by Guy James
A regular series of shuffling and grumbling sounds was coming from somewhere nearby.
Memories rushed back into the vegan’s mind. There had been another outbreak. He was in a bunker. The architect of the virus had brought him there…to experiment on him, or to talk to him, or to experiment on him by talking to him, that part of it the vegan wasn’t clear on. Then he remembered that he was dead, or at least that he was supposed to be dead.
“Was it a dream?” the vegan asked. “Was it…”
He slid a hand down his forearm, curious about what he would find when his hand reached his wrist.
The cold metal confirmed that it had not been a dream, that none of it had been a dream. Touching the bracelet sped the vegan’s recall, and altered the clarity of the past events that were reentering his mind. All the events of his life flashed back into his mind in an instant, and with a lucidity than they had not had when he had lived them. He looked down at his wrist and froze.
Dried blood covered the front of the vegan’s clothes. There was dried blood on the floor around him. It was everywhere. Shaking his head with distaste, he braced himself with a hand and tried to push up off the floor. He got a few inches off the floor before his clothes, which were stuck to the blood on the floor, pulled him back down. He sank down, and rather than trying to push himself up again, rolled over.
The blood seal between the vegan’s clothes and the floor tore, popping as it did.
The vegan got onto his other side and forgot that he had been trying to get up. His jaw dropped and he gaped at what was left of Dr. Zamirsky, at what he knew had been his own doing.
Dr. Zamirsky—a ghoul Dr. Zamirsky—was shuffling in place, up against the wall near the stove. The back of Dr. Zamirsky’s neck was torn open.
The sight of the frayed flesh jogged the vegan’s memory. His mind flashed back to how he had leapt across the room to destroy Dr. Zamirsky, and then…then all that the vegan could remember was pain, or rather the discomfort of being dried up to nothing. He couldn’t remember anything after that.
“I must have gotten hold of Vladimir,” the vegan said under his breath, “and sucked him dry just as the bracelet was killing me. I must have taken in enough of his blood to…” The vegan swallowed, suddenly aware of an acrid, metallic taste on his tongue.
Then he remembered that he had been trying to look at his wrist. He raised his hand to his face and stared, turning his hand slowly. There was still flesh there, but it took effort to find it.
The hand looked like it should have been connected to a discolored skeleton rather than anything that was even half alive. The vegan could see the bones of his fingers and hand beyond a thin layer of what looked like overlapping strips of peppered soy jerky. He couldn’t move his fingers or hand, and he couldn’t feel anything below his elbow.
The vegan pushed up his sleeve. His forearm looked as gnarled and grey as his hand. The vegan winced at the sight and let his eyes slowly creep up his arm. The higher he went, the better his skin looked.
He looked down at his hand again. The sight of his desiccated hand and forearm ignited a thirst in him, and he looked up at the ghoul Dr. Zamirsky. His eyes focused on the torn neck, and then he made himself look away.
The vegan rose, steadied himself on his feet, and turned his back on the ghoul Dr. Zamirsky. The vegan picked up one of the metal cups and filled it at the sink. He gulped down cup after cup of water until he was no longer parched. Then he leaned against the stove for a few minutes, gathering his thoughts.
The vegan began to feel a tingling sensation in the elbow of his partially desiccated arm. It grew into the most intense pins and needles feeling that the vegan had ever had, and then the feeling spread down his forearm and into his hand. The metal cup slipped from the vegan’s good hand and half a scream escaped from his mouth before he clapped his good hand firmly over his lips.
He glanced sideways. Dr. Zamirsky paid him no mind. The ghoul doctor continued to shuffle in place.
At first, the sensation in the vegan’s arm was so unpleasant that he wished he could return his arm to the unfeeling state of a few moments earlier, but the painful sensation gradually dulled.
The vegan’s damaged forearm and hand regained some of their previous sallow color. The flat, sunken flesh rounded a little and took on a more socially acceptable appearance, at least by half-ghoul norms.
He tried to flex his fingers, and they obeyed slightly. He sat down in the chair that he had sat in during his talk with Dr. Zamirsky and leaned backward, feeling the hydration spread throughout his body. He felt better with every passing minute.
The thought of staying in Dr. Zamirsky’s bunker indefinitely flitted through his mind. Maybe there was even a way to make Dr. Zamirsky conversational again.
“Oh, Vladimir,” the vegan said. “What to do with you?” He sighed. “What to do with you?”
The vegan decided not to stay. He understood that his role with Dr. Zamirsky was over, and the world intended for the architect of mankind’s final plague to stay isolated in his bunker, a rapidly dehydrating bundle of spasmodic nerves over a frail skeleton.
“We did have a nice chat,” the vegan said. “I think I’ll miss that in a way. I’m not around people much, and it’s nice just to talk to someone, even if it’s about something as horrible as all of this.” The vegan sighed again. “What could you have done if you were different? What diseases could you have cured?”
The ghoul Dr. Zamirsky moaned.
“Yeah,” the vegan said, “probably every single one.”
The vegan tried to flex the fingers of his damaged hand again, and they were more cooperative this time. “And if what you say is true about the spread of the virus—and I think that it is—then I must have brought the ghouls to the Wegmans. They were probably on their way there already, but I am sure I sped their arrival. For that I must do my penance, of which you are a certain part. I must roam the world, part ghoul myself, and do good deeds. I will not be a virus, Dr. Zamirsky. I will not be like you.”
Dr. Zamirsky moaned. He remained facing the wall.
The vegan stood and walked over to Dr. Zamirsky. He searched Dr. Zamirsky’s pockets as the ghoul scientist staggered into the wall, backed away from the wall, and staggered into it again, repeating the dance over and over and grumbling in a ghoul-like way at every attempt. The grumbling had a Russian accent to it. The vegan thought he found what he was looking for—a key that seemed to fit the clasp of the bracelet on his wrist. He tried the key and it fit. He unlocked the bracelet and removed it and its protrusions from his flesh. He placed the bracelet into the pot that Dr. Zamirsky had used to boil water for their tea.
“I guess this is it,” the vegan said. “Vladimir? Dr. Zamirsky?”
The ghoul Dr. Zamirsky gurgled something that the vegan couldn’t discern, and kept on shuffling toward and away from the wall.
The vegan sighed. “I’m sorry I insisted on calling you Vladimir. I could tell you didn’t like it. And I’m sorry if I couldn’t pronounce your name exactly right.” The vegan looked at Dr. Zamirsky’s shuffling feet for a long moment. “It’s sad what happened here, but I guess it’s what you always wanted. At least you seem to be over your cold.”
The vegan hobbled toward the doors at the far end of the bunker. He opened both. One opened into a bathroom, and the other into a short, narrow hallway that terminated at the foot of a ladder.
The vegan chose the hallway and walked into it.
He shut the door behind him, leaving the ghoul Dr. Zamirsky to continue his pointless shuffle. The vegan walked to the ladder and looked up. It was at least a twenty foot climb, and the vegan had to wonder how Dr. Zamirsky had brought him down there. He suspected that Dr. Zamirsky may have simply thrown him down. The vegan shrugged, admitting to himself that it didn’t matter because he was no worse off for it, and began to climb.
At the top of the ladder, the vegan turned a wheel and undid the bunker’s hatch. He pushed the hatch open and cold wind b
lew in, carrying a light dusting of new snow with it.
The vegan climbed all the way out of the bunker and tipped the hatch, which clanged shut. He found himself in a small clearing just past a tree line in the forest. He looked up into the sky, found some traces of sun, oriented himself, and began to walk north.
“For as long as I have breath left in me,” the vegan with the handlebar moustache whispered, “I will seek out and destroy the remnants of the abomination that Dr. Zamirsky unleashed upon the world. I will walk undetected among the ghouls and strike them down one by one. When this task is finished—if it is ever finished—I will disappear and embark on a different journey: that of propagating fruit trees throughout the planet.”
115
SVEN, JANE, AND LORIE’S APARTMENT, SUTTON PLACE, NEW YORK
Lorie was sitting on her bed, doing the scheduled math homework in the workbook she kept at home. There wasn’t a school schedule anymore, because there wasn’t any more school for the time being, but Lorie wanted to do the homework. There was the satisfaction of mental box-checking in learning and adapting to the structure of the problems and solutions. Structure could be remembered, modified, and impressed upon the as yet unstructured aspects of life.
Doing homework out of the workbook reminded Lorie of where she had been forced to leave her textbook—outside her locker when she first learned of the outbreak in Stuyvesant. Every now and again as she ran through the math problems, subjugating them to her will one by one, her mind repeatedly made attempts, in progressively increasing detail, to form images of the current state of the textbook in a hallway that had been overrun by zombie students.
The images, in spite of the depth of detail with which Lorie’s mind drew them, did not move her.
“If I can’t feel anything anymore, at least I can fake it.”
Lorie squeezed her eyes shut and willed the images of the Stuyvesant hallway to fade.
She turned to her nightstand and looked at the fateful Coca-Cola can. It was the first Coke she’d had in a long time, and, luckily for her, the student who she’d taken it from had been on a strict no fructose diet, and had been saving the can since Christmas for a special occasion, to consume in secret and deny its consumption even to himself. The can, which featured ice skating holiday polar bears, had been produced before Milt had had his way with any of the syrup vats.
She regarded the can that could just as easily have taken her life as given her the sugar rush she had needed. Her face wore an expression that was both cool and vacant.
A scratching sound came from beyond the door. Lorie tilted her head and stared at the door, her eyes burning a hole through the spot where she projected the source of the noise was.
“Before I became a robot,” Lorie said, robotically, “I would have been excited about this distraction from Ivan.” She paused and thought on this. “Let’s see if we can act that way.”
She gave her workbook an exaggerated frown, then threw it aside and got up. She walked to the door and opened it. Ivan was there, sitting just beyond the threshold. He meowed up at Lorie and padded past her into her room.
The cat circled Lorie’s chair once, brushed up against her legs, purred, then leapt up onto the bed and settled on top of the math workbook, crunching the paper as he did so.
“Agreed,” Lorie said, “it’s time I took a break.”
Ivan looked at Lorie, and his cat eyes grew wide. He tilted his head to one side, blinked, meowed, and yawned in quick succession.
“You’re a good cat,” Lorie said. “You know that?”
Ivan meowed.
“Of course you know that. Are you hungry?”
Ivan meowed with greater enthusiasm, then yawned.
“I think I could use a snack too,” she said, even though she didn’t care for one and felt like she could be alright never snacking again. “Let me finish a couple of these equations and we’ll both go scrounge around in the kitchen...in the high fat survival food bins…delicious.”
Lorie picked Ivan up off the workbook and placed him on a piece of scrap paper that she was done with.
Ivan settled down with a crunch, put his head on his paws, and waited.
116
Sven knocked on the door of Lorie’s room. “Hey,” he said, “can I come in for a minute?”
Nila click-clacked past Sven toward the kitchen, wagging her tail. Sven looked at the dog that had saved Lorie. He was still having trouble wrapping his head around it—both the fact that Lorie had needed saving and that she had been so lucky to have Nila find her, drag her to safety, and wake her in time.
“Yeah, sure,” Lorie said. Her voice was muffled, but sounded resilient.
Sven walked in and found Lorie lying in bed, on her side. Her head was propped up by two pillows, and she was holding a book upright in front of her.
The room was immaculate. It looked like Lorie had cleaned it moments earlier. She had always been a bit compulsive about tidiness for as long as Sven had known her, but this was the most precisely organized state of Lorie’s room that Sven had ever seen.
Sven looked at Lorie, trying to read her face. Her face and eyes were red, as if she had been crying, but her eyes shone with a fierce light that made Sven sure she had not been crying at all. A lump materialized in Sven’s throat.
“It looks like you cleaned up around here…again,” Sven said. He cleared his throat, but the lump remained.
Lorie nodded. “Yep. It needed it, you know?” Lorie shrugged. “Well, maybe it didn’t really need it, but sometimes I have too much energy.”
“Yeah,” Sven said. “That I do know.”
“Ivan was in here begging for snacks earlier, and I gave him some, so if he claims that he hasn’t been fed…he’s just being sneaky.”
Sven nodded. “Sounds about right. He just got some treats out of me, too. What’s that you’re reading?”
Lorie picked up the book and turned it so that Sven could see the cover. “Lord of the Flies,” she said. “It’s our assigned reading for English…was our assigned reading, I mean.”
“I remember that book,” Sven said, trying to smile. “They made us read it too. How do you like it?”
“I like it, but I know what’s going to happen to Piggy. And I don’t feel bad for him. It’s already obvious that he’s gonna die.”
Sven looked at Lorie. He gulped. “Why do you say that?”
Lorie put the book aside and sat up in bed. “The glasses, the asthma, he’s fat. He’s an instant outcast, and the other kids just seem to be looking for ways to be aggressive. I’m sure they’ll find a way, and he’ll die. He’s going to die. It’s the path of least resistance.”
“You…uh…you’re right.” Sven sighed. “It is that: the path of least resistance.”
Lorie shrugged.
Sven tried to force a smile onto his face. “How are you doing otherwise, you okay, you hanging in there?”
“Yeah, I’m hanging in there. I’m fine. What about you?”
“Sure, I’m okay, given the circumstances.”
“You’re gonna need a lot of help rebuilding, you know, being the first post-apocalyptic mayor of New York City.”
“Yeah, I know. The outbreak is just about over now, based on what people are saying online and what we can see here. Soon everyone will be coming out of the woodwork, looking for help…and for trouble. It’s my—our responsibility to restore what we can, to maintain some sort of order. I’m still optimistic, Lorie, about people, I mean. They—we’ll pull through this.”
“Sure, that seems logical now.”
Sven thought her use of the word “logical” odd in what she had just said. Her entire demeanor seemed off somehow, chilled and unfeeling. He wasn’t sure if it was his imagination or not. Maybe she had finally snapped, irreparably, maybe they had all finally lost all that had been left of the humani—
“What’s the latest on the forum?” Lorie asked.
“Uh, the forum?”
Lorie nodded.
“Well,” Sven said, struggling to get his mind back on track, “it’s hard to get a real sense of the damage at this point, but it looks like a lot of people survived. We were lucky that Milt admitted what the source of the contamination was and that we were able to get that information online. If it hadn’t been for that, then…I don’t know.” Sven shook his head. “Right now people are staying inside and waiting it out. It looks like we’re already approaching the tail end of this thing. The infected should die off in the next twenty-four to thirty-six hours, but I’m mostly concerned about the ones in the river, or covered in ice or snow. They probably won’t disintegrate for a while, so the threat won’t be over.”
“You’ll have to post about that.”
“Jane and I already have. You know, it’s weird, the New Yorkers who are left really are calling me their mayor.”
“You are,” Lorie said. “I mean, you are now. You saved them, and now you’re keeping them alive. They need you to get them through all this.”
Sven nodded gravely.
“And the rest of the country?” Lorie asked.
Sven sighed. “The rest of America was hit pretty bad. Luckily, they were watching us and got the alerts from the forum. A lot of people took precautions in advance. So it’s bad, but it could’ve been much worse. The federal government and local governments are all coordinating the same set of instructions now: stay inside and wait out the infection.”
“What about the rest of the world?” Lorie asked.
“The infected who are under water are a real complication. We know that in Virginia, based on the virus that we were able to study there, that virus had a limited life. Now, this could be a different strain. The zombies here were different, more aggressive…”
“And more breakable, too…more brittle. Do you think Milt did it? He changed the virus?”
“I think so,” Sven said. “Maybe not on purpose, but he did.”
“Yeah, it must have reacted with his body chemistry somehow. The virus changed him, and his body chemistry changed it. I don’t think he was the kind of person to do something like this, before he…was infected.”
