I didn’t have any answer and my mother grabbed my arms in a pincer grip and shook me, yelling things I couldn’t hear, and Ms. Acosta was suddenly right there puffing and panting in white sneakers like nurse’s shoes, and my mother screamed at her to mind her own goddamned business for once in her life, and I wrenched free and ran fast as I could from the smell, the shouting, the cries of pain that just kept growing louder. It all got lower and fainter, faded out entirely around Hollister, and I sat there on the sidewalk like my mother had on the grass, letting my nose and ears fill up with the clean airy quiet. A good hour, maybe more. The color faded and retreated from the sky, everything bathed in the soft formless dark.
I went home and threw up and then sat in the basement, on the cots we had set up in case of tornadoes or what had just happened, and that’s where my mother found me. Staggering tired, she looked drained dry, a dried streak of something like blood except sticky and ashen smearing her cheek. She didn’t yell at me, we had the leftover baked beans for dinner and went straight to sleep. The next morning and all afternoon she just lay there, quiet, staring at the wall next to her bed. And the day after that. And the day after that.
My aunt Kate said later my mother hadn’t been right in the head since my father died, that even before that she’d been strange. Off. A lot of people said that, about my mother. But I knew her, and they didn’t, and all I’ll say is that after that evening something inside her seemed to bend and twist like that thing’s rotten twiggy fingers, tearing in two without making a sound. She never cried. She wasn’t the type. She never talked to anyone. She could take care of herself. She went to work. She came home. She asked me about school, how anyone smart as I was (ha) could be barely passing history, asked me about my music, cooked the pancake dinner we ate every Friday she was off-shift. No more lying around in bed. There was no time, and she liked to keep busy.
And then one winter morning a year later, when I was fifteen, I woke up and she was gone. No note.
She used to go out sometimes at night, long after dark, when she thought I was asleep; all she’d ever say was she was taking a walk. Walking for hours, sometimes not coming home until dawn. That was so reckless I got scared, even knowing I couldn’t stop her, that her job meant she knew “stranger”-danger better than I ever would, that like everyone else she never went anywhere without her lighter. I’d lie there half-awake, drifting, as the sky lit from iron to pearl, and sometimes I’d fall back into thick heavy sleep and when I woke she’d be lying beside me on the bed, fully dressed, snoring. We never talked about it. Always, no matter what, she came back.
They found her LCS jacket, folded neatly at the edge of a forest preserve a half-mile outside the town gates, her badge and ID in one pocket. The jacket’s too big, but it’s warm. I like to imagine it’s what got me through this past winter.
If you’re going to get anywhere in life—this is how I see it— it’s important to always show the truth of things, even when it doesn’t make you look good. Even when it makes you angry. You have to be honest, no matter what, or it all just goes to shit. So the truth is that she’s not forgiven, my mother, for what she did. I have the power of forgiveness in me and it’s the only power I have left; I wave it inside my head like a July sparkler, letting the little line of fiery floating light it traces in the dark mark out the saved, the damned, those forever left behind. She’s not forgiven. My father isn’t forgiven, for disappearing while coming home from the mill when I was five. Ms. Acosta isn’t forgiven, for . . . I’d thought we finally understood each other, when there was nothing else left. But we didn’t. That dead thing isn’t forgiven, ever, for spreading its filthy contagion of crying, pain, despair—
No, I change my mind. I forgive it because it hurt so much. Only for that. Just like I have to forgive my uncle and aunt, for getting so sick. The way everyone got so sick, the way everyone died—human, zombie, everyone. Everywhere. Except me. I’m one of the only ones left.
Last spring, a year after my mother disappeared, it started. A plague. A famine. Everyone around me got sick, a disease nobody had heard of, no doctor could diagnose. It made people hungry—no. It made them ravenous, insane with hunger and the more they ate, the more the disease ate at them, turning them to great gobbling mouths crammed with meat, drink, garbage, soap, grass, paper, tree bark, dirt, insects, vermin, antifreeze, glue, face cream, Styrofoam, gammon, spinach, anything, anything they could chew or swallow. They attacked and killed their pets, children, each other. For food. Everything they’d ever feared the intruders, the real flesh-eaters, might do to us—
But the undead too. Even them. They got sick too.
But not me. I don’t know why. I hid and kept hiding until the sickness burned itself out, hit a peak and a slope and finally the living, the undead, every eating thing couldn’t eat anymore, didn’t want to. After all that, they starved to death. The disease binged on them, gorged itself sick, and then it purged. And they all died.
No. Not everyone.
Some who got this sickness—living, undead, didn’t seem to matter—they survived the ceaseless hunger, the self-starvation afterward, and became something else. They look human, some of them used to be, but they’re not. Not anymore. As strong as zombies ever were, even stronger, but they don’t rot, they don’t decay and no matter if you stab, shoot, starve, freeze them, drown them, smother them, torch them with fire, they can’t die. They heal right before your eyes, and it’s the last thing you see before they kill you. Fast-moving, fast-talking, fastthinking as humans. Strong as zombies. And no matter what, they can never, ever die. The intruders are dead, but they’ve left a new generation behind. So many of them. So few of us.
There were only four of us in Lepingville who stayed human, who never got sick, and I’m the only one who got through last winter. And it was a mild winter, this year.
I don’t know what I’m going to do. I’ve got no idea what I’m supposed to do now, and there’s nobody to tell me. One foot in front of the other, my mother always said. Step forward, keep going even as your feet sink into the soft lawn mire all around you, the shuuuck of your shoe yanked from a pocket of mud making you flinch like a starter pistol just went off by your ear. Keep going. Somewhere. You’ll figure it out. You’ve got no choice.
I think somehow, from all her years working cheek by jowl with death, my mother sensed this was coming, the way animals sniff out impending earthquakes and flee. She was going to take me with her, but it was too dangerous and she knew someone would take me in, they have to because it’s a felony otherwise, and once the sickness ceased she’d find me and we’d figure out, together, what to do next. I couldn’t die, we had to find each other. I didn’t kill myself. I didn’t starve. I didn’t freeze or get sick or butchered for my flesh, I didn’t ever mean to do what I—I stayed here. I have a right to be proud of that. I stayed.
That’s what they tell you, when you’re little. Right? If you’re lost, stay right where you are. Somebody will find you. It’s inevitable. Someone. Somewhere.
I’m still waiting.
TWO
Five days, since I left Lepingville. I counted. Six. Maybe seven. Everything was all blurred, that first day or two, like a drawing half-wiped from a chalkboard; my ears buzzed softly and I couldn’t quite see straight, didn’t really register where I was going. I stopped sometimes, sat down, pushed sticks of jerky or handfuls of nuts down my throat, pissed in ditches, found an empty tollbooth on U.S. 30 and slept in there dreamlessly with my weight against the door. I remembered to bring food. Water. Searched for more. I lost half a day sleeping in that tollbooth so split the difference, call it six.
I can’t afford to sleep half the day. I chart and graph all my time now, so much walking, resting, walking, picking through abandoned homes and broken tollbooths and cleared-out underground shelters, eyes before me for thieves and rapists, ears behind me for any soft-footed thing hunting fresh meat, always locating my exits first. I have to plan where I’ll sleep every night, somew
here small enough to defend or big enough to hide in. Exits first. I never checked like this, before.
There’s never anyone. Maybe there’s nobody else left.
Movie theaters are good. Sleeping in theaters settles me down for some reason, soft torn-up seats, carpet and concrete flooring lousy with streaks of grease and blood, dried pop puddles, ground-in popcorn kernels, rodent droppings. Signs of life. If everyone else hadn’t got to the concessions stand before me and smashed it to get to the popcorn, the glugs of fluorescent buttery grease and nacho cheese, every last Skittle in the candy display, I might’ve just stayed in that Cineplex out near Morewood. Forever.
I was actually doing okay, sort of, before yesterday. That’s the thing.
Warmer now. Good. It felt like it must be March, late March, the wind still slapped me full in the face but its knife-edge was going blunt. Days longer. Snow piles reduced to limp Styrofoam shavings. Relative barometric pressure and humidity of—I could figure out what month it was, counting back to September using Kristin’s pregnancy, except I think the baby came early anyway. All of a sudden, she was in labor. No warning.
Every night, before I sleep, I take inventory, the few things I brought with me that I really don’t want to lose. My sewing kit, not those useless store miniatures but my own bag with needles, big thread spools, scissors. Sunglasses. Aspirin. Hunting knife. Lighters, a whole collection: metal, plastic, monogrammed, filigreed, engraved, embossed, painted with pinup girls and cartoon characters and company logos and skulls and rainbows and pot plants and flowers. Kristin’s, this one, purple with forsythia sprays. She gave it to me before she died. Mine had a picture on it, a girl playing guitar with long red hair streaming over the strings. I lost it last fall when they broke into our house, all the sick folks looking for food. Sewing kit. Already mentioned that. I forgot.
Pocket atlas. This one has all my scribbled notes, places Dave went hunting and said later to avoid, landmarks to look out for. My cell phone. My last birthday present ever, from my mother, before she left. Defunct, of course, but they weren’t getting it, not after they got my lighter. I keep it in my front jeans pocket with her old LCS ID, her driver’s license, security clearance card, everything with her name and photograph. A record she really was here.
I think I’m going crazy. Taking inventory, reminding myself where I’ve been and what I have, it doesn’t help because last night I saw something that wasn’t really there. I was on Caldwell Road, that long stretch snaking through the industrial park outside Briceland, and I stopped to rest, squeezing my eyes shut against the fading afternoon sun; I opened them again, and I saw staring back at me a pair of disembodied eyes. Rheumy, sickly yellow pinpoints, smudged and faded like gaslights coated in soap, gazing steadily from the air, the sky, from nowhere. Dog’s eyes.
I slid to my feet, ready to run, but there was no dog there. Except there was. There in the air, a ghost, a chimera. I turned my back on it and the eyes were there again, following me past the little steel mill, the auto body shop, over the harmonicacluster of railroad tracks. Afternoon became evening and when I lay down in the remains of an antique shop the deep gray night took shape around the eyes floating in it, scrabbling into outlines of a single cocked ear, a thick solid neck, a ridge of hair bristle-straight all down a phantom spine. Hard, sharp teeth, bared against me. Swift strong legs, ready to spring.
There aren’t as many stray dogs out there as you’d think: They were some of the first casualties, when everyone was going hungry. I’m not afraid. I can’t walk around afraid of everything. But this was different. It was like how when I was young I was afraid to look in the bathroom mirror at night, scared the face staring back wouldn’t be mine at all but something distorted, grinning, a melting predatory mouth about to swallow up the room’s darkness, and me. I turned my head to the shop wall, I closed my eyes and halfway toward sleep I felt it, there beneath my hand, the fleeting sensation of hunched-up muscle beneath rough, ungroomed fur. It’s not guarding me. It’s not guarding anything. It’s lying in wait, so I can’t get away.
It’s not there. I know it’s not. And I thought it’d go away, I thought my brain was just worn out and inventing its own cheap thrills, but today those eyes are still watching, waiting, melting right into the sunlight, magnifying to make a Panopticon of the air. Judging. Waiting. There’s nowhere for me to go where they’re not.
Then I blink, and shake my head, and they vanish.
Somebody needs to tell me I’m not crazy. But it’s like I said, there’s nobody left.
Taking inventory, that’s not helping. Or looking at my mother’s badges and cards. The only thing distracting me from that damned dog is my tribunals, when I think hard on everyone dead or lost and organize their fates as I see fit. I need to keep my mind occupied, and if I can pretend sorting out the whole endless mess of living and dying is my job, I feel calmer and I can sleep. So court’s always in session, day and night.
This is what I remember, the evidence the tribunal considers:
My uncle John, at my aunt’s funeral. Kate died in less than a week, breathing in guttural gasps until her throat swelled permanently shut, and at the reception John stood hunched over the funeral buffet, glassy-eyed, bloated with illness, and ate so fast that the egg salad oozed from one side of his mouth even as the teeth on the other side tore at chunks of ham. Stares of shock. Then others, fingers twitching, shoved the gapers aside to get at more ham, potato salad, handfuls of tortellini dripping sauce scooped straight from the steam tray into waiting, scalded palms.
Jenny Waldman from my English class, sitting at her desk blue-tinged and shivering, unable to keep her hands from the full grocery bag of lunch at her feet. Drippings of peanut butter smearing her copy of The Sound and the Fury. Cheese slices piled in teetering, gelatinous wedges on a half-loaf’s worth of bread. She gorged and shivered right in front of us and nobody knew what to do and then, still chewing, she started to cry, got sick everywhere. When Mr. Lowry dragged her to the nurse three other kids fought over the vomit-smeared bag, cramming what they could get in their mouths and then rocking back and forth, trembling, hands clutched into greasy fists.
Grocery store riots. An ashen-faced man lying in a pile of shattered display glass, blood welling up from beneath him like rainwater permeating a basement. The sick with puffy, softened skin and loosening nails sitting in the aisles, emptying cereal boxes and diving into the sugary sawdust piles, wrenching out teeth trying to gnaw frozen meat. We the supposed healthy ones shoving, pushing, screaming for a spare can of green beans, a crushed coffee cake, anything, anything at all. One of them grabbed me and I kicked him in the head so hard something crunched and gave way, I didn’t look down, I was hungry too. There was something dried on my shoe, I saw later, blood and something else. He was dying anyway. It’s not my fault.
The woman in the street, gnawing on something charred in the shape of a hand. Cats, dogs, anything small and snareable, disappearing. That last day, just before I left for good, when I—
Enough. Tonight’s verdict: innocent, forgiven, all of you. No matter what. You were sick, and hungry. Innocent. Except the pet killers, you can go to hell. Now let me go to sleep. I need to sleep.
I’ll reach Leyton tomorrow. A rich town, a lucky town, they got the plague early and died quick. The shelters will have food. That’ll distract me. You see things when you’re hungry. Everything will be better, in Leyton.
My first bona fide first-stage town! Let’s have a party. Most folks here died in the initial phases like my aunt, suffocating in a bruising diphtheria before the monstrous hunger hit them and emptied every last shelf of food. The beautiful turn-of-last-century brick homes were hardly touched, only a few gas-explosion craters here and there, and all those pretty parks, and a forest smack in the center of town. Vanderhoek Woods. A tiny Franciscan monastery right next door, signs advertising TRIDENTINE and POLISH MASSES. Pilgrims welcomed. Fancy. I wonder if they got into fights with the Ukrainian Catholic Church across the st
reet, like rival high schools at homecoming. There were still infirmary cots set up in both of them, long rows. The smell hit you coming and going.
Lepingville, we were second-stage. Very secondary.
The things that took the zombies’ places don’t like it here, they like the beach. The shoreline. Which makes sense because the shoreline was always dangerous, off limits to everyone but the thanatological scientists; Dave, he used to insist the sickness, the exes—ex-humans, ex-zombies—it all had to do with the shoreline itself, with the sands. Fairy tales, if you ask me, just like the old stories about how a meteor hitting the Great Lakes basin started waking the dead in the first place. But listening to him rant helped pass the time.
Pale, hard blue sky this morning. I’d slept in a grotto in the monastery yard and woke up sweating, and to peel off all the malodorous layers of fleece and flannel was a luxury you can’t imagine; just airing out my feet, letting them soak up a warm, steady breeze, made me close my eyes with how good it felt. They stank, of course, just like every other part of me, and itched and burned incessantly between the toes but I let myself imagine sunlight really was the best disinfectant before I pulled my socks back on—turned inside out for the illusion of changing them—and grabbed for my mother’s charcoal jacket. Time to get what I came for.
If she were here now, my mother, she’d be ashamed of how bad I smelled, from a yard away, like a homeless person. I was a homeless person. But that’d been my choice. I kept going, following the grimy yellow signs with the DESIGNATED SHELTER logo. I didn’t need a home when I had safe houses.
They call them safe houses but they were actually built underground, like big tornado cellars; every town above a certain size had to have at least one, government-subsidized. Lots of private ones too, in a town this rich, but they were a dodgier bet: Builders cut corners and the walls cracked, seepage got in, ventilation systems didn’t work right and you went to sleep feeling all cozy inhaling pure carbon monoxide. A family of six, once, over in Taltree. You’d hear stories. The manhole-cover entrance was rusty and hard to turn but that was a promising sign, other hands hadn’t touched it in a good while. After an eternity of sweating and swearing I got it moving, felt the hinge creak and give way, climbed down the metal ladder, sawed my socked toes furiously back and forth against the ladder railing; scratching made it worse but sometimes I couldn’t stand it.
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