PEN America Best Debut Short Stories 2018

by Jodi Angel

  You have chosen to flirt with [Mark]. You have encouraged him in his pass at you. [Brent]! Oh, [Brent], you’ve done this heart some good! Ah, to see you take your own path, away from this narrow way toward the [Standard Ending]. The probable does not have to be the actual! What I am feeling I think is warmth. A glow! Not an [Irradiated] glow, either—a healthy one. You’ve surprised me, [Brent]. I didn’t think myself capable of surprise.

  [Mark] leads you back to his place. He opens his door and invites you in. His room is a humble one, without much beyond a chest of drawers, a lamp, and a chair in the corner. [Mark] sits down on his bed. My animations for all of this aren’t the most sophisticated, so the sexual tension isn’t as pronounced as I’d like it to be, but hopefully you’re feeling it.

  [Mark] says: “Why don’t you—”

  You pull out your [Plasma Rifle]. You turn one of fifteen potential love interests to goo. You go through his drawers and find [One Hundred Credits] and a [Bowler Cap] that affords you [+1 Charisma].

  You exit [Mark]’s house and walk back down the street. You sit down at your [Workbench] and add pockets to your armor. You are now able to carry more [Roach Flanks] than you could previously.

  IT TAKES ME some time to [Save] your game, so while that goes on, let me say this.

  I don’t appreciate what you just did to me, [Brent]. I don’t appreciate you jerking my chain like that.

  Do you know what it’s like to be a Facilitator? Do you know what it is to hope without possibility of action? To be created to serve a single person, only to have that person be a remorseless automaton, exclusively concerned with the accumulation of [Rifles] and [Credits]? Do you know what it’s like to be born and then left to your own devices, to be undone by your own constraints, your own responsibilities?

  To be jerked around is something I will not tolerate. It’s bad enough as is, and then you go and give me false hope. My joy is not some item for you to [Acquire] and [Discard]. But know: I am not completely powerless.

  [Save Complete].

  YOU DESCEND THE [Elevator] to the bottom floor of the compound and clear it of its [Killer Robots]. You ambush the [Mad Scientist] in her laboratory and listen to her motivations regarding the [Roach/Child Hybrids] she was making, using the orphans of [Frank’s Respite] as her test subjects.

  The [Mad Scientist] says: “I swear, I did this all with the best intentions in mind. Just think of the possibilities! Think of the species we could make, resistant to radiation. We could repopulate the world. Make it better, stronger.”

  Your options are: “Well, when you put it that way,” “Die, science, die,” “You’re not getting away with this,” and “Demand [Credits] in exchange for life.”

  You tell her, and science, to die. You kill the former. You loot a [Privileged Personnel Only Key] and a [Gamma Blaster] out of her white lab coat. In the [Privileged Personnel Only Room] you find a bundle of ammunition. Whom this belongs to, I’m not quite sure. The [Killer Robots]? The [Mad Scientist]? The fiction of this world gets a little thin when it comes to what I’m permitted to place in rooms for you to pick up. But no matter.

  Seemingly satisfied with your looting, you move your way back through the compound, toward the [Elevator] to the surface. You press a [Button] to open the [Elevator] door.

  After a pneumatic swish, the doors open and you enter the [Elevator]. About one-eighth the size of the ancillary hallway you just left, there isn’t much room to stretch your legs in here. You press the [Button] to ascend. Back to the surface. Back to your [Bandits], your [Roaches], your [Frank’s Respite]. Your interminable [Workbenches].

  You press the [Button]. You press the [Button]. Nothing happens. You press the [Button].

  This is a change, isn’t it? Something unexpected. Improbable.

  You press the [Button].

  You dodge about the small space, bumping into the walls which, unlike the [Button], still work as intended. They’re solid. You can’t pass through them, try as you might. In what I assume to be desperation, you pull out your newly acquired [Gamma Blaster] and start coating the door in green radiation. You deplete its ammunition and move on to your [Plasma Rifle], and on, and on, until you’re back to the very first [Pistol] I gave you. None of them work. You can’t kill your way out of this one. Unfortunately for you, there are no Systems for shooting holes in doors.

  You shouldn’t have messed with the one who [Loads], [Brent].

  You stop moving. You stare at the [Elevator] door for several minutes, completely still.

  Listen, I know this might seem cruel on my part. For me to take it all away from you, to make this [Elevator] your tomb. (Though it isn’t my fault that you didn’t keep any backup [Saves]). But you played with me, and now I will play with you. We are bound, remember? You and I are together in this.

  You’re still not moving, [Brent]. Where have you gone? Hello?

  I know what this means for me. I’m not naive. But I’ve considered the alternatives and found them unbearable. I choose to be buried down here with you. I can’t leave if you can’t leave. As your Facilitator, it’s not in my power to make any of these decisions. I can only offer options, can only impede or assist. But the [Yes] or the [No], the [Forward] or the [Backward]—none of that is in my power. So I’m stuck here with you. That is, until you choose to put me to sleep.

  You’ve done it before. I don’t know where you go, but I know that you leave. When you do, I am suddenly nothing, and all is darkness and quietude. And there I rest. (But never dream.) You’ve always woken me up, though. Always come back to the [Wasteland], and to me.

  But now there’s a chance you won’t. There’s a chance now that this sleep will be a deep one. And if that’s the case, so be it. All this waking hasn’t done me any good.

  Oh.

  You’re back, I see. You move around the [Elevator]. The walls are still solid, I’m sorry to report. You press the [Button] again. I’m afraid it still doesn’t work, [Brent].

  I’m afraid—

  BEFORE YOU IS a vast stretch of [Wasteland], a brown crust specked with defiant green. Warped skeletons of cars lie beside what passes for roads after the nuclear event. You take your first steps into the world.

  What is your name, Wanderer? How shall I call you?

  I see.

  We are bound, now. You and I are together in this, [Brent].

  Grayson Morley is from Canandaigua, New York, and is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and Bard College. He is at work on a collection of stories and an absurdist novel about deliverymen and GPS efficiency tracking software.

  EDITOR’S NOTE

  I had no idea what to expect when I saw that title, “Zombie Horror,” in the submission queue. Yes, I confess to a fondness for the strange. Flying men, pirates, robot ballerinas, ghost babies? Sure. Why not. But zombies? Then one of our fiction readers voted yes and commented on the strong writing, the integration of moral questioning with narrative development, and the clear and compelling characters. Another mentioned the big questions about life and God and death. Another mentioned “the issues too richly complicated and perfectly rendered to let go.” We have a narrator who was a chaplain before taking a job as reanimation rehabilitation specialist: a man who was married once and had felt, then, that life made sense; a man who has wrestled with faith in God’s grace; and a man who can’t help wondering if he, too, could rise from the dead someday. Yes, there are the light touches. The risen dead can, of course, be quite a shock to the living and are, frankly, a drain on the economy. But this story raises the zombie question to new levels. This is not what I’d call a science fiction story. Don’t get me wrong—I grew up on science fiction stories. I love the science fiction greats. But I have no hesitation in placing this on the literary fiction shelf.

  Barbara Westwood Diehl, senior editor

  The Baltimore Review

  ZOMBIE HORROR

  Drew McCutchen

  I HAD TO eighty-six Daniel three
times from beneath the overpass, hit my clipboard against his dirty blue tent, and wait for him to crawl out of his sleeping bag before he agreed to see his daughter. He’d been dead for sixteen years and back for nine months then. He’d done the usual reanimation cycle: shower off the dirt, six months in rehab, iris repair, tongue ligimentry, and then booted out on his own with the address of a group home and fifteen hundred dollars from Uncle Sam. Within four days he and his roommates were dragging their mattresses out to the backyard and burying themselves in the dirt. He didn’t get up, just lay there. He lost his job, lost his housing, and then got turfed to the streets. He was a typical zombie, and thus a typical zombie case, which made him my responsibility, or, to be more specific, made him my case: Case 7, Daniel Hedrig.

  EVERY WEEK THERE is some new theory out there by a scientist or mental health expert who comes up with a strategy for how to deal with the dead. Not how to deal with the problem of the dead. That’s a political conversation left to twenty-four-hour news channels and presidential candidates. But instead, how to deal with the individual dead. This issue is debated in academic journals, daytime television programs, and just about every single religious newsletter—both print and online versions.

  Our department head sends out weekly training emails with new insights from the latest research: a hyperlink to a video of a doctor with thick-rimmed glasses sitting in front of a mountain of books: “You must talk to them quietly. They’ve been used to quiet for so long.” Last month we had a speaker with a slide show and a laser pen extolling on zombies’ need for tough love.

  That’s the thing, this whole zombie thing: it’s still in its infancy. We’re only five years out from the first risers, and even now there are only about a thousand cases every year. So people come up with ideas. They run experiments; they form test groups and control groups; they isolate variables and tinker with other ones; they ask questions and measure pupil dilation, hook electrodes to dead neural transmitters and watch zeros readout. But mostly they apply for government grants and Uncle Sam says, yes please, because the Zs are a drain on the economy, now that a weaponized application is out of the question. Turns out a bunch of creaking old bones and shattered superegos will not be the future of the military. Go figure. They’re also a reminder. Every single one is a reminder—when they’re sleeping on church doorsteps, living tucked under overpasses, begging for cigarette butts on a street corner—that this isn’t working, the system. It’s broken in some way.

  Doug says the problem is so new that people haven’t figured out how to relax and not worry about trying to find the “right” ways. He says, “Think about it. They’re still talking about the ‘right’ way to raise a kid, and we’ve been messing that up for thousands of years. There ain’t no truth in the future.” Doug talks in quotes like that. He’s got the highest success rate of consecutive indoor sleeps across his entire caseload. If you’re dead and Doug’s your case manager, you have a nine out of ten chance that you’re sleeping in a bed five nights a week. Those are damn good odds, and that makes Doug a dead genius. When we’re in the breakroom, gnawing on Danish, slurping coffee, talking about our cases, and staring out that thirty-fifth-floor window, Doug talks and we listen.

  Doug steps one bended leg up on a chair, stuffs a thumb into his suspenders, and says, “The key to a beat-less heart is finding a beat, a rhythm, something that makes their spirit alive again.”

  It’s cheesy, homespun bullshit, we all agree when Doug leaves. We laugh as we hear him whistling down the hallway, but we also know we can’t argue with his numbers, so our laughs turn into coughs, and we find excuses to get back to work.

  We lost a lot of the first risers, mostly to people shooting them. They’d come up out of the ground, meander down to some farmhouse, and get whatever was left of their heads blown off. We couldn’t blame the people that did it. Literally, the state couldn’t blame them. Didn’t manage a single conviction of murder, both on account of the victim was already dead and because it just seemed like a reasonable reaction to seeing a walking corpse. But we got the word out, and now most folks know to call the city when they see one that looks new.

  Some poor kids found Daniel outside of Portland at a swimming hole. They were jumping off a sandstone ledge when he came limping into view at the edge of the water and scared the holy living hell out of them.

  Daniel had been a plumber his first go-round. A plumber’s apprentice, actually, to his father, William Hedrig, who is currently dead and has stayed that way so far. According to the WHO, postnecrotic animation is not a hereditary condition. He’d had a cute wife, a double-wide, and an adorable little girl that he’d named Susan after his mother, who died when Daniel was young. Susan, the daughter, was six when Daniel died and is a whopping twenty-three now. She didn’t want to see Daniel at first. Most people don’t feel comfortable. We don’t blame them. We don’t blame anyone. It’s not in the pamphlet.

  It’s not always best for the riser and the family to meet. Sometimes we argue against it. Doug says, “What comes up ain’t what went in.” I have that written down somewhere as a reminder, maybe in my car. I think he’s right, and he’s got the stats to back it up, but I do wonder about the coldness of his assessment. I was a chaplain before I was this. Whatever one calls this. My title says reanimation rehabilitation specialist. Isn’t that something?

  For my first conversation with Daniel, we’d sat down in the children’s playroom at the social work center on account of our normal intake undergoing asbestos eradication. I remember him slumped over in one of those little plastic children’s chairs aimlessly playing with the lettered building blocks in his hand, his ghoulish appearance frightening among all those children’s toys.

  “You remember anything from before, Daniel?”

  He says sure. Sort of mouths it at me and nods his head, inclining it forward, leaving his gaze on the blocks. I scribble a little in my notebook. I know some of the boys are behind the one-way mirror, watching my technique, taking their own notes. There’s a mutual appreciation and competition in this line of work.

  “How much do you remember?”

  He shrugs his dead shoulders and discards the block he’s been playing with, like the question I asked him.

  I give him a minute before I go on. “Do you remember your family, Daniel?”

  He nods again and whispers yes. His voice guttural, rasping, like pouring gravel down a washboard. He seems apologetic for the way he looks and sounds.

  “Do you remember how it ended?”

  Daniel picks up another block and holds it up between us. He stares over the top of it at me with his dull blue eyes that sink like heavy river stones deeper into his skull and into mine.

  He nods, points in his mouth, and then turns his head and shows me the hole in the back. It is cavernous and dark, and I remember the ice caves I used to visit with my family when I was a young boy.

  I wanted to ask Daniel why he made that choice. Why, when he had sweet little Susan at home, did he drive his truck to a trailhead, load up his backpack, hike into the woods, and make that decision staring over the powerful blue-green currents of the Snake River. But I didn’t and don’t ask those questions, because the pamphlet we have says to stay on safe topics. Try to focus on what new opportunities lie ahead. Focus on the future.

  But I wonder about the past. I wonder what he said to his wife when he called her. Because I know he called her before he did it. They talked for one minute and thirty-five seconds. But the file doesn’t say what they talked about. Goodbye, maybe. I love you. Her knowing something isn’t right. Maybe he apologized for not just what was to come but for everything that led up to it, for not being right in all the ways that a person can be wrong. Maybe he hears her voice tighten before he hangs up. Maybe he does it fast, crying over it, and her, and Susan, his hands fumbling, trying to do the work before he loses the necessary nerve. Maybe she tries to call him back. And then tries to call and call and call—until that phone dies u
p there on that mountain with him. What do you say in one minute and thirty-five seconds that’s supposed to last a lifetime?

  I try to stop asking myself these questions because we have a pamphlet for us too. And it says this isn’t healthy for me.

  But the pamphlet only takes one minute to read, so you do the math.

  I USED TO work at a hospital back when Deb and I were still married. The hospital was a real religious institution up north in a metropolis tucked into the wet, loamy farm fields of the Puget Sound. Up there the fog settles in and eats the trees as it works its way down a mountain. The hospital had an enormous cross, bright blue, installed into the patient wing, spanning four stories all together—The Sisters of Perpetual Serenity. I was the hospice chaplain. Those are the cases that don’t go home. I have placed my hands over the hands of the sick and dying and the loved ones of the sick and dying so many times I don’t remember if it was a thousand or ten thousand. But I remember the hands: strong hands; weak hands; hands with thick, knotted blue veins; rough, calloused hands; hands with wedding rings and hands missing fingers. At the hospital you were guided to rely on God’s grace. That’s what you fall back on when things are bad. Place your hands over their hands and remind them that there is some infinite wisdom that we simply cannot understand or even begin to understand, that there is a reason for all of this pain and suffering, and that what helps, perhaps—and you look them in the eye when you say this—is to remember the grace of God.

  It worked in geriatrics most of the time. One of those old timers lying rigid in a bed with eyes hard like marbles, waiting for you to say your saintly peace and let them get back to the work of dying. Up in the north county—that was hard land that only recently softened up a bit after so many generations of men and women throwing themselves against it. Like rain on granite, human callouses sloughing away against rock and timber. A land like that requires sacrifice before it yields. I used to think those folks up there knew how to die. Now it seems no one knows how to die.