"How could they?" I asked. "The infection has never affected animals."
"I know, that's what we said, but it didn't make any difference. The scientists must've been working on a different strain of the virus at that facility. Or they created it by mistake. I don't know. But the dogs were definitely standing there, and they definitely weren't alive.
"The ranking soldier whispered to back slowly toward the door. As we did, he shoved his .45 in my hand. He told me, ‘Do what you can, Doc. I'm sorry we got you into this.' I told him I wouldn't be any better off still cowering in my townhouse, and he just nodded."
The three of them edged toward the door. The soldier who gave Milton his .45 was the same one who had made the pilot land next to the jet back at the airbase. I smiled at how kind and grateful Milton sounded when he described such bravery. I guess, like Jack or Tanya, things had hardened and calloused me more, and I haven't appreciated such little things as another person's bravery. That's where Milton seems to have survived better than many of the rest of us: he can still see the moments of grace and virtue amidst the horror.
But the horror in the lab had continued. The other soldier couldn't take the pressure and ran for the door. Apparently, zombie dogs—if, God forbid, there are more such abominations out there—aren't as slow as zombie humans, and they were all over him. Milton and the commanding soldier started shooting, but in the dark, they weren't too accurate. They probably hit the soldier more than once before they finally put down the dogs.
They went to drag the wounded man out. "But then we heard scraping noises in the main lab, and we saw them." Again, his voice dropped lower. "Monkeys, dogs, cats, even smaller animals like rabbits and rats—all their lab animals, undead, edging toward us. And in the smaller lab, some of the undead scientists and soldiers were staggering toward us. I thought for sure we were finished.
"The commander took the wounded man's submachine gun, so he had one in each hand. He whispered to me, ‘Doc, try to take out the human zombies in there. They're bigger targets, you might get lucky. These killer bunnies and shit are going to be the real problem. Damn things have brains about the size of a damn walnut.'
"We started shooting again. It seemed like it went on for hours, though it must've been only a few seconds. We shot until we were out of bullets, then we fought them hand to hand. I'm sure you know—the .45 is a big, ugly piece of iron in your hand, and I did the best I could with it, bashing them in the head. In the end, we put them all down, but we were bitten up by the animals, so it was only a matter of time before it was all over. The soldier who'd first been attacked by the dogs was already dead. The commander took the .45 from me, reloaded it, and finished him when he got back up. He had the decency to say, ‘God forgive me,' as he did it. People's decency has also constantly amazed me in all this, Jonah. He told me to do the same for him when it came time, if he went first, and to be sure to save a bullet for myself."
But the attack hadn't killed them, and even though they thought that death was inevitable, the will to survive almost never listens to rational thought or logical analysis—it just fights and scraps. In that sense, the zombies are just exaggerations of what we always do—fight to live, whether we should or not. So the two survivors searched and found bandages, and Milton dressed their wounds as best he could. They took shelter in a different building and found some food.
"We even boiled some water with a Bunsen burner and had tea." Milton laughed and shook his head. "Sipping tea right next to a damn slaughterhouse, with poison coursing through our veins—what were we thinking? But on the other hand—why not?
"It hurt like crazy, of course. Burning, wracking pain, with fever and shaking. We took turns, only one of us sleeping at a time, so the other could shoot him in case he turned. We didn't know what to do if the guy who was awake turned while the other one slept, but we didn't have a better plan.
"After a couple days, we actually seemed to be improving. You know how most people are gone in hours, unless it's just a scratch, and we were both bitten all over. After a week, it seemed as though, so long as you didn't die from loss of blood, the infection from the animal strain wouldn't kill you. I don't know whether the virus had just mutated again, or if this strain the animals had contracted had always been that way, and the people originally on the base had all bled to death, and that's how they became zombies. I still have no idea why we survived.
"But a definite downside was that the pain didn't go away. It was like it had become a low-grade infection, and it would always hurt—forever. It makes it difficult and painful to breathe or move. At least it has for me, ever since. And sleeping—you can just about forget about sleeping. And then we noticed the smell. I mean, we noticed it at first, but we thought it was because we were dying. But it never went away. It's like the rot and death are inside us, never healing, but never quite finishing us off."
The two of them had gathered up some food and headed back to their own base. When they got there, Milton had taken the .45 and the commander had gotten out a shovel, so they could kill the zombies at the gate and get inside. "But that's when we noticed their reaction to us.
"As soon as we got out of the jeep, when we must've still been about fifteen or twenty feet away from them, they all started to cower, with their hands up to their faces, like we were really bright lights that were blinding them. The commander motioned for me not to shoot. We walked toward them, and they started to back away from us. We could just shoo them away from the gate. It was like in the cartoons, when an elephant is stomping everything in sight, and then it sees a mouse and runs away. We were thrilled. Now we could gather food or anything else and bring it back to the camp.
"But when we went in, we found that everyone else had left. The other jeep was gone. They must have waited a couple days, and when we didn't come back, they gave up and went their own way. We waited a couple days to see if they'd come back, and to enjoy our mountain paradise a little longer, then we split up and went our separate ways, to look for them, or any other human survivors that we could help with our new gift."
He'd wandered for weeks before he found the museum. He was lucky, as it was starting to get cold by then, and Milton freely admitted he lacked any kind of outdoors skills to survive in the wilderness on his own, even if he was safe from the undead.
"When the people here saw my gift," he said, smiling, "they thought I was their salvation, and I could do anything. I tried to explain that it was just some wild, unforeseeable side effect of a mutant virus, but I heard them whisper—that I'm sent from God, and I can kill zombies by looking at them, and if you touch me then a zombie can't bite you for twenty-four hours. I can't do all that crazy stuff. I really can't do that much of anything. Sometimes the pain is too intense for me to go out and gather supplies or help people. And even when I do, I can't carry everything by myself, so we still have to risk other people on our raids. And I can't protect them. It's not like I have mind control over the zombies—they just avoid me.
"I assume it's because of some smell, maybe pheromones. They think I'm one of them, maybe even some kind of alpha or king zombie, though God forbid I could be something so horrible as that. But unless someone is pressed up against me, I can't keep the dead from attacking them. I do what I can, and we've lost very few people since I came here, I'm proud to say. My pain is a little price to pay to help build up this community."
He sighed and leaned back. "That's my story, Jonah. I'm sorry it took so long to tell, and I'm sorry I got so worked up, when others have been through so much worse."
"No," I said, "it's amazing. I know you don't like to hear it, but it really does seem like your coming here was a miracle for these people. And since they saved me, now it's a miracle for me, too."
He smiled. "Oh no, not you, too! Aren't there real miracles all around us? Isn't that enough? Why do people look at one thing rather than another and put all the pressure and stigma of ‘miracle' on it? It's a miracle the people here survived for months before I got here,
or there wouldn't have been anything for me to ‘save,' and I probably would've frozen to death during the winter. No one is really a savior, I don't think. I think we just help each other. Or, we're supposed to."
We sat, just staring out the window. It was another beautiful spring day, and I was feeling quite content, even pleased, with Milton's way of looking at things.
* * * * *
Milton broke the silence again after a moment. "Isn't it wonderful that the place they could seal off and defend was a museum? I just assumed, as I wandered around, that I'd find survivors at an army base, or storage facility, or some other place with nothing but concrete walls and barbed wire and fluorescent lighting. But instead, we're here, surrounded by so many beautiful and amazing things, things we can use to teach the children about how life was, and to remind us that life isn't just canned food to eat and a wall to keep you from being eaten. It keeps us from becoming merely animals, I think."
"Yes, I've been thinking that as I looked around here. It was very fortunate."
"Another of your miracles, I suppose?" He smiled. "Maybe so. Maybe, somehow, events conspired to make sure we had just a little more than the barest of necessities. And now I think we need to work on getting more such things, just as much as we need food and other supplies."
"Jack told me about your initiation rite, that you use it as an opportunity to get such non-essentials."
"And what do you think of such a task?"
"I was skeptical at first, to be honest."
He nodded. "I can imagine. I think you have to be a part of the group for it to make sense. I'm sorry you weren't here when we started it."
"Yes, I think that's what I'm realizing. But I think I can see its value. And if you have Jack sold on the idea, then it can't be totally unreasonable, can it?"
He smiled. "Quite right, though he had to be convinced to see its value, just like with burying the bodies. But anyone can see, I think, that people need more than just food and shelter. Allow not nature more than nature needs…"
"Man's life is cheap as beast's," I finished the quotation.
Milton laughed. "Now that time I was being just a little naughty and trying to catch you. Do you know I hadn't read Shakespeare since high school, before I came here? And the only play I remembered from high school was Macbeth. Witches and ghosts and bloodstained hands—all quite appropriate to how we live now, I suppose. But now I'm amazed at what else I've read in his plays."
He looked up again with his dreamy look. "Isn't that strange—we had all his plays, just sitting around, and I never bothered to read them? And now we have to fight and kill to get some copies of his books and others, books that are blowing around at the smashed-up local bookstore, quickly turning into dust. Maybe that was what was wrong with the way we used to live—so many luxuries sitting around that we didn't appreciate them."
"Too many, and the wrong kind."
"Exactly. I think we should have to work for luxuries and not just be handed them." He gave a mischievous little grin. "Well, there was one time when I thought the people here just needed to be handed some luxuries and shouldn't have to fight for them."
"Oh, when was that?"
"I hardly think it'd be considered too indulgent. We had a long, wet fall last year. By December, everything was all muddy and gross, but not really cold."
"Global warming? I wish that was all we had to worry about anymore."
"Yes. My point is, everyone was feeling down. So I snuck out one night. I'm sure Jack would've blamed me for wasting batteries and risking getting hurt, but I had to try. I didn't know my way around that well because I had been too sick to go on many of the raids, but I did find what was left of one big store. The dead seemed especially docile that night, parting before me as I invaded their little castle or tomb. They didn't seem to cringe from me so much as bow and scrape. I know it's crazy, but maybe even they can be made to feel peaceful, under the right circumstances. I filled a huge sack with various things and dragged it back here. We didn't have a bad Christmas, all things considered."
I smiled. Milton had again lapsed into painting a rather absurd image, a Santa trudging through walking corpses to bring back a bag of goodies from the remnants of Wal-Mart. But again, in a world of unrelenting ugliness and brutality, it had a certain charm, a kind of humble beauty and value that you couldn't ignore.
"But other than that one night, I think perhaps we got too spoiled in our old world, and I wanted a world where we'd have beauty, but we'd appreciate it better, not take it for granted. So I wanted to work it into the initiation, the thing that made people ready to enter the community, by having them show that they could fight and struggle and present everyone with something that wasn't just useful, but beautiful or uplifting, even if it was just in some tiny little way. Maybe especially if it was only a tiny little thing! God, do you remember how pretty women's toes used to look with nail polish on them, wearing sandals in the summer? Now that was something!"
I laughed and shook my head. So did Milton, and for a long time. "Oh my God, Milton, now how did you go from Shakespeare to toenail polish as the essence of what makes us human and separates us from the beasts or zombies!"
"I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I told you I haven't had anyone to talk to, and it all just comes spilling out now. But really," he turned serious again, "I hope that some day we have the place built up enough that we can just take the food and safety for granted, and people can start to work on their own for better things, whatever it is that excites them, whether it's cosmetics or Shakespeare or disco. Wouldn't that be something? To have the luxury again of people being poets, or musicians, or fashion designers, or athletes? Don't you want that for your children? And is it so much to ask?" He got a little quieter. "Did we mess up so bad that our children don't even deserve that?"
Talking to him was like careening down a twisting road, and he'd made the next curve and was on to his next phase, or his next role. Now he wasn't the reluctant messiah, or the guy infected with a mutant virus that allowed him to defeat the living dead, or a post-apocalyptic Santa with a toe fetish: now I could see a glimpse of how he could motivate people to organize politically, to have an agenda and make sacrifices to accomplish something and become part of something greater than themselves. I don't think Milton was all the way to an "Ask not what your country can do for you" speech, or an "I have a dream" speech, but he was miles ahead of the "No child left behind," or "I feel your pain" kind of rhetoric to which we'd become so debased and accustomed.
"I think you'll be able to pull that off here, Milton, maybe sooner rather than later."
"I hope you're right, Jonah. And I hope you'll help us."
"Oh, I'm sure I will. You and Jack just let me stay here a little longer before you send me back out there. I've been among the dead too long. Now I'd like to enjoy life here a little. I've been dying to live, I guess you could say."
Milton smiled and rose. "Not my best pronouncement, I hope, but it seemed right as a slogan for people to come in and rest."
"It worked for me," I said as we shook hands.
"I'm so glad it did," Milton said. He led me to the door, and we parted for the day.
Chapter Eight
A few weeks passed. I moved from my guest room to the main living quarters. I got used to fighting practice with Jack and Tanya in the mornings, and I got to where I could fight without getting all worked up, finally moving with some grace and ease. When I was done there, I'd help out around the compound—hauling water from the river, planting and watering the crops we hoped could help feed us, shoring up defenses where they were needed.
Afternoons I usually spent talking with Milton. He never tired of it. I smiled that it had taken the zombie apocalypse for a scientist and an English professor to appreciate and discuss the finer, more humane points of civilization. On balance, perhaps it was not the most surprising irony one could imagine, but it was still funny.
Some evenings I spent with Tanya, far too few for my taste. She was
devoted to Popcorn and spent most of her time with him, reading with him, helping him with his mathematics lessons. It was nice to see them together, as they both obviously needed it very much.
On the other hand, I was constantly reminded of how much I disliked other people's children, and the fact that this one was the most extreme charity case imaginable only slightly offset that. I was honest enough to admit—only to myself, of course, never to Tanya—how much I resented him for threatening or diminishing what little opportunities I had to work on a sexual or romantic relationship with her. But a couple evenings with Tanya were better than I had expected ever to have again, and much better than I deserved.
On balance, like Milton's meager little Christmas among the undead, everything was a lot better than I had dared hope for, under the circumstances, and it made me quite optimistic for the future.
I learned that, spats and posturing notwithstanding, Jack did have an infrequent and more or less completely physical relationship with Sarah. I usually smiled at it, seeing how right Milton was that categorizing people made it so much easier to understand them and work around their idiosyncrasies. Whereas some objective standard of morality might have made the relationship of Jack and Sarah seem wrong, seeing it from Jack's rational point of view made it much easier to appreciate and weigh its merits.
As Jack explained it—in completely rational, cost-benefit terms—the physical relationship was satisfying to both, and the relationship brought Sarah some increased status among the women in the community, by attaching her to the strongest male leader and removing the stigma of not having a mate or children. Though Jack didn't include it in his list of benefits, I could've added that it also removed him from the inconveniences of sexual advances from either males or females in the group, thereby cutting down on jealousy and competition, as well as eliminating any doubts about his potency or preference, making it easier for him to command.
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