Warm Bodies - Chapter 18

step three

living

Nora Greene is in the square by the Stadium’s main gate, standing with General Rosso in front of a huge crowd. She is a little nervous. She wishes she had smoked before coming out today, but it seemed inappropriate somehow. She wanted a clear head for this occasion.

‘Okay, folks,’ Rosso begins, straining his reedy voice to reach the back of the assembly spilling out into the far streets. ‘We’ve prepared you for this as best we could, but I know it may still be a little . . . uncomfortable.’

Not everyone in the Stadium is here, but everyone who wants to be is. The rest are hiding behind locked doors with guns drawn, but Nora hopes they’ll come out eventually to see what’s going on.

‘Let me just assure you once again that you are not in any danger,’ Rosso continues. ‘The situation has changed.’

Rosso looks at Nora and nods.

The guards pull open the gate, and Nora shouts, ‘Come on in, guys!’

One by one, still clumsy but walking more or less straight, they wander into the Stadium. The Half-Dead. The Nearly-Living. The crowd murmurs anxiously and contracts as the zombies form a loose line in front of the gate.

‘These are just a few of them,’ Nora says, moving forward to address the people. ‘There are more out there every day. They’re trying to cure themselves. They’re trying to cure the plague, and we need to do whatever we can to help.’

‘Like what?’ someone shouts.

‘We’re going to study it,’ Rosso says. ‘Get close to it, knead it and wring it until answers start to emerge. I know it’s vague, but we have to start somewhere.’

‘Talk to them,’ Nora says. ‘I know it’s scary at first, but look them in the eyes. Tell them your name and ask them theirs.’

‘Don’t worry,’ Rosso says. ‘Each one will have a guard assigned to them at all times, but try to believe that they won’t hurt you. We have to entertain the idea that this can work.’

Nora steps back to let the crowd come forward. Cautiously, they do. They approach the zombies, while wary guards keep rifles trained. For their part, the zombies are handling this awkward experience with admirable patience. They just stand there and wait, some of them attempting affable grins while trying to ignore the laser dots jittering on their foreheads. Nora moves to join the people, crossing her fingers behind her back and hoping for the best.

‘Hi there.’

She turns towards the voice. One of the zombies is watching her. He steps forwards from the line and gives her a smile. His lips are thin and slightly mangled under a short blond beard, but they, along with countless other wounds on his body, appear to be healing.

‘Um . . . hello . . .’ Nora says, glancing up and down his considerable height. He must be well over six feet. He’s a little heavyset, but his muscular arms strain his tattered shirt. His perfectly bald head gleams like a pale grey pearl.

‘I’m Nora,’ she says, tugging at her curls.

‘My name is Mm . . . arcus,’ he says, his voice a velvety rumble. ‘And you’re . . . the most beautiful woman . . . I’ve ever seen.’

Nora giggles and twirls her hair faster. ‘Oh my.’ She reaches out a hand. ‘Nice to meet you . . . Marcus.’

The boy is in the airport. The hallways are dark, but he’s not scared. He runs through the shadowed food court, past all the unlit signs and mouldy leftovers, half-finished beers and cold pad thai. He hears the rattle of a solitary skeleton wandering in an adjacent corridor and quickly changes course, darting around the corner without pausing. The Boneys are slow now. The moment the boy’s dad and stepmom first came back here, something happened to them all. Now they wander aimlessly like bees in winter. They stand motionless, obsolete equipment waiting to be replaced.

The boy is carrying a box. It’s empty now, but his arms are tired. He runs into the connecting overpass and stops to get his bearings.

‘Alex!’

The boy’s sister appears behind him. She’s carrying a box, too. She has bits of tape stuck all over her fingers.

‘All done, Joan?’

‘All done!’

‘Okay. Let’s go get more.’

They run down the corridor. As they hit the conveyer, the power comes back on and the belt lurches under their feet. The boy and the girl are running barefoot at the speed of light, flying down the corridor like loping deer while the morning sun drifts up behind them. At the end of the corridor they nearly collide with another group of kids, all holding boxes.

‘All done,’ the kids say.

‘Okay,’ Alex says, and they run together. Some of the kids still wear tatters. Some of them are still grey. But most of them are alive. The kids lacked the instinctual programming of the adults. They had to be taught how to do everything. How to kill easily, how to wander aimlessly, how to sway and groan and properly rot away. But now the classes have stopped. No one is teaching them, and like perennial bulbs dried up and waiting in the winter earth, they are bursting back to life all on their own.

The fluorescent lights flicker and buzz, and the sound of a record needle scratches onto the speakers overhead. Some enterprising soul has hijacked the airport PA system. Sweet, swooning strings swell into the gloom, and Francis Albert Sinatra’s voice echoes lonely in the empty halls.

Something wonderful happens in summer . . . when the sky is a heavenly blue . . .

The dusty speakers pop and sizzle, short out and distort. The record skips. But it’s the first time in years this place’s inert air has been stirred by music.

As the kids run to the Arrivals gate to get fresh boxes, fresh rolls of tape, they pass a pale figure shambling down the hall. The zombie glances at the Living children as they run past, but doesn’t pursue them. Her appetite has been waning lately. She doesn’t feel the hunger like she used to. She watches the kids disappear around the corner, then continues on her way. She doesn’t know where she’s going exactly, but there’s a white glow at the end of this hallway, and it looks nice. She stumbles towards it.

Something wonderful happens in summer . . . when the moon makes you feel all aglow . . . You fall in love, you fall in love . . . you want the whole world to know . . .

She emerges into the waiting area of Gate 12, flooded with bright morning sunlight. Something in here is different than before. On the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the runways, someone has taped small photos to the glass. Side by side and stacked about five squares high, they form a strip that runs all the way to the end of the room.

Something wonderful happens in summer . . . and it happens to only a few. But when it does . . . yes when it does . . .

The zombie approaches the photos warily. She stands in front of them, staring with mouth slightly agape.

A girl climbing an apple tree. A kid spraying his brother with a hose. A woman playing a cello. An elderly couple gently touching. A boy with a dog. A boy crying. A newborn deep in sleep. And one older photo, creased and faded: a family at a water park. A man, a woman and a little blonde girl, smiling and squinting in the sun.

The zombie stares at this mysterious and sprawling collage. The sunlight glints off the name tag on her chest, so bright it hurts her eyes. For hours she stands there, motionless. Then she takes in a slow breath. Her first in months. Dangling limply at her sides, her fingers twitch to the music.

‘R.’

I open my eyes. I am lying on my back, arms folded behind my head, looking up at a flawless summer sky. ‘Yes?’

Julie stirs on the red blanket, scooting a little closer to me. ‘Do you think we’ll ever see jets up there again?’

I think for a moment. I watch the little molecules swim in my eye fluids. ‘Yes.’

‘Really?’

‘Maybe not us. But I think the kids will.’

‘How far do you think we can take this?’

‘Take what?’

‘Rebuilding everything. Even if we can completely end the plague . . . do you think we’ll ever get things back to the way they were?’

A lone starling swoops across the distant sky, and I imagine a white jet trail sketching out behind it, like a florid signature on a love note. ‘I hope not,’ I say.

We are silent for a while. We are lying in the grass. Behind us, the battered old Mercedes waits patiently, whispering to us in sizzles and pings as its engine cools. Mercey, Julie named it. Who is this woman lying next to me, so overflowing with vitae she can grant life to a car?

‘R,’ she says.

‘Yeah.’

‘Do you remember your name yet?’

On this hillside on the edge of a crumbled freeway, the bugs and birds in the grass perform a tiny simulation of traffic noise. I listen to their nostalgic symphony, and shake my head. ‘No.’

‘You could give yourself one, you know. Just pick one. Whatever you want.’

I consider this. I thumb through the index of names in my brain. Complex etymologies, languages, ancient meanings passed down through generations of cultural traditions. But I’m a new thing. A fresh canvas. I can choose what history I build my future on, and I choose a new one.

‘My name is R,’ I say with a little shrug.

She twists her head to look at me. I can feel her sun-yellow eyes on the side of my face, as if trying to tunnel into my ear and explore my brain. ‘You don’t want to get your old life back?’

‘No.’ I sit up, folding my arms over my knees and looking down into the valley. ‘I want this one.’

Julie smiles. She sits up with me and faces what I’m facing.

The airport spreads out below us like a thrown gauntlet. A challenge. There was no global transformation after the skeletons surrendered. Some of us are on our way back to life, some are still Dead. Some are still lingering here at the airport, or in other cities, countries, continents, wandering and waiting. But to fix a problem that spans the globe, an airport seems like a good place to start.

We have big plans. Oh yes. We’re fumbling in the dark, but at least we’re in motion. Everyone is working now; Julie and I are just pausing for a moment to enjoy the view, because it’s a beautiful day. The sky is blue. The grass is green. The sun is warm on our skin. We smile, because this is how we save the world. We will not let Earth become a tomb, a mass grave spinning through space. We will exhume ourselves. We will fight the curse and break it. We will cry and bleed and lust and love, and we will cure death. We will be the cure. Because we want it.

Categories: Warm Bodies

Warm Bodies - Chapter 17

‘Julie,’ I say, bracing to confess my final sin. ‘I need . . . to tell you . . .’

BANG.

The Stadium’s field halogens flare like suns and midnight becomes daylight. I can see every pore in Julie’s face.

‘What the hell?’ she gasps, whipping her head around. A piercing alarm further shatters the night’s stillness, and then we see it: the Jumbotron is aglow. Hanging from the upper reaches of the open roof like a tablet descending from Heaven, the screen plays a blocky animation of a quarterback running from what appears to be a zombie, arms outstretched and clutching. The screen blinks between this and a word that I think might be:

BREACH

‘R . . .’ Julie says, horrified, ‘did you eat someone?’

I look at her desperately. ‘No ch . . . no choi . . . no choice,’ I stutter, my diction collapsing in my state of panic. ‘Guard . . . stopped me. Didn’t . . . mean. Didn’t . . . want.’

She presses her lips together, her eyes boring into me, then gives a single shake of her head as if banishing one thought, committing to another. ‘Okay. Then we need to get inside. God damn it, R.’

We run into the house and she slams the door. Nora is at the top of the stairs. ‘Where have you guys been? What’s going on out there?’

‘It’s a breach,’ Julie says. ‘Zombie in the Stadium.’

‘You mean him?’

The disappointment in her reply makes me wince. ‘Yes and no.’

We hurry into Julie’s bedroom and she turns out the lights. We all sit on the floor on the piles of laundry, and for a while nobody speaks. We just sit and listen to the sounds. Guards running and shouting. Gunfire. Our own heavy breathing.

‘Don’t worry,’ Julie whispers to Nora, but I know it’s for me. ‘It won’t spread much. Those shots were probably Security taking them out already.’

‘Are we in the clear, then?’ Nora asks. ‘Will R be okay?’

Julie looks at me. Her face is grim. ‘Even if they think the breach started from a natural death, that guard obviously didn’t eat himself. Security will know there’s at least one zombie unaccounted for.’

Nora follows Julie’s eyes to mine, and I can almost imagine my face flushing. ‘It was you?’ she asks, straining for neutrality.

‘Didn’t . . . mean. Was . . . going . . . kill me.’

She says nothing. Her face is blank.

I meet her stare, willing her to feel my crushing remorse. ‘It was my last,’ I say, straining to force language back into my idiot tongue. ‘No matter what. Swear to the skymouth.’

A few agonising moments pass. Then Nora slowly nods, and addresses Julie. ‘So we need to get him out of here.’

‘They shut everything down for breaches. All the doors will be locked and guarded. They might even shut the roof if they get scared enough.’

‘So what the hell are we supposed to do?’

Julie shrugs, and the gesture looks so bleak on her, so wrong. ‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘Once again, I don’t know.’

Julie and Nora fall sleep. They fight it for hours, trying to come up with a plan to save me, but eventually they succumb. I lie on a pile of pants and stare up at the starry green ceiling. Not so easy, Mr Lennon. Even if you try.

It seems trivial now, a thin silver lining on a vast black storm cloud, but I think I’m learning to read. As I look up at the phosphorescent galaxy, letters come together and form words. Stringing them into full sentences is still beyond me, but I savour the sensation of those little symbols clicking together and bursting like soap bubbles of sound. If I ever see my wife again . . . I’ll at least be able to read her name tag.

The hours ooze by. It’s long after midnight, but bright as noon outside. The halogens ram their white light against the house, squeezing in through cracks in the window shades. My ears tune to the sounds around me. The girls’ breathing. Their small shifting movements. And then, sometime around two in the morning, a phone rings.

Julie comes awake, gets up on one elbow. In some distant room of the house, the phone rings again. She throws off her blankets and stands up. Strange to see her from this angle, towering over me instead of cowering under. I’m the one who needs protecting now. One mistake, one brief lapse of my new-found judgement – that’s all it took to unravel everything. What a massive responsibility, living as a moral being.

The phone keeps ringing. Julie walks out of the bedroom and I follow her through the dark, echoing house. We step into what appears to be an office. There is a large desk covered in papers and blueprints, and on the walls various kinds of telephones are screwed to the Sheetrock, different brands and styles, all from different eras.

‘They rerouted the phone system,’ Julie explains. ‘It’s more like an intercom now. We have direct lines to all the important areas.’

Each phone has a name-tag sticker stuck below it, with the location Sharpied onto the blank. Hi, my name is:

GARDENS

KITCHENS

WAREHOUSE

GARAGE

ARMOURY

CORRIDOR 2

GOLDMAN DOME

AIG ARENA

LEHMAN FIELD

And so on.

The phone that’s ringing, a pea-green rotary dialler covered in dust, is labelled:

OUTSIDE

Julie looks at the phone. She looks at me. ‘This is weird. That line is from the phones in the abandoned outer districts. Since we got walkie-talkies nobody uses it any more.’

The phone clangs its bells, loud and insistent. I can’t believe Nora is still asleep.

Slowly, Julie picks up the receiver and puts it to her ear. ‘Hello?’ She waits. ‘What? I can’t under—’ Her brow furrows in concentration. Then her eyes widen. ‘Oh.’ They narrow. ‘You. Yeah, this is Julie, what do you—’ She waits. ‘Fine. Yeah, he’s right here.’

She holds the phone out to me. ‘It’s for you.’

I stare at it. ‘What?’

‘It’s your friend. That fat fuck from the airport.’

I grab the phone. I put the earpiece to my mouth. Julie shakes her head and flips it around for me. Into the receiver I breathe a stunned, ‘M?’

His deep rumble crackles in my ear. ‘Hey . . . lover boy.’

‘What’s . . . Where are you?’

‘Out in . . . city. Didn’t know . . . what would get with . . . phone, but had . . . to try. You’re . . . okay?’

‘Okay but . . . trapped. Stadium . . . locked down.’

‘Shit.’

‘What’s . . . going on? Out there.’

There is silence for a moment. ‘R,’ he says. ‘Dead . . . still coming. More. From airport. Other places. Lots . . . of us now.’

I’m silent. The phone wanders away from my ear. Julie looks at me expectantly.

‘Hello?’ M says.

‘Sorry. I’m here.’

‘Well, we’re . . . here. What now? What should . . . do?’

I rest the phone on my shoulder and look at the wall, at nothing. I look at the papers and plans on General Grigio’s desk. His strategies are all gibberish to me. I have no doubt it’s all important – food allocation, construction plans, weapon distribution, combat tactics. He’s trying to keep everyone alive, and that’s good. That’s foundational. But like Julie said, there must be something even deeper than that. The earth under that foundation. Without that firm ground, it’s all going to collapse, over and over, no matter how many bricks he lays. This is what I’m interested in. The earth under the bricks.

‘What’s going on?’ Julie asks. ‘What’s he saying?’

As I look into her anxious face, I feel the twitch in my guts, the young, eager voice in my head.

It’s happening, corpse. Whatever you and Julie triggered, it’s moving. A good disease, a virus that causes life! Do you see this, you dumb fucking monster? It’s inside you! You have to get out of these walls and spread it!

I angle the phone towards Julie so she can listen. She leans in close.

‘M,’ I say.

‘Yeah.’

‘Tell Julie.’

‘What?’

‘Tell Julie . . . what’s happening.’

There’s a pause. ‘Changing,’ he says. ‘Lots of us . . . changing. Like R.’

Julie looks at me and I can almost sense her neck hairs standing on end. ‘It’s not just you?’ she says, moving away from the phone. ‘This . . . reviving thing?’ Her voice is small and tentative, like a little girl poking her head out of a bomb shelter after years of life in the dark. It almost quivers with tight-leashed hope. ‘Are you saying the plague is healing?’

I nod. ‘We’re . . . fixing things.’

‘But how?’

‘Don’t know. But we have to . . . do more of it. Out there . . . where M is. “Outside”.’

Her excitement cools, hardens. ‘So we have to leave.’

I nod.

‘Both of us?’

‘Both,’ M’s voice crackles in the earpiece like an eaves-dropping mother. ‘Julie . . . part of it.’

She eyes me dubiously. ‘You want me. Skinny little human girl. Out there in the wild, running with a pack of zombies?’

I nod.

‘Do you grasp how insane that is?’

I nod.

She is silent for a moment, looking at the floor. ‘Do you really think you can keep me safe?’ she asks me. ‘Out there, with them?’

My incurable honesty makes me hesitate, and Julie frowns.

‘Yes,’ M answers for me, exasperated. ‘He can. And I’ll . . . help.’

I nod quickly. ‘M will help. The others . . . will help. Besides,’ I add with a faint smile, ‘you can . . . keep yourself safe.’

She shrugs nonchalantly. ‘I know. I just wanted to see what you’d say.’

‘So you’ll . . . ?’

‘I’ll go with you.’

‘You’re . . . sure?’

Her eyes are distant and hard. ‘I had to bury my mom’s empty dress. I’ve been waiting for this a long time.’

I nod. I take a deep breath.

‘The only problem with your plan,’ she continues, ‘is that you seem to be forgetting you ate someone last night, and this place is going to stay clamped shut until they find and kill you.’

‘Should we . . . attack?’ M says. ‘Get you . . . out?’

I put the phone back to my ear, gripping the receiver hard. ‘No,’ I tell him.

‘Have . . . army. Where’s . . . battle?’

‘Don’t know. Not here. These are . . . people.’

‘Well?’

I look at Julie. She looks at the ground and rubs her forehead.

‘Just wait,’ I tell M.

‘Wait?’

‘A little longer. We’ll . . . figure it out.’

‘Before . . . they kill you?’

‘Hopefully.’

A long, dubious silence. Then: ‘Hurry up.’

Julie and I stay up for the rest of the night. In our rain-wet clothes we sit on the floor in the cold living room and don’t say a word. Eventually my eyes sag shut, and in this strange calm, in what may be my last few hours on Earth, my mind creates a dream for me. Crisp and clear, alive with colour, unfolding like a time-lapse rose in the sparkling darkness.

In this dream, my dream, I am floating down a river on my housejet’s severed tail fin. I am lying on my back under the blue midnight, watching the stars drift by above me. The river is uncharted, even in this age of maps and satellites, and I have no idea where it leads. The air is still. The night is warm. I’ve brought only two provisions: a box of pad thai and Perry’s book. Thick. Ancient. Bound in leather. I open it to the middle. An unfinished sentence in some language I’ve never seen, and beyond it, nothing. An epic tome of empty pages, blank white and waiting. I shut the book and lay my head down on the cool steel. The pad thai tickles my nose, sweet and spicy and strong. I feel the river widening, gaining force.

I hear the waterfall.

‘R.’

My eyes open and I sit up. Julie is cross-legged next to me, watching me with grim amusement.

‘Having some nice dreams?’

‘Not . . . sure,’ I mumble, rubbing my eyes.

‘Did you happen to dream up any solutions to our little problem?’

I shake my head.

‘Yeah, me neither.’ She glances at the wall clock and bunches her lips ruefully. ‘I’m supposed to be at the community centre in a few hours to do story time. David and Marie are going to cry when I don’t show up.’

David and Marie. I repeat the names in my head, savouring their contours. I would let Trina eat my whole leg for the chance to see those kids again. To hear a few more clumsy syllables tumble from their mouths before I die. ‘What are . . . you reading them?’

She looks out of the window at the city, its every crack and flaw brought into sharp relief by the blinding white light. ‘I’ve been trying to get them into the Redwall books. I figured all those songs and feasts and courageous warrior mice would be a nice escape from the nightmare they’re growing up in. Marie keeps asking for books about zombies and I keep telling her I can’t read non-fiction for story time but . . .’ She notices the look on my face and trails off. ‘Are you okay?’

I nod.

‘Are you thinking about your kids at the airport?’

I hesitate, then nod.

She reaches out and touches my knee, looking into my stinging eyes. ‘R? I know things look bleak right now, but listen. You can’t quit. As long as you’re still breath— sorry, as long as you’re still moving, it’s not over. Okay?’

I nod.

‘Okay? Fucking say it, R.’

‘Okay.’

She smiles.

‘TWO. EIGHT. TWENTY-FOUR.’

We jolt away from each other as a speaker in the ceiling blares out a series of numbers followed by a shrill alert tone.

‘This is Colonel Rosso with a community-wide notice,’ the speaker says. ‘The security breach has been contained. The infected officer has been neutralised, with no further casualties reported.’

I release a deep breath.

‘However . . .’

‘Shit,’ Julie whispers.

‘. . . the original source of the breach remains at large within our walls. Security patrols will now begin a door-to-door search of every building in the Stadium. Since we don’t know where this thing might be hiding, everyone should come out of their houses and congregate in a public area. Donot confine yourself in any small spaces.’ Rosso pauses to cough. ‘Sorry about this, folks. We’ll get it taken care of, just . . . sit tight.’

There’s a click, and the PA goes quiet.

Julie jumps to her feet and storms into the bedroom. She pulls open the blinds, letting the floodlights burst through the window. ‘Rise and shine, Miss Greene, we’re out of time. Do you remember any old exits in the wall tunnels? Wasn’t there a fire escape somewhere by the sky box? R, can you climb a ladder yet?’

‘Wait, what?’ Nora croaks, trying to shield her eyes. ‘What’s happening?’

‘According to R’s friend, maybe the end of this shitty undead world, if we don’t get killed first.’

Nora finally comes awake. ‘Sorry, what?’

‘I’ll tell you later. They just announced a sweep. We have maybe ten minutes. We need to find . . .’ Her voice fades and I watch her mouth move. The shapes her lips make for each word, the flick of tongue against glistening teeth. She is holding onto hope but my grip is slipping. She twists at her hair as she talks, her golden tresses stiff and matted and in need of a wash.

The spicy smell of her shampoo, flowers and herbs and cinnamon dancing with her natural oils. She would never say what brand she used. She liked to keep her scent a mystery.

‘R!’

Julie and Nora are staring at me, waiting. I open my mouth to speak, but I have no words. And then the front door of the house bangs open so hard it resonates through the metal walls all the way to where we’re standing. Heavy, booted footfalls pound the stairs.

‘Oh Jesus,’ Julie says in a panicked breath. She herds us out of the room and into the hallway bathroom. ‘Get his makeup back on,’ she hisses to Nora, and slams the door shut.

As Nora fumbles with her compact and tries to re-rouge my rain-stained face, I hear two voices out in the hall.

‘Dad, what’s going on? Did they find the zombie?’

‘Not yet, but they will. Have you seen anything?’

‘No, I’ve been here.’

‘Are you alone?’

‘Yeah, I’ve been here since last night.’

‘Why is the bathroom light on?’

Footsteps pound towards us.

‘Wait, Dad! Wait a second!’ She lowers her voice a little. ‘Nora and Archie are in there.’

‘Why did you just tell me you’re here alone? This is not a time for games, Julie, this is not a time for hide-and-seek.’

‘They’re . . . you know . . . in there.’

There is the briefest of hesitations. ‘Nora and Archie,’ he shouts at the door, his voice compressed and extremely loud. ‘As you just heard on the intercom there is a breach in progress. I cannot begin to imagine a worse time for lovemaking. Come out immediately.’

Nora straddles me against the sink and buries my face in her cleavage just as Grigio yanks the door open.

‘Dad!’ Julie squeals, flashing Nora a quick look as she jumps off me.

‘Come out immediately,’ Grigio says.

We step out of the bathroom. Nora straightens her clothes and pats down her hair, doing a pretty good job of looking embarrassed. I just look at Grigio, unapologetic, limbering up my diction for its first and probably last big test. He looks back at me with that taut, angular face, peering into my eyes. There are less than two feet between us.

‘Hello, Archie,’ he says.

‘Hello, sir.’

‘You and Miss Greene are in love?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘That is wonderful. Have you discussed marriage?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Why delay? Why deliberate? These are the last days. Where do you live, Archie?’

‘Goldman . . . Field.’

‘Goldman Dome?’

‘Yes, sir. Sorry.’

‘What work do you do at Goldman Dome.’

‘Gardens.’

‘Does that work allow you and Nora to feed your children?’

‘We don’t have children, sir.’

‘Children replace us when we die. When you have children you will need to feed them. I’m told things are bad at Goldman Dome. I’m told you are running out of everything. It’s a dark world we live in, isn’t it, Archie?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘We do the best we can with what God gives us. If God gives us stones when we ask for bread, we will sharpen our teeth and eat stones.’

‘Or make . . . our own bread.’

Grigio smiles. ‘Are you wearing make-up, Archie?’

Grigio stabs me.

I didn’t even notice the knife coming out of its sheath. The five-inch blade sinks into my shoulder and pokes out the other side, pinning me to the drywall. I don’t feel it and I don’t flinch. The wound doesn’t bleed.

‘Julie!’ Grigio roars, stepping back from me and drawing his pistol, his eyes wild in their deep sockets. ‘Did you bring the Dead into my city? Into my home? Did you let the Dead touch you?’

‘Dad, listen to me!’ Julie says, holding her hands out towards him. ‘R is different. He’s changing.’

‘The Dead don’t change, Julie! They are not people, they are things!’

‘How do we know that? Just because they don’t talk to us and tell us about their lives? We don’t understand their thoughts so we assume they don’t have any?’

‘We’ve done tests! The Dead have never shown any signs of self-awareness or emotional response!’

‘Neither have you, Dad! Jesus Christ – R saved my life! He protected me and brought me home! He’s human! And there are more like him!’

‘No,’ Grigio says, abruptly calm. His hands stop wavering and the gun steadies, inches from my face.

‘Dad, please listen to me? Please?’ She takes a step closer. She is trying to stay cool but I can tell she is terrified. ‘When I was at the airport, something happened. We sparked something, and whatever it is, it’s spreading. The Dead are coming back to life, they’re leaving their hives and trying to change what they are, and we have to find a way to help. Imagine if we could cure the plague, Dad! Imagine if we could clean up this mess and start over!’

Grigio shakes his head. I can see his jaw muscles tightening under his waxy skin. ‘Julie, you are young. You don’t understand our world. We can stay alive and we can kill the things that want to kill us, but there is no grand solution. We searched for years and never found one, and now our time is up. The world is over. It can’t be cured, it can’t be salvaged, it can’t be saved.’

‘Yes it can!’ Julie screams at him, losing all composure. ‘Who decided life has to be a nightmare? Who wrote that fucking rule? We can fix it, we’ve just never tried before! We’ve always been too busy and selfish and scared!’

Grigio grits his teeth. ‘You are a dreamer. You are a child. You are your mother.’

‘Dad, listen!’

‘No.’

He cocks the gun and presses it against my forehead, directly onto Julie’s Band-Aid. Here it comes. Here is M’s ever-present irony. My inevitable death, ignoring me all those years when I wished for it daily, arriving only after I’ve decided I want to live for ever. I close my eyes and brace myself.

A spatter of blood warms my face – but it’s not mine. My eyes flash open just in time to see Julie’s knife glancing off Grigio’s hand. The gun flies out of his grip and fires when it hits the floor, then again and again as the recoil knocks it against the walls of the narrow hall like a ricocheting Superball. Everyone drops for cover, and the gun finally spins to rest touching Nora’s toes. In the deafened silence she stares down at it, wide-eyed, then looks at the general. Cradling his gashed hand, he lunges. Nora snatches the gun off the floor and aims it at his face. He freezes. He flexes his jaw and inches forward as if about to pounce anyway. But then Nora pops out the spent ammo clip, whips a fresh one out of her purse, shoves it into the gun and chambers a round, all one liquid motion without ever taking her eyes off his. Grigio steps back.

‘Go,’ she says, her eyes flicking to Julie. ‘Try to get out somehow. Just try.’

Julie grabs my hand. We back out of the room while her dad stands there vibrating with rage.

‘Goodbye, Dad,’ Julie says softly. We turn and run down the stairs.

‘Julie!’ Grigio howls, and the sound reminds me so much of another sound, a hollow blast from a broken hunting horn, that I shiver in my damp shirt.

We are running. Julie stays in front, leading us through the cramped streets. Behind us, angry shouts ring out from the direction of Julie’s house. Then the squawk of walkie-talkies. We are running, and we are being chased. Julie’s leadership is less than decisive. We zigzag and backtrack. We are rodents scrambling in a cage. We run as the looming rooftops spin around us.

Then we hit the wall. A sheer concrete barrier laced with scaffolding, ladders and walkways to nowhere. All the bleachers are gone, but one staircase remains; a dark hallway beckons to us from the top. We run towards it. Everything on either side of the staircase has been stripped away, leaving it floating in space like Jacob’s ladder.

A shout flies up from the ground below just as we reach the opening. ‘Miss Grigio!’

We turn and look down. Colonel Rosso is at the bottom of the steps, surrounded by a retinue of Security officers. He is the only one without his gun drawn.

‘Please don’t run!’ he calls to Julie.

Julie pulls me into the hallway and we sprint into the dark.

This inner space is clearly under construction, but most of it remains exactly as it was abandoned. Hot-dog stands, souvenir kiosks and overpriced pretzel booths sit cold and lifeless in the shadows. The shouts of the Security team echo behind us. I wait for the dead end that will halt us, that will force me to turn and face the inevitable.

The hallway ends. In the faint light creeping through holes in the concrete, I see a sign on the door:

EMERGENCY EXIT

Julie runs faster, dragging me behind her. We slam into the door and it flies open—

‘Oh shhh—’ she gasps and whips around, grabbing onto the door frame as one foot dangles out over an eight-storey drop.

Cold wind whistles around the doorway, where torn stumps of a fire escape protrude from the wall.

Birds flutter past. Below, the city spreads out like a vast cemetery, high-rises like headstones.

‘Miss Grigio!’

Rosso and his officers roll to a stop about twenty feet behind us. Rosso is breathing hard, clearly too old for hot pursuit.

I look out the door at the ground below. I look at Julie. I look down again, then back at Julie.

‘Julie,’ I say.

‘What?’

‘Are you sure you want . . . to come with me?’

She looks at me, straining to force breath through her rapidly constricting bronchial tubes. There are questions in her eyes, maybe doubts, surely fears, but she nods. ‘Yes.’

‘Please stop running,’ Rosso groans, leaning over, hands on his knees. ‘This is not the way.’

‘I have to go,’ she says.

‘Miss Cabernet. Julie. You can’t leave your father here. You’re all he has left.’

She bites her lower lip, but her eyes are steely. ‘Dad’s dead, Rosy. He just hasn’t started rotting yet.’

She grabs my hand, the one I shattered on M’s face, and squeezes so hard I think she might break it even further. She looks up at me. ‘Well, R?’

I pull her to me. I wrap my arms around her and hold tight enough to fuse our genes. We are face to face and I almost kiss her, but instead I take two steps backwards, and we fall through the doorway.

We plummet like a shot bird. My arms and legs encircle her, almost completely enveloping her tiny body. We crash through a roof overhang, a support bar tears into my thigh, my head bounces off a beam, we tangle in a cellphone banner and rip it in half, and then, finally, we hit the ground. A chorus of cracks and crunches shoots through me as my back greets the earth and Julie’s weight flattens my chest. She rolls off me, choking and gasping for breath, and I lie there staring up at the sky. Here we are.

Julie raises herself on hands and knees and fumbles her inhaler out of her bag, takes a shot and holds it, supporting herself against the ground with one arm. When she can breathe again she crouches over me with terror in her eyes. Her face eclipses the hazy sun. ‘R!’ she whispers. ‘Hey!’

As slow and shaky as the day I first rose from the dead, I lift myself upright and hobble to my feet. Various bones grind and crackle throughout my body. I smile, and in my breathy, tuneless tenor, I sing, ‘You make . . . me feel so young . . .’

She bursts out laughing and hugs me. I feel the pressure snap a few joints back into place.

She looks up at the open doorway. Rosso is framed in it, looking down at us. Julie waves to him, and he disappears back into the Stadium with a swiftness that suggests pursuit. I try not to begrudge the man his paradigm – perhaps in his world, orders are orders.

So Julie and I run into the city. With each step I feel my body stabilising, bones realigning, tissues stiffening around cracks to keep me from falling apart. I’ve never felt anything like this before. Is this some form of healing?

We dash through the empty streets, past countless rusty cars, drifts of dead leaves and debris. We violate one-way streets. We blow stop signs. Ahead of us: the edge of town, the high grassy hill where the city opens up and the freeway leads elsewhere. Behind us: the relentless roar of assault vehicles gunning out of the Stadium gate. This cannot stand! declare the steel-jawed mouths of the rule makers. Find those little embers and stomp them out! With these howls at our backs, we crest the hill.

We are face to face with an army.

They stand in the grassy field next to the freeway ramps. Hundreds of them. They mill around in the grass, staring at the sky or at nothing, their grey, sunken faces oddly serene. But when the front line sees us they freeze, then pivot in our direction. Their focus spreads in a wave until the entire mob is standing at attention. Julie gives me an amused glance as if to say, Really? Then a disturbance ripples through the ranks, and a burly, bald, six-foot-five zombie pushes his way into the open.

‘M,’ I say.

‘R,’ he says. He gives Julie a quick nod. ‘Julie.’

‘Hiiii . . .’ she says, leaning into me warily.

Our pursuers’ tyres screech and we hear a rev of engines. They are very close. M steps up to the peak of the hill and the mob follows him. Julie huddles close to me as they sweep in around us, absorbing us into their odorous army, their rank ranks. It could be my imagination or a trick of the light, but M’s skin looks less ashen than usual. His partial lips seem more expressive. And for the first time since I’ve known him, his neatly trimmed beard is not stained with blood.

The trucks barrel towards us, but as the swarm of the Dead rises into view on the hilltop, the vehicles slow down, then grumble to a stop. There are only four of them. Two Hummer H2s, a Chevy Tahoe and an Escalade, all spray-painted military olive drab. The hulking machines look small and pitiful from where we stand. The Tahoe’s door opens, and Colonel Rosso slowly emerges. Clutching his rifle, he scans the row upon row of swaying bodies, weighing odds and strategies. His eyes are wide behind his thick glasses. He swallows, then lowers his gun.

‘I’m sorry, Rosy,’ Julie calls down to him, and points at the Stadium. ‘I can’t do it any more, okay? It’s a fucking lie. We think we’re surviving in there but we’re not.’

Rosso is looking hard at the zombies arrayed around him, peering into their faces. He’s old enough that he’s probably been around since the beginning of all this. He knows what the Dead are supposed to look like, and he can tell when something’s different, no matter how subtle, subliminal, subcutaneous.

‘You can’t save the world by yourself!’ he yells. ‘Come back and we can discuss this!’

‘I’m not by myself,’ Julie says, and gestures at the forest of zombies swaying around her. ‘I’m with these guys.’

Rosso’s lips twist in a tortured grimace, then he jumps in his vehicle, slams the door, and revs back towards the Stadium with the other three right behind. A brief respite, a quick suck of breath, because I know they aren’t quitting, they can’t quit, they’re just gathering their strength, their weapons, their brute-force determination.

Categories: Warm Bodies

Warm Bodies - Chapter 16

The Orchard, as it turns out, is not part of the Stadium’s farming system. It’s their one and only pub, or at least the closest thing they have to a pub in this new bastion of prohibition. Reaching its entrance requires an arduous vertical journey through the Stadium’s Escheresque cityscape. First, we climb four flights of stairs in a ramshackle housing tower while the residents glare at us through their cracked apartment doors. This is followed by a vertiginous crossing to a neighbouring building – boys on the ground try to look up Nora’s skirt as we wobble over a wire-mesh catwalk strung between the towers’ support cables. Once inside the other building, we plod up three more flights of stairs before finally emerging onto a breezy patio high above the streets. The noise of crowds rumbles through the door at the other end: a wide slab of oak painted with a yellow tree.

The place is packed, but the mood is eerily subdued. No shouting, no high-fiving, no woozy requests for phone numbers. Despite the speakeasy secrecy of its obscure location, the Orchard doesn’t serve alcohol.

‘I ask you,’ Julie says as we push our way through the well-behaved crowds, ‘is there anything sillier than a bunch of ex-Marines and construction workers drowning their sorrows at a fucking juice bar? At least it’s flask-friendly.’

The Orchard is the first building I’ve seen in this city with some trace of character. All the usual drinking accoutrements are here: dart boards, pool tables, flatscreen TVs with football games. At first I’m amazed to see these broadcasts – does entertainment still exist? Are there still people out there engaging in frivolity despite the times? But then, ten minutes into the third quarter, the images warp like VHS tape and switch to a different game, the teams and scores changing in the middle of a tackle. Five minutes later they switch again, with just a quick stutter to mark the splice. None of the sports fans seem to notice. They watch these abbreviated, eternally looping contests with blank eyes and sip their drinks like players in an historical reenactment.

A few of the patrons notice me staring at them and I look away. But then I look back. Something about this scene is burrowing into my mind. A thought is developing like a ghost on a Polaroid.

‘Three grapefruits,’ Julie tells the bartender, who looks vaguely embarrassed as he prepares the drinks. We settle in on bar stools and the two girls start talking. The music of their voices replaces the jangling classic rock on the jukebox, but then even this fades to a muffled drone. I’m staring at the TVs. I’m staring at the people. I can see the outline of their bones under their muscles. The edges of joints poking up under tight skin. I see their skeletons, and the idea taking shape in my head is something I hadn’t expected: a blueprint of the Boneys. A glimpse into the their twisted, dried-up minds.

The universe is compressing. All memory and all possibility squeezing down to the smallest of points as the last of their flesh falls away. To exist in that singularity, trapped in one static state for eternity – this is the Boneys’ world. They are dead-eyed ID photos, frozen at the precise moment they gave up their humanity. That hopeless instant when they snipped the last thread and dropped into the abyss. Now there’s nothing left. No thought, no feeling, no past, no future. Nothing exists but the desperate need to keep things as they are, as they always have been. They must stay on the rails of their loop or be overwhelmed, set ablaze and consumed by the colours, the sounds, the wide-open sky.

And so the thought hums in my head, whispering through my nerves like voices through phone lines: what if we could derail them? We’ve already disrupted their structure enough to incite a blind rage. What if we could create a change so deep, so new and astonishing, they would simply break? Surrender? Crumble into dust and ride out of town on the wind?

‘R,’ Julie says, poking me in the arm. ‘Where are you? Daydreaming again?’

I smile and shrug. Once again my vocabulary fails me. I’m going to need to find a way to let her into my head soon. Whatever this thing is I’m trying to do, I know it can’t be done alone.

The bartender returns with our drinks. Julie grins at me and Nora as we appraise the three tumblers of pale yellow nectar. ‘Remember how when we were kids, pure grapefruit juice was the tough-guy drink? Like the whiskey of kiddie beverages?’

‘Right,’ Nora laughs. ‘Apple juice, Capri Sun, that stuff was for bitches.’

Julie raises her glass. ‘To our new friend Archie.’

I lift my glass an inch off the bar and the girls clang theirs down against it. We drink. I don’t exactly taste it, but the juice stings my mouth, finding its way into old cuts in my cheeks, bites I don’t remember biting.

Julie orders another round, and when it arrives she hefts her messenger bag onto her shoulder and picks up all three glasses. She leans in close and gives me and Nora a wink. ‘Be right back.’ With the drinks in hand, she disappears into the bathroom.

‘What’s . . . she doing?’ I ask Nora.

‘Dunno. Stealing our drinks?’

We sit there in awkward silence, third-party friends lacking the connective tissue of Julie’s presence. After a few minutes, Nora leans in and lowers her voice. ‘You know why she said you were my boyfriend, right?’

I shrug one shoulder. ‘Sure.’

‘It didn’t mean anything, she was just trying to deflect attention away from you. If she said you were her boyfriend, or her friend, or anything to do with her, Grigio would’ve grilled the fuck out of you. And obviously if he really looks at you . . . the make-up’s not perfect.’

‘I under . . . stand.’

‘And by the way, just so you know? That was a pretty big deal that she took you to see her mom today.’

I raise my eyebrows.

‘She doesn’t tell people that stuff, ever. She didn’t even tell Perry the whole story for like three years. I can’t say exactly what that means for her, but . . . it’s new.’

I study the bar top, embarrassed. A strangely fond smile spreads across Nora’s face. ‘You know you remind me a little of Perry?’

I tense. I begin to feel the hot remorse boiling up in my throat again.

‘I don’t know what it is, I mean, you’re sure not the blowhard he was, but you have some of that same . . . sparkle he had when he was younger.’

I should stitch my mouth shut. Honesty is a compulsion that’s damned me more than once. But I just can’t hold it in any more. The words build and explode out of me like an uncontainable sneeze. ‘I killed him. Ate . . . his brain.’

Nora purses her lips and nods slowly. ‘Yeah . . . I thought you might have.’

My face goes blank. ‘What?’

‘I didn’t see it happen but I’ve been putting two and two together. It makes sense.’

I look at her, stunned. ‘Julie . . . knows?’

‘I don’t think so. But if she did, I’m pretty sure she’d be okay.’ She touches my hand where it rests on the bar. ‘You could tell her, R. I think she’d forgive you.’

‘Why?’

‘Same reason I forgive you.’

‘Why?’

‘Because it wasn’t you. It was the plague.’

I wait for more. She watches the TV above the bar, pale green light flickering over her dark face. ‘Did Julie ever tell you about when Perry cheated on her with that orphan girl?’

I hesitate, then nod.

‘Yeah, well . . . that was me.’

My eyes dart towards the bathroom, but Nora doesn’t seem to be hiding anything. ‘I’d only been here a week,’ she says. ‘Didn’t know Julie yet. That’s how I met her, actually. I fucked her boyfriend, and she hated me, and then time passed and a lot happened, and somehow we came out the other side as friends. Crazy, right?’ She upends her glass over her tongue to catch the last drops, then pushes it aside. ‘What I’m trying to say is, it’s a shitty world and shit happens, but we don’t have to bathe in shit. Sixteen years old, R – my meth-head parents dumped me in the middle of a Dead-infested slum because they couldn’t feed me any more. I wandered on my own for years before I found Citi Stadium, and I don’t have enough fingers to count all the times I almost died.’ She holds up her left hand and wiggles the half-gone finger like a bride-to-be showing off her diamond. ‘What I’m saying is, when you have weight like that in your life, you have to start looking for the bigger picture or you are gonna sink.’

I peer into her eyes, failing to read her meaning like the illiterate I am. ‘What’s . . . the bigger picture . . . of me killing Perry?’

‘R, come on,’ she says, mock-slapping the side of my head. ‘You’re a zombie. You have the plague. Or at least you did when you killed Perry. Maybe you’re different now, I sure hope you are, but back then you didn’t know you had choices. This isn’t “crime”, it’s not “murder”, it’s something way deeper and more inevitable.’ She taps her temple. ‘Me and Julie get that, okay? There’s a Zen saying, “No praise, no blame, just so.” We don’t care about assigning blame for the human condition, we just want to cure it.’

Julie emerges from the bathroom and sets the drinks on the bar with a sly grin. ‘Even grapefruit juice can use a little kick sometimes.’

Nora takes a test sip and turns away, covering her mouth. ‘Holy . . . Lord!’ she coughs. ‘How much did you put in here?’

‘Just a few minis of vodka,’ Julie whispers with girlish innocence. ‘Courtesy of our friend Archie, and Undead Airlines.’

‘Way to go, Archie.’

I shake my head. ‘Can please . . . stop calling me . . . ?’

‘Right, right,’ Julie says. ‘No more Archie. But what do we toast to this time? It’s your booze, R, you decide.’

I hold the glass in front of me. I sniff it, insisting to myself that I can still smell things besides death and potential death, that I’m still human, still whole. A citrus tang pricks my nostrils. Glowing Florida orchards in summer. The toast that enters my head seems unbearably corny, but it comes out anyway. ‘To . . . life.’

Nora stifles a laugh. ‘Really?’

Julie shrugs. ‘Unbearably corny, but what the hell.’ She raises her glass and clinks it against mine. ‘To life, Mr Zombie.’

‘L’chaim!’ Nora bellows, and drains her glass.

Julie drains her glass.

I drain my glass.

The vodka slams into my brain like a round of buckshot. This time it’s no placebo. The drink is strong and I feel it. I am feeling it. How is that possible?

Julie orders another round of grapefruits, then promptly converts them into Greyhounds, and she is generous with the pours. I expect the girls to be as lightweight as I am, since alcohol is contraband here, but I realise it’s probably quite routine to visit the liquor store while out salvaging the city. They quickly outpace me as I sip my second drink, marvelling at the sensations that swirl through my body. The noise of the bar fades and I just watch Julie, the focal point in my blurry composition. She is laughing. A free, unreserved kind of laugh that I don’t think I’ve heard before, throwing her head back and letting it just cascade out of her. She and Nora are recounting some shared memory. She turns to me and says something, inviting me into the joke with a word and a flash of white teeth, but I don’t respond. I just look at her, resting my chin in my hand, my elbow on the bar, smiling.

Contentment. Is this what it might feel like?

After finishing my drink I feel a pressure in my lower regions, and I realise I have to piss. Since the Dead don’t drink, urination is a rare event. I hope I can remember how to do it.

I wobble into the bathroom and lean my forehead against the wall in front of the urinal. I unzip, and I look down, and there it is. That mythical instrument of life and death and first-date back-seat fucking. It hangs limp, useless now, silently judging me for all the ways I’ve misused it over the years. I think of my wife and her new lover, slapping their cold bodies together like poultry in a packing plant. I think of the anonymous blurs in my past life, probably all dead or Dead by now. Then I think of Julie curled next to me in that king-sized bed. I think of her body in that comically mismatched underwear, her breath against my eyes as I study every line in her face, wondering what mysteries lie in the glowing nuclei of her each and every cell.

There in the bathroom, surrounded by the stench of piss and shit, I wonder: Is it too late for me? Can I somehow snatch another chance from the skymouth’s grinding teeth? I want a new past, new memories, a new first-handshake with love. I want to start over, in every possible way.

When I come out of the bathroom the floor is spinning. Voices are muffled. Julie and Nora are deep in conversation, leaning close and laughing. A man in his early thirties approaches the bar and makes some kind of leering comment to Julie. Nora glares at him and says something that looks sarcastic, and Julie shoos him away. The man shrugs and retreats to the pool table where his friend is waiting. Julie calls out something insulting and the friend laughs, but the man just grins coldly and calls back a retort. Julie looks frozen for a moment, then she and Nora turn their backs to the pool table and Nora starts whispering in Julie’s ear.

‘What’s . . . wrong?’ I ask, approaching the bar. I can sense both men at the pool table watching me.

‘Nothing,’ Julie says, but she sounds shaken. ‘It’s fine.’

‘R, could you give us a quick minute?’ Nora asks.

I look back and forth between them. They wait. I turn and walk out of the bar, feeling too many things at once. On the patio I slump against the railing, the streets a dizzying seven floors down. Most of the city’s lights are out, but the street lamps flicker and pulse like bioluminescence. Julie’s mini-cassette recorder is an insistent weight in my shirt pocket. I pull it out and stare at it. I know I shouldn’t but I’m . . . I feel like I just need—

Closing my eyes, swaying gently with one arm on the railing, I rewind the tape for a moment and press play.

‘—really that crazy? Just because he’s . . . whatever he is? I

mean, isn’t “zombie” just a silly name we—’

I press rewind again and it occurs to me that the gap between the beginning of this entry and the end of the previous one comprises the entire time I’ve known Julie. Every meaningful moment of my life fits inside a few seconds of tape hiss.

I press stop, then play.

‘—thinks no one knows but everyone knows, they’re just afraid to do anything. He’s getting worse, too. He said he loved me tonight. Actually said those words. Said I was beautiful and I was everything he loved about Mom and if anything ever happened to me he’d lose his mind. And I know he meant it, I know all of that’s really there inside him . . . but the fact that he had to be raging shitfaced drunk to let any of it out . . . it just made the whole thing seem sick. I fucking hated it.’

There is a long pause on the tape. I glance over my shoulder at the bar door, feeling ashamed but desperate. I know these are confidences I should have to earn through months of slow intimacy, but I can’t help myself. I just want to listen to her.

‘I’ve thought about making a report,’ she continues. ‘March into the community centre and make Rosy go arrest him. I mean, I’m all for drinking, I love it, but with Dad it’s . . . different. It’s not a celebration for him, it seems like it’s painful and scary, like he’s numbing himself for some horrible medieval surgery. And yeah . . . I know why, and it’s not like I haven’t done worse stuff for the same reasons, but it’s just . . . it’s so . . .’ Her voice wavers and breaks off, and she sniffles hard like a self-rebuke. ‘God,’ she whispers. ‘Shit.’

Several seconds of tape hiss. I listen closer. Then the door flies open and I whirl around, tossing the recorder out into the dark. But it’s not Julie. It’s the two men from the pool table. They stumble out the door, jostling each other and laughing through the sides of their mouths as they light up cigarettes.

‘Hey,’ the one who was talking to Julie calls to me, and he and his friend start ambling in my direction. He’s tall, good-looking, his muscular arms sleeved in tattoos: snakes and skeletons and the logos of extinct rock bands. ‘What’s up, man? You Nora’s new guy?’

I hesitate, then shrug. They both laugh like I’ve made a dirty joke.

‘Yeah, who ever knows with that chick, right?’ He punches his friend in the chest while continuing to saunter towards me. ‘So you know Julie, man? You Julie’s friend?’

I nod.

‘Known her long?’

I shrug, but I feel a coil inside me tensing.

He stops a few feet away from me and leans against the wall, taking a slow drag on his cigarette. ‘That one used to be pretty wild, too, a few years back. I was her firearms teacher.’

I need to leave. I need to turn around right now and leave.

‘She got all pure after she started dating that Kelvin kid, but man, for a year or so she was ripe fruit.’ His exhalations form a haze of smoke that stings my dry eyes. ‘A hundred bucks won’t even buy a pack of cigarettes any more, but it sure went a long way with that bitch.’

I lunge forward and crack his head into the wall. It’s easy, I just palm his face and thrust forward, punching the wall with the back of his skull. I don’t know if I’ve killed him and I don’t care. When his friend tries to grab me I do the exact same to him, two big dents in the Orchard’s aluminium siding. Both men slump to the ground. I wobble my way down the stairs and out onto the catwalk. Some kids leaning on the support cables smoking joints stare at me as I shove past them. Excuse me, I try to say, but I can’t seem to find the syllables. I slide down the four apartment floors and lurch out onto Fairy Street or Tinkerbell Street or whatever the fuck it’s called. I just need to get away from all these people for a minute, collect my thoughts. I’m so hungry. God, I’m starving.

After a few minutes of wandering, I’m completely lost and disorientated. A light rain is falling and I’m alone on some dark narrow street. The asphalt glitters black and wet under the crooked street lamps. Up ahead, two guards converse in a rain-flecked cone of light, grunting to each other with the affected toughness of scared boys straining to be men.

‘. . . out in Corridor 2 all last week, pouring foundations. We’re less than a mile away from Goldman Dome but we’ve barely got a fuckin’ crew any more. Grigio keeps pulling guys off Construction and dumping ’em into Security.’

‘What about the Goldman crew? How’s their end coming?’

‘Goldman is shit. They’re barely out their front door. I’ve been hearing the merger’s in bad shape anyway, thanks to Grigio’s bad diplomacy. Starting to wonder if he even wants the mergers any more, the way he handled Corridor 1. Wouldn’t surprise me if he arranged the collapse himself.’

‘You know that’s bullshit. Don’t be spreading that story around.’

‘Yeah, well, either way, Construction’s gone to shit since Kelvin got squished. We’re just digging holes and filling ’em in.’

‘I’d still rather be out building something than playing rent-a-cop in here all night. You get any action out there?’

‘Just a couple of Fleshies wandering out of the woods. Pop, pop, game over.’

‘No Boneys?’

‘Haven’t seen one of them in at least a year. They stick to their hives now’days. Fuckin’ bullshit.’

‘What, you like running into those things?’

‘Hell of a lot more fun than Fleshies. Fuckers can move.’

‘Fun? Are you shitting me? Those things are wrong; I don’t even like touching ’em with my bullets.’

‘Is that why your hit rate’s one in twenty?’

‘Doesn’t even seem like they’re human remains any more, you know? They’re like aliens or something. Creeps the shit out of me.’

‘Yeah, well, that’s probably ’cause you’re a pussy.’

‘Fuck you. I’m going to take a leak.’

The guard disappears into the dark. His partner stands in the spotlight, pulling his parka tighter as the rain comes down. I’m still walking. I’m not interested in these men; I’m looking for a quiet corner where I can close my eyes and gather myself. But as I approach the light, the guard notices me, and I realise there’s a problem. I’m drunk. My carefully studied gait has been replaced by an unsteady stagger. I lumber forward, my head lolling from side to side.

I look like . . . exactly what I am.

‘Halt!’ the guard shouts.

I halt.

He moves towards me a little. ‘Step into the light please, sir.’

I step into the light, standing on the very edge of the yellow circle. I try to stand as straight as I can, as motionless as I can. Then I realise something else. The rain is dripping off my hair. The rain is running down my face. The rain is washing away my make-up, revealing the pale grey flesh underneath. I stumble back a step, slightly out of the lamplight.

The guard is about five feet away from me. His hand is on his gun. He moves closer and peers at me through slitted eyes. ‘Have you been drinking alcohol tonight, sir?’

I open my mouth to say, No, sir, absolutely not, just a few glasses of delicious and heart-healthy grapefruit juice with my good friend Julie Cabernet. But the words evade me. My tongue is thick and dead in my mouth, and all that comes out is, ‘Uhhhnnn . . .’

‘What the fuck—’ The guard’s eyes flash wide, he whips out his flashlight and shines it into my grey-streaked face, and I have no choice. I leap out of the shadows and pounce on him, knocking his gun aside and biting down on his throat. His life force rushes into my starved body and brain, soothing the agony of my hideous cravings. I start to tear into him, chewing deltoids and tender abdominals while the blood still pulses through them – but then I stop.

Julie stands in the bedroom doorway, watching me with a tentative smile.

I shut my eyes and grit my teeth.

No.

I drop the body to the ground and back away from it. I can no longer hide behind my ignorance. I know now that I have a choice, and I choose to change no matter what the cost. If I’m a thriving branch on the Tree of Death, I’ll drop my leaves. If I have to starve myself to kill its twisted roots, I will.

The foetus in my stomach kicks, and I hear Perry’s voice, gentle and reassuring. You won’t starve, R. In my short life I made so many choices just because I thought they were required, but my dad was right: there’s no rulebook for the world. It’s in our heads, our collective human hive-mind. If there are rules, we’re the ones making them. We can change them whenever we want to.

I spit out the meat in my mouth and wipe the blood off my face. Perry kicks me in the gut again and I vomit. I lean over and purge myself of everything. The meat, the blood, the vodka. As soon as I straighten up and wipe my mouth, I’m sober. The fuzz is gone. My head is clear as a glossy new record.

The guard’s body begins to twitch back to life. His shoulders slowly rise, dragging the rest of his limp parts with them, as if he’s being pinched and pulled upwards by unseen fingers. I need to kill him. I know I need to kill him, but I can’t do it. After the vow I’ve just made, the thought of tearing into this man again and tasting his still-warm blood leaves me paralysed with horror. He shudders and retches, choking and clawing the dirt, straining and dry-heaving, his eyes bulging wide as the grey sludge of new death slithers into them. A wet, wretched groan escapes his mouth, and it’s too much for me. I turn and run. Even in my bravest moment, I am a coward.

The rain is in full force. My feet splash in the streets and spatter mud on my freshly washed clothes. My hair hangs in my face like seaweed. In front of a big aluminium building with a plywood cross on the roof, I kneel in a puddle and splash water on my face. I wash my mouth out with dirty gutter run-off and spit until I can’t taste anything. That holy wooden ‘T’ looms overhead, and I wonder if the Lord might ever find cause to approve of me, wherever and whatever he is.

Have you met him yet, Perry? Is he alive and well? Tell me he’s not just the mouth of the sky. Tell me there’s more looking down on us than that empty blue skull.

Wisely, Perry doesn’t answer. I accept the silence, I get off my knees, and I keep running.

Avoiding street lights, I make my way back to Julie’s house. I curl up against the wall, finding some shelter from the balcony overhead, and I wait there while the rain pounds the house’s metal roof. After what seems like hours, I hear the girls’ voices in the distance, but this time their rhythms stir no joy in me. The dance is a dirge, the music is minor.

They run towards the front door, Nora with her denim jacket pulled over her head, Julie with the hood of her red sweatshirt cinched tight on her face. Nora reaches the door first and rushes inside. Julie stops. I don’t know if she sees me in the dark or just smells the fruity stench of my body spray, but something draws her to look around the corner of the house. She sees me huddled in the dark like a scared puppy. She ambles over slowly, her hands stuffed into her sweatshirt pockets. She crouches down and peeks out at me through the narrow opening of her hood. ‘You okay?’ she says.

I nod dishonestly.

She sits next to me on the small patch of dry ground and leans against the house. She takes off her hood and lifts the wool beanie underneath to brush wet hair out of her eyes, then pulls it back down. ‘You scared me. You just disappeared.’

I look at her miserably, but I don’t say anything.

‘Do you want to tell me what happened?’

I shake my head.

‘Did you, um . . . did you knock out Tim and his friend?’

I nod.

A smile of embarrassed pleasure creeps onto her face, as if I’ve just given her an over-large bouquet of roses or written her a bad love song. ‘That was . . . sweet,’ she says, holding back a giggle. A minute passes. She touches my knee. ‘We had fun today, didn’t we? Despite a few sticky moments?’

I can’t smile, but I nod.

‘I’m a little buzzed. You?’

I shake my head.

‘Too bad. It’s fun.’ Her smile deepens and her eyes become far away. ‘You know, I had my first drink when I was eight?’ There is just a faint slur in her voice. ‘My dad was a big wine buff and him and Mom used to throw tasting parties whenever Dad was between wars. They’d bring all their friends over and pop a prized vintage and get pretty well toasted. I’d sit there in the middle of the couch taking little sips off the half-glass I was allowed and just laugh at all the silly grownups getting sillier. Rosy would get so flushed! One glass and he looked like Santa Claus. He and Dad arm-wrestled on the coffee table once and broke a lamp. It was . . . so great.’

She starts doodling in the dirt with one finger. Her smile is wistful, aimed at no one. ‘Things weren’t always so grim, you know, R? Dad has his moments, and even when the world fell apart we still had some fun. We’d take little family salvage trips and pick up the most crazy wines you can imagine. Thousand-dollar bottles of ’97 Dom. Romane Conti just rolling around on the floors of abandoned cellars.’ She chuckles to herself. ‘Dad would have absolutely lost his shit over those back in the day. By the time we moved here he was kinda . . . muted. But God, we drank some outrageous stuff.’

I’m watching her talk. Watching her jaw move and collecting her words one by one as they spill from her lips. I don’t deserve them. Her warm memories. I’d like to paint them over the bare plaster walls of my soul, but everything I paint seems to peel.

‘And then Mom ran off.’ She pulls her finger out of the dirt, inspecting her work. She has drawn a house. A quaint little cottage with a smoke cloud in the chimney, a benevolent sun smiling down on the roof. ‘Dad thought she must have been drunk, hence the alcohol ban, but I saw her, and she wasn’t. She was very sober.’

She is still smiling, as if this is all just easy nostalgia, but the smile is cold now, lifeless.

‘She came into my room that night and just looked at me for a while. I pretended I was asleep. Then right as I was about to pop up and yell “boo” . . . she walked out. So I didn’t get the chance.’

She reaches a hand down to wipe away her drawing, but I touch her wrist. I look at her and shake my head. She regards me silently for a moment. Then she scoots around to face me and grins, inches from my face.

‘R,’ she says. ‘If I kiss you, will I die?’

Her eyes are steady. She’s barely drunk.

‘You said I won’t, right? I won’t get infected? Because I really feel like kissing you.’ She fidgets. ‘And even if you do pass something to me, maybe it wouldn’t be all bad. I mean, you’re different now, right? You’re not a zombie. You’re . . . something new.’ Her face is very close. Her smile fades. ‘Well, R?’

I look into her eyes, splashing in their icy waters like a shipwrecked sailor grasping for the raft. But there is no raft.

‘Julie,’ I say. ‘I need . . . to show you something.’

She cocks her head with gentle curiosity. ‘What?’

I stand up. I take her hand and start walking.

The night is still except for the primeval hiss of the rain. It drenches the dirt and slicks the asphalt, liquefying the shadows into shiny black ink. I stick to the narrow back-streets and unlit alleys. Julie follows slightly behind me, staring at the side of my face.

‘Where are we going?’ she asks.

I pause at an intersection to retrace the maps of my stolen memories, calling up images of places I’ve never been, people I’ve never met. ‘Almost . . . there.’

A few more careful glances around corners, furtive dashes across intersections, and there it is. A five-storey house looms ahead of us, tall, skinny and grey like the rest of this skeletal city, its windows flickering yellow like wary eyes.

‘What the hell, R?’ Julie whispers, staring up at it. ‘This is . . .’

I pull her to the front door and we stand there in the shelter of the eaves, the roof rattling like military drums in the rain. ‘Can I . . . borrow your hat?’ I ask without looking at her.

She doesn’t move for a moment, then she pulls it off and hands it to me. Over-long and floppy, dark blue wool with a red stripe . . .

Mrs Rosso knitted this for Julie’s seventeenth birthday. Perry thought she looked like an elf in it and would start speaking to her in Tolkien tongues whenever she put it on. She called him the biggest nerd she’d ever met, and he agreed, while playfully kissing her throat and—

I pull the beanie low over my face and knock a slow waltz on the door, eyes glued to the ground like a shy child. The door opens a crack. A middle-aged woman in sweatpants looks out at us. Her face is puffy and heavily lined, dark bags under bloodshot eyes. ‘Miss Grigio?’ she says.

Julie glances at me. ‘Hi, Mrs Grau. Um . . .’

‘What are you doing out? Is Nora with you? It’s after curfew.’

‘I know, we . . . got a little lost on our way back from the Orchard. Nora’s staying at my house tonight but um . . . can we come in for a minute? I need to talk to the guys.’

I keep my head down as Mrs Grau gives me a cursory appraisal. She opens the door for us with an annoyed sigh. ‘You can’t stay here, you know. This is a foster home, not a flop house, and your friend here is too old for new residency.’

‘I know, sorry, we’ll . . .’ She glances at me again. ‘We’ll just be a minute.’

I can’t endure formalities right now. I brush past the woman and into the house. A toddler peeks around a bedroom door and Mrs Grau glares at him. ‘What did I tell you?’ she snaps, loud enough to wake the rest of the kids. ‘Back in bed right now.’ The boy disappears into the shadows. I lead Julie up the staircase.

The second storey is identical to the first, except there are rows of pre-adolescents sleeping on the floor on small mats. So many now. New foster homes pop up like processing plants as mothers and fathers disappear, chewed up and swallowed down by the plague. We step over a few tiny bodies on our way to the stairs, and a little girl grasps feebly at Julie’s ankle.

‘I had a bad dream,’ she whispers.

‘I’m sorry, honey,’ Julie whispers back. ‘You’re safe now, okay?’

The girl closes her eyes again. We climb the stairs. The third floor is still awake. Young teens and patch-beard semi-adults sitting around on folding chairs, hunched over desks writing in booklets and flipping through manuals. Some kids snore on stacked bunks inside narrow bedrooms. All the doors are open except one.

A group of older boys look up from their work, surprised. ‘Wow, hey, Julie. How’s it going? You holding up okay?’

‘Hey, guys. I’m . . .’ She trails off, and her ellipsis eventually forms a period. She looks at the closed door. She looks at me. Gripping her hand, I move forward and open the door, then shut it behind us.

The room is dark except for the faint yellow glow of street lamps through the window. There is nothing in here but a plywood dresser and a stripped bed, with a few pictures of Julie taped to the ceiling above it. The air is stale, and much colder than the rest of the house.

‘R . . .’ Julie says in a quivery, dangerous voice. ‘Why the fuck are we here?’

I finally turn to face her. In the yellow dimness, we look like actors in a silent sepia tragedy. ‘Julie,’ I say. ‘That theory . . . about why we . . . eat the brain . . .’

She starts to shake her head.

‘True.’

I look into her reddening eyes a moment longer, then kneel down and open the bottom drawer of the dresser. Inside, under piles of old stamps, a microscope, an army of pewter figurines, there is a stack of paper bound together with red yarn. I lift it out and hand it to Julie. In so many strange and twisted ways, I feel like the manuscript is mine. Like I’ve just handed her my own bloody heart on a platter. I am fully prepared for her to claw it to shreds.

She takes the manuscript. She unties the yarn. She stares at the cover page for a full minute, breathing shakily. Then she wipes her eyes and clears her throat.

‘“Red Teeth,”’ she reads. ‘“By Perry Kelvin.”’ She glances down the page. ‘“For Julie Cabernet, the only light left.”’ She lowers the manuscript and looks away for a moment, trying to hide a spasm in her throat, then steels herself and turns the page to the first chapter. As she reads, a faint smile peeks through the tear tracks. ‘Wow,’ she says, wiping a finger across her nose and sniffling. ‘It’s actually . . . kinda good. He used to write such dry and detached bullshit. This is . . . cheesy . . . but in a sweet way. More like how he really was.’ She glances at the cover page again. ‘He started it less than a year ago. I had no idea he was still writing.’ She flips to the last page. ‘It’s not finished. Cuts off in the middle of a sentence. “Outmanned and outgunned, certain of death, he kept fighting, because—”’

She rubs her thumbs into the paper, feeling its texture. She puts it near her face and inhales. Then she closes her eyes, closes the manuscript, and reties the yarn. She looks up at me. I am nearly a foot taller than her and probably sixty pounds heavier, but I feel small and featherweight. Like she could knock me down and crush me with a single whispered word.

But she doesn’t speak. She sets the manuscript back in the drawer and gently slides it shut. She straightens up, dries her face with her sleeve, and embraces me, resting her ear against my chest.

‘Thump-thump,’ she murmurs. ‘Thump-thump. Thump-thump.’

My hands hang limp at my sides. ‘I’m sorry,’ I say.

With her eyes closed, her voice muffled by my shirt, she says, ‘I forgive you.’

I raise a hand and touch her straw-gold hair. ‘Thank you.’

These three phrases, so simple, so primal, have never sounded so complete. So true to their basic meanings. I feel her cheek move against my chest, her zygomaticus major pulling her lips into a faint smile.

Without another word, we shut the door on Perry Kelvin’s room and leave his home. We descend the stairs past beleaguered teens, past tossing and turning kids, past deeply dreaming babies, and out into the street. I feel a nudge low in my chest, closer to my heart than my belly, and a soft voice in my head.

Thank you, Perry says.

I would like to end it here. How nice if I could edit my own life. If I could halt in the middle of a sentence and put it all to rest in a drawer somewhere, consummate my amnesia and forget all the things that have happened, are happening, and are about to happen. Shut my eyes and go to sleep happy.

But no, ‘R’. No sleep of the innocent. Not for you. Did you forget? You have blood on your hands. On your lips. On your teeth. Smile for the cameras.

Categories: Warm Bodies

Warm Bodies - Chapter 14

In my old days of scavenging the city I often gazed up at the Stadium walls and imagined a paradise inside. I assumed it was perfect, that everyone was happy and beautiful and wanted for nothing, and in my numb, limited way I felt envy and wanted to eat them all the more. But look at this place. The corrugated sheet metal glaring in the sun. The fly-buzzing pens of moaning, hormone-pumped cattle. The hopelessly stained laundry hanging from support cables between buildings, flapping in the wind like surrender flags.

‘Welcome to Citi Stadium,’ Julie says, spreading her arms wide. ‘The largest human habitation in what used to be America.’

‘There are over twenty thousand of us crammed into this fishbowl,’ Julie says as we push through the dense crowds in the central square. ‘Pretty soon it’ll be so tight we’ll all just squish together. The human race will be one big mindless amoeba.’

Why didn’t we scatter? Head for high ground and plant our roots where the air and water were clean? What is it we needed from each other in this sweaty crush of bodies?

As much as possible I keep my eyes to the ground, trying to blend in and avoid notice. I sneak glances at guard towers, water tanks, new buildings rising under the bright strobe of arc welders, but mostly my view is of my feet. The asphalt. Mud and dog shit softening the sharp angles.

‘We’re growing less than half what we need to survive,’ Julie says as we pass the gardens, just a blurry dream of green behind the translucent walls of the hothouses. ‘So all the real food gets rationed out in tiny servings, and we fill the gaps in our diet with Carbtein.’ A trio of teenage boys in yellow jumpsuits hauls a cart of oranges past us, and I notice one of them has strange sores running down the side of his face, sunken brown patches like the bruises on an apple, as if the cells have simply collapsed. ‘Not to mention we’re burning through a pharmacy worth of medicine every month. Salvage teams can barely keep up. It’s only a matter of time before we go to war with the other enclaves over the last bottle of Prozac.’

Was it just fear? the voices wonder. We were fearful in the best of times; how could we cope with the worst? So we found the tallest walls and poured ourselves behind them. We kept pouring until we were the biggest and strongest, elected the greatest generals and found the most weapons, thinking all this maximalism would somehow generate happiness. But nothing so obvious could ever work.

‘What’s amazing to me,’ Nora says, squeezing past the strained belly of a morbidly pregnant woman, ‘is that despite all these needs and shortages we have, people keep pumping out kids. Flooding the world with copies of themselves just because that’s tradition, that’s what’s done.’

Julie glances at Nora and opens her mouth, then closes it.

‘And even though we’re about to starve to death under a mountain of poopy diapers, no one’s brave enough to even suggest that people keep their seed in their nuts for a while.’

‘Yeah, but . . .’ Julie begins, her voice uncharacteristically timid. ‘I don’t know . . . there’s something kind of beautiful about it, don’t you think? That we keep living and growing even though our world is a corpse? That we keep coming back no matter how many of us die?’

‘Why is it beautiful that humanity keeps coming back? Herpes does that, too.’

‘Oh shut up, Nora, you love people. Being a misanthrope was Perry’s thing.’

Nora laughs and shrugs.

‘It’s not about keeping up the population, it’s about passing on who we are and what we’ve learned, so things keep going. So we don’t just end. Sure it’s selfish, in a way, but how else do our short lives mean anything?’

‘I guess that’s true,’ Nora allows. ‘It’s not like we have any other legacies to leave in this post-everything era.’

‘Right. It’s all fading. I heard the world’s last country collapsed in January.’

‘Oh, really? Which one was it?’

‘Can’t remember. Sweden, maybe?’

‘So the globe is officially blank. That’s depressing.’

‘At least you have some cultural heritage you can hold on to. Your dad was Ethiopian, right?’

‘Yeah, but what’s that mean to me? He didn’t remember his country, I never went there, and now it doesn’t exist. All that leaves me with is brown skin, and who pays any attention to colour any more?’ She waves a hand towards my face. ‘In a year or two we’re all gonna be grey anyway.’

I fall behind as they continue to banter. I watch them talk and gesticulate, listening to their voices without hearing the words.

What is left of us? the ghosts moan, drifting back into the shadows of my subconscious. No countries, no cultures, no wars but still no peace. What’s at our core, then? What’s still squirming in our bones when everything else is stripped?

By late afternoon, we’ve come to the road once known as Jewel Street. The school buildings wait for us ahead, squat and self-satisfied, and I feel my stomach knotting. Julie hesitates at the intersection, looking pensively towards their glowing windows. ‘Those are the training facilities,’ she says. ‘But you don’t want to see in there. Let’s move on.’

I gladly follow her away from that dark boulevard, but I stare hard at the fresh green sign as we pass. I’m fairly sure the first letter is a J.

‘What’s . . . that street called?’ I ask, pointing to the sign.

Julie smiles. ‘Why, that’s Julie Street.’

‘It used to be a graphic of a diamond or something,’ Nora says, ‘but her dad renamed it when they built the schools. Isn’t that sweet?’

‘It was sweet,’ Julie admits. ‘That’s the type of gesture Dad can manage sometimes.’

She takes us around the perimeter of the walls to a wide, dark tunnel directly across from the main gate. I realise these tunnels must be where sports teams once made their triumphal entries onto the field, back when thousands of people could still cheer for things so trivial. And since the tunnel on the other end is the passage into the world of the Living, it seems fitting that this one leads to a graveyard.

Julie flashes an ID badge at the guards and they wave us through the back gate. We step out onto a hilly field surrounded by hundreds of feet of chain-link fencing. Black hawthorn trees curl towards the mottled grey-and-gold sky, standing guard over classical tombstones, complete with crosses and statues of saints. I suspect these were reappropriated from some forgotten funeral home, as the engraved names and dates have been covered over with crude letters stencilled in white paint. The epitaphs resemble graffiti tags.

‘This is where we bury . . . what’s left of us,’ Julie says. She walks a few steps ahead as Nora and I stand in the entry. Out here, with the door shut behind us, the pulsing noise of human affairs is gone, replaced by the stoic silence of the truly dead. Each body resting here is either headless, brain-shot, or nothing but scraps of half-eaten flesh and bones piled in a box. I can see why they chose to build the cemetery outside the Stadium walls: not only does it take up more land than all the indoor farmlands combined, it also can’t be very good for morale. This is a reminder far more grim than the old world’s sunny yards of peaceful passings and requiem eternum. This is a glimpse of our future. Not as individuals, whose deaths we can accept, but as a species, a civilisation, a world.

‘Are you sure you want to go in here today?’ Nora asks Julie softly.

Julie looks out at the hills of patchy brown grass. ‘I go every day. Today’s a day. Today’s Tuesday.’

‘Yeah, but . . . do you want us to wait here?’

She glances back at me and considers for a moment. Then she shakes her head. ‘No. Come on.’ She starts walking and I follow her. Nora trails an awkward distance behind me, a look of muted surprise on her face.

There are no paths in this cemetery. Julie walks in a straight line, stepping over headstones and across grave mounds, many still soft and muddy. Her eyes are focused on a tall spire topped by a marble angel. We stop in front of it, Julie and I side by side, Nora still lingering behind. I strain to read the name on the grave, but it doesn’t reveal itself. Even the first few letters remain out of reach.

‘This is . . . my mom,’ Julie says. The cool evening wind blows her hair into her eyes, but she doesn’t brush it away.

‘She left when I was twelve.’

Nora squirms behind us, then wanders away and pretends to browse the epitaphs.

‘She went crazy, I guess,’ Julie says. ‘Ran out into the city by herself one night and that was that. They found a few pieces of her but . . . there’s nothing in this grave.’ Her voice is casual. I’m reminded of her trying to imitate the Dead back in the airport, the overacting, the paper-thin mask. ‘I guess it was too much for her, all of this.’ She waves a hand vaguely at the graveyard and the Stadium behind us. ‘She was a real free spirit, you know? This wild bohemian goddess full of fire. She met my dad when she was nineteen, he swept her off her feet. Hard to believe it, but he was a musician back then, played keys in a rock band, was actually pretty good. They got married really young, and then . . . I don’t know . . . the world went to shit, and Dad changed. Everything changed.’

I try to read her eyes but her hair obscures them. I hear a tremor in her voice. ‘Mom tried. She really did try. She did her part to keep everything together, she did her daily work, and then it was all me. She poured it all into me. Dad was hardly around so it was always just her and the little brat. I remember having so much fun, she used to take me to this water park back in—’ A tiny sob catches her by surprise, choking off the words, and she covers her mouth with her hand. Her eyes plead with me through strands of dirty hair. I gently brush it out of her face. ‘She just wasn’t built for this fucking place,’ she says, her voice warbling in falsetto. ‘What was she supposed to do here? Everything that made her alive was gone. All she had left was this stupid twelve-year-old with ugly teeth who kept waking her up every night wanting to snuggle away a nightmare. No wonder she wanted out.’

‘Stop,’ I say firmly, and turn her to face me. ‘Stop.’ Tears are running down her face, salty secretions shooting through ducts and tubes, past bright pulsating cells and angry red tissues. I wipe them away and pull her into me. ‘You’re . . . alive,’ I mumble into her hair. ‘You’re . . . worth living for.’

I feel her shudder against my chest, clinging to my shirt as my arms surround her. The air is silent except for the light whistle of the breeze. Nora is looking our way now, twisting a finger through her curls. She catches my eye and gives me a sad smile, as if to apologise for not warning me. But I’m not afraid of the skeletons in Julie’s closet. I look forward to meeting the rest of them, looking them hard in the eye, giving them firm, bone-crunching handshakes.

As she dampens my shirt with sadness and snot, I realise I’m about to do another thing I’ve never done before. I suck in air and attempt to sing. ‘You’re . . . sensational . . .’ I croak, struggling for a trace of Frank’s melody. ‘Sensational . . . that’s all.’

There’s a pause, and then something shifts in Julie’s demeanour. I realise she’s laughing.

‘Oh wow,’ she giggles, and looks up at me, her eyes still glistening above a grin. ‘That was beautiful, R, really. You and Zombie Sinatra should record Duets, Volume 2.’

I cough. ‘Didn’t get . . . warm-up.’

She brushes some of my hair back into place. She looks back at the grave. She reaches into her pocket and pulls out a wilted airport daisy with four petals remaining. She sets it on the bare dirt in front of the headstone. ‘Sorry, Mom,’ she says softly. ‘Best I could find.’ She grabs my hand. ‘Mom, this is R. He’s really nice, you’d love him. The flower is from him, too.’

Even though the grave is empty, I half expect her mother’s hand to burst out of the earth and grip my ankle. After all, I’m a cell in the cancer that killed her. But if Julie is any indication, I suspect her mother might forgive me. These people, these beautiful Living women, they don’t seem to make the connection between me and the creatures that keep killing everything they love. They allow me to be an exception, and I feel humbled by this gift. I want to pay it back somehow, earn their forgiveness. I want to repair the world I’ve helped destroy.

Nora rejoins us as we leave Mrs Grigio’s grave. She rubs Julie’s shoulder and kisses her head. ‘You okay?’

Julie nods. ‘As much as ever.’

‘You want to hear something nice?’

‘So badly.’

‘I saw a patch of wild flowers by my house. They’re growing in a ditch.’

Julie smiles. She rubs the last few tears out of her eyes and doesn’t say anything more.

I peruse the headstones as we walk. They are crooked and haphazardly placed, making the cemetery look ancient despite the dozens of freshly dug graves. I am thinking about death. I’m thinking how brief life is compared to it. I’m wondering how deep this graveyard goes, how many layers of coffins are stacked on top of each other, and what portion of Earth’s soil is made from our decay.

Then something interrupts my morbid reflections. I feel a lurch in my stomach, a queer sensation like what I imagine a baby kicking in the womb might feel like. I stop in mid-step and turn around. A featureless rectangular headstone is watching me from a nearby hill.

‘Hold on,’ I say to the girls, and begin climbing the hill.

‘What’s he doing?’ I hear Nora ask under her breath. ‘Isn’t that . . . ?’

I stand in front of the grave, staring at the name on the stone. A queasy sensation of vertigo rises through my legs, as if a vast pit is opening up in front of me, drawing me towards its edge with some dark, inexorable force. My stomach lurches again, I feel a sharp tug on my brainstem . . . I fall in.

Categories: Warm Bodies

Warm Bodies - Chapter 15

I am Perry Kelvin, and this is my last day alive.

What a strange feeling, waking up to that awareness. All my life I have battled the alarm clock, pummelling the snooze button over and over with mounting self-loathing until the shame is finally strong enough to lever me upright. It was only on the brightest of mornings, those rare days of verve and purpose and clear reasons to live that I ever sprang awake easily. How strange, then, that I do today.

Julie whimpers as I extract myself from her goosebumped arms and slip out of bed. She gathers my half of the blankets around her and curls up against the wall. She will sleep for hours more, dreaming endless landscapes and novas of colour both gorgeous and frightening. If I stayed she would wake up and describe them to me. All the mad plot twists and surrealist imagery, so vivid to her while so meaningless to me. There was a time when I treasured listening to her, when I found the commotion in her soul bitter-sweet and lovely, but I can no longer bear it. I lean over to kiss her goodbye, but my lips stiffen and I cringe away from her. I can’t. I can’t. I’ll collapse. I pull back and leave without touching her.

Two years ago today my father was crushed under the wall he was building, and I became an orphan. I have missed him for seven hundred and thirty days, my mother for even longer, but tomorrow I will not miss anyone. I think about this as I descend the winding stairs of my foster home, this wretched house of discards, and emerge into the city. Dad, Mom, Grandma, my friends . . . tomorrow I won’t miss anyone.

It’s early and the sun is barely over the mountains, but the city is already wide awake. The streets are crawling with labourers, repair crews, moms pushing knobby-tyred strollers and foster-moms herding lines of kids like cattle. Somewhere in the distance someone is playing a clarinet; its quavery notes drift through the morning air like birdsong, and I try to shut it out. I don’t want to hear music, I don’t want the sunrise to be pink. The world is a liar. Its ugliness is overwhelming; the scraps of beauty make it worse.

I make my way to the Island Street administrative building and tell the receptionist I’m here for my seven o’clock with General Grigio. She walks me back to his office and shuts the door behind me. The general doesn’t look up from the paperwork on his desk. He raises one finger at me. I stand and wait, letting my eyes roam the contents of his walls. A picture of Julie. A picture of Julie’s mother. A faded picture of himself and a younger Colonel Rosso in proper US Army uniforms, smoking cigarettes in front of a flooded New York skyline. Next to this, another shot of the two men smoking cigarettes, this time overlooking a crumbled London. Then bombed-out Paris. Then smouldering Rome.

The general finally sets down his paperwork. He takes off his glasses and looks me over. ‘Mr Kelvin,’ he says.

‘Sir.’

‘Your very first salvage as team manager.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Do you feel ready?’

My tongue stalls for an instant as images of horses and cellists and red lips on a wine glass flicker through my mind, trying to knock me off course. I burn them like old film. ‘Yes, sir.’

‘Good. Here is your exit pass. See Colonel Rosso at the community centre for your team assignments.’

‘Thank you, sir.’ I take the paperwork and turn to leave. But I pause on the doorway threshold. ‘Sir?’ My voice cracks a little even though I swore I wouldn’t let it.

‘Yes, Perry?’

‘Permission to speak freely, sir?’

‘Go ahead.’

I moisten my dry lips. ‘Is there a reason for all this?’

‘Pardon me?’

‘Is there a reason for us to keep doing all these things? The salvages and . . . everything?’

‘I’m afraid I don’t understand your question, Perry. The supplies we salvage are keeping us alive.’

‘Are we trying to stay alive because we think the world will get better someday? Is that what we’re working towards?’

His expression is flat. ‘Perhaps.’

My voice becomes shaky and very undignified, but I can no longer control it. ‘What about right now? Is there anything right now that you love enough to keep living for?’

‘Perry—’

‘Will you tell me what it is, sir? Please?’

His eyes are marbles. A noise like the beginning of a word forms in his throat, then it stops. His mouth tightens. ‘This conversation is inappropriate.’ He lays his hands flat on his desk. ‘You should be on your way now. You have work to do.’

I swallow hard. ‘Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.’

‘See Colonel Rosso at the community centre for your team assignments.’

‘Yes, sir.’

I step through the door and shut it behind me.

In Colonel Rosso’s office I conduct myself with utmost professionalism. I request my team assignments and he gives them to me, handing over the envelope with warmth and pride in his squinty, failing eyes. He wishes me luck and I thank him; he invites me to dinner and I politely decline. My voice does not crack. I lose no composure.

Marching back through the community centre lobby I glance towards the gym and see Nora staring at me through the tall windows. She’s wearing snug black shorts and a white tank top, as are all the pre-teens on the volleyball court behind her. Nora’s ‘team’, her sad attempt to distract a few kids from reality for two hours a week. I walk past her without so much as a nod, and as I start to push the front doors open I hear her sneakers slapping the tile floor behind me.

‘Perry!’

I stop and let the doors swing shut. I turn around and face her. ‘Hey.’

She stands in front of me with her arms crossed, her eyes stony. ‘So today’s the big day, huh?’

‘I guess so.’

‘What area are you hitting? You got it all planned out?’

‘The old Pfizer building on Eighth Ave.’

She nods rapidly. ‘Good, that sounds like a good plan, Perry. And you’ll be all done and home by six, right? ’Cause remember we’re taking you to the Orchard tonight. We’re not letting you spend today moping alone like you did last year.’

I watch the kids in the gym, bumping-setting-spiking, laughing and cursing. ‘I don’t know if I’ll make it. This salvage might go a little later than usual.’

She keeps nodding. ‘Oh. Oh, okay. Because that building is crooked and full of cracks and dead ends and you have to be extra careful, right?’

‘Right.’

‘Yeah.’ She nods towards the envelope in my hand. ‘You checked that yet?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Well, you should probably check it, Perry.’ Her foot taps the floor; her body vibrates with restrained anger. ‘You need to make sure you know everyone’s profiles, strengths and weaknesses and all that. Mine, for instance, because I’m on there.’

My face goes blank. ‘What?’

‘Sure, I’m going, Rosso put me on yesterday. Do you know my strengths and weaknesses? Is there anything on your agenda you think might be too hard for me? ’Cause I’d hate to jeopardise your very first salvage as team manager.’

I rip the top off the envelope and start scanning the names.

‘Julie signed up, too, did she mention that?’

My eyes flash up from the page.

‘That’s right, fucker, will that be a problem for you?’ Her voice is strained to breaking. There are tears in her eyes. ‘Is that a conflict at all?’

I shove open the front doors and burst out into the cold morning air. Birds overhead. Those blank-eyed pigeons, those shrieking gulls, all the flies and beetles that eat their shit – the gift of flight dumped on Earth’s most worthless creatures. What if it were mine instead? That perfect, weightless freedom. No fences, no walls, no borders; I would fly everywhere, over oceans and continents, mountains and jungles and endless open plains, and somewhere in the world, somewhere in all that distant untouched beauty, I would find a reason.

I am floating in Perry’s darkness. I am deep in the earth. Somewhere far above me are roots and worms and an inverted graveyard where the coffins are the markers and the headstones are what’s buried, piercing down into the airy blue emptiness, hiding all the names and pretty epitaphs and leaving me with the rot.

I feel a stirring in the dirt that surrounds me. A hand burrows through and grabs my shoulder.

‘Hello, corpse.’

We are in the 747. My piles of souvenirs are sorted and arranged in neat stacks. The aisle is softened with layers of oriental throw rugs. Dean Martin croons on the record player.

‘Perry?’

He’s in the cockpit, in the pilot’s chair with his hands on the controls. He’s wearing a pilot’s uniform, the white shirt stained with blood. He smiles at me, then gestures at the windows, where streaks of clouds flicker past. ‘We are now approaching cruising altitude. You’re free to move about the cabin.’

With slow, cautious movements, I get up and join him in the cockpit. I look at him uneasily. He grins. I rub a finger through the familiar layers of dust on the controls. ‘This isn’t one of your memories, is it?’

‘No. This is yours. I wanted you to be comfortable.’

‘Is it your grave I’m standing on right now?’

He shrugs. ‘I suppose. I think it’s just my empty skull in there, though. You and your friends took most of me home for snacks, remember?’

I open my mouth to apologise again, but he shuts his eyes and waves it away. ‘Don’t, please. We’re past all that. Besides, that wasn’t really me you killed, that was older-wiser Perry. I think this is mostly junior-high Perry you’re talking to, young and optimistic and writing a novel called Ghosts vs. Werewolves. I’d rather not think about being dead right now.’

I eye him uncertainly. ‘You’re a lot more cheerful here than in your memories.’

‘I have perspective here. It’s hard to take your life so seriously when you can see it all at once.’

I peer at him. His reality is very convincing, pimples and all. ‘Are you . . . really you?’ I ask.

‘What does that mean?’

‘All this time I’ve been talking to you, are you just . . . leftovers from your brain? Or are you really actually you?’

He chuckles. ‘Does it really actually matter?’

‘Are you Perry’s soul?’

‘Maybe. Kind of. Whatever you want to call it.’

‘Are you . . . in Heaven?’

He laughs and tugs his blood-soaked shirt. ‘Yeah, not exactly. Whatever I am, “R”, I’m in you.’ He laughs again at the look on my face. ‘Fucked up, isn’t it? But Older-Wiser went out of this life pretty darkly. Maybe this is our chance to catch up with him and work some things out before . . . you know. Whatever’s next.’

I look out the window. No glimpse of land or sea, just the silky mountains of Cloud World spread out below us and piled high above. ‘Where are we headed?’

‘Towards whatever’s next.’ He lifts his eyes to the heavens with sarcastic solemnity, then grins. ‘You’re going to help me get there, and I’m going to help you.’

I feel my guts twist as the plane surges and drops on erratic air currents. ‘Why would you help me? I’m the reason you’re dead.’

‘Come on, R, don’t you get this yet?’ He seems upset by my question. He locks eyes on me and there’s a feverish intensity in them. ‘You and I are victims of the same disease. We’re fighting the same war, just different battles in different theatres, and it’s way too late for me to hate you for anything, because we’re the same damn thing. My soul, your conscience, whatever’s left of me woven into whatever’s left of you, all tangled up and conjoined.’ He gives me a hearty clap on the shoulder that almost hurts. ‘We’re in this together, corpse.’

A low tremor rumbles through the plane. The control stick wobbles in front of Perry, but he ignores it. I don’t know what to say, so I just say, ‘Okay.’

He nods. ‘Okay.’

Another faint vibration in the floor, like the concussions of distant bombs.

‘So,’ he says. ‘God has made us study partners. We need to talk about our project.’ He takes a deep breath and looks at me, tapping his chin. ‘I’ve been hearing a lot of inspirational thoughts prancing around in our head lately. But I’m not sure you really understand the storm we’re flying into.’

A few red lights blink on in the cabin. There is a scraping noise somewhere outside the plane.

‘What am I missing?’ I ask.

‘How about a strategy? We’re wandering around this city like a kitten in a dog kennel. You keep talking about changing the world, but you’re sitting here licking your paws while all the pit bulls circle in on us. What’s the plan, pussycat?’

Outside, the cotton clouds darken to steel wool. The lights flicker, and my souvenir stacks rattle.

‘I don’t . . . have one yet.’

‘So when? You know things are moving. You’re changing, your fellow Dead are changing, the world is ready for something miraculous. What are we waiting for?’

The plane shudders and begins to dive. I stumble into the co-pilot chair, feeling my stomach rise into my throat. ‘I’m not waiting. I’m doing it right now.’

‘Doing what? What are you doing?’

‘I’m trying.’ I hold Perry’s gaze and grip the sides of my seat as the plane shakes and groans. ‘I’m wanting it. I’m making myself care.’

Perry’s eyes narrow and his lips tighten, but he doesn’t say anything.

‘That’s step one, isn’t it?’ I yell over the noise of wind and roaring engines. ‘That’s where it has to start.’

The plane lurches and my souvenir stacks collapse, scattering paintings, movies, dishes, dolls and love notes all over the cabin. More lights flare in the cockpit, and a voice crackles on the radio.

R? Helloooo? Are you okay?

Perry’s face has gone cold, all playfulness gone. ‘Bad stuff is coming, R. Some of it’s waiting for you right outside this graveyard. You’re right, wanting change is step one, but step two is taking it. When the flood comes, I don’t want to see you dreaming your way through it. You’ve got my little girl with you now.’

Okay, you’re creeping me out. Wake up!

‘I know I didn’t deserve her,’ Perry says, his quiet murmur somehow rising above the noise. ‘She offered me everything and I pissed on it. So now it’s your turn, R. Go keep her safe. She’s a lot softer than she seems.’

God damn it, you asshole! Wake up or I’ll fucking shoot you!

I nod. Perry nods. Then he turns to face the window and folds his arms across his chest while the controls shake wildly. The storm clouds peel apart and we are diving to Earth, hurtling directly towards the Stadium, and there they are, the infamous R and J, sitting on a blanket on the rain-soaked roof. R looks up and sees us, his eyes open wide just as we—

My eyes open wide and I blink reality into focus. I am standing in front of a small grave in an amateur cemetery. Julie’s hand is on my shoulder.

‘Are you back?’ she asks. ‘What the hell was that about?’

I clear my throat and look around. ‘Sorry. Daydreaming.’

‘God, you’re weird. Come on, I don’t want to be here any more.’ She strides briskly towards the exit.

Nora and I follow her. Nora keeps pace with me, eyeing me sideways. ‘Daydreaming?’ she asks.

I nod.

‘You were talking to yourself a little.’

I look at her.

‘Some pretty big words, too. I think I heard “miraculous”.’

I shrug.

The waterfall noise of the city rushes into our ears as the guards open the doors and we step back into the Stadium proper. The doors have barely slammed shut behind us when I feel that baby kick in my stomach again. A voice whispers, Here it comes, R. Are you ready?

‘Oh, this is lovely,’ Julie says under her breath.

There he is, marching around the street corner in front of us: Julie’s dad, General Grigio. He strides directly towards us, flanked on each side by an officer of some kind, although none of them wear traditional military attire. Their uniforms are light grey shirts and work pants, no decorations or rank insignias, just pockets and tool loops and laminated ID badges. High-calibre side arms gleam softly in their belt holsters.

‘Be cool, R,’ Julie whispers. ‘Don’t say anything, just, um . . . pretend you’re shy.’

‘Julie!’ the general calls out from an awkward distance.

‘Hi, Dad,’ Julie says.

He and his retinue stop in front of us. He gives Julie’s shoulder a quick squeeze. ‘How are you?’

‘Fine. Just went to see Mom.’

His jaw muscle twitches, but he doesn’t respond. He looks at Nora, gives her a nod, then looks at me. He looks at me very hard. He pulls out a walkie-talkie. ‘Ted. The individual who slipped past you yesterday. You said it was a young man in a red tie? Tall, thin, poorly complected?’

‘Dad,’ Julie says.

The walkie squawks. The general puts it away and pulls a pair of thumb cuffs from his belt. ‘You are detained for unauthorised entry,’ he recites. ‘You will be held in—’

‘Jesus Christ, Dad.’ Julie steps forward to push his hands away. ‘What is wrong with you? He’s not an intruder, he’s visiting from Goldman Dome. And he almost died on the way here so cut him some slack on the legalities, will you?’

‘Who is he?’ the general demands.

Julie edges in front of me as if to block me from responding. ‘His name is . . . Archie – it was Archie, right?’ She glances at me and I nod. ‘He’s Nora’s new boyfriend. I just met him today.’

Nora grins and squeezes my arm. ‘Can you believe what a nice dresser he is? I didn’t think guys knew how to wear a tie any more.’

The general hesitates, then puts the cuffs away and forces a thin smile. ‘Pleased to meet you, Archie. You’re aware of course that if you want to stay any longer than three days you’ll need to register with our immigration officer.’

I nod and try to avoid eye contact, but I can’t seem to look away from his face. Although that tense dinner I witnessed in my visions couldn’t have been more than a few years ago, he looks a decade older. His skin is thin and papery. His cheek-bones protrude. His veins are green in his forehead.

One of the officers with him clears his throat. ‘So sorry to hear about Perry, Miss Cabernet. We’ll miss him very much.’ Colonel Rosso is older than Grigio but has aged more gracefully. He is short and thick, with strong arms and a muscular chest above the inevitable old-man paunch. His thin hair is wispy and white, blue eyes big and watery behind thick glasses. Julie gives him a smile that seems genuine.

‘Thanks, Rosy. So will I.’

Their exchange sounds proper but rings false, as if paddling above deep undercurrents. I suspect they have already shared a less professional moment of grief somewhere away from Grigio’s officious gaze. ‘We appreciate your condolences, Colonel Rosso,’ he says. ‘However, I’ll thank you not replace our surname when addressing my daughter, whatever such “revisions” she may have embraced.’

The older man straightens. ‘Apologies, sir. I meant nothing by it.’

‘It’s just a nickname,’ Nora says. ‘Me and Perry thought she was more of a Cab than a . . .’

She trails off under Grigio’s stare. He pans slowly over to me. I avoid eye contact until he dismisses me. ‘We have to be going,’ he says to no one in particular. ‘Good to meet you, Archie. Julie, I’ll be in meetings all night tonight and then heading over to Goldman in the morning to discuss the merger. I expect to be back at the house in a few days.’

Julie nods. Without another word, the general and his men depart. Julie examines the ground, seeming far away. After a moment, Nora breaks the silence. ‘Well, that was scary.’

‘Let’s go to the Orchard,’ Julie mutters. ‘I need a drink.’

I’m still looking down the street, watching her father shrink into the distance. Just before rounding a corner he glances back at me, and my skin prickles. Will Perry’s flood be of water, gentle and cleansing, or will it be a flood of a different kind? I feel movement under my feet. A faint vibration, as if the bones of every man and woman ever buried are rattling deep in the earth. Cracking the bedrock. Stirring the magma.

Categories: Warm Bodies