by Joe McKinney
The crowd of zombies seems to materialize out of nowhere. One moment, the mother is putting on her brave face for her daughter, telling her how they are going to bury Daddy in his favorite place, and the next she is ducking for cover, pulling her daughter close to her breast.
She’d been forced to leave the wheelbarrow out in the open, and that made her mad. It seemed like a failure somehow, like leaving him was a weakness on her part, something she didn’t do right. But the zombies don’t like dead flesh. They rarely touch a corpse, even a fresh one, and so it’s a chance she feels she can take.
The zombies pass the wheelbarrow by. They hardly seem to notice it. One by one, they shuffle past it, dragging their feet, pulling their weight endlessly through a world without meaning, without purpose, without even the hint of redemption. Even the grave is an empty promise for these dead ones.
Then one of the zombies stumbles—and howls in pain.
Mother and daughter raise their heads above the tall weeds where they’ve taken shelter, searching for the injured one.
Zombies don’t make noises like that.
They damage themselves all the time, tearing hands and arms reaching through shattered windows, shredding bare feet on busted glass, and then they get up and walk away. Soundlessly. No emotion, no pain, no nothing.
But this one . . . he is standing up, holding his bleeding wrist in his other hand.
One by one, the dead turn their heads slowly in his direction.
Faker, the mother thought, and pushed her daughter’s head back down into the tall weeds. She has seen these fakers before. They live by pretending they are one of the dead, by walking among the dead. They live, if it can be called living, by abandoning all sense of self, by surrendering completely to the emptiness and pointlessness that is death in life, death on two feet. They live by giving up.
Her husband hated these people.
She looks down at his corpse, the runner of dried blood eking from his left nostril where she drove in the ice pick to keep him from coming back as a zombie, and she sees a man who lived his life like every moment mattered, who understood the importance of his life, even if he didn’t fully grasp its meaning. His life stood for something, and his death was painful, and too soon, for the truly good are always gone too soon.
She looks again to the street. Already the zombies are closing in around the faker, moaning, clutching at the air in anticipation of the kill to come, and she feels nothing but disgust. Her husband never would have given up like that. Never.
She watches the man sink to his knees. She watches him drop his head to his chest rather than lash out with the last breath he has. The mother cradles the child’s head in her hands, covering her eyes. But she herself does not look away, because what’s going on out there reminds her so much of how strong her husband was, and how much is gone from the world.
She doesn’t like it, doesn’t want to admit it, but the faker’s silent acceptance of death makes her feel a powerful sense of pride in her husband.
He had been a man worth having.
Our second game has gone down smoothly, like a fine whisky.
As usual, Jon has picked up a lot of properties through his slow and studied method. But it has cost him. He has property, but little development, and he has next to no cash held in reserve.
I, on the other hand, am sitting pretty. Fat on cash.
I have three houses on Pacific Avenue, and when he lands there and counts his cash, he has no choice but to concede.
“Too bad I didn’t land on Marvin Gardens,” he says.
I look up as I clear the board.
“I like Marvin Gardens,” he says, catching the look in my eye. “It’s special.”
I wait for more, but it doesn’t come.
After a pause, I finish clearing the board.
The mother knows what’s coming, even before she passes the jail. She can hear the zombies banging their fists against the chain-link fence. She can hear the musical clanging it makes, even over the awful moaning of the dead.
She doesn’t look at them as she passes down the alleyway. They are sticking their shredded fingers through the diamond-patterned wire, surging against it, pressing against it with the combined weight of their dead bodies, but she ignores them. All she does is move her daughter to her other side, putting herself between the little girl and the hungry dead.
The little girl is brave. She doesn’t shrink or break down, the way some adults the mother has seen have done. This makes her proud.
But the thing that really strokes her pride is the way the little girl hitches her backpack up onto her shoulders, looks up, and smiles.
So young, and so brave.
It’s then that the zombies break through the fence. It had seemed so secure just seconds ago, but now it’s leaning over into the alley like a drawbridge caught on the way down, and the dead are pouring over it, filling up the alley behind her.
And now, in front of her, too.
The mother has no choice. She gently lowers the wheelbarrow down. Even in death she can’t imagine dropping him. Then, before the child can speak a word, she scoops her up into her arms and runs away, leaving the body of the man she loves in the middle of the alley.
He’ll be safe.
The dead don’t attack the dead. Even the newly dead seem to not exist for them. Only the living, only those with pain in their heads and love still in their hearts seem like food to them.
The mother finds a bakery with a large oven and puts her daughter in it. Deer hide their yearlings in the tall grass, she remembers from the years she lived in the Texas Hill country. Perhaps it will work now.
And some atavistic impulse seems present in the daughter as well, for she understands without words. She doesn’t ask questions, but instead sinks into the darkness at the back of the oven. From the depths, her brown eyes seem to shine like jewels under halogen vapor lights. She is so vulnerable, so beautiful, so incredibly trusting.
The mother hopes she knows what she’s doing.
“I’ll be right back,” she says. “I’m going to get Daddy.”
She slips off her own backpack and removes a collapsible police baton she got from a friend during the early days of the outbreak. She snaps it open and circles back around the City Jail so she can re-enter from the other side.
When she steps back into the alley, she sees a small group of zombies gathered around her husband’s corpse.
They seem uncertain, but interested, as though they just might fall upon the body. When one of them lifts her husband’s hand and tries to put it in his mouth, the woman rushes in like a fury and swings at every face and hand that tries to close upon her. It’s a fast job, a messy job, and she hardly registers the dull crack of flesh-covered bone, the give of skulls as they cave beneath the baton.
And when it’s done, she jams the baton down on the pavement and collapses it with a sharp smack.
She looks around. Nothing else moves.
Then she picks up the wheelbarrow that holds her husband’s body and carts him out of the alley.
We’re thirty minutes into our third game and I have Jon handily by the throat. Pacific, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania are dull properties, never seeming to gather much action, but they are the only properties I have left without hotels and so I start to develop them.
Jon, realizing he’s beat, concedes.
The woman is looking down North Carolina Avenue, into the heart of the city. It is a vast ruin of empty buildings and darkened windows. This could be a war zone, abandoned to the scavengers. It looks that bad. Roofs have fallen. Bricks are strewn about as though thrown by an explosion. But this isn’t some military scar. This city, this collection of empty buildings, is the product of decay, a complex rune speaking of all things past.
Dark clouds are rolling in off the sea, turning the sky to a washed-out gray. The wind carries sand down the cracked and buckled street, lifting it like curtains dancing on the wind, and the city seems so lonely, almost su
blime in its desolation. Again she wonders why his last wish has brought her here. What could he have possibly seen in this world?
He was a kind man, a caring man who knew that there is a presence moving in the background of our lives. That presence is hard to fathom, especially now, especially since her husband’s death, but it is there. She can feel it. Her husband never doubted it. And because of that conviction she knows there must be a reason.
“Momma, you’re all gross.”
The woman looks down at her daughter, her voice surprising her out of her thoughts.
“What?”
The girl points at the spattered gore on the woman’s jeans, the clumps of blood and brain left from when she fought the zombies off her husband’s corpse.
She wipes her palm across her shirt, clearing away the dirt and sweat and grime before taking her daughter’s hand and giving it another reassuring squeeze. “We’re gonna be okay,” she says, and in her soul she tries to believe it, because she has to. She needs this one truth to be real.
She takes out the game board she’s been using as a map, her gaze darting back and forth between the cartoon board and the sea of ruin before her, and she’s confused. Marvin Gardens must be here somewhere. According to the board, it should be right here.
We’ve started our fourth game. Most people think Monopoly takes forever to play, but with just two players, and a deep understanding of its finer points, you can finish off a game in less than twenty minutes and still stay soundly within the rules.
This one is going fast, and Jon’s luck is getting on my nerves. He takes Boardwalk, and Park Place. He looks at me, sees me scowling, and laughs.
To lighten my mood, he asks about my writing. “More zombies?”
“Yep. And death cults, too.”
“Cool.”
I like discussing horror with Jon. He gets it. After reading a rough draft of my first novel he told me zombies were the perfect means to reinvent the world and all its problems. They’re entirely metaphorical, more so than any other monster in fiction, and because of that, they can represent any societal issue or any personal crisis.
As I said, he gets it.
But meanwhile there is still a game to be played, and I’ve just landed on Ventnor Avenue, where he has four houses.
“Stop smiling,” I say, and concede.
Game five is our tiebreaker. We race around the board, and I get Ventnor and Atlantic Avenues, and then Water Works. Only Marvin Gardens remains unclaimed.
Jon looks worried.
The woman stands in the shadows of a movie theater entrance, watching a death cult make its way down the street. These people she understands even less than the fakers. At least the fakers are a known quantity. Their motivation is simple. Death terrifies them so much that they’re willing to embrace it in order to hold it at bay. She can understand fear. And she can understand—even though it disgusts her—why some people are willing to give up on their lives in order to keep them.
But these people, these death cults, they are a mystery.
She has heard of them in other cities. They believe that the zombies are a means to set the soul free. The zombies are prophets, they claim, and they welcome the act of getting slaughtered as though it were communion.
This cult is made up of a dozen people, walking two abreast down the street. They seem eerily content and unworried. They are happy to die.
Zombies stagger out of doorways, peel themselves away from the insides of abandoned cars, and close in on the cult.
Screams come with the killing, but they are not screams of pain. When the woman realizes this she is truly and utterly horrified. These people are in love with their own slaughter, and for them it is some kind of grotesque joy. It is spiritual. It seems vile to her, obscene somehow.
“Come on,” the woman says to her daughter. She takes up the wheelbarrow again and slips away.
Jon takes his fourth railroad, but looks disappointed.
“What’s wrong?” I ask. He’s pulling ahead, and the tiebreaker that I thought was mine seems to be tilting in his direction.
“I want Marvin Gardens,” he says. “I keep missing it.”
“You said that before. What’s so special about it?”
“It’s the only place on the board that isn’t a real location in Atlantic City.”
“Really?” I look at the board. I didn’t know this. I’ve loved this game since I was a little boy, and I never knew. “I wonder why they’d put it there if it isn’t really there.”
“Well, it’s a mystery, isn’t it?”
The woman and child have made it to the Boardwalk. The long pier extends far out into the Atlantic, which has grown irritable from the weather.
“Momma?” the girl says. “Where do we go now?”
The woman has no idea. None of this makes sense. Why would he make this request of her, and why can’t she find Marvin Gardens?
Acting almost on autopilot, she pushes the wheelbarrow out to the end of the pier, and stops before a bronze plaque featuring a raised relief of Charles B. Darrow, inventor of the game of Monopoly. Briefly she considers asking Darrow where she might find Marvin Gardens, but doesn’t want to scare the little girl. No need to make her think Momma’s lost her mind.
A strong wind gusts off the water and shoves her roughly to one side. She staggers, and the wheelbarrow topples over, spilling out its precious cargo onto the pier.
The woman looks down at her husband sprawled there and she finally breaks down. She sits down beside him. She’s so tired. She has no way of lifting him back into the wheelbarrow. Not now. Not like this. She doesn’t know what to do.
She hears footsteps on the planks behind her.
The woman jumps to her feet and wheels to face the intruder, pulling her daughter behind her.
But it’s an old man, not a zombie. She relaxes, but only a little. There are other dangers in the world besides the walking dead. But the man makes no move to attack. He actually looks kind. He’s dressed in a full-length black coat, the collar pulled up tightly against a scarred cheek. The brim of a floppy old hat shields gray, weathered eyes.
“Let me help you,” he says.
Together, they right the wheelbarrow.
There is another gust of wind and then the rain starts to fall. “We need to get under shelter,” he says. He’s holding his hat down on his head as he nods toward a nearby arcade. The inside is dark, but dry. “In there,” he says.
She reaches for the wheelbarrow, but he puts a hand on her wrist.
“No,” he says, “leave him here.”
She wants to object. At first it seems like a gross disrespect of the man she loved—and still loves—with all her being. But as the rain turns to silvery sheets curling on the wind, it suddenly seems right to her, and the three of them run for the cover of the arcade.
The little girl knows the routine. They won’t be going anywhere for a while, so she removes her backpack and sits on the ground and makes herself busy with the few belongings they’ve been able to carry with them.
“Thank you,” the woman says to the man.
He nods, says nothing. The man removes his coat and hat and shakes the water from them.
“Can you help us?” the woman says. “We’re trying to find Marvin Gardens.”
The man looks up from his clothes and a strange smile tugs at the corners of his mouth. “There is no Marvin Gardens,” he says. “Not here, anyway. Not in Atlantic City.”
This floors the woman. Her first instinct is to get angry. She’s been lied to, made a fool of. Why would her husband do this to her? Why would he send her on an errand like this, wandering a blasted land with only a stupid board game for a map? It doesn’t make sense.
“Bubbles!”
The woman shakes her head, clearing her thoughts. Dozens of tiny bubbles are rising from the floor, filling the air around her head. She looks down and sees her daughter clapping her hands and giggling wildly as her little bubble-making machine whirs.
One bubble in particular drifts past the woman’s nose. She focuses on it, and its beauty startles her. The way it shimmers and catches the light like a diamond. It is geometric perfection. It is a delicate thing, like a flower, or a life; and it is, she realizes, the most perfect, the most beautiful thing she’s ever seen.
It explodes suddenly—even over the pounding rain she swears she hears a faint, muffled pop. It’s gone.
She stares at the empty air where it once floated, but she isn’t seeing the air. She’s actually looking inward, and backward, across the years. Images of her husband crowd her mind, and though she doesn’t realize she’s doing it, she’s smiling, for he lives there, whole and perfect, a part of her soul that will never die.
But what of this crazy quest he’s sent her on? What of that?
He knew there was no Marvin Gardens here. He had to have known. Her husband was crazy smart that way. This was deliberate. Not a cruel trick. He wasn’t that kind of man.
There is a lesson here. Something she is meant to understand.
But what?
And then she thinks of the bubble, how it was beautiful, and then gone. And she thinks of this world, how it, too, was once a thing of beauty.
It dawns on her all at once, understanding swelling inside her chest like a balloon until she can barely breathe, barely contain it. He gave her an impossible quest, not because he expected her to fail, but because he knew she would succeed. She would come to this point. The old world is gone, and though the new world, the world without him, is a little emptier, it is still a place for beauty, and a place to raise the little girl who is so much like her daddy.
She looks out across the rain-swept pier, to where her husband’s body faces the open ocean, unknowable in its vastness, and she thinks again of bubbles.
And smiles.
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