What should I have expected, though? What was the best I could have hoped for, really? One monster bringing to life a second, a third, a tenth monster?
In hindsight, the endeavor was doomed to fail from the beginning.
Still, if I can be honest with you, if we can speak honestly about this, if I can tell you exactly what I felt during that long stretch of time, what I felt every time a new one came to life, lifted itself to uncertain feet, stumbled back a few steps, then saw me and then lunged for me, only to realize it would get nothing more from me, and then ignored me and everything I said to it, looked past me as if I didn’t exist, as if I hadn’t just that moment brought it to life, and then stumbled off into the night in search of some living morsel, what I felt was this: envy.
Envy and desire.
Envy and desire and power.
But never satisfaction. I never felt satisfaction, not even the satisfaction of a job well done, which is such a small kind of satisfaction that it’s the kind of satisfaction that I get from submitting my salary sourcing reports on time.
But no matter. It’s no matter to me at all. It’s not a point I wish to belabor. I’m not the kind to dwell. I’m not the kind to say that things are unfair even when things are unfair. We are dealt our hand in this life, and we can only do with it what we can is more the kind of thing I’m known to say. We are given opportunities, and we have to know when these opportunities come around so we can take advantage of them is another.
And what I have now is an opportunity, what I have now is a chance. This is the thought on my mind, what’s going through my head as I look at Roger and then leave him, or what’s left of him. This is what’s in my head as I make my way back to my office, back to the twelfth floor. And because opportunity is fleeting, because chances like this don’t come around every day of your life, because when an opportunity such as this presents itself, you want to take advantage of it quickly, as quickly as possible, because of all of this, I take the elevator back to our offices, not the stairs.
It isn’t large-scale change I’m hoping to effect. It isn’t the grand course of human events that I want to influence, but just one person, just one woman, just the life of one woman. And as I wait outside our office, around the corner from our office, hidden by the potted ficus next to the elevators, it’s her I am thinking of, her and her alone.
I wait for what seems an inconceivably long time. I wait for what feels like hours. I wait and wait and wait, but still, I am focused. My mind is focused on this new decision I’ve made, this new direction my life will take.
And when he finally turns the corner, I smile. For the first time in a long, long time, I smile in the way that someone who knows what he’s doing smiles. I smile the way a man who knows what’s going to happen next, who knows what his place in this life is meant to be, smiles. In that way, I smile.
But then I see her walking next to Mark. I see Barbara walking there at his side, and that’s when things go dark.
Barbara likes birds.
She watches them. She’s a bird-watcher. She attends bird-watching events. She’s rather devoted to them. She donates money and time to the Audubon Society. For a while, before Mark made her give them up, she owned parakeets, four or five of them. At one point, they had babies.
Once she told me she wanted to change her name to Bird, change her name to Barbara Bird. She told me that and then she laughed and then she blushed and then she said, “It’s dumb, it’s stupid. It’s a stupid name,” and I told her, “No, it sounds nice,” and she said, “Mark says it’s dumb.” She said, “He’s probably right.”
I’m not fond of birds, personally. For what it’s worth, they’re not fond of me, either. Most animals aren’t, but birds are at times aggressive in their dislike.
They have dead eyes, is the thing that bothers me most about birds. They have dead eyes and they seem to me lifelike but lifeless, or maybe it’s the other way around, or maybe it’s nothing like that at all.
But still, her attraction to them gave me some amount of hope. Not a large amount of hope. Nothing has given me anything more than the smallest amount of hope. But still. The birds and their dead eyes: Are they so different from me?
Dead-eyed me.
Lifelike yet lifeless me.
I can tell you now, though, I can tell you now with confidence, with utmost confidence: It is not a hope worth hoping.
The thing is: Barbara likes birds, maybe she even loves birds, maybe she even likes me. But she cannot love me. She simply cannot.
I know this now. I can accept this now. This is a basic fact of life that I can now accept.
You could argue that her being twenty or thirty heartbeats away from death, you might argue that the broken form of her laid out awkwardly across my desk, you might argue that the misshapen state of her really leaves me little to no choice in the matter.
But that’s not entirely true. It’s not entirely true that I have no choice in this. It’s not entirely true that there are no options left on the table for me.
There are steps, there are a number of steps I could take. At least let’s recognize this: It’s my choice not to take these steps.
Her husband is nowhere to be found. I can’t see him, in any case, glancing briefly around my space, or in any of the cubicles near mine. Granted, there is a lot to see. Granted, there are a lot of bodies to see, and it’s possible he’s one of them. It’s possible he’s one of the many, covered, perhaps, by one of the others.
I am, admittedly, fuzzy on the details. Let’s just say that my command of the details is not very commanding.
How about, let’s say, of the details, what I know is this: Things did not go according to plan.
Or let’s say that things did not go according to my plan.
Not that my plan was an especially good plan, not that my plan didn’t have its own inherent flaws. Not that I don’t know that my plan to help Barbara make sounder decisions in her life by taking care of Mark, by which I mean killing Mark, wasn’t necessarily the best-laid plan.
But still, it was a plan. Still, it was a simple plan. It was a simple plan that did not, I know for a fact, include the slaughter of my office mates, least of all the slaughter of Barbara, who is even now making a soft gurgling sound as she’s lying there across my desk.
The point I’m trying to make being: The zombie has plans of his own.
By which I mean: Some of the bodies are beginning to stir now.
What truly surprises me, though, what comes to me as completely unexpected is this moment right now, this very moment, this moment of wakefulness, of cognition.
I saw Barbara and things went dark, and things could have remained that way, could have been kept dark for an eternity, and what would I have known about any of it, what would I have been able to control of any of it? Yet here I am, things decidedly not dark, and I am not sure what to make of it, to make of any of it.
By which I mean: Is this a gesture of cruelty or generosity?
Is this the zombie laughing at me, laughing at my weak attempts to effect some change in me, in her, in the world? Or is this the zombie saying, “Here you go, one last look, one last look at least, a moment, at least, a reward for your efforts, doomed though we all knew them to be”?
Frankly, though, I don’t care.
There is shuffling now going on behind me. There are groans, and there are things—picture frames, computers, file cabinets—crashing to the floor.
I don’t care. I take my one last look.
As to the circumstances surrounding my arrival, I have no memory of this moment. I have no memory of who I was before, or what I was before. It’s a blank. It’s a pleasant and unassuming blank.
There was the one time. There was that one time with the memories, a slew of them. Relentless memories, a series of them, flashing through my h
ead for fifteen, twenty, thirty minutes, one right after the other, nonstop, these memories, in no particular order, of no special significance, but personal, deeply personal, brief sensations, images, smells, sounds, forced out of hiding, maybe, by that darker part of me, forced out into the open to be devoured or simply to dissipate, those last remaining pieces of the me that was me before. A park bench, the quality of light in a dormitory cafeteria, the smell of lavender, the smell of cooking oil cooked too hot, a swimming pool, a bloodied knee, soft, soft lips, a blue couch, a dark room, a bright blue sky, a man’s voice saying “Sometimes I just don’t know about you, son,” a flat tire, a long, hot stretch of road, mist rising off a small pond, a kite shaped like a swan overhead, the first cool day in October, on and on, these memories rose up from within me, traveled through me and then out. I staggered under the rush of them, and then they were gone, so quickly gone, I stumbled, grabbed for a chair, sat down hard on the floor, and that was it. I remember them still, but I remember them now as things I have seen in a movie or on the television, as disconnected sensations that don’t touch me at all.
So let’s not demean ourselves with talk of who I was and if this person still lives inside me. If my eyes are this person’s eyes and if in them you can see remnants of who this person once was.
Let’s not resort to this kind of nostalgic preening.
Let’s not reduce my story to that kind of tragedy.
Instead, let’s remark on how unsurprising this outcome really is, and then let’s move on, inexorably, deliberately on.
To pick up where we left off: Her body bent awkwardly over the desk, the soft gurgle escaping her lips.
I want to tell her, It wasn’t supposed to happen like this, you know.
I want to take her head in my lap. I want to smell her hair, smell her wrists. I want to kiss her neck.
I want to say to her soft, lovely things, whisper unyielding truths in her ear. I want to run my finger along the length of her nose, from the bridge to the tip, and then over and onto her lips.
I want to feel the warmth of her as her living body warms my thighs and my feet and the lower part of my stomach, makes my skin, which is cold and rubbery to touch, feel pliant and lifelike again.
These are the things that I want. These are the things I have wanted for some very long time now. I imagine that these are the things I have wanted since even before I became the kind of thing that could not have them.
But the zombie in me wants something else. The zombie in me wants to eat. The zombie wants to eat and he wants his horde, and as much as I try to deny it, there is no zombie in me, there is only me, and all of me is zombie.
Life on Capra II
Just as we bag that piece of shit swamp monster, the robots attack. Ricky goes down immediately, and that’s a fucking shame because he was a good guy, and also he owes me—owed me—a pack of cigarettes and had promised to introduce me to the tomato who runs the commissary, a pretty little thing named Becky who he’d known back when he was in grade school. That lady has a fine ass and has expended more T&E avoiding me than I’ve spent trying to get her attention, and Ricky was my last chance, and maybe it’s cold of me, but as I watch him fall face-first in the swamp muck, my first thought is how all those plans have just gone straight to hell.
Fucking robots, being my second thought.
I think about hoisting him up out of the muck and throwing him over my shoulder and hoofing him back to the convoy, if only to have some good story to tell Becky once we get back to the barracks, maybe make like he wasn’t killed with the first shot, that he was barely breathing but that I wouldn’t leave my good friend Ricky behind, and that he expended his last breath to tell me to keep going, to never give up, that I would someday find true love in the sympathetic heart of a beautiful woman. But then I figure I don’t actually have to go through all the trouble of carrying Ricky’s deadweight body to be able to tell that same story, so I leave him where he is and start beating a hasty retreat.
That’s one of the first lessons any new cadet learns here on Capra II: Simplify your life.
Twenty minutes later and five cadets lighter, we finally make it back to the convoy. Turns out we weren’t the only battalion to be ambushed by the sonsabitches, and, unlikely as it seems, the piece of shit swamp monsters and the fucking robots made some sort of concerted play on us.
Five minutes later we’re in the air on our way back to the barracks.
I look out the window down at the wreckage. Someone set fire to the swamp muck. I squint, wondering for a minute or two if I can see Ricky, but mostly all I can see are glints of light reflecting off the robot body parts and the last few of the swamp monsters writhing in flames. Then I put my head back and close my eyes and try to catch a little sleep.
When the New Worlds Confederation started casting about for a planet to house the excess settlers, those who didn’t exactly fit the profile of the young, able-bodied, handsome folk who settled Capra I, they took their money, shipped them off, deposited them on this piece of rock, and then forgot about them, that is, until the tithing stopped, which is why we’re here.
It’s a strange planet, Capra II. Or, hell, maybe it’s not even a planet, just some rock floating through space the New Worlds Confederation decided to terraform. You can’t tell these days, and, sure, maybe there was a briefing about it all when we shipped out, but I’ll say right now, I’m not one for holding on to the finer details of an assignment. Either way, it’s a strange fucking place. For one, the colors seem off. I can’t explain how they seem off, only that when I’m looking around, the whole world looks like it’s covered in some kind of filter, or like I’m wearing a yellow-tinted visor, even when I’m not. Blues look green. Reds look orange. Everything is covered in a haze. Something about the atmosphere makes us light-headed, too, and suppresses the smell of things, which, when you’re living in a barracks with a hundred other grunts, isn’t the worst thing you could ask for.
Still. It’s a bit off-putting.
What worries me most is the emptiness of this place. Most of what we’ve got are those wild and unending swamplands, and whatever asshole decided to terraform a planet of swamps deserves a swift kick in the balls if you ask me. Practically uninhabitable, and even if you could devise some kind of structure that would survive the swamp muck, which seems to eat anything inorganic, one that could keep out the bugs and swamp rats and not allow the poisonous swamp gas to seep into your bedroom and kill you while you slept, you’d still have to contend with those piece of shit swamp monsters. You get pockets here and there, dry lands just above sea level that could pass for livable, and you’ll see structures and the signs of society—a glass-cased infirmary, a one-room schoolhouse, carbide huts that make you wonder why the hell you’d take a material as formidable as carbide and build out of it a hut like you’re part of some ancient civilization—and maybe if you squint and put your imagination to the test, you can picture how a life of sorts might’ve been obtained here, but the people are gone, and no one knows for sure why, though my money’s on the swamp monsters or the robots having some hand in all of that. And whatever the case, it’s a goddamn ghost planet out here, and to me it seems like we’re just biding our time, giving whatever evil thing resides here a chance to size us up, find out that weakest part of us, and then do to us what was done to the colonists who first gave it a go here.
We are hunting swamp monsters, and part of me wants to say that we have done this before, wants to say we are in the swamps hunting swamp monsters again, but that can’t be right, and so I shake the feeling off and do my best to keep myself steady, alert.
Ricky’s on my right flank and, to release the tension building in the back of my neck and to give us something to do while we truck through this hellhole, I’m about to ask him about Becky, ask him about what she was like when they were in grade school together. He’s made noise about how he can i
ntroduce me, make me seem like a decent enough sort of guy, that he and she go way back, and I want to know if he’s bullshitting me or if he’s serious. But then one of the swamp bastards rears up between the two of us, and it’s a monster, all right, which I know. I know these things are real monsters, that what we’re playing at here is no joke, but the sight of them, no matter how many surveillance videos I’ve watched, no matter how many pictures I’ve seen, no matter how many good men we’ve lost to these bastards, the sight of them does not fail to surprise me.
For one thing, they’re of the swamp more than they are from the swamp. It’s as if the swamp rises up, ten, fifteen feet up in the air, takes on a face with eyes and a mouth hole and swampy teeth of a sort, forms arms and clawed hands, a torso but no real legs, no legs to speak of, just a hovering jet of swamp muck that pushes these monsters up against gravity, against physics, against God. They make for a sick and unsettling sight, and this one’s looking right down on me, and I’ve got a good shot, an opportunity to take this fucker out, but for some goddamn reason I’m holding the wrong gun. I’ve got a sniper rifle in my hands, and I feel like I’m in some kind of anxiety dream, where I come to school having forgotten a major test I have to take, or my clothes, because what the fuck is a sniper rifle going to do to this thing made of swamp shit and twigs?
Miniature Wife : And Other Stories (9781101602041) Page 12
