by Isaac Marion
Addis watches her intently. “What’s that stuff feel like?”
She looks at him, holding in her lungful, then breathes it out and hands him the joint.
His eyes widen. “Really?”
“Sure. It’ll help you sleep.”
“Mom said it’s bad for kids.”
“No worse than for grownups. Same as coffee and alcohol.”
“But Mom said those are all bad for kids.”
“It’s not that different. Grownups just don’t like seeing kids in altered states. It creeps them out. Reminds them you’re a person, not some little toy they sewed their faces onto.”
Addis looks at her for a moment. “Are you high already?”
Nora giggles. “Maybe. I haven’t smoked in a long time.”
“Dad said weed stunts kids’ brains.”
Fuck Dad, she wants to say. Fuck them both and any advice they ever gave us. When a corpse tells you how to live, do the opposite. Instead, she clings to her herbal calm and says, “Oh well. None of us are gonna grow up to be doctors anyway.”
Addis studies the joint. He puts it to his lips and takes a dainty puff. He coughs and hands it back to her, then stares at the trees for a minute.
A slow smile creeps across his face. “Whoa…”
Nora sucks in another hit and they both regard the moonlit sea of trees, rooftops poking through like distant islands. She is in love with this moment. She glances at her brother, hoping to see that dopey grin again and maybe find out what stoned-child philosophy sounds like, but the grin is gone. His face has turned abruptly blank, and Nora feels a spike of dread piercing her cloud of well-being.
“Mom and Dad left us alone,” he says.
Nora releases the smoke in her lungs in a long sigh.
“They were supposed to take care of us. Why did they leave?”
So soon. She thought she’d have another year to prepare for this. She looks out at the trees and auditions lies in her head.
Maybe they went to find food and got lost.
Maybe they got bitten and didn’t want to infect us.
I don’t know why they left.
But she rejects these. Addis deserves truth. He is a child, but why does that make him deserve it any less? Nora herself is a child; so are her parents—everyone is equally young and foolish in the wide lens of history, and the arrogant denial of this is what unraveled the world. So much easier to think of people as children when you want to lie to them. Especially if you’re a businessman, a congressman, a journalist, a doctor, a preacher, a teacher, or the head of a global superpower. Enough white lies can scorch the earth black.
“Addis,” she says, looking her brother in the eyes. “Mom and Dad left because they couldn’t take care of us. It was hard to find enough food and they wanted drugs and we were slowing them down, so they left.”
Addis stares at her. “Didn’t they care what happened to us?”
“Maybe they cared a lot. Maybe they were really sad about it.”
“But they still did it.”
“Yeah.”
“They left ‘cause they cared more about food and drugs than us. ‘Cause staying with us was hard.”
Nora winces a little but doesn’t back down. “Well…yeah. Pretty much.”
Addis looks at the ground, his face slowly tensing into a scowl. “Mom and Dad are bad people.”
She begins to worry. Is this right? Should a seven-year-old be swallowing a truth this jagged?
“Good people care more about people than food,” he mutters. “They try to help people and don’t give up even when they get hungry.” There is a strange intensity in his voice. His child falsetto sounds lower, rougher. “Only bad people give up.”
“Addis…” she says uneasily. “Mom and Dad are fucked up and selfish but they’re not ‘bad people.’ There’s not really such thing as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ people, there’s just like…humanity. And it gets broken sometimes.”
“But good people fix things. Good people stay good even when it’s hard to.” He is gripping the railing so tightly his brown knuckles have turned white. His face is filling with a rage Nora has never seen before. “Even if they’re sick or sad or they have to lose their favorite stuff. Even if they have to die.”
“Addis—”
“Good people see past their own fucking lives.”
Nora freezes and her eyes go wide. The air around her feels strange.
“They aren’t just hunger and math. They aren’t just animals.”
She grabs her brother’s shoulder and tries to pull him away from the railing but his muscles are stiff as wood.
“Good people are part of the Higher,” he says in that deep growl, and for a brief moment, Nora swears the color of his eyes is changing. “Good people are fuel for the sun.”
“Addis!” she shrieks and shakes him hard.
He turns and frowns at her. “What?”
His eyes are brown. His voice is mousy. The faint rustle of wind in the trees reclaims the night, muffled by the blood throbbing in her ears.
“What…what were you just saying?”
He turns his sullen gaze back to the moon. “Mom and Dad are mean.”
Nora stares at the joint in her fingers. Addis reaches for it and she reflexively flicks it off the balcony.
“Why’d you do that?” he whines, frowning at her. “It made me feel really good.”
“I don’t think it’s…” She’s too rattled to finish. She shakes her head. “No more.”
“Fine.”
They both study the moon, Addis pouting, Nora wondering where the cop got this baggie and if perhaps there were a few other spices mixed into those herbs. That eerie sensation of charged air is gone now, leaving only the familiar fog of a standard high. She settles into it, trying to erase the image of her brother’s eyes flashing like two gold rings in the moonlight.
She aims her flashlight at the moon. She imaginen. trying to s her beam touching its powdery deserts and takes some whimsical comfort from the thought. A small taste of escape from this awful place. Then she swings the beam back to Earth, and it glints off the silver eyes of a rotting bald giant.
She manages not to drop the flashlight and stifles most of her scream. The man is standing in the middle of the yard looking dumbly up at her, his eyes unsquinting in the flashlight’s beam.
“I told you to leave us alone,” she says in a shaky whisper.
The man makes no response. Just stares. He has barely rotted at all since his death. He is grey all over, but the only other sign of decay is his lips, which have gone from full and sensuous to blue and slightly shriveled. It’s a shame. They were his best feature.
“Nora?” Addis says, his eyes wide with fear.
“It’s okay,” she says, scanning the yard with her flashlight and running mental checks on all the doors. “We’re safe up here.” She shines the light back into the big man’s eyes like a cop interrogating a suspect. “Where’s the new guy?” she yells at him in her toughest cop-voice, trying to force some steel into her nerves.
The man looks over his shoulder; Nora follows his gaze with her light and notices the top of a head peeking over the wall of shrubbery that surrounds the fence. She can’t help a little chuckle.
“What’s with him? Shy?”
“Nora…” Addis whimpers, tugging on her shirt.
“I told you it’s okay, Addy, they can’t get up here. Hey,” she calls to the big man. “Where’s your girlfriend?”
He raises his arm and points at the sky.
Nora looks up, frowns, looks back at him. “What’s that mean?”
He continues to point.
“She’s flying?”
He lowers his arm, raises it again.
“Maybe he means she went to Heaven,” Addis offers.
“Do you mean she died?” Nora asks the man.
He lowers his arm and makes no further comment.
“Well hey, I’m real sorry for your loss, but go the fuck away. We�
�re not letting you eat us.”
He doesn’t respond for a moment, then a low moan rises in his throat. The tone is unmistakably mournful, so resonant with despair it makes Nora shiver. When she shines her light into his eyes she sees pain, and it disturbs her in a way she can’t explain. She feels an urge to comfort him. She remembers all the pamphlets she’s read, the stories on the news and the warnings from her parents telling her what these creatures are. The tests done on them, declaring them nothing more than corpses experiencing bizarrely prolonged death spasms. But looking into this corpse’s eyes, she can see that there’s a man in there. And he’s suffering.
She sighs and folds her arms, turning to her brother. “What are we gonna do with these guys?”
“Shouldn’t we kill them? What if they get in?”
“This place is a fortress, Addy. They can’t get in.”
“What if they climb up here?”
“Zombies can’t climb. They have a hard enough time walking.”
“Okay.”
“We’ve got to figure something out, though. They’ll still be there in the morning.”
The big man waits patiently. Nora can hear the new guy pacing anxiously behind the hedge.
“They’re probably just hungry, right?” Addis sht?e big manays. “That one was trying to eat that wolf.”
“They’re always hungry. But they have to eat people; animal energy doesn’t work. Maybe he hasn’t figured that out yet.”
“What about Carbtein?”
“What about it?”
“You said it was like life powder.”
Nora’s eyes drift. “Right…”
“So maybe we could feed some to them? And they’d get full and leave us alone?”
“Addis Horace Greene,” she says in a tone of pleasant surprise. “You are super smart.”
He grins.
“Let’s try it. Toss him one.”
Addis pulls a cube out of the backpack and unwraps it. “Hey!” he calls down to the man. “Eat this and leave us alone!” He throws the cube. It hits the man directly in the face. The man backs away, looking up at them in surprise.
Nora giggles. “That’s food, dumb-ass!” she says, pointing down to where the cube fell. “It’s human energy! You can eat it.”
He looks down at the cube. He looks up at Nora. He picks up the cube, sniffs it, and stuffs the entire thing in his mouth.
Addis laughs. “He likes it!”
Nora watches him chew. “This could be a big deal, Addy. They could put piles of it all over the city and keep the zombies fed. Then maybe they wouldn’t—”
The man spits out his mouthful in a gooey pile of white shards, then stares up at Nora as if waiting for more.
“What the fuck, man?” She pulls another cube out of her backpack and rubs it hard against her wrist, leaving red abrasions caked with white powder. “Swallow it!” She raises it over her head to throw. “It’s human life, it’s what you—”
Something clamps onto her wrist. A withered vise of leather and bone—a hand, but barely. She looks up into a face but finds no eyes, just gluey blobs stuck to the sides of empty sockets. A skeleton shrink-wrapped in flesh is crouching at the edge of the roof like a spider, bracing against the gutter with one hand and gripping Nora’s with the other. Only the tendrils of blonde hair dangling from its scalp tell her this was once a human woman. A warbling hum emanates from its bones.
Nora buckles her knees and yanks against the thing’s grip but it’s shockingly strong—her knees dangle above the balcony floor with her full weight grinding against her wrist. The creature bites the Carbtein cube out of her hand and chews briefly, then tilts its head and lets the chunks drop out in strings of brown saliva. It looks at the man far below on the ground. It looks at Nora. It shoves her hand in its mouth and bites off her ring finger.
What happens then happens so fast it barely reaches Nora’s brain: blurry, disjointed images in flickery black and white. Before the pain in her finger even registers, her brother is standing in front of her and jumping up and swinging his hatchet; the creature’s arm snaps off above the wrist. He is yanking her back into the house and slamming the balcony door and slapping her hand down on the floor and then he is spreading her fingers away from her ring finger and swinging his hatchet down hard. The remainder of her finger jumps away from her hand and rolls into one of the children’s rooms. She stares at it, and when the hoarse scream rises in her throat, she’s not sure if it’s from the pain—a deep, aching agony that radiates through her hand and up into her arm—or from watching her severed finger turn gray, black, then shrivel up and slough away to bone right there in front of her.
“I’m sorry I’m sorry!” Addis is sobbing as he inches away from the blood pooling under Nora’s hand. She wants to tell him it’s okay; she wants to thank him and tell him she loves him so much, but she can see the creature through the balcony door’s windows, crouched on all fours and tearing apart her backpack, crunching greedy mouthfuls of Carbtein and drooling it back out in slimy piles. “Why?” she screams hysterically at the door, watching her and her brother’s future disappear into the thing’s gnarled jaws. The thing just glances at her briefly and keeps chewing, and Nora feels her mind sinking into a dark well.
She wobbles to her feet, squeezing her left wrist tight with her right hand. “Come on,” she hisses and staggers down the staircase. When she hits the bottom she pauses to listen. No breaking glass. No crunching wood. Even the sound of the thing’s frenzied chewing has stopped, and the house is silent. Where did it go? Surely one knuckle wasn’t enough to satisfy its hunger. That little nibble of finger food?
An unhinged giggle escapes her throat. Her head is swimming.
Addis dashes down hallways and sweeps his flashlight over doors and windows, checking the perimeter, but the house is still empty except for the family of skeletons reclining in the living room. Their yellowed faces sneer at Nora as Addis passes his light over them, casting all their awful edges in sharp relief.
She smells that burnt odor again. Plastic? Hair?
“Nora?” Addis whispers.
She sees a wisp of smoke pass through his beam and glances around in the dark.
“These skeletons…how come their skulls aren’t open like the ones in the street?”
Nora freezes. She follows her brother’s flashlight beam to where it rests on the father’s cranium. And she notices:
No cracks. No bullet holes. No gaping lobotomy. Inside that skull is an intact brain.
This is when she hears a noise, but not from upstairs. From the kitchen. A dry scraping, then the metallic squeak of an oven door opening.
Nora turns around. A skeleton is straightening up from behind the oven, holding a smoking baking pan in its bare bone hands. The pan’s Teflon peels off the sides in smoldering flakes. Neither Nora or her brother react as the skeleton carries the pan into the dining room and sets it on the table, where it sizzles on the cherrywood, adding more bitter smoke to the already acrid air. The skeleton is wearing an apron. Bits of long hair cling to its thin film of a scalp. The baking pan is empty.
The father rises from its easy chair in a noisy clatter of bones. The two children follow. They all sit at the dining table and begin dipping forks into the empty pan, serving nothing onto their white china plates, shoveling nothing into their mouths, teeth scraping and grinding on the steel tines. Then in mid-bite, as if surprised by a dinnertime doorbell, they all pause in unison and turn their heads to look at Nora.
Addis is the first to scream. Nora grabs his hand, ignoring the stabbing pain in her finger stump, and rushes to the front door. She is reaching for the latch when she sees two decomposing faces peering through the door’s arch window. She whirls around to head for the back door but the skeletal family is lined up at the end of the hall, staring with those grotesquely cheerful grins. The front door rattles violently. The big man is trying to force his way in. Nora has a flash of irrational hope, imagining for a moment that he is coming to
save her, but then his fist smashes through the door’s window and she sees the look on his face, no longer pain but pure, mindless hunger. Whatever she sahatmomew in him before is rapidly departing.
The man and his partner are at the front door and the family is planted at the end of the hall, claw-like fingers twitching and pinching the air. There is no exit.
Nora pulls Addis into the hallway half-bathroom, a tiny box containing only a sink, a toilet, and a narrow window looking into the side yard. The room is barely wide enough for two people abreast. A good enough place for a last stand.
“Stay behind me,” she whispers. “If they get me…” She doesn’t finish. There is nothing else to say.
She holds her breath and listens. Louder than anything she hears her heart pummeling her breastbone. Throbbing in her temples and roaring in her ears. The tiny howls of her finger nerves, reaching out into open space and grasping around for their cut endings.
The big man has stopped pounding the door. There is silence in the hall. Then footsteps. Slow, one at a time, bone feet tapping the hardwood like dog claws or stiletto heels. The click of a latch. Squeak of a door. More footsteps, much heavier, but softened by shoes. Then silence.
Nora tenses. She grips the hatchet in both hands despite the growing numbness in her right. Addis is huddled behind her on the toilet seat, breathing hard but too terrified to cry. Her wide stance fills the room’s width, shielding him. She indulges in one selfish thought: if he dies, at least she won’t be here to see it. She is his older sister. She gets to go first.
She glances back to tell him she loves him. A shriveled face is grinning in the window. A spear of bone punches through the glass and through Addis. The spear lifts him, a hand grabs him, and he disappears through the window hole.
Nora is alone in the bathroom, staring into a dark yard of neat grass and trimmed shrubberies, just her and the soft chirp of crickets.
Her face contorts and trembles in a soundless shriek. She kicks open the bathroom door. The hall is empty. She runs through the wide-open front door and dashes around the house, waving her flashlight in wild arcs. She sees the back door swinging open and staggers back inside.