He conducted an FBI-style shakedown of the flat, pausing at each door before kicking it open, sizing up the corners while keeping an eye on any suspicious movement behind him. Nothing. Not even in the back room, which he thought he’d left locked up. All clear. He retreated to the lounge, where he collapsed on the sofa and tried to make his mind go empty. A woman kept ringing him from Calcutta to ask about car insurance, till he disconnected the phone. Blank, empty, think of nothing. Thinking instead of everything, every hurtful, shameful thing, he eventually beat himself down into sleep, till a knocking woke him up. A knocking at the door to the flat.
Outside it was almost dusk, sun dipping beneath a banked mass of gray cloud, turning the end of a leaden day to gold. Dan came upright all in one at the sound of the knock, a dreadful tic pulling one side of his stubbly face into a remarkable grimace. “Who is it?” he croaked, without stopping to ask himself how they were going to hear him out there at the top of the stairs. Unsurprisingly, then, no answer. He crept into the hallway and tried again, a little louder. This time, he heard something.
“Dan?” A woman. “Dan, is that you? Are you okay?”
For a giddy moment he thought it might be Angie. Then, more fully awake, he recognized Molly’s voice, and remembered, several hours too late, their date for after work this evening, dinner at hers.
He was all apologies opening the door, gabbling before he’d turned the knob. Molly had to beat aside a gush of guilt and contrition even to get inside the flat. And the first thing she said? Not where do you think you’ve been, or dinner’s ruined now, hope you’re happy, you bastard. No. “Are you all right? Oh, sweetheart, look at you, you look so poorly. Come in and sit down. Poor Dan. There we go, ups-a-daisy. Come on. Sit down. You look dreadful. When did this come on?”
“When I was going home last night,” admitted Dan weakly, allowing her to reinstall him on the sofa. He slid all in a heap at the touch of her hand, and buried his mashed-up head in the soft upholstered sanity of her lap. “It’s . . . I’m not well.”
“And you’ve been trying to sleep it off. That’s why you took your phone off the hook.” Things that would make other women throw plates at him, Molly recognized as both necessary and practical. Dan wondered whether he could keep her forever. Maybe she’d fit into the cupboard, he thought, with a self-accusatory wince. Wait, she was talking, listen now. “I tried your mobile, but it was off too. I wondered whether everything was okay, or maybe you were just, you know, busy writing . . . ?”
“No,” Dan said truthfully. “No, I’ve not been writing, not today. . . . . I just haven’t felt too hot, that’s all. Look, I’m really, really sorry I forgot to ring—I’ve been flat out on the settee here, I didn’t know what time it was. Now I’ve missed dinner, messed it all up—I really am so sorry, An—” that was a close one, he’d been just about to say Ange, but caught it in time so it just sounded like a bit of a gawp “—and, and, you must be hungry, what time is it, I don’t know if there’s anything in the house, I could ring for a pizza, no, we had pizza last night, didn’t we . . . ” Rambling. Stop it.
Molly smiled. “You wait there,” she said, and got up. And like a good boy Dan did just that, till she reappeared from her short dash out to the car and back, holding aloft a tin-foiled dish of moussaka in her oven-gloved hands.
At least there was some wine in the house: incredible, what were the odds? So they ate Molly’s warmed-up moussaka from trays balanced on their knees, and toasted each other with discount Shiraz, and decided between them that Dan’s ailment must have been one of those twenty-four hour bug things that go away as quickly as they come on, and he was probably over the worst of it. After the meal they piled up the unwashed crocks in the sink and retreated, first of all to the sofa, where multiple passages of mutual contentment ensued; and then, later on, when there became little point in delaying the inevitable any longer, to the bedroom, where Dan had fortunately remembered to change the sheets earlier in the week.
Later on, freed from care and blessed with pleasure, snuggled tight against Molly’s flawless back like spoons stored away in a drawer, Dan felt every bit as purely, elementally happy as he’d been miserable only hours before. As happy as he’d been since Angie, since before it all went wrong—let alone the fall of Nevernesse and the business with X. This, he told himself, was the real world, and he’d connected with it once more; a man and a woman in bed together, no thinking, only doing, nothing else to it but a long, smooth slide into pleasure. That had been great. Soon, it would happen again; and again and again, as often as could feasibly be achieved. Even the thought of it . . . Almost (but not quite) involuntarily, Dan waxed improper, just an inch or so.
“Hello?” Bleary confusion in Molly’s waking murmur. “Who are you then, little chap?”
“Not so much of the little,” murmured Dan into the hot rushing depth of her ear, before seeing what she’d seen and turning to ice-water jelly right there in the bed, shrinking away from her like a salted slug.
Standing by the bedside, rubbing his nose with a dirty sleeve, was X in his pajamas. “I’m scared,” was all he said. Before Dan could get to him, before he could throw him back into the cupboard or out of a window or down a well, whatever it would take to be rid of him, once and for all: “I’m scared, missus.”
“Love?” Molly struggling up on one elbow, reaching for her clothes. “What’s the matter? Why are you scared?”
“I’m frightened.” A gulp. “He shouted at me. He made me go in the cupboard.”
“No!” Dan was trying to hold it together, but already he could feel it slipping out from under him. Not so much a moodswing as a tectonic shift, a geological catastrophe. “Get out! Get out of here!”
“Don’t let him hurt me again, missus!” X shrank back, and instinctively Molly reached for him, the way she’d reached out to Dan in the bookshop. Dan, meanwhile, was frantically trying to free himself from the duvet, get around the bed to shut X up before it was too late.
“It’s all right, no one’s going to hurt you.” Molly had him now, both hands on his trembling shoulders. “Tell me what happened.”
Just then, Dan caught his foot in the flex of the bedside lamp and tipped the lot over, table, lamp and all. Molly started at the crash; X gave a high-pitched, unearthly scream and flung himself into her arms.
“He’s horrible to me!” he sobbed. “He makes me go in the cupboard, and he threw me in the boot of his car, and he hurt me, I’ve got bruises, and I’m hungry, and he shouted, and I hate him!”
“Dan?” Molly turned to Dan, X clasped tight against her as Dan himself had been only minutes ago. It was all going wrong. It was too late, it was ending before it had really begun. “Dan, what’s going on? Who’s this boy? Where does he come from? Who’s been hurting him?”
“He’s . . . he’s from next door,” Dan improvised frantically. “He comes through the fire door, I unblocked it, I was looking where it went, and he comes through all the time now.” Gabbling, no time to think, making stuff up on the spot. “They’re, they’re like this problem family, you know, single parent, there’s a social worker comes round, social services? I’ll take him back where he belongs,” hopping on the spot, trying to get both legs down one side of his jogging pants, before overbalancing on to the bed. The dream of too-late, the dream of disaster in slow motion, and there’s nothing you can do. And you don’t even have any trousers on.
“Nooo!” The child was shrieking now, and Molly clung to him more tightly, trying to calm him. “No! Don’t let him put me back in there!”
“Love, you’ve got to go back,” she tried to tell him, and Dan for a moment glimpsed a speck of hope. “Your mummy’ll be looking for you, she’ll be worried—”
“I don’t live with me mam any more,” sobbed X. “I live here, and he’s horrible to me all the time. He brought me here to live with him, and he shouts at me and hurts me—”
“Hurts you?” Molly looked from X to Dan disbelievingly. Dan couldn’t meet h
er eyes; he just couldn’t do it. Afraid of what he might see. “Dan, what’s he saying? Who hurts him? Is it the father?”
“He’s lying,” protested Dan, oblivious in his panic to the implications of what he was saying. “I’ve never touched him.” Walking right into it. But Molly was already running her hands over X, checking for damage. She caught sight of something, bent to examine it more closely, and gasped.
“Oh my God . . . ” She swung to face Dan. “His feet! What’s happened to the soles of his feet?”
“He burned them!” X’s wail cut through the humming panic in Dan’s head: it filled the room, it filled everything Dan knew or was aware of. “With a cigarette! He said I hadn’t to tell!”
“Who? Who did?” Molly held his face in both her hands, looked straight into his eyes. “Tell me who did this to you?”
“HE DID!” Hand outstretched, pointing straight at Dan. The tiny traitor, Judas in his stained pajamas. “HE DID! IT WAS HIM! HE DID!” Till Molly hushed him, clutched him to her bosom so his thin high screams were muffled between her breasts, her breasts so lately cupped by Dan’s guilty hands in post-coital serenity. She tried to hug him, to hang on to him and calm him down, but the boy twisted away, he couldn’t be held, couldn’t be contained that way. With one last accusation—“It was HIM!”—he was gone, out of the bedroom to who knew where, to whatever reality he now inhabited. And Dan, stuck inconveniently in this worst of all worlds, stayed slumped against the wall, ruined and abandoned, hardly hearing a thing, aware only peripherally of Molly’s disbelieving accusations, her mounting anger. The noise in his head swelled to drown it out, so that each time she tried to get an explanation, each fresh accusation she flung at him in her mounting anger, all he heard was a harsh and monstrous buzzing, the feedback whine of metal stressed on metal, the sound of an engine wrecking itself.
In the end, her parting words cut through. “I’m getting out of here. And I’m calling the police.” He looked up, just in time to receive her slap full in the face. She was fully dressed now, glaring at him with pure repugnance. He turned away, unable to bear the loathing in her eyes.
After the door slammed shut behind her, Dan half-hoped the noise in his head might abate a little. It didn’t, though; not even when he slammed his ringing head against the loathsome, hopeless reflection that mocked him in the mirror. Neither pain nor blood nor destruction could touch it. It was his new condition, the scornful complement to the loss of everything else. Welcome, stranger, to the world of the insane.
In a childish attempt to get away from it—as if he could escape from the inside of his own head—he even crawled into the cupboard, X’s special place, tugged the door shut behind him and flattened himself against the cobwebbed brickwork. The feel of the rough edges grinding against his face brought him a temporary measure of relief at least; though the noise never went away, he felt that here he could bear it better, or could try to at least. When the knocking came at the door to the flat, harsh and relentless, he pressed himself still further against the gap, willing it to stretch open and receive him entire, translate him to some other world, some other mode of being; a kinder fiction, a life story somehow less tragic.
How do you deal with a zombie apocalypse? Make Cleveland, Ohio, a zombie preserve/penal colony, of course . . .
THE NATURALIST
MAUREEN MCHUGH
Cahill lived in the Flats with about twenty other guys in a place that used to be an Irish bar called Fado. At the back of the bar was the Cuyahoga River, good for protection since zombies didn’t cross the river. They didn’t crumble into dust, they were just stupid as bricks and they never built a boat or a bridge or built anything. Zombies were the ultimate trash. Worse than the guys who cooked meth in trailers. Worse than the fat women on WIC. Zombies were just useless dumbfucks.
“They’re too dumb to find enough food to keep a stray cat going,” Duck said.
Cahill was talking to a guy called Duck. Well, really, Duck was talking and Cahill was mostly listening. Duck had been speculating on the biology of zombies. He thought that the whole zombie thing was a virus, like Mad Cow Disease. A lot of the guys thought that. A lot of them mentioned that movie, 28 Days where everybody but a few people had been driven crazy by a virus.
“But they gotta find something,” Duck said. Duck had a prison tattoo of a mallard on his arm. Cahill wouldn’t have known it was a mallard if Duck hadn’t told him. He could just about tell it was a bird. Duck was over six feet tall and Cahill would have hated to have been the guy who gave Duck such a shitty tattoo cause Duck probably beat him senseless when he finally got a look at the thing. “Maybe,” Duck mused, “maybe they’re solar powered. And eating us is just a bonus.”
“I think they go dormant when they don’t smell us around,” Cahill said.
Cahill didn’t really like talking to Duck, but Duck often found Cahill and started talking to him. Cahill didn’t know why. Most of the guys gave Duck a wide berth. Cahill figured it was probably easier to just talk to Duck when Duck wanted to talk.
Almost all of the guys at Fado were white. There was a Filipino guy, but he pretty much counted as white. As far as Cahill could tell there were two kinds of black guys, regular black guys and Nation of Islam. The Nation of Islam had gotten organized and turned a place across the street—a club called Heaven—into their headquarters. Most of the regular black guys lived below Heaven and in the building next door.
This whole area of the Flats had been bars and restaurants and clubs. Now it was a kind of compound with a wall of rubbish and dead cars forming a perimeter. Duck said that during the winter they had regular patrols organized by Whittaker and the Nation. Cold as shit standing behind a junked car on its side, watching for zombies. But they had killed off most of the zombies off in this area and now they didn’t bother keeping watch. Occasionally a zombie wandered across the bridge and they had to take care of it, but in the time Cahill had been in Cleveland, he had seen exactly four zombies. One had been a woman.
Life in the zombie preserve really wasn’t as bad as Cahill had expected. He’d been dumped off the bus and then spent a day skulking around expecting zombies to come boiling out of the floor like rats and eat him alive. He’d heard that the life expectancy of a guy in a preserve was something like two and a half days. But he’d only been here about a day and a half when he found a cache of liquor in the trunk of a car and then some guys scavenging. He’d shown them where the liquor was and they’d taken him back to the Flats.
Whittaker was a white guy who was sort of in charge. He’d had made a big speech about how they were all more free here in the preserve than they’d ever been in a society that had no place for them, about how there used to be spaces for men with big appetites like the wild west and Alaska—and how that was all gone now but they were making a great space for themselves here in Cleveland where they could live true to their own nature.
Cahill didn’t think it was so great, and glancing around he was pretty sure that he wasn’t the only one who wouldn’t chuck the whole thing for a chance to sit and watch the Sox on TV. Bullshitting was what the Whittakers of the world did. It was part of running other people’s lives. Cahill had dragged in a futon and made himself a little room. It had no windows and only one way in, which was good in case of attack. But he found most of the time he couldn’t sleep there. A lot of time he slept outside on a picnic table someone had dragged out into the middle of the street.
What he really missed was carpet. He wanted to take a shower and then walk on carpet in a bedroom and get dressed in clean clothes.
A guy named Riley walked over to Cahill and Duck and said, “Hey, Cahill. Whittaker wants you to go scavenge.”
Cahill hated to scavenge. It was nerve-wracking. It wasn’t hard; there was a surprising amount left in the city, even after the groceries had been looted. He shrugged and thought about it and decided it was better not to say no to Whittaker. And it gave him an excuse to stop talking to Duck about zombies. He followed Rile
y and left Duck sitting looking at the water, enjoying the May sun.
“I think it’s a government thing,” Riley said. Riley was black but just regular black, not Nation of Islam. “I think it’s a mutation of the AIDs virus.”
Jesus Christ. “Yeah,” Cahill said, hoping Riley would drop it.
“You know the whole AIDs thing was from the CIA, don’t you? It was supposed to wipe out black people,” Riley said.
“Then how come fags got it first?” Cahill asked.
He thought that might piss Riley off but Riley seemed pleased to be able to explain how gay guys were the perfect way to introduce the disease because nobody cared fuckall what happened to them. But that really, fags getting it was an accident because it was supposed to wipe out all the black people in Africa and then the whites could just move into a whole new continent. Some queer stewardess got it in Africa and then brought it back here. It would kill white people but it killed black people faster. And now if you were rich they could cure you or at least give you drugs for your whole life so you wouldn’t get sick and die which was the same thing, but they were still letting black people and Africans die.
Cahill tuned Riley out. They collected two other guys. Riley was in charge. Cahill didn’t know the names of the two other guys—a scrawny, white-trash looking guy and a light-skinned black guy.
Riley quit talking once they had crossed the bridge and were in Cleveland.
On the blind, windowless side of a warehouse the wall had been painted white, and in huge letters it said:
Hell from beneath is moved for thee to meet thee at thy coming.
—Isaiah (ch. XIV, v. 9)
This same quote was painted at the gate where the bus had dumped Cahill off.
There were crows gathering at Euclid, and, Riley guessed, maybe around East Ninth, so they headed north towards the lake. Zombies stank and the crows tended to hang around them. Behind them the burned ruins of the Renaissance Hotel were still black and wet from the rain a couple of days ago.
The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror Page 14