by Isaac Marion
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 realized that the closest we’d ever get to objective truth was the belief of the majority, so we enthroned the majority and ignored all 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 cruel 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 face guard. 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 upward, 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 tired 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 toward 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 recognize 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 toward 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 aluminum siding. Most of the buildings seem to be multifamily apartment complexes, but this one is smaller, narrower, and separated from its tightly packed neighbors by an awkward distance. Four stories 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 rhythms and tart timbres. 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 been only 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 both 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.
“Came to . . . see you.”
“But I had to go home, remember? You were supposed to say good-bye.”
“Don’t know why you . . . say good-bye. I say . . . hello.”
Her lip quivers between reactions, but she ends up with a reluctant smile. “God you’re a cheeseball. But seriously, R—”
“Jules!” a voice calls from inside the house. “Come here, I wanna show you something.”
“One sec, Nora,” Julie calls back. She looks down at me. “This is crazy, okay? You’re going to get killed. It doesn’t matter how changed you are, the people in here won’t care, they won’t listen, they’ll just shoot you. Do you understand?”
I nod. “Yes.”
I start climbing up the drainpipe.
“Jesus, R! Are you listening to me?”
I get about three feet off the ground before I realize that although I’m now capable of running, speaking, and maybe falling in love, climbing is still a ways down the road for me. I lose my grip on the pipe and fall flat on my back. Julie covers her mouth, but some laughter slips through.
“Hey Cabernet!” Nora calls again. “What’s going on, are you talking to somebody?”
“Hang on, okay? I’m just doing a tape journal.”
I stand up and dust myself off. I look up at Julie. Her brows are tight and she bites her lip. “R . . . ,” she says miserably. “You can’t . . .”
The balcony door swings open and Nora appears, her curls just as thick and wild as they were in my visions, all those years ago. I’ve never seen her standing, and she’s surprisingly tall, at least half a foot above Julie, long brown legs bare under a camouflage skirt. I had assumed she and Julie were classmates, but now I realize Nora is a few years older, maybe in her mid-twenties.
“What are you—” she starts to say, then she notices me, and her eyebrows go up. “Oh my holy Lord. Is that him?”
Julie sighs. “Nora, this is R. R . . . Nora.”
Nora stares at me like I’m Sasquatch, the Chupacabra, maybe a unicorn. “Um . . . nice to meet you . . . R.”
“Likewise,” I reply, and Nora slaps a hand over her mouth to stifle a delighted squeak, looks at Julie, then back at me.
“What should we do?” Julie asks Nora, trying to ignore her giddiness. “He just showed up. I’m trying to tell him he’s going to get killed.”
“Well he needs to get up here, first of all,” Nora says, still staring at me.
“Into the house? Are you stupid?”
“Come on, your dad’s not back for another two days. Safer for him in the house than on the street.”
Julie thinks for a minute. “Okay. Hold on, R, I’ll come down.”
I go around to the front of the house and stand at the door, waiting nervously in my dress shirt and tie. She opens it, grinning shyly. Prom night at the end of the world.
“Hi, Julie,” I say, as if none of the previous conversation happened.
She hesitates, then steps forward and hugs me. “I actually missed you,” she says into my shirt.
“I . . . heard that.”
She pulls back to look at me, and something wild glints in her eyes. “Hey R,” she says. “If I kissed you, would I get . . . you know . . . converted?”
My thoughts skip like a record in an earthquake. As far as I know, only a bite, a violent transfer of blood and essences, has the power to make the Living join the Dead before actually dying. To expedite the inevitable. But then again, I’m fairly sure Julie’s question has never, ever been asked before.
“Don’t . . . think so,” I say, “but—”
A spotlight flashes at the end of the street. The sound of two guards barking commands breaks the night quiet.
“Shit, the patrol,” Julie whispers, and yanks me inside the house. “We should get the lights out, it’s after curfew. Come on.” She runs up the stairs and I follow her, relief and disappointment mixing in my chest like unstable chemicals.
Julie’s home feels eerily unoccupied. In the kitchen, the den, the short halls and steep staircases, the walls are white and unadorned. The few pieces of furniture are plastic, and rows of fluorescent lights glare down on stainproof beige carpets. It feels like the vacated office of a bankrupt company, empty echoing rooms and the lingering scent of desperation.
Julie turns lights off as she goes, darkening the house until we reach her bedroom. She switches off the overhead bulb and flicks on a Tiffany lamp by her bed. I step inside and turn in slow circles, greedily absorbing Julie’s private world.
If her mind were a room, it would look like this.
Each wall is a different color. One red, one white, one yellow, one black, and a sky-blue ceiling strung with model airplanes. Each wall seems designated for a theme. The red is nearly covered with movie ticket stubs and concert posters, all browned and faded with age. The white is crowded with paintings, starting near the floor with a row of amateur acrylics and leading up to three stunning oil canvases: a sleeping girl about to be devoured by tigers, a nightmarish Christ on a geometric cross, and a surreal landscape draped with melting clocks.
“Recognize those?” Julie says with a grin she can barely contain. “Salvador Dalí. Originals, of course.”
Nora comes in from the balcony, sees me with my face inches from the canvases, and laughs. “Nice decor, right? Me and Perry wanted to get Julie the Mona Lisa for her birthday because it reminded us of that little smirk she’s always—there! Right there!—but, yeah, it’s a long way to Paris on foot. We make do with the local exhibitions.”
“Nora has a whole wall of Picassos in her room,” Julie adds. “We’d be legendary art thieves if anyone still cared.”
I crouch down to get a closer look at the bottom row of acrylics.
“Those are Julie’s,” Nora says. “Aren’t they great?”
Julie averts her eyes in disgust. “Nora made me put those up.”
I study them intently, searching for Julie’s secrets in their clumsy brushstrokes. Two are just bright colors and thick, tortured texture. The third is a crude portrait of a blond woman. I glance over at the black wall, which bears only one ornament: a thumbtacked Polaroid of what must be the same woman. Julie plus twenty hard years.
Julie follows my gaze and she and Nora exchange a glance. “That’s my mom,” Julie says. “She left when I was twelve.” She clears her throat and looks out the window.
I turn to the yellow wall, which is notably unadorned. I point at it and raise my eyebrows.
“That’s, um . . . my hope wall,” she says. Her voice contains an embarrassed pride that makes her sound younger. Almost innocent. “I’m leaving it open for something in the future.”
“Like . . . what?”
“I don’t know yet. Depends on what happens in the future. Hopefully something happy.”
She shrugs this off and sits on the corner of her bed, tapping her fingers on her thigh and watching me. Nora settles down next to her. There are no chairs, so I sit on the floor. The carpet is a mystery under ancient strata of wrinkled clothes.
“So . . . R,” Nora says, leaning toward me. “You’re a zombie. What’s that feel like?”
“Uh . . .”
“How did it happen? How’d you get converted?”
“Don’t . . . remember.”
“I’m not seeing any old bites or gunshot wounds or anything. Must’ve been natural causes. No one was around to debrain you?”
I shrug.
“How old are you?”
I shrug.
“You look twentysome
thing, but you could be thirtysomething. You have one of those faces. How come you’re not all rotten? I barely even smell you.”
“I don’t . . . um . . .”
“Do your body functions still work? They don’t, right? I mean can you actually still, you know—?”
“Jesus, Nora,” Julie cuts in, elbowing her in the hip. “Will you back off? He didn’t come here for an interrogation.”
I shoot Julie a grateful look.
“I do have one question, though,” she says. “How the hell did you get in here? Into the stadium?”
I shrug. “Walked . . . in.”
“How’d you get past the guards?”
“Played . . . Living.”
She stares at me. “They let you in? Ted let you in?”
“Distrac . . . ted.”
She puts a hand to her forehead. “Wow. That’s . . .” She pauses, and an incredulous smile breaks through. “You look . . . less gross. Did you comb your hair, R?”
“He’s in drag!” Nora laughs. “He’s in Living drag!”
“I can’t believe that worked on the guards.”
“Do you think he could pass?” Nora wonders. “Out on the streets with real people?”
Julie studies me dubiously, like a photographer forced to consider a chubby model. “Well,” she allows. “I guess . . . it’s possible.”
I squirm under their scrutiny. Finally Julie takes a deep breath and stands up. “Anyway, you’ll have to stay here at least for tonight, till we can figure out what to do with you. I’m going to go heat up some rice. You want some, Nora?”
“Nah, I just had Carbtein nine hours ago.” She looks at me cautiously. “Are you, uh . . . hungry, R?”
I shake my head. “I’m . . . fine.”
“’Cause I don’t know what we’re supposed to do about your dietary restrictions. I mean, I know you can’t help it, Julie explained all about you, but we don’t—”
“Really.” I stop her. “I’m . . . fine.”
She looks uncertain. I can imagine the footage rolling behind her eyes. A dark room filling with blood. Her friends dying on the floor. Me, crawling toward Julie with red hands outstretched. Julie may have convinced her that I’m a special case, but I shouldn’t be surprised to get a few nervous looks. Nora watches me in silence for a few minutes. Then she breaks away and starts rolling a joint.
