by James, Guy
That was always a good thing to do, and how he’d forgotten it he didn’t know. Herds always needed culling. That would get the fear going again.
And now he was back to the certainty that it was a problem of fear deficiency, which he was sure could be solved by refilling the fear bucket…with the blood of a brother or two, and perhaps a sister as well. Fuck, he’d kill most of them if that’s what it took.
The point was this: the Order was his, and his it would stay.
That would leave more food for him, and for those who chose the right side. In fact, the flagging faith in him and the Order’s principles was being churned by hunger in the brothers’ and sisters’ bellies.
When the food stopped coming regularly to their table—which had been more than a year ago, sixteen months to be precise even though Brother Mardu was too spacey and hungry himself to remember—that was when beliefs and allegiances had begun to shift.
40
As these thoughts were racing around his head like whippets with their tails on fire, scorching the banked track that was the inside of his skull, Brother Mardu was kneeling in front of the Order’s altar, which was at the head of a narrow, windowless room. Overhead, the ceiling lights that weren’t out—a little less than half of the total number—were beaming down a soft yellow that wasn’t quite filling the room.
He adjusted himself, rising slightly before settling down again, and both of his knees—the right and then the left—crackled in mild protest as he sank lower to the floor. His right hip chimed in as well.
Have a fucking party, why don’t you? he thought. Just go on and break.
In calmer times, the room had reminded him of a space capsule, all of which he figured were lost in space now, assuming, of course, that they’d been deployed from Earth in the first place. The ones that had never been launched were still stuck on the planet, and the room he sat in might as well have been one. From his perspective, it contained all that a space capsule should have: humanity’s legacy, which to him was the virus and those enlightened enough to advance its cause.
Now, their time was perhaps running out. Midnight was fast approaching, and his mind was struggling to trudge through a swamp of doubt. His thoughts, rather than being clear as the waters of the Caribbean as they’d once been, were darkened by helpless and pathetic reflections on the past.
He was fifty-four years old, and though he’d been twelve years younger when the virus had made its glorious debut, until recently with each passing year he’d felt more energetic than ever before in his life. His pursuit seemed to be making him progressively younger. That had for a time been conclusive, irrefutable proof of the divinity and virtue of his mission, of the truth he was spreading to the ignorant, those unversed in the true way of the zombie.
Born Maris Dubois, he’d grown up a homeless orphan in the Bronx. Up until the ripe age of eleven he’d whiled away the time summering on dingy steps on streets too far north for any but the most lost of white people to be seen, and wintering in vomit and STD-infested shelters for those who, like him, went without. Oh, what spice variety could be, and certainly was, in those years.
And the smells, he still remembered those. Blood, bile, upchuck, broken glass or pavement or both embedded in skin, all manner of cheap drink oozing out of clogged pores, body odor the likes of which many would never have the good fortune to appreciate, and don’t forget the shit and piss and drugs and all the cocktails thereof. He’d always had a keen olfactory sense, sharp enough that smells could recall images, even the faintest odors that most of his friends in those days couldn’t detect.
Friends. Was that really the right term for it? Maybe it wasn’t, but he could use it all the same. That wasn’t what they’d called one another then. They were brothers, blood brothers, gangbangers, and they’d helped him push ‘homeless’ to a lower position on his resume, to something that was first in the recent past, and then in the look it’s really over past, and eventually, in the distant past, but, most importantly, behind him, and over and motherfucking done with.
Mostly, these friends were just drug-runners, too low on the totem to have any real clout, working their way slowly up the blood-slick pole, slipping every now and again, sustaining permanent injuries in their falls, sometimes dying if they weren’t so good at the pole dancing thing. Physical injuries or no, membership was itself a permanent mark on the soul, and that was what had made the friendship run as deep as well-used track marks on a greying junkie.
His given name was Maris, but all his friends, had called him ‘Maurice,’ or, more frequently, ‘Yooooo Maurice.’ Not ‘Yo Maurice’ or even ‘Yo Maurice’ but ‘Yooooo Maurice.’
He hadn’t minded. It was nice to have someone to talk to, some kind of family-type thing, even if it was based on drugs and the blood they shared was the blood they spilled.
It was all good, as they’d liked to say. All fucking good, until the zombies showed up, that was. Hey, maybe there'd even been some love there. Some of the days with his gang seemed to have been the best days in his life. High as a kite, wild and free, and now, in retrospect, lucky to ever have made it back to the ground.
They’d called themselves The Destroyaz, and that’s what they did—destroy the neighborhood and themselves, to the extent there was still room to do either. He was the last of The Destroyaz, a living relic, and of that he was sure. He couldn’t really know, of course, but there was no way to picture any of his friends in The Destroyaz living past the first night after the outbreak.
They had street smarts, and all of them were familiar with the concept of spotting as it related to looking out for narcs, police, snitches, and other unseemly types, but zombies were another matter entirely.
And, to add insult to injury, the zombies undid the client base itself. That was a real problem, one that forced Yooooo Maurice of The Destroyaz to start over again, from scratch.
And it was a damn shame, too, because in the three years before the outbreak hit, he’d really been making a name for himself, building a brand, and gaining ground like no one’s business. He was finally past the low as dirt, foot soldier days, when he’d always been a step away from prison or the shelters or a drive-by or some sordid combination of the three, and that would’ve made one hell of a story.
It was that nasty Krokodil shit showing up that did it. Because there he was, cornering the market, owning it, making it his bitch and exclusive domain. And that motherfuckin’ bitch complied. She was an obedient ho, or so he’d thought. As it turned out, perhaps she’d had her own plan all along.
It was some real mean junk, that Krokodil. It was the one drug Yooooo Maurice of The Destroyaz wouldn’t touch, not even for a sample. He’d tried everything, but not that, never that.
“That shit’ll melt your face right the fuck off,” he’d told his friends. He should’ve said rot, because that’s what Ms. Krokodil really did to your face, and your other soft matter, and not just the soft stuff either, but your bones, too.
The smart ones among his friends, which in many cases meant they already had a drug addiction they were committed to financially and had no room in their lives or wallets for another, had listened. They’d still been torn the fuck apart when the apocalypse hit, whether they’d stayed away from the Krok or not, so maybe in the end, it hadn’t amounted to anything. He, on the other hand, hadn’t been torn apart, not in the least.
Back during The Destroyaz’ prosperous times, the generals and captains gave Yooooo Maurice leeway to run an operation that was all his own. Autonomy, they called it on their more ambitious vocabulary days. They wanted to be in Krokodil.
Fuck, if the bitch paid, everyone ought to have a go, but none of them had the balls to touch it, except for Yooooo Maurice, who was like white on rice to the stuff. And so he’d finally found his niche before the outbreak, as he’d similarly find his calling after it, or more precisely, the calling would find him.
In private, he took all the credit for introducing Krokodil to New York. “A new
street drug for a new New York,” he’d confided to himself in his solitary moments. Perhaps he’d known even then, had felt, what was coming, but he didn’t anticipate being in the eye of the storm, and perhaps threading it, if his role in the outbreak was as great as he told his Order of the Dead disciples that it was, or as great as future scholars of the virus would have believed, if not for a woman named Senna Phillips, who at the time Yooooo Maurice was turning out the lady Krok, was just beginning her career as an elementary school teacher in Northern Virginia, which the virus would not let her take to fruition.
Unbeknownst to either of them, their paths would cross, and they’d leave permanent marks on each other’s lives and legacies. Their meeting, though brief, would profoundly alter the course of human events.
41
The virus hit New York and tore it to mold-ridden and festering shreds. It was crystal clear to Yooooo Maurice, who’d broken into and hidden in the abandoned, high-floor offices of a brokerage house, that the whole motherfuckin’ game was changing now, and he wasn’t to start from the bottom this time.
The way he saw it, from his lofty perch of the former office of Landry, Davis, and Pullman, whose views of the Hudson were only partially obstructed by other high-rises, the outbreak had reorganized the streets, undealt all the hands and reshuffled the deck.
That put him face to face with an incredible opportunity. He just couldn’t make out the features of that face all at once. It was a once-in-a-lifetime shot at breaking into the big time. The greatest buy low sell high play in the history of mankind.
Given the talent he’d been given, whatever he was about to do would have the makings of an inside job, and that kind of thing is bad karma to pass up, a straight-up sin. Still, he didn’t know what that would be, but that was when you had to wait for it to come to you, poised to execute.
There were still people to sell to, he was sure. If he was surviving, then others must have been too, and there was always some shit to be sold. He realized that he wasn’t Yooooo Maurice of The Destroyaz anymore, but he wasn’t Maris, either.
He was becoming someone else, someone in need of a name. When he was figuring out how to shape the next phase of his life, Caribou Lou would often come back to him. That damned Caribou Lou, who’d haunted him before the outbreak, and would keep tormenting him until hell itself froze over and cracked.
There were sleepless nights when Caribou Lou raced around in circles in his head, as if his skull were a Harlem block where an amped Lou pushed his half-broken, fully-stolen bicycle to its limits, hovering above the space where the seat wasn’t anymore and pedaling like a madman.
Before The Destroyaz had taken Yooooo Maurice in, back when he was still Maris and racking up his share of SWB—Sitting while Black—and WWB—Walking while Black—and LIAGWB—Lying in a Gutter while Black—stops and searches and arrests, Caribou Lou and he were guests in the same homeless shelter from time to time.
Caribou’s name actually was Lou, and everyone called him Caribou Lou for some reason, even though that wasn’t his drink of choice and wouldn’t be even if he could get it. Of course he wasn’t going to pass up a chance at Malibu rum, but please, please hold the fucking pineapple juice, which would just take up precious liquor real estate in the glass.
On one of those fine nights, Caribou Lou made the speech for which Maris, and Yooooo Maurice, Brother Mardu, and every permutation thereof would remember him. And that, too, was the night when it had all started for Mardu, except that he didn’t know it then.
The beginnings of it were too faint for him to catch, as the beginnings of great things often are. But the scratching in his skull had started, like something was taking root there, an idea or a force or spirit that had been searching for the perfectly-fertile soil that was suited to it, that it needed.
“You see these bootstraps here,” Caribou Lou had said, pointing to the dingy loops on the backs of the chewed, too-big workman boots he’d found somewhere—or perhaps pulled from the pallid feet of a corpse—and tied to his own ashy and bunion-riddled paws. “You see ’em?”
He was swaying, his small belly full to the brim with Aristocrat Royal Vodka and the contents of at least five—he couldn’t remember how many with the load of drink he was carrying—varied airplane bottles. There had been Jäger, that disgusting treasure, and Jack, but mostly Jäger, or at least more Jäger than Jack. He didn’t remember and it didn’t matter.
The Aristocrat had done the trick of taking Jäger and Jack alike into a friendly huddle, and that top-hatted gentleman with his cheap, pretty much unfiltered vodka had topped him off perfectly well. Lou hadn’t been given a top hat of his own, he never was, but that was okay. The Aristocrat hadn’t had a spare with him that night, the gentleman’s usual excuse.
“I’m ’a—” he belched and put a forearm to his mouth, and, for a moment, to him and to everyone around him, it seemed that he was going to puke and douse the room with his stomach-warmed dinner of half a can of refried beans. But the heat left his head, the feeling passed, and the beans, unhappily, stayed put in their liquor infusion. He pulled a corner of his hood to the side, straining the tired strings that had the thankless job of holding the ancient sweatshirt together, and wiped at his lips, picking up the blots of saliva that had bloomed there.
“I’m ’a pull up… I’m ’a pull up myself by these…by these here bootstraps.” He reached down and made a hooking gesture with his forefingers, than raised his hands with the kind of dramatic flair that Larry Knapp would’ve envied. “All the way up. And I’m ’a make some’in’ of myself.”
He reeled but kept his balance. “I’m ’a—” He wanted to begin again but found his energy was flagging. He needed a drink. “I’m ’a—” He tried again, but his audience had been lost. They’d lost interest, and were turning away from him. To them he was just another pontificating drunk who’d never see one red cent come out of the conviction of his words.
“I’m ’a—” he grumbled, and then stalked off—drunkenly—to a corner of the shelter where he could light up his crack pipe in peace. He’d tried to make them see, but blind, rabid and lame horses couldn’t be led to water, or something like that.
42
The almost great man that was Caribou Lou was stabbed to death behind the shelter on the night of his bootstrapping proclamation. Two thirty-something men had thrown in together to see if Caribou Lou’s boldness was brought on by new loot.
A search of his still-twitching corpse revealed a cache of empty airplane bottles, one of which was more than a year old, two cigarettes, one chewed and one empty of all goods, and a family Polaroid of something that didn’t exist anymore, folded over in half twice and cracked as a result, which Caribou Lou couldn’t bring himself to look at unless he was obliterated on the juice.
Well, he was on the wagon permanently after that, what with being murdered and all. His killers, disappointed at what they’d found on his body, began to leave to look for a more profitable alley. One of them was still holding the family photo.
Finally, he circled back a few steps and dropped it on Caribou Lou’s body, which wasn’t twitching much at all anymore. The one who’d had the photo turned to leave. His accomplice, whose real name was Dwyane Moore but who went by the nickname Dwy-Dwy, picked the picture up and pocketed it.
Dwy-Dwy was still alive and with the photo in his possession when the outbreak hit. He was looking at it when the zombies took him, pleading with the eyes of the man, woman, and two little children in the picture, like he was begging them for forgiveness, or for a quicker death, or something he couldn’t grasp, and wouldn’t have much chance to reflect on in later years, because there weren’t to be any later years at all.
The children were Deja and Javon, six and seven at the time the picture was taken, the woman was Belinda, and Caribou Lou’s real name was Steve Reginald, and before the alcohol took him back from the family to which it had lent him, keyword lent, he’d been the father and husband that all family men aspired to
be.
Had it not been for his murder and the worldwide zombie outbreak that followed shortly thereafter, Caribou Lou really would’ve shrugged the alcohol off once and for all. He was undergoing a sea change in his dreamless float on the waves of homelessness, and the tide was actually going to come in, and for good. His family would welcome him back with understandable trepidation, and from there they’d sail—slowly at first but then with increasing speed—into the proverbial sunset.
None of that happened of course, because Caribou Lou was murdered by two drug-addicted and hungry men who were also treading the homeless water, and then the outbreak hit, and his wife Belinda was turned by her best friend and coworker Nellia Roberts, with whom she worked at a Chipotle in Midtown. Belinda had just been promoted to manager.
Deja and Javon found their human lives ended at school. Deja was turned by a boy she didn’t even like named Andre, but who always hung around her for some reason, which, being city kids, both of them understood damn well already.
Javon was turned in the principal’s office, by none other than the principal himself. Javon was in trouble for fighting...yet again. He’d beaten up an older boy, Omari, who’d said he was Javon’s mother’s pimp and that Javon’s mother had to see him every night and pay him what he was owed before she was allowed to return home to Deja and Javon. Javon had done a good job of it too, almost breaking Omari’s nose, and more than almost dislocating the older boy’s shoulder.
Oh the schoolyard battles he was to have, if not for the darned zombie virus, of course. But then a lot of things would’ve been different, if not for the virus.
Deja would’ve found herself in a nice and stable career first as a promoter and then as a public relations advisor in the music industry, specializing in something called soft or light or fluff or pillow rap, which basically meant white rap—the stuff that white guys put on after bringing home a date and trying to set the mood for getting lucky—after having her fifteen minutes in the spotlight as one of the final twenty contestants on America’s Got Talent, where she showcased her impressive but less than earthshattering gift of song.