The Living Dead

by Kraus, Daniel

  “I want…”

  “Stop wanting, Acocella. You’re going home if I have to drag you there myself.”

  There was a long, long pause, during which Luis Acocella might have died, Charlie would never be sure. Around one in the afternoon, with Victor Young’s “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen” swooning, another sound finally emitted from the garbage-bag hood: “Mmmmm,” that noncommittal noise Luis so often used to drive her batty.

  Charlie chuckled, and stood, and laughed some more, and the lifting of the gun, like the lifting of an arm—Shall we dance?—shook tears from her eyes, hundreds of them, hot down her face, cold down the front of her shirt. She decided it was a kind of home, after all, to give Luis the friendly, familiar, playful middle finger he’d always loved to see. She put the .38 to his forehead, buffered by a pillow as instructed. The bag wrinkled back like a surprised forehead. It would only take her one try to do what he’d told her to do. She may have been a mediocre wife, but she’d been the best damn assistant Luis Acocella ever had.

  This Is a Test

  Someone dies. Someone else learns to live. A fair trade, and the best way Greer could frame her new life. It was the worst of times, like the first chapter of that famous book Greer couldn’t remember. She did, however, remember the other half of that line too.

  Against stratospheric odds, she was involved in a romance. Out here in the chilly sticks of bumfuck Missouri. Though hunting was all right, she’d never liked camping; the Morgan living quarters had been uncomfortable enough, Yet in the nine days she’d been with Muse, they’d slept on barn hay, beds of dry pine needles, inside a junked rowboat, and on the ground itself, waking up damp from dew and smelling of grass, bark, and each other. She liked it. She loved it.

  Best place to hide, I figured, was right out in the open—Muse had been drunk when he’d said it, but he had a canny instinct for survival. Those trapped inside trailers at the Last Resort, or inside Bulk High School, or, as Muse described, inside every business in Kansas City might all be doomed. Ghouls had bulldozer strength in numbers. Worse, They were patient. If They couldn’t crack your stronghold, They’d wait until you ran out of food and broke free, becoming food yourself.

  Deep into the land of long, flat crop tillage and vacant, grassy fields, Greer and Muse could see trouble coming. The largest herd of ghouls they’d spotted was five. More often, they’d see one or two at a half-mile distance, and they’d finish what they were doing—scavenging, eating, packing up, kissing—before putting a few miles between them and danger.

  Sometimes, while hurrying away, they’d giggle. It felt like being caught making out in the park by a police officer. It made Greer think she might be in love. When she first thought it, one ridiculous day into their relationship, she brushed it off. Old married couples at Sunnybrook believed they needed their spouse to survive, for who else knew how to pay the bills on time or make the coffee right? Transpose that reliance into actual life-or-death situations and, yeah, it’s probably going to feel like love.

  Greer knew all that, yet wondered. She’d never been in love, not even close, and preferred it that way. There was lust: poor Qasim and other guys before him. There was what Daddy called bonhomie: guys who gave her a buzz because they were interesting and inspired her to be interesting in return. Muse wasn’t just the whole package, he was the whole Amazon warehouse, a guy of infinite stories who preferred to hear hers. She hadn’t thought she had stories, but Muse was thirsty for them, like the maudlin incarceration of her mother and her grimy Sunnybrook struggles reminded him of someone.

  She came to find it did: Will and Darlene Lucas, a hardscrabble married couple whom Muse held in lofty esteem, so much that he winced when speaking of them, clearly fearful of what fate had befallen them. Best she could figure, the Lucases were the only ones who’d loved Muse for Muse, not because he could sell out a major venue. Skills like that no longer counted for shit, Farmers, carpenters—they’d be heroes now, though Greer suspected Muse’s charm might still come in handy.

  He was disarmingly open about that charm. He’d loved a lot of ladies, as he put it, and mourned them as part of the tapestry of his old world. Greer discovered she didn’t mind being the latest in a line of ladies rather than a worshipped exemplar. To stand out in the new world was to tempt death. All she needed was the feeling with which she’d woken up on October 24: want. She had want now, a lot of it, Muse had want too.

  Their profession, if they had one, was raiding empty houses. Inside the first house they’d hit together, a one-story bungalow tucked inside a crumbling farm, she found binoculars, and realizing what a help they’d be, hurried to show Muse. She found him rifling through bedside-table drawers. She knew what he was doing. He was looking for condoms. Next to other guys she’d laid, who sulked the second they heard the wrapper crinkle, this was staggeringly mature. She’d seen enough end-of-the-world sci-fi to know getting preggers in the apocalypse was some seriously stupid shit.

  It took three days to find condoms. Forever, it seemed, though she supposed it could have taken three years. She hoped the discovery meant nonstop screwing, but it didn’t. Fourteen condoms. That was it. Who knew when, or if, they might find more. Muse meted out sexual overtures as he might a rare liquor. Every three or four days, or when something special happened. Another sign of responsibility, though Greer didn’t like it and made her attitude known.

  “Hey, what side of this Civil War you on?” Muse asked.

  Playful, but there was a watchfulness there, like Greer Morgan was a girl he’d better keep his eye on. Honestly, she liked that too, She’d never dwelled on why she’d defied so many teachers back in Bulk and had never backed down from fights. Now it crystallized: she liked feeling dangerous. In Bulk’s tedium, the feeling couldn’t be fulfilled, but out here, she could embrace it.

  That didn’t mean she enjoyed killing ghouls. It disrupted their bliss. They slept with an alert system in place, usually a perimeter of wire they unspooled each night and respooled each morning. Three times the wire had been tripped. It was scary shit. The first time, they’d been in a shed with a wall at their back, a rookie blunder, and thank fuck they only had to face a single ghoul. Greer slept with the machete, and she hacked into the ghoul’s skull like it was a coconut husk, wedges of bone capering like coconut flakes.

  Her other focus, in those early days, was survival. That meant one thing: the bow.

  Hunting with Daddy, she’d mostly used a gun, but Freddy Morgan had also used a bow. Not a compound bow, one of those oversized, high-tech, multi-stringed contraptions loaded with axels, pulleys, and stabilizers. No, he’d had a simple English longbow, which had a pleasant storybook quality to it but wasn’t going to hit shit without a lot of practice. Greer had shot once or twice, without much success.

  Now, however, she was a girl with an excess of time on her hands. So she practiced. For hours, every day. She waited until they came across some outbuilding or, as she got more skilled, a tree or telephone pole. She scratched a circle on her target with a rock. From five paces away, she shot her six arrows, hunted them down, shot them again. Nature’s hush, what she enjoyed most when hunting with Daddy, was still alive to enjoy, only now there was a bonus element of self-betterment. When she hit her mark consistently, she moved to ten paces away, then fifteen.

  The string slapped her forearm bloody until she found a leather belt, knifed a notch, and cinched it around the vulnerable flesh. Her back muscles felt swollen enough to split the skin.

  “Trapezius,” Muse said, working his thumbs into her sore flesh. “Latissimus dorsi,” he said, moving downward. “External oblique,” he continued, lower now, his thumbs teasing the waist of her jeans. Not all sex acts required a condom. She lay back, her aching back throbbing on the cold ground, and placed her hands softly on Muse’s unkempt orb of hair—even her palms were sore.

  One of six arrows hitting home wasn’t good. Three out of six wasn’t going to make them feel safe in an emergency. Five of six—now
she was getting somewhere. Just over a week into her new, nomadic life, Greer was hitting 80 at fifteen yards. Was that unusual progress? She didn’t know, but it felt good. She’d take fifteen yards with a bow over a machete blow any day.

  Muse appreciated the added safety. He said he did. But did he really? His golf claps at her archery feats were funny, his dutiful sharpening of her arrow points helpful, and his sore-muscle therapy heavenly. But the darkness that clouded his eyes when she practiced was no different from how it was after she’d chopped into the head of the ghoul. He didn’t seem to like it when she killed Them.

  Here she was saving their asses, and he had the gall to pout about it? He’d used her hunting knife to cut a circle of tractor tire to place over his guitar’s sound hole, thereby allowing him to play at a fraction of the instrument’s usual volume. And play he did, every spare moment. Old songs, except one, a secret new “protest song” he called “Walk Away.” He plunked away at it, day after day, working toward an inscrutable perfection. This was his big contribution to their life?

  She rebuked herself. He offered plenty in man power and spirit. Maybe she was overly enthusiastic about killing things that used to be human.

  Otherwise, they were happy, but this discontent was the pebble in her shoe. Walk enough miles and pretty soon that pebble had to come out. For Greer, it was on day ten of their time together. They kept too far off roads to know their precise location, but she guessed thirty miles north of Kansas City; the brown-and-yellow quilt of November farmland was the best spot they’d found yet. They turned up a pickup truck half-stocked with food its former driver couldn’t carry when his ride ran out of gas, and Greer and Muse contentedly picked delights from its horn of plenty: SPAM, baked beans, peaches, cereal, even pasta sauce they added to cooked spaghetti.

  The pocket of paradise had one weakness: a long, gentle rise to the west that would cut their usual reaction time by a third should ghouls crest it. And they might: at the northern end of the hill was a farm, and ghouls, grouped there by some instinct, paced about it, bumping into fences, grain bins, and silos. Every day, for most of the day, Greer and Muse sat on decrepit lawn chairs beneath a patch of trees at the foot of the hill, and like a bird-watcher and his wife, he kept an eye on Them while she offered up fat to be chewed. He rarely accepted her proposal to take watch. He gripped those binoculars like he gripped his guitar, like he gripped her.

  “Well that’s new,” Muse said. He adjusted the focus dial.

  “If we could find a second binoculars,” she said, “we could split the duty.”

  “I don’t mind,” he said.

  “Yeah, but, you know.” She shrugged; she hated being mushy. “I kind of miss you, You’ve got a plastic prosthetic glued to your face.”

  “We got a couple runaways, Sixty, seventy yards off? Near side of the farm, you see it? Looks like They maybe followed a horse out? It looks like They’re … I’m not sure I’m seeing this right.”

  Greer sighed. On the road again, it seemed. She stretched her legs to touch the wheelbarrow in which they hauled food, gear, and, of course, the space-hogger of the guitar called Hewitt. Three days ago, they’d replaced Fadi Lolo’s Schwinn with the wheelbarrow. Greer’s heart broke a little when they left it. She missed the bike’s latent potential for speed. They should have snagged a second one, and gone anywhere. California, Mexico, Canada.

  “Where would you go?” she asked. “If you could go anywhere?”

  “A couple miles south with you,” he replied. “Looks like I’m in luck.”

  “For real.”

  “They’re done eating. I think They’re looking at us.” He lowered the binoculars enough to glance at Greer. “Like where would I go, fantasyland?”

  “Sure.”

  His grin hadn’t quit thrilling her. The creamy thinning of his lips, his crooked canines, the bristling corkscrews of his beard.

  “Capitol Records, no question.”

  “Is that, like, a record store?”

  “It’s a recording studio in Hollywood, You’ve seen it in movies. Big round building, looks like a stack of records on a platter? Giant needle at the top, blinking red?” He began raising the binoculars, but didn’t bother. “Yeah, here They come. We got to pack up.”

  “You want to record some songs? I didn’t mean that much fantasy.”

  Muse chuckled. “Full orchestra version of ‘Walk Away’? Yeah, I could get into that. No, what I’m thinking is, Capitol Records has these echo chambers. They call them Vine Street, Eight chambers, sort of trapezoid shaped, no parallel lines, you feel me? Every room’s got a special reverb. They put vocalists down there. Sinatra, Nat King Cole, the Beach Boys. Hell, the Beastie Boys. You get a five-second delay and a decay like chocolate syrup, like you’re singing in St, Patrick’s Cathedral. Folks will tell you you can do that now with filters, but it ain’t the same, not if you have ears.”

  He stood and stretched. Greer could see the ghouls now, half a football field away. They were a 1940s comedy team, one short and fat, one tall and thin. Both wore overalls. Both were bloodred from the chin down. Whoever they’d eaten had a lot of hair; thick, long thatches of black hair adhered to Their stickiest spots.

  “All right, Capitol Records,” Greer said. “Our death screams in hi-fi.”

  “Vine Street’s thirty feet underground. Ten-inch concrete walls. Foot-thick ceiling, No ghouls are getting down there. I mean, if you’re going hole up, might as well do it in a place with a little history, right?”

  “You think you’re the first guy to think of this? Studio space is all filled up, KK.”

  He folded his chair and offered a hand to help her from hers.

  “Can you imagine who’s there right now? The world’s top recording artists, all thrown together? No way they’re not going to jam, Like the Righteous Brothers said, ‘If there’s a rock ’n’ roll heaven, well, you know they’ve got a hell of a band.’ I’m talking last-days music. A new kind of gospel.”

  He folded her chair and lodged them both in the wheelbarrow. The ghouls were forty yards off, Their peeled flesh jiggling with each wobbly step down the hillside, She could hear Them now, a bass grumble like a nearby interstate.

  “Guess we’ll have to hear it in our dreams,” Muse sighed.

  “Until then, binoculars,” Greer griped. “One pair of binoculars.”

  “We find another pair, you’re welcome to them. It’s not a thing.”

  “You act like it’s a thing.”

  “It’s not a thing, all right? Someone’s got to be the lookout while you’re doing target practice. I’ve just gotten used to it.”

  There it was, that underlayer of disapproval.

  “Is it a man thing?”

  “What? Come on.”

  “Because I’m doing the protecting. Some emasculating thing?”

  His eyes gave her some heat. She’d seen glimmers of this during sex or when they had to run. His cheekbones got sharper, his throat articulated.

  “Is this a woman thing? Trying to pick a fight?”

  The ghouls were thirty yards off now, the width of a small parking lot, the distance at which a girl needed to start really paying attention. Greer, though, wanted Muse to be the one who paid attention. To the ghouls, to her, to everything she did and the very real shit going down all around them, while he sang, “Walk away, walk away.”

  “I guess this is what I get from an artist,” she said. “‘If the Blues Wuz a Woman.’ Anybody tell you that shit’s offensive? All’s I’m saying is, every time I shoot an arrow, you get this look.”

  “I get a look.”

  “Like you wish I wasn’t doing it! I can hear it in your guitar. It gets all sad and shit.”

  His voice got softer. “It’s not my place to tell you what to do.”

  “It’s your place to have an opinion! I mean, we’re together, aren’t we?”

  How could the response to this question still scare her in a world without school dances, nice dinners, or social-medi
a declarations of love? Yet Muse’s slow blink might as well be the teeth of the two ghouls. They were a classroom distance away now, close enough for her to make out Their identifying moles, laugh lines, states of shaving when They died.

  “We’re together, lady,” Muse said, “But the world isn’t together. Things I used to think were all right, maybe I don’t anymore. You say it’s my place to have an opinion. Okay, fine. But I don’t have one worked out yet. Some things just feel wrong.”

  “How could killing ghouls be wrong? They’re dead, King Kong.”

  “What’s death? Did people just, like, make death up? Maybe it’s only death if we mark it. Funerals and prayers and all that: that’s death. This is … I just feel like maybe we’re doing the wrong thing. Like this is a test from the Big Man and we’re failing it.”

  She gestured at the obvious: the ghouls, a car-length away, shoes squelching with fresh blood, the buckles of Their overalls clanging as They lifted Their arms to get what They wanted. While she and Muse stood arguing, Who’d back down first? Or would they just let the ghouls wrap ice-cold, blood-hot hands around their squabbling necks? She snatched up the handles of the wheelbarrow.

  “You know your whole career kicked off with you bashing some shooter in the face, right?” Greer shouted.

  The wheelbarrow stuck, a scary moment, the weight of the supplies sinking it into the mud. The tires popped free with a slurp, and she wheeled it around, putting it between them and the ghouls.

  “It did.” Muse stepped behind her. “But Will and Darlene taught me better.”

  He got in the last word, of course he did—he didn’t have the wheelbarrow to worry about, The fat ghoul toppled over the edge of it, knocking a precious jug of water to the ground. There was no time to recover it; the skinny ghoul rounded the side of the wheelbarrow, his long legs proving him a lot faster on flat ground. Ghouls, They always surprised. Greer scrambled backward, pulling the wheelbarrow with her. Muse took the duffel bag, the parcel most likely to fall, and slung it over his back.