The End in All Beginnings

by John F. D. Taff

  Durand found what he was looking for easily. A short shelf stood near the front counter, festooned with the school colors of purple and gold. Above it was tacked a homemade banner: “LBJ SCHOOL SPIRIT THROUGH THE YEARS!”

  Below this was as an entire shelf of yearbooks, arranged by year, from 1946 to 2013.

  Smiling, Durand ran his fingers down the row of spines, stopped at 2007.

  He unwedged the book from between its neighbors, took it to a nearby table and sat.

  It didn’t take him long to find her.

  She was unmistakable, stunning in her senior photo—bright blonde hair, big blue eyes, and her skin, her skin seemed just as it was now, luminous, soft, immensely touchable. He lingered over the photo for a long time, studying it intently.

  What struck Durand most was the sense of her that came through the picture. She didn’t seem to be posing for the camera, playing to it. She appeared to be caught in the moment, rather than looking staged or faking a smile. And in that regard she came off more like a real, down-to-earth person than a stuck-up, snooty drama queen.

  Snooty.

  That jogged Durand’s mind, and he looked away from the book, tried to dredge it up.

  He looked for Scott’s name in the index, knowing what he would find. He found it easily, saw that Scott was a sophomore in the same book, class of ’09. Durand felt his stomach flip.

  I knew he lied, but why lie about that?

  He found his picture, and it showed that Scott Gibbons, like a lot of kids his age, didn’t take a good photo. He wore a shirt with a collar that was too big, that didn’t button down. His hair was in complete disarray, and his face bore all the telltale signs of adolescence—the bad skin, crooked teeth and unmistakable aura of tortured self-doubt.

  Looking at that photo, Durand was sure why Scott had lied.

  He was sure why Scott had acted so weird when they’d first met; why he’d been so twitchy when he’d first seen Beth at the lumberyard.

  Why Scott never wanted to venture out of the Bargain Barn, was so angry that Durand did.

  Taking the yearbook, he left the library, left LBJ High School, and hoped that he was wrong.

  Hoped that Scott had not done what he knew Scott had done.

  * * *

  Durand found him sitting on a bench in Millstone Park.

  He didn’t see Durand, wasn’t paying any attention.

  Scott was completely caught up in watching Beth McClary lurching through a wide field. The sun shimmered in her hair, the wind caught her dress, and for a moment, Durand was spellbound, too.

  Then, he remembered why he was here. He walked up behind Scott, dropped the yearbook in his lap.

  “Jesus!” Scott sputtered in surprise, leaping from the bench and shooing the yearbook off his lap as if it were a rabid animal.

  Durand watched him, but said nothing, didn’t apologize for scaring him.

  “What the fuck are you doing, bro? Scaring me like that? Christ, if I’d had a gun…”

  Durand moved his gaze conspicuously to the ground, to where the yearbook lay.

  Scott acted confused, but turned to where Durand was looking.

  His back slumped when he saw the yearbook.

  “Why?” was all Durand could think to say.

  Scott’s face went slack and white. He looked like one of them now, a zombie himself. And when he started to talk, to explain what he’d done, the words fell from his mouth, as if he had no force to expel them.

  “She ran up the street when they started appearing. I’d already locked myself in the cafe. She…banged on the door…wanted to be let in…and I…I…”

  “You hid under the counter and ignored her.”

  Scott looked at him with annoyance.

  “No, I heard her voice…I knew who it was…I mean, are you shitting me? I climbed out…for her…I went to the door. She was afraid…shit, I was afraid….I…she pleaded with me to let her in, but I wouldn’t…I couldn’t. I…saw the others walking all over, killing people, eating them…fuck…it was awful…awful…”

  Durand said nothing. There was nothing to say.

  “I…uhh…was afraid to open the door, afraid to let her in. Christ, she got mad. Really fucking mad, banging on the door, shaking the glass. I thought…I was afraid that she was going to break it… she’d break the glass and they’d get in and that’d be it, dude. That’d be fucking it.”

  “You didn’t let her in,” Durand said, his voice filled with contempt. “You left her out there to die with them, to be killed by them.”

  Again, that look of annoyed disbelief. “You don’t get it, do you? I loved her, fucking loved her since the eighth grade. But she never paid any attention to me, was never going to. I knew that. But she banged on the door so hard that the glass shook and I could see the others, the zombies coming up behind her…I freaked. I shot her.”

  The words didn’t register at first, because they were not at all what Durand expected.

  “You what?”

  “I shot her. I’d started to open the door to let her in…Christ, I loved her, I couldn’t leave her out there. But I saw a bunch of them coming toward the door. Fuck! I thought if I let her in, they’re going to get in, too. And then…then…”

  Durand stared at him in wonder. “You shot her. You?”

  “The owner of the cafe gave me his gun when he left, told me to…to…take care of myself. She wouldn’t let go of the door…wouldn’t let me close it…and they were right there, dude…right there. So, I shot her…to keep her from getting in and to keep the others from getting in. I fucking shot her. I shot her…”

  He burst into loud, braying sobs that seemed to tear loose from deep inside him. He collapsed onto the bench, huddled forward with his head on his knees and wept.

  Durand didn’t know what to do, how to react.

  “The gun?”

  “I tossed it into the grease pit at the cafe,” he sobbed. “I couldn’t look at it anymore. And then you come along and you have a gun, and I think it’s going to be okay. But she was gone, she wasn’t near the door, where she’d fallen. She was one of them, a zombie. I knew that…I fucking knew that. It wasn’t enough that I killed her, I made her a zombie, too. Fuck…fuck…FUCK!

  “Then you find a girl in town,” Scott said, his voice now a low, papery whisper that made the hairs on the back of Durand’s neck rise. “And what the fuck do you know, it’s her.”

  Scott rose, turned to Durand with hatred in his eyes, his fists balled and shaking at his sides. “And if that’s not enough, you fall for her. You. Fall. For a dead girl. For her! I can’t have her for myself, even when she’s a fucking zombie!”

  Durand prepared for Scott to hurtle himself at him.

  But that’s exactly what Scott didn’t do. Instead, he smiled.

  “She’s mine, bro. Mine. And I’m going to be with her…finally.”

  Durand hesitated, unsure of exactly what Scott meant until it was too late.

  Scott’s story had held his attention, kept him from focusing on where the zombies were.

  Where she was.

  In the time it had taken Scott to tell him what had happened, she had moved closer to them.

  Scott smiled at Durand, turned and walked right into her arms.

  She caught him with tremendous strength, a strength she didn’t need. Scott didn’t fight; instead, he embraced her, lowered his head to her shoulder like a lover.

  And she slammed her mouth into his exposed neck, closed her jaws, shook her head like a puppy worrying a toy. Blood, extravagant in quantity and exuberant in color, flashed in the late sunlight, founted from his neck, gushed over his hoodie, over her new green dress, spattered onto her new white shoes.

  With a rough tearing sound, oddly intimate, she jerked her head away, her mouth filled with red meat. A spray of arterial blood covered her face, and she uttered a gurgling groan, smashed her face back into the pulsing wound.

  Durand pulled the gun from his waistband.

&nb
sp; Scott turned in her arms, his head lolling on his torn neck, and looked at Durand, at the gun.

  Shook his head weakly.

  It took Durand a full minute to lower the gun, maybe more.

  By then, Scott was the kind of dead there was no coming back from.

  And still she fed, crouched over him as he slumped to the ground. She ate most of his face, leaving a wet, red ruin in the wake of her teeth and her fingers.

  But he couldn’t kill her either, couldn’t bring himself to pull the trigger.

  For a moment, just a moment, he felt an emotion, one that he had as little experience with as he did love.

  Jealousy.

  He was jealous of Scott.

  But that was a crazy, ugly feeling, and he tried to push it aside, to deny it.

  But then, jealousy is supposed to be a crazy, ugly feeling.

  Eventually he lowered the gun, fingered the safety, slid it into his waistband.

  * * *

  That was weeks ago.

  Durand walked slowly back to the Bargain Barn after his daily circuit of the town, after seeing her.

  There weren’t many left anymore, and he now thought of them as almost an endangered species. He kept the gun in his waistband, left them alone as they left him alone.

  Inside the store, he went to the Electronics department. He didn’t touch Scott’s set up, though he’d cleaned a little, sprayed the recliner with Febreze.

  Firing up the biggest stereo on display, he slipped a disc into the CD player, cranked the volume up as loud as it would go, slumped into the recliner, waited for the end of the world—however, whenever it might come.

  He thought of the smell of bitter, burned almonds, Beth McClary’s face, and the love he carried for her, the love he would always carry for her, regardless of her inability to return it.

  And Linda Ronstadt sang of loving someone for a long, long time, as if reading directly from those words etched into his heart.

  The hand in my dream, her hand, reached up from the dark, reached through the swirling, midnight water, stretching for my hand. Our fingertips grazed. I could feel the swirls of her pads on mine, the wrinkled pruning of her wet skin.

  Then it slid away, she slid away, down, down, first her face lost to the darkness—her eyes wide, filled with anoxia, filled with fear—then the slim, pale line of her arm. Finally, the flutter of her fingers swallowed by the darkness, engulfed by the water, the peaceful, quiet water.

  I awoke from the nightmare again, the only nightmare I had these days that were, themselves, one long, extended nightmare. I was sitting in my bed, the covers kicked to the floor, my body slick with perspiration. My right arm was outstretched, muscles taut, sweat-covered skin shining silver in the moonlight. My hand was frozen in a rictus, grasping at the ghost of the dream that still swirled in the room, in my mind, the ghost of her.

  I took a deep, strangled breath, filled with the reality of the loss of everything, but mainly her loss. Still her loss, always her loss. Time had not made it better, easier. Time had not in any way lessened the fact that she was no longer here.

  I lowered my chin to my chest and allowed myself, there in that cool, midnight room, the sound of water lapping against the building far below, to experience a few seconds of quiet tears, denied under the sun.

  Denied in front of her.

  * * *

  When I awoke, I padded into the bathroom, bright with sunshine, to void my middle-aged bladder. Finished, I pushed the handle, waited for the toilet to flush. It did, but I knew that one day it wouldn’t. One day all of this would fail, and not just the toilet. And then what would we do?

  Shrugging on a robe that hung on a hook behind the bathroom door, I belted it snug and walked down the hallway to the kitchen. The day was bright, brilliant, cloudless. I could see the blue of the sky through the huge plate glass windows that made up one whole wall of the penthouse apartment we shared. It bent on the horizon to meet that other blue, the green-blue of the sea, stretching in every direction as far as I could see.

  Ignoring the contemporary art on the walls, the no doubt expensive sculptures that squatted on their white pedestals, I entered the kitchen. It was sleek and modern and bright, all stainless steel and cool glass the color of the sea, the damnable sea. White cabinets, pickled white wood, white marble—it was as cold as an arctic landscape; antiseptic as an autopsy room.

  I moved the kettle to the tap, turned on the water, again half-expecting it not to gush forth.

  Someday, someday.

  But it did, as it had every day for the last fourteen years, and I filled the kettle, turned it on. Electricity still worked, too. Within minutes, I had boiling water, a cup, instant coffee. A few scalding swigs of this and I meandered through the far rooms of the penthouse, what had been a media room, a dining room, a living room.

  Now, all rearranged for me and my daughter and this life, filled with the detritus we’d collected on our trips, bursting with camping equipment, batteries, flashlights, radios, maps and books, hundreds, thousands of books, stacked against the interior walls, the exterior glass. Books on every subject imaginable, fiction and non-fiction, sorted by topic.

  Skirting a leaning tower of these, I stepped into the sunken living room, wrapped in glass on three sides, dazzling in the morning sun, the reflected light of the all-encompassing water. A useless big-screen TV hung above an equally useless fireplace. Coffee tables of etched glass were at the center of an expanse of leather furniture, costly stuff. More art here and there, curios, knickknacks. The penthouse had been the home—well, one of the homes—of a billionaire tech guy who spent some of his time and money here in Miami.

  The wealthy young man was gone now, probably anyway. I had no way of knowing. Most of the tech places—Silicon Valley, Cupertino, Seattle—were gone too, below the water.

  The end of the room opened in enormous panels of sliding glass onto a patio large enough to land a helicopter in its day, certainly large enough to host a cocktail party of beautiful, wealthy people, which I supposed that it had, probably quite often. The patio was encircled by two layers of iron railing on all sides, except the eastern side, where I had removed a panel to gain access to the edge of the building.

  And that’s where she was now, where I knew she’d be.

  Cassie, my daughter.

  Her daughter.

  She was seventeen, lithe and tanned, her hair white-blonde, nothing unusual about that for a child of Miami. Her eyes were dark, dark brown, almost black. Like her mother’s, her Cuban-American mother. Again, nothing unusual about that in Miami. She sat on the edge of the building, her coltish legs swinging in the air. She wore a simple pair of baggy, satin shorts and a plain white t-shirt.

  I didn’t want to scare her, sitting precariously as she was, so I cleared my throat as I approached. She didn’t flinch or turn.

  “Hi, Daddy,” she said, her voice small and flat.

  “You know I don’t like you out here doing this when I’m not around,” I chided, taking another sip of coffee, leaning against the railing near the gap in which she sat. She had a fishing pole resting on the railing, a big deep-sea rig, the line swaying in the wind as it descended the side of the building, maybe 300 feet or so, disappearing into the ocean.

  The ocean, below us, rushing through what used to be Fourteenth Street.

  She didn’t answer, just toyed with the reel, squinted into the burning sky.

  “Catch anything?”

  After a minute, she responded. “Not yet.”

  I sighed, reached out to ruffle the straw of her hair. “Okay, kiddo. Well, don’t stay out here too long. I’m going up on the roof to check the reclamation system. Weather looks like it should hold today, but who knows?”

  She grunted indifferently. We’d had this conversation, with small variables, every morning for years now.

  “Maybe, around noon, we’ll take the boat and scout out that building we saw south of where the cemetery was, see if there’s any way inside, an
ything worth scavenging. If the weather holds, that is.”

  Cassie turned slowly, squinted up at me with a face that was heart-wrenchingly like her mother’s. “Can I steer?”

  “Sure,” I laughed, turning away. “Sure.”

  * * *

  The roof above the penthouse was filled with all sorts of equipment, most of it useless now, like most everything else in this new world—cell phone antennas, microwave towers, air conditioning units. Worthless, all of it. But, as I never tired of thinking, thank God the developers had taken a stab, even half-hearted, at being green.

  A tower at the center of the roof held a sophisticated water collection and reclamation unit, totally self-contained, solar powered and, amazingly enough, still working. For a decade now, we hadn’t had to worry about water, at least not in that way.

  As I climbed the steps, I heard the reassuring whug-whug-whug of the machinery, the glug and glurt of water running through the maze of pipes. The massive array of solar panels, gleaming in rows, angled up at the sun. Many were cracked, some were destroyed, but those that remained were enough to provide power for the one unit in Biscayne Towers that was still inhabited, enough to power the kettle, heat the oven, warm the bath water and recharge my daughter’s iPod. Some evenings, when I was feeling particularly daring, it even powered a few lights for us to read by.

  Convincing myself, as I did each morning, that this arcane collection of technology was still doing something, I descended the ladder, went back inside for another cup of coffee. I drank it squatting in the living room, sorting books into piles: fiction, biography, medicine, botany, first aid, flora and fauna of North America, survival techniques, home repair.

  Someday, I knew, we would have a use for this. Someone would have a use for this.