Dead City

by Joe McKinney

  I nodded.

  “That officer I told you about earlier,” he said. “He was badly injured when he came to us. He was only able to fire a few shots before those people out there attacked him. His body is upstairs. Perhaps you’ll stay for the service. Afterwards, you can take whatever ammunition you can find and then you can go to your family.”

  I didn’t want to, but I realized it would be stupid to say no. He and his people had been good enough to take me in when I needed it most, and now they were giving me ammunition, too.

  “Excellent,” Tiresias said. “I’ll start in just a moment.”

  “You? I thought you said you weren’t the minister here.”

  “I’m not,” he said. “I’m a bricklayer. Been doing it for more than fifty years. But I’ve been coming to this church for longer than that, and the folks here asked me to lead them in prayer after the Reverend Jones died. I had planned on waiting till morning to do that, but after what’s happened, I think now is as good a time as any.”

  We shook hands again and I took a spot next to a pillar behind the last pew. My plan was to leave as soon as I could slip out and try not to be noticed. I figured the fewer questions they asked me, the easier it would be.

  The place was alive with moving light. It made the place seem warmer, friendlier. People around me chatted with each other and exchanged greetings and it was almost surreal enough for me to think I had dreamed everything up to that point.

  Almost.

  The people milled around like Sunday morning until they saw Tiresias mount the pulpit.

  Everyone took their seats.

  That’s when I slipped away. I stepped back into the shadows and made for the upstairs room near the front door, where Tiresias said I would find Gibbs’s body.

  I half expected every step to carry me over the edge of a cliff. It was like there was a big coiled snake moving slowly through my gut. I wanted to sit down and rest, to let the sick feeling inside me pass, but I knew I couldn’t. I still had miles to go before that could happen.

  I took the stairs slowly, one at a time, lugging my heavy, mud-and blood-stained boots up the steps like I was climbing a gallows, and from somewhere behind me, I could hear Tiresias leading the others in prayer.

  Chapter 30

  The upstairs room was really just a storage closet. They kept a few broken chairs and a cheap metal picnic table off in the corner, but the rest of it was empty.

  Almost empty, anyway. There were eight corpses along the opposite wall beneath a blue window. The bodies were covered with white tablecloths and tied off with a small gauge rope.

  They reminded me of the root balls of trees about to be planted.

  There wasn’t any sign of gore. There were no pools of congealed blood and no foul odors. It was all very clean and decent. The bodies were laid out on the floor, but it had been done with obvious respect.

  Of course, Tiresias and his people had only been able to do so much to cover up the violence that had brought those bodies to that point. I saw a white hand and wrist, still wearing a watch and wedding ring, sticking out from under the sheet, like it was reaching for something.

  I stopped in my tracks, waiting for the rest of the body to unfold itself and come after me. That didn’t happen, though. The body was at rest.

  Even still, there was something grotesque about the way that hand rested there, palm upwards on the floor, like it wanted something I couldn’t give. I got the feeling from that mute gesture that it was reaching back for the life that had once moved it, even if that meant returning to this nightmare world of the necrosis virus.

  It wanted even that.

  I moved very slowly as I crossed the rest of the way to the bodies and worked back the sheets, one body at a time, until I found Gibbs’s corpse. I pulled the sheet back far enough to uncover his gun belt, but I didn’t want to look at his face. It made it easier, somehow, not to.

  He had two full magazines in his belt pouch and I took them both. I slapped one in the gun, tucked the other into my belt, and then slid the sheet back over his body.

  I kept meaning to turn around and go, but it was hard to look away. It was like watching the hands of a clock chase each other around the dial. Nothing ever seems to change, but all the while, something precious slips away.

  I looked out the blue window at the unburied corpses in the parking lot, and I thought about what it all meant. The problem was so big, so incredibly vast.

  I had a vision of myself standing in the middle of an immense, utterly featureless plain, the horizon impossibly distant in every direction. Wherever I turned there were miles and miles of nothingness. There was no sound, no taste, no reference of any kind. I was alone, and my questions had no answers. If I could have painted a picture of my personal hell, that featureless plain would have been it.

  I heard footsteps.

  They stopped somewhere behind me, and I turned to face them.

  Simon was standing there, and he was holding a bat.

  “What do you want?” I asked him.

  He shrugged, but he made sure I saw the bat.

  “Is that supposed to scare me? It doesn’t, you know. After all, I’m not the one who brought a bat to a gun fight.”

  “You ain’t gonna shoot me.”

  “You sound awfully sure of yourself.”

  “Yeah, well, I got good reason to sound sure of myself, because I’m gonna knock the fuck out of you if you take one step closer.”

  My pulse quickened, and my body tensed. This was familiar territory for me, the old game of who’s got the biggest balls.

  “What’s wrong with you, Simon? Did somebody write you a ticket and hurt your feelings. Come on, fess up. I bet you’ve got warrants, don’t you?”

  “You think this is funny?”

  “No, Simon, I don’t. I think you’re an asshole. That’s about as far as I’ve taken it and that’s about all I care to know. Now why don’t you take your dumb ass downstairs before you get yourself hurt.”

  His eyes narrowed on me and I knew things were about to get really nasty.

  When he took a step for me I drew my gun and pointed it right at his head. If he had been a little faster, he probably could have put the bat upside my head. But as it was, he stopped in his tracks.

  My finger was twitching on the trigger, ready for him to make a move.

  Wait for it, wait for it.

  “Stop it. Both of you. Stop it.”

  It was Tiresias. He was behind Simon, standing at the top of the stairs. Simon didn’t take his eyes off me. My gun didn’t move.

  “Simon,” Tiresias said, his voice was softer the second time.

  But neither one of us moved. Simon was fighting a battle with himself, and I watched it play out on his face. He desperately wanted to wrap that bat around my skull, but at the same time I knew Tiresias had a special power over him.

  In the end, that power won out, and Simon let the business end of the bat fall to the floor with a thud.

  Damn, that thing would have hurt.

  “Simon,” Tiresias said, gently, but very firmly. “Go downstairs.”

  Simon didn’t say another word. He wrapped his fury up inside him and walked downstairs, leaving me with Tiresias.

  When he was gone I said, “I wouldn’t have shot him unless he made me.”

  Tiresias didn’t say anything to that for a long moment. He took his small, gold-rimmed glasses out of his shirt pocket and slipped them on. In his powerful hands they looked like they might crumple.

  He smiled at me and said, “I’m blind as a man can be without these things.”

  “I didn’t start that,” I said, pointing at the stairs. “I don’t know what his problem is, but I didn’t start it.”

  “He doesn’t like the police.”

  “Was that it? Gosh, I couldn’t tell.”

  “His feelings are misplaced, obviously, but tonight has been very hard on him.”

  “Yeah, well, it hasn’t exactly been a cakewalk for me
either.”

  “No, of course not. It’s been hard on all of us. But it’s been especially hard on Simon. He lost his mother tonight. She was a good woman, and a dear friend of mine.”

  “I’m sorry about that,” I said. “But he acts like I’m the one who killed her. I never said a cross word to him before he tried to get me to fight on the porch.”

  “Things are rarely as simple as they ought to be,” he said. “We carry so many things around inside us, so much baggage. Sometimes that baggage keeps us from changing when we need to.”

  “That may be,” I said, “but it still doesn’t answer why he hates me so much.”

  Tiresias paused over that for a moment. Finally, he said, “I brought Simon and his mother here as soon as I heard about what was happening. Simon’s mother was a nurse. When the first wounded starting showing up here, she treated them as best she could. Your friend Officer Gibbs was one of those wounded. She worked on him for a long time, but in the end there was nothing she could do for him but let him slip into that coma-like state the infected have. At the time we still didn’t understand what was happening with the people who did that. How they—came back. After he rose up he attacked her. That’s how we lost her. Her body is over there with the others.”

  There was nothing I could say to that. It didn’t make Simon any less of an asshole in my opinion, but at least it gave his hostility a context.

  We stood there for a moment in silence before he said, “You must be eager to leave.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “You said you have a six-month-old son, right?”

  I nodded. “His name’s Andrew.”

  “So young,” he said, and whistled through his teeth. “Do you know where you’ll meet your family?”

  “I haven’t got a clue. We didn’t have time to make plans. I don’t know how I’m going to find them. I’ve already been to my house once tonight, but they weren’t there. Her car wasn’t in the garage, so I guess they could be anywhere. I just don’t know.”

  “And there’s no place you can think of where she might have gone? Your church maybe? Or another family’s house?”

  “No. It’s just us.”

  “So where will you start looking for them?”

  “You know, I don’t have the foggiest idea. They could be anywhere. I suppose I’ll go back to the house and start from there. Maybe they left me a note or something. Last time I was there I didn’t really take the time to look around. First thing I need to do though is find a car.”

  He cracked a small smile. “I don’t think you’ll have a problem with that. You have friends, after all.”

  “I appreciate your optimism. But I think I’ve been kicked around a little too much tonight to share it. From where I’m standing, it looks like I’m going at it alone from here on out.”

  “That bothers you.” It wasn’t a question, just a dry observation.

  “Don’t you think that’s enough?”

  “Absolutely. Being alone is a terrifying thing. It’s enough to scare any man, even one who is as equipped to take care of himself as a police officer.”

  I nodded uncomfortably. All I wanted to do was get out of there, find a car, and make my way back to my house.

  I happened to glance back at the bodies and I noticed the hand still sticking out from underneath the sheet. Tiresias had said Gibbs was injured not too far away, and I figured that meant his patrol car had to be close by too.

  “What about Gibbs’s car?” I asked him. “Did you see where he left it?”

  “Yes. But I’m afraid it won’t be much use to you. When I found him he was climbing out of a culvert a few blocks over. His car was at the bottom of that culvert.”

  “Eddie,” he said, and it startled me a little to hear him use my first name, “do you mind if I ask you a personal question?”

  Here it comes. Leave the sermon early, the preacher grabs you by the ear later.

  “No,” I said warily. “Shoot.”

  “I’ve been thinking about everything I’ve seen tonight. Sitting in this church, there’s not much else to do. Just sit and pray and think.”

  He walked over to the blue window and looked out, then ran his finger lightly across the sheet, respectfully, mindful of the heavy burden under it.

  “So many people have died tonight,” he said. “So many friends and strangers and people I’ll never know. It boggles the mind. What I want to know, Eddie, is if you’ve tried to put some kind of value on it. Have you thought about what it means?”

  His back was to me, which was good, for had he been looking at me he would have seen my mouth fall open. The man was in my head, saying the words that I had said to myself in the exact same spot where he was now standing. I was dumbfounded.

  I thought about telling him about my vision, about the featureless land where answers had ceased to exist and that I had named my personal hell, but I held back. Somehow, I just couldn’t put that in words.

  Instead I simply said, “That’s not an easy question to answer.”

  “No, it’s not. But it occurs to me that those of us who live through tonight are going to have to try and put some kind of meaning to it. Those of us who live are going to be defined by this, changed by it in ways we can’t even begin to imagine right now. You will have to raise a child in this new world. You have to put your thoughts in order. If not now, soon.”

  I thought about it, about putting my thoughts in order, about what I might tell Andrew about this night, many years from now when he happened to ask what it was like, and it shamed me that I had nothing to say. There was a great big hole where the answer should have been. All I could think of was that I wasn’t ready for something like this to happen, that it wasn’t fair.

  I had no idea how to put it all in one little neat package. The world had flipped upside down and left me hanging. There was absolutely nothing in my experience to prepare me for the new world Tiresias was talking about. Now that I was asked to articulate what I was feeling, all I could do was stammer around the issue.

  “I don’t have an answer for you, Tiresias. I just don’t know what I think. I guess my gut reaction is that it just isn’t fair. I saw one of the officers I used to work with die tonight. I watched him as he slipped into one of those things. He was a husband and a father, just like me. He loved his wife and his new baby as much as I love my family, and in the end, he couldn’t even remember their names. He told me he didn’t even remember what love felt like. That’s the worst part of all this, I think. That’s what really scares me about those things. It scares me that I could lose my mind that way. Die without any understanding. It makes me wonder what we did to deserve that kind of cruelty.”

  He nodded silently. I got ready for him to harangue me about God, and maybe give me the bit about Job and how we’re just not equipped to understand the ways of God, but to my relief he simply turned and stared out the window.

  When he turned back to me he said, “For me, tonight has been about salvation. For you, it seems to be about justice. We couch our thoughts in different language, but I think we’re not too far off from each other. Justice and salvation, after all, are two sides of the same coin as far as God is concerned.”

  He turned and looked out the window again, and it seemed his mind was focusing on something that only he could see.

  “I was standing here when I saw you come out of the trees,” he said.

  “I’m lucky you were there.”

  He tapped on the window thoughtfully. “You know, it occurs to me that the hardest part of the days and weeks and years to come is not going to be putting the conveniences of our old world back together, but reestablishing the bridges between those who survive. There’s a lot of work ahead of us. A lot of community building.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I used to come home and watch the news. I would sit on my couch and stare at the TV and shake my head, wondering why we never seemed to get anywhere. Everything was the same. Always the same thing, nigh
t after night, year after year. I have the terrible feeling that what we’re seeing out there is the failure of our community, that all of that death is simply the manifestation of our lack of place, a sense of who we are and what we mean to each other. Our cities have turned into a nightmare landscape of violence and apathy where personal responsibility is optional and our affection for one another withered to a ghost of its former self. I know as a police officer you have seen what I’m talking about. Perhaps you’re better equipped than most to understand what I mean.”

  “People have always been that way though, haven’t they? None of this is new, like you say. Isn’t it man’s nature to be self-serving and cruel. Brotherly love only goes so far as it’s mutually advantageous.”

  “Nothing is impossible, Eddie.” He said it with honest conviction, not irony. “People can change. Worlds can change. Christ’s death destroyed a community, but his resurrection created a new world. Maybe that’s our task. Have you thought about that? Have you considered that maybe this is the birth of a new world, that what happens next is a golden opportunity to change the nature of man in a fundamental way?”

  “Those are brave words, Tiresias.”

  “New parents can’t afford to be anything but brave, Eddie.”

  “You’re right about that.”

  I stood there for a moment, ready to leave, but almost not wanting to.

  “Do you have any idea where you’ll go from here?”

  “Not a clue,” I said.

  “You said you needed a car, right?”

  “Yeah. I figured I would head east from here and try to find one in a traffic jam somewhere. That’s worked for me once already.”

  “I think I can help you,” he said. “Did you happen to see a maroon Pontiac in the parking lot when you were fighting on the porch?”

  I shook my head.

  Then he did something that completely floored me. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a set of car keys and put them in my hand. I stared at the keys, and then at him.

  “I can’t take your car, Tiresias.”

  “Yes, you can. I don’t need it. The people you met downstairs, they are my family. That’s where I’m going to start building my bridges. Now it’s your turn to go home, start building the bridges from your end. Hopefully I’ll meet you in the middle someplace.”