Q.
Proud, yes. Flippant, no—I don’t think I’m being flippant. We were killing beings who’d invaded our country, who were trying to replace our culture with their own.
Q.
I do, in fact. I do know how that sounds, Etta. Not to tell you how to do your job, because you’re doing a fine job, but maybe the better question to ask is why it took me so long? It’s not an answer I’m proud of. With the garbage-truck gang, everything had been so overtly awful. At Generator King, everything seemed so idyllic. But the two places shared one thing: women, how they used us. They always took a couple of us on jihads, but why? To make sure anyone who got zombie guts on him got cleaned off. To make sure everyone got fed. Back at the compound, what did we do? All the women and girls? We kept house. We cooked meals. We had sex with the men, And the people who read this transcript one day might judge us, but I ask you, what were we supposed to do? What were any women, across history, supposed to do? The worst part was, while you were prancing around the sparkly kitchen in your heels and your dress with your hair grown back pretty, you could feel your survival skills drain away. I’ll tell you something. You can be infected with an idea that same way you can be infected by a zombie.
Q.
I can isolate it to a single moment. The men were sitting around the table, Kristoffer at the head, while a few of us women buzzed around, pouring coffee, picking up dishes. They were discussing what to do with us. Should girls learn first aid at ten years old instead of fifteen? Should the pregnant women be moved to the second floor where the generators weren’t so loud? Should we get the older women knitting sweaters and darning socks? I don’t know why, but it hit me. They were talking about me, my life, my future, and I wasn’t even being consulted.
Q.
Waited, that’s what. One thing you can count on from any patriot is they can’t resist spreading patriotism. It was Year Fucking Six, maybe Year Seven? Somewhere between zombie rats and zombie dogs. By that time, the Patriots were blowing up whole towns. That’s the kind of stock we had. We’d carpet-bomb the place. We’d squeal this police siren, our signal for anyone alive in town to get the hell out, and then we’d descend, wire the streets and buildings with explosives, and boom-boom-boom-boom. Bonus was, it took care of rats like pretty much nothing else. Some of us women were sewing great big U.S, flags by then, and there were always a couple rolled up in the back of a van, ready to plant on poles above the ruins. Smoky, black, bloody ruins—it was the country we wanted.
Q.
I walked. What could be simpler? But is there anything that’s ever been stronger? People getting to their feet and walking? The Patriots’ wiring had gotten sophisticated, which meant the actual detonations were easier, but there wasn’t any stopping them once they started. We were in a town called Guymon in the Oklahoma panhandle, and as soon as I heard the first bomb go, I dropped a pitcher of lemonade right in the dirt and walked straight into town.
Q.
I’m sure they tried. But how could they really follow? Guymon was ten seconds from being an inferno. A fast-food joint: blam! A police station: boosh! Geysers of fire, and even though I knew where some of the bombs were, I sure didn’t know all of them, Pieces of brick whacked me on the shoulders. I got shrapnel in the back of my legs. I had to pat out a fire in my hair, all that big blond hair I’d grown back. This thing, this metal coil, came flinging out of the fire, red hot, and ripped open my cheek and neck—that’s how I got this. Even then I kept walking. I walked through hell and somehow, some way, didn’t get burned alive.
Q.
Perfect question, Etta. They did, in fact. Some of the men drove around the other side of town to catch me if I came out. I saw them right before I passed right by this nice brick building and noticed all these faces staring out the windows. Zombie faces. What do I care? These were women’s faces, though. Only women. I got closer and saw the windows were shatterproof plastic. That’s why they’d never gotten out. And even though the whole world was blowing up, I got closer and really looked at them. I could tell when they’d died, they’d had black eyes and fat lips and bruises, because they’d never healed. The place was a women’s shelter. A safe house. And this line just came to me, I don’t know where from. Did someone famous say it? Haunt them like you’re already dead.
Q.
Haunt them like you’re already dead.
Q.
Haunt them like you’re already dead.
Q.
Because I want you to remember it, Because one day, you might need it. When I let those women out, it felt like letting every woman out of every car in the garbage caravan. Don’t ask me how I knew it, but once those zombie women came upon those Patriot men hoping to catch me, there would be a fight, a real fight, and finding worthless old me wouldn’t be a priority anymore.
Q.
Eventually. Once I made it out of town. Eventually, I did look back, and a fair number of zombies had made it out too, and you can call me crazy if you want, and I know I’d sucked down a lot of smoke and lost some blood and wasn’t in a super-reliable state of mind, but I swear all those zombies were women too. Like they’d remembered they could run, and hunt, and I was glad, even if the one they were hunting right that second was me. The one closest was so strange-looking it makes me doubt the whole memory. She had these hatchet wrists and, of all things, a bow—like a bow-hunting bow. She had these metal legs, like racing prosthetics, and they made her move really fast. I thought, damn, this robo-zombie’s going to get me. But she didn’t. She looked at the sun, like she was relieved it wasn’t hidden behind smoke, and headed due west.
Q.
Yeah, the rest of the zombies chased me. Look, this is the first interview, Let’s set a precedent for not prattling on forever. Plus, I’m tired. Aren’t you tired? Talking is tiring, I’d forgotten that. Who’s had time to talk much for fifteen years? Long story short, the Patriots didn’t mean to teach me about getting gas from gas stations, and hot-wiring cars, and all that, but they did, and it helped me get going, and fast. All I wanted was to get as far as possible from the land of little American flags. After a while, it only made sense. I was headed to Canada.
Astonish Ourselves
Twenty years ago, Greer had been woken from sleep by a pounding on the trailer door. It was early; only Daddy was up, doubtlessly fumbling with his HortiPlastics uniform and monitoring the coffee maker’s black spits, but he’d come alive at that, using his most resonant voice to scare off whatever druggie had chosen to pester them. But talk ensued, and when Greer crept into the main room, she and Conan, peeking from under his sheet on the sofa, watched one of the Sunnybrook owners enter, accompanied by a white guy with a big gut hanging over a holstered sidearm.
The stranger started poking through their shit while Daddy sputtered. This was illegal! You need a warrant! The owner rolled his eyes and said, Mr. Morgan, didn’t you want to figure out who was selling drugs and making beautiful Sunnybrook a hellhole? The humiliation was hot, and Daddy gulped it in place of his coffee, Big-gut man found no evidence of drugs, but plenty of evidence of a lousy life: a pail catching rainwater; window glass repaired with tape; a system of bent hangers keeping the refrigerator door shut, innovations the Morgans had been proud of until these men sneered at how these animals lived.
Greer was the big-gut man now, sidearm traded for a bow, nosing where she wasn’t wanted: behind Slowtown’s closed doors. She had good reason, but hadn’t the owner of the Last Resort thought the same? Greer opened the ground-floor apartment door. A zombie looked up at her from an easy chair so wasted that exposed springs corkscrewed through his rotted thighs. The tufted, polyester carpet was littered with crap: an oven mitt, half a briefcase, loose synthesizer keys, the bones of a squirrel. Her first thought?
Animals, They live like animals.
Humiliation burned for both the zombies and herself, sharp at either end like all the pikes out there holding severed heads. Thinking of zombies as animals was no better than what Mama
Shaw’s orderly had said a million years ago: Maybe They’re smarter than They seem. She strode in, too quickly for the zombie to do anything but stare in blank surprise, and checked to make sure the other rooms were vacant, They were not: two zombies in one, three in another, and in the bathroom a dozen zombie rats drawing their whiskers back from yellow teeth. But no Muse, so she hustled out, shut the door, closed her eyes, and listened. Still there, that low, musical vibration. She leaned to see up the stairwell. Two stories, four more units. She could do this.
Consensus estimates were that Queen Street buildings hid one or two shamblers each, but after Greer finished her second-floor census, she was up to fourteen. In a single building. Either a lot of zombies wanted to live near the Chief, or Slowtown was far more populated than anyone had guessed, Greer’s skin burned hotter, baking her bones. Keep up the pace, stay vigilant. Glancing down the stairs, she could see the first-floor zombie had pulled his thighs free from the easy chair, opened his door, and climbed the first flight of stairs. Crick-cracks could be heard behind every second-floor door too. She was an outsider being reminded of it—gently so far, though she couldn’t rely on that goodwill to last.
RESIST: Had they received the message already?
Steps were missing on the flight to the third floor, giving glimpses of zombies gathering below. Greer reached the landing and felt the flooring sway. Unless it was the effect of the music, so close now she didn’t have to investigate both apartments. It was a guitar, no question. She placed her hand on a hard plastic doorknob, feeling for vibrations in her fingertips, knuckles, and sternum, all places that had been touched before by “Walk Away,” as well as by the hands that played it.
She opened the door, crossed the threshold, and thought, That was too easy. There had to be a twist; twists were all the past fifteen years had supplied. But what she saw was exactly what she’d hoped to see for three months, not a creased magazine photo of eighteen-year-old Muse King, but the real-life late-thirties version, playing the 1978 maple-necked, mahogany-bodied, custom Alpine White Les Paul Gibson called Hewitt. Though he did not sing, the gray puffs of his breath in the cold air might as well have been whole songbooks. He was alive.
Every possible emotion shot from Greer’s body, a maelstrom of relief, gratitude, betrayal, and rage, that last of which, of course, because she was the Lion, dominated. She slammed the apartment door behind her and let out a single ice-pick shriek.
“You’re here? All this time? I’ll put your head on a pike! Asshole!”
The prehensile scrambling of his fingers paused a beat before continuing. Less than one second, and yet it cleared a space inside which she could clear her eyes and try to think. It was Muse, all right, but not the Muse she remembered. He was pungent, too sweet. His meager sweater draped over the knurls of skeletal shoulders. His face was whittled to a thin pyramid and coated with a beard like black mold, and his skin was the color of sandstone. The red bulbs of his eyes shone through the churn of his breath, into which she wanted to dip her face until it turned to tears on her cheeks.
Stairs creaked behind her, Zombies were coming, slow and weak, and in numbers she hadn’t expected.
“Get up.” She snapped her fingers. “We’ll talk it out later.”
He smiled, a pale purple slash. “Remember this tune?”
“Remember this tune? Me yelling at your ass to get the fuck in gear?”
“Shh.” He nodded dreamily. “Listen.”
The Gibson was scored with the surface damage of the Second Dark Age, but a music-store raid in Year Two had supplied Muse with enough strings to last a lifetime, and the guitar sounded good, with the homemade tractor-tire buffer still secured over the sound hole. Greer had no wish to squander seconds, but knew, as anyone did after fifteen years of living with someone, the exchange rate of giving a little to get a little. She made fists and pretended to listen, and then, quite by accident, recognized the plink-plink-plink.
“Walk Away” had segued into the song Muse had been playing when they’d first met at a dirt crossroads in a Missouri field. She had too much control to let a gasp escape, but felt it jab like a ripped-out rib. Muse, his voice a ravaged rumble that only made it prettier, grated through the second verse.
Take my burned old bones
Cool them in the river, y’all
Take my burned old bones, ooo-ee
Cool them in the river, y’all
So all the pitch-black things I done
Slide right down the waterfall.
Muse had again heard Greer’s approach and played to guide her way, It was the only reason to pine for those fearsome days: wishing to feel how she’d felt the morning they’d met. She remembered how their conversation had played out. It was easier than inventing new dialogue.
“You thirsty?” she asked, an echo wending through the years.
Muse smiled. He hadn’t forgotten his line: “Need to piss.”
Greer’s turn: “You eat like a dog.”
“Woof,” Muse recited.
Greer managed to swing her arms, heavy as dead anacondas, at the collapsing apartment. “This your place?”
Muse, as tired and ill as he looked, had the reply ready: “Nah, girl. Just wandering around and got to feeling Faustian, I’m ready to cut me some Robert Johnson–type deal.”
Greer needed a cane, so she lodged her bow against the floor, its hard thump announcing the end of playacting. “I know who that is now. ‘Kind Hearted Woman Blues.’”
“Then you know what he did out there at the Devil’s Crossroads.”
“Sold his soul.” The words frightened her, and she waved a hand to conceal it. “Come on. Put it away.”
“Can’t go with you, baby.”
Her sigh became a thorned hairball, To clear it, she aimed her face at the floor. It looked like a junkie lived here. Canned foods opened with the stomp of a boot heel, Crusted stains where the jellied contents had squirted free. Plastic cigarette lighters. Scorch marks and ashes from half-assed fires. Old socks and rags soiled with what might be blood. A bucket in the corner that could be holding piss and shit. She kicked one of the emptied cans and followed its wobbly roll.
Cat food, its label photo of an orange Persian degraded to a chiaroscuro, The sight stung her eyes; her heart too. This was bad. She wanted to fold herself onto the mucky mattress and hold this once-beautiful boy, but worried after she was buckled in by his bony arms, she wouldn’t get back up, not even when the zombies closed in with their vestigial teeth and dry tongues.
“This has to do with all that stuff you were talking about,” she said. “For months. Years, really.”
He chuckled softly. “You never listened.”
“I’ll listen now, back at the fort, There’s a vote tomorrow. You don’t know anything, It’s Richard, he wants to—it’s too much to explain.”
“Richard,” he sighed, “He’s why I left when I did.”
“Now he can be why you come back. You can talk to people, make them understand what they should do. You’re good at that.”
“It’s too late. I have to be here. For my people.”
“Your people are at the fort.”
His smile looked like it hurt. He rolled his neck, which crackled like rice cereal, an odd backdrop to his string-picking.
“You know Hoffmann, yeah?” he asked, “The librarian?”
Greer jumped on it; she’d jump on anything. “She’s down there on Queen Street right now. Let’s go see her.”
“We all knew it deep down, but it didn’t sink in till that lady laid it out. ‘The zombie virus isn’t cannibalistic, it’s antihuman.’”
Squeals, creaks, moans: doors opened, banisters gripped, stairs climbed.
“No one wanted to hear that shit then,” she said, “and we don’t have time to hear it now.”
“Hoffmann got a lot of things right. But she got one thing wrong.”
“Enough with the drama. Say it, then we go.”
His five right fingers sprang
out, deserting the strings, while his left fingers smothered the neck, the silence of snow.
“The zombies aren’t the virus. We are.”
A long, cold hand slid down her throat, taking hold of her hope like viscera and yanking them out her mouth. It wasn’t the specifics of what Muse said; she didn’t give a shit about specifics. It was that tone of stubborn belief. Nothing was going to get him out of here besides a brute force she’d never manage, not with zombies amassing, Tears rimmed her eyes.
“This is what you’re doing out here? Deep thinking with the white-eyes?”
“What did I say at the crossroads? Best place to hide is right out in the open.”
“In the freezing cold? Eating cat food?”
“Just listen, Greer. Just listen. I’m going to play some more.”
“This is what the fuck you’re doing?”
“It soothes them when I play. It’ll soothe you.”
“I’m not dead!”
Or was she? Standing above a demolished donut shop with a cat food–eating blues guitarist? Sounded like afterlife nonsense to her.
“What do viruses do? Hear me out.” He was playing again, heartbeat patterns, lovelorn dips. “They multiply, adapt, and kill. People did all that first, didn’t we? We were on our way to take down the whole operation. We were the disease, Greer. What does that make the zombies?”
“You want me to say ‘the cure.’ There, I said it.”
“They’re the antivirus, that’s right. Go easy now. Feel the music, I’m telling you now why I can’t go with you.”
The Living Dead Page 55