by Isaac Marion
I meet M later that evening at his home in the women’s bathroom. He is sitting in front of a TV plugged into a long extension cord, gaping at a late-night soft-core movie he found in some dead man’s luggage. I don’t know why he does this. Erotica is meaningless for us now. The blood doesn’t pump, the passion doesn’t surge. I’ve walked in on M with his ‘girlfriends’ before, and they’re just standing there naked, staring at each other, sometimes rubbing their bodies together but looking tired and lost. Maybe it’s a kind of death throe. A distant echo of that great motivator that once started wars and inspired symphonies, that drove human history out of the caves and into space. M may be holding on, but those days are over now. Sex, once a law as undisputed as gravity, has been disproved. The equation is erased, the blackboard broken.
Sometimes it’s a relief. I remember the need, the insatiable hunger that ruled my life and the lives of everyone around me. Sometimes I’m glad to be free of it. There’s less trouble now. But our loss of this, the most basic of all human passions, might sum up our loss of everything else. It’s made things quieter. Simpler. And it’s one of the surest signs that we’re dead.
I watch M from the doorway. He sits on the little metal folding chair with his hands between his knees like a schoolboy facing the principal. There are times when I can almost glimpse the person he once was under all that rotting flesh, and it prickles my heart.
‘Did… bring it?’ he asks, without looking away from the TV.
I hold up what I’ve been carrying. A human brain, fresh from today’s hunting trip, no longer warm but still pink and buzzing with life.
We sit against the tiles of the bathroom wall with our legs sprawled out in front of us, passing the brain back and forth, taking small, leisurely bites and enjoying brief flashes of human experience.
‘Good… shit,’ M wheezes.
The brain contains the life of some young military grunt from the city. His existence isn’t particularly interesting to me, just endless repetitions of training, eating and mowing down zombies, but M seems to like it. His tastes are a little less demanding than mine. I watch his mouth form silent words. I watch his face shuffle through emotions. Anger, fear, joy, lust. It’s like watching a dreaming dog kick and whimper, but far more heartbreaking. When he wakes up, this will all disappear. He will be empty again. He will be dead.
After an hour or two, we are down to one small gobbet of pink tissue. M pops it in his mouth and his pupils dilate as he has his visions. The brain is gone, but I’m not satisfied. I reach furtively into my pocket and pull out a fist-sized chunk that I’ve been saving. This one is different, though. This one is special. I tear off a bite, and chew.
I am Perry Kelvin, a sixteen-year-old boy, watching my girlfriend write in her journal. The black leather cover is tattered and worn, the inside a maze of scribbles, drawings, little notes and quotes. I am sitting on the couch with a salvaged first edition of On the Road, longing to live in any era but this one, and she is curled in my lap, penning furiously. I poke my head over her shoulder, trying to get a glimpse. She pulls the journal away and gives me a coy smile. ‘No,’ she says, and returns her attention to her work.
‘What are you writing about?’
‘Nooot tellinnng.’
‘Journal or poetry?’
‘Both, silly.’
‘Am I in it?’
She chuckles.
I lace my arms around her shoulders. She burrows into me a little deeper. I bury my face in her hair and kiss the back of her head. The spicy smell of her shampoo—
M is looking at me. ‘You… have more?’ he grunts. He holds out his hand for me to pass it. But I don’t pass it. I take another bite and close my eyes.
‘Perry,’ Julie says.
‘Yeah.’
We are at our secret spot on the Stadium roof. We lie on our backs on a red blanket on the white steel panels, squinting up at the blinding blue sky.
‘I miss airplanes,’ she says.
I nod. ‘Me too.’
‘Not flying in them. I never got to do that anyway with Dad the way he is. I just miss airplanes. That muffled thunder in the distance, those white lines… the way they sliced across the sky and made designs in the blue? My mom used to say it looked like Etch A Sketch. It was so beautiful.’
I smile at the thought. She’s right. Airplanes were beautiful. So were fireworks. Flowers. Concerts. Kites. All the indulgences we can no longer afford.
‘I like how you remember things,’ I say.
She looks at me. ‘Well, we have to. We have to remember everything. If we don’t, by the time we grow up it’ll be gone for ever.’
I close my eyes and let the scorching light blaze red through my lids. I let it saturate my brain. I turn my head and kiss Julie. We make love there on the blanket on the Stadium roof, four hundred feet above the ground. The sun stands guard over us like a kind-hearted chaperone, smiling silently.
‘Hey!’
My eyes snap open. M is glaring at me. He makes a grab for the piece of brain in my hand and I yank it away.
‘No,’ I growl.
I suppose M is my friend, but I would rather kill him than let him taste this. The thought of his filthy fingers poking and fondling these memories makes me want to rip his chest open and squish his heart in my hands, stomp his brain till he stops existing. This is mine.
M looks at me. He sees the warning flare in my eyes, hears the rising air-raid klaxon. He drops his hand away. He stares at me for a moment, annoyed and confused. ‘Bo… gart,’ he mutters, and locks himself in a toilet stall.
I leave the bathroom with abnormally purposeful strides. I slip in through the door of the 747 and stand there in the faint oval of light. Julie is lying back in a reclined seat, snoring gently. I knock on the side of the fuselage and she bolts upright, instantly awake. She watches me warily as I approach her. My eyes are burning again. I grab her messenger bag off the floor and dig through it. I find her wallet, and then I find a photo. A portrait of a young man. I hold the photo up to her eyes.
‘I’m… sorry,’ I say hoarsely.
She looks at me, stone-faced.
I point at my mouth. I clutch my stomach. I point at her mouth. I touch her stomach. Then I point out the window, at the cloudless black sky of merciless stars. It’s the weakest defence for murder ever offered, but it’s all I have. I clench my jaw and squint my eyes, trying to ease their dry sting.
Julie’s lower lip is tensed. Her eyes are red and wet. ‘Which one of you did it?’ she says in a voice on the verge of breaking. ‘Was it that big one? That fat fuck that almost got me?’
I stare at her for a moment, not grasping her questions. And then it hits me, and my eyes go wide.
She doesn’t know it was me.
The room was dark and I came from behind. She didn’t see it. She doesn’t know. Her penetrating eyes address me like a creature worthy of address, unaware that I recently killed her lover, ate his life and digested his soul, and am right now carrying a prime cut of his brain in the front pocket of my slacks. I can feel it burning there like a coal of guilt, and I reflexively back away from her, unable to comprehend this curdled mercy.
‘Why me?’ she demands, blinking an angry tear out of her eye. ‘Why did you save me?’ She twists her back to me and curls up on the chair, wrapping her arms around her shoulders. ‘Out of everyone…’ she mumbles into the cushion. ‘Why me.’
These are her first questions. Not the ones urgent for her own well-being, not the mystery of how I know her name or the terrifying prospect of what my plans for her might be; she doesn’t rush to satisfy those hungers. Her first questions are for others. For her friends, for her lover, wondering why she couldn’t take their place.
I am the lowest thing. I am the bottom of the universe.
I drop the photo onto the seat and look at the floor. ‘I’m… sorry,’ I say again, and leave the plane.
When I emerge from the boarding tunnel, there are several Dead grouped near th
e doorway. They watch me without expressions. We stand there in silence, still as statues. Then I brush past them and wander off into the dark halls.
The cracked pavement rumbles under our truck’s tyres. It abuses the old Ford’s creaky suspension, making a quiet roar like stifled rage. I look at my dad. He looks older than I remember. Weaker. He grips the steering wheel hard. His knuckles are white.
‘Dad?’ I say.
‘What, Perry.’
‘Where are we going to go?’
‘Someplace safe.’
I watch him carefully. ‘Are there still safe places?’
He hesitates, too long. ‘Someplace safer.’
Behind us, in the valley where we used to swim and pick strawberries, eat pizza and go to movies, the valley where I was born and grew up and discovered everything that’s now inside me, plumes of smoke rise. The gas station where I bought Coke Slushies is on fire. The windows of my grade school are shattered. The kids in the public swimming pool are not swimming.
‘Dad?’ I say.
‘What.’
‘Is Mom coming back?’
My dad finally looks at me, but says nothing.
‘As one of them?’
He looks back at the road. ‘No.’
‘But I thought she would. I thought everyone comes back now.’
‘Perry,’ my dad says, and the word seems to barely escape his throat. ‘I fixed it. So she won’t.’
The hard lines in his face fascinate and repel me. My voice cracks. ‘Why, Dad?’
‘Because she’s gone. No one comes back. Not really. Do you understand that?’
The scrub brush and barren hills ahead start to blur in my vision. I try to focus on the windshield itself, the crushed bugs and tiny fractures. Those blur, too.
‘Just remember her,’ my dad says. ‘As much as you can, for as long as you can. That’s how she comes back. We make her live. Not some ridiculous curse.’
I watch his face, trying to read the truth in his squinted eyes. I’ve never heard him talk like this.
‘Bodies are just meat,’ he says. ‘The part of her that matters most… we get to keep that.’
‘Julie.’
‘What?’
‘Come here. Look at this.’
The wind makes a ripping sound through the shattered plate glass of the hospital we’re salvaging. Julie steps to the window’s edge with me and looks down.
‘What’s it doing?’
‘I don’t know.’
On the snow-dusted street below, a single zombie walks in a loose circle. It bumps into a car and stumbles, slowly backs up against a wall, turns, shuffles in another direction. It makes no sound and doesn’t seem to be looking at anything. Julie and I watch it for a few minutes.
‘I don’t like this,’ she says.
‘Yeah.’
‘It’s… sad.’
‘Yeah.’
‘What’s wrong with it?’
‘Don’t know.’
It stops in the middle of the street, swaying slightly. Its face displays absolutely nothing. Just skin stretched over a skull.
‘I wonder how it feels,’ she says.
‘What?’
‘To be like them.’
I watch the zombie. It starts swaying a little harder, then it collapses. It lies there on its side, staring at the frozen pavement.
‘What’s it… ?’ Julie starts, then stops. She looks at me with wide eyes, then back at the crumpled body. ‘Did it just die?’
We wait in silence. The corpse doesn’t move. I feel a wriggling sensation inside me, tiny things creeping down my spine.
‘Let’s go,’ Julie says, and turns away. I follow her back into the building. We can’t think of anything to say all the way home.
Stop.
Breathe those useless breaths. Drop this piece of life you’re holding to your lips. Where are you? How long have you been here? Stop now. You have to stop.
Squeeze shut your stinging eyes, and take another bite.
In the morning, my wife finds me slumped against one of the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the runways. My eyes are open and full of dust. My head leans to one side. I rarely allow myself to look so corpse-like.
Something is wrong with me. There is a sick emptiness in my stomach, a feeling somewhere between starvation and hangover. My wife grabs my arm and pulls me to my feet. She starts walking, dragging me behind her like rolling luggage. I feel a flash of bitter heat pulse through me and I start speaking at her. ‘Name,’ I say, glaring into her ear. ‘Name?’
She shoots me a cold look and keeps walking.
‘Job? School?’ My tone shifts from query to accusation. ‘Movie? Song?’ It bubbles out of me like oil from a punctured pipeline. ‘Book?’ I shout at her. ‘Home? Name?’
My wife turns and spits at me. Actually spits on my shirt, snarling like an animal. But the look in her eyes instantly cools my eruption. She’s… frightened. Her lips quiver. What am I doing?
I look at the floor. We stand in silence for several minutes. Then she resumes walking, and I follow her, trying to shake off this strange black cloud that’s settled over me.
She leads me to a gutted, burned-out gift shop and lets out an emphatic groan. Our kids emerge from behind an overturned bookcase full of best-sellers that will never be read. They’re each gnawing a human forearm, slightly brown at the stumps, not exactly fresh.
‘Where did… get those?’ I ask them. They shrug. I turn to my wife. ‘Need… better.’
She frowns and points at me. She grunts in annoyance, and my face falls, duly chastised. It’s true, I haven’t been the most involved parent. Is it possible to have a midlife crisis if you have no idea how old you are? I could be in my early thirties or late teens. I could be younger than Julie.
My wife grunts at the kids and gestures down the hall. They hang their heads and make a wheezy whining noise, but they follow us. We are taking them to their first day of school.
Some of us, maybe the same industrious Dead who built the Boneys’ stair-church, have built a ‘classroom’ in the food court by stacking heavy luggage into high walls. As my family and I approach, we hear groans and screams from inside this arena. There is a line of youngsters in front of the entryway, waiting their turn. My wife and I lead our kids to the back of the line and watch the lesson now in progress.
Five Dead youths are circling a skinny, middle-aged Living man. The man backs up against the luggage, looking frantically left and right, his empty hands balled into fists. Two of the youths dive at him and try to hold his arms down, but he shakes them off. The third one nips a tiny bite in his shoulder and the man screams as if he’s been mortally wounded, because, in effect, he has. From zombie bites to starvation to good old-fashioned age and disease, there are so many options for dying in this new world. So many ways for the Living to stop. But with just a few debrained exceptions, all roads lead to us, the Dead, and our very unglamorous immortality.
‘Wrong!’ their teacher roars. ‘Get… throat!’
The children back away and watch the man warily.
‘Throat!’ the teacher repeats. He and his assistant lumber into the arena and tackle the man, forcing him to the ground. The teacher kills him and stands up, blood streaming down his chin. ‘Throat,’ he says again, pointing to the body.
The five children exit shamefaced, and the next five in line are prodded inside. My kids look up at me anxiously. I pat their heads.
The five youths inside are nervous, but the teacher shouts at them and they begin to move in. When they get close enough all five lunge at the same time, two grabbing for each arm and the fifth going for the throat. But the old man is shockingly strong. He twists around and flings two of them hard against the wall of luggage. The impact shakes the wall and a sturdy metal briefcase topples down from the top. The man grabs it by the handle, raises it high, and smashes it down on one of the youths’ heads. The youth’s skull caves in and his brain squishes out. He doesn’t scream or twi
tch or quiver, he just abruptly collapses into a heap of limbs, flat and flush with the floor as if he’s been dead for months already. Death takes hold of him with retroactive finality.
The whole school goes silent. The remaining four children back out of the arena. No one really pays attention as the adults rush inside to deal with the man. We all gaze at the youth’s crumpled corpse with sad resignation. We can’t tell which of the gathered adults might be his parents, since all our expressions are about the same. Whoever they are, they will forget their loss soon enough. By tomorrow the Boneys will show up with another boy or girl to replace this one. We allow a few uncomfortable seconds of silence for the killed child, then school resumes. A few parents glance at each other, maybe wondering what to think, wondering what this all means, this bent, inverted cycle of life. Or maybe that’s just me.
My kids are next in line. They watch the current lesson intently, sometimes standing on tiptoes to see, but they aren’t afraid. They are younger than the rest, and will probably be matched against someone too frail to put up much fight, but they don’t know this, and it’s not why they’re unafraid. When the entire world is built on death and horror, when existence is a constant state of panic, it’s hard to get worked up about any one thing. Specific fears have become irrelevant. We’ve replaced them with a smothering blanket far worse.
I pace outside the 747 boarding tunnel for about an hour before going in. I open the jet’s door quietly. Julie is curled up in business class, sleeping. She has wrapped herself in a quilt made of cut-up jeans that I brought back as a souvenir a few weeks ago. The morning sun makes a halo in her yellow hair, sainting her.