by Beth Mattson
“We have some training to do,” I told Juliet, “Remember how I knew how to club skulls long before their ages? They don’t know what they are doing. They need some help. Even better than what we got.”
They didn’t have any firewood to chop to build up their muscles. They didn’t have any solid cages to sleep inside of. They didn’t have anyone to teach them about zombie killing. They didn’t have any parents to look out for their education. Neither did I. We would have to look out for each other.
The Training
I built Swan a Training dummy out of light metal scraps and shredded plastics that I salvaged while she was distracted with the breakfast tea and rat bacon that I made her every night for a week. While she sat sipping and munching, I lurked in the shadows of mostly empty, snoring buildings, my body pressed up against holes in walls and slouching away with any rebar or tangles of wire that I could drag quietly. For the head of the pretend zombie, I stuffed tattered plastic bags and moldy paper flyers inside of an old, tied off, doll-sized t-shirt that wasn’t Warm enough for any baby to wear. The neck was a short coil of thick, re-braided and repaired rope. Anytime she knocked the head off, I could just re-coil it. The zombie dummy swayed back and forth on its overturned garbage can stand with a broken broom handle body.
Swan was a quick student after I convinced her to leave her heavy rolling pin behind in favor of the fire poker. The wrought iron poker was longer and sturdier, extending her reach beyond the length of her still growing arms. To make up for her short arms and sprouting legs, she bounced and jumped wildly as she struck at the Training dummy. She sprinted as fast as she could towards the unbalanced decoy and then stopped short, rapidly tiptoeing and hopping, the baby t-shirt head barely lolling off as she leapt in front it with the very end of her poker thrashing wildly.
After twenty three attempts, she hit the head square on and it dangled off to one side on the rope coil neck. She shrieked with joy and pumped her fists in the air, losing control of her weapon, sending it clattering to the ground.
“Not bad, not bad” I confirmed, replacing the head and neck, “But settle down and regain your weapon. That would have been a blow to the zombie’s skull, but let’s see if you can take the head off at the neck. We’ll work on skull-smashing later. Control before power.” Like Dad always said.
She stooped to retrieve her poker and tried rushing the dummy again. She still stopped awkwardly in front of the fake beast, her legs spread wide at the ankles, jumping to a strange height while swinging, but this time she hit the rope neck instead of the head. She knocked it apart at a nice angle and barely nicked the plastic shoulder on her way down.
“Bravo,” I clapped, “That was an excellent swing, but the entire body would have fallen on top of you. Don’t stop in front of it. You need to leap past the zombie, and then, after you knock the head off, you have to destroy the brains. We can practice on this rotten, frozen cabbage.”
She glared down at the counterfeit un-dead head. She stood directly above it and clobbered it, six or seven times, mashing it into a festering slaw. She rested her victorious hands on her hips and gazed into the cluttered sky above our heads.
“Felt good, didn’t it?” I asked.
Her eyes gleamed at me with the satisfaction of defeating something that had been terrorizing her for years. She licked her peelings lips, looking around for more to do.
“But,” I added, “Your swings are wasting energy. Diagonals are better. Slamming straight down is a finishing move. Going for the temple or top corner of a head keeps you in motion.”
She nodded, soaking it all up, lungs full of fresh night air. I tried using my lungs, too, to feel some of the soothing, cool breeze, but my chest rattled and wheezed. I shuddered. Swan shrugged, not as scared as she should be of zombie noises.
“Don’t be so cavalier. This is dangerous work. Now, try this frozen raccoon. Not all zombie heads are as small as that cabbage.”
She swung at everything that I gave her until her shoulders tired and her swings grew slower and sloppier. She yawned. I had forgotten that building up muscles was hungry and sore work. When Dad and had taught me how to pike heads, I had sprained my left shoulder. Mom had wrapped me in our only un-torn blanket and fed me broth for a week before she would let Dad take me outside again. What I had now was worse than a sprained shoulder, but Swan should go eat dinner and stretch.
I gave her the sliced and diced raccoon that she had practiced on. I was going to have to find her something else to chop as more practice, soon – something more difficult than even frozen flesh. Dad had always given me chunks of firewood. Maybe plastic, cardboard or a block of frozen ice would work, but things were about to start thawing. I could have her lift garbage into the dumpster for a few hours. That would build muscles and character, cleaning up the city for those who couldn’t or wouldn’t. But there would be time for those lessons after she slept off this one.
“Go inside and start a fire. Rest – you earned it. Have some dinner. I’ll be back in a couple of hours with a reading lesson.”
She ran to throw her arms around me in a full embrace, but I stopped her with my hammer extended.
“No,” I said, “Be more careful. Don’t touch things that are Infected, especially me.”
Her face fell for a moment, but then she gazed at me and smiled lop-sidedly. She stretched out one mitten and patted my elbow. I longed to pull her mittens from her fingers and breathe on them with Warmth enough to take away their Late Spring chill, with nothing in my mouth that could kill her. Instead, I nudged her with my gloved knuckles.
“Go on inside and get Warm,” I urged her away, “And don’t burn the Books.”
“Ok, Ophelia,” she shuffled her mismatched sneakers inside of our building, waving at me over her shoulder as she went, “I’ll see you later.”
I pushed the dummy off to the side of the alleyway. Probably nobody would bother it. It was made out of garbage that no body wanted in the first place. Plus, I threw a ragged biohazard sheet over it. It looked like lumpy, Infected trash – safest way to hide anything. Nobody wanted that.
I waited until I could see the dim lights in Swan’s window before I picked up my Complete Works of Kathryn James from the front stoop and set off for the Clinic. I had made two dummies for Jim, out of supplies that he borrowed without permission from his Clinic – twisted cardboard for arms and legs, inflated plastic gloves for heads – things that turned out to be almost as useful for Training gear as they were for kindling.
Jim was waiting for me in the flickering glow of the red exit sign above the Clinic, with a new blue and yellow wool cap rolled down over his ears. Its thick, lumpy, bunchy style matched the green, brown, pink and orange sweater that he was also wearing under his lab coat. The bright colors looked like the clothes that Mom used to make when she was learning how to knit. I wondered if maybe his Great Aunt, who had raised him in her Highrise, had made the new layers for him. He talked about her sometimes, how she took care of him and gave him everything that she had. I wondered how much more yarn she owned, how much other stuff she could buy, how much other stuff I could take if I robbed her. But I banished the thought; I liked Jim and he paid me for the Training and blood with reading lessons and hot coffee. I wouldn't rob his Great Aunt.
I heaved my Book at him and retrieved the Training dummies from behind the dumpster. Jim struggled and stumbled to catch the gigantic Book, but he didn’t let my precious tome touch the ground. His arms didn’t falter. He had been doing his prescribed exercises.
He read to me as I dragged the dummies into a realistic formation, one following the other towards him and the Clinic door. I inflated my lungs and used the air to fill the zombies’ pop-able heads. I leaned against a twisted cardboard shoulder to listen, clicking my tongue appreciatively. He taught me to snap rhythmically when I liked a Sonnet, but my gloves were still on.
I traded him my homework for a thermos full of coffee. My pencil marks read O-p-h-e-l-i-a in shaky handwriting. On
the Farm at home, I knew when something was mine; there was no need to make marks on it or waste my crayons to make a label. After learning most of the alphabet, I still couldn’t understand why my name wasn’t O-f-e-e-l-e-a. E’s were my favorite, curly and wiry like me. But there was something to be said for the variety of letters in my name as Jim spelled it, and he said that it was rooted in the pages. I liked the pages. And maybe my parents had liked the pages, too. Why hadn’t they taught me how to read? Why hadn't their sacrifice even kept me alive? Why had they left me to wander the earth, lonely and decrepit?
Jim folded my paper into his back pocket to correct later.
“Let’s see what you’ve practiced,” I nudged him towards the dummies.
He walked firmly towards the first with his reinforced crutch raised high. We had taped and re-taped some scalpel blades to the wide, armpit end, which he swung at the inflated latex heads. They popped with a bang as he confidently proceeded from one to the other. He was too slow and measured, but he remembered all of his technique.
“And if there were more of them?” I quizzed.
“I would keep my head about me and take the closest one first and smash all of the skulls afterwards.”
“And you would walk backwards while you were swinging. Where could you climb?”
“On the dumpster, for one.”
“You’d be stuck if there were too many zombies. If you couldn’t keep up with the hacking you could always head for the Clinic door or a fire escape. Don’t get trapped, and keep moving, looking behind you. How are your arms doing?”
Jim held a bicep up for me to see. When I was unimpressed he did a few pushups, a handstand against the brick wall and a pull-up on a fire escape.
I sat down on a box of cotton swabs and alcohol pads. I opened up the steaming thermos and sipped at it while Jim pushed the headless fakes back behind the dumpster. He leaned against the blunt end of his crutch, retrieving my letter from his pocket.
“Well” I asked, hopeful, “How is the Cure coming along?”
“Oh, about as well as your words,” he chided me, “half finished and barely viable.”
I rolled my eyes with great effort and moaned. Coffee gurgled from the bottom of my gullet. He laughed happily.
“At least I’m not as slow as you are,” I glowered from under my softly bristled hat, which I pulled farther over my eyes, “Any luck finding more Immune people, like me?”
He shook his head and concentrated on the notes he was making, “There may not be any others like you, Ophelia,” he patted my shoulder in consolation.
“Don't. Don't touch me. I can’t touch anybody. Not unless you find others like me. I shouldn't even be around you.”
“I’m sorry, Ophelia. If I hear anything, I will let you know,” he clicked his pen closed, not patting me anymore, putting the paper between us, “So, here I drew you a picture of a snowflake with the word for this month, April. And next month a raindrop for May. Keep working on the word for ‘stop,’ which you see on all of the red signs, and I want you to try and discover the word for ‘radio’ in the next few days. Look at windows and boxes. See if you can figure it out yourself.”
He handed my paper back to me so that I could use the reverse side. We didn’t waste what little paper we had. I dripped some blood into a vial for him, and less uncomfortably full, I bid him farewell.
“Until the morrow,” he blew a kiss in my direction, gazing out of his back-lit doorway, reaching for a clipboard full of papers.
“Good morning,” I whispered, yawning into my scarf.
Swan’s lights were out when I arrived home in the rising dawn. Juliet was curled around her empty water dish. I filled her bowl, scratched her lightly behind her ears, and checked her tether and the nails by the window for rough spots. Finding none, I crawled into my closet and cuddled my large, brown Book through the hours of long daylight until it was late enough to wake Swan for the night.
Knock, thud-thud-thud, knock.
“I hope there isn’t a zombie at my door,” Swan hollered through the locked wood, and then opened it, “Oh no,” she cast a hand across her mouth, “It is! It’s a zombie!”
I groaned. She jigged out the rhythm of our secret knock and, with a swing of one arm, she struck a match, lighting the Propane burner that stood on the floor between us. Though I noticed that the night was rather balmy, almost Warm. Moist and tepid. We hardly needed the extra heat of the burner or hot water.
“I’m so glad that Spring is coming round,” she cooed, handing me a mug.
We sipped on sweet berry and nettle tea and sharpened our flimsy yellow pencils against my blade. Pointy tools in hand, blankets on our laps, we practiced our new letters first on the floor – scrawling April and May in a corner not often used, next to the marks from when we had learned our names and the days of the week. The floorboards were the flattest, smoothest surface that we had. The paper we only used for final drafts.
Swan’s letters were thicker and straighter than my narrow, curly ones, but she broke the tip of her pencil repeatedly and could never sharpen it to a fine point. I told her that our assignment, before I could get us more paper and more new words to learn, was to find out how to spell “radio.” She looked up.
“Ophelia, where do you get the words that we learn?”
“Oh, just … a … source I know.”
“A source? Why won’t you tell me?”
“Because he’s none of your business, and I don’t want …”
“Ah ha! ‘He!’ I knew you had a secret man.” She threw one of her rag pillows at me.
“I do not have a secret man, and be quiet if you want to learn anymore new words.”
She sighed at my frown and copied “April” onto the floor for the thirty-seventh time. She always wrote her words inside of a shape that she outlined thickly on the floor in front of her, wasting precious pencil lead – this time it was a heart. “Sunday” had been a star, “Thursday” a rainbow. I practiced my spelling words in straight lines, alphabetical order when there was more than one.
I wasn’t going to take her to meet Jim. She couldn’t come with me to the Clinic every night. I couldn’t train and look out for two Humans at once, nor have her interrupting my Sonnets. I didn’t want her to feel badly that she didn’t have as many Warm clothes or as much food as Jim, nor for her to tell him where and how we lived. I wouldn’t watch them get married and move into a big apartment building with doors and no zombie experts around. Swan was too young and Jim wasn’t ready to protect her yet. They probably wouldn’t even like each other if they met. It would be dangerous and could easily lead to their deaths. I would keep them apart, but I would share the spelling lessons with her. Reading was as important as the Training.
“Get your best running shoes,” I told her, “It’s still early. We should go looking for ‘radio’ before all of the shops close and pull down the metal shutters.”
The sun was about to go down behind the tall, tired buildings that framed our neighborhood as we spilled outside. Our neighbors spoke to each other with Northern words that made no sense to me, but I thought that I could understand their tone. Yes, I got the cans of beans. Did you remember the Propane? Oh, I forgot. Better go now, before the stores close. Ok, save me some beans. Goodnight, Neighbor! Good evening, Friend. Have a good day? Shut the door before we all freeze in here! Such a blessing that not many of the creatures have defrosted yet.
Dusk was slow. Or maybe the moon was rising. I couldn’t tell over the rooftops, but I could see some of the Squatters that I had only known by voice. They had their hoods pulled down over their faces almost as far as we did.
“It’s still very light out,” I cautioned Swan.
She swung her poker around and around her head. She knocked it into a metal vent with a clang.
“Dark enough,” she said, flailing towards a dumpster. She scarred it lengthwise with the tip of her poker. Her iron screeched along the rusty steel. I grabbed the weapon away from her.
/> “Shhhh. Be quiet,” I gave it back with a stern look. She took it and fell in line with my shoulders, prancing to keep up.
“Let’s go West first, on the smaller streets, closer to the River” I instructed in hushed tones, “better than the bigger, busier streets.”
“Ok,” Swan golfed at a wadded up piece of cardboard with her poker, bashing the pavement with a loud bang.
I grabbed it from her and threw it on the ground with a growl, “Be quiet or stay home! You’re being dangerous.”
I heard the low scrape of her picking it up off of the pavement and then the quiet padding of her steps behind me. She would recover. I had gotten that lecture many times. A patrol, even just for words, was no time for playing.
I kept my pace brisk, glancing from side to side at every intersection. She fell behind me as we crept West around our neighborhood and into the Market District. Silence settled around us, crouched behind two barrels piled high with ash. Swan leaned and peered, squirming from side to side to see. Her eyes and ears eventually settled on what I was tracking.
There was an Electronics Store with radios and other electrical machines in the window. The cords snaked around each other and back to an outlet in the wall behind the display. Packages of batteries littered the staging area. Some of the little devices glowed, some of them blinked, and some of them moved from side to side, all of their gears fidgeting as much as Swan.
The shop attendant locked the front door around the customers who were already inside. He wasn’t going to let anybody else in before he closed for the night. We wouldn’t have long to wait before we could peek safely in the window with no one else around.
“Yes, yes! This is an Electronics Store. They definitely sell radios here! Let’s go find the word.”
Swan bounded towards the store, poker dangling jauntily from her hand. She turned around when she realized that I wasn’t following her, tilting her head. I waved her back to me and the shelter of the ash barrels. She looked around her to all sides. She was already in the middle of the street. She walked defiantly away to press her hands and nose against the store window.
