The Living Dead

by Kraus, Daniel

  * * *

  Twenty months after John Doe, on 662–08:51, Etta Hoffmann received the first and last phone call she ever received from someone she knew. It was Elizabeth O’Toole, one of AMLD’s final four before she ran off with Terry McAllister, Annie Teller’s status as Hoffmann’s favorite coworker was largely predicated on the fact the two of them had never spoken, Among those with whom Hoffmann had been forced to interact, she liked no one better than Elizabeth O’Toole. Before leaving the bunker with Terry McAllister, Elizabeth O’Toole’s last act had been to entice Hoffmann to come with them.

  “It’s you,” Elizabeth O’Toole said in greeting. “The Poet.”

  It took Hoffmann several seconds to identify the voice. The signal was fuzzy, and Elizabeth O’Toole sounded like her throat had been damaged.

  “Yes,” Hoffmann replied, She understood she did not experience emotions the same way as others, but felt a force akin to hands upon her back, pushing her to acknowledge the moment’s narrative drama. She shuffled through the Personal History Conversation Guide, brand-new back then, and pressed sweaty fingers to her pencil. “Tell Me Where You Are.”

  “I didn’t think you’d still be there. Hoffmann, how are you living?”

  Hoffmann stared at the pencil point, the paper. What mattered was where they met. The woman who gripped the pencil, who held the paper steady, did not.

  “I…” she began, “Tell Me Where You Are.”

  Elizabeth O’Toole laughed. The bad signal split it into digital mist.

  “You haven’t changed. I guess I’m glad. Everything else has, I really didn’t think you’d be there. But we have this phone, it’s like, this giant, military thing, size of a lawn mower, huge rubber antenna. It’s not even American. It’s got, what do you call it? Cyrillic? I think it’s Russian. Remember that politician who said she could see Russia from Alaska? I guess they came on over. Seem to be gone now. Made good equipment, though. This phone really works. Naturally I said, who would we even call? And Terry said, ‘The Poet. Call the Poet.’”

  Hoffmann wrote, Military telephone, Possibly Russian. She paused. “Terry McAllister?”

  “We did it, Hoffmann, Terry and I made it out of Georgetown. Got up to Harrisburg. Got on a train. A train, you believe that? Crossed into Canada. Since then, it’s been north. Ontario, Manitoba. I’m not sure anymore. We might be in the Northwest Territories? I just don’t know. All I know is, it’s cold. Terry’s the one who said we had to go north. He was saying it before we left the office. Fewer people up north. The dead ones, They’d be too cold to move. He was mostly right. We didn’t see a whole lot. They’re slower up here, for sure. You can see Their tracks in the snow. Blood shows up really clear. You usually hear Them coming too—the ice on Their joints pops. What was your question? Where are we? I guess I answered it. How are you, Hoffmann?”

  Hoffmann gazed around. The usual slats of light, everything in its place.

  “I’m…” She consulted her notes. “Tell Me The Last Thing That Happened.”

  Elizabeth O’Toole’s chuckle was not as friendly as it once was. “Talkative as always, huh? The last thing that happened? Oh, let’s see. There were the wolves, They followed us for a while. Picked off most of our group, actually, There were the Inuits. They had bows and harpoons. These fucking things called ulus they used to cut people’s heads off. I don’t know what they were thinking. We were talking, we were alive, but they kept at us. They don’t want us up here, We’re ruining it somehow. Oh, and polar bears. I don’t remember knowing that polar bears were so aggressive. I guess they changed! Makes sense, I guess. Humans aren’t the dominant species anymore. Might as well get in there with your fangs and claws and take some shit back. I guess no one’s taken any of yours yet, huh?”

  Next Q, next Q. “Are You…?”

  The static blasted, a gale wind over icy rock. “You ever hear from John? John Campbell? I hope he made it. I doubt he did.”

  “No.”

  “What about Carrie Wilmot? I think about her a lot. All the backpacking she did? She might be surviving out there.”

  “No.”

  “Athena Sherman? She’d go off on your ass, She could be a leader now.”

  “No.”

  “Oh, what about Buffy Carter?” Elizabeth O’Toole laughed, “I remember catching Ole Buff in the New Mother’s Room making out with Jimmy Freestone. What a hero.”

  Dan Mangold, Ginny Ullmann, Jamil Chalk, Rolando Grose, Bridgette Hannums, Erica Jessop, Trey Fernandez, Betty Lamb-Cursley, Names that were as dry as the paper Hoffmann wrote on, but were a fireworks display of memories to Elizabeth O’Toole. Even when the snarled reception of the Russian phone made identifying some words impossible, Hoffmann could make out laughter and weeping. To recall these people and their dull, silly, irritating, clever antics was to resurrect them, molecule by molecule. Hoffmann understood and was patient.

  Finally, one of Elizabeth O’Toole’s laughs elongated into a sigh. Hoffmann recognized it from romantic movies. Time for shut-eye, though the lovers could gab all night. Many calls to the VSDC number concluded with sighs like this. Hoffmann wondered if such a sound would be the world’s last. Not a bang, not a whimper, just the glum little sigh of accepting the end had come.

  “Well, Hoffmann,” Elizabeth O’Toole said. “It’s been—”

  “Wait.”

  Hoffmann’s fingers bore down on the pencil. The lead cracked. The bedrock on which she stood cracked too, and her only hope to avoid the crevasse was to say something that might convey the twinges of care and concern she felt. This was far more difficult for Hoffmann than living in solitude or knowing that most of the people she’d ever met were dead.

  “Is … is Terry McAllister…” She reminded herself any question she asked, no matter how stupid, would appear in the record only as Q. “How … how is Terry McAllister?”

  Elizabeth O’Toole’s pause was the call’s longest. Polar wind shrieked like a dying animal. Electricity popped like hundreds of small bones underfoot. When she spoke, her voice was one more slashing, sinuous facet of the wind.

  “Let me tell you something, Hoffmann. I don’t know if anyone’s ever said it. Certainly they didn’t when we all worked together, and no one knew shit about anyone, even if they worked ten feet apart for thirty years, You’re brave, Hoffmann. Okay? You’re smart. When all the rest of us are dead and gone, or dead and walking, you’re going to still be going. You’re going to survive this shit, Poet. All of it.” The shivering sound might have been her exhale.

  “Terry’s dead. Zombies, Riding a dogsled. Sounds like a bad joke. It sounds funny. It was not. Poor dogs, you know, we train them to do certain things, and they lose their souls, maybe. They just want to be good boys and good girls. They carried those zombies right up to our igloo and—well. Anyway. I loved him. I did love him. So thank you for asking, Hoffmann. Thank you, Poet.”

  * * *

  Nine years separated Elizabeth O’Toole’s only call from Snoop’s first. That was a long time to go without being asked Qs requiring personal introspection. Hoffmann abhorred introspection. Her sleep, a decade smooth, grew fitful, goosed by thoughts of Snoop, that prying, devious woman whose calls made Hoffmann’s heartbeat skip. It was distressing to realize, during these sleepless stints, how it was asking Qs, not answering them, that cut you open like cake and revealed your layers.

  Snoop’s breezy attitude made Hoffmann surmise a new era was beginning. A good thing, probably, though she thought she might prefer the Second Dark Age. Hoffmann could take no more credit for that phrase than she could zombie; it had filtered up through the calls. In those years, energy grids collapsed, cities and towns went dark, food production and waste management systems foundered, and all methods of sharing information—the mortar binding civilization’s bricks—dissolved.

  You could find motifs in each year of the Second Dark Age if you had good records, and Hoffmann had the best. Year One, for instance, felt like endless night, through which you could
see only a few feet at a time. It seemed every Tom, Ben, and Harry (was that how the saying went?) called Hoffmann from inside boarded-up houses where fiery arguments were shredding survivors to little pieces, easier for zombies to munch.

  Year Two brought war. Even to nonpolitical Hoffmann, this felt inevitable. Certain countries were less equipped to confront zombies, and their chaos was irresistible to nations sharing borders and nurturing grudges. There were invasions. Drones, tanks, fighter jets, ground troops. Historic cities razed to the ground. Unchecked genocides. Any two-sided battle spawned a third side that routed both belligerents. Rumors surfaced of zombies using guns—just a few of Them, and clumsily, and no report was ever confirmed. Still, a troubling thought on a number of levels. Anything They knew, we’d taught Them.

  In some cases, there was no tussling. Nuclear weapons were deployed with the justification that, to destroy zombie hotbeds, one had to obliterate them. Whether that was merely an excuse or not, it did not work. The bombs turned famous skylines into tundras of radioactive scrap and murdered what Hoffmann estimated were tens of millions, most of whom came back as zombies—millions of Them, all at once. Rumors reached Hoffmann that atomic zombies were the worst of all, able to kill without a touch. Their flesh radiated death.

  Year Three was embodied by exodus, out of cities, into the country. Hoffmann received calls from odd area codes preceded by odder country codes. Often these were islands off the edges of America, occupied under the assumption the surrounding water would protect them. It never did. Islands were equivalent to a battlefield’s high ground; everyone wanted to control them, resulting in per capita bloodshed that outdid the biggest cities, Hoffmann heard the story of an island wiped clean of its population, without a single death attributed to a zombie. Year Three taught the living that safe places could be the most dangerous of all.

  Tucked away in her bunker, Hoffmann did not fully appreciate the Second Dark Age until Year Four. Call volume fractioned; Hoffmann, needing a mission, began her cataloging and indexing project. From intermittent updates, she gleaned the most successful survivors established themselves in structures with similar benefits to AMLD: sports arenas, grocery warehouses, shopping malls. In a single week beginning with 1,471–00:00, Hoffmann received no fewer than seventy calls from the same Pennsylvania number. People were taking turns on a functional phone to describe a high-rise run by the rich that had fallen to zombies, which were coming for them now too—the nouveau riche—so they’d better run, except they simply had to tell their stories first, even if it killed them.

  At 1,909–02:35, well into Year Five, Hoffmann spoke to a population specialist who insisted zombies now outnumbered the living, four hundred thousand to one. Hoffmann had to get out a calculator to come to grips with it. According to a book in the AMLD Lending Library, Earth’s population on 10/23 had been around eight billion. The absolute best-case scenario suggested the planet now contained 7,999,980,000 zombies, versus a mere 20,000 living people.

  Hoffmann sifted through her feelings. She could not help but pinpoint a silver lining. If the specialist’s numbers were accurate, humans were doing a first-rate job of devising ways to contact her. The Archive included Personal Histories from a higher percentage of the living than she’d believed. She used her nascent index to shuffle through the first five years of impossible tales.

  Housewives forming covens as a means of survival. Stopgap police forces burning citizens to contain what they stubbornly believed was a biological agent. A young man encouraged by the chaos to play out delusions of vampirism. A troupe of ren-fair motorcyclists who believed their Arthurian code could withstand any strain. A paraplegic man trapped indoors, tortured by his helper monkey, begging her to send help. Such strange tales, and Hoffmann read them over and over. One day they might remind us who we used to be, and who we tried to be, and that recollection could save the world.

  * * *

  Year Fucking Six. Multiple callers, in quivering voices, referred to it this way, Everything changed in Year Fucking Six. Etta Hoffmann had begun to think people were getting their legs under them. The calls in Year Five had bolstered this assumption. No one sounded optimistic, but no longer did they sound shattered. She detected the grim fortitude she used to hear from retirement-age coworkers who’d seen it all, Shit happens. You move on. End of story.

  But the story was just getting going.

  Naturally, she took note of it the first time she heard it. She even marked the page in the binder with a neon-pink adhesive note. On that day, 2,297–18:05, a man named Mike—a prosaic name for a fellow whose words would be writ large in history—spun his yarns well past Hoffmann’s strictly held quitting time of six o’clock. She was peeved and impatient, nearly enough to miss a detail so startling, she went off script to ask a Q.

  “You just said … did you say … the zombie was … a champ?”

  “A champ?” Mike scoffed. “I did not say that.”

  “Did you say it was … a chump?”

  “The zombie was neither a champ nor a chump. Or a chomp, for that matter.” Mike sighed in irritation. “The zombie was a chimp.”

  From this asinine interplay Hoffmann first learned of the development that would, she believed, end any attempt by humanity to take back the world. Mike was calling from a sheriffs’ station northwest of Memphis, where he and two others, while scrounging suburban streets, had come across a pair of chimpanzees outside a Long John Silver’s.

  A chimp sighting by itself was not implausible. Animals left to starve in zoos had started breaking out as early as ten days after 10/23, and exotic animals had taken up residence, and multiplied, in public parks, city streets, and shopping centers that now seemed designed specifically for their pleasure. Hoffmann had fielded three corroborating accounts that elephants were doing especially well, those able descendants of the La Brea woolly mammoths.

  Camels in Chicago, lions in Indianapolis, zebras in Seattle, all thriving. Chimps in Memphis? Not so strange. Mike agreed, until his party saw the simians loping toward them. That was concerning. Rabies had mushroomed since 10/23, In a vacuum of vaccinations, every mammal was a potential threat, from cats and dogs to rabbits and foxes. The chimps were rabid refugees from the Memphis Zoo, Mike suspected.

  It was only when the chimps got closer that Mike realized They were dead. Their black fur was purple and shining with hardened blood, Their bowels hung loose and They were missing segments of Their groins, armpits, and necks. When Mike and his friends waved their weapons, the chimps did not flinch. Their white eyes rolled and They kept coming on feet and knuckles, moving together as if following the same command. When one’s lips peeled back from its crooked yellow fangs, so did the others’.

  “We had to brain the zombie apes the same way we do zombie people,” Mike said. “Turned from chimps to chumps, I guess you could say.”

  Hoffmann consulted the Lending Library. In Year Fucking Six, she’d do that a lot. A well-thumbed medical reference from the desk of a hypochondriac statistician explained the theory of simian immunodeficiency virus, how it infected people who ate chimpanzee meat before mutating into HIV. There was, therefore, a precedent for sharing a virus with this species. While disturbing, it did not seem disastrous. Zombie chimps might cause trouble in the Congo, and wherever else chimps lived in the wild, but the world zoo population could wreak but limited havoc.

  Two months later, Hoffmann received an overnight phone message alleging zombie rats. A young woman calling from someplace where there was a deafening, metallic echo begged for help. Through shrieks and sobs, she said her brother had killed a bunch of rats, same as every day, except this batch, before he could bag Them, wiggled back onto Their tiny, clawed feet and charged, grappling up legs, leaping to chests, knotting Themselves in hair. Her whole family was in different stages of pale-skinned, dark-socketed, zombie-bite death, and it wasn’t fair, they’d made it all the way to Year Fucking Six.

  Hoffmann believed the notion of a rat that would not stay dead mig
ht cause the most hardened renegades to go fetal. Though she had no particular fear of rodents, the news felt like the breaching of a castle’s walls, Zombie chimps, that made some sense. Zombie rats? She did not need a lab coat to understand some bigger barrier had been broken. Literal barriers would need to be rethought as well; determined survivors could build obstructions large enough to keep out two-legged zombies, Could they also build them finely enough to keep out little scurriers?

  Back to the Lending Library. A book on great disasters, a chapter on plagues. New York City alone houses two million rats. Paris, six million. London, seven million. Hoffmann recalled a bit of AMLD watercooler chat, one staffer bemoaning pest problems, the other citing a supposed truism: no one was ever more than six feet from the nearest rat. We just let ourselves forget it, that’s all.

  There would be no more forgetting. Not for Hoffmann either. Calls she received about zombie rats were not localized: Utah, Wisconsin, South Carolina. The switch on rats had been pulled everywhere, and she had no reason to doubt the next rat that died at AMLD would not decompose in civilized silence. It would roll back over, sniff her out, and hunt her down, its tiny red eyes gone white.

  No more slippers, Hoffmann started wearing the tallest boots she could rustle up in her size, which happened to be the most stylish items she’d ever put on her body. Red leather, chunky heels, laces all the way up to her knees. Hoffmann sharpened the end of a broom and carried it everywhere, including to bed. No more sleeping on the break room sofa. She moved the cushions onto a break room table, then slathered the table legs in Crisco to make them too slippery for rodent feet. As a final safeguard, she coated the room’s perimeter with flour each night, so she’d know in the morning if any little toes, zombie or not, had come tramping.