The Living Dead

by John Joseph Adams

  And then, trying not to think too much about it, I ran. It was not a pretty thing, as I am a writer, not a runner. Those two roles cohabit rarely, and certainly not in me. I am ashamed to say that it was not courage that propelled me clumsily on. It was loneliness that had overcome my fear, not altruism.

  When I was closer to the armored car than I was to the library’s front door, I suddenly thought—what if that hadn’t been a living person I had seen staring back at me through that narrow window? What if the guard had died in the crash and was now himself a zombie, and the face was that of something struggling to get out and unable to figure out how… and hungry?

  It was too late to dwell on that for more than an instant, because out of the corner of an eye, I could see a shuffling form. As I ran more quickly, soda sloshing, the thick back door of the armored car was raised in front of me, and I dove in. The door slammed shut behind me and I turned my head quickly to see that, yes, thankfully, I was visiting someone still alive. The man in the stained guard uniform locking the door looked far the worse for wear than I did, but he was still a man. The air hung heavy with sweat, but after someone has lived in the back of a small truck for a week, I guess I was lucky I could stand it at all.

  I lay there, breathing heavily, feeling drained as much from the tension as the exertion, and did not protest as the guard patted me down. I knew what he was looking for, and was just thankful at this juncture that he was eating my food instead of attempting to eat me. He snapped a huge chocolate chip cookie in half and shoved both pieces in his mouth, then popped a soda, which exploded across his face thanks to my mad dash. But he wasn’t angry, as he surely would have been back in the old days of only a week before. He just laughed, and took a long pull from the can.

  “Thanks,” he said, wiping the crumbs and foam from his face. “I don’t think a soda has ever tasted this good. And as you might guess, I haven’t had many reasons to laugh in a while.”

  I nodded and forced a smile. I was glad to see him, to know that I wasn’t alone, but I wasn’t happy about the fact that I’d had to come to him, rather than the reverse, to do it.

  “Why are you still here?” I said, a little too terse, considering what should be joyful circumstances. “Once you knew I was inside, why didn’t you make a break for the library? That place is like a fortress.”

  He swiveled clumsily about and showed me his right foot, the ankle of which twisted at an ugly angle.

  “I’d never have made it with this,” he said. “Once we flipped, and I felt the snap, I knew that it was all over for me.”

  “But you have to try, Barry,” I said. He started when I called him by name, so I pointed at his ID badge, still hanging from his chest pocket. “I didn’t want to feel responsible for you starving out here, so I brought food, but it’s too risky to do more than once. You can’t expect me to continue supplying you. And you can’t last forever in here alone.”

  “I didn’t plan on lasting forever.” He shrugged. The bags under his eyes shrugged with him. “Would have been nice, though. But better starved to death than eaten to death. I’ll admit I expected to end up with a bigger coffin. But this one will have to do.”

  “No,” I said suddenly and firmly, surprised at myself even as I blurted it out. “I’m not going to let that happen. We ought to be able to get you up those steps and into the library if we work together. I can distract them. They don’t move that fast.”

  “Faster than me,” he said wearily.

  His expression was a defeated one, but I knew better than to accept it as irreversible. If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the years, it’s that people want to live.

  “We’ve got to try,” I said. “You don’t want me to have come this far for nothing. I ought to at least get a chance to save your life.”

  He laughed, which I considered progress. I peered out the small window in the rear door, back up the steps of the library to safety. The front gates looked infinitely far away. I was stunned that I had survived the first leg of the journey. But I knew that regardless of how treacherous it seemed, I was going back. If I was going to die, it was going to be in that library, or at the very least trying to get back to that library, and not in the rear of an armored car. Barry might have been willing to settle for a coffin of that size, but mine had to be a little larger.

  And contain the complete works of Shakespeare besides.

  Barry had not answered, but it was as if we had made a silent decision. We watched and waited, too weary for small talk (which we both hoped and pretended that there would be time for later), too weary for anything but studying the street, praying for a moment when it would be completely clear, and allow Barry time to hobble to safety. But unlike earlier that day, no such moment came. Each time the random patterns of the shuffling undead had the streets almost emptied, there would always be one lone zombie lingering under a stop light as if waiting for it to change. I didn’t really think it could be doing that, responding to the world that used to be, no, not in real life, only in stories maybe, but still, there it was. The lights did not function, and so it stared up at the pole.

  Until I grew tired of waiting.

  “I’m going to distract him,” I whispered.

  The guard ordered me not to in one of those voices guards have and grabbed at my arm, but I leapt through the door anyway, and was back on the street before he could do anything about it. Instead of running immediately toward the steps leading up to the door of the library as any sane person would have done, I ran at the light-distracted zombie, prayed for it to notice me before I got too close, then veered away at the last possible instant I knew I could still outrun it. It was pulled along in my wake by its undead desire.

  “Now,” I shouted back at Barry over my shoulder. “This is your chance. Take it!”

  I watched as he tumbled out from the safety of his truck and began hopping, but I could not spare him any more of my attention after that. A second zombie, perhaps sensing my presence on that street as I imagined only a zombie could (or was that truly only a power of my imagination?), had come around a corner, and now I had to distract two of them. Luckily, even though my lack of anything resembling an athletic past slowed me down, death kept the zombies even slower. As I ran, it seemed to me that they must only catch their prey by surprise, and with persistence, for they did not have speed on their side. I lured them away from the path Barry had to be taking, but when I saw a third zombie appear, I knew that I could tempt fate no longer. There were getting to be too many trajectories for me to calculate to stay alive. I swooped down on the struggling guard, who had just reached the bottom of the steps, and grabbed him by the shoulders, nearly knocking him down.

  As I shouted at him to move, I don’t think I used any actual words.

  We ran a desperate three-legged race together, dodging the undead who slowly began to follow us as I pulled him up step by step, agonizingly slow ourselves. As we neared the door, I could hear the snapping of teeth behind us, and knew that Barry had slowed me down too much. I dove in, pushing him ahead of me, and from my knees slammed the gates shut behind us. Gasping, I stood, looking in awe at the dead flesh that obscured my vision of anything beyond. They glared at us, but we were protected from them. Once we moved more deeply inside the building, they would forget about us, as they had forgotten about all else, and drift away.

  We were safe.

  We laughed, and there was a hysterical tinge to our laughter, as I imagined there would always be in circumstances where death seemed so close, and yet was repulsed.

  And then a zombie who must have snuck through the door while I’d been outside rescuing and doing my supposedly distracting dance reached out from within the library and, with a sickening groan, completely ripped off Barry’s injured leg.

  Now here’s a story that I think I still deserve to tell. I don’t know that there are many more like that, stories that I have actually earned. And besides, I’m doing a pretty good job of proving that there isn’t much else t
hat I’m good for.

  A writer (again, no names please), no longer having access to a human audience, and unable to stop writing, begins to write stories suitable only for the undead. He cannot write the love stories he was used to writing, because the zombies know nothing of love. He can no longer write stories in which the motivations are based on greed, because zombies know nothing of money. All that is left to him is to write stories of action and adventure (well, boring and repetitive action and adventure), because zombies know of that, in their own special but limited way. Since the zombies know of only one thing, all the stories sound the same, but this writer, he figures that it doesn’t matter, because if zombies have one trait, it is patience.

  My agent, on the other hand, tells me that my readers do not have patience, and certainly have no desire to read of writers. The only people who want to read of writers, or so he tells me, are other writers. But what does he know? Anyway, at this time, I probably have no agent. And I say this not the way a beginning writer in search of an agent does. I say this because my agent has probably been eaten.

  Which some might say isn’t a bad end for an agent.

  But since he is dead and my fictional writer’s readers are also dead, we might as well just move on.

  The stories this writer writes all follow the same pattern, as zombies are easily entertained. They begin with the sense that there is walking meat nearby. And then it is spotted. And then it is chased.

  And then the walking meat is no longer walking, for the living is inside the dead.

  The writer types out many variations of this outline, because that is all that he knows how to do, and when there are no more stories to tell, he’s going to continue to tell them anyway. Some of his tales are set on city streets. Some are on country roads. Still others take place in zoos, in shopping malls and schools and airplanes. But whatever the setting, at their heart, they are all the same.

  Shuffle.

  Shamble.

  Shuffle a little more quickly.

  Run. (Well, as zombies run anyway.)

  Run, run, run.

  Eat!

  Eventually, this writer, who is obviously not very self-aware, or he would have given up long ago—or if not long ago, at least once his audience had deserted him—realizes that he has written hundreds of such stories. But now that the reams of paper are stacked high next to his manual typewriter (because he refused to let the fall of civilization keep him from his appointed rounds), he had no idea what to do with them. There were no zombie magazines in which to publish them, no zombie bookstores in which they could be sold.

  At least, not yet, he thinks.

  And so he decides he must go out into the street, the street which he had avoided for so long, and declaim his stories. He expected that this would be the end of him, and he was ready for it. After all, a lion tamer may stick his head into a lion’s mouth for a brief moment, but let him attempt to read Hamlet while so inserted and all will be lost. But he had been too alone for too long, and without an audience even longer. Whatever was to happen had to be better than what had happened so far.

  But when he actually begins his readings, out in the middle of an intersection that hadn’t known a car for years, he was pleasantly surprised. Zombies gathered and approached him, but they only came to a certain point, and then came no further. As he read, they stood about him in a circle and seemed to listen. (Well, he could pretend that about those that had ears, at least.) So he did not stop reading, even as he grew hoarse. He felt fulfilled. He believed that he had at last found the one, true audience he had been seeking his entire life.

  But then he realizes that he is getting to the end of the stories that he has brought along with him, and encased in a circle of the dead, as it were, there was no opening in the crowd for him to get back to the additional manuscripts that remained in his hiding place back inside. So when he gets to the end of the last story in his hands, he begins all over again.

  The zombies begin to growl. They may like the repetitiveness of theme, but they do not like the repetition of actual stories. He tries to back away, but there is nothing behind him but more of the undead. They move forward, and their circle closes tightly around him until it is difficult for him to breathe from the weight of them. And as they start to tear him to quivering shreds, he has just enough time to think, “Everyone’s a critic—”

  —before he has no more time in which to think.

  But no. That’s not right either.

  Because even though the ending is horrifying, and the writer’s fate undeserved (though I can think of a few publishers who might wish that all writers ended up that way), there’s still a moral to the telling of the tale. Zombies are a force of nature, and forces of nature do not come equipped with morals. Forces of nature do not come packaged with a purpose, a message, or a reason. They just are. Which is why the guard was suddenly dead, destroyed just when we thought we’d gotten back to safety.

  Or maybe… maybe the one thing that forces of nature can share with fiction is that they often bring along with them a sense of irony.

  We would have heard the zombie that had slipped in during my trip outside coming toward us if we had not been laughing so loudly after our return to the supposed protection of the library. Perhaps a force of nature cannot allow such joy to continue without a response. We were hysterical with relief, slapping each other on our backs as we extricated ourselves from our heap on the floor, and so I didn’t even realize that anything unplanned was happening until the guard’s laughter turned to a howl of pain.

  I sprung away from him to see that Barry’s right leg was no longer his. It was in the zombie’s hands, dripping blood. The guard kept screaming while clawing at his spurting leg, which spilled more blood than a body should be able to lose and still have the screaming continue. There was nothing I could do for him, no way to save him. Even if I was able to tie off the leg, to stop the bleeding, he would be one of them soon, and after my leg. I knew what I had to do. I hoped that he was too dazed from loss of blood to realize what was coming.

  I helped him stand on his remaining foot. His moaning was by then barely audible, and he was nearly unconscious, which made what I was about to do easier.

  I opened the gate that protected us from the few zombies still milling about at the top of the stairs, and pushed him into the midst of them. For a brief moment, he surged with more energy. He mustered a scream, but then the undead began to tear him apart, and the screaming stopped.

  While they were distracted in their feeding, I was able to step back from the door without fear that any of them would enter. But still, I kept my eye on them at all times as I circled around the zombie inside that had stolen our rescue from us. It was intent on its snack, chewing on the leg that had broken in the first place to start the chain of events that led us to this horrible event. So it didn’t notice me at all as I rushed at it from behind and shoved it out to join his fellows. As I slammed the gate again, this time hopefully not to be opened again until the Earth shifted on its axis once more, I could see that it showed no sign of even having noticed that anything had happened. He just continued attacking the leg of the man I had gotten killed.

  See, in a story, this would never have turned out that way. In a story, which has to make sense, which has to provide rewards for its journey, or else we wouldn’t call it “story,” Barry would have lived, but life does not often promise such rewards, and when it does, rarely delivers. In a story, the two of us could have struggled to make a life for ourselves here until the world woke from this zombie dream and brought rescue, or until we found a way to make contact with the enclave of civilization that I’d know—well, at least in a story that I’d know and hope—would be out there. Fiction would have given us both a better end.

  Unfortunately, I am a better writer than God chooses to be.

  For it does not seem as if either rescue or solace will be found. I no longer even think it possible.

  No one answers the e-mails I send out on
the intermittent days I am even able to send them. No one posts updates to the Web sites I used to visit. In fact, day by day, sites that I had previously been able to visit are gone. I have grown so used to error messages that life itself seems an error message.

  With each part of the Web that vanishes, I imagine that a part of the real world has gone as well. When it all goes, I will be alone.

  Well, not entirely alone. I will still have my friends. Shakespeare is here. And Frost. And Faulkner and Austen and Carver and Proust. All telling me of the worlds in which they lived. Worlds that continued to exist only because I am still here to read about them. I’ve always known that fact, and the lesson it taught me is that my world will not continue to exist unless someone is there to read about it.

  That is why I have been creating these stories. That’s why I’ve always created stories. But I can’t do it any longer. I see that I have lived too long, have lived through the time of my usefulness out to the time beyond stories. I could keep trying to tell them, but what would be the point of that? It’s not worth remaining in a world without readers, and I doubt that you still exist.

  My world can survive my death. But it cannot survive yours.

  Art for art’s sake was never what I was about. Art alone was never enough.

  So I’m going to stop writing.

  And I’m going to start praying.

  Prayer.

  I’ve tried it.

  And it just isn’t working for me.

  But it does plant the seed for one last story.

  I give you my word. And this time, you can believe my promise.

  After the world went to Hell, a priest who had been traveling hurried back to his flock so that they could still make it into Heaven.

  He didn’t make it home alive, the same way most of the world didn’t make it home alive as the disease began to spread. But he made it home.