The Living Dead

by Kraus, Daniel

  Sleep no longer was a sure thing. One night, she looked around the moonlit break room, absorbing the absurdity of her bedtime routine. She tried to imagine the defensives others out there had devised. She imagined metal bars being inserted into plastic housings, daily caulkings, small-gauge wire. Right before she drifted off, she gasped back awake. What she was imagining were cages, the kind meant for hamsters, gerbils, chinchillas, guinea pigs, and, yes, rats. Only people were locking themselves inside.

  Yet another trip to the Lending Library. This one on a hunch, in the middle of the night. She sat on a stool, her habit now to keep her booted legs free from zombie-rat surprise, and browsed, Someone in the building had owned a trove of self-help and inspirational books, including one on “being kind.” Hoffmann, dismissive of rote politeness, had nearly chucked it. But the book had a chapter on empathy, and when her gaze settled on a list of the most empathetic animals, she felt a lonely, echoing sorrow for what the world had become.

  In the top spot, humans.

  In the second spot, chimps and orangutans.

  In the third spot, rats.

  The chapter included plenty of unfollowable specifics, The roles of the neocortex, right supramarginal gyrus, temporoparietal junction. But the bigger stuff she understood. When a rat was trapped, its fellow rats attempted to free it. They would save it morsels of food. If the rat was freed, it was affectionately nuzzled. Females out-empathized males, no surprise there, but all rats exhibited pro-social behavior once attributed solely to primates.

  Hoffmann shelved the book. What it suggested about the zombie disease was too cruel, and she didn’t want to memorize the exact order of the animals on the list. She didn’t think she could know the precise shape of the horror to come and still lift herself from her spike-legged, flour-encircled table-bed each morning, not without paging to the Suicide entry in the Archive index and wondering what it would look like with another page reference after it, just one more.

  It was rare for her to bury her head, but she knew why this one hurt. She’d always felt a kinship with animals. That was different from loving animals; she’d never wanted a pet. But she recalled spending school recesses alone on the playground, staring into the woods beyond the chain-link fence, knowing she shared more with steady, watchful squirrels, rabbits, and birds than she did the screeching, frenetic, unpredictable grade-school monsters behind her.

  Teachers, school psychologists, and even fellow classmates, once they had the vocabulary, liked to explain to Etta Hoffmann that she lacked empathy. She never believed that. She had empathy, the same way animals had it: hidden from the loud, grabbing, demanding world, experienced in her own private ways. Losing animals to undeath hurt more to her than losing people, because the only thing that was certain about the zombie plague was that animals were not to blame for it.

  * * *

  No one really got over losing dogs. Losing dogs was like losing the war. It was the final betrayal, not by dogs Themselves, but by God, or Science, or whatever other powers you chose to blame, Hoffmann knew dogs were special. She’d seen Lassie, The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin, Benji, Marley & Me, Homeward Bound. Dogs were our protectors, our partners, our friends, our babies, our elders. The love between humans and dogs was the best example of the planet’s potential, how every living thing might harmonize.

  Evidence became irrefutable on 2,502–00:00. Loyal dogs, their formidable sniffers and radar ears more helpful for survival than anything humans could offer, had been welcomed in thousands of shelters and hideaways. Overnight, They became terrorist bombs. The earliest stories Hoffmann heard involved dogs, either dead via incident or old age, digging Themselves out of Their shallow graves. Even dead dogs were excellent diggers.

  It took a lot of killing, more than it should have, before people accepted the new reality and dragged their beloved dogs from their homes by the collars. Hoffmann could not stop herself from envisioning it. Their confused eyes. Their flattened ears. The low wag of their tails, eager to make things right. People would bludgeon their dogs to death with shovels and baseball bats, taking care to destroy, beyond all doubt, the same heads they’d stroked during dark days, the same muzzles they’d snuggled to their necks during cold nights.

  What would happen if the zombie virus transferred to mosquitoes? Upon the lifeless planet would sit zombie people with nothing to do but accept the face licks of Their zombie dogs, each lap of Their tongues peeling away another layer of epidermis, then muscle, then tendon, until the zombies’ faces were gone and Their yellow skulls grinned for infinity, or at least until zombie people and dogs alike blew away, dust in the wind.

  * * *

  Hoffmann credited her impatience to bid good riddance to Year Fucking Six for inspiring her revelation in Year Seven. The idea came to her while she was working on the Archive.

  Cannibalism had been an inherent, if not explicit, element in every zombie story Hoffmann had read and heard. Zombies were people who ate people; thus They were cannibals. Cannibalism had no entry in the Archive index. It was every entry. The rise of animal zombies revealed the flaws in this assumption. To attain cannibal status, a creature must consume another of its own kind. But. Were zombie chimps eating living chimps? Were zombie rats eating living rats, zombie dogs eating living dogs? They were not. All zombies, no matter Their species, pursued humans. From this simple fact Hoffmann drew two startling conclusions.

  The zombie virus was not cannibalistic.

  The zombie virus was antihuman.

  The world got quieter after this realization, as if the AMLD building had been buried in snow. The sense of danger that had slept in Hoffmann’s gut for seven years unfolded and grew claws. Humans were not the incidental victims of a natural disaster. They had been specifically targeted for annihilation. The gradual zombification of the animal world was tantamount to a biblical flood, with people being reduced to a handful of Noahs.

  It was newspeople who needed to know. Telling them, in Hoffmann’s view, was empathetic. In Year Eight, Etta Hoffmann added a postscript to the last of her Qs: Please notice, zombie animals only attack humans, which means humans are being purposefully eliminated. Goodbye. It went poorly. Reactions were sputtering and furious. Confrontation had always sickened Hoffmann. She would run from the phone and throw up, each splash of vomit sounding like Q, Q, Q.

  Hoffmann’s antihuman warning might have had a severe influence on survivors’ acceptance of their withering relevance. It might have had no impact at all. Either way, fewer and fewer calls came through after that. The last significant wave of news Hoffmann received revolved around vegetarianism. Meat had been eighty-sixed from the menu. No one trusted an animal not to return to screaming life under their butcher knives. Hoffmann believed this culinary pivot was overdue. For eight years, she’d transcribed descriptions of animal bones piled into small mountains, dry creek beds flowing with animal blood. It was unsustainable slaughter, the bison massacres of the Old West all over again.

  Hoffmann had read all about the things people had done to animals. Pigs crushed into manure-filled cages, turkeys eating one another in teeming sties, chickens ground up while still alive. Follow the logic, Hoffmann told herself. If nature was having its revenge for how we treated animals, what had we done to our fellow humans to make the initial wave of zombies come after us? She considered that certain S entry in the Archive index so often now, the paper began to wear through.

  * * *

  Without making any sort of dramatic declaration, Hoffmann began to tidy her affairs. Shaping up the Archive’s preface. Establishing a comprehensive table of contents. Testing materials to determine what might best protect the Archive from moisture and rot. Piecemeal processes that might take a year or so to complete if she wanted them perfect, which she did. It would give her time to come to terms with not just the end but her end.

  Between January and April of Year Nine, she received only four calls. None of them had new information. All had a fare-thee-well flavor. Having given up all
hope for restored equilibrium, people were fleeing old safe spaces, even those with access to landlines or the Corpse Web, with the intent to migrate as animals once had, roaming and grazing, eyes ever open for that night’s home.

  With living people forced to scurry and burrow, the planet would be largely free of human colonization for the first time in two hundred thousand years, Hoffmann wondered what this would mean on a global scale. It was beyond anything covered in the Lending Library. Only when she was half-asleep atop her Crisco-slicked table-bed would her mind dislodge from its usual rails of logic and drift about. She dreamed zombies were the new indigenous people, native to the land in a way few others were. The big difference was They’d been created in all lands at once. Earth, its entirety, was Theirs. Hoffmann thought there was something graceful about that, even given the ugly flip side: the living cordoned off in bleak reservations, making do under conditions little better than what they’d once inflicted upon livestock.

  * * *

  Hoffmann had not gone entirely unnoticed over the decade. Zombies had coalesced on occasion, tipped off by some unknown indicator. Hearing groans and palm slaps, she’d go to the upper floor and gaze down at the wedge of D.C. she’d come to know so well. Once electric with pink cherry blossoms and bright green grass, now a blast zone of concrete shavings and windblown dregs. From up there, she’d take measure of the zombie threat, Usually just a couple. Sometimes a dozen. Once, in Year Five, seventy-nine passed like sap down tree bark, a slow, breathtaking spread.

  Only in Year One and Year Two had humans tried to get inside. Hoffmann did not like to think of it. She did not feel sorry for how she reacted. But she knew, according to old standards, she should feel sorry. The tall, bearded man, a vacant baby carrier still strapped to his chest, who’d yanked on the AMLD door handle, desperate to evade the zombie ranks behind him; Hoffmann watched him get eaten. The teenage boy, lurking in the predawn, wearing a goofy Hula-Hoop contraption that kept zombies at an arm’s length: if anyone deserved to share Hoffmann’s safety, it was that kid, but she ignored his efforts. The family of four who’d somehow deduced AMLD was occupied and screamed to be let in for forty minutes; Hoffmann, unwilling to advertise her location to every zombie and raider in D.C., was prepared to break a second-story window and pelt the poor family with heavy objects. She would have, too, if the family had not been chased off by ten zombies in football uniforms.

  Etta Hoffmann was no hero.

  She knew that about herself on 4,095–4:55, the day, hour, and minute of Snoop’s first call. Snoop, who wanted to learn so much about her. Snoop, who convinced Hoffmann to trust because it was the right thing to do. Ten years of stories could be really important, she’d said. You could help a lot of people understand how we got here.

  If Snoop knew the truth of how much Hoffmann had “helped” people, she’d quit calling. After Snoop slyly elicited Hoffmann’s name, Hoffmann believed her days were numbered. She altered her schedule for the first time in a decade, working two additional hours per day. She completed a final draft of her preface, at last satisfied with her instructions for the Archive’s use. She finished the vast, nested table of contents she felt would be most helpful to future users. She settled upon watertight, industrial-strength, self-adhering stretch plastic, available in the maintenance room, to shrink-wrap the Archive.

  Lastly, she began to approach the idea of suicide not from an oblique angle but with the forthrightness she applied to other issues. It was a quandary. She had no gun. She did not know which toxic chemicals might be fatal if swallowed. The building was not tall enough to jump from. She did not trust herself, or the aged ceiling, to handle a hanging. Setting fire to herself put the Archive at risk. Slicing one’s wrists, she’d read, was one of the least reliable options. The only surefire method, she concluded, was going outside and letting the zombies have her.

  She thought about it every day, Taking off her clothes so she’d be easily bitable, disassembling her barricade, calling for zombies to come get her. Day after day, she did not do it. Not even after spotting the first zombie rats at AMLD, two waddling side by side down the center of a main hallway. She scolded herself mercilessly. Classic Etta Hoffmann, the girl who’d frustrated every doctor, relative, and would-be friend into giving up on her, immobilized by the idea of disrupting routine.

  She had only herself to blame when Snoop came knocking.

  * * *

  Hoffmann always got up early, five thirty on the dot, but this was even earlier. A thunk-thunk-thunk, steadier than any noise a zombie could make, jostled her awake. Her drowsy brain decided the thunk-thunk-thunk was distant drums, the kind characters in old adventure flicks heard coming from jungles full of headhunters.

  “Etta? Let us in, okay?”

  Already lost in jungle vines, Hoffmann’s bleary thoughts turned to Haiti, where bokors stole offenders’ souls. Hearing her own name spoken aloud after ten years was like hearing proof her soul, too, had been stolen, and the bokor was outside, teasing her with it, offering to give it back if only she’d be a good nzambi, do as she was told.

  “Etta, it’s not safe out here. If you don’t open up, we’re going to break in.”

  It was Snoop. Her voice sounded the same as on the phone, if less patient. Hoffmann inspected the Crisco-caked table legs for rat fur and the floor flour for rat prints, and got up. She could think of no better way to handle her cold dread than sticking to routine. She checked the windows for threats. Got dressed. Laced up her red leather boots. By the time she got to the workspace, the lobby clatter had changed from breaking glass to squealing furniture, Beyond that, the fleshy thumps of zombies being dispatched with blunt objects.

  There was no telling if Hoffmann would be dragged away without time to prepare. She tightened her camo fanny pack. She clipped her pink sippy cup to her belt with a carabiner, She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Her stomach burned, her chest fluttered. She was standing in the center of the main room, with no expectation of what might happen next, when Snoop marched in.

  She wore sensible, tight leather clothes, Elastic cords were wrapped around her legs, holding in place homemade sheaths for a long knife and a foot-long sharpened steel pipe. Above the collar of her bomber jacket, a black hockey helmet.

  “Etta,” Snoop sighed. “I’m sorry.”

  Hoffmann said nothing. Always better to watch and wait.

  In the background, the rasps and clucks of her ten-year-old bulwark being shoved back into place.

  Snoop pulled off her hockey helmet. Her face suggested late forties. She had thick blond hair lopped at the shoulders, a safe choice. She had burn marks on her arms and a fierce red scar squiggling down her left cheek and neck. Keeping a cautious eye on Hoffmann, Snoop moved, passing rows of cubicles until she and Hoffmann were only six feet apart. Etta Hoffmann found herself staring at Snoop’s feet. Attached to her boot soles were one-foot-square metal grates. Hoffmann guessed why, and felt admiration. The edges were crusted with the dry guts of zombie rats.

  “I know how this looks,” Snoop said. “It looks like I tricked you. There’s an element of truth to that. But what I’ve found is people like you—people alone?—they get used to thinking certain ways. They can’t see the bigger picture. They don’t remember there is a bigger picture. But there is. It’s the picture of the whole world.”

  A man’s voice rang from the lobby: “Less talk in there! They’re gathering.”

  Snoop’s gaze wandered to the 214 shelved binders, Next to it, Hoffmann noted with a pang of frustration, was the plastic wrap she hadn’t had time to apply.

  “Is that…?” Snoop’s voice lowered to a hush. “Is that it?”

  Hoffmann nodded.

  Snoop turned her head over her shoulder and shouted.

  “Hart, Lowenstein! Close up shop! This is going to take some time!”

  More activity in the lobby, though no complaints: the sounds of their lockdown had a curt efficiency. Snoop turned back around and chewed her lips.

/>   “Yes,” she conceded, “we’re taking it.”

  Hoffmann thought she should feel grief, but instead felt only lightness. She’d carried those binders on her back for a decade.

  “What I want to assure you,” Snoop said, “is we intend to take care of it. What you’ve got here, Etta, is worth more than all the gold in the world. If you’re going to start over—and where I live, we have started over—you need a sense of history. You have to know where things went wrong. I know you think the Archive is safest here. I know you’re scared if we move it, we’ll endanger it. But we’ve done this sort of thing before, we’ve—”

  “Take it,” Hoffmann said.

  Snoop hesitated. “You understand I’m not threatening you.”

  “No one calls anymore,” Hoffmann said. “Except you. You might as well take it.”

  Snoop nodded cautiously, “Okay. Thank you. We’ve got this armored wagon, wait till you see it. We can transport all of it. But that’s not all we hope to take. Every library needs a librarian, Etta.”

  None of Hoffmann’s late-night fretting over how this encounter might unfold included this jarring proposal. She knew her reaction looked the same as ever, like Snoop’s overture was a pebble plinking off a statue. The statue, however, was hollow, and the impact of the offer swelled until it dizzied her, shook her knees, until she could think of nothing at all.

  Moments passed. How many? She was braced against Annie Teller’s workstation, her perspiring palms crinkling a printed photo of Tawna Maydew. She looked back and found Snoop extending a canteen. She had been flanked by two men, both carrying hockey helmets, their outfits just as leather-heavy and tool-strapped. Their expressions, however, were different. They looked repulsed. Hoffmann did not understand. All the things they must have seen out there, and they found AMLD repellent?