by Joe McKinney
The mother hopes she knows what she’s doing.
“I’ll be right back,” she says. “I’m going to get Daddy.”
She slips off her own backpack and removes a collapsible police baton she got from a friend during the early days of the outbreak. She snaps it open and circles back around the City Jail so she can re-enter from the other side.
When she steps back into the alley, she sees a small group of zombies gathered around her husband’s corpse.
They seem uncertain, but interested, as though they just might fall upon the body. When one of them lifts her husband’s hand and tries to put it in his mouth, the woman rushes in like a fury and swings at every face and hand that tries to close upon her. It’s a fast job, a messy job, and she hardly registers the dull crack of flesh-covered bone, the give of skulls caving beneath the baton.
And when it’s done, she jams the baton down on the pavement and collapses it with a sharp smack.
She looks around. Nothing else moves.
Then she picks up the wheelbarrow that holds her husband’s body and carts him out of the alley.
§
We’re thirty minutes into our third game and I have Jon handily by the throat. Pacific, North Carolina and Pennsylvania are dull properties, never seeming to gather much action, but they are the only properties I have left without hotels and so I start to develop them.
Jon, realizing he’s beat, concedes.
§
The woman is looking down North Carolina Avenue, into the heart of the city. It is a vast ruin of empty buildings and darkened windows. This could be a war zone, abandoned to the scavengers. It looks that bad. Roofs have fallen. Bricks are strewn about as though thrown by an explosion. But this isn’t some military scar. This city, this collection of empty buildings, is the product of decay, a complex rune speaking of all things past.
Dark clouds are rolling in off the sea, turning the sky to a washed-out gray. The wind carries sand down the cracked and buckled street, lifting it like curtains dancing on the wind, and the city seems so lonely, almost sublime in its desolation. Again she wonders why his last wish has brought her here. What could he have possibly seen in this world?
He was a kind man, a caring man, who knew that there is a presence moving in the background of our lives. That presence is hard to fathom, especially now, especially since her husband’s death, but it is there. She can feel it. Her husband never doubted it. And because of that conviction, she knows there must be a reason.
“Momma, you’re all gross.”
The woman looks down at her daughter, her voice surprising her out of her thoughts.
“What?”
The girl points at the spattered gore on the woman’s jeans, the clumps of blood and brain left from when she fought the zombies off her husband’s corpse.
She wipes her palm across her shirt, clearing away the dirt and sweat and grime before taking her daughter’s hand and giving it another reassuring squeeze. “We’re gonna be okay,” she says, and in her soul she tries to believe it, because she has to. She needs this one truth to be real.
She takes out the game board she’s been using as a map, her gaze darting back and forth between the cartoon board and the sea of ruin before her, and she’s confused. Marvin Gardens must be here somewhere. According to the board, it should be right here.
§
We’ve started our fourth game. Most people think Monopoly takes forever to play, but with just two players, and a deep understanding of its finer points, you can finish off a game in less than twenty minutes and still stay soundly within the rules.
This one is going fast, and Jon’s luck is getting on my nerves. He takes Boardwalk and Park Place. He looks at me, sees me scowling, and laughs.
To lighten my mood, he asks about my writing. “More zombies?”
“Yep. And death cults too.”
“Cool.”
I like discussing horror with Jon. He gets it. After reading a rough draft of my first novel, he told me zombies were the perfect means to reinvent the world and all its problems. They’re entirely metaphorical, more so than any other monster in fiction, and because of that, they can represent any societal issue or any personal crisis. They turn the real horrors into a fictional plaything we can around which we can wrap our minds.
As I said, he gets it.
But meanwhile there is still a game to be played, and I’ve just landed on Ventnor Avenue, where he has four houses.
“Stop smiling,” I say, and concede.
§
Game five is our tie-breaker. We race around the board, and I get Ventnor and Atlantic Avenues, and then Water Works. Only Marvin Gardens remains unclaimed.
Jon looks worried.
§
The woman stands in the shadows of a movie-theater entrance, watching a death cult make its way down the street. These people she understands even less than the fakers. At least the fakers are a known quantity. Their motivation is simple. Death terrifies them so much that they’re willing to embrace it in order to hold it at bay. She can understand fear. And she can understand—even though it disgusts her—why some people are willing to give up on their lives in order to keep them.
But these people, these death cults, they are a mystery.
She has heard of them in other cities. They believe that the zombies are a means to set the soul free. The zombies are prophets, they claim, and they welcome the act of getting slaughtered as though it were communion.
This cult is made up of a dozen people, walking two abreast down the street. They seem eerily content and unworried. They are happy to die.
Zombies stagger out of doorways, peel themselves away from the insides of abandoned cars, and close in on the cult.
Screams come with the killing, but they are not screams of pain. When the woman realizes this, she is truly and utterly horrified. These people are in love with their own slaughter, and for them it is some kind of grotesque joy. It is spiritual. It seems vile to her, obscene somehow.
“Come on,” the woman says to her daughter. She takes up the wheelbarrow again and slips away.
§
Jon takes his fourth railroad, but looks disappointed.
“What’s wrong?” I ask. He’s pulling ahead, and the tie breaker that I thought was mine seems to be tilting in his direction.
“I want Marvin Gardens,” he says. “I keep missing it.”
“You said that before. What’s so special about it?”
“It’s the only place on the board that isn’t a real location in Atlantic City.”
“Really?” I look at the board. I didn’t know this. I’ve loved this game since I was a little boy, and I never knew. I wonder why they’d put it there if it isn’t really there.”
“Well, it’s a mystery, isn’t it?”
§
The woman and child have made it to the Boardwalk. The long pier extends far into the Atlantic, which has grown irritable from the weather.
“Momma?” the girl says. “Where do we go now?”
The woman has no idea. None of this makes sense. Why would he make this request of her, and why can’t she find Marvin Gardens?
Acting almost on autopilot, she pushes the wheelbarrow out to the end of the pier, and stops before a bronze plaque featuring a raised relief of Charles B. Darrow, inventor of the game of Monopoly. Briefly she considers asking Darrow where she might find Marvin Gardens, but doesn’t want to scare the little girl. No need to make her think Momma’s lost her mind.
A strong wind gusts off the water and shoves her roughly to one side. She staggers, and the wheelbarrow topples over, spilling its precious cargo onto the pier.
The woman looks at her husband sprawled there, and she finally breaks down. She sits beside him. She’s tired. She has no way of lifting him back into the wheelbarrow. Not now. Not like this. She doesn’t know what to do.
She hears footsteps on the planks behind her.
The woman jumps to her feet and wheels to face
the intruder, pulling her daughter behind her.
But it’s an old man, not a zombie. She relaxes, but only a little. There are other dangers in the world besides the walking dead. But the man makes no move to attack. He actually looks kind. He’s dressed in a full-length black coat, the collar pulled up tightly against a scarred cheek. The brim of a floppy old hat shields gray, weathered eyes.
“Let me help you,” he says.
Together, they right the wheelbarrow.
There is another gust of wind and then the rain starts to fall. “We need to get under shelter,” he says. He’s holding his hat down on his head as he nods toward a nearby arcade. The inside is dark, but dry. “In there,” he says.
She reaches for the wheelbarrow, but he puts a hand on her wrist.
“No,” he says, “leave him here.”
She wants to object. At first it seems like a gross disrespect of the man she loved—and still loves—with all her being. But as the rain turns to silvery sheets curling on the wind, it suddenly seems right to her, and the three of them run for the cover of the arcade.
The little girl knows the routine. They won’t be going anywhere for a while, so she removes her backpack and sits on the ground and busies herself with the few belongings they’ve been able to carry with them.
“Thank you,” the woman says to the man.
He nods, says nothing. The man removes his coat and hat and shakes the water from them.
“Can you help us?” the woman says. “We’re trying to find Marvin Gardens.”
The man looks up from his clothes and a strange smile tugs at the corners of his mouth. “There is no Marvin Gardens,” he says. “Not here, anyway. Not in Atlantic City.”
The woman is floored by this. Her first instinct is to get angry. She’s been lied to, made a fool of. Why would her husband do this to her? Why would he send her on an errand like this, wandering a blasted land with only a stupid board game for a map? It doesn’t make sense.
“Bubbles!”
The woman shakes her head, clearing her thoughts. Dozens of tiny bubbles are rising from the floor, filling the air around her head. She looks down and sees her daughter clapping her hands and giggling wildly as her little bubble-making machine whirs.
One bubble in particular drifts past the woman’s nose. She focuses on it, and she’s startled by its beauty. The way it shimmers and catches the light like a diamond. It is geometric perfection. It is a delicate thing, like a flower, or a life; and it is, she realizes, the most perfect, the most beautiful thing she’s ever seen.
It explodes suddenly—even over the pounding rain she swears she hears a faint, muffled pop. It’s gone.
She stares at the empty air where it once floated, but she isn’t seeing the air. She’s actually looking inward, and backward, across the years. Images of her husband crowd her mind, and though she doesn’t realize she’s doing it, she’s smiling, for he lives there, whole and perfect, a part of her soul that will never die.
But what of this crazy quest he’s sent her on? What of that?
He knew there was no Marvin Gardens here. He had to have known. Her husband was crazy smart that way. This was deliberate. Not a cruel trick. He wasn’t that kind of man.
There is a lesson here. Something she is meant to understand.
But what?
And then she thinks of the bubble, how it was beautiful, and then gone. And she thinks of this world, how it too was once a thing of beauty.
It dawns on her all at once, understanding swelling inside her chest like a balloon until she can barely breathe, barely contain it. He gave her an impossible quest, not because he expected her to fail, but because he knew she would succeed. She would come to this point. The old world is gone, and though the new world, the world without him, is a little emptier, it is still a place for beauty, and a place to raise the little girl who is so much like her daddy.
She looks out across the rain-swept pier, to where her husband’s body faces the open ocean, unknowable in its vastness, and she thinks again of bubbles.
And smiles.
Zombies and Their Haunts
For as long as I can remember, I’ve thrilled at the sight of abandoned buildings. Something about those dark, empty windows, the vacant doorways, the sepulchral quiet of an empty train station or hotel lobby, spoke of discontinuity and of the slow, relentless violence of passing time. There was a vacancy in those wrecks that evoked loss and heartache and the memory of dreams that have fallen by the wayside. They were a sort of negative space in the landscape, symbols of our world’s mortality.
And then zombies came along, and I fell in love with them for many of the same reasons.
But here’s the thing.
It took me a while—as a writer I mean—to figure out that abandoned buildings, and even abandoned cities, don’t just appear because a horde of zombies happen to show up. Sure, most everybody gets eaten, and so you end up with a lot of buildings and very few people, but it goes a little deeper than that. Zombies and abandoned buildings, it seems to me, are actually two sides of the same coin. Aside from the obvious similarity—that they are both miserable wrecks somehow still on their feet—both are symbols of a world that is at odds with itself and looking for new direction. And in that way, zombies merge symbolically with the abandoned buildings they haunt in ways that other monsters never really achieve with the settings of their stories.
But just because the zombie and the abandoned building are intimately related symbols doesn’t mean that they function in exactly the same way.
Consider the abandoned building first.
When a building dies, it becomes an empty hull, and yet it does not fall. At least not right away. Its hollow rooms become as silent as the grave, but when you enter it, its desolate inner spaces somehow still hum with the collected sediment of the life that once thrived there.
When we look at graffiti scrawled across fine Italian marble tiles, or a filthy doll face-up in a crumbling warehouse parking lot, or weeds growing up between the desks in a ruined schoolhouse, we’re not just seeing destruction. We’re also seeing what once was, and what could be again. In other words, we’re seeing past, present, and future all at the same time.
The operative force at work here is memory. Within the mind, memory bridges the gulf between past, present, and future. But in our post-apocalyptic landscapes, our minds need a mnemonic aid...and that aid is the abandoned building. The moldering wreck forces us to consciously engage in the process of temporal continuity rather than simply stumble through it blindly.
Put another way, we become an awful lot like Wordsworth daydreaming over the ruins of Tintern Abbey. Like Wordsworth, we’re witnessing destruction, but pondering renovation, because we are by nature a creative species that needs to reshape the world in order to live in it. That is our biological imperative.
And so, in the end, the abandoned building becomes a symbol of creative courage.
But now consider the abandoned building’s corollary, the zombie.
Zombies are, really, single-serving versions of the apocalypse. Apocalyptic stories deal with the end of the world. Generally speaking, they give us a glimpse of the world before catastrophe, which becomes an imperfect Eden of sorts. They then spin off into terrifying scenarios for the end of the world. And finally, we see the survivors living on, existing solely on the strength of their own wills. There are variations within the formula, of course, but those are the nuts and bolts of it.
When we look at the zombie, we get the same thing—but in microcosm. We see the living person prior to death, and this equates to the world before the apocalypse (or the ghost of what the abandoned building used to be). We see the living person’s death, and this equates to the cataclysmic event that precipitates the apocalypse (or the moldering wreck of an abandoned building). And finally, we see the shambling corpse wandering the wasteland in search of prey, and this equates to the post-apocalyptic world that is feeding off its own death.
It is in t
his final note that the symbolic functions of the abandoned building and the zombie diverge. As I’ve mentioned, the abandoned building, so long as it stands, calls to our creative instincts to rebuild. But the zombie, so long as it stands, speaks only to our ultimate mortality.
And so, the ruined hotel or office park becomes our mind’s cathedral, the spiritual and creative sanctuary of our memory, while the zombie becomes the devil that drives us out of it.
I see a satisfying sense of symmetry there.
The Day the Music Died
“But this changes everything,” Isaac Glassman said. “You see that, right? I mean, you gotta see that. We can’t... I mean, Steve, you can’t... I mean, shit, he’s dead. Tommy Grind is dead! How can you say nothing’s changed?”
“Isaac,” I said, “calm down. This isn’t that big of a deal.”
He huffed into the phone. “Great. You’re making fun of me now. I’m talking about the death of the biggest rock star since The Beatles, and you’re cracking jokes. I’m telling you, Steve, this is fucking tragic.”
I let out a tired sigh. I should have known that Isaac was going to be a problem. Lawyers are always a problem. He’d been with us since Tommy’s first heroin-possession charge back in 2002. That little imbroglio kept us in the LA courts for the better part of a year, but we got The Cells of Los Angeles album out of it, which went double platinum, so at least it hadn’t been a total disaster. And Tommy was so happy with Isaac Glassman that he added him to the payroll. I objected. I looked at Isaac and I saw a short, unkempt, Quasimodo-looking guy in a cheap suit in the midst of a school-girl’s crush. He’s in love with you, I told Tommy. And I mean in the creepy way. But Tommy laughed it off. He said Isaac was just star-struck. It’d wear off after a few months.
I knew he was wrong about Isaac even then.
