The Living Dead

by Kraus, Daniel

  The way of things cant be changed, Will often wrote. Muse sensed the sentiment came less from defeat than it did an appreciation of humanity’s smallness. He reminded himself of that when howling into the mic and punishing the Gibson before sold-out crowds: he, too, was small, very small.

  The superstar potential of a blues player in modern America had limits. Muse King’s crossover potential plateaued after a couple of years, but thanks to the Lucases’ stabilizing influence, Muse was not disappointed. He had a recognizable name and the royalties on “If the Blues Wuz a Woman” kept coming, which meant it was high time to get down to being what he’d set out to be. Not a magazine cover model but a down-and-dirty bluesman, what Hewitt Lucas would have wanted.

  It was also high time to meet Will and Darlene. Muse flew them out to see him play a homecoming show in New Orleans, put them up in a nice hotel, and gave them a couple of days to explore the city alone. Finally, he met them in the safe zone of Audubon Park, two bewildered, perspiring white folks in too-heavy Sunday best. Both gave him cordial handshakes, but Will was shaking and Darlene was holding back tears.

  “It’s like…,” Darlene managed, “It’s like Hewitt … I know you’re a…”

  “What Darlene means is,” Will said, “you’re … Hewitt was a white person, like us.”

  “Oh yeah,” Muse chuckled, trying to roll with it. “Yeah, that makes sense.”

  “But it’s like…” Will wiped away what could be sweat, but might be tears.

  “It’s like Hewitt has come down from heaven,” Darlene said. “As I live and breathe.”

  Muse treated them to a white-tablecloth lunch that made them uncomfortable, and on instinct followed that up with street food: Southern-fried chicken tenders and waffles, which they gobbled like pigs at a trough. Through sticky mouthfuls, they divulged their flight was the first they’d ever taken and their hotel the second they’d ever stayed in, the first being when they drove down to Tupelo to lay Hewitt in his paid-for family plot. Their first night at the New Orleans hotel, they hadn’t slept a wink, but made up for it on night two by hunkering down in their rented car.

  Muse demanded they stay with him for their last night. The hours leading up to the concert confirmed the Lucases were the real deal. They genuinely preferred silence to small talk. Muse’s business was sound; silence spooked him. But what the heck, the day was already strange, so he gave in to the sonic experiment, a kind of meditation. Within a couple of hours of sharing the Lucases’ quiet, Muse was recalling dead relatives and estranged friends. He was able to feel sorrow for what he’d lost and what he’d never had, and self-forgiveness for what he knew was bad behavior—drinking too much, sleeping with too many women. It must have been in such a mind-set that Will and Darlene had sent the Gibson.

  How the Lucases lived was far more heroic than a well-timed swing of a hollow-bodied Gretsch. If the Jo-Jo’s Hog situation repeated itself, Muse knew he wouldn’t swing that guitar, for better or worse. He wanted to be more like Will and Darlene. He wanted to stand for peace. The only way to do that—the most radical way, especially for an American—was to learn how to walk away from a fight.

  “Walk away,” he sang to himself.

  Yeah, he’d write a song about it, his best song ever, one people might not love right now but would remember after he was gone.

  “Walk away,” my sisters and brothers, he sang. “Walk away.”

  The last time Muse King saw Will and Darlene Lucas was eight days before the ghouls came, at Phoenix’s Sky Harbor International Airport after the kickoff date of a tour that would take Muse through Austin, Little Rock, Memphis, St. Louis, and Kansas City. Muse was preoccupied. He had “Walk Away” started, but it was all in his head; he was afraid to put it on paper lest it prove unworthy. So it surprised him when Will, while Darlene was in the ladies’ room, took a tight grip of his shoulder. The squeak of his jacket’s black leather gave voice to his shock. Will gave handshakes exclusively and profusely—to Muse, to doormen, to waiters.

  “Darlene.” Will’s eye wrinkles deepened. “She worries. No, that’s not the whole truth, I worry. Thinking about you alone out there … riding fast planes … fast cars … doing who knows what with fast women.”

  Muse blushed.

  “Who says fast women?” It was a joke, but it felt misplaced. He let his silly grin flatten to something serious, “I’m over all that, Pops. I really am. I can feel it, I’m changing. I got this new song I’m working on that…”

  Muse trailed off, Will’s lips were pursed and quivering. His voice shook too.

  “It’s … real good to hear someone … someone call me Pop again.”

  “Ah, you know.” Muse shrugged to play it off as nothing, but he couldn’t, he wouldn’t; the new Muse King threw out the garbage that didn’t matter—the parents who’d abandoned him, the family who’d vultured over him—and acknowledged the things that did, “That’s what I … I mean, that’s how I think of you, man.”

  “I think the Lord purposed us to send that instrument.” Will’s eyes shone. “And now he’s rewarding us.”

  “This is just stuff,” Muse insisted, “Hotels and food, concert tickets.”

  “That’s not the reward. Giving us you to care about, that’s the reward.”

  The people slugging down the concourse became ghosts, the brush of their sleeves and luggage passing through Muse like smoke. All he could see was Will’s trembling face. All he could feel was the old man’s fingers digging into his shoulder. He wanted to grip Will back in the same way. Why didn’t he do it? What was he waiting for?

  “Nothing’s going to happen to me, Pops,” he said. “I’m the one who should be worrying about you. You want to see another show, just say the word. Don’t make me come looking for you now, all right?”

  Darlene returned, maybe ignorant of the emotion that had passed between them, maybe not, and gave Muse a hug, followed by Will’s formal handshake, and off they scooted toward security, leaving Muse standing there, believing if he didn’t move, the tears wouldn’t fall, and a video of it wouldn’t show up online titled CRYBABY MUSE KING AT THE AIRPORT!!! He had to move eventually, but did so with his head lowered, mind storming with joy and sadness, flushed face cooled by wet stripes.

  Don’t make me come looking for you now, all right?

  The words echoed in his dreams on the morning of October 24. The Kansas City gig had gone all right, but he was eager to get home. He was going to make some changes. Step away from the band for a time. Work on some solo stuff—just him and Hewitt. Finish “Walk Away.” Line up shows that mattered. Schools. Civic centers. Rest homes. Tenement parks, He’d slept poorly, his mind racing with possibilities. He thumbed alive his phone and opened Instagram, ready to post his thoughts as a way to hold himself to them.

  A bang on the hotel-room door.

  Muse checked his watch, Eight thirty.

  “Still in bed,” he called out.

  Another bang. Another. Another. He pitched his feet over the side of the bed and slow-footed across the room. Normally he might lay into someone bothering him this early, but he was already up, and besides, he was turning over a new leaf, He undid the security latch, pulled the door open, and found himself face-to-face with Leticia Luz, whose signature he had found the night before on a card: I have been servicing your room, a gratuity would be greatly appreciated. Muse had seen her a couple of times, her deferential behavior making him uncomfortable, as most service personnel did.

  Leticia Luz’s small smile had split into a gaping abscess. Her downcast eyes shone straight at him, blank white headlights. She was naked below the waist. Her teeth were covered with red drool, and blood stained the front of her retro maid’s uniform. The first thing Muse thought was something he’d seen on Instagram about Ben Hines exposing himself to hotel staff, and he realized how this might look if someone saw—the maid half-clothed and bloody, Muse in his underwear.

  The Lucases, he thought later, would not have hesitated to help her.<
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  Leticia walked straight into him, mouth open. Muse might have tried to hold her, but he’d been caught by enough bayou dogs to know bared teeth brought pain. He lurched back, dodging her swinging hands. She stumbled and fell over a service room cart, sweeping away prime rib bones, salt, pepper, ketchup, rolls, and patties of butter. In seconds, Leticia was back on her feet, but Muse drove the cart into her gut, pinning her against the wall. It hurt, Not her—she swung her arms over the cart. It hurt him. He had no more stomach for fighting, “Walk Away, Walk Away.”

  “You okay?” he demanded. “You need help?”

  Leticia growled, spattering bloody froth.

  Muse remembered the rest, but wished he didn’t, Determined not to harm the maid, he released the cart. She came after him with doubled fury, punishment for nonviolence. For ten grueling minutes, he used sofa cushions to drive her away, finally maneuvering her into a closet he propped shut with a chair. He shouted for help that didn’t come, thinking how much easier it would have been to brain Leticia with the phone, the table, the ice bucket, anything, Violence was always easier.

  With his back against the closet, he struggled into clothes, hat, and scarf, his usual all-black affair. Quickly, he grabbed the case that housed Hewitt—unbloodied, nonviolent Hewitt—and headed for the stairs, always safer in a crisis. Five flights down, he’d encountered a second hotel employee, this one headless, or that’s how he’d looked at first. He’d been blasted by what had to have been a shotgun. Half his neck was gone, and his head dangled forward, bumping against his chest as he advanced. One blow with the guitar case would have ripped the head off, but Muse resisted: “Walk Away, Walk Away.”

  Muse meant to do all the right things in the lobby. Tell the front desk what he’d seen, promise to explain it to the cops. But the lobby was bedlam, furniture overturned, the floor carpeted with tourist pamphlets, a thick smear of blood leading from the elevator to the front door.

  Tull Bledsoe, his driver and friend, caught him by the shoulders and steered him right through the blood, out the door, and into an overcast morning. Muse tried to stop, but Tull kept pushing, insisting the rest of the band “couldn’t be got”—he wouldn’t go into any more detail than that. They tumbled into the front seats of the Cadillac Escalade. As Tull peeled out of the hotel lot, Muse did two things: turn on the radio and yank a bottle of Beam from the mini-cupboard.

  “Where to, boss?” A question nearly normal enough to conceal Tull’s terror.

  Muse glugged bourbon, gasped, and said, “Rhode Island.”

  “Rhode Island?” Tull’s calm broke, “I mean where we going right now, motherfucker!”

  “Just get out of the city, Tull, fast as you can.”

  They hadn’t gotten out. Few people drove more aggressively than Tull, and still they’d gotten boxed in at the 35/670 interchange and been forced to hoof it. They’d spent a day running—away from ghouls, toward others in need, Hewitt making escape a chore, Tull cursing him for refusing to use the Gibson as a weapon. That night, they’d sheltered inside an unlocked Supercuts.

  Unlocked, but not empty. Tull had been in full recline on one of the hair-washing chairs when an aproned ghoul tottered from an adjacent door and latched its face to Tull’s. Enough mirrors reflected moonlight for Muse to see the ghoul’s teeth perforate Tull’s lips, the ghoul’s tongue stretch down Tull’s throat. The ghoul bit, slid upward, and sucked out Tull’s left eyeball. Muse figured his friend’s last sight was his own eyeball popping like a cherry tomato in the ghoul’s mouth.

  Could Muse have prevented it if he’d been willing to use the Gibson like he’d used the Gretsch? He told himself no and spent the rest of the night on the run, trying to believe it. He’d picked a crap time to become a pacifist. Unless, he thought, he’d picked the best time of all. The only feeling he trusted right now was sadness. There were the blues you could sing about, and then there was the blues, the stuff you kept tamped down deep inside you.

  He ended up at Waterfall Brewery, where fermenting beer tried to kill him. He stole a Vespa, if anything could be considered stealing anymore. He rode north till the gas tank pinged and sputtered. Then he walked. He thought of Rhode Island. He sat at a dirt crossroads. He played. He drank. He met a girl named Greer Morgan. He laid his exhausted body over hers. It felt nothing like the one-night stands he’d been having for half a decade. If anything was peaceful, it was this. He kissed her until he believed that all roads out of this place weren’t blocked at all.

  Legion

  Ghouls were killed, plenty of Them, though this was kept secret from Father Bill, who did not want any ghouls harmed. But he wasn’t down there, was he? Both soft and hard kills occurred, Military terms, those. Soft: destroying a ghoul’s capabilities. Say the time when Nishimura used the ax that had chopped up Clay Szulczewski to lop off a ghoul’s hands. Hard: death, lasting death. Say when Nishimura used a nail gun to fire five long nails, point-blank, through a ghoul’s forehead. The head was the key. Head wounds kept Them down. He and his team of Missionaries figured that out pretty quickly. Team—funny word in this context. He was both in charge and held hostage. Leave through the Flag Cabin, circle past the CIC, climb down to Public Affairs. He summoned the glow, charted the path, and led the way, but with the heat of a couple of guns at his back. Each time they went under, a new set of objectives: Raid the dry goods storeroom and ship’s store. Take what they wanted from the hospital. See what weapons were left in the magazine, Get fresh water production up to a fraction of its two-hundred-thousand-gallons-per-day capacity. Raise the spirits of true believers holed up in engine-room outposts by bringing food, water, and glad tidings from Father Bill. It was harrowing work, each corner-turn unbearable. This corner: nothing. This corner: nothing, This corner: eight ghouls, flesh jiggling, innards unraveling, jaws clacking. Six missions in four days, six men lost. One had only been scratched, but the Missionaries knew better and kicked in his face, Boots were quieter than bullets. Rage built up and had to find release. Nishimura tried to understand. War was war. When other Missionaries wanted to linger to torture a ghoul, he appealed to them pragmatically. They did not have time for this. The men glared. How easy it would be to report to Henstrom that Nishimura had gotten nicked by a ghoul. Larry, Atsuko, Chiyo, Daiki, Neola, and Bea: he had to remain a useful leader. When he passed CMC Bertrand Veevers’s Idea Box, he paused. Inside, a single crumpled scrap of paper. He kept the suggestion, a good one, to himself: KILL US BLOW IT ALL UP END THIS. Deep in the hull was the room used to process trash. Wood, metal, plastic, dunnage. Now ghouls too. Fully dead or still wiggling, They were hurled down chutes into the ocean. Hold on. Could ghouls swim? What if they paddled into the nuke intakes? The Seahawk helo could have dipped a sonar node into the water to check, but the Seahawk was history, pushed over the edge of the boat. That mission came directly from Father Bill. All flight deck craft were to be shed within the month. It was tough, dicey work. Men died doing it, because no one dared kill ghouls where Father Bill might see it. To Nishimura, each plane over the edge was a bomb’s tick.

  Then things got even worse.

  No one saw it coming. How could they? The last anyone had heard of the man, he’d been ten days into a sick-bay stay that had the ship swirling with weird rumors. Nine days after the ghoul coup of the USS Olympia, right in the middle of Father Bill’s Morning Prayer, a shout from the meteorological-level catwalk evolved into multiple shouts, The island population was down to thirty-five, but not everyone had been promoted upward. Nishimura, for instance. He sat up fast, hitting his head on the counter above.

  “Captain Page!” someone cried. “It’s Captain Page!”

  Even the most weakened men found the energy to rush onto the catwalk. Nishimura dizzied with hope. If there was a single thing that might shake awake sailors under the spell of a delusional lunatic, it was the return of the man representing civilization, law, social orders.

  Nishimura was the last to the catwalk, but he was better fed now, his muscles agil
e from the daily work of staying alive belowdecks. He shoved past others to peer over the railing. If Page was down there with the ghouls, he was in mortal danger. Nishimura was ready to jump into the quagmire to save his captain.

  Problem was, Captain Page was already dead. He’d always been a rawboned, sharp-angled fellow, with a lean, pointy-chinned face pinked from vigorous shaving. His formal dress never fit right, a sign he was a worker at heart, not a bureaucrat. None of that had changed. He was still Captain Page, just a shade greener. Nishimura looked in vain for wounds. Perhaps the captain had died of his illness after all.

  His body scrabbled against the steel with enough energy to peel gray paint. On the nav bridge waited the captain’s chair, and Nishimura felt certain Page remembered it.

  Henstrom’s voice rang from the 1MC.

  “Father Bill on the move! Father Bill on the move!”

  Great hubbub attended any downward motion of their leader, and the remaining sailors parted to reveal Henstrom leading—carrying the brass crucifix—and two bodyguards following. Once on the lowest landing, the Hawaiian-shirted priest stopped, and Henstrom handed over the old man’s symbol of authority.

  Looking uncertain, Father Bill inched toward the railing. He peeked over, then gasped, long and low.

  “The captain,” he whispered, “has returned.”

  Nishimura’s only cue on how to feel came from the horrified bulging of Henstrom’s eyes. The second Father Bill ceded any authority, the pissant was done for. Nishimura wanted to shout: Grab the priest! Get him! But the Nishimura Delay served him well. Lieutenant Commander William Koppenborg turned to face his flock, raised his arms, and lifted his voice to caw over the sizzling ocean waves.

  “The captain has returned!”

  Father Bill clutched a hand to his breast, playing to the back reaches of the theater. His mouth stretched into a gaping grin. Sunlight rhinestoned his eyes.