by Joe McKinney
Thankfully, no one made any stupid speeches. They simply nodded, and we filtered out into the white-hot brilliance of a San Antonio afternoon in late March.
I went to my vehicle and started it, thankful now that I had taken the time to fill it up and that I had made periodic trips out here over the last month to start it and keep the battery charged.
I looked at my cell phone, fully charged, and wanted to cry. It had been days since I’d been able to reach Tina on the phone. The closest I’d come was a voice mail, telling me that they’d decided to go to Montana, but the message had been punctuated by a scream and cut short.
There had been nothing else.
Desperate, I called Tina’s number and outlined my plan. I was going to go by my parent’s place first. If they were there, wonderful; if not, I’d gather what information I could and track them down.
But I thought I knew where they might be, where they would go if they could. Paradise Valley in Montana, the place where my dad and brother and I had gone on the vacation of our lives. It was a secluded paradise, a bulwark against the undead.
I had a wonderful memory of that place, looking down on an abandoned apple orchard from the sun deck of some friend of my dad’s. The bears would come down and eat the apples on the ground, most of which had fermented, and by the time dusk rolled around they were drunk on rotten fruit. More than once I had watched as the wasted animals staggered off into the dark of Yosemite’s forests.
And as I put my Nissan in gear and drove out, I had visions of watching those same bears with my daughters, laughing as they teetered off drunkenly into the darkness.
Please God, that’s my only wish, my only prayer. Let them, and me, live to see that day.
Bury My Heart at Marvin Gardens
For Jon Michael Freiger
1978-2011
Jon rolls double fours. He lifts his marker, the old shoe, his favorite, from GO and drops it onto...
§
...Vermont Avenue, where the zombies are drifting thick as fog through the cracked and weedy streets, picking their way through the rusting hulks of abandoned cars, searching, always searching, for food. The mother catches sight of one in particular, broken arms swinging limply at his side, ribs showing through tatters of decomposing flesh, flies swarming about its head, and she’s worried. She’s seen these before, the wounded ones. The ones that can get around more or less on their own power are predictable. They come straight for you, attack without strategy. But the wounded ones, like this one, are far more dangerous. They hide. They wait. They become part of this desiccated world, one of its hidden dangers. She knows if she loses sight of him, he will surface again when she least expects it.
She sets the wheelbarrow down quietly and finds her daughter’s hand. She squeezes the girl’s hand, just to let her know everything is going to be okay. She doesn’t believe this, but she knows she has to be strong for the child’s sake, and so she squeezes encouragement.
The little girl meets her mother’s gaze and smiles. It’s a pretty smile, lots of healthy teeth. She’s a pretty girl, too good for this world.
The mother surveys their surroundings and shudders. Everywhere she looks she sees a world in ruins. So many buildings have been reduced to rubble. But where the walls still stand, she sees exposed lath and standing garbage and doorways without doors. Not a window has gone unbroken. A sign that reads PEDESTRIAN CROSSING has been bent over and nearly flattened by an out-of-control vehicle that still rests in the ruins of a dress shop, busted glass all around it catching the oranges and scarlets of morning light like an explosion frozen in time. Inside the car is a corpse, motionless and decomposed, but probably only dormant. Given a reason, it could walk again.
In the wheelbarrow is the body of the woman’s dead husband. The woman, on the night the man died, went to great trouble jamming an ice pick up the dead man’s nose to make sure he wouldn’t come back as one of them. It was an agreement between them, something she never wanted to think about, let alone do, but did anyway when the time came because she loved the man with a love so deep it made her ache inside. She still aches. She aches all the time. Even when she’s numb, she aches. She’s told the daughter none of this and has no intention of doing so. She’s told the girl only of the dead man’s enigmatic wish to have his heart buried at Marvin Gardens; though now, as she looks around at the wasted landscape that is Atlantic City, and watches as the dead man with the broken arms and the flies swarming about his head wanders off, she wonders why.
Why this place?
§
Jon buys Vermont Avenue. At $100, it’s a no-brainer. The cheap properties on the first leg of the square are good buys. Purchase cheap, build hotels, gouge your opponent later. They are investments in the future. It is the strategy of a man who thinks long thoughts, who goes deep into the future of things.
That’s Jon, the studied approach. The logical approach.
I am different. I am the wild-scramble opponent, the one who buys, buys, buys, and worries about building hotels later, once I see what I’ve got to work with.
We have never decided who is right, Jon and I.
He rolls a puny two-one combo, but it is enough to skip over Jail and land him at...
§
....St. Charles Place, where the weeds grow up through the sidewalks and the streets have buckled and blistered in the endless cycle of seasons since the world gave way to zombies.
There are no apartments here, no casinos, no hotels. This is an urban wasteland of vacant lots and mounds of trash and the occasional dog sniffing out a rat among the piles of lumber and brick dotting the landscape.
Nothing of any substance grows here.
Only grass and weeds.
And the woman carrying the wheelbarrow and the mysteries of good men dead and the little girl with her hand clasped tightly around her belt can only stare around in wonder and confusion and bootless anger at the injustice of it all.
Why here? she asks the corpse in front of her.
Why, for the love of God, here?
§
The game is just part of the reason I’ve asked Jon over here. I’m a little worried about my kids. They fight with each other constantly. Jon, he’s a wizard at things like this. The man has a way of getting to the heart of things. He’s made it his life’s work, understanding people, and especially kids.
It’s nothing serious, I tell him, nothing bad. They don’t do drugs. They don’t try to hurt themselves. Nothing like that.
“They’re just little kids,” I say. “I know that. But damn it, they fight like two little beta fish. Put ’em next to each other and the next thing you know, they’re trying to claw each other’s eyes out.”
“Exactly,” Jon says, and meets my questioning gaze and won’t look away.
“Huh?”
“Exactly,” he repeats. “It’s nothing like that.”
I shake my head. I know he’s parroting what I’ve just said, like any good psychologist, but I don’t understand.
“It’s nothing like that,” he repeats. “Not at all. They’re good girls. They’re your girls, part of you. They love you, and you love them.”
“Yes...?” I hope he’ll explain more.
“Remember that. Even when you’re mad. Even when you feel like you’re not getting through. They are part of you and you are part of them. You may not think you’re getting through, but you’re imprinting yourself on them. Years from now they won’t remember why they fought, or even that they fought at all, but they will remember you. It’s pretty simple, when you boil it down to what really matters.”
I don’t have an immediate response. It’s true, every word. Everything he’s said is right on the money. But it’s a hard thing to remember when you’re mad.
“It’s your turn,” I say.
§
On Illinois Avenue, the mother has to move quickly.
Screams, the sounds of fighting, fill the air.
She pushes the wheelbarrow between two
ruined cars and pulls her child underneath the lead vehicle. From their hiding spot, they can see the street, smell the tinge of death on the morning breeze.
Soon the screams of rage and desperation turn to panic.
Whoever they are about to meet is close.
Very close.
A young woman, her left arm limp at her side and blood streaming down her body, runs into the street. Three men, zombies, stagger from an alley behind her. Fresh blood stains their mouths, and the mother knows they have just fed. They’ll be strong. But they’ll also be focused on the young woman.
The mother’s heart is a good one, and it’s telling her to go help the woman.
But she’s smart, and her head is telling her to stay down, stay quiet, keep the child quiet. She has responsibilities, and they extend far beyond this moment.
The child whimpers as the zombies fall upon the woman.
The young woman’s screams seem louder than any human could possibly make, and they go on and on and on. The mother can only put her face in the dust and hold her baby and tell herself that there must be a reason, there has to be a reason.
Or else nothing in life makes sense.
And it has to make sense.
It has to.
§
Jon buys Illinois Avenue for $240, looks at me, and smiles.
“You bastard,” I say. He has just secured two-thirds of the board.
He raises his eyebrow, like Spock, only it’s not a casual sign of surprise that the universe is not as logical as it should be, but a smug, self-satisfied gesture denoting imminent victory.
He knows he has me.
“You bastard,” I say.
“Your turn,” he says.
§
Jon has me over a barrel. He has both Boardwalk and Park Place, and I have surprisingly little. Not for the first time I wonder about the fickleness of luck.
“Damn it,” I say. “I surrender.”
He nods. He’s not above enjoying a victory.
“A pity, though,” he says.
“What?”
He nods at the board. “Nobody got Marvin Gardens. I’ve always wondered about that place.”
§
The mother has studied this place, she knows the history of Illinois Avenue, because this isn’t the first time she’s wondered about her husband’s fascination with Atlantic City. She knows how the city started as a dream, a conversation among wealthy investors and railroad tycoons on a lonely, wind-swept beach, and how it ended as a nightmare.
Like the rest of the world.
Like her own life.
She knows that the city died long before the rest of the world fell beneath the relentless tread of the walking dead. The zombies are really only an afterthought to this place. They are the symbols of a world that has moved on, but they are redundant here. This place needs no reminder of the glory of the past, or of the wasteland that is the modern age.
She looks down at the body in the wheelbarrow, the man whose eyes had shown such surprise, such fear, such unknowable depth, at the time of his passing, and who were now closed against all time, and she wondered what was in his mind when he asked to be buried at Marvin Gardens.
Did he see the old world splendor that R. B. Osborne saw back in 1852 when he glibly described his vision to his investors, his pen scribbling out the names of the city to be—Oriental Avenue, States Avenue, Tennessee Avenue, New York Avenue, Pennsylvania Avenue? Or did he see the world of Charles B. Darrow, who stole the game of Monopoly from Lizzie Magie, daughter of the prophet of the single tax theory?
It is hard to tell, for her husband, who was so kind, so intelligent, so impossibly giving, was also—sometimes frustratingly so—an enigma to her.
She looks at the only map of the city she has, an old Monopoly game board, and doesn’t understand. She wonders if she ever will.
Why this place?
Why would he want his heart buried at Marvin Gardens?
§
The crowd of zombies seems to materialize out of nowhere. One moment, the mother is putting on her brave face for her daughter, telling her how they are going to bury Daddy in his favorite place, and the next she is ducking for cover, pulling her daughter close to her breast.
She’d been forced to leave the wheelbarrow out in the open, and that made her mad. It seemed like a failure somehow, like leaving him was a weakness on her part, something she didn’t do right. But the zombies don’t like dead flesh. They rarely touch a corpse, even a fresh one, and so it’s a chance she feels she can take.
The zombies pass the wheelbarrow. They hardly seem to notice it. One by one, they shuffle by, dragging their feet, pulling their weight endlessly through a world without meaning, without purpose, without even the hint of redemption. Even the grave is an empty promise for these dead ones.
Then one of the zombies stumbles—and howls in pain.
Mother and daughter raise their heads above the tall weeds where they’ve taken shelter, searching for the injured one.
Zombies don’t make noises like that.
They damage themselves all the time, tearing hands and arms reaching through shattered windows, shredding bare feet on busted glass, and then they get up and walk away. Soundlessly. No emotion, no pain, no nothing.
But this one...he is standing up, holding his bleeding wrist in his other hand.
One by one, the dead turn their heads slowly in his direction.
Faker, the mother thought, and pushed her daughter’s head back down into the tall weeds. She has seen fakers before. They live by pretending they are one of the dead, by walking among the dead. They live, if it can be called living, by abandoning all sense of self, by surrendering completely to the emptiness and pointlessness that is death in life, death on two feet. They live by giving up.
Her husband hated these people.
She looks down at his corpse, the runner of dried blood from his left nostril where she drove in the ice pick to keep him from coming back as a zombie, and she sees a man who lived his life like every moment mattered, who understood the importance of his life, even if he didn’t fully grasp its meaning. His life stood for something, and his death was painful, and too soon, for the truly good are always gone too soon.
She looks again to the street. Already the zombies are closing in around the faker, moaning, clutching at the air in anticipation of the kill, and she feels nothing but disgust. Her husband never would have given up like that. Never.
She watches the man sink to his knees. She watches him drop his head to his chest rather than lash out with the last breath he has. The mother cradles the child’s head in her hands, covering her eyes. But she herself does not look away, because what’s going on out there reminds her so much of how strong her husband was, and how much is gone from the world.
She doesn’t like it, doesn’t want to admit it, but the faker’s silent acceptance of death makes her feel a powerful sense of pride in her husband.
He had been a man worth having.
§
Our second game has gone down smoothly, like a fine whisky.
As usual, Jon has picked up a lot properties through his slow and studied method. But it has cost him. He has property, but little development, and he has next to no cash in reserve.
I, on the other hand, am sitting pretty. Fat on cash.
I have three houses on Pacific Avenue, and when he lands there and counts his cash, he has no choice but to concede.
“Too bad I didn’t land on Marvin Gardens,” he says.
I look up as I clear the board.
“I like Marvin Gardens,” he says, catching the look in my eye. “It’s special.”
I wait for more, but it doesn’t come.
After a pause, I finish clearing the board.
§
The mother knows what’s coming, even before she passes the jail. She can hear the zombies banging their fists against the chain-link fence. She can hear the musical clanging it makes, even over the awful moaning
of the dead.
She doesn’t look at them as she passes down the alleyway. They are sticking their shredded fingers through the diamond-patterned wire, surging against it, pressing against it with the combined weight of their dead bodies, but she ignores them. All she does is move her daughter to her other side, putting herself between the little girl and the hungry dead.
The little girl is brave. She doesn’t shrink or break down, the way some adults the mother has seen have done. This makes her proud.
But the thing that really strokes her pride is the way the little girl hitches her backpack up onto her shoulders, looks up, and smiles.
So young, and so brave.
It’s then that the zombies break through the fence. It had seemed so secure just seconds ago, but now it’s leaning into the alley like a drawbridge caught on the way down, and the dead are pouring over it, filling the alley behind her.
And now, in front of her.
The mother has no choice. She gently lowers the wheelbarrow. Even in death she can’t imagine dropping him. Then, before the child can speak a word, she scoops her into her arms and runs, leaving the body of the man she loves in the middle of the alley.
He’ll be safe.
The dead don’t attack the dead.
The mother finds a bakery with a large oven and puts her daughter in it. Deer hide their yearlings in the tall grass, she remembers from the years she lived in the Texas Hill Country. Perhaps it will work now.
And some atavistic impulse seems present in the daughter as well, for she understands without words. She doesn’t ask questions, but instead sinks into the darkness at the back of the oven. From the depths, her brown eyes seem to shine like jewels under halogen vapor lights. She is so vulnerable, so beautiful, so incredibly trusting.