The World Itself Departed

by J. B. Beatty

  I nod. It’s cold outside and it doesn’t really hit me until he turns off the engine. I want nothing more than to lay my head back on the seat and close my eyes, but I feel I must stay alert. It pays off soon enough, as a helicopter flies above the road and keeps moving to the west. “There,” RIP says. “Twenty more minutes, it will be back at its base, the pilot will be sitting on the toilet. Then we haul ass straight home.”

  “Bunker sweet bunker.”

  He looks at me oddly. “So, you’re kind of an intellectual type…”

  I look at him like he’s crazy. “Not hardly.”

  “Well, you’re some kind of smartass.”

  “That’s been said.”

  “What do you want to do when you grow up?”

  “Options seem a little limited, these days. Who’s hiring?”

  “Smartass. I meant before all this shit hit the fan.”

  “Oh. That. No idea. Not sure I even pictured getting old enough to have to do anything with my life.” Except end it, I think.

  “That’s a little pessimistic. The world ain’t that bad. The politics got a little messy for a while, but there’s still opportunity.”

  “Ah, it wasn’t the politics. I never paid attention to politics. And now I guess politics are gone for good.”

  “It’s never gone. There will always be people jockeying for power. And in this world now, I think the key is staying low profile. Whoever they are, they think that most everyone that counts is dead. We just need to lay so low they think we are dead.

  “Death is the only safe place anymore,” he adds.

  Eventually, RIP steps out of the truck, tilting his ear to the sky. He sniffs the air—I’m thinking he must have seen that in a movie once. Then he nods and gets back behind the wheel and turns the key.

  We race away from Traverse City. Not only are we trying to avoid detection, we’re also racing the sunset, since driving after dark is dangerous in itself—losing our ability to see hazards would be a tremendous handicap. But when we get to the paved road stretch, RIP slows and pulls onto the driveway where we saw the attack. Windows rolled down, we have guns ready, and we slowly make our way toward what used to be a house with a large outbuilding. Both are smoldering piles of shattered wood and smashed plasterboard. We step out and walk a bit, looking at the ground. Bodies are scattered. The gunshot wounds appear to be particularly vicious and effective—lots of head shots. We don’t see any guns by the bodies. If they had any supplies with them when they were attacked, they’ve all been burnt.

  “What did these people do to deserve this?” says RIP, more to himself than to me.

  “They were alive,” comes a voice. “That’s all they did.” We both jump and see her emerge from behind a gutted truck. She is thin, maybe in her twenties, and looks exhausted. She wears a camo jacket and carries a rifle but it’s only half-pointed at us.

  “Hey,” I say. Acting all casual as if this is a perfectly normal random encounter with a girl.

  “Hey,” she says back. She nods toward me.

  “Um… Who are you?” I ask, looking around to see if she’s alone.

  “I’m one of them. Though now I guess I’m alone. My name’s Carrie.”

  “What happened here?”

  “We had a group. We were sticking together for safety, finding food where we could. We figured we were safe here. But GAC found us and must have decided we were a threat. So they took us out.”

  “A threat to what?” RIP asks.

  “The people behind the fence.”

  “Wait, who’s the GAC?”

  “Those are the guys with the big guns, Humvees, helicopters.”

  “Ahh,” I say to RIP. “Humvee boys, or the Blacks as the old guys call them.”

  “We call them GAC,” the woman says. “ ‘Blacks’ just seems like an inappropriate word in this context.”

  RIP snorts. “Oh God, here we start with the PC crap.”

  She glares at him.

  “Why do you call them ‘GAC?” I ask. “What’s that stand for?”

  She’s still giving RIP the stink-eye. “Doesn’t stand for anything,” she explains. “It’s just what all their license plates start with. Maybe it’s an Illinois thing. They all seem to have Illinois plates.”

  We take Carrie with us. She seems harmless and traumatized enough. Mostly she’s quiet for the rest of the ride in the dusk, but she asks me, “What do you have?”

  “What do you mean, what do I have?”

  “I mean that your voice has changed and you’re not a grandfather. So you must be sick with something to be still alive.”

  40→WITH SLOUCHED HAT AND GUILTY EYE

  That night Maggie starts her chemo after Justin warns her and all of us that it’s a gamble, that he really doesn’t know what he’s doing. “I’ve been watching videos on YouTube,” he says. He’s actually serious. Remember this for when we put together a 25-signs-that-our-world-is-apocalyptic-AF blog.

  We eat, and everyone’s interested in what Carrie has to say. Except for Maggie, who is tripping on her chemo drugs. Every once in a while she asks, “Has my hair fallen out yet?” Sometimes we say no, sometimes we say yes, just to keep it interesting for her.

  “Who’s GAC anyway?” RIP asks Carrie.

  She sips from a cup of broth. She really hasn’t stopped eating since she got here. “They kill people.”

  “Military?”

  “Private, we think… we thought.”

  “How strong are they?”

  She gazes back at RIP and finally laughs. It’s a pathetic, sad laugh that harbors no joy. “They’re everything now. They’re all-powerful. There is no government anymore. No police, no army, no marines. They’re all dead. It was a nasty flu that went around. So all that’s left is the GAC.”

  “How come they didn’t get the flu?” asks Justin.

  “You tell me. You’re the doctor.”

  “I’m really just a nurse.”

  “Yeah, same thing nowadays.”

  “So, GAC’s in charge now, and they’re hunting people like us.”

  “No,” she says, setting down her cup and using both hands to pull her hair out of her face and start pulling it into a ponytail. “The people behind the wall are in charge. GAC is just making sure it stays that way. They’re just making sure that everything outside of the wall is dead.”

  “What wall? And we’re outside of it?”

  “We are most definitely outside the wall. They are hunting you. But they still have a lot of targets, and maybe they’re hoping that the walkers get you first. They’re busy. Quite a backlog.”

  “We call them zombies.”

  She clicks her tongue in disgust. “There’s been no reanimation, so they’re not zombies. God, I hate it when people use that term. It’s intellectually lazy.”

  RIP stands and faces her, looking like he feels he needs a drink. “English professor?”

  “Almost,” she says. “Bartender.”

  He nods as if that makes terrific sense. He turns to the rest of us. “You know how I said we should move into the bunker when things get bad for us? I think we can now say that things are bad for us. First thing tomorrow, let’s move the whole operation. Maggie too.”

  “It’s going to be tough moving her,” cautions Justin.

  “Probably tougher leaving her to die,” RIP answers, staring at Justin coldly.

  “I get that Maggie has cancer,” says Carrie.

  “Leukemia,” corrects Justin.

  “Yeah,” she nods. “I have lupus.”

  No one reacts at all so I figure they’re all as dumb as I am. I say, “I’m sorry, I went to a lousy high school. Our science teacher mostly talked about shopping. I learned more about Kohl’s Cash than normal science things. What actually is lupus? I’ve heard of it, but I don’t know anyone who’s had it.”

  She answers as if it’s the thousandth time she’s had to do so this year alone: “It’s an autoimmune disease. No cure. I get rashes. My joints hurt. My
life sucks. And it’s why I’m alive.”

  “Wait,” says Justin. “Why’s that?”

  “Because the flu didn’t get anyone who was sick. It only killed healthy people. And it left behind the children and the old folks.”

  “That makes no freaking sense, girlie,” says RIP.

  Justin, though, seems to think she’s on to something. “Lupus?” He looks to her for confirmation. She nods. He tilts his head toward Maggie’s room: “Leukemia, another disease that greatly compromises the immune system.” He points to himself; we all look at him. He is a virtual mountain of a man, strong and athletic. “HIV,” he says.

  I can’t believe my ears. It doesn’t fit. But it’s a fucking cruel disease. Things like that never fit. I look up: “So… the drugs you’ve been grabbing for yourself?”

  “AZT basically. A cocktail of treats to keep the virus beaten down. I need to be on them for the rest of my life.”

  I look around in a panic. “Do you have enough?”

  “I’m fine,” he says. “I have enough for the rest of my life, as long as I plan on dying in February.”

  “Well, shit,” says RIP. “We need to start hitting up some pharmacies.” Carrie looks up at him and he says, “Don’t look at me. I’m one of the old guys. I don’t need a sickness. Though I do have a stent and some blood pressure meds I need to stay on.”

  I start clearing peoples’ plates and taking care of the rest of the meal, a stew that RIP made. Not because I have any natural housekeeping tendencies, but because I am trying to avoid the fact that everyone in the room is staring at me now.

  Carrie repeats the question she asked me in the truck: “So what do you have?”

  “I’m fine,” I say defensively. “There’s nothing wrong with me.” I shrug.

  RIP squints at me. Justin cocks his head. Carrie looks extremely dubious. “Really,” I say.

  “Maybe you just haven’t been diagnosed,” says Justin. “How do you feel?”

  “I feel great. Honestly,” I say as I leave the room so they can talk about me behind my back.

  41→ANY MERE TRICKS OF THE STAGE

  The game we play is called “If This Were A Movie.” You can play it anywhere and we do. The rules are simple: compare the life we are living to the zombie movies we have seen. Often the results are simply observational:

  “If this were a movie, they’d run faster.”

  Or

  “If this were a movie, they’d run slower.”

  Sometimes we use the game to make idle conversation about relationships: “If this were a movie, you two would be in love by now.” (That’s actually one that Justin said, but he was clearly just joking. It was probably his revenge for my saying to him: “If this were a movie you’d probably have a love interest by now.”)

  Even RIP, who was a latecomer to the game, has used it effectively. When we grabbed the chemo drugs from the cancer center in Traverse City, he expressed surprise at how easy the job was by saying, “If this were a movie, we would have been attacked by zombies by now.”

  Carrie’s initiation to the game comes her first night with us, when Justin tells her, “If this were a movie, you’d be Asian.” Carrie, who is a paler shade of white than most, with thin, light brown hair dropping to her shoulders, doesn’t quite know how to take this until he explains that most movie producers would have balanced out the cast to make it more representative demographically. “It would be cool if you were African-American, but I don’t think they would have two of us—redundant. And the problem now is you’re already redundant, since now we have two sick white girls.”

  “Okay,” she says. She seems fine with it. Then she tries one herself: “If this were a movie…” She freezes for a few moments and then her face seems to melt into a sob. She bursts into tears and flees into the bathroom.

  “What did we do?” asks RIP, who seems to have been conditioned to think that all crying women are a consequence of some action of his. And probably, I think, in his earlier life, he was usually correct. Now he nurses his bourbon and looks troubled.

  “This is where I would look around the room for another girl to go in after her and console her,” I say. Maggie, however, is unconscious again after her last do-I-still-have-my-hair incident. I look at RIP. We look at Justin.

  Finally, he breaks. “Make the gay guy do it.” He stands. “You people suck.” He goes to the bathroom door and knocks softly. “Carrie, can I come in?” We hear a flush and then the door opens. He steps inside.

  RIP looks plainly irritated. I tell him, “If you think about it, she’s probably had a rough day.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” he says. “And a rough life. Jees.” He stands and says that instead of wasting time we should be moving everything into the bunker. Following his lead, I start lugging boxes of canned goods down the stairs, along with just about everything else we have except for our bedding. We’re not going to move our sleeping quarters until we’re ready to do it all at once, and that means moving Maggie.

  While we’re down there, he shows me his latest discovery, an escape hatch. It is a series of one-way locking hatches that rise above what we thought was a vent in the ceiling of the control room. There is a ladder that goes up for a few dozen feet before it angles off and the vent becomes your standard concrete and steel-reinforced tunnel. He made it all the way up to what he thinks is the final escape hatch. “It must be on that hill above us somewhere. But I don’t want to open it until we need to because simply opening it would disturb the scene. Might make it easier for outsiders to find.”

  He offers to take me up there but I decline. I’m not sure how that’s going to work for Justin, what with his claustrophobia. Even I have a touch of it in the sense that I think I could do it if I had to—I managed the vents at the first cancer center—but it’s nothing that I would ever do for fun.

  We start divvying up bedrooms. “You can have your own,” he says. But each room has four bunks in it. I think I would feel weirdly friendless if I slept in a room with three empty beds in it. In the end, we figure Maggie gets her own room, and whoever wants to can bunk with her any night to keep her company. I know that both Justin and me would do so. Not so much RIP. He never really knew her when she was healthy. No negative vibes there, but I doubt there’s much of a bond.

  The guys would share a room. Or Justin could have his own if he wants. RIP says, “He might get uncomfortable watching me undress.” I look at him with a squint and tell him I’m not so sure it works that way. He shrugs.

  And Carrie can have her own room. Or bunk in any of the others. It really doesn’t matter. We finally decide that we are unqualified to micromanage the sleeping arrangements.

  Justin joins us after a while. We look up. “Well?”

  “It’s not that complicated,” he says. “She told me what she almost said was, ‘If this were a movie, all of my friends would be killed by the bad guys.’ And then she realized that she would be playing the game wrong because that’s actually what happened, not a difference. She lost everyone. And she had already lost everyone from her first life. She feels like this is her third life and while she’s glad she got rescued by us—she feels like we’ve already welcomed her into our family—she’s scared to death we’re all going to die too.”

  “Not anytime soon,” says RIP. “Not with this bunker.”

  “I hope so. Question: what happens if we sleep in this bunker every night and lock the door behind us?”

  “Ummm, we get eight hours of sleep in without worrying about our throats being torn out by zombies?”

  “Okay, then what happens in the morning when we get up after eight hours of sleep? We open this monstrously solid door with no peephole, and the men in black are sitting there with machine guns. We die and they have access to everything.”

  “Oh,” I say. “I didn’t think about that.”

  “I didn’t either,” says RIP, who sounds suddenly excited. “But sometimes I’m accidentally smart. Does that ever happen to you? You have no c
lue what you’re doing and then a problem comes up and you realize that you solved it in advance without even knowing what you were doing?”

  We shake our heads at him.

  “Well, that’s what happened. On our last shopping trip into Big Rapids I picked up those remote security cameras that you can monitor wirelessly. I was going to put them up outside to watch for Mr. Super Neighborhood Zombie or the local welcome wagon guys. Maybe instead I should put one of them inside the building, so that if we’re locked in the bunker we can check to see that we haven’t been compromised outside the door.”

  He grins, adding, “And then we’ll know if it’s safe to come out every morning.” We nod. “Plus, I already checked out the Internet in the bunker. Decent wifi signal on this main floor, but there are Ethernet connections that are lightning fast. I mean, they are so fast you’re at the website before you even type it in. Your taxpayer dollars at work.”

  “Sweet,” I say. Justin nods and heads upstairs to check on the women. We get back to moving boxes. Soon we are at the point where we’ve moved just about everything except the stuff we need tonight.

  “First thing in the morning,” promises RIP as we head up the stairs. “We move Maggie and the rest of the beds. Then I’ll finally be able to sleep at night.”

  “If this were a movie,” I say, “We’ll regret not sleeping down there tonight.”

  “Don’t even say that.”

  42→THE SORT THAT NEEDS NO HELMET IN THE MOST BRAIN-BATTERING FIGHT

  Before we go to bed, Carrie tells us this about her life:

  “The thing about being a bartender is that it gave me an incredible sense of independence. I first showing signs of Lupus when I was 16. I grew up on the beach, outside of Ludington. I lived in the sand as soon as it was warm enough every summer. I was healthy, I was athletic, I was a kickass soccer player.

  “Ironically, the doctor said that all of that exposure to sunlight might have been what triggered the Lupus. It’s like it was always in me, you know? And then, bam. Suddenly my knees hurt. My shoulders hurt. My everything hurt. I was sore and tired all of the time. They thought I had cancer. They thought I had everything before they got around to thinking I had Lupus. They even thought I was pregnant and wouldn’t believe me that I was still a virgin.