Milton smiled and rose. “Not my best pronouncement, I hope, but it seemed right as a slogan for people to come in and rest.”
“It worked for me,” I said as we shook hands.
“I’m so glad it did,” Milton said. He led me to the door, and we parted for the day.
Chapter Eight
A few weeks passed. I moved from my guest room to the main living quarters. I got used to fighting practice with Jack and Tanya in the mornings, and I got to where I could fight without getting all worked up, finally moving with some grace and ease. When I was done there, I’d help out around the compound—hauling water from the river, planting and watering the crops we hoped could help feed us, shoring up defenses where they were needed.
Afternoons I usually spent talking with Milton. He never tired of it. I smiled that it had taken the zombie apocalypse for a scientist and an English professor to appreciate and discuss the finer, more humane points of civilization. On balance, perhaps it was not the most surprising irony one could imagine, but it was still funny.
Some evenings I spent with Tanya, far too few for my taste. She was devoted to Popcorn and spent most of her time with him, reading with him, helping him with his mathematics lessons. It was nice to see them together, as they both obviously needed it very much.
On the other hand, I was constantly reminded of how much I disliked other people’s children, and the fact that this one was the most extreme charity case imaginable only slightly offset that. I was honest enough to admit—only to myself, of course, never to Tanya—how much I resented him for threatening or diminishing what little opportunities I had to work on a sexual or romantic relationship with her. But a couple evenings with Tanya were better than I had expected ever to have again, and much better than I deserved.
On balance, like Milton’s meager little Christmas among the undead, everything was a lot better than I had dared hope for, under the circumstances, and it made me quite optimistic for the future.
I learned that, spats and posturing notwithstanding, Jack did have an infrequent and more or less completely physical relationship with Sarah. I usually smiled at it, seeing how right Milton was that categorizing people made it so much easier to understand them and work around their idiosyncrasies. Whereas some objective standard of morality might have made the relationship of Jack and Sarah seem wrong, seeing it from Jack’s rational point of view made it much easier to appreciate and weigh its merits.
As Jack explained it—in completely rational, cost-benefit terms—the physical relationship was satisfying to both, and the relationship brought Sarah some increased status among the women in the community, by attaching her to the strongest male leader and removing the stigma of not having a mate or children. Though Jack didn’t include it in his list of benefits, I could’ve added that it also removed him from the inconveniences of sexual advances from either males or females in the group, thereby cutting down on jealousy and competition, as well as eliminating any doubts about his potency or preference, making it easier for him to command.
But, of course, to understand a relationship was not the same as to want to imitate it: I wanted something more with Tanya, but was also willing to wait until the opportune time.
Further complicating this was the initiation rite. I learned that Tanya and Popcorn would be the next ones going out. Milton explained they could’ve added an age requirement to exclude Popcorn until later, but it hardly made sense in his case. If anything, they were afraid he’d grow more sullen and withdrawn if he didn’t have this to work for. It made sense for me to go with them, though there was precedence in the community for two people to go out with someone who had already been initiated as a full citizen, if a suitable, new, third person was not ready at the time of their initiation. But I told Jack and Milton that I would be going with them, and everyone seemed happy with that.
The day before our big outing, I was sitting up with Tanya, back in the recreated frontier cabin. Jack had been kind enough to sneak us a bottle of wine on his last raid to the supermarket, and Tanya was considerate enough to me that she tucked Popcorn in early. But the evening was still mostly business. Using various utensils and crockery, Tanya was recreating a map of the city on the table and going over the plans for tomorrow.
“If we head west, we can see what’s in this part of the town. The hospital’s there.” She set a cup down on the table to represent the hospital. “The only other things I remember there were offices and some restaurants, so we might not find anything. By that time, it should be getting sunny and hot, so we should be alone on the streets. Then if we turn south, there’s a big grassy hill, with the library in the middle of it. Depending on how far south we go, we can make it across the bridge right in front of the museum, or across the next one down. If we do that, we’ll be in the park, but it’s just a few hundred yards before we’re back here and we’re done.”
I looked at her. I’d thought she was stunning from the first, but candlelight and familiarity and respect only compounded it; I hadn’t been so smitten since I met my wife back in college. “You know, whatever happens, I think it’d be nice if the kid made it back.” It wasn’t quite what I’d expected to say, but I’d turned into such a lightweight when it came to drinking that it didn’t surprise me when I spouted things I might have rethought, if given the chance. Living on a diet of mostly burnt biscuits and canned peaches, I guess it made sense that a half bottle of wine would go to my head and drop my guard this way.
Tanya’s eyes sparkled and she smiled. “Jonah, coming on to me by acting like you’re interested in Popcorn when I know damn well you’re not? Oh my, you are slick. Jack would just say something crude and flex his biceps, the big, macho doofus.”
I put my hand on hers and said, “I love you, Tanya.” I really hadn’t been planning on that, either.
She raised an eyebrow and leaned close. She was trying to hide it, but she was as tipsy as I was. We weren’t the first couple to ease the awkwardness with alcohol. “I think I knew that, Jonah, but thanks for saying it. Most men take way too long getting around to the saying part. And I don’t think now’s the time to be taking too long saying things.”
She put her other hand on mine. Then she leaned across the table, and we kissed, just lightly at first. Between kisses, she breathed, “I love you, too.” Then she leaned back. “You’re not going to ruin everything by saying, ‘Let’s make love,’ are you?” She smiled as she asked it.
I’m sure I had the usual crushed look that men always have in that situation. “Why not?”
She walked around the table, and I stood up. She started kissing my neck, working up to my ear. “Because it sounds goofy as hell when a man says it.” She leaned back and put her forefinger on my lips. “But don’t say it the other way, either. Just don’t talk.” Then she really kissed me.
I’d never been a prizefighter, and I’d never stormed the beach on D-Day or gone over the top of the trench at the Battle of Verdun. But if I remembered the film conventions appropriate to each type of combat, then I knew it was imperative—indeed, a matter of life and death—that one never have sex before the big fight. Yet it was equally imperative to lose one’s virginity before going into battle in the war to end all wars. As I kissed Tanya more and more passionately, as my hands found her breasts and then her buttocks, I decided that, even though I wasn’t a virgin, what was the war to end all wars if not the one we were in?
That night, I found that Tanya’s passionate nature extended to something other than fighting and raising kids. And between her extremely muscular thighs, on some musty, 150-year-old quilt, I got much, much more optimistic about the future.
Chapter Nine
We were up before dawn, on the museum’s roof with Jack, Milton, Popcorn, and some others. Popcorn, Tanya, and I were all wearing denim jackets and jeans for the little protection they’d afford us from bites. In the summer heat, though, it would wear us down quicker, so we each had to carry a canteen to offset dehydration.
Jack handed each of us a walkie-talkie. “The bridge to the north is pretty clear, so we’ll send a vehicle across if you call. They should be able to pick you up pretty quick wherever you are. We’ll watch all the bridges. When we see you coming across, we’ll distract the stiffs away from either the front or the back gate to let you in.”
On a table, Jack had set the weapons he had chosen for us. To Popcorn he gave four spikes—huge nails about ten inches long. I remembered having aluminum ones almost that long for sticking in baked potatoes, but these were thicker and looked a little rusty, although the couple inches closest to the point were all silvery, like someone had been sharpening them.
“Remember what we went over,” Jack said. “Stab them in the eyes, ears, or temples. And no throwing!”
To Tanya he gave the particularly brutal weapon of a machete. “Careful with that thing: I’ve been sharpening it every night.”
“Oh, Jack, now I know you care,” Tanya teased. “Or did Sarah finally come to her senses, and you’ve been lonely at night, playing with your big, sharp ‘machete’?”
Jack cocked an eyebrow at her, but he was smiling, too. “Easy, gal, the stiffs aren’t known for their sense of humor, and we need yours back here.”
He handed me an aluminum baseball bat and smiled. “I think this has always been your weapon. Be careful.”
He took us over to his favorite little addition to the museum, his insane zip line across the river. The sun was just coming up behind us, and I could begin to make out the gloomy streets and buildings of the dead city. Looking down the zip line, I had a clear view of where I’d touch down, and one man was watching the landing zone through the scope of a rifle. Never mind the dead on the other side; the main fear I had was how long the zip line was: it must’ve been well over five hundred feet across the museum grounds, the river, and into the city. “Jack,” I said, “how fast are we going to hit the other side?”
“Not a problem. The slope is really shallow. Some people have actually gotten stuck in the middle, but if that happens, you can just drop in the river, and we can pick you right up. If you’re to the other side, you’d be close enough to the ground that you should be able to drop off. But with you three, I’d only worry about Popcorn not having enough momentum, since he’s so small, so he should go second. Tanya could knock him along if she had to, and hopefully not lose all her momentum.”
Jack handed us each a leather belt. “They’re all greased up in the middle, so don’t touch them there. Put it over the cable, wrap the ends around your wrists, and give yourself a good push off the edge here. All of you be careful.”
“Good luck,” said Milton. “Don’t take any unnecessary risks, and hurry back to us.”
Part of me still thought the whole thing was an unnecessary risk, but I wanted to prove myself to the group. I’d lived for weeks on my own out there; a few hours with two people who were fairly brutal and efficient killers should be easy. I was pretty confident neither of them would get careless, and I knew I wouldn’t.
I got up on the edge of the roof and did as Jack instructed. I’d never been afraid of heights, but this was definitely daunting, looking down the four stories to the ground, then scanning the hundreds of feet across the river. There was nothing to do about it but just go. I launched myself forward and started sliding along the cable. As Jack had said, it was a fairly slow and steady ride. I let go as my feet were about to hit the ground, then rolled forward and got up without too much difficulty.
Popcorn was right behind me. I caught his legs as he came sliding across the cable, so I could stop his descent before he let go. I did the same for Tanya. Then all three of us started forward, down the middle of the street to avoid anything hiding in doorways.
As Tanya had planned, we would move straight ahead, up a slight hill to the hospital. The stores and restaurants in this part of town were all thoroughly ransacked, and we saw no sign of the dead as we worked our way west through the abandoned cars.
When we got to the third large cross street, we saw the hospital on the northwest corner of the intersection, definitely a scene of much greater carnage and destruction than mere looting and ransacking. Most of the hospital’s windows were smashed out, and from some, the blinds were flopping in the wind. Above others, blackened marks reached up the side of the building, as though many rooms had been on fire, with the flames licking upward. Since the building was still standing, most of this must’ve happened in the first few days of the crisis, when there was still water-pressure in the sprinkler system to put out the fires.
The wrecked cars in front of the building were especially dense, essentially shutting off the entrance, and many of them were also badly burned, as though they had kept coming there and crashing, even when the wrecks were already two deep and up on the sidewalk. I couldn’t help but shake my head at the sign above the entrance: “MERCY HOSPITAL.”
I had thought perhaps of checking out the building when Tanya had mentioned it the night before, but it didn’t look too inviting now. With such a traffic jam in front of the doors, I couldn’t even see any way in. “Come on,” she whispered, “let’s go. I hated hospitals before this, and now they must be crawling with them. Let’s go.”
Just then we heard a wail. At a smashed-out window on the third floor, one of the dead had spotted us. It wore a nurse’s uniform, covered in blood, and was partly burned all over. It was pointing at us.
The room behind her must’ve been crowded with other zombies, for at her signal of new prey, they pressed forward and toppled her out the window. She flipped in the air and landed on her back with a horrible, dull thud. The impact was hard enough that her upper torso and arms bounced up, then flopped back down. The fall must’ve broken her back, as her arms kept writhing and her head kept lolling around, yet she made no move to get up.
As my gaze moved back to the window, another zombie crawled onto the sill. It was burned so badly I couldn’t tell what it had been in life. The others pushed it out. Unlike the other, it landed face first, a more fatal landing, as the head snapped back, then flopped forward, and the whole body stayed still. Mercy Hospital was continuing to claim victims.
More zombies stood at the window, flailing and clamoring and killing themselves to get at us. I turned to see both Tanya and Popcorn just as mesmerized by the grotesque display of undead, human lemmings. And I saw, almost at the same time as I smelled its hideous stench, a zombie’s rotted hand reaching for the back of Tanya’s neck.
* * * * *
As I shoved her to the side, I raised the baseball bat up with my left hand.
The zombie wore coveralls. He was hunched over, his right arm out in front, his head lolled to the left. The right side of his face had been torn off, revealing blackened teeth through flayed flesh and caked blood. The right eye had been gouged out as well, leaving a black, sightless hole. And as I pushed Tanya out of the way, I could see he still clutched a hammer.
Though it happened frequently—either when zombies obsessively clutched things they had been holding when they died, or when their random groping latched onto something—there was still an extra element of terror in seeing a zombie wielding a weapon. It wasn’t that it made the creature more dangerous: their insatiable, plague-contaminated teeth would always be their most terrifying weapon.
No, seeing them clutch anything made by human artifice—a hammer, a pistol, or, in one of my most horrible visions, a little girl’s doll—was a terrible reminder of what we all tried desperately to overlook every minute of the day: that the undead were not some alien invader that had descended upon us. They were what we, the temporarily living, would inevitably become, each and every one of us—a rotting, tottering, mindless parody of ourselves.
I gave a backhanded blow with the bat. It smashed him across the mouth, sending teeth flying like a shower of bloody raisins, snapping his head around, and making him stagger back. I grabbed the bat again with both hands and raised it high to finish him, but he raised his one good eye to l
ook at me. As usual, there was no emotion or feeling in his eye—not rage, not fear—but, like the hammer in his hand, they held just enough residual humanity to make him both horrible and pitiable.
He reared up, growling, wheezing, and raising both his arms. Whether it was to attack with the hammer or to ward of my blow, it was completely impossible to tell.
With a sudden flash to my right, Tanya’s machete went through his left wrist and neck. The hammer, with the bloodless hand still clutching it, clanked at my feet, while his head fell to the left and rolled under a car. The remaining limbs and trunk stayed where they were, the right leg and arm twitching slightly.
Tanya took a step forward and shoved it to the ground. “Son of a bitch! Try to touch me, you son of a bitch!” She wiped the machete blade on the leg of his coveralls, then stood up and spat on him. I remembered my little ritual over the dead, and knew she would think I was either stupid or crazy for doing it, just as I was feeling increasingly uncomfortable with her savagery. But I also knew there was no sense judging her. As bestial as our lives had become, the only question was how to maintain some respect and humanity among the living: whether you did it by granting some tiny shred of respect to the dead, or by completely dishonoring them, that was a choice you had to make for yourself, based just on what drove you the least crazy.
I looked around. Fortunately, Headless had not brought any of his undead friends along.
I looked Tanya over. She was panting, teeth gritted, veins bulging out of her neck, sweat on her brow, and she was holding the blood-smeared machete down with her left hand. Like Milton said, such an unbelievable and frightening amount of rage. I’d never seen a lover decapitate someone trying to kill us; it was as disconcerting as I would’ve imagined, though strangely arousing in some savage, primal way. I guess you’d know she’d always have your back, and if anyone could raise and defend your kids in this insane, charnel-house of a world, it had to be her. But you really didn’t want to piss her off.
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