After the Apocalypse

by Maureen F. Mchugh

  After the Apocalypse

  Maureen F. Mchugh

  Publishers Weekly Top 10 Best of the Year

  In her new collection, Story Prize finalist Maureen F. McHugh delves into the dark heart of contemporary life and life five minutes from now and how easy it is to mix up one with the other. Her stories are post-bird flu, in the middle of medical trials, wondering if our computers are smarter than us, wondering when our jobs are going to be outsourced overseas, wondering if we are who we say we are, and not sure what we’d do to survive the coming zombie plague.

  Praise for Maureen F. McHugh:

  “Gorgeously crafted stories.”

  —Nancy Pearl, NPR

  “Hauntingly beautiful.”

  —Booklist

  “Unpredictable and poetic work.”

  —The Plain Dealer

  Maureen F. McHugh

  AFTER THE APOCALYPSE

  Stories

  THE NATURALIST

  Cahill lived in the Flats with about twenty other guys in a place that used to be an Irish bar called Fado. At the back of the bar was the Cuyahoga River, good for protection since zombies didn’t cross the river. They didn’t crumble into dust, they were just stupid as bricks, and they never built a boat or a bridge or built anything. Zombies were the ultimate trash. Worse than the guys who cooked meth in trailers. Worse than the fat women on WIC. Zombies were just useless dumbfucks.

  “They’re too dumb to find enough food to keep a stray cat going,” Duck said.

  Cahill was talking to a guy called Duck. Well, really, Duck was talking and Cahill was mostly listening. Duck had been speculating on the biology of zombies. He thought that the whole zombie thing was a virus, like Mad Cow Disease. A lot of the guys thought that. A lot of them mentioned that movie 28 Days Later, where everybody but a few people had been driven crazy by a virus.

  “But they gotta find something,” Duck said. Duck had a prison tattoo of a mallard on his arm. Cahill wouldn’t have known it was a mallard if Duck hadn’t told him. He could just about tell it was a bird. Duck was over six feet tall, and Cahill would have hated to have been the guy who gave Duck such a shitty tattoo, ’cause Duck probably beat him senseless when he finally got a look at the thing. “Maybe,” Duck mused, “maybe they’re solar powered. And eating us is just a bonus.”

  “I think they go dormant when they don’t smell us around,” Cahill said.

  Cahill didn’t really like talking to Duck, but Duck often found Cahill and started talking to him. Cahill didn’t know why. Most of the guys gave Duck a wide berth. Cahill figured it was probably easier to just talk to Duck when Duck wanted to talk.

  Almost all of the guys at Fado were white. There was a Filipino guy, but he pretty much counted as white. As far as Cahill could tell there were two kinds of black guys, regular black guys and Nation of Islam. The Nation of Islam had gotten organized and turned a place across the street—a club called Heaven—into their headquarters. Most of the regular black guys lived below Heaven and in the building next door.

  This whole area of the Flats had been bars and restaurants and clubs. Now it was a kind of compound with a wall of rubbish and dead cars forming a perimeter. Duck said that during the winter they had regular patrols organized by Whittaker and the Nation. Cold as shit standing behind a junked car on its side, watching for zombies. But they had killed off most of the zombies in this area, and now they didn’t bother keeping watch. Occasionally a zombie wandered across the bridge and they had to take care of it, but in the time Cahill had been in Cleveland, he had seen exactly four zombies. One had been a woman.

  Life in the zombie preserve really wasn’t as bad as Cahill had expected. He’d been dumped off the bus and then spent a day skulking around expecting zombies to come boiling out of the floor like rats and eat him alive. He’d heard that the life expectancy of a guy in a preserve was something like two and a half days. But he’d only been here about a day and a half when he found a cache of liquor in the trunk of a car, and then some guys scavenging. He’d shown them where the liquor was, and they’d taken him back to the Flats.

  Whittaker was a white guy who was sort of in charge. He’d made a big speech about how they were all more free here in the preserve than they’d ever been in a society that had no place for them, about how there used to be spaces for men with big appetites like the Wild West and Alaska—and how that was all gone now, but they were making a great space for themselves here in Cleveland, where they could live true to their own nature.

  Cahill didn’t think it was so great, and glancing around he was pretty sure that he wasn’t the only one who wouldn’t chuck the whole thing for a chance to sit and watch the Sox on TV. Bullshitting was what the Whittakers of the world did. It was part of running other people’s lives. Cahill had dragged in a futon and made himself a little room. It had no windows and only one way in, which was good in case of attack. But he found most of the time he couldn’t sleep there. A lot of times he slept outside on a picnic table someone had dragged out into the middle of the street.

  What he really missed was carpet. He wanted to take a shower and then walk on carpet in a bedroom and get dressed in clean clothes.

  A guy named Riley walked over to Cahill and Duck and said, “Hey, Cahill. Whittaker wants you to go scavenge.”

  Cahill hated to scavenge. It was nerve-wracking. It wasn’t hard; there was a surprising amount left in the city, even after the groceries had been looted. He shrugged and thought about it and decided it was better not to say no to Whittaker. And it gave him an excuse to stop talking to Duck about zombies. He followed Riley and left Duck sitting looking at the water, enjoying the May sun.

  “I think it’s a government thing,” Riley said. Riley was black but just regular black, not Nation of Islam. “I think it’s a mutation of the AIDS virus.”

  Jesus Christ. “Yeah,” Cahill said, hoping Riley would drop it.

  “You know the whole AIDS thing was from the CIA, don’t you? It was supposed to wipe out black people,” Riley said.

  “Then how come fags got it first?” Cahill asked.

  He thought that might piss Riley off, but Riley seemed pleased to be able to explain how gay guys were the perfect way to introduce the disease because nobody cared fuckall what happened to them. But that really, fags getting it was an accident, because it was supposed to wipe out all the black people in Africa, and then the whites could just move into a whole new continent. Some queer stewardess got it in Africa and then brought it back here. It would kill white people, but it killed black people faster. And now if you were rich they could cure you, or at least give you drugs for your whole life so you wouldn’t get sick and die, which was the same thing, but they were still letting black people and Africans die.

  Cahill tuned Riley out. They collected two other guys. Riley was in charge. Cahill didn’t know the names of the two other guys—a scrawny, white-trash, looking guy and a light-skinned black guy.

  Riley quit talking once they had crossed the bridge and were in Cleveland.

  On the blind, windowless side of a warehouse the wall had been painted white, and in huge letters it said:

  Hell from beneath is moved for thee to meet thee at thy coming.

  Isaiah (ch. XIV, v. 9)

  This same quote was painted at the gate where the bus had dumped Cahill off.

  There were crows gathering at Euclid, and, Riley guessed, maybe around East Ninth, so they headed north toward the lake. Zombies stank, and the crows tended to hang around them. Behind them the burned ruins of the Renaissance Hotel were still black and wet from the rain a couple of days ago.

  When they saw the zombie, there were no crows, but that may have been because there was only one. Crows often meant a n
umber of zombies. She fixed on them, turning her face toward them despite the blank whiteness of her eyes. She was black and her hair had once been in cornrows, though now half of it was loose and tangled. They all stopped and stood stock still. No one knew how zombies ‘saw’ people. Maybe infrared, like pit vipers. Maybe smell. Cahill could not tell from this far if she was sniffing. Or listening. Or maybe even tasting the air. Taste was one of the most primitive senses. Primitive as smell. Smelling with the tongue.

  She went from standing there to loping toward them. That was one of the things about zombies. They didn’t lean. They didn’t anticipate. One minute they were standing there, the next minute they were running toward you. They didn’t lead with their eyes or their chins. They were never surprised. They just were. As inexorable as rain. She didn’t look as she ran, even though she was running through debris and rubble, placing her feet and sometimes barely leaping.

  “Fuck,” someone said.

  “Pipes! Who’s got pipes!” Riley shouted.

  They all had pipes, and they all got them ready. Cahill wished he had a gun, but Whittaker confiscated guns. Hell, he wished he had an MK19, a grenade launcher. And a Humvee and some support, maybe with mortars, while he was at it.

  Then she was on them, and they were all swinging like mad, because if she got her teeth into any of them, it was all over for that guy. The best thing to do was to keep up a goddamn flurry of swinging pipes so she couldn’t get to anyone. Cahill hit other pipe, mostly, the impact clanging through his wrist bones, but sometimes when he hit the zombie he felt the melon thunk. She made no noise. No moaning, no hissing, no movie zombie noises, but even as they crushed her head and knocked her down (her eye socket gone soft and one eye a loose silken white sack) she kept moving and reaching. She didn’t try to grab the pipes, she just reached for them until they had pounded her into broken bits.

  She stank like old meat.

  No blood. Which was strangely creepy. Cahill knew from experience that people had a lot more blood in them than you ever would have thought based on TV shows. Blood and blood and more blood. But this zombie didn’t seem to have any blood.

  Finally Riley yelled, “Get back, get back!” and they all stepped back.

  All the bones in her arms and legs were broken, and her head was smashed to nothing. It was hard to tell she had ever looked like a person. The torso hitched its hips, raising its belly, trying to inchworm toward them, its broken limbs moving and shuddering like a seizure.

  Riley shook his head and then said to them. “Anybody got any marks? Everybody strip.”

  Everybody stood there for a moment, ignoring him, watching the thing on the broken sidewalk.

  Riley snarled, “I said strip, motherfuckers. Or nobody goes back to the compound.”

  “Fuck,” one of the guys said, but they all did and, balls shriveled in the spring cold, paired off and checked each other for marks. When they each announced the other was clear, they all put their clothes back on and piled rubble on top of the twitching thing until they’d made a mound, while Riley kept an eye out for any others.

  After that, everyone was pretty tense. They broke into an apartment complex above a storefront. The storefront had been looted and the windows looked empty as the socket of a pulled tooth, but the door to the apartments above was still locked, which meant that they might find stuff untouched. Cahill wondered: if zombies did go dormant without food, what if someone had gotten bit and gone back to this place, to their apartment? Could they be waiting for someone to enter the dark foyer, for the warmth and smell and the low steady big drum beat of the human heart to bring them back?

  They went up the dark stairwell and busted open the door of the first apartment. It smelled closed, cold and dank. The furniture looked like it had been furnished from the curb, but it had a huge honking television. Which said everything about the guy who had lived here.

  They ignored the TV. What they were looking for was canned goods. Chef Boy-ar-dee. Cans of beef stew. Beer. They all headed for the kitchen, and guys started flipping open cabinets.

  Then, like a dumbshit, Cahill opened the refrigerator door. Even as he did it, he thought, “Dumbass.”

  The refrigerator had been full of food and then had sat, sealed and without power, while that food all rotted into a seething, shit-stinking mess. The smell was like a bomb. The inside was greenish black.

  “Fuck!” someone said, and then they all got out of the kitchen. Cahill opened a window and stepped out onto the fire escape. It was closest, and everyone else was headed out into the living room where someone would probably take a swing at him for being an asshole. The fire escape was in an alley and he figured that he could probably get to the street and meet them in front, although he wasn’t exactly sure how fire escapes worked.

  Instead he froze. Below him, in the alley, there was one of those big dumpsters, painted green. The top was off the dumpster and inside it, curled up, was a zombie. Because it was curled up, he couldn’t tell much about it—whether it was male or female, black or white. It looked small, and it was wearing a striped shirt.

  The weird thing was that the entire inside of the dumpster had been covered in aluminum foil. There wasn’t any sun yet in the alley but the dumpster was still a dull and crinkly mirror. As best he could tell, every bit was covered.

  What the fuck was that about?

  He waited for the zombie to sense him and raise its sightless face, but it didn’t move. It was in one corner, like a gerbil or something in an aquarium. And all that freaking tinfoil. Had it gone into apartments and searched for aluminum foil? What for? To trap sunlight? Maybe Duck was right, they were solar powered. Or maybe it just liked shiny stuff.

  The window had been hard to open, and it had been loud. He could still smell the reek of the kitchen. The sound and the stink should have alerted the zombie.

  Maybe it was dead. Whatever that meant to a zombie.

  He heard a distant whump. And then a couple more, with a dull rumble of explosion. It sounded like an air strike. The zombie stirred a little, not even raising its head. More like an animal disturbed in its sleep.

  The hair was standing up on the back of Cahill’s neck. From the zombie or the air strike, he couldn’t tell. He didn’t hear helicopters. He didn’t hear anything. He stamped on the metal fire escape. It rang dully. The zombie didn’t move.

  He went back inside, through the kitchen and the now-empty apartment, down the dark stairwell. The other guys were standing around in the street, talking about the sounds they’d heard. Cahill didn’t say anything, didn’t say they were probably Hellfire missiles although they sure as hell sounded like them, and he didn’t say there was a zombie in the alley. Nobody said anything to him about opening the refrigerator, which was fine by him.

  Riley ordered them to head back to see what was up in the Flats.

  While they were walking, the skinny little guy said, “Maybe one of those big cranes fell. You know, those big fuckers by the lake that they use for ore ships and shit.”

  Nobody answered.

  “It could happen,” the little guy insisted.

  “Shut up,” Riley said.

  Cahill glanced behind them, unable to keep from checking his back. He’d been watching since they started moving, but the little zombie didn’t seem to have woken up and followed them.

  When they got to Public Square they could see the smoke rising, black and ugly, from the Flats.

  “Fuck,” Cahill said.

  “What is that?” Riley said.

  “Is that the camp?”

  “Fuck is right.”

  “One of the buildings is on fire?”

  Cahill wished they would shut the fuck up because he was listening for helicopters.

  They headed for Main Avenue. By the time they got to West Tenth, there was a lot more smoke, and they could see some of it was rising from what used to be Shooters. They had to pick their way across debris. Fado and Heaven were gutted, the buildings blown out. Maybe someone wa
s still alive. There were bodies. Cahill could see one in what looked like Whittaker’s usual uniform of orange football jersey and black athletic shorts. Most of the head was missing.

  “What the fuck?” Riley said.

  “Air strike,” Cahill said.

  “Fuck that,” Riley said. “Why would anyone do that?”

  Because we weren’t dying, Cahill thought. We weren’t supposed to figure out how to stay alive. We certainly weren’t supposed to establish some sort of base. Hell, the rats might get out of the cage.

  The little guy who thought it might have been a crane walked up behind Riley and swung his pipe into the back of Riley’s head. Riley staggered and the little guy swung again, and Riley’s skull cracked audibly. They little guy hit a third time as Riley went down.

  The little guy was breathing heavy. “Fucking bastard,” he said, holding the pipe, glaring at them. “Whittaker’s bitch.”

  Cahill glanced at the fourth guy with them. He looked as surprised as Cahill.

  “You got a problem with this?” the little guy said.

  Cahill wondered if the little guy had gotten scratched by the first zombie and they had missed it. Or if he was just bugfuck. Didn’t matter. Cahill took a careful step back, holding his own pipe. And then another. The little guy didn’t try to stop him.

  He thought about waiting for a moment to see what the fourth guy would do. Two people would probably have a better chance than one. Someone to watch while the other slept. But the fourth guy was staring at the little guy and at Riley, who was laid out on the road, and he didn’t seem to be able to wrap his head around the idea that their base was destroyed and Riley was dead.

  Too stupid to live, and probably a liability. Cahill decided he was better off alone. Besides, Cahill had never really liked other people much anyway.

  He found an expensive loft with a big white leather couch and a kitchen full of granite and stainless steel and a bed the size of a football field, and he stayed there for a couple of days, eating pouches of tuna he found next door, but it was too big and in a couple of days, the liquor cabinet was empty. By that time he had developed a deep and abiding hatred for the couple who had lived here. He had found pictures of them. A dark haired forty-ish guy with a kayak and a shit-eating grin. He had owned some kind of construction business. She was a toothy blonde with a big forehead who he mentally fucked every night in the big bed. It only made him crazy horny for actual sex.