. Her body was a bony jangle of sticks. She looked like a crack whore, though she imagined that even the crack whores of the world gone by had more self-respect than she did at that moment.
She had nothing.
But then her gaze shifted beyond her reflection in
the window, to the Sexy Elf costume in the display. For a moment she experienced an odd sense of displacement. It was her face, her gaunt, exhausted face, but her body was draped in the red velvety finery of the elf costume. Her fingers reached for, and could almost feel, the cotton candy fringe at the edge of the playfully short skirt.
She smiled.
Kevin O’Brien, you wonderful bastard. I’m gonna blow your mind.
§
It was Christmas morning.
He had hoped to wake up late and spend the day with her, hopefully draw her out little by little. The two of them had been pretty good, he thought, back in the day. And they were certainly good last night. When they were good, it seemed, they were really good. He’d hoped it could be that way again.
But she’d left him sometime in the night.
His attempts to draw her into his world weren’t fair, he supposed. Why would she want to join him anyway? Hadn’t she found him out? She knew he was faking it. He knew he was faking it.
And he was tired of faking it.
The choice, once he’d given it voice, was surprisingly easy to make. The only hard part had been accepting that as an option. But once he opened his mind to it, it actually made a lot of sense.
He went to the billboard and spray painted a message for her.
Then he went down to the street and climbed on top of a brick wall and waited for one of the dead to come along.
He thought he’d be scared, but for the first time in a long time, he felt relaxed, at ease with himself and the world in which he lived. You can settle in quite comfortably to even the most horrific of circumstances, he thought, given enough exposure to it. All horrors lose their immediacy, their nastiness, sooner or later. The nerves can only be slashed and cut and shredded so many times before they deaden to the pain.
No, he was beyond horror now. What he was feeling now was far worse than that. In the time before he found her again, his world had been filled with zombies. The horror they represented was a shallow, fast-moving river that beat him down and cut him on its jagged rocks.
What he was feeling now, though, made horror seem small.
Here, in this world that suddenly included Mindy in it, the waters ran far slower, but they were deep, endlessly deep, and what lurked down there was something he could not fight.
For what lurked down there was love.
A zombie was at the base of the wall, its hands clumsily scratching at the bricks just below Kevin. Kevin stared into the thing’s eyes and saw the emptiness he’d fought against for so long but had never truly understood. That would all change now. He had tried to get Mindy to live in his world, and that had failed. So now, he would live in hers.
And only love could allow him to do that.
He jammed his left hand down into the zombie’s face. It shook its head, as though to shoo away an insect, and then realized what was in front of it.
The zombie grabbed Kevin’s forearm and clamped its teeth onto his wrist.
“Mother fu—”
Kevin pulled his hand away, holding his wounded wrist in his right hand while blood oozed between his fingers. It hurt so badly he nearly rolled off the top of the wall. Already he could feel the virus creeping through his blood stream, racing for his heart. It felt like somebody was jamming a red-hot copper wire up his veins.
He didn’t have much time. Maybe thirty minutes, but probably less.
Kevin rolled off the wall and trotted back to his apartment. Once inside, he washed the wound with hot water and wrapped it in a towel. It was already starting to smell like death. His head was soupy, and walking to the chair in the center of the room was hard.
But he made it.
He dropped down into the chair and turned it to face the door and waited for the pain to stop.
§
This felt absolutely glorious.
Mindy had spent the day cleaning herself up, scouring off the stain of more than a year of living among the dead. Now, her hair was washed and brushed. Her legs were shaved, her skin soft and fragrant from cocoa butter, still a little pink from her hot bath. The Sexy Elf costume showed a lot of leg, and a lot of bruises and cuts, but those would heal. If her heart could heal, her legs certainly would.
She felt better than she had felt in a very long time. She couldn’t remember a time she’d felt this good, even before the world died. Mindy Matheson had come back from the dead, and love had done it for her.
And it was glorious.
Now, she picked her way carefully through the rubble-strewn streets. The dead were out—the dead were always out—but there weren’t many of them around at the moment.
Then she saw the sign, and she smiled.
It’s all for you, Mindy Matheson.
I love you.
I want to be with you forever.
She couldn’t hold herself back any longer. She sprinted up the stairs and down the hall to his door.
Slightly out of breath, she knocked on the door.
No response.
Maybe he was out getting stuff, she thought. More candles, maybe. Or, God help her, even a bottle of wine. Wouldn’t that be great? And heaven help him if he got her drunk. She’d make his toes curl for sure.
With a huge grin on her face, she turned the knob and swung the door in slowly.
“Kevin?”
Dating in Dead World
Heather Ashcroft told me to come to the main entrance of her father’s compound. She said the guards there would know my name; they’d be expecting me.
They were expecting me all right.
Four of them had their machine guns trained on me while a voice on a PA speaker barked orders.
“Turn off your motorcycle and dismount.” The voice was clear, sharp, professional.
I did what I was told.
“Step forward. Stand on the red square.”
I did that too.
“Stand still for the dogs.”
Three big, black German shepherds were led out of the guard shack and began circling me, sniffing. Cadaver dogs, trained to sniff out necrotic tissue. No surprise there. Even the smaller compounds used them, and the one I was about to enter was no minor-league operation. John Ashcroft controls the largest baronage in South Texas, and his security is top notch.
“I’m Andrew Hudson,” I said. “I’m here to see Heather Ashcroft. We’re going out on—”
Somebody called off the dogs, and two guards came forward. One used the barrel of his weapon to point me toward a table next to the guard shack.
“Stand on that green square. Face the table.”
“You fellas sure put a guy through a lot of trouble for a first date,” I said. I gave him a winning grin. He wasn’t impressed.
“Move,” he said.
He asked me what weapons I was carrying, and I told him.
“Put them in there,” he said, pointing to a red plastic box on the corner of the table.
“I’m gonna get those back, right?”
He ran a metal detector over my body, taking extra care to get inside the flaps of my denim jacket, under my hair, up into my crotch.
A guard fieldstripped my weapons.
“I am gonna get those back, right?”
“When you come out,” he said. “Nobody’s allowed to be armed around Mr. Ashcroft.”
“But I’m not here to see Mr. Ashcroft,” I said. “I’m taking his daughter out for a date.”
He rattled a smaller box. “Ammunition, too.”
I unloaded my pockets. There was no need to tell him about the extra magazines in my bike’s saddlebags. They were already searching those.
He looked me over again, and I could tell by the contempt in his glare that he didn’t see anything but a street urchin from the Zone. “Get in that Jeep over there,” he said. “We’ll drive you into the compound.”
Several machine guns turned my way.
I shrugged and got in.
§
I hadn’t been allowed within the inner perimete
r fence on my earlier visits, so what I saw when I did finally get inside the Ashcroft compound took my breath away. Outside the compound’s walls, downtown San Antonio was an endless sprawl of vacant, crumbling buildings, lath visible in the walls, no doors in the doorways, every window broken. Everywhere you turned, there were ruins and fire damage and rivers of garbage spilling into the streets. It’s been twenty years since the Fall, and the streets are still full of zombies. But inside Ashcroft’s compound, life looked like it was starting to make a comeback. He controlled most of the medicines, weapons, and fuel that South Texas needed, and it had made him rich enough to carve his own private paradise out of fifteen square blocks of hell.
Sitting in the back of the Jeep, I rode down what had once been Alamo Street and tried not to look like a barefoot barbarian gawking at the wonders of Rome. Ashcroft had preserved a few of the main roads from the old days, and he had left a few of the old buildings intact, but he had changed a lot more than he left alone.
Off to my left was what had once been Hemisphere Park. It was farmland now. Beyond that was a huge field where cattle grazed, their backs dappled with the golden copper hues of the setting sun. Men on horseback patrolled the edges of the fields, rifles resting on their shoulders.
Most of the housing was on the other side of the river, to my right—small cottages, comfortable and clean, a few children playing in a garden under an old woman’s watchful eye.
But the crown jewel in Ashcroft’s compound was the Fairmont Hotel. He’d turned the ancient four-story building into his private domain. It was flanked on one side by the ruins of the Spanish village of La Villita. The crumbling adobe buildings had once been stables for horses. Pre-Outbreak San Antonio had turned them into a tourist attraction, but Ashcroft had seen the wisdom of the original settlers and was once again using them for the horses. In front of the hotel was a Spanish-style garden fed by a large, circular stone fountain. A fork of the San Antonio River, blasted out of the streets that had once crisscrossed the area, curled around the rear of the hotel, supplying fresh water for the whole compound.
