The Living Dead

by Kraus, Daniel

  “Sarcophages,” he muttered.

  “Remind me,” Charlie said.

  “From the Greek sarco, for flesh, and phage, for eat. Flesh flies, basically. The ones that hatch their maggots during a body’s active decay phase.”

  Charlie banked to avoid a honking horde of vehicles, slinging Luis into his door.

  “Let me see if I follow, boss. If I recall the videos they made us watch in school, sarcophage maggots show up pretty instantly.”

  “Within twenty-four hours.”

  “They’ve got little hooks on their heads so they can chew the rotting meat without slipping off.”

  “They’re not going anywhere.”

  “Pretty soon, there’s so many at work that the corpse’s temperature rises to 120 degrees.”

  “Very hot in the kitchen, yes.”

  “In a week, 60 percent of the body is gone.”

  “That’s what I’m worried about. Except the body is…”

  Luis gestured at the San Diego skyline. Charlie’s moan was the one she pulled out when exasperated by his melodrama, She was patching bicycle tires, too, keeping things normal till they found Rosa safe and sound. He was grateful for her efforts. He completed his post, minus sarcophages. He could try to get that trending later.

  URGENT: I’M A DOCTOR & THE ONLY WAY TO STOP THE DEAD PEOPLE RETURNING TO LIFE IS BY DIRECT TRAUMA TO THE HEAD, PLEASE RT!!!

  He had half his 280 characters left, valuable real estate for the millions of retweets he hoped were coming. But what else was there to say? Officials were providing nothing to which to link, and he had jack shit to attach. Despite Luis and Charlie’s threats to Lindof, neither had taken a single photo of John Doe. He didn’t even have one of the site’s blue checkmarks to bequeath him a scintilla of legitimacy. All he had was the truth. The truth had to be enough, Wasn’t this America?

  He hit Tweet, then refreshed his feed to watch it land.

  Usually social media brought him the tingling rush he used to see patients receive after thumbing bedside buttons for morphine or fentanyl. Not this time. San Diego’s service was throttled down to the kind of anemic signal parceled to hayseeds in South Dakota’s Badlands or the Texas Panhandle. The upload bar was moving, however, so Luis trusted in the app—he believed in Twitter shit more than God shit—and scrolled to see if there was breaking news.

  There was, though it took him a while to see it.

  The surface text was largely innocent. Anyone know what’s happening on Lower Wacker, people abandoning cars. Cops surrounding a funeral home in downtown lawrence kansas, wtf. The subtext, however, was darker and required Luis to open the threads. Regarding Lower Wacker: its black gangbangers from the southside they crawled up thru tunnels. Regarding that funeral home: my friend a cop told me jews took it over cuz jew sinagogs suck.

  The bulk of accounts Luis followed were San Diego–based, people he knew or friends of friends, more liberal-minded and better educated than any randos adding their shitty two cents. It was with rising nausea, then, that Luis read updates that might have been written by Detective Walker.

  Looks like Tijuana trouble ha ha—a lawyer friend he’d had over to dinner.

  “Acocella, put down the phone.”

  SD crime wave tonight, friends. Beginning to come around to idea of Build the Wall—the real estate agent who’d sold him his house.

  “Acocella. Please.”

  We need a citizen militia to trash compact this Mexcrement!!!—a city councilman Luis had voted for, referencing San Diego’s Latino-dominated garbage-collecting industry.

  “Acocella! Pay attention! Now!”

  Charlie skidded to a stop, propelling Luis into the seat belt so hard he felt bisected. The phone flew from his hands, its plastic clacking like shattered teeth, something suddenly easy to imagine. He was Latino. He was born in Mexico. In just a few thumb strokes across a touch screen, had he gone from potential savior from the sarcophages to the one being blamed for it?

  The answer was waiting in the car’s headlights. Sliding in front of the Prius, close enough that Luis could hear their toted objects clucking across the front bumper, was a quartet of men. Four John Does expunged by the Miscarriage, Luis thought, until he saw the flash of eight eyes, none of them cloudy white. The men lifted gadgets lit up like a mob’s torches and peered into the car. They curled their lips at Charlie, no-good lady driver, before giving Luis a harder look.

  The objects making noises against the bumper rose into the view: crowbar, baseball bat, wrench, hatchet.

  Luis told himself it was all right. His car was idling beside a Dunkin’ Donuts, Catty-corner from a Denny’s. Bad things did not happen at the junction of such icons of Americana. But when one of the men muttered a word and the others positioned themselves at intervals around the hood, Luis lost faith in the safety promised by his adopted country and wondered how he’d allowed himself to blithely believe it would always be there. The .38 in his pocket doubled in weight.

  “You okay, lady?” Baseball Bat called.

  “I will be,” Charlie snapped, “when you get away from my car!”

  “We need to move,” Luis said.

  “We’re collecting trash tonight,” Wrench jeered, another allusion to Latino garbage collectors.

  Scare tactics fired up his diener. “Look in a mirror, then, shitter!”

  “Gas, Charlie.”

  Crowbar pointed his weapon, “We want the Mexican out of the car, ma’am.”

  “I’d like to see you try, xenophobic beer-gut asshole!”

  Wrench and Hatchet went for the doors.

  “Will you stomp the damn gas?” Luis cried.

  Charlie did, while holding a foot on the brake, an advanced move probably taught in Bronx grade schools. The squeal of rubber and dervish of smoke made all four commandos scatter, at which point Charlie released the brake and the Prius fishtailed forward, Luis’s door glancing off a parking meter with a spray of sparks. Charlie hooted, wrestling the wheel for control while sparing an arm to shoot the bird out the window.

  “You!” It was all Luis could sputter, “You!”

  “Quiet,” Charlie laughed. “You love it!”

  “I do not fucking love it!” Luis cried, though at that instant his fear was vanquished by the thrill of the wind in his hair, the engine throbbing beneath his feet, the wicked chortle of the sexy lady at the wheel. He’d long suspected Charlie had a crush on him. Now he wondered if a similar feeling had been hiding deep under his layers of professionalism.

  “Least it got your face out of that phone,” Charlie said.

  That it had, and five minutes later, swerving around pedestrians on the outer circle of the Highwood Park area where he and Rosa lived, Luis was thankful. It meant he was alert and focused as they approached the Lincoln Military Housing complex, which was exactly what it sounded like. In front of it, a throbbing knot of humanity blocked the road.

  First he feared it to be more guerrillas hunting “Mexcrement.” Then he hoped it was off-duty military forming an ad hoc safety zone. As Charlie slowed the car to a crawl, Luis realized that whatever it was had gone drastically wrong. What Luis had thought was a bonfire was a house in flames, lighting the road in front of them. Military order did not reign; there was no order at all. One faction of people had fallen upon another, the first group’s wiggling and slurping more like sarcophagal maggots than Luis could have imagined.

  They also toddled a bit. Learning to walk. Like babies.

  Maybe the Miscarriage was the most apt phrase after all.

  “Ditch is too deep to take,” Charlie said.

  He said it without thinking: “Mmmmm.”

  “Where’s your place? Point to it.”

  He pointed, an obedient child. “There.”

  “Out of the car. Acocella, out of the fucking car!”

  He picked up his phone and got out. Charlie took his wrist and they ran, Not fast enough. Luis saw plenty.

  People were being eaten. It was the darkly logic
al extension of John Doe’s grasping fingers and smacking lips. In the firelight, Luis saw open mouths blot out whole faces, fingers hollowing bones from thighs, tongues lapping exposed innards. When Charlie hesitated, twenty feet from the crush, Luis saw no fewer than three people fall to sarcophages. He was not able to tell if they were neighbors he knew, because gadgets masked so many of them. It felt like irony that it was the dead who had faces, while the living were known only by their designer cases.

  One person was desperately texting with his thumbs; seconds later, both thumbs were gone inside grinding jaws. One was checking a notification; even after he was facedown in the grass, teeth clamped to his spine, he kept reading, the dopamine surge a rebuke to the blood loss. One was taking photos of a sarcophage; even as it scaled her legs, she preferred to view it through her camera, and Luis related. The little box could make anything seem contained, controllable, and closable with a single touch.

  Charlie pulled him down a slope, through a wet culvert, and around a backyard pool, carving a shortcut to Rosa, Luis should have given Charlie credit for that—hurrying them to the doorstep of the woman who had the man she wanted—but they were going too fast, the world blearing like swipes of his gadgets’ screens. You swiped past enough awful things enough times and you quit seeing them, quit feeling them, and that, he realized, was when you began to die.

  Urschleim

  Bicycling from Sunnybrook Mobile Home Resort to the town proper of Bulk, Missouri, took twenty minutes. But that was going it alone, butt popped high, legs at full extension, the wind in your face making you believe you were going eighty in a topless hot rod, So fast that, in spring, rain parted before you like a biblical sea, and in fall, dead leaves peeled away like company dancers revealing their prima donna: you.

  On the seat of Fadi Lolo’s blue Schwinn, Greer Morgan suffered the trip at agonizing half speed. Their combined weight fattened the bike’s tires against pavement and sank them spoke-deep in mud, The path was desolate on a normal day; today, Greer saw enough bad signs to make her want to hop off the bike and run for it: a loose dog trailing a bloody leash, a station wagon drilled with bullet holes, the scoreboard at the fairgrounds baseball park flashing only one word: RUN.

  Biking was still faster than walking, so she stuck with it.

  “Straight,” she snapped. “Straight, straight, straight.”

  “Faster here,” Fadi wheezed, nodding at derelict storage buildings.

  “You can’t get through here!”

  “Faster here.”

  Plenty going on Greer didn’t like. Sitting static while this subdued Syrian did all the work. Gripping his waist like a damsel. Not being listened to for directions when she was the one who’d lived, if that’s what you wanted to call it, in Bulk her whole stupid life. What kept shutting her up was Fadi’s gentle self-assurance, and the fact he kept being right. It made some sense. He was the one who might see Missouri’s mild hills, skeleton trees, and pale sunsets as beautiful, worthy of exploration. He’d pioneered shortcuts she’d never had the energy to pursue.

  Fadi sailed into a four-foot gap between rusty sheds with perfect aim, just as he’d shot between jammed cars to get out of Sunnybrook. Greer held on tightly and spotted the split fence ahead that would indeed lop a couple of minutes from their journey. A good sign, but still she shivered. Fadi Lolo might like to pick up trash and rescue Black girls from besieged trailers, But he was also a man, not to be fully trusted. At his whim, he could swerve into one of these outbuildings and try to overpower her.

  “You do not need the big knife,” he said, “We are going to town for our brother.”

  Greer had to look down to see she still had the machete against his back. She told herself to chill out. She had a duffel bag full of hunting weapons. This screwball would have to be nuts to pull any shit. When she’d told him she wanted to go to town to find her brother, Conan, he’d replied, Our brother. We all share the same brother now, yes? Greer took deep breaths shallowed by the air’s hot mist. She would trust this guy. With Vienna Morgan lost to the prison system and Freddy Morgan rabid and faceless, instincts were all she had left.

  Daddy. She felt like sobbing. She felt like throwing up, What would she tell Conan? If she didn’t distract herself, she’d lack even the strength to keep clinging to Fadi’s waist.

  “Mister,” she said, “What do you do?”

  “What do I do.”

  “For fun. What do you do for fun?”

  “You must measure the tire pressure and you must lubricate the chains.”

  “Your bike? You take care of your bike. What else?”

  “I watch so much TV.”

  “What do you watch?”

  “Damages.”

  “Damages. What’s that?”

  “Damages is an Emmy-winning legal drama starring Glenn Close as Patty Hewes.”

  Greer laughed, She paused and laughed again. It was the most words she’d heard Fadi say at once, and possibly the funniest thing she’d heard in her life. Laughter was a self-perpetuating magic: she felt more coming and was greedy for it.

  “What else, what else?”

  “New Girl is an Emmy-nominated sitcom starring Zooey Deschanel as Jessica Day.”

  “You’re really into the Emmys, mister.”

  “The X-Files is Emmy-winning drama starring David Duchovny as Fox Mulder and Gillian Anderson as Dana Scully.”

  “Oh, I’ve seen that. Flukeman. He’s the shit.”

  “‘The Host’ is the second episode of the second season.”

  “What’s your favorite episode?”

  “‘Kill Switch,’” Fadi said instantly. “It is the episode they talk of Urschleim.”

  “Is he the smoking guy?”

  “Urschleim is primordial slime,” Fadi said. “It is the life between plant life and animal life. It is the missing life.”

  “You mean the missing link?” She giggled, “Daddy used to call Conan that.”

  “There is not just life and death. It is not so simple. There are many shades.”

  Greer’s laughter died out. “Yeah, I think you’re right.”

  “I have seen it.” He paused. “But the word I learned from Dana Scully.”

  Missouri’s famous rocky bluffs hemmed along the Mississippi River, but the western half of the state was not without hills. The hilltop before them, crowned with leafless trees, looked like a patchy, upside-down chin-beard, Upon cresting it, one would see everything the town of four thousand had to offer, if one’s heart could take the excitement: Jimmy’s Tap, Auto Value, Shopko, Kunkle’s Tire & Repair, Farmers Mutual Insurance, Casey’s, and the Raskey Apartments, all huddled around a miserable little town square as if pissing on it.

  Fadi was out of breath when he reached the top. He climbed off the bike and staggered aside to breathe. Greer bailed in the other direction, machete in one hand, duffel in the other, so they were a Schwinn’s length apart, unable to feel the comfort of each other’s bodies, when they saw what the town square had become.

  One of the gas pumps at Casey’s was on fire, a roaring, white-hot furnace melting a hole through the service station awning. More shocking was the blaze was being ignored. No men with fire extinguishers, no ululating fire trucks, no deputy diverting motorists from the danger of additional explosions. Bulk was inhabited by rotten, small-minded people, Greer had always known, but she hadn’t believed they were this bad.

  They were this bad, and worse. From the look of it, everyone within ten blocks had amassed in the town square. Some three hundred Bulkers seethed as a single angry mass. A distinct line split the crowd into two unequal groups.

  The larger group was mostly white folks clad in seed-company hats, hairnets, work aprons, and, most ubiquitous of all, the same gray HortiPlastics uniform Daddy had worn. Brandishing guns, brooms, and other arms, Team HortiPlastics promised the kind of mob brawl Greer had only seen in movies. Though she preferred texting on her phone to watching history-class videos, she paid attention when Black
people came on-screen, usually in scenes like this, getting shit-kicked in Alabama or Arkansas or Mississippi, but looking proud as hell and badass as fuck.

  She expected the second, smaller group to be the enemy she’d met at Sunnybrook.

  But the things distinguishing those forty or fifty people from the HortiPlastics crowd were darker beards, a sprinkling of hijabs, and clothing that, even at a distance, had the ill-fitting look of items plucked from Salvation Army racks. They were the Syrian refugees, a point of pride for Jefferson City legislators, a point of contempt for Bulk residents.

  Greer got the feeling the Syrians’ lack of weapons was less due to pacifist views than it was the brief time they’d had to assemble, They’d come outside to hold their own, that’s all, and an echo rang through Greer’s bones. No one at the Last Resort gave two shits about the trailer park, but they’d fought for what was theirs, hadn’t they? Refugee—Greer was pretty sure it meant a person forced to run. The Raskey Apartments might be an insect-and rodent-ridden eyesore, but for these countrymen of Fadi’s, it was a true last resort.

  Hateful sneers, flexed like muscles, ripped across Team HortiPlastics. Greer knew a lot of these people. Store owners, teachers, parents of classmates. People who drove cars with bumper stickers like CRIME CONTROL NOT GUN CONTROL and FIGHT CRIME, SHOOT BACK. Daddy, owner of two rifles himself, had discussed these people in a voice too worried to be disdainful. They like to imagine themselves as heroes, he’d said, but all they’re going to do is get folks killed. He’d glanced at Conan, a young Black man, when he’d said it, but Conan, as always, seemed lost in his own world.

  Self-proclaimed heroes could only exist in opposition to villains. Why not blame the sudden violence on the local refugee population? Many of the Syrians barely spoke English. They ate strong-smelling food. They took up too many benches on the town square, too much picnic space in the park. They were freeloaders who didn’t have jobs, and also, they should stop stealing all the jobs.

  Qasim made some of these complaints last night, and she’d merely thought them tiresome. She’d been a different person then; by now, Qasim might be different too, Where was he? She didn’t see many teens in the crowd. At school, probably; perhaps teachers had chosen to barricade the student body against the unfolding crisis. Good—Greer would give Conan the machete and Qasim the knife, and the three of them would do what needed doing.