by Nick Mamatas
“Well, I don’t either.”
“So, let’s be sure to stay at least fifty feet away from one another during the party,” I said. The exact opposite of what I wanted to say. Even as the sentence left my mouth, I thought of saying, Well, in your company, I wouldn’t grow maudlin and wanted to stab myself in the belly for not saying it. And for even thinking a phrase like “grow maudlin.”
Alexa didn’t say anything.
“What?” I said.
She set her jaw. The bat in her hands was still. She looked out through the slit we were standing near at the ruins of the neighborhood passing by.
“I was just joking. I’m happy to see you. It’s a great coincidence. This is my first time here. Even before the big zombie apocalypse, I never made it out to the East Bay. Weren’t you living here?”
“I was supposed to. And it’s not a coincidence.” She poked with the thick rounded end of her bat. The aluminum was hot. We were all sweating. “I’ve been trying to track you down for days.”
“So, you’re a stalker, eh?” That almost sounded promising. Alexa looked good, armed and sweaty.
She leaned in close and said, “City Hall. Remember?” I turned to look out the slit. “Here comes the stop,” I said.
There comes a time between a man and a woman when the man can cut loose with no regrets. As I’d already had sex with her, which apparently made her comfortable enough with me to demonstrate some severe mental issues, the time was now. But I was never one for doing something just to avoid regrets, or to cut a girl loose. I let them do it, after long seasons of sucking every bit of affection and attraction from their spines. Even at the fork of the road, where I can see the road less traveled, the one normal people take, I can’t help myself. I took Alexa’s hand, and squeezed it hard.
“Let’s go.” The problem is that the normal people are all dead. I don’t know what I do that helps me to survive, but I decided that I’d better keep doing it.
The walk across Berkeley was fairly uneventful at first. University Avenue was the usual row of low storefronts, windows smashed, goods torn to shreds or rotting. We all spread out, us party-goers; couples mostly, taking one block at a time, partially to keep the noise down in case any revenants were about, and partially because the boxcar had been pretty tight. Alexa was anxious, so we took the vanguard. She handed me her baseball bat; it felt ridiculous to carry two of them. We were in sight of the campus, which loomed over the street on a dark hill at the end of the avenue, when they jumped out at us, howling and screaming.
Alexa was quick with the shotgun. It was off her back and balanced against her hip in a flash.
“Wait!” I shouted. I dropped both ball bats and slammed into her. The gun roared and lit up the night. Then the kid she aimed at spun around and shrieked, much of his arm disintegrating into meat.
The others stumbled away hands up, quickly articulating, “Don’t shoot! We were just messing around! We’re human, we’re alive!” Their friend moaned in his fresh puddle on the sidewalk.
“What the fuck!” Alexa shouted. It wasn’t a question, but she repeated it when she didn’t get an answer. “What the fuck, what the fuck!” She didn’t drop the gun, but she did stagger and nearly fall to one knee. I retrieved the bats.
There must have been eight of them, all white kids. Older than teens, dirty like the slumming homeless punk rock kids. With a glance, I saw that the rest of the boxcar crowd had vanished off onto the side streets or empty buildings or just ran back to wait for the returning train, having been scared away from the idea of free Berkeley booze. I stepped in front of Alexa and brandished both bats. Someone giggled, so I dropped the one in my left hand and hefted the other, ready to swing.
“What the hell is wrong with you all! When the fuck did jumping out at people become a good fucking idea? Especially armed people!”
“Hey man…” one of them said, but he ended the sentence with a confused shrug and a look at his bleeding friend. They all wanted to run on their skinny legs, dreadlocks and nearly visible clouds of stink waving in the breeze, but they stayed, loyal to the kid moaning on the sidewalk.
“I totally bruised my hip. Jesus fucking Christ,” Alexa said, an open letter to us all. She raised the gun again, nearly stumbled, then pointed the barrel at the sidewalk. “Are you guys here for the party?” she asked.
“Can we please—?” one thick kid, who I suddenly realized was a girl, said. She nodded toward the wounded one. She had some kind of fabric ready, spilling out of an old military-issue bag of some sort.
“Yeah, do,” I said. She ran to comfort the kid, wash his wounds with the boozy contents of a canteen, bind them with torn sheets. The kid was awake, sweating. The moon was big and low. I walked up to her and snatched the canteen from her hand, took a swig. Didn’t recognize it.
“Homebrew stuff.”
“Yeah,” she said. She had a pudgy face, plastic glasses, and a big dirty hand outstretched. She took back the canteen and helped herself to a swig.
“I said,” Alexa said, “are you here for the party?” She had the gun leveled at two guys, including the shrugger. The others must have run off.
‘We live here,” the shrugger said. “They don’t let us on campus.”
“But we manage to sneak in all the time,” the other added. That one was tall and thin. I thought he was just another dirty white kid at first, but he had the slightest sing-song Mexican accent. Maybe he was mixed, or had an immigrant parent.
“Names?”
“Thunder,” the girl said. I just laughed at her. Poor thing must have been named after her thighs by her cruel crustypunk boyfriends. But then the others topped her.
“Spaz,” the shrugger said.
“Man-o,” said the Mexican-seeming kid.
And then the wounded kid gurgled a bit and said, “Louis… uhm, Magpie.”
“Listen, we were just messing with you,” Spaz said. “It’s safe around here. Cal takes care of everything.” He meant UC Berkeley, of course, but it sounded like an individual. Cal, a mean hombre who eats zombies for breakfast and shits vegan burritos for brunch.
“Will they take care of him?” I asked, pointing to Magpie with the tip of my baseball bat.
Alexa stiffened up, though she still winced when she moved. “This is ridiculous. He jumped out right in front of us. It’s not like he couldn’t see my gun.”
“You’re pretty cold-blooded,” Thunder snapped. Alexa muttered something along the lines of fucking Berkeley. “Thank you,” Thunder said directly to me. “I saw what you did. That’s why he’s not already dead.” That’s when I realized she was the leader of the crew, not any of the guys.
“You do a good job keeping these guys alive off-campus, eh?”
Thunder frowned down at Magpie, then shifted on her knees. Her fat jeans were sticky from the blood she was kneeling in. “Until fucking now I did,” she said. Then, “Jesus.”
“May I be excused to get a cart?” Man-o said. “It’s a shopping cart with an end cut out. We can put him in and get him to campus sooner.” He addressed the gun pointed at him, not the woman pointing it.
“Go,” I said, before Alexa could say anything. He hustled off.
“Do you think he’ll be back?” I asked Thunder.
Alexa answered, “Doesn’t matter. We’re leaving now. It’s not like they need us to get to Cal.”
“But wait—”
“Go,” Thunder said. “You’ve done enough already.”
“Not nearly enough. There’s a world to save,” Alexa said. Her voice was steel all of a sudden.
“‘You begin saving the world by saving one man at a time,’” I said. “‘All else is grandiose romanticism or politics.’”
From the ground, Magpie, weak but enthusiastic, said, “Hey, that’s Bukowski.” And then Man-o reappeared, with a dirty shopping cart lined with somewhat clean-looking towels. Alexa tugged on my arm.
“What?”
Her eyes blazed. Through clenched teeth she s
aid, “Come. On.” She sounded like my mother, like every angry Greek woman I’d ever met. The old shriekers at church, the fist-shakers on the city bus, the table-pounders and hair-pullers and catfighters. Greek girls are a sheet of skin and hair draped over a bonfire. She had her bat in hand again. Alexa had come to some kind of decision, and my choices were comply or join Magpie on the asphalt.
“Walk!” she said, like a cop. We walked. The kids loaded Magpie up; there was some wailing.
Alexa limped a little bit, but held herself erect. The kids didn’t seem to care about making noise or attracting revenants at all. Magpie was probably dying, and not because he was bleeding, but because he was a dirty, undernourished teenager who was bleeding. Would Alexa be upset if he died? Would she blame him, or me, with all the intensity and righteousness of a President launching a war, or my father railing at the television? Probably.
I decided to daydream about the party instead. Nobody ever comes to Berkeley from San Francisco if they could help it, and it was always easy for me to help it, even before the country collapsed. So I suppose I imagined a lot of tie-dye and girls with hairy armpits and jazz-listening longhairs with crazy pipes and tweed jackets. And lots of Asian kids.
I was all wrong. The party was held in the midst of a collection of shattered eucalyptus trees. They’re not local to California. Some genius brought them over years ago to turn them into railroad tracks, but the eucalyptus wood is too soft for spikes. An invasive species without local predators, the trees spread pretty rapidly. Except for the occasional joke about air-dropping in koalas to strip the leaves, nobody ever looks at the trees and sees anything but California’s “natural” environment. In that, the mighty eucalyptus tree is much like the living dead.
The party wasn’t much of one. We doubled the size of it when we rolled in, and that’s without anyone else from the train following us. They were probably all running down side streets and tripping over revenant nests. No screams in the distance though. It was a quiet party too, with all of eight people, dressed identically in orange jumpsuits. They all rocked the same slick haircuts too, gelled with sharp sharp parts; sort of like a New Wave band, or Bowie, from some era I’m not familiar with. A number of tree trunks had battery-powered lights attached to them—big round ones that for all their size didn’t give off that much light. They were the kind of thing you used to be able to find in chintzy stores full of off-brand and as-seen-on-TV crap. Grandmothers had them in closets and vestibules. The fissure from the quake didn’t look like I’d imagined—not a cartoon crack in the earth, glowing red from deep magma and steaming with hideous sulfurous gases. It was pretty much just a new curb in the grass, or a shelf. There were some few puffs of steam coming up from the ground, but it could have just been busted pipes or something.
I also noticed a table full of snacks. No drinks. No wine bottles, no cooler, nothing. Just crooked homemade pies and pots of green stuff and roughly piled chips.
Thunder pushed past us, even shouldering Alexa out of the way, and called out, “Hey, we need help! This bitch,” she said, hiking a thumb over at Alexa, who literally growled at that, “shot Magpie.” She said it like the partiers knew who the hell Magpie was supposed to be. They probably did. The whole Bay Area is just a small town, now. My mouth felt so dry. I tried to remember if we’d passed a liquor store on the way. But a very burnt out storefront in my mind’s eye looked like it could have once been a liquor store to me. I didn’t bring anything with me. I never do. I’d discovered long ago that when I go to get some wine to bring to a party or some girl’s apartment, the bottle never made it there, and even I was only a fifty-fifty shot.
The Bowies rushed to take care of Magpie. I heard the death rattle in his throat. It was a quiet thing, a gurgle under gurgles, but I’d heard enough of them to know when some divine spark has finally sputtered and blackened. The last dregs of wine and gin from earlier in the day teased the back of my throat, my sinuses. The Bowies pushed Magpie’s cart over to one of the little vents in the ground that was puffing steam. I vaguely wondered if I should do something. I didn’t have my drill, and Berkeley isn’t part of the City and County of San Francisco so I wasn’t going to get paid, but didn’t off-duty cops often intervene when coming across a robbery back in the old days? I looked at Alexa, whose own gaze followed the Bowies as they set the cart over the steam.
She noticed me looking and said, “They think the revenants come from some formerly dormant bacteria.”
“God, this is going to be one of those parties, isn’t it?” I said. Alexa made a face.
Thunder stepped between us, her eyes slick with tears. “Can you…” she looked at me, then at Alexa, and specifically her shotgun. “…you know?”
Alexa didn’t. She hugged Thunder instead, tightly. Thunder put one arm around Alexa, like a confused man might, and shared a grimace with her two filthy comrades. They stood around uselessly. Then they all started looking at me. I wished I could run off into the woods, though there were really no woods around. The little eucalyptus grove was plopped down in the middle of campus, and the ruined city beyond it.
Spaz finally spoke. “So, what’s supposed to happen? Is he gonna wake up and kill us all sooner, or later, or never?”
“That’s what we’re trying to determine,” one of the Bowies said. The others had arrayed themselves around us, casually pretending to chat in pairs by this or that favorite tree or puff of steam. It was all transparent bullshit. How would they know we’d bring a fatally injured person to the party? Clearly, they were planning on somehow killing whoever came, and experimenting on their corpses. Forget about poor dead Magpie. Let him rise up, let him eat his fill of all of us. My head was throbbing. The Bowies, I decided, where the ones who needed to die. I started measuring them up, the way an old streetfighter once told me to. That guy was a prime juicer, arms and legs like rebar, and he loved to shove his tongue through the gap left by his missing front teeth at any woman who walked in. He told me to watch for posture:
“Good posture is bad.” Badasses knew how to carry themselves. They wore good shoes; bad ones often split during brawls. Real fighters were relaxed.
“In a situation,” he said, doing what they’d do, “they just tuck their chin, put their hands up, and are ready to go. First punch, motherfucker,” he’d said. Then he jabbed expertly at the air, and sat back down. He gave that little lecture, or a variation on it, whenever I saw him. He coulda been a contender in his prime, I’m sure.
None of the Bowies looked all that tough. Their glacial art-rock facades had all melted into art-project anxiety as they undid Magpie’s multiple layers of clothing. One of the Bowies, shorter than the rest and a little stockier, made eye contact with me. He muttered something I didn’t hear, then trotted up to me.
“C’mon,” he said without stopping, “I need your help.”
Alexa’s eyes pleaded something like, Don’t be a fuck-up, just go with him, so I did.
A few seconds later we were out of sight of the party. The baseball bat felt so good in my hands. One down, seven to go maybe? But the short guy stopped and turned and put a hand on my chest.
“Hey there,” he said. He had an accent. A squeaky New York accent; he was a little rat face from Queens. And my salvation. “You gotta help me with this,” he said as he unzipped a few inches of jumpsuit and stuck his hand inside. Maybe I wouldn’t need the bat. He didn’t have his hands up, he wasn’t calm and relaxed. I was a foot taller. His chin pointed up at me like he was a little kid marveling at a freakish circus giant. And it wasn’t a gun he withdrew from the interior pocket of his suit, though at this point I hardly would have minded, but was the most glorious object in all the world. A flask, and a fancy one at that; round, with a steel shot glass inset. Less booze that way, but classy, pure class. Ah yes, drinkers know drinkers, and drinkers hate to drink alone. Especially not with dead bodies nearby. He flipped the top, poured himself a shot, then slammed it.
“There, now you know it ain’t poisoned,
” he said, though his voice was raspy enough that I wasn’t actually entirely convinced. He handed me the flask. “It’s a faggy little bottle, ain’t it? I was married once, ya know. Father-in-law gave it to me. Had to put my own wife down.”
Whatever was in the flask was a lemony homebrew. Neither sweet nor girly; it bit like a small animal. The poor bastard probably just found some rotten Meyer lemons at the base of a tree in an abandoned backyard and made the best of it. It filled my ears and drowned out Ratso’s story about the be-yoot-ee-ful girl he met while mopping floors in Atlantic City. The one who wanted to move out to Reno to get away from her crazy family, and spin the roulette wheel, and when the shit hit the fan they took another gamble and managed to claw their way into San Francisco. Then she managed to plant her foot atop a rusty nail and died right away and so he killed her. He came out to Berkeley hoping to be torn apart by the living dead who roam the center of town in the shadow of the Berkeley Hills—the coyote and wild turkeys own those lands again—and instead he ended up wrapped up with the Bowies and their mad scientist experiments.
“I was a vet tech, see?” he was saying as I floated back to the surface. The lemon rot was warm in my stomach, already filling all my booze-hungry cells. Juicers know juicers. The problem is that this guy was the type of juicer who liked to talk to others when he drank; I’m the type of juicer who prefers to drink and just talk. Good thing we had booze in common.
He continued, “So I had a good job out here. I know the campus like the back of my hand. I knew that other people would have the same idea, and then I met this crew. They’re real scientists, see. Real scientists. Not like me. I just clean cages, dissect mice, you know…”
Lots of juicers, kooks, and imaginary CIA radio transmission recipients believed in the real scientists. I did too, half the time. The real scientists are the ones who knew what the hell happened when the dead began to rise, and failed to warn humanity for their own purposes—say, because most scientists are hideous foreigners out to destroy America somehow. That’s the soft version. The hard version is that the scientists, evil foreigners and fifth columnists all, used some sort of virus to create a change in the infected. Or maybe it was plastics, some peculiarly American form of Tupperware illegal in Canada and unaffordable in Mexico, adding methyl groups to the national DNA, rotting the dopaminergic neurons, and giving us all a very virulent form of posthumous Parkinson’s disease. The usual contingent partial story, like all the grand narratives of humanity and theories of history. I did take it seriously, only because I heard some variation on it whenever someone else was buying the drinks. Always sounded more like the real industrialists to me, rather than the real scientists, but I try not to argue when someone else is buying.