The Living

by Isaac Marion

  I feel someone watching me, which is a strange thing to feel while ploughing through dense crowds, but after a quick scan, I find it: the beady black eye of a security camera, staring down at me from a rooftop. Another one across the street. Will they recognize me? Will they care if they do? My grandfather is long gone, swallowed by the angry earth, and my face will mean little to whoever’s running this mess now. I am just a man whose effect on the Dead was briefly intriguing, but now they’ve reproduced that effect—or a perverse imitation of it—and moved on. I am the past, and they live in the present.

  Good.

  “Can I help you, sir?”

  The Orientation building. Once it was a place where the Living studied the Dead, looking for new ways to kill them. Then it inverted into a place of healing—of resurrection. And now? I can only guess. The windows are boarded over. Only the occasional muffled scream tells me we’ve come to the right place.

  “Sir? Can you identify yourself please?”

  Julie nudges me. With reluctance, I return to the present, and with even greater reluctance, I summon the wretch.

  “What the hell is happening in this branch?” I snap back at the guard. “Is the founder’s grandson really getting ID’d? I’m here to inspect Orientation procedures. Open the door.”

  “I’m sorry sir, this is a secure building and we need—”

  “What you need is to know your fucking place, you beta piece of shit.” I step in close. “Does the name Atvist mean anything to you?”

  He looks me up and down. He’s older than the one at the gate, his face leathery, his mustache flecked with gray, and my bully act is having less of an effect.

  “Haven’t heard that name in a long time,” he says, meeting gaze just long enough for it to register as a challenge, then he looks down at his clipboard, snapping back to professionalism. “But Red Ties do have full access, so if I can just verify your SSN with the officer manifest…”

  I like him, the wretch says. Management potential.

  You’re done here, I reply, and shove him down the stairs.

  “Okay,” I sigh. “How about this?”

  I pop open the briefcase, lift the flap of black felt, and rest my finger on the red switch. Finally, I get a reaction.

  “What’s that?” the guard says, but his cool sounds forced now.

  “I think you know what it is.”

  The other guards raise their rifles but the officer holds out his hand. He gives me a smirk that’s not very convincing. “Is this some kind of undead rights thing? Free the zombies?”

  Without missing a beat, Julie jumps in. “Yeah, that’s right, that’s exactly right!” Her voice is shrill and twitchy and I almost laugh when I see her face: she’s a wild-eyed fanatic, twisting her hair and fidgeting from foot to foot. “Zombies are people, sick people, they’re us, they deserve to be free, they deserve to run…” Her scratches and bruises give the performance a druggy authenticity. The guard cringes away from her and she dials up the spittle flying off her syllables. “It’s time for you fascist fuckers to face the fact that people are people, plague or no plague, and we won’t put up with imprisonment!” She pauses for a breath while he wipes his face. “So there’s two ways we can set them free. By that”—she points to the door—“or by this.” She points to the briefcase. “Your choice.”

  The guard looks uneasy but still unconvinced. He sizes me up and makes an exaggerated grimace of disdain, his mustache bristling like a dog’s hackles. “Bullshit. You’re no suicide bomber.”

  “Julie,” I say calmly, “get clear. This is my sacrifice, not yours.”

  “Bullshit!” he repeats as Julie backs away, but there’s some urgency in it now. “That bitch might be crazy enough but I know a pussy when I smell one. You’re not gonna blow yourself up for a few dozen corpses.”

  Still gripping the briefcase’s handle, I hook my thumb into my collar and tug it aside, revealing the bite on my neck: raw purple flesh with deep teeth marks.

  “I’m about to die anyway,” I say with a grin. “Might as well die for a reason.”

  The guard’s face pales. “Shit,” he whispers.

  He and his men scatter into the streets.

  I feel the black worms shudder in outrage. How dare I put them to good use?

  When the guards are out of sight, Julie comes back. She gives me an approving nod. “Strong performance.”

  “You too.”

  “Although this changes the plan a little.” She looks up at the security camera watching us and casually flips it off. “How long do you think we have?”

  I feel the urge to laugh again. The “plan.” It was a ramshackle construction to begin with, built from gambles stacked on assumptions and duct-taped together with hope. Now it’s falling on our heads, and all we can do is run.

  I answer Julie’s question with a firm shove to the door. I barge into the building like I own the place.

  • • •

  What I find inside might shock me more if I hadn’t seen each stage of its development, from a few bloody instruments in a log cabin to a university laboratory full of grotesque experiments to the entire population of Pittsburgh replaced by twisted corpses. What I find in this building is just one more rung down the ladder.

  It’s a warehouse full of chairs. Office chairs, table chairs, folding chairs, recliners, a hellish discount furniture store. Each chair has a person strapped into it, connected to an array of wires and an IV line dangling from a hub on the ceiling. They all wear headphones, and some have screens in front of them, flashing incomprehensible text and imagery like an art installation that’s the opposite of thought-provoking. The flickering screens are the only illumination in the cavernous space. The only sound is the tinny noise shrieking from the headphones, along with the occasional scream or groan.

  “Everybody out!” Julie bellows, startling a handful of men in white coats—doctors? Scientists? What do I call the practitioners of such strange arts? Do they even know what they’re creating here, or are they just following one order at a time, assembly line workers who never see the final product? They’re all listening to their walkies, no doubt receiving warnings of our little attack, so Julie doesn’t have to push her point. They flee the building without a word, and we’re left alone with the human resources.

  “Julie!”

  Sprout’s high voice carries from the far end of the warehouse, and we run toward it. They’re all there, a line of familiar faces inserted between rows of strangers, sweaty, feverish, but alive.

  “Help,” Addis says, piercing me with those gleaming eyes. “Help Nora.”

  Nora’s head hangs forward. Drool drips from her mouth.

  “She’s bad,” M wheezes. “Get her first.”

  Julie rushes to free her friend and I attend to my kids. They look like they have a bad flu, damp and paler than usual, but they’re lucid. “Hi,” Joan says as I disconnect tubes and wires.

  “Hi, Joan,” I reply, going to work on their restraints. “Are you okay?”

  “We’re okay,” Alex says. He looks down at the pink syrup oozing onto the floor. “Plague juice…supposed to make us Dead again.”

  “Won’t work on us,” Joan says, shaking her head. “We’re over it.”

  I feel a mist coming into my eyes. I tug my collar aside and show them my new bite. “Me too.”

  A moment later everyone is free and ready to run. Except Nora. Nora can barely stand. She sways back and forth, head down, mumbling incoherently.

  “I’ll take her and the kids,” M says, slinging Nora’s arm over his shoulders. He shoots me a meaningful look which I’m not sure how to translate. “You do…whatever you need to do here.”

  He hauls Nora to the exit and Julie turns to Tomsen. “Are you good?”

  Tomsen nods, blinking delirium out of her eyes. “So odd. So very odd. Such a sickly ste
w, psychology, pharmacology, virology, thanatology, manually triggered vacillations, impossible stuff, like they’ve tapped some reservoir of—”

  “Huntress,” Julie cuts her off. “We need to get the rest of these people out. We have maybe five minutes. Are you good?”

  Tomsen rubs her face and lets out a puff of breath. “Good. Great. Best.”

  “Get a few more free and let them do the rest. We have to finish our job before the whole place locks down.”

  “Our job?”

  “See that briefcase—” She cuts off. “R! Where are you going?”

  Where am I going?

  Their voices are growing fainter as I wander toward the back of the warehouse. I am staring up at the jungle of IVs dangling from the ceiling. I am following the pink hose that runs from the ceiling hub to wherever the pink syrup comes from. I am moving past the last row of chairs and encountering a series of white curtains placed across the warehouse like office partitions. I am pushing through them.

  The pink hose runs down from the ceiling into a machine that resembles a soda fountain: several pressurized canisters feeding into a central mixing unit, but the hose doesn’t end there. It continues out the other end of the machine and connects to the base of a clear tank. And in this tank, floating in cloudy pink syrup, are several grinning skeletons. They wriggle and writhe, clawing against the Plexiglas, and then go still, drifting. They thrash again; one rips an arm off the other, a rib, a foot, then they go still. They float in the syrup like scorpions in tequila, infusing it with plague—their shriveled thoughts, their mindless hunger, their dark, sub-animal emptiness. And the machine mixes this with other poisons and pumps it into people, a chemical-spiritual cocktail.

  What human mind could create this? What unspeakable product is this company trying to produce?

  From some distant overhead viewpoint, I watch myself pull the hose out of the tank and tip over the mixing machine and hammer it with one of the steel canisters until I’m sweating and gasping and the machine is a heap of smashed parts.

  Only then do I notice I have an audience.

  Behind me is a chain-link corral just like the one in Pittsburgh, except the Dead locked in this one are not a feral horde. They are clean and placid, like embalmed corpses propped upright. Human resources waiting to be spent.

  “I know they’ve done things to you,” I tell them. “They’ve put things in your blood and brains. But you can push them out.”

  Their expressions are mostly blank, but I catch faint hints of curiosity. A crowd of about two hundred, like the crowd I once faced from the community stage while Lawrence Rosso cheered me on. And what was it he told me a few hours later as he bled out in my arms?

  Show them. Help them wake up.

  I recognize one of them. Young and muscular, with pockmarked brown skin. His name comes to me easily now. “Evan Kenerly.”

  His eyes widen, then they squint. I see him straining to remember.

  “Your name is Evan Kenerly.” I move up close to the fence. “Major Evan Kenerly. You worked with Lawrence Rosso. You loved Nora Greene.”

  “R!” Julie shouts from the other end of the warehouse. “We have to go!”

  I hear the escapees stampeding for the exits. I hear distant shouts. Gunshots. No time to finish my little sermon. I raise the canister over my head and bring it down on the corral’s padlock once, twice—snap.

  “You’re not dead,” I tell the people behind the fence. “You can come with us.”

  Without waiting to see the results of my latest impulsive act, I drop the canister and run.

  WE

  “You’re doing the right thing,” Abbot says.

  Abram watches the manager take a drag of his cigarette and release it in puffs that the wind instantly erases.

  “Axiom has its issues, but it’s the only game in town. It’s going to be the new government, and no branch breaks or religious pyromaniacs are going to change that. So we might as well get on-board.”

  The smoke blows into Abram’s eyes but he’s already squinting, watching the horizon, the freeway. He and Abbot stand in the stadium’s open gate as troops buzz in and out, preparing.

  “When you have a family,” Abbot says, “you don’t always get to ‘do the right thing’ anymore. You don’t get to take risks or make sacrifices to indulge your moral qualms. You have to do what’s best for them.” Another drag, another wind-swept cloud of tar. “Anything can be ‘the right thing’ if you’re doing it for your family.”

  “Sir?” Abram says.

  “Yeah?”

  “Should I go help the defense set up?”

  Abbot presses his lips together. “All business, aren’t you, Roberts? That’s okay. I’m preaching to myself anyway.”

  “I just want to make sure we’re ready.”

  Abbot grunts and looks out at the horizon. “We’re ready. This place is a vault. The old management just repelled a skeleton swarm two months ago, and we’re twice as well armed.”

  “I heard Executive sent half of Security to acquire Portland.”

  Abbot waves this off. “We have eight hundred men here and six hundred at Goldman for backup, not to mention three armed choppers. We’ll mow them down before they even reach the walls.”

  Abram nods toward the line of panicked immigrants being herded away from the gates. “What about them?”

  “We’re putting them in the camps. Sealing up a few highrises for shelter.” He shrugs. “They might get hit, but we’re overpopulated anyway.”

  Abram watches a young couple that was at the front of the line into the stadium, now at the back of the line away from it. The man carries their bags, the woman carries their crying daughter; both of them look dumbfounded at their bad luck. But every line to every sold-out show has one tragedy like this, turned away a single step from the entrance.

  “Hey,” Abbot says, flicking the ash from his cigarette. “There’s a lot of people in the world. Worry about your own.”

  Abram does. He never stops. He had hoped to drop by the foster home before joining the defense to tell Sprout to hide in the basement. He wanted to assure her that they will leave this horrible place but they have to wait for the right moment, that perfect strategic window when the risk is low and they have plenty of time and they’re healthy and fed and well-rested. Until then, just a while longer, they have to play along.

  The chance never came. Abbot brought him to the gate without ever letting him out of sight. He seems to have made Abram’s “probation” his own personal project, watching his every move with a calm but stern vigilance. But the man has been surprisingly lenient with him. Abram knows company policy; he should have been terminated ten times over for his countless infractions, but here he is working at the Team Manager’s side. Abram wonders how many times Abbot has served as father-boss, how many young men he’s raised into the Axiom family, and how long it’s been since his last.

  “In the old days, Burners were pretty sneaky.” Abbot puffs smoke away from his eyes as he scans the surrounding streets. “They’d spread themselves thin, hide out in basements with their napalm, and no one suspected a thing until Bark came on the loudspeaker. But that shit doesn’t work when the city’s empty. We’ve got rat patrols on every block. And from the sounds of it, they’re not after the ruins anyway.”

  Abram looks back at the stadium, then toward the thick forests in the east. His eyes narrow.

  “Yeah,” Abbot says, following his gaze. “If they were smart, they’d come at us through the woods. Spread their little ‘army’ as wide as they can and try to surround us.” He shrugs. “But Bark’s not a tactician. He’s a fucking showman. I’ll bet you my last bottle he comes right through there.” He sights his finger like a gun down the length of Corridor 1. “Bet you he marches right up Main Street and dumps his little bone collection right on our doorstep. And then we just”—he pul
ls the trigger—“sweep it up.”

  Abram is still staring into the forest, but Abbot has misread his interest. Abram isn’t calculating the Ardents’ plan of attack. He is trying to imagine how this happened to them. How they drifted out so far, became so hopeless and desperate for purpose that they would rally around anyone who offered it, no matter what the cost. So angry and alone that the whole world became their enemy.

  Abram tries to imagine all this, and he finds it easy. He can see it a dozen different ways in a dozen different places. Staring out into the forest and the countryside beyond, he wonders how many other towns like Bark’s are out there, shunned and forgotten by society, left to fester in their bitterness until they’re ready to erupt.

  A thought creeps down his spine like a cold worm.

  “Sir?” he says. “Do we know how many skeletons were in that siege three months ago?”

  Abbot shrugs. “Reports say about nine hundred.”

  “And they almost breached the stadium?”

  “Well…‘almost’ is a slippery word.”

  “What if there are more this time?”

  Abbot frowns. “You saw the Burners’ warehouse. Couldn’t have been more than a thousand in there.”

  “But that was four days ago. It’s a two hour drive.”

  Abbot opens his mouth, then closes it.

  “So where are they?” Abram’s tone is slipping out of proper deference but he doesn’t care. “If they had their army in tow when they escaped, why wouldn’t they come straight here and set it loose? Why give us time to prepare?”

  “We rattled them,” Abbot says. “They had to regroup.”

  He’s preaching to himself again. Abram can tell the idea has already taken hold, but he says it anyway: