Where the Dead Go to Die

by Aaron Dries

  Lucette thought to herself, They’re doing the thing that makes babies. Though it’s not what I’d heard. They’re doing it differently. Or maybe the girls at school were wrong.

  The sight intrigued as it terrified. She sensed that something was clicking in her mind, a final turning cog falling into place. This was what it was to be a man and a woman. And even though it sent her stomach into rollercoaster lurches, Lucette knew she had no choice but accept it. Everyone was born. Everyone grew up. Everyone did what everyone does. And then you die, just as her father had died. Just as Robby would, too.

  And one day, so will I.

  Beginning and end linked through bodies in strange and sickening ways. It made no sense, yet made complete sense at the same time.

  The two stick figures in the room stilled, drew up their heads and turned to face her, each moving at the same slow pace. They looked like automated Christmas decorations in a storefront window, robots without emotion contorted into painful positions for the benefit of others. Their eyes were almost dead, and seemed not to care that they had been observed. Tammy, tears on her cheeks despite the rictus smile, turned back to Speedy’s penis and swallowed it whole.

  Screech. Screech. Screech.

  Lucette backed away, afraid. She ran to Robby’s room and bolted through the door, holding up the crane. In her head it became a talisman. Something to keep her strong, whilst still keeping her young.

  She skidded to a halt. Robby was drenched in sweat, as were his sheets. He thrashed on the mattress. His breathing was shallow, clambering for air.

  “Oh, Robby,” she said. “No.”

  This was what her mother had been hiding from her. On some level Lucette had known all along and had been pretending it wasn’t so. This was the F and S alluded to in the FSU sign mounted into the wall beside the keypad she’d hacked. The final stage.

  Lucette didn’t know if she loved or hated her mother in that moment, as the lights burned red and the vultures called. There were lies wherever she looked, as unavoidable as shadows. There was no Santa Claus, no Tooth Fairy—only wrongs and rights intersecting in ways nobody had stopped to warn her about.

  She looked down at her imperfect crane and realized how silly it was. It wasn’t going to change anything. It wasn’t going to save anyone.

  Robby’s thrashing ceased the moment she let the crane drop. His breathing drew into a long rattle. She crushed the origami beneath her sneaker as she neared the bed, watching her friend die in front of her.

  Lucette knew she should call for someone—the alert buzzer was right there—and yet all she could think about was the day she’d created summer for him, with Robby musing about all the things he’d never get to do. It hadn’t seemed real to her then. The fantasy had been as much for her benefit as it was for him.

  Like their dream, Robby was almost gone.

  His eyes no longer blinked, the last of his lashes cast across his cheeks. He lay there, bald and broken, white as the ghost he soon would become, smiling up at her. She thought, just maybe, that there was a flicker of recognition in his face, that yes—he knew he wasn’t alone. Although this may have been wishful thinking.

  Lucette wanted to do the right thing. There was still enough time to give him a gift while he was still here. Something a lot better than a sheet of folded paper.

  She leaned forward to give him a kiss.

  There were no fairytale illusions that this would restore him to health as always happened in cartoons. There was only the act itself: a much-delayed sliver of reality at the end of their summer. It would not fade as her drawn-on leaves had in the frosted window. This gift would linger, and hopefully Robby would take it with him wherever he ended up.

  ***

  Eternity in a cup of cocoa. The answers to all questions in a single fortune cookie. No faces, yet every face at the same time. It all came rushing at him, the enormity of it all. And for the first time in so long he knew relief. It severed him from his body, whooshing away all of the pain that had come to define him.

  The uglies were there with him, only they didn’t claw or scratch. They stood around him in a vigil, no longer scary, breathing in unison. The longer they stood there the more their expressions blurred. Soon they were just eyes and mouths, though not even this lasted. He watched them fade into the red, and despite everything that had happened, Robby missed their assaults.

  Now there was only the face lowering itself over him. It was as big as the moon.

  He smelled her. She was delicious.

  Like a baby turning its tongue to its mother’s tit for the first time. Like someone shielding themselves from flame. His hunger was not learned, it was simply known.

  ***

  Lucette kissed the taut pull of her friend’s lips.

  And he bit hers off in return.

  INTERLUDE SIX

  To complete, inside reverse fold one side to fashion the head, and then fold down the wings. Only then, as you do this, will the origami crane take shape. You are finished.

  Emily was in the bed she no longer shared with her husband, yet which still smelled like him, when the noise came. Twisting metal, shrieking tires, engines that roared like rabid things hell-bent on biting and tearing until there was nothing left to bite and tear. Whoever they were, they had knocked down the gate. All that noise was lightning-fierce, seeming to shake the earth their house was built on, snapping her from sleep. It extinguished all other sound. She bolted upright, unable to hold in or hear her cry, and watched the window overlooking the driveway burn bright, the venetian blinds sending swirling bars of yellow light across the walls. Emily shielded her face, splayed fingers doing little to obscure that false-dawn glare.

  Doors slammed. The thump of heavy boots pounding the lawn.

  She looked at the closed bedroom door, imagined the hallway just outside leading to the spare room where her husband would by lying, hopefully doped up enough that the edge of his agony was blunted. She feared for him, now more than ever, as she felt the thunder-thrum of strangers breaking into the house.

  Emily screamed Jordan’s name, throwing back the blankets, leaping off the mattress and bumping the bedside table in the process. A half-empty glass of water overturned and shattered against the floorboards, shards pin-wheeling here and there. The world spun on a dizzy axis for a few beats and she steadied herself against the door, face flush with the wood. Her head settled. Emily gripped the handle, knowing that the moment she turned it her world would change, knowing deep down in the parts of her where dark thoughts grew that, yes, yes she knew it would end like this. One day.

  Just please, not today. I’m not ready. We’re not ready.

  Panic detonated inside her as she drew the door open, the blast tearing away the walls separating Emily from her husband, dissolving the heat of the infection that was turning him into something he was not, revealing all of the raw memories she had of the man she’d married. A man whose face dimpled when he smiled, who despite his stubborn streak, despite his inability to remember that the toilet seat should go down and not be left up, she adored.

  Love had stitched them together, made them whole; something better and more unique than anything either one of them had been before they met. But everything was different now. The stitches were being yanked from their skins, and the pain of coming unsewn was without comparison. Everything she’d come to think of as white had turned out to be black after all. Everything that was cherished had to be despised if she was going to stand a chance of surviving. And the joy of life had been replaced by a desire for it all to just end. There was no ugliness like loss, and now, as the front door to their home burst down and those thudding feet crashed in the hall, she knew that ugliness was about to reach a new low.

  Not now. Please. Just one more day. One more day.

  And through all this, a question.

  How?

  The corridor outside her bedroom was full of men with guns and head-mounted torches. They reached out and grabbed her, hands snaking about
her arms, mouthing her name, and she found herself answering. They pushed her against the wall, knocking photographs off their hooks. Shadows and light, a ballet of figures skirting through her house like crazed dancers about a bonfire, shrieking prayers to a deaf sky.

  Papers were flashed in her face. Photographs of her husband from his social media accounts. Sneaky surveillance shots of Emily in her pajamas putting out the trash. Of Lucette playing on the front yard. A warrant. She watched, unable to move, as the man in front of her moved his lips. They were linked by a chain of gummy saliva. There was no air in the room anymore. They had come and steeled it all away like fire. A fire that was spreading down the hallway, forcing doors open as it went.

  There had been no pain that compared to Jordan’s turning. Emily had felt lost at sea, tugged this way and then that by dueling currents, whilst from below reeds snatched at her ankles and dragged her down; and the more she flailed the more entwined she became. Now there was light in the water, shimmering and indistinct, lights mounted on heads screwed into bodies covered in clothes with the Ministry’s insignia woven into its fabric. Stitched in. Not with love, but with diplomacy, with good intentions. Mercy.

  I knew this would happen, came a voice from the darkest part of her. And at the sad, strange end of the day maybe I wanted it to.

  But how? How did they know?

  Perhaps the sky was not so deaf after all.

  Sally.

  Her daughter was screaming, carried away by silhouettes. Emily fought against those who held her, desperate to reach Lucette. Her small face, so shocked and sleepy in the glare of a torch.

  Emily called out to her, reached through the human barricade, and still heard nothing. The current was strong down here. She longed to go back to her room and grab the machete from under the bed.

  A cluster of men dragged Jordan out into the hall and wrestled him to the floor. He kicked out, his thin arms waving, but Emily knew he was too weak to fight them off. She ached for him then, felt the final strands that stitched them together being cut by these intruders.

  They dragged Jordan across the tiles in the direction of the broken front door, his underwear bunching around his thighs as his skin screeched across the tiles. He looked so white in the glow of their torches, a child’s chalk sketch of a man on a pavement moments before the rain came and washed it all away. His upturned feet slid from view, thumped across the threshold.

  “Let me go,” Emily assumed she was saying, yet still couldn’t hear. There were tremors in her throat from her vocal chords, the thud of her pulse in her temples. That was all. The man in front of her, the one with the strands of saliva linking his lips, continued to bark at her, a hot diamond of spittle flying through the air to land on her cheek.

  Emily clenched every muscle in her body and drew strength from her reserves. She’d heard stories of mothers overturning cars after accidents to get at their trapped children, stories of people running through burning rooms to retrieve family members—a primeval force locked away, accessible only through an extreme need to protect all you held close. And Emily had the key.

  She kicked out, whirled her arms, connecting. Thud. Grunt. Torches went wide, gifting her with a few evanescent moments of shadow in which she ducked low and bee-lined straight for the door the intruders had hauled her husband through. Emily didn’t stop to savor her assault, there was no time for that. She had to get outside. Now.

  The moment her foot stepped through the architrave, lights trailed in on her. More arms vined about her torso and yanked her down the steps. Everything turned sideways—the moonlit front yard, the driveway—as the men and women of the Ministry forced her onto the grass. Dirt on her lips. Oxygen vanished from her lungs, and she didn’t care.

  Jordan was kneeling by the mailbox before black skittish outlines of men holding guns. There was no color out here. Everything was monochromatic, a wartime photograph, a captured beat of history depicting the final seconds of a life before the inevitable execution. Her husband twisted around in search of someone to hear his pleas, the accordion contours of his ribcage casting their own shadow.

  It played out in silence for Emily. Her hush—it felt both delicate as moth’s wings and as steely as the stars staring down at them. She feared nothing would break it.

  Jordan turned and locked eyes with her.

  (And reached across to take her left hand, slipping the ring on her wedding finger. His grin, so big and toothy, prickled his cheeks in those schoolboy dimples. What a goober, she’d thought, he’s crying. The ring slid across her skin, snug-as-a-bug-in-a-rug, as her mother used to say.They were knit together now, legally and in the eyes of all those with them in that cramped southern church. And to prove their worth, they cheered when he lifted her veil to kiss her, just as they’d rehearsed—a goodish, respectable mingling of pecks and just a flick of the tongue.)

  He extended his arm out to her.

  (And then dragged Emily into his warmth. There in the cold hospital room they basked in disbelief so pure it boggled their minds. They had created life, made something from absolute nothingness. And now they held that life together, a girl. “What should we call her?” Emily asked, offering her breast to the baby. Her nipple tingled under the tug of those lips, the sensation rippling her skin in gooseflesh. He then whispered his suggestion in Emily’s ear, and they laughed, nodding.)

  Jordan’s button eyes blinked away the last of his humanity. The smile stretched across his face revealed the elongated curve of his teeth. There was sorrow there, so much loss, and Emily could see it, despite his inability to sculpt emotion through muscle and skin anymore. She saw him grieving for the final tie binding them together, and recognized it because she grieved for it, too.

  Jordan spoke. And for the first time since the Ministry crashed through the gate, she heard.

  “Emily,” he said.

  Emily.

  One of the silhouettes put the barrel of a shotgun against his hairless head, haloed his face in a ring of torchlight. A trigger was pulled. Where there had been a face there now was a bowl of gruel and bone spears, the blood and gore streaking the mailbox. He toppled to the ground and was filled with flashes, bullets spearing him from every angle.

  Like sound, like oxygen and pain, color crept back into the world then. That hue, regardless of the knowledge she’d housed in that part of her where dark thoughts grew, still surprised her.

  The color was red. Devilish fireflies in the night.

  RED

  “What in the name Sam Hill was that?”

  It was the first time Emily had dropped the expression in years. When times turned south, so too did her vocabulary—even her accent sounded stronger. But the shock of her slip was nothing compared to the sound reverberating through the facility, ringing in her ears.

  You know what that was, said a voice in the back of her head. You know only too well.

  Woods was next to Emily at the door to her supervisor’s office, surrounded by the five Crowners. As expected, their visitors had arrived in their ‘casual’ attire, a thrift store patchwork of summer shirts that made them look like unassuming RV drivers, only instead of prowling highways they coursed the corridors of America’s hospice system. Like Emily and Woods, they had all flinched and ducked at the gunshot, exchanging wide-eyed glances.

  A second blast rung out. Someone started screaming for help. Mykel.

  “The break room,” Woods said. She clutched her blouse, a gesture that undermined the ferocity of her tone.

  “No, don’t go,” said one of the Crowners, a skinny man in a Hawaiian shirt. “We don’t know what’s happened down there. It could be anything.”

  Emily watched the stern-faced woman named Geraldine, whom she’d seen before (Lordy, you don’t forget someone like that), drop the forged consent form and followed the echo, a hound sniffing out blood. Woods attempted to settle the other startled Ministry workers, men and women who had been drawn up from their offices at random, as Emily broke into a run, matching Gerald
ine’s strides one for one. Her supervisor’s yells ended with a scream for someone to call the goddamn police, and Emily sensed Woods’ presence at her back again. Right where it should be.

  Adrenaline pumped through Emily with such vigor that she didn’t even bother to glance around the break room as they passed to check on Lucette. The moment she entered the space she sensed her daughter’s absence and was grateful for it.

  Woods forged ahead and threw the courtyard door open. Cold air slapped their faces, turned their breaths into shock crystals that fell across their boots.

  The rational world was crumbling outside.

  Mykel was on the ground, lying on top of the old woman who had approached Emily on her first day at the hospice, the one who told her that the dead roamed these halls. However, as bizarre as that sight was, it was nothing compared to what lay in the snow next to them.

  At first Emily thought it was her husband, his skull cracked open in twilight once more. Only no. It couldn’t be. The Ministry no longer exterminated the infected in their homes, dragging them out into the streets and slaughtering them like dogs as they had her husband. In fact, Jordan was the last person to have his life prematurely ended that way in all fifty states. It was his death that led to the revolt, catching the entire country off guard. Emily had been proud of South Carolina then, despite their betrayal coming from those very streets—from people she had trusted no less. The zombie may have bitten the modern world, but it was Charleston of all places that bit back.

  At the time, Emily hadn’t had the strength to join the revolutionaries, as those who had and hadn’t known her husband threw Molotov cocktails through storefront windows, flipping cars so the President would listen. And the President did. It was from those flames that the hospice system was funded, the Ministry reconstructed, and statues erected around the country to commemorate what was now referred to as ‘the atrocities’. Emily had taken her daughter, the little girl she did not blame for being what she was, and headed north up Interstate 85. Natalia her doll, however, Emily left on Sally’s doorstep with an accompanying note.