by Joe McKinney
He thought, Oh Jesus, am I that shallow? I am, aren’t I?
Vogler looked up at the tree line. The rest of the zombie horde had emerged. They stood inside what had once been his yard, staring at him with a vacuous menace. None blinked. The dead didn’t do that.
“Get out of here!”
They didn’t move. They didn’t even flinch.
“Get!”
He ran down the steps and into the yard, screaming and waving his arms in the air like some mad prophet coming down from the hills to announce the end of days.
All but one of the zombies stumbled back into the woods. For some reason he had never figured out, they could be startled and turned away if you made enough noise.
All but a few. Some, almost as though they realized their advantage, stood their ground and stared.
“You better run, you son of a bitch.”
But the zombie just stared. Vogler raised the pistol and closed one eye and put the front sight square on the zombie’s head and pulled the trigger.
The gun blast echoed through the surrounding hills, and when the noise was gone, Vogler wondered at how quiet it was here at the end of the world. Like a graveyard on a Sunday morning.
§
He couldn’t catch his breath as he remounted the stairs and went inside. In the darkened kitchen, he stood with one hand over his heart, trying to will himself to breathe.
And then he coughed.
He coughed hard, again and again, and each hack felt like something was inside him, trying to claw its way out. When the coughing finally subsided, he steadied himself against a granite counter top that had been the finest money could buy not so many years ago, before the necrosis filovirus and the military quarantine and all the useless madness that had come with those times.
He stared at the light fixture above the empty floor where their dining room table had once stood. The room seemed to swell and contract, swell and contract, like he was standing inside a giant lung, and he thought he was going to vomit. He wasn’t turning into one of those things, he told himself. He hadn’t been infected. This was just the flu.
Vogler had been a surgeon in the early days of the outbreak, and he’d heard patients describe what it felt like to undergo the change. They experienced nausea-inducing hallucinations, shortness of breath, a sense of drifting, inability to control their thoughts.
That wasn’t what this was.
The worst things he would have to deal with would be fever, muscle weakness, chills, maybe a few headaches.
And then he remembered the pistol in his hand. Vogler looked down at it then and was surprised to see it was still there.
“Just make sure you save yourself a bullet.” He was mildly amused at how easy it was to decide to use the gun on himself.
He wondered what it was going to taste like, the soot-stained metal.
Vogler stepped outside again to see if the horde had returned, but the yard was empty. He leaned against the porch railing and let his mind drift. Behind him stood an eight-thousand-square-foot monstrosity, a moldering Mediterranean-style villa that had been his dream home ten years ago when he built it for Margaret. It stood on top of a low, domed hill, commanding a view of other hills, other mansions. They were all wrecks now—all that remained of what had once been the Dominion, San Antonio’s wealthiest neighborhood. Looking to the south, he saw the city skyline and the yellowish, hazy dust that rose from it. Those streets were crowded now with the ambulatory corpses of the victims of the necrosis filovirus.
He turned away.
There was an obligation waiting for him inside. Margaret, in the dying moment of clarity that had penetrated her fading, had asked him to bury her next to their son in the soft dirt beneath the old oak in the front lawn.
He had promised her he would.
“Promise me you will,” she’d said, trying to sit up, trying to grab his arm, but unable to do either. “Tell me you will. Promise me.”
At first he thought she repeated herself because of the infection waging war in her bloodstream. She wasn’t thinking clearly. But then he saw the look on her face and he knew differently. He knew that her mind was as sharp as ever, at least for that moment.
Twenty-five years earlier, right after completing his residency, his head swollen with pride at his accomplishment, there had been a nurse, a sexy brunette with brown eyes and small breasts and graceful hips. A short, white-hot affair had followed. He ended it when Margaret found them out. And then, as she made him promise to bury her body next to their son’s, he had seen an echo of the doubt and mistrust that had plagued their marriage during the decade after that affair. He felt its sudden return now like a knife in his gut.
He went to the bedroom, and with a great deal of difficulty, for the coughing had returned, he shouldered her shrouded corpse and a shovel and headed for the old oak tree in the front yard to do his widower’s duty.
§
He dug for two hours, listening by turns to the slice and crunch of the shovel cutting into the earth and the moans of the zombie horde circling, just out of view.
He touched the pistol in his waistband and felt reassured by it. When he was done, he was going to lie down on the other side of his son’s grave and eat the gun.
“It’ll be like it used to be,” he said to the simple cedar post marker at the head of his son’s grave. The boy had been twenty years old when he died, but at that moment, Vogler thought of him as he had been many years earlier, a four-year-old child coming downstairs in the middle of the night to climb in bed between his parents.
Vogler wiped the sweat out of his eyes and went back to digging. Despite the coughing, despite the knowledge that there wouldn’t be anybody to throw earth on top of him when he was done, he had a sense that the labor was a good thing, that he was making good on the most important promise he had ever made. It felt good to sweat. The stiffness in his lower back felt good. The pain was honest, and Margaret deserved that. After all the years and all the troubles, she deserved something honest from him.
§
Later, when the hole was finished and the body was inside and he had said all he could say in words to a woman who had shared his life with him and given so much of herself to him, he began to shovel the dirt in.
So absorbed was he with his work, so overheated by the unaccustomed exertion, that he failed to hear the big male zombie padding through the grass toward him.
He didn’t so much as hear the zombie as feel the weight of its stare on his back. And when he did finally feel that weight, he spun around and let out a startled cry at the charging mass of tooth and nail bearing down upon him.
The zombie clawed at his face, knocking him down, tearing into him. Vogler put his hands up to keep the zombie’s teeth away from his throat, and they fought, not as man and dead man, but as two wild things whose only weapons were the muscles and the fists and the teeth they were born with.
Vogler managed to get one hand into the zombie’s mouth and grabbed onto its lower jaw. The zombie’s teeth shredded the palm of his hand, but Vogler wouldn’t let go. He twisted the jaw, and the dead man went down. But even then, even with the zombie on the ground, groaning, snarling, Vogler refused to let go. He pushed the zombie’s head up and away, exposing the throat. He was infected already; there was no point in fear now. Vogler threw punch after punch into the soft flesh of the zombie’s throat.
“You go to hell, you son of a bitch!” he roared, screaming the words with the rage of one who has seen the world around him die and has been unable to do a damned thing about it, even for all the wealth and power that had once been his to command.
The zombie convulsed under the blows, raking at Vogler’s belly with his fingernails. But there was no stopping Vogler’s attack. As a civilized man, he had a long way to fall to reach that savage state where only survival mattered, and when he did finally fall, when the protective veneer of reason and humanity peeled away and there was nothing left but the bright burning spark of primal rage insi
de him, he proved to be the stronger. He sank his teeth into the zombie’s throat and tasted the corrupted flesh and then the polluted blood as the zombie gradually weakened.
The thing clawed his stomach once, twice, before it died its second death, and with that last swipe of its hand snagged the trigger guard of the Ruger and pulled it from Vogler’s waistband. Vogler was bent over forward so that he couldn’t feel the gun leave its seat. But he did hear it go off, and he did feel the bullet punch into his belly and tear through his organs like a boy with a stick ramming the pointed end into a fire-ant mound and stirring it until nothing but an angry mess remains. That was what his belly felt like. That was what the pain of being shot in the gut felt like.
Vogler coughed in disbelief, then pitched face-down in the soft, black dirt beneath the oak. He lay there, trying to catch his failing breath, his eyes growing darker by the second and his skin crawling with a sudden chill until it seemed he was the only being left alive on the barren, bald tip of the world, the blackness of space around him. The thought passed through his mind that in the time before the world died, he had been a surgeon, the head of a hospital... a wealthy man... a married man... a father. And now, he was a dying man, and none of it counted anymore because now he was none of those things. Now, he was merely a tree falling in the woods, unseen. Unheard.
Until he rose again, an empty husk of rotting meat.
The zombies closed in on him. He could hear them, he could hear their excited panting and their slobbering jowls slopping together, and he knew what was coming. Though he couldn’t see, he could still feel, and he could sense rotted breath and wet teeth on his fingertips, the teeth pulling at the skin, almost gingerly but for their sharpness, taking a hesitant first taste of his flesh.
Starvation Army
From the window of his abominably small, second-story room, Jonathan Nettle could see the alley where he’d found the body earlier that morning. He’d accidentally stumbled onto the corpse while he was wandering the huge, unending slum of London’s East End, looking for the homeless shelter on the Mile End Road where he was to take up his new post as assistant minister. He’d smelled the noisome stench moments before he came across the homeless man’s body, and he’d spun on his heel and vomited all over the sidewalk when he saw the iridescent black flies swarming around the mouth and eyes. After that, he’d stumbled from the alley and grabbed the first policeman he saw. He babbled and pointed and grunted until, at last, he made himself understood enough for the policeman to follow him.
The policeman looked at the body, at the bruise-like splotches on the skin that weren’t bruises, but lividity, at the emaciated, rail-skinny arms and legs, and merely nodded.
“Yer an American, ain’t ye, sir?”
“Huh?” Nettle said, the back of his hand against his lips. “Uh, yes.”
“What are ye doin’ here in the East End?”
Nettle told him he was looking for the homeless shelter, and the policeman merely nodded. “The peg house yer lookin’ for is over there,” he said, and pointed over Nettle’s shoulder.
Nettle could barely take his eyes off the body, but he did long enough to see the tumbledown, soot-stained building the policeman pointed out for him. He looked back at the policeman—at the bobby, he reminded himself—and said, “What… happened to him?”
“This bloke? Prob’ly starved to death’d be my guess, sir.”
“Starved?”
“Aye,” the bobby said.
Nettle had said nothing to that, only nodded as he tried to take in the wonder that a grown man could starve to death in the middle of the largest city on Earth, in the heart of the most powerful empire the world had ever known. He tried, but couldn’t wrap his mind around it.
His stay was supposed to be brief, only long enough for him to get some experience with the great things William Booth and his “salvation army” were doing for the poor here in London, so he could take those practices back to his Methodist ministries in New York and Boston. But he could already tell that the “problem of the poor,” which such great orators as the Reverend Merle Cary of New York had spoken of so eloquently to audiences up and down the New England seaboard all that preceding summer of 1875, was far worse than he had been led to believe.
Just then, as if on cue, several men began lugging bags of garbage out of the hospital across the street and dumping them on the sidewalk below Nettle’s window. The bags split open and soon an almost liquid pile of corruption was festering in the open air. Nettle watched the pile grow into a shapeless mass of rotten vegetables, scraps of meat, orange peels, and bloody surgical rags and blankets. The street was a miasma of squabbling and obscene yelling and fighting, and yet no one said a word about the garbage. Indeed, after it had been sitting there for a few minutes, children converged on it, burying their arms in it up to their shoulders, digging for any kind of food they could find and devouring it on the spot.
One boy, a stunted little runt of perhaps six years old, came up with something black that might have once been a potato, and tried to steal away with it. Several older boys surrounded him, punched him until he fell, then kicked him until he gave up the nasty potato thing he clutched near his groin.
For Nettle, it was too much. His sister Anna had snuck a dozen oranges into his luggage as a treat for him. Fully aware that indiscriminate charity is cruel, he made up his mind to be cruel. He collected the oranges in a paper sack and went down to the street.
“How old are you, son?” he asked the boy.
“Twelve, sir.”
Nettle blinked in shock. Twelve! And he had envisioned the boy a runt of six. How this place must beat them down, he thought.
He handed the boy the oranges, and the boy’s eyes went wide, like he’d just been given all the jewels in Africa.
“Go on,” Nettle said. “Enjoy.”
The boy was gone faster than the sun from a November day, and Nettle, feeling a little better, went back up to his room to write a letter to his sister in New York.
§
The porter’s name was Bill Lowell. He was a weathered, bent-back old man whose job it was to watch the door to the shelter and tell the poor wretches who came there when there was no more space available. Most nights, there was room for between twenty and fifty people, depending on the shelter’s food stores and what work needed to be done—for the cost of a bed indoors and a hot meal was a day of hard, hard labor.
“We open the doors at six,” Bill said to Nettle, who’d been told he’d work at each job in the shelter so he could better learn its overall operational strategy, “but the line’ll start formin’ ’fore noon. By four the blokes’ll be lined up ’round the corner.”
“Even when there’s only room for a few of them?”
Bill shrugged. “We’ll need to search ’em as they come inside,” he said. “Sometimes, they try an’ sneak tobacco inside in their brogues, and they ain’t allowed that.”
Nettle glanced through a window next to the door, and sure enough, a long line had already formed and was snaking its way down the sidewalk and around the corner. Word had gone out earlier that there was only room for twenty-five, and yet no one in the line seemed to want to leave his spot.
The faces he saw all looked hollow, the eyes vacuous. It wasn’t until several days later that Nettle learned why everyone he saw shared the same corpselike expression. London law didn’t allow the homeless to sleep outside at night. The idea was that if the homeless weren’t allowed to sleep outside at night, they would find somewhere indoors to sleep. To those who only saw the problem from the stratospheric heights of wealth and power, it was a clear example of give a man a fish and he eats for a day, teach him to fish and he eats for a lifetime. The reality, though, was a homeless population that was constantly driven from one doorway to the next by the police, forced to stay awake by the toe of a boot or the bite of a baton, resulting in an expression of slack-jawed exhaustion that stared back at Nettle from every pair of eyes he met.
Bi
ll himself had nearly shared that fate, he told Nettle. He had had a family once—a wife, three daughters, and a son—but had outlived them all. His wife and daughters he’d lost to scarlet fever, all within a month of each other, but the son survived and had helped Bill in his work as a carpenter in days past.
One day, Bill had been carrying a load of nails that was too much for him. “Something in me back just broke,” Bill said. His load of nails had spilled, and he’d ended up flat on his back, unable to get up. He was taken to a hospital, but they refused to admit him, telling him, essentially, to “walk it off.”
This he had tried to do, but two hours later was on his back again. He was taken to a different hospital, and this time spent three weeks in bed. He emerged a broken man, unable to do the hard labor that was, unfortunately, the only kind of work that he and most of the men like him were qualified to do, only to learn his son had fallen from a rooftop and died the week before his release. The boy was buried in a pauper’s grave, unmarked, along with a dozen others.
He lived on the streets after that—carrying the banner, as the expression went—chased from one doorway to the next by the police, until, as luck would have it, he ended up in the Mile End Road shelter on the day they had an opening for a porter who could also do a little light carpentry. His nine-pounds-a-year salary made him a veritable Croesus among the East End’s poor.
Nettle thought idly that such a man as Bill, who had narrowly escaped a cruel death by exposure and malnutrition, would be more charitable toward his fellow men, but such was not the case.
Much to Nettle’s unease, Bill seemed to heartily enjoy his position of relative power over the poor and stared down his soot-blackened nose at all who entered, demanding from each their name, age, condition of destitution, and what kind of work they were good for, before searching them all with a rough, hard hand.
