I curl into the smallest ball possible, pull my knees practically up to my chin, and wrap my arms around my legs. I try to tell myself that it’s only to help trap my body heat, to ward off the damp air that seeps into my flesh with a chill that penetrates the very marrow of my bone.
But I know better.
For some reason, laying like this makes me feel less exposed, less vulnerable. It doesn’t matter if I’m in some old structure with wood that smells of mildew or some cramped cave with its army of gnats and mosquitoes. I can never make myself tiny enough to escape from myself.
So I lay there and cry, all the while listening to each snap of a twig, each rustle of undergrowth, to ensure my soft sobs haven’t garnered unwanted attention.
The dream is always the same. I am small. So small that people tower above me like gods, their faces shining down benevolence and love but far too distant to ever touch. I’m with my mom and dad and they are on either side, each with one of my little hands entirely folded into one of their own. Above us are monstrous buildings of steel and glass; they gleam in the sunlight like the swords of angels and cast long shadows over the throngs of people who pass below.
And there are so many people, more than I ever thought possible. Men and women and children of all ages, all packed together shoulder to shoulder, some smiling, some talking into these weird little boxes they press against their ears. No one is running. No one screams or looks frightened in the least bit. They simply walk by, well-fed and clean, as if they are the only ones who exist. As if a crowd of rotters could be sidling right up beside them and they would never know.
In the dream I can feel a flutter of excitement so strong that it almost makes me nauseous. My parents and I are going to something called dizzy knee on ice and I am jabbering on and on about seeing the giant mouse and the duck who gets so mad you can’t understand what he’s saying. My parents laugh and squeeze my hands softly as they look at one another with a smile.
It’s one of those dreams that feels like a memory and maybe that’s why I always wake up crying afterward. But I know how absurd this is. For one, ducks can’t talk. Plain and simple.
And mice don’t grow to the size of the one we were going to see. But there’s this small part of me that feels this tugging: like there’s these little strings attached to my heart. And I want so badly to be pulled back into that surreal landscape of my dreams. To be in that place and never have to wake up from it.
I’ve thought about this a lot. Which really shouldn’t be any surprise. Other than scavenging for food and water and hiding in the shadows, there’s not much to do out here. I just try to stay alive and my mind turns over the dream again and again, picking it apart piece by piece.
I think what I’m really missing is Free Town and those huge buildings represent the security and safety I felt behind its walls. My parents and all the other residents, obviously, are still there in their little tents and shacks so that explains their presence and all the other people in the dream as well. As far as I can tell, the mouse and duck are just odd little things my mind threw in for reasons I’ll never be able to comprehend. But I definitely know why I’m so small…. I want to return to the innocence of my childhood, to a time when my biggest concern was whether I would be a refugee or a rotter. I want this emptiness in my stomach to be filled with the greasy warmth of possum and to be explaining the rules of Freshies and Rotters to some kid who’s just now old enough to learn how to play.
The rules were simple. But everything is when you’re a child. And that’s what I want to return to: a time of simplicity and ease. A time when I didn’t have to worry about where my next meal would come from or whether or not I would live to see the sun rise on another day.
Damn that Tommy Ballister. This is all his fucking fault. He may have wanted this, but not me. Not in a million years. All I ever wanted was Free Town. But I’ll never be able to feel its cool mud on my feet again and because of that, if for nothing else, I’m glad that Tommy’s dead. Looking back, I only wish I would’ve killed him myself.
III. GANGS OF FREETOWN
I had grown too old for Freshies and Rotters. At fourteen, I was nearly a man; within the next couple of years, I would be expected to move out of my parent’s tent and make my own way in Free Town. I would provide my own food, make sure the Emperor got his required share, and go about the business of being an adult. The problem was, I wasn’t quite ready for all of that responsibility. While I’d cast aside the games and toys of childhood, I needed something to take its place. Something that would exist as a buffer between the innocence of youth and the obligations of maturity. Which is where the gangs came in.
There were three major gangs within the confines of Free Town, each comprised of approximately eight teenage boys at any given time: Los Muertos, The Rotter Nation, and The Free Town Freshies. Los Muertos had way too many rules for my tastes: they dictated everything from what you could wear to who you were allowed to speak with… if I wanted to subject myself to that kind of control, then I’d just stay at the tent all day while my mom and dad barked orders at me; it was also generally agreed that The Free Town Freshies were a bunch of pansies and posers. So by default, the gang I really wanted to belong to was The Rotter Nation.
For some reason, the boys in The Nation seemed so much cooler than anyone else I knew. They all had this swagger in the way they walked, as if they were the true emperors of Free Town, and they could nick apples from someone’s basket without that person even realizing what they were up to. Which is saying a lot; the gangs are generally distrusted and people tend to keep their food close to their bosom, as my mother used to say. But somehow they pulled it off, time and time again, while members of the other gangs were routinely brought before the Emperor for punishment.
As it turned out, Tommy Ballister also wanted to join The Rotter Nation. We’d never spent much time together as kids: I was too busy playing Freshies and Rotters while he was pretending his stick was a machete and the hulks of twisted metal littering Free Town where zombies needing dispatched. But we knew each other enough to throw back our heads at one another as we passed and knew quite a few people, like Sarah Thompson, in common.
Sarah, though, wasn’t doing so well. The fever had set in a few weeks back and her condition had gradually declined with each passing day. Which, secretly, caused me to whisper prayers for her when no one was listening. See, I’d developed something of a crush on her: every time she’d look at me with those big green eyes, I’d feel this little quiver in my stomach and I wouldn’t know whether to throw up or just keep grinning until my face cracked. I’d lay on my bedroll at night, long after my mom and dad were both snoring loud enough to call the dead, and picture her long dark hair and the little smattering of freckles across her nose. I’d think of those thin lips, the swells of breasts that rounded the front of her shirt….
But I was much too worried about how I would look in front of the other guys to admit this. They all thought she was kind of weird because she’d picked up this odd little habit after her baby brother had died. At least once a day, she would walk to the walls of Free Town and place her hands against them. She would stand there and talk to the Rotters on the other side. She’d tell them little details about her morning… what she had for breakfast, how her mother was teaching her to sew, that sort of thing. And even though she couldn’t see the corpses she was talking to, she gave them names: I don’t know, Robert, but I think Anna might not be as good of a friend as I thought… I hope you’re well today, Shirley, or at least as well as possible seeing as how you’re dead and all.
The other kids called her a zombie lover and would laugh and point as she passed. The boys would find dead mice to throw at her and the girls would hold her down in the mud while long strands of spit slowly descended towards her face. She was ridiculed, mocked, beaten up, and threatened at every turn; but day after day she persisted in making her pilgrimage to the wall and talking with the dead.
When I would string tog
ether my elaborate fantasies in the dark of night, they almost always began the same way: a bunch of other kids had her surrounded and they were pushing her from one person to the next as they spat their derision in words carefully chosen to inflict maximum emotional damage. Tears streamed from her eyes and she yelled for help until her voice cracked but this just seemed to incite the kids even further and the jeers got more vicious, more personal. But then I showed up and pushed my way through the crowd; my voice boomed above their mocking chants and they all immediately lowered their eyes in shame as I scooped the trembling Sara into my arms and whispered everything will be alright, now. I’m here….
In real life, however, it was an entirely different story. Even though it left me feeling like I needed to somehow clean myself from the inside out, I was right there in the crowd. My voice might not have been the loudest and my comments may not have been the most biting, but other people were watching. I had to say something… even if it was only to call her a dirty zombie lover.
Of course it didn’t help matters any that her cousin, Carlos Thompson, was usually the one responsible for the attack in the first place. He seethed with hatred for his cousin and made no attempt at hiding it from anyone other than their family. When he looked at her, his face had this expression that seemed to encompass anger, shame, and disgust all at the same time. Spittle would fly from his snarled lips as he hurled insults at her and if she began to cry or tried to run away, his eyes would spark with cruel amusement as he doubled his efforts.
He was a real piece of work, that Carlos. He’d been before the Emperor so many times that his body was still covered with bruises from his last punishment. The usual food rations and ever increasing amounts of time in the solitary hole never seemed to have much of an effect on ’ole Carlos. So when he killed the Henderson’s prize kitten and tainted the meat by making sure that all the internal organs had ruptured, it was obvious more drastic measures were needed.
The entire Henderson family were given these long wooden dowels and Carlos had to kneel naked before them as they struck him over and over as hard as they could. The Emperor had decreed that the beating should continue for as long as the Hendersons had strength left in their arms; when all was said and done, Carlos had to be carried back to his tent and had been laid up in bed for nearly three days. His mother and aunt had stirred up quite a fuss, claiming that the evidence was all circumstantial and that everyone was just out to get their family for some reason I never quite understood.
But Carlos wore those bruises like badges of honor, rolling up the sleeves of his shirt so that everyone could clearly see the blue and green splotches covering his arms. He bragged how the entire time he’d never screamed and begged for mercy… how he’d just knelt there and took his punishment like a man.
Whether or not that was true was anyone’s guess. The entire scene had played out within the confines of the Emperor’s doublewide trailer and it was strictly forbidden for anyone to come close enough to his palace to have witnessed anything. But Carlos was one tough son of a bitch; and, as the de facto leader of The Rotter Nation, it was easy to imagine him kneeling there with an expression of grim determination as the dowels whacked his flesh again and again.
Sometimes, I think that maybe that’s why he hated Sarah with such fervor. Being related to her might have caused others to wonder if it was something in the blood; if perhaps he, too, was somehow tinged by the same madness that gripped his younger cousin. Could he also be considered a zombie lover by default? If so, how would this effect his standing within the gang? Perhaps some young upstart might see his relationship to Sarah as a sign of weakness and lay challenge to his role as leader; all it would take was a few whispered conversations, several well-rehearsed lies, and a gaggle of gossip.
Or maybe he was just a cruel and sadistic mother fucker who didn’t have a cell of compassion within his entire body. The truth is, I’ll never really know for sure. All I know is that during that point in my life, I worshiped this man like a god. Anytime I’d filch a bit of food from some other resident of Free Town, I’d always ensure that he got a fair share of the booty.
As if he were the emperor and I a humble supplicant showing gratitude for his protection and mercy. Sometimes, but only when Carlos was in clear view, I would pick out a member of the Free Town Freshies and start a bit of trouble. The scenario I played into was always the same; some imagined disrespect the other boy had shown me, some little slight I’d dreamed up the night before. And I would beat that kid into the ground, would pummel him until his face was nothing more than a bloody mess and all the fire had gone out of his eyes.
But the entire time, I was keeping watch out of my peripheral vision. Watching Carlos and that little grin of approval that would spread across his face….
IV. HISTORY & LORE
My parents told me once that when the world was still alive, Free Town had been what used to be called a junk yard. They said it was a place that people had taken their trash and rubbish to, all the garbage leftover from their day to day existence. They also claimed that the emperor hadn’t built the walls that surrounded our little city. These had existed long before the world knew what a freshy or rotter was; the emperor, they claimed, simply saw the possibilities that the enclosure offered and began the task of transforming this place of refuse into a refuge.
The earliest residents had helped him clear away most of the wrecked cars that littered what would become Free Town; they’d drug them outside the wall and surrounded the city with these rusty hulks of metal as a kind of additional barricade against the dead.
However, the zombies, it turned out, were far more persistent than anyone had ever dreamed. They came clamoring through the doorless shells of trucks, squirmed between the tight passages of this metal labyrinth, and slowly made their way to the outer wall. Drawn by the sounds of life like ants to a crust of bread, they clustered together and clawed at the bricks, scrambled over one another as they searched for even the smallest weakness in our defenses.
So a new plan had to be put into place. I have vague memories from when I was very small of hammering and pounding as the residents of Free Town constructed a series of platforms that rose almost to the very top of our great wall. These structures looked rickety with their planks jutting off at odd angles and the rungs of ladders being nailed in at irregular intervals; but they were surprisingly sturdy. As we would come to learn, they were actually capable of supporting the combined weight of every person in Free Town without so much as even a creak or groan.
Once the platforms had been constructed, a group of men had been sent outside the wall with picks and shovels. Their first order of business had been to kill the rotters who’d surrounded our little enclave like an invading army. I don’t know how many widows were made in this undertaking or how long that battle outside raged on… I was, after all, just a small child and barely understood the events that were unfolding around me. History, however, has taught me that the mission was a success and that these men quickly set to their primary objective.
In a spot that was mostly free of wrecked vehicles, they dug out a long trench that hugged the base of the wall like an earthen shadow. Somehow, they also managed to bore a hole through the bricks just large enough to insert a metal pipe. The pipe jutted out of the wall at a forty-five degree angle and connected the safety of our life within Free Town to the savage wilderness outside.
And that, my parents said, was how The Day of Burning came to be.
V. THE DAY OF BURNING
All of Free Town was buzzing with the babble of excited conversations, the clanging of pots and pans, and the squeal of laughing children as they zig-zagged through town. And the scents… good God, the scents. Deep fried hawk mingled with the spicy aroma of batter dipped rabbit and the smell of those little wild onions that grow down by the south side of the wall was sweet and pungent, permeating the tents and shacks like the promise of heaven. Mushrooms, crispy crickets, rhubarb pie baking in rusty ovens whose sides h
ad become blackened from the fires that crackled underneath: every household was preparing their finest dish in the hopes that the Emperor would bestow upon them the coveted title of Best in Show.
Tattered streamers had been strung between the structures of our city and the multicolored triangles and squares flapped in the breeze as if they were applauding the collective efforts of the residents. Some of the banners sparkled with large, block letters that formed words I didn’t understand: SALE!, Clearance, and Grand Opening. But these strange phrases really weren’t the point; no, the point was that a collective madness had seized the resident’s of Free Town and brought smiles to faces that otherwise were locked into deeply creased frowns and tight-lipped expressions of disapproval.
Two Finger Freddy had set himself up on the back of a flatbed truck and the strumming of his battered guitar was soft and haunting as Sadie Hoffman sang cryptic lyrics. Something about imaging there was no heaven or hell. Not normally my thing, but I, too, had been swept up in the whirlwind of cheer that made eyes sparkle like jewels in the sunlight.
I was lounging in the shade of what the older folks called a refrigerator with my eyes closed, breathing in the smells as my stomach gurgled, and listening to the music drift through the wordless drone of a dozen overlapping conversations. By the time the sun had begun its descent in the sky, the real festivities would have started: people dancing in the brightly colored costumes exclusively reserved for The Day of Burning, wrestling matches where grown men squirmed in mud in the hopes of claiming the wild pig that had been snared from the wilderness following the last Day of Burning and allowed to grow fat and round. Maybe I’d try for that pig, I thought to myself, bring it home and let my mother prepare it however she liked….
Sex in the Time of Zombies Page 12