The Living Dead

by Kraus, Daniel

  The Face pulled her off the path, past the Armory. He was leading them toward what had been the Garrison Common battlefield and now was the way out. She was awash in gratitude for his effort, but didn’t intend to run. Everyone had business in Slowtown tonight, including her.

  Greer pulled her arms free. The Face looked pained.

  “You can’t reason with them,” he said. “They won’t listen—”

  Abruptly, he looked to the right, and Greer looked too. Two children were skipping around the Well House, dizzy with destruction, chanting an educational rhyme gone sour: Zombie, zombie, bite me not. As the info plate described, the Well House’s gazebo was a modern reconstruction, complete with an old-fashioned bucket on a chain, built to protect the well itself, a seven-meter drop dating back to 1802.

  It was also a safety hazard kept boarded shut, until now. The children accented their dance by pitching rubble from the Armory walls down the well. Negligible havoc in the greater scope of things, but the Face was famous for noticing details, and when he left Greer’s side to approach the well, she made sure to beat him to it. The children cheered, happy for new playmates. She elbowed one aside, not giving a shit about his age. He’d grow up to be as rotten as any of them; she knew it even before looking into the hole.

  Twenty feet below, barely visible, was Karl Nishimura. In her overlong thirty-two years, Greer had seen carnage of the worst sorts, but anyone knew when a body looked wrong. A right arm that had to be dislocated was trapped under Nishimura’s back. His left leg was bent the wrong way at the knee. His gore-striped neck was arched too drastically, and his mouth, garish with blood, was open as if dying of thirst. Greer believed him dead even as she called out his name.

  “Greer,” he replied instantly.

  “Karl! We’ll get you out.”

  “They’re coming to get you.” His relaxed tone chilled her. Conan had told her the same thing fifteen years ago before slaughtering more former classmates: They’re coming to get you.

  “If we send down this bucket, can you grab hold?” the Face shouted.

  “They’ll throw you down too, and we’ll all be a pile of limbs. We’ll all be the same thing. We’ll be Legion.” He chuckled. “How about that. Legion is us.”

  “Your other arm,” the Face demanded. “Is it okay?”

  In the deep dark, Nishimura’s grin held the pale contours of a skull. He raised his left hand into the moonlight. All four fingers lay broken against the back of his hand.

  “One of us will have to go down,” Greer said softly to the Face, who pulled experimentally on the bucket’s chain to gauge its strength.

  “The golems,” Nishimura mused. “Greer, you remember?”

  “You’re hurt,” she called down. “Try not to move.”

  “You said, ‘Isn’t that a Tolkien character?’ and I said, ‘No, no. They’re monsters. Monsters we call forth to wipe us out.’”

  “The chain might be strong enough,” the Face whispered. “But this bucket. We’ll bust it to pieces.”

  “Jenny said she had to tell me in case she died. Now I’m telling you, Greer.”

  “Shut up, we’re trying to—”

  “I’m telling you because it looks like we’ll need them again.”

  Nishimura’s laugh echoed up the well, the circling of a clumsy ghost. Greer felt the sound as if the tuning fork that made it had been stabbed into her ribs. The Face let the useless bucket swing free, his eyes stricken behind their fleshy folds. Greer’s sinuses thickened with tears. She could fill the bucket with them, make this well wet again, let Nishimura float his way out.

  “Learn to call them back, Greer. The rules are in the old books. Not all the libraries can be burned.”

  The end of zombies, all they ever wanted; the urgent need to bring them back. Greer snatched the chain. She’d wrap it around her foot if she had to, toss Nishimura over her back.

  “I’m coming down!” she cried.

  “No!” the Face shouted, while Nishimura said, quietly, “No.”

  She had a foot on the well’s edge, but the Face pushed it off.

  “I’m going down!” she roared.

  “You can’t,” the Face said.

  “I will!”

  Nishimura: “You will not, and that’s an order!”

  Greer stumbled off the Well House’s floor and fell to the cold dirt. The children danced around her. Ribbons of soot-black slobber swayed from their lips. Their pink mice eyes shone. Their beastly little hands the stone shards they’d use to carve the heart from the world.

  The Face swooped down next to her and shoved the children aside. They didn’t lose their balance, though, and their sickly sweet song kept circling: I will not cry, I will not moan, oh, zombie, zombie, take me home.

  A united roar rose up, almost a cheer, except without a trace of joy. Greer thought it was the sound a pack of hominids might make when, through combined effort, they pulled apart the ribs of a mammoth. A whole corner of the Armory had collapsed. At least one person had gotten pulverized, her muffled screams futile icicles against the destroyers’ furor. People poured into the Armory like ants. They grabbed the smooth thighs of the guns, caressed the long barrels, and unboxed ammo so they could slot it in, hard.

  Once armed, they stood, and saw in the weapons’ steel the reflection of torches held by those hollering for Slowtown. Both guns and torches lifted higher, two separated lovers in a train-station crowd. The weapons lusted for the good times they remembered so fondly.

  Nishimura’s voice rose from the earth.

  “Don’t worry about me. What’s the worst they can do? Put me in a camp? For my sympathies, of course. My sympathies to the enemy. My ancestors lived through this. I’m Japanese American. You know what I’m saying?”

  Greer looked at the Face so hard his scars seemed to run with fire.

  “All right,” she whispered.

  “Japanese,” Nishimura croaked, “American.”

  “All right!” the Face shouted, and Greer was glad, because outrage was what they needed if they were going to move. The Face grabbed Greer’s arm to help her up, but she was already up and sprinting toward the embrasure by the North Soldiers’ Barracks, which fed out to Strachan Avenue—not the quickest way to Slowtown but their best shot at beating the mob. The Face was behind her, and again, she felt a sobby gratefulness, now that she was leading them into the fray rather than out of it.

  She kept hearing Karl Nishimura’s voice, drifting on smoke, his final word repeated like a curse.

  “American … American … American…”

  Let the World Rise Gently

  The second sacking of Fort York lit their way. The brighter fires of torches indicated the mob was heading up Niagara Street, which would land them east of Slowtown’s center. Greer, better schooled in these streets than anyone, hurtled north on Strachan, which should feed them onto Queen Street two blocks west of the mob’s mass. What then? The Face had no idea. If Nishimura couldn’t avert Old Muddy’s fall with common sense, what could he and Greer do? They had no weapons besides Greer’s bow. They were insignificant.

  His history reading, done at the dearly departed New Library, gave him one sliver of hope. Insignificant described most great people of history.

  Greer was half a block ahead. Fort York’s blaze turned her quivered arrows into candles, each one seeming to carry a flame. The Face ran faster, his heaving gasps covering the bellowing of those on Niagara Street as well as the distant whinnies of Old Muddy’s three hundred horses, penned up in the path of the fire. He didn’t even hear Greer’s clomping boots until she abruptly stopped. She stood at Queen Street in what looked like delicate surprise, arms outward as if pinching an invisible gown off the ground. Her head rolled left, then right, with an awed slowness that made no sense. Slowtown never changed; that was what made it Slowtown.

  The Face heard it before he saw it: a sustained tone as multifaceted as any choir, those Italian distinctions he’d never really grasped, mezzo-soprano
to contralto, baritone to bass, lifting and sighing like snow drifting down before sweeping back into the sky. Beneath this shifting drone was soft, irregular percussion, like calloused fingertips brushing over weathered drums. By the time the Face halted—by grabbing hold of Greer—the sounds had grown to be no different from those of his blood, bones, and meat. It was him; he was it; they were us. They had always been us.

  Hundreds of zombies filled Slowtown. The Face remembered, after the Chief was shot, the unexpected galaxies of white eyes glowing from every window and doorway. Here they were, emptied from florists, coffee bars, shoe stores, dress boutiques, secondhand shops, bookstores, ice cream parlors, diners, cafés, and the countless apartments above them. Three hundred zombies? Four hundred? Five? The Face couldn’t tell.

  Too many shuffling feet trailing too many Fort York shackles; too many dangling arms and those arms’ dangling flesh; too many torsos so eviscerated the Face could see other zombies through the holes; too many heads hanging from too many exhausted necks, though these heads were lifted—he swore to whatever was left to swear to, the heads were lifted, bony chins thrown to the moon, the fire, to whoever or whatever might look them in the milky eyes and know them at last.

  When the mob emerged, it looked like fire itself; the torches, of course, but also five years of firearms flashing, being leveled. This was why Greer swung her head: the zombie herd to her left, the mob to her right. The two parties would meet roughly in front of where Greer and the Face stood. Front-row seats for the final clash everyone had feared, or anticipated, or hoped they could eternally avoid.

  At the front of the zombies stood Muse King; at his side, a zombie German shepherd dragged its gray tongue across pavement. Muse was gaunt, gray, and filthy, but still magnetic. The shudder of his gait told the Face he was weak, until the fact that zombies weren’t biting him suggested another possibility. The Face found he didn’t care. He wanted to run up to Muse, shake his hand, tell him how good it was to see him again, how nice it would be to hear him play one more time.

  He did not have to ask. Muse’s alabaster guitar, still outfitted with its threadbare strap, hung over his shoulder. His gray fingers, slow but steady, plucked out a four-bar tune, simple but compelling, sad but inspiring, wistful but exhilarating, the kind of tune that, once in a generation, became the anthem of protest, its own kind of fire. The Face thought he might be crazy, but the moans of the zombies seemed to be duplicating the tune’s base chord, getting as close to a single song as any mass of marchers ever had.

  The truth broke over the Face like a dawn.

  “This isn’t an attack,” he said.

  “Walk Away,” Greer gasped.

  Her hand was pressed to her face, burying her mouth, flattening her nose, halfway covering her wide eyes. The Face thought of the RESIST button Greer had given the Chief. A coincidence, had to be, but why not believe in the impossible? Why not now, at the end of everything? Maybe that tiny little trinket was the last push they’d needed.

  The Face smelled soot in the air. The New Library, the Personal Histories. He’d spent hundreds of hours reading them, and a line from Charlie Rutkowski’s transcript came back. I walked, she’d said. What could be simpler? But is there anything that’s ever been stronger?

  Acting either on an order or simply on the ingrained instinct to kill, the armed mob spread out in a line across Queen Street. Though their guns were ready, the triggers were not yet pulled. These people, roaring for blood, had bled plenty themselves. They wanted a way to release their pain, even if that meant shooting it from weapons, hoping it might embed in someone else.

  That wasn’t how viruses worked—a disease passed to one person remained in the other. Everyone ended up infected. With the zombies a single block from collision with the militia, the Face knelt and pulled Greer down with him. To the mob, he thought, it must seem like there had never been anything like this. But there had been. This march felt like all marches put together. Flesh loss made the zombies roughly the same shape. Deterioration had made them roughly the same color. Their oldest, the softies, were disabled, yet had been brought along—softie ribs entangled in zombie legs, softie skulls lodged in zombie ribs. Most improbably, the Chief was there too, her unmistakable, button-covered torso being carried by a zombie walking alongside Muse King.

  They came, the dead bodies; they stood in wait, the living souls.

  “Body and soul back together,” Greer whispered.

  The zombie front line passed so close the Face might have plucked free a scrap of moldered skin. He could feel the heat of the maggots being circulated like sluggish white blood. The torches carried by the militia could never run so hot, for fires, even ones the size of Fort York, eventually died. Maggots, though, you never squashed them all. Some would hatch and become flies, and their descendants would be waiting when you died. Waiting for you—you, specifically. It didn’t have to be gruesome. It could be miraculous.

  He saw torches dip, rifles and revolvers lower.

  The music, that heartbreaking four-count, kept going.

  Tears found odd routes down the Face’s perfect cheeks.

  “You did it, baby,” Greer wept. “You did it.”

  He nearly did, but for a single bone. The underlying percussion the Face had first heard had been the dry-bone crick-crack! trademark of aged zombies, except layered hundreds of times until the sharp pops achieved a cloudburst’s softness. The zombies were fifty feet from the mob when one of the thousands of zombie bones broke in half. Crick-CRACK!

  It sounded like a gunshot.

  That was all it took. That was all it had ever taken. One of the militia fired. A zombie’s head exploded. When the skull bones clattered down, they sounded like projectiles. Bullets erupted from the mob, hundreds at once.

  Greer screamed. The Face covered her head in his arm.

  The zombies were ripped apart. Faces punching inward; the backs of heads exploding; tongues landing, still licking, among clumps of brain. Teeth sprayed in kitelike arcs, catching torchlight, escaping like fireflies. Pulpous limbs split and went tumbling, ankle chains ringing like castanets. Spinal columns blew out intact, bone pythons glissading across concrete. Hanks of gray muscle flew all over, as if great hands were prying zombies open, seeking pearls. Automatic revolvers put so many holes in chests that torsos ripped along the perforations, dumping full trash-bag loads of organs. Shotguns blew massive holes through stomachs, flinging intestines over other zombies like nets and taking them down. Shooters closed and kept firing, turning skulls to dust, bodies to sludge. Those with blunt weapons pummeled brains into puddles of mucus while anyone with boots smashed loose eyeballs and blobs of flesh. Queen Street was a meat grinder; Slowtown was a slaughterhouse. The gutters, so nicely tidied by zombies, pulsed with a thick, fibrous mire, part congealed blood, part liquified tissue.

  “Nothing’s happening,” the Face said into Greer’s ear, his first lie in fifteen years.

  Only after a large number of the zombies fell did the Face see the animals. They’d crept from side streets, behind the farthest rows of marchers. Not undead dogs, and not, for that matter, undead rats or zombie chickens, but living animals of every stripe. A bear. A cougar, a bobcat. Wolverines, foxes, coyotes. Smaller beasts too, mammals and reptiles and insects, rushing like brown water around the larger contingent’s paws, claws, and hooves. Lording over all was the giraffe the Face’s recovery team had seen just that morning, its lippy mouth held in the same grave line.

  The Face was sobbing when he had a sonic hallucination. Minutes later, when the shooting ended, he’d blame it on the fired ammo, the expended shells ringing off the street, the crunch of bone and pound of flesh. But in that moment, what he heard was voices. The zombies’ voices. Had Greer heard it too? Had everyone in the mob heard it as well, and was that why they kept firing, to cover it up? Or was it only him, because he was a reporter by trade and might yet serve again as witness?

  The zombies referred to themselves as You. You were a family
called the Coopers, dead in a moldy basement, wishing you could have ended your lives in love. You were a man named Roger, wondering if what you died for meant anything at all. You were a group of friends named Sarah and John and Bill, dead on a deserted tropical island, even in victory wondering how you might have saved others. And on, and on, a litany of regrets, so incredibly sad, because it did not have to be like that. We all could have been so happy.

  The Face buried his ashy face in Greer’s ashy hair, and smelled in her sweat and tears the parts of her that would one day turn her body into spoil, from which would rise new kinds of life. He forced himself to smile; his lipless mouth unwittingly kissed her scalp. The kiss made him feel better, just a little. Inside us, there is no original evil, nothing to fear, no reason for regret. Our bodies contain everything. Let the world rise gently from them.

  All Her Favorite Songs

  The explosives for which Richard Lindof had advocated had already been built. Greer had learned enough to know things like that weren’t whipped up in an hour. The first major kind of explosives relied on gunpowder, which required charcoal, sulfur, and saltpeter, and that last ingredient was a real bitch to manufacture, involving soaking limewater through dung and other unpleasant tasks. In hindsight, the second major kind of explosive had been inevitable at Fort York. It relied on nitroglycerin. And where did one find the chief component of nitroglycerin?

  It was an offshoot of the production of soap.

  Her bitter laugh had the sound of taking a punch. The people of Old Muddy, their hands had been so clean! Now they were so dirty. Hearing people explain the handmade dynamite to kids, Greer understood the production of it predated Lindof’s arrival. Maybe Lindof had never mattered. Maybe Lindof’s death from her arrow was inconsequential. Maybe this night was always going to come.