The Living Dead

by Kraus, Daniel

  “I don’t see any other way. No one’s getting out of here.”

  “Well, I wonder.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “You’re a pilot, aren’t you, Pagán?”

  “But the aircraft, I heard them fall. It sounded like towers collapsing.”

  “Affirmative. Father Bill’s having us push the planes into the ocean. But with ghouls out there, it’s taking time. What do you fly?”

  “F-18s, sir.”

  “We’ve got a Super Hornet on the runway, just aft of Elevator #4. D model, two-seater.”

  “But, sir, without the catapults … if we had a Harrier II, maybe—”

  “I spend a lot of time on the meteorological level, A lot of time. And something I just happen to know about, because it’s displayed on a monitor directly above where I sleep, is that in twenty-four hours, we’re scheduled to see fifty knots of trade winds.”

  “Sir. You’ve picked the wrong pilot.”

  “I don’t think I have.”

  “I don’t know if I can get into a plane again.”

  “You can, You have to.”

  “You’re using me, sir, as a way off the boat. A way that won’t even work.”

  “So what if I am? I’ve got something important to get home to. There’s very little left in this world I believe in, very little, but what there is, for me, it’s in Buffalo. Where’s home to you?”

  “Detroit, sir.”

  “Buffalo, Detroit. The Bills, the Lions, We’re practically neighbors. Maybe you and I get home together. Operation Bills-Lions. Why not believe in it? You’d rather run around down here forever like the rats?”

  “It’s just that I’ve spent the last week just … just trying to live. Crawling up to every dead body I see. Patting it down for food. Looking for a shoe. I lost my left shoe when I fell down the trunk. It was an important shoe, sir. Fighter pilots have brown shoes. It means something. Maybe I didn’t have my name on a plane, and maybe I didn’t have a call sign. But I had the brown shoes. Sir? Why are you laughing, sir?”

  “Pilot.”

  “Yes?”

  “Look behind you. Next to the crucifix.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the other weapon you took from me is a shoe. A woman’s brown fighter-pilot shoe. Petty Officer Pagán, I think we were meant to be.”

  “I … thank you, sir. I can’t tell you what … I think it fits, I—thank you, sir.”

  “Stop calling me sir, pilot.”

  “It’s Jennifer. Call me Jenny. Just plain Jenny.”

  Home

  “It’s the Big G,” Luis croaked into his phone, winking a purple, swollen eyelid at Charlie.

  She grinned back, but it hurt. Luis’s resolve to keep his sense of humor was his gift to her, in return for all the Shotgun Marriage events, and she couldn’t reject it. His latest effort was funny. It was. Rationing of generator diesel forced Luis to charge his precious, useless phone infrequently, but he had a bit of battery left and was scrolling through his contacts to make mock farewell calls. It was the act of a man dying of cancer, the Big C. She’d seen those movies before.

  “I appreciate that, JT,” he said. “It’s true, the Big G runs in my family.”

  Charlie scowled at this morbid reference to Mamá Acocella, and Luis gathered enough energy to look scandalized. She didn’t like the expression; his face was gray and waxy, and to warp it like that made him look like one of the cadavers they saw on occasion in the morgue, its face gnarled into a death-gape. But she rolled her eyes, feigning the good time Luis wanted her to have.

  “Enough about me, JT, we all gotta go sometime,” Luis said. “How are you, old boy? You sound a little … flat.”

  He raised a patchy, mangy eyebrow at Charlie. It took her a second to get it: their old boss, Jefferson Talbot, reported by Lindof to have leaped from the sixty-fourth floor of Trump International Hotel. It was too dark, but in this too-dark time, it was just what she needed. She snorted, a piggy noise that struck her as funny, and at which she laughed. If there was a God out there, and he had any more power than the plastic Jesus on Mae Rutkowski’s wall, he’d better bless the hell out of Luis Acocella.

  “JT, pal, I gotta—yeah, I know, I’m late for work—yeah, okay, I’m ten days late, but I had—well, if you let me finish—traffic was a real nightmare, and then I had some home remodeling to do—look, I really have to go. See you soon, JT, Bye-bye.”

  Luis ended the call with an exaggerated finger. Charlie smiled, but his words echoed.

  I really have to go.

  He did. They both knew it. The Big G had him in its withering grip. His blurry vision had progressed to near blindness; he now called her “the prettiest blond blob I’ve ever seen.” When racked by pain and fever, his moans became nonsense. His only concern seemed to be for her. He was sorry she’d have to face this world alone. Did she remember how to load the gun? He went over the places he thought most likely to stock ammo. Just in case civilization made a surprise return, he scrawled an illegible will leaving her everything, though if Rosa came back, she had to share it. Did she remember how to load the gun? Had he already asked that?

  Luis thumbed his dead screen.

  One thing Charlie missed since the diesel rationing was the sustaining presence of Chuck Corso. She and Luis had poked fun at Corso until they, along with what Charlie guessed was the rest of the nation, came to see the anchor as a hero, the one man holding America together with Elmer’s Glue and sailors’ knots. In WWN’s absence, bitterness had crept into Charlie’s thoughts. Since the second Luis had been bitten, theirs had been a marriage on fast-forward, and finally, they’d arrived at the part where Charlie had to quit being a wife and start being a nurse.

  Nagging after his comfort only to get confusing, contradictory replies. Saddled with the thankless task of making him eat only to have to clean him after he vomited it up. Feeling like worthless crap when she dropped him on another trip to the tub because he’d shit himself again, Full-circle time: she was his diener again, assisting not with autopsies of others but with his own death.

  “Hello,” Luis said, “is Manolo there? Oh, this is Manolo? Manu, old sport, it’s tu hermano. How are things in the Pine Tree State? Overrun with the dead? You don’t say. Oh, well, thanks for asking, but I’m afraid the news here isn’t too good. I’ve come down with the Big G. The hospital? I don’t need a hospital. A bit of Mamá’s pork posole will do the trick, eh?”

  Luis smiled at Charlie. She didn’t return it. She could tell he’d just suffered a wave of pain. Perspiration sloughed down his face like icing, and the phone’s light only made him paler. She also saw his resolve. After taking several fake phone calls to conclusion, to bail out of this one early would be to reveal the whole thing as the grotesquerie it was. Luis forced his lips into a distorted grin. The touch screen glow shone off teeth that had begun to brown.

  “It’s been too long, Manu. I agree, we should get together. I’d suggest you take a nice cross-country drive my way, but I heard highways are going to be bumper-to-bumper for a while. Me? Oh, I’m in no state to travel. I’m afraid the Big G is quite advanced. The old legs don’t run anymore. It’s hard for me to even stay awake more than—”

  His voice snagged. Charlie held her breath. Whether Luis’s gasp was from emotion or pain, his red-and-yellow eyes submerged in tears. He brought a quavering hand to his forehead, hiding his crumpling face.

  “You remember, don’t you, Manu? We used to watch scary movies Rafi’s big brother bootlegged, and I’d be up all night, afraid if I fell asleep, the monster was going to get me. That’s how it is now, brother. Every time I drift off, I think … is this the last time? Is this the last time I’ll think of Mamá and Papá and you and … and I’m scared, Manu.” Luis laughed, “I used to crawl into bed with you, recuerda? You’d say, ‘There’s no monsters, bobo, get in here so I can sleep.’ And then everything was okay. That’s what I want now. That’s all I want. Make the monsters go away, Manu. You
’re the only one who ever could.”

  Luis sobbed, a blast of cracking mucus, and Charlie saw the light leave his phone, the battery dead, maybe for good, leaving behind a black screen, which anyone who wears lipstick can tell you can be used as a mirror. In the black screen, Luis saw the last news byte his phone would deliver: his own face, good as dead. He sobbed again. There was nothing Charlie could do. He fell asleep, and after a while, she went downstairs and slept on the sofa, because what if he died in the night, rolled over, and bit her?

  With that, she knew it was over.

  Most nights, a few creaks of bedsprings, a couple of ghostly moans, and she was up. Tonight, she slept undisturbed, and there were no noises when she woke in the morning. She let that sink in. November 4: so today was the day she’d never forget. She did her morning check of the boarded-up doors and windows, put on the coffee, picked up the .38, and headed upstairs.

  Luis was alive. But he’d changed, one more time. His body had sunk into the bed like it was grave soil. He’d gone chalk white. Most ominous of all, he’d gone still. She’d read about this in med school: the point when a patient’s pain could no longer be recognized as pain. It was the air, the light, gravity; it was everything. When Charlie sat on the bed beside him, only his eyes moved, rolling her way.

  “Char-lie.” His rasp slowed the word, “Show me the gun.”

  She should be devastated, but she’d read about this too: the exhausted, ashamed gratefulness loved ones felt near the end. She held up the revolver for Luis to see. Luis blinked, the closest he could come to a nod.

  “Once you’re done with me,” he said, “save one bullet for yourself. Just in case.”

  “Do I … I mean, if I have to … do I aim for my … my heart, or…”

  “Diener. You know this.”

  Charlie laughed. “Yeah. I guess I do.”

  “Tell me,” Luis sighed. “For old times’ sake.”

  She sniffled; her eyes, still swollen from sleep, swelling even more.

  “If you aim for the chest,” she said, “the ribs might deflect it.”

  “And?”

  “You could end up with a pneumothorax. A hemothorax. Quadriplegia.”

  “So what should you do?”

  “The head,” she said softly. “Not the temple. You might miss the brain, sever the eyeballs, end up blind. Not under the chin either. Your hand might jerk and you’d end up blowing your face off. You want to put the gun inside your mouth and aim down, where the skull meets the spinal column.”

  “But not with ghouls, right?”

  “Oh, shit, Right. That’s right. So, yeah, the skull, then. Right in the middle of the head. Straight at the brain. Oh, Luis. Oh, shit. Oh, fuck. I don’t want to do this.”

  “You might not have to. I hope you don’t have to.”

  “I mean this. I mean you. We didn’t have enough time. I tried to go fast, but it wasn’t good enough, was it?”

  “It was pretty good. Now go to the dresser. The duct tape. Tape up my ankles and wrists.”

  “No, Acocella, no.”

  “You won’t have that bullet to save if you spend it all on me.”

  He was right. Of course he was right. Even during John Doe’s rebirth, Luis Acocella had been the perfect professional, uploading his recording to the VSDC when anyone else would have hightailed it out of there. He deserved to have been elected medical examiner over JT. He deserved a lot of things he’d never gotten. Before Charlie could think too hard about it, she snatched up the duct tape and unknotted the sheets from Luis’s limbs. She hadn’t seen his body in days. It was skeletal, his pajamas pasted to his limbs. Not really him, she repeated as she taped his ankles together. He’s bigger than these bones, she told herself as she taped his wrists behind his back.

  “Good,” he said. “Now listen. I don’t want to make a mess.”

  “You’re already a mess, dummy.”

  The slightest upward twinge of his lips.

  “Go downstairs. Get a few garbage bags. Put them inside each other so they’re thick. And then I want you to—”

  “No, Acocella, Jesus—”

  “—put them over my head and tape them to my neck.”

  “I’m not going to smother you!”

  “You won’t. Make a hole so I can breathe, But when I come back, you’re not going to be able to get those bags on me. And I don’t want you to have to see it. The mess, I don’t want you to remember me like that.”

  “You’ll never be like Them, Never.”

  “You know, I’ve been thinking. My thoughts don’t make sense. About the ghouls, They’re not imperfect humans. They’re perfect humans, You know what I’m saying? All humans did was kill enemies, Like those guys who surrounded our car, who wanted Latinos. The ghouls are the same. Except they want all colors, all kinds. Equality at last. That’s not so bad, is it?”

  When Charlie went downstairs, she could see herself as if from a floating camera. It was disassociation from shock, another thing she’d read about in school. There was also an element of theatricality. You spent your whole life watching, hearing, and reading stories that spotlighted major rituals. The walking-down-the-aisle scene, the delivery-room scene, the crying-at-the-funeral scene. This was the deathbed scene, and she felt herself pulling her shoulders back and adopting the right expression of sad fortitude. Here it was, her time to take the stage.

  She fired up the generator. Fuel was low, but at this stage, what wasn’t? She retrieved the heavy-duty black garbage bags from the kitchen, but instead of going to the second floor, she descended to the basement. Several days ago (or several decades ago, depending on how she measured it), while she’d been excavating holiday decorations, she’d come across boxes, dated in faded pen, from what had to be Luis’s early twenties. Knowing young Luis might be a way to make him live forever, and she tore at the tape, only to find inside not the photographs and ephemera for which she’d longed but books.

  The musty volumes introduced a boy whose intellectual curiosity had prevailed against ten-hour workdays. Heavy Latin American lit, Old English poetry, European film criticism, German philosophy. Inside each front cover was a signature of ownership, done with the kind of swoopy flash people used before they turned thirty, like their autographs might be worth something someday: Luis Jorge Acocella.

  She assembled a stack of the best-thumbed books, balanced the garbage bags on top, and carried them upstairs to the bedroom, where she found Luis unconscious. She got right to work layering garbage bags. She was cutting out a mouth hole when he woke.

  “You’ve got five bullets,” he said, “Don’t use more than four. It’s going to be loud. It’ll bring Them. Shoot through a pillow. It might soften the noise. I don’t know.”

  His eyes were closed, his lids a greasy black against a pasty face. She leaned in as casually as she could, not wanting this good-night kiss to be any different from the others she’d given him. His lips were ice. The skin around them boiled. She slid away, licked his hot sweat from her lips, and looked at his beautiful, kind face one last time before letting it disappear beneath black bags.

  She duct-taped the bags to his pajama shirt. She watched the plastic around the mouth hole puff in and out with his puny breaths.

  “You want music?” she asked.

  He nodded once, the bag crackling. She went to the DVD player and inserted The Quiet Man. Once the sprightly yet sad Victor Young score rang out, she sat on the edge of the bed, her knee touching a man bound and hooded as if awaiting execution, which he was, though unlike most executioners, she loved her victim beyond what she could express, Next to his legs she placed four books and one revolver.

  “I’m going to read to you,” she said, “Things from when you were young. Would you like that?”

  The head nodded. The garbage-bag hole sucked inward, blew out. She selected a fat volume of poetry and began paging through the index. She did not quite make it to B before seeing, with surprise, a poem about the occupation they shared: autopsy.r />
  The poem was “Autopsy in the Form of an Elegy,” published in 1972 by a cardiologist named John Stone, Charlie read it to herself and recognized it as being about the Big C, or the Big G, or something of the kind. When she read it aloud, she did so softly, because her lover, her patient, her favorite person was drifting away.

  In the chest

  in the heart

  was the vessel

  was the pulse

  was the art

  was the love

  was the clot

  small and slow

  and the scar

  that could not know

  the rest of you

  was very nearly perfect.

  Charlie knew this part of the scene too: she sank her face in her hands and sobbed.

  “Diener.” Luis’s scratchy voice, the plastic hiss.

  Charlie nodded and trusted he would feel it.

  “You know this,” he said, “Try to remember it. Childhood isn’t a moment. Old age isn’t a moment. Maybe death isn’t either. It’s a process. Some bone cells keep going. Some cell clusters too. Like constellations in the sky. I don’t make sense. I want to go home. The metabolic waste. The enzymatic breakdown. The sarcophages, The feeding animals. The putrefaction. The soil. The new life. I want to go home, Charlie. I want to go home.”

  She didn’t know what he meant. Home could be Mexico. Home could be Rosa. She flipped the pages of the book and kept reading, blundering sentences, skipping whole stanzas, not that it mattered. All she could concentrate on was the plume and wilt of the garbage bag, the rise and fall of Luis’s chest, and how she, only twelve days ago, had cradled John Doe’s heart in her hands and wondered if anyone, or anything, out there cradled hers. If what Luis raved was true, the hands that held her did not belong to a Thing, but to Things, all of Them ready to fill her with new life when she was ready. It was the saddest thought: the ghouls as correctives, a million mushroom clouds come to repair all that had gone awry.

  “You’re going home,” she promised.

  “I want to…”

  “You’re going home, I said.”