The Living Dead

by Kraus, Daniel

  Even now, more sobs waited in her lungs; only the heaviness of the flight suit she still wore kept them in. But Father Bill was perceptive, his wrinkle-wadded eyes more piercing than those of the boat’s bright-eyed young sailors.

  “You fear you put other sailors in harm’s way,” he concluded.

  He’d sliced to the marrow. Jenny nodded, watching her shoes, wondering if falling tears might darken the proud brown leather to pedestrian black.

  “Whoever’s throwing ChemLights into the water.” Jenny sniffled and wiped her nose. “I’m no better than he is.”

  She didn’t think she’d meet another person’s eyes ever again. But she felt a pinching sensation and found Father Bill’s hand was on her knee. His bony grip hurt, but she knew he meant the squeeze to comfort.

  “You are better than he is,” he whispered, “Because you’re here. Look around you. You’re in God’s house. That’s all he wants. We can systematize forgiveness if you want. Some Hail Marys and so forth. But by speaking here, in this humble place of worship, you’re already doing the asking.”

  “But will he … forgive someone who doesn’t even … who’s not sure…”

  “If she believes in him?” Father Bill’s hand moved to just above her knee and squeezed again. “Belief is a funny thing, My Sweet. Some who have it in excess only use it in self-serving ways. Others might believe one single time in their life, but it’s the time that makes all the difference. It reminds me of the Jewish legend of the golem. Do you know it?”

  She could not hold his tender gaze for more than an instant; Jenny found herself looking at his footwear—black, rubber-soled boots, thick gray socks.

  “A golem is a monster of sorts, usually made of clay. It’s illuminated with life by a creator who rarely comprehends the sort of beast he has unleashed. A colleague of mine, a rabbi, said he knew an old Jew who swore he’d shaped a golem from the mud and blood of a World War II battlefield, a golem that had saved his battalion, This rabbi believed it. He believed that golems have been created all through history, supposedly to protect Their creators, but actually to protect the Earth itself. Why else were They so easy to create? The rabbi swore that one day, golems would turn on Their creators, learn how to build more of Their own kind, and use Their overwhelming numbers to cleanse the Earth of evil.”

  A dark drop of red expanded on one of Father Bill’s gray socks, Blood? Jenny’s eyes traced upward to the leg he had been favoring.

  “Nonsense, of course,” he continued. “But revealing. When it comes to belief, it is the quality, not the quantity.”

  “Father.” Jenny’s voice cracked, “You’re bleeding.”

  Father Bill did not look. Instead, he grinned, a wide mouthful of yellow teeth, and gripped her thigh so tightly she thought the tips of his fingers might spear through her flight suit. He leaned in, and she thought she smelled blood on his breath.

  “Let all mortal flesh keep silence,” he shushed.

  Jenny valued and trusted this man. Yet she now heard, as clarion as Olympia’s man-overboard whistles, the internal alert all women knew. She’d misjudged something. She wasn’t safe. She felt her elbows bend and pale arms rotate, mobilizing for Wrist Warfare.

  Before she could begin to fight, both she and Father Bill were gripped by the loudest alarm of all—the alarm of silence. On a carrier, you quit hearing the whang and whoosh of flight ops the same way you quit hearing your pulse and breath. It was the middle of the afternoon on a day with a busy flight sked, and the stretch of flight-deck quiet lasted one second too long. Jenny gasped and felt faint, as if she truly had no breath or pulse, dead without having noticed.

  You Are Hungry

  You are hungry. You wake up. In that order.

  This hunger is different from any you knew before. This hunger is a lack. Something has been taken from you. You do not know what. This hunger is everywhere. Hunger, the fist. Hunger, the bones, Hunger, the flesh. Hunger, the brain. Hunger, in all the between places. It is your reason for waking up. It is the reason you move, It is the reason.

  You look. Your eyesight is poor, There is a body next to yours. You smell it. It smells strong. You have a faint recollection of booze. You recognize the body. It used to be called Jean Cobb. Was Jean Cobb important? You do not know, Jean Cobb called you Scud. You remember this now. Here is the curious thing. Jean Cobb is no longer Jean Cobb. She is you. You are also you. You feel the hunger in both of you. You feel the hunger between both of you. The hunger is a thing that stretches outward. Feels around for more yous. But finds nothing. Not yet. Only the Scud-you and the Jean-you. Only

  You experiment, Your neck works. Your fingers work. Your limbs work. You disentangle from Jean-you. You stand. You stagger. But your foot knows what to do. It kicks out, saves you from collapse. This is because your foot is hungry too. Where are you going? You don’t need to know, not all of you. Your body is a hound’s nose, trailing a scent it cannot help but pursue. You will know you have reached your goal when you reach the goal. You already have a sense of it. Nourishment to fill the void. To replace what was taken.

  You walk on unstable legs. Your muscles cramp. You walk into a wall. The thudding sound is far away. You hear as poorly as you see. You turn, You walk in a different direction. You hit another wall. Turn again. Your eyes see a door. A memory comes with it. Doors are passageways. You think of Jean-you on the floor and feel a desire to stay with it. The feeling is close to hunger. But hunger overrides. You move your legs and hit the door belly-first.

  The door does not open. This displeases you. A sound comes out of you. It is lionlike, a roar. You are surprised by it. You did not know you could make sounds. You try to make another sound. You are unhappy with it. You want the first sound again, the stronger one. It is a preference. Preferences are more important than you know. You are no longer Scud, but you are closer to Scud than a mouse or insect. You try again for the roar, Closer this time, a growl.

  You are learning.

  The door yawns open under your hands. You shuffle forward, your weight drawing the door wider. Abruptly, you are free of its opposition, in a new place. It is a narrow, gray, windowless corridor. Nothing but walls. You are developing another preference, Walls: you do not like them. You point yourself at a distant point where the walls appear to end.

  Before you can head off, a noise comes from inside the room you left. It is the Jean-you, Jean-you has risen like Scud-you has risen. The Scud-you would like to see Jean-you. You turn back to the door and push it with your hands again. But pushing this side does no good. There is a thing, a handle. You do not recall how it works. You make a sound. This time it is the roar you want.

  There is nothing to be done. You cannot reach Jean-you. No longer valid, the idea winks out, Hunger, hunger. You turn back to the hallway and begin walking. Your first steps are awkward. Your body pitches and slants. You get better at it. You establish a functional lope. You learn that you have no sense of time. When you get to the hallway’s termination point, you do not know or care if the walk took an instant or eternity.

  You discover the hallway turns. So you turn. You cannot hear well, but sounds surround you. Hiss, clank, rattle, chug, trill, bang, creak, ping, honk, ding, beep, whang, hum, boom, glug, snap, whoosh, purr, clink, zing. Also an echoing clop. Also a burbling murmur. You know what these sounds are. Walking, talking. The hunger spikes. These sounds are not produced by you. But they could become you. You go toward them.

  You do not know fluid has begun to run from your mouth. You do not know it is a cocktail of livid plasma, dead cells, and blackened bits of arterial plaque. You do not know it is thickening from waste matter you can no longer excrete. You cannot taste this fluid because it tastes like you. What you want has a different taste.

  You see them. Three fast-moving ones, coming into view. Hunger, hunger. They pass through pockets of light. Each second they spend in the dark, you mourn their disappearance. Each second in the light, you feel saliva heavying your chest hair. The fast-mov
ing ones reach you in seconds. Hunger, hunger, hunger. They stop a few feet away. You cannot tell them apart. Their faces share the same expression. Their uniforms are the same. Only the insignia on their shoulders is different.

  You look down at your own shoulder. You have an insignia too. You do not understand it designates you as a former fast-moving one. Yet you feel oddly about it. If you knew the word wistful, that would be the word to use. There was a life that went with that insignia. You have the sense parts of that life were good. You watch brown strands of your saliva creep over the insignia. That life is gone. Life is gone. That is okay. Back then, there was only one you. How unfortunate. Now there can be so many more.

  The fast-moving one in front has check marks on his sleeve. He opens his mouth. You smell the salt of his lips, the brine of his tongue. He makes delicious, moist sounds that make your flesh sing. Certain words are recognizable.

  muck muck muck SICK muck muck muck DRUNK muck muck muck SALUTE muck muck SALUTE muck SALUTE muck GODDAMN IT muck INSUBORDINATE muck

  The fast-moving one’s face reddens. All that hot, salty blood right under the surface. Your hunger ignites. You reach for him with both hands. He slaps one aside, but the other grabs his shirt. You know how to grab. The fast-moving one takes hold of your wrist. He shouts in alarm. You bow your upper body. Your feet trip, Your head dives at his head. You open your mouth. Your mouth is all that matters. You fall onto him. Your teeth sink into the soft bulb of his chin and strike bone.

  The fast-moving one screams.

  Your bottom jaw snaps onto the underside of his chin. You have lost your footing. You hang from his face by your teeth. You hear flesh tear from his chin. Hot blood pours into your cold mouth. Hunger, hunger, hunger. Your jaws gnash. Your tongue wants more. Your tongue extends to lick exposed bone. Your tongue stretches so hard you feel it rip from your mouth. The fast-moving one is shoving you away. The skin of his chin is stretching. You remember melted cheese. It is like that, just as salty.

  The other two fast-moving ones grab and pull you. You want to bite them too. You wrench your neck. The skin rips off the first one’s chin. As you fall, you catch the second fast-moving one’s arm and pull him to the floor. The floor is cold. Blood, so hot, steams on it. You can smell the infection. It is the infection of life. You want to lap it up, but the fallen one is below you and that is even better. He blocks you with his forearm. You bite his wrist and pull from it a hot mouthful. You can feel the severed veins twitch and spurt along your tongue.

  The fast-moving ones now arriving are beyond your ability to count. They try to stop you. You do not mind, They are made from meat. Fingers to bite. Hands to chomp. Legs to scratch. You are delirious with appetite. The fast-moving ones fall and flop and make silly noises. You can smell yourself in their newly changing blood. It is

  The fast-moving ones are all over you now. They may destroy you. You are not worried, You will live on in these other yous. One small speck of you, formerly known as Scud, does miss the you formerly called Jean Cobb, but you have a sense that Scud-you and Jean-you will reunite as the yous multiply. This is the end. It is also the beginning.

  Mommy’s Boy

  Two hours before Jennifer Angelys Pagán’s alarm over Lieutenant Commander William Koppenborg’s squeezing fingers was cut short by flight-deck silence, Seaman Recruit E-1 Matthew Sears, Culinary Specialist, was derelict for duty. Matt was scheduled to work soup and chili at the largest of Big Mama’s six crew galleys on second deck at 1400; carrier food service began at 0600 reveille and ended with midnight rations, or midrats. Now it was 1425 and Matt was really going to get it. His superior, Warrant Officer Lance Fiederling, was a shouter to whom no reality-TV restaurant chef could compare.

  This tardiness followed two others. Five weeks ago, Matt had been physically restrained by two asshole gunner’s mates. He’d been making a weepy phone call to his mother, who he called Mommy, and the gunner’s mates had overheard. They sat on his chest until he was five minutes late, goading Mommy’s Boy to fight back, which he’d refused to do. This morning, they’d done it again, sitting on his chest for fifteen minutes. There wasn’t a thing Matt could do about it except gimp away after they grew bored and accept he was about to have Lance Fiederling’s furious spittle all over his face.

  Matt Sears ran—then walked when encountering officers—then ran again. His vision careened like he was drunk. His balance was off; he listed portside. He whacked a shoulder on a hatch. He thought he felt, like a worm in his belly, the onset of nausea. Just what he needed. He knew what Mommy would say: Stay in bed, baby. He also knew what Father, a former rear admiral, would say: You show up for duty unless you’re dying, sailor, and even then, you ask permission.

  Was it the flu? He recalled the flu outbreak in the third month of deployment; the docs vaccinated all five thousand sailors in three days. It sure felt like the flu. His head and chest were brick heavy, a funky sludge coated his throat, and he was cold despite the underdeck heat. Mommy would call it psychosomatic. He was a nervous kid, and the whole boat was on edge after last night’s storm, the bolting incident, the third man-overboard alert, and deployment’s approaching end.

  Maybe his body was reacting to what he’d just seen outside the winch room: a heap of men wrestling a naked nutcase. Meltdowns like this happened more often than the navy admitted; people really did go mad at sea, Matt had heard stories. Guys spreading shit all over their racks, Bludgeoning bombs with wrenches. Maybe even tossing ChemLights into the water.

  Picking a moment to slip past the fray, he flattened himself to the wall and crept along. The naked man at the bottom of the heap convulsed, causing a sailor landslide, and Matt felt fingers, shockingly cold, blindly snatch for his hand. As Matt pulled away, the man’s fingernails clawed across the back of Matt’s hand. Matt stumbled out of reach, his shoes smacking through underfoot blood.

  He kept going, he had to, and didn’t examine his hand until he was under the brighter lights of a ladder. Three scratches welled blood. Self-pity overwhelmed him. The scratches hurt, he was starting to feel sick, and he wanted to be home—he was Mommy’s Boy, just like the gunner’s mates said. He clamped his opposite hand over the scratches to staunch the blood until he began to climb the ladder. A carrier was an injury factory; this was not even the worst wound he’d taken this month.

  Fiederling’s bawling out was one for the books. But by the time oratory truly started soaring, Matt couldn’t pay attention. He felt worse, Awful, actually. Oily bullets of sweat were slaloming down his face, through Fiederling’s spit. The inside of his throat was so feverous he pictured it crimson. His intestines cramped, but there was no rectal urgency. Whatever was festering inside was just sitting there.

  Matt staggered to the pantry. Fluorescents glared off tins of Victory Garden Pork and Beans, Country Sausage Gravy. Focus on the job, he told himself, Feeding Olympia was a gargantuan task, Fiederling’s army included one hundred cooks and two hundred attendants. They served fifteen thousand meals a day. Matt alone might serve soup and chili to several hundred before the day’s dinner rush even began.

  He happened upon the latex-glove dispenser. Yes, best to be safe. The two rubbery snaps over his hands invigorated him like slaps to the face. He didn’t need Mommy. He was going to be all right. He opened and shut his eyes several times, granulating the crust forming along his eyelids.

  There it was. The soup line. A long casket of contoured steel. Sneeze guards recently wiped. Because Matt was late, the soups were already waiting, containers resting in hot wells set to 140 degrees. He shambled to the open station. The CS who had been handling his portion of work glared at him.

  When the CS’s expression changed to one of concern, Matt figured he must look pretty bad. He turned away and studied the soups. The vat of tomato blurred into the vat of chicken and rice. Gradually, he became aware that a sailor was waiting. Matt reached for the ladle, which rattled away from him. He blamed the latex gloves; he couldn’t feel anything. He reached for t
he ladle a second time and felt a kind of awe as he successfully lifted it.

  He did not, however, successfully serve the soup. The ladle cracked down on the sailor’s bowl, splashing all over. The sailor shouted and cursed and said unkind things about Matt, but Matt was not listening. His hearing had deadened as if he’d strapped on flight-deck earmuffs. Other senses were dimming too. He could barely smell the “bug juice,” the navy’s bright-red, sugar-bomb take on Kool-Aid. He could barely see two feet in front of him. Despite all this, he no longer felt sick, or not exactly; he’d gone past ill to a prickling numbness. Leaving the galley per Mommy’s advice was no longer an option.

  He’d show Fiederling. He’d show Father. He chased after the ladle with dumb fingers. This time, he saw the problem. The three gashes on the back of his hand were still bleeding. In fact, blood had inflated his latex glove like a full condom.

  Slowly, he grasped the handle of the ladle. As he curled each finger into place, the glossy balloon of blood swelled larger. Matt was transfixed. He wondered how long the glove would hold. He folded the fourth finger, The latex tumor wobbled. He pictured Mommy, weeping, telling him he never should have enlisted. He pictured Father, snorting over his mustache, declaring any job worth starting was worth finishing.

  Matt bent his thumb around the ladle. The latex bubble burst. Dark blood shot into the tomato soup and sank beneath the surface like a meatball. Matt blinked, felt his eyelashes gum together. Maybe he should use the ladle to fish out the blood. But that would take so much effort, and he was so tired.