Nishimura emerged from the Garden at the back edge of the crowd.
“I don’t need to tell you these things,” Lindof boomed. “You’re smart. You’re the smartest bunch of people I’ve come across, and I’ve traveled many, many miles. Because you’re so smart, you’re going to appreciate what I’m about to say. Those people on the other side of the fort, they’re smart too. You think they can hear me? Hey, people! Come on over! We’re just talking! Look, here come some. Right through the Garden, isn’t that a pretty sight. The ones who don’t, have a chat with them later. Explain our side of things. No need to be violent or anything. Not unless you have to!”
Lindof laughed, and the crowd laughed back. Nishimura was inside the throng now, able to identify individual chortles: the biology teacher who made the soap, the preschool teacher who kept things equitable at mealtimes. He loved these people. He loved them. He kept moving.
“Since we’re talking about violence. We know why we’re here, don’t we? We’re standing right in front of—what do you call this thing? The Brick Magazine? The Brick Shithouse is more like it, right? Do you Canucks know how to build houses or what? Those four deadbeats in there aren’t getting out. Those four hoods. Those four thugs. Can we be honest? Those four are no better than zombies. And what do we do with zombies?”
A man: Shoot ’em!
A woman: Kill ’em!
From the instant he’d slipped his hand from Georgia’s neck, Nishimura had felt as if he were running on rails. Now he skittered offtrack, taking elbows to the ribs and fingers to the eyes, the whaling of frenzied applauders.
“All I’m trying to say to you smart people is, there’s this old idea called scared straight. Any of you remember it? I’m seeing some nods. Preventive justice, my friends. Who really ought to throw the first punch? The bad guy? Or do you punch the bad guy before he even gets the chance? The sad truth, folks, is that’s never going to happen with this sad-sack Council of yours.”
Nishimura pushed through the last line of fanatics and stared right up Lindof’s nose, which, in the stark firelight, had the subtle notches of plastic surgery. Things had been removed from Lindof, but not nearly enough.
As Nishimura took a step toward the crate, Lindof glanced down. His foreshortened nose wrinkled back, his thin lips curled in victory, and his glassy blue eyes flashed in hot glee. In that instant, fifty years peeled back: Lindof was a fifth-grade harasser fueled by a rage he’d never get to the bottom of, and Nishimura was a twiggy, obedient Japanese boy who always came when bullies ordered.
A cuff clasped over Nishimura’s biceps and slung him back into the crowd. He whirled and saw a monster, worse than any childhood tormenter, worse than Soba Ayumi’s Millennialist. He blinked; this was no monster. It was the Face. His mangled features were cryptic, but his bright eyes said everything.
“You sure about this?” the Face hissed under the clamor.
Because the Face allowed no lies to cross his lips, Nishimura replied with a question: “What do you think?”
The Face nodded, his pale blob of a head tossing tiki smoke. “Get up there,” he said, without hesitation, and to thank him, Nishimura, also without hesitation, placed his hands atop the waist-high crate and hoisted himself up. Lindof did not make room for him to stand, a power play, and Nishimura was scared he’d totter off. That would be that, five years of work undone by a slip of the foot. But he bore down, stood tall, and gazed from a higher vantage than he’d ever wanted over his fellow Fort Yorkers.
Nishimura looked at Lindof. Lindof looked back. The Face proved it better than anyone: in the new world, it was more foolish than ever to judge people on their looks. But he wanted to. Lindof’s underdeveloped arm and hunched back made him stand out. Otherwise, he was wildly unexceptional. He had no big ideas. No guiding ideology. He was not particularly intelligent. He was a slob, a lout, a boor. The bad things he’d done, he’d done them simply because he could.
There used to be millions like him.
Lindof stepped to the crate’s front edge. If his left hand wasn’t so small, Nishimura thought, he would be rubbing them together.
“Look, folks! We’ve got Karl up here! You all know Karl. He’s the guy who told you the Council was a great idea. He’s the one who said, hey, let’s not have guards guarding anything at all and see how that goes. We saw how it went, didn’t we? Personally, I’m thrilled Karl has decided to join us, because I, for one, would like a few answers. Wouldn’t you? If he can’t give them, we’ll send him a message tomorrow morning, won’t we? Unless we go ahead and send it tonight. Unless we go ahead and send it right now.”
All That Mattered
The Dying Room was small and Spartan. Its native furniture had been cleared before Hoffmann arrived at Fort York, but she could imagine it well enough. Cheap desks with chipboard drawers, metal rack shelving, a rickety end table that held a broken printer. She had lived with similar décor during her long years at the American Model of Lineage and Dimensions.
Here, all had been replaced by a single stool, a small table, and a dentist’s chair. The last did not exactly put people at ease, though the scariest accoutrements had been removed: the suction tools, the spittoon, the adjustable light, the rotary arm. This left only the adjustable seat itself, which could handle any size of person and, thanks to its nonstick vinyl, was easy to wipe clean. The room’s new-world innovation was chair straps, rigged from old seat belts, and an unassuming wooden box that held the bolt gun.
By dumb luck, Charlie Rutkowski’s old friends Lenny Hart and Seth Lowenstein had been at Hospice when she was brought in. Lenny Hart cut free Charlie’s cable-tied wrists and ankles and strapped them down flat, whispering apologies the whole way. Seth Lowenstein removed the bolt gun and fondled it like a rosary. Hoffmann thought it might as well be. It was the holiest object at Fort York, a tool capable of taking life, death, and undeath all in a single shot.
Either man could prepare the substances used to lessen a dying person’s final minutes of agony, but Marion Castle was the expert. Charlie Rutkowski did not need instructions. She popped open her mouth to accept the willow bark that, when chewed, offered minor relief, and tilted her head to allow the application of menthol and chili pepper capsaicin to her temples and sternum, which generated a cold burn that helped mask pain signals. There was fort-made ether too, but Hoffmann knew Charlie Rutkowski would shake her head at it, which she did.
The room could be better, Hoffmann noted with pinpricks of regret. Plans were in place to create a dimmable light system. Hoffmann’s assistant, Luvvie Lafayette, who was loud but not too difficult to work with, wanted to poll every interviewee during Personal Histories to find out what music, if any, they would like playing when and if their turn in the Dying Room came. Charlie Rutkowski had cried when she’d heard that idea, explaining through tears how she had played music from a movie called The Quiet Man while Luis had died. The idea inspired Hoffmann toward another one. In the library’s special collection room, they could keep file folders of a Last Image for every resident, something for them to focus upon in their final minutes.
Karl Nishimura liked that idea so much, he had given Hoffmann the only family photo he had. The photo was pale and wrinkled, like he had spent fifteen years rubbing his thumb over it. Hoffmann felt strange taking it. The Last Image was still only a concept. But Karl Nishimura insisted she keep it. Should he be mortally wounded, Hoffmann would bring the picture to the Dying Room, wouldn’t she? Of course she would. Unlike every supervisor she had worked for at AMLD, Karl Nishimura was someone it gave her satisfaction to assist.
Over four years at Fort York, especially with the help of Luvvie Lafayette, Hoffmann had learned enough about herself to know she had a way of distracting herself from what was happening. In this case, Charlie Rutkowski’s death. Hoffmann regretted moving so slowly on things. Charlie Rutkowski would die under blazing oil lamps, not dimmable light; staring at blank walls, not a picture of her beloved Luis Acocella; in crashing silence, not
along to a Bruce Springsteen power ballad. In the absence of those comforts, Hoffmann needed to offer her own. That meant doing the thing she had never been any good at: talking.
“Charlie Rutkowski,” she said.
Charlie Rutkowski turned her head in response. Her bright blond hair contrasted with her gray skin. Her eyes, like anyone zombie-bit, had gone a creamy yellow, but for now, they remained her eyes, flickering with stubborn life as her pale purple lips attempted a smile. Hoffmann could not return it. She had never mastered smiling.
“You don’t have to say anything,” Charlie Rutkowski rasped.
“I’m going to…”
“You’re not a blabberer like me. That’s okay. That’s good.”
“I’m going to miss you.”
Charlie Rutkowski cried, long fingers of salt scrubbing paths down a dirty face. Her torso wrenched and flopped, the seat belt straps squealing in sympathy. She balled her fingers, the nails still bearing red smutches of polish she had turned up weeks ago. She gave a great, trembling heave, as if trying to void herself of tears in a single sob. Lenny Hart looked away. Seth Lowenstein wrapped his face in his elbow and cried too. Marion Castle tented both hands to her mouth as if whispering a blessing, and who knows? Behind that hospital mask, she could be doing anything.
Charlie Rutkowski’s wet eyes sprang open. Tears wobbled on her lashes, raindrops on spiderwebs.
“Few things,” she gasped. “Real quick.”
“We have it under control,” Hoffmann said.
Charlie Rutkowski waved this off as best she could with bound wrists. “Few things I haven’t had time to think through. Horses. We tried giving them squirrel meat and it didn’t work. Why horses? You think because horses were in league with humans? Stupid thought. Half-baked theory. Tell it to someone. Or not. There it is.”
“All right.”
“We’re never going to make it to the Global Seed Vault in Sweden. We need to stop pretending that’s going to happen. The Seed Savers Exchange in Iowa is the next best thing. We need to send a delegation. Tell people that was my vote.”
“I will.”
“Now here’s the important one. Richard Lindof. I spoke to him on 10/23. I know it sounds crazy. But I did. Time, man. Blows by so fast. Knocks you clean the fuck over. Lindof doesn’t care about us. About any of this. He’s out for himself. He needs to be stopped. At all costs. All costs. Tell Nishimura to do whatever he has to do.”
“Okay.”
“Last thing. Etta Hoffmann? You safeguard the Archive. Hart, Lowenstein, Castle—you help. Without it, we’re fucked. Without it, it’s all going to happen again. Maybe it won’t be zombies next time. But it’ll be something. Some other kind of sarcophage. Luis called his zombie infection the Big G. Guess now we’d call it the Big Z. Luis. Oh, Luis.” Her laugh was a single icy scrape. “He gave me orders up to the last second too.”
Charlie Rutkowski’s fingers shot outward. Her back arched. Marion Castle tried to apply more menthol-chili balm, but Charlie Rutkowski’s head was thrashing, and so she nodded at Lenny Hart, and the most unpleasant piece was put into place: a thick leather band strapped around the lower half of the face, with small holes drilled so the wearer could breathe and talk for as long as they were able. It also held the head securely in place, which would make it easier for Seth Lowenstein, when the time came for the bolt gun.
The word muzzle was not used, but Hoffmann knew that’s what it was, the person on the chair having neared wild-beast status. Hoffmann felt hot liquid push through her pores and into her eyes. She wiped her face and looked away. Nothing but blank walls. What Last Image would she choose when her time came? Would it be a still from one of her favorite shows, I Love Lucy or This Is Your Life? Would it be a photo scoured from a real estate brochure of the kind of tiny, comforting D.C. apartment she still missed? Would it be a rendering of the New Library, all that inspiring order? No, none of that. When she thought of it, the correct answer was obvious.
As much as Karl Nishimura warned against the pitfalls of materialism, people at Old Muddy filled their living spaces with trinkets or pictures reflecting the person they wanted to be. Hoffmann’s belongings were few enough to fit inside the camo fanny pack she wore everywhere. Included were the color printouts she had taped together on 4,187–05:18, the day she had left AMLD at Charlie Rutkowski’s side. On the left, Annie Teller, robust in her soccer jersey, and on the right, Tawna Maydew, in bed with her calico cat—an odd couple every bit as heartening as Greer Morgan and Muse King.
Already the photos were the last thing she looked at before sleeping each night. She had taken more than one thousand Personal Histories; across them had emerged strange parallels, unexpected repeating details. She puzzled over them by candlelight in the New Library, long after Luvvie Lafayette had wiggled her hips out the door. Twelve separate interviews referenced what sounded like the same zombie. A zombie Karl Nishimura had chanced upon in Taos, dazzling beneath a negligee of frost. A zombie Charlie Rutkowski had spotted outside the firestorm of Guymon, Oklahoma, released amid a flood of undead women. A zombie who had stolen, and even fired, one of Greer Morgan’s bows during the St. Croix catastrophe. A zombie the Face had witnessed clawing from battlefield mud, equipped with steel leg prosthetics and wrist hatchets.
According to the Face’s unbelievable testimony, this zombie had worn a name tag reading ANNIE TELLER. Hoffmann was prepared to believe in radical coincidence. But she was not prepared to believe that Annie Teller had died. The battlefield zombie had been clad in clothing that belonged to an “Annie Teller,” that’s all. The only detail to make her doubt was the one shared by all twelve accounts, that the metal-legged zombie was heading west, always west.
Can we make that our emergency plan? If the world goes gooey, we’ll meet on the banks of beautiful La Brea!
Hoffmann tried to accept she’d never know the end of the story of Annie Teller and Tawna Maydew. This was difficult. The two times she had been unable to finish a TV show’s full run still tortured her. To get her mind off it, she focused on a truth almost as inspiring as the photos. Living in close quarters with other people had provided her with drama better than any TV series. If she was lucky, The Old Muddy Show would never go off the air, with reruns forever accessible via the Archive.
Even now, two women were working on a printing press. One used a repaired wood chipper to pulp plant matter for paper and mixed ink from iron sulfate and oak tree gall. The other forged metal mods from which she planned to cut upper- and lowercase letters and punctuation. The printing press’s first project would be the Hoffmann Archive of Tales from the New World. Once mass-produced, it would be distributed to every community they could find.
This would be good. It would be Hoffmann’s legacy. It was all she had left, now, for Charlie Rutkowski was leaving her. Blood vessels extruded like red yarn from the yellowed eyes rolled back into her head. Pale slime oozed from the mouth holes of the leather band. The yank of her body had reversed, like she was trying to crouch beneath the pain. The very end could be the worst part. Hoffmann leaned in. She did not like to touch people. But people, she knew, sometimes liked to be touched. She tried to do it right. Not a poking finger, but a whole, open palm. She settled it on Charlie Rutkowski’s shoulder. The heat of the woman’s body baked right through her clothes into Hoffmann’s hand.
“Remember when we met?” Hoffmann asked.
Charlie Rutkowski’s bottomless black pupils rotated down from their sockets. Tears had thickened into a gel that jiggled when she nodded. Her voice crackled through rabid froth.
“Our phone calls.”
Hoffmann shook her head. “No, when we met. When you broke into my home.”
Charlie Rutkowski laughed hard enough for beads of red spittle to escape the leather band. Above her medical mask, Marion Castle flashed Hoffmann a cautionary look. At the foot of the chair, Lenny Hart was pulling on rubber dish-washing gloves. Behind the chair, Seth Lowenstein wiped sweat from palms and regripped the bolt
gun. Somewhere outside Hospice, a low-voiced man was hollering, and another man was hollering back, stuff about the Blockhouse Four, though it might as well have been every unwinnable argument ever. All that mattered was right here.
“Your clothes,” Charlie Rutkowski managed. “Staples and tape. A cup of dead bugs.”
“Yum,” Hoffmann said. It was, she thought, a decent joke, which might mean the advice Charlie Rutkowski offered at Slowtown had sunken in: You need to learn the art of the white lie.
Charlie Rutkowski’s laugh distended into a pealing wail. Hoffmann did not have to think first. She held her friend’s shoulder more tightly.
“You were pretty,” Hoffmann said. “Even in a hockey helmet.”
The only sign of Charlie Rutkowski’s miserable grin was the bunching of her cheeks above the leather muzzle. Her reply was labored, gruff with sick lather, hiccupped with pain.
“I was—scarred up—by then. Hair was—too short. But thank you—thank you. I shouldn’t—care. Here I am—about to—about to die—talking about if—if I was pretty. Fuck it. I—was. I’m—glad I was. I was the—sexiest—goddamn bitch—who ever survived—the apocalypse.”
“Damn right,” Lenny Hart whispered.
“Still are, babe,” Seth Lowenstein said through sniffles.
Foul-smelling sweat clung to Charlie Rutkowski’s every pore. Her hair had gone amok with grease. Her skin went from gray to seaweed. But she beamed, and because of it, the Dying Room did not need fancy lighting, a fresh paint job, or record albums. She was the light of the world and all its music. Personal History Transcript #1, Charlie Rutkowski, was kept in a binder in the New Library, and it might have its uses, but this, right here, was all anyone needed to know about this woman. Hoffmann once read of the bokor who stole the Haitian nzambi’s soul. No one would ever steal Charlie Rutkowski’s. Everyone in this room would make sure of that.
The Living Dead Page 63
