She was scaring herself. Time for chitchat. A regular friendship with Hoffmann was impossible, but she’d grown attached to the odd, and oddly brave, woman whose first trip outside the D.C. area had been that long, dangerous safari to Fort York with the Archive in tow. During that trip, Hoffmann had latched on to Charlie with an avidity that was as strange as it was touching. Their comparable ages never prevented Charlie feeling like Hoffmann was a younger sister, even a daughter, the child she and Luis never had the time to raise.
“Etta. When do we start getting more sun?”
“Winter solstice. Six weeks.”
“Six. Christ. And daytime peaks in what? July?”
“June 21.”
“Fabulous. Is Luvvie going to send out a reminder?”
“I don’t know what Luvvie is going to do.”
Charlie grinned, since Hoffmann couldn’t see her do it. Old Muddy’s librarian worked too hard, and frankly too much knowledge of how the New Library functioned resided in her head alone. So Charlie had assigned to her an assistant, Luvvie Lafayette, The girl was everything Hoffmann wasn’t. Peppy and persistent, the flirty, fast-talking, twenty-year-old lesbian had the brazen practicality that mystified anyone who came of age before 10/23, Hoffmann reacted to Luvvie like a wasp flying too close to her face, but Charlie suspected she’d come around.
“Well, whether it’s Luvvie or you, let us know when we’re close, huh?”
“Of course. It’s on my calendar.”
“These days, we all need something to live for.”
Before arriving at AMLD, Charlie had never met anyone who’d kept an exact day count during the Second Dark Ages. The best unexpected perk of annexing the Hoffmann Archive of Tales from the New World was reclaiming a calendar. Upon meeting Hoffmann and learning of her Archive, someone at the fort had asked, rather offhandedly, if she knew what day it was. Hoffmann had responded specifically and confidently. The man’s eyes welled up. He shouted for others to gather.
People kept asking the same question, needing to have the experience of receiving a true answer after a decade of wild estimation. Some broke into laughter: It was a Monday? How could it possibly be a Monday?! Some broke into sobs: How could they have misplaced an entire two years? There was hugging, dancing, celebration. It was a holiday no one expected, a birthday—a rebirth day—for everyone at once.
Time that had dissipated like dandelion fluff snapped back into stackable blocks: days, weeks, months, years, Nishimura had been pushing folks to adopt calendars and clocks for eighteen months; Hoffmann convinced them overnight. Was it possible to build a clock, they wondered? Hoffmann dug through the sloppy stacks of the mostly ignored Toronto Public Library branch across the street, found the right text, and reported that, yes, they could. Behold: the elegant sundial. Plans for sundials passed like gossip, and soon crude rods surrounded by hemispherical shells marked with hour lines were cropping up everywhere. Within a week, a Master Sundial, plated with valueless pennies, was erected in the center of Fort York: the place of honor within the place of honor.
A team set to work on building an honest-to-God clock featuring brass gearing and a quartz oscillator. It didn’t work yet, but when Charlie heard it go click-click—so close, yet so different from crick-crack—she accepted it as the world’s heart, resuscitated from the brink, Being able to measure the time going forward gave dimension to time passed. Luis’s death by her bullet was no longer smeared over her entire past. Rather, his death had occurred a specific, identifiable quantity of time ago. Now she could hold the instant up to the light and see it, and grieve it, and for the first time, put it behind her, back in the lineup of hours, days, months, and years where it belonged.
One page of her past, cataloged in the Archive, held the biggest regret of her post-10/23 life, and that was saying a lot. It was, in fact, the first page of her record, the night of October 23 in Autopsy Suite 1, According to Etta Hoffmann, John Doe was among the first, if not the very first, zombies to revive in the United States, and wow, did Charlie wish she had never learned that.
What if John Doe had been the ambassador of a new race? What were the chances the first zombie would manifest beneath the gentle hands of two people whose sympathy to the dead should have made them the least likely to panic? All John Doe had done was look at her and reach for her, and what had she done in response? She’d dropped his heart, kicked it with a bootie-covered shoe. She’d set the tone for everything that followed.
What if she’d committed the original sin?
What if all of Earth was paying for it?
A preposterous, self-important worry, one that nonetheless kept her awake for months. When she felt Face-like levels of honesty, she admitted the John Doe regrets were why she’d made herself the leading force of Hospice, the whole reason recovery missions like this existed. No offense to Hoffmann, but right then, she wanted to see Lesser Hedrick more than anyone. The crisis of the Blockhouse Four might be inevitable in the social experiment of Old Muddy, but she’d still feel safer balming her past scars at the softie’s side.
“What do you think?” she asked, “We all going to be okay?”
“I don’t know,” Hoffmann said.
“Based on history, I mean. The new history. You know it best.”
“Then no. We aren’t.”
Charlie sighed. “You need to learn the art of the white lie.”
“Yes. We are going to be okay.”
“It’s just, I don’t know, everything, all at once. Richard, the Blockhouse Four. Muse leaving. Now Greer, People are going to feel vulnerable. It’s all going to play right into Richard’s hands. It’s like we’re cursed.”
“There’s no such thing.”
“But you don’t think we’ll be okay. You feel it, same as me. We’re on the ledge.”
“If Richard weren’t here, it wouldn’t be ‘the Blockhouse Four’ at all.”
Coming from Hoffmann, this was sweeping oratory and deserved Charlie’s consideration. By the time she arrived back at the softie on the stretcher, she understood, If Richard hadn’t come, puffing his flames of justice, the Blockhouse Four would simply be known as Federico, Reed, Stuart, and Mandy. The chasm between these four people everyone knew and liked and Richard’s foreboding epithet was deep and throbbing with monsters.
Nishimura and the Face caught up, and the four gathered around the softie. Nishimura checked the yellow razor of sun before sighing.
“Anybody got anything? A button? Piece of foil?”
Pockets were checked, but no one did. Nishimura nodded grimly, took a deep breath, and headed over to the Chief. Charlie believed in Nishimura’s policy of addressing the Chief as rarely as possible. The zombie was physically delicate, and her relationship to the living more so. Pushing a minor miracle like that, Charlie thought, was like petting a butterfly. A reasonable instinct, but you’d probably rip off its wings.
From Queen Street’s defunct trolley tracks, she watched Nishimura’s slow approach and respectful bow, and then, to her surprise, his gentle kneel, his forward knee nearly touching the Chief’s ankle shackle so he could look up at her rather than down. Charlie was touched. Not only for the respect it showed the Chief, but for how it revealed how badly he wanted to find Greer, Nishimura’s cool rationality made it too easy to forget that unfenced love for his fellow human fueled most of what he did.
“She’s not looking at him,” Charlie observed.
“Sometimes she doesn’t,” the Face said.
“She’s not gesturing at all.”
“It can be subtle. A little roll of the eyes.”
“No,” Charlie determined. “It’s not working.”
“Then she doesn’t want it to work,” the Face pointed out, and Charlie had to agree.
It was only because Nishimura had kneeled, she thought, that he noticed two little wads of paper beneath the Chief’s withered feet. Much later, Charlie would think that this moment, as much as any, had pointed a path forward: it was when you humbled
yourself before another that secrets were revealed to you, right there in the dirt. Keeping one eye on the Chief, Nishimura picked up the wads and flattened them over his palms.
For the first time Charlie had heard, Nishimura didn’t use a Slowtown voice.
“It’s a picture of Muse. And the Chief, she’s got a new button. Greer, and maybe Muse, they must be right—”
From the third floor over the donut shop came not a woody, duster, screecher, or any of the sounds that narrated this gradually changing world but the kind of noise one didn’t hear much these days: the deliberate, vehement crash only a living person could make, followed by a sharp, piercing shout.
Little American Flags
Personal History Transcript #1
Location: Fort York New Library
Subject: Charlene Rutkowski
Interviewer: Etta Hoffmann
Time: 4,217–10:05
Notes: This is the first Personal History transcript recorded at Fort York in Toronto, Ontario (Canada).
Q.
The exact literal precise minute I was forced to shave my head. That’s when I knew: this was not going to be a good time for women. It could have been, Zombies didn’t go after women more than men, or Black people more than white, or Republicans more than Democrats. If things had gone a different way, I don’t think we’d even be calling it the Second Dark Age. We’d be calling it the Great Equalizer.
Q.
I do think that was a good question. You’re doing great. I think this whole thing is going to be really great.
Q.
Early. Way before you were taking calls. No one knew a single clue about a single thing. Was it airborne? Was it foodborne? One guy with us had the idea it could be mites, or ticks, or lice, and that was that. Off came the hair. Not with an electric razor either. We were on the move. We were in cars and garbage trucks. For us it was scissors and disposable razors, and dull ones too, because we only had one pack, and at our peak, there were forty-eight of us. The men didn’t care. It was actually scary how much they didn’t care. You shave the heads of a group of guys, any group of guys, and you start getting skinhead vibes. Something about looking the same—they start acting the same too. The women, it was … fraught. I don’t want this to sound like the women were weaker. But I cried when they shaved my head. What can I say? Hair is all wrapped up in emotional stuff, you know? You can’t control that. Maybe if it had been the Great Equalizer, it wouldn’t have mattered.
Q.
Clothes too. Of course clothes too. They had to eradicate those nonexistent mites, didn’t they? Funny how the men and boys got their clothes back a lot sooner than the women and girls. They said it was because they had limited soap, and had to get clean clothes to the ones working outside the caravan, and those were all males, no exception. It was California, they said, we’d be fine. I guess we were. But it didn’t feel fine. Bunch of naked women, crammed in a car? Does that sound fine to you?
Q.
The worst part of it, easily. You were instantly helpless. I’d only been with Luis a couple weeks, but I’d done everything, everything. With the garbage crew, they’d fight with zombies and people would get killed right in front of me, on the other side of the car window, and I couldn’t do anything. To help them, to protect myself. We were a fucking Happy Meal in there, just waiting to be eaten. They had the child locks on, and there was always a man guarding both front doors, You could try squeezing out, but—see this here?
Q.
Shotgun butt to the chin. I tried to get out, got butted, and now there’s blood all over the inside of the SUV. What do these other women know? Maybe this Rutkowski bitch is going to bleed to death and in a few minutes they’ll be locked inside a car with a zombie. You see what I’m saying? The fear just doubles and triples until you’re dependent on the men. You’re doting on them so you’ll get clothing and food. You’re seducing them. You have no choice, It’s the old world all over again. It happens so fast.
Q.
Relatively speaking? Yeah, it ended quick. But the psychological effect I think took years to play out. The end of the garbage-truck caravan was nothing special. One of the cars broke down in a big-box shopping area. Best Buy, OfficeMax, Zombies rolled out like a fog. This was only a few months in. People had plenty of spit and vinegar, as old Maury Rutkowski used to say, but no procedures yet. I’m sure that’s all over your Archive: procedure saved asses. Zombies had us totally circled by the time the women were able to get out of the SUV’s front doors, and I’d say half of us died. Rosa made it into a car with some men and got away. You don’t need to know who she was, but I was glad she got out of there. I think. It’s a screwed-up world, right, when you don’t know if someone’s survival is good or bad?
Q.
By another car! There’s something very American about it, don’t you think? You watched a lot of TV. Happy Days, Dukes of Hazzard. What says “U.S.A.” like a car? Henry Ford lived right here in the good ol’ U.S.A., remember. He was also a racist. American to the core, right?
Q.
A van, to be exact. What we used to call a child-molester van. Big white box, no windows. They picked me up on a frontage road off Highway 52. What do they teach girls? Never go to a second location. But I’d been on my own for a week, and was starving, and thirsty, and sleepless, and pretty much definitely going to die, and here was this vehicle that ran, you know? Second location, third location, whatever. I was in. I waved my arms, and I guess they didn’t think my peach-fuzz head looked too weird, and that’s how I got mixed up with the Patriots.
Q.
Different, right from the get-go, The garbage-truck gang, they were anonymous, no one in charge beyond men in general. The Patriots had a leader, this guy Kristoffer Skipp. He wasn’t in the van. He was in Salina, Kansas. The guy driving the van worked for him—he’d been doing some job for Skipp in San Diego on 10/23—and though Kristoffer Skipp got all the credit for the Patriots, I think it was this guy, the driver, Byrd Entwistle, who made the whole thing take off. Something was screwy with Byrd, He’d lost his nut in those first weeks. But he’d lost it in a really persuasive way. This boss of his became like a god in his head, and he went on about him for fifteen hundred miles, the great Kristoffer Skipp, how no one would be able to weather the storm better than the ingenious Kristoffer Skipp. You say that stuff enough to a van load of people who’d lost all willpower, they start to believe it.
Q.
I was the sixth person in that van: three men, two women, twenty-some cans of fuel. Near San Bernardino, we hooked up with another van of people, and they liked what Byrd was saying, and then the whole group picked up a third van full of folks at the Utah border, and a fourth and fifth in Colorado Springs. All thirty of us made it to Kansas. When we got to Salina, there was this big billboard: KRISTOFFER SKIPP, GENERATOR KING. I think I started to get the picture then.
Q.
Would you call it a cult, though? Maybe I’m being defensive. He certainly had the compound for it, his outdoor showcase arena. Totally walled in, because he’d been obsessed with people trying to steal from him. Probably untrue before 10/23, but definitely true after. Think about it this way. Luis and I had one single generator we stole from his neighbor, and for two weeks, we worshipped at it like a metal temple. It let us watch DVDs, listen to music, put up Christmas lights, feel like human beings. Imagine if you had a couple giant outbuildings full of generators and another full of fuel. Not only would you have continual electricity, your bartering power would be through the roof. We had food, we had desserts, we had entertainment.
Q.
Girl, you know he had heads on pikes. A hundred? Two hundred? Kristoffer Skipp was a big-dicker. He was one of those guys just waiting for something like 10/23 to happen. He sort of reclined into it, you know? His house was right there on the premises, a big, electrified palace. I saw things there I thought I’d never see again. Working toasters. Irons for clothes. Electric can openers. Those air fresheners you plug into outlet
s. All of it flooded in light, day and night. You could see Generator King from miles away, like the sun. And we were like moths, We would’ve sizzled ourselves crispy to keep close to it.
Q.
I’m not defending him, But everyone back then wanted to get rid of the zombies. They truly believed that was the only viable option. Kristoffer was different because he actually had the means to do it. Jihad wasn’t the best choice of words, that’s all. I don’t know, Maybe I am defending him.
Q.
Mostly overnight trips at first, Great Bend, Dodge City. Wichita, after a while. Topeka, Lawrence, Eventually north into Lincoln and Omaha, south into Tulsa and Amarillo. Jihads could take all kinds of shapes. IEDs, primarily, Like I said, we had gasoline like crazy and the know-how to pump gas from beneath gas stations—tens of thousands of gallons, whole lakes of the stuff untouched. Trigger mechanisms were easy. Old cell phones were like acorns, all over the place. Half of what Kristoffer traded for was C-4 and Semtex from construction sites, so there’s our explosives. Naturally only one thing reliably attracted zombies, so we hid our IEDs inside fresh bodies.
Q.
Dead bodies. Freshly dead bodies.
Q.
Not that I know of. Though I guess I can’t rule it out.
Q.
We’d fill a car with gas, set it on fire, and let it rip into a crowd of zombies. A few times we tried suicide bombers, attaching the bomb to a zombie and waiting for it to join a larger herd. Blast wave, shrapnel, fire. It really tore them up. Every time, after the zombies were in itty-bitty pieces, we’d take these little American flags—Kristoffer had boxes of them, stupid giveaways for customers—and we’d plant them right in the middle of the carnage. In a few years, there were thousands across the lower Midwest, whole fields of American flags like wildflowers. Anywhere bodies were blown to bits, that was the land of the Patriots.
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