The Living Dead 2

by John Joseph Adams

  Another quarter-mile past the city limits brings him to a kudzu-covered 7-Eleven. It’s the first shop since the Hess Station in Howell that doesn’t look bombed out or looted. “Water. Here we go, Connie,” he mumbles in that same, wrong-sounding voice. “See? It’s all going to turn out great!”

  He shuffles toward the storefront on a bent back and spry, skinny limbs, so that the overhead view of him appears crablike. He is sixty-two years old, but could pass for eighty.

  His reflection, a grizzled wretch with a concave chest and hollowed eyes, moves slowly in the jagged storefront glass, but everything else is still. No crickets chirp. No children scream. It’s too quiet. He grabs his holster—empty—and remembers that he lost his gun to the bottom of the Mississippi River two days ago, and has been without water and food ever since.

  “This looks like Capital T trouble. Right here in River City,” he says in the high-pitched voice. It belongs to his wife Gladys. He’s so lonely out here that he’s invented her ghost. “Keep walking, Connie.”

  He knows she’s right, but he’s so thirsty that his tongue has swollen inside his mouth, and if he doesn’t find water soon, he’ll collapse. So he sighs, angles himself between the shards of broken doorway glass, and enters the 7-Eleven.

  It’s small—two narrow aisles flanked by an enclosed counter up front. Dust blankets the stock like pristine brown snow. A morbidly obese woman with a balding black widow’s peak and chipped purple nail polish stands behind the counter, holding a bloodied issue of The Enquirer. “Zombies rise up from Baton Rouge Ghetto!” the lead article screams.

  “Hi,” Connie says.

  The woman drops the magazine and bobbles in his direction. Something has eaten most of her abdomen and in the weeks or months since her death, the wet climate has not dried her out, but instead made a moldy home of her. He pictures lizards, crickets, even unborn children flying out from her gaping hole. Her apron, which presumably once read, “Thank Heaven for 7-Eleven!” now reads: “Heaven-Eleven!”

  “Are you trying to tell me this is heaven?” Conrad asks.

  She lunges at him and the force of her weight against the three-foot-high counter opens her stomach, spraying the shrunken Big Bite Hot Dogs’ spit glass and Enquirer with gangrenous green fluid.

  “Sorry. I didn’t mean to tease you,” he grunts as he wipes his face and pitches toward the darkened glass refrigerators in the back.

  Behind him, Heaven figures it out and climbs the counter, then falls to the floor and crawls after him on a leaking stomach.

  Conrad tries to pick up his pace, but he’s so dehydrated that his heart is a trapped bird in his chest, fluttering and in pain.

  Do zombies eat cold meat? Do they dream of electric sheep?

  “Shut up about the poor, innocent zombies and find the water, Con!” he hisses, only he’s too tired to use Gladys’ voice, so now it’s just him, talking to himself, which strikes him as sort of sad.

  Behind, Heaven pushes herself to her feet. Her lips spread into a grin, and then keep spreading until they split open. The heat has turned her blood to thick soup that doesn’t run.

  He hurries, but his heart’s not in it. Literally. It’s pumping spastically, as if to Muzak—his wedding song forty years ago:

  With all of your faults, I love you still. It had to be you!

  Lovely young Heaven lunges and swipes at him. He reaches the refrigerator, whose shelves are lined with new world gold, and lifts a gallon-sized container of Poland Spring Water. Though Heaven’s gaining, he chugs for one second… two… three… as he rounds the second aisle and doubles back toward the exit.

  Just then, something cracks. “What the—?” he asks.

  Glass skids like sand under Heaven’s feet. To his shock, she isn’t shambling anymore; she’s running. Bad luck. Runners are rare.

  “Hurry up, Con,” he pants, but he’s rooted there for a second, water in hand, as her voluminous flesh bounces and thuds. He’s wondering if maybe this is the second coming and he got left behind, because Heaven’s lips have split length-wise like a hag’s clit, and inside, all her teeth are gold.

  She dives, fast this time. He doesn’t know she’s got hold of his denim jacket until she reels him into a festering embrace. She’s strong and tall—his toes don’t even touch the floor, so he uses her body as a hinge and kicks up as hard as he can. His knees slop against her chest, hooking gristle as something cracks (her ribs? her hardened kidneys?), and she drops him.

  Back muscles screaming like cop sirens, he dives over the counter. His hands find the twelve-gauge on the shelf beneath the cash register, and he reaches over and presses it against Heaven’s ugly face before his physical mind ever recognizes that it’s a gun.

  “I’m sorry, Heaven” he intends to say as he squeezes the trigger. But instead, Freudian slip: “I’m sorry, Delia.”

  The mention of his daughter’s name trips him up. He hesitates as he shoots, and by luck or intention, she knocks the gun out of the way. He hears the sound of shattering glass, but doesn’t see what the slug hit. All he can see is Heaven as she sinks her gold teeth into his shoulder, down to the bone.

  There’s no time to think. He reaches inside her open belly with both hands and pulls her spine until it cracks. She hugs him tighter and then lets go, falling backward and in half.

  “I loved you where the ocean met the sky,” he tells the thing named Heaven, though he does not hear himself say those strange words. She blinks, only her eyelids aren’t long enough to cover her rot-bloated eyes. So she watches him, perhaps seeing nothing, perhaps seeing everything, as he pulls the trigger and her head explodes.

  When he’s finished, he stands over her remains while his shoulder bleeds and infection worms its way through his heart and into his frontal lobe. “I’m sorry, Delia,” he tells her, “for that bloodlust. For Adam, and not testifying. For not believing you that time you called. Especially for that. I’m sorry for everything,” he says. Then he staggers out, a damned man down a long, lonely road that is almost over, toward Delia.

  II.

  How Rosie Perez Foretold the End

  Some blamed cockroach feces. Others, the hand of God. Whatever it was, nobody who got the virus survived. It attacked the immune system first, then it devoured the entire frontal lobe. The sick forgot who they were or how to walk, and eventually, how to breathe. After they died, the virus worked its way into the hindbrain’s instinct center, and kept eating. Then something funny happened. They woke up, only this time, the virus was in charge, and it was hungry.

  Fox News broke the story on April 1, 2020. At first, everybody thought it was a joke: the dead rising from embalming and autopsy tables, sick beds, basement bedrooms. They spread the blood-borne disease with their bites. It started in Baton Rouge, but quickly spread to all of Louisiana. Overnight, hospitals throughout the south were full. A week later, national radio signals and satellites were offline. Two weeks after that, the army disbanded and went rogue. By Easter, America had dissolved.

  Conrad had only been walking for three months since the world ended, but it felt like years. He didn’t like to think about the old days. They were bittersweet.

  When his wife got pregnant with Delia more than twenty years ago, Gladys had called the child a gift from God. After three miscarriages, two years of fertility treatments, and, finally, experimental blood transfusions, they’d almost given up hope. “She’s the best thing we could have hoped for,” Gladys said the day she arrived at the hospital, and for once, cynical Conrad had agreed: Delia Christen Wilcox was perfect.

  Smart, pretty, full of giggles. They’d doted, indulged, hugged, and kissed until their hearts had overfilled, broken, and grown back larger and more accommodating. And she’d taken. And kept taking. It had started at her mother’s tit, which she’d suckled too hard and drawn blood. Then the bigger things: backyard swing-set, horseback riding lessons, her own room, a lock on her door, hand-sewn boutique clothes, ski vacations, all-night curfews, and finally, the sil
ver and crystal, and even their flat screen television.

  Drugs, they’d guessed, though they’d never known for sure. After their dog Barkley went missing, Conrad had imagined it was something much worse. Bloodier. Probably, one of them should have asked.

  She moved out at sixteen and began couch surfing at boyfriends’ houses. “Back surfing,” he’d once called it, for which the kid had slapped him. He’d slapped her right back. Then she’d bit his arm hard enough to draw blood.

  There were more shenanigans. The house got broken into. The Dodge stolen. Some fool named Butter had called them at all hours, asking for his “Sweet Momma.” They instituted a curfew when the high school kids at Tom’s River started turning up dead, but she’d climbed out the window and come waltzing back at dawn. Then she went missing entirely, and though both of them had imagined this absence in their darkest moments and assumed it would bring relief, it only ushered more misery. Was she cold, frightened, alone? Did she need them, only she was ashamed to ask?

  Two years later, they got the call from a special victims unit detective in Louisiana—Delia had been arrested for the human trafficking of her own child.

  He’d learned but had promptly forgotten the particulars: A son named Adam born a year after she left home, a kiddie-porn ring, a trannie boyfriend who’d kept her high and happy, a $1000 payoff for her infant son. It amounted to less than the going rate for any of the boy’s individual organs on the black market, as if the living child as a whole was worth less than the sum of his parts.

  Though he considered it, in the end Conrad decided not to testify in his daughter’s defense. She was sentenced to eight years at the Louisiana Women’s Correctional Facility. He never visited. She never wrote. He and Gladys legally adopted Adam. They gave away Delia’s pretty things and painted her old room blue. Adam never learned to attach significance to the word mother, and for this they considered themselves lucky.

  “It’s like she’s dead,” Gladys once said. Behind her, the section of wall where Delia’s picture once hung had appeared especially white.

  “It’s not like she’s dead,” Conrad replied. “It’s like she was never born.”

  After some time, they got used to the boy. They cherished his coos, and the way he cried out with glee when he woke from naps, so happy, once again, to find them waiting. This second time around the scale tilted in the opposite direction, and they did not spare the rod. For this they were rewarded with an obedient, if less spirited child.

  Trouble came when the boy turned five. It started with the fevers. When the welts appeared, the specialists diagnosed him with viral meningitis. He’d gotten it, the best anyone could figure, from an act of sodomy while under his mother’s care. This was also how he’d gotten the syphilis.

  Conrad and Gladys sold everything Delia had not stolen, from the diamond ring to the Belgian lace linens. When insurance wouldn’t cover the experimental spinal filtration, they mortgaged their house. Little Adam lived in the Columbia-Presbyterian Intensive Care Unit, and as much as they could, they lived there, too.

  Two months later, they saw firsthand in the hospital what the virus did to its victims. They survived somehow, in the way that people meant to live through every kind of misery always do. To his own surprise, Conrad got cold blooded. He bashed two infecteds’ heads with an IV pole while Gladys pulled the tubing from Adam’s wrists, and together they ran. Most others, from the administrators to the doctors, surrendered with open hands and horrified expressions. Fighting meant believing, and they hadn’t been ready for that. But by then Conrad’s daughter was a jailbird junkie, his grandson’s skin too tender to touch, and his wife a new-age Jesus freak, praying for the health of her lost family, so what the fuck did a few zombies matter?

  He and Gladys took the boy back home to Tom’s River, where he wheezed his final breaths in their arms. Throughout, Adam wore this betrayed expression on his face, like he’d died under the misapprehension that Conrad was God and could have cured him, but had chosen otherwise, to teach him a lesson.

  Outside their manicured split-level ranch, sirens blasted. Carnage littered the streets. Inexplicably, his walking buddy Dale Crowther, slick with soap, ran naked down Princeton Road. But the animated dead stuck to old routines, and in the suburbs nobody visits their neighbors, so Conrad dug the shallow grave in the backyard next to the family dog’s bones unperturbed.

  On the television the next night, they learned that the research institutes were close to a cure. With Martial Law declared and Civil Rights rescinded, the CDC had turned the southern prisons into laboratories, and begun experimenting on convicts. In thick Brooklyn-ese, Rosie Perez, the fill-in WPIX news anchor, announced that the government had discovered a twenty-three-year-old convict who was immune.

  “Isn’t that the lady from the lottery movie?” Gladys asked. Conrad shushed her by putting his hand over her mouth, and they’d sat erect and tense as metal tuning forks while a still photo of their daughter had illuminated the television. She’d looked younger and more pissed off than he’d expected.

  “They shot her full of the virus and she’s not sick?” Gladys whispered. “Thank the Great Buddha. My baby, I love you so much. Momma loves you,” she told the angry woman on the glowing screen while Conrad inspected his hands, because the sight of his wife’s tears, when he was helpless to console her, was intolerable.

  Then Rosie returned, and spoke off teleprompter. “So, basically, we’re killing a buncha prisoners even though there’s like, a million zombies out there we could capture and test instead. So if this Delia Wilcox winds up curing everybody, then I guess it was worth it. But if she doesn’t…” Rosie had looked directly into the camera, through the screen, at Conrad, and he’d felt like someone who’s done wrong, and been caught.

  “Think about it, people! They can’t see and they can’t hear but they’ll still chase you twenty miles, ’cause it’s not your skin these fuckin’ things want. This virus eats souls. That’s not gonna be me. Is it gonna be you?”

  Rosie glared. Connie thought about Delia, and the dog Barkley, and that day the ocean met the sky. Then Rosie produced a gun, pressed it to the side of her head while the cameraman shouted, thought better of her strategy, placed the gun in her mouth, and fired. The program went offline.

  Conrad and Gladys got close enough to press their faces to the snowy screen, just in case Delia came back. She didn’t. After a half-hour, a rerun of America’s Funniest Home Videos played. Somebody’s cheeky monkey stole a bunch of bananas from a grocery store. Then the signal went out, the television was gone, and America died, just like that.

  That night, Gladys shook him awake. The bed was just a mattress on the floor—he’d broken apart the cedar frame, along with the rest of the wood furniture, and nailed it against the windows and doors. They were living on saltines and defrosted vegetables. Some days it felt like camp, but mostly it didn’t.

  “I’m dying, Connie,” Gladys said.

  His belly filled with cold and his heart slowed as it pumped. “You’re healthy as a cow, Gladys,” he told her, though in fact she was sweating now, her breath shallow, and he understood with increasing alarm that there was something he’d forgotten.

  “It’s my heart. We’re out of the digitalis.”

  “I’ll get it right now,” he answered. The digitalis—why hadn’t she reminded him?

  “It’s no good, Connie,” she said, and he realized then that she hadn’t been too upset to help dig Adam’s plot: she’d been too sick. “I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want you to risk it.”

  “Stop this talk,” he answered, standing now, in the dark. Orange light played through the cracks in the windows, because something out there was on fire. “I know a little high school chemistry. We’ll cook it on the kitchen stove. What’s digitalis made of?”

  “No, Con. I’m on my way, and you’ve got to promise me something.”

  He ran his hands along the sheets, and found that they were wet with her sweat. “I won’t
promise you anything. You tricked me, you coward.”

  Gladys shook her head. “Stop that, Connie. Now promise. I won’t rest peacefully knowing she’s alone. Locked up, even, with no one to remember to feed her. Remember the time with the blood? She drank it all straight out of the freezer bag. Maybe there’s a reason she ran off and it wasn’t just the drugs. We were wrong to give up on her like that. You’ve got to promise to see what’s become of her.”

  He looked at his wife, whose complexion had turned orange with the fire. Over these last thirty-nine years, she’d grown wrinkled and fat and timid. He hated her whiny voice, and her old lady stink, and her sagging tits. Mostly, he hated her worthless ticker. “I’m empty, Gladys. I don’t love anything anymore. Not even you.”

  She shook her head in what he would later remember as amusement. You’re married to somebody that long, you know better than to pretend like love is a fish. “Oh shut up and find her, you big baby!”

  In the morning he dressed her in her comfy bathrobe and plastic-soled slippers, then cut off her head just in case, and buried her next to the boy and the dog. By noon he was gone. Walking south, toward Delia.

  III.

  He Finds the Dog

  It’s only been two hours since he left the 7-Eleven, but his water is gone and he’s thirsty again. Dusk has settled like a tall man’s shadow, and though the prison is still two miles of dark, broken road to go, he doesn’t have time to set up camp for the night, so will instead persevere.

  His back went out during that last fight, so his crab-walk is exaggerated, but at least his shoulder has stopped hurting and become numb. Veins along his neck shine bright blue and green with infection, and he wonders what those little virions are eating. His defenses probably, then his memories.

  That’s when he hears the howl carrying across the broken blacktop. It sounds human—a soulful lament. He thinks it must be the thrumping bass of old world music since he can’t imagine there are any survivors left who’d be so incautious as to wail.