Even the loneliest dead body, the doctor expounded, without a single loved one to identify it, affected the living. His example: a shut-in gets shot during a break-in. Think of the first responders who’d have to live with the memories of the mess they found; the surgeons, nurses, orderlies, and interns whose quiet night would be disrupted; the detectives who’d spend weeks chasing the truth; the DA’s staff, under pressure to close cases, who’d become personally involved; the insurance agents who’d labor to evade responsibility; the landlord stiffed on the victim’s back rent and in sudden possession of hills of detritus. All those people formed a second family of the deceased, and as a family, they had to pull together if they wanted to survive, Luis, Charlie, Lindof, whoever—they had to get along.
Charlie, however, decided to explode.
“Did JT jump, Mr. Lindof? Or did someone give him an assist?”
“Charlie!” Luis hissed.
From the cooler, another crackly rasp.
“Oh, a lady,” Lindof said. “To whom do I owe the pleasure, baby?”
Charlie’s mouth opened, teeth flashing.
“No!” Luis cried. “Don’t give him your name!”
Rarely did the whoosh of the cooler’s automatic doors even register in Luis’s brain. Now he looked at the open doors as he’d looked at his open closet while in bed as a kid, Manolo asleep beside him and no help at all. He’d known something unspeakable was waiting inside.
Rippling into view was a white body bag distended into abstract shapes by the hands, feet, and head trapped inside it.
“Now,” Luis croaked. “Charlie, we’re leaving now!”
He snatched his keys from the counter, and on second thought, his phone charger, Without hesitation, Charlie ran to pluck her purse from another counter, avoiding the gore centered on John Doe. Her path brought her close to the cooler, and Luis thought he might shriek in fear. Two more body bags had appeared behind the first, the heads inside straining against zippered plastic like babies against placental sacs. They might be born any second, Their jellied decay spilling from the bags as They crabbed forth, reaching out with unfolded arms.
Luis ran, holding his hand out to Charlie, They’d never held hands before, but her palm sealed to his, sweaty and strong, and it was as if he, like John Doe, was leavened with renewed life. He grew steadier, determined. They would escape these crawling atrocities. They would evade whoever the Vegas contingent had sent to shut them down.
Luis dropped his phone into his scrubs pocket, right alongside the .38, and ripped off his hairnet, apron, and sleeve protectors. Charlie did the same, Declothing was not easy with hands joined, but neither had any intention of breaking the bond.
“Where to?” Charlie asked.
“Rosa—I have to see if Rosa’s all right. Okay?”
“I’m with you, all right? Let’s get the fuck going!”
When they reached the parking lot, California’s nighttime warmth made its usual ambush after the frigid morgue. Luis’s sweat sizzled like bacon grease. The air felt thick and smelled of soot. The police and ambulance sirens in the distance might be the normal amount for this time of night, but it might not be.
Only two cars were in the lot. Luis’s silver Prius was the more reliable, and Charlie made no objection. When they unlocked their hands to get in, Charlie swiped his keys and it was his turn not to object. Right now, an aggressive driver was who they needed behind the wheel.
Inside the Prius’s quiet, Luis realized Lindof’s voice was still audible; neither party had ended the call. Lindof was talking quite happily, clearly not caring if anyone was listening. Luis wanted to shut it off, more so with Lindof’s every word, but his attention was focused on traffic congestion that shouldn’t exist at this hour, and smoke from an uncleared accident, and a distressing quantity of pedestrians darting across the highway. Helping Charlie navigate, he mumbled to himself, “Not God shit. Not God shit. Not God shit.”
Yet he still heard Lindof, beneath, “Even if you know who I am, you’re wrong. I’m not who I was an hour ago, I can tell you that. I’m better, baby. I’m better, and here’s the one thing I know for sure: you’re worse. Should you be panicking? The answer is yes. Yes, you really should. You should be pissing your shitty little diapers. Because you know what I think? I think your world is about to fall into the ocean, Acocella, and my world is about to rise up like a fucking mountain. Jesus Horatio Christ, it’s going to be glorious.”
Go Redskins
When Etta Hoffmann discovered VSDC case number 129–46–9875 on October 25, she brought it, with characteristic lack of emotion, to the attention of fellow statisticians John Campbell, Terry McAllister, and Elizabeth O’Toole. They huddled in Hoffmann’s cubicle—closer than she liked, though she was adept at keeping such discomfort to herself. Not yet confident about AMLD’s emergency power, she had printed the report and handed it to Elizabeth O’Toole. Elizabeth O’Toole read the second half aloud, a voice-to-text transcription sent in by a Dr. Luis Acocella in San Diego. Terry McAllister, who had given up hiding his feelings and held Elizabeth O’Toole by the waist, knew the glitchy software by heart and translated.
“Write meal…”
“White male.”
“Cause of debt…”
“Death.”
“Not … repeat, not barristic…”
“Ballistic.”
“… ballistic insult, Preceding…”
“Proceeding.”
“… with examination of the fart…”
“God, that one’s my favorite. Heart.”
“Will check for confusion.”
“Too late for that, Occlusion.”
“… and car dee oh, my empathy…”
“It’s poetry. Someone make this Acocella guy poet laureate, stat.”
Hoffmann knew people at AMLD called her “the Poet.” She was not deaf. This joke, however, was not being made at her expense. Elizabeth O’Toole laughed quietly, perfect round tears enlarging the corners of her eyes, Hoffmann was glad to see this reaction. She understood laughing was a necessary relaxant for most people. It had been forty-eight hours since so much as a smile had been seen in the office, which had begun to trouble even Hoffmann.
By then, there was nothing novel about the content of 129–46–9875. It relayed the same news about They and Them that had been reported 300,642 times over the past two days. The report’s only notable detail (beyond its bonkers translation) was its time stamp. Hoffmann slid it into the Origin folder and applied a Post-it to it, bearing a tidy red-ink notation: Zero-00:00. The next oldest one, which the VSDC had recorded four hours and twenty-one minutes later, would be labeled Zero-04:21. And so on, a new organization for a new age. It brought Hoffmann the sort of relaxation that laughing had brought Elizabeth O’Toole.
Zero-00:00 had a different effect on Hoffmann’s coworkers. Instead of seeing a starting point, they saw the beginning of the end.
“I used to celebrate every year around this time, when the holidays kicked off, how I’d made it another year, you know?” John Campbell said with a wistful grimace. “Then I always said to myself, ‘Well, fine, but will you be here next year?’ That was the whole deal, wasn’t it? Worrying about whether you’re going to be here tomorrow kept you going.”
Hoffmann knew that John Campbell was not faring well, He’d lost a child to leukemia and a wife to divorce in the span of twenty-one months. It made for a shaky foundation. He was barely eating, existing on coffee. Though he’d lasted to the final four, a feat that impressed Hoffmann, she knew he’d be next to vacate. She was fine with that. She looked forward to it, John Campbell always stood too close to her.
“Are any of us going to be here tomorrow?” Elizabeth O’Toole wiped away her tears. Hoffmann was strangely disappointed not to have seen them fall.
“That’s what I’m saying,” John Campbell insisted. “If there’s no tomorrow, we’re just left here with our mistakes. Everything we did before the Poet reset our clock to zero-zero-zero-
zero-zero, Now we get to stare at those mistakes. With no hope of a new day coming. You see what I’m saying? It’s a huge goddamn reckoning for everything we ever did wrong.”
“Sounds like church,” Terry McAllister muttered.
“What do you mean?” John Campbell pressed.
“Isn’t that what they tell you in church? You sin, you go to hell, and Satan parades your sins before you like that old TV show.”
This Is Your Life, Hoffmann thought. She liked old TV shows. She watched them, episode after episode, with food and bathroom breaks, until either it was precisely midnight—bedtime—or there were no more episodes in the series, at which point she changed to a different program.
“Except we haven’t gone to hell,” John Campbell said. “We’re still here.”
“But so are They,” Terry McAllister replied.
“All that means is They took it away from us! The promise we were told that, when we die, we could go to a better place. They, Them—They’re telling us no. This is it. This is it.”
“Stop,” Elizabeth O’Toole said. “You’re not making sense.”
“Life was a gift.” John Campbell was gripping the back of Hoffmann’s chair. She could feel his hot breath and wished he would go away. “And as a gift, it belonged to us. We’re the only ones who can take it away. It’s our choice. Not Theirs.”
John Campbell left two days later. Hoffmann believed he had gone to kill himself. She felt no sorrow. He would not have survived out there anyway. Shortly thereafter, Elizabeth O’Toole said it was the end of the world, and Terry McAllister responded that, if that were true, why the fuck were they hanging around here when he had good tequila at his place? Despite everything, Elizabeth O’Toole smiled. The two of them could live together, if only for a short while.
Asking Hoffmann if she’d like to come with them, Elizabeth O’Toole added, “The only obligation we have left is to ourselves.”
Hoffmann appreciated the sentiment. She looked up at Elizabeth O’Toole’s red eyes, hollowed sockets, and stringy hair. She would not miss the woman, but she wished her well. Elizabeth O’Toole had always defended Hoffmann when others had mocked her. Hoffmann knew this. She was not deaf.
She glimpsed the outdoors when Terry McAllister and Elizabeth O’Toole left. Dead leaves skittered across the street, adding themselves to berms of litter accumulated over five days without street cleaning. There was a distinct lack of traffic. The most troubling sight was a dead horse curled around a fire hydrant. Hoffmann felt an urge to go see it. She’d never been close to a horse. But it was missing its entire midsection. It was only legs, a head, and a spine.
The Census Bureau, of which AMLD was a part, had maintained offices in Suitland, Maryland, since 2006, and though other satellites moved into those headquarters, AMLD had remained in D.C. This had been a great relief to Hoffmann. Change in routine upset her, Even thinking about the two bus lines she would have to take to Suitland made her feel ill. Others had hoped for relocation, griping about their office building, a small, two-story, functionalist, windowless concrete box decorated with abstract formations of brick and iron. Hoffmann had never given the architectural qualities a thought until she locked the door behind Terry McAllister and Elizabeth O’Toole and bolstered it with a furniture barricade.
The AMLD office was an impregnable bunker.
Hoffmann wandered the building, She’d never done it before. She’d never been curious, In the basement, inside walk-in pantries and coolers, she discovered ponderous stacks of nonperishable food and staggering reserves of bottled water. Although it bothered her to leave her computer post, she devoted an entire afternoon to cataloging the food. By her estimates, she could live off the stockpile for twenty-two years.
Not until she had spent several hours back at her usual post could she classify what she was feeling: the serenity of perfect belonging. She might never again have a face-to-face interaction with another person. This filled her with a lightness she did not think she had ever felt. Amputated from the unpleasant heat, bodily smells, sharp voices, alarming clothing, jarring arrivals, unpredictable physical positionings, and confusing sexual energies of the human race, Etta Hoffmann felt true happiness for the first time.
Days passed. She did her job. She fixed herself three meals a day. Canned soup. Frozen pizza. Peanut butter on bread until the bread went bad. Each midnight, she went to bed on a sofa. Weeks passed.
By a month after the rise of 129–46–9875, roughly nine out of ten VSDC network members had gone off-line. By Hoffmann’s calculations, that was 92 percent of hospitals, 95 percent of nursing homes, and 74 percent of police departments. There was less data for her to upload, less to print, less to log, less to file. Never had she known empty queues, but now, even though she was the sole statistician left, half the day could pass without a blip from the outside world. She hit the Refresh icon until her fingertip hurt. She felt adrift for the first time in many years.
The idea came gradually, as ideas always did to Etta Hoffmann. AMLD was unique among government organs, linking the internal data systems of the census, medical, and law enforcement bureaus. AMLD staff might be lowly in terms of Beltway status, but they had nearly unique access to ancillary government interfaces, unprecedented outside of intelligence agencies. These digital inroads were shallow but plentiful. Over the years, Hoffmann had glimpsed them, just as she’d glimpsed hallways she had no interest in exploring.
She remembered a statistician who had been fired eight years earlier for sneaking the phrase GO REDSKINS onto the home pages of NASA, the Forest Service, the Patent and Trademark Office, the Food Safety and Inspection Service, and, most lamentably, the Office of Native American Affairs. Hoffmann had not joined in the appalled watercooler gossip that followed the firing. But she was not deaf. She was not deaf.
Modifying other government sites was forbidden. But there was no one left to punish her. Accessing outside agencies’ control panels should have been impossible, but most AMLD employees had fled the office without shutting down their workstations. Like too many other government agencies, their tech was outdated, so dormant computers did not automatically log off, Hoffmann had been raiding the unprotected drives for weeks.
The mother lode, she suspected, was inside the password manager of a senior statistician named Annie Teller. Hoffmann recalled Annie Teller. She was Black, tall and athletic, had an English accent, wore colorful clothing, and walked with a limp, her dark eyes trained on a distant point. She did not seem to notice anyone she passed. Usually, she did not say hello. Hoffmann hated when people said hello; thus, Annie Teller had been her favorite person to pass in the hall.
Hoffmann set about mining Annie Teller’s personal email, open in a separate browser window. Annie Teller tagged nothing, and a search of password did not help, so Hoffmann had no choice but to begin reading every email. She had no qualms about this. Once, a woman had left her purse in an AMLD bathroom stall, and Hoffmann, sitting on the toilet, went through every item. She knew such behaviors were considered “invasions,” but she never felt like an invader. She felt like what her job title said she was: a statistician, gathering information, cataloging data, and drawing objective conclusions.
Annie Teller sent and received a lot of personal emails. Did everyone send so many? An ongoing music-recommendation thread between Annie Teller and two friends was over three hundred messages long. Hoffmann, hunting for password clues, took note of the artists Annie Teller referenced most, as well as favorite food items and movies. Annie Teller had a hard-to-tabulate number of nieces and nephews both in the UK and the U.S.; Hoffmann noted each name. Annie Teller had suffered a spinal injury a few years back; Hoffmann wrote down the name of a chiropractor who’d become Annie Teller’s friend.
Receipts: there were thousands. Digital music, clothes, shoes, personal care products, and a surprising number of picture frames—Hoffmann imagined Annie Teller’s home as filled with framed photos of two countries’ worth of friends, siblings, grandparents, a
ll those nieces and nephews. Annie Teller did not appear to have pets, which was unfortunate. Even Hoffmann knew pet names were password gold.
Annie Teller was single. There were pings from online dating sites as well as emails from relationships that had progressed into the physical world. A few were sexually explicit; some employed a playful, coy voice that did not seem like Annie Teller at all; some were angry and in all caps; some were heartbroken and sloppy with spelling errors. None of the men seemed worthy of password status.
One relationship rose above all others. The woman’s name was Tawna Maydew. Annie Teller had met Tawna Maydew at Disney World in Florida. Even the mention of the theme park made Hoffmann’s stomach roil. All those strange people jammed chest to back inside snaking, inescapable queues—she could think of nothing worse. Annie Teller, though, seemed to have had a wonderful time there with one of her nieces, mostly because of being seated alongside Tawna Maydew on a ride called the Tower of Terror, The ride, Hoffmann gathered from contextual clues, emulated a plummeting elevator, which sounded hellacious but apparently forged camaraderie among riders.
The first emails between Annie Teller and Tawna Maydew were brief and tentative. Annie Teller: Hope you made it home safe to LA, just wanted to say thanks for being a friend at Disney! Tawna Maydew: No problem, limey! Did your lovely niece get that stain out? Annie Teller: Hahaha! I think that shirt will have to be burned. Btw, I did what you suggested and signed up for that service. I’m so hard to buy for. Too tall! I’ll let you know how it goes! Tawna Maydew: Not too tall—perfect. And you have the shoulders of a runway model. (The accent too.) Own it, mama.
Hoffmann’s least favorite old TV shows were romances. Not only did she feel nothing in terms of passion, she felt vaguely threatened by the physicality of larger men descending on smaller women. She wondered if this was why she felt an unusual investment in the burgeoning online affair of Annie Teller and Tawna Maydew. Annie Teller was the tall one, though Tawna Maydew’s selfies, of which there were plenty, showed her as fairly tall herself, a pale-skinned, pale-haired Nordic type with strong thighs and biceps, Even when Annie Teller resorted to expletives in frustration with her career or life, there was an honesty to her communication that had been missing from her stilted exchanges with dating-site men.
The Living Dead Page 7