She and the Face hadn’t budged from their forlorn embrace on the edge of Queen Street. For a while, he’d had to hold her back. She’d wanted to find Muse, pull him from the line of fire. But once marchers began being torn apart, the Face had covered her eyes, and she’d lost him. He hadn’t tried to drag her away, and for that, she was thankful. They had to watch this slaughter play out. For punishment. They were not blameless.
Few noticed them. Those who did didn’t care. They might have been Nishimura allegiants, but the time when that mattered was over. The ravagers appeared to believe this was a new beginning. Greer believed the opposite: this was the start of another long, slow, ugly end. She pressed her cheek harder into the Face’s. She could feel every hill and valley of his scars and wondered if she pressed hard enough, her face would take on the same contours, allowing her to mask her guilt from everyone, herself included.
Gasoline was a rationed substance at Fort York, but you wouldn’t know it from the dousing of Slowtown: zombies, softies, weeds, trees, buildings. A dozen bonfires were already going, flames two stories high. Zombies were being tossed into them, some still twitching, some still moaning. Dry, papery flesh went up quickly. Soggy organs melted into black puddles that sizzled like grease. Scorched bones collected at the foot of each fire, interlocked like fingers.
Those who’d stolen liquor bottles from East Blockhouse did not wait to use them. As strong as the stink of the dead was the stench of alcohol. People’s faces and chests glistened with it. There was cheering and singing. A man licked whiskey off a woman’s face while cackles rose from her arched throat. Another man knelt beside a boy, letting him sip from a rusty beer can. Two children kicked a zombie’s head down the street like a soccer ball, celebrating when it caromed into a fire. A dozen young men and women stripped bare and danced a ring around a bonfire, crooning bygone hits, sweat glistening off their ribs, so heaving, so hungry. She saw sex: women with women, men with men, men with women, men with zombies—or at least with parts of zombies. It was an orgy more untamed for the five years of decency that had preceded it.
“The animals.” The Face’s voice was hoarse from smoke.
Greer kept her eyes on the revelry, still hoping she might see, silhouetted against flames, a thin figure with a loping step, a guitar on his back, and a dog at his side. Or hear the faint, hopeful notes of what should have been a prophetic song. A gunshot snapped, close enough to make her jump.
“Actual animals,” he continued. “I swear I saw them at the back of the crowd. Giraffes, bears, raccoons. Nothing now. I guess I’m crazy.”
Crazy didn’t mean untrue. Meeting Muse King on a dirt path was crazy. Traveling with him across America was crazy. Finding him living among zombies was crazy.
“Not crazy,” she replied, somehow wringing sound from her raw, aching throat. “Astonishing.”
With the magic word spoken, there he was, Muse King, a.k.a. King Kong, a.k.a. KK to his friends. Hewitt, the 1978 maple-necked, mahogany-bodied, custom Alpine White Gibson Les Paul, was gone, but Hewitt’s strap still dangled from Muse’s neck, clicking across the pavement. Greer would have known him anywhere: the long limbs, slightly sunken chest, scraggly beard, the outline of his lips. He was being carried by two men, one at his skinny shoulders, the other his shoeless feet. Greer’s heart exploded, fueled on Missouri nitroglycerin. The men carried Muse like he was a bag of trash.
Greer bolted up, ripping free of the Face’s grip. Muse’s condition had been unclear earlier, his ragged gait either that of a zombie or of someone starving and sick. He might still be alive, or something on the borderline, close enough, but the men carrying him were too drunk, on booze or power, to see anything other than one more worthless ghoul.
She sprinted into a scene that looked like an old battlefield photo, and why not? This was the Second Civil War. She was outside of her body, operating it like a kite caught in a gale. She’d never make it in time. Her legs were older now, and tired, and wounded. She’d need a miracle, a real one, and selected one from her past: Fadi Lolo and his Schwinn, not all that fast really, but enough to do the job. She felt the blue bike’s rumble through her thighs and the silly slap of Fadi’s fluttering scarf. It was enough. She doubled her speed, hearing what Fadi had said before leaving her: The fight waits for me. I should have stayed with my people.
Ride fast.
She shouted Muse’s name, knowing that if he heard her, as he always had, he’d turn his head and chuckle, same old Greer, same old heroics, the Lion coming after her Dove. The men would see their mistake and set Muse on his feet, and when Greer collided with his chest, his hands would settle upon her as expertly as they always had. Just like Hewitt, Muse knew how to play her, knew all her favorite songs.
Her mistake was forgetting who she was. Just like that, it mattered again. She was Black. She carried a weapon. She should not have been surprised to feel a bullet punch into her side, Slowtown whirling into pinwheels of flame as the impact spun her in a complete circle. She staggered, but kept going. Fadi’s Schwinn had wind at its back now. Muse was a few feet away. She could be astonishing too. Look at her go.
When a second bullet lanced her throat, she barely noticed. One of the fires set off planted dynamite, and there was a thunderous, blinding explosion that ripped a hole through reality, and through the world’s new wound, she saw Muse’s world, the place of astonishment, the place of Urschleim, the life between people, animals, plants, everything. Too bad the Face was behind her, screaming. There was no reason for screaming. He’d learn that soon enough.
The third bullet entered her skull, and the last sight Greer Morgan had in this particular world was of Muse King as she collapsed onto him. Her weight drove him from the men’s hands and to the ground. His body was warm, though not as warm as the body from the first song she’d heard him play, Take my burned old bones, cool them in the river, y’all. She was cozy there on top of him, a repeat of the hundreds of times she’d pinned him to kiss him, and though her eyes burst with hemorrhaging blood, his were soft, and kind, and waiting, and not white, not white at all.
The Gauze
Charlie found Hoffmann sitting near the Little Norway Park incinerator. The coals were dead. The only light was that reflecting off the bay: blue moonlight and the red ripples of the Fort York fire raging to the north. Charlie had come here often to dispose of softies, but as far as she knew, no one ever sat here by choice. The spot had a nice view, but cremains got everywhere.
She joined the librarian—former librarian, now—on the bench. Hoffmann said nothing.
For a while, they listened to the distant crackling of the fire, and beyond that, the muffled blasts of mysterious detonations. They watched a thin fog roll over the water. Fog was rare this late in the year, and Charlie wondered if the heat of all that fire and spilled blood made Lake Ontario exhale this disappointed breath.
“You need to go back?” she asked. “Get anything?”
She could see that Hoffmann was wearing her old, ugly fanny pack and was unsurprised when the woman shook her head. Hoffmann was not one for belongings. There were bits of paper in her hair, drifting out like dandruff. Charlie watched a burned bit of page settle on the librarian’s fanny pack. Typed on it was a single unanswered letter: Q.
Being careful of her bandaged, self-splinted fingers, Charlie shook her backpack straps to make the carabiners jingle so Hoffmann knew she was ready to go.
“I took some stuff from Hospice. Willow bark. Some ether. I left most of it. People will need it. They’ll need it tonight. They’d better hurry, though. Fort York Boulevard is all weeds. The fire will burn right across. Lesser Hedrick, all the softies, they’ll burn too. I don’t know. In there, out here—maybe it doesn’t matter.”
Hoffmann tilted her head and looked north. It was a night to expect anything: Charlie looked too, and saw no one at first. Moments later, at the limit of her vision, she spotted a group of people gathered in the lot of the old Waterfront Neighborhood Centre. She felt a s
hort, unraveling loss. Nishimura had wanted to rebuild the center as an improved version of its old self, a lively meeting place for when Old Muddy’s population outgrew the immediate area. What plans they’d had. How outrageous had been their visions.
“I think that’s the AV Club,” Charlie said. “That tall girl, I think that’s Georgia. They’ve got bags. They must be getting out. I remember Muse King used to say it was art that was going to save us. I hope so. I hope those kids do all right.” She looked at Hoffmann. “You want to chase them down? See if we can go with them?”
Hoffmann squinted for a while, then shook her head. Charlie wanted to watch the AV Club hike away. They’d do it with energy and purpose, still confident they could achieve anything. But she turned away, knowing it would only hurt. Because that was utopia, wasn’t it? Nishimura, who’d gotten so much right, had whiffed at the concept’s essence. Utopia had nothing to do with settling in. It had everything to do with keeping moving, never stopping. The fear of death was the same damn thing. It had nothing to do with dying, everything to do with failing to have lived.
“Right,” Charlie said. “They’re young. We’d only slow them down.”
Giving it no advance thought, she one-upped the handhold she’d given Hoffmann in the Dying Room. She stretched her right arm along the back of the bench, gripped Hoffmann’s far shoulder, and nestled the strange woman into her side. Hoffmann’s failure to recoil was its own reply.
Charlie rested her head against Hoffmann’s head and watched the weaving threads of gentle currents. She sat as still as possible and listened to her body, every minute part of it, searching for signs of sickness. She’d been doing this since she’d woken up in the Dying Room. There was nothing to be felt, aside from four smarting fingers. It was a good sign. So why did she feel so disheartened? She thought of plastic Jesus, lording over Mae Rutkowski’s dining room. Be merciful, he’d preached. He hadn’t been wrong. All the people of Fort York had needed to do to thrive was be merciful to themselves.
“I’m sorry,” Charlie said.
“Why?”
“For bringing you here. The Archive would have been safer in D.C. You were right to keep it a secret.”
Hoffmann shook her head.
“No?” Charlie asked.
“People read it. The parts they remember, they’ll tell others. It’ll be passed along. Stories never really end.”
“That’s nice of you to say, Etta, but I don’t know—”
“Luis Acocella,” Hoffmann said.
Charlie’s mouth shut with a snap. She didn’t believe she’d ever heard Hoffmann interrupt anyone before. She was a listener, not a talker. Hearing Luis’s full name in Hoffmann’s voice, a voice that only ever spoke of business, that mostly asked questions, made Charlie press her lips together. She wouldn’t cry. She couldn’t. Tears dripping onto Hoffmann’s neck? It would be too much. Hoffmann would pull away in disgust.
“Luis Acocella’s been gone a long time,” Hoffmann said. “But his story keeps growing. Doesn’t it?”
Charlie nodded. Tears spilled, everywhere, all at once, over her face and arm, down Hoffmann’s chest and back. Afraid of who her sobs might attract, Charlie wrapped her free arm around her hitching torso. Her hand grazed her belly. Thin, hard, and leathery from years of scrapping for food, but once it had been soft and fertile, capable of growing a life. Sitting here on the edge of another uncertain world, she had no regrets about never having given birth. Especially now that she’d become a kind of child herself: the first should-be-dead reborn into life. Luis would challenge that. Rebirth or Miscarriage, he’d ask. Given the rumbles coming from Fort York and Slowtown, Charlie admitted the prognosis didn’t seem good. She focused on the sounds closer to hand. The huffs of her crying, Hoffmann’s exhales, the whispers of hands stroking arms.
“I hope this means we get dogs back,” Charlie said. “I miss dogs. Would you help me take care of a dog?”
“Yes. But I am uninterested in dogs.”
Charlie laughed. “Love you, weirdo. You ready to go?”
Hoffmann, true to form, only nodded.
One more sound joined the mix. It was the gentle, plinking noise of water being forcibly pushed. Charlie straightened, wiped enough tears to loosen her finger bandages, and stared straight ahead. Lake Ontario was rippling. The sandy shoreline frothed. Something was in the water. Something coming closer.
The fog was as white as a zombie’s eye. The center of it darkened like blood spotting the strip of gauze that held this fragile world together, then released a canoe holding two men. Their dark clothing and black-painted faces had kept them hidden. The man in the rear plied an oar with expertise. The man in front wore a belt with a gun strapped to either side, though it was the old coffee tin of tools on his lap that squeezed Charlie’s throat.
She’d learned about these tools in med school. Wire saws. Cranial rongeurs. Scalp clips. Laminectomy punches. Tumor forceps. Drill guides. Micro knives. These were neurosurgical instruments, which meant these men, whom Lindof might have called Beachcombers, came from Fort Drum, where leaders promulgated good behavior through corrective brain surgery.
Unimportant details, really. How they got you, exactly, didn’t matter. Once again, the time had come to run. Cutting from the fog were two more canoes, four after that, another eight, another sixteen, another thirty-two, the gauze shredding now. Charlie realized that zombie resurrection hadn’t ended only in Toronto; it had happened all over, including Fort Drum. That, plus the chaotic signals of smoke and fire from Fort York, told these would-be conquerors now was their best shot. When my utopia doesn’t align with your utopia, Charlie thought, this is what happens.
Never would the living stop trying to turn themselves into the dead. The lead boat struck sand. The name of the boat came into view. It was Antonia. The men climbed out. Charlie Rutkowski stood, grabbed Etta Hoffmann by the hand.
Shall we dance? she almost asked.
Are You OK? she almost asked.
“Here They come,” she said instead.
Beautiful
At the first flower of dawn, Annie Teller crossed Wilshire Boulevard and entered Hancock Park. Somewhere in her shadow memories, she knew what it should look like. It did not look like that anymore. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art had fallen, spray-painted and shattered, cousin now to the broken segments of the Berlin Wall on display across the street. The Pavilion for Japanese Art, a curvilinear structure that, even in death, had never left Annie’s dreams had collapsed inward like a folding fan. The park itself had none of the scruffy, green-brown Los Angeles charm she’d seen in so many photos. It was all red dirt and scorched earth, the trees and plants replaced by drifts of nondegradable plastic trash.
Half of Annie’s legs were metal. She had a sense they were why she kept going when others of her dead generation fell. Blades, dulled by time, had been screwed into her wrist bones. Only patches of her clothing survived. Large swaths of her skin were fire-damaged. Ice-burn scars from winter journeys had turned the rest of her flesh a stippled gray. Chunks of her fell off every day. Just as Hancock Park had become unrecognizable, so had she.
But the La Brea Tar Pits were still here.
Sourceless facts swirled in the twitching glob of her brain. Crude oil had seeped from this ground for tens of thousands of years. Bones recovered here dated back thirty-eight thousand years. No race of animals, no matter how inventive their self-destruction, was going to change that.
Her brain, active for so long, was winding down. She could feel it, the unspooling of the thoughts she’d replayed for unknowable years. She was here, though she did not recall why she’d come. LA BREA TAR PITS: the words had hunted her like the rest of her kind had hunted fast-moving ones. The words once had been written on her chest. She needn’t have worried when they faded away. She’d lost her way many times, but never her purpose.
Why, then, did she still feel her journey was incomplete?
Annie Teller had fallen down thousands of ti
mes, and every time, LA BREA TAR PITS ordered her to get back up. Here she believed she’d find something to keep her down for good. The notion came to her simply, gently. Tar was sticky.
A whisper of memory informed her that Lake Pit was to her right. She moved toward it, but progress was slower than usual. She looked down with a right eye that still worked and observed her metal legs being gripped by hot asphalt exuding through the grass. Crossing a stony granulate that had once been a sidewalk, she then found a way through the latticed remains of a chain-link fence. She hobbled to the bank of a black pond bubbling with methane.
Annie had seen many beautiful things on her journey, things that made her pause despite the ferocity of her calling. Endless freeways of gleaming vehicles like giant dead cobras. Collapsed bridges like slain dragons, visible beneath bodies of water gone lucid as diamond. Bison in such incredible numbers their herds looked like the shadows of skyscrapers long since fallen. None of that could match this.
Lake Pit’s surface was browns, yellows, and purples, gliding through and past each other in iridescent patterns like smoke, or clouds, or intermixing pools of blood, all slowed to prehistoric speeds. Evidence of the dead was everywhere. Festoons of feathers where birds had been sucked under. Filigrees of bone from small mammals that had edged too close. A conglomeration of skulls, all different, all wide-jawed in a silent, happy chant.
Annie Teller’s good eye surveyed the opposite side of the pit.
Tawna Maydew stood in the golden rays.
Memories, though incomplete, filled in fast. Annie recalled, in the first hours and days, everyone wondering why. Here was all the why she’d ever needed: one person needing another to make the pain of life bearable. She had a vision of shooting an arrow from a window of the Mansfield-on-Sherwood rehab center, choosing and pinpointing the end of her first long walk. Now, at the end of her second, after overcoming the physical and mental struggles of recuperation, the alienation of being something called a senior statistician, the loneliness of a sterile workplace, Tawna was the only point Annie had yet to reach.
The Living Dead Page 68