The Last Weekend

by Nick Mamatas

  “I can’t believe this is it,” was his last message to the Internet.

  Maybe Aishwarya is alive. I used to daydream about that occasionally. About coming across her out here. Maybe she’d even remember my face, and tell me the miraculous story of a forty-person troupe comprised of her extended family slashing their way across country to San Francisco, like the pioneers of old. But no, she’s dead, I know it. The Boston metroplex went especially quickly, as all the resources up and down the Northeast Corridor were mustered in an attempt to save New York City. I hope she had a quick death—all teeth and bloodspray. Better than a slow decline amidst the ruins, or a terrifying inevitable checkmate from the resource microwars on the block, I think. I’m living the latter two, and certainly would have preferred the former. Apocalypse is a Greek word. It means lifting the veil. That’s why the last book of the Bible is also called Revelation. You can’t lower the veil afterwards and pretend to unsee all that has been seen. Even moonshine potent enough to make a man blind won’t help.

  San Francisco is . . . okay. We’re all crazy here, just like we were before. We’re ruled by men with guns who kill us for our own safety, just like we were before. There are fewer distractions now, except for one another. The façades have all been torn down, the glaze rubbed off with steel wool. It’s hard to live after revelation. Better to wander the world in a daze, in doubt, sure that there’s some good life story out there to live. Go to school, get married, have a baby, die painlessly in your sleep if you can, with smiling relatives around the hospital bed if you can’t. They won’t start screaming and fighting till after you close your eyes for the final time that way. That’s the life my parents wanted, and they sure as hell didn’t get it, but at least they didn’t live to see me now.

  After I saw Yvette out, I went to bed and dreamed of us dancing in a black and white field taken straight from the few photos my parents had of their early lives in Greece. Papa smiling at the camera, two goats on either side of him staring dumbly forward. My mother in a long skirt, leaning against a motorcycle that is leaning against a fence, squinting up at the sky, gray grass all around her. We all danced arm in arm, and we all fell down when the world rolled out from under us. In the morning, I called my parents and told them that I wouldn’t be coming home for Christmas, because I had gotten a job in California and had to start right away. At a magazine, for the shipping industry. Shipping is lousy with Greeks. Papatheofanis had introduced me to an old friend, see, who set up a phone interview, and I did really well. Not much money to start, but enough to make moving worthwhile. And in San Francisco, all the backyards have orange trees too. They pretended to be excited for me, and I pretended to believe that they believed me. So we were all happy.

  (14)

  Junior woke us up in the morning. He looked like a cartoon character that had been in an explosion—clothing torn, a black eye, soot and ash everywhere. He was upset with our desertion and showed it with a kick to my shoulder, then a stomp on my forearm when I didn’t immediately spring to my feet.

  “Yo!” he said. “Wake the fuck up. We won. And I got something for you.” I extricated myself from Alexa’s limbs and dragged to my feet. Alexa stayed on the floor, but she was awake now, dazed as if emerging from an incomplete afternoon nap and confused to find that it was dark outside.

  “Bring her down!” Junior called up the stairs, and down came a well-beaten police officer. He dragged Thunder down the steps by her wrist. Her face was smeared with greasy stripes of eye make-up and dust.

  “We found this bitch inside. You want her free, or fuck her?” Junior said.

  Alexa scrambled to her feet, one bitch smelling another.

  “Normally, we’d just punch her ticket,” the cop said. “But Junior says you know this girl.” He shoved Thunder and she took half a step in front of me.

  “What the hell’s going on?” I said. “Thunder, what were you doing in the Japanese mall?”

  “We wanted in. You know, City Hall? It was the only way.”

  “Clearly not,” Alexa said.

  “What do you think is in City Hall that’s so important?” I said.

  Thunder shrugged. “I don’t know. But if it were nothing, they wouldn’t be keeping it a secret, would they?” Behind her, the cop and Junior exchanged looks, then looked at me expectantly.

  “Okay, I’ll—”

  “Don’t…” Alexa hissed.

  “—take—”

  “…fucking do…”

  “—responsibility—”

  Alexa howled at that. “You? Take responsibility? Fucking right.”

  “Do I need to sign her out or anything?” I asked the cop, who shrugged. Thunder moved to my left side, keeping me between her and Alexa.

  The cop said, “There are two reasons, potentially, to keep people from a place. To keep something in, or to keep something out. Think about that, okay?”

  “That’s cryptic,” Alexa said to the cop.

  “Almost a Zen koan,” I said to Alexa.

  Junior’s phone beeped. He looked at the text and nodded toward the steps. “Let’s go. All y’all.” Even the cop obeyed without hesitation.

  The street had been torn from the ground, given a good shake, and then plopped back down. The mall’s exterior was scorched and black—now it matched most of the rest of the block, most of the rest of the city. Bodies, both uniformed and civilian, were stacked neatly in one corner, a precise hole in every forehead, open and expectant like a mouth expressing surprise. Junior guided us to a large bus of the sort that used to take old people to Reno for unfun vacations and we all walked up the steps. Most of the seats had been torn out, and replaced with long, slim desks on either side. A few people manned laptops and in the back, toward the restroom, sat the social worker. She smiled and waved when she saw us; when she saw me, anyway.

  “Hello!” she said. “So we meet again.” She laughed aloud.

  “The mad scene: enter Ophelia,” I said. She laughed at that as well. She did look mad. Though the bus, some sort of mobile command center, was slick and appeared new, the social worker’s own dress betrayed reduced circumstances. Her suit jacket had a mismatched button, and she had to settle for “nude” stockings—the pinkish-beige of Caucasian nylon looked fairly awkward on an older black woman. Men’s boots too. A sidearm in a holster strapped to a large leather belt, like a movie cowboy.

  The social worker looked at Thunder and introduced herself as Dr. Jaffe. Thunder decided that her name was Ashley, or perhaps it truly was. Then the doors closed behind us.

  “Yo!” Junior said, to nobody in particular.

  “Relax, it’s just a precaution. We’re not driving off anywhere,” Jaffe said. “Someone probably spotted a reanimate outside, or an undrilled corpse. We’re actually waiting for a mechanic and a tow truck. It was a pitched battle last night, I tell you. For the future of the city.” She looked at Thunder. “So, tell me dear, what would you like to know?”

  “What’s so special about this city?” Thunder said. “Everywhere else I’ve been, all around the Bay, is an utter wreck. You have electricity most days, wireless. The friggin’ traffic lights still work. I met someone who received a letter from a friend in France.”

  Jaffe shrugged. “Mostly, it’s just a quirk of geography. We’re a port city. Hilly. Temperate climate. Before the chaos of the reanimate uprising, we had a highly educated and technically astute population base. We still do, though the base is much smaller now, of course. You may as well ask the Arabs why they have all the oil—does Allah like them best?”

  “Luck’s a relative thing,” the cop said. “San Francisco isn’t lucky, it’s a shithole overrun with zombies and heavily armed assholes who are trying to destroy what’s left of civilization. Siberia is lucky, compared to us. The people in the slums of Tijuana are lucky, compared to us.”

  “That’s not everything though—no graveyards. No cemeteries. Even long before the reanimations, the city would ship bodies to Colma. Is that a coincidence too,
a lucky happenstance?” Alexa demanded to know.

  Jaffe shrugged. “If I said yes, you wouldn’t believe me. If I said no, you wouldn’t be any less angry about it. Tell me what I should say, young woman, to make you happy and I’ll do my best to say it convincingly.”

  “‘Neither confirm nor deny’ is the same as a confirmation!” Alexa said.

  “Or a denial!” I said. Only Junior laughed at that, and just barely. “I mean, why not ask why Colma accepted all those bodies, hmm?”

  “Are you saying that this was some sort of experimental virus gone out of control, and that there’s a secret lab in Colma that had spent decades experimenting on dead bodies in order to reanimate them?” Thunder said.

  “Hmm, that’s a new one to me . . .” I glanced around the bus. Nobody seemed to be taking Thunder’s new notion seriously. Then I asked Jaffe. “What is any of this to do with you? I mean, who are you? Why do you get a bus, why do you know what’s going on, or get to pretend to?”

  Jaffe said plainly, “I’m the mayor. After a fashion. You’re a Greek boy, yes? Ever read deeply into the notions of the Greek Orthodox church?”

  “Nope,” I said. I looked at Alexa.

  “You’re an . . . ethnarch?” she said to Jaffe.

  “More or less. We’re in the kingdom of the death, an oppressed minority. The actual ruling elite of San Francisco died early on, mostly thanks to stupid stunts for the news cameras. Someone had to step up to take charge and administrate the city government for the living, and that was me,” she said. “Really, William, it was all over the Internet. I’m happy to step down if the citizens can get it together to elect a replacement. Heck, I’ll step down right now and let one of you take over. Or all three of you. You can be a troika.”

  “You’re the mayor of the city, but you go on door-to-door missions finding people in case they’re not dead yet?”

  “I haven’t had to do that in some months, sadly . . . You were actually the only one we ever found. I suppose we can say that you were well-preserved,” Jaffe said. She made a drinky-drinky gesture with her hand. It was clear to me then that every last human being in the city was insane. Alexa and Thunder were rampaging maniacs, getting out all their aggressions on the ruins of the world. Most of the clients I’d met while drilling were hanging on to a dead past, blind to the world around them. Even Junior was some sort of weirdo. It would take a crazier person than all the rest to climb to the top of this shitheap and declare herself Queen and Protector. And here she was. There could be no secrets here, just dumb accidents and ridiculous fate. No conspiracies, just the futile graspings of deranged minds for some narrative that could make sense of their lives.

  “I’m not the only well-preserved one around here,” I said. “You’re the witch of the place.”

  “I love this city, friend—”

  “‘I’ll tell you what real love is,” I said. “It is blind devotion, unquestioning self-humiliation, utter submission, trust and belief against yourself and against the whole world, giving up your whole heart and soul to the smiter—as I did.’”

  I heard Thunder whisper to the cop, “That’s from Charles Dickens.”

  “I’ve done all that,” Jaffe said. “I do that every morning before breakfast. We have some chickens in a coop in a courtyard. When did you last have fresh scrambled eggs, English muffins, orange juice? I have that every morning, you know. So too do the full-time city workers.” She nodded toward the policeman, and then to Junior.

  “You see, I’m all carrot, no stick. There’s no use in killing anyone, and it’s expensive—and superfluous—to imprison them. So all I am going to do is let the three of you off the bus now. Cornelius here can protect you from any remnant reanimates while in Japantown, I’m sure, and Officer Grady will also accompany you so long as you like. Then tomorrow, I’ll give you a call. What I’d like to know is what young Ashley here was up to, and who her confederates might be. Talk to her about it,” Jaffe said. As an aside, she said, “And I apologize for speaking of you as though you’re not standing right here in the room with us, Ashley, but you’ve been a bit rude to me.” The bus door opened again, and the cop made a sweeping gesture with his arms to usher us all out. “I’ll call you tomorrow,” Jaffe said to us.

  Outside, we let the cop and Junior go immediately. The cop was happy to get right back on the bus, but Junior had words for us.

  “You know, I would of plugged this girl, bam, like that!” He snapped his fingers. “But I seen you two together. You a driller, man, and we gotta hella watch our backs. So do right by the city, you feel me?”

  “Uh…all right,” I said. That seemed to satisfy him.

  We walked down to the Civic Center and found a place to sit in the old Asian art museum. I’d decided that I was just going to sit down and stare at Thunder until she decided to say something, but Alexa started arguing with her immediately.

  “You were an armed group with no goals, no plans, no strategy—you expect us to believe that?”

  “Why not? You shot the shit out of my friend with no goal, plan, or strategy! You’re a fucking murderer; you don’t get to lecture me on moral issues,” Thunder said. A powerful rhetorical ploy, but Alexa didn’t fall for it.

  “He jumped out at us. Actually, your little stunt with your ‘new’ friends—if they were really new at all—is just like what you tried to pull on us in Berkeley. Lure us in, then attack.”

  I was struck by an epiphany at that very moment. I needed a drink. I could get one too, if I wanted to. I was entirely, utterly free. “‘Anything, anything would be better than this agony of mind, this creeping pain that gnaws and fumbles and caresses one and never hurts quite enough,’” I said, straight out of Sartre, but the girls ignored me. I wandered away and out of the great hall of the museum.

  The public common was busy, as always. Tents in bunches, vans from out of which spilled whole desperate families, the smell of street meats, tiny pawnshops one card table wide—it would be easy to find a drink. I could trade my cell phone for one. Let Mayor Jaffe call someone else first thing tomorrow, offer him eggs in exchange for information. She’d get a better deal from whatever random boob took her call anyway.

  I found myself chanting, “Drink, drink, drink,” as I wandered through the agora, and though I was the only one singing about booze to himself, I didn’t garner any attention, wanted or unwanted. We were all muttering freaks now.

  I found a stone soup bar operating out of the back of a repurposed hot dog cart. Stone soup is essentially a randomly generated highball of haphazard proportions. If you brought something to pour into the bucket—booze of any type, or fruit juice, or soda—you could drink a double for the price of a single. The rest of us had to pay, which funded the base broth of the soup. I got a cupful for some change and my shoelaces. The soup du jour was a brown and orange swirl, typical of a town with a fair number of orange trees in vacant lots and in hidden backyards. Tasted like feet, but one gets what one pays for, especially after total economic collapse. My body was hungry for the sugars and the vitamins, and straighted right out. I could picture every little cell in my body, little cartoon blobs with gaping toothless mouths, opening wide to take a dose of the medicine.

  Only after my first swallow did I bother looking at my fellow patrons. A fat fag on my right—not a slur, he wore a black T-shirt with the words FAT FAG spelled out in glued-on acrylic diamonds; huge arms covered in pre-collapse sleeves. On my left, a painfully thin woman; she looked like a collection of chicken bones wrapped in soiled paper. I’ve seen a lot of ugly people in my time, but this woman was in the top 99 percent. More wrinkles than features, a jaw shaped like an iron, eyes nearly sunk together in the middle of her face. She drank slowly, tilted her cup past a lipless fringe. Her teeth were crooked, like tombstones after an earthquake, which is how she managed to get any stone soup down her throat. Her jaw was clenched.

  I turned to the bartender, a young Mexican guy with a decent mustache who sat behind his vat of grog in a
full lotus position, and asked, “This woman is dead, isn’t she?”

  “I think so,” he said slowly, like a Berkeleyan. Maybe he drove out here on the weekends to make some extra money, or to poison San Franciscans. “What should we do?”

  The fat guy said, “Oh, just leave her be. Maybe you should mass produce this stuff and hand it out to the dead when they come waltzing down the street. Then all our problems will be solved!” He giggled.

  “How long has she been this way?” I asked.

  The bartender shrugged.

  “Jesus Christ, did she pay with soup or cash?”

  He shrugged at that too.

  “Well, how long has she been here—and think before you fail to answer, okay?”

  The guy shrugged anyway, but then he said something. “She was waiting for me. She even slapped the side of the car to try to get me to hurry up.” Both Fat Fag and I laughed at that one, and exchanged looks. “Oh wait, I remember, she did pay with something. Something . . . something . . .” he looked around his legs for a moment. “This,” he said finally as he held up a keychain with both standard keys, the old-fashioned skeleton key with long shafts, and some plastic fobs. He jingled the keychain at her. She glanced up at it and growled like a dog, then went back to dribbling her drink on her chin and blouse. She had flat fried-egg tits.

  “And you accepted mysterious keys as a payment because . . .” my new fat friend asked before I had a chance to. He patted me on the arm. “This should be good,” he stage-whispered. He had wisely determined that the bartender wouldn’t even realize that we were just mocking him now.