by Nick Mamatas
“I mean the real real scientists,” Ratso McGee—he handn’t introduced himself, so I gave him a name—said. “The ones looking for a cure.”
I just laughed. I spilled some of the lemony booze. The real real scientists were the biggest purveyors of bullshit left in the United States. They raised money, and then later traded goods, going door to door. They had plans. Flyers and websites explaining the need to weaponize some Winnebagos and make a run for the border. Tales of tanker ships turned research labs, and zombies chained deep in blood-splattered holds. When I was a kid, our next-door neighbors were this family called the Knowleses. The Knowles girls were blonde-haired cuties, a few years older than me, and their mother was an evangelical Christian of an especially gullible type. She hoarded food when Y2K was coming around—but had no interest in buying one of my typewriters, because she “had all the writing anyone would need” in the Bible already. One of the girls, Joanne or something like that, told me that one time her mother had handed over the family vacation fund to two ersatz archaeologists who came to church one Sunday to raise funds to go to Turkey and dig up Noah’s Ark from where it rested deep within Mount Ararat. Not that Joanne knew what the word ersatz meant, even after I told her—she’d just told me that the pair were archaeologists. Like Ratso telling me know that the Bowies were the real real scientists.
Ratso read my expression. He made a fist and pumped an enormous, if imaginary, dick down by his waist. “I know, I know, but these guys really have something going on. Your little pal hasn’t woken up yet, has he?”
“No…but, it can take more than thirty minutes for a corpse to revenate,” I said. For a moment, I thought about telling him that I was a driller. That I saw two people in a tent in Golden Gate park and used my discretion to put holes in their heads. When I drink I can never quite tell how forthcoming I should be with my experiences. “Well, I mean, you know. In the city we end up with a lot of dead people.”
Ratso snorted. “In the city, you do, eh? You’re in the East Bay now, ol’ buddy ol’ pal. You should go take a stroll down to the border with Oakland and see what we had to do to keep those dead niggers out.” I suddenly lost my taste for Ratso and his Lemon Pledge rotgut. I strained my ears, practically hoping for a scream and the thrashing of an undead corpse tearing through partygoers. Ratso was a small guy. I could have just punched him right in the face. But why did I ever care—it’s not like black people ever did very much for me. It was just all those damn survivalists taking advantage of the chaos of apocalypse for their own redneck racist ends, and that I’d just coined a neat term like “revenate” and Ratso didn’t even fucking notice. And then the screaming started, just a few seconds after I would have really appreciated it.
The party was in chaos, of course. The Bowies had scattered into the trees, their orange jumpsuits beacons and targets.
Thunder and Alexa were tussling over the gun, Alexa shouting, “Fucking hupper!” and trying to throw rabbit punches. Her hip was still hurting her though, so Thunder had the advantage. Spaz and Man-o were leaning over Magpie, who didn’t look like he was reanimated. He had moved, or had been moved, and was slumped over the steaming bit of earth differently now, but he was no revenant.
“Great party,” I said. Ratso trotted past me and expertly drunk-weaved through the trees to where Magpie lay. The girls had worn themselves out and now just shoved and tried to upset one another, all sweaty and gulping air.
“Maybe you should just not shoot anyone else right now, eh?” I called out to them, and Alexa actually backed off, leaving Thunder with both hands on the rifle, which she in turn shyly handed back to Alexa.
Magpie stayed dead. The Bowies slowly made their way back to his position. One of them, the tallest male who I supposed was the leader because he was tall, and a man with an excuse on his lips. Dead bodies sometimes jerk or move, there’s air in the lungs, cellular death comes later. The usual sort of thing someone says right before a body’s eyes snap open and arms lurch for a human throat.
“‘But, alas? What avails the vigilance against the Destiny of man? Not even these well-contrived securities sufficed to save from the uttermost agonies of living inhumation, a wretch to these agonies foredoomed!’” I shouted, happy I could remember the lines. Everyone turned from Magpie to me.
“Poe, motherfuckers. Edgar Allan Poe.” They still just all peered at me, even that semiliterate baboon Ratso. “Count on it,” I said, lacking anything else to say. I headed over to the snack table and started eating with both fists, leaving my bat at my feet. The food wasn’t too bad. Not stale, or overly rough and “natural” like so much food is these days. The Berkeley crew probably had some decent refrigeration, maybe even some real bakery ovens, buzzing away in the depths of the campus.
Thunder came up to me. She was sweating a bit, glistening like heavy girls do sometimes. She was cute though, doable. The booze didn’t make her attractive to me so much as it made me feel confident in my ability to somehow get her to another part of the campus and fuck her quickly, maybe standing up or on a bench, and then make my way back to Alexa, then San Fran, and nail two in one day. Whatever is not forbidden is permitted, and little is forbidden anymore.
“Hey,” I said. Some bit of cracker fell out of my mouth. “What do you think about the current situation?”
“Your friend’s a fucking maniac, you know that?” Thunder said, her voice a whisper.
“This is a world of maniacs, girl,” I told her. “Is there any other way to survive this barren place?”
“Stop hitting on me,” she said. She was pretty sharp after all. Had to be, to live in Berkeley, and to run with a crew off-campus. “Listen, she’s going to shoot someone else, eventually. Don’t you think it’s strange that she basically killed someone, even if by accident, and doesn’t seem to have any emotional response to her own actions? She’s like one of those soldiers in an old movie who goes crazy and becomes a cold-blooded killer.”
I looked over the top of Thunder’s head. Alexa was pacing in front of two of the Bowies, talking to them, gesticulating emphatically. The tone of her voice cut through the woods, but she had the Bostonian tendency to underannunciate so I couldn’t quite make out what she was saying. The party, such as it was, seemed strangely empty.
“Hey, where are your fri—” Then I felt four hands on me. “Oh.” They marched me up to Alexa and Thunder demanded the gun, which Alexa raised and pointed at all of us.
“Jesus!” I said. Man-o said it too. Spaz just twitched. I recovered myself. Nothing slices through booze-haze like the barrel of a pistol-grip shotgun in one’s face. “Look guys, you can’t really keep me hostage.” Thunder turned to look at me with one eye, the other still on Alexa. “I mean,” I said, “I can kick all your asses. I’m a goddamn driller. I almost kill people for city government.” Then I added, for the benefit of the Bowies: “A real goddamn city too. Not a hippie-dippy college town in the fucking East Bay.” It only then occurred to me that with my arms in the grip of her comrades, Thunder could knee me in the balls any time she wanted, and that’s exactly what she did.
I went down pretty hard, and decided to play dead. The boys let me slip from their grasp, almost as though they wanted Alexa to shoot. The ground seemed to be the best place for me, especially if the gun went off. I noticed that the Bowies were all wearing matching Nikes, which reminded me of that cult of UFO people who all killed themselves when I was a little kid to hitch a ride on a comet. Feet were suddenly everywhere. I covered my head with my arms and waited for kicks and stomps, but I was forgotten. The argument had grown generalized, a Stirneresque war of all against all, except for me. I peeked out at the world again through my fingers, like a child might. Naturally, whatever processes reanimate the recent dead finally hit the tipping point inside Magpie’s body and he began to twitch and jerk.
It was Ratso who saved the day. His nasally voice cut through the cacophony. “Hey, you dumbasses, it’s back! So much for the anaerobic bacterium vent theory!”
Thunder and Alexa and the boys stopped shouting like dumbasses, Alexa dropped the gun and screamed like a girl in a movie. Ratso and Spaz both scrambled for it, and got tangled up in the mess. Magpie got to his feet and started shuffling over. The Bowies spread out into some sort of weird defensive formation—each of them had picked a tree to hide behind sometime beforehand, I guessed, since the trunks they rushed to were the ones with the lights attached. Man-o had his head about him and rushed to get my bat from the snack table where I’d left it. With a whoop he snapped it up, turned on his heel and swung right at what was left of Magpie’s head. It burst like a rotten melon hitting the sidewalk. I reached for the gun and snagged it. Sometimes I love having long arms. Headless, fueled by nothing but memories of memories of walking inscribed in his nerves, Magpie managed three or four more steps. There was still enough chaos that I was able to get to my feet, wave the gun menacingly—yet non-chalantly—at the assembled and smack Alexa across the face to get her to stop screaming before Magpie fell to his knees and flat onto his stomach, black blood and grue pouring forth from his neck.
“Is everyone all right?” Man-o shouted. “Headcount?”
“Minus one!” Ratso said. Then he fell into a fit of boozy giggles. The other Bowies came out from behind their trees, and now some of them were armed with small pistols, or devices that resembled small pistols anyway. The firearms pickings in Berkeley had to have been pretty slim right after the apocalypse, but if these guys were real real scientists and not an insane cargo cult of test-tube pretenders, the weapons probably had some kick to them.
Alexa was back to normal, though probably not thanks to my slap. She had her nails sunk deep in my left forearm, and moved to drag me out of the eucalyptus grove.
“Well, we had a lovely time at your party. Sorry the vent theory turned out to be bunk. You know what Thomas Edison once said—now I know ninety-eight different things that don’t work. That’s progress!”
“Wait,” one of the Bowies said. He was large. Not as tall as I, but twice as wide, easily. “You can’t leave.”
“Well . . . why not?” Then I shrugged, like I was only vaguely interested in the question in an academic sense.
“Maybe you’re infected.”
“Then we should leave, eh?” Alexa said. “After all, we’d just join everyone else prowling around Berkeley already. You don’t let possible infecteds stay on campus, do you?”
“And if you shoot us,” I said, nodding at the weird squash-shaped gun in his hand. “We’ll just change right now.”
He smiled. “This weapon is non-lethal.”
I turned my gun to my own chest, awkwardly thumbing the trigger. Everyone took a step back. “This one ain’t. I don’t care if I live or die, let me tell you that right now. But I do care that I get the fuck out of the East Bay, with quickness. So let us by.”
One of the other Bowies said, “Samuel, this really isn’t the protocol we discussed.” Samuel shrugged and stood aside, his mouth open to say something.
We walked past him and Alexa said, “Thank you, Samuel.”
We trudged back across Berkeley in silence. I didn’t give Alexa her gun back, and she didn’t ask for it. I only had about a quarter-buzz on from Ratso’s flask, and all the crackers from the snack table were soaking up the juice in my stomach, so I was still a little twitchy. We passed so many bombed-out liquor stores, and I cringed and sucked my teeth at each one we passed. My mouth filled only with blood, thanks to my missing molar. Berkeley once had a number of ghetto strips, and forty thousand liquor-hungry students to dose, but not one intact bottle remained in the rubble and wreckage. Nobody, living or dead, was on the streets either, so it was a lonely walk, and slow because Alexa was still limping the slightest bit. Finally, at the train stop, Alexa asked for her gun back. The train was waiting on the tracks, just as when we had left it, with the One-Way Dead-End Transport Cooperative skeleton crew hanging around near the engine, passing a cigarette around and chatting about whatever microdrama railroad squatters chat about. A girl named Emily figured large in their conversation. She was a crazy bitch, apparently, but I knew crazier.
“I don’t want to ride in the same train car as you,” Alexa said. “And if I’m alone…”
“I left my bat back at the party. We should stick together,” I said, being reasonable. I didn’t want to get into a long discussion of whatever terrible thing it was that I did that made Alexa so upset with me. She was the one who shot somebody, after all. All I did was nothing.
“No, we’re not going to stick together. If you follow me, I’ll scream rape till someone intervenes. I’ll throw myself on the fucking tracks and kill myself if I have to.” Alexa clutched the air, her eyes wide. “I fucking killed someone! Those assholes jumped out in front of me, and you let them come along to the party, like they were friends. You—”
“I let—” But she barked right over me.
“You know what, maybe you should keep the gun. The way I feel right now, I’ll blow your head off,” she said. “Or maybe blow my own head off.” Then she said, “No, fuck that. Give it to me. Get out of my fucking sight.” I gave it to her, calmly, like I was handing over a French bread or something.
“All right then. I know it’s hard. I’m a driller…” And with that, I transformed myself into an utter asshole, now and forever.
There’s a particular sort of man, one more common back when American capitalism was a worldwide phenomenon rather than a secondary practice somewhere to the south of scavenging, who was expert in every conceivable topic because he had some success in his own career. The greatest orthodontist in Danbury, Connecticut, knew everything there was to know about pitching fastballs—hey man, it takes a steady hand, just like slapping on a pair of braces—or running a war—blood, everywhere!—or writing novels—so many characters coming in and out of the office. Or sex. You know, it takes that steady hand again. And it was the same with writing. What’s just like writing? Pretty much anything according to these guys: coaching a Little League team, being a corporate accountant, breeding champion Schnauzers. Anything save reading and actually writing. I’d promised myself back in Boston that if I ever managed to land a good job and make something of myself, that I wouldn’t use my expertise as a platform from which to pontificate. Well, drilling isn’t exactly a great job, and I’ve studiously managed to avoid making anything of myself, but “I’m a driller…” still spilled out of my mouth, like it had been programmed into me. I didn’t even care about being a driller, and certainly didn’t qualify as a good one. I couldn’t even imagine what a good driller’s working day would be like. Soberly burning through the waiting foreheads of a ward full of kids with measles, I suppose.
Alexa could smell my anguish. “You’re a driller…” she said. “And?” That and was a long one, stretching to full volumes. And you’re one to talk. And you think you can give advice? And you’re the world’s biggest cretin, a worthless sack of rank wine and dirty flesh. And you need to get on some other train car, or I’ll kill us both right here and it’ll be all your fault. And then everyone will know what you drove me to do.
“…and I’ll see you back in the city,” I said. I walked down the platform to the first car, nodded to the train crew and slipped in to one of the cars. It was empty of the freight that had been brought over from the city, of course, but there was a surprise waiting for me. Thunder.
(9)
I fell in love with Boston’s T. Not the buses; the trains. The streetcars of the Green Line especially, that were dual-use subway and street cars. Boston had a token system too during my time there, forsaking the impersonal and authoritarian swipe card regimes of New York and San Francisco.
It was a small system—Colin called it a “wind-up toy subway” as compared to the transit systems of the world’s great cities, but to me the trains and their passengers were endlessly fascinating. When not in class I’d take my pocket change and ride all day. To Downtown Crossing and then to the Red Line all the way to t
he provocatively named Braintree. I still picture cartoon brains pulsing and thrumbing to themselves like hideous apples on the hundred-branched tree from my parents’ backyard. Or I’d take the Blue, which led to the water. The lines were color-coded that way. The Green Line cut under the lawns of Boston Common, Red brought passengers to Harvard Square. It was a subtle little thing, one I was told at some drunken party or other. The secret was knowing that the Orange Line runs down Washington Street, which was once called Orange Street.
I told myself I was taking the train for material. To eavesdrop on people’s lives, to record snippets of real proletarian dialogue that surely spilled from the lips of passengers over every inch of track. And I did hear a few good things. One guy swearing that he “didn’t never been there today,” to his girlfriend, on the topic of visiting the home of his other baby mama, grumbling about “our boy Chucky”—it was another drunken night in a pub when I learned that was slang for the members of the Irish Republican Army, and that I was helping fund the conflict just by ordering another pint; which I was happy to do twice more that night before switching to whisky.
An old Greek lady I followed all the way to Brookline mumbled Kyrie eleison for the entire trip. None of this stuff ever made it into any of my stories. Mostly I just spent time watching girls, the unself-consciously sexy Latinas with big hoop earrings and shocking black hair; white girls in cardigans and long skirts messing with their iPods; fat girls in even bigger Tufts sweatshirts. How did they fuck? Did they shave their cunts? Take it up the ass? Lay on their backs, heads hanging off the side of the bed, letting men fuck their mouths? Moan when they come, or whimper like a hurt little girl, or did they not come at all from sex—instead sneaking orgasms later with some ferocious clit-rubbing after their boyfriend rolled over and went to sleep? Did they ever try other girls, or just swap spit when boys were watching? Even older women, with their worn-out old tits and horrid eye makeup, I couldn’t help but fantasize about. The ones who were “bad girls” back when there was such a thing. Those who only ever slept with their husbands, and spent their whole lives regretting it. And sometimes those old women would make eye contact with me, and I’d wonder if they were thinking the same thing, thinking of coming up to me and asking for a little phallic charity now that poor old Sal or Buddy or Leon was in the ground.