The Living Dead

by Kraus, Daniel

  Hoffmann followed their gazes.

  They were looking at her. Her clothing, she began to realize, was not all right. Her sweatpants were ripped in fifty spots. Strings flowed from torn holes like cilia. Critical gaps were repaired with staples. Staples—had she lost her mind? You could see her underwear through a hole in the crotch. Her sweater, the best she had, was a quarter gone from mouse nibbles and striped with duct tape. The shirt beneath was ringed with stains from a decade of dribbled food.

  They looked at her face, She tried to recall the last time she’d faced a mirror. Maybe eighteen months back, when she’d had to yank her third tooth with a wrench. One thing AMLD did not stock was toothpaste. Her teeth had gone an appalling array of gray, yellow, and brown. The rest of her face was in bad shape too. Chapped from dry air, rashed from mold and dust, spotted with fungus. She was pale beyond pale; this site had been built for longevity, with windows that did not open. Her hair was like something pulled from a drain, gummy and tangled into greasy tails.

  The remains of last night’s dinner sat on Annie Teller’s desk. Was a cup of dead beetles so shocking? Protein-rich food had run thin in Year Seven, and so, going off the entomophagy described in a camping-survival book from the Lending Library, she’d started eating insects. Alongside the cup, a plate: a granola of moths, ants, crickets, and houseflies.

  She’d become an insect herself, and no creatures rated lower on the empathy scale. She felt something she hadn’t in ages: shame. The pre-10/23 Etta Hoffmann had rejected many trappings of civilization, but now she’d slumped too far. It had taken seeing three people in the flesh, not on the page, for her to see it.

  Librarian: Hoffmann let the word settle, Without a job to do, she was more than miserable. She was suicidal, Here was a job offer for which she, the world’s worst interviewee, did not have to apply. Yes, librarian. Even having only the scarcest idea what the position entailed, she’d accept it, Leaving this place, learning new behaviors, it might be the most difficult thing she’d ever done, but it might be the thing that turned her from insect back to human.

  She let the word escape like a moth, before she could grab it back and eat it.

  “Yes. Yes. Yes.”

  She nodded too, in case her words came out mealy. Her gaze was fixed on the floor when Snoop’s hand took hold of her shoulder. Hoffmann had always despised being touched, and after so many years since even a public-transport jostle, it felt like being attacked. She retracted; Snoop flinched. Shame, a monster now, swallowed Hoffmann. She imagined she heard the stomach-acid squish of her squalid, soiled, sweaty sweater.

  “We’re going to get you cleaned up.” Snoop whispered now, an apology, “We’ll use some of your water. It’s okay. We have lots of water where we’re going.”

  * * *

  At 4,187–05:18, Etta Hoffmann left the AMLD building. She was the second out the door, behind Snoop, who wielded both knife and steel pipe. Hoffmann held open the door for Lenny Hart and Seth Lowenstein, who began to unload two rubber-wheeled trolleys of Archive binders into what looked like a child’s hand-pulled wagon except twice as big and equipped with big rubber wheels, outfitted with a pioneer bonnet of plated steel, and painted with its own name: Giulietta. They winced as they worked, as if doing so might make them silent.

  Hoffmann winced too, then froze, then forgot how to breathe. More than four thousand days had passed since she’d tasted air not channeled through oily intakes, rusty shafts, dusty vents. Being back in the world was a tough rebirth. Hippodrome colors stabbed her dilated eyes, the pepper of leaves plugged her throat, the sugar of flowers furred her tongue. Hot-concrete fumes melted her sinuses, windblown dirt struck her skin like bees. The world was loud. Whirs, purrs, clicks, and rattles played a fanfare for her first foray into unimaginable vastness.

  Snoop had learned not to touch her. She held up capable hands, each weaponed.

  “See these? I’ve got you.”

  No one had ever said anything like that to Etta Hoffmann, and until that moment, Hoffmann would have thought she wouldn’t have cared if anyone had. But she did care. The words, coupled with the sight of Snoop’s strong, well-protected body, slithered into Hoffmann’s bloodstream and imbued her with strength she’d long misplaced. She pushed her cheeks into the slapping wind, opened stinging eyes against a brilliant sun. Down the block, between two buildings she’d forgotten existed, a zombie pushed through a row of trees shaggy with overgrowth. But Hoffmann felt no fear. Snoop was near; Lenny Hart and Seth Lowenstein were speedy and ready to roll; the world so overflowed with possibility she refused to believe there was only one end coming, There had to be infinite ends. A poetic thought. Perhaps she was the Poet after all.

  There had been little to do before leaving. That said a lot, didn’t it? The Corpse Web bore few surface similarities to the old internet, but with Seth Lowenstein’s help, she confirmed a one-to-one data match of any changes she made on the back end. Arranging the bones of government sites was easy. The difficult part was deciding in what shape to arrange them. Hoffmann stared at the message she’d chosen ten years ago.

  ARE YOU OK? CALL ME.

  Those five words, the very first Q, had worked wonders, convincing those who had nothing to believe in that someone wanted to hear from them—and if one person cared, there must be others. What could she possibly put in its place now that the operation was over? She thought about it all night, restless due to a warm, squeaky body after submitting to Snoop’s command of a full-body bath. After waking before dawn with the others, she sat for the last time at Annie Teller’s desk and poised her fingertips over the keyboard, still deciding.

  “Etta,” Snoop had said. “Time to go.”

  Hoffmann deleted the five words. They blinked out as if they’d never existed. Without a single mistake, she typed a new message, barely different from the last, but one she hoped would bring strength and solace to someone.

  YOU ARE OK.

  Snoop expressed surprise Hoffmann had no personal items beyond her sippy cup and a fanny pack full of smartphones for recording future transcripts. Hoffmann looked around, just to be sure. Her gaze settled upon the photos she’d tacked to Annie Teller’s workstation. Hoffmann removed her two favorites. Annie Teller, smug in snappy soccer gear. Tawna Maydew, sleepy-eyed in bed, with a calico cat licking her face. Taking a pair of scissors from the drawer, Hoffmann cut excess space from each picture, then used tape to bring the two women together at last.

  She slid the result into her fanny pack.

  “I’m ready,” Hoffmann said. It was a lie, but she’d never had problems lying.

  The zombie down the block was old and slow, Lenny Hart pointed his aluminum bat to indicate two other zombies emerging from shadow. Seth Lowenstein took hold of Giulietta’s handle. Snoop raised her eyebrows at Hoffmann.

  Hoffmann took a deep breath, Outdoor air must contain more oxygen. It stung her lungs, spun her vision. This must be what riding a roller coaster felt like. She regretted never having ridden one back when fake danger still provided a service to the human brain. She nodded.

  They headed for a side road between zombie locations, Hoffmann’s first steps were unsteady. Not only had the road buckled from burst water mains, but she wore rat-stomping plates Lenny Hart had improvised from floor drains and screwed to the soles of her boots. It required a bandied-leg stance and longer steps, but she liked the concentration it took to successfully walk in them. She did not want to trip and cause a ruckus. People had trusted her over the past ten years, but never this much. She ought to trust them back. That meant speaking to them, she thought, the same as she’d spoken to callers.

  “Is it just rats and dogs and chimps?” she asked.

  “We’ve heard of dolphins, but obviously haven’t seen proof,” Snoop said. “Right now it’s chickens. You see a chicken, you let us know, They’re surprisingly hard to hit. I could have really done without zombie chickens.”

  Snoop smiled, though, and Hoffmann looked back down at her feet, to
keep her rat-stompers straight, yes, but more critically, to settle the powerful palpitations in her chest.

  “Here’s a tip,” Snoop said, “Once we get into mud, keep those stompers moving or they’ll sink. There’s a lot of mud in D.C. They say the pumps here failed in the first month. Water flooded the aquifers, We’re on high ground now, but you’ll see, There’s beaver dams all over the beltway. You probably knew D.C. was built on a swamp. Well, the swamp is back.”

  Lenny Hart made a low whistle. Snoop looked up, and Hoffmann followed suit. A block away milled three more zombies. He pointed his baseball bat toward the target crossroad, this time more vigorously. The whole group picked up the pace.

  “I could be crazy,” Snoop said, “but the zombies, I think they’re getting slower.”

  Their party bent north. Hoffmann watched the zombie trio follow. They did seem slow. But what stirred her about Snoop’s remark took fifteen minutes to reveal itself, as gradually and beautifully as the dawn sun cresting the horizon. It was Snoop’s inflection.

  Snoop didn’t call the zombies They, with a capital T. She called them they.

  A subtle difference that might change the world.

  Hoffmann, to the consternation of her parents, had never cried before, and never would. She would forever recognize this as the time she came the closest.

  “Etta,” Snoop checked, “You’re okay. You’re okay.”

  YOU ARE OK: if Hoffmann believed in signs, she’d take this as a good one. She did not look up in response; she wanted sure footing until the Second Dark Age lightened enough for her to handle new paths with confidence. In the patient silence she felt an invitation to pose more Qs. She did, in fact, have one she wanted answered.

  “The name you told me … was it your real name?”

  Snoop laughed. “Of course. Wasn’t yours?”

  “Etta Hoffmann,” Hoffmann acknowledged, trying it back on, seeing if it still fit.

  “Nice to meet you again,” Snoop said, “I’m Charlene Rutkowski.”

  The living dead: a contradictory phrase that posited lots of Qs, Qs, Qs, the biggest of which was who was who? When life and death were equally bad, and you could barely distinguish each group’s denizens, was it only the crossing of the border that was to fear? Perhaps Hoffmann would make it her new purpose to figure out the difference. Perhaps where they were headed, a place Snoop—Charlene Rutkowski—called Old Muddy, everyone could figure it out together, and the tape-spliced photo of Annie Teller and Tawna Maydew would prove itself a prophetic object. It was worth a shot. These were the nights, the dawns, and the days of the dead, however one wished to define the term, and across these lands, they—not They—all of them—not Them—might yet write diaries of new hopes and forge new definitions of survival.

  ACT

  THREE

  The Death of Death

  ONE DAY

  HAUNT

  THEM

  LIKE

  YOU’RE

  ALREADY

  DEAD

  You Will Soon Be Gone

  The fast-moving ones are not fast anymore.

  You know why. For a long time, though you are bad at judging time, the fast-moving ones were in danger. The danger was you. All of you. You were everywhere. You wanted what the fast-moving ones had. The salt, the blood, the meat. They knew this and were fast. Their mouths moved fast. Their legs moved fast. Their arms moved fast. The hard, sharp things they carried in their hands moved fast. That is gone now. The fast-moving ones are quiet and slow. It is not only because they have faded. It is because you have faded, All of you.

  For a long time, though you are bad at judging time, you did not know loneliness. Now you know. Loneliness is the inability to hunt. The inability to be among fast-moving ones, You feel it all the time.

  Your legs do not work well. Your hands do not go where you want. You sit in the same spot all day, all night. Before, you did not sit at all. You walked. Now walking is difficult. When you walk, pieces fall off. When you fall, it is difficult to get up. Some of you never get up. You see yous lying all over. Some of the yous have a shackle around an ankle connected to a broken chain. A remnant of another time, though you cannot recall what that time was.

  You have a shackle too. You do not like it. You look at it all the time. It used to be shiny. Now the only shiny parts are sparkles of rust. Usually you like shiny things. There are shiny things all over your chest, You like them very much. Sometimes when the fast-moving ones come, they put new shiny things on your chest. It makes you feel good, Almost good enough to stand up.

  You are sitting on what used to be called a newspaper kiosk. You recall the last time you stood up. It was to walk over to a you who had fallen in an alley. You stomped the other you’s head in with your foot. The shackle around your ankle made noise. You lost most of your toes that day. You did not mind. You had to do it. The fallen you had been there for a long time. You are sure of this, though you are bad at judging time.

  This is the other part of loneliness. First, the yous were strong, which meant you were vicious. Next, the yous were stronger, which meant you could be gentle. You shared ambition. You changed the world. You were a generation, and it was a great one. But your time is ending. You know it by how few of you remain. Before, the yous were the stars in the sky. Now, the yous are planets, growing ever more distant. You know the time is coming when the yous will become only you. It is happening to the smaller yous too. The rat-yous, the dog-yous, the chicken-yous. It is lonely.

  From your newspaper kiosk, you hear fast-moving ones. They are coming. These days, they come to you like you used to come to them. Sometimes they look into your eyes. Sometimes they talk to you. When that happens, you can feel all yous everywhere twinkle, stars in the skies once more. It is not like tasting the salt, blood, and meat of the fast-moving ones, But it is close.

  You used to understand some of the fast-moving ones’ words. Your mind was weak, but it was united to other yous. Together, your minds were agile and creative. Now you cannot even decipher the name the fast-moving ones have given you, Jaff. Geef. Chiff. You do not know what they are saying. What you know is you like hearing it. You like hearing it, and you like the shiny things they give you. When they remember you, you remember yourself. You feel like the things you have done were important.

  The fast-moving ones are different every time. Some are small, some large. Some are soft, some loud. Some are old, some young. You like the young ones best. The parts of you that have rotted away, the young ones somehow replace them. You can feel it. It tickles. You do not understand it. But you are grateful.

  Fast-moving ones have a certain shape, a certain motion, Your eyesight is poor, but you can see them now, a few blocks away, They will be here soon. They will do what they always do. They will poke around. They will pick up things and take them. One of the things they might pick up is one of the yous. You do not know why they do this. They find old yous, very old yous, and take them away. You do not mind. You hope they talk to you today. You hope they call you Jaff, or Geef, or Chiff. For a short while, as the fast-moving ones stand in place, you will not be able to tell the fast-moving ones from you, and it will make you feel better that you, all of you, will soon be gone.

  More Shit to Do

  Crick-crack.

  Earth was scored with new music. Greer Morgan, having spent exactly half her life in the old world and half in the new, still got disoriented. She shook her head at loud, shouting children who showed no reverence for the change. Forget the burbling creek of electronic notifications and the hullabaloo of music, TV, streaming video. When Greer woke from dreams of Bulk, Missouri, it was Old Muddy’s absence of white noise that gave her vertigo. Air vents, computer fans, cars thumping over distant highways: it had been persistent bad gossip, and all of it was gone.

  The soundscape kids took for granted today left Greer awestruck. Not even when hunting with Daddy and Conan had Greer heard nature so vibrantly. Blankets of birdsong were stitched of distinctive threa
ds, and symphonies of insect sibilance were played by a billion tiny legs and feelers. And the trees! Trees were like a great, looming race, their branches creaking in coos of childlike curiosity, rustling leaves in satisfied exhales, the tsks of their twigs the gentle chiding humans deserved.

  Fifteen years after 10/23, new sounds existed too, though only a few justified terminology. Greer remembered a teacher rhapsodizing how Inuits had fifty different words for snow. Well, the survivors at Old Muddy—a.k.a. Fort York—had a half dozen words for the sounds of collapsing buildings. A woody was the cracked-knuckles splintering of a wooden structure: houses, barns, pavilions. A duster was the caving of a brick structure; there was a softness to it, even when multiple floors succumbed. Screechers were unpleasant: metal structures yielding to rust with banshee shrieks, Screechers could stop you in the middle of a laugh and make you fold up in fear. Greer once heard the collapse of an Ohio theme-park roller coaster and was still haunted by the ride’s ghost riders.

  Other sounds included kaboomies (methane explosions in underground tunnels) and marimbas (the xylophoning of rain plunking through multiple floors of gutted high-rises). It made perfect sense to Greer they’d been slapped with such childish labels. You had to reframe the sounds of a dead world if you planned on getting out of bed every day.

  Crick-crack.

  Unlike the noise of collapse, that was a sound you could hear anytime you wished. You only had to venture seven blocks north of the Fort York perimeter. Along a roughly fifteen-block stretch of what used to be Queen Street in what used to be Toronto, Ontario, Canada, you could hear it from inside former businesses and apartments, down shadowy alleys, out of forested former parks. Crick-crack. Crick-crack. Crick-crack.