Two Things
First published in Zombonauts, 2009
Reprinted in Wily Writers, 2014
© Amanda C. Davis, 2009
Escape from Ape City
First published in Zombie Kong, 2012
© Amanda C. Davis, 2012
Memories
First appeared in Necrotic Tissue, 2011
© Amanda C. Davis, 2011
Cover art by Amanda C. Davis, 2014
Contents
Two Things
Escape from Ape City
Bonus: Memories
About the Author
Two Things
The memorial microbial fuel cell was broken; that was the first thing. Nobody wanted to put good crewmen of the SS Trebuchet into the same cell that processed leftovers, plant cuttings, and human waste. So Admiral Than ordered some provisions to be shifted from one cold storage unit to another, and they stacked the bodies in there, rolled in white sheets, tagged by name, to last out the journey beside boxes of dehydrated chicken substitute and vacuum-sealed bags of beer. That seemed all right. Some of them had been pretty fond of beer.
"We could bury them!" said David, who loved all things retro. "That's what they used to do Earthside."
"In the ground?" said Mo, who didn't. "You're disgusting."
They wouldn't reach the colony for fifteen more months, so neither took the argument too personally.
By the time four or five people had gone on to glory and been stowed in cold storage, nobody had the time or inclination to fix the microbial fuel cell; it was a small one, anyway, and didn't power much more than itself. Certain people (like David) thought it was nice to be able to sit with their cold-packed loved ones once in a while. Certain other people (like Mo) disagreed. But it wasn't hurting anyone, so there they stayed: well-preserved, stiff in every sense.
The second thing happened down in the hydroponic chambers, and nobody noticed until it was too late. A couple of nanobots from the tomato plants took an interest in one of the earthworms and made an unsolicited transfer. It killed the worm, of course. When one of the gardeners saw the worm flopping around on top of the soil like a garden hose, she assumed it had gone space crazy and tossed it into the bucket they kept for incidental sources of protein.
The bucket, of course, stayed in cold storage.
Two things: a broken fuel cell and a couple of malfunctioning nanobots.
It turned out that two was enough.
#
David walked into Dr. Laine's office, threw himself onto the couch, and said, "I think I saw Cuomo."
Dr. Laine said, "David, get out." To the other man on the couch she said, "I'm sorry, Mo. We can continue after David gets his ass back to work."
"You saw Coumo?" said Mo to David.
"Just now," said David.
"You're space crazy, man."
"No one is 'space crazy'," said Dr. Laine sharply. "And if you're going to talk about extraplanetary isolation and containment fatigue you could at least call it by the correct--"
"I know, it's nuts," said David cheerily. "I passed him in the hall and was like, Hey! that's Cuomo! I didn't realize until he was past--"
"Wait, Brad Cuomo?" said Dr. Laine. Her professionalism vaporized.
"Yup."
"But he's been dead for two months."
"Yup," said David again.
Mo's eyes shifted from one to the other. "Did you--you know--check on him?"
"No way," said David, "I came straight here." He winked at Dr. Laine. "If you're going to go space crazy it's best to start treatment early."
"That's actually very sound reasoning," said Dr. Laine.
"We need to check on Cuomo," said Mo.
"That is not sound reasoning," said Dr. Laine. "Mo, we should get back to our conversation."
"Sure," said Mo. He and David stood up in tandem. "I'll be right back."
"You're not really--"
"Better safe than sorry!" sang out David, on their way out the door.
Dr. Laine took off her glasses and put her fingers on her eyelids. Some days she felt like the only sane person on the ship, and some days she thought she might be the one who'd gone completely nuts.
The door slid open. Someone came inside.
Dr. Laine looked up. Her mouth opened. "...Brad?"
She did not speak again.
#
The bodies weren't in cold storage.
"Oh, this is bad," said David, who had seen a thousand old movies about the walking dead. "So, so, so bad."
"Maybe they moved them," said Mo, who hadn't. "Maybe the fuel cell is functional again."
"We would have heard about the funerals."
"Unless we were drunk," said Mo pointedly. "Or busy. Or not paying attention, David."
"They didn't even leave the body bags."
"Because they're probably still in them! Look," said Mo, running a hand through his coarse black hair, "just ask someone if you care so much. Ask Dr. Cheng. He'll know what you're talking about."
#
"I have no idea what you're talking about," said Dr. Cheng.
"You didn't move them?" said David.
"Why would I do that?" said Dr. Cheng. "The corpses are fine where they are. The temperature and humidity are perfect. Too long outside of cold storage and they'll start rotting. Are you sure you were in the right storage unit?"
"I've been there a dozen times," said David. "They were there, and now they're not." He put his hands on his hips, looking exasperated for the first time that day. "We have to warn people."
Dr. Cheng sighed. "I'll find them. All right? Perhaps Jerry moved them into laboratory space. He spent half the day on that floor and now I can't find him. Get back to work. Don't worry about it."
#
"Don't worry about it!" seethed David, when they were in the hall. "There are a hundred reasons these bodies could be missing, and they're all horrible."
"Not all of them are horrible," said Mo. "Not even half of them are horrible. Get a grip. I'll bet maintenance knows what's up."
#
The maintenance staff told them to ask the kitchen staff.
The kitchen staff told them to ask human resources.
Human resources told them to ask the maintenance staff.
"How the hell," said David, "can you lose five human bodies in an enclosed vessel with sixteen hundred people in it?"
Mo shrugged. "I've been trying to find my blue socks for weeks."
They looked at each other.
"I think someone stole them out of the laundry," said Mo.
"Maybe someone dumped them outside," said David.
"My socks?"
"You're an idiot." David snapped his fingers. "Security."
"You're calling security on me for worrying about my socks?"
"Shut up," said David. "There's got to be a camera in the storage room. We'll get security to review the video feed until we see...something," he finished, looking at the floor.
"Fine," said Mo. "But we're not going to see anything."
#
The audio was crisp, the picture crystal-clear. Vivian, in security, rolled through the video feed in quick-time. After a few minutes her mouth thinned. She beckoned Mo and David to watch.
Mo and David leaned in. Onscreen, the corpses lay stacked, zipped into body bags, a pyramid of long blue sacks. Seconds ticked away.
One of them moved.
The top body bag rolled away. Another, below it, wriggled like a caterpillar until it lurched out of place and began a twisting, spastic dance along the floor. One by one, the others shook to life: some hanging out of their bags, crawling away until none remained.
"Hilarious," said Vivian.
David turned to her, mouth agape. "What?"
"Nice effort. Good prank. That one even looks like Brad Cuomo." Her demeanor went hard. "Now you listen to me. I have enough to deal with today without some minor-league astronauts staging horror movies just to get a rise out of me. You put those people back where you found them within one hour or I am going straight to your superiors. Capische?"
"I--"
"Capische?"
"Capische! Capische!" David backed away with his hands raised.
"Thanks anyway," blurted Mo, before David grabbed his arm and hauled him away.
#
"Did you see that?" howled David.
"I don't know."
"Bodies getting up--"
"Maybe someone's pranking us."
"Crawling away like worms--"
"Maybe you're pranking me."
David didn't bother to reply to that. He slumped against the wall.
"That really did look like Brad Cuomo," said Mo.
"I told you so."
Mo leaned against the wall beside him. Together, they slid to the floor.
"This ship is huge," said David. "They could be anywhere."
"Did Vivian say she had a lot to deal with today?"
As he was speaking, Vivian burst from the security center, weapon in hand, and charged past them.
"Hey," Mo called after her, "did you say--"
She was gone before he even finished.
"They could be everywhere," said David.
Mo's eyes lit up. "No," he said. "No, listen. They're not everywhere. We know where they're not. That's the point, it's the whole reason we've been running around all day in the first place."
David sat up straighter. "You're right," he said. "They're not where they're supposed to be. They're not in cold storage."
#
The storage unit had been closed and latched tight; Mo and David, working together, were able to pry open the door. David braced it shut while Mo started trying to make calls through the communication system.
"Nobody's answering," said Mo. "Maybe the system's down."
"The system's down?" said David. "If you think you can't reach anyone because the system's down, why are you hiding with me in a refrigerator?"
Mo dropped his eyes and dialed again.
"I'll tell you one thing," said David, as Mo shuffled around with his hand over his earpiece so he could hear. "I'm not going out there until I find out what's going on. We can last in here for a while, can't we? I mean, we'll set the temperature higher. We can latch the door shut from the inside. There's plenty of food...hell, there's plenty of beer. Just...just sit here until someone comes to tell us it's over. Right? Just hide out until we know it's safe." He trailed off. "What...what are you looking at?"
Mo stared past him, comm. unit at his side. "Brad Cuomo."
David turned and the stiff, gray form of Brad Cuomo embraced him, caught him up in a terrible kinship, eyes rolling in a way they never did in life.
"I'm crazy," said Mo, without moving a muscle. David's blood spattered across his cheek. "I'm space crazy. I shouldn't have left Dr. Laine's office."
Brad tossed David aside. David rose again, pale-eyed and torn. They turned to Mo.
"At least I'll be with friends," said Mo, and he welcomed them with open arms.
#
The weather was terrible; that was the first thing. When the winds picked up across the plains that hadn't been fully terraformed, they brought burst after burst of painful, noxious sand. Most people chose to wait out the sandstorms within the spaceport compound. At the moment, it was near capacity.
The second thing happened near dinnertime. Space traffic controllers saw the SS Trebuchet arriving on time, but without functional communications; a tech jockey fiddled his way into the controls and two pilots in tandem got the thing docked with minor hull damage. A few dozen soldiers boarded to check it out. The dock workers connected chemical lines. The microbial fuel cells drained into the settlement reservoirs.
Two things: poor weather and an uncommunicative starship.
It turned out that two was enough.
Escape from Ape City
At some point our first question--the keening, desperate "Where did the giant zombie gorillas come from?"--became moot. It was merely academic. The origin of the giant zombie gorillas was as useful to us as the number of angels who could dance on the head of a pin. Less useful, in fact--pinprick-sized angels might be somehow brought under our control. Building-sized undead great apes left us no option but to run.
"They're like any silly fashion," said Bradbury to me, one day in the bunker. "One turns up and before long they're on every street corner."
"Fashion!" spat Lillian. "Who cares about fashion?" Before the giant zombie gorillas she had cared very much. "Only a month and they've turned us back into cavemen."
"Minus the advantages vis-à-vis cavewomen." Bradbury really is a card.
Lillian, giving him a vicious look, went back to sharpening a curtain rod into a double-ended spear.
Jenny squeezed inside then, through the trapdoor that used to be a basement window. She fell neatly to the ground and landed on her feet like a cat. "Listen to this, you Morlocks," she said. (She's a card too, a good match for Bradbury, I always thought.) "Get your things. Get everything. There's a boat. We're getting out."
We ignored everything but that penultimate sentence, and the shock of it drove us to our feet. "A boat!" said Lillian, for once losing her scowl.
"A warship?" said Bradbury.
"All I know is it floats."
Lillian said, "It can't be. Who's still got a boat?"
"Astor. Rockefeller. Who cares?" said Jenny. "The Laurel Street bunker says there's a yacht or something not far out to sea and it's coming toward us at a quick old clip. They think it'll be here by dark. It must be a rescue. It must be."
I said, "It's nearly dark now," although I had no way to know other than one page torn out of an almanac and a watch I kept faithfully wound.
"Then pack fast," said Jenny.
We didn't need to be told twice. We scattered. Everybody had a corner, and we all went there. Lillian had the corner nearest to mine. She laid out a bed sheet and started throwing clothes and tinned food and tools into the middle of it.
"Do you suppose we'll have to live on the boat," said Lillian, "or do you suppose they can take us somewhere nice? Tom, I couldn't live on a boat."
"I expect we'll live there," I said. I had salvaged precious few belongings compared to her and they all went into my cardboard suitcase without trouble. "I hope you know how to cook a fish."
I hauled myself and my suitcase across the room before she could work up any kind of a retort.
If I had any proper luck, I'd have never met Lillian; I'd have been hiding in an underground bunker with Bets, my sweetheart and best girl. But I had been at the college the day the giant zombie gorillas popped up, and she had been at Macy's. Of course everyone knew what happened to Macy's. By the time I discovered where she had been, the giant zombie gorillas had turned the city into their own dead iron jungle. There was no getting anywhere. I'd never made it as far as the ruins of Macy's. And there had been no sign of her since.
I didn't like to think about Bets. But it was better than actually talking to Lillian.
#
They used to say all kinds of things about this city. To hear people talk nobody liked any part of it, although a whole bunch of people lived there. To be honest, the accusations of squalor were never far off. Now they were dead on.
I didn't like to go out in the daytime, so I never did it. The destruction was simply too enormous. We squeezed out the basement window of the tailor shop and all the ruin and squalor of our little room expanded as far as I could see: cars under buildings, buildings under cars, clothes and papers strewn wherever the wind took them, body parts too small for the giant zombie gorillas to notice. I kicked a crushed baby stroller. I had no way to know whether it had been occupied when the crushing took place.
Jenny beckoned, and we fo
llowed her over the mountains of debris. I could see giant zombie gorillas sitting on their rubble thrones not too many blocks away. One put the end of a steel beam in his mouth and tried to chew it like a stalk of celery. The metal creaked under the strain of his vast flat teeth.
Lillian moaned. The giant zombie gorilla paused his chewing and sniffed the air. He dropped the beam--it made a terrible clatter--and began to heave his enormous, rotting simian form onto its knuckles.
"It's Tubbo," Bradbury hissed. He really believed he could tell the giant zombie gorillas apart. He ducked to the nearest building and gestured us all to join him. We picked through debris and jammed ourselves into the door he held open.
It was the old post office. I couldn't believe the place still stood. The inside walls were plastered with notes and posters so that you couldn't tell whether there was any wallpaper underneath. One of them caught my eye: fresh paper, and large letters. I pulled it off the wall.
YOU ARE NOT ALONE
OUR BUNKER IS SAFE
BENEATH THE SITE
OF MACY'S DEPT STORE
YOU ARE WELCOME
And beneath that were about thirty or forty signatures in blue ink, all kinds, women's and men's and some so scrawly their makers must be either very old or very young.
And I knew one of them.
Bets.
"Look at this," I said, thrusting the note toward Jenny, not quite willing to actually give it to her. "Have you seen this?"
"Oh, sure," Jenny said. "All over the city. I guess they're recruiting. Bradbury, that isn't Tubbo. Tubbo's only got one arm now."
"Do hush," said Lillian, watching through a bullet hole.
"It's Bets," I said. "That's her name, her signature. It's her. She's there. I have to find her."
Lillian turned to me and said, with icy emphasis, "Do. Hush."
I stood there with the note in my hand, no doubt looking as stupid as I felt. I never had made it to Macy's. I hadn't found Bets, earthly remains or living ones. I simply hadn't gone looking.
I said again, "I've got to find her," as if it was the only thing I knew how to say.
Now Jenny turned too. "Find someone?" she hissed. "In this? You've got to get out of here, is what you've got to do!"
"She's right," said Bradbury. "I know you love her and all, but think of the odds. And come on, Tom, how often does a boat come by?"
"Exactly that," I said. "Exactly that. What if I leave her and it's the last boat ever to come by?"
"REALLY," said Lillian, through her teeth, "YOU MUST. HUSH. RIGHT--"
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