by Isaac Marion
Julie watches the sun change from a fierce point of light to a sad orange blob that sags against the horizon like rotting fruit. She shivers when it disappears, imagining evil eyes snapping open in the shadowy trees, hungry mouths hissing at last, at last. She knows this is stupid; her fear of the dark makes her feel like a child instead of a strong and capable twelve-year-old. There are monsters in the dark, of course, plenty of them. But there are just as many in the light.
“Bedtime,” her father announces, and pulls off into a deserted rest stop alongside I-5. Julie’s legs are numb, so she gets out of the truck and paces around, stamping her feet to revive the nerves. Her father opens the rear doors and grabs his shotgun off the ceiling-mounted rack. The rack holds three weapons: a big Army-issue riot gun for him, an automatic twelve-gauge for his wife, and a twenty-gauge Mossberg Mini for his daughter, which he procured after noticing the bruises her big Remington was inflicting on her shoulder. He gave it to her for her tenth birthday. His thoughtfulness almost made her cry.
“What are you doing?” she asks him.
“Perimeter c fry.heck.” He starts toward the bathrooms.
“Hey Dad?”
He stops, turns.
“Is Seattle exed?”
“It’s still a question mark in the Almanac, but probably. Big cities take a while to survey.”
“Do you think we’ll find people there?”
“Unlikely.”
Julie releases a low sigh that gets lost in the wind. Her father finishes checking the buildings and heads out into the evergreen blackness. Her mind suddenly recalls one of last night’s dreams and begins to flood with images—a deep, murky hole lined with teeth, a voice from the bottom beckoning her father—so she retreats to the Tahoe and sits in the driver’s seat next to her mother. Her stomach growls like the voice in the hole. She reaches around the seat for the bag of Carbtein, tears open one of the little foil packages, and pops a dusty white cube in her mouth.
“Hungry?” she asks her mother, offering her a cube as she attempts to chew the one in her mouth. Her mother stares at it like she’s never seen one before. Like she hasn’t been eating these nutrient-packed billiards chalks and little else for months. She scratches at the sunken brown spots on her neck and shakes her head. Julie forces herself to swallow the lump of gritty, astringent mortar in her mouth, then slumps into her seat, relieved to have it over with. She begins to wonder what they’ll do when that bag is empty, but she stops herself. The bag is still half full.
Her mother flips the radio on and leans her seat back, lying with her arms folded, gazing at the ceiling. The radio hisses static as always.
“At least there’s no commercials,” Julie says, anticipating a big laugh for such precocious wit.
Her mother’s lips curve just slightly. “I would love to hear a commercial. I’d listen to commercials all day if it meant there were people out there making and selling things.”
“Even those suicide pill commercials?”
“Especially those.”
Julie doesn’t understand this comment but it creates a cold feeling in her chest. She looks away from her mother.
“Has your life gone on long after the thrill of living is gone?” her mother intones through a bitter smirk. “Are the dreams in which you’re dying the best you’ve ever had?”
Julie starts flipping through stations, looking for something to change the subject.
“Knock, knock, knock on Heaven’s door, with Enditol. Because only the good die young.”
Each station plays a different genre of static. White noise, brown noise, blue noise. Then she lands on 90.3 and her mother’s smirk vanishes.
“Mom!” Julie squeals under her breath.
For the first time in 3,208 miles, there is music on the radio.
“It’s that song!” Julie says.
An oldie. Something from the late ‘90s, long before pop music began to resemble horror movie scores. Julie has never particularly liked this song, but her mother is transfixed as it fights through the clouds of static.
Starting and then stopping…taking off and landing…the emptiest of feelings…
Julie’s mother watches the radio as if the singer is inside it. Her eyes begin to glisten.
Floors collapsing, falling…bouncing back and one day…I am gonna grow wings…a chemical reaction…
The song ends with an ironically cheerful guitar strum, and a kstr wingsyoung woman's voice claims the silence, soft and shaky between spasms of static.
This is KEXP, 90.3 Seattle, bringing you the perfect soundtrack for huddling with your loved ones waiting to die.
To Julie’s surprise, her mother laughs. She wipes at her eyes and grins at her daughter, who returns the grin twice as big. They both turn to the radio.
If you’ve been listening for a while I apologize for the repetitiveness. We usually try to keep things diverse here, but our door’s being battered down as I record this and I didn’t have much time to put a playlist together…
Her mother’s smile starts to stiffen.
But anyway, if you’re hearing this it means they didn’t break the equipment, so enjoy the loop for as long as the power lasts. Consider it the last mix tape from us to you before our big breakup. I’m sorry, Seattle. America. World. We knew it couldn’t last.
Julie’s mother hits the radio’s off button and sinks back into her chair. Her smile is gone with no trace.
“Mom?” Julie says softly.
Her mother doesn’t respond or react. Her damp eyes regard the ceiling, as blank as a corpse’s. Julie feels horrible things crawling in her belly. She gets out of the truck.
Her father is still securing the area, marching around with his gun in position, all procedure and tactics. Her mother has told her stories of when they were both young and wild. How they met on an airplane while in line for the bathroom, how he stole her away from her friends at the airport and showed her around Brooklyn, how they holed up in his tiny apartment for days and played music and drank wine and talked philosophy and causes and things they wanted to fight for. She knows he changed when the world changed. Adapted to survive. And there is a small part of her—a tender, bleeding organ that’s been battered and bruised for too many years—that’s starting to envy him.
She wanders out toward the trees that surround the rest stop like an infinite void. She sticks her earbuds in and clicks play on an iPod she found on a dead girl somewhere in Pennsylvania. There is a song on this dented, cracked device that she reserves for moments like these, when she needs a reminder that there’s still a world out there. That her family is not alone on a spinning ball of rock.
The song is called “For Hannah.” She has never heard of the band and the song isn’t especially good. What makes it her favorite is the date listed on the file. It’s the most recent date she’s seen on a song by at least two years. Everything else in her collection was released back when there were still remnants of a music industry, money to be made and goods to spend it on. She has come to believe that this song—a sappy little ballad strummed clumsily on an out of tune guitar—is the last song ever recorded in the daylight of civilization.
Can you hear me? it begins. Look up…
She stands at the edge of the forest, listening to the indefensible beauty of the singer’s flat, tuneless tenor, and whispers the melody into the shadows.
The tall man watches the girl. He stands absolutely still, staring at her through a gap in the bushes, and although she is so close he can see the freckles on her ears, she does not notice him.
What is she?
She is different from him. Smaller, softer, yes—he knows what a female is—but also something else. A fundamental contrast that has nothing to do with her physical shape. Something ephemeral that he can’t explain.
The brute knows what it is. The brute is ecstatic about it. Its cloud of hands swarms around the girl, caressing her face, hissing into the man’s mind:
This. This. This.
; The man doesn’t understand. He feels his hollowness lurching toward her, an angry prisoner flinging itself against the walls of his belly, but he doesn’t move. What? he asks. What do you want?
THIS.
His foot lifts off the ground. Left leg up, forward—
“Look up… Look up…”
He halts. An incredible sound is coming out of the girl’s mouth. He has heard similar sounds inside his head—words—but they are always short and blunt, devoid of tone, like the thud of heavy boots on asphalt. This is wondrously different.
“The clouds are parting…the window’s open…and don’t you own a pair of wings…?”
These are not just words. They bend and stretch and toy with pitch in a way that somehow elevates their meaning, infusing them with something beyond information. He feels the hairs on his neck stand up.
TAKE! the brute insists, growing furious. FILL!
Not yet, the man snaps back. I want to see if…
He opens his mouth and forces air through it. A harsh, phlegmy note honks out of him like an old bicycle horn. He wants to blush, but his blood is too congealed.
The girl’s mouth clamps shut. She pulls out her earbuds and scans the trees with wide eyes.
“Dad…?” she says, backing away.
The tall man starts to move toward her, but another person suddenly appears by her side, this one holding a gun.
“What’s wrong?” this much bigger person says in a much different voice, harsher and less tonal, closer to the boot stomp of the tall man’s thoughts.
“Nothing,” the girl says. “I thought I heard something.”
The sound of her special words—singing—rings in the tall man’s head, gently teasing the tone-deaf idiot that lives there. Come on, they seem to say. Try a little harder. The idiot in his head backs away from the girl’s voice as he backs away from her father’s gun.
He is glad he has information in his head instead of feelings. He is proud of himself for knowing what to do. The brute screams in protest as he creeps back into the forest, but he shoves it down. When he is a safe distance away, back in the smothering darkness of the woods, it finally surrenders. The cloud of hands goes limp, dejected, then slowly gathers itself and floats off in a new direction.
Soon, it growls at him, and although the man still isn’t sure what he’s agreeing to, he nods.
Soon.
Nora is in Washington D.C., at the community center, doing practice volleys with her teammates.
Bump. Set. Spike. vstr w/spap>
She has managed to reduce everything to this. When a cult burns down her school, when a soldier corners her in a dark room, when she finds her parents on the floor with a pipe and powder, laughing and screaming like things born in Hell, she comes here. She puts on shorts. She hits the shiny white ball again and again and as long as she’s here, the ball is all she has to think about. Keeping it aloft.
The community center is the one place that hasn’t changed much in the upheaval. Its ping-pong table, its stained furniture, its snack machines and painfully earnest free condom dispensers—everything is still familiar, even the tired faces behind the help counter. Not because the place is somehow safe from the decline, but because it was already at the bottom before things fell. Nothing here will change until the bottom drops out. Until the president appears on TV to give the final goodnight and good luck, to cut everyone loose to scavenge in the dark.
“Girls!” a staff lady shouts over the sound of their squeaking sneakers. They all stop and look at her. The ball hits the floor. “You should come watch this.”
They file into the lobby. All the staff people are crowded around the small TV in the corner of the room. Someone raises the volume until the speakers rattle, and Nora strains to make out the words through all the digital distortion and static.
“Logic is no longer enough,” says a man being interviewed in what appears to be a bomb shelter. “We have moved past the point where science alone can offer answers to our predicament. It’s grown too large for that.”
“What’s he talking about?” Nora whispers to the staff lady. The lady doesn’t respond or move her eyes from the screen.
“My question for you, Doctor,” the host says, “is whether you felt this way yesterday, or if this is simply a reaction to today’s news.”
“Today’s news?” The doctor chuckles bitterly. “This is not today’s news. This is us finally acknowledging what’s been happening all over the world for years.”
“And when did you learn about it?”
“Last summer. A few days after my wife died in a car crash, when I woke up and looked out my bedroom window and saw her standing in the front yard, gnawing on a human head.”
“What’s he talking about?” Nora asks more loudly. Still no one looks at her. Signal interference spatters the screen with red pixels. She hears low laughter in the girls’ restroom.
“What is our reaction to that? How can we understand it? In the space of a few decades we’ve suffered nearly every catastrophe we ever imagined and now, with civilization already on the brink, we’re given this. Our friends and families, all the casualties of all our conflicts, getting up again to keep the tragedy flowing. To consummate it.”
The signal sputters and cuts off, detaching the two men’s heads, scrambling their faces in a flurry of pixels and ear-piercing noise. Someone clicks the TV off and there is silence.
“What’s he talking about?” Nora shouts, but no one answers her. Her friends stand with their backs to her, staring at the blank screen, unblinking. A warbling hum begins to fill the room.
She glances out the window and sees her baby brother playing alone in the mud of the playground. A gaunt black wolf stands behind him, tongue lolling out, grinning. Her teachers and teammates stare at the blank TV, ignoring her screams as the wolf’s jaws stretch open.
• • •
“ {gn=e worNora!”
Her eyes snap open just in time to see Addis shutting the window curtain and dashing back to the bed, his eyes wide with panic.
“It’s okay, Addy,” she murmurs groggily.
“There’s a…there’s a—”
“I know. He was there last night. He can’t get in.”
She climbs out of bed and approaches the window, fingering the Colt’s trigger. She opens the curtain. The big man doesn’t seem to have moved all night.
“Go away!” she shouts, her face mere inches from his. No reaction. She waves her hands in aggressive shooing motions. “Get the fuck out! Leave us alone!”
Nothing.
She raises the pistol and points it at his forehead.
Addis jams his hands against his ears. But before Nora can give her brother his next lesson on the brutality of modern life, the man pulls back. His expression remains blank, but he backs away from the window and steps aside like a gentleman holding a door for a lady. It unnerves Nora more than she would have expected.
“Get your stuff,” she says to her brother, still aiming the gun.
“Aren’t you gonna shoot him?”
“Not yet.”
“Why?”
“Because he backed up.”
“But isn’t he a zombie?”
Nora hesitates before answering. “I don’t know what he is. No one does.”
She slips her backpack on and undoes the door locks, keeping her eyes and pistol trained on the man through the window. Addis huddles close behind her, gripping his hatchet.
“We’re coming out!” she yells, having no idea if the man still understands language. “You stay away from us or I’m shooting you!”
She opens the door a crack. He doesn’t move. She opens it the rest of the way and steps out, keeping him firmly sighted. “All clear, Addis?”
Addis runs to each corner of the motel and peeks around, securing the perimeter like a seasoned police officer. His father taught him at least one thing well.
“All clear.”
Nora walks backward toward him, not taking her
eyes off the big man’s empty silver gaze.
“Nora?” Addis says quietly.
“What.”
“You should shoot him.”
She glances back at her brother to make sure the voice really came from him.
“Auntie Shirley said we’re not supposed to let them stay alive. If you don’t kill him he’s gonna kill someone else.”
“I know what Auntie said.” She keeps her sights on the center of the man’s forehead. “And Dad said don’t waste bullets on other people’s problems.”
“But Dad is mean.”
Her teeth are grinding. The gun is getting slippery in her hands. The big man watches her calmly, standing a safe twenty feet away, arms hanging at his sides.
She doesn’t want to shoot him.
She doesn’t know what possible good it could do to spare his life, but she knows she wants to. Is it as simple as empathy? That uniquely human reluctance to kill? It can’t be. She’s killed two people since her fourteenth birthday. Yes, she did it in self-defense to protect her family, but does that really matter? Is the difference between killing with satisfaction and killing with horror nothing more than context?
“I can look away,” Addis offers.
“What?”
“If you don’t want to shoot him ‘cause of me, I can look away when you do it.”
“Addis, just shut up, okay?”
He shuts up. There is a long silence.
“Hey!” Nora shouts at the man. “You’re infected right? You’re not just mute or sleepwalking or something? You’re capital-D Dead?”
No response. As if she needs one. As if his skin, his eyes, and the gaping wound in his stomach weren’t enough. She knows exactly what he is, but…
“Hey,” she almost pleads, knowing she is talking to no one, nothing. “Can you understand me?”
He nods.
Nora gasps. Her gun lowers.
She hears the creak of a door behind her and whirls around. A naked woman is standing three feet from her face, skin gray and mottled and split open in places, head tilted to the side, a beard of brown blood running down her mouth and neck. Her jaw creaks open and she moans, a hollow sound of pain and hunger, and she lunges.