The Living Dead

by Kraus, Daniel

  He grabbed hold of Hoffmann’s rucksack and hauled her with him up the small slope to where Nishimura sat, dazed. The Face dropped to the ground, taking splinters in his knees from the busted crate, one more injury to ignore, and shook the man’s listless wrists as he might to two ends of a jump rope.

  “Karl! Wake up! Look at me!”

  Nishimura, his eyes red blotches behind tears, squinted at the Face and Hoffmann.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered.

  Hearing these two sad words from the hardiest of Fort York’s residents, the Face felt his marrow expand until it cracked his bones, the best thing that could possibly happen. His former trainer, Xander, had always said real strength came from the body repairing itself from wounds. The Face took Nishimura by the shoulders.

  “You were wonderful, Karl. You made me proud.” It was true, and he felt himself begin to rebuild.

  “They didn’t listen…,” Nishimura said.

  “Karl, I need you to hear what Hoffmann has to say.”

  “There’s no point. They’ll never—”

  “Master Chief Karl Nishimura!” the Face shouted. “You listen to Hoffmann right now or I’ll court-martial your ass!”

  No one submitted to military orders their whole career without the sound of one striking fear. Nishimura’s eyes widened and cleared; his gaze sharpened.

  “Affirmative,” he said. “Let’s hear it.”

  While Hoffmann talked, the Face gazed across Old Muddy. It was all but emptied. Resounding off the highways overhead and the high-rises all around were the earthbound hollers of the vigilante convoy, trackable by the miasma of sparks lifting from toted tiki torches. By the time he looked back at his friends, Hoffmann had done it again.

  “Help me up.” Nishimura extended both hands. “We have to tell them.” He was pulled to his feet. “We have to run.”

  This was no tiptoe down Queen Street. The three of them sprinted in the direction of the torchlight. In their urgency, in traces of the mob’s destruction, the Face stomped plants in the Garden and Nishimura knocked a piece off the Master Sundial. Hoffmann took the worst of it. She was already lagging when the Face heard the thump. He looked back to see her down in the grass, having struck the unlit Well House outside the Armory. She pushed herself up on two hands but was clearly dazed.

  Nishimura shouted from the vicinity of the Dry Moat.

  “We need to move!”

  Hoffmann’s face was lost in moon shadow. His face, then, was lost as well, and as awful as he looked, the Face regretted they couldn’t see each other, as this might be their last chance. At the same time, he was heartened. The librarian had pulled him from quicksand. She was not going to be able to keep up with the men, but one of her good qualities was an immunity to feeling slighted. The Face whispered goodbye and ran after Nishimura, who was climbing over the inoperable eighteen-pounder gun positioned at the fort’s southwest corner.

  These were the streets of the greater Fort York, former lakefront Toronto. The svelte ribbon of Fort York Boulevard; the ovoid towers of the Waterpark City condos; the Fleet Street trolley tracks, kept up to snuff in hopes of eventual revival; the cute, red-topped Queen’s Wharf Lighthouse, daytime meeting spot of teams of workers, nighttime meeting spot for new lovers. The Face caught up to Nishimura on the seven lanes of Lake Shore Boulevard. Stomped weeds revealed the path of the caravan.

  Coronation Park was barely larger than the three softball fields it once contained, two of them plowed now in favor of crops. A group of sports fans, Stuart Shardlow included, had kept the last outfield mowed, the infield soft and level with raked dirt. Stuart, Reed, Mandy, and Federico had been forced to their knees on the pitcher’s mound, a dough of tears, spit, and blood dangling from each of their faces. Shrieking, jeering, hissing people encircled them, all but the children, who skipped the baselines, delighted by tonight’s distraction.

  One man sat separate in right field, head dipped between his knees. Nishimura ran over, squatted, and the Face pulled up behind. It was Seth Lowenstein, a close friend of Charlie’s, and the Face’s first thought was he’d come to the lakefront to mourn her death. If that were the case, they had astonishing news for him. It was not the case: Lowenstein’s knees were spread to allow him to cough up blood.

  “What happened?” Nishimura demanded. “You okay?”

  “We tried to tell them about Charlie,” Lowenstein mumbled.

  “Who’s we?” the Face asked.

  “Me and Hart. They wouldn’t listen.”

  The Face pivoted and searched, like an outfielder after a mishandled ball, and saw, not fifty feet off, a second body in the grass, motionless.

  “We tried to stop them,” Lowenstein moaned.

  If Hart was alive, Lowenstein would have to be the one to help him. Nishimura sprang to his feet, a young sailor again instead of a fifty-eight-year-old organizer, and darted for the swarm of bodies, bright orange from torchlight, their heckles louder than any blubbering for mercy. The Face took off after him. From Lowenstein to the Blockhouse Four was one hundred feet; it should have taken only seconds to cover. The Face wondered why it took the duration of four entire lives.

  He saw a lot of things in that time. He saw a resurfaced Richard Lindof, beaming at the apex of the tightening circle, his teeth reflecting fire. He saw arms as long as grasshopper legs—because they held baseball bats. It was not irregular for equipment to be left beside the rusted chain-link backstop. Some bats were pulled back in proper Major League stance, others rose like caveman clubs. Yowling faces, misshapen by flames, urged the hitters to hit.

  He saw the first swings, the rocket into Federico’s ribs, the pile driver onto Reed’s shoulder, the torpedo into Mandy’s stomach, the level, professional swing into the center of Stuart’s face. So much blood jetted so quickly it struck other jets midair, making plasma dance as playfully as hummingbirds. The Face, who had drowsed through thousands of dull sports reports, instantly grasped how these baseball bats were inevitable, an American symbol as potent as any the U.S. carried when last ravaging Fort York.

  The Face heard infield dirt under his boots but seemed to be going nowhere. Bats rained blows until a knife made its obligatory appearance and sank into Federico’s jugular. Arterial blood shot three feet. Everyone at Old Muddy had a knife; they were handy. Mandy was stabbed in the chest, her tongue flapping amid black spurts of heart blood. People were jumping up and down as if this were a concert, as if they were young and indestructible, and it was murder that had performed that miracle, not Charlie’s defeat of undeath. Stuart, blinded, his face staved in, crawled toward first base until he was knifed in the back what seemed like a hundred times, until his wool coat, cotton shirt, skin, and muscle formed a thick purple stew. Reed was stabbed in the face repeatedly, slivers of cheeks, chin, nose, and ear pinwheeling astray, destined to look like the Face if he lived, which he would not.

  Exactly when he hit the crowd, the Face didn’t know. He only knew he felt bodies, sticky and squirming like newborn mice, knocking him back and forth. Nishimura was nearby; they collided repeatedly until a huge man lifted Nishimura from his feet and carried him off. From the dirt near second base, the Face saw the Blockhouse Four’s corpses being hit with boots, dirt, rocks, streams of urine. Knives stayed brandished; the fun part was still coming. No Hospice for these four, no Dying Room, no bolt gun. People paced, waited, flicked blood off their weapons. The Face dug his chin into the dirt, afraid that to get up now would attract the baseball bats still glistening in the flame.

  Everyone knew zombie revival was fickle. It could take two minutes or twenty; in frigid climates, it could take two hours. The Face didn’t know how much time passed, but it was enough. With four chances at revival, it was more than enough. The Blockhouse Four did not stir. There were murmurs of confusion. Cries of disbelief. Startled recollections of Hart and Lowenstein yelling something about Charlie Rutkowski. Was it true? A few shrieked when the news drove home. A few began to cry. The Face wondered if he sh
ould feel relief. But after living through Rochelle Glass and Nathan Baseman, Scotty Rolph and Ramsey Dylan, Generals Spalding and Coppola, and Richard Lindof, he could read bad news like Nishimura could read a ship’s log. Safe waters were nowhere near.

  “We made this happen!” Lindof cried. “All of us together!”

  Gasps, sobs, expletives, keens, yawps.

  “No,” the Face said, cold dirt swirling into his eyes.

  “Let’s finish it! Let’s end it! This is our chance!”

  Cheers, hoots, shouts, claps, hails.

  Men came forward like men always did, dropping to their knees and plunging knives into dead flesh. They sawed like the carnivores they still were in their hearts. One of the men, on his non-cutting hand, wore a baseball glove, and when it was fully opened, it made the perfect cushion for Stuart’s severed head. The other three men gathered the heads of Reed, Mandy, and Federico, and held them high, greeted by the mad wails of the other meat-eaters, newly hungry for fresh blood.

  Someone had already embedded the baseball bats into packed dirt.

  The bat handles were dull but the severed heads, with their torn trapezius muscles, snapped tracheas, and dislodged vertebrae, put up no resistance when thrust downward. Stuart Shardlow, Reed Hollis, Mandy Moundson, and Federico Riera became mottled, bloody hams steaming with heat, staring with bright red eyes at a world that had no use for them, not in any state of life or death. Heads on pikes at last! The status symbol Lindof treasured! He strode through the prizes, their extruded tongues painting delicate lines of blood across his sleeves.

  Half the crowd was already gone, rushing to the next stop. Lindof, though, did not look as if in any particular hurry. He stopped in front of the Face. For the first time, he didn’t recoil or gag. He grinned straight down, the licks of flame behind him completing his Bela Lugosi metamorphosis.

  “To Slowtown!” he shouted to scattered whoops and ovations. “Everyone to—”

  A globule of blood and rind of flesh popped into the air. A metal arrowhead poked through the center of Lindof’s chest. His jaw opened, empty of words at last. His fingers wiggled daintily before his arms, both the normal-sized and shrunken one, dropped to his sides with butcher-board slaps. He fell like an axed tree and was blanketed by a cloud of infield dirt. Richard Lindof died, Jesus Hercules Christ, right when a zombie’s revenge became unavailable, and when the Face peered past the stunned crowd and the four leering, severed heads, he saw, still in her bowhunter’s stance, Greer Morgan.

  Carve the Heart

  Greer had never adopted the gung ho attitudes of Old Muddy true believers and so was surprised at her feelings upon seeing Fort York burn. Her breath was reeled from her chest like a tapeworm, and she choked violently, coughing until it felt like her lungs were dangling down her abdomen.

  The Face fared little better at her side. He clung to her to remain upright, which almost toppled her; she had to cling back, and between them, they found equilibrium. The first thing she thought of was white fire melting the gas station awning in Bulk, Missouri, and how it went ignored in favor of the brawl between Raskey Apartments refugees and Team HortiPlastics. Same damn thing: the Brick Magazine might be brick, but that didn’t mean fire couldn’t gut its insides and roof. The terms for collapsing buildings cycled through her head. She’d be able to call this one a duster soon, if she was still around.

  Also on fire were the Officers’ Brick Barracks and Officers’ Blue Barracks, which made unfortunate sense. They were the fort’s birthplaces of revolutionary ideas, and though Greer used to roll her eyes at the public brainstorming sessions, as she’d once rolled her eyes at the Sunnybrook Club, she understood now, at a visceral level, that she’d believed in all of it. Why else had she given it three and a half years of her life, all her energy, her courage, her arrows and bows? Some of it had been for Muse, but not all of it.

  Trees were aflame. So were sections of grass. Most upsetting of all, the Garden was an inferno, individual plants hissing and popping as they curled into skeletons of ash. One person was on fire, screaming as people whipped at her flames—unless, of course, they were beating her, wanting whatever pillage she’d nabbed first.

  The Face pointed, and Greer looked. Silhouetted before the Brick Magazine flames were the frolicking forms of people dashing in and out of East Blockhouse, arms overloaded with soup, rice, beans, and most of all, alcohol, the flames making caramel swirls through translucent bottles. She could feel the Face’s tears, icy against the wild heat of the bare arm she’d flung over his shoulder, and she understood why. These people were committing the same crime as the Blockhouse Four—whom they’d just gleefully executed.

  After Marion Castle and Etta Hoffmann had stretchered Charlie Rutkowski toward the Dying Room, Greer had hightailed it out of Hospice. She couldn’t take the Face’s monkish acceptance or Nishimura’s aggravating sympathy. Greer’s pursuit of Muse was to blame for Charlie’s bite, simple as that. She’d hung a sharp right at Bathurst and gone all the way to Little Norway Park, the new border of Lake Ontario. She sat on a bench near the softie incinerator, cradling her bow in her arms like a loved one’s corpse. Daddy? Mom? Conan? Or Charlie?

  Deep down, she’d loved Charlie. Who hadn’t? Why, then, had she behaved like her love for Muse was more important? Perhaps because he was the Dove? No zombie dog named Willy was going to protect him. He needed a Lion.

  The pep talk did no good. After all, the shit Muse had spewed was moronic. Only a man with an unwell mind would inject himself with fluids from the Chief, wanting to be part of some antiviral solution. We got to put body and soul back together if we’re going to have a chance, he’d said. Sounded like bullshit, though, hell, sitting here looking over the cold gray bay, who really knew? Muse also said, The fort’s a step that doesn’t go anywhere, and from distant howls she heard, he might have been right.

  The sound of Lindof’s mob grew closer and louder. Greer let it. She pulled her legs onto the bench and breathed in the cinnamon spice of zombie ash, wondering if inhaling enough of it would have a similar effect to Muse’s injection. If she were a zombie, she could walk into Slowtown without guilt or fear, find Muse, and go on loving him as she had for fifteen years.

  She dipped so deeply into that strange, pleasant thought that she didn’t register the sobbing until it became screaming. She snapped her bowstring to sting her forearm. That did it; she leaped to her feet and put her ear to the wind, same as she’d done while traveling the eastern half of America. The upheaval came from Coronation Park, and she could tell by its sharpness it had nothing to do with zombies.

  What in old Toronto would have been a brief three-block walk was complicated by the eroded bay. She had to backtrack to Lake Shore and cut down the Martin Goodman Trail. She had to admit, it was invigorating to creep again, to hunt again, to duck beneath overgrowth and navigate rubbly paths. But it was slow work, and when she emerged from foliage, she found only twenty people. Twenty-four, if you counted severed heads.

  She’d seen hundreds, if not thousands, of heads on pikes since the Second Dark Age. Never had she seen any this fresh. Their eyeballs still glistened. The bat handles, visible through their open mouths, still ran with blood. The heads were so deformed she might not have identified them if she hadn’t already guessed their names: Stuart, Reed, Mandy, and Federico, the first casualties of a different kind of dark age.

  Greer killed Lindof. She felt nothing but regret she hadn’t done it sooner. She found the Face stumbling sideways, trying to stand. She steadied him. He babbled, told her how Charlie hadn’t died, gestured at the fort, and only then did she realize it was hours too early for dawn to be lighting the sky.

  Now this: fiery cataclysm, the whole utopia crumbling, and not from a thirst for justice, as Lindof’s masses might claim, but a hunger to possess objects that, in the light of day, of all days, would do nothing to make them happier. Look how they tore at walls with bare hands. Look how they gathered at the northern embrasures, jabbing torches towa
rd Slowtown. More, more, more, until they had nothing at all.

  The Face moaned at the plundering of East Blockhouse. But Greer’s eyes rose higher and farther, just across the abutting street. It was the largest fire in sight, as smoke-frothed as a storm-maddened sea, each whip of flame a piece of civilization peeled away to reveal a white nothingness. The billowing sparks, Greer realized, were bundles of paper spat into the sky. Books, magazines, hundreds of binders of paper. The New Library, wholly consumed.

  Etta Hoffmann, standing in the middle of Bathurst, gazed up at the blaze, her deadlocked posture a jarring contrast to the ungovernable twists of flame. A blizzard’s worth of spewed paper settled atop Hoffmann’s head, shoulders, feet, and that stupid fanny pack. Her bearing was calm, as if she’d seen it all before. Or at least read about it.

  Fifteen years of tireless work, gone. The Hoffmann Archive of Tales from the New World, vaporized. Its planned reproduction and distribution never to happen. Once Greer had scoffed at the project; now she felt its loss like that of a major organ. Mi corazón, she mourned, mi corazón. Everything they’d lived through, now fated to slip the collective mind.

  No millions had died.

  No billions of bones were strewn across the land.

  None of this had ever happened.

  The Master Sundial proved it. The gnomon was busted, the hour lines scratched to nonsense. There was only right now, and Greer was moving. The Face was tugging her down the path bisecting the blazing Garden. Long flames met over their heads like they’d just been wed and were dancing beneath red-and-orange-flowered arbors.

  They emerged into the west half of the fort. What had been known at its 1815 founding as the Stone Magazine was so besieged it looked to have been built from the nightmare lumber of human limbs. These days, it was called the Armory, and a horde wanted inside. Some drove hammers and tire irons against the walls, but most used the tools that ruled this night—their bare, bloody hands—to dislodge shattered rock. A small hole had been bashed all the way through the wall, and a woman was caught inside it, screaming to be pulled out as men pushed her farther in. Maybe it was the nearby fires, but Greer swore she smelled the ammo inside, baking toward explosion.