Carniepunk

by Rachel Caine

  “Like what? What is there? I’m six months from surgery. I’m in the middle of something here. I can’t just live this . . . this . . . half life.” I grab my breasts as a reminder.

  “Well.”

  “Well?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  And with those words I feel the hope slip away. One moment I’m a transitioning woman with a plan, the next I’m a thing, with hormone-enhanced breasts and a shriveled dick. I imagine what will come next: the horrible decision to hack it off like the rest of the unfortunates who can’t work out a deal with Dr. Bloom, dick in a jar of brine, my balls and groin cinched up with dental floss.

  Annick taps a pencil on the desk, her eyes narrowed in thought. “There may be something. We’ve heard word of an alternative to the surgery. A . . .” She pauses, searches the room for a word and then seeming to find it, her eyes snap back to mine. “Transformative agent.”

  “What does that even mean?”

  “We only know that it’s called Zed. We don’t know who’s supplying it or where it comes from. Just that it’s post-pharmaceutical, so there hasn’t been any testing done, obviously. No guarantees of efficacy. But there have been claims of transformations. Body changes. Miraculous to hear them tell . . .” Her voice trails away. “If you were to verify this for Dr. Bloom—and bring some back, of course—your entire care here would be gratis.”

  The words don’t register quite right.

  “Gratis,” I repeat.

  “It means free treatment, Mr. Reynolds.”

  Free treatment. Let’s bask in that for a moment. I’m not a lucky person. I never have been. Except surviving the zombies—that’s pretty lucky. Still, I think you’ll agree, that little trick was entirely offset by being born into the wrong body.

  I nod that I understand, lost in thought.

  It’s not the worst thing that could happen. In fact, it could be a godsend. Black-market meds for Dr. Bloom in exchange for the freedom I’ve always longed for—freedom from this torturous prison of a body . . . and these horrible, foreign genitals.

  The more I think about it, the more I feel like I’d be providing a service to the Sisters of Perpetual Disappointment. Bringing hormones to my people. Like Moses, only instead of slaves from Egypt, I’d deliver the transsexuals from crippling dick dependence. Obviously, there’d be no Red Sea parting—because, FYI, a monthly period cannot be re-created through surgery.

  I’m woken from my daydream by fingers drumming.

  Annick glares like I’ve just shit in her oatmeal. “Why are you still here?”

  —

  IF I’VE LEARNED anything from the zombie apocalypse, it’s that you take advantage of every spot of fortune that comes your way. Those moments are fleeting. Think you’re safe enough to relax? A zombie horde pops in for a surprise party—one in which you’re the cake. You’re well fed and your pantry’s stocked? Your place is targeted by scavengers and cleaned out. Sex-change financing in the bag?

  Shit. I don’t even want to think about how that could fuck up.

  I have to move quick. I have to be smart.

  Outside, I’m confronted not by the fruit vendor, who’s sadly packed up his stand and disappeared—“sadly” because I could really go for a mango now—but by an impromptu street carnival.

  It is the smell that hits me first.

  Already steamy in the afternoon heat, the air rumples with the all-too-common stench of rotten flesh.

  And then Gretta stumbles into me, clutching my shoulders like a railing and pressing the hard shell of her fake stomach against my back.

  “Jesus,” I mutter.

  She gropes and clings and struggles to remain upright. I finally have to twist on my heels and snatch both of her arms to balance her. When she’s settled and I’m sufficiently fondled, she looks over my shoulder, lets out a sharp whistle, and says, “Now, that’s a float.”

  And she’s right.

  An old El Camino fitted with a wooden stage cantilevered over the bed of the truck by a good six feet on either side creeps up the street. It’s flanked by several scantily clad women and men, both young and old, some horrendously sagging but all unapologetically gyrating, kick-stepping to big band music blaring from a pair of precariously duct-taped speakers on the roof of a trailing taxi. Atop the stage, in all its macabre glory, a family diorama is on proud display. Three corpses positioned in the roles of swing dancers, two males dressed in zoot suits and a female, hair in victory rolls and a retro dress tight enough to keep her withered flesh from falling apart.

  As is customary, the immediate family follows behind, puppeting the movement of their beloved dead, with rods fitted with slipknots strung around decaying wrists, necks, and precarious kneecaps.

  These are no ordinary dead. They are the blessed, the unrisen, the precious few who have died since the plague and were unmoved by reanimation.

  They are the new American iconography.

  I find the entire display almost tasteful. But I’ve attended some where the celebrants were clearly half-assing it. Shoddy costuming. Incongruent theming. Missing body parts. It’s enough to make me want to judge them openly, like when we used to have Olympics.

  This float earns at least an eight point three—points off for not working in a Mexican theme with the El Camino.

  But festive nonetheless.

  “Annick made me an offer,” I say. “I need to track down this drug. Zed.”

  Gretta nods. “This is a job for Neuter.”

  The name sends a shiver up my spine. Neuter is the epitome of a botched sex change, right down to the name. He represents the kind of failure that terrifies me. A place where we all might end up without the kind of prospects Annick has offered up. Plus he tries to make out with everyone, which is only okay if I’m really really stoned.

  “Seriously?” I ask.

  She nods.

  I groan, but I know it’s true. Neuter is also a gigantic drug addict. Nearly to the point of fetishism. He collects information on new drugs and where to get them like girls used to do with high heels. If he doesn’t know where to find Zed, no one will.

  “Fine,” I say. “Let’s go.”

  “After the parade, okay?” Gretta asks. She leans back on the stoop, rubs her belly, and bops her head along to the music.

  —

  EVENTUALLY I NOTICE that somewhere behind the music, and outside the possibility of speaker feedback, another sort of buzzing vibrates, familiar enough to have me collecting my things and searching the street for an escape route.

  Pat-pat-pat.

  Not close, but coming.

  The taxi stops first. Its driver, a curious youth with more ink than not and a bulbous head crammed into a wool cap, sticks his needle neck out the window, putting an ear to the wind. He twists off the tunes and the El Camino stops too. The parade goes still.

  Slap-slap-slap.

  The sound is like cards being shuffled through thumbs. Slap. Slap. Slap.

  I turn to Gretta; everything about her face is wide open: eyes, nostrils, mouth. That’s the look. Zombie radar.

  Alleys and streets begin to echo with their footfalls. There are no groans like the films have led us to believe. Zombies have no use for their vocal cords. The only thing their throats are good for is inhaling large quantities of flesh. Gulping back the wet stuff. They don’t even bother to chew. I came across one, once, lying on its side like an opium addict, an intestine dangling from its mouth. It slowly pushed the organ down its esophagus with a loose chop-stick. It watched me but wasn’t interested in anything fresher. They’re pretty calm once they are eating.

  But there’s always that smell. Acrid. Cloyingly sweet. A human innately knows the smell of their own kind’s rotting flesh. The first couple of times, it wrenches the bile out of your gut, but after a while you learn to use it as a tool.

  A warning.

  The approaching horde has either figured out how to hide their own putrification—unlikely—or they are an unusually fresh group
of undead. Whatever. They are clearly coming toward the impromptu carnivale like the once-happy family staging it rang a dinner bell.

  Gretta claws at my back. “Save yourself!” she cries dramatically, hand fluttering at her chest like an honest-to-God self-sacrificing southern belle. “I’ve already lived a life!”

  Normally, I’d be fine with that, but something’s wrong here. Something that stops me from climbing atop her like a drowning victim.

  In an alley across from where the El Camino idles, its desiccated passengers abandoned by the scattered revelers, shadows begin to stretch up the brick walls. I push us back into an alcove, Gretta’s fake pregnancy bump jutting into my suddenly aching back. I feel a thud and worry about whether the cat or whatever she’s smuggling in the shell under her dress is getting enough air.

  The first of the marauders appears. He’s small and angry, and what looks to be a port-wine stain blotches the area around his mouth. Something glints in his hand in the seconds before he bolts into the street. And then it’s slashing its way through what’s left of the crowd.

  A knife.

  Knives. His compatriots flood the street.

  There are too many of them to be zombies. There hasn’t been a decent horde in weeks; they just can’t assemble like they used to. These folks are different, and as they each appear from the alley, darting into the street to join the fray, it’s clear exactly how different. Besides being blind with fury and armed—zombies never carry weapons—each and every one of them is disfigured by a purpling splotch radiating from their lips. One of them, a craggy branch of a woman, staggers up and points a metal skewer at us. Her stain is as dark as plum and stretches across her cheeks like a black doctor’s mask. We make eye contact, and her eyes narrow.

  Alive . . . and crazy. Clearly.

  I hold up my hands instinctively, but she isn’t interested in us.

  “Bitch is trippin’, ” Gretta whispers.

  “For real.”

  The woman’s eyes roll back into her head as she catches the scent of what the group is really after, and her head lolls to the side, facing the family iconography. Two men have already heaved themselves atop the El Camino’s stage and are busy tearing at the corpses. An arm detaches and lands on the hot concrete, and I could swear I hear the damn thing sizzle before the woman dives atop it, grips it between her clawed hands like a hoagie, and begins to gnaw at the bone end, tugging at the dry flesh as a dog does with rawhide.

  Soon the street turns into a smorgasbord for the living carrion. Even the Sister of Perpetual Disappointment lying prone in the gutter isn’t immune to their savage foodfest. A pair of the grape-mouthed sickos tear at her clothing and dig into the weak flesh of her abdomen, using their spread fingers to wind up intestines like spaghetti caught in the spinning tines of a fork.

  A niggling stitch winds in my stomach as I try to hold back my disgust.

  They devour dead flesh like vultures but seem to be completely uninterested in the living. A reversal of what we’ve become so used to with the undead.

  Gretta, who can’t be bothered with discretion, retches behind me, bumping me forward onto the sidewalk in the process with that disgusting growth of hers.

  “Dammit, woman!” I shout.

  The movement catches the feeders’ attention, and before I can back away, one of the bigger freaks—a real pushy bastard—rushes past me, sending me spinning into a tumble across the concrete. I hear Gretta’s hoarse screams first, followed by the rapid clops of her gigantic platforms.

  The man is gaining ground on her and, like any good pseudo-acquaintance would, I reach for the gun in my purse, kick off my heels, and give motherfuckin’ chase. I’ve never shot a person, living or dead, that I recall—though things got pretty hairy in the thick of the apocalypse, so you never stuck around to see if your bullet found a soft home.

  That I’d be totally conscious of this, paired with the way my day was going, brings a tiny smile to my face.

  Gretta ducks into the gaping doorway of a ground-floor apartment decorated to look like the dash of a third-world cab. A rope of fuzzy puffs garlands the frame, and instead of a knocker, a brass Virgin Mary clings to the open door. The guy darts in behind her.

  I leap the three stairs and rush inside, but what I’m witness to isn’t altogether clear. The carrion eater has Gretta Graves on the floor, backed into a corner and screaming her head off. Her legs are spread and he’s chomping away, and at first I wonder if they’d like some privacy, and then I realize I hear the scraping of teeth against plastic.

  “What the fuck?” The words escape without any real control on my part.

  Grape Ape’s head pivots in my direction and that indigo tongue of his laps at bleeding black gums. Whatever he’s been eating is staining them from the inside out. His eyes are crazy, and I’m certain it’s drugs. I look past him to my friend’s torn dress. The man’s blood trickles from the fake navel of Gretta’s prosthetic gut. Beside the belly button a dark spot. The freak managed to puncture it, and the hole is just large enough for what’s inside to make itself known.

  “Oh, Jesus, Gretta,” I say.

  The freak’s head jerks back and it howls, lunging for the gray protuberance. Wiggling out of the hole is a tiny finger. Correction: a tiny dead finger.

  Gretta shrieks and bats at the junkie as I lurch forward, taking the gun by the barrel and driving the butt into the man’s skull hard enough to crack it open and taste the resulting ferrous spray. He collapses into a heap.

  I kneel beside Gretta, who is frantically coaxing the fingers back inside. “Hush, now,” she coos. “You’re safe in Mama’s belly.”

  I fall against the wall, panting. “You’re crazy, Gretta. You’re fucking crazy.”

  But all she can do is smile and stuff the hole with a red bandanna the apartment’s previous occupant had been using as an end-table cozy.

  —

  WE HIT THE Jimmy on the floor of Neuter’s apartment. Nothing says escapist drug use like sucking smoke off of a sizzling pie tin through fast-food straws. Squalor is the perfect design scheme, and Neuter has it down. I collapse into the only chair that’s not held together with electrical tape and plastic shopping bags and let the smoke soothe my edges.

  “What the hell is causing those people to eat the dead?” Gretta mumbles.

  “Here’s a better question,” I say. “What the hell are you doing toting around a zombie baby?”

  “Shh,” Gretta scolds. “You’re going to make her upset.”

  “Her? It’s those things out there you need to worry about . . . and me, when I leave your ass the next time it happens. And I expect it will unless—”

  “Lula,” Gretta cuts in. “Her name is Lula Belle Graves. And when I birth her, I’m gonna dress her in frills and teach her to spin. Spin so fast.”

  At some point, hard to say when, Gretta clearly lost what was left of her already paper-thin grasp on reality.

  “Sweet Jesus,” I sigh, and slump back against the wall, drained from the futility.

  But then Gretta reaches across the chasm back into sanity, grasping my hand as though to make a vow. “If we’re attacked again, I’ll run. I won’t leave you with a decision like that. To leave your bestest best friend of all time.”

  Her smile is genuine. Mine is, well, less so.

  “Sure.” I nod and then turn to our companion. “How are those cocktails comin’, Neuter? I’m gonna need something high-octane to make Gretta sound like she’s not going to kill us in our sleep.”

  “Pshaw.” Gretta shrugs off my volley with a jiggle of her head. “You are so funny, Jade!”

  Neuter leans over the pan, shaking his pimply face in judgment, and takes another hit. “There’s been more attacks than just that one. I heard about one a few days ago. A bunch of trust fund kids committed suicide up on Central Park West and they only found them because of these purple-faced crazies sniffing the place out and chomping away at them where they hung from the rafters. Crazy shit, right?”
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  “Jesus.”

  Gretta takes a break from cooing at her abomination to say, “Jade needs some Zed. Quantity. You know who’s holding?”

  Neuter smiles, thin lips scraping back over a grisly graveyard of teeth. “Yeah. When you need it?”

  “Yesterday,” I say, but Neuter is already drifting to sleep.

  “Gotta go see the Geek,” he mumbles.

  —

  “ZED AIN’T EASY, ladies,” Neuter says, stopping in the middle of the street. “It’s about as hard to get as a new pussy.”

  “Fucking hilarious.”

  “Didn’t mean that shit to be funny. Meant it to sound like you’re about to walk through hell to get the transformation you’re after. A whole bunch of hells. Starting with this one.”

  Neuter points down the way a bit. A few people line the shadowed side of the street, avoiding the heat and the black smoke billowing from the subway entrance. He whips the backpack off his shoulder and strides up to a vendor, a crooked little man cowering under a parasol, rubbing a pistol like a lover. Neuter digs out three oranges and drops them in a basket at the guy’s feet.

  “Rent,” Neuter says. “Need three kits to get us through to Coney.”

  Dark eyes narrowing to slits and brows curling up, thick as caterpillars, the vendor holsters his gun and reaches for the fruit, twisting each around, examining them. “This one got a bruise.”

  Neuter shrugs. “Don’t matter. They’re sweet, man. Sweet as fuck. But if you don’t want ’em, someone else will.”

  He hunches over as if to take the oranges back. The vendor, quick to change his tune, drops a hat over them and brushes the basket under his cart with the toe of his shoe. The man pulls out some bulky masks, hoses, and metal tanks from his cart and lines them up on the curb. “Three kits. You need tickets?”

  “Don’t try to pull that shit. The conductor don’t take no tickets.”

  The little man’s lip curls back from blackened nicotine-flecked teeth.

  “Let’s go,” Neuter says, still looking at him.