The Living Dead

by Kraus, Daniel

  Q.

  I found a motorcycle buried in snow with a sidecar full of fuel, and I took it, and I tell you, I nearly wrecked ten times a day because I couldn’t stop gawking. The life. The life that had come back. I knew chances were slim, but I kept hoping that L-A-C-D-N-B were alive to see it. Because you can’t see it and not be changed. You can’t see it and not realize how badly we’d messed up the whole thing.

  Q.

  No, I did. I did find them.

  Q.

  [Long pause.] I was a different person by then. What would have broken me in half back on the boat—I understood we were part of something larger. You ever see how a group of zombies works together without saying a word? They know they’re part of something larger. Maybe with the machines dead and the white noise gone, maybe we can start to hear what the zombies, and the dogs, and the rats, and the trees hear. Larry … he did what he felt was best. They were all inside our house in Buffalo. What a number they’d done on it. It took me a half day to get through the barricades.

  Q.

  Six lumps under cobwebs thick as a quilt. I thought they were dead-dead until one of the lumps shifted, then all six did, like they’d been woken up. Larry, Atsuko, Chiyo, Daiki, Neola, and Bea. I used their full names when I took care of them. Today, I’d do it differently. They were softies before we had a word for it. Afterward, I wandered around looking at pictures of our extended families. Of course, I got to thinking about the last time the world almost killed itself. And I had this thought. And it’s vain. And I don’t want it to come out wrong.

  Q.

  I’m Japanese American. Half-bomber, half-bombed. Me, and others born like me, we were the solution to that war, the only possible solution. What if that means I have, mixed up in my genes, the qualifications to bring together both halves of this war too? A stupid notion, undoubtedly. But it kept me going to Toronto. I’d been hearing things about Toronto for a long time.

  Q.

  Three hundred people living together and not at each other’s throats? That alone was notable. Yes, they had heads on pikes. Yes, there was the shackle situation in the Stone Magazine. But they were doing something right. I came in via the Gardiner Expressway, which was coated with bright-green grass, and way up there, looking down on Fort York, you see how defensible it is. Did you know the fort used to be on the water’s edge? That’s why they used to call it Muddy York and why we started calling it Old Muddy. It took a couple centuries of landfill to push the water back, but by Year Ten, the natural borders were coming back. Pretty soon, the fort’s going to be waterfront property again, and that’s really defensible. People would need to arrive in boats to attack that.

  Q.

  I know, I know. It’s a tough mind-set to break. Defense—it’s all we thought about in the navy and all I was thinking when I got here, even though, by then, I was seeing softies by the side of the road every day. What stood out to me were the crops. In Garrison Common. In the lots across Bathurst. This had to be a special place. When I went down and said hello, the people were open. The people were kind. You didn’t travel much, so I’m trying to convey to you, and to anyone reading this in the future, how incredibly, preciously rare that was. I was wiping away tears. Later, when I thought about Fort York, what it meant symbolically, it all made so much sense.

  Q.

  Navy officers generally know their military history. The Sacking of York. April 27, 1813. The U.S. invades Canada. This is what’s going through my head while I’m taking a tour of the place. America invaded Canada. If they’d won, there wouldn’t even be a Canada. Why did the U.S. need all that extra land? Because the British had it, naturally. The U.S. sails up in its boats, there’s only a few hundred British regulars, some militia, a handful of Mississauga and Ojibwe. Not only do we roll over them, we’re appalled by them. Any Brit caught fighting alongside one of those Indian savages will be executed, we say. We end up torching York. A year later, the Brits revenge our revenge and burn down the White House. When the Treaty of Ghent is signed, guess what’s changed about the U.S./Canada border? Nothing. Twenty thousand casualties, and the answer is nothing.

  Q.

  Exactly Earth’s estimated population in Year Ten, that’s right. Eerie, huh?

  Q.

  Uselessness. That’s what Fort York represents to me. Before the War of 1812, most people in Upper Canada were American. We were fighting ourselves, you know? 10/23 hits and again: we’re fighting ourselves. That’s human history, and it has to end, Hoffmann. That’s what we’re trying to do here.

  Q.

  Which brings us back to the Stone Magazine. Let’s not be afraid of it. Let’s spell it out for posterity. The Stone Magazine is a bombproof, windowless storage building built in 1815 to keep powder safe. When I arrived, it was filled with zombies. Those crop fields I’d seen? They had zombies working them, pushing plows and harrows. They dangled meat in front of the plows—human meat they tried to keep fresh in buried boxes. Disgusting on numerous levels. The zombies had shackles on their ankles to keep them controllable. People here called them domesticated. They were not domesticated. They were enslaved.

  Q.

  We could. But we could also focus on how receptive these people were to a dissenting alternate viewpoint. I came in with a lot of ideas. They didn’t shut me up. They didn’t kick me out. They wanted to be better people. They were excited about it. All I said was we shouldn’t do a thing until we freed the zombies. We couldn’t build a new world on the mistakes of the old one. It was the very first vote we held, Decree One. It wasn’t unanimous, but it was a plurality, and we led those zombies out to Stanley Park and started breaking off their chains, and then they …

  Q.

  I’m sorry. Do you have a … thank you.

  Q.

  If you could have seen it. Larry had family enslaved in Trinidad and Tobago—if only he could have seen it. If only video cameras were still around, and WWN, so the whole world could see. Once a few zombies had been freed, they didn’t come after us. They started trying to free the other zombies. Trying to chew through the chains. Breaking fingers off on the shackles. I didn’t know what to make of it, exactly. No one did. But one thing was for sure. We knew, without a doubt, we had done the right thing. We got out of there, climbed up the expressway, and watched the zombies walk away. To where? Queen Street. Slowtown. They chose it. Our second vote, Decree Two, was to let them keep it.

  Q.

  I made it clear from day one I was no leader. A leader, in fact, was the worst thing we could have. What we needed here was the opposite of Olympia. We needed to disperse power. End the patriarchy. Share burdens and blames. Be brothers and sisters, not leader and followers. You begin doing it, it starts to feel so obvious. We’d make a haven. Maybe a heaven. At least give it a shot. We’d never have so clean a slate ever again. Hence the Custodial Council.

  Q.

  It’s how we end up at the Armory. It’s not so radical when you think about it. The fact that it felt so scary was the proof we needed to do it. We needed to break bad cycles. The Armory was our chance to put our money where our mouths were. Well, that’s a bad metaphor. Seeing how Decree Three was prohibiting the use of money.

  Q.

  Everything! Guns were everything. How you caught your dinner. How you protected yourself from zombies. How you asserted yourself against rivals. But guns were also how you stole food from children. How you murdered. How you raped. Having guns was handling fire. Eventually, it engulfed everything. Look at me. It engulfed my whole life. So we took what we’d believed were our most valuable possessions and locked them up. Bricked them inside the Stone Magazine, the same place we’d enslaved the zombies. They’re right there. You can get to them. But you’ll have to spend some time breaking them out, right in front of everyone. It’d feel like defiling a temple, wouldn’t it?

  Q.

  To that I’d say, ask the children. Are you going to interview children? To them, the Armory isn’t some reservoir of latent violence. It
’s a tombstone. If they grow up viewing guns the way older generations viewed medieval torture devices in museums, nothing would make me prouder.

  Q.

  That’s the best question of all. Because if it’s just us, what good will it do? I take back calling Old Muddy a special place. We can’t hope for that. We’ve got to hope it’s not a special place at all, that all budding societies are headed in the same direction. My last stop before Buffalo was Detroit. Jenny Pagán was from there. That’s how we named our escape plan: Operation Bills-Lions. I promised I’d get her home, and obviously, I failed. But I went there to see if I could find anyone who looked Puerto Rican, and I actually did—Jenny’s parents, Jorge and Lorena. They were living in a high school gym. All my military stuff came back. I stood straight, and saluted, and didn’t move until they saluted back. I told them what an exceptional sailor their daughter had been, and how, if there were honors left to give, I’d recommend her for all of them. I said I was sorry. And they said, no, they were the ones who were sorry, and they cried till they slumped to the floor, and I thought to myself, Whoever these people were, whatever they’re sorry for, they’ve changed. We’ve all changed. We just might have a shot.

  Libido Dominandi

  The Face devoured the New Library’s history books, but it was still WWN’s offbeat, end-of-broadcast “kickers” that stimulated his strangest musings. One kicker profiled a Palm Springs high school teacher who’d created a utopia exercise for his brightest seniors: a homespun biodome in which they’d have to live for two weeks. WWN’s soft-news correspondent kidded that it could get a little Stanford Prison Experiment in there, prompting the teacher to catalog quirky historical notions of utopia. The one the Face remembered was Cockaigne, a medieval fantasyland with wine rivers, pancake trees, pastry rain, and roast geese flying overhead. To get there, you had to eat through three miles of rice pudding.

  Compare that to Fort York’s squat, utilitarian, two-hundred-year-old wood, stone, and brick structures, which looked no better with four hundred anxious people turning the grass to mud. This rinky-dink hodgepodge was going to be their paradise? The Face lodged his fists into the aching small of his back and watched Nishimura plod, rather like a zombie, back toward the fort. He had a sudden worry Nishimura would turn around and, knowing full well the Face never lied, ask him if he still believed Old Muddy could pull it off. Right now, the Face would be forced to reply that he wasn’t sure.

  When he’d arrived in Year Eleven, he’d been a quick convert to the navy man’s sweeping vision. It was a tough row to hoe, Nishimura told the Face, while literally hoeing a row of sorghum. He was right. The urge to own was so overpowering even the Face had to force himself not to hoard what he scrounged. An intact love seat, for example, better used in the fort’s commons, or the perfectly preserved carving knife, best employed by those on cooking duty.

  The Face’s face made him an unlikely spokesman for Nishimura’s designs, but the anchor desk had given him persuasive chops, and he’d helped convince Old Muddy residents to gamble a passable present on an idealistic future. The first phase was heavy on classic, commune-style egalitarianism. If you labored, you got everything for free. The Custodial Council served short, monthlong terms, responding to ideas, filling out labor sheets, and overseeing workaday choices. Nishimura said the Council was conceived opposite to military hierarchies.

  “Being on the Council should suck,” he said.

  Mission accomplished: the Face could report firsthand that council work was like being chased by chickens—the squawking kind, not the zombie kind. Someone turns up a trove of canned soups, delectables like Broccoli Cheese and Chicken Won Ton and French Onion, and guess who got the fun job of choosing who got them? One of the waterwheels powering the fort’s machines breaks at three in the morning, and guess who had to rustle up the repairman? In those too-late or too-early hours, shivering and yawning, the Face felt as slow as any zombie.

  What Nishimura got right was this: it felt good to finish a custodial spell. Public service was a phrase WWN folks loved using to describe their jobs, forgetting their six- or seven-figure salaries. The Face recalled a partisan talking head complaining that President Bush, after 9/11, had missed a once-in-a-generation chance to galvanize Americans toward a volunteerism not seen since World War II. A few decades late, the Face agreed. Selflessness would save the world.

  Nishimura slipped through the Circular’s embrasure. The Face watched residents swarm him like a zombie horde. Beyond that, he could not see much; the sun had dipped, and he barely noticed Greer slinking south toward the bay, the curve of her bow looking straight next to her bowed back. He didn’t know what to do. Follow Greer, make sure she was all right? Stay here and wait for Charlie to finish her journey? Or go after Nishimura and be the loyal deputy he’d always been? There was no real choice. If the results of tomorrow’s vote were in danger, his responsibility was telling the truth to those who might ask him for it. He walked down the Hospice stairs, his ankles, he thought, giving out a small crick-crack.

  The Face greeted the soap sentry, washed his hands, and leaned against the cannon, glad that the dim, flickering light of the fort’s tiki torches hid his face. The people inside these stone walls were sick with worry; the odor resembled that of the zombies who’d crawled from General Spalding’s battlefield. Maybe Muse King had been wise to vacate after Richard Lindof had landed.

  The world is rough, Nishimura once said, but utopia is delicate.

  The Face let the cannon take more of his weight. He wished it could take the weight off his mind. He thought back to the long night of conversation he’d shared with Nishimura and Charlie after he’d arrived four years ago. It was his best memory since 10/23. It might be his best memory, period. When else in his life of disinterested models and disdainful coworkers had he felt truly accepted?

  The three of them had been in Fort York’s Mess Establishment, built in 1815, or so said the placard, and the cleanup of a community meal had turned into one of those magical nights you quit having after college, when like-minded souls intoxicated you with directionless joy and daylight had yet to find the cracks in your notions. They’d lollygagged like they’d had a case of PBR to plow through. Nishimura, looser than the Face ever saw him again, put his feet on a table and expounded on ideas he’d developed across Mexico, the United States, and Canada.

  “You two religious?” he asked.

  “My folks bled rosary beads.” Charlie lay flat on the floor like a girl at a slumber party. “I wonder if faith gets stronger when you don’t think about it. Is that blasphemous? But doesn’t it feel true?”

  The Face blew out a whole row of candles before taking a closer seat. He was still new and eager to spare these people from a clear sight of him. “I never thought much about it back in the day.” He shrugged. “Never thought much about anything.”

  “My people were Shinto or Buddhist,” Nishimura said. “I never practiced any of it, and what I saw on Olympia didn’t particularly endear me to Christianity. But that’s the kind of fervor we’re going to need. We need people to make a leap of faith.”

  “Not going to happen,” Charlie said. “Everything they had faith in went kaboom.”

  “What did they have faith in most?” Nishimura pressed.

  Charlie sighed. “I knew a guy whose faith was gadgets.”

  “I was like that,” the Face said. “I was logged on 24–7. I don’t know why. They told us all the time our devices were being used against us, to steal our information, or sell it. But I kept believing anyway.”

  “Little nuclear bombs we carried around like kittens,” Nishimura agreed. “The problem with so-called smart devices was you could personalize them. You could follow who you wanted to follow. See and hear things you already liked. They were hand mirrors. Of course we were obsessed with them. The trick now is to replace that mirror with a window. No more seeing ourselves; we see each other.”

  “It won’t work,” Charlie said.

  “That�
��s the spirit, Rutkowski,” Nishimura said.

  “Everyone’s going to feel like we’re moving backward. Even I feel it!”

  “You’re talking about inspiring people with ideas like they used to be inspired by religion,” the Face said. “The problem is, religion relied on miracles. We used up all we had. People in biblical times would have thought our pre-10/23 life was full of miracles. Our blind could see. Our crippled could walk.”

  “Our dead,” Charlie added, “could live.”

  “And all we used it for was to hurt each other,” the Face said.

  “That’s what gives me hope,” Nishimura said. “One thing I know for sure is, we weren’t happy back then. We weren’t satisfied. What’s different now is we can actually see the world again, beautiful and unspoiled. I really believe we can use it safely if we operate under animal philosophy, taking only what we need.”

  “How many people are there here?” the Face asked.

  “Hoffmann’s running a census,” Charlie said. “But it’s got to be, what? Five or six hundred?”

  “With that many, you might be able to pull off what you’re talking about,” the Face said. “You might be able to say, ‘Don’t split the atom again.’ ‘Don’t make mustard gas.’ ‘Whatever you do, don’t invent social media.’ But with a thousand? Two thousand?”

  “I read a population needs ten thousand to avoid inbreeding,” Charlie added.

  “Libido dominandi,” Nishimura said. “Lust for domination. Meet enough sea captains, you learn the phrase.”

  “Latin,” Charlie groaned. “Give me a choice, I’ll take apocalypse over med school.”

  “Somewhere in Connecticut, I was poking around an old shopping center and saw this security camera,” the Face said. “Few minutes later, I saw another one. When I started looking, I saw them all over the place. There must be thousands of cameras like that, some still running on wind or solar, and all they’re staring at is other cameras. A feedback loop, no humans in sight. That’s our legacy. A world we’re not even part of. We can’t do that again.” He shrugged. “I think that means I’m with you.”