The Living Dead

by Kraus, Daniel

  “You left me. You left me.”

  “Just for a bit. We’re all coming back together.”

  “What does that even mean?”

  “I used to sing a lot about soul, but I never gave it a single real thought. I think about it now. I think about it all the time. Because we let our virus run wild, the world had no choice but to put up a defense. It tried to stop us. It ripped our soul right out of our bodies, made it into halves: the living, the dead, We’re all at the crossroads now, baby. We got to put body and soul back together if we’re going to have a chance. If the world’s going to have a chance.”

  “We already have the chance. It’s Old Muddy, KK.”

  “KK? Uh-oh.” He laughed, “I’m in trouble now.”

  She felt a flicker of the old anger and snatched it. “Let me get this straight. You figured this all out. You. King Kong. Musician. Fifteen years, no one has shit-all of a clue what the hell went wrong, but you eat cat food for a few weeks and suddenly you’re Socrates.”

  “It’s not me, It’s the music. I don’t think it even had to be music, Could’ve been poetry. Painting. Art, is what I’m saying. Art, all of it, went down the tubes after 10/23, right? Except me. I kept playing. I kept the flame. The only reason I was able to do that was you. You did the fighting. You did the protecting. You made art, all art, possible again. You helped keep our souls alive. You should be proud.”

  “Proud? I’m not proud of anything. You think those St. Croix kids aren’t screaming in my skull every fucking day? If I’d bashed that guitar of yours into a hundred pieces, maybe I’d be proud of that. Maybe.”

  “I think you have to go through some shit before you can see it. And you’ve gone through some shit. Will and Darlene, too—I think that’s why they sent me their son’s guitar. We got to bring people together, animals together, plants, trees, fire, water together, the whole thing, and accept all of it, find beauty in all of it. That’s art, That’s art.”

  “You sound like someone who’s about to do something stupid. Muse. Please. Come back to the fort.”

  “The fort’s a step that doesn’t go anywhere. Greer, we got to stop trying to own the world. We tried that already. We fought over it like wolves over a carcass. Forgetting, you know, the world’s not ours to fight over. We’re here to live with it, Musically. Poetically. Artfully.”

  “All right. Okay? All right. I’m not arguing. You hear those sounds on the stairs? Fuck! I’ve got a bow here, Muse, not a machine gun. You’re going to get us both killed; how poetic is that?”

  Muse’s ring finger dandled the B string, a tremorous lament.

  “They won’t hurt you. Not while you’re with me.”

  “A little blues is going to keep them away?”

  His lips now, the same tremor, the same lament.

  “Because I’m like them now. Or will be, right quick.” He smiled sadly. “My old spirit’s going to slide right down the waterfall.”

  As if on a hinge, her head tilted back down toward the floor. It wasn’t only burn marks and food cans that made this place look like a junkie’s den. There was a used syringe. Several syringes, actually, probably scrounged from the vet clinic a few blocks north. If Muse had been honest about his past, intravenous drugs were out of his comfort zone, which meant this was something so awful she didn’t know how she guessed it.

  “Did you…? Muse. Did you make yourself…?”

  Both sleeves of his sweater were ripped and unraveling, and along his left arm she saw the black entry points of injection. He was nodding, soft and metered, the way he might reassure a child who might be thinking about sobbing. His playing, too, had mellowed into a lilt that sounded rather Irish. Only now did she sense how much of a struggle it was for him to make his fingers move, to keep his body upright, all for her.

  “Don’t get spooked,” he urged. “Took me a time to find a vein, that’s all.”

  Tears ran, hot grease down her cold cheeks.

  “Muse, no.”

  “I took it from the Chief. From the best of them all. She’s the mom I never had. The dad too. Though Will and Darlene, they came awful close.”

  Greer let the bow fall, holding her head with both hands, her fingernails ice chips along her scalp. “I know you didn’t want to kill them. Or even hurt them. But become them? Muse, you moron, you dumb fuck, why did you do that? It’s way too fucking far!”

  “You’re upset,” he whispered, “and, baby, I hear that, I honor that. But you got to ask yourself, what other kinds of people did they say that about? That they’d gone too far? That they had to be put back in their place?”

  Snick—fingernails against the door. More likely, finger bones. No depth of melancholy could dull Greer’s instincts. She pivoted on a heel, locked eyes on a metal chair, grabbed it, and levered it beneath the doorknob. It might hold back a few zombies. But the chair was welted with rust; the knob hung like an eyeball in a rotted socket; the wood of the door looked ready to split like an old pumpkin. She veered back to the bed.

  “You arrogant asshole! No one listened to your rah-rah shit at the fort, so you came here to find people who couldn’t tell you to shut up!”

  “Be mad. It’s okay. But I’ll be one of them soon. They can tell. You stay in my arms, none of them will hurt you.”

  “No fucking way. In your arms? You going to bite me? That your big plan?”

  He grinned. His teeth were brown, “Not unless you want me to.”

  “I am not going to die up here with you, dumb fuck!”

  “People, zombies—we’re all dying,” he said gently, “Here’s what we need to accept. We’re smart zombies as much as they’re dumb humans. Any second now, those two lines are going to converge, and us and them will be exactly the same. Body and soul back together, I can feel it. The Chief can feel it. All of Slowtown can feel it, Why do you think Richard’s fighting so hard, like a fish on a line? He feels it too. I knew you were coming to see me, baby girl, I’ve been waiting. Because you can feel it too, can’t you?”

  Fuck no, she couldn’t. She didn’t feel anything but furor, and under that, grief, and under that, the unrest she’d known since she was born, Fighting was what she knew, and he was telling her to lower her fists. That’s what she called giving up. But what if it wasn’t? Muse asked if she felt it too. Willpower streaming from her eyes, she let herself believe she did. It had come in the stirring of trees that now owned the world, their branches reaching only halfway down so she’d reach up, or a pattern in the sparrows, ovaling near before darting off to show her the sky’s immensity and how puny humans were in comparison, or the way Slowtown zombies’ eyes followed her like sunflowers followed the sun, their rib cages pre-sunken as if to allow room for her inevitable surrendering embrace.

  She slapped herself on the forehead to drive out these thoughts, then thought she heard a second slap, a third. The apartment was too cramped for the bow, but she’d fended off plenty of zombies by boot and fist alone. She coiled defensively, hearing the slaps draw near. Once she’d spotted Muse, she’d forgotten all protocol, which insisted, above all, checking every other fucking room in the place. Such a rookie move—she deserved whatever she got.

  What she got was a dog, It rounded the corner with a loping, irregular gait brought on by a missing back left leg. Not missing entirely: half of it dangled, the snapped bones swaying. It was a zombie German shepherd, the distinctive qualities of the breed transformed. Its weighty chest held its barrel shape, though half its organs had fallen out through wide cracks in exposed ribs. Its once-fluffy tail was as bony as a string of beads, with remnants of fur hanging like Spanish moss. Its ears, once pointy radars, had rotted down to nubs. Its low-positioned head, a signal of aggression when it was living, now signaled nothing but a decomposing neck. From this position, the German shepherd’s trademark long tongue trailed, even longer, a twelve-inch strip of dry, gray flesh dragging along the floor—the source of the slapping sound.

  Greer adjusted her stance. Oversized jaws mad
e zombie dogs, unlike zombie people, dangerous right up until they went softie. The German shepherd plodded forward, its white eyes two penlights in the dark, its canines two more. It entered the main room inches from Muse’s mattress, and Greer didn’t care if he was doomed to death, she didn’t intend to stand here and watch it happen at the teeth of this three-legged monster. She lifted a boot, reared back.

  The dog sat. It was the least likely thing imaginable. It propped itself up on its ruined front legs, as properly as possible, wrapping its bone-tail around the mangy puffs of its hindquarters. It looked at Greer, its dead tongue dangling, not in happiness exactly, but a kind of contentment.

  Muse stopped his plucking to touch it. Greer inhaled sharply, picturing his talented fingers reduced to spurting stumps, but the dog did nothing. He scratched its head. He’d clearly done that many times before: the fur there had been rubbed off, and Muse’s fingernails rasped over the animal’s exposed skull.

  “This is Willy,” he said.

  That was it. She’d seen too much. Greer dropped to her knees, slicing her calf on a cat-food can, and let her face fall hard against Muse’s damp, feverish neck. He slid the guitar aside and she twined her arms around his shivering, skeletal back and found, despite the things that had ravaged them both, they still fit together, living and dead, body and soul.

  Greer waited to feel Willy or Muse bite her, or to hear the clack of a syringe full of the Chief’s fluids being lifted from the floor. Instead, she was the one who lifted, back onto her feet, and though she made her tired legs do the hard work, because Muse was so weak, she let him do what she’d never done out in the wild: take control of where they were going. He walked their joined bodies to the apartment door, slid aside the chair, and turned the knob. She searched herself for fear and found a curious lack.

  “We’re going to astonish ourselves,” he whispered. “All I ask is, don’t tell them I’m up here. All right? You—you come back when you’re ready. For now, I’m going to give you a little taste of what we can do.”

  The door opened. White-eyed skulls bobbed toward her as if loosed from the bottom of a lake, Their slushy shreds of skin smeared mucus over her neck. Their spiny fingertips danced like kitten claws up her arms. Their cold teeth pushed like corn kernels into her cheek. But those fingers did not dig, and those teeth did not sink. Greer tucked herself deeper into Muse. His body was weak but his fingers, ever strong, locked at the small of her back. Taking the cue, a dozen other hands pressed against her, innocent as children, reverent as priests. They carried her; Muse carried her; she carried herself. It was a bewildering, intoxicating motion, not life, not death, but a path that cut through both.

  Suddenly Sadness

  There should have been order. When a developing situation required assertive action, the ten seconds it took to parcel out duties could feel like ten years, but those few moments could save lives, often everyone’s. The lesson was fifteen years proven.

  Charlie had suspected the last couple of years of relative peace had loosened these codes, and here was the proof. Nishimura plowed into the donut shop without explaining the plan to the Face, Hoffmann, or Charlie. The Face rushed in after him, Hoffmann, consummate follower, went third. That forced Charlie, who’d yet to move since Greer’s shout, to take the critical position in the donut-shop doorway. A team never left its rear unguarded.

  From two stories above the donut shop came the whale songs of straining wood, the sandpaper hiss of bodies along walls, the rattle of a few ankle-chains, the crick-crack popcorn. There were zombies up there in unforeseen numbers, though if anyone had the skills to slink right past the slowpokes, it was Greer Morgan. Charlie’s concern was Nishimura. She pictured his brain like a ball of twine, pulled too tight by Richard. Greer had snapped it.

  His voice, fractured, from inside: “Greer!”

  Charlie bit back terror and surveyed Queen Street as her post required. In the center of the street lay the poor softie, still strapped to the stretcher. Other zombies didn’t appear to like that; Charlie believed twice as many were visible from windows and doors than she’d ever seen before. She tried to exude calm, the opposite of the donut-shop clamor, before permitting herself to look at the zombie sitting three feet away.

  The Chief’s skull faced straight, but her eyes, the color and luster of a seashell, had rolled upward to stare at her. Charlie liked the Chief, This was, she now realized, a radical thought. Over the past decade and a half, she’d felt spates of sympathy for individual zombies, even affinity, as in the case of the safe-house zombie women of Guymon, Oklahoma. But she’d never felt inclined to spend time with one, until the Chief. The ancient one seemed wise, and Charlie supposed she craved that wisdom.

  Everyone said the Chief’s fascination with shiny objects was an amygdalic anomaly. Yet it imbued her with the maturity one saw in veteran zoo animals that had made peace with captivity’s rules and allowed you to study them as they studied you. For Charlie, looking at softies—whether as a Caretaker with Lesser Hedrick or out here in the field—was looking over the waterfall of death itself. You learned nothing, yet came away awed and rejuvenated. Even the frailest softie contained this power; at Hospice, where several were always present, their lost moans harmonized into a single, forceful fermata.

  From inside the donut shop, more shouting, a door kicked, floor trash booted. From higher up, fracturing wood. Instead of feeling tense, Charlie felt exhausted. For so long, she’d heard this life-or-death bickering, each noise daggering into her shoulders like vulture claws, bowing her spine under the weight of vulture meat, the black density of vulture feathers.

  “No shooting!” Nishimura cried, “Everybody hold! It’s her!”

  Greer had been found. That was good. Charlie, though, felt no uplift. Suddenly sadness soaked into her. There was something mournful about the Chief, or, more bitingly, about Charlie herself when she stood before the Chief. Fort York protocol dictated that, when you died, your brain was incapacitated at the instant of zombie revival and your body burned, That meant, though Charlie was a loyal handmaiden to zombies, she would never exist as one herself. That had to be a positive thing, But what miracles zombies had been! And how little headway the living had made in grasping their meaning, even as they hurtled toward obsolescence.

  As if of its own accord, her hand floated toward the Chief, a vast spacecraft sailing amid stars of dust. Charlie wore pink faux-leather winter gloves with faux-fur trim, the fingers scissored off. She’d chosen them from Old Muddy’s stockpile because they fit. But in the tepid gray light, they felt like a glimpse of a future when people once again had time for things like style. The bright pink outshone the brown, perishing Chief; what if one day this venerated zombie was thought of less frequently than which shade of pink was more flattering to which shape of lips?

  She touched the Chief’s braids. They were wire. Nishimura would kill Charlie if he saw her caress a zombie like this. She didn’t care. It hit her the Chief looked a bit like her mom, Mae Rutkowski, or what Mae might look like now. Charlie moved her fingers along the Chief’s rot-mottled cheek. It sank under her touch like wax. Just like that, she’d changed the Chief. Everything was changing, every day, and only the Chief saw the end as well as the beginning—whatever it had been, what it might be again, Charlie drew her fingers across the purple, festered bottom lip, a gesture of the acceptance she’d failed to give John Doe.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

  A dross of metal whanged across shattered tile as four people stumbled out of the donut shop. Greer was among them, flailing to remove her wrist from Nishimura’s grip. Charlie recognized her lividness for a far rarer emotion: shock. She’d witnessed something notable, and in the chaos only Charlie noticed.

  “—had to have heard us down here,” Nishimura hissed, “calling your name—”

  “Let go,” Greer growled.

  “She said Muse wasn’t up there,” the Face told Charlie.

  “But a lot of zombies were,” Nishimura
said.

  “Will you get your asshole hands—”

  “A lot, way more than anyone—”

  “I will hit you, Nishimura.”

  “We should move,” the Face said, spying dozens of white eyes in the dark.

  “Better to hit me,” Nishimura said, “than put the whole group at risk like that, ever again, do you hear me?”

  “Snoop.”

  This last word was a soft gasp, nearly lost in noise too loud for Slowtown, all those scuffling feet and jangling buckles, Snoop—a name only ever used by one person, and not in four years, which suggested it was blurted out in shock.

  Here was the pattern she’d replay until the end: Charlie looks at Hoffmann; Hoffmann looks at the Chief; Charlie looks at the Chief.

  Only after seeing it did Charlie feel it, no more painful than an overfirm handshake. The Chief’s jaws were fastened over all four of Charlie Rutkowski’s fingers. She absorbed the dreamlike sight of her own guaranteed death for a few seconds. It was a mirror of Luis’s bite from Mamá Acocella—a warped mirror, since the Chief’s excluded Charlie’s thumb. The zombie’s milky white eyes contained no malice. She had only done what was in her nature. Charlie found herself nodding, hastening to forgive. The living, after all, had done what was in their nature too.

  The Chief blinked. No biologic reason for it. The blink felt like a small gift.

  Did that mean the bite was a gift too?

  “No!” Nishimura bellowed.

  He pulled on Charlie’s coat. Her left arm yanked straight, each bone and tendon a link in a tightened chain, but the Chief’s teeth did not yield. Nishimura swiveled, agile for an old guy, and kicked the zombie in the chest, hard. Words screeched from Charlie’s lungs as if she were the one struck.

  “What are you doing?” she demanded.

  Nishimura kicked again. The Chief’s chest caved like a cardboard box, ribs snapping from the sternum in puffs of powdered bone. Three teeth, black as three drops of oil, flew from flaccid lips and Charlie pinwheeled free, past the curb, expecting a hard Queen Street crack to the skull. Arms caught her. She heard the clatter and ping of a bow dropped to pavement. Greer maneuvered from under Charlie to snag her wrist like the neck of a rattlesnake, Charlie took in the askew angles of her pointer, middle, and ring fingers. Each one had taken a tooth to the second phalange. As the two women stared, the wedge-shaped holes began squirting blood.