Warm Bodies wb-1

by Isaac Marion

  Two more zombies hit the ground behind me. As I slip in through the doors, I see M and the remaining Dead veer off and retreat. As they go, their gait suddenly changes. They lose their stumble and run like living things. Not as fast as me, not as graceful, but with purpose. The guards hesitate, the gunfire falters. ‘What the fuck… ?’ one of them mutters.

  Inside the entrance is a man with a clipboard and a notebook. An immigration officer, ready to take my name and have me fill out a stack of request forms before most likely tossing me out. The Dead have depended on this man for years to provide us with the defenceless stragglers we eat in the ruins outside. He comes towards me, flipping through his notebook, making no eye contact. ‘Close call, eh, friend? I’m going to need you to—’

  ‘Ted! Look at this shit!’

  Ted looks up, looks through the open doors, sees his fellow soldiers standing dumbstruck. He glances at me. ‘Wait right here.’

  Ted jogs out and stops next to the guards, staring at the eerily animate zombies dashing off into the distant streets like real people. I imagine the look on the men’s faces, their stomachs bubbling with the queasy sensation that the earth under their feet is moving.

  Momentarily forgotten, I turn and run. I run through the dark entry corridor towards the light on the other end, wondering if this is a birth canal or the tunnel to Heaven. Am I coming or going? Either way, it’s too late to reverse. Hidden in the gloom under a red evening sky, I step into the world of the Living.

  The sports arena Julie calls home is unaccountably large, perhaps one of those dual-event ‘super-venues’ built for an era when the greatest quandary facing the world was where to put all the parties. From the outside there is nothing to see but a mammoth oval of featureless walls, a concrete Ark that not even God could make float. But the interior reveals the Stadium’s soul: chaotic yet grasping for order, like the sprawling slums of Brazil if they’d been designed by a modernist architect.

  All the bleachers have been torn out to make room for an expansive grid of miniature skyscrapers, rickety houses built unnaturally tall and skinny to conserve the limited real estate. Their walls are a hodgepodge of salvaged materials — one of the taller towers begins as concrete and grows flimsier as it rises, from steel to plastic to a precarious ninth floor of soggy particle board. Most of the buildings look like they should collapse in the first breeze, but the whole city is supported by rigid webs of cable running from tower to tower, cinching the grid tight. The Stadium’s inner walls loom high over everything, bristling with severed pipes, wires, and spikes of rebar that sprout from the concrete like beard stubble. Under-powered street lamps provide dim orange illumination, leaving this snow-globe city smothered in shadows.

  The moment I step out of the entry tunnel my sinuses inflame with an overwhelming rush of life-smell. It’s all around me, so sweet and potent it’s almost painful; I feel like I’m drowning in a perfume bottle. But in the midst of this thick haze, I can sense Julie. Her signature scent peeks out of the noise, calling out like a voice underwater. I follow it.

  The streets are the width of sidewalks, narrow strips of asphalt poured over the old AstroTurf, which peeks through any unpaved gaps like garish green moss. There are no names on the street signs. Instead of listing off states or presidents or varieties of trees, they display simple white graphics — Apple, Ball, Cat, Dog — a child’s guide to the alphabet. There is mud everywhere, slicking the asphalt and piling up in corners along with the detritus of daily life: pop cans, cigarette butts, used condoms and bullet shells.

  I am trying not to gawk at the city like the backwoods tourist I am, but something beyond curiosity is gluing my attention to every kerb and rooftop. As foreign as it all is to me, I feel a ghostly sense of recognition, even nostalgia, and as I make my way down what must be Eye Street, some of my stolen memories begin to stir.

  This is where we started. This is where they sent us when the coasts disappeared. When the bombs fell. When our friends died and rose as strangers, unfamiliar and cruel.

  It’s not Perry’s voice — it’s everyone’s, a murmuring chorus of all the lives I’ve consumed, gathering in the dark lounge of my subconscious to reminisce.

  Flag Avenue, where they planted our nation’s colours, back when there were still nations and their colours mattered. Gun Street, where they set up the war camps, planned attacks anddefences against our endless enemies, Living as often as Dead.

  I walk with my head down, keeping as close to the walls as I can. When I meet someone coming the other way I keep my eyes straight ahead until the last possible moment, then I allow brief contact so as not to seem inhuman. We pass briskly with awkward nods.

  It didn’t take much to bring down the card house of civilisation. Just a few gusts and it was done, the balance tipped, the spell broken. Good citizens realised the lines that had shaped their lives were imaginary and easily crossed. They had wants and needs and the power to satisfy them, so they did. The moment the lights went out, everyone stopped pretending.

  I begin to worry about my clothes. Everyone I encounter is wearing thick grey denim, waterproof coats, mud-caked work boots. What world am I still living in where people dress for aesthetics? If no one realises I’m a zombie, they may still call in a report on the stylish lunatic roaming the streets in a fitted shirt and tie. I quicken my pace, sniffing desperately for Julie’s trail.

  Island Avenue, where they built the courtyard for the community meetings, where ‘they’ became ‘we’, or so we believed. We cast our votes and raised our leaders, charming men and women with white teeth and silver tongues, and we shoved our many hopes and fears into their hands, believing those hands were strong because they had firm handshakes. They failed us, always. There was no way they could not fail us — they were human, and so were we.

  I veer off Eye Street and start working my way towards the centre of the grid. Julie’s scent grows more distinct, but its exact direction remains vague. I keep hoping some clue will emerge from the chanting in my head, but these ancient ghosts have no interest in my insignificant search.

  Jewel Street, where we built the schools once we finally accepted that this was reality, that this was the world ourchildren would inherit. We taught them how to shoot, how to pour concrete, how to kill and how to survive, and if they made it that far, if they mastered those skills and had time to spare, then we taught them how to read and write, to reason and relate and understand their world. We tried hard at first, there was much hope and faith, but it was a steep hill to climb in the rain, and many slid to the base.

  I notice the maps in these memories are slightly outdated; the street they’re calling Jewel has been renamed. The sign is newer, a fresh primary green, and instead of a visual icon it has an actual word printed on it. Intrigued, I turn at this intersection and approach an atypically wide metal building. Julie’s scent is still distant, so I know I shouldn’t stop, but the pale light coming through the windows seems to prick some wordless anguish in my inner voices. As I press my nose against the glass, their musings go quiet.

  A large, wide-open room. Row upon row of white metal tables under fluorescent lights. Dozens of children, all younger than ten, divided by row into project groups: a row repairing generators, a row treating gasoline, a row cleaning rifles, sharpening knives, stitching wounds. And at the edge, very near the window I’m staring through: a row dissecting cadavers. Except of course they aren’t cadavers. As an eight-year-old girl in blonde pigtails peels the flesh away from her subject’s mouth, revealing the crooked grin underneath, its eyes flick open and it looks around, struggles briefly against its restraints, then relaxes, looking weary and bored. It glances towards my window and we make brief eye contact, just before the girl cuts out its eyes.

  We tried to make a beautiful world here, the voices mumble. There were those who saw the end of civilisation as an opportunity to start over, to undo the errors of history — to relive mankind’s awkward adolescence with all the wisdom of our modern age. But ever
ything was happening so fast.

  I hear the noise of a violent scuffle from the other end of the building, shoes scraping against concrete, elbows banging sheet metal. Then a low, wet groan. I traverse the building, searching for a better viewpoint.

  Outside our walls were hordes of men and monsters eager to steal what we had, and inside was our own mad stew, so many cultures and languages and incompatible values packed into one tiny box. Our world was too small to share peacefully; consensus never came, harmony was impossible. So we adjusted our goals.

  Through another window I see a big open space like a warehouse, dimly lit and scattered with broken cars and chunks of debris as if simulating the outer city landscape. A crowd of older kids surrounds a corral of chain-link fencing and concrete freeway barriers. It resembles the ‘free speech zones’ once used to contain protesters outside political rallies, but instead of being crammed full of sign-waving dissidents, this cage is occupied by just four figures: a teenage boy armoured head to toe in police riot gear, and three badly desiccated Dead.

  Can the Dark Ages’ doctors be blamed for their methods? The bloodletting, the leeches, the holes in skulls? They were feeling their way blind, grasping at mysteries in a world without science, but the plague was upon them; they had to do something. When our turn came, it was no different. Despite all our technology and enlightenment, our laser scalpels and social services, it was no different. We were just as blind and just as desperate.

  I can tell by the way they stagger that the Dead in this arena are starving. They must know where they are and what’s going to happen to them, but they are far beyond what little self-control they ever had. They lunge for the boy and he aims his shotgun.

  The outside world had already sunk under a sea of blood, and now those waves were lapping over our last stronghold –we had to shore up the walls. We realised that the closest we’d ever get to objective truth was the belief of the majority, so we elected the majority and ignored the other voices. We appointed generals and contractors, police and engineers; we discarded every inessential ornament. We smelted our ideals under great heat and pressure until the soft parts burned away, and what emerged was a tempered frame rigid enough to endure the world we’d created.

  ‘Wrong!’ the instructor shouts at the boy in the cage as the boy fires into the advancing Dead, blowing holes in their chests and blasting off fingers and feet. ‘Get the head! Forget the rest is even there!’ The boy fires two more rounds that miss entirely, thudding into the heavy plywood ceiling. The quickest of the three zombies seizes his arms and wrenches the gun out of his hands, struggles with the pulse-checking safety trigger for a moment, then throws the gun aside and tackles the boy into the fence, biting wildly against the helmet’s faceguard. The instructor storms into the cage and jabs his pistol into the zombie’s head, fires a round and holsters the gun. ‘Remember,’ he announces to the whole room, ‘the recoil on an automatic shotgun will drive the barrel upwards, especially on these old Mossbergs, so aim low or you’ll be shooting blue sky.’ He scoops up the weapon and shoves it into the boy’s trembling hands. ‘Continue.’

  The boy hesitates, then raises the barrel and fires twice. Bits of gore slap against his face-guard, spattering it black. He rips the helmet off and stares at the corpses at his feet, breathing hard and struggling not to cry.

  ‘Good,’ the instructor says. ‘Beautiful.

  We knew it was all wrong. We knew we were diminishing ourselves in ways we couldn’t even name, and we wept sometimes at memories of better days, but we no longer saw a choice. We were doing our best to survive. The equations at the roots of our problems were complex, and we were far too exhausted to solve them.

  A snuffling noise at my feet finally tears me away from the scene in the window. I look down to see a German shepherd puppy studying my leg with flaring wet nostrils. It looks up at me. I look down at it. It pants happily for a moment, then starts eating my calf.

  ‘Trina, no!’

  A little boy rushes up and grabs the dog’s collar, pulls her off me and drags her back towards the open doorway of a house. ‘Bad dog.’

  Trina twists her head around to gaze at me longingly.

  ‘Sorry!’ the boy calls from across the street.

  I give him an easy wave, no problem.

  A young girl emerges from the doorway and stands next to him, sticking out her belly and watching me with big dark eyes. Her hair is black, the boy’s is curly blond. They are both around six.

  ‘Don’t tell our mom?’ she asks.

  I shake my head, swallowing back a sudden reflux of emotions. The sound of these kids’ voices, their perfect childish diction…

  ‘Do you… know Julie?’ I ask them.

  ‘Julie Cabernet?’ the boy says.

  ‘Julie Gri… gio.’

  ‘We like Julie Cabernet a lot. She reads to us every Wednesday.’

  ‘Stories!’ the girl adds.

  I don’t recognise this name, but some scrap of memory perks at the sound of it. ‘Do you know… where she lives?’

  ‘Daisy Street,’ the boy says.

  ‘No, Flower Street! It’s a flower!’

  ‘A daisy is a flower.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘She lives on a corner. It’s Daisy Street and Devil Avenue.’

  ‘Cow Avenue!’

  ‘It’s not a cow, it’s the Devil. Cows and the Devil both have horns.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I tell the kids and turn to leave.

  ‘Are you a zombie?’ the girl asks in a shy squeak.

  I freeze. She waits for my answer, twisting left and right on her heels. I relax, smile at the girl and shrug. ‘Julie… doesn’t think so.’

  An angry voice from a fifth-floor window yells something about curfew and shutting the door and not talking to strangers, so I wave to the kids and hurry off towards Daisy and Devil. The sun is down and the sky is rust. A distant loudspeaker blares out a sequence of numbers, and most of the windows around me go dark. I loosen my tie and start to run.

  The intensity of Julie’s scent doubles with each block. As the first few stars appear in the Stadium’s oval sky, I turn a corner and halt below a solitary edifice of white aluminium siding. Most of the buildings seem to be multi-family apartment complexes, but this one is smaller, narrower, and separated from its tightly packed neighbours by an awkward distance. Four storeys tall but barely two rooms wide, it looks like a cross between a town house and a prison watchtower. The windows are all dark except for a third-floor balcony jutting out from the side of the house. The balcony seems incongruously romantic on this austere structure, until I notice the swivel-mounted sniper rifles on each corner.

  Lurking behind a stack of crates in the AstroTurf backyard, I hear voices inside the house. I close my eyes, luxuriating in their sweet timbres and tart rhythms. I hear Julie. Julie and another girl, discussing something in tones that jitter and syncopate like jazz. I find myself swaying slightly, dancing to their conversational beat.

  Eventually the talk trails off, and Julie emerges onto the balcony. It’s only been one day since she left, but the sense of reunion that surges in me is decades strong. She rests her elbows on the railing, looking cold in just a loose black T-shirt over bare legs. ‘Well, here I am again,’ she says, apparently to no one but the air. ‘Dad clapped me on the back when I walked in the door. Actually clapped me on the back, like a fucking football coach. All he said was, “So glad you’re okay,” then he ran off to some project meeting or something. I can’t believe how much he’s… I mean, he was never exactly cuddly, but…’ I hear a tiny click and she doesn’t speak for a moment. Then another click. ‘Until I called him he had to have assumed I was dead, right? Yeah, he sent out the search parties, but how often do people really come back from stuff like this? So to him… I was dead. And maybe I’m being too harsh but I absolutely can’t picture him crying over it. Whoever told him the news, they probably clapped each other on the back and said, “Soldier on, soldier,
” and then went back to work.’ She stares at the ground as if she’s seeing through it, down into the hellish core of the Earth. ‘What’s wrong with people?’ she says, almost too quiet for me to hear. ‘Were they born with parts missing or did it all fall out somewhere along the way?’

  She is silent for a while, and I’m about to show myself when she suddenly laughs, closing her eyes and shaking her head. ‘I actually miss that stupid… I miss R! I know that’s crazy, but is it really that crazy? Just because he’s… whatever he is? I mean, isn’t “zombie” just a silly name we came up with for a state of being we don’t understand? What’s in a name, right? If we were… If there was some kind of…’ She trails off, then stops and raises a mini-cassette recorder to eye level, glaring at it. ‘Fuck this thing,’ she mumbles to herself. ‘Tape journaling… not for me.’ She fast-pitches it off the balcony. It bounces off a supply crate and lands at my feet. I pick it up, tuck it into my shirt pocket and press my hand against it, feeling its corners dig into my chest. If I ever return to my 747, this memento will go in the stack closest to where I sleep.

  Julie hops onto the balcony railing and sits with her back to me, scribbling in her battered old Moleskine.

  Journal or poetry?

  Both, silly.

  Am I in it?

  I step out from the shadows. ‘Julie,’ I whisper.

  She doesn’t startle. She turns slowly, and a smile melts across her face like a slow spring thaw. ‘Oh… my God,’ she half giggles, then hops off the railing and spins around to face me. ‘R! You’re here! Oh my God!’

  I grin. ‘Hello.’

  ‘What are you doing here?’ she hisses, trying to keep her voice down.

  I shrug, deciding that this gesture, while easy to abuse, does have its place. It may even be vital vocabulary in a world as unspeakable as ours.