“Sure, that would be cool.” I tried to sound enthusiastic but I didn’t pull it off. “But that’s not for me. Sure, most of the people there are douchebags, but I can’t see myself feasting on them.”
“Yeah, they all do seem like they would be a bit greasy,” Pete mused. “How about you head downstairs to Vanderhoff’s lair. Knock on the door, she lets you in and gets started on one of her famous rants. Before you know it, you turn on her like a lion on a wildebeest. You could dine on that sizable chunk for a good month and I’d be livin’ rent free for a year or more. Fuck, you’d be a bloody hero to everyone in the building. It’s win-win, what do ya say?”
“I wouldn’t mind that too much. I’m not sure she wouldn’t pop like a balloon when I bit into her.” The thought made me smile, albeit briefly.
Pete smiled back. “That’s the spirit! I’m sorry that it has to end this way. Like you said, it sucks. This world is fucked and most everyone knows it. That’s why people are living like it’s their dying day. The rotters are eventually going to get everyone. You can be as cautious and careful as you want. Shit, you can lock yourself in a fucking vault with years of supplies but it’s still a matter of time. They’re going to get us all. Myself included. Eventually, you gotta remember that it’s nothing personal and learn to accept the apocalypse as it comes.”
Pete’s simple philosophy on the times we lived in did ring true. The rotter that got me, it wasn’t personal. It was just doing what any rotter does. Eventually, there might come a day when the world was nothing but rotters. My number had come up and it was time to join the new in-crowd. First of my group to sign up, I was on the bleeding edge of existence.
“Car keys?” Pete asked. I motioned to the set on the kitchen table. He scooped them up and slipped them into his pocket. He then gathered up the collection of micro-brews and stacked them on the crate just outside the door. He hoisted the whole stack of music and beers up to his chest. His big… beefy chest. Before exiting the doorway, he recommended, “Oi, if you do stay here and turn, appreciate it if you lock yourself in the bathroom. I may be coming back for the couch tomorrow.”
“Aar… Urr…” was all I could manage, along with a droplet of drool. The words were there in my head, but my lips and tongue were not cooperating.
“Thanks, mate. Cheers!” and he strolled off with his loot.
I sat on the couch for a time contemplating my final act. So hungry now… so hungry. Who was I to stand in the way of the new world order? Eventually, I rose from my seat and walked over to a drawer in the kitchen. It was full of mismatched utensils, rubber bands, push pins, and assorted junk. From it, I pulled the spare key to my car that I kept there and shambled out into the hallway.
Outside the building, it was dark and the night air was cool. The first stars had begun to shine. It had been six months since the first zombie uprising began to change the world. There were far fewer people these days, barely any cars on the road, more space in the town, cleaner air to breath. None of the animals seemed to mind the slow-moving corpses; they made for easy meals. Each day had actually become better than the last. A world without humans was coming to pass and who could say that it wouldn’t be a marked improvement?
I unlocked the car and climbed into the back. The rear floorboard would make for a nice quiet resting place. I cleared my mind and let the virus wash away my trouble and anxieties. If my timing was right, there should be a very nice meal or two stopping by in a little while.
11 In the Valley of the Dead, Johnny Rotten is King by Alexei Kalinchuk
His white tee said “Tad” in handwritten letters. The T and D looked more carefully printed than the A, blackly scratched in chisel-tipped, permanent marker. Classic Anarchy A in a circle. I drew it last year as a senior in high school to piss off my parents, who bought me these white tees to wear under my dress shirts when I went looking for a job because their bitter divorce had eaten through my college fund.
Who are you? I asked this small Asian kid wearing my twice-defaced tee in my parents’ summer cabin.
He’s cute. Can we keep him? Marisol cracked.
I’m Tad, he said, pointing at the shirt. Then he told Marisol, I’m not a house pet.
How did you get in? I asked, noting that beside the baseball glove on the couch, there was a wooden baseball bat.
Stop interrogating him, Bill. He’s not here to steal your parents’—well, whatever that is. Marisol pointed at an end table where a stuffed jackalope stood on its haunches, sniffing the air for danger.
***
I decided against explaining anarchy and punk rock and my anger at my parents to Tad. Whatever the state of things, I knew some things mattered more now; like food and fuel. If this was anarchy, Johnny Rotten could keep it.
Salivating, I busied myself opening a can of sardines from the pantry, after tossing another can to Marisol.
I used a ballpoint I found to write my name, Tad told me, smiling, still pointing at the shirt.
That he was still able to smile with dental brochure teeth wasn’t the strangest thing about him—that would be the baseball cleats, baseball socks, and pin-striped baseball pants. Was it so long ago I was in that world of little league with its pizza celebrations and parents bragging about your nonexistent fielding skills to other parents?
Have you eaten? Marisol asked Tad, still trying to mother him after my “interrogation.”
Tad blinked several moments before responding to probably the only Latina with a Mohawk he’d ever seen.
Um, no. I’m real hungry. Hey, you speak good English.
Are you shitting me, little man? Marisol said to him.
You’re Mexican, right?
Uh, I’m not. Are you Chinese? Malaysian? Nice English.
Korean. I’m sorry.
Shaking my head, chewing fish, I went to get the jersey I saw through the patio window. It hung on a deck railing. Although Tad had washed most of the blood out, leaving it drying out here where the wind could carry a blood smell out to the bears was a bad idea. Also, this drying shirt advertised our presence. I decided not to say anything when I walked in, ready to hang the ruined jersey from the shower rod.
Marisol stopped explaining Reagan’s Central American sins to Tad when she saw me. We’d been friends since high school so she could read me. She raised an eyebrow.
It’s nothing, I said, shutting the patio door.
Don’t nothing me. What’s up?
I looked at Tad, trying to think of how to describe the risk of those things being drawn here, but without alarming him. Maybe my attempt at calm was amateur, maybe it was misplaced concern for a polite kid who had already laundered his own bloodied baseball jersey, maybe I should’ve said nothing.
But that’s when Tad broke.
Did I do something wrong? he asked, his eyes wet and watering down his cheeks. The happy kid in half a sports uniform was now unmasked, scared, just like the rest of us.
***
Over canned peaches, Tad told us how he’d found the key under the potted plant on the deck. Marisol told him that was very smart of him to look where lazy people hid their keys, smiling at me over his head. I shrugged, my heart not in our usual teasing. She understood because she stopped, and in that moment, Tad asked about her Mohawk.
Oh this? Marisol flapped a hand at her hair.
It’s fallen a bit, I said.
Well, Bill, Marisol said, it wasn’t like we could’ve stopped for hairspray.
It sorta looks like a dinosaur back fin, Tad said, ignoring Marisol’s remark. Like a dimetrodon maybe?
Marisol and I didn’t know what a dimetrodon looked like, but I remembered a set of encyclopedias we had here for those moments when my parents wanted me to study in the hostile quiet we all enjoyed on our family vacations. After paging through the dark brown D volume, we found pictures of a stegosaurus and a t-rex, but no dimetrodon. I tried to cheer Tad up.
It’s okay, at least we have encyclopedias until TV comes back. Hey, worst comes
to worst, we can rebuild everything from the ground up. These will be blueprints to start over. Build engines. Purify water. Grow crops. Just tear out the pages we don’t want to replicate in the New World.
Goddamnit, Bill!
Goddamnit, yourself. I’m not treating him like a kid if he’s probably already seen a lot of crazy shit out there.
Goddamnit, Marisol said one more time, then launched herself out of the chair and out of the room. That’s when I understood that she didn’t want to protect Tad from reality.
She wanted to protect herself.
***
Last night our journey out of the city wasn’t easy. I’d driven us here after the concert broke up. Or rather the scheduled bands didn’t show and the few punks there weren’t even talking about Fang or Flipper’s cancellation.
They were sharing cannibalism rumors.
I walked away from these stragglers outside the chained doors of The Yard, wondering where all the scenesters were when Marisol approached. I usually drove her home from shows.
Let’s get out of here, she whispered.
I put a finger to my lips. Some gutter punks might have wanted a ride, too, and after one vomited in my car last year, I was less tolerant, even if that made me “a suburbanite poser.”
When we pulled away from the curb, some of the gutters sneered at us in my rearview for not inviting them.
And I did try to drive Marisol home, which brought us to a National Guard checkpoint.
That wasn’t here when I left earlier, Marisol said, both of us so still as we slowly pulled up.
The Guardsmen assumed alert postures behind a sawhorse. Under a sodium lamp casting orange light down on their faces, they looked as mythically menacing as tomb statues.
How long was it that you left? I asked in a soft voice.
I took the bus, transferred, so, forever ago.
Beyond the checkpoint was the part of the city where Marisol lived with her aunt and uncle and cousins. Her parents were “disappeared” last year when they made the mistake of going back to visit El Salvador, a country in the middle of a civil war. Now, anyone in a uniform flat-out scared her.
The Guardsmen walked toward us.
That’s when Marisol jumped out of my car.
The Guardsmen raised their assault rifles and started shouting orders. Marisol yelled back that she needed to go home and what was going on.
My trance broke. Jumping out, I announced in a calm voice that I was trying to take my friend home.
They lowered their weapons and relaxed upon seeing me, I noted. I’d grown out and cut my blue hair off a week ago. I looked normal enough. They told me the street was closed.
What am I supposed to do? she asked those pale faces atop their camouflage uniforms, their eyes squinting at her Mohawk, her leather jacket and her jeans.
No one gets in, a Guardsman said to me, ignoring Marisol.
Gunshots rang out from nearby.
The Guardsmen yelled at us to get back in the car and turn it around, their weapons held again in a fighting stance. Their radios hissed and crackled with excited voices.
We got in the car and drove off. We didn’t say anything about Guardsmen or gunfire. We didn’t discuss alternate routes into this area of pawnshops and discount stores and Latin supermarkets and tire repair places. Minutes later, she spoke.
Have a good night, sir, Marisol said in her whitest voice. She was mocking me for how the soldiers had treated me.
C’mon, I said, my voice flat.
How about a pat on the back and a blowjob, sir? After we shoot this Mohawk bitch, how about it?
She was sobbing, so I said nothing.
Minutes passed.
Can we stop somewhere? she asked at last, as we drove the night streets without a direction. I’m thirsty.
There’s a gallon of spring water in the backseat, I told her. I brought water and a shirt to change into when I went to shows, in case I sweated up slamming in the pit.
She found the water. After sucking down several mouthfuls, she was putting it back when she found my spare shirt.
She unfolded it to read the front.
NO SKATE HARASSMENT, it said.
I used to hang with a lot of skate punks. She snorted at the shirt and rolled down her window and tossed it out.
I almost complained, but someone stumbled out into the road in front of us. Someone in a mask. It reminded me of those carnecerias in Marisol’s neighborhood. Those meat coolers stacked with flensed heads, the bare eyeballs fixed on you. Goats. Lambs. More naked-looking than the pig heads because the pigs still looked smug, but bodiless. This masked person slapped at the car’s hood although I’d had to slam on the brakes to keep from hitting him. Half his face was gnawed off, the white of a cheekbone protruding. Blood splashed down from his eye orbit to his chin and pasted the collar of his shirt to his body. Some crazy mask.
Hey! Hey! Move out of the way!
Instead of minding me or my hand waving over the steering wheel for him to move his ass, he crossed over to Marisol’s open window. She just managed to roll it up when he slapped a hand to the glass. Marisol shouted for me to drive.
Shadows detached themselves from the roadside in a jerky stagger toward us. They beat the sides of the car until I gunned it out from under their stink. I don’t know how many of them there were. Then we saw more. What I thought was civil unrest or some out of control costume party was something very different. And those weren’t masks.
And I drove through stop signs and red lights, sometimes around those freaks as they milled in the street.
The sound of their clawing at my car, palms slapping it, made me think of the beating wings of some terrible beast.
***
He probably let them die, Marisol said, halfway to the cabin. He probably let them die.
Who let who die? Even already knowing what she’d say, I felt that letting her talk might take some of the chill out of her guts. I know I felt like I was all ice cubes myself.
The president talks to the governor, he decides parts of the state, they aren’t worth saving, but some are.
Marisol named places. Moneyed places, white places.
Normally, we went back and forth and I asked a lot of questions about these things. I didn’t now. I knew Marisol’s family were somewhere in a city we were deserting.
My own parents were in Europe.
They were doing divorce rehab with new lovers and they were supposed to call me at home every night. Before they’d left the country to go sleep with Ugly and Boring near ruins where people spoke modern languages, they both asked what I wanted from Europe. Like that could’ve fixed our brokenness.
Just look over the Berlin Wall, tell them I said hi.
That was what I told my parents, lying on my bed, fetal position, staring at a wall of a room in a house that was put up for sale just days before. I said goodbye to my parents with a stupid joke and now I wished I could take that back.
***
Over more canned sardines packed in tomato sauce, Tad told us how he’d come to be in my parents’ cabin. He’d been sleeping over at a friend’s so they could get up and go play in a little league game the next day. But that morning after they suited up, Tad’s friend said he couldn’t go.
Tell coach I’m sorry, Keith said.
You’re burning, Keith’s mother said, touching the back of her hand to his forehead.
Tad said goodbye to his friend and left and started riding his bicycle to the ballpark. His friend was sweaty and looked so awful Tad didn’t think he’d show later as promised.
I didn’t know who was going to play first base, Tad said.
But riding down his friend’s street, he forgot all about games. A few houses away, a dog was barking beside a car parked in the drive. The car quaked and Tad almost stopped to look. He saw two people in the car.
I just thought they were kissing, he said.
But the dog, an Irish setter leaping and planting its paws on the car door
and barking, that puzzled him.
I didn’t have time to think about it after I saw these people in the road in front of me, Tad said. There was something wrong with them, how they were moving.
Then they knocked Tad off his bike and grabbed at his clothes and tried to bite him.
And then Miss Florence ran them down with her car. I didn’t know her, Tad said, but she looked like my science teacher. She was black with freckles and glasses. I was scared and when I picked my glove and bat off the street, I saw that the ones that tried to grab me were still crawling for me with broken legs like it didn’t even hurt being hit by a car.
Little boy, you better get in this car, she said to him.
And before he got in her car, Tad looked behind him.
And then he saw that whimpering Irish setter being torn apart and eaten by three strangers in the road.
There was no going back to Keith’s.
And Miss Florence drove us out here, Tad said.
I asked where Miss Florence was and that’s when Marisol tagged me hard in the shoulder, which hurts a lot if the puncher wears a goddamned horned demon ring.
We didn’t mention Miss Florence again.
***
The cabin’s fuse blew our first day. We didn’t have another, and anyway, reception in this valley meant meaningless static on radio and TV. Two mornings after, before we’d even eaten breakfast, there was Marisol going through the pantry and piling everything up on the kitchen counter. Tad helped. When I saw her with a legal pad and pen from my dad’s study writing things down, I had to investigate.
Apoc Series (Vol. 1): Whispers of the Apoc [Tales From The Zombie Apocalypse] Page 23