Relief flooded my veins and I grinned, pleased that I’d nearly completed my task. I replaced the subfloor and then the carpet tile, tamping it back into place before I ran my fingers over it to make sure it was even. With that done, I stood up and followed the metal wall back to the doorway.
I opened the door and quickly slid between it and the door frame, leaving the darkness of the storage room behind me. The main room was empty, the lights off. I could see the traffic on the moving sidewalk, the people still trying to get home after a long workday. I looked up at the clock that hung over the counter and I realized I’d been inside the storage room for only seven minutes.
It had seemed like hours.
I clutched the metal box to my chest, my heart thumping in my throat. My escape plan was simple. I would unlock the door and then just slip out onto the moving sidewalk. I would remain calm and I would not act as if I’d just done something highly illegal.
I walked over to the front door, turned the lock, and then I pushed it open, letting the sounds from outside wash over me. No one looked twice as I stepped through the doorway and grabbed hold of the metal bar in front of the store just long enough to pull the front door closed behind me. The metal box still under my arm, I moved into the throng, letting the moving sidewalk take me away.
I didn’t turn around, didn’t look to see if anyone had noticed anything unusual about my exit. Just kept my eyes trained forward and the box close to my heart. It wasn’t until I’d reached the Second Block Bridge and crossed over to the other side that I let out a long, nervous breath.
* * *
I didn’t know what was in the box. I hadn’t asked, hadn’t wanted to know, really. But now I was curious.
I was standing in front of the garbage bin where I’d originally encountered the man. We’d agreed to meet here exactly twenty-four hours from our first introduction, but he was late.
I’d taken the box back to a special hiding place I’d arranged before the burglary and then I’d spent the rest of the night scavenging food. After I’d eaten my fill, I’d crawled into the rear doorway of the Pain-du-Pain and promptly fallen asleep. I was stiff when I woke up the next morning, my joints sore from tension, but I was more excited than I’d ever been in my entire life. Today I was going to get a Black jumpsuit.
Tomorrow, I would be on the road to a job with hazard pay.
“You made it.”
The voice was in my ear before I felt the hands slip around my shoulders and squeeze them. I turned around, the stench hitting me full in the face before I had time to draw a clean breath. Today the man was on full display, the rotting skin of his face and neck grotesque in the light.
I gagged, taking a step back and forcing him to let go of my upper arms.
“Not what you were expecting?” he wheezed, his bright blue eyes like rolling marbles.
From the man’s rotten smell and chilled body temperature, I’d already deduced that he was a zombie—one of the role-playing weirdos that frequented the store and made employees like Demeter and Laguna uncomfortable. The zombie grinned at me, interpreting my silence as fear.
Yes, the guy standing in front of me scared me, but not because he was an elixir-made zombie. The real zombies were people like me, living a life without purpose, watching the minutes tick away until our lives expired. This guy scared me because there was just something plain wrong about him. Something crazy in his eyes.
I held the box close to my chest, my fingers anchoring it in place.
“Jumpsuit first.”
The zombie shrugged, unzipping his own Black jumpsuit and stepping out of it. Unlike me, he wasn’t naked underneath his but was wearing a moth-eaten Yellow polyester leisure suit that was probably standard wear in the suburbs, but unlike anything I’d ever seen on anyone in the Color Sector. He kicked the jumpsuit over to me and I released the metal box, letting it drop into his outstretched arms.
I hated to put on the Black jumpsuit he’d given me. I knew it would smell like rot and death, but I’d gone through too much to let the stench put me off. I unzipped my own Purple jumpsuit and shrugged it off, then I picked up the Black one and slipped it on.
The stench was overpowering, but I ignored it as I forced myself to enjoy the thrill of finally possessing a Black jumpsuit.
The zombie looked at me, cocking his head.
“Aren’t you gonna ask what I wanted the box for?”
I had to admit that my curiosity was piqued. Of course I wanted to know what was inside the box, but I was smarter than that.
“Nah,” I said, shaking my head and starting down the alleyway, proud in my new Black jumpsuit. “It’s yours now.”
I’d been around long enough to understand a few things about life on the street. And possessing too much information about something illicit was not a good thing.
But the hand on my shoulder—the one gripping my flesh so hard I knew it would leave a bruise—stopped me in my tracks. I stiffened, rigid with fear as the zombie’s rancid breath, hot and foul, whistled against my neck.
“But I want you to understand what you’ve done.”
I didn’t want to know, but there was no polite way to extricate myself from the situation, so I shrugged.
“And what’s that?” I asked.
The zombie released his grip and I stumbled away from him, the Black jumpsuit weighting me like a stone.
“You’ve opened up a new market, one that promises a different path to human existence … for those who can afford to pay,” he said, a snaggletoothed grin splitting his face in two.
He lifted the lid of the metal box—and I don’t know what I’d expected to see inside, but it certainly wasn’t the six slim glass vials that were nestled against the blue-velvet inlay.
“These vials are very special, so special that they’re not for sale just to anybody,” the zombie continued. “The man who owns the store makes them only for the most elite buyers. Imagine how much money he makes from one, single vial, then imagine how much money someone else could make selling them at a lower cost to a much less ‘select’ clientele … that is, if one possessed the formula.”
“Like you do now,” I offered.
“Like I do now,” he agreed, reaching inside the box and extracting one of the vials as though he were bestowing a gift upon himself.
“What’s it do?” I asked.
It was the only question left to ask.
“It’s a fixer,” the zombie said. “Take the elixir of your choice once, followed by one of these vials, and your change will become permanent.”
Uncorking the vial in his hand, he drew it back so that he could tip the contents into his open mouth.
I couldn’t help wondering why someone would choose to remain a zombie permanently; what kind of a freak or fetishist would look forward to such a bizarre, rot-filled existence? And then I realized that the question was moot. No sane person would ever do what this man had just done.
“Zombiehood forever,” he rasped, letting the empty vial drop to the ground, then crushing it underfoot.
Suddenly his body began to convulse as the fixer he’d ingested started to filter through his system—and in this moment of weakness, I acted.
I didn’t think. Didn’t let myself process what I was about to do. Just ripped the metal box away from the zombie, the lid slamming back into place as I turned and ran. I heard the zombie shriek in anger, felt the pounding of his feet as he lumbered after me, body still struggling to process the fixer.
When I looked back, I discovered that he was gaining on me, the change having made him even stronger and faster than he’d been before. Terrified, I did the only thing left to me: I turned around and slammed the metal box into the zombie’s face, gristle and bone crumpling underneath its heavy weight. He gave a muffled cry and fell backward—and I was too worried about him getting up again even to think about what the impact might’ve done to the vials inside the box.
At that moment, it was either fight or be killed. And I
was too close to freedom to stop now. Besides, I had the advantage. This was my home turf. I knew every hiding place in the Chroma. Once I’d lost him, I could disappear into the heart of the tenements, lose myself so completely that he’d never find me.
The Black jumpsuit might be enough to save me from my fate … but these vials … these vials were a sure thing. A one-way ticket to freedom if I was smart enough to use them.
I had already begun to formulate a plan: I would go to the suburbs and find Demeter, the only person I had ever trusted, then together we would discover a way to exploit the gift the zombie had unwittingly given me.
I was tired of being nothing, tired of waiting for my thirtieth birthday to come and go and for my life to end.
Tired of being the walking dead.
HOW WE ESCAPED OUR CERTAIN FATE
Dan Chaon
I think of you when I am dead, the way rocks
think of earthworms and oak roots …
—Reginald Shepherd, “Also Love You”
THE ROBBERY WAS IN PROGRESS when my son, Peter, came out of the back storeroom. Everything happened so quickly. That’s what we said to ourselves later.
I was on the floor by the cash register and the robber was pistol-whipping me, and without thinking Pete took our gun from its hiding place beneath the counter. At that moment the robber looked up and Peter shot him in the face.
* * *
This robber, this young guy that Peter shot, was a normal, living person, that was the weird part. He wasn’t one of them, one of the infected—the zombies or whatever you want to call them.
In the last few years, we’d gotten used to having to kill a zombie or two every once in a while. If you weren’t careful, they’d get in your backyard and attack your dog and trample your tomato plants; you’d come across them in parking garages late at night, or you’d accidentally hit one when it wandered onto the interstate as you were driving home after staying late at work.
But this robber that Peter killed was just a regular kid. Maybe eighteen, nineteen years old.
“Where’s the money?” he was snarling. “Where’s the money, where’s the money, motherfucker?”—and then when he heard Peter behind him, he stopped hitting me with the butt of his revolver and started to turn, fumbling with his gun—
If he hadn’t fumbled he would have killed Peter, so I don’t know why I should have to think about that expression on the robber’s face when he realized that Peter was going to shoot him, the way he said, “… Hey, wait…” right before Peter pulled the trigger. Seeing the young robber’s eyes widen, you might have thought, why, he’s no more than a child, he could be my own baby, something like that, a foolish and sentimental thing to think because of course this thug would have murdered us without a second thought. People like that will only use mercy to their advantage and in the end it was probably better that he was no longer walking the earth, though I guess I’m sorry that I didn’t do it myself.
The pistol that Peter had in his hands was a compact .380 semiautomatic, a Beretta Cheetah with a black matte finish, lightweight and easy to use.
We took the robber’s head off, just like you do with the zombies, and we hauled him out back and put him in the Dumpster, just like you do with a zombie.
But this was the first living person we’d killed.
* * *
Afterward, I had some trouble sleeping. Insomnia. Nightmares.
Peter seemed to be getting by okay, despite everything. He continued to eat with good appetite. He was doing well in school, got good grades, was involved in activities, and came home and made supper for the two of us. He’d sit at the kitchen table finishing his homework while I did the dishes and I would try to engage him in conversation. How was school? What were his plans for the weekend? And he answered respectfully, looked me in the eye, seemed perfectly stable and reasonable. Despite everything.
* * *
Still, I worried.
More than a few nights I lay awake, listening to him moving from room to room in the house, checking all the locks, the creak of the boards as he went into the basement to check on the generator, the hum as he held open the refrigerator door and peered into it, wishing, I presume, that it was as full as it used to be. He turned on the television—even though, of course, they broadcast more and more rarely—and over the shush of the static I could hear him taking the guns apart and cleaning them.
His mom had died before any of this began to happen. How horrified she would have been to imagine him so devoted to weaponry, to see him go off to school in his youth militia uniform, ammo belt on his shoulder. She was in the hospital when the first reports of the infection had begun coming in, and I remember thinking that it was a hoax, some bizarre mass hysteria and media frenzy.
There was something on the news the day she died—some footage from Detroit that was playing over and over on CNN—and I remember pausing in one of the hospital waiting rooms to watch it, holding my bouquet of flowers, and then I turned and went down the hall to her room and she was no longer living; she had died in those moments that I was standing there mesmerized by the television. When I told Peter later that she was gone, I pretended that I’d been there with her. I pretended that I’d been holding her hand, and she’d let out a sigh, and closed her eyes very peacefully.
I’ve repeated this scene so often in my mind that most of the time it feels like a real memory.
* * *
For a time after the robbery, Peter was up at all hours, pacing and prowling, nearly every night. But then after a week or so, he began to calm down. Maybe he got worn out from so little sleep. In any case, when I woke in the night the house was quiet, and when I went into his bedroom I found him sound asleep in his bed, still in his clothes with his headphones on. The tinny specters of music wisped up as I detached the plastic branch of the earpiece from his head.
Sitting there on his bed—untangling the cord from his neck, hushing him as he stirred for a moment—I couldn’t help but think back to when he was a baby. I could picture him in his infant carrier in the backseat of our car, the way I would play those children’s lullabies on the tape deck, over and over, driving around the neighborhood until his bottle or teething ring grew slack in his mouth and his head lolled and his eyes lost focus and shut—at last, at last, I used to think, it was so hard to get him down for the night when he was little.
Of course he was not a baby any longer. Not at all.
At sixteen, he was already bigger than I. Six foot two, two hundred-odd pounds. A real bruiser, as they say, which was taking some getting used to. For years he was small for his age. It was embarrassing to recall some of the gushing, diminutive nicknames my wife and I had for him. Peter Rabbit, Mouse, Squeakie, Bunny. I loved to pick him up, to carry him in my arms or on my shoulders. I loved to rub his soft cheeks, tickle him, tousle his hair, and it may be that I kept him babified for too long after his mom died, because he was small for his age and I didn’t recognize that he was growing up.
Now, of course, I was getting my comeuppance. His physical affection could be alarming. I’d often to speak to him sharply: I don’t want to wrestle, I don’t care to have my back slapped, I don’t enjoy being lifted off the ground in a bear hug. His strength was unnerving. Was this the way he felt once? The looming larger adult, the implied threat of being overpowered, suffocated, crushed?
“Enough!” I told him that night, when he was pestering me and roughhousing after dinner. Enough! It never seemed to sink in with him until I raised my voice. Quit it right now, Peter! I mean it! Get off me!
His face fell, then, and he dropped his arms abruptly to his sides, backing away. “Fine,” he said petulantly. “Jeez, I was just being affectionate…” and off he slumped to his room.
Then I felt bad, naturally. He had needed to be hugged, he had needed to be close to me, especially after all he had been through, after the robbery, etc. He had needed some comfort. How could I not realize that?
But there was no hugging him
now. When I went to the doorway of his room, he barely looked at me. Headphones plugged into his ears, face hooded. Out came the solvents and lubricating oils, pipe cleaners and toothbrushes. Wordlessly, he began again to clean the guns.
* * *
So then, to make it up to him, I decided to take him out driving. He had been wanting to learn to drive—he couldn’t wait to get behind the wheel, couldn’t get enough of it—but there wasn’t much opportunity for me to teach him, not much time in the day between work and chores, and of course it wasn’t particularly wise to be out on the roads at night, especially with an inexperienced driver at the wheel.
But that night I saw that it was necessary. I had atoning to do, and when I went upstairs with the keys and held them out, he deigned to unplug a single ear from its headphone.
“Hey, buddy,” I said. “Why don’t we take the car out?” And it was better than an apology.
* * *
The power grid had become very spotty in recent years, and there were rolling blackouts all over the city. You’d see the lights shut down, streetlights fluttering dimmer, and then dead, block by block, vanishing, and some of the house alarms setting up a wail—
But at the same time, the city could be very beautiful in the darkness, very mysterious. The tree boughs hung over the road in layers and the sky intensified with starlight, constellations, the sheets of headlights emerging from the distance, the corona of a police cruiser’s flashers, red-and-blue sheen circling over the surface of the bushes and houses and wet asphalt.
We drove for quite a while before we began to catch glimpses of zombies. By the park, we saw a naked female on the edge of a ravine, her skin almost fluorescently pale as she bent there, digging through the leaves, lifting her head as blankly and innocently as a deer, the headlights glinting in her eyes before she bolted. Behind the old Popeye’s Chicken, we noted a bearded male emerging from an overturned Dumpster, scrambling on his hands and knees toward a hole in a fence, still dressed in a ragged lumberjack shirt and jeans, one foot missing, the other wearing a boot. Over on Derbyshire Lane, where most of the houses were abandoned, an elderly female froze in the road as we approached. It was carrying a dead shih tzu in one hand as daintily as a purse, and for a moment it appeared that it was trying to flag us down, that it was waving. Then, it tottered with surprising speed off the road and into a long-neglected yard overgrown with tall grass and butterfly weeds.
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