by Oliver Atlas
“That’s a lot of wall,” I breathe. “Although it’s a bit much, isn’t it? I mean, we’re talking about zombies here, not King Kong.”
Josie shrugs as though to say better safe than sorry, and Milly adds, “Our response technology has become strong enough to handle almost any outbreak. The one outbreak we could not handle, however, would be if the Preserve suddenly cracked open. If all the living dead in Oregon made it out all at once . . . well, that would be a problem.”
“But the living dead come to Oregon,” I point out. “They’d never leave en masse.”
Milly nods. “Maybe. Unless it’s not the area itself that draws them.”
“Anyway,” interrupts Josie, sweeping her hand forward. “This is one of the three Western Gates. I thought you might want to see it.”
“’See it’?” says Milly. “I thought we were going through it.”
“Nope. The next Quarantine passage isn’t until morning. If we go in there now, they’ll make you stay in Quarantine all night. They might even make me stay all night. If Charonville’s border patrol can justify anything that pisses anyone off, they’ll probably try it. They tend to lean toward the jerkish side of life.”
Josie leads us to a barbershop that’s shutting down. We pass through its black and white tiled back room, down a flight of concrete stairs, through an inconspicuous metal door, and into a plexiglassed, iron-barred customs area. An old patrol officer with no hair and three chins checks our passports, pats us down, nods us through a doorway scanner, and asks us to place our thumbs on a red circle on a pole in front of us. When I do, I feel a prick and jerk my hand away.
“Thank you,” drones the agent as I inspect the dot of blood on my thumb. “Thank you,” he adds to Milly a moment later. Without any change of expression, he studies the computer screen in front of him. “You’re clear,” he announces. “You can pick up your bags and belongings in the bins past that next glass gate. Enjoy New Pokey and the Oregon Territory.”
Josie passes through every scan and inspection untouched and unquestioned.
“Wow,” I say. “You’re quite the rock star, aren’t you?”
“You’d better stop flirting with me before Milly notices.”
Milly nearly chokes. “Ha! You can have him!”
With facetious eyes, Josie scans me over. “Nope. I’m not into the whole hunky metro cowboy thing. Give me a pudgy, programmer security guard every time.”
The two ladies enjoy a laugh. The guard and I share a dour look. Josie then leads us out the other side, through another inconspicuous door, through another overly clean barbershop, into a town as different from Charonville as dead from living dead.
For starters, although it’s night, it’s hard to believe anyone could be sleeping in New Pokey. The extra wide cobbled streets are packed with revelers. Men and women, boys and girls—dogs, cats, horses, cattle, sheep—everyone is flowing from place to place, laughing, yelling, barking, bleating, cavorting. Shops are bustling. Saloons are overflowing. We even pass a palatial apartment with a bustling wraparound porch, red-lit windows, and a sign with elegant scripting that reads, The Naughty Pony.
Unlike the semi-modern, 1950’s brick and bunker look of Charonville, New Pokey’s buildings are all grand Victorian high-rises or stately colonial boxes. Humming gas lamps line the street. Chimneys puff with moonlit smoke. Everything appears made of brightly painted wood, old west style, but Josie makes a point to say it’s really nonflammable synthetic. When I ask why, she offers only, “Torchers,” and I’m past caring about what that might mean.
I once saw a documentary film about bygone theme parks. This place reminds me of them, only laced with a darker, more ominous irony. Everyone is acting as though they’re in The Jolliest Place on Earth, when a few miles away, beyond the New Pokey Wall, roam ten thousand people who used to be people. The perverse facts about New Pokey stare at you out of any travelogue or fact book, but it’s not until you’re staring at them in person that you can feel their particular sting.
Milly’s face is enrapt, alert. I can’t tell if it’s with the same dark awe I’m feeling, or a genuine pleasure at the spectacle. I don’t ask. I don’t want to judge her. I don’t want to judge anyone.
“I really want a bed,” I say to no one.
“Relax, Deputy Prose,” says Josie. “We’re here.”
I raise my head and read a big carved sign: The Last Stand.
Perfect. Sounds great. I’m glad I’m not superstitious. “Do they have bedbugs?”
As we march through the Victorian hallways and up five flights of stairs with fancy cedar banisters, Josie explains how the Sheriff’s department keeps a room for guests and for surveillance jobs, how all kinds of villains and shysters keep shop in New Pokey, and how we’ll need to follow Yaverts in the next forty-eight hours if we want to catch his trail.
She shows us to the room, to the bed. I offer to take the floor, but Milly says she’s not tired, she’s going out. My mind notes that that’s not a good idea, but my body nods and I flop onto the bed.
Gunfire, heckling, catcalls, doors slamming, breaking glass, pounding footfalls, lights flickering outside the window in fire, gunfire, fireworks, flashbulbs.
Ah, I sigh, breathing in the sulfur and whiskey tinged air, New Pokey.
I wonder if there was something in the amber elixir. I’m way more tired than I . . . .
Chapter Eleven
Making Up
Coming out of dreams, for me, is often like clawing up from too far underwater, desperate for air. When part of my mind gets the idea it needs to wake up immediately, it typically introduces a random disaster to expedite the process. Meanwhile, another part likes to sit back and watch the dramatic measures of its alter ego. In any case, that is how I wake up for the first time in the Preserve: both terrified and curious.
And then.
Blue eyes.
My hands instinctively race to my hips.
Pants—check. I’m still dressed. I’m still on top of the bedding. The windows are still full of gauzy moonlight and the blare of revelry. A tiny lamp fizzes yellow from the corner.
And I’m staring into a deep, wide, azure blue.
Milly.
Her face is about two feet from mine.
“You have a perfect nose,” she says matter-of-factly. “Your eyebrows are decent too.”
“Yeah?” I say, stretching. “No love for my poor cheekbones? What time is it?” My watch says 10:55 p.m. “You’re kidding me. I’ve barely slept two hours.”
“Um, try you’ve barely slept twenty-six hours.”
That launches me up. “What the!—The elixir?—”
“Relax,” says Milly, pressing my chest until I fall back onto the bed. “It wasn’t the elixir—that was what we call scotch. You conked out because the thumb scan in customs.”
“What?” I sit up again, exasperated. “Why would customs—”
Milly giggles wickedly and clobbers the side of my head with a pillow. “Would you relax, you blockhead! Nobody is out to get you, Mr. Blake Prose. Josie told me the special customs scan includes an antibody meant to protect agents and dignitaries against certain exotic diseases that have been on the rise in the Territory. There are apparently a few nasty strands of rabies floating around thanks to Duchess Desreta’s crazy blood-minglings. Anyway, the antibody knocks out one in ten folks. I guess you were the lucky minority. You needed the sleep anyway.”
I begin to rise but she pushes me back down. One second I’m on my back, staring at the ceiling, and the next her face is above mine and our eyes are locked again.
“I’m sorry I let you have it back in the cell,” she says, washing me in a topaz sea and a rush of soft words. “Well . . . and I’m sorry I wasn’t clear about all my motives either. And I’m really sorry if I belittled your sense of right and wrong. Buzz was still alive. I almost stabbed a decent, living man. I’m also sorry about . . . well, I didn’t realize about your sister.”
“It’s okay,” I say
. “I’m not sure I trusted my gut about Buzz. And Astrid . . . well, you couldn’t have known about my sis. And I’m sorry for being such a whiner. I picked quite the time to bail on you and start moaning me me me. You were right about my hypocrisy: helping Jenny does matter in the big scheme of things. If I let wrong happen right here, chances are I’ll let it happen in Portland too. And that makes me just a different kind of Infect, doesn’t it? Apathy and selfishness disguised as common sense and defended as self-righteousness. I’m pretty embarrassed about how I behaved, to tell you the truth.”
A mischievous light catches fire in Milly’s eyes. “Does that mean you’re going to kiss me after all?”
I blink. “What?”
“Back in the cell,” she prompts, nuzzling my nose with hers. “I said if we got out you were going to lecture me instead of kissing me. Well, you didn’t lecture me, so why not keep proving me wrong? We survived the dungeon. We found Schlozfield’s trail. We made it into the Territory. What better way to celebrate?”
“Milly,” I say, trying to keep a playful tone, “I can’t kiss you.”
She sits up with a frown. The fire in her eyes dies. “Why not? It’s only a kiss. Are you with someone?”
“No,” I say, sitting up and shaking my head. I open my mouth to continue, but Milly cuts me off.
“I thought you liked me.”
Something about her comment needles me and I throw my hands in the air. “What are you talking about? Of course I like you!”
“But—”
“But what?” I say, deciding it’s my turn to interrupt. “Because most guys would jump at the chance to jump you, and because I don’t, that means I don’t like you? You know, there was a time long ago when that logic would run in reverse. Maybe I don’t want to kiss you because I like you.”
“It’s only a kiss, Blake.”
“Is it? What does that even mean? It’s only a kiss, then it’s only fondling, then it’s only sex.”
“Okay,” she whispers, her eyes a little too bright. “I get it. You’re a slippery-slope guy, some kind of puritan.”
“Milly, come on. Call me a true hedonist, call me a romantic imbecile, but spare me the straw man labels. I can’t kiss you because I can’t bear to indulge anymore in a life of it’s only. I’ve been there, done that. I’ve thought of things as easy and disposable so I could have more, experience more. But I’m sick of more. I’m sick of disposable. That’s what I’m running from. I’m on the adventure of my life, heading west after decades of dreaming. I’ve just met a complicated, intelligent, mysterious woman, and I don’t want to tamp the drama down by giving her ‘only a kiss.’ That would be too easy. That would be too ‘natural.’ What I want is second nature. Maybe it sounds stupid, but I want the strengths of habit that can sustain a life of weight and meaning.”
Milly raises an unconvinced eyebrow. “Aristotle?”
I drop back onto my side and prop myself up on an elbow, impressed. “Among others. You don’t relate?”
Flopping onto the bed, Milly mirrors my pose. She studies me for an uncomfortable minute before confiding, “I can relate to your desire. I’m not sure I can share your conviction. A life of weight and meaning sounds great, but what does that really look like?”
“I guess that’s what two people have to decide before they have a kiss that’s more than just a kiss. As much as the shared experience, I suppose it’s the process of envisioning it that makes the meaning. And that doesn’t supplant or ignore all the natural desires that were there in the beginning. It gives them shape and structure, like taking a swirl of notes and arranging them into a symphony.”
Milly is still watching me, unreadable. Unable to resist, I reach out a finger and lightly tap her nose. “Am I putting you to sleep?”
Her blue eyes blink. Her sprightly mouth whispers no. And then in a lightning strike of arms she whaps the side of my head with a pillow. She laughs and starts bludgeoning me with softness as I try to fight her off. Before I know it, she has my arms pinned and we’re nose to nose.
“How do you manage to be so mysterious and stodgy at the same time?”
“Ummm,” I say, struggling for words as I meditate on her eyes.
“Ummm?” she teases, eyebrows wagging. “Does that mean you’re ready to make cosmic music together?”
I gulp. “Errrr . . . ”
In a whirl, Milly pecks me on the lips, unpins me, grabs a pillow and starts buffeting my raised arms. “Cosmic music!” she cries. “Yeah, right! I just wanted a kiss!”
We’re suddenly a rolling flurry of laughter, yelps, saucy barbs, and dislodged pillow feathers. A moment later I’m chasing her around the room, leaping the bed, dodging thrown boots and socks, threatening the worst tickle torture the west has ever seen. And then I bull over a yellow vase of fake roses on a corner table. It shatters and the plastic flowers spill between us.
Milly skitters to a halt and turns with a dramatic gasp. “Not the roses!”
She throws herself onto her knees and gathers up the flowers, clasping them to her chest in a ragged bouquet. “Why now look, Blake,” she cries, launching into her best Scarlett O’Hara. “Just look! Fetch some water! Or some duct tape! Whatever shall we do? Your passion—your passion has murdered the roses!” Milly begins to swoon.
“Har har,” I say, offering a golf-clap. “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”
“Heartless brute,” sniffs Milly, standing up with her sad bouquet. “Such pent-up passion.”
“Okay, here’s a pet rant,” I say, kneeling to collect the shards of the vase. “That’s not passion, Milly. If an emotion can be pent up, it’s not worthy of the name passion.”
“Oh, really?”
“Yes, really. Listen. If you have money that is invested and earning interest and you really want a piece of land, what do you do? You either withdraw your money and buy what land you can, or you keep your money in the bank until you’ve saved enough to buy the land of your dreams. So which desire was greater? Which desire was more like passion? The desire that led you to withdraw your money and buy a bit of what you wanted in the moment, or the desire that led you to save your money and buy all of what you wanted in the long run?”
“Let’s get back to how this relates to kissing,” says Milly, setting the flowers on the bed and lying down beside them, yawning and stretching like a tabby. “Wait,” she exclaims, brightening. “Was all that about the bank a round-about way of saying want to marry me? Blake, we haven’t even met one another’s parents yet. People will talk.”
“You’re incorrigible,” I laugh, placing the last piece of vase onto the little pile of rubble, and sidling onto a corner of the bed.
Milly’s sassy look softens. “I hear what you’re saying. Delayed gratification is a big part of true passion. I agree.”
“You do?”
“Of course. But I still think a kiss can be just a kiss.”
I shake my head. “I think, my dear, you’ve overlooked one key factor in our little argument.”
“And what is that?”
“The fact that you kiss me, but I kiss you.”
Milly’s eyes widen. “See? Your passion is driving you insane. You can’t even make sense any more.”
She could use a good thwack with a pillow. But she has wisely sequestered them all behind her. “In other words,” I continue, ignoring her sass, “you may be able to enjoy a kiss as a moment, but I may only be able to experience it as a promise. I may only inspire you to desire pleasure’s consumption, but you might inspire me to long for joy’s consummation. I may only inspire you to desire a taste of connection, but you might inspire me to desire a feast.”
Milly’s eyes have closed. A warm smile covers her face. “Do you?” she asks.
“Do I what?”
“Desire a feast?”
“Who doesn’t? My problem isn’t that we want too much. It’s that we’re willing to settle for too little. I desire a feast. That’s why I’m wary of appetizers.”
Milly’s eyes crack open. “You sure take these things seriously.”
I shrug. “Joy is a serious business.”
“Blake?”
“Hmm?”
“If I can impress you right now will you give me an innocent little kiss on the cheek?”
That catches me by surprise and I bark a laugh. “I don’t know,” I reply, warily. “How do you propose to impress me?”
“A definition for passion came to mind. I think you might like it.”
I pause to consider. Could a definition of passion impress me? It’s unlikely, but possible. “Okay,” I say. “Shoot.”
“Passion,” says Milly, stretching again, her midriff showing, “is a long obedience in the same direction.”
I’ve got to hand it to her. That’s not bad. Stolen, but not bad.
Her eyebrows arch with impish expectancy. “Well?”
Outside, a group of folks whoop and a volley of shots fire.
I lean over and kiss Milly on the cheek, probably far too close to the mouth.
Chapter Twelve
Naps and News
After Milly and I discuss the morrow’s predeparture plans—when I’ll go search for my brother’s courier at the stables and she’ll attend a speech by the Mayor—she goes to bed and I decide to go exploring. I’ve never slept for more than ten hours before, and twenty-six has left me feeling rather bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.