Q.
That one happens to be true.
Q.
Well, we saved most of them. But yeah, I guess that one’s true too.
Q.
Well, fuck, I didn’t say it was all false! There was shit that needed to be taken care of! I’m sure there were other heroes out there, but they probably had guns, and guns run out of ammo. I probably just picked the right weapon. Once I got confident, I got creative. I wasn’t just shooting arrows, you know? I was leading revolts, I sicced trained dogs on bad guys, before dogs went zombie. I sent cars full of TNT into walls that were keeping people from food. I had a battalion of teenage girls in Springfield, Illinois, on skateboards. We can true-or-false all ten thousand stories if you want, but what matters is I tried to do the right thing. Fadi Lolo said he should’ve stayed with his people all along, and that’s what I tried to do—fight for my people. And I don’t mean Black people. I mean people who needed fighting for.
Q.
Oh, just a guy I knew. He probably didn’t last a day. He wouldn’t take the Schwinn, wouldn’t take the machete. Those are what we call poor survival instincts. If I had one thing, it was instincts. You were Black back in the so-called good old days? Or a woman? You felt violence every fucking day, rising off half the people you passed on the street. Having it out in the open was almost a relief. Only problem was, the new violence was so wild, it let people pretend none of the old violence ever happened. Plenty of white folks were thrilled to meet me when I set their asses free. Where were those white folks before 10/23?
Q.
That’s the first question you’ve asked worth a shit. Hell yes, it worked the other way. Nobody got out of this mess scot-free. We ran into a few all-Black groups, and maybe you think Muse and me would’ve fit right in peachy keen, but that’s not how it works, lady. Not that I didn’t hope! Even I was like, well, cool, we all know what it’s like to struggle. We got fewer ties to old power centers. Maybe we’re dressed for success here. But everyone gets to the same place eventually. Everyone starts chopping off heads, sticking them on pikes.
The last time I saw Conan, my brother, he was like, Now we can be anyone, we can do anything. No, Conan, we can’t. Not here in your darling fort either, mark my words. End of the day, we’re all just stupid people. Huh. I sound like Muse.
Q.
Well, he’d been famous before. So I guess I can’t blame him for not getting too excited about it. People used to take pictures of us—me, mostly. People’s phones were dead, but the cameras worked, and they became little photo albums. They’d carry them around till someone with a generator let them charge it. To take a picture of me, people would have to delete a photo. Fuck what Muse thought. I think that means something, when people take you into their heart. I used to live in this shit box called Sunnybrook, and this woman, Señorita Magdalena, called me mi corazón, So what if I wanted a little of that feeling back?
Q.
I’m being defensive because I know what you want to talk about! Fuck! Everyone here’s waiting for me to apologize for St. Croix, but all you fort fucks can suck my dick. You’re no different than everyone else who believed all the Lion and the Dove legends. Man, I shouldn’t have agreed to this. I don’t have to prove shit to you people.
Q.
No, let’s do it. St. Croix. Let’s get into that shit. It was one of the worst setups I’d ever seen, for starters. It was comic-book, Heads on pikes all along the perimeter, goes without saying, Blond-haired white guys swinging their dicks around while women were kept in barns, literally in barns like literal animals. All the progress women made in the past, we were stupid enough to think men had our backs? Into the barns, baby-makers. St. Croix was ripe for the Lion. Fuck yeah, I came in roaring.
Q.
Your maps are accurate, anyway. Hoosier National Forest, Indiana. No troops to rally this time. I had to Jason Bourne that shit. I had a second bow by then, an Elite Pure I picked up at a sporting goods store, draw smooth as butter, quiet as a whisper, better than anything Daddy ever afforded. Muse might not use weapons, but he’d carry them. So I went old school. It was October and I could fire right through the trees. Shoot and run, shoot and run. I wasn’t even shooting people. I shot their stuff. You want to rile up men, that’s how you do it. Water tanks. Car tires, Windows. I had shit exploding all over town. They couldn’t assess the threat, so they groundhogged their asses. Place was a ghost town in half an hour, and I guess I got a little high on that, A little overconfident. What do you want me to say? I’m the Lion. I’m Diana, goddess of the hunt. I made a fucking miscalculation, all right?
Q.
Because I thought I was right! Up to then, I’d always been right. In the middle of the woods was this zombie pen, probably the best I’d ever seen, maybe thirty or forty white-eyes in there, all their heads destined for pikes. I don’t know if St. Croix was the world production center of barbed wire or what, but they had that pen so covered in wire a zombie would be in tiny little pieces before it got out. And I knew, I fucking knew, if I let Muse alone for five minutes, he was going to free those zombies, and I didn’t want to have to deal with that shit. I didn’t want the women of St. Croix to have to deal with that shit. So I sent Muse to bust open all the barns while I made up some lie and set fire to the forest. I’m admitting it. You happy now? Greer Morgan set the St. Croix fire.
Q.
Like I said. Early October. It was dry. Zombies went up like paper, and then the whole fucking forest caught fire. Fountains of it. The whole sky gone with smoke, Nighttime in the middle of the day. Women started running up, all filthy, a whole bunch of them pregnant, but they didn’t see me and get excited, like most did around that time. They were running straight into the fire. How was I supposed to know? I’m asking you.
Q.
Not till Muse found me. He looked dead. His face, that’s all I had to see. And then I realized. We had men over there, women over there, Who’s missing?
Q.
The children were in their school when the fire hit. We tried to help. Of course we did. But the only kids we saw—I mean, you want me to paint you a picture? How much detail you need for your little book? You want me to tell you about little four-year-olds running around with their hair on fire? Ten-year-olds with melting faces? What do you want to know about, specifically, Miss Hoffmann, specifically?
Q.
Crystal clear. Crystal, They’d rather have spent the rest of their lives in those barns than have me come along and roast their kids alive. But I couldn’t go yet. I had a new task right then. I had to kill those kids. What else was I supposed to do at that point? Let them burn to death? Let them come back as crispy zombies? Muse fed me arrows and I shot. Never shot so poorly in my life. The feathers were all wet because Muse was crying on them. But I’m not blaming him. The targets were little. So little.
Q.
We saw the smoke for days. Like I’d set fire to the whole planet. There was more truth about the Lion in that smoke than anything anyone ever said. You start believing what they say about you, that’s what happens, You’re more than fucked. You’re damned.
Q.
There’s nothing more to say. I guess one thing. There was one zombie who popped up when we were leaving town. Jumped out of the smoke, grabbed me. Zombie flesh should be cold, you know? But this one was sizzling from the fire, Skin was torn into all these puffs from getting out of the barbed wire too. Real strange-looking zombie. Had those metal racing legs, you know? I think that was why she was so fast. And these kind of hatchet things on her wrists? She came away with Daddy’s bow and she gave it this weird look, like she knew it. And she did. She put an arrow in the bow. Like an expert. I got out the Elite and we fired at each other. And you know what happened? The arrows hit each other. Midair. We backed off and went our separate ways. I know it’s crazy. Did it even happen? My mind was on the kids. I can’t even tell you for sure.
Q.
A name tag? I don’t know, lady. It was dark.
Q.
Things weren’t the same with me and Muse after that. No, things weren’t the same with me after that. Muse was Muse. He was kind. He was really fucking kind. He was really fucking kind and really fucking supportive, and I treated his ass like shit. Because I was ashamed. I told him to quit treating me like a baby, start acting like a man. Told him to stop working on “Walk Away”’cause he was never going to finish that irritating piece-of-shit song. Cruelest shit you ever heard. But he never stopped taking care of me. Fuck, why can’t I just say it? He never stopped loving me. So, whatever, I’m glad we’re here. Fort York, Old Muddy, whatever you call it, I’m just glad you don’t have any heads on pikes, you know? The fact that a bunch of white guys aren’t running the show, that’s a bonus. Soon as we’re done here, kick me out if you want, I deserve it. But Muse, he deserves a place like this. You might deserve him too.
Q.
Oh, yeah, Rhode Island. Will and Darlene were dead. Naturally. There was actually a grave for Will, nice little wooden cross, and Darlene was in her bed, dead-dead. By then, Muse had heard about Canada. While I was searching for the next place I could be a hero, he’d been searching for the opposite. I didn’t give him any mouth about it. Humans were gone from the scene by then anyway. So we came up, And here I am. Asking you to let Muse in. Telling you the whole honest truth so you’ll do it. Lady, I’m at your mercy.
It Was a Monday?
Large emotion at a low volume: you got used to it after 10/23. Purpled faces, spittle-coated lips, and snarled postures became the indicators of rage and fear. Charlie saw the tightening of Nishimura’s face, a look he’d once told her fellow sailors had called the glow. He nodded, the gesture for setting down the stretcher. Charlie did and turned to face the setting sun. The Face was staring down Queen Street, Hoffmann was doing the same. Nishimura entered Charlie’s field of vision and stood between the other two.
Two, not three.
“Should’ve got started earlier,” Nishimura hissed.
Toronto’s November nightfall was around five. If they wanted to get back to the fort by then, they had forty minutes, tops, to figure out what had happened. Nishimura looked over his shoulder.
“Rutkowski. She say anything to you?”
Charlie shook her head. She felt like crap. She’d been concerned about this job since seeing Greer Morgan’s name on the list. The poor woman was in mourning, anyone could see that, For Greer, that didn’t mean sobbing in bed. It meant searching, plotting, and preparing. Charlie believed Old Muddy instilled in Greer a tranquility she’d probably never known, But she’d once been known as the Lion, and though you could train lions, you couldn’t tame them.
Nishimura checked with the librarian, “Anything?”
Hoffmann shook her head.
“Face,” Nishimura said, “tell me you know where she is.”
It had taken Charlie a year to learn to divine emotion from the Face’s fleshy debris. Most of the difficulty, it turned out, was because his emotions rarely changed. He was invariably calm and upbeat; if he weren’t so distressing to behold, she’d put him right after Luis Acocella in the lifetime rank of people whose company she treasured, Greer’s desertion did nothing to affect the Face’s composure. He pointed down the block.
“She went toward the Chief,” he said.
“Good eye,” Nishimura said. “How we doing on horse?”
“Gone,” the Face said, and Charlie echoed, “Gone.”
Nishimura’s eyes flashed with calculations.
“Right. Okay. Let’s relocate to the Chief, She’s not far. Bring the softie. Charlie and I will take the stretcher. You’ve got the gun, Face, if things get hairy.”
Charlie couldn’t help but be invigorated. It was part of Nishimura’s gift. He was generally plainspoken, which made his rare indulgence in military barking all the more bracing. Again she was reminded of Luis, the way he’d call on her to weigh a bowl of intestines or posit a cause of death, Her anarchistic girlhood self would have been appalled to learn she liked taking orders, but she did, because she liked nailing the results. She hustled to the stretcher, waited for Nishimura to take his end, and lifted on a quick three count.
The softie’s eyes wobbled like the egg skin over unbroken yolks, Since the foundation of Hospice, Charlie had administered to hundreds of softies, both as the facility supervisor and, when it was her turn, as a Caretaker. Right now, in fact, she was Caretaker to an especially poignant softie called Lesser Hedrick. Seeing softies up close could still break her heart. She wondered if her young self would be appalled at that too. Had Charlene Rutkowski become something of a softie as well?
Determining post-mort decomp levels had been part of her job in San Diego, Zombies provided a tougher challenge, one Luis would have relished, Their deterioration moved more slowly. Some theorized it had to do with their ingestion of nerve tissue from victims’ brains, Charlie didn’t think this held water; reports of zombies craving brains were as false as those claiming zombies had enough healthy cartilage and tendons to run. The stages of rot, however, were scalable to living levels.
This specimen was a classic example. She looked to have been roughly eighteen years old when she’d died. Stages of rigor mortis, swelling, bursting, liquefaction, and adipocere were in her past. Charlie had memorized the order of organ putridity via a vulgar acrostic she’d created with fellow med-school students: Little boys should investigate short men like Bob Hope likely kneeling beneath every pretty dame’s vagina and uterus stood for larynx, brain (infantile), stomach, intestines, spleen, mesentery and omentum, liver, brain (adult), heart, lungs, kidney, bladder, esophagus, pancreas, diaphragm, blood vessels, and uterus. Every one of these parts was kaput in this softie. Because she’d been lying fallow for some time, weeds had grown through her back, flowering from her pelvis, ribs, neck, and mouth. It was cold now, and the plant matter was shriveled, but the phenomenon was always breathtaking, as if the zombie’s own body couldn’t help but reflect the earth’s revived verdure.
Retiring as Slowtown zombies were, they began to emerge, crick-crack, from dark places to seek the source of the ruckus. Charlie and Nishimura took the next block at a trot while the Face and Hoffmann jogged in front, monitoring the shriveled faces surfacing from storefronts and upper windows. Charlie believed their white eyes, many gone marmalade in the dark, focused on the writhing remains of the softie.
The Chief sat beneath the donut shop’s shredded awning. She did not note their arrival, but that was normal. Charlie and Nishimura set the stretcher in the middle of the road and joined the others in surveying the area. Charlie thought, as she often did, of how quickly the recovery party would be encircled if all the zombies decided to descend. Decayed or not, on this street, they had the numbers to win.
“What do we do?” Charlie asked.
“What we don’t do,” Nishimura said, “is take undue risk. Everyone got that? Free will exists in Fort York. If Greer, or anyone else, wants to act stupid and chase after a boyfriend, that’s their prerogative.”
He pushed out these words well enough, and it was the proper boilerplate to convey, but Charlie could hear the hard fold down the center of his voice. The fact was, Greer Morgan was not an anonymous citizen. She was the legendary Lion, and having her at the fort was a symbol that even those known for violence were better suited in a place of peace. Losing the Lion so quickly after losing the Dove wouldn’t look good. On the eve of the Blockhouse Four vote, it might make Nishimura look all the weaker.
“Greer,” Charlie hissed, “Goddamn it.”
Goddamn herself too, For three months, she’d kept to herself a fact about Richard’s past no one else knew. Nishimura said when you entered Fort York, you had the right to shed your past and make a new beginning. Greer Morgan, for instance, had done just that. By the time this bad business with the Blockhouse Four rose up, it seemed too late for Charlie to reveal what she knew about Richard. But she should have. She was starting to see that.
“Let’s do
a check, three blocks, no more,” Nishimura said. “No calling out, all right? No getting closer than sidewalks. Walk soft and listen. You hear something, give a snap. Same configuration: Charlie, Hoffmann, left, Me and the Face, right. Ten minutes, then we book it. Show me nods.”
They nodded. Nishimura stepped right, a navy snap to his heels, the Face following, soft as a cat. Charlie decided: when she got back to the fort, she’d tell people about Richard. For now, though, do the job. She took to the curb and, with Hoffmann right behind, began moving slowly down Queen Street.
A record shop, its floor the onyx scree of shattered vinyl. A tea shop, a spicy redolence mixed with sweet zombie spoil. A lingerie shop, empty but for a few lacy puffs and elastic straps. Charlie stepped, stopped, listened, eyed zombies eyeing her, and moved on, Hoffmann so close her breath furled around Charlie.
Three blocks, and nothing. Nishimura pointed back up the street where they’d left the softie, and they performed the routine in reverse, though not really. Nishimura might be doing things by the book on his side, but on her side, Charlie didn’t bother. She’d heard nothing but crick-cracks and did not expect that to change.
Etta Hoffmann didn’t believe in preambles: “She’s gone.”
Charlie replied at a Slowtown volume, “Or she doesn’t want to be found.”
Compared to the walk west, the walk east was dark. Trees, parking signs, and trolley stop shelters dripped into a gulley of shadow. Elevated frameworks clung to pieces of original signage, and the golden light made molten hues from what used to advertise frozen yogurt, mobile phones, desserts. The going assumption was that, at night, Slowtown was as still as Fort York. But did Charlie know that for sure? The crick-cracks might combine to create the crackle of a boisterous bonfire as putrid percussionists tightened in a ritual knot.
The Living Dead Page 53