by Isaac Marion
“Dad, what’s going on? Did they find the zombie?”
“Not yet, but they will. Have you seen anything?”
“No, I’ve been here.”
“Are you alone?”
“Yeah, I’ve been here since last night.”
“Why is the bathroom light on?”
Footsteps pound toward us.
“Wait, Dad! Wait a second!” She lowers her voice. “Nora and Archie are in there.”
“Why did you just tell me you’re here alone? This is not a time for games, Julie, this is not a time for hide-and-seek.”
“They’re . . . you know . . . in there.”
There is the briefest of hesitations. “Nora and Archie,” he shouts at the door, his voice compressed and extremely loud. “As you just heard on the intercom there is a breach in progress. I cannot begin to imagine a worse time for lovemaking. Come out immediately.”
Nora straddles me against the sink and buries my face in her cleavage just as Grigio yanks the door open.
“Dad!” Julie squeals, flashing Nora a quick look as she jumps off of me.
“Come out immediately,” Grigio says.
We step out of the bathroom. Nora straightens her clothes and pats down her hair, doing a pretty good job of looking embarrassed. I just look at Grigio, unapologetic, limbering up my diction for its first and probably last big test. He looks back at me with that taut, angular face, peering into my eyes. There are less than two feet between us.
“Hello, Archie,” he says.
“Hello, sir.”
“You and Miss Greene are in love?”
“Yes, sir.”
“That is wonderful. Have you discussed marriage.”
“Not yet.”
“Why delay. Why deliberate. These are the last days. Where do you live, Archie?”
“Goldman . . . Field.”
“Goldman Dome?”
“Yes, sir. Sorry.”
“What work do you do at Goldman Dome.”
“Gardens.”
“Does that work allow you and Nora to feed your children?”
“We don’t have children, sir.”
“Children replace us when we die. When you have children you will need to feed them. I’m told things are bad at Goldman Dome. I’m told you are running out of everything. It’s a dark world we live in, isn’t it, Archie.”
“Sometimes.”
“We do the best we can with what God gives us, don’t we. If God gives us stones when we ask for bread, we will sharpen our teeth and eat stones.”
“Or make . . . our own bread.”
Grigio smiles. “Are you wearing makeup, Archie?”
Grigio stabs me.
I didn’t even notice the knife coming out of its sheath. The five-inch blade sinks into my shoulder and pokes out the other side. I don’t feel it and I don’t flinch. The wound doesn’t bleed.
“Julie!” Grigio roars, stepping back from me and drawing his pistol, his eyes wild in their deep sockets. “Did you bring the Dead into my city? Into my home? Did you let the Dead touch you?”
“Dad, listen to me,” Julie says, holding her hands out toward him. “R is different. He’s changing.”
“The Dead don’t change, Julie! They are not people, they are things!”
“How do we know that? Just because they don’t talk to us and tell us about their lives? We don’t understand their thoughts so we assume they don’t have any?”
“We’ve done tests! The Dead have never shown any signs of self-awareness or emotional response!”
“Neither have you, Dad! Jesus Christ—R saved my life! He protected me and brought me home! He’s human! And there are more like him!”
“No,” Grigio says, abruptly calm. His hands stop wavering and the gun steadies, inches from my face.
“Dad, please listen to me? Please?” She takes a step closer. She is trying to stay cool but I can tell she is terrified, and I hate myself for being the cause. “When I was at the airport, something happened. We sparked something, and whatever it is, it’s spreading. The Dead are coming back to life, they’re leaving their hives and trying to change what they are, and we have to find a way to help. Imagine if we could cure the plague, Dad! Imagine if we could clean up this mess and start over!”
Grigio shakes his head. I can see his jaw muscles tightening under his waxy skin. “Julie, you are young. You don’t understand. We can stay alive and we can kill the things that want to kill us, but there is no grand solution. We searched for years and never found one, and now our time is up. The world is over. It can’t be cured, it can’t be salvaged, it can’t be saved.”
“Yes it can!” Julie screams at him, losing all composure. “Who decided life has to be a nightmare? Who wrote that fucking rule? We can fix it, we’ve just never tried before! We’ve always been too busy and selfish and scared!”
Grigio grits his teeth. “You are a dreamer. You are a child. You are your mother.”
“Dad, listen!”
“No.”
He cocks the gun and presses it against my forehead, directly onto Julie’s Band-Aid. Here it comes. Here is M’s everpresent irony. My inevitable death, ignoring me all those years when I wished for it daily, arriving only after I’ve decided I want to live forever. I close my eyes and brace myself.
A spatter of blood warms my face—but it’s not mine. My eyes flash open just in time to see Julie’s knife glancing off Grigio’s hand. The gun flies out of his grip and fires when it hits the floor, then again and again as the recoil knocks it against the walls of the narrow hall like a ricocheting Super Ball. Everyone drops for cover, and the gun finally spins to rest touching Nora’s toes. In the deafened silence she stares down at it, wide-eyed, then looks at the general. Cradling his gashed hand, he lunges. Nora snatches the gun off the floor and aims it at his face. He freezes. He flexes his jaw and inches forward as if about to pounce anyway. But then Nora pops out the spent ammo clip, whips a fresh one out of her purse, shoves it into the gun and chambers a round, all one liquid motion without ever taking her eyes off his. Grigio steps back.
“Go,” she says, her eyes flicking to Julie. “Try to get out somehow. Just try.”
Julie grabs my hand. We back out of the room while her dad stands there vibrating with rage.
“Good-bye, Dad,” Julie says softly. We turn and run down the stairs.
“Julie!” Grigio howls, and the sound reminds me so much of another sound, a hollow blast from a broken hunting horn, that I shiver in my damp shirt.
• • •
We are running. Julie stays in front, leading us through the cramped streets. Behind us, angry shouts ring out from the direction of Julie’s house. Then the squawk of walkie-talkies. We are running, and we are being chased. Julie’s leadership is less than decisive. We zigzag and backtrack. We are rodents scrambling in a cage. We run as the looming rooftops spin around us.
Then we hit the wall. A sheer concrete barrier laced with scaffolding, ladders, and walkways to nowhere. All the bleachers are gone, but one staircase remains; a dark hallway beckons to us from the top. We run toward it. Everything on either side of the staircase has been stripped away, leaving it floating in space like Jacob’s ladder.
A shout flies up from the ground below just as we reach the opening. “Miss Grigio!”
We turn and look down. Colonel Rosso is at the bottom of the steps, surrounded by a retinue of Security officers. He is the only one without his gun drawn.
“Please don’t run!” he calls to Julie.
Julie pulls me into the hallway and we sprint into the dark.
This inner space is clearly under construction, but most of it remains exactly as it was abandoned. Hot dog stands, souvenir kiosks, and overpriced pretzel booths sit cold and lifeless in the shadows. The shouts of the Security team echo behind us. I wait for the dead-end that will halt us, that will force me to turn and face the inevitable.
“R!” Julie pants as we run. “We’re going to get out, ok
ay? We’re going to!” Her voice is cracking, halfway between exhaustion and tears. I can’t bring myself to respond.
The hallway ends. In the faint light creeping through holes in the concrete, I see a sign on the door:
EMERGENCY EXIT
Julie runs faster, dragging me behind her. We slam into the door and it flies open—
“Oh shhh—” she gasps, and whips around, grabbing on to the door frame as one foot dangles out over an eight-story drop.
Cold wind whistles around the doorway, where torn stumps of a fire escape protrude from the wall. Birds flutter past. Below, the city spreads out like a vast cemetery, high-rises like headstones.
“Miss Grigio!”
Rosso and his officers roll to a stop about twenty feet behind us. Rosso is breathing hard, clearly too old for hot pursuit.
I look out the door at the ground below. I look at Julie. I look down again, then back at Julie.
“Julie,” I say.
“What?”
“Are you sure you want . . . to come with me?”
She looks at me, straining to force breath through her rapidly constricting bronchial tubes. There are questions in her eyes, maybe doubts, surely fears, but she nods. “Yes.”
“Please stop running,” Rosso groans, leaning against his knees. “This is not the way.”
“I have to go,” she says.
“Miss Cabernet. Julie. You can’t leave your father here. You’re all he has left.”
She bites her lower lip, but her eyes are steely. “Dad’s dead, Rosy. He just hasn’t started rotting yet.”
She grabs my hand, the one I shattered on M’s face, and squeezes so hard I think she might break it even further. She looks up at me. “Well, R?”
I pull her to me. I wrap my arms around her and hold tight enough to fuse our genes. We are face-to-face and I almost kiss her, but instead I take two steps backward, and we fall through the doorway.
We plummet like a shot bird. My arms and legs encircle her, almost completely enveloping her tiny body. We crash through a roof overhang, a support bar tears into my thigh, my head bounces off a beam, we tangle in a cell phone banner and rip it in half, and then, finally, we hit the ground. A chorus of cracks and crunches shoots through me as my back greets the earth and Julie’s weight flattens my chest. She rolls off me, choking and gasping for breath, and I lie there staring up at the sky. Here we are.
Julie raises herself on hands and knees and fumbles her inhaler out of her bag, takes a shot and holds it, supporting herself against the ground with one arm. When she can breathe again she crouches over me with terror in her eyes. Her face eclipses the hazy sun. “R!” she whispers. “Hey!”
As slow and shaky as the day I first rose from the dead, I lift myself upright and hobble to my feet. Various bones grind and crackle throughout my body. I smile, and in my breathy, tuneless tenor, I sing, “You make . . . me feel so young . . .”
She bursts out laughing and hugs me. I feel the pressure snap a few joints back into place.
She looks up at the open doorway. Rosso is framed in it, looking down at us. Julie waves to him, and he disappears back into the stadium with a swiftness that suggests pursuit. I try not to begrudge the man his paradigm—perhaps in his world, orders are orders.
So Julie and I run into the city. With each step I feel my body stabilizing, bones realigning, tissues stiffening around cracks to keep me from falling apart. I’ve never felt anything like this before. Is this some form of healing?
We dash through the empty streets, past countless rusty cars and drifts of dead leaves. We violate one-way streets. We blow stop signs. Ahead of us: the edge of town, the high grassy hill where the city opens up and the freeway leads elsewhere. Behind us: the relentless roar of assault vehicles gunning out of the stadium gate. This cannot stand! declare the steel-jawed mouths of the rulemakers. Find those little embers and stomp them out! With these howls at our backs, we crest the hill.
We are face-to-face with an army.
They stand in the grassy field next to the freeway ramps. Hundreds of them. They mill around in the grass, staring at the sky or at nothing, their gray, sunken faces oddly serene. But when the front line sees us they freeze, then pivot in our direction. Their focus spreads in a wave until the entire mob is standing at attention. Julie gives me an amused glance as if to say, Really? Then a disturbance ripples through the ranks and a burly, bald, six-foot-five zombie pushes his way into the open.
“M,” I say.
“R.” He gives Julie a quick nod. “Julie.”
“Hiiii . . . ,” she says, leaning into me warily.
Our pursuers’ tires screech and we hear a rev of engines. They are very close. M steps up to the peak of the hill and the mob follows him. Julie huddles close to me as they sweep in around us, absorbing us into their odorous army, their rank ranks. It could be my imagination or a trick of the light, but M’s skin looks less ashen than usual. His partial lips seem more expressive. And for the first time since I’ve known him, his neatly trimmed beard is not stained with blood.
The trucks barrel toward us, but as the swarm of the Dead rises into view on the hilltop, the vehicles slow down, then grumble to a stop. There are only four of them. Two Hummer H2s, a Chevy Tahoe, and an Escalade, all spray-painted military olive drab. The hulking machines look small and pitiful from where we stand. The Tahoe’s door opens, and Colonel Rosso slowly emerges. Clutching his rifle, he scans row upon row of swaying bodies, weighing odds and strategies. His eyes are wide behind his thick glasses. He swallows, then lowers his gun.
“I’m sorry, Rosy,” Julie calls down to him, and points at the stadium. “I can’t do it anymore, okay? It’s a fucking lie. We think we’re surviving in there but we’re not.”
Rosso is looking hard at the zombies arrayed around him, peering into their faces. He’s old enough that he’s probably been around since the beginning of all this. He knows what the Dead are supposed to look like, and he can tell when something’s different, no matter how subtle, subliminal, subcutaneous.
“You can’t save the world by yourself!” he yells. “Come back and we can discuss this!”
“I’m not by myself,” Julie says, and gestures at the forest of zombies swaying around her. “I’m with these guys.”
Rosso’s lips twist in a tortured grimace, then he jumps in his vehicle, slams the door, and revs back toward the stadium with the other three right behind. A brief respite, a quick suck of breath, because I know they aren’t quitting, they can’t quit, they’re just gathering their strength, their weapons, their brute-force determination.
And well they should, because look at us. We are several hundred monsters and a hundred-pound girl, standing on the edge of their city with fire in our eyes. Deep under our feet Earth holds its molten breath, while the bones of countless generations watch us and wait.
WE ARE MASSED on the freeway on-ramp. Behind us, the city. In front of us, angular hills of alders and landscaped medians leading back toward the airport. Julie stands close by my side, looking a lot less confident than the brash revolutionary she just portrayed for Rosso. I put a hand on her shoulder and address the crowd.
“Julie!”
The crowd shivers, and I hear one or two sets of teeth snap. I raise my voice. “Julie! We keep her safe.”
A few of them look tempted, but for the most part what I see in their eyes isn’t hunger. It’s the same fascination I saw back in the airport, intensified. More focused. They’re not just looking at her, they’re studying her. Absorbing her. Strange spasms ripple through their bodies every few seconds.
I catch M giving her a slightly different kind of stare, and I snap my fingers in his face.
“Come on,” he says as if I’m being unreasonable.
I sit down on the concrete barrier, struggling to think. The noise of Rosso’s trucks is still fading into the distance. Everyone is looking at me. Impatient stares from every direction. It’s a look that says, Well? and I want to shout, We
ll what? I’m not a general or a colonel or a builder of cities. I’m just a corpse who wants not to be.
Julie sits next to me and puts a hand on my knee. I finally notice all the scrapes and bruises she acquired during our chuteless skydive. There’s even one on her cheek, a shallow cut that makes her wince when she smiles. I hate it.
“You’re hurt,” I say.
“Not too bad.”
I hate that she’s hurt. I hate that she’s been hurt, by me and by others, throughout the entire arc of her life. I barely remember pain, but when I see it in her I feel it in myself, in disproportionate measure. It creeps into my eyes, stinging, burning.
“Why did . . . you come?” I ask her.
“To help, remember? And to keep you safe.”
“But why?”
She gives me a soft smile, and the cut on her cheek brightens with fresh blood. “Because I like you, Mr. Zombie.” She wipes the blood away, looks at it, then smears it down my neck. “There. Now we’re even.”
Watching her sitting next to me, this blue-eyed angel surrounded by the drooling Dead, this fragile girl smiling with bloody lips into a highly uncertain future, I feel something surge in me. My vision blurs, and a wet trail streaks down my face. The burning in my eyes cools.
Julie touches my cheek and looks at her finger. She stares at me with such fascination I can’t return her gaze. Instead I stand up and blurt, “We’re going back to the airport.”
The Dead look at me. They look at M.
“Why?” M says.
“Because it’s where . . . we live. Where . . . we start.”
“Start . . . what? War? Fight Boneys?”
“Not war. Not . . . that kind.”
“Then what?”
As I stand there trying to answer, trying to distill the whirlwind of images in my head—music in the airport’s dark halls, my kids coming out of their hiding places and dusting off their pinkening skin, a movement, a change—as I stand there dreaming, the hushed city air shivers with a scream. A frantic, gurgling howl like a cow thrashing around half-butchered.
Someone is coming toward us from farther down the freeway. He’s running, but his lumbering gait betrays his biological status. M rushes out to meet the newcomer. I watch them converse, the newcomer waving his hands and gesturing in a way that creates a sinking feeling in my stomach. He is, without question, a bringer of bad news.
