by Nick Mamatas
“She said they were important,” the bartender said. “That they’ll open all doors, reveal all truths, expose all secrets.” He didn’t seem capable of lying, or joking. I looked over at the woman again. That old urban legend was true—a juicer of sufficient enthusiasm would continue drinking posthumously, thanks to whatever force animated the reanimates. In an instant I experienced a very complete daydream. Myself, a few years from now or maybe even a few days. My drill soaked in blood at my feet, a wound that would not heal soaking my pants. But my arms were good, still strong. And with my right I’d scrawl on my legal pads furiously, recording every sensation and cogitation, with my left I’d drink from an aluminum water bottle; a big one, like hikers used to use. My blood would turn thick like molasses and slow down my heart, and I’d still write, and still drink. Like this woman next to me, but still scratching with my pen against the page. Maybe writing the same last words over and over, posthumously performing one final fiction—and then and then and then till the page fills up and the ink runs dry.
What could the corpse tell me? She was dressed casually, and rattily, but not like a typical wino lady. She had had a job of some sort, and a wardrobe for it. Khakis and a blouse. She wore sneakers that were still white, like someone who only wore them occasionally. Maybe she had sneakers while commuting and then switched to dress heels right outside her job. Her hands were gnarled and fingers twisted, but not too outrageously. So some sort of office gig. There weren’t many office gigs left for older women—except for City Hall itself. Where we were. I needed those keys.
“How much were those keys worth to you?” I asked.
“I told her she could drink as much as she wanted,” the bartender said. “And she is, I guess.”
“What do you want for them?”
“Yes, what do you want for them?” Fat Fag said. “Whatever he offers, I’ll double it!”
I didn’t know whether he was kidding, suddenly serious, or simply asking for me to take off my belt, wrap it around my fist, and beat his face into a puddle of meat sauce, but I knew better than to react. I kept my eyes focused on the bartender, trying to drag him out of whatever half-booze half-pot haze he had put himself into with sheer force of will. I needed another drink myself, but needed every trade good I had access to for those keys.
“Uh . . . make me an offer?” the bartender finally said.
“How about a laptop? Works, wireless, the whole bit. I’ve kept it in good shape since the reanimations. Even got some cracked Chinese software on it, so it’s almost up to date.” I regretted that even as I said it. I couldn’t dare give away my computer, not for anything. I also had nothing else to bargain with—the stupid laptop was the only thing of value I owned. If Fats was serious about outbidding me simply for the sake of pique, I was already done.
“A laptop, eh?” Fat Fag bent over, seamlessly really, without a huff or a grunt of exertion and pulled a smartphone from a brown leather satchel at his feet. He put it on the bartop—the open hatch of the vehicle—we were sitting before and proffered it with a wave of his hands. “All yours, for the keys!” Then to me he said, “If you have your laptop with you, I might give you a single key from the chain for it.”
“Why are you doing this?”
“Why are you doing this?” he asked. “You must have a reason, and it’s probably one you don’t want to share. So let’s just say that I might have a similar reason . . . or perhaps I don’t. But I definitely don’t share.”
Thunder and Alexa appeared behind me. “C’mon,” Alexa said. “We have to go.”
“No, not yet,” I said.
“You may as well,” the bartender said. “I’m closing up shop.” He held the keys out. The woman near me growled, her throat dead and dry. Everyone was stock still for a second, but then the woman took up her cup again and tried to pour more of the stone soup past her lips. The bartender and Fat Fag made their exchange, and the keychain caught Alexa’s eye. She knocked the cup from the dead woman’s hand. The woman howled in the way that only a reanimate can, and panic spread in a wave. I jumped back, both phone and keychain hit the floor, and the woman went for the closest target—the bartender.
“You shits are crazy!” the Fag howled. “She’s gonna kill us all!” That didn’t help the panic. People started surging away. Someone hit the public sirens.
“No she ain’t,” Thunder said. She kicked the woman square in the ass, and she tumbled into the car, atop the thrashing, shouting bartender. Then she kicked the hatch up, and slammed down the back windshield. Alexa had already grabbed the keychain and kicked the guy in the balls.
She had her own cell phone out and shouted, “Stand back, we’re drillers, we’re handling this!” A few people turned and looked at us expectantly, then to the rocking car. The windows were streaked with red and black. We ran, blended into the crowd. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught Dr. Jaffe’s bus rolling out of the City Hall parking lot—if she was evacuating or coming to the rescue, I didn’t know.
“Should we try it now, before they change the locks?” I said. It was hard to run. The soup was powerful stuff, even for a heavyweight like me.
“Way ahead of you,” Thunder said. We ran a long circle up to Market Street, then to Gough, and back around. City Hall and the environs seemed clear. After the battle in Japantown, there probably weren’t too many city employees left anyway, and a general evacuation made sense given the amount of traffic and trade in the shadow of the building. The steps were clear. Then Alexa’s phone rang, as did mine.
“It’s Jaffe,” I said. Thunder grabbed the keys from Alexa and turned to run back down the block, but Jaffe’s bus turned the corner. She was literally waving at us from an open window, her phone to her ear. So I picked up and said, “Hello.” She said something, but I couldn’t hear it over the braking of the bus. Alexa trotted up to Thunder and grabbed her arms, like she was performing some sort of ridiculous citizen’s arrest. I lost track of the keys in their tussle, but then Jaffe stepped off the bus, so it didn’t matter.
“Well,” she said, both into the phone to me and to the girls, “What’s the story, my morning glories?”
I hung up and jogged down to meet with Jaffe. “Have you heard about the reanimate, the evacuation?” We were on the opposite side of City Hall, so the locked-up woman and her new Berkeleyan comrade were probably still tearing one another apart, but only just out of earshot.
“Yes, yes, we have a tow truck coming out,” Jaffe said. To Thunder, she said, “Good work, by the way. I hope this means that you’ve decided to come around to the side of the angels.” She smiled at all of us and said, “Let’s go inside and talk about it.” Alexa and I tried very hard not to look at one another, not to give anything away, and we almost succeeded.
Jaffe’s office wasn’t a large one, and at one point it was shared. I presumed it was the same one she had back before the reanimate apocalypse. Two desks, four chairs, some bookshelves with no books of interest—textbooks, policy guides, binders—but a whole raft of cell phones and cell phone chargers of different vintages. Laptops and towers and hard drives too, all the way up to the high ceiling. The unused desk was covered in dust, its computer covered in a plastic sheet. I pulled a chair over from that side of the room and squeezed in next to Alexa. Still wasn’t sure who had the keys when Jaffe began to speak in measured tones, as if she had been practicing.
“We, as a city, are suffering greatly. Not only do the dead continue to menace us internally, thanks partially to the turnover in drillers . . .” I squirmed when she looked at me, “. . . and externally. Our borders are porous, despite the Bay, despite the guarded bridges, despite the ever-burning fires of Colma. And then we come to the living.
“San Francisco is no longer a democracy. How could it be? We live in a large city, seven miles by seven miles, surrounded by the remnants of immense wealth, and perhaps there are forty thousand people left alive. We’re all squatters, all criminals. Most of us are just trying to stay alive one more day
, the rest seem almost eager to die. What’s left is the permanent government—the bureaucracy, if you will.” Jaffe remembered something, and reached into her desk drawer. For a moment, I thought she’d produce a gun, but she actually withdrew a small white box. “See’s Candies?” she offered.
The girls ignored it, but I opened the box. The little chocolates didn’t look bad, though there was a bit of bloom on them. I put one in my mouth and sucked on it, betting it would be too hard to simply bite.
It wasn’t bad, and I said “Thanks” with my mouth full.
“‘Bureaucracy’ used to be a dirty word. Something people complained about. But like the song says, ‘you don’t miss it till it’s gone,’” Jaffe went on.
Alexa and I exchanged another look and silently decided not to correct her on the lyric. Thunder, too young for the reference, just slumped and stared ahead, looking past Jaffe the way a Zen archer looks past the target. She was a sullen child sitting between a raging mother and a dubious, half-buzzed father.
“But we’re not gone!” Jaffe said, suddenly emphatic. “While the elected officials were killed doing their media stunts, or went to ground and never ever came back up, we were still here, silently doing the work we had been trained for, the work necessary to a keep a semblance of civilization alive, even as the typical citizen turned to . . .” She frowned for a moment, then decided on a term. “Primitive accumulation.” Ah, so Jaffe was a college Marxist of some sort, clearly. I sniggered and almost choked on my candy.
“When I find people who are capable of accomplishing something, I try to reach an accord. To bring them in. William,” she said to me, “did you know that you are our longest-serving driller? It’s only been a month, true, but most people don’t last more than a week before either quitting, vanishing, or . . . succumbing.
“And you . . .” she looked at her notes. “Ashley. You were part of something significant. But I think you’ll agree now that you were on the wrong side, if only because your side no longer exists. Do you think we’re keeping secrets here? I’ll tell you now that we’re not—you can have access to whatever information you need as part of your job description.”
Then Jaffe shifted in her seat and looked at Alexa, whose face betrayed some curiosity as to what Jaffe could possibly say about her.
But Thunder interrupted. “But, Dr. Jaffe, you see, the thing of it is—” Then she grabbed Jaffe by the lapels, and threw all her weight into slamming the older woman’s head down against the desk. One, two, three times! Jaffe’s skull dented. Thunder hit it again, and again. It looked like Jaffe’s features had slid off her head. She didn’t have time to scream; Thunder had caught her mid-inhalation.
“Let’s go!” Thunder shouted. “I have the keys!” She ran out of the room. Alexa and I tore after her, though I wasn’t sure if we were going to search City Hall or just try to kill Thunder for what she had just done.
“Bureaucracy!” Thunder said to us before a set of locked doors. “Everything’s labeled!” And she waved a transponder at a little pad on the side, and the doors unlocked, and buzzed loudly.
“Well, everyone heard that,” Alexa said. She took off doubletime, and I followed.
“Where are you going!” I called out to Thunder.
But Alexa answered first. “After her!”
Then Thunder said, “The basement!” She was slow enough that we caught up with her right away, at an elevator bank. She had a key for it, and the car came right away.
“Well, since you’re both here, this is the story,” Thunder said. “We did the whole Japan Center thing so that one or more of us would get captured or brought here somehow. It’s been known to happen. City Hall is great at co-opting movements. The woman at the bar, the reanimate, she was a mole ready to pass her keys off to us. She just died, somehow, beforehand.”
“Wait, if you had a mole with the keys, why would you need to infiltrate this place?” I said.
“Obviously,” Alexa said. “She wasn’t a willing mole. What do you do, poison her slowly or something? Trade keys for antidote? Those Berkeley scientists seemed capable of that level of chemistry. Or was she just a boozer you caught in a compromising position?” Alexa looked over Thunder’s head to glare at me. We were headed down, not to the basement, but to a sub-basement. Not the kind of structure most buildings in an earthquake-prone city would have.
Thunder didn’t answer Alexa’s question; she just said, “Some things it’s important to see for yourself.”
I said, “Well, that’s a non-answer,” but Thunder didn’t rise to that bait either.
The elevator opened into a short hallway with thick double doors right across, and those in turn opened up into a surprisingly well-lit, half-done classroom of sorts. Spackle was still visibly sealing the gaps between slabs of drywall. A mismatched collection of desk chairs were scattered around a projection screen. There was no video projector though—just an ornate wooden cabinet with an old-fashioned and frayed electrical cord coming out of it.
“This is the orientation room for city workers,” Thunder said. I went to the cabinet and opened it up. It was a film projector of sorts, but old. Film was threaded through the gearwork, and it looked strange, as if manufactured prior to the standardization of film sizes. My brief stay in the high school A/V club was paying off. No audio, or rather the audio was run separately, thanks to an ancient cylinder phonograph.
“There’s a breeze down here,” Alexa said. “Not musty at all.”
“Can you work the video?” Thunder asked.
“It’s not a video, but . . . maybe?” I said. I told Alexa to kill the lights, which had snapped on automatically when we entered. She found the switch, and an oversized vent at the top of the wall.
“Check it out,” she said, but I don’t remember, even now, if she said it immediately before we heard the first thump, or just as it sounded. But another one followed, and another right after, as if something was tumbling down the duct.
“Turn off the light . . .” Thunder said, quietly, but Alexa didn’t. Jaffe looked like a bag of laundry splitting open more than anything else as she rolled up to the vent and spilled out as the grating gave way. She hit the ground hard, wetly, but without a grunt or scream. The first thing I realized was that Alexa had left her drill—my drill, actually—up in the office. Not that it mattered, as Jaffe was already a reanimate. She lurched to her feet and through hammered features glared at us, driven by her last conscious thought to bring us on to her team. Now though, her team was the dead.
(15)
It is curious to break a first-person narrative into chapters. Suspense of the traditional sort is impossible, and it is not as though human beings normally relay accounts of their lives in chapter form. It’s a habit we’ve picked up from novels, and from memoirs which are simply novel-shaped objects. Novels can be a bit tawdry. Is there a cheaper trick than ending a chapter with the main characters in deadly peril? Probably only one: the secret plan a character has in a crime or mystery novel that will solve all the problems of the book. We get to know all of the protagonist’s innermost thoughts, likes and dislikes, childhood encounters with ancient evil, sexual tastes, etcetera, but when it comes time for the story to wrap up, we never get to see the content of the forbidden box, or the text of the hidden letter, or the contents of the protagonist’s head.
Clearly, I survived the encounter with Jaffe’s reanimated corpse. It involved the usual thrashing about, though I have trouble even now thinking about it. The desk chairs were nailed to the floor, so I couldn’t pick one up and brain her with it. The projection screen wouldn’t have killed a baby, and it rolled up into the ceiling, so there was no metal casing to use as a weapon. But we did outnumber her, and we were so close. Jaffe had broken a leg, so she could only limp at us, dragging half her body behind her.
The girls rushed to the projection cabinet, where I stood. We knew without speaking that wrecking the cabinet to manufacture a makeshift weapon would defeat the whole purpose of getting into
City Hall in the first place. But the cabinet did have doors, and the doors had hinges. I grabbed the keys from Thunder and found a key with a thick stem, slammed it under one of the hinges, and pried the aging pin free. The three of us together pulled on the door and freed it from the other hinge. Then I raised it over my head, and swung down atop Jaffe’s. The wood was light, though, so it just bounced off her skull. We backpedaled a bit, and held the door horizontally as a shield.
“Her head’s already half-destroyed, she shouldn’t even be walking!” Thunder said.
“Well, it’s like the woman who liked to drink—if you have a lot of passion for something, some trace of that can survive,” I said. “Some of those perceptions aren’t so hysterical after all.”
“Shut up and put the door down across two of the chairs, quick!” Alexa said. She tugged on her end and we let go. Then she hopped up onto another desk chair, and wobbled. I didn’t know what she was planning on doing at that moment, but I held her still. Then she jumped, and landed on the door. It splintered, but didn’t break.
“Fuck!” she shouted. Then she just jumped into my arms. I stumbled backwards.
“Good idea, shit execution!” Thunder grabbed the door and swung it against the desk chairs. Four, five times, like Babe Ruth, all gut and ferocity. I closed my eyes. For the first time, I was afraid to die. Then I heard a sharp crack. The door had split near the edge. Thunder tore and kicked at it, and had a spear.
She howled, “Fucking bourgie bitch!” and drove the point of it into Jaffe’s eye. Jaffe swung her arms, and tried to jerk free.
“Grab ’em!” I said and I got a hold of her right hand and elbow. Jaffe got the left. Then Thunder pushed while we pulled. There was a quick slide, then something jammed in Jaffe’s skull, then Alexa and I yanked harder and Thunder slammed her shoulder into the wooden plank, and we pushed past it, deep into Jaffe’s head. Her neck snapped backwards, and she was done.