by Nick Mamatas
“Well, of course,” she said. “It was their party. Anyway, California self-defense laws always worked that way. You have to run if you’re at all able to.”
“I’m not from around here,” I said. “It’s just that I think I fit right in. Now I do, anyway.” I held my arms open wide. “Now that this place is a fucking wreck, and still the greatest city in the U, S, of A!”
“You Ess of Ay!” Thunder mimicked my voice, aping my baritone. “Yah, I can tell you’re from the Midwest. Nobody from the Bay Area would say You Ess of Ay, unless it was a joke. And…”
“And?”
“And you didn’t offer to reciprocate this morning. Typical Midwestern patriarchy bullshit.” I must have looked appalled, or disgusted, or maybe even bemused—which I was—because she burst out laughing. “Why so serious?!” Then she added, “I like it down here. The population is large enough that it is still possible to be somewhat anonymous. You can hustle in this town. Be the hunter, rather than the hunted. I want to fight back, Billy.”
Thunder had strong opinions, and some jewelry. Probably stolen or salvaged, but she claimed that the chains and rings were her mother’s, and she knew enough about the precious metals to talk a good game and make some decent trades. By the end of the afternoon, we had bags of pot, two snub-nosed revolvers and a few boxes of ammo, first aid stuff, some MREs Thunder was strangely fascinated with, a set of brass knuckles with a built-in Taser, a car battery and transformer for it, and some new clothes—mostly old T-shirts and hippie dresses. Thunder didn’t spend all her jewelry either.
“Portable wealth. It’s an old Roma trick. No bank accounts when riding across Europe in a caravan.” At home she stripped nude and stood in front of me like she was about to be inducted into the Army. She was a cute pear of a woman, with large tits and a shameless gut. She got sweaty when we fucked on the floor, and went into a stream-of-consciousness mode in which she discussed whether she should trim her pubic hair, the bad spackle and tape job done on the ceiling, how strange linoleum feels against her ass when it’s warm, that I could slap her tits and face as hard as I like, and wouldn’t I like to do it harder and that she liked pain and the idea of being fucked very roughly, which gave me the idea to plant my forearm against her throat which at least stopped her talking. She orgasmed easily and twice, a datum toward confirming the folk-belief that fat girls come a lot. She smiled when she came, both times, and had the little curl in her upper lip that Yvette did, but more pronounced. I liked this girl. She was somewhat less insane than Alexa. I pulled out and ejaculated on her belly, like a high schooler.
Later, I showed Thunder my drill and pager and told her a few drilling anecdotes, but not the one about the couple in the tent in the park.
“Lame,” she said. “We should go out on patrol, like superheroes.”
“Superheroes go out on patrol, hoping to stumble across corpses?”
“Police, then. We can get skateboards and make good time. I used to be pretty good.”
“Lots of hills; I’d hate to drag a skateboard up one.”
She shrugged. “You said revenants never make it to the tops of hills anyway.”
“As a driller, I report to deathbeds and make sure people don’t become revenants. We’re not going after revenants.”
“I am,” she said. “You can come with me if you want. Do you have a spare key?”
Spare key. There are so many parts and practices of the old world that just don’t matter anymore. Nobody cares about Twitter, really, though of course it still works just fine, internationally. The “third date rule” went out the window, as it always does after disasters, except that our national disaster is continually unfolding. School prayer is a non-issue, as is alternate side of the street parking, and what to name next year’s hurricanes, and whether leash laws are a good thing. Spare keys are another non-issue. People either don’t let anyone near their home, or just leave all the doors and windows wide open. Looting and theft is so supersaturated that for anything still around to steal, scarcity is a thing of the past. Someone takes your bike, walk a block and find another. Come home to a trashed apartment, just kick down the door in a building across the street and sleep there. Half the population is living out of bug-out bags at any given time, and the other half watch the world go by through peepholes and slits in the blinds, never coming out onto the streets themselves except under cover of darkness and armed to the teeth. And then they die and on the way to some bar or other I hear the half-rotted howl of a starving revenant and the slam of dead flesh against the doors as I walk by. But spare keys, no, nobody has spare keys anymore. Take anything you want from me, and good luck with it.
We patrolled the Mission with our handguns tucked discreetly in the pockets of our coats. It gets chilly at night in the city, and foggy, and the end of America took a big hunk out of global warming—and there’s another theory that zombism is just parasitic manipulation of humans by some naturally occurring but typically dormant fungus that responded to climate change by waking up—so we were inconspicuous. I never spent much time around guns. I’d done some plinking with a .22, went hunting to no result a time or two. I knew just enough to know that it was hard to shoot a moving target in the head, even if the target was moving in an awkward shuffle. I often find myself attached to women who simply cannot be argued with, though, and thus here I was, stalking the streets for zombies with Thunder, who huffed as she walked and often asked me where the prime locations for zombie sightings were as we marched from the Mission to the Castro.
“This is stupid,” Thunder finally decided. I was about to agree with her and suggest a bar I knew nearby when she added, “We can’t just walk around randomly. Who dies—old people mostly, and the sick. But hospitals have drillers, right?”
“Well, generally—”
“So where do we go?”
It was about two miles to the Tenderloin, which consistently hung on to its shithole aspect for a century, and when the dead arose, not a lot actually changed. Thunder had a lot of questions about the city, which was pretty odd for someone who was from the Bay, I thought. Was she lying—and it’s not as though she magically owed me the truth about anything—or was she just one of those provincial suburban types whose parents never let her come down to the big city? I checked my pager a few times, but the city was quiet.
“Are we going to walk all night?” I asked Thunder.
“Don’t you like walking the night?” she said, like a bad poet might.
“I prefer a bar. I like to have a few drinks, unwind, catch up on the local gossip. Do some people-watching. Or stay home and write.”
“You write?”
I just remembered then that I had a print-out of my published short story in the breast pocket of the coat I was wearing. It was well-creased and a little faded but still plenty readable. I handed it to her, and she took it and skimmed the first page. Maybe she knew that I was testing her, to see if she’d wave her hands and tell me she’d read it later, or make a face, or just tease me for carrying it around. It’s not as though I’d hang on to my printouts, like little talismans, if the world hadn’t collapsed around me. We all need security blankets of some sort. Thunder’s were street punk clothing and plastic specs and a mannish posture. Alexa’s belief in some conspiracy hidden inside City Hall was her security blanket. I suppose I should add drinking to my list, but it’s not like there’s any reason not to drink oneself to death anymore.
Thunder snorted as she read. I kept myself from asking, What? What’s funny? Do you like it? but only just barely. I should have brought a bottle with me.
Then she asked, “Who is Edward Said?”
“Well, he was a literary critic. He had this term called ‘Orientalism,’ by which he meant that Western writers and social scientists looked at the Middle East through a racist lens.”
She read aloud from the story: “The real problem, Jeremy decided, was that the alien problem was the precinct of bad, expensive movies, and bad, cheap paperbacks.
Public intellectuals had never bothered with the aliens. Noam Chomsky never wrote anything about the aliens. Edward Said never wrote anything about the aliens. For the last three days, Israeli bulldozers hadn’t knocked down any Palestinian houses because of the aliens. If they had, Jeremy hadn’t seen it on the news because of the aliens. If there was looting and riots because of the aliens Jeremy hadn’t seen it on the news because of the aliens.” Then she took a big step to outflank me, shrugged comically, and said, “Lol what? What is this story about? It’s all English major stuff. I get that the aliens are supposed to be all 9/11 and stuff, but why are you—”
“It’s not me, it’s a character.”
“Oh fuck you,” Thunder said. “It’s you. You have aliens invade New York and their mother ship is floating around and all you—well, this guy—does is sit around thinking about the aliens and how nothing will ever be the same.”
“Right. That’s the story. It’s a story. So this character read a lot and so he thinks about people like Noam Chomsky and Edward Said.”
“Well, it’s fucking bullshit. I mean, look at what actually happened to America. It fell apart, but people fought. Hell, we’re still fighting!” She patted the pocket in which she carried her gun. “I’ve seen all sorts of crazy shit. Explosions, riots, pirates taking over tanker ships in Oakland and trying to drive them to Japan. And you write about some sad sack who sits in his room all day. This is supposed to be sci-fi?” She handed the papers back to me—she hadn’t read the last two pages—and then caught a look at my expression. “I mean, it’s well-written and all. Very English major-y, in a way. Experimental. But, you know…”
“I know…”
“It’s not…”
“Leisure reading?” I said.
“Right, it’s not leisure reading.” She turned around and looked both ways before crossing the street. “C’mon, there has to be some revenant out here.”
I followed her lead for a block or two, though she didn’t know the area. I always seem to fall in line behind aggressive, assertive women. There was something especially out about Thunder, though.
Finally, I asked her, “You realize, this sort of adventure you’re after is what led Alexa to Berkeley. She shot your friend, mainly because she was looking for someone . . . something, to shoot.”
Thunder turned and sneered. “She’s a cunt and a fucking murderer. I’m not after something to shoot, I’m after a revenant.”
“You still sound pretty bloodthirsty.” She didn’t have anything to say to that. She stomped out in front of me, standing straight, legs springy, ready for action. Then I asked her. “Do you think, Thunder . . .” I said, trying to get my words right, since she was both armed and angry, “that the whole disaster with the living dead has changed something about the way women behave?”
“Changed. Women?” she said. “Oh yes, oh fucking yes. You don’t get it, Billy boy, do you?”
“Let’s both pretend that I don’t, and you can tell me and I’ll listen,” I said.
“Two big changes, I think. The first is that the men fucked everything up. They’re the ones in charge of stuff like security and law enforcement and science, and something happened. Then they died by the millions. Women have always had to defend themselves from men—from rapists, abusive husbands and boyfriends, you know? But we’ve never been successful. You know why?”
I wasn’t sure what to say that wouldn’t get me either shot or screamed at, so for a moment I said nothing. Thunder repeated herself: “You know why, Billy?” She frowned at me. “Well, men have greater upper body strength, I guess, and back in the old days . . .” I didn’t know what was on her mind, not at all.
“We’ve never been successful because there’s a whole . . . ideology!” She waved her hands around, trying to encompass the whole crazy wide spinning world. “That men protect women. If you’re a Mormon or a punk, men protect women. Even lesbians have bull dykes. Men protect women and prey on them at the same time. Men can prey on women because, socially, their role is to protect women. Well, guess what? Women live longer than men. We don’t get into a lot of street fights. Men took care of the problem of men, and in the space that remained, women were able to step up.”
“Is that why you’re going reanimate hunting?” I asked. “Are you stepping up? Acting out?”
“Yeah,” Thunder said. But she was distracted. “Is that one?” she whispered and nodded with her chin. It was a woman—if that’s ironic or not, I don’t know anymore—obviously homeless, hunched over a two-wheeled wagon filled with the usual detritus of a life on the streets. She was hunched over the handlebar of her cart, her back nearly parallel to the sidewalk, and she was slowly moving toward us.
“Hey you!” Thunder called out. “Hey lady! Identify yourself.” She reached into her oversized pocket for her pistol and struggled to draw it.
“Maybe she’s deaf,” I said, talking quickly. “Or schizophrenic. Just because she doesn’t answer, just because she doesn’t hear you, doesn’t mean she’s a revenant. She could be alive and insane. She could be alive and suicidal, or really dangerous in some other way. Don’t assume, don’t assume—”
Thunder had her gun out now, and pointed it right at the woman, who certainly had the posture and sensibility of a reanimate. I drew my own firearm and called out: “Lady, please! She’s not kidding! If you’re in there at all . . . Christ, I’m a hupper!” I blurted out.
“Relax, you’re just making sure,” Thunder said. She cocked the hammer. The old woman glanced at the sound, finally betraying awareness of something. Her skin was dark and rosy, like someone with lupus, or a classic alcoholic with a face full of shattered capillaries. She only had a few teeth, hair like strings, and a significant hunch. Honestly, she could have been alive three minutes ago and turned while she walked toward us. Stranger things have happened, if barstool blowhards are to be believed. Sometimes it takes an hour, sometimes it’s over—and begins! in a flash. Maybe that’s evidence of some sort of viral contamination that magically stops at the borders. The word “magically . . .” has to be inserted into every damn theory of reanimation at some point or other. As it turns out, nothing is like the movies. No easy answers that one group of scientists can quickly arrive at. No rampaging bands of military rapists or cannibals kitted out in hubcaps and burlap sacks and riding across the open desert on color-coordinated dune buggies. And no obvious moment of transition—the woman shuffled toward us, no, at us really, her head bowed. There was no great moment of revelation when she opens her mouth and roars like a CGI dinosaur, no red glowing eyes burning with rage. We either shoot her now, or wait till she attacks, if she attacks.
Then a voice from overhead. “Whatchoo motherfuckers doin’?” Three stories up, a black guy in an undershirt leaning out the window of his apartment shouted. He had a kerosene lantern or something in one hand. “Don’t you be shooting up the neighborhood! I’ll call my boys on you.” In his free hand, he waved something else. Cell phone? Small gun? Maybe it was nothing but the back of his hand.
“We have a reanimate here!” Thunder shouted up at him. “Do you know this woman?”
“I don’t know nobody. Don’t you be shooting!” He ducked inside and slammed the window shut. The lantern light danced behind the row of black windows—the guy must have had a railroad apartment.
“Is he coming down? Should we wait?”
“No, let’s retreat . . . and wait,” Thunder said. We both walked backwards, keeping our guns on the woman, who must have been a reanimate, I decided. No random mentally ill person is so locked off from outside stimuli and still able to walk. Not that I had any psychological training. Not that I myself didn’t have a few episodes of waking up on my couch two days after leaving my apartment. Who knew how I acted during those blackout periods? Not me.
A heavy steel apartment building door flew open and out came the guy, lantern still held high in his left hand and a drill in his right. The little object was a battery, of course. “I’m a driller,” h
e said. “This is my gig.”
Thunder gestured with a shoulder toward me. “He’s a driller too,” she said. He glanced at me, expectant.
“Hello,” I said. He turned back to the woman and approached her slowly, like a kid trying to catch a wary cat.
“Oh yeah, oh yeah, she’s one of them.”
“How can you tell?” Thunder asked. She shot me another hard look. “Are you sure?”
“Yeah, I know this one,” he said. “Don’t shoot, don’t shoot. You be shooting, everyone will start poppin’ off. I care about this neighborhood.” He put the lantern down carefully and stood between us. The lady was moving ever so slowly right toward him. “This lady be screaming all day and all night, all the time. Cunt this, baby that, shouting nig—the n-word.” He licked his lips. “If she quiet, she dead. Watch this, y’all.” He bounced on the balls of his feet a few times and then swung out his left leg. His shin took the wagon out, sending garbage and empty bottles flying. Lights came on all over the canyon walls of the block. The woman staggered, then fell to the ground. She lurched forward on her belly, fingers scrambling across the asphalt of the street. Almost nobody used cars in the city anymore. It was just the four of us, and an increasing audience of lookie-loos twinkling into existence through open windows. The driller jumped to the right, pivoted, and ended up with one foot on the lady’s back. He reared back with his right hand, planted the drill on the back of her skull and only after making contact did he hit the button. She didn’t scream, only burbled. Black blood burst from the back of her head, splattering all over the driller’s undershirt and face. He didn’t mind. He didn’t blink. He smiled, teeth still white.
Above us, a small round of applause circulated in the air. The driller yanked hard on the handle of his drill, but it wouldn’t come out. He smiled again, sheepishly this time, at me and Thunder. We finally realized that we could lower our pistols.
“It’s stuck,” he said quietly, an embarrassed grin on his face. “It’s got a reverse button.” He flipped a switch, and the drill brrred slowly to life, its bit rotating backwards as he eased it from the old woman’s head. He looked up at us. “Good spotting, y’all. Good hustle.” Then to the people above us, now looking through their windows down at the streets. “It’s a’ight! Thank you for your cooperation! Have a safe night!” He switched the drill to his left hand and then held up a fist for a bump. I slipped my pistol back into my jacket pocket and obliged. Thunder and he just hugged, arms wide and with a huge smile. Then he walked upstairs while we waved bye, both of us a little confused.