The Living Dead

by Kraus, Daniel

  “Don’t hang it up yet, Gramps. I heard life expectancy’s back on the rise.”

  Laughs in Slowtown topped out at agreeable murmurs. When Nishimura glanced back at the softie, Greer took a hard look at him, hoping to resent him, and failed. Damn, she hated it when good, clean spite got fucked up with admiration.

  Charlie and the Face had finished binding the fallen zombie. Like the gun and the dumping of horseflesh, it was an exercise of extravagant caution. Both edged aside to give the team’s last member space to unroll the canvas stretcher she’d removed from her pack. No question about it: Etta Hoffmann was the weak link of today’s posse, Any day’s posse, really—Hoffmann refused to converse, Normally, Greer wouldn’t care, but a little chitchat helped ensure everything ran smoothly out here. It even helped you give a shit about the people beside you.

  What ticked Greer off about Etta Hoffmann was she was a grown-ass woman whom everyone treated like a preschooler. Hoffmann’s sole job at Old Muddy was keeping what was called the New Library, installed in the Toronto Public Library branch across from the fort at Bathurst Street. Housed like the Ark of the fucking Covenant were shelves of binders, a post-10/23 history Hoffmann had apparently created and titled, with exasperating hubris, the Hoffmann Archive of Tales from the New World. People seemed to like reading it; the library was a busy spot.

  Greer had been inside the New Library exactly once. As a new arrival, she provided a “Personal History” to Hoffmann. It was both customary and symbolic: you shared your story, you became one of the group. The main thing Greer recalled from her interview was watching Hoffmann sift through papers and books, and thinking that “librarian” was an awful cushy job to have at a place in perpetual need of manual labor. In a fair world, Hoffmann would be doing double duty in Slowtown.

  Instead, the Custodial Council who arranged schedules—which Greer suspected meant Karl Nishimura—took care to assign Hoffmann to recovery jobs only alongside Charlie Rutkowski. What was that about? Lots of people had BFFs, family members, or fuck buddies they’d like to work alongside, but for them, it was tough titty. You got thrown together, you made nice. Etta Hoffmann didn’t, while Greer worked like a coal miner. The way of the world hadn’t changed. Being good at shit only earned you more shit to do.

  Charlie and the Face prepared to shift the softie onto the stretcher. A delicate maneuver: guts could pour, chests collapse, limbs detach.

  “I’d better help,” Nishimura said.

  “Aye-aye.”

  As he moved away, Greer scanned farther along Queen Street. The sinking sun permeated the gray clouds enough to make her squint. Half a block down sat the Chief, easily the most recognizable zombie in Slowtown, An old zombie edging toward softie, the Chief would sometimes do what Etta Hoffmann, a living human, did not: convey pieces of information.

  Why hadn’t Greer thought of her before? There was no time to ponder. She cast her eyes about to confirm no pressing threats, and using the hushed, heel-toe hunter’s steps Daddy had taught her, walked away from the group. Just like that. She had some feelings about it, sure. The team would worry about her. They’d be pissed too. Forget Nishimura’s batteries; this was an act no one would condone, She was a selfish asshole. But sometimes you had to look out for yourself, or even more importantly, your own.

  Fort York knew of Greer’s reputation when she’d arrived. The only reason they’d let her join, she was certain, was because they’d liked Muse King so damn much. It was hard to listen to Muse talk and not want to go on listening forever. Old Muddy had become cold and quiet in his absence. Three months now, he’d been gone.

  She glanced at the surrounding buildings as she hurried through shadow.

  “Come on, baby,” she whispered. “Where are you?”

  She had a good, strong hunch she was about to find out, The Chief was just ahead, as usual sitting atop a toppled, rust-burred ad-circular kiosk in front of a three-story building, the bottom of which had been a donut shop. Greer stole a final look back at the recovery team. They remained bunched around the softie.

  Except the Face. He’d backed away. To Greer’s surprise, his muddled face was aimed right at her. He did not shout or raise an alarm. Maybe he knew what she was doing, Maybe he understood. Whatever the reason for his silence, she’d take it. Before ducking beneath the Chief’s donut-shop awning, she gave the Face a grateful nod. He was a block away, but she figured he’d see it. Behind that gnarled flesh, he had a way of noticing everything.

  Super Bowl Sunday

  Personal History Transcript #811

  Location: Fort York New Library

  Subject: “The Face”

  Interviewer: Etta Hoffmann

  Time: 4,458–11:43

  Notes: Subject’s face is disfigured. Subject refused to supply his real name.

  Q.

  Awful, isn’t it? I appreciate it. I know that might sound strange, but I appreciate you just being straightforward and asking about it. That doesn’t happen very often. I’m trying to think. Let me see. You know, I don’t know if it’s ever happened, someone just coming right out and addressing it. Not that I blame them for looking away and all that. If you saw a face like mine and didn’t react, I think that would mean you’re not okay inside. You’d lost something human.

  Q.

  It felt like I was the last man on Earth being chased by an army of the dead. How’s that for an answer? I wasn’t, of course, That was obvious from what I saw. And I saw lots of things. Lots and lots of horrible things. I’m sure you did too.

  Q.

  I appreciate the question, Honestly, I do. But I wonder what good it would do. Listing off atrocities just for you to write them down.

  Q.

  I worked for, let’s just say, a news organization. I’m not sure what good we did, We tried to keep people informed, but after a while, it was just all bad news, you know? Oh—I see. I see what you’re saying, How was broadcasting all those terrible stories different from listing them off for you? You’re clever! I guess I can tell you some. Is it all right if I just rush right through them? I think sometimes people see my face and they think my heart must be the same, all blistered and calloused. But it’s not.

  Q.

  I saw a man’s guts pulled out of his anus. I saw a woman’s guts pulled out of her vagina. I saw a zombie caught in an escalator, just like little kids worry about. Wild pigs—I saw so many wild pigs. I guess pigs are smart, and figured a way out of their pens and went hog wild. Ha, I didn’t mean to say that. But they did. Pigs got lean and mean. They’d eat people who weren’t dead yet, They’d eat zombies too. Pigs didn’t have a side in the whole thing. One time, I hid out in this beauty salon and found a zombie wrapped in electrical cords and stabbed with curling irons, This was back when some spots still had electricity, and the irons had burned holes in her the size of baseballs. The smell wasn’t even the worst part. The woman was naked. Why would she be naked? I had this real bad feeling she’d been tortured. You know, for fun. One thing I remember, I don’t know why, is a tennis court, where someone had written the word ALIVE in blood, huge all over the green clay, And heads on pikes. Lots and lots and lots of heads on pikes, You’ve seen them. Can we just stop there? It was a long trip.

  Q.

  Six hundred and fifty miles as the crow flies. Unfortunately, I’m not a crow. There were road signs, sure, but you couldn’t use the roads. The most valuable thing in the world were paper maps, but who had those? Everyone used GPS. You know how it was. One direction, zombies. The other direction, people worse than zombies. You’d have to double back, go a new way, and then you didn’t know where you were. Things were probably different for me. Even people I wanted to meet, my face scared them off. Probably for the best. Traveling alone, finding food alone, it was easier. Any big food hoard, people guarded with their lives. It made me think of the commercials we played at the station. All those silly jingles. We were consumers back then. Consumption far as the eye could see.

  Q.

&nbs
p; Correct. No lasting damage to my eyes, but the skin around them … well, you can see it, It was so torn up it swelled shut. I made Zoë find a knife and let some blood out so I could see. I got the idea from Rocky. You ever see the Rocky movies? You did? All of them? Me too. I used to love them. I’d sing the songs when I was walking alone. Quietly, of course. “Eye of the Tiger,” “Burning Heart.” Those movies had a bad message, though. I had a lot of time to think them through. After the first one, all of them were fights Rocky should have walked away from. That was the whole problem with America. Oh, that’s a good one—“Living in America,” James Brown, Rocky IV.

  Q.

  Zoë was an intern. Zoë Shillace. She got me out of there. This zombie had broken glass stuck in her hands, and, well, that’s the story of my face. My hand ended up on Baseman’s gun. There was this guy, Nathan Baseman. I guess you don’t need to know him, but I want to say his name, just for the record. I got that first zombie off me and started firing Baseman’s gun all crazy because I couldn’t see, and ended up on Dylan Ramsey’s wheelchair, which rolled through the crowd of zombies like a snowplow. That’s when Zoë grabbed me. I knew it was her because I felt the keys in her hand, She had the elevator keys. And up we went.

  Q.

  I’ve wondered about that, Did my face, messed up like that, keep zombies away? Did they think I was already dead? Once we got out of CableCorp and found a place to stop, Zoë wiped off my face and flipped out. I mean, really flipped out. I don’t think she had any idea how bad it was, under the blood. She screamed and ran off. I thought, well, that makes sense. She needs to save herself. When she came back later, she said she’d only left because she couldn’t stop screaming and didn’t want to lead the zombies to me. She’d found some stuff too, clean towels and iodine. Who knows where she found iodine. Zoë was … she was one of those people who probably didn’t make your Archive, but is the reason the rest of us are here. So she should be remembered. That’s Zoë with an umlaut, S-H-I-L-L-A-C-E.

  Q.

  Oh, yes, She’s dead. I’m sure of it. One day, she didn’t come back. She had to go out all the time to find us food and water, or T-shirts or aprons, things she could tear into bandages. For my awful, unsalvageable face.

  Q.

  If there’s one thing those last couple weeks at the station taught me, it’s that people won’t lie down and die. They just won’t do it. They’ll make life terrible for themselves, they’ll make one another miserable, but they won’t stop. Is there any better proof than zombies? Even when we’re killed, we don’t stop. It’s maniacal, It’s like Rocky. Just stay down, Rock, you know? But I’m not that strong. I got up.

  Q.

  I had a bit of an advantage there. I’d had facial surgeries before. Plastic surgery, I mean. I knew a thing or two about keeping things germ-free. I got by. Just barely. For a while, I did what I imagine everyone did. Picked up every cell phone I saw, Turned on every computer. Fiddled with every radio. Until I saw myself. That’s one thing Zoë did that was really smart, Kind too. She kept saying she couldn’t find a mirror or anything reflective. And I believed her!

  Once I was out walking around, of course, I saw all sorts of mirrors, and one day decided to take off the bandages and look. And I—it’s so strange, Etta. There was this, I don’t know. This lifting. On the one hand, it was the worst thing I’d ever seen. But at the same time, I felt this emptying of all the garbage inside me. Just, whoosh. Gone. Clean. Something that looked like me couldn’t be human, right? Which meant I could feel like I’d developed into a new form of being. Not human, not zombie, something else.

  I’m not trying to be self-important here, but I used to have this itch, this itchy feeling that I was in the wrong body. Finally, it was gone. No more vanity, no more pride. And no more lies. So much of the news we reported, so much of humanity’s so-called progress, it was all built on lies. I knew right then I’d never lie again, no matter what.

  Q.

  I suppose that’s true. If you guessed my name and asked me straight-out if you were right, I guess I’d have to tell you.

  Q.

  That’s it, exactly. Phones, radios, computers—I stopped trying to get them to work. I stopped wanting them to work. Once you let go like that, it’s amazing. You start truly seeing how dependent we’d become. All the stuff that was supposed to connect us to one another, it got created too fast, before we knew what we were doing, and it ruined us. What else rose up so fast? I’m asking you. What else?

  Q.

  Zombies. That’s what else, It was like 6G replacing 5G, you know? It was our own doing. We created technology we couldn’t live without. How dumb was that? We made ourselves into brain-dead bodies. Our gadgets were the respirators keeping us alive. Zombies show up, our plugs get pulled, and we revert to vegetables.

  Q.

  Of course we’re better off now. We’re far better off. What I’m saying is we had to devolve first, go back to living in caves and huts and just talking to each other, like you and me are right now. We had to devolve to realize we’d never really much evolved.

  Q.

  That’s easy. If I experienced one thing that belongs in your Archive, it’s the battle of General Spalding and General Coppola. I’d estimate it was Year Four? I was in the Atlanta area for a long time, recuperating, healing. I remembered a story I did on Vietnam vets, how some of them used superglue to close their wounds. It doesn’t sound pleasant, and it isn’t, but I found some and it helped a lot.

  Spent some time in Talladega National Forest, then outside Tuscaloosa, then ended up following the Tennessee River east of Knoxville. One night, I heard all these noises, like gunshots, except lighter, and I guess because I’m a stupid human, I chased after it and found fireworks, Just beautiful. You can imagine what it made me think of. Not only family stuff, New Year’s, and Fourth of July. I’m talking country stuff—how we used to feel about our country. I followed the fireworks and noticed zombies following them too. They didn’t see me because they were looking up at the sky. That was sort of beautiful too.

  Q.

  I guess you’d call it a farm? Someone had built an impressive fence around it, ten feet tall, no gaps, and the zombies had gathered in this one spot. I hid in the trees for a while because—Etta, I’m sure you’ve heard some nutty things. But get ready, This farm didn’t have any heads on pikes at all. It was more like a little Las Vegas. Not only were there fireworks, but there were neon signs all over the wall. Beer and girls and hot wings and football. Screens were set up on top of the fence, with old-fashioned projectors playing vintage porno films and car-crash footage and sports highlights. And the zombies were rapt. I mean slack-jawed. I walked right up next to them to get a better look myself. Naked ladies, fast cars, sports. I was suckered in right along with the rest.

  Q.

  The fence opened up, that’s what! The zombies rushed in, and I got caught up in that, and suddenly, all these nets scooped us up like crabs. I can’t tell you how I didn’t get bit in there. We all ended up in this pen and I started screaming for help. A woman yelled back, asking who I was, and I told her, I didn’t even think about it, I just said my name, my real name.

  Q.

  Etta. I’m not going to tell you.

  Q.

  Because it’s been fifteen years. That person is gone.

  Q.

  Yes, she recognized me. I should clarify—she recognized my voice. Thank goodness she heard my voice first, right? She sent in a man and a woman to drag me out, but as soon as they got a look at me, they froze. I had to get out by myself. I’ll spare you the time it took for everyone to get used to my face. I’ll spare myself. The point is, the woman in charge called herself General Spalding, and she thought my arrival was a gift from God. She said the greatest newsperson of all time—her words, not mine—had been delivered to her on the eve of the greatest contest of the new era: Super Bowl Sunday.

  Q.

  You’re telling me. I hadn’t the slightest. I got her to give me t
his hoodie so I didn’t scare all the farmhands. That’s what she called them, though I don’t think they did much farming. She took me out on a couple horses to what she said was the field of battle. It was this big, open, hilly field about a mile from the farm. On the closer end was a hole about the size of a backyard pool. Next to it were the same nets they’d caught me with, full of zombies, fifty or sixty of them. Still moving, but all busted up. I got they were headed for the hole, but they weren’t going in just yet. The farmhands were taking these red kerchiefs off them. Spalding was so proud. I thought she was going to cry. She said zombies were easy to come by, a dime a dozen. But red kerchiefs?

  Q.

  No, that wasn’t all. They were ripping off arms and legs too. They just popped right off. It was pretty shocking until I noticed the farmhands were saying things like “BK” and “AE,” and I remembered the terminology. BK: below the knee. AE: above the elbow. These were prosthetic limbs. The zombies had been wearing prosthetic limbs. So that was, you know, weird, First time I saw anything like that. Spalding took me back to the farm, where I saw something else new. The farmhands were training zombies. I know that sounds crazy. But also maybe promising, right? Like maybe Spalding had figured out something that could help everyone.

  Q.

  What do you think? They were training them to fight. A few battered old zombies, the same kind being buried in the big hole, were nailed to fence posts. Then the farmhands made newer zombies tear through the older zombies to get to a pail of meat. It was a nightmare. You might think it’d be better than watching zombies maul people, but no. Because we forced them to do it. We forced them to go after a pointless prize, the same way we squandered our own lives, chasing pointless prizes, It’s all meat in pails.

  Q.

  I asked the general. I pointed at the pail and asked. She wouldn’t say.

  Q.

  What could I do? It’s hard to remember now, but Year Four? In Year Four, most of us still believed someone would save us. You barely ate, you barely slept, half the people you met died of the stupidest things—a little cut on their toe gets infected, there’s no antibiotics, three weeks later, they’re dead. I couldn’t tell if General Spalding was doing a good thing or a bad thing. She had food, and she was giving me some, the end.