by Joe McKinney
“One bullet,” she said.
“I’m sorry.”
She groaned once, and his gaze fastened on her. Her breathing slowed, her mouth working like a fish left on the shore by a wave. She tried to speak and couldn’t. He watched her struggle through two final breaths. There was a phlegmy rattle in her throat and her shoulders sagged, as though at rest after carrying a great weight.
Stillness descended on the lobby.
And then, slowly, laboriously, she climbed to her feet. Her head drooped to one side, her mouth hanging open. A fine patina of dust coated her lips. She reached for him, but he did not move until she began to moan, and when that happened, he slid the collapsible baton from its holster at the small of his back and snapped it open.
She never acknowledged the danger. He sidestepped the woman and slapped her in the back of the head with the baton, knocking her forward onto her face. But he was still dizzy from the concussion bombing and was uncertain on his feet, and the force of his swing also knocked him onto his hands and knees.
In the stillness that followed, he heard something small and metallic drop to the floor.
He looked into the puddle of broken glass below him and saw a single, perfectly clean bullet glittering amongst the dusty rubble. At first he didn’t know what to make of it, but gradually it came to him, the loose round he’d accidentally ejected while clearing a malfunction in his pistol during the fighting the evening before. He’d forgotten it was there.
That one bullet.
He stared at it for a long time. He could have helped her if he’d only had his wits about him. It was like Sarah all over again.
The thought curled around his heart like a cold, wet vapor.
He heard the echo of automatic rifle fire in the near distance, like people clapping in the next room.
“Marines, stand and identify.”
“In here,” Canavan shouted.
Another Marine appeared in the doorway, his rifle at low ready. “Identify,” he said. “Are you wounded?”
It was a question Canavan didn’t quite know how to answer.
§
Fourteen months later, Canavan made his way up the front walk of a one-story, white wooden house in a Nashville suburb and rang the doorbell. It had been raining all that evening and the air was thick with the damp scent of mown grass and pulsing with the sound of frogs. He had researched a lot of dead leads, but now his hunt was at an end. This was the house.
Paul Shepard was the spitting image of the smiling fat man Canavan had seen in Jessica’s photograph, though he had begun to gray at the temples and the bright smile had been replaced by nests of wrinkles around his eyes. He invited Canavan into the entryway but no farther, and the two men stood in a web of soft white light and shadow cast by three glass chandeliers in the hallway that led to the rest of the house.
“My twelve-year-old has the flu,” he said in a whisper. “She just got to sleep about twenty minutes ago.”
Canavan nodded, though images of Sarah rose in his mind like corks that won’t stay submerged.
Then Canavan told him about San Antonio, and about his sister’s final minutes. Shepard listened to it all without interrupting, the expression on his face never wavering.
A woman poked her head around the far corner of the hallway and said, “Paul?”
“It’s okay. This is Mr. Canavan. He was with Jessica when she died.”
The woman looked at Canavan without expression. “I have Cokes and Dr. Pepper in the icebox,” she said. She waited a beat. “Scotch, if you’d like something stronger?”
“No, thank you, ma’am.”
She nodded and slipped back into the quiet darkness at the back of the house.
Shepard said, “You’ve come a long ways, Mr. Canavan. Are you sure I can’t offer you something?”
“I’m fine, really. I ought to be going.”
But before Canavan could leave, Shepard put a hand on his arm. “A moment, Mr. Canavan.”
“Yes?”
“Fourteen months is a long time to spend looking for somebody.”
“Your sister wasn’t completely lucid there at the end,” Canavan said by way of apology. “She never told me anything about you. Besides your name, I mean. It took a while to find you.”
“I don’t mean that. I want to know why you didn’t stop looking. You didn’t have to come tell me this. We all figured my sister was dead. Deep down we knew it. You must have realized that too.”
“I guess I figured I owed it to... I don’t know. To her.” Canavan’s eyes slid off of Shepard’s face. “Maybe to myself.”
Shepard’s brown eyes seemed to soften, and the knots of veins that stitched his temples slackened.
He said, “Mr. Canavan, when my sister left for San Antonio, she did so to escape our mother. The woman was dying of cancer of the small intestine. Have you ever known anyone with that particular condition? She was in terrible pain. There at the end, she was living with Jessica because we couldn’t afford a hospice nurse, and sometimes when I’d visit, I’d see Jessica sitting on the curb in front of her house, crying her eyes out. You could hear our mother moaning all the way out in the driveway. I’ve sometimes asked myself if Jessica didn’t go down to San Antonio knowing what she’d find there. I think maybe she found what she was looking for.”
Canavan just stared at him.
“Did you know, Mr. Canavan, that the Japanese have a word for the people who survived Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Those people with the thousand-yard stares. Those people who cannot hold down a steady job or stand in a crowd without wanting to cower into a ball, or even carry on a conversation that goes beyond a few inane pleasantries. They called them Hibakusha. It means ‘sufferers.’ Our word for it is survivors. But I think their word seems much more fitting, don’t you?”
Canavan said, “Are you trying to tell me something, Mr. Shepard?”
“I think I just did, sir. I think all survivors carry hell around with them like a turtle does his shell.”
Canavan thought about those words several hours later as he washed his face in the sink of a gas station bathroom south of Nashville.
He went into one of the stalls and locked the door and sat on the toilet without pulling down his pants.
In his hand he held the bullet that had dropped from his pocket back in San Antonio. He turned it around and around in his fingers, feeling its gun-oil smoothness, as slick as bacon grease against his skin. It was raining outside, really coming down, too. Out the windows that lined the wall near the ceiling to his left, he could see the wind gusting across the station’s roof, feathering the rain off the corner flashing. His mind was crowded with images of the living and the dead, and those in between. His mind echoed with the screams of the innocents.
He looked down into his lap and studied the single bullet and the pistol that rested there, and he wondered if he was strong enough to go on being a survivor.
Suburbia of the Dead
There are others—I am not the only one—who believe that houses too can become zombies. Urban spelunkers and ghost hunters have built legends out of such places. On Callaghan Hill, for example, on the east side of San Antonio, stands a regal, plantation-style mansion built by Frank Betancourt, whose company brought the first air-conditioning to San Antonio back in the 1920s. During the Crash, Betancourt lost everything, and as the Depression raged, his mansion was abandoned and turned tumbledown. Gutters rusted against the wooden exterior, streaking the fading brilliance of its exterior like runners of blood. Children and birds broke its windows so that it stood, sightless and not sane, over an empty street. There’s a very reasonable, a very economic, explanation for the spread of diseased houses that grew up around the Betancourt House in the following decades. A neighborhood becomes unfashionable. The rich move away. The poor, the gangs, the prostitutes and junkies, move in. But the house, dead and vacant, festers like a polluted wound, and everything around it dies, yet remains upright.
On the Monopoly game
board, you can buy Pennsylvania Avenue for $320, but when I last visited Atlantic City, in 2002, Pennsylvania Avenue was hardly worth that price. The Hotel Astoria, once so gay, so vibrant, so like a ship at sea with bright pennants flying, stood boarded up with nothing but an unpainted scrap of plywood for a door. It now commands a view of Mediterranean and Baltic, where packs of dogs thread their way through piles of debris in vacant, overgrown lots. The paint on the walls of the Faith Temple Church of God in Christ just down the street is peeling down to the curb, one corner of the roof drooping like the brim of an old hat. Pigeons alight on the eaves of the buildings, picking at termites in the wood.
In a way, you don’t have to stretch the imagination too far to see these hulking urban wrecks as zombies. They are created for people, and though not meant for permanence like the pyramids or ancient temples, we expect them to outlive us. We root them solidly in the ground, like mighty trees, like dreams made real, and like our dreams, they have a life all their own. They faithfully shield us, comfort us, sustain us, and in return we fill them with life. They don’t know it, these forsaken buildings, but they too live. Through us, they live. Perhaps that is why they stand for so long after the life inside them fades. Perhaps they feel, though blindly, that loss so intensely, that when it’s gone, they reach for their neighbors, hoping once again to be filled with the rattle and hum of life.
A few months after I learned you’d cheated on me, and after we tore our marriage apart and let the lawyers sort out the pieces, I went driving up and down our street. It was a cold March night, the streets still wet from the rain that afternoon, but I had the windows down. I didn’t notice the cold. I paid more attention to the houses, to our neighbors’ houses. I reached the dead end down by the greenbelt and turned around, came back, still driving slow, still watching the crumbling bricks, the weedpatch yards, the gray, ugly, disturbingly sick-looking houses, and I realized they were dying, corrupted by the dark, dead thing that used to be our home.
The Crossing
A cold February wind fingered its way through the gaps in the walls. The shack where we’d taken shelter had been cobbled together from cinder blocks and castoff lumber, the roof a rusting sheet of corrugated tin held down by baling wire. Rotting sheets of plywood covered the windows. It was thin protection from the zombies massing outside. The place smelled of stale beer and sweat, mildew and rot, and the dim morning light revealed a lot of ice-encrusted trash on the floor—broken beer bottles, tin cans, a scattering of cigarette butts, an occasional spent shell casing—sad markers of others, like Jessica and me, who had taken refuge here.
Jessica hunkered down in the corner to get out of the seething wind. She had a tattered bath towel wrapped around her shoulders, but it was too threadbare to warm even her, withered as she was from starvation. She scanned the garbage, her breath pluming from the cold. I figured she was looking for something she could use. Depravation had made her keen that way. She never missed anything.
“Looks like we’re not the first to hide out here,” she said.
I looked around. It was hard to believe this was luck, but she was right. We were lucky to find the shack when we did. The surrounding countryside was empty grassland, nothing but an occasional mesquite thicket to break up the soul-sucking emptiness of it. There were few places to hide from the zombies. I tried to imagine all the others who had come this way before us, how every bit of garbage on the floor was a marker representing anxious days and nights waiting for the zombies to move on down the road. There was a faded blood stain on the wall above Jessica’s head, spattered, as though from a gunshot, and as I stared at it, I felt overwhelmed by the emotional sediment of desperation and exhaustion that permeated the small space. I never really believed, even as a little girl, that a place could be haunted. But if ever a place had a right to be, it was that shack.
Jessica went to the wall and stared through a crack. I joined her, noticing as I did that the gap in the lumber was smeared with dried blood left behind by fingers trying to claw their way inside.
There were two other shacks that we could see, both about the size of ours, and both surrounded by thick knots of the infected. From one of the shacks, we heard a man screaming. He was one of the people we’d been traveling with when the zombies found us. Jessica had said she didn’t trust him, that he seemed unstable, and from the way he was shrieking, I believed it. But crazy or not, his screaming was driving the infected mad. He’d yell and they’d beat on the walls with renewed fervor, answering his fear with an ululating chorus of moans.
We didn’t know who was in the other shack, but every once in a while, someone jabbed a sharpened stick through the walls at the crowd.
“They’re idiots,” Jessica said in a whisper.
They were idiots. She was right about that. But I was too scared to talk. As disgusting as the shack was, we were safe. I didn’t want to say anything or do anything that would change that. I didn’t want those things out there to hear us talking. I just wanted to shrivel up into a little ball and wait for the horrors to pass us by.
Be the reporter, I told myself. Watch, observe, soak it all in. Don’t get involved. That was why I was here, after all, to report on living conditions in the Zone.
I almost laughed at that.
Like it or not, I was involved. I was involved up to my ears.
Just outside the door, a young female zombie had her face buried in the abdomen of a corpse. One of the men we’d been traveling with who hadn’t made it inside quickly enough. A lot of meat had been torn from his bones, and what was left of the body jerked and twitched as the zombie tore bits of the remaining flesh away. We probably could have slipped by her, but she would have sent up a moan to bring the rest of the zombies after us.
“Why in the world would they bring attention to themselves like that?” Jessica said, still whispering. “They should know better.”
I shrugged, silently praying that she’d stop talking.
“It’s okay,” she said, like she could read my mind. “Just whisper. They won’t hear us.”
“How do you know?”
I looked through the crack in the wall again. Most of the zombies were too intent on beating against the other two shacks, and those few that weren’t with the main group were busy feeding off our dead companions. But still, scared as I was, I didn’t want to chance it.
“They don’t hear so well,” she said. “They’ll pick up on our movement, though, so try not to make any sudden moves.”
She was right, of course. Moving would cause the light coming through the walls to flicker on our clothes, and that would be as good as jumping up and down and waving a flag. Though I’d known Jessica for only three days, I found myself amazed yet again at her common-sense grasp of tactics. She was like a soldier or some hardcore beat cop. Living in the Quarantine Zone had sharpened her survival instincts far beyond my own.
“I bet you’re sorry you came, aren’t you?” she asked.
I was scared like I’d never been in my life, but I wasn’t sorry. Not a bit. I would have been dead without her, and when you get to the point that you can say that about another person, can you really be sorry about it? Doesn’t that create a sense of loyalty that’s worth a world of hardships?
Before I could answer, she put a hand on my shoulder.
“Look there,” she said.
I put my face up to the crack again. Something was happening over at one of the shacks. The building trembled. As we watched, a section of the wall caved in, and the zombies poured through the breach, tearing the two men inside to pieces.
“Oh my God,” Jessica said. There was no shock in her voice, just sadness.
“They were brothers, weren’t they?” I asked.
“Yes.”
The commotion caused even the female zombie in front of our door to join the swarm. My pulse quickened. Looking off to the right of the shack where the crazy man shrieked, I saw that the field beyond was absolutely empty. If we were quiet, we just might be able
to get enough of a head start to leave this crowd of zombies behind us.
Before I could say anything to Jessica, the crazy man burst out of his shack and tried to make a break for it. Several of the zombies lunged for him, causing him to swerve. But he was too scared to control his footing on the muddy ground and fell face-first into a puddle of water. He was up and running, still screaming, before any of the zombies could get to him. Jessica and I watched him go, shocked to see most of the zombies shambling after him.
“Wow,” she said.
I agreed. I was impressed, despite the man’s lunacy. “Lucky for us.”
“Yeah.”
We waited about two minutes, neither of us speaking. Only a few zombies remained near the shacks, and those were busy feeding on the fresh corpses of the two brothers. It looked clear to me, and I reached for the brace on the door.
Jessica grabbed my wrist.
I started to speak, but the look on her face stopped me.
With a glance, she gestured toward the gaps in the wall. A moment later, a male zombie stepped into view. It stopped and slowly turned its head toward us. The thing’s hair was a stringy mess, matted with dried blood. Its beard was filthy. Its mouth swarmed with flies. What clothes it had left were little more than soiled rags hanging from its emaciated frame. The wind shifted. It was cold enough to cut us to the bone, and though it carried the zombie’s stench with it, I didn’t dare shiver or gag. Reacting would get us killed.
After a bit, it went on its way, leaving us alone again.
I let out the breath I’d been holding. “That was close,” I said. “Thanks.”
“Tell me about it.” Jessica pointed to the door. “It should be clear now.”
§
My first night in the Zone I got caught in a sudden, hard rain that left me cold and miserable. I wandered into an abandoned bus depot, looking for someplace warm to sleep. Jessica and the rest of her group huddled in the back, barely visible in the darkness.