21st Century Dead

by Christopher Golden

  I watched as Peter straightened in the driver’s seat, hands tightened on the wheel, face stern and alert, not reaching for the gun on the seat beside us, not overreacting. “Just go slow,” I said. “Keep your eyes on the road,” I said, and his expression was pinched but nevertheless I felt that this moment was better than any other kind of driving we’d done together. This kind of focus. Down the pitch-dark streets, our headlights pulled us across the surface of the road. We were as close to father and son as we’d ever be again, I thought. For a moment. For a second.

  * * *

  And then it was morning. I opened my eyes and my cheek was pressed against the passenger window and I could see, close-up, a smatter of rain droplets on the glass. We were pulling into the driveway and the garage door was folding open to receive us, and upon waking I didn’t for a moment know where I was being taken or whom I was with. I blinked to see him behind the wheel, his big square head, his sideburns and chin hair, his stern eyes straight ahead as he settled the car gently into its place in the garage. Here was the gray dawn light, the sun spreading up into the sky and tracing along the branches of the trees.

  “We drove all night,” I said. “I can’t believe I fell asleep.”

  “Yeah,” he said, and smiled sheepishly. “I just didn’t want to stop. I know it’s a waste of gas, I hope…”

  Then, abruptly, his eyes hardened. “Oh, crap,” he said, and pointed to where our trash can lay overturned. Garbage was strewn about and clawed through. “Damn,” Peter said. “Looks like they got into the backyard somehow last night!”

  “I could have sworn I locked the gate,” I said, and he frowned.

  “Great,” he said. “If they found any food in there, they’re liable to come back, you know.”

  * * *

  I slept for a little while and then got up around noon and went down to the store. Cleveland wasn’t as bad as a lot of places—not like Atlanta or Chicago. The ratio of living to dead was still in our favor, and most of the basic services were still plugging along, police and firemen, water and electricity. I still had customers coming in—maybe more than usual. In such times, people needed a good liquor store.

  The zombie problem had been spreading across the country for a while by that point—though not as exponentially as they’d first thought. It wasn’t the end of the world, or at least that’s what I kept telling myself. In most cases, a zombie was more like a pest than a threat. Of course, a bite would infect you, but they weren’t terribly aggressive, in general. “They are more afraid of us than we are of them,” people said; and they feared with good reason, since the militias and the national guard and police shot them on sight, and took their heads off and burned the corpses down at the old foundry by the river.

  The truth was, the military was so efficient about it that it seemed like they should have just about finished them all off. But they clung on stubbornly. They were nocturnal, and seemed to have an instinctual sense of self-preservation, since it was oddly difficult to discover their daylight hiding places—the narrow little burrows they would find to curl up in, like culverts and the crawlspaces under abandoned houses and piles of junkyard debris. Some were even said to dig nests for themselves under overgrown bushes and shrubs, and then cover themselves up with leaves.

  We had been assured that they had no thoughts or feelings, but sometimes I wondered if there wasn’t some tiny little spark of memory or emotion left inside their skulls, still flickering from time to time.

  That evening, I was locking up the store and pulling down the security gate when I saw one in the alleyway. A boy, maybe thirteen or fourteen years old, eating a pigeon. The zombie went stock-still when it saw me, its mouth full of feathers, its jaw working stupidly as it gazed at me. Its eyes were wide and alert, and when I looked into them I thought it seemed scared and sad. As if there were a shudder of remembering: a house, an old room with a bunk bed and football posters, a mother and father: all lost.

  “Shoo!” I said. “Shoo! Get out of here!” and it took off with a hunched, ambling gait, pigeon still clutched in its mouth, vanishing into the alley, the tunnel of garbage bags and rubble and abandoned buildings.

  Driving home, I couldn’t help but wonder if my sentimentality would be repaid one day—that zombie kid popping back one evening to give me a quick, nasty death with its sharp teeth and ragged fingernails.

  “Stupid,” I whispered to myself. “Stupid, stupid,” and I mentioned nothing about it to Peter when I got home.

  * * *

  He was in the backyard when I pulled into the driveway, pacing along the perimeter. We had lined the top of the fence with razor wire, and I watched as he tapped the wire with an old golf club, testing the tautness.

  “What’s up?” I said, and he turned to regard me with that soldierlike gaze he’d been developing.

  “Just trying to figure out how they got in here last night,” he said. “I think we need to get a chain and padlock for that gate.”

  “Okay,” I said—though it seemed doubtful to me that a zombie would have been able to work the latch on our gate.

  “Maybe it was something else,” I said. “Like cats or raccoons or something…” Though this was equally unlikely, since most such animals had long ago been cleared out by roving, hungry zombies. You hardly saw squirrels anymore, let alone a skunk or an opossum.

  “Anyway,” I said, and showed him the bag I was carrying. “I got some ground beef! Pretty fresh, too! Some guy came in and traded it for a bottle of Absolut. You want to make some meatloaf?”

  That was always his favorite when he was a kid, and his look brightened.

  “Like Mom made it,” I said. “With the carrots and onions chopped up in it.”

  “Yeah,” he said softly.

  * * *

  Like a lot of things, meat had become a rarity, so dinner had a kind of celebratory quality. Our worries about the breach in the yard were forgotten momentarily, and we had the sort of cheerful, ordinary conversation I imagined fathers and sons used to have back in times past. Peter spoke enthusiastically about his day at school, where the kids were being taught to operate a flamethrower, and I listened and nodded, though of course a part of me was sad to think that this was the state of the world we lived in.

  I didn’t mention this, naturally. There were so many things we never talked about: that zombie kid with its puzzled, rueful expression; that dead robber, the way Peter had taken a hacksaw to his neck while I held the corpse steady on the plastic tarp in the back room; his mother in her hospital bed that last week of her life, the fitful way she drifted in and out of awareness, the way she tucked her face against her shoulder as she slept, frowning hard like an infant or an old, old woman.

  For such things, what words could we find? A whole species of language seemed to have gone extinct. But maybe that had always been so between teenage boys and their fathers.

  * * *

  In general, I think, it was more difficult to find words for the things we did and saw.

  Like the word zombie; for example. At first, people tried to believe the official pronouncements—that it was an “infection,” akin to rabies, that a cure was being actively sought, etc., etc. They were sick people, not “zombies”—that was what the government and the news networks told us in the beginning.

  But once you began to see them in real life, there was no way to deny that—whatever else they were—they were definitely dead. They came out of fatal car wrecks and morgues and graveyards and burbled up out of the bottoms of murky rivers. I had never seen an actual walking skeleton, but I’d come across plenty that were decayed or eviscerated or nearly limbless or essentially mummified, and it was clear that they hadn’t been living creatures in a very long time.

  Everyone had heard the stories. People swore that they had seen long-dead mothers, lost loved ones, people whose funerals were years and years past. One of my customers insisted that he had seen his son, Skittles, who was killed in a drunk driving accident a decade ago. That S
kittles, still young, still with his long hair and bright blue eyes, had come to their front porch late one night and tapped gently against the door, and they’d been afraid, the old man said, blinking quickly, as if still astonished. “We were afraid, my wife and I,” he said. “We didn’t let him in, and he never came back again.” He put his hand to his mouth.

  I nodded thoughtfully, though I didn’t put much stock in it. Skittles had been in the ground for ten years, I thought; Skittles was dust.

  * * *

  I thought of the story again that night, though. I had been asleep when I was awakened by a noise. I took out my little flashlight and looked at my watch. It was 2:30 A.M.

  There was the sound of a rusty hinge—uncertain and irregular, an unlatched door opening and closing in the wind—and when I peered down from my second-floor window I could see her there in the backyard garden.

  No, I’m not saying that it was my wife.

  It was only that I was reminded of her in a powerful way. She was about the same height, and her hair was also blond, though matted and tangled. She wore a hospital gown, and she—it—was walking in our garden in the moonlight, stepping carefully, barefoot, through the rows of green-bean vines and carrots and cabbage, toward the corner where our corn was almost shoulder high, appearing to take care not to step on our plants. There was a kind of tenderness in its step, a sort of reverie or reverence in its movements.

  Was this the way you would walk into a yard that had been lost to you long ago? A place from your past that was changed a little, but still mostly the same: that old apple tree, that little statue of Saint Francis with a bird alighting on his finger, that patch of garage wall where trumpeter’s vine had rooted and spread?

  I couldn’t see her face, only the slow movement of her body and the white of the hospital gown, rustling in the wind of a summer night. Still, for at least a minute, every part of me believed. I stood there at the window, motionless, conscious even of the rising and falling of my chest as I breathed, fearing that any movement or sound would startle her and she would be gone. I just wanted her to linger a little while. Her face remained in shadows, turned away.

  When people we love are dead, it’s common, I guess, to keep looking for them, to be willing to give anything to see them again, even just for a moment.

  I wanted to tell her about how the world had changed since she’d left it. To find a barometer in her eyes and voice: Be honest, how bad are things, really? It will get better, won’t it?

  I thought about how it would be to explain to her about Peter. I know I haven’t been the best father, I know I’ve screwed things up, but I’ve tried, really I have, and he’s a good boy, despite everything. Didn’t he turn out okay?

  She wandered around the backyard, aimlessly, as I watched. They have no thoughts or feelings, I told myself. There is nothing human about them anymore, I told myself as the zombie female crept along the edge of our fence. She scratched in the dirt under the apple tree, picking out morsels from the upturned soil—earthworms, maybe, or grubs—and putting them into her mouth. For a moment, she paused, as if struck by a thought; she passed her hand through her hair.

  * * *

  As morning was nearing, she left. I watched as she pushed open the gate and hobbled down the driveway, and when I went to a front-facing window to see which way she was headed, she was already gone.

  I went to the front door and peered out. A breeze stirred the geraniums and the maple trees, and moths swam around the porch light. The squat fire hydrant stood at attention on the street corner, gazing back at me as blankly as a guard.

  At the table, sipping my weak, contraband coffee, I felt embarrassed and ashamed. Such stupid, indulgent sentimentality! How angry Peter would have been if he’d known I’d willingly stood and watched a zombie traipse about our garden.

  The first lesson everyone learned was not to anthropomorphize the dead. In the early days, the infection spread rapidly because we couldn’t stop believing they were still human. Zombie mothers preyed on their children, biting them, often eating them. Zombie husbands sought out their wives, zombie neighbors would seem to be merely confused and then would rush at you, teeth bared. An infected person would go to work in the morning and by midafternoon would have transformed, often managing to drag down and contaminate a good number of their coworkers in their wake.

  After that first wave, we learned quickly that the infected would always first seek out those they knew, those they had once loved. With strangers, they were far less aggressive. Almost shy, you might say.

  After that first wave, most people learned quickly how to harden their hearts. It reminded me a little of the way, when I first moved to a city in my youth, I had to teach myself to ignore the homeless. No eye contact. No acknowledgment when they called out after you as you passed. Only fools would interact with them or give them money or linger on their condition, no matter how wretched or pathetic they might seem.

  But I never perfected that thousand-yard stare of the true urbanite, never quite figured out how not to look, how to make my face and mind as blank as outer space, and it was in this way that even now I created problems for myself. Thus, watching silently as a zombie invaded my yard or crept around my place of business.

  Thus, the last words of the young robber still vividly imprinted, right on the surface of my consciousness when I closed my eyes: “… Hey, wait…”

  * * *

  When I got home from work that day, Peter was back out in the yard. He had a colander and was working his way along a row of our green beans, but when he saw me drive up he stood and came to meet me.

  “There was something in the yard again last night,” he said, and he pointed over to a spot beneath the apple tree where it was clear that digging had occurred.

  I recognized the spot, then. It was the place where, many years ago, we had buried Peter’s pet turtle, Louisa. She had lived her life in a terrarium in Peter’s room, swimming in circles around the edges of a plastic tub or sunning herself on a rock in the middle of her enclosure. She had been unusually responsive for a turtle, we believed—she seemed to become eager and even playful when it was her time to be fed, and she would often stretch her neck out to its full length and regard us flirtatiously with her yellow reptile eyes. When she died, it was the first real death that Peter had experienced, and my wife created a fairly elaborate ceremony for her funeral, with songs and flowers and a little cardboard coffin that she and Peter decorated with crayons and ribbons and glued-on sequins.

  The coffin, of course, had rotted long ago, but the turtle’s shell and skeleton remained. This is what had been unearthed. We saw that Louisa’s carapace had been dug up and broken open, and whatever had still been contained in it had been picked over.

  I watched as Peter bent down and fit the pieces of the broken carapace together, as if they were shards of a smashed vase. He looked up at me grimly.

  “I think we better start keeping a watch,” he said. “We can just do it in shifts.” He looked back down at the turtle shell and shook his head. “If one of them is getting in here, before long it’s going to bring others. And then we could end up having some serious problems.”

  “Right,” I said. “You’re absolutely right.”

  * * *

  There was a dinner of rice with a few frozen peas and carrots thrown into it, and some of the green beans, which we stir-fried with some hot pepper flakes and oil, and I sat there touching my plate with my fork, thinking for some reason about the boy we had killed, the robber. He might have been very hungry, I thought.

  And I thought, Should a hungry man be punished for stealing bread? It was one of those old ethical riddles. Probably not applicable in this case, since it was a liquor store and the corpse of the perpetrator, when we dismembered him, was not the body of someone who was starving. And he probably would have killed us if we hadn’t killed him, I reminded myself.

  “This is really good,” I said, and put a green bean to my mouth. “I like the spices.�
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  “Mm-hm,” Peter said.

  He was already deep in thought—thinking about killing, I assumed, thinking about his gun and the bead he would draw on the garden from the upstairs back landing, and the things they had taught him in school about crosshairs and accuracy.

  * * *

  When she arrived at our back gate, it was almost midnight. It was my shift—Peter was asleep, and I was sitting on our second-floor porch, staring down. Not really “keeping watch,” I have to admit.

  I was thinking about Peter. Peter, that little rabbit we had loved so much, the way he fit in my arms and nuzzled against my chest; the way he had walked between us, my wife and me, as we waded in the lake, the way we lifted him as the water got deeper, his little legs paddling along without touching bottom. The way we would sit on his bed, the two of us, singing softly together, taking turns stroking his hair until he fell asleep. It is not until much later that you realize that the child you once had is lost to you; you cannot even pinpoint the moment when it happens, when you understand that you will never see that little boy again, you will never again hold him in your arms. There is the other person that he has become, of course. But that baby, that child—that is something you will never get back.

  It sent a kind of keen shudder through me, this thought. And then I looked down and the gate was opening. There was the familiar creak. She knew how to work the latch, I thought. How was that possible?

  In any case, here she was again. White cotton hospital gown with periwinkle pattern. Long, matted blond hair. The old rifle was beside me, which my father had given me when we used to hunt deer, but I didn’t pick it up.