The Living Dead

by Kraus, Daniel

  No one in the biz would touch him. He was whispered about at restaurants, mocked on the Sunset Strip. He was a sniveling boy again, except without Mother to run to. Richard had no joy. No job, No prospects. No pride, no self-respect. Neva was no help. Did he forget to mention he had a wife? He usually did. Her name was Neva, She lived in his Hollywood place, sometimes. He went the other way: Miami. The Magic City, capital of beach, booze, and boobs, It’d fix him up, inspire him toward his next venture.

  It did no such thing. He fell like a bag of dog shit into a dumpster. Coming up fast was the annual Lindof Thanksgiving bash, the point of which was to brag about your successes. Richard would be a punching bag. He started considering the guns he kept—for display only, until now—at the Miami place. Maybe he’d end it all. Why not? He’d never produce another incredible film. Nobody loved him, or even liked him.

  Vegas was the place for it: no winters there, no discontent. He chose October 23, a day with no obvious historical import, to minimize the chance his suicide would be overshadowed in the press. He began arranging the final blowout, Pull-out-all-the-stops time. The biggest, highest suite he could find. Exhaust his contacts, see who might show. Stick coke up one foreshortened nostril, Adderall up the other. Dancers, stripteasers, hookers: invite ’em, keep coaxing them with Benjamins. Give a couple of off-strip homeless dudes fifty bucks to fight in the bathroom, let people place bets. Rent a chimp, you know, just to have it around, doing funny chimp shit. It was going to be great, really great.

  He didn’t know where he’d do the deed (the balcony? the hot tub?) or when (the stroke of midnight? in the midst of a three-way?), so he stowed his smallest handgun in his right jacket pocket, where his normal-sized arm could extract it when the time was right. He felt good. For the first time since the Ratz opened his dumb mouth, Richard Lindof felt like his swaggering old self again. Not a Lindof, but the Lindof, at least for one more night.

  The A-listers didn’t show. That was okay—they’d hog the attention anyway. The B-listers didn’t show either. Fuck ’em, those suck-ups were worse than the A-listers. To cover his ass, he sent invites to the VIPs of several conventions. The result was a spiky, surreal mix of Pop’s defense-department associates, forgotten ’80s singers, the mayors of a number of midsized cities, third-rate Vegas magicians, plastic-faced ex-models, dorky app creators, a boxer who’d once fought for the heavyweight crown, and a crop of coroners and medical examiners in town for a training symposium, Lindof loved it: once he’d blown his brains out, he’d have a dozen pros on hand to examine every glob.

  Lindof started fondling the gun at eleven. He was high as a comet. A shirtless rapper with gunshot scars had done some freestyle, and it had been awesome. The girl he’d paid to suck his dick had been a sweetheart, and when he gave up trying to come—because he was high as a fucking comet—she petted his arms, even his withered one, and he imagined divorcing Neva and marrying a good-natured, dick-sucking sweetheart like this. Sadly, there was no chimp. He’d spent half the day trying to find a chimp. On the upside, he’d given the winner of the bum fight another fifty to hop around the furniture, hooting like a monkey.

  Ten minutes before midnight, as Lindof stood on the balcony, gazing across the pulsing quasar of the Vegas strip, the desert breeze ruffling his hair like Mother used to, he became aware of a hubbub. It had been some time, he realized, since he’d been inside. He reentered the suite to find it mostly emptied, glasses dropped on carpets, drugs abandoned in varicolored anthills. That wasn’t good. If he shot himself and nobody saw it, what was the point? By the time he got to the foyer, he found twenty-some people thumbing phones and listening to one of the medical examiners talking about … well, it didn’t make much sense.

  Dead bodies reviving in their morgues back home?

  Pop’s defense-department pals were setting up shop in the parlor, opening laptops while speaking into phones set on speaker. A few blanched coroners and MEs remained, murmuring into phones with voices gone cold sober. Lindof was sobering too. He took stock of the suite, soiled now with everything but his brains. His gun hung heavily in his pocket like a lethal case of blue balls, the climax of his exploding head having been rudely interrupted.

  His eyes fell upon a fellow who’d introduced himself earlier as JT, some kind of morgue guy from one of the Sans, Francisco or José or Diego. He’d been partying hard earlier, singing at the top of his lungs, grinding men and women alike, drinking what looked like a giant piña colada out of a steel mixing bowl. He looked like shit now, curled and shivering in the corner of a sofa, his phone cradled to his face like a kitten.

  Forget Adderall, forget coke. JT’s slide into quivering jelly filled Richard’s body with what felt like quick-drying liquid plastic. He felt brand-new. He felt indestructible. When JT tossed himself off the balcony, Lindof’s urge to do likewise vanished. Feeling frisky, he plucked up JT’s phone and gabbed a bit with a guy named Acocella, who’d just dealt with one of those walking corpses in person. The more agitated Acocella got, the more his wetback accent emerged. That really revved Lindof’s engine. This guy was falling apart, same as Clark’s employees would stream from their factories when they heard. Pop’s stocks would scream into the gutter.

  Jesus Hernando Christ, it was perfect.

  Power brokers all over the world headed underground. Most people didn’t know the rich had priority phone networks, but they did, and Pop reached Lindof after most people’s infrastructure had failed. He urged his youngest son to join him in a luxury bunker in Colorado before they sealed it, Pop’s iron voice had melted to a whimper. It felt good telling the old man, nope, that’s okay, go ahead and brick yourself up, God bless. Up top, that’s where real power could be taken, and Lindof intended to have the grabbiest hands.

  The key was training your nose to the smell of roadkill—and everything was roadkill now, the rancid new colors of the American flag. Lindof got to where the smell made him hungry, and people were drawn to anyone who still had appetite. They were also desperate to be told what to do, one thing at which Lindof excelled. In fact, every quality Pop and Clark said doomed Little Richie to mediocrity (lazy delegation, lack of curiosity, blind greed) now brought him success. Zombies were the dead-eyed workers at Pop and Clark’s factories; they posed no real threat. While everyone else boo-hooed about why and how, Lindof scooped up everything he wanted.

  He was Beowulf, killing who needed killing, fucking who needed fucking, king of wherever he was.

  Lindof thrived. For about twelve years, anyway. After animals started going zombie, even his most fervent followers lost their will. He was increasingly alone, which meant he was nobody. He did the only thing that made sense, returning to his beloved Vegas. Trump International Hotel, apparently having been built of the chintziest material, was gone from the skyline. But the lower buildings of the strip were mostly as he’d left them. Vegas, as ever, was filled with stuff, providing plenty of gigantic fiberglass props, echelons of dead slot machines, and moldy card tables to shield him from zombies. Even zombie rats, at plague levels in Year Twelve, were sparser in the desert, and their skeletons made nice, crispy sounds when he squashed them.

  Hoping for uplift, he skulked into his favorite haunts: MGM Grand, Paris, Caesars Palace. Lindof hated how easy it was. No security guards, no guest lists, no all-access passes. Even the private high-roller rooms had been opened to a dirty, shambling, undeserving public. It might be the worst thing ever to happen in Vegas, which was saying something.

  One last time, Vegas delivered. At the Venetian, inside the Grand Canal Shoppes, he came upon the famous Madame Tussauds wax museum. Sunlit via ceiling cave-ins, it was the tidiest post-zombie setting he’d ever seen. It made sense; a wax museum held nothing survivors needed. It wasn’t until he stood face-to-face with Khloé Kardashian that Richard Lindof realized he, however, did need something here.

  Most of Khloé’s face had dripped to her shoulders, slopped about her neck in a shawl of peach wax. Her long hair existed in patch
y ponytails, swaths having been gnawed off by starving animals, Stripped of fake flesh, the exposed clay skull still had Khloé’s bright blue glass eyes, begging to be put out of their misery. Lindof wouldn’t oblige. Though her big breasts and renowned booty had also melted, her lingerie top, jeans, and stilettos kept the pooled wax roughly in place and turning him on. He could do what he wanted and Khloé couldn’t complain. She couldn’t even say he looked like Bela Lugosi. Though, for once, he felt like Lugosi, drawing sustenance from this bitch, same as if sucking her blood.

  He’d seen zombies rip open dozens of people. It was kind of erotic, if he was being honest: people forcibly stripped until there was nothing left to take off. He gazed around the shadowed wax museum. Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt, Halle Berry, Johnny Depp, Jennifer Lopez, Katy Perry, Rihanna. The prettiest people in America, turned into the ugliest. Richard Lindof, he of long nose and short leg and stubby arm, was lording over superstars he’d once dreamed of meeting at the Oscars—and he was better-looking than any of them.

  He’d never paid heed to rumors of Toronto. Hauling his ass through a jungled country just to be someone’s second banana held little appeal, But standing before all these fabulous people he’d outplayed, he changed his mind. He loitered only enough to fuck Marilyn Monroe (when was he going to get that chance again?) and got moving. What a wild, colorful world those zombie bastards had ushered in. Pretty, he admitted, though it’d look better with streets and sidewalks, To keep things tidy. To let you know who owned what. They’d get back there, and he’d be the one to make it happen.

  Fort York, once he got there, was a letdown, especially its de facto captain, a walking headache named Karl Nishimura. It was also just what the doctor ordered. Nishimura claimed Fort York was representative of a lot of emerging societies. If so, all the better, because it meant those places needed Richard Lindof too. He’d go Lugosi on them, suck out their insides, bring them to their knees like Beowulf did—Beowulf vs, Everyone. Jesus Henry Christ, he’d make the bastards feel what he’d felt the first four decades of his life.

  Ticks all over their eyeballs.

  No Long Goodbyes

  First rule, only rule: wash your hands. In a world lacking antibiotics and antivirals, humans were as vulnerable as goldfish in a bag of water. A minor cough, a sniffle, a little scratch. Anything could take you down for good. Karl Nishimura’s time aboard aircraft carriers had prepared him for the task of organizing a society, and no area of that education was as valuable as hygiene. Long before zombies had redefined the idea of communicability, sicknesses had swept through Olympia like gales. Officers lectured their staffs on the simple thing every sailor could do to squash future contagions. Soap, warm water, scrub, repeat.

  Upon arriving at Old Muddy and eyeing the runny noses of those he shook hands with, he made hygiene step one. Soap was quite harvestable, Wrecked buildings often had full, boxed bars, and a hotel score could set a person for life. But a trade-and-barter society could only last so long. Nishimura was all about production, teaching a man to fish and all that. Fort York was hardly Colonial Williamsburg, but its museum and collections had examples of older technologies: the tools of a blacksmith, a wheelwright, a brickmaker, a shoemaker, a weaver.

  Nishimura canvassed residents to find those best capable of operating the tools. Next, he befriended a man who’d been a middle school chemistry teacher, and together they reproduced one of his classroom experiments: making soap. It was complicated, involving boiling embers and mixing the residue into simmering lard. Soon entrances to all fort structures were stocked with soap, water, a heating element, and a volunteer who ensured your grubby hands did their civic duty.

  Naturally, people got lazy, but never enough that reports reached his ears. The first person Karl Nishimura definitively knew to have violated the rule—or was just about to—was Karl Nishimura. Nai Nai, the elderly, farsighted soap sentry on Wellington, sang greetings to the recovery team in the order she recognized them.

  “Right before the sun falls, Face, very good. Nĭ hăo, Greer and Etta. Karl, everyone is saying, ‘Where is Nishimura, we can’t find Nishimura.’ The voting, it is causing much, much—”

  The Face motioned Nai Nai aside.

  “No soap, not now.”

  Nai Nai’s skin folded into a frown. “Karl?”

  “No soap,” he snapped.

  “Why are you bringing a softie through the fort?”

  Greer, far less polite than the Face, sent Nai Nai’s water bucket flying with a kick while keeping both hands on the stretcher. Aggression was rare at Old Muddy and likely brought back fifteen years of trauma to Nai Nai. Her quick cry for mercy pierced Nishimura’s heart as she collapsed into the soapy spill. Any other time, the Face or Nishimura would have knelt to check on her, but the former was racing for the railroad tracks to head off anyone else who might slow them, and the latter had half the stretcher to worry about.

  From the tracks, Nishimura saw it: Fort York. The name was not a misnomer, but neither was it sufficient. Located near the city’s Bathurst Quay lakefront, the historical site itself was about five blocks long, a roughly triangular park bordered by highways. The eight original buildings might have squeezed in two hundred people, but residents had outgrown the space well before Nishimura’s arrival. What they’d begun to do, a capital idea Nishimura helped them pursue with navy rigor, was rehab bordering properties as living quarters, allowing historic Fort York to serve community, administrative, and ceremonial functions.

  The fort’s hundred-year-old stone walls were head-high and served no real defensive purposes; the train tracks, Bathurst Street overpass, and elevated Gardiner Expressway offered superior vantage points for spotting zombies, back when they were a threat. Hospice was situated in a former commercial complex off the fort’s southeast corner, next to their cobbled-together hospital. Softies, as Nai Nai suggested, were transported around the fort’s eastern edge. Who they carried today, however, was no softie, and the fastest route to Hospice was straight through the historic site.

  The stone walls were slotted with embrasures through which soldiers had once fired cannons, and Nishimura and his team dashed through one. It was eighty yards to the opposite edge. Jolted by adrenaline, Nishimura and Greer should have covered that in under a minute, even carrying a stretcher. But the historic site was the settlement’s hub and heart, and this sundown was thick with people wrapping up their daily activities—reviewing building plans, testing inventions, giving lessons, and playing with children. It was always a bustling, clamorous mess, but a satisfying one, the way Nishimura’s home with Larry, Atsuko, Chiyo, Daiki, Neola, and Bea had been, once upon a time.

  Today, the fort was twice as busy, Nishimura had the sickening thought that everyone already knew that he, the unerring Saint Karl, had botched a recovery operation so badly that beloved Charlie Rutkowski was dying and the Chief had been blown to bits. In seconds, the dozens of loose groupings would constrict around him, the way zombies once had, their eyes blankly disappointed, their mouths drooling for his blood.

  The real reason they’d amassed, of course, was the vote, only hours away now, which would decide the fate of the Blockhouse Four and decide the future of Old Muddy. The vote was scheduled to begin at sunup, using the same simple process they’d used for smaller matters. You wrote your vote on a slip of paper, dropped it into a box, and got your name checked off a master list. Before the trip to Slowtown, Nishimura believed his proven platform would win the day, and easily.

  No longer was he sure. He heard people arguing at frequencies foreign to Fort York. He saw invisible lines drawn through a populace that until now had eschewed any, Karl Nishimura followers to the east, Richard Lindof devotees to the west—and more than Nishimura expected, He was disturbed by all the backs of heads, the unmistakable look of people gathered for a speech. He didn’t see a speaker yet, but it had to be Lindof. His followers were gathered before the Brick Magazine, inside which the Blockhouse Four were kept, and which itself was fifty f
eet from East Blockhouse, the scene of the crime.

  Nishimura, Greer, the Face, and Hoffmann got as far as the Officers’ Blue Barracks before people blocked the way, bidding for attention.

  “Karl, folks are getting riled up here—”

  “If he’s going to talk, Mr. Nishimura, you really ought to consider—”

  “If Lindof sees you’ve brought a softie in here, he’s going to—”

  “Move back!” Nishimura shouted. “We have a woman bit here!”

  His own words made him shiver, and he watched the shiver transfer to people’s bodies. If only the children’s instructors were here, he thought. Astonishing numbers of kindergarten and preschool teachers had survived the Second Dark Age, and no one could calm a crowd like they could.

  “That’s terrible. But, Karl, the situation here—”

  “Put her down. Someone fetch a bolt gun.”

  “We’ll take care of her. You go talk to the people—”

  “This is Charlie Rutkowski!” Nishimura cried. If these people took the stretcher, they’d have to learn urgency, which he’d already accepted as his god. “We are not bolt-gunning her right here like a cow! Doesn’t she deserve to die right? We’re taking her to Hospice. Get out of our way, please.”

  Greer took up the charge, elbowing ferociously while the Face made a wedge of his arms and bolted forward. The crowd, at last, parted. The only ones still in their path were three children playing hand-clapping games like centuries of little ones before them, except instead of Patty Cake or Miss Mary Mack nonsense, their rhymes had been learned in Fort York’s small but growing school:

  Zombie, zombie

  Bite me not.

  But if you do

  I’ll take the shot.

  I will not cry

  I will not moan.

  Oh, zombie, zombie

  Take me home.

  The “shot” in question was the aforementioned bolt gun, the kind used for rendering livestock brain-dead before slaughter. Children accepted the practice as readily as their parents had once accepted the equally mystifying ritual of burying corpses in body gardens. Other chants and songs involved what to do if someone got bit or died off-site, and how Slowtown was to be left to the zombies. The surprise to Nishimura was how the rhymes also soothed adults as they bore down through the world’s rebirth.