The Living Dead

by John Joseph Adams

  Albert tried to turn away, and said, “David, I don’t think we should,” but I knew what was good for us.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Sure we want to see.”

  Luke was already more than a head taller than either of us and fifty pounds heavier. He was cultivating the “hood” image from some hand-me-down memory of James Dean or Elvis, with his hair up in a greasy swirl and a black leather jacket worn even on hot days when he kept his shirt unbuttoned so he could show off that he already had chest hair.

  A cigarette dangled from his lips. He blew smoke in my face. I strained not to cough.

  “Well come on, then,” he said. “It’s really cool.”

  So we followed him, along with a kid called Animal, and another called Spike—the beginnings of Luke’s “gang,” with which he said he was going to make himself famous one day. My little brother tagged after us, reluctantly at first, but then as fascinated as I was to be initiated into this innermost, forbidden secret of the older, badder set.

  Luke had quite a sense of showmanship. He led us under bushes, crawling through natural tunnels under vines and dead trees where, when we were smaller, we’d had our own secret hideouts, as, I suppose, all children do. Luke and his crowd were getting too big for that sort of thing, but they went crashing through the underbrush like bears. I was small and skinny enough. David was young enough. In fact it was all we could do to keep up.

  With a great flourish, Luke raised a vine curtain and we emerged into the now half-abandoned Radnor Golf Course. It was an early Saturday morning. Mist was still rising from the poorly tended greens. I saw one golfer, far away. Otherwise we had the world to ourselves.

  We ran across the golf course, then across Lancaster Pike, then up the hill and back into the woods on the other side.

  I only thought for a minute, Hey wait a minute, we’re going to see a corpse, a kid like us, only dead… but, as I said, for Luke Bradley or even with him, all rules were suspended, and I knew better than try to ask what the kid died of, because we’d see soon enough.

  In the woods again, by secret and hidden ways, we came to the old “fort,” which had probably been occupied by generations of boys by then, though of course right now it “belonged” to the Luke Bradley Gang.

  I don’t know who built the fort or why. It was a rectangle of raised earth and piled stone, with logs laid across for a roof, and vines growing thickly over the whole thing so that from a distance it just looked like a hillock or knoll. That was part of its secret. You had to know it was there.

  And only Luke could let you in.

  He raised another curtain of vines, and with a sweep of his hand and a bow said, “Welcome to my house, you assholes.”

  Spike and Animal laughed while Albert and I got down on our hands and knees and crawled inside.

  Immediately I almost gagged on the awful smell, like rotten garbage and worse. Albert started to cough. I thought he was going to throw up. But before I could say or do anything, Luke and his two henchmen had come in after us, and we all crowded around a pit in the middle of the dirt floor which didn’t used to be there. Now there was a four-foot drop, a roughly square cavity, and in the middle of that, a cardboard box which was clearly the source of the unbelievable stench.

  Luke got out a flashlight, then reached down and opened the box.

  “It’s a dead kid. I found him in the woods in this box. He’s mine.”

  I couldn’t help but look. It was indeed a dead kid, an emaciated, pale thing, naked but for what might have been the remains of filthy underpants, lying on its side in a fetal position, little clawlike hands bunched up under its chin.

  “A dead kid,” said Luke. “Really cool.”

  Then Albert really was throwing up and screaming at the same time, and scrambling to get out of there, only Animal and then Spike had him by the back of his shirt the way you pick up a kitten by the scruff of its neck, and they passed him back to Luke, who held his head in his hands and forced him down into that pit, saying, “Now look at it you fucking pussy faggot, this because it’s really cool.”

  Albert was sobbing and sniffling when Luke let him go, but he didn’t try to run, nor did I, even when Luke got a stick and poked the dead kid with it.

  “This is the best part,” he said.

  We didn’t run away then because we had to watch just to convince ourselves that we weren’t crazy, because of what we were seeing.

  Luke poked and the dead kid moved, spasming at first, then grabbing at the stick feebly, and finally crawling around inside the box like a slow, clumsy animal, just barely able to turn, scratching at the cardboard with bony fingertips.

  “What is he?” I had to ask.

  “A zombie,” said Luke.

  “Aren’t zombies supposed to be black?”

  “You mean like a nigger?” That was another of Luke’s favorite words this year. He called everybody “nigger” no matter what color they were.

  “Well, you know. Voodoo. In Haiti and all that.”

  As we spoke the dead kid reared up and almost got out of the box. Luke poked him in the forehead with his stick and knocked him down.

  “I suppose if we let him rot long enough he’ll be black enough even for you.”

  The dead kid stared up at us and made a bleating sound. The worst thing of all was that he didn’t have any eyes, only huge sockets and an oozy mess inside them.

  Albert was sobbing for his mommy by then, and after a while of poking and prodding the dead kid, Luke and his friends got tired of this sport. Luke turned to me and said, “You can go now, but you know if you or your piss-pants brother tell about this, I’ll kill you both and put you in there for the dead kid to eat.”

  II

  I can’t remember much of what Albert and I did for the rest of that day. We ran through the woods, tripped, fell flat on our faces in a stream. Then later we were walking along the old railroad embankment turning over ties to look for snakes, and all the while Albert was babbling on about the dead kid and how we had to do something. I just let him talk until he got it all out of him, and when we went home for dinner and were very quiet when Mom and our stepdad Steve tried to find out what we had been doing all day.

  “Just playing,” I said. “In the woods.”

  “It’s good for them to be outdoors,” Steve said to Mom. “Too many kids spent all their time in front of the TV watching unwholesome junk these days. I’m glad our kids are normal.”

  But Albert ended up screaming in his sleep for weeks and wetting his bed, and things were anything but normal that summer. He was the one with the obvious problems. He was the one who ended up going to a “specialist,” and whatever he said in therapy must not have been believed, because the police didn’t go tearing up Cabbage Creek Woods, Luke Bradley and his neanderthals were not arrested, and I was more or less left alone.

  In fact, I had more unsupervised time than usual. And I used it to work out problems of my own, like I hated school and I hated Stepdad Steve for the sanctimonious prig he was. I decided, with the full wisdom of my twelve years and some months, that if I was to survive in this rough, tough, evil world, I was going to have to become tough myself, bad, and very likely evil.

  I decided that Luke Bradley had the answers.

  So I sought him out. It wasn’t hard. He had a knack for being in the right place at the right time when you’re ready to sell your soul, just like the Devil.

  I met him in town, in front of the Wayne Toy Town, where I used to go to buy model kits and stuff. I still liked building models, and doing scientific puzzles, though I would never admit it to Luke Bradley.

  So I just froze when I saw him there.

  “Well, well,” he said. “If it ain’t the little pussy scuzz.” He blew smoke from the perennial cigarette.

  “Hello, Luke,” I said. I nodded to his companions, who included Spike, Animal, and a virtually hairless, pale gorilla who went by the unlikely name of Corky. As I spoke, I slipped my latest purchase into my shoulder bag and ho
ped he didn’t notice.

  Corky grabbed me by the back of the neck and said, “Whaddaya want me to do with him?”

  But before Luke could respond, I said, “Hey, have you still got the dead kid at the fort?”

  They all hesitated. They weren’t expecting that.

  “Well he’s cool,” I said. “I want to see him again.”

  “Okay,” said Luke.

  We didn’t have any other way to get there, so we walked, about an hour, to Cabbage Creek Woods. Luke dispensed with ceremony. We just crawled into the fort and gathered around the pit.

  The smell, if anything, was worse.

  This time, the dead kid was already moving around inside the box. When Luke opened the cardboard flaps, the dead kid stood up, with his horrible, pus-filled eye-sockets staring. He made that bleating, groaning sound again. He clawed at the edge of the box.

  “Really cool,” I forced myself to say, swallowing hard.

  “I can make him do tricks,” said Luke. “Watch this.”

  I watched as he shoved his finger through the skin under the dead kid’s chin and lifted him up like a hooked fish out of the pit. The dead kid scrambled over the edge of the box, then crouched down on the dirt floor at the edge of the pit, staring into space.

  Luke passed his hand slowly in front of the dead kid’s face. He snapped his fingers. The dead kid didn’t respond. Luke smacked him on the side of the head. The dead kid whimpered a little, and made that bleating sound.

  “Everybody outside,” Luke said.

  So we all crawled out, and then Luke reached back inside with a stick and touched the dead kid, who came out too, clinging to the stick, trying to chew on it, but not quite coordinated enough, so that he just snapped his teeth in the air and rubbed the side of his face along the stick.

  I could see him clearly now. He really was rotten, with bone sticking out at his knees and elbows, only scraggly patches of dark hair left on his head, every rib showing in hideous relief on his bare back, and holes through his skin between some of them.

  “Look!” said Luke. “Look at him dance!” He swirled the stick around and around, and the dead kid clung to it, staggering around in a circle.

  Corky spoke up. “Ya think if’n he gets dizzy he’ll puke?”

  Luke yanked the stick out of the dead kid’s hands, then hit him hard with it across the back with a thwack! The dead kid dropped to all fours and just stayed there, his head hanging down.

  “Can’t puke. Got no guts left!” They all laughed at that. I didn’t quite get the joke.

  But despite everything, I tried to get the joke, despite even the incongruity that I really was, like it or not, a more or less “normal” kid and right now I had a model kit for a plastic Fokker Triplane in my schoolbag. I still wanted to measure up to Luke Bradley, for all I was more afraid of him than I had ever been. I figured you had to be afraid of what you did and who you hung out with if you were going to be really bad. You did what Luke did. That was what transgression was all about.

  So I unzipped my fly and pissed on the dead kid. He made that bleating sound. The others chuckled nervously. Luke grinned.

  “Pretty cool, Davey, my boy. Pretty cool.”

  Then Luke started to play the role of wise elder brother. He put his arm around my shoulders. He took me a little ways apart from the others and said, “I like you. I think you got something special in there.” He rapped on my head with his knuckles, hard, but I didn’t flinch away.

  Then he led me back to the others and said, “I think we’re gonna make David here a member of the gang.”

  So we all sat down in the clearing with the dead kid in our circle, as if he were one of the gang too. Luke got out an old briefcase from inside the fort and produced some very crumpled nudie magazines and passed them around and we all looked at the pictures. He even made a big, funny show of opening out a foldout for the dead kid to admire.

  He smoked and passed cigarettes out to all of us. I’d never had one before and it made me feel sick, but Luke told me to hold the smoke in, then breathe it out slowly.

  I was amazed and appalled when, right in front of everyone, he unzipped his pants and started to jerk off. The others did it too, making a point of trying to squirt on the dead kid.

  Luke looked at me. “Come on, join in with the other gentlemen.” The other “gentlemen” brayed like jackasses.

  I couldn’t move then. I really wanted to be like them, but I knew I wasn’t going to measure up. All I could hope for now was to put up a good front so maybe they’d decide I wasn’t a pussy after all and maybe let me go after they beat me up a little bit. I could hope for that much.

  But Luke had other ideas. He put his hand on the back of my neck. It could have been a friendly gesture, or if he squeezed, he could have snapped my head off for all I could have done anything about it.

  “Now David,” he said, “I don’t care if you’ve even got a dick, any more than I care if he does.” He jerked his thumb at the dead kid. “But if you want to join our gang, if you want to be cool, you have to meet certain standards.”

  He flicked a switchblade open right in front of my face. I thought he was going to cut my nose with it, but with a sudden motion he slashed the dead kid’s nose right off. It flew into the air. Corky caught it, then threw it away in mindless disgust.

  The dead kid whimpered. His face was a black, oozing mess.

  Then Luke took hold of my right hand and slashed the back of it. I let out a yell, and tried to stop the bleeding with my other hand.

  “No,” Luke said. “Let him lick it. He needs a little blood now and then to keep him healthy.”

  I screamed then, and sobbed, and whimpered the way Albert had that first time, but Luke held onto me with a grip so strong that I was the one who wriggled like a fish on a line, and he held my cut hand out to the dead kid.

  I couldn’t look, but something soft and wet touched my hand, and I could only think, Oh God, what kind of infection or disease am I going to get from this?

  “Okay David,” Luke said then. “You’re doing just fine, but there is one more test. You have to spend the whole night in the fort with the dead kid. We’ve all done it. Now it’s your turn.”

  They didn’t wait for my answer, but, laughing, hauled me back inside the fort. Then Luke had the dead kid hooked under the chin again, and lowered him down into his box in the pit.

  The others crawled back outside. Before he left, Luke turned to me, “You have to stay here until tomorrow morning. You know what I’ll do to you if you pussy out.”

  So I spent the rest of the afternoon, and the evening, inside that fort with the dead kid scratching around in his box. It was already dark in the fort. I couldn’t tell what time it was. I couldn’t think very clearly at all. I wondered if anyone was looking for me. I lay very still. I didn’t want to be found, especially not by the dead kid, who, for all I knew, could crawl out of the box and the pit if he really wanted to and maybe rip my throat out and drink my blood.

  My hand hurt horribly. It seemed to be swelling. I was sure it was already rotten. The air was thick and foul.

  But I stayed where I was, because I was afraid, because I was weak with nausea, but also, incredibly, because somehow, somewhere, deep down inside myself I still wanted to show how tough I was, to be like Luke Bradley, to be as amazing and crazy as he was. I knew that I wasn’t cut out for this, and that’s why I wanted it—to be bad, so no one would ever beat me up again and if I hated my stepdad or my teachers I could just tell them to go fuck off, as Luke would do.

  Hours passed, and still the dead kid circled around and around inside his cardboard box, sliding against the sides. He made that bleating, coughing sound, as if he were trying to talk and didn’t have any tongue left. For a time I thought there was almost some sense in it, some pattern. He was clicking like a cricket. This went on for hours. Maybe I even slept for a while, and fell into a kind of dream in which I was sinking slowly down into incredibly foul-smelling muck and there
were thousands of bald-faced hornets swarming over me, all of them with little Luke Bradley faces saying, “Cool… really cool…” until their voices blended together and became a buzzing, then became wind in the trees, then the roar of a P&W light-rail train rushing off toward Philadelphia; and the dead kid and I were hanging onto the outside of the car, swinging wildly. My arm hit a pole and snapped right off, and black ooze was pouring out of my shoulder, and the hornets swarmed over me, eating me up bit by bit.

  Once, I am certain, the dead kid did reach up and touch me, very gently, running his dry, sharp fingertip down the side of my cheek, cutting me, then withdrawing with a little bit of blood and tears on his fingertip, to drink.

  But, strangest of all, I wasn’t afraid of him then. It came to me, then, that we too had more in common than not. We were both afraid and in pain and lost in the dark.

  III

  Then somehow it was morning. The sunlight blinded me when Luke opened the vine curtain over the door.

  “Hey. You were really brave. I’m impressed, Davey.”

  I let him lead me out of the fort, taking comfort in his chum/big-brother manner. But I was too much in shock to say anything.

  “You passed the test. You’re one of us,” he said. “Welcome to the gang. Now there is one last thing for you to do. Not a test. You’ve passed all the tests. It’s just something we do to celebrate.”

  His goons had gathered once more in the clearing outside the fort.

  One of them was holding a can of gasoline.

  I stood there, swaying, about to faint, unable to figure out what the gasoline was for.

  Luke brought the dead kid outside.

  Corky poured gasoline over the dead kid, who just bleated a little and waved his hands in the air.

  Luke handed me a cigarette lighter. He flicked it until there was a flame.

  “Go on,” he said. “It’ll be cool.”

  But I couldn’t. I was too scared, too sick. I just dropped to my knees, then onto all fours and started puking.