by Nick Mamatas
The rest of the world had a different response to America’s peculiar malady: pointing and laughing.
I am, in general, not a fan of single-sentence paragraphs. Even worse are one-word paragraphs. And yet our national dilemma lends itself to the poetaster strum of that one tedious chord:
Soldiers.
And from the darkened corner of the room, I heard an unearthly groan. She wasn’t my mother anymore.
It was all I could do to keep from holding out my arm to the nearest slavering mouth, to offer myself, to join this brave new world of the dead.
Dear Reader, I ate him.
Twitching.
Then Emily’s body began to twitch.
You know exactly the sort of asinine bullshit I mean. The zines are full of it, as is the Internet and all the mimeographed and hot-glue-gunned “novels” that anyone can publish these days if they want to put the work into it. All the greats are dead, and that was so even before the outbreak. “Zombies” are ubiquitous these days, as overwhelming to auctorial understanding of America as was the Vietnam War or the settling of the West. The rise of the dead was so inexplicable, and yet down deep in our cultural DNA. It was so universally anticipated that it has created immense problems for American letters.
But you want to hear a zombie story? Fine, I’ll tell you a zombie story.
Drilling is essentially a welfare program; something right out of the New Deal. Of course, the job itself is vital and in an ideal world would be handled by trained professionals according to minutely designed protocols created after years of field testing and results analysis. Instead, we have a bounty system and a network of localband mobile phones—not true cellulars, those networks have long since failed—and ordinary power drills liberated from hardware stores. The job’s a simple one and any able-bodied individual can have it for the asking. Find the dead and before they reanimate destroy the brain with the drill.
Firearms, it was quickly discovered, were more trouble than they were worth. San Francisco didn’t have much of a gun culture, and the best way to deploy a brace of fascists to the streets is to arm a bunch of milquetoast liberals and explain that they are responsible for keeping civilization intact. Six-shooter fiefdoms sprang up on every other block, but luckily none of them lasted very long. Neither bone nor drywall stops most bullets, and armed morons ended up simply increasing the number of dead and thus exacerbating the local reanimate problem. The first generation of civilian security joined the ranks of the undead.
Then there was the issue of sheer cowardice—City Hall simply couldn’t pay people enough to hunt the dead. Nor was it even necessary, so long as the reanimates could be quickly isolated. Bodies still decompose, even if driven by whatever force or infestation leads to dead men walking. A week after reanimation, the danger passes, even if the groaning continues for several more days. Is she not your mother anymore? Just push all the furniture you own in front of the door to her sickroom and let the bitch pound her desiccated hands to jelly trying to get to you. Soon enough she’d fall apart and it would be over; just like drowning a bag full of kittens, except it takes three days and you have to listen to it the entire time. Thus, drilling—destroy the brain and the body will not stand. Preventative—though slightly posthumous—medicine, after a fashion.
The trick is that death is not an event. It is a process. When I put the bit to a forehead and squeeze the trigger, am I mutilating a corpse or killing a human being? Most doctors didn’t want to find out—they still believed in “do no harm,” or claimed to with a unanimity that bordered on the conspiratorial. So a driller with a folding chair could make a few hundred dollars in goods and government scrip over the course of a week in an ER. Nurses draw curtains and turn away with pursed lips. The other patients pretend to hear nothing, see nothing—just as they did back when vomiting, raving, and death in a puddle of black blood was the worst thing one might see in an emergency room.
I signed up for drilling because I couldn’t get down to Mexico. I needed to experience life, to find something to write about. I needed pocket money. My credit score was immaterial, my landlord dead, and as electricity only worked fourteen hours a day PG&E just let the grid run and stopped billing. But the agora bloomed on Market Street once again, and most anything could be had for the right combination of trade goods, favors, scrip, and foreign currencies.
Not Canada, not Mexico. Not even Hawaii and Alaska. Just the lower forty-eight. No one took responsibility for the events, and anyone who could reanimate the dead probably would have had a better plan than “Go for it!” And a disease doesn’t vector within national borders. What did they know in City Hall? That was the other reason. I dreamt that there was some Masonic hand charting the course of events, or competing elites drawn to some endgame. The chessboard was flooded with pawns again, as if a player had overturned a bucket of them onto the field. But we’re okay here in The City. If I worked for The City I might hear something. If I did well, I might be invited into a smoke-filled room. “Kostopolos!” a man in a gray suit would bark at me. “Come with me. We have plans for you. Big plans.” It wouldn’t be a job interview so much as an initiation complete with oaths and handclasps. William Randolph Hearst, reanimated and hustled out of Colma through a BART service tunnel that hadn’t been sealed up, would preside with a great wooden paddle in his hands. Things would get weird, but I’d have finally joined the fraternity of men. I would be one of Them. All I had to do was climb the ladder, and the rungs were largely free of competitors these days. This wasn’t an era for bureaucrats or brown-nosers and surely the Star Chamber would recognize my skills. I’d grown fond of the City and wanted to do my part for it. Compared to Youngstown, of course, San Francisco may as well have been gilded Babylon, rich with fruited whores and perfumed vines. In Ohio, there’s nothing to do but drink and die, but in San Francisco there’s life. The irony in the fact that I had nonetheless found myself drinking and dying, and that that strategy took hold as if it were genetically predetermined even before the return of the dead, does not escape me. It never has, not even for a moment.
Intake and orientation for new drillers was held once a week at the Moscone Center, in the great exhibitor hall where in better times I’d sold my old baseball cards and comic books for rent money. I got there early, as when they run out of drills they run out of jobs, and by early I mean after the 500 Club closed. I decided I’d walk to kill some time. There’s a de jure curfew in place within city limits, but it’s rarely enforced in the Mission, and it struck me as very foolish that I should miss my chance to join the drillers, a squad of brave men who prowl the night in search of the dead and dying, due to such flummeries and mummeries. I’d be facing plenty of danger, and soon enough. It’s easy to get lost in the city, especially if one doesn’t have a terrain map. The shortest path between two points is hardly ever a straight line given the hills and the collapsed buildings often stretched across a street as if right after a dramatic yawn. It took me a few hours to pick my way over; once I found Howard Street the walk wasn’t bad at all, except for some reason I felt entirely turned around and dyslexic, and in need of a nap, so it took me forever to find the main drag.
I sobered up in the pre-dawn chill and waited at the ragged end of the line. Nobody talked except for a few of the agitated and toothless sorts who hunched and shuffled about the line, trying to strike up conversations. There was a time I’d seek such mental defectives out for any wisdom that might emerge from their word salads, but I was dry and nervous that morning. My bravado sweated itself out of my body and smelled of beer and I was in no mood for deranged bullshit. Neither was anyone else. One guy, who had been going on about Oakland and its gigantic Mountain View Cemetery and how the dead were walking under the Bay and coming to take the City back for the famous Folger family of coffee millionaires, was jumped by three machos and kicked across the street. He rolled to the relative safety of the curb and made some submissive-sounding noises, and finally someone else on the line shouted:
&nbs
p; “That’s enough! That fucker dies, we’re all in deep-ass shit.” And deep-ass shit was just the sort of wisdom I needed to hear.
The line inched forward, and it was almost 10 a.m. when I had my intake interview; a long table with a woman and two men. It was the usual sort of Department of Motor Vehicles-style event—vacant looks and affectless bleats, though one of my interlocutors was at least some sort of queer and thus amusing.
“Oooh, Greek,” he said when I responded to the honking prompt of the woman next to him: Name. Then age and residence and current situation. “Work situation, that is!” he explained, and I said:
“Writer.”
The woman next to the queer said, “Don’t put that down. Put down unemployed.” I was already beyond arguing.
“Martial experience?”
“Really?”
“Have you been in the military or received military or paramilitary training?” the woman recited. “Do you have experience as a law enforcement officer, a licensed security professional?”
“Martial arts?” the woman asked.
“Maybe some sort of active criminal?” the third person, a white man, suggested. “Can you handle a firearm? Would you call yourself street smart? Perhaps too smart to have ever been successfully prosecuted in…the old days?”
“Oh no, nothing like that. I’m a passive criminal. A lifestyle criminal, really. The state arrays itself against people like me.”
“Any alcohol or drug abuse problems?” the woman asked. “And mind you we hear, ‘Oh it’s not a problem’ forty times a day around here.”
“I was three-year varsity on the wrestling team.” The woman just stared at me, then both turned to the queer.
“Yes, I’ll write that down.”
“Does that count as a martial art?” I asked.
“You were a wrestler?” the woman asked me. She looked me up and down over the rims of her glasses.
“There are weight classes in wrestling, you know.” I’m tall and lank, an oddity in my family, the men of which mostly looked like fire hydrants who for breakfast each morning ate slightly smaller fire hydrants. I hadn’t heard from any of them since—how did junior over there put it?—the “old days” and that’s just as well. I often wondered who went first, my father or my mother. My mother had a weak heart, or so she always said, but she was essentially a pack mule in a flowered housecoat. Sad though, as after me there were two miscarriages and then she lacked the heart to try again. Or was it papa, who would probably do something stupid like nail all the doors shut from the inside and then blow a gasket thanks to the machinations of the intelligence community, or perhaps just accidentally shoot himself with the rifle he never used or cleaned, only to rise up and finally consume my mother with his black blood-smeared teeth?
“I bet at your size it wasn’t so much two men in tight little onesies grunting on the mat as it was a couple of kids squeaking,” the man said with a laugh. And I’d pegged the other one as a campy homosexual. But my observational acumen had been blunted as of late and the ever-shifting sexual and performative politics of San Francisco had been under significant pressure these past few years.
“One last question Mister Kastas.” Kastas? I was used to that sort of instant Ellis-Islanding of my name by now, but in this moment it rankled. “Why do you want this job in the Infection Control department?”
I honestly wasn’t expecting such a question. After all the deaths—perhaps one hundred million people, followed by maybe half that many corpses possessed by hungry idiot spirits who live only to feed and savage all that lie before them—after all the chaos, after the jury-rigged society we managed to hold together by cannibalizing shopping malls and launching basement factories; in a city where it never quite gets dark enough to sleep soundly, as Colma is to this day still smoldering, “Why do you want to work here?” is the bit of madness we preserved from the ruins of civilization. Bile rose and it tasted like rye on my tongue.
“I don’t want this job for the Infection Control department,” I said, so they’d understand. “I don’t want anything to do with anyone here. I don’t want to look in the faces of dead people. I don’t want to hurriedly mutilate them, while hoping their eyes don’t snap open and their fingers, like withered tree branches, don’t start reaching for me.” I held up my own hands and choked the air in front of me. “Really? What the bloody blue fuck do you expect me to say? ‘I’ve always wanted to help people’? ‘I want to walk to work every morning’? ‘It’s my way of giving back to the community’? What did you soulless pus-sacks say when you applied for your jobs? What a lunatic question. What a goddamned monstrosity.”
The woman struck a pose I thought fairly manly—hands behind her head, she leaned back and put her kicks up on the long table, all over the assorted paperwork and doodled-on pads before her.
Then she said, “‘How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world.’” She said, “That’s Hamlet.” Then I recognized her as the social worker from the first days after the outbreak.
My friend Jay, whom I’d met a number of times through different mutual acquaintances—at house parties, poetry readings, movie nights, and of course always down at the bar—quipped, “The City only seems large, but really there are only eighty-five people living here.” He died from the usual mix of HIV-positive and health insurance–negative status and was cremated before his joke very nearly came true. I wouldn’t see Jay wandering around the streets while out on patrol. I had nothing to say to this woman. For a second my mind was filled with the image of an urn in a vaguely Chinese style, white with blue floral designs—rattling and shaking and buzzing like the last moments of a rung bell. Jay’s ashes, animated and trying to be free.
“Well, we can make our decision now,” she said, looking at me but addressing her colleagues. “What do we think? What do we think! Mm-mmm.” The man on her left, the one I’d assumed wasn’t gay, checked his notes.
“He mentioned wanting to give back to the community—”
“I did not. That was an example of what . . .” I realized that I was talking myself out of a job, and that I was arguing with insane people. And that I very likely was just as mad as anyone else here because I’d stood in line all morning for the opportunity just to keep myself in enough liquor to die and not care at all about what happened to me next.
I was handed a ticket and told to go collect my drill and contact phone and do my on-the-job training. In a kiosk set up elsewhere in the exhibit hall I was handed a drill and some bits in a case, told not to swap out the drills for cheaper ones or try to pawn them, then I practiced on a bowling ball. I didn’t quite get it right; the bit wouldn’t bite properly and my hands were shaking, so I engraved the side of the ball with a series of jagged scratches before finally getting the drill to push through. I was good enough. The guy I was with, who was perhaps my age though he looked much younger—it was his voice that betrayed him as a forty-year-old, it was deep and thick like a pool of syrup—told me to practice at home. “Drill other things.”
“Like what?”
“It doesn’t matter. Just get the hang of it. You can put a hole in anything you like now, so long as nobody else is using it. Drill the whole city; make it look like Swiss cheese. It doesn’t matter.”
I wanted to pat him on the back and tell him it was all going to be okay, but decided instead to take my drill and find a bar. The Chieftain wasn’t far off—I’d passed it when walking up, and already tired, I was ready to lower my standards. Outside the battered man from earlier was still stalking the streets, still ranting, but now the ranting was about how he had a knife and was going to kill his own nigger ass and then when he rose from the dead as God’s vengeance, he’d kill us all, turn us all, and we’d flood the city with drills and meat-stained teeth and kill all the motherfuckers left in the shitburg town of white faggots. I supposed that was an open possibility.
The Chieftain is a pub that claimed some link to Ireland, or at least Irishness, d
espite the Liverpool flag and the food and the handsome servers and the goddamned juke box. At least it was before noon so I hoped the assholes with jobs wouldn’t be slithering in for their lunch. I put my new drill on the bartop and ordered a Guinness, which I usually don’t drink, and a burger with a fried egg cooked in it because I didn’t want to make conversation with anybody. Most people know better than to chat up someone who doesn’t care enough about life to order likely expired meat. It didn’t work, as the bullshit started immediately.
“Well, if it ain’t a hero?” the bartender said, declaring open season.
“A city employee, dedicated to service and diversity!” someone else chirped.
“Get that fucking thing off the bar,” an old woman, almost all of her jaw red with poorly applied lipstick, said of my drill case. I had my foolscap with me in my bag and took it out.
“Ooh, are we on report?” That was the chirper again. “Writing all our names down? Everybody always wants to write my name down. I don’t let ’em though. You can’t reduce me to a scrap of paper.” I could have sworn I’d seen him lined up outside the Moscone and told him as much. He lit a cigarette—as an emergency sanity law we were allowed to smoke in the bars again.
“A moment of weakness,” he said. He launched into his theory of life and work and labor and the futility of it all and even the bartender sighed.