That’s why the apolitical Face would be casting his vote tomorrow for Nishimura, not Richard. Things couldn’t be allowed to go backward, not even a little.
Nishimura had one end of the stretcher, Charlie the other, The Face lifted the gnarled remnants of his chin in an offer to help, but Charlie shook her head. He strolled over anyway. They didn’t know it yet, but in a few seconds, they were going to be setting down that stretcher. They’d realize Greer was gone, The Face knew the urge to find her would be strong, but nothing was as sacrosanct as getting in and out of Slowtown quickly. A new Eden was opening to them, and that was good, but what the Face recalled from Sunday school was that Eden had an apple you weren’t supposed to pluck.
All these streets are yours. Except Slowtown.
He watched the recovery team navigate the broken glass and rubble of the alley, Nishimura walking backward, while Hoffmann kept her unreadable eyes on the lookout for any break in horseflesh feasts. They had one scary moment when Nishimura’s right heel slipped off the curb, The stretcher jounced. The shackle and chain on the softie’s ankle pulled and two of her toes snapped off and landed in the gutter. Instead of the stretcher tilting, the Face felt the whole world tip on its axis, while a counterweighted world prepared to swing up to take its place. So much hope and danger in a single second, the Face didn’t know if he could take it.
Yay, Toast!
The Chief wore a shackle too. The chain dangled down the kiosk, flaking rust.
Her face was hard, tawny leather, cracked into black lines of rot. She’d been old before she died, evident from the frizzled gray hair split into long, frayed braids; the hollowed, scowling cheeks; the wattled neck; the sagging drape of the upper lip over a half-toothed maw. Those who predated Nishimura at the fort reckoned she’d been dead for thirteen years, which made her a marvel—the oldest zombie yet recorded. People made up stories about her that felt like the foundational myths of a new culture; children drew pictures of her radiating light, flying, even smiling, as well as other things she could not do.
Greer figured it was a lot simpler than that: the Chief had been an early adopter of sitting, staving off softiehood as walking zombies dropped all around her. The ad kiosk, her seat of choice, had been stained black by years of her liquified innards. Similar stains grew below her ears, nose, and mouth, giving her the look of a painted warrior. Few beings, alive or dead, could humble Greer, but the Chief did.
“Here we go,” Greer said to herself. “Step one.”
Though she hadn’t planned to speak to the Chief, she always kept decorative buttons or pins in her pack, precisely for this purpose, She attached her bow to her back and withdrew a round black button with white block text: RESIST. Not colorful, which was a strike against it, so she angled it to catch the dusk light’s shine. The Chief’s eyes, dull silver from advanced decomp, were as taciturn as any zombie’s, but her doughy eyelids pulled back and her mouth opened enough to dispense a string of gray drool.
Greer flipped the button over, showing its rusty pin. The Chief watched with interest, Greer inhaled. Here came the scary part; even old zombies could hurt you if you acted stupidly. Some people just jammed their pins straight into the Chief’s flesh, which she didn’t seem to mind, but Greer didn’t want to risk any upset. Careful to avoid the sticky liquids, she took gentle hold of the Chief’s brown wool coat, attached the button, and pulled away, exhaling loudly, the dicey part over.
No one knew who figured it out first, but the Chief loved bright, plastic buttons and fancy enamel pins. Like deathless corsages, they covered almost every inch of her coat. Most of them had a certain slant; this was Queen Street, Toronto. TRANS PEOPLE MATTER, sparkly gold. FEMINIST AF, matte pink. STAY GREEN, over a recycling symbol. LOVE IS EQUAL, two smiley clouds linked by a rainbow, SEAWORLD STILL SUCKS, blue and fishbowl-shaped. Greer didn’t know what to make of YAY, TOAST!, but it was a bright butter yellow. It was the shimmery colors the Chief liked, that’s all.
“All right,” Greer exhaled. “Step two.”
From her back pocket, she withdrew and unfolded a wilted magazine page. Years back, while cutting through Cleveland, she and Muse had come across the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, victim to an idiosyncratic fire that had cut the building’s distinctive pyramid shape in half. The forward-facing exhibits were ash, but the offices and archives were intact. Anything useful had been raided, but hundreds of gray cardboard bins survived, and while Greer tracked advancing zombies with her bow, Muse popped lids and nabbed old magazines. One item he took solely for her amusement: a copy of Living Blues featuring a profile of New Orleans’s own “King Kong.” The magazine didn’t last long; it got cold in Ohio, and nothing was too precious when you needed kindling. But she’d saved the full-page picture of Muse and nothing but a layer of clothing ever kept it from her.
She held it out for the Chief to see. The old zombie was transfixed by the RESIST button, but eventually noticed the page and curled her gnarled fingers around it, Greer bit her lip as the Chief’s protruding finger bones poked holes into Muse. Greer felt each puncture, as if it were Muse touching her one last time: lips, throat, breast, pussy.
“That’s Muse,” she said, feeling stupid.
The Chief’s brow thickened.
“Handsome, right?”
The page rustled in tightening hands. Greer spotted a small rip at the page bottom and prayed for it to hold.
“I asked him what a rock-and-roll place was doing with blues crap, and he got all offended and said there’s lots of blues guys there. Buddy Guy, Muddy Waters, Lead Belly. Some other dumb names I don’t remember.”
The Chief brought the page closer, inches from mucus-filled eyes and ulcered lips dribbling plum-colored ooze. The rip in the page began to run up the center of Muse’s body like Daddy’s buck knife used to run up the underside of a deer, Greer heard herself whimper and, for her own sake, rushed to cover it.
“I’ve heard things, all right? Someone said they saw apple peels out here. Strawberry stems. I heard one guy joke he saw a shit and swore it was human. There’s been fire marks too. Little burned circles. Muse liked to start fires with steel wool and a nine-volt. It made circles just like that.”
The Chief pressed her face into the page. Her sunken spine arched briefly as she sniffed at the paper, Her chain mail suit of buttons clicked, and her ankle shackle chimed against the kiosk. Her rotted nose caught the page rip, and it tore fast, all the way up to Muse’s neck. Greer’s breath caught: the knife was at his throat. The RESIST button had been an inferior offering, she’d fucking known it, and if she had to beg, fuck it, she would.
“Please. Chief, please. His name’s Muse. He looks just like that. Have you seen him?”
Greer pointed: the page, Queen Street, her own heart.
“Muse. I need him. Can you help? Please?”
The page, the street, her heart.
“Please!”
The Chief’s nose lifted, splitting the photo with a damp purr, Greer gasped. A lifting nose indicated a lifting head, and the Chief’s pearly eyes now stared into Greer’s, a taunting void. The zombie made fists and Muse collapsed into them, both halves crushed, exactly what Greer was afraid of—Muse had spent the fifteen years being two people, fighter and pacifist, neither satisfied with the other, both battling to be King Kong’s king. Now both were finished.
Something in the Chief’s face changed. Zombies generally didn’t emote beyond surprise or frustration. Odder expressions were credited to rogue nerves firing inside decaying brains. Here, it was a single twitch, and only its location made Greer wonder, the wadding of wrinkles at the corner of the lips. It looked like a grin being suppressed. You stupid girl.
The Chief’s pale eyes rolled languidly. If Greer expected help, and she really hadn’t, she would have guessed it would come in the form of a gesture east or west on Queen Street, or maybe north, off the Slowtown thoroughfare, But the Chief looked into the donut shop behind her. Greer peered at the two stories of apartment units
before squinting into the shop’s murk.
The tangled metal tracery of the drop-ceiling grid intruded into the donut shop like winter forest branches. The mineral-fiber tiles had long ago fallen, bloated into slop piles from in-blown rain and crusted into wasp-nest orbs. Pastel wall paint still existed, but it peeled in the manner of zombie flesh. Amputated limbs of tables and chairs were piled against a glassless display case, and above a busted beverage cooler hung a chalk menu that had smudged into a cosmic nebula.
Greer ducked to get a better look. Past the gutted water fountain, beyond a restroom disgorging broken ceramic, was a door stamped STAFF ONLY.
She looked back at the Chief.
That twitch again. Maybe not You stupid girl, but rather, You clever girl.
It wouldn’t be the first time Muse wrapped himself in the support of an older stranger—just ask Will and Darlene Lucas. Greer wanted to ask the Chief more, not just about Muse but about everything, the secrets of life and death; suddenly, it seemed possible the ancient zombie was capable of anything. But she didn’t dare dally. Nishimura and the rest of his rule-followers were overdue to begin their pursuit. Anyway, the Chief was finished. She let her bony fists relax, the two wads of Muse falling to the sidewalk, instant litter, and swiveled her rawboned head to look once more at her new button.
Greer stepped inside the donut shop. The November chill grew to February cruelties. Resist, she told herself, Resist turning back, resist running away, resist abandoning hope. Her boots scrunched over pulverized tile, hissed across particled plaster, grumbled through chunked ceramic. She paused, bowed her head, shut her eyes, and heard something. She might be crazy. People had been saying as much since she was born. But she had to trust her ears. Yay, toast! she thought, and laughed, and felt fear tingle down into her fingertips. She believed she heard, behind the STAFF ONLY door and up some staircase, the slow, low pluckings of what might be the first bars of that never-finished protest song, “Walk Away.”
The Lion and the Dove
Personal History Transcript #1284
Location: Fort York New Library
Subject: Greer Morgan
Interviewer: Etta Hoffmann
Time: 4,549–16:10
Notes: Before interview, subject was belligerent and made unfavorable comments about the process.
Q.
Let’s not.
Q.
I don’t see how or why it matters. We all started somewhere. Those somewheres are gone.
Q.
Oh, is that right? Well, you hear a lot of things. I heard zombies somewhere were driving race cars. I heard the continent of Australia was one big fire. I heard the whole International Space Station crash-landed in Brazil.
Q.
For real? You’re not shitting me? Did it land in a city? Fuck. All right. All right, fine, I suppose you heard right. There’s some truth to it, anyway, But we didn’t set out to do it. Muse and me weren’t trying to be famous, you know? You just do your shit, and sometimes it ends up being the shit that needs done.
Q.
Iowa first. I’d never been to Iowa, and the border was only about an hour north of Bulk. If I wanted to stare at corn, there was plenty in Missouri. But Muse said we should get my mom. I don’t really know why. You should ask him. It’s not like I gave a shit. She was in the clink, a place called Bluefeather. I guess it gave us somewhere to go. Plus, shit, I don’t fucking know. Maybe the end of the world is when bygones really get bygone, you know? We had a lot of bygones, me and Mrs. Vienna Morgan. So we hauled our asses up there. Took a fucking year, and no, I’m not kidding. We were on foot. This was Year One.
Q.
What do you want me to say? We hugged it out and had tea, all that Lifetime shit? Half a mile off, we saw Bluefeather was crawling with white-eyes. I had to learn to make arrows before we got close. Think about that, lady. If I said, “Go make an arrow,” where would you start? I’ll tell you where. You find an arrow-shaped stick, that’s where! Once you start looking, you start seeing arrow shafts everywhere. Baby cribs. Baby gates. Baby seats. When did we start surrounding our babies with arrows? You measure it out, rasp that shit down, shave it, sandpaper it till your palms bleed. You make feathers out of Tupperware lids, push them into slits, use electrical tape to make it tight, cut yourself a notch for the string. Then it’s time to hacksaw some metal and tie it to the tip. Takes days, lady. That was my life. That was my fucking life.
Q.
I found her, all right. It wasn’t hard. The Bluefeather zombies—they were all messed up. All of them were deformed in the exact same way: their chests caved in and their noses squashed flat. Muse and me figured it out. Looked like before the jailers hightailed it out, they shot all the inmates through the bars. Why not, right? Scum of the earth, right? Blam, blam, blam. Of course, all those inmates turned zombie, and over the next year squashed themselves out of the cells. You heard me right. Once they got rotted enough, they oozed right through the bars. So there was a shit-ton, but they were flat as pancakes, flopping all over the floors. I could shoot them close-range, yank out the arrow, go again. The big mother-daughter reunion scene you’re waiting for was me finding Mom slithering on the floor like a fucking eel.
Q.
Through the back of the skull.
Q.
I didn’t care. Why should you?
Q.
[Laughs.] Once you get to know Muse, you’ll understand. He didn’t help for shit. It was only Year Two and he was already doing his peacenik thing. He has this theory, how we react to zombies is some kind of test.
Q.
Don’t even bother. He’s a fucking lunatic. If I had a brain in my head, I’d have left his ass in Iowa. I was like, if you think zombies aren’t dangerous, that’s because I’m the one shooting them down while you tinker with your damn protest song all day! I protest that, motherfucker! Easy to be a pacifist when you’re not getting any blood on you, you know? But I stopped trying. He never pushed his whole philosophy on me, I’ll give him that. He did as much work as I did in every other way, probably more. And “Walk Away,” the song he never quit working on? It was good. The parts he let me hear, it was perfect. It’s another thing you’ll learn about Muse. It’s real fucking hard to hate that guy, and believe me, I have tried.
Q.
I guess, but you’re using words I wouldn’t. We didn’t set out to “make a difference.” The time for that shit had passed. We were trying to get to Rhode Island, where Muse had people. It’s just, turns out, Rhode Island’s really, really, really far away. You don’t get to Rhode Island without getting to a hundred other places first, and that’s how it started.
Q.
Somewhere on the Mississippi, maybe? Shit went south so fast. We’re talking Year Three here, and already people were using the whole thing as an excuse to do all the awful shit they always wanted.
It was a baseball park, a minor-league baseball stadium, and I had a bad feeling right off. There were heads on pikes. That was the first time I saw that. But we could smell food, and so we begged and they let us in, and it seemed okay when we were going up the stairs, but once we sat down in the top level, we realized there was a hierarchy to the seats, same as when you bought tickets to a game. The good seats were by the field. That’s where the yummy-smelling smoke from the grills was. But up where we were? People were passed out from hunger, killing each other over a bag of pretzels. Some went zombie up there and got dragged down to this cage at the back of the ball field, the pitcher’s bullpen, Muse said.
Q.
Yeah, and it didn’t take long either. You learned like [snaps fingers] who was running the show down there. You saw men being pissed on before they could have any food. You saw women forced to give blow jobs. Fuck, yeah, I got out my bow. Fuckers were too stupid to confiscate it, that’s on them. I started picking them off from way up. Now that Muse was cool with, When I shot up bad guys, living guys, he never had a beef. I used every single arrow I had, and the place—man, it was like I
’d hit a grand slam, you know? The stadium was on its fucking feet. The whole upper deck rose up around me, and we fought our way down, and I’m not going to lie. It felt good. Having an army at my back? It felt real good.
Q.
Of course he screwed it up! Screwing shit up is Muse’s whole MO. While we were storming the fucking castle, he let the zombies out of the bullpen, He’d tell you he “freed” them. After that, everyone had to run. Knocked some heads off pikes on my way out, though, you bet your ass. Once we got a couple miles off, I let him have it. You can’t be unleashing white-eyes in the middle of my army attack, man! But it didn’t do any good. It never did. “You have your battles, I have mine.” That’s why the others left us. Some people, you know, had followed us from the stadium. Guess they were looking for a leader, but Muse spooked them. Just as well. I never saw a group bigger than two that didn’t eventually go boom.
Q.
Here? We’ll see. I have my doubts, lady.
Q.
I think the baseball thing alone did it. Very next place we went, people had heard of us. I did the same thing there, fixed what needed fixing, shot who needed to be shot, and then did it all over again, the next place, the next place. Pretty soon folks we met on the road had a name for us: the Lion and the Dove. Of course, they always assumed I was the dove. I wised them up pretty quick. Besides, most of what they knew about us, the same stuff you’ve heard? It’s not true. I figure that’s how it was with Jesse James or Billy the Kid. Your reputation becomes a bunch of tall tales, and then you’re forced to live up to them.
The Living Dead Page 52