The Living Dead

by John Joseph Adams

  Mary avoids being hit head-on, which would’ve killed her, but she’s tossed to the side of the road. To her credit, the girl stops, reverses, and leaves the truck to see to the woman who collided with it. Actually it’s a risky move—for all the girl knows, she could’ve knocked down a zombie. Mary’s pretty seriously concussed, but it’s clear to the girl she hails from one of the big houses on the side street—the houses from which a few zombies are emerging, doused with blood. The girl doesn’t waste any time: she hustles Mary into her truck and literally burns rubber racing away. The girl—who deserves a name: she’s Beth Driscoll—Beth takes Mary into the center of Goodhope Crossing, to the new walk-in emergency-care place, and stays with her as the doctor examines her with an openly worried expression on his face. Mary’s in what he’s going to call a fugue state—like being part of the way into a coma—and she’s never going to surface from it. The doctor—Dr. Bartram, for the record—tries to arrange for an ambulance to transfer her to one of the local hospitals, but all at once, the ambulances are very busy. By the time he considers driving her himself, the police will have told everyone to stay off the roads. When those same police start stumbling through the front doors with wounds of their own for the doc to treat, Mary will be placed on a cot in one of the hallways and left there. Beth will check on her as she’s able, which won’t be much, because she’ll be busy helping the doc and his staff with the injured. After the medical facilities are transferred to St. Pat’s church hall, Mary’s installed there, given a futon-bed and a molded plastic chair and a garbage bag full of assorted sweatpants, t-shirts, underwear, and socks. Beth tends to her as she can.

  Ted doesn’t show up looking for his wife. In fairness to him, that’s due to his having parked in front of his house about two minutes after Beth sped off with Mary. Once he realized what was taking place, he bolted his car for the house, whose front door he’d noticed open and which had him dreading the worst. The worst met him at the door, in the form of the pair who’d devoured his children, one of whom was holding Brian’s stuffed frog, which was dark with blood. You may consider it a kindness that Ted died without seeing what was left of his beloved daughter and son upstairs.

  Mary can eat and drink, use the toilet if you take her to it. Speak to her, and she’ll bob her head in your direction. There are times, after Beth’s sat with her for an hour, maybe read to her from the Bible (which Beth secretly hopes might produce a miraculous cure), the girl looks at Mary half-slumped in her chair, or reclining on her bed, and wonders if Mary isn’t lucky to be like this, safe from the chaos that’s descended on the world. She has no idea—she can have no idea that deep within Mary’s psyche, she’s standing at that stove for the ten-thousandth time, watching a pot full of water begin to boil, waiting for her children to start screaming.

  (The Stage Manager sighs, looks up, looks down, rubs his hands together half-heartedly, sighs again.)

  Stage Manager: I never finished telling you about the town, did I? Not that it makes much difference at this point, but maybe one or two of you are curious.

  (Once more, the Stage Manager settles himself on the ground, against the headstone; although he appears to have more trouble finding a comfortable position than previously.)

  Stage Manager: All right. What more is there to say about Goodhope Crossing? The longer-term history of the town isn’t that much different from any other in this neck of the woods. There were farms around these parts as far back as the Dutch, but Goodhope Crossing, as the name suggests, owes itself to the railroads. In the years after the Civil War, when track was stitching up the country everywhere you looked, three north-south lines and one east-west line met one another right here.

  (From the orchestra pit, a quartet of wooden train whistles sound softly.)

  Stage Manager: There was a long, low hill to the east of the junction, a stream and some flatter land to the west. The town was plotted on that axis, the poorer folk crowding their small houses together on the hill, the better off setting up Main Street and its larger dwellings on the other side of the stream. From those two locations, the town spread outward, most of the commercial establishments opening on the other side of the hill; while the majority of new homes went up on and just off Main Street. Lot of Irish settled here; Poles and Italians, too. Big Catholic population: the local church, St. Patrick’s, started on Main Street and by the turn of the century had moved across the stream to the top of another hill just south of the one most of its parish lived on. St. Pat’s was part of the Archdiocese of New York; right before everything fell apart, they were the third or fourth largest congregation in the fold.

  Interestingly—you might even say, ironically—enough, pretty much the entire surviving population has relocated to the hill, which remained a location of more… affordable housing. Control the high ground: it’s what a military strategist will tell you, and it’s a good plan, for zombies as much as anything. Once the half-dozen or so who’d staggered up Concord Street were dealt with, and all the dwellings had been checked and double-checked to be sure they were clear, folks started putting up the best barrier they could as fast as they could around the foot of the hill, tipping over cars; running barbed wire; propping up old boxsprings, mattresses; piling whatever looked as if it might hold a walking corpse at bay long enough for you to have a clear shot at it: sofas, bureaus, bookcases, china cabinets.

  (From either side of the theater, the sounds of men and women grunting, furniture creaking atop other furniture.)

  Stage Manager: Hillary Schwabel, who used to manage the local True Value hardware, strung some wires all the way around what people already had christened the Wall and hooked them to several of her louder alarms; she also hung a dozen motion-detector lights from trees and houses next to the Wall. Things are so sensitive a cat’ll trip them, but it beats the alternative. As a rule, zombies travel in numbers; when you see one of them, you see ten, twenty, sometimes as many as fifty, a hundred. A significant percentage of that group is going to be limber enough to make a try at getting past the Wall—and all it takes is for one of them to succeed, grab someone and start biting, for you to want to know they’re moving in your direction while they’re still a safe distance away. It’s another myth that they only, or mostly, move at night. Their eyesight’s poor-to-nonexistent—apparently, the ravages death inflicts on the eyes are exacerbated by the process of reanimation. Although they never stop moving completely, if you should have the misfortune to come across them after dark, they’re likely to be shuffling their feet, practically standing in place. No, they prefer the light; the dawn pouring through the trees sets them going. A bright day is practically a guarantee you’re going to see some of them.

  All of that said, a few of them have been known to travel by night, especially if the moon is full. And even inching forward a little bit at a time will bring you somewhere, eventually. Better safe than sorry, right?

  Have you noticed how disasters bring out the clichés in droves? Why is that? Is the trite and overused that consoling? Or is it that, even though the brain is short-circuiting, it still wants to grasp what’s going on, so it reaches for whatever tools are at hand, no matter how worn and rusted? Or is the language breaking down along with everything else? I’ve never been what you’d call a poet, but I have always prided myself on my phrasing, on a knack for finding a fit and even memorable form for whatever sentiment I’m attempting to convey. Lately, though—lately, I swear I sound more and more like a parody of a Good Ole Boy, your folksy uncle with his bucket of country wisdom.

  Nor is that the worst. Before everything went down the crapper, one of my—you might say duties; although I considered it more a responsibility, if that distinction means anything to you—anyway, one of the things I did was to help those who’d shuffled off their mortal coils come to grips with their new condition. Mostly, this meant talking with them, taking them for a last look at their loved ones, about what you’d expect. In a few cases, I let them have one of their days over again, which, kn
owing what they knew now, tended to be a more unhappy experience than they’d anticipated. Even after I’d spoken to them, showed them what I could, there were a few who refused to walk down the long dark hall to join the ranks of those who’d gone before, who insisted on remaining in their house, or at the spot they’d ceased breathing, which was a shame, but was allowed for.

  Once the dead started to rise, though—for the one thing, death no longer separated what lasted from what didn’t; instead, the two remained bound together as the one began its new existence. For another thing, the destruction of that second life—or un-life—didn’t allow matters to proceed on their natural course. Instead… well, maybe you want to see for yourselves.

  (The theater’s lights come on. Their harsh brightness reveals the center aisle, side aisles, front, and rear of the theater crowded with figures—with zombies, it appears, since the men, women, and children surrounding the audience bear the familiar signs of decay. Whatever shock and fear the appearance of so many of them in such proximity engenders, however, is gradually tempered by their complete lack of movement. Indeed, with the exception of one figure shuffling its way from the very back of the theater up the center aisle, the apparent zombies might as well be mannequins.)

  Stage Manager: Being chained to that body as it stumbles along in the single-minded pursuit of flesh, as it finds and kills and consumes that flesh—it isn’t good for the other part, for what I call the spark—it twists it, warps it, so that when it’s cut loose, this is how it appears. Mostly. A few—I haven’t worked out the exact numbers, but it’s something on the order of one in a thousand, fifteen hundred—they show up hostile, violent, as if what they last were in life has followed them across its borders. There’s no talking to them, let alone reasoning with them. I’m not certain what they could do to me—there’ve been rumors through the grapevine, but you know how that it is—but I’m not inclined to find out.

  (The Stage Manager rises to his feet, withdrawing his revolver from its shoulder holster on the way. In a continuous motion, he extends his arm, sights along the long barrel of the gun, and squeezes the trigger. The gun’s BOOM stuns the air; the young man in the brown three-piece suit who is approximately halfway to the stage jerks as the back of his head detonates in a surprisingly solid clump. The young man falls against one of the motionless forms in the aisle, an old woman wearing a blue dress and a knitted white pullover, who barely moves as he slides down her to the floor. The Stage Manager maintains his aim at the young man for five seconds, then levels the gun and sweeps it across the theater. It is difficult to ascertain whether his eye is on the figures in the aisle, the audience in their seats, or both. Unable to locate any further threats, he re-holsters the pistol. He remains standing.)

  Stage Manager: That’s—there’s nothing else I can do. It means—I don’t like thinking about what it means. It’s a step up from what a fellow like that was, but—it’s not a part of the job I relish. Could be, it would be a service to the rest of these folks, but I haven’t got the stomach for it.

  (The Stage Manager lowers himself to the ground. The lights dim but not all the way. The forms in the aisles remain where they are.)

  Stage Manager: Once in a while—it’s less and less, but it still happens—a regular person finds their way here. That was how I had the chance to talk with Billy Joe Royale, he-of-the-famous-homemade-napalm. I’d witnessed his handiwork in action—must have been the day after the day after that truckload of zombies parked in the middle of Mary Phillips’s neighborhood. The number of zombies had increased exponentially; the cops had been overrun in most places; the National Guard who were supposed to be on their way remained an unfulfilled promise. Those who could had retreated to the parking lot of St. Pat’s, which, since the hill hadn’t yet been fortified, looked to be the most defensible position. I reckon it was, at that. There wasn’t time for much in the way of barriers or booby-traps, but those men and women—there were forty-six of them—did what they could.

  (From the right and left of the theater comes a cacophony of gunfire; of voices shouting defiance, instructions, obscenity, encouragement; of screams. It is underscored by a frenzied, atonal sawing of the violins. It subsides as the Stage Manager continues to speak, but remains faintly audible.)

  Stage Manager: In the end, though, no matter how much ammunition you have, if the zombies have sufficient numbers, there’s little you can hope for aside from escaping to fight another day. These folks couldn’t expect that much: they’d backed themselves against the church’s north wall, and the zombies were crowding the remaining three sides.

  Exactly how Billy Joe succeeded in evading the zombies, finding his way inside St. Pat’s, climbing up the bell-tower, and shimming out onto the roof—all the while carrying a large cloth laundry-bag of three-liter soda bottles full of an extremely volatile mixture—I’d like to take credit for it, but I was down below, all my attention focused on the by-now forty-two defenders staging what I was sure was their updated Alamo. They were aiming to die bravely, and I was not about to look away from that. When the first of Billy Joe’s soda-bottle-bombs landed, no one, myself included, knew what had just taken place. About twenty feet back into the zombies’ ranks, there was a flash and a clap and an eruption of heavy black smoke. Something had exploded, but none of the men and women could say what or why. When the second, third, fourth, and fifth bombs struck in an arc to either side of the first, and smoke was churning up into the air, and the smell of dead skin and muscle barbecuing was suddenly in everyone’s nostrils, it was clear the cavalry had arrived. A couple of guys looked around, expecting a Humvee with a grenade-launcher on top, or an attack helicopter whose approach had been masked by the noise of the fighting. The rest were busy taking advantage of the wall of fire the bombs had created, which separated the zombies on this side of it from those on the other, reducing their numbers from who-could-count-how-many to a more manageable thirty or forty. While they worked on clearing the zombies closest to them, Billy Joe continued to lob bottle after bottle of his fiery concoction, dropping some of them into the thick of the zombies, holding onto others almost too long, so that they detonated over the zombies, literally raining fire down on their heads. He’d stuffed twenty-three bottles into that laundry bag, and he threw all but one of them.

  (The din of the battle rises again, accompanied by the pops of a drumstick tapping on a drum, and the lower thrum of viols being plucked. The pops increase, the thrums increase, then the violins scream an interruption and all noise stops.)

  Stage Manager: That last bomb was what killed him, a single-serve Coke bottle that remained in his hand past the point of safety. It blew off his right arm to the elbow and hurled him flaming from the roof. He didn’t survive the fall, which was just as well, since his burning corpse was shot by roughly half the people he’d saved. Stupid, but understandable, I guess.

  He took longer to show up than I’d anticipated, the better part of a day, during which his identity and his actions had been discovered, along with the two hundred additional bottles of napalm standing row after row in his parents’ basement. Unfortunately, he hadn’t seen fit to leave the formula, but those bombs were a big downpayment on buying those among the living sufficient time to move to the hill and begin the process of securing it. There’ve been a couple of tries at duplicating his secret mix, neither of which ended well.

  (From the rear of the theater, the faint crump of explosions.)

  Stage Manager: As for Billy Joe…

  (Stage left, a stage light pops on, throwing a dim yellow glow over one of the tombstones and BILLY JOE ROYALE, who is a very young sixteen, his face struggling with its acne, a few longish hairs trying to play a goatee on his chin. He is dressed in an oversized blue New York Giants shirt, baggy jeans, and white sneakers. A backwards baseball cap lifts the blond hair from his forehead, which emphasizes the surprise smoothing his features. He hooks his thumbs in the pockets of his jeans in what must be an effort at appearing calm, cool. He sees the Sta
ge Manager and nods at him. The bill of the Stage Manager’s hat tilts in reply.)

  Billy Joe: So are you, like, him?

  Stage Manager: Who is that?

  Billy Joe: You know—God.

  Stage Manager: I’m afraid not.

  Billy Joe: Oh. Oh. You aren’t—

  Stage Manager: I’m more of a minor functionary.

  Billy Joe: What, is that some kinda angel or something?

  Stage Manager: No. I’m—I meet people when they show up here, help them find their bearings. Then I send them on their way.

  Billy Joe: Like a tour guide, one of those hospitality guys.

  Stage Manager: Close enough.

  Billy Joe: Where am I headed?

  (The Stage Manager points stage right.)

  Stage Manager: You see that hall over there?

  Billy Joe: That looks pretty dark. I thought it was supposed to be all bright and shit.

  Stage Manager: No, that’s just an effect produced by the cells in your eyes dying.

  Billy Joe: Oh. Where does it go?

  Stage Manager: Where everyone else has gone.

  (Billy Joe notices the figures in the aisles. He nods at them.)

  Billy Joe: What about them? Are they—

  Stage Manager: Yes.

  Billy Joe: Shouldn’t they be moving down that hall, too?

  Stage Manager: They should.

  Billy Joe: So why aren’t they?

  Stage Manager: I’m not sure. It’s got something to do with what’s going on—where you came from.

  Billy Joe: These guys were like, the living dead?