by Joe McKinney
§
They moved quietly through the overgrown courtyard, stopping at the south wall so Richardson could peek over it to see if it was clear.
He saw four zombies, all of them with their backs to him. They moved stiffly down a cobbled street toward the Alamo’s façade.
He waited for them to round the corner onto the Alamo Street side of the building, then said, “We’re going over.”
“How are we gonna get out of here?” Christy said.
“The street is clear. I think most of them went inside where we were.”
“But what if they didn’t? What if they’re all over the place, waiting for us?”
“Then we’ll figure something else out.” Richardson glanced at Carnes. “Are you ready to go?”
Carnes nodded.
“Okay, let’s go.”
He climbed to the top of the wall, straddled it, and helped them both over, first Christy, then Carnes.
They crept along the Alamo’s south wall to the corner. Standing on the stone walkway that led around the Alamo, they could see the grassy plaza littered with the dead and dying, a few zombies still walking around, and beyond that the bus, the dead driver still on his back on the steps, his body holding the folding doors open.
Richardson could hear the low moaning of a few zombies in the courtyard on the other side of the wall, and the sound of many more inside the main visitor’s center where they had been, where Michael had died.
“We can make it,” he said. “But we need to hurry.”
The two women nodded, and then they were running for the bus.
Richardson shot two zombies that got in their way, and they were at the bus, Richardson pulling the driver’s body out while waving Christy and Carnes on board.
Richardson got behind the wheel, put it in gear, and they were off, mowing down zombies as they headed back for the quarantine line.
In his rearview mirror Richardson saw the two women, their ages right to be mother and daughter, sitting on opposite sides of the aisle, each looking out a different window, each in their own little world.
§
Six weeks later, Richardson was sitting at his kitchen table, reading Christy Carter’s front page exposé in the Dallas Morning News.
Next to his chair was a suitcase. Richardson was leaving for Houston that afternoon, most of that city still under water almost two years after the hurricanes that had brought on the necrosis virus, patrolled now by gun boats that both enforced the quarantine and protected all the wealth of Houston’s banks and jewelry stores and museums sunken beneath the new shape of Galveston Bay.
Christy’s article was excellent, and he was stunned by the clarity and intelligence of her written voice.
He had chosen a more philosophical approach for his own article, concentrating on the politics of the quarantine and the legal issues surrounding the continuing effort on the part of People for an Ethical Solution to encourage medical research on a cure.
Christy had also written on the fundamental issue of right to life, but had gone about it in a radically different way. Her article put a human face on the problem—but not Michael’s face, as Richardson had expected. She chose a much more surprising face.
“The best government statistics put the death toll for the outbreak at 4.3 million,” Christy wrote. “Add to that another three million still infected, still wandering the streets of San Antonio, Houston, Corpus Christi, New Orleans, and at least a hundred other smaller towns across the Gulf Coast, and the loss of life is nothing short of a holocaust.
“The recent expedition to San Antonio has added twenty-six more lives to that holocaust.
“But there are also losses that can’t be added neatly to any one column.
“Dr. Sylvia Carnes of The University of Texas at Austin is one such invisible casualty. Whatever judgment she may face in the courts, where the wrongful death suits of the students who accompanied her are still to be decided, and whatever judgment she receives from the conscience of the community, she will remain an emotional cripple. The very fabric of her belief structure has been stripped from her and torn to pieces, and in that sense, she is a microcosm of those of us left behind in the wake of so many tragedies.”
After reading through that section again, Richardson sipped his coffee and looked out across his lawn where the morning sunlight stirred a lazy haze through the air. Focusing on Carnes was brilliant journalism. Her fractured belief system had given her a sort of brutal half-life, and in that sense she was a perfect parallel to the half-life existence of the zombies she had tried so hard to help.
Richardson made up his mind to call her and offer his congratulations. Journalism, he had told her, was about opinions, because that’s where the story is, and oh man did that girl ever have a story.
Swallowed
The snake, a twenty-foot female Burmese python, slowly uncoiled as the man walked past. The snake’s tongue flicked the air and tasted a miasma of death swirling around the man, though her reptilian brain made no connection between the man and the familiar, rotting taste. The snake saw only a man, stumbling, picking his way uncertainly through the tangled weeds. She saw an easy kill, nothing more.
The man tripped over an exposed root, and in that moment, the snake struck.
She lunged forward, biting the man high on the back of his thigh, her momentum knocking him to the ground, twisting him onto his side.
The kill was not difficult. Beyond a few weak attempts to bite back, the man fought little. His legs twitched. His hands groped ineffectually at her flanks. She ignored his hands and coiled around him, around his waist, his neck, and began to squeeze.
Her jaws unhinged, and the man and the snake became intimate as the slow ballet of predator and prey played out to its inevitable conclusion.
§
The snake was born in the Everglades. Her ancestors were pets released into the wild by owners who could no longer care for the giant reptiles. Those first generations squeezed out the wetland’s top predators, creating an ecological nightmare. For a time, the authorities hunted the giant snake and her many cousins, but that stopped when humanity’s dead rose from their graves and overwhelmed the living.
The snake knew nothing of that, of course. She knew only that she had eaten alligators and grown huge in this world without game wardens. And at two-hundred pounds, the man who tasted like death was a long meal, but went down soon enough, one gulp at a time.
§
A night passed, and when the sun came up it found the snake warming herself on a narrow strip of bald earth next to a scummy pond. The snake had spent the night in great pain. Her flanks were swollen, distended, her muscles twitching. Spasms of pain caused her head to bob. She opened her mouth and tried to vomit out the pain inside her.
But she couldn’t.
And for a blinding moment, the pain became so intense her primitive reptilian mind couldn’t recognize it as pain. All she knew was relief as her side burst open and the man who smelled like death spilled out in a streaming gooey mass, like a mockery of birth.
She was still reeling with pain that was infinitely more than pain when the meal, in its turn, began to feed upon her body.
§
Time is gone, but the man doesn’t know it.
He knows only that life is gone. The heat that drove him here is gone. He must find more heat. He must find life.
He must feed.
He stands, strands of snake offal stretching like melted cheese from his body, and he walks, without a memory, without a rudder.
Sabbatical in the Ohio Methlands
Not really zombies.
Not like in the movies, anyway. To begin with, they’re alive. And they don’t eat their victims. They’ll rape you, rob you, murder you, sure, but not eat you.
The rest of it’s the same, though.
They lurch around looking dead. They smell dead. Boils, abscesses, old infected injuries—all do their part in approximating putrefaction. Sometimes, a murmurin
g haze of flies surrounds their eyes and mouths. They look like skeletons in leather sheets. Their knee joints have a bigger circumference than their thighs. Starvation and malnutrition are the norm. But their crippled movements and disoriented moaning can be deceptive. Step into the street with your head elsewhere, and they’ll swarm you.
Afterward, your corpse will look like it’s been eaten.
But they don’t eat you. Just... tear you up.
I’ve seen it happen too many times. Some family in a station wagon, just passing through, gets lost, doesn’t see the roadblocks. College kids looking for a gag. Survivalists, testing their mettle, and failing. I even watched them get an Ohio state trooper once. But usually those guys know better.
This is the sixth year I’ve been coming to what used to be Gatling, Ohio. Like most of the small towns in America’s midsection, Gatling was abandoned after the Meth Rebellion of 2017, given over to the meth zombies who now wander its streets and sleep in the doorways of its uninspired, post-WWII architecture. The buildings are falling apart. Few windows remain unbroken. Insulation hangs from ceilings. Scrolls of wallpaper curl off walls. The only life is that which feeds off meth and wanders the streets, moaning like something out of a Romero film, looking for the high that will take them through the coming night.
Luckily, the little second-floor dentist office I’ve taken over as my observation point has escaped the depredations. During the day, when the meth zombies are most active, I can sit at the window and get film footage or dictate notes, whatever I feel like doing. At night, I sit in the old patient’s chair and read Jack Finney novels and drink gin. It’s diligent field work—don’t get me wrong—but I enjoy my summers here in Gatling just the same.
Gene Northrop, a chemistry professor from Texas A&M, has a similar setup across town in the old New Life Baptist church. I’ve seen him around. He’s working on a paper on aboriginal techniques for methamphetamine production in the post-industrial ruins of abandoned America. Sometimes, late at night, I’ll hear a building explode at the edge of town, and I think to myself, Ah, one of Gene’s grad students just scored himself a paper. Some night soon I’m going to visit him. Maybe we can compare notes.
In the meantime, I’ve been working on a paper on the mating habits of the female meth—
Okay, I need to change gears for a second.
There was a noise outside the door just a bit ago, and I had to make sure it wasn’t a wrecking party. The males can be dangerous when they’re scavenging for a high. I had to shoot a few of them earlier this month. I hated doing it, but I have to preserve this observation post.
Luckily, it was only Susan.
She started coming to my office two years ago. She’s a white female, early 30s, which means she was in her teens when the Rebellion happened. The meth has charred most of her mind to cinders, but her survival instincts are still strong.
She caught me off guard the first time. It was late at night. I had gone through a lot of gin. I got up from my dentist’s chair to jot some notes on something I’d seen that day, forgetting that the front door was still unlocked. I heard a floorboard creak and turned around. She was squatting in the middle of the floor, dressed in rags, her long, brown hair a frizzled, shaggy mass around her dirty face, nicks and cuts over her hands and arms.
Have you ever been watched by a squirrel? Same nervous, unblinking look I got from her.
I tried to speak, but she scrambled toward the door. She didn’t make it, though. She was hungry, dehydrated, her body weak.
I gave her some clean water and let her sleep on my couch. When she woke the next morning, she was going through withdrawal. She looked at the clean clothes I’d dressed her in, touched her face that I’d scrubbed clean, and panicked. Residual feelings of violation? I wondered. I watched her from my desk. I put a military MRE on the floor. She snatched it up and backed toward the open door. I didn’t make a move to stop her, just went on smiling.
I was delighted when she came back the next night.
We developed a routine. I’d leave the door cracked at night, a little food and water on the chair next to my bed. Though she never talked, she could still communicate, with her eyes and her body language.
She seemed grateful. I know I was.
I started calling her Susan, after this girl I used to dream of dating back in my grad-school days. I don’t think my meth girl minded. It seemed to comfort to her, just as she became a comfort to me, a bulwark against the loneliness that used to overwhelm me here at night in the Methlands.
I’ve been back in Gatling for three days now. That first night, when I was still getting settled, she came to me. She had something to show me, a memento of our night together last August.
Now I’m sitting here at my desk, watching her rub her belly. I wonder if her baby will be born without a soul, or if it will lose it along the way.
Like its father.
Two-and-a-Half Graves
If they’d come a few minutes earlier, the zombies would have surprised him in the bedroom, kneeling next to the bed, muttering his good-byes to his dead wife. They’d have found a middle-aged man in shabby clothes, dirty gray hair hanging in curtains over his face, his expression ashen with grief. They’d have found a broken man, turning the hog-tied woman onto her side, flinching as she began to struggle against the ropes. They’d have found him armed with only a kitchen knife, and that buried midway up the blade in the narrow gap between the base of her skull and the top of her spine. They could have torn him to pieces in that moment. He’d have been helpless, unable to rise to his own defense. But they came too late, and when they broke from the tree line and into his weed patch backyard, Mark Vogler was already on his feet and heading for the kitchen, where he had moved most of his tools.
At first there were only two of them, both rotting, slow-moving hulks, but there were almost certainly more in the dense cedar thicket that lined the yard. These two were part of the horde that had been trying to get at him for the last week, clawing holes in the boards he had nailed over his windows and doors, moaning all night long, melting like ghosts into the cedar thicket when he got drunk enough to stagger onto the back deck and take pot shots at them with his pistol.
Now, numb with grief—but not as numb as he thought he’d be—he leaned his forehead against a gap in the boards and watched the zombies shambling toward the house. He wasn’t afraid, and he found that funny. He tried to tell himself that he should be afraid, that this time the zombies would sense how exhausted he was and claw at the windows and doors until they got inside, but instead, all he could think about was how long it had been since he’d slept last. What was it, two nights? Three?
He coughed. Yeah, he thought, it’s the flu. Probably be on my ass the next week at least.
“You need to do it if you’re gonna do it,” he muttered to himself.
He grabbed an old Ruger pistol he kept on the counter and ran his finger over the trigger. The gun was a .357 with a blued barrel and walnut grips. Nothing fancy, but solid and reliable.
Probably the last solid and reliable thing left in this world.
His eyes snapped to a loose corner of the plywood board he’d nailed over the back door. A woman, her face streaked with blood, one eye clouded to a pale milky pink, was forcing her head and shoulders inside.
“Aren’t you the smart one?” Vogler said. “I didn’t see you.”
Ropes of saliva and flecks of foam flew from the woman’s bloody mouth. A stuttering growl rose in her throat, and her one remaining eye rolled in its socket with a feral intensity that only hunger could create.
He put the business end of the Ruger against the side of the woman’s head. “You’ll get nothing from me, you bitch,” he said through clenched teeth, “trying to break into my home...”
He fired, and then everything the woman’s brain had ever known and experienced sprayed across the rainwater-sodden floor.
He stood there, looking at the woman’s mostly headless corpse, and thought abou
t what it meant for a zombie to die. They had no thoughts, no feelings, no humanity. But the person they had once been had had all those things. Were they in there still? Even imperfectly recorded, like an echo? This woman, beneath all the rot and filth, looked to be about thirty. She would have gone to college, dealt with finding a job. She might have even had children, been a mother. She was old enough to have experienced love, and heartache, and joy, and beauty, too. All the things that made humanity great could very well have lived in that mind. Now, all those wonderful possibilities were but a smear on his kitchen wall.
The vulgarity of it made him ill.
The dull pad and drag of bare feet on the terracotta tiles of his back patio pulled his attention away. Both of the zombies he had seen earlier were there, their stiff, clumsy bodies bumping like blind men in a strange room against the rusted remains of his lawn furniture.
Vogler moved fast. He kicked the boards off the back door. With the dead woman’s weight to pull them down, they tumbled away easily. The next moment he was through the door, his weapon trained on the lead zombie. Vogler fired, turned, then fired again at the second one. The first collapsed instantly from a solid head shot. The second fell back with a groan and tripped over a toppled chair. Flat on its back, twisting miserably like a bug trying to right itself, it let a horrible gurgling sound as a black, tar-like smear of old coagulated blood formed at its throat.
He kept the weapon trained on the second zombie, waiting for it get back up, but it didn’t. It stared up at him, hacking like it was choking.
Vogler was looking at the zombie, but he was thinking of Margaret, his dead wife. His grief was real, that much he knew, but he felt like he was too shallow to grieve her the way she deserved to be grieved. She had loved him honestly, despite all his years of self-absorption and putting his career before her, despite his ability to convince himself that providing for her was the same thing as loving her, and that made him wonder if his grief was for her passing, or for himself having to live without her.
