by AHWA
“That’s the benefit of the narrow path. And for themselves they have automatic locks. They work on some kind of battery device they have. They’ve got the better deal, of course, but with the key, you’re paying attention to what’s around you, and you don’t let them through that first door to the carport, then you got it made.
“I went through the doors and went into the house, and for a moment, I thought no one was there, and then I heard that moan. You know the one. The one the dead make.”
“Oh, god, yes. It’s awful. Were Jane and Mason okay?”
“Yes, they were okay.”
“Good. Good. I don’t like them, but I don’t want that for anyone. I feel so sorry for the ones who are like that. I hear them I almost cry. I think it could be me. It might someday be me.”
I reached across the table and took Mary’s hand. “No. It won’t be you. And it won’t be me. We’re too careful. We’ll die of old age. We won’t get bitten by them, and the disease is long gone. If we were going to get it, going to die and come back, it would have happened long ago. We’re among the immune.”
“But we still don’t know why,” Mary said.
“No, we don’t. Some of the scientists say it’s because we took a flu shot that year. There were so many that didn’t, and they got the disease, the new flu, but we didn’t.”
“We almost didn’t get the shots, remember?”
“I do. But we did. We did and we’re fine.”
“If we hadn’t, in just a matter of days, we’d have gotten the flu, and died, and then—”
“It’s best not to worry about something that didn’t happen,” I said.
“I can’t believe I stopped your story. I get so scared just thinking about the dead, you know.”
“I know,” I said.
“So you heard a sound you thought was the dead, but wasn’t.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You said they were okay.”
“Yes.”
“Go on,” she said.
“I heard the sound and I looked around, saw across the way a fire poker by the fireplace. I went over and got it and listened again, and now I heard the moaning; the way they moan, you know, kind of continuous, and I thought, heavens, those things have gotten in the house and they’ve cornered or killed Jane and Mason upstairs. I decided I had to see if they were okay, if they needed help. I thought about running, too, but I didn’t. I carried the poker upstairs, going softly. Those things have that great hearing, you know. For whatever reason they have that. Even the deaf, they die and come back, they got that ability to hear, and when they hear a noise—”
“They come,” Mary said.
“Yes, they come. So I went up the stairs carefully, and when I got to the top of the stairs I could see their bedroom door was open, and I crept along the hall, all the while hearing that noise, and when I got to the doorway and looked in … It wasn’t good.”
“Zombies?”
“Yes. But not the way you think. On the bed was one of the dead. A fresh one, a bite mark on her arm, but other than that, she looked normal. Except for the eyes, you know how the eyes are. I could see those eyes from where I was and they looked horrible, and she was trying to bite Mason. You see, she was tied spread eagle on the bed. Naked. She was tied that way and Mason was trying to tie a rag over her mouth, something to keep her from biting, maybe something to control her head.”
“But why on the bed?”
I looked at her.
“Oh.”
“They were naked too. And Jane, she had a broom handle, and she … Well, she was using it on the dead woman. Using it in a way it shouldn’t be used.”
“My god,” Mary said.
“Yes. Mason, he was … well, sexual ready. Like he was waiting his turn, second to the broom.”
“What did you do?”
“There wasn’t anything I could do. Technically, the dead are dead, so they weren’t really abusing a living being. But it let me know who they were. It let me know how they thought, and made me think they might have wanted to do those kind of things to the living before the flu event, but hadn’t for fear of being caught. Or maybe they had done those kinds of things and hadn’t been caught. I don’t just mean sexual things, but things that might have led to someone being hurt. Or worse.”
“They were always inviting us over,” Mary said. “Do you think …?”
“I don’t know they’re killers, but maybe they wanted to enlist us in some fun and games and we just never got the hint, and then you quit coming, and they kept inviting me over … I mean, it doesn’t matter. That’s okay. We weren’t interested, but if we had been, that’s okay. That’s just a choice, an adult choice. But maybe they would have carried it farther.”
“No.”
“Maybe. And maybe they never did anything to anybody, but then the opportunity with this dead woman, maybe others, was there, and they saw their chance and took it. But to me, dead or alive, on one level, it’s still the same thing. Just because they aren’t alive doesn’t change much. Maybe it changes something, but for me it didn’t change that much. It told me something about them. It told me everything about them.”
“Did they see you?”
“Yes,” I said. “They did. They turned and saw me there. I don’t think they cared. I think they may have liked it. They didn’t stop what they were doing.”
“What did you do?”
I hesitated before I answered. “I left. I just left.”
“Good grief. Is there someone to tell? The law?”
“It’s not a crime. With all that’s going on, no one, law or otherwise, cares about the dead. They don’t care as long as the dead get completely dead. They have enough to worry about without worrying about if that kind of thing is immoral or if it isn’t.”
“But it’s not right.”
“No. And I’m done with them. I left the key there when I went out. I went out through the front door. I took the chance. I went out that way and to the carport and the yard was full of them, but it was like they didn’t see me. And by the time they did see me, I was in the car. I got in and drove home, and I thought I wouldn’t mention it, but now that time has passed and you asked, I’ve told you.”
“It’s horrible.”
“We’re done with them,” I said.
“But if I see them in the store, or something, I know what they did, and I don’t know I can make chit chat.”
“Maybe you won’t see them.”
“I hope not. Jesus, how horrible are they?”
“Pretty horrible.”
Two days later I went to the supermarket, and as I was driving up to the plastic tunnel that led into it, the guards let me pass when I waved at them because the dead don’t drive and the dead don’t wave. I drove inside and wheeled my car up to the upper parking berth and used the stairs to go down to the market. Once I got groceries, I’d use the elevator back up to the car.
I went in and shopped. Through the reinforced plastic that served as windows for the store, I could see men in the lot shooting the dead, shooting them in the head. It was messy, as always, and it made me feel odd to see them do it and not think too much about it. Them shooting the dead and blowing their skulls and dry brains all over the lot didn’t bother me, but yet I couldn’t get that young dead girl out of my mind.
I bought the groceries and started home. The dead were thick that day, and I kept wondering: how many of them are there? How do they just keep coming, keep showing up. With all of them that were being killed you’d think there’d be a lot fewer. But, hell, Houston is a big city and therefore it has a big population, so statistically there should be a lot of the dead; made sense there would be. Still, it seemed like way too many of them.
I had to drive by Jane and Mason’s house,
and when I did I saw the front door was still open, the way I had left it. I didn’t tell Mary that I didn’t close it and I lied about going out of it. There were dead in the yard, wandering about. One came out of the front door as I drove past.
That day I had slipped away quietly unseen and had gone downstairs and opened their front door because I knew their yard was filled with the dead. When I opened the door, I knew those things would hear that moaning upstairs, because not all of it was the dead girl moaning. Some of it was from Jane and Mason, moans of enjoyment at what they were doing. The dead know the difference in their own moans and the moans of the living, and it’s the sounds the living make that excites them, and flu shot or no flu shot, once they’re dead and they get hold of you, well, they eat, and if they don’t completely eat you, you come back, and are the same as them.
So I opened that door and went back through the house and through the tunnels. I kept the poker with me until I came into the carport. There was one of the dead nearby, but not so close I wasn’t able to get in the car and back out. I hit one doing that, running over it, and I remember thinking I had no trouble doing that but I was bothered by what Jane and Mason were doing upstairs.
As I was driving away the dead were already going through the front door. The house would soon be thick with them. Up the stairs they would go, and there they would find Jane and Mason, naked, preoccupied. The rest of it I didn’t like to think about, and the thing that bothered me most was how I made a judgment to let happen to them what I know must have happened.
I felt bad for a dead woman, but I didn’t feel bad for them. I thought for awhile I might not be any better than them. Or that I might be worse. For in a way, I had committed murder, and they had not murdered that girl. I told myself that they might have done other things before to the living, and I told myself if they hadn’t, they might yet when the dead were no longer fun. Then I decided I didn’t know that either of these things was true, and I was just trying to make myself feel better.
I did feel better, and that didn’t seem right, considering what I had done.
As the days passed, and I thought about that dead girl and how Jane and Mason looked, the sweat on their faces and the eager way they moved and the excitement they had about it all, the fun they were having at that dead girls’ expense, I began to get over it.
The Girl from the Borderlands
Felicity Dowker
There is truth in this story, brothers and sisters. Lies too, oh yes, always lies—but they are unimportant, and anyway, are we not all little girls and boys from the Borderlands, displaced, lost, recreating this world and its myriad tales every day through the warped lens of our own perception? What is truth, anyway?
Whatever it is, it’s in this story.
And so am I.
* * *
As a child, she had trouble discerning reality from fantasy. Her report cards from an early age spoke of how ‘easily upset’ she could become, so she knew her emotions were childish things that should be put away. Her dreams were more tangible than what moved before her eyes while she was awake; they told stronger truths. A skeleton dancing in front of the kitchen door (behind which her parents argued in loud, angry voices), she reaching out to the gleeful bones in supplication, promising I won’t hurt you if you don’t hurt me. A moment spent skipping down the garden path when she found herself floating in mid-air, then drifting, flying, soaring, until she gently touched down. A night huddled beneath the covers in frozen terror after her giant purple stuffed rabbit moved from the foot of her bed to sit in silent judgement and threat right next to her face.
She was alone in all those moments and had the feeling she always would be, that she was born to be abandoned and unwanted and other. It was her gift and her curse, but not her choice.
She had no idea where the gauze curtain between reality and unreality fell, but she knew her strangeness to be as true as her parents’ fighting, as solid as the packet of Ryvita biscuits her mother threw at her father’s head, as strong as she had been the time she’d marched into the kitchen on her sturdy pre-schooler’s legs and screamed stop fighting! (They’d told her they weren’t fighting, they were having a discussion, and if that was reality, then she wanted no part of it.)
Blood was everywhere, the red, red wine. Her brothers’ noses spurting as they lashed out and broke each other’s bones, big boys so much older than her, she born so late, just another way she didn’t quite fit in the world. Her mother’s battered face and knocked-out teeth, the red of her lipstick a bleed sprung when she smiled, her nails red talons that never protected her or her daughter. Blood on the sheets after her father’s nocturnal visits, when she thought the weight of him would kill her even if the hand he held over her nose and mouth didn’t. And, later, her uterine blood, not monthly but whenever it felt like it, sometimes once a year, sometimes several times a year, no rhyme or reason because she was an abstract, not really here, not a real girl subject to the rules and privileges of this real world.
“Won’t you be more careful when you flush the toilet? Your father went in there and saw your blood,” her mother said, lips curled in disgust, and she knew then even her body was wrong, even her mother felt no connection or solidarity with her, especially against men.
She came from the Borderlands, this girl, and she knew it. Everyone around her knew it. She was a paradox of disquietude. Princess and witch, saint and trickster, Madonna and whore, all these things she held within her. She’s very mature for her age, people said, their voices hushed, as if they realised this was not a compliment, only a recognition that she had already had much stolen from her, or, worse still, had never possessed it to start with. And she might infect them with her presence of absence.
She kept diaries, inane ramblings about what she ate and where she’d gone that day, an effort to tie herself to the world with words, to care about normal girl-things and hold the gate to the Borderlands closed with ink and paper. But the words only took her through the gate.
One day I will break hearts, she wrote with painstaking care in lemon juice in her patient diary, the invisible admission thrilling and confusing. They never told her, in the Borderlands or in this world, that when you break the hearts of others you also break your own. They never told her much at all, and even if they had, she wouldn’t have known how to listen.
When you’re lost and alone in a strange land, you adapt or you die. She learnt to act, to project the identity that suited the person and the moment, to hide the whistling chasm at the core of her and cover her Borderlands face with laughter and confidence and everything else that gladdened people’s hearts when they looked at her. She was smart. She survived. She didn’t cry out loud, no matter whose weight crushed her and whose hand cut off her air.
And then she met the heart she was destined to break, the only one that mattered, and found she didn’t want to break it at all. But the Borderlands in her refused her any reality but that of the Borderline, and she had no choice.
No choice at all.
* * *
He found her at a party, near death, which was no surprise, as she and death had been close friends her whole life—death being a thing of the Borderlands, an escape and a way home, a paradox, like her.
She lay on the bathroom floor, kitchen knife still in her hand, her inner left forearm a bloody mess. He swooped in like he’d been born to be her champion, white towel in hand instead of white horse between his thighs, and gently cleaned her arm before binding it. He called an ambulance and then sat on the cold tiles beside her, lifted her head into his lap, and stroked her hair while music pulsed and boomed outside their haven.
“Why did you write that?” He said after a while, as the sirens ululated in the distance and her consciousness finally began to spin away. She didn’t answer, but she loved him then. For saying write instead of carve. For asking the right question. For seeing not
just the blood but also the word ME etched on her arm. That was all she’d been doing, not committing suicide, never that; just trying to find herself, to cut away all the pain that shrouded who she was.
She recovered from the bathroom and the knife, just like she’d recovered from the pills, and the wine, and the powder, and the sex, and the starvation and bingeing, and all the other presents the Borderlands sent her way.
“I’ll be alright,” she told him, a long time after; Dominic, her white-towel champion, “I’m always alright, because I have to be.”
“Close your eyes,” he said, pulling her close, cradling her. “Picture a grassy hillside. There’s a tyre swing, and you and I are sitting on a picnic rug, watching our little girl play.” He stroked her forehead, caressed the frown out of it, soothed and numbed her.
For a while he was her gift from the Borderlands, and she killed herself with him instead of with a knife, because he was too good, too real, too here, and she knew it from the start. Not a boy for her. She was not worthy, she was trouble, she was … she didn’t know what she was, and that would always be the problem.
He knew what he was. He used words like integrity and when he had a thought or feeling, he told her, even if she didn’t like it. She so admired him. She envied him. She raised him high upon a pedestal, and she watched him, and waited for him to fall. They always fell. In this he would be no different, could be no different, she knew that. But oh, she hoped she would be wrong. She loved him with all her heart and soul, whatever that meant, for there was no love in the Borderlands.
Only dreams.
* * *
“I hate you,” she screamed at his retreating back, and then, as the door slammed behind him, “Don’t leave me!”
He’d be back, of course. He’d only gone for a drive to let off steam, or maybe to the park to sit and smoke and think, away from the noise she emanated. But he’d left, he’d abandoned her, mid-argument, he’d simply walked away from her tears and shouting. Had disconnected, deserted, betrayed, ignored, rejected. No white-towel chivalry now. He had, perhaps, finally seen her for what she was: an alien, a black hole, a vacancy.
