Dying to Live

by Kim Paffenroth

  * * * * *

  Jack didn't like the knife-throwing. "Hey! You may not have killed it, and now you're down to one knife!"

  "All I need is one," the kid hissed, turning toward the dummy in the back.

  "Yeah," Tanya said, continuing her story of the zombie intruder in the theater, "Popcorn whacked it with a broom, but the broom handle broke without bashing its head in."

  Popcorn leaped on the dummy at the back of the stage, planting his feet where its hips would be; he grabbed it by the neck and plunged the knife into its eye. As the dummy fell to one side, he jumped off, turned to the left side of the stage, and crouched.

  "So he took the broom handle—it was all pointy where it had broken off—and shoved it in its eye. Before he dumped the body, he lowered down a string and pulled the top of the dumpster open, so they couldn't do that again."

  "Smart kid."

  If Tanya had made knocking the dummies' heads in look like a scene from a Chuck Norris movie, then Popcorn definitely made it look more like the Matrix. With a shriek, he ran at the back wall of the stage, took two steps up it, then launched himself at the dummy on the left side of the stage. He stabbed the knife into the side of its head and knocked it over, then kept stabbing it when it was on the ground.

  He got up and faced Jack. Popcorn ran right at him, then at the last moment, he threw his feet forward and slid past Jack, like a runner in baseball. Before Jack could turn around, Popcorn had leapt onto Jack's back, where he was pounding both sides of his head, one with the pommel of the knife, the other with his empty left fist.

  "Okay! Okay!" Jack conceded defeat, and the kid jumped off him. Popcorn left the stage and walked out of the auditorium. "Okay, Jonah, you're next," Jack said.

  I really didn't want to do this. I had no training. All I had done for the last few weeks was hit, shoot, or stab dead people in the head, with no grace or accuracy. Many of them hadn't even gone down permanently dead, but had just kind of flopped around, twitching, and I was lucky to have gotten away from them. My survival in spite of my ineptitude was as sure a proof of God looking out for me as Popcorn's little plastic magnifying glass and soda cups catching rain water. Oddly, as I walked up to the stage, I realized I had never looked at my situation that way until now, though I also realized how little it would save me from embarrassment in front of all these people.

  * * * * *

  I was in the middle of the stage. "Okay, Jonah," Jack said, "we'll make it easy for you. Give him a bat."

  The kid tossed me an aluminum bat. It felt good in my hands, and it was kind of the ideal weapon for whacking dummies in the head.

  "Jack," I said, "I don't know about this. Maybe I should just sit this out."

  He laughed at me. It was mostly good-natured, I knew at this point, but there still might have been just a little more posturing. From some time in middle school, you learned that guys couldn't completely get past that. "Come on, Jonah, anybody should be able to kill four zombies with a bat, especially when three of them don't even move. Ready?"

  "Ready," I said, with no conviction.

  "Begin!"

  I had seen from the first two combatants that Tanya's was the only logical sequence: take out the one in the back, the one on the left, then Jack, and finally the one on the right. I turned toward the back, took two steps as I raised the bat, then swung it horizontally and took the dummy's head off. I turned to the left, took three steps, and brought the bat down on the other dummy's head. It was all perfunctory and graceless, but at least I hadn't slipped and fallen, or anything else embarrassing.

  I turned to face Jack. "I still don't know about this," I said.

  "You're halfway there, just finish it."

  I closed the distance with him and brought the bat down. Again acting a little more dexterous than a zombie, Jack raised his arms to defend himself from the blow and grabbed the bat with his left hand. This is what I was afraid would happen, and it was starting to annoy me.

  I wrestled with him for the bat, then jerked it out of his grip, throwing him off balance. Then I shoved the end of the bat into his face. I think it stunned him more than anything, and he took a step back.

  Holding the bat with my left had, I reached across with my right to grab his wrist, so he couldn't block or grab. I jerked him forward again to put him off balance, as I raised the bat and brought it down on his right shoulder blade. It was a savage blow, but it only made me want to hit him more, so I gave it to him on top of the helmet next. I was raising the bat for a third time when he yelled, "Okay, enough there, killer! This dummy's down, go get the other."

  I let go of him and walked to the last dummy. I brought the bat down on its head.

  Jack walked up to me, his helmet off, and put his hand on the bat. "Easy, easy there," he said soothingly.

  "I don't… I never trained… it's just embarrassing. I can do it for real, but not like this."

  Jack laughed a little, rubbing his shoulder. "That's kind of the problem; you do it a little too real."

  "I'm sorry," I said. "I didn't mean to."

  "It's okay, really. I should've known, wandering around out there alone, you wouldn't be ready to fight just for practice."

  Tanya had walked up to us. "Guys, not in front of the kids," she whispered. "Make it look good."

  Jack knew what she meant and said in a louder voice, "Great job, really got me there." He slapped me on the back and looked out at the audience.

  I realized then some of the difficulties of joining this new community. Like Popcorn, I'd picked up killing on my own, but it was a private, emotional, and, most of all, shameful ordeal each time. Now I'd have to do it in front of others, and play at it, and joke about it. It would definitely take some getting used to.

  * * * * *

  Jack caught up with me later that day. I had gone back to the edge of the river. It was the most enlivening, calming place in our very circumscribed little world. "You okay?" he said calmly.

  "Yeah, I don't know what happened."

  "Don't worry, I should've guessed before it happened. There are so many things you have to adjust to here, sometimes I forget and do things out of order. Usually it goes the other way. We had so many people here at first who had never hit anyone before in anger. What were we supposed to do with them? There weren't enough of us with training and weapons to protect the place, let alone go out and try to forage for supplies.

  "And it's not like when you're a kid, and some jerk gets tired of you being afraid of water, so he throws you into the deep end of the pool and yells, ‘Sink or swim!' We couldn't open the gates and shove people out there and yell, ‘Kill them before they eat you!' So we trained them. Katas, sparring, dummies—we got them to pretend to hit things. We got them to get good at pretending to be good at hitting things.

  "But it was just pretend. And the first time they went out to defend the gates, or on a raid to scrounge up supplies, they usually froze. And crapped their pants. And then, if they managed to pull it together and bash some stiffs head in, and they had brains splattered all over themselves, they usually stopped to puke. And hopefully they didn't get themselves killed. But sometimes they did. And sometimes the guy next to them, too. A lot of times they came back bitten and sick. And guess who had to sit up with them? And when they turned, guess who had to split their skull with an axe, so we could save a bullet?" He stopped and shook his head.

  "But you're different," he continued. "You've gotten okay at killing. Not great, but you're definitely not going to freeze if one of those things comes up out of the water right now. But you don't like practicing it. It's not pretend for you: it's too real for you, it's too personal, and you can't pretend. I'm sorry. I should've guessed, but Popcorn was one of the few people we picked up that was like that. Tanya was a little, too. But they were both eager to practice, so they could get better and kill as many of those things as possible. They have a lot of rage that you don't. You're just resigned to it. And that's good. I respect that. And it'll work good her
e. I think I have enough hot heads and enough people who are too scared. So don't worry, Jonah."

  "Thanks, Jack."

  "Anyway, since we had so much trouble training people right for combat, that was one of the things Milton thought to change when he arrived. He wanted an initiation rite, I guess you'd call it."

  "Sounds a little bizarre."

  "Well, don't be too quick. People need rituals, they need some kind of structure or plan, and most of the old ones are gone. We don't have to go to church, or school, or work. We can't vote, or pay taxes, or take tests to get driver's licenses or black belts or whatever. It puts people too much up in the air, and then they get in trouble, either in here with one another, or out there when they're fighting."

  "I guess so." Again, the subtler points of the new society were constantly eluding me, but I was trying to adapt.

  "So we started making rules, and getting them accepted by the group. Some were straightforward, like you've seen: no weapons, no hoarding food, no stealing, hands off anybody else's man or woman. The usual Ten Commandments stuff. Rules for sanitation and for dealing with infected people. Rules for settling disputes. But once we had those, Milton still thought there had to be something more, something other than prohibitions. Responsibilities, something that made us a community and not just a bunch of people who still had a pulse and had ended up at the same place. So we started having two levels of citizenship. First, if you're part of the community, then you work. You do whatever you're good at, and we all take turns with the jobs nobody wants. If you don't work, you don't eat. We'd already pretty much been doing that, but we made sure it was a rule, and everybody agreed to it."

  "Makes sense."

  "Then we had the trickier one, the one that would involve an initiation rite. We decided that anybody could stay here and be protected, so long as they did some kind of work, but they couldn't be full citizens and participate in making the group's decisions unless they fought. If you don't fight, you don't vote."

  "Seems kind of harsh."

  "I thought so too, but I was surprised how little fuss there was over it. Everyone seemed to like it, even if it meant they wouldn't vote. Like Sarah—she'll never try to get citizenship, and she thinks it's fair that way. I guess the idea of having less responsibility but less rights, or more rights and more responsibility, just made sense to most people. So we've been doing it that way since."

  "And this initiation rite?"

  "We didn't know what to do exactly. I mean, in the regular world, I guess these things just developed over time; you didn't sit down and make them up. We didn't know whether to make it just symbolic, you know, like being knighted with a sword. People actually didn't seem to like that. They wanted it to be some kind of real, first act of fighting that would initiate you as a warrior and a citizen. But we had to be practical: there wasn't any sense in fighting and risking your life unless there was something more than a symbolic payoff. We wanted it to yield some real benefit for the group, as well as initiating the person.

  "So for our ‘citizenship test,' we've been sending people out in little groups, without guns, to raid the city for ‘special,' non-essential supplies. We go out in force to get the food and fuel, but everybody looks forward to initiation days, because they'll bring back a few little things that make us more human and remind us of what we've got to fight our way back to—soap, CDs, pens and paper. The remnants of civilization, I guess you'd call them. When a group of three or four new people has trained enough that they think they're ready, then we send them out."

  "How many come back?"

  "All of them. They have something to work for, they're not rushed into anything, and they're ready. And they have a walkie-talkie: if they call for help, we go get them. They just don't get citizenship then. I've lost people on regular raids, but not on initiations."

  "And you want me to do this, I take it?"

  "Maybe someday. I was just telling you the kinds of things Milton has thought of, and how we live here, because I guess it must be strange, just being thrust into it. I think you should go meet him now. It's always an interesting conversation."

  "Yes, that sounds good. A lot better than the practice fighting."

  He smiled. "You like the water, don't you?"

  "Yeah, I do. Sometimes I forget how much. I guess that's why I always liked working on the ships. I missed my family, but it was a good time to recharge and regroup."

  "Yeah, I used to like to go fishing in a rowboat with my dad when I was little. Didn't do it so much when I grew up. Maybe that's why I was never regrouped enough." He looked thoughtful and smiled. "Well, Jonah, I hope someday you and I can get on a boat and do some fishing. But until then, let's take you to see Milton. I think you'll find he kind of recharges you in a way, too. Definitely always gets me thinking."

  Chapter Six

  I followed Jack to the third floor of the museum, to the end of the corridor where a glass door was labeled "LIBRARY." The room was on a corner of the library, with windows on two sides, and therefore very brightly lit. Wherever there weren't windows, bookcases were built into the walls, and these were full. There were several tables and chairs for studying in the room. Milton was sitting in a comfortable chair, reading, and he rose to greet me.

  He was in late middle age, I'd guess in his mid fifties. He was as tall as Jack, but looked like he had always been slim, even before a life of privation. He was dressed in some sort of baggy pants, and a covering like a poncho or smock on top of them: it was really just a big piece of fabric with a hole cut out for his head, drawn tight around his waist with a piece of rope. His hair and beard were completely white, but not as unkempt as most people's.

  Overall, he was perhaps the only person I'd met since the end of the world who I would say looked dignified, but he was not especially imposing or mysterious-looking. I guess I had expected Yoda and had gotten Obi Wan.

  Milton extended his hand in greeting. He wore wire-rimmed granny glasses, and I had to keep myself from smiling; the only celebrities I could remember wearing those were John Lennon and Heinrich Himmler: though I suppose both had some claim to charisma, neither was a particularly striking or intimidating looking man, and neither was Milton.

  In a way, he too was somehow appropriate to our particular apocalypse. The world had ended in such a mundane way, with your utterly ordinary neighbors attacking you and turning you into yet another member of a mindless, anonymous mob. So maybe it made a sort of sense that the new leader or prophet of the apocalypse would be an entirely regular-looking man.

  But then I thought of Tanya and her steadfast love of God and Popcorn, deeper than any theologian's, and her Stoical acceptance of her children's horrible deaths, as strong as any Greek philosopher's or Roman statesman's, and I knew there needn't be anything aristocratic or exotic about wisdom. Milton was what he was, and if he had brought some guidance to this community, then I had better respect that.

  "Jonah Caine," Milton said happily. He paused a moment, then added, "We have all killed many of our brothers, haven't we?"

  "Yes, unfortunately, we have," I said, not knowing where else to go with his reference to my name.

  Jack spoke up. "Milton, I'll leave you two alone for a bit. I have some things to do."

  "Yes, thank you, Jack," Milton said amiably. "Amiable" was a good word for him. He just seemed easy-going, more than guru-like.

  As we sat there, I caught a whiff of something foul. It was the odor we had all grown used to in the last year—the smell of decay and rot, of gangrenous infection and lingering death. The windows to the room were all open, and a breeze was blowing through, but I didn't think it was from outside. We were too high up, and the direction of the wind wasn't right for it to be blowing around from the front, where we had fought and incinerated so many zombies the day before, and it wasn't a burnt smell, either. In fact, I thought the windows were left open to air the place out and get rid of the smell.

  Milton noticed my discomfiture. "I'm sorry, Mr. Caine,
it's part of my… condition. I'll explain more later, if that's all right."

  "Oh, of course," I said, embarrassed, "I didn't mean anything. And call me Jonah, if you want." I suddenly wondered whether everyone was on a first- or last-name basis with Milton, but this wasn't the time to ask.

  He smiled. "Thank you. Tell me how you came to us."

  I repeated my story more or less as I had told it the night before, though more briefly and matter-of-factly in this setting. Milton watched and listened as though it was imperative to note every nuance and detail and word choice. When I finished speaking, he leaned back and looked off dreamily, as though to digest everything I'd said, when, of course, the whole story seemed quite straightforward and uninteresting to me.

  "You're so lucky," he finally said. "You must've read so many books as an English professor."

  I was taken aback, to say the least. Jack would've asked me about the details of killing zombies or how I survived, Tanya would've asked about my family, and Sarah, well, she probably would've just cried. But Milton was the only person I could imagine who would've been interested in what it was like to be a damned English professor at a community college. It was hard for me to understand, but again, it seemed to fit him.

  "Well, yes," I said, "I suppose I did. I always liked reading. I mean, I used to. Not so much anymore."

  "I hope you reacquire the habit someday. Let's go over by the window. It should make the smell more tolerable for you as well." He got up and walked past the bookshelves. "I never read books before coming here. But once I was here, it was all I wanted to do."

  He looked at me intently again. "You see, there were all these people here, and they seemed automatically to look up to me, like I was a messiah sent to save them. But I'm not, Jonah, and I keep telling them that, but it doesn't seem to sink in. I'm glad I can talk to you because I doubt you'll have that misconception. But they did, right away, once they saw my… condition."