“This is impossible!” Nishimura cried.
Hoffmann crashed to her knees before Charlie, lips making fish motions, possibly trying to breathe, possibly muttering, Snoop, Snoop, Snoop. The librarian hurled her rucksack to the road, peeled the Velcro, and pulled out the first aid kit. Good, solid, proper procedure, but Charlie was dizzy and couldn’t pay attention to the right things. She looked at Karl Nishimura, his hands open and trembling, as if even clutching his head was beyond him.
He sobbed, “How could things go so wrong?”
Charlie felt her coat sleeve being pushed back, heard her shirt being ripped. She felt a tourniquet bite into her forearm. All she could think of were Nishimura’s words. He saw more than a bite, more than a dead friend. He saw the loss of one of the fort’s most vital citizens—sentenced to death. Charlie knew that Nishimura understood how the loss might reflect upon him, given that he’d gone against all norms to protect zombies at the risk of the living. In his eyes, Charlie saw the potential turn of the vote and the ruin of the fort, all from one instant of inattention.
Charlie wished he wouldn’t worry. She’d touched the Chief to make things right, not wrong, but the Lion was roaring—
“Was she bit? Are we sure?”
—and Charlie didn’t have the energy to outshout her. She regretted it right away, as she watched Nishimura’s wide, rattled eyes land on, and latch upon, a particular object slung to the Face’s right hip.
Don’t, she wanted to beg, but in place of words from her throat came blood from her fingers. Greer dodged the blood, maybe already poison. First aid kits no longer included butcher knives. Fifteen years had taught them that chopping off bitten parts only prolonged the misery. The tourniquet served a purpose opposite to its original intent, not to slow blood gushing out but rather to slow poison flooding in, to delay it long enough to get the infected to Hospice.
Absolutely no one knew the routine better than Charlie, Next from Hoffmann’s rucksack would be cable ties to bind her ankles and wrists in case she turned early. Her ankles, her wrists—it was really happening.
Nishimura lunged for the Face’s holster—a sight more surreal to Charlie than her onrushing death. Karl Nishimura, figurehead of peace, minister of nonviolence, founder of the Armory that kept guns out of everyone’s hands, grappled for a firearm. Hands that looked to recall navy training ripped away the safety strap, and Nishimura got a palm on the grip before the Face clamped his hand and whirled to catch his ambusher. There was a tussle: Nishimura going at the gun with both hands, the Face, in shock, blocking him.
The Face’s right hand slipped off the holster, surprising both men. Nishimura’s left hand, abruptly freed, arced across the air, his pinkie grazing the Face’s mangled cheek. Despite having no air, Charlie gasped. She knew the Face thought seeing his face was bad enough. Making someone touch it, even by accident, was unthinkable, and the man recoiled like an unmasked movie phantom. Nishimura’s face curdled in self-disgust, but he withdrew the gun anyway, took two big steps to the Chief, and shot the oldest zombie in recorded history, point-blank, between her iridescent eyes.
The detonated skull hit the entry alcove, an aerosol of yellow bone chips, black clods of brain, and a gray miasma of everything else, the stuff of incalculable years lived, and died, and lived, and died. The shackle on the Chief’s ankle jerked, rang once, and was still.
“We’ve been so good to you!” Nishimura howled at the headless body. “Why did you do it?”
Charlie shivered. Could be the blood loss. Could be death’s microscopic claws sinking into individual cells. She let her heavy, grief-pounded head loll back until the Chief, Nishimura, the Face, Greer, and Hoffmann all vanished from sight. Her scalp touched pavement; she was looking across Queen Street upside down.
The incapacitated softie swayed in her stretcher. Multiple white eyes glowed from every dark opening; the density of zombies above the donut shop was no fluke. Rather than groan, they exhaled, dust billowing from dead chests; a mournful lowing like that old soul singer Sam Cooke.
A change gonna come, oh yes it will.
Not only eyes now. She saw lowered heads, slouched shoulders, and curled backs: crick-crack, crick-crack. The locals were stirring as they never had before. First, the maltreated softie, and now, far worse, their elder, dispatched in a fashion against all Slowtown accords. Their limbs jerked in ways only a great dancer might manage. Charlie’s brain betrayed her: they were Fred Astaire, all of them, holding out long, white hands, asking the unanswerable question: Who’s got the last laugh now?
Warmer hands brought her back to a sitting position, back to reality. It was Etta Hoffmann. From what details Charlie had been able to pry over the years, Hoffmann had withstood batteries of psychiatrists and therapists to remain her unemotive self, and Charlie had never been more thankful for that than right this second, when she was fucking dying and everyone else was losing their goddamn minds. Hoffmann abhorred touching more than absolutely necessary, and Charlie wanted to make this easy for her, With her good arm, Charlie took hold of Greer instead.
“We need to leave,” Charlie said into her ear.
Greer nodded. Hoffmann removed a garbage bag from her pack. She wrapped it around Charlie’s left arm to prevent blood leakage, and secured it with tape. Behind them, Nishimura quit gaping at the mess he’d made of the Chief and gazed at the others with childlike puzzlement.
“Unstrap the softie,” he croaked.
The Face was already doing it, on his knees in the middle of a street being usurped by a couple of dozen zombies crick-cracking onto the sidewalks. The Face had neither the time nor leverage to remove the softie from the stretcher without damage. His gloved hands skated through the softie’s mucid flesh to the rib cage, which he gripped like handles. Though he slid the softie to the road as gently as possible, she lost her left arm in the transfer, and Charlie’s poisoned brain tried to excuse it. Her left arm for the softie’s left arm, fair trade. Please let it be a fair trade.
She heard the stretcher clack down beside her. She watched Hoffmann wipe it clean of softie slurry. She heard Nishimura set down the cursed gun before easing her onto the canvas, She felt the Face cable-tie her ankles and wrists. She saw Greer buckle and tighten the stretcher straps. Her body sailed upward, the sagging trolley lines seeming to dive at her like nooses. It was happening too fast. She didn’t know who to think of. Luis? Her mother, who looked like the Chief? She laughed, tasted blood. She was going to have a second chance at being a daughter, rebirthed by a Mother Earth gone mad.
They were on the move at last, booking it in Old Muddy’s direction. Thinking of that good place, the home she’d come to love, her unglued thoughts strayed to another person: Richard. She had to hold out, had to tell them. When Richard arrived four months ago, when Charlene Rutkowski had heard his voice, his full name, she had known, even all these years later, that she and Luis had spoken to him on that first night, right after John Doe’s disposal.
Richard Lindof.
WALK
AWAY
Beowulf
Winter of discontent. What asshole said that. Who cares, The asshole was right. It was winter, and Richard Lindof had himself a whole heap of discontent. He’d gotten to Fort York in mid-July, when it was eighty-plus. Jesus Hayward Christ, wasn’t Canada supposed to be the land of igloos and all that? But it didn’t take long before polar bear weather set in, He’d always hated the cold. Why do you think he kept places in Miami, Vegas, and Hollywood? Miami, he knew, was sayonara, He’d been watching when Fox News, as if it’d been Election Day, called Miami as the first city to go solidly zombie, Owner of a battery of off-road vehicles, Richard had hightailed it the other direction, to Hollywood, where he witnessed firsthand the holocaust of fire that burned the city to ash. But Vegas?
Vegas was still standing.
Even without the evening pyrotechnics, even halfway crumbled, the memories of Sin City’s casinos, towers, spires, pyramids, and pavilions lulled him to sleep each n
ight at Fort York and got him up each morning. The glories of Vegas—the sex-and-fireworks arousals; the on-demand delights of lips and tits and pussies; the sperm-like spilling of two million bucks per day—might yet return, if men like him had the gonads to wise up the delicate flowers.
He’d get it done. Four months at so-called Old Muddy, and he’d already engineered a major vote. Small steps first, giant second. That’s what Pop always said. If he could see Richard now, he’d be proud, for once in his life.
At his peak, Pop Lindof’s energy conglomerates boasted revenues topping fifty billion. You name the fuel, Pop produced it: petroleum, gasoline, diesel, jet, ethanol, as well as the thousands of miles of pipelines to transport crude oil, refined petroleum, and natural gas. His eldest son, Clark, had scooped up the family football, making millions in fertilizers and pesticides, as well as in the cheap production of resins, chemicals, plastics, and polymers. Clark also picked up Pop’s custom of funding lobbying firms that made sure no green groups could impede growth.
To Joe and Jane Average, too busy struggling to pay rent or whatever, the Lindof name meant nothing, but to titans of business and politics—the only sectors to matter—the name was a bellwether of profit. Richard Lindof, the younger son, learned quickly this was as much a curse as a blessing. He was expected to trail-blaze new avenues of earnings. It was tough. Damn tough. Richard might have the headwind of a millionaire’s bank account, and the benefit of being able to fail spectacularly without repercussions, but he also had challenges Clark didn’t.
To start with, he’d been born ugly. Pop and Clark were no George Clooneys, but Jesus Hugo Christ, Richard had truly gotten the scant end of the stick—“More like a handful of bark,” his grandmother had said right to his face. His absurdly long nose had been pared down between senior year and college, but there wasn’t anything to do about his too-short left leg. A built-up shoe was uncomfortable, awkward, and, in Richard’s assessment, unpleasant to look at. So he went without. The result? A permanent limp and a corkscrewed, hunched back.
Worst of all was a withered left arm. The arm was a well of humiliation that never dried. It didn’t matter what his last name was or which fancy academy Pop sent him to after he flunked out of the previous one. He hid the arm with scarfs or book bags when he could, but eventually, it showed itself. It was a hand-length shorter than the other, skinny as a broomstick, and had the pink slickness of burn tissue.
The Lindofs, of course, could afford the best medical care, but the arm was beyond what any surgeon could repair or augment. Pop advised him to seek counsel with the Lord in private, but in public, to never let the arm get in his way. Pop was a religious man. Ribbon-cuttings were preceded by Bible verses, stock-price spikes celebrated with prayer, God’s grace evoked for executive bonuses as well as mass layoffs. Clark wore duplicates of his father’s cross-themed jewelry. Only Linda Lindof, Pop’s wife, referred to as Mother by everyone, right down to boards of directors, was cool on the God stuff, and Richard had loved her for it. If God was good, he wouldn’t have crippled an innocent kid like him! Mother Lindof didn’t hedge; she wrapped her arms around his hunched back, snuggled his long-nosed face, and conceded the point.
Richard spent much of his young life crying about the unfairness of the world. The tear ducts at the corners of his eyes swelled so large, they looked, and felt, like bloated ticks sucking on his eyeballs. Boys laughed that his arm looked like a giant second dick—he should be proud of it! If only that were true. The girls he met, affluent and unmagnanimous, didn’t hide the repulsed curls of their pretty lips. Tears gushed some more, the ticks returning to his eyeballs. Humiliation made him angry. Now that, he was proud of. A stubby leg, an anorexic arm: those were deficits. Anger, on the other hand, he could use.
Mother died of a heart attack when Richard was nineteen. By then, he’d quit crying, He’d never cry again. He turned her death into a bucket of coal, Pop’s favorite fossil fuel, and pitched it into his heart’s red-hot furnace.
As an adult, he got into movies. Of course he did. Movies had a grand history of unattractive men splashing their fetishes onto huge screens, making bank, and getting to screw enterprising starlets along the way. There was no lack of would-be auteurs willing to adjust their principles in exchange for funding. Richard dreamed of being a good sport from the front row of the Academy Awards, as the host poked fun at him for hours before handing him an Oscar. The problem was he didn’t like any of that Oscar crap. Action movies, TV sitcoms about fat guys and their sexy wives—that’s what he liked.
So he threw money at supposedly acclaimed filmmakers anyway—and lost his shirt. Sure, they’d included the T&A he’d required as part of the deal, but Jesus Humphrey Christ, the idiots had drained out all the sexiness! At Christmas dinner, Pop told him to seek Christ for guidance. Clark tsked Little Richie for choosing the riskiest possible market while holding the saltshaker just out of reach of his underdeveloped arm, Richard’s face boiled. Ticks crept back over his eyeballs and fed.
Then, finally, jackpot: Nicolò Bonfiglio, an Italian artista who bounded into Richard’s office in sunglasses and beret, jabbering how he made films not only for the mind and the heart but for the cock and the cunt! Richard, a dick hair from quitting the biz, was transported, and right there shook on a deal to give Bonfiglio the million he needed to make his hot-blooded adaptation of what he avowed was the most revered Old English epic poem.
“Richard Lindof, you resemble Bela Lugosi,” Bonfiglio proclaimed. “You will cameo in my little art film, no?”
Having heard the rude comparison before, Richard had avoided all old vampire flicks, but from the Italian’s fluttering lips, Lugosi had a buccaneer’s brio, and Richard grinned, feeling pleased, Sure, why not? He’d embrace it.
Richard didn’t know what rated as an “art film” in Italy, but he was thrilled by Bonfiglio’s product: Beowulf vs. the Spider Women, a big, sweaty, lusty, bloody flick in which all characters, regardless of gender, went topless. There wasn’t much plot, just how Richard liked it. Beowulf, played by the unknown Stefan Ratzenberger—soon to be known as “the Ratz”—a guy so muscled he looked like a bunch of grapes, used swords, spears, tridents, and hammers to devastate scores of monsters before pounding (in both senses) the spider women themselves. The climactic scene was staged by Bonfiglio to get as much stage blood as possible splashed across the actresses’ heaving breasts.
Beowulf vs, the Spider Women didn’t win any Oscars—in fact, it won something called a Razzie—but it generated five times its budget worldwide, two-fifths of which Richard funneled into Bonfiglio’s sequel, Beowulf vs. the Wasp Women, which made seven times its budget, three-sevenths of which went into its sequel, Beowulf vs. the Cobra Women. Richard loved snipping and framing profiles of Bonfiglio and himself, though he rarely read past the intros. He never had much patience for words, and the articles’ opening paragraphs always had mocking tones he didn’t like.
He heard the same tone from Pop and Clark. Even though Richard no longer cried, ticks still clung to his eyeballs. He didn’t get it. He was a successful Hollywood producer! His name was ten feet tall on movie screens! Every time he had a private viewing of a new sequel (most recently, the excellent Beowulf vs. the Women from Uranus), he looked at the actresses’ delectable bodies and the Ratz’s muscled arms and felt ownership. They made up for what he lacked, Mother would have appreciated it. Like Beowulf at the end of the fabulous Beowulf vs. the Colosseum Bitches of Rome, Richard Lindof had an empire.
How quickly it collapsed. Bonfiglio had thus far cunningly convinced the Ratz to remain a man of mystery, but now the Ratz demanded a publicity tour for their biggest film yet, Beowulf vs. All Women, and he got it, despite Bonfiglio’s frothy cautions. The problem? The Ratz had always been dubbed by the growly basso profundo of a retired sports announcer from Detroit. The actor’s own voice was airy and finicky, and online jerks quickly called him a faggot. Seemingly befuddled, the Ratz came right out with it: he was gay and proud of it.
Richard didn’t give a hoot; the revelation might gin up interest.
But once opened, the Ratz’s mouth would not shut, He might be gay and proud, but he was also sexist and proud, racist and proud, and anti-Semitic and proud, and before the tour was finished, the new film was finished. Production on the Lindof/Bonfiglio magnum opus, Beowulf vs, the Entire Female Population of the Universe, was shit-canned.
Richard’s Google Alerts exploded. The Ratz got the most vitriol, and after him, Bonfiglio, but trailing not far behind was Richard Lindof, the “talent-free” son of an “unsparing tycoon,” a “hunchbacked,” “Lugosi-looking,” “Shit Midas” who peddled “soft-core smut,” “too stupid” to realize “camp value” was the reason “low-IQ idiots” watched the Beowulf “films.” In short, it was everything Pop and Clark had ever said. Jesus Hieronymus Christ, the ticks, how hard they’d sucked at his aching eyes, and to bear the pain Richard thundered around his Hollywood mansion, breaking things, fucking pillows, going a little crazy.
Pop sent him a crisis manager, but Richard turned the man away. He didn’t need help! There was no crisis! The movies were good! He’d make fifty more! None of that was true, but if he let the Lindof estate dig him out, Clark would lord it over him for the rest of his life. Little Richie, who had his nose cut off and now couldn’t smell garbage when it splattered across his face; Little Richie, whose hobble sent him tripping into every business pothole; Little Richie, whose stubby arm couldn’t grab money when it was sitting right there on the table.
The Living Dead Page 57
