by Isaac Marion
My dad looks at me for a long time. “When I met your mom,” he says, “I asked myself that. And all we had going on back then was a few wars and recessions.” His walkie starts crackling again. He ignores it. “I got nineteen years with your mom. But do you think I would’ve turned down the idea if I’d known I’d only get one year? Or one month?” He surveys the construction, shaking his head slowly. “There’s no benchmark for how life’s ‘supposed’ to happen, Perry. There is no ideal world for you to wait around for. The world is always just what it is now, and it’s up to you how you respond to it.”
I look into the dark window holes of ruined office buildings. I imagine the skeletons of their occupants still sitting at their desks, working toward quotas they will never meet.
“What if you’d only gotten a week with her?”
“Perry . . . ,” my dad says, slightly amazed. “The world isn’t ending tomorrow, buddy. Okay? We’re working on fixing it. Look.” He points at the work crews below. “We’re building roads. We’re going to connect to the other stadiums and hideouts, bring the enclaves together, pool our research and resources, maybe start looking for a cure again.” My dad claps me on the shoulder. “You and me, everyone . . . we’re going to make it. Don’t give up on us yet. Okay?”
I relent with a small release of breath. “Okay.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
My dad smiles. “I’ll hold you to that.”
• • •
Do you know what happened next, corpse? Perry whispers from the deep shadows of my awareness. Can you guess?
“Why are you showing me all this?” I ask the darkness.
Because it’s what’s left of me, and I want you to feel it. I’m not ready to disappear.
“Neither am I.”
I sense a cold smile in his voice.
Good.
• • •
“There you are.”
Julie heaves herself up the ladder and stands on the roof of my new home, watching me. I glance at her, then put my face back in my hands.
She makes her way over, cautious steps on the flimsy sheet metal, and sits next to me on the roof edge. Our legs dangle, swinging slowly in the cold autumn air.
“Perry?”
I don’t answer. She studies the side of my face. She reaches out and brushes two fingers through my shaggy brown hair. Her eyes pull on me like gravity, but I resist. I stare down at the muddy street.
“I can’t believe I’m here,” I mumble. “This stupid house. With all these discards.”
She doesn’t respond immediately. When she does, it’s quiet. “They’re not discards. They were loved.”
“For a while.”
“Their parents didn’t leave. They were taken.”
“Is there a difference?”
She looks at me so hard I have no choice but to meet her gaze. “Your mom loved you, Perry. You’ve never had to doubt that. And so did your dad.”
I can’t hold the weight. I give in and let it fall on me. I twist my head away from Julie as the tears come.
“Believe that God discarded you if you want to, fate or destiny or whatever, but at least you know they loved you.”
“What does it even matter,” I croak, avoiding her eyes. “Who gives a shit. They’re dead. That’s the present. That’s what matters now.”
We don’t speak for a few minutes. The cold breeze pricks tiny bumps on our arms. Bright leaves find their way in from the outer forests, spinning down into the stadium’s vast mouth and landing on the house’s roof.
“You know what, Perry?” Julie says. Her voice is shaky with hurts all her own. “Everything dies eventually. We all know that. People, cities, whole civilizations. Nothing lasts. So if existence was just binary, dead or alive, here or not here, what would be the fucking point in anything?” She looks up at some falling leaves and puts out her hand to catch one, a flaming red maple. “My mom used to say that’s why we have memory. And the opposite of memory—hope. So things that are gone can still matter. So we can build off our pasts and make futures.” She twirls the leaf in front of her face, back and forth. “Mom said life only makes any sense if we can see time how God does. Past, present, and future all at once.”
I allow myself to look at Julie. She sees my tears and tries to wipe one away. “So what’s the future?” I ask, not flinching as her fingers brush my eye. “I can see the past and the present, but what’s the future?”
“Well . . . ,” she says with a broken laugh. “I guess that’s the tricky part. The past is made out of facts . . . I guess the future is just hope.”
“Or fear.”
“No.” She shakes her head firmly and sticks the leaf in my hair. “Hope.”
• • •
The stadium rises on the horizon as the Dead stumble forward. It looms above most of the surrounding buildings and consumes several city blocks, a gaudy monument to an era of excess, a world of waste and want and misguided dreams that is now profoundly over.
Our cadaverous cadre has been walking for a little over a day, roaming the open roads like Kerouac beats with no gas money. The others are hungry, and there’s a brief, mostly wordless debate between M and the rest before they stop at an old boarded-up town house to feed. I wait outside. It’s been more days than I can remember since my last meal, but I find myself strangely content. There’s a neutral feeling in my veins, balanced precisely between hungry and sated. The screams of the people in the house pierce me more sharply than in all my days of hands-on killing, and I’m not even anywhere near them. I’m standing far out in the street, pushing my palms into my ears and waiting for it to be over.
When they emerge, M avoids my gaze. He wipes the blood off his mouth with the back of his hand and shoots me just one guilty glance before brushing past. The others are not quite there yet, not even to M’s level of conscience, but there is something a little different about them, too. They take no leftovers. They dry their bloody hands on their pants and walk in uneasy silence. It’s a start.
As we get close enough to the stadium to catch the first whiffs of the Living, I go over the plan in my head. It’s not much of a plan, really. It’s cartoonishly simple, but here’s why it might work: it’s never been tried before. There has never been enough will to make a way.
A few blocks from the entry gate, we stop in an abandoned house. I go into the bathroom and study myself in the mirror like the former resident must have done a thousand times. In my head I jog through the maddening repetitions of the morning routine, getting into character. Alarm—shower—clothes—breakfast. Do I look my best? Am I putting my best foot forward? Am I stepping out the door prepared for everything this world has to throw at me?
I run some gel through my hair and straighten my tie. I adjust my shirt to hide a few black wounds. I splash on some cologne.
“Ready,” I tell the others.
M sizes me up. “Close . . . enough.”
We head for the gates.
• • •
Within a few blocks, the smell of the Living is nearly overpowering. It’s as if the stadium is a massive Tesla coil crackling with storms of fragrant pink life-lightning. Everyone in our group stares at it in awe. Some of them drool freely. If they hadn’t just eaten, our loosely constructed strategy would collapse in an instant.
Before we get within sight of the gate, we take a side street and stop at an intersection, hiding behind a UPS truck. I step out slightly and look around the corner. Less than two blocks away, four guards stand in front of the stadium’s main entrance doors, dangling shotguns over their shoulders and chatting among themselves. Their gruff, military sentences use even fewer syllables than ours.
I look at M. “Thanks. For . . . doing this.”
“Sure,” M says.
“Don’t . . . die.”
“Never do. Are . . . ready?”
I nod.
“Look . . . alive . . . out there.”
I smile. I brush my hair back
one more time, take a deep breath, and run for it.
“Help!” I scream, waving my arms. “Help, they’re . . . right behind me!”
With my best possible balance and poise, I run toward the doors. M and the others lumber after me, groaning theatrically.
The guards react on instinct: they raise their guns and open fire on the zombies. An arm flies off. A leg. One of the anonymous nine loses a head and goes down. But not a single weapon points in my direction. Painting Julie’s face on the air in front of me, I sprint with Olympian focus. My stride is good, I can feel it; I look normal, alive, and so I snap neatly into a category: “human.” Two more guards emerge with guns drawn, but they barely even look at me. They squint, they take aim at their targets, and they shout, “Go! Get in there, man!”
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. 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 defenseless stragglers we eat in the ruins outside. He comes toward 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 toward 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 designed by a modern 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 particleboard. 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. Underpowered streetlamps 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 bright 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 rube tourist I am, but something beyond curiosity is gluing my attention to every curb 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 cold.
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 colors, back when there were still nations and their colors mattered. Gun Street, where they set up the war camps, planned attacks and defenses 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 fleeting contact. We pass briskly with awkward nods.
It didn’t take much to bring down the card house of civilization. Just a few gusts and it was done, the balance tipped, the spell broken. Good citizens realized 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 gray denim, a waterproof coat, mud-caked work boots. What world am I still living in where people dress for aesthetics? If no one realizes 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 more importantly, so were we.
I veer off Eye Street and start working my way toward the center 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 our children 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 new anguish in my inner voices. As I press my nose against the glass, they 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, s
harpening 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 blond 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 toward 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 civilization 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 everything 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 armored head to toe in police riot gear, and three badly desiccated Dead.
Can the Dark Ages’ doctors be blamed for their methods? The blood-letting, 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.
