The Living Dead

by Kraus, Daniel

  The swerve drove her closer to the door, where Daddy’s exposed skull, nearly completely peeled now, pressed against the wire. Nails were coming out there too, collecting on the ground amid the patties of skin, Greer kept going, past the horror, all the way into her dad’s room, where little Máximo, shorter and weaker, hadn’t made much progress against his chicken wire and an unknown aggressor kept striking the trailer’s corner with the bat.

  Greer threw open Freddy Morgan’s closet and dropped to her knees. There it was. It’d been years since she’d used any of it. If she placed her hands upon it, would the know-how come rushing back? She grabbed a huge duffel bag, shook it empty of camouflage clothing, and began shoveling everything she could into it. The Remington hunting rifle, the field-dressing knife, the machete, the binoculars, the first aid kit, the quiver of arrows, the bow.

  Dream’s Over

  With all those weapons so close, maybe Freddy Morgan had been less concerned with securing his own bedroom. That was the only excuse Greer could conjure for Máximo’s unexpected ousting of the chicken wire. Unlike Sam Hell, whom she could hear still struggling with his half-open mesh, Máximo dislodged the whole panel and within seconds began wriggling through broken glass, The remaining nails punched meaty holes in his hands. The baseball bat outside kept crashing, a relentless heartbeat.

  It was an ill-timed moment. Greer was entangled in gear, With Máximo nearly inside, calls had to be made. The Remington rifle, the thing she wanted most, had to go, because she couldn’t find a single fucking box of ammo. That made sense—it wouldn’t be like Daddy to leave a rifle and ammo sitting out—but if she’d kept closer to him, instead of just expecting him to bail her out at school, she’d know where the shells were now that it mattered.

  She knew Daddy had an older rifle, too, a Browning, but it was nowhere to be seen. Greer forgot it and kept piling. The fishing line of a collapsible pole got caught up in the mess, so in it went, and a box of tackle to boot. The bow was too long for the bag to close, but when she zipped it mostly shut, the bow stayed in place, She took one more, longing look at the Remington. She ought to take it. Scrounge up ammo later. Ignoring Máximo for another second, she lifted the rifle.

  From the wall behind it, white eyes stared.

  It was Constanza, Señorita Magdalena’s second oldest. Greer saw a flash of red and realized the girl was the one bashing the trailer with Drasko’s bat. She’d managed to make quite a hole. A couple of minutes more and it might be large enough to crawl through.

  Greer rocketed to her feet, the Remington abandoned. The duffel bag, swinging wildly, lobbed hard against the back of her knees. She fell, her butt hitting the carpet while the back of her head landed on her dad’s bed, She stared directly up at an upside-down boy, face warped with hunger. Máximo was crouched on the windowsill like a gargoyle, He pounced.

  His snarling face landed at her crotch; Greer kneed him in the nose, chin, and teeth. His kicking legs were in her face; she lassoed them with the arm not caught in the duffel’s straps. Now he was a cat in a bathtub, berserk, but he was also a little boy, and Greer was able to hurl his featherweight aside. She heard his teeth zing across her blue-jeaned calf.

  He landed badly, his neck sharply angled against Daddy’s bedside table, but she didn’t let herself regret what she’d done. She shot to her feet, taking the duffel bag handles in both hands, and sprinted. She blew past awful sights as quickly as shuttling through Netflix options. Freddy Morgan’s rinded skull, pimpled with skin blobs. Sam Hell’s grasping, mutilated hands. Greer veered back into the bathroom, locking the door behind her. Máximo was inside the trailer, and Constanza would be next.

  Greer rotated on a heel, set down her other foot, and José Frito got her.

  Her right leg sank through a hole he’d ripped through the floor, her heel planting on the dirt under the trailer, She cried out in shock and pain, dropping the duffel, José’s arms sprouted upward like tentacles. His hands, cockeyed bouquets of broken fingers, twined around her trapped thigh, Greer’s screech rattled the bathroom fixtures. It was the opposite of her earlier warrior shriek, the cry of a trapped rabbit.

  She twisted, straining to reach the duffel bag and Daddy’s machete. But the bag was behind her, and with her legs so widely scissored, her ability to turn was truncated. She felt her jeans tighten as José’s teeth clamped on a seam, One of her whipping arms struck a small decorative table with a semicircle top and Baroque legs, an unusually pretty accent piece, maybe the last item of beauty in her life.

  Fuck it—her mom probably stole it. Greer yanked a leg. The table crashed. She whacked it against the floor, and the leg snapped off in her hand. She lifted it high, then harpooned it downward. The splintered end drove straight into José’s open mouth and down his throat. Greer heard the wood rip through the back of his neck. His broken hands kept scratching, but he’d lost all leverage. Greer got her leg back and got herself back as well—juiced on apocalyptic frenzy, more awake than she’d ever felt at school, at parties, with Qasim.

  She opened the duffel bag, extracted Daddy’s machete, re-zipped the bag, and took to her knees beside the plywood wall that Freddy Morgan had erected with Drasko Zorić. She slotted the machete blade under the plywood and levered her full weight on it. Nails creaked like the hull of a wooden ship, and the four-by-eight board inched toward her. Too loud—those outside would hear—but there was no turning back. Greer set down the machete, slipped the fingers of both hands into the gap, braced her shoes against the wall, and pulled. The plywood wailed. Nails sprang free all over. One foot, two feet, three feet of space opened up. Greer felt as if she’d been locked in a vault for decades; she gasped at the rainy daylight.

  Like Constanza in the closet, two eyes stared back.

  Greer snatched the machete and reared back.

  The eyes were bright, not milky.

  “Please,” he coughed, “do not cut my head.”

  The accent was sandpaper and bubbles: Fadi Lolo, the Last Resort’s Syrian refugee. Rain flumed from his short black hair, through his thick eyebrows, and down into his tidy beard. He wore a soaked gray scarf, a striped dress shirt, and what looked like brand-new jeans. He gave his distinctive emphysemic wheeze, looked both ways, and made a small beckoning gesture with his hands.

  “They come,” he said, “Please be fast.”

  Greer had lost the ability to be slow. She gave the plywood one more gigantic yank. Fadi Lolo shoved from the other side. First out was the duffel, passed carefully through the yawning wall. Fadi placed the bag carefully behind him before offering Greer his hand. Again, no hesitation: she took it, and as José Frito choked on wood below and hands began pounding against the locked bathroom door, Fadi helped Greer through what felt like a portal.

  Only after her feet squished into mud did she appreciate Fadi’s composure. Drawn by her noisy escape, the rabid had swarmed. They moved like puppet strings were speared through Their limbs and directed by a common hand. Nearest was Constanza, who, instead of fighting through the breached closet, had circled around front, the Louisville Slugger making a rat-tail squiggle through mud. She was six feet away and in heartbreakingly pristine shape, her pajamas spotless.

  Right behind her was Miss Jemisha. Greer nearly shouted for her to run before she saw the white eyes glowing from a face crimson from partial scalping. Greer turned right to find an equal shock: Señorita Magdalena walking despite being run over by a van, ribs poking from her chest like ruffles down a suit. Behind Magdalena toddled her daughter Antonella, blood covering her face with theatrical uniformity.

  The hands, the teeth, the eyes. There was no way out.

  With apologetic tenderness, Fadi took her elbow.

  “It is a dream,” he said softly.

  When Greer picked up the duffel, it was funny: the bag did have a dream’s cloud-weight. By the elbow, he shepherded her to the right, out of reach of Constanza’s one-armed bat-swing.

  “Dreaming,” Fadi reminded her. He coughed and angle
d her leftward, away from Antonella’s lurch, and then spun her like a dancer to evade Jemisha’s hands. “Dreaming.” He put on the brakes, a football-style fake-out that sent Magdalena stumbling to the wrong spot. “Still dreaming.” Fadi led her through the steaming cloud left behind by Magdalena’s opened chest and hurried forward: “It is a very long dream.”

  A shape loomed straight head. Not Drasko, Greer prayed. But like everything this morning, the worst-case scenario prevailed. It was Drasko. Ten feet away, he tilted in their direction, his severe brow loosened to cowlike stupor while the ribbons of his tracksuit dangled like stringy blue udders. His hands made fists, as if aching for Greer and Fadi. Not noticing Fadi’s blue bicycle on the ground, Drasko stepped atop the gears and fell. A pedal whirred.

  “Dream’s over,” Fadi said, “Time to wake up.”

  He pinched Greer’s elbow hard and rushed off. She followed, shocked at the duffel bag’s abrupt resumption of weight. Drasko, on his knees, swiped at her and got nothing. Fadi hoisted his bicycle. Greer grieved the loss of his steady hand, but felt as though his fingers had been the prongs of a charger. Newly energized, she swung about to take in the advancing crowd. Five total, people she used to know. No, six—Daddy turned around to wiggle his forked tongue in his skeleton grin.

  “We go,” Fadi Lolo said. “Please.”

  He had one foot planted, the other ready on a pedal. The seat was empty, reserved for her. She slung the duffel bag over a shoulder, climbed on, and gripped his waist the best she could while holding a machete. Fadi tried to shove off, but Greer’s weight kept the bike from moving in the mud. Jemisha, Constanza, Drasko, Antonella, and Magdalena circled them, drawing closer in unison, a noose of pearly eyes, exposed teeth, and twitching fingers. Fadi stood on the pedals, his skinny thighs shaking. The wheels began to turn. One revolution and they were out of the mud; two revolutions and they hit asphalt.

  Greer thought of Mr. Villard, who’d called her black bitch, but who, in an untidy twist, had given her the right advice from the start: Get clear of the whole park.

  With a vertiginous waggle, they were off, more or less, Greer wasn’t aware of the playground area’s blood stench until they punched through its humid net. The rain beyond was chillier. She reminded herself she meant nothing to Fadi Lolo. How could she? She’d never had the gumption to say a single word to him. He’d picked her up like he’d picked up Last Resort trash: it was an optimistic act, and perhaps optimism was all a man like Fadi Lolo had left.

  It might be all any of them had left.

  Greer gripped him tightly, feeling the strain of his stomach as he pedaled faster. His rain-sodden scarf flapped like a pennant past Greer’s head, She ducked under it and saw, in the center of the asphalt road, the ravaged being once known as Silvana. She looked barely human. Her hand was gristle. Her torso was tunneled by rifle shots. Her head dangled by a cordon of vertebrae. Somehow her jaws continued to gnash and her blinkless white eyes still stared.

  Fadi swung wide, but not overly so; the bicycle didn’t dare take on the muddy shoulder. Greer felt her arm extend. She looked down its length and rediscovered the machete. The blade was sprinkled with the weeds Daddy had hacked with it. It had been a tool with a purpose. It still was. Greer drew the blade back slowly, so as not to unbalance the bike. Fadi glanced back, aware of what she was doing and prepared to counterweight.

  Silvana, her upside-down head sending inverted messages to her brain, reached for them—in the wrong direction. Greer did not swing the machete; instead, she held it straight and used its point, almost tenderly, to give the girl a push. It was enough to topple her. The weight of Silvana’s head finally tore it free. The head rolled into a ditch, litter no one would ever collect.

  Greer tucked the machete against Fadi’s side. The bicycle took the long, last corner before the home stretch toward the exit—a smashup of cars and people. Greer stared directly at Fadi Lolo’s back, which crackled with a new round of coughs. Fadi had never been invited to the Sunnybrook Club; Greer had been invited but never joined. Yet she felt both of them had done enough in this day’s first hour to carry on the club’s extraordinary spirit. She’d been Señorita Magdalena’s mi corazón and she was glad of that, but it wasn’t enough. To make her survival count, Greer Morgan would have to be all of their hearts, and keep fighting, keep surviving until the end.

  ALL THAT

  TALK

  MAKES

  YOU

  BELIEVE

  Bad Vs. Badder

  By 10:00 a.m. EST on October 24, the news domineered the airwaves. It broke like a tsunami, walloping TV stations, gossip sites, and radio shows before splashing across millions of breathless social media accounts. Histrionics reigned even as some dismissed the reports as fiction. Disbelief was understandable; news like this was liable to shake the bedrock beliefs of any American.

  Ben Hines, beloved actor, Academy Award winner, “America’s Dad,” had been accused of exposing himself to not one, not two, but forty-five different hotel workers over the past decade, all of whom, through their law firm, had released a joint statement at dawn.

  Those with trained ears could hear the doors of newsrooms banging wide open, followed by satellite vans revving like jungle cats. Los Angeles police, skilled in scandal, proactively dispatched officers to Hines’s Pacific Palisades neighborhood to enforce parking and privacy laws. Reporters in other cities pounced just as quickly. Hines had acted in more than one hundred movies and had filmed in nearly every metropolitan market in the country, begetting legions of locals—hotel staff in particular—who might be willing to describe brushes with the suddenly disgraced star.

  An insatiable anger stewed like toxic waste inside average Americans, an ardent belief that no mortal should be permitted a charmed life without periodic flogging in public. Hines was overdue. He was married to a woman so wretchedly unfamous people didn’t even know her name. He’d had no divorces, no public spats, no leaked tapes of the sexual or prima donna variety. He’d spawned not a single scurrilous hashtag, The desire to speckle his immaculate record with mud had grown fevered, almost erotic.

  “It’s huge,” WWN news director Pam Tripler gushed as Nathan Baseman, the second executive producer, charged into the newsroom, before clarifying, “The story is huge. No news yet on the dick.”

  Baseman shivered instead of replying. Could Tripler not see the train crash that had been set into motion? Three hours later, his shiver had matured into a clenching stomach as he stared from the glare-proof, floor-to-ceiling, conference-room windows on the twentieth floor of the CableCorp Tower, the parent company of a bevy of networks, including WWN. He pictured his old buddy, his bottle of antacid, waiting for him inside his desk and tried to distract himself with the Atlanta skyline. The sunblasted skyscrapers, bushy green parks, sports-stadium cornucopias, gray canals of streets ferreting cars like gondolas—these things never changed. Except today, the harder Baseman looked, the more change he saw. Two separate spires of black smoke. A multiple-car pileup. Emergency vehicle lights everywhere. Maybe every morning looked like this. It was possible. Maybe he, and everyone else in the conference room, had simply forgotten how to see.

  He was the only one facing the outside world. The rest were doing what they did best, staring at a TV. While five smaller screens continued to play the muted broadcasts of competitors (all embroiled in wall-to-wall Hines coverage), the one-hundred-inch 4K TV mounted on the eastern wall played, for the third straight time, an unedited, watermarked, six-minute piece of footage sent in by notorious Chicago stringer Ross Quincey.

  Quincey ran a circuit of speed-demon nightcrawlers who regularly scooped Windy City photogs; he sold their exclusive footage to the highest local bidder. On occasion, one of Ross Quincey’s men would capture something worthy of the twenty-four-hour networks. The brash firebrand was no less aggravating for having been minimized to a blinking red dot on the room’s central speakerphone, on hold awaiting WWN’s bid. Quincey said he had simultaneous calls out to C
NN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, and Fox, and Baseman did not think he was bluffing.

  Quincey’s video was not why this meeting had been called; it was, for the stringer, fortuitous coincidence. The fifty-two people packed into this room designed for thirty was the result of a proliferation of smaller, impromptu huddles not even network overlords could ignore. Baseman considered it a damning barometer. In the parlance of the morning’s first breaking-news story, WWN had been caught with its pants down.

  Ben Hines flashed through Baseman’s mind, ruffled and coiffed in one of his period performances. Baseman wanted to take Hines’s Oscar and ram it up the man’s ass. That maid-harassing slimeball had so utterly distracted the media with his old-man dick that not a single major station had reserved camera crews for the story that mattered, one assignment editors had heard rumblings of last night but wiped from their brains the second the word penis hit their in-boxes.

  Every cell in Nathan Baseman’s sixty-six-year-old body told him this was the kind of TV game changer he’d seen only thrice in his career. Nixon’s fall, O.J.’s trial, 9/11. His gut was rarely wrong, and the rest of his organs were fair oracles as well. His pounding lungs, tingling extremities, and rushing blood told the truth: he could not hold Hines responsible for the media’s sins. If this turned out to be the thing to end their careers, it’d be the end they deserved—tut-tutting over some guy’s wayward willy while the world burned down around them.

  Baseman glanced at the screen, hoping Quincey’s tape had run its course. Not even close; the footage had the ability to warp time, turn three minutes into three years. The camera was at telephoto length. This was typical; stringers often zoomed in from across the street while they assessed the situation. Seconds later, though, the perspective jostled forward as the photog sprinted toward the scene, This was what made Ross Quincey’s crew famous. Where average humans hid, if not fled, Quincey’s freelancers hurled themselves into the fray like Navy SEALs, minus all noble intentions.