by Nick Mamatas
I had a two-liter Coke bottle filled with beer, and a few airline bottles of Bacardi. The future was before me like the night, dark and endless. I had a lot of pages to transcribe, but I’ve always been a fast typist, albeit with only two rapid-fire fingers. Colin called it the “hunt and peck” method, but I always preferred to think of it as “search and destroy,” one letter at a time.
This wasn’t what California was supposed to be like. An understatement I instantly want to scratch out—let the pen tear the pages. Boston was so cold, and so dark. It was heavy with history, and ridiculous parodies of history. Tour guides in tricorner hats and petticoats. Then there was Harvard in Cambridge, pretty much a great middle finger to me and everyone else like me. And it had been a huge brick Fuck You since before the country had even been founded.
San Francisco seemed like a place of hope. Expensive sure, but the dot.com bubble had already popped, and even the homeless could thrive there thanks to the temperate weather and compassionate, liberal, guilt-riven populace. California was the shelf where America stored its hustlers, a place for reinvention and imagination.
I cried, “Los Angeles, give me some of you!” like Fante’s Bandini once did, but I knew I’d need a car to get around. And I’d be one more wannabe writer, just like every broom-pusher and bagboy with a script. The only thing that differentiated me from them was that if I sold a book or another story, I might make a few grand, or another fifty dollars. If one of those assholes sold one of their asinine scripts, they’d make a house. I was too egotistical, too fragile, too incompetent and unsure of myself for LA. And I couldn’t afford to relocate and instantly buy a car.
San Francisco, where the Beats drank and fags still hustled on select street corners. San Francisco, which still had Italians in North Beach, and nearby Oakland, which had a real live Greek ghetto. There were still SROs full of shaky-limbed alkies, and overstuffed libraries, and a great big park full of little hidey-holes to sleep in. And maybe some kind of new job for some kind of new person. The Internet was practically hatched in California, and what was the Internet except for a big pile of mostly text? There was something out there—something out here—for me, I knew it.
I also needed an entire country between Yvette, with her four little sleeping pills, and me, before I did something extremely stupid. I was never anything but a side character in the drama of her life. The only thing we really had in common was the skin torn from our wrists, and ankles, and necks, in our attempts to escape Youngstown, and lives of rented furniture, high fructose corn syrup, bad backs from the factory, and toxic debt buildup from the layoffs. In San Francisco, I could drown myself in women. Catholic schoolgirls turned pagan sluts, dykes into dick on alternate Thursdays, hippie chicks with hairy armpits, older women in old man bars . . . anyone who’d have me, really.
So I bought a ticket, via Southwest. Four hundred bucks got me a cramped seat and two layovers. At Midway Airport, in a little bakery called Let Them Eat Cake, I had a slice of tres leches cake. It was the single best piece of solid food that had ever passed through my lips. How many people still alive have ever had that soft cake melt on their tongue? How many would still treasure that mayfly sensation over the other experiences of their lives? The army of the dead didn’t just destroy civilization, it ruined the very nature of the everyday. Every sober moment is a crisis—how to get food, who to trust, what’s worth trading. I suppose some things never change. Now there are so few sober moments, and little need for there to be any.
There are times—times like now—that I think the reanimates are the lucky ones. They have another chance to get it right, but with no social obligations and only a single appetite. The living have it a little better in some ways now than in the days before reanimation—the huge databases of demographic information and debt records and legal histories and property deeds have been destroyed, so it’s just whatever street hustles one finds oneself wrapped up in that weigh heavily—but the dead have evolved beyond caring about anything but the quick-moving, screaming blurs before them.
“There are no dead people.” I can imagine Alexa’s childhood priest matter-of-factly making such a declaration. I was told the same exact thing. Nobody is dead, and hell is empty until the Day of Judgment. Somewhere in Constantinople, a bearded old man is laughing his ass off. All the other branches of Christianity have to try to explain human suffering—Eastern Orthodoxy just wallows in it. At a loss my whole life, when the zombies came and Jaffe woke me up, a part of me was, finally, well-prepared for the world beyond the walls of my apartment. There are no dead people, so the shuffling footsteps I hear in the hallway outside my door do not belong to the dead. The reanimates are as alive as I am. It’s just that I’m not so very alive.
On the last leg of my flight to California, after a lengthy delay in Denver where I had to stay on the plane while other passengers disembarked and a new troupe boarded, I was seated next to an older woman. She was eager to chat. So eager that she complimented my selection of orange juice during beverage service. I’d never been afraid to fly, and needed to save every dime for the struggles ahead, so I was pleased to select a free drink. Burying my nose in the book I was reading at the time—some horrifically boring thriller I’d found in the seatback pocket—didn’t help either. She knew she was more interesting than the high-stakes nonsense in my hands.
“Do you know what someone should come up with?” she told me. “A sort of map, or chart, that explains whatever it is we see when we’re flying over America. Did you notice those round patterns back before the Rockies? Are those crops? I wonder why they were planted as circles within the squares of the property lines.”
I shouldn’t have told her, but I did. So rarely did I actually have a definitive answer to anything. “Circle irrigation. A long moving pipe waters all the crops, so it describes the radius of the circle. You only see it in flat parts of the country.” I did a little maneuver with my forearms and table tray to illustrate.
“Are you from a flat part of the country?” she said. She touched my arm. A wrinkled old auntie, just a few years from grandma, the brush of her fingers was entirely asexual, but it was the only warm, meaningful contact with another human I’d had in weeks. She had me.
“Not especially. I’m coming from Boston, but I’m really from Ohio.”
“And what brings you to the Bay?” she asked. “Vacation?”
“Relocating. I’m . . .” I’m planning on drinking myself to death in a transient hotel where the bunks are surrounded in chicken wire. I have no idea what I’m going to do, because I’m too stupid to plan ahead, and because my mother spent twenty years cooking my meals and ironing pleats in my blue jeans because she thought they were to be worn like trousers. I’m beyond help, so I figured I may as well throw myself in the middle of a big crazy mess of a city and see if somehow something good happens to me, like falling and tripping over a broken jar of mayonnaise in the supermarket, and settling out of court. There was no hope in truth. This was my moment, my chance to declare something before another human being, and in front of the lower echelons of the heavens themselves.
“I’m going to be a writer,” I said. “I’ve already published one story.” Of course I didn’t mention that it was in some dopey sci-fi webzine. Maybe she’d think I’d been in the New Yorker, my old enemy. “California seems like the place to be to get some serious work done. It’s like America’s Paris—full of vitality. Full of life. That’s where I want to be.”
The woman, who didn’t ever introduce herself or offer any quid pro quo personal information, smiled at me. “How do you plan on paying your rent till you make it big?”
“Oh, I have some money saved.” One hundred-fifty dollars, actually. A little leftover from Colin’s payout, augmented by the proceeds from selling sperm and blood and some hardcovers to a sympathetic clerk at Rodney’s Bookstore in Cambridge. Enough for a week in the worst room in a dumpy residency hotel in the worst neighborhood in the city. My only plan, and it was half-baked,
was to find the Californian version of Papatheofanis and talk my way into a job washing dishes or running a bread and pastry route servicing the local restaurants. Little did I know that the Greek diner, or Greek-run pizzeria, was virtually unknown out west. My gig, ultimately, was picking up odd jobs via Craigslist—moving furniture and writing term papers for Chinese college students at Berkeley were my twin specialties. “And I can write anything. Fiction, journalism. Copy for websites. Maybe even a piece for an in-flight magazine,” I told her. A wrinkled copy of the airline’s rag, Spirit, mocked me, the torn corner of the front cover a permanent wink. But I made a note to take the magazine with me, just in case.
“Good luck to you. Maybe I’ll see your name on the spine of a book one day. What is it?” I told her, and she made a face, as normal white people do when they hear a Greek name, but she recovered quickly and made me write it down for her on a scrap of paper she fashioned from her seatback’s barf bag. For a moment, my father’s paranoia roared to the forefront of my brain. She’s a cop! CIA! This is a trap set by the airline because they don’t like people flying one-way after 9/11! She still may have been, actually, but it didn’t matter. My ears popped, and the pilot told us to fasten our seat belts as we were beginning our final approach.
A few months later she was dead, and I got an email from her son. He’d Googled me, and wanted to know how my name, written in my handwriting, ended up on a piece of paper in his mother’s only partially unpacked luggage. Her name was Mary Beth. She had taught school in the South Bay somewhere for thirty years, then retired. Her husband had died the year before, and she had taken a flight out to Chicago to visit a sister who lived in nearby Lake Forest. Then a stroke took her suddenly, and it was sonny’s job to pick through her belongings. He was as chatty as his damn mother was in his friggin’ email.
I was curious, and wrote back. “She didn’t happen to have any other names written down anywhere, did she?” I pictured great snowy piles of scraps of paper atop a coffee table, spilling forth from her pocketbook, stuffed into the pockets of a sensible coat with a breadcrumb trail leading back to the front door.
“She did, actually,” he wrote back. “Mom liked talking to people. But only your name was easy to Google. Sorry to bother you.” It hadn’t been a bother. In fact, the email kept me from cutting my belly open with a kitchen knife, an action I had been seriously entertaining, even though it meant finding a dollar store and buying a kitchen knife. Dollar store cutlery ain’t an easy way to check out. A little human contact was enough to keep drinking rather than bleeding that day.
San Francisco had not been good to me that first month. How could it have been? It was a city of artists, of sexual adventurers, of intellectuals and mathematical geniuses. Nobody here cared whether I was alive or dead. Hell, nobody here knew that I was alive and not dead, except for Mary Beth’s very thorough first born son. San Francisco had only given me one thing ever, just as I got off the airplane and walked out from the terminal.
My little card table desk and laptop face south. There’s a window on my left. Saturday has become Sunday, and the cold steel night sky is melting into bright day. In my peripheral vision, I caught a shambling reanimate moving down the sidewalk across the street, then another. Maybe I saw a third too, or maybe it’s the drink, and the long hours of squinting and typing. There are more dead than I’ve ever seen at once, though of course I slept through the initial uprising. I don’t hear the ones out in the hallway, surely loitering by my door, but if they’re not moving and jostling one another, not scratching at the knob, there’s nothing much to hear. No breathing, no impatient sighs. I think I know who they are, regardless. The girls, Alexa and Thunder. Whatever’s out there fills space, displaces air, in the way those two do. Eureka! They found me. I don’t want to know what they look like now. If one another’s flesh is under their fight-ruined cuticles. If Alexa died smiling. Maybe behind them, still climbing the steps, is poor, loyal Junior, or crazy Tolbert with a scam to sell me some new skin. Or it could even be long lost Aishwarya, a skeleton with a name tag pinned to a pitted, crumbling rib. Only Yvette is truly dead and buried to me, forever.
Something terrible must have happened when the video hit the net. A rash of suicides, or a crazed power struggle outside City Hall. Why not both? The dead walked alone. Only the living hunted in packs, until now. Some faction or other has lost for winning. A brace of cops versus a coterie of drillers. Garbage men versus sewer workers. Fags versus breeders. Draw the line any way you like, someone will step over it. One set wiped out the other, but even in death the passions and desires of the losers have reanimated their limbs, compelled them to keep working together to fill the power vacuum, to take the city. There’s a stream of ambulant dead now, little lives on scraps of skin scattered like Mary Beth’s paper slips across the streets. The message of these last few paragraphs isn’t the street corner prophet cliché The End Is Near! but The Beginning Is Near!
That’s what the city gave me, on the first day. I walked out into a new beginning. A new world, rising forth from the ashes of the old. The sun was rising on my left, as it is now. I turned to the orange-painted sky, saw the sun boiling away the Northeast—evaporating frigid Boston, melting rusted Youngstown, consuming all of old America—and I smiled. In that one moment, I was happy, and I was free. That moment, I’ll remember forever. This next one too. For now I see another new dawn, and I’m here to greet it. The notes on my foolscaps and pads have all been keyed in. The printer is humming. The text file has been uploaded. There’s a number of solicitors standing just outside my door with a great new deal, and I’m ready to take it.
The germ of this book started with an email from my friend R.J. Sevin, who had what seemed like the surefire idea of launching an imprint of zombie fiction, and then getting George A. Romero to lend his name to the concern. Well anyway, it didn’t work out, as these things rarely do, but I kept writing anyway out of sheer pique despite the howls of protest from publishers and my agent about the sheer number of zombie books—as if I’d been publishing them all. I do agree though; this should be the last zombie novel ever published. I’d also like to thank Erica Satifka for her keen eye, and Jeremy Lassen and Cory Allyn at Night Shade for bringing this book to the United States.
Nick Mamatas is the author of six and a half novels and several collections. His work has been translated into German, Italian, and Greek. Nick is also an anthologist and editor of short fiction, including the Locus Award–nominated The Future Is Japanese (co-edited with Masumi Washington) and the Bram Stoker Award–winning Haunted Legends (co-edited with Ellen Datlow). Nick’s own short fiction has appeared in genre publications such as Asimov’s Science Fiction and Tor.com, lit journals including New Haven Review and subTERRAIN, and anthologies such as Hint Fiction and Best American Mystery Stories 2013. His fiction and editorial work has been nominated for the Bram Stoker Award five times, the Hugo Award twice, the World Fantasy Award twice, and the Shirley Jackson, International Horror Guild, and Locus awards.