“Oh, great, the men have a plan,” Charlie snorted. “Surely this ends well.”
But before the night was over, all three were high on the hope of the blank canvas. They gasped in enthusiasm, oohed in agreement, laughed at everything. At one point, Charlie covered her face, mortified by their ambition. The Face snagged her elbow to reveal her grinning embarrassment, and she batted at him playfully, and he had to sit back, way back, to calm his heart. No one had touched him with kindness in eleven years. His resolve to help turn Fort York into paradise doubled. Anything was possible.
In that single dizzying eve, seeds were planted for the fort’s two guiding protocols: the Armory and Hospice. In the meantime, they had a philosophy to follow and a direction in which to head. With Charlie and the Face’s help, Nishimura’s big ideas spread faster than a PERPLEXED meme. To the Face, it felt natural. Zombies were dying out. The Fort was growing. In the New Library’s collection of vintage magazines, the Face found a yellowed 1950s ad for suburban development, which he tore out and tacked to the door of his room.
An Experiment in Better Living!
Was the experiment failing? The Face strolled into the fort. Every tiki torch blazed, painting the crowds on either side in a thin orange wash. These were people who hugged and held hands and gave piggyback rides to any kid who wanted one. Seeing them split in half was shocking.
The people outside the Brick Magazine, the holding cell of the Blockhouse Four, were the loudest. If the Face’s forthrightness was needed anywhere, it was there. He walked down the central sidewalk, still in place from the fort’s days as a historical attraction. It bisected the Garden, passed both the Armory and Master Sundial, and curled into the waiting crowd. Richard Lindof had not yet appeared, though a large crate had been situated before the Brick Magazine for his eventual boost. The Face nudged his way closer until he could read its faded stamp: DRY AGED BEEF. It felt fitting. Fort York, as well as every other known settlement, might have gone vegetarian, but the ghost ache for flesh lingered, and red meat was what Lindof had been tossing since the day he’d arrived.
The Face rubbed warmth into his arms, thinking through what he’d heard about other communities from Fort York newcomers. Their reports described colonies like Old Muddy but for their lack of Arcadian underpinnings, which made them more volatile. Generally encouraging news, as were the stories of the collapse of less palatable societies.
Fort York’s closest neighbor was Fort Drum, a former military training base on the U.S. end of Lake Ontario. Prior to 10/23, eighty thousand troops had trained there annually. Today, from all accounts, it was a quiet, walled village occupied by industrious workers who’d come to kindred conclusions about softies, choosing to leave them be rather than mop them up. Fort Drum had a peculiarity confirmed by two visitors. Like Fort York, Fort Drum dreamed of a world divested of its self-destructive impulses, but they approached the goal through brain science. Among Fort Drum’s population were three neurosurgeons studying the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and the insular cortex, areas of the brain controlling egalitarian behavior and kindness. If they could manipulate these areas, they theorized, they could neuter antisocial urges.
While it would be nice to rid the world of future Lindofs, the thought of DIY neurosurgeons made the Face queasy. He was glad Fort Drum was there, glad they were forward-thinking. For now, he was also glad they were at least a day’s horse ride away.
The crowd quaked. The Face lifted onto his toes and saw a group of seven or eight people entering the fort from the East Gate. There was no question it was Lindof. There was a chest-puffed pride in the strut of those serving as unnecessary bodyguards, while the man in the middle indulged in a slow strut that didn’t quite hide his limp. The fanfare turned the Face’s stomach.
No one at Fort York had fewer exchanges with Lindof than the Face. The reason was simple. Lindof found the Face repulsive. When Lindof caught a glimpse of him, he turned away, his face clenching into a child’s dinner-table mask of disgust. At first, the Face hadn’t held it against him. The reaction was honest, and there was no quality he prized more. This benefit of the doubt lasted one week. Like other Fort Yorkers, Lindof had complaints. Unlike other Fort Yorkers, he did not submit them to the Custodial Council. He bad-mouthed, got personal. Council idiots. Those morons who did whatever they said.
People strong enough to have lived through the Second Dark Age should have seen right through such middle school whisper campaigns, but a surprising number gravitated toward it. The Face watched people’s lips relearn the workings of sneers.
The Face had kept these observations to himself; it didn’t feel good to be the subject of such open revulsion. Now he regretted it, violently. He should have walked straight up to Lindof and forced him to look at his mangled face, if only to make him acknowledge what everyone at Old Muddy had been through. What had been the purpose if they were going to revert to petty, despicable behaviors?
Once he’d amassed a disgruntled clump of followers, Lindof began trumping up minor incidents as major scandals. A month after arriving, a yacht beached nearby with a manifest of zombie rats, and two days were spent torching the vessel in the water. If Fort York had a policy of proactively patrolling the Lake Ontario waterfront and firebombing empty boats, a red-faced Lindof cried, threats like this would never happen.
If Lindof had presented valid concerns, Old Muddy would have addressed them with frank debate, same as always. But Lindof’s discourse was so absent of intellect, so focused on base urges, it glissaded under higher echelons of reason and caught everyone by surprise. For the first time in five years, confidence in their way of life was eroding.
Maybe the Fort Drum folks have it right, the Face thought, imagining a trio of neurosurgeons piercing lobotomy lances through Lindof’s eye sockets. Instantly, he chastised himself. These were the sorts of spiteful thoughts that made people rebel against the Custodial Council—an infection was spreading. Charlie Rutkowski had once confided in the Face she might have known Patient Zero. There was a new Patient Zero now: Richard Lindof.
The Face didn’t want to attribute cliché qualities to Muse King strictly because he was an artist, but the Face noticed things. For three years, Muse had been the fort’s warmest, gentlest resident. The Face, capable only of blurting unvarnished facts, envied Muse’s ability to wrap hard truths in cozy fables. But he’d seen Muse go cold observing the rash-like spread of Lindof apostates. Seven days after Richard arrived, Muse went bye-bye, as if to protect something pure inside him. Now the Face wondered, if the vote went Lindof’s way, if those on the west end of the fort would follow Muse’s lead.
People cheered as Richard Lindof rounded East Blockhouse, the scene of the crime, and gave it a little pat, perhaps assuring the building that he would protect it from future wrongs. Inside the blockhouse were the most valuable, delicious, spoil-resistant, shelf-stable relics of yesteryear, and by and large, residents did a solid job bringing such finds to be stored. If they quietly took for themselves a finder’s fee, who really cared? The Council doled out the rest for birthdays, weddings, deaths, other occasions. Campbell’s soup. Boxes of salt, cornstarch, powdered milk, Jell-O. Containers of rice. Bottles of soy sauce, corn syrup, vanilla extract, vinegar, honey. Cans of dried beans. And, of course, alcohol: beer, wine, and spirits, all of which the Face knew made Nishimura nervous, but none of which could be ditched without being tyrannical.
Even rarer than alcohol at Fork York were drugs, but Federico, Reed, Stuart, and Mandy had gotten high on some sort of inhalant before deciding their case of midnight munchies could not be denied. They pushed past a seventeen-year-old named Shyam Iyer, on duty at East Blockhouse, and began loading their arms with food. Shyam tried to stop them. They resisted. Shyam shouted. Fifty-two-year-old Yong-Sun Tang, pacing with insomnia, came to his aid. The delirious foursome beat both Shyam and Yong-Sun. The young man suffered broken ribs and lost teeth and was still urinating blood, while the older man broke his hip and five ribs, which set of
f a lung infection that just might kill him.
For their trouble, Federico, Reed, Stuart, and Mandy absconded with a carton of assorted ramen noodles, sixteen packs of instant cocoa, four bottles of wine, two bags of sugar, one bottle of maple syrup, and a fistful of bouillon cubes.
Now the Blockhouse Four were locked right here inside the Brick Magazine. Fort York, by design, had no jail. Loss of community status, Nishimura contended, was a more productive punishment. But angrier people made a decision before most were awake, and so in the Brick Magazine the foursome remained, going on six days now. They were brought food and water, and allowed out to relieve themselves, wearing shackles left over from the enslaved zombies. Why didn’t that detail have the impact it should have?
If he were in charge, Lindof crowed, those chains would never come off.
Tomorrow’s vote was not about the Blockhouse Four. Ostensibly it was a no-confidence vote against the Fort’s Custodial Council (An Experiment in Better Living!), which would then permit the permanent exile of Federico, Reed, Stuart, and Mandy. But anyone with a set of eyes could see the real purpose of the vote: the growing shadow in the shape of Richard Lindof.
He climbed atop the crate. He was far from graceful. The man was late sixties and out of shape, and his shorter leg and half-length arm required the assistance of four men. But Lindof knew how to play a crowd. Once standing, he raised a victorious fist over his head, making light of his struggle to get there, though in reality he wanted that hooray that, sure enough, burst from everyone. The Face jerked in fright. He knew every one of these people’s names, a trick he’d picked up as a roving reporter. But the way tiki fires danced in their pupils and flames slithered across their exposed teeth? He swore he didn’t know them.
They quieted only when Lindof signaled with his good arm he was ready to speak. As the din died, the Face again ached at the loss of Charlie. Once while walking with the Face and noticing Lindof holding court, she’d muttered, “If they only knew what I knew.” The Face, as always, held nothing back and asked her what she meant. Charlie, however, was true-blue, honor bound to the Old Muddy principle of allowing people to remake themselves. The Face wished he had pressed the issue. He pictured Charlie as she’d been that magical night, lying on the Mess Establishment floor, drunk on hope, brighter than all the candles, her scarred face beautiful with gaiety and her blond hair spread like the sun.
Past Due
My God—if Charlie believed in God, which even now, at the draining, dizzying end, she wasn’t sure she did—my God, Hospice was beautiful seen from this floating, gliding stretcher. The physical details might be dismaying, but added together, they created not oppressive despair but soaring inspiration. Both in med school and at the morgue with Luis, she’d spent untold hours with the dead, but never had she expected her concerns for them would evolve from corporeal to, let’s face it, spiritual. Life, it really knew how to surprise a gal.
All she could see were the two people carrying her stretcher. Marion Castle looked beaten by grief, though her unflappable professionalism held strong. Charlie detected grapefruit essential oil under Marion’s medical mask, often used to combat Hospice odor, though in truth, the odor wasn’t as bad as one might expect. Degraded past their most fetid phases, softies exuded nothing more than a rancid cinnamon stink.
Charlie might still be the only one able to interpret Etta Hoffmann’s blank looks. Right now, the slight bulges of her locked jaws and her gently pulsing temples were what indicated she was barely keeping it together. Charlie tried to smile at her. Did she do it? Her lips had gone numb.
She visualized their path through the maze of tables with the stretcher’s every turn. She saw posters drawn by schoolchildren, supplying encouragement to caretakers. MAKE FRIENDS WITH DEATH, read one, with a painting of two clasped hands, one tan and thick, the other green and bony. WE ARE ALL THE SAME, read another, featuring a dramatis personae of humans, zombies, giraffes, horses, cats, and birds in a smiling line. Only after Lindof’s arrival had Charlie felt a twinge of doubt about these charming messages. She recalled the rage she’d felt when antiabortion protestors made children hold hateful placards. This was different, right?
Richard Lindof. What were the chances he’d end up at Fort York? She recalled with chilling precision his smug, callous voice through Luis’s speakerphone, editorializing on JT’s suicide with He seemed like a fun little gay guy. It had been the instant of the Earth’s pivot—John Doe’s brain incapacitated; other dead bodies animating all over; chaos at Trump International Hotel—and yet nothing had been as sickening as Lindof’s bemusement. It was as if he’d been a long-dozing, cold-blooded reptile waiting for the sun to die so he could crawl out and own the night.
You should be pissing your shitty little diapers, he’d said as Charlie had piloted Luis’s Prius into the gridlock of apocalypse. Because you know what I think? I think your world is about to fall into the ocean, Acocella, and my world is about to rise up like a fucking mountain.
Charlie had fuzzy recollections of a Richard Lindof being the son of some industry giant. Had he maybe produced a few soft-core action films? All of it was slipping from her brain in a long, final exhale. She closed her eyes and tried to bury the pain beneath the falling-soil shushes of Caretakers murmuring to softies. Actual burial might be a thing of the past, but at Hospice, symbolic burial was very much alive. Charlie breathed through her nose and repeated the wisest words she knew. Make Friends with Death. We Are All the Same.
Nishimura had wanted Hospice smack in the middle of the fort, right in Centre Blockhouse. Charlie, as she often did, nudged his ambitions to a realistic level, suggesting a spot just outside the fort’s walls. Ideally, an actual former hospice facility or nursing home. Hoffmann took to the idea instantly; nursing homes, she’d said, had been part of the VSDC network, and Charlie had to smile at the woman’s steadfast dream of getting the system back online. Unfortunately, they found no such place, but the only tools really needed were tables, chairs, and curtains for the Caretakers, and a smaller space in back to serve as the Dying Room.
That’s where Charlie was headed. What could be luckier than kicking the bucket in a room expressly made for bucket-kicking? She tried to smile, but damn those numb lips. Too bad. She’d come to believe that softies responded to smiles. It made sense. Pre-language babies did; the post-language senile did too. Tonight she’d have to hope tone of voice alone carried meaning too.
“Stop.” She rapped her fist against the stretcher bar. “Table 20.”
Marion would have disregarded anyone else’s request. Above her mask, the woman blinked once, telling Hoffmann to pause. Charlie was jostled against her binding buckles—a reminder she’d become as dangerous as softies were harmless. She strained to see over the stretcher’s edge. Marion again took pity: she nodded for Hoffmann to lower the stretcher so Charlie could see what she so badly wanted to see.
The softie on Table 20 had been recovered from Slowtown six weeks ago. While securing him to the table, Charlie had discovered in his shredded pants a moldy wallet. Inside, she’d found faded photo evidence the man once had multiple brothers, all much taller, and their shared last name was Hedrick. Hence the softie was dubbed Lesser Hedrick. Caretakers were encouraged to name their softies if it helped, and here was proof it could: the name endeared this softie to Charlie so much, she’d fudged the books to be his Caretaker.
Charlie rested her cheek on the side of the stretcher. There he was, her elder, her child, now her brother too. The wallet photos pictured Lesser as white, male, midtwenties, average in every way but height. He’d hate to learn he’d lost a few more inches: his feet had fallen off in Slowtown. He’d also lost his genitals, and his skin had gone brown-black. In short, he was no longer white, or male, or midtwenties. He’d become what all softies in their last days became: everyone.
His body was shriveled inward, shoulders close to touching, wrists crossed, a posture Charlie found saintlike. Since being emplaced in Hospice, everything sout
h of his ribs (abdominal muscles, stomach, liver, appendix, pancreas, colon, intestines—she felt like a diener again, listing them off) had crumbled to flakes, piled atop loose vertebrae and draped with skin the color and texture of black banana peels. Lesser’s sternum had fallen in, creating a cage for the shriveled sacks of heart and lungs.
Lesser’s lone eyeball rasped as it rotated toward Charlie. Like most softies, his eyelids had been picked off by scavengers, giving him a statue’s severe, impartial stare. Such stares invited truth-telling, the same as the dark windows of Catholic confessionals she’d been shoved into at age eight. Everything came round. One of the unintended surprises of Hospice: things you hadn’t been able to say to people before the world fell apart, you could say to softies. They’d lost most of their features, become anyone you needed them to be.
“Lesser.” Her croak frightened her, but she thought she saw in Lesser’s eye an interest in hearing her voice. Charlie no longer valued understanding as much as she did the desire to understand—as Greer Morgan had once put it, the want. She didn’t care what naysayers like Lindof said. They weren’t here every day like she was. What softies wanted was tenderness, and Charlie was determined to deliver it.
“You’ll have to pass without me,” she said. “I know you don’t have much time. My brave boy. But don’t be scared. We’ll get you through. My brave, brave boy. Marion will find you a new Caretaker.”
“I’ll do it myself,” Marion said.
Charlie’s relieved sigh shot acid into every bronchiole of her lungs, and she mashed her lips against what had to be a coming upchuck of blood. Moments from now, she’d be in the Dying Room, where she, per rules both biological and cultural, would die. Out here, Lesser Hedrick and the other softies would continue shuffling off their coils. So much death, so much life, in this sighing little cathedral.
The Living Dead Page 61