The Last Weekend

by Nick Mamatas

  “Is everything all right!”

  Of course not. Nothing is all right, and nothing would ever be all right again. I thought that. I said, “Just freshening up!” and immediately smacked myself in the face with a meaty palm. Alexa glared at me. I supposed at that moment I had just been relegated to the role of patsy in her plan to infiltrate City Hall, as if that hadn’t been my part to play since the very first day we met, since she started trawling San Francisco for allies.

  We stayed for a while, taking turns patting the guy’s back as he cried over Jerome, hugging the body as best he could given the straps and spread-eagled posture of the deceased. He offered us drinks from his little dry bar.

  “Mix your own, help yourself.” So I did. Vodka and some grenadine, so it wouldn’t look like I was drinking vodka straight. It was good stuff, pre-collapse, smooth. Hangar 1. Most current vodka we’re able to get is either homemade stuff that may as well have chunks of potato floating in it, or is outrageously expensive and floated to shore by passing Russian pirates. With Jerome gone, I’m sure the guy wouldn’t miss it too much, plus Alexa didn’t want anything, so I was basically just consuming a double largely on her behalf.

  He finally introduced himself—his name was Terry. He had been in the Navy. He had a wife at one point, in Vallejo, but left her to come down here and be with Jerome. They’d gotten a domestic partnership the moment they could, got married in the San Francisco County courthouse the moment they could, got married again in Alameda when it was actually legal before Prop 8, and then had a Unitarian wedding with a Buddhist priest and an “ultra-reform transman rabbi” when gay marriage was “re-reinstituted.” That’s what Terry called it. He took a few minutes to carefully wrap the body of his lover in the tarp he had offered us. We looked at pictures on his laptop.

  “I love your country,” he told us both when we got to the Greek islands part of the extensive slideshow. That’s where I should have gone, when I had the chance. Greece, where the living start fires and cause panics, not the dead. Greece, where cousin Taki would hook me up with a scooter and a girlfriend and I could lay on the beach and make my own wine with the grapevines of my grandfather. The news from America would have been greeted with grim smiles from the older generation who remembered the junta, with war-whoops and dancing from the younger generation who remembered Serbia and Iraq and everything else. It would be sunny, not foggy, and if Greek girls are uptight when they’re home, German tourist girls never are. The war with the dead would be far away, a priest could say, “There are no dead people” and really mean it. “Everyone you know who died is just sleeping. One day they’ll wake up, for better or for worse.”

  It was dark when we went home to my apartment, which still smelled a bit like Thunder—sweet and rank at the same time. Alexa noticed immediately, of course.

  “It smells like fucking in here, and homeless guys.” I opened a window.

  “Everything smells like that everywhere now,” I said. She found a lemon and tore it open just to get a different scent into the air. “Now it smells like soup,” I said.

  Alexa, on the couch, her nose still wrinkled, asked me, “Is it always like that?”

  “No, that was probably the smoothest, nicest drill gig I’ve ever experienced, or heard about. If you had an ER shift the physicians wouldn’t be so kind as poor old Terry and Jerome were. They might strap someone down, or just lock the door behind you and hope for the best.”

  “Really…?”

  “Well, I’m just guessing they hope for the best. Maybe they’re like the Bowies of Berkeley, hoping for a decent experimental subject.”

  “You thought they looked like David Bowie?” Alexa said. “They reminded me more of Devo. With the orange jumpsuits and whatnot.”

  I sat down next to her, letting our knees touch. She didn’t mind blood. How could she, anymore?

  “Why are we even talking about them? That was a crazy night, in a long line of crazy nights.” The vodka had made me warm. I decided that I wouldn’t fuck Alexa that night, not even if she initiated it. Not that I suspected she would initiate anything, except a discussion about her plans.

  “Give me your laptop,” she said. “Not for keeps; I just want to show you something, if you have any net.” I did, and she did. Building plans, BART and MUNI tunnels, hand-drawn sketches on cocktail napkins scanned and uploaded along with every splotch and wrinkle, PDFs of rants and speculations. All publicly available on a freebie website.

  “If it were secret,” Alexa explained, “the surveillance state might take it seriously. Out in the open, it looks like a prank or a hoax, so we can operate with impunity.”

  “You hope.”

  “I think,” she acknowledged. “But it’s not like life is so great now, is it? What do we have to lose?” Another person with a suicide installment plan. My mind always drifted there; I couldn’t help but encounter people like me, as my daily life and habits kept the people who passed for normal away from me. Alexa’s enthusiasm and belligerence did have another possible origin—she was a cop. Back in the war on terror days, plenty of FBI agents made their careers by finding some mental defective immigrant from a Middle Eastern country, cultivating his crazy ideas to blow up the Pentagon with a remote-controlled airplane from Radio Shack, then arrested his ass just in time for a slow news day, or the kickoff of a re-election campaign. This could all be a set-up, Alexa could just be a city government honeypot. No wonder she got a driller gig so easily, no surprise that she was able to shoot Magpie down in cold blood and be ready for more, ready for gore, just a few days later.

  Greek kids in America are all paranoid. Comes from our parents—they were either running from the junta or, later, running from democracy when the junta was overthrown. Alcoholics also have a bit of a problem with paranoia. Then there’s simply the conditions of existence—the way we live now. I should bring showers instead of sunshine, melancholy in lieu of mirth. It’s a cliché to say that it’s not paranoia when they’re really out to get you, and wrong besides. It remains paranoia, and paranoia is terrifying, crippling. I needed another drink already. I wanted to run screaming out of my own apartment, find a revenant, drink its black blood, just to end the gnawing sensation in my head, the constant twisting of my stomach. I got a drink. Alexa frowned at me. I took her lemon and squirted a twist into the little bottle of Jack just to double down on how annoying I was being to her.

  “What’s your problem?” she demanded, and I giggled at her. I sounded like a fat retard in the mental hospital. I could imagine another me, from another world, sitting in some well-lit room with steel meshing securing the windows, wearing a hospital gown and drooling onto my chin. Institutional pudding and Xanax would have made me obese. My pants fit like a child’s hand-me-down shorts.

  I caught my breath and said, “What isn’t my problem?” I finished the bottle. “Let’s say we find out the unbelievable truth—even if there is some remarkable clue in City Hall, and not buried under a ton of bodies in the Empire State Building, or hidden behind a panel on the International Space Station, or encoded onto the bicep tattoo of some Navy SEAL in a cave in Afghanistan. Then what? Speak truth to power? There isn’t even a significant platform to get anyone’s attention anymore. And if we do figure it all out, and do everything right, and manage to tell everyone in a straightforward and comprehensible way that will leave no room for doubt, and then if we don’t get shot for doing it, then what?”

  “Then we’ll know. I don’t even care to tell anyone about what we find. I just want the world to make a little bit more sense, and . . .” Alexa hesitated for a moment to twitch an eye and take a thoughtful chew of her lower lip. “And maybe reverse everything? That sounds like a comic book daydream, doesn’t it? Fix the dead, get them back to their families, their work. Get some help to repair the country. But I don’t even mean it on that level—I mean I want the information so we can show it to someone, somewhere outside of the US and maybe get a little help.”

  Back when the crisis
first began, the President and Congress were very clear that they were going to handle the “outbreak” as we called it for lack of a better term—the joke was that grandmas nationwide were breaking out of their coffins—without international assistance. A week later, the President was gunned down by the remnant of his own Secret Service detail after his daughter had fallen down a flight of steps and died in his arms, only to awaken and infect him with her teeth in his neck. Then the joke was that the Vice President had messed with the runners on the stairs in the hope of precipitating some event. Whoever the President is now—I think we’re down to the President pro tempore of the Senate—he or she is hiding in a bunker somewhere, and her phone doesn’t have international dialing. The City is on its own for the most part, and San Franciscans like that just fine. We’ll make our own deals with Asia and Latin America and through Russia, the rest of Europe. The joke is that all we have to trade is cockrings.

  “So, you’re a real hero type after all, hmm?” I said.

  “I have a theory. We could all be heroes, except that everyday life gets in the way. If you have to work all day, feed your family, have your teeth cleaned every six months, keep income tax forms for seven years, when do you have time to do something important or meaningful in one go? Volunteering at a soup kitchen or with the philoptochos like some old lady is one thing, but . . .”

  “But it’s not flashy, not the spectacle. But remember, ‘In a world which really is topsy-turvy, the true is a moment of the false.’”

  “Wait . . . what?” she said.

  “Society of the Spectacle? You know, it’s—”

  “Billy, quoting books randomly doesn’t make you seem smart or cultured. It makes you seem like a nervous, insecure douchebag.”

  When a woman says something like that, and you’re not a Neanderthal who thinks smacking one in the face is acceptable, the only alternative to a fierce objection followed immediately by an all-night screaming match and a ritual reading from the Book of Flaws which all women have memorized is to play it as it lays.

  “I am a nervous, insecure douchebag, Alexa. I don’t think either of us are surprised by that. ‘Γνῶθισεαυτόν—’” I laughed because I knew she couldn’t object to that quotation. “And I do know myself.” I glanced over at my collection of legal pads, all covered in scribbles and scratch-outs. “I don’t know much else, I suppose. That’s why I’m an unskilled laborer. As are you, as of tonight.”

  “If you don’t want to help, Billy, that’s fine. You can sit here and drink yourself to death. Or you can come with me, and then after we see what there is to see, you can come home, sit here, and drink yourself to death. Or if they catch us and float us out on a prison barge, you can sit out in the bay and drink yourself to death. You’ll find a way, I’m sure.”

  “Half the booze in town is prison-grade homebrew anyway,” I said. “Fine. My book needs an ending of some sort. I’m in.” Then I added, “Is anyone else in? Do you have a bunch of other guys you visit occasionally?”

  “Yes, I do have a bunch of other guys I visit occasionally. And I’m sure you stick your penis into anything that isn’t trying to kill you. But no, don’t worry, you won’t have to meet them and then mutter dumb insults to yourself between the beers they’d buy for you because you look just that sad and pathetic.” For a moment, I wondered if she had somehow managed to read some of my work on the legal pads.

  “You could be nice to me, occasionally,” I said. “I . . .” I was going to say that I was nice to her, but that wasn’t quite true. “I’ll do my best to try to be nice to you.” In return, Alexa took off her top. Then both our cell phone pagers went off. We were asked to report to the same place. Something big must have happened. Another earthquake—not likely. I rarely felt the small tremblors, but one big enough to kill a lot of people even I’d notice. A mass shooting or murder or bus accident more likely, or a new contagion ribbing through an apartment block or hospital ward. In some dim corner of my brain, I wondered if this was all just another layer of conspiracy, the final set-up. I agree to aid and abet, Alexa takes off her top, and we get called to duty.

  The call was in Japantown, pretty close to the Civic Center and City Hall. It would take us awhile to get there. Even before the reanimations, Japantown was a geographical oddity—almost impossible to get to without seriously meaning it. It’s not much of a neighborhood either, dominated by a theme mall and a few concrete slab buildings supposedly reminiscent of Tokyo’s industrial housing blocks. With the buses mercurial and the unofficial transports worse, it might take an hour. But Alexa was curious and I was resigned.

  “Is it a trap?”

  “Maybe,” she said, her voice muffled through her sweater, which she was snaking back into.

  “Is it a trap you set?”

  Her head popped out of the neck-hole just in time for her to peer at me, eyes wide. “You’re not that important, friend,” she said.

  “I can tell you’re serious. You’re talking like a movie cowboy all of a sudden. Anyway, two drillers, one drill. You want it?”

  “Oh yeah, I fucking want it.” She went to the sink where she’d wiped down the equipment and quickly put everything back in the box. I grabbed a baseball bat, not so I’d go down swinging if I had to, but to have something to do with my hands. My fingers clenched the aluminum compulsively. This was strange and stupid, a new kind of oppression that people trained to obey the dictates of everyday life could never understand, never see as anything other than the freedom of anarchy, the audacity of will and desire. But I’d spent my adult life trying to avoid adult life, living a simplified version of it without dreams of a family or concern for the polity, so I had a special sensitivity to the traps laid by the world. The most obvious and straightforward of social demands—wear a seatbelt, don’t spit, drink only in the evenings, save money, don’t vanish in the middle of the night, defend yourself when punched in the face by an angry husband instead of just laughing at him because no matter how hard he hits, you still fucked his wife—all were inhabited by the spirit of tyranny. City work, the war against the demon futility, was just another aspect of mental indenture. But I was going, because Alexa had just shown me her tits again, and because I said I would, and because I didn’t want to be alone.

  The Japan Center was ringed with police wagons and fire trucks. They hadn’t aged well. Several had unrepaired crumples or obvious DIY fix-ups—duct tape and plastic sheeting for a side window, a ruined ladder twisted like a bow atop a wrapped gift, scratches and innumerable small dents. Ditto the personnel in mix ’n’ match uniforms, scars and bruises, even a few fingers missing to the second knuckle on the right hand of the cop who waved us behind a cordon, where several other drillers waited along with a few medics by a tent.

  We were briefed via gossip. A revolutionary, or religious, or just plain suicidal sect had barricaded themselves in the mall as best they could. There were hostages, or at least suspected hostages. It wasn’t a Japanese American or local action—virtually everyone inside appeared to be white, which further fueled the suspicion that the hostages were just sect members ready to be rescued in order to explode their dynamite belts in the midst of us. Or the whole thing was just a distraction, or the prelude to the Canadian invasion. Or the hostages were going to be killed, and the cultists would kill themselves or just wait for the reanimates to do it, then they’d storm out of all entrances, take out the police, and the plague would finally spread uniformly across the city. The end of the world between two rows of spittle-slick teeth, finally. Then, a hand was on my chest. The guy from the other night stood before me, smiling.

  “You a driller?”

  I shrugged. “Sure.”

  “I could tell, I could tell with you,” he said. “You was calm, man.” Then his hand slipped from my chest to my hand and he shook it. “Cornelius. Call me Junior.” To Alexa he said, “This your man? He a rock.”

  “A rock!” I said to Alexa. “What’s news, Junior? Why are we here?”

 
He shrugged. “Where there be bodies, there be drillers.”

  “They don’t expect us to go into the mall after a big firefight and poke around in the dark, do they?” Alexa was staring past at the Japan Center itself. As malls go, it was a fairly small one, split into two buildings, and only a few stories high. Lots of entrances and exits, but not so many that the cultists were going to be able to slink away. Ten seconds around the police, and I was already thinking like a cop. Secure the perimeter! Don’t let the criminals escape! Standing by to crack heads open, sir yes sir!

  “We’re not here for them,” Alexa said, still looking past us and across the street. “We’re here for the cops. When the cultists start shooting and killing us, we’re here to drill their heads open.” She had spotted something up on the roof, and she wasn’t the only one. Shouts, hands in the air, then a spotlight filling the night. There was a gun, a big one on a tripod, and it roared to life. Junior tackled us both as bullets streaked over our heads in a wide arc, sweeping through the cordon. Legs were everywhere, knees too, and flailing. I grabbed Alexa and Junior and got up. They had their drill boxes held over their heads. Junior took us down again. The rhythm—I’m up, he sees me, I’m down. Junior, a soldier, chanted that. Long strides with my long legs, a wide wingspan; I knocked us a hole in the crowd and we swam through it like dolphins breaking the waves.

  An explosion somewhere behind us felt like the earthquake, but the sky shone red, a tiny sun rising. The Japan Center was on fire. Then a parked car across the street on Laguna went up, as did the one next to it. I caught a glimpse of the third car—an obvious wreck, but the city is full of them—and thought I saw a small spark reflected in the spidery remains of the windshield before it exploded too.

  “Run!” I said, but Junior grabbed me.

  “They want us to run,” he said. “We move, but we stay.”

  I looked to Alexa, waiting for a scream or tears, but she was stone except for her wild eyes, ready to fight. The police were returning fire now, from behind their cars, but it was pistols versus military stuff. We made way for firefighters running with hoses. The scene was the opposite of anarchy—suddenly everyone was in charge, full of authority, shouting orders and then instantly carrying them out. A stolen city bus rolled down the cross street and machine gun fire poured from two of its windows. Another faceful of asphalt, another quick stagger back to my knees, my feet.