by Isaac Marion
She starts doodling in the dirt with one finger. Her smile is wistful, aimed at no one. ‘Things weren’t always so grim, you know, R? Dad has his moments, and even when the world fell apart we still had some fun. We’d take little family salvage trips and pick up the most crazy wines you can imagine. Thousand-dollar bottles of ’97 Dom. Romane Conti just rolling around on the floors of abandoned cellars.’ She chuckles to herself. ‘Dad would have absolutely lost his shit over those back in the day. By the time we moved here he was kinda… muted. But God, we drank some outrageous stuff.’
I’m watching her talk. Watching her jaw move and collecting her words one by one as they spill from her lips. I don’t deserve them. Her warm memories. I’d like to paint them over the bare plaster walls of my soul, but everything I paint seems to peel.
‘And then Mom ran off.’ She pulls her finger out of the dirt, inspecting her work. She has drawn a house. A quaint little cottage with a smoke cloud in the chimney, a benevolent sun smiling down on the roof. ‘Dad thought she must have been drunk, hence the alcohol ban, but I saw her, and she wasn’t. She was very sober.’
She is still smiling, as if this is all just easy nostalgia, but the smile is cold now, lifeless.
‘She came into my room that night and just looked at me for a while. I pretended I was asleep. Then right as I was about to pop up and yell “boo”… she walked out. So I didn’t get the chance.’
She reaches a hand down to wipe away her drawing, but I touch her wrist. I look at her and shake my head. She regards me silently for a moment. Then she scoots around to face me and grins, inches from my face.
‘R,’ she says. ‘If I kiss you, will I die?’
Her eyes are steady. She’s barely drunk.
‘You said I won’t, right? I won’t get infected? Because I really feel like kissing you.’ She fidgets. ‘And even if you do pass something to me, maybe it wouldn’t be all bad. I mean, you’re different now, right? You’re not a zombie. You’re… something new.’ Her face is very close. Her smile fades. ‘Well, R?’
I look into her eyes, splashing in their icy waters like a shipwrecked sailor grasping for the raft. But there is no raft.
‘Julie,’ I say. ‘I need… to show you something.’
She cocks her head with gentle curiosity. ‘What?’
I stand up. I take her hand and start walking.
The night is still except for the primeval hiss of the rain. It drenches the dirt and slicks the asphalt, liquefying the shadows into shiny black ink. I stick to the narrow back-streets and unlit alleys. Julie follows slightly behind me, staring at the side of my face.
‘Where are we going?’ she asks.
I pause at an intersection to retrace the maps of my stolen memories, calling up images of places I’ve never been, people I’ve never met. ‘Almost… there.’
A few more careful glances around corners, furtive dashes across intersections, and there it is. A five-storey house looms ahead of us, tall, skinny and grey like the rest of this skeletal city, its windows flickering yellow like wary eyes.
‘What the hell, R?’ Julie whispers, staring up at it. ‘This is…’
I pull her to the front door and we stand there in the shelter of the eaves, the roof rattling like military drums in the rain. ‘Can I… borrow your hat?’ I ask without looking at her.
She doesn’t move for a moment, then she pulls it off and hands it to me. Over-long and floppy, dark blue wool with a red stripe…
Mrs Rosso knitted this for Julie’s seventeenth birthday. Perry thought she looked like an elf in it and would start speaking to her in Tolkien tongues whenever she put it on. She called him the biggest nerd she’d ever met, and he agreed, while playfully kissing her throat and—
I pull the beanie low over my face and knock a slow waltz on the door, eyes glued to the ground like a shy child. The door opens a crack. A middle-aged woman in sweatpants looks out at us. Her face is puffy and heavily lined, dark bags under bloodshot eyes. ‘Miss Grigio?’ she says.
Julie glances at me. ‘Hi, Mrs Grau. Um…’
‘What are you doing out? Is Nora with you? It’s after curfew.’
‘I know, we… got a little lost on our way back from the Orchard. Nora’s staying at my house tonight but um… can we come in for a minute? I need to talk to the guys.’
I keep my head down as Mrs Grau gives me a cursory appraisal. She opens the door for us with an annoyed sigh. ‘You can’t stay here, you know. This is a foster home, not a flop house, and your friend here is too old for new residency.’
‘I know, sorry, we’ll…’ She glances at me again. ‘We’ll just be a minute.’
I can’t endure formalities right now. I brush past the woman and into the house. A toddler peeks around a bedroom door and Mrs Grau glares at him. ‘What did I tell you?’ she snaps, loud enough to wake the rest of the kids. ‘Back in bed right now.’ The boy disappears into the shadows. I lead Julie up the staircase.
The second storey is identical to the first, except there are rows of pre-adolescents sleeping on the floor on small mats. So many now. New foster homes pop up like processing plants as mothers and fathers disappear, chewed up and swallowed down by the plague. We step over a few tiny bodies on our way to the stairs, and a little girl grasps feebly at Julie’s ankle.
‘I had a bad dream,’ she whispers.
‘I’m sorry, honey,’ Julie whispers back. ‘You’re safe now, okay?’
The girl closes her eyes again. We climb the stairs. The third floor is still awake. Young teens and patch-beard semi-adults sitting around on folding chairs, hunched over desks writing in booklets and flipping through manuals. Some kids snore on stacked bunks inside narrow bedrooms. All the doors are open except one.
A group of older boys look up from their work, surprised. ‘Wow, hey, Julie. How’s it going? You holding up okay?’
‘Hey, guys. I’m…’ She trails off, and her ellipsis eventually forms a period. She looks at the closed door. She looks at me. Gripping her hand, I move forward and open the door, then shut it behind us.
The room is dark except for the faint yellow glow of street lamps through the window. There is nothing in here but a plywood dresser and a stripped bed, with a few pictures of Julie taped to the ceiling above it. The air is stale, and much colder than the rest of the house.
‘R…’ Julie says in a quivery, dangerous voice. ‘Why the fuck are we here?’
I finally turn to face her. In the yellow dimness, we look like actors in a silent sepia tragedy. ‘Julie,’ I say. ‘That theory… about why we… eat the brain…’
She starts to shake her head.
‘True.’
I look into her reddening eyes a moment longer, then kneel down and open the bottom drawer of the dresser. Inside, under piles of old stamps, a microscope, an army of pewter figurines, there is a stack of paper bound together with red yarn. I lift it out and hand it to Julie. In so many strange and twisted ways, I feel like the manuscript is mine. Like I’ve just handed her my own bloody heart on a platter. I am fully prepared for her to claw it to shreds.
She takes the manuscript. She unties the yarn. She stares at the cover page for a full minute, breathing shakily. Then she wipes her eyes and clears her throat.
‘“Red Teeth,”’ she reads. ‘“By Perry Kelvin.”’ She glances down the page. ‘“For Julie Cabernet, the only light left.”’ She lowers the manuscript and looks away for a moment, trying to hide a spasm in her throat, then steels herself and turns the page to the first chapter. As she reads, a faint smile peeks through the tear tracks. ‘Wow,’ she says, wiping a finger across her nose and sniffling. ‘It’s actually… kinda good. He used to write such dry and detached bullshit. This is… cheesy… but in a sweet way. More like how he really was.’ She glances at the cover page again. ‘He started it less than a year ago. I had no idea he was still writing.’ She flips to the last page. ‘It’s not finished. Cuts off in the middle of a sentence. “Outmanned and outgunned, certai
n of death, he kept fighting, because—”’
She rubs her thumbs into the paper, feeling its texture. She puts it near her face and inhales. Then she closes her eyes, closes the manuscript, and reties the yarn. She looks up at me. I am nearly a foot taller than her and probably sixty pounds heavier, but I feel small and featherweight. Like she could knock me down and crush me with a single whispered word.
But she doesn’t speak. She sets the manuscript back in the drawer and gently slides it shut. She straightens up, dries her face with her sleeve, and embraces me, resting her ear against my chest.
‘Thump-thump,’ she murmurs. ‘Thump-thump. Thump-thump.’
My hands hang limp at my sides. ‘I’m sorry,’ I say.
With her eyes closed, her voice muffled by my shirt, she says, ‘I forgive you.’
I raise a hand and touch her straw-gold hair. ‘Thank you.’
These three phrases, so simple, so primal, have never sounded so complete. So true to their basic meanings. I feel her cheek move against my chest, her zygomaticus major pulling her lips into a faint smile.
Without another word, we shut the door on Perry Kelvin’s room and leave his home. We descend the stairs past beleaguered teens, past tossing and turning kids, past deeply dreaming babies, and out into the street. I feel a nudge low in my chest, closer to my heart than my belly, and a soft voice in my head.
Thank you, Perry says.
I would like to end it here. How nice if I could edit my own life. If I could halt in the middle of a sentence and put it all to rest in a drawer somewhere, consummate my amnesia and forget all the things that have happened, are happening, and are about to happen. Shut my eyes and go to sleep happy.
But no, ‘R’. No sleep of the innocent. Not for you. Did you forget? You have blood on your hands. On your lips. On your teeth. Smile for the cameras.
‘Julie,’ I say, bracing to confess my final sin. ‘I need… to tell you…’
BANG.
The Stadium’s field halogens flare like suns and midnight becomes daylight. I can see every pore in Julie’s face.
‘What the hell?’ she gasps, whipping her head around. A piercing alarm further shatters the night’s stillness, and then we see it: the Jumbotron is aglow. Hanging from the upper reaches of the open roof like a tablet descending from Heaven, the screen plays a blocky animation of a quarterback running from what appears to be a zombie, arms outstretched and clutching. The screen blinks between this and a word that I think might be:
BREACH
‘R…’ Julie says, horrified, ‘did you eat someone?’
I look at her desperately. ‘No ch… no choi… no choice,’ I stutter, my diction collapsing in my state of panic. ‘Guard… stopped me. Didn’t… mean. Didn’t… want.’
She presses her lips together, her eyes boring into me, then gives a single shake of her head as if banishing one thought, committing to another. ‘Okay. Then we need to get inside. God damn it, R.’
We run into the house and she slams the door. Nora is at the top of the stairs. ‘Where have you guys been? What’s going on out there?’
‘It’s a breach,’ Julie says. ‘Zombie in the Stadium.’
‘You mean him?’
The disappointment in her reply makes me wince. ‘Yes and no.’
We hurry into Julie’s bedroom and she turns out the lights. We all sit on the floor on the piles of laundry, and for a while nobody speaks. We just sit and listen to the sounds. Guards running and shouting. Gunfire. Our own heavy breathing.
‘Don’t worry,’ Julie whispers to Nora, but I know it’s for me. ‘It won’t spread much. Those shots were probably Security taking them out already.’
‘Are we in the clear, then?’ Nora asks. ‘Will R be okay?’
Julie looks at me. Her face is grim. ‘Even if they think the breach started from a natural death, that guard obviously didn’t eat himself. Security will know there’s at least one zombie unaccounted for.’
Nora follows Julie’s eyes to mine, and I can almost imagine my face flushing. ‘It was you?’ she asks, straining for neutrality.
‘Didn’t… mean. Was… going… kill me.’
She says nothing. Her face is blank.
I meet her stare, willing her to feel my crushing remorse. ‘It was my last,’ I say, straining to force language back into my idiot tongue. ‘No matter what. Swear to the skymouth.’
A few agonising moments pass. Then Nora slowly nods, and addresses Julie. ‘So we need to get him out of here.’
‘They shut everything down for breaches. All the doors will be locked and guarded. They might even shut the roof if they get scared enough.’
‘So what the hell are we supposed to do?’
Julie shrugs, and the gesture looks so bleak on her, so wrong. ‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘Once again, I don’t know.’
Julie and Nora fall sleep. They fight it for hours, trying to come up with a plan to save me, but eventually they succumb. I lie on a pile of pants and stare up at the starry green ceiling. Not so easy, Mr Lennon. Even if you try.
It seems trivial now, a thin silver lining on a vast black storm cloud, but I think I’m learning to read. As I look up at the phosphorescent galaxy, letters come together and form words. Stringing them into full sentences is still beyond me, but I savour the sensation of those little symbols clicking together and bursting like soap bubbles of sound. If I ever see my wife again… I’ll at least be able to read her name tag.
The hours ooze by. It’s long after midnight, but bright as noon outside. The halogens ram their white light against the house, squeezing in through cracks in the window shades. My ears tune to the sounds around me. The girls’ breathing. Their small shifting movements. And then, sometime around two in the morning, a phone rings.
Julie comes awake, gets up on one elbow. In some distant room of the house, the phone rings again. She throws off her blankets and stands up. Strange to see her from this angle, towering over me instead of cowering under. I’m the one who needs protecting now. One mistake, one brief lapse of my new-found judgement — that’s all it took to unravel everything. What a massive responsibility, living as a moral being.
The phone keeps ringing. Julie walks out of the bedroom and I follow her through the dark, echoing house. We step into what appears to be an office. There is a large desk covered in papers and blueprints, and on the walls various kinds of telephones are screwed to the Sheetrock, different brands and styles, all from different eras.
‘They rerouted the phone system,’ Julie explains. ‘It’s more like an intercom now. We have direct lines to all the important areas.’
Each phone has a name-tag sticker stuck below it, with the location Sharpied onto the blank. Hi, my name is:
GARDENS
KITCHENS
WAREHOUSE
GARAGE
ARMOURY
CORRIDOR 2
GOLDMAN DOME
AIG ARENA
LEHMAN FIELD
And so on.
The phone that’s ringing, a pea-green rotary dialler covered in dust, is labelled:
OUTSIDE
Julie looks at the phone. She looks at me. ‘This is weird. That line is from the phones in the abandoned outer districts. Since we got walkie-talkies nobody uses it any more.’
The phone clangs its bells, loud and insistent. I can’t believe Nora is still asleep.
Slowly, Julie picks up the receiver and puts it to her ear. ‘Hello?’ She waits. ‘What? I can’t under—’ Her brow furrows in concentration. Then her eyes widen. ‘Oh.’ They narrow. ‘You. Yeah, this is Julie, what do you—’ She waits. ‘Fine. Yeah, he’s right here.’
She holds the phone out to me. ‘It’s for you.’
I stare at it. ‘What?’
‘It’s your friend. That fat fuck from the airport.’
I grab the phone. I put the earpiece to my mouth. Julie shakes her head and flips it around for me. Into the receiver I breathe a stunned, ‘M?’
&
nbsp; His deep rumble crackles in my ear. ‘Hey… lover boy.’
‘What’s… Where are you?’
‘Out in… city. Didn’t know… what would get with… phone, but had… to try. You’re… okay?’
‘Okay but… trapped. Stadium… locked down.’
‘Shit.’
‘What’s… going on? Out there.’
There is silence for a moment. ‘R,’ he says. ‘Dead… still coming. More. From airport. Other places. Lots… of us now.’
I’m silent. The phone wanders away from my ear. Julie looks at me expectantly.
‘Hello?’ M says.
‘Sorry. I’m here.’
‘Well, we’re… here. What now? What should… do?’
I rest the phone on my shoulder and look at the wall, at nothing. I look at the papers and plans on General Grigio’s desk. His strategies are all gibberish to me. I have no doubt it’s all important — food allocation, construction plans, weapon distribution, combat tactics. He’s trying to keep everyone alive, and that’s good. That’s foundational. But like Julie said, there must be something even deeper than that. The earth under that foundation. Without that firm ground, it’s all going to collapse, over and over, no matter how many bricks he lays. This is what I’m interested in. The earth under the bricks.
‘What’s going on?’ Julie asks. ‘What’s he saying?’
As I look into her anxious face, I feel the twitch in my guts, the young, eager voice in my head.
It’s happening, corpse. Whatever you and Julie triggered, it’s moving. A good disease, a virus that causes life! Do you see this, you dumb fucking monster? It’s inside you! You have to get out of these walls and spread it!
I angle the phone towards Julie so she can listen. She leans in close.
