The Living Dead

by Kraus, Daniel

  Tawna Maydew: they’d met at the most American place of all, Disney World, But Tawna had been no Imagineer’s trick; after weeks of emailing, Annie knew she was in love with the big, blond Californian, who stood just as tall as Annie, but was softer in every way. Tawna was the opposite of D.C.’s insomniac go-getters; she slept late, loafed at boardwalk cafés in the LA sun, devoured film noirs, and compared Annie’s limp to the hip-swinging walks of Lauren Bacall and Gloria Grahame.

  Scheduling obstructed a repeat face-to-face month after month, making Annie wonder if it was a sign from Robin Hood (certainly not God) that their romance was not meant to be. Then Tawna started sending photos of the La Brea Tar Pits, which were right by Tawna’s apartment. We can kiss by the gooey ruins of prehistoric Earth! Tawna emailed, which made Annie’s heart gooey too. She emailed back, If the world goes gooey, we’ll meet on the banks of beautiful La Brea! She meant it. She thought daily of walking out of AMLD.

  Weeks later, on the morning of October 24, she wished more than anything that she had. That was the day dead people quit staying dead, thereby screwing up the VSDC system, the AMLD models, and every other bloody thing in the world.

  She could not get hold of Tawna. She sent texts all morning, but her phone refused to confer DELIVERED status to a single one. Around lunch, Annie began trying to ring her—even Tawna, lazy and on Pacific time, should be up by then. Instead of Tawna’s voice mail, Annie was met with a dial tone. Cellular networks were crashing all over, coworkers were saying. Annie glared at the plastic gadget that had once meant so much.

  People had been trickling out all day, but 3:15, for some reason, was the instant of critical mass. The trickle grew to a flash flood, and when the statisticians in the cubicles to either side of Annie left, she recognized the moment for what it was: a chance to chase what mattered, as she’d once chased a wooden arrow shot from a window. Briefly, she met the flat glance of the remote Etta Hoffmann, who munched dusty trail mix with her usual lack of concern.

  Annie picked up her jacket and purse, same as she always did, and exited. The street was a calamity of honking, swerving cars and people threading between them. She had to walk forty minutes before she lucked into sharing a cab with another Dulles-bound woman, Annie asked the woman if she had a ticket. The woman said no. Annie asked her where she was hoping to fly. Anywhere, the woman said, but here.

  After sickening hours spent in snaking, shoving, shouting lines, Annie, barefoot because of the unsensible heels she’d worn that day, took what she could get, a red-eye to LAX with a five-hour layover in Vegas. La Brea, she repeated to herself to block out the shouting men and crying children. The inside joke had become the oath upon which all depended.

  Hours later, in a clipped voice, the pilot announced midair their flight was being rerouted, either to Chicago or Atlanta, he didn’t fucking know. The second Annie heard the curse word, she knew she’d never reach LA by ordinary means. Getting to the tar pits would require the same tenacity it had taken to get out of that Mansfield bed and into Sherwood Forest.

  Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport was designed in the style of a multilevel shopping mall. That day, the shoppers had gone madder than any Black Friday throng, creating a mosh pit of humanity no regular cadre of security guards was capable of quelling. Airline employees tried to keep a handle on their passengers. Name tags were slapped to people’s chests so they might be found in the madness. A kindergarten idea, it’d never work, but Annie scrawled her name on it, and as an added measure included her destination.

  Most name tags didn’t survive the hour. Annie saw gate agents tackled so people could storm packed planes; she saw people clambering over x-ray conveyer belts, laptops scandalously stowed and shoes indecently on their feet.

  Annie limped outside. Late October in Atlanta was hot, and she was sleepless and starving. She wandered sweltering asphalt frontage roads and gravel shoulders, trailing locals who must know better than she did. Half a day later, she came upon a city bus idling on some airport access road; it was taking people west, free of charge, and that was all Annie needed to hear: west. She got on, spotting a few others with name tags, and was sandwiched so tightly in the aisle she was able to catch a nap standing up.

  She woke to a pressing, elbow-into-ribs tumult, people crying and bulldozing off the bus. Annie squinted past rushing bodies—still daytime. She was soppy with sweat, only some of it her own. She smelled diesel smoke, sweet and woolly. Following the crowd, same as at the airport, she found herself in the middle of a city street. To her right, the bus, its nose flattened to the discharge chute of a cement truck. The back undercarriage of the bus was on fire, and the right half of its sixteen wheels were smeared with a gloppy red paste. To her left, dozens of people streamed like ants from a McDonald’s, arms filled with to-go bags of food. Oh, the two were connected: one of the fast-food raiders had been flattened by the bus, his body exploded at either end like a toothpaste tube squeezed in the center.

  Between the bus and McDonald’s, directly in front of her, was a hospital.

  Several bodies were laid out on a neat patch of lawn, where two women in grass-stained white coats ministered to them. High up a tower, a window had been broken, and furniture was being launched from it. Why, Annie could not imagine. She thought of the VSDC network that, last she knew, still functioned and how vital it was that hospital staff kept sending data if anyone wished to understand this someday. She thought of Mildred, of how she and the rest of the Mansfield-on-Sherwood team had commended Annie for picking up nursing principles so swiftly.

  The La Brea Tar Pits had waited tens of thousands of years. They could wait a few hours until Annie paid her dues.

  The fiascos at AMLD and ATL were nothing next to the blooming catastrophe of Westside Medical Center. The beige-and-pink lobby writhed with bodies as overburdened triage teams decided which cases were hopeless. Annie fled. Wandering the halls, she saw the bucking lower body of a woman being attacked by a man who’d crawled into her MRI tube. She saw an active treadmill in a physical therapy room unoccupied but for a human leg attached by a string of sinew. She saw overturned incubators and a nurse’s body, upon which three tiny, blue-skinned infants sucked noisily. Annie sobbed in relief when she found a crowded ER room. Finally, a place of professionalism where she could help, or not, and get on with her westward trek.

  It took three seconds for a dead woman named Katrina Goteborg to wake up, latch on to Annie’s arm, reel her in, and bite.

  Memories bit too, Dorchester, six years back: a scrape with a juiced midfielder who bit her on the forearm. Georgetown, two years ago: in bed with a man named Barney, whose ear nibbles drew blood. The brain-stem frenzy of being attacked, of being food, was primal and familiar. Annie pulled away as doctors, or possibly passing do-gooders, tried to help. She saw the flesh of her right arm stretch a good two inches and watched twin red lines appear as Katrina’s canines sliced through the skin, trying to hang on.

  Yanking free, Annie stumbled back six feet, tripped, and landed hard, supine. For a short while, she saw only operating lights, multiple white suns risen over a radically changed world. When her eyes worked again, she investigated her wounds. Katrina’s canines had made tidy, razor-blade slashes. They felt both white hot and icy cold. Her stomach flopped like she was going to vomit. Every throb of her pulse shoved thickening blood into her brain. Her limbs went cold even as her bones got so hot she could smell the marrow. She stopped hearing doctors, or Katrina Goteborg, or Atlanta’s fall.

  She curled around an IV stand, pressed her hot face against cool steel. It was the last conscious act she’d ever make, and she knew it. Anger faded to bitterness. The storybook tale of Annie and Tawna was supposed to end with them in each other’s arms. Where was the scene when Robin Hood’s spirit inspired Annie to keep fighting? Where was the scene when Annie used a footballer’s nimble legwork to evade all dangers?

  Annie Teller died. It wasn’t fair.

  She had undergone seismic chan
ges before, but nothing near to the change she experienced fourteen minutes after death. She was still Annie Teller—her name tag insisted it—but not only Annie Teller. She was also Katrina Goteborg. She was also several others. She was all of Them. She is all of you.

  You know your loss. You know your hunger to fill it. You learn how to walk. From there, you take up the hunt.

  Only by the number of fast-moving ones you taste can any progress be measured. While feasting on the buttocks of a fast-moving one, a memory surfaces, as palpable as the boiling blood on your tongue. It is a place. You can picture it but cannot invoke its smell, sounds, tastes, or textures.

  You see green trees with long, leafless trunks. You see tall fences around black ponds. The blackness is tar. It bubbles. A mammoth is being sucked into the tar. You are not aware it is a statue. You sense the beast’s fear but feel none of it yourself.

  The photos you recall are emblazoned with letters. Thirteen letters, always in the same order. Curiously, you find them repeated on a piece of paper on your breast: LA BREA TAR PITS. You do not know how exceptional it is for you to link a thought to printed words. What you know are three facts. LA BREA TAR PITS is a place. LA BREA TAR PITS is far away. LA BREA TAR PITS is where you need to go.

  Your limp will slow you. It will not stop you. You walk for months, or days, or weeks, or just a few minutes until you exit the hospital. You hear fast-moving ones in all directions. That is good, Along the way to LA BREA TAR PITS you will use fast-moving ones to make more yous. There is plenty of time, because there is no time.

  You look into the sun. It is red orange and low in the sky. You have a sense you should pursue it. Again you walk for seconds, or minutes, or days, or weeks, or months until the need to have a fast-moving one overwhelms you. You stop and see a tall, mirrored building. You decide to enter. There are letters on the building, just three, far fewer than those making up LA BREA TAR PITS. You cannot read them, but their pointy, up-and-down slashes remind you of beeping bedside monitors you saw in the hospital. This must mean there’s life inside. Fast-moving ones inside. You like these three letters a lot.

  WWN.

  Sarcophages

  “Fuck me, you gotta be fucking kidding me, you fucking fuck!”

  Luis Acocella yelled this at his phone—his best friend, his archnemesis. Between encouraging Charlie’s more outré decisions, such as bashing through the red plastic of a Wendy’s sign to evade a fender bender or destroying a front-yard rose garden to escape a bottleneck, Luis had managed to dance his jittery fingers through the multiple, multisyllabic passwords required to open up a Lilliputian version of the VSDC home page. His goal was to manually upload what he felt was the pivotal revelation of the John Doe case: that a killing blow to the brain, and nothing less, had stopped him.

  Turns out, his fucking access was tied to the fucking morgue’s secure fucking IP address. Here he had real fucking info that might save real fucking lives and no fucking way to spread it. Unless he was being timed out by the shitty signal?

  This was, for Luis, an anxiety familiar enough to be comforting, and he embraced it, hoisting his phone out the rolled-down passenger window like that ever did a goddamn thing, then thumbing background apps into oblivion, like that did a goddamn thing either. The Prius hit a bump. Traffic was only moving at a start-and-stop ten miles per hour, but the car’s shocks jounced. The impediment was larger than a speed bump. Luis peered into his rearview mirror.

  “Don’t look back, Acocella.”

  Good advice. Given what they’d seen both at the morgue and since leaving it, it was better not to know, even if it went against a physician’s instincts. Luis shrugged at Charlie, hoping to project a goofiness that might help get them another five minutes down the road. It was like patching his bicycle tire with his brother, Manolo, when they were kids. The rubber-and-glue patches held for a few miles, and Luis would settle for that, a distraction against the hell that had crawled out of the morgue’s cooler and begun to flood the San Diego streets.

  He thought back to sprinting from Fabi’s Spanish Palace, to his first sight of John Doe’s body, a soft lump beneath the overpass. How quaint his argument with Detective Walker seemed now. In the hours since, Luis had seen many similar lumps on sidewalks, lawns, porches, and playgrounds, a couple of which he’d caught in the process of standing back up. Still, branding this as Armageddon was premature, Twenty-four-hour fast-food joints were still doling out bagged heart attacks, and all-night check-cashing spots were still carving up paychecks.

  Only one thing had really collapsed: the roads. A power plant must have blinked out somewhere, cutting traffic signals and streetlights. Not even a passenger with a complete mental map of the city and a driver of IndyCar ability could get anywhere, Interstates, two-lanes, byways, alleys—any route he and Charlie tried, a crash, abandoned vehicle, or sawhorse fort held them back.

  Luis felt Charlie’s hand give his free wrist a squeeze.

  Maybe it was the fright, the disorientation, but her hand felt good.

  He had to pull his wrist away to tap Rosa on his Favorites. His phone said it was his thirty-third time. Once more, only the dead tone he’d never heard before today. The vehicle jerked as Charlie hit the brakes. Right outside Luis’s window, a veterinary clinic. Shavings of dirt rose up from the bottoms of doors, and hair and whiskers poked from screen windows. The animals were trying to get out. Luis swiped to his camera to get a shot, but the storage was full. He cursed, thumbed back, and squinted at thumbnails to choose a photo for execution.

  “Wasn’t it some indigenous tribe that said photos stole your soul?” Charlie asked.

  “If that’s true,” Luis said, “we’re all empty.”

  “Broken-record time: you’ve got to stop staring at that phone.”

  “Mmmmm.”

  “Shit is happening, Acocella. It’s happening right in front of our faces.”

  “Fuck! Of course!”

  “Well, that’s more enthusiasm than I’d expected.”

  “No! Social fucking media! That’s how I’ll get this out!”

  “Oh, come on.”

  He axed Favorites, swiped to find Twitter, “Taylor Swift, Justin Bieber—I’m counting on you guys.”

  Charlie snorted, which made Luis grin: another patch on another tire. The diener had kept her spirits up, Luis gave her that. Glancing at Charlie, he had to acknowledge she’d never looked better, her scrubs long gone to reveal her fallback ensemble of frayed jean shorts and a breast-baring flannel shirt, her blond hair like soapsuds in a breeze. Luis had seen before how she sharpened during a crisis, reverting to the agility and energy of her booze-and-bruise Parkchester youth. It was attractive; there was no denying it. He’d never been more grateful for it than tonight. The Acocella home was ten miles from the morgue, a fifteen-minute drive on an ordinary night, but they were hours into it now, and still Charlie had an athlete’s loose, alert poise, He was lucky to have her. That hadn’t changed.

  Gallows humor had been key to thriving in the morgue. Now it was absolutely crucial if they wanted to ignore three big, menacing questions for however long it took to reach La Mesa.

  First: Was Rosa alive? It was a question so beyond anything Luis could have imagined when leaving the house yesterday that he found it easy to sidestep, as preposterous as a Bigfoot invasion.

  Luis could see the second question in Charlie’s rearview-mirror glances; it was harder to dodge. Was Lindof, the man who’d reveled in JT’s plunge from Trump International Hotel, pursuing them in some way? Or were others affiliated with Lindof? The man had encouraged Luis to panic, and as much as he’d like to deny that asshole, panic was the emotion du jour. Luis had known men who spoke like Lindof, men in power, and they made lifelong hobbies of grudges. Luis had a hunch he’d be checking his rearview for a long time.

  The third question, of course, was the biggie. What the flying fuck was this? When they rode a shoulder to escape a clusterfucked Martin Luther King Jr. Freeway, Luis pictured the p
laque from his office on the front of a Pizza Hut being boarded up, He saw the plaque on the Home Depot on Imperial, where people ran out carrying what he assumed were stolen hoes, posts, and other swingable objects, while orange-vested workers gave chase. He pictured the plaque atop St. Stephen’s Church of God, which looked to be holding an impromptu late-night service, complete with gun-toting parishioners at every door.

  THIS IS THE PLACE WHERE DEATH REJOICES TO HELP THOSE WHO LIVE, except “the place” had expanded far beyond Luis’s office, and how the dead were “helping” the living remained thoroughly unclear. Yet Luis had a hunch there was something to it, the same way he’d had a hunch none of the bullets in John Doe had been kill shots.

  He opened his Twitter. The heavily filtered profile pic of him flashing pearly whites at the last Pride Parade, the trying-too-hard bio reading San Diego assistant medical examiner / ceviche artist / still like the Chargers, the archive of tweets sent to, and ignored by, his disinterested 835 followers. This post might be different. He started typing, decided this warranted all-caps, and started over.

  URGENT: I’M A DOCTOR & THE ONLY WAY TO STOP THE MISCARRIAGE

  He stopped. He thought of the event as the Miscarriage, but that wouldn’t mean shit to anyone else.

  “What do I call Them?” he asked.

  “Huh? Who?”

  “The, you know, the people! The fucking John Does!”

  “How am I supposed to know? The radio’s just saying They and Them. You’re the one on Twitter, Inspector Gadget.”

  Fair point: Luis tapped the search icon, then scrolled to Trends. Evidence of the Miscarriage was there, though not yet coalesced under a single hashtag, and being pounded by #BenHines—the beloved actor must have made some inspirational statement. Luis toggled back to his message.