by J. B. Beatty
“Fucker. Are there mushrooms on the pizza?”
“No, just pepperoni.”
“Good, because if there were mushrooms, I would have to kill you.”
“Today,” I say, “I just might believe you.”
“You know, mushrooms aren’t even from Earth.”
“They have them at Kroger’s. That’s Earth.”
“No, seriously. Scientists can find no such thing as a fossil of a mushroom. That means they weren’t even on Earth during the Creation and the dinosaurs and Adam and Eve and all that.”
“Have you thought of being a science teacher?”
“No, really. The spores that grew mushrooms came on an asteroid from Outer Space. It’s on the Internet. Do you even eat them? Because you shouldn’t.”
“I actually don’t like them either.”
“Oh my god! Don’t you see? We don’t like mushrooms, and we’re alive. Everyone else likes mushrooms, and they turned into cannibal fucktards!”
“Julie didn’t like mushrooms.”
Maggie slaps her hand on the counter. “Well, Julie was a bitch. God, I hate jock girls. And she was one of the worst. I mean, they party and screw just as hard as everyone else, but in front of coaches and parents and teachers, they’re all fucking angels. And she was one of the biggest hypocrites of the fucking hypocritical bunch…. And what were we talking about?”
“Um, space, mushrooms, and… killing your friends.”
“Oh yeah! So after I shot everyone, I grabbed some more supplies from Tommy’s house. I found a couple of flashlights, some jugs of water, a camping stove, and a ton of ramen noodles.”
“Phew! I was worried we wouldn’t have enough salt in the Apocalypse.”
Maggie hits me. “Shuttup. I love ramen. Oh, and I got three shotguns, too. And a buttload of shells.”
“Nice image there.”
“Whatever. All I know is that all the rules have changed, and when the sun rises in the morning, this is going to be a completely different world than any world we’ve ever known. Kind of like school’s out forever.”
“We need to sort this out,” I say. “We need to know what we’re up against. We need a plan.”
“I thought we’d just kill the crazy cannibals and survive,” Maggie says. “If this were a movie, that’s what we would do. But if this we’re a movie, we’d both be great looking.”
I look at her and clear my throat, a technique which occasionally helps me get the nerve to say something. “You actually are what most people would call attractive.”
“I know,” she says, tossing her hair back and burping for punctuation. “I was just trying to be modest.”
“Ah,” I say. And this moment feels like so many other moments that I’ve suffered through. “Speaking of movies,” I say.
“Speaking of movies…”
“I’ve been trying to think of what kind of zombies we have here.”
“They’re not regular zombies, I can tell you that for sure. A chest shot kills them.”
“Maggie, you do know that zombies are fictional, right? And so there’s really no such thing as ‘regular’ zombies. In fact, our use of the term ‘zombie’ itself is probably questionable.”
“You’re the one that called them ‘zombies.’ I was calling them ‘crazies,’ or in the heat of the moment, ‘motherfuckers.’ ”
“It might just be more accurate just to call them ‘flu victims’.”
“Very fucking hungry flu victims.”
“Yeah. They are eating people. And pets.”
“Okay,” says Maggie, “but their minds have changed. They’re vicious. And they don’t seem to be terribly smart. They can’t talk.”
“I wonder if they will get over it in a few days. Maybe just some rest and chicken soup, and they’ll shake it off and be normal again.”
Maggie laughs derisively. “Oh, yes, I’m sure it will all blow over. They’ll wake up with just a little hangover and say, ‘Boy, did I tie one on,’ and then they’ll take their kids to the park—oh wait, they ate their kids.”
“Relationships are complicated.”
“I don’t think it’s going to blow over. I think we’re fucked. But there’s a plus side.”
“What?” I ask.
“They’re not rising from the dead. It’s a flu thing. But from what I saw, no one dead is climbing out of the grave.”
“Were you at a graveyard?”
“I drove by one at about 95mph. Nothing happening there. Totally dead.”
“Then reanimation isn’t happening. At least, not that we’ve noticed.”
“So why aren’t we getting this flu?”
“You got me,” I say, opening the oven to pull out a slightly burned pizza.
As we tear our meal in half, I say, “We still need a plan.”
“You didn’t like mine?”
“I loved it. It just needs a little massaging.”
“Okay, genius. Take over the group project again. What should we do?”
“Well,” I say while chewing, “if help is out there, we need to find it. If there’s a safe place to go to, we need to get there. And if the world is overrun with renegade gangs of bikers who are hell bent on raping us all and making us take meth, then we need to get someplace really safe.”
“Raping all of us??”
“You’ve seen the movies.”
“Gross.”
After we eat and wash ourselves off, we both end up on the living room floor. I find pillows.
As the conversation slows, I say, “You know, this is really weird that you and I would end up together.”
Maggie is silent for a while after that. Then she says, “We’re not together.”
6→YOU HEAR NO NEWS
Sunlight streams into the house, despite my best efforts to close all the curtains the previous night. Somewhere, I am sure, birds sing the joy of their tiny hearts, oblivious to our changed world. I lift my head, and Maggie is on the other side of the room, peacefully sleeping. Her face radiates a calm beauty that will drastically change when she later awakes and starts cussing. In a way, all seems good in the world for now.
Then, however, I start going down a mental checklist of horrors. I tried to kill myself yesterday, a milestone of the utmost horror, one would normally think. At the end of the day, it hardly warranted a footnote.
Mom is dead and laying somewhere beside the house. The same with Julie, who killed Mom. Shannon is in dog heaven, drifting out to sea in a metaphorical sense. Dad, probably dead, or working on making other people dead. Roving packs of zombies—for lack of a better term—terrorize the neighborhood. No one is home at 911. I have no idea if this catastrophe is local or worldwide. Here is where someone else might say, “I feel all alone in the world.” Yet I actually feel less alone than I did yesterday morning, the morning I had decided would be my last. I am with a beautiful young woman who knows how to use an automatic weapon, and for all I know, we are the last two people on Earth.
We got through the night without being attacked and eaten. We have that going for us. Little steps.
I am sore from sleeping on the floor. I get up and stretch. Walking from room to room, I peek out each window to see what the night laid on our doorstep, so to speak. I see nothing of note, except for a gathering of dead bodies in front of our garage.
I check my phone for messages, and there are none. Everything’s the same as it was yesterday in that sense. In the kitchen, I get a bowl from the cupboard and fix myself some Lucky Charms. I take it upstairs to my room and fire up my desktop. Someone has to be home out there. It takes a few minutes to warm up, and then I start hitting the sites. The Internet is still working—yet another clue that this is not a movie I’m stuck in.
CNN says, “Is epidemic global?” I skim that article and several others that are linked to it. Whatever is happening, it’s certainly widespread. They mention New York, Washington, and Los Angeles, as well as Paris. One expert calls it a “flu gone wild.” Another doctor s
ays it’s too soon to call it a pandemic. Mostly, though, the articles are speculation by news guys and their consultants. Nothing is official.
Buzzfeed has an article called, “14 reasons you should fear the zombie apocalypse—No. 12 will make you want to kill your own children!” Being childless, I skip the article.
My Reddit feed leads off with, “The Kardashians all dead? Spokesperson has no comment.”
I check my email—nothing. I check Facebook—nothing except a cryptic status update from Charlie Watson, saying, “Goodbye cruel world.” Creepy, but then the datestamp says he did it two days ago, back before anything weird happened. So it’s not zombie creepy so much as it is regular Charlie creepy. Maybe he was killing himself too. But then, he always overshared and I think he would have told me.
I check Twitter. Aleena Bradburn says, “Great, now I’m sick too. Thanks Mom!” Cody Patwell says, “Has anyone seen my family? This is weird.” Josh Werblo says, “Sure hope they’re filming Walking Dead in my hood, because #zombieswalk.” For all the clues those tweets give, they are overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of one word messages: “Shit” “HELP!” “Crap” and “goodbye.”
The top trend on Twitter is “#fluzombies.” People are still tweeting out there, but they’re all alone. No one seems to have an answer, or even hope.
I try to see more, but every time I hit reload, nothing comes up. Eventually I start to wonder if Twitter is now down. I try to leave my own tweet, “Who’s still out there?” but it won’t fly. Yet it works when I try my phone. I send it and sit at the keyboard waiting to see someone respond. I almost fire up “Resident Evil.” Or I could just go back downstairs and live it.
“Arvy?” Maggie is up and looking for me. I head downstairs.
“Just checking on the world,” I say.
“Any news?”
“Well, a little. It seems to be widespread, maybe global. No one’s got any answers, and the number of people asking questions seems to be dropping dramatically.”
“We should check the website for FEMA, or the military.”
“Yes, we should have. I should have. Looks like our Internet is cut off now, at least from our router. I’m still getting it over my phone.”
“Check the TV.”
“Sure,” I say, heading into the living room, “but my hopes are small. We get our Internet through the TV cable people.”
“Great. I hate those fuckers.”
I turn on the box. No channels are happening. “Everyone hates those fuckers,” I say. “And I’ll bet you money that even in a zombie apocalypse, even being off the air, they’re still making money like there’s no tomorrow.”
7→UNSPEAKABLE CARRION OF THOSE BATTLEFIELDS
Iuse my phone to get to the FEMA website, where the message says to stay home and treat the flu by resting, staying warm and drinking plenty of fluids. It adds: “Please do not go to clinics or emergency rooms. The fast-moving nature of this flu variety has created huge backlogs nationwide and the best treatment is rest and fluids.” That’s all.
“We should hit the road,” says Maggie, pulling her boots on. “In the grand scheme of things, this is not a safe place.”
“Yes and no. I mean, I will gladly go someplace safer. We need to. But until we have an idea of where to go, part of me just wants to stay put. And maybe the authorities will get this under control soon…”
She looks at me like I have needs so special even a gunshot wouldn’t fix them. “If a big enough pack of those fuckers smashes through that sliding glass door, we’re in trouble. And do you remember the guy who shot all those crazies in front of your garage last night?”
“He was probably a good guy. We need to find him.”
“No one is a good guy anymore, Arvy. He had a gun. For all we know he’s been cleaning his guns for 20 years just waiting for open season on people. He’s using zombies for target practice, and once they run thin, he’s going to start killing everyone on his hate list.”
“We’re probably safe. I mean, it’s America and we’re white.”
“You dork,” she says. “No one’s safe. He probably hates teenage drivers because they tailgate. And brunettes, because his first wife was one and she ran off with a skeezy bartender. And liberals, because everybody hates liberals. And Chevy owners, because he has a crappy Ford pick-up. And school bus drivers, because they’re always making everyone wait…”
“You have quite an imagination.”
“Don’t you see? The point is that we have no frickin’ idea where this guy is coming from! We need to be very careful about waving to anyone with a gun and yelling, ‘Hey, we’re over here! Come save us! Oh, and I have boobs!”
I sit on the chair on the other side of the room. “Um,” I mutter. “I don’t really think, or believe, that your b… your mammary situation is a factor here.”
“Well,” she says, a bit calmer now, “that’s because you’re stupid. At least on this sort of thing. If we have total meltdown of our government, then there are no rules anymore. Haven’t you seen any movies? Guns are power. And boobs are just trouble. They’re the goodies in the candy jar that guys looked at with desire before all this hell broke loose. Now that the only power is guns, they will think they can grab anything they’re hungry for. You remember the pussy-grabber—if that wasn’t about power than I don’t know what is. And every guy thinks like that, below the surface.”
I reach down to tie my shoes. “A lot of guys, I’ll grant you that. Not all guys. I don’t think like that,” I say matter-of-factly.
“Then you’re either a liar or a freak.” She stares at me coldly with eyes that could easily pull a trigger. Just like when I would answer a question correctly in class. I can’t bear to look back at her, so I concentrate on my shoes.
We hear a gunshot from the street. It’s close. I creep to the window and move the curtain just an inch so I can peek out. An old man stands at the curb with a rifle. He’s staring at the house, and when he sees the curtain move, he yells, “Hey, are you alright in there?”
I turn to Maggie and she’s already up, checking the clip on her AK.
“I just want to make sure you’re okay,” the man says. He really sounds old. I take another look. He’s got a green oxygen tank on wheels that he drags around with him. Both his hands are on the gun and he keeps nervously looking around.
Maggie looks at me, nods, and walks to the front door. She opens it a crack and yells, “The fuck you want?”
The old man seems taken aback by her vocabulary. He adjusts a tube going into his nose and closes his eyes for a second. Finally, he says, “Nothing. I don’t want anything from you. I saw you drive in last night and I wanted to see if you are okay. There don’t seem to be many survivors in the neighborhood.”
“Are you the neighborhood watch?” she shouts.
“No, I’m John O’Reilly. I just live over there. At 5513.” He points down the street.
“You know him?” she says to me.
I take another look and think I remember him. He looks really old now.
“I think so. I think he’s okay. But he never gave out Halloween candy.”
“How come you never gave out Halloween candy?” she shouts angrily.
O’Reilly cocks his head, confused. Gray hair rings his scalp, and it is long and unkempt. He’s wearing a pink bathrobe. “Are you asking me why I didn’t give out Halloween candy?” he says in a quiet voice.
“Yeah, kind of un-American, don’t you think?”
“Young lady, I am very American. It’s a church thing. No one at my church gives out Halloween candy. It’s a Satanic holiday.”
“You know, grampa, I should just shoot you for saying that. I should shoot your oxygen tank and just blow up your petrified AARP ass!”
He stands there, nods. “I think that would prove my point. Besides, kids eat too much sugar anyway. It rots their teeth. And so many kids are fat nowadays. Fat and they think if they so much as take out the garbage, they deserve a trophy.”
Maggie shuts the door and puts her back to it. “He had to go there,” she mutters.
“Where?” I say cautiously.
“I’ve gained 10 pounds since high school. I don’t need Mr. Oxygen Tank lecturing me on obesity in young people.”
I look out again, and O’Reilly is still standing there. Still looking around for the enemy. I decide he’s probably okay, and I need to calm Maggie down a bit. “I really don’t think it counts as a lecture if you just threatened to blow him up. You’re the one that asked him about candy…”
“Speaking of which, do you have any? I’m a total witch if I don’t get some sugar or coffee or food in me first thing in the morning. I have low blood sugar. If I don’t get something to eat, I’m going to have to shoot him.”
“Pop-tarts?” I offer.
“Yes. Now.”
I run to the pantry to do her bidding. I hear O’Reilly’s voice outside, asking again if we’re alright. I find the chocolate Pop-tarts and bring her the entire box. She rips into it, and has one inside her in three bites.
“Oh mfy godff, that’sf fgoodf.” Crumbs spill out her mouth.
“Please don’t talk with your mouth full,” I say. She gives me the finger.
When she is finally done chewing, she closes her eyes and smiles for a moment. Then she turns and opens the door and politely says, “Do you want to come in?”
O’Reilly looks around and says, “You won’t shoot?”
“Not unless I decide to.”
He looks straight at her for a moment, then grabs his oxygen tank handle and pulls it along behind him as he comes up the walk. He steps in, but has trouble pulling the tank over the threshold behind him. Maggie reaches out and helps him.
I guess I’m the host, so I say, “Please, have a seat, Mr. O’Reilly.” Maggie looks down the street and locks the door.
“Thank you.” He nearly collapses on the couch, but seems relieved. He is wheezing, and he grasps the tube going into his nose again.
“Are you okay? Can I get you anything?”