The Living Dead 2 Part 10

#2.

Picture of the famous "Painted Ladies": Victorian houses in old San Francisco, in a park in the middle of the Western Addition. You can see a few people sunbathing in the gra.s.s just before it to the left. I've never lived in houses like that, but I bet it's nice. Admittedly, they look better in the post cards, but they're still quite pretty.

Behind the Painted Ladies lies the whole San Francisco skyline, including the Transamerica Pyramid. To the right you can see a pillar of smoke rising from the southern part of the city.

#3.

Just May and Kyoko, hugging each other and grinning. Close up zoom on their faces, so close you can see Kyoko's acne scars. That old gray 7 Seconds tee shirt that May's wearing, that's mine.

In the background people walk past and stuff. I think this one was taken in the j.a.pantown Peace Plaza, but I don't remember.

#4.

Picture of my neighbor, Mr. Sumpter. He's standing in the hallway, wearing an old polyester b.u.t.ton-up shirt, leaning to one side and putting his weight on one foot. He has his head tilted and eyes open, mouth closed. One fist is clenched.

Mr. Sumpter's eyes didn't glow red when I took the picture, it just looks that way now. I think it was the flash from the camera. I didn't know then what I know now.

The hallway frames Mr. Sumpter. You can't see where he's looking at, but he's looking at a blank wall. I was walking down the hallway and saw him like that. I called out to him but he didn't say anything, so I took a picture.

#5.

Face of my roommate, Bradley. He's grinning and the color of the photograph is bleached out by the flash. His eyes are red, too. You can see that blond stubble of a goatee that he has, and the blur in the corner is his hand holding a bottle of Miller Genuine Draft. This is important because it was the only alcohol he ever drank. He wouldn't even drink Miller Lite or Miller High Life. Just MGD.

Bradley was always a little bit weird. I took this picture at a party we had in our apartment. It got shut down a little after this because of noise complaints from my neighbors.

#6.

Picture of May, caught in a half-laugh. May hated this picture the most, though I personally think she looks really cute. That thing in her hand is a bottle of beer, I think, but I don't remember what brand she drank. Behind are the windows of the apartment Bradley and I shared. You can't really see the view of the west side of the city that we got, though.

Yeah, the smudges and rip on one side is from my fingers handling the sides once or twice too many.

#7.

Group shot. I don't remember a lot of these faces anymore. The couple to one side, those were May's friends. The two guys in faded computer tee shirts, those were my coworkers. Of course, May, Kyoko, and Bradley are easy to spot. I'm not in the picture because I was behind the camera. You can't tell where this was taken, but I'm pretty sure it was in my apartment at the party.

#8.

Blurred picture of Kyoko. She's standing in the living room with one hand raised with half of her coat off. She has her head tilted and her mouth is open, but you can't quite see that. She just got stuck that way putting on her coat. Kind of an odd time for it to hit. The blurry black cloud-looking thing is the couch that Bradley and I bought with our tax returns. It doesn't look like a lot in the picture but it was really comfortable.

I think the picture got blurred because May was moving past me and b.u.mped my shoulder. This was just before we took Kyoko to the hospital.

#9.

Those big brick buildings are San Francisco General Hospital. You can see all the cars in the parking lot and the crowd to one side. I took this from across the street, on Potrero Avenue.

#10.

Picture of inside the emergency room waiting area. You can see it was really packed. In the corner, the guy dressed in blue, that's a security guard who got angry at me soon after this. May you can see over by the side standing over something that doesn't look like Kyoko but is her sleeping, I think maybe just her shoulder and maybe a leg is all that's in the picture, but she fell right asleep in the middle of the waiting area.

Over at the corner you can see a television set, note the four people watching it and one of them is just staring off into s.p.a.ce. You can tell his head is angled just a bit differently than the others, but you have to hold the photograph up close to your face.

I think that was the last time I saw Kyoko. Nice girl. Odd sense of humor. I can't describe how. I guess some people who learn English but don't speak it natively, they get caught up with one word or two that just sounds interesting to them. With Kyoko it was words like "susurrus." She'd fit it into any conversation she could. I don't think she even half-understood what it meant. She was just fooling around.

#11.

This is Bradley and May at the Jack in the Box which was down by Bernal Heights, which is pretty far south in the city without being South San Francisco. There are a lot of warehouses and stuff there. You can't see what May's looking out the window at but it's just the road, I think. There might have been a McDonald's or something across the street, I'm not sure. But it was a pretty busy road.

Behind Bradley you can sort of see a figure that looks like someone standing in that awkward position again. But I don't remember anyone like that when we were there so the picture probably just caught someone mid-stride.

#12.

Picture of the four-car pileup outside our apartment building. I'd seen a few car crashes before, but nothing like this one. Usually you'd see a car crash and it'd be two cars, one dented, and a bunch of people arguing. Not here, though, obviously. The building to the left is ours, the shattered window is the coffee house where I used to always get double mocha lattes with extra whipped cream in them. Those mochas ended up somehow tasting like some perfect mix of hot chocolate and coffee. It's one of the things I miss the most these days.

You can only see three of the four cars, because the smoke from the first two is obscuring the last one. That's Bradley standing to one side with a stupid grin on his face, near him are two cops. If you look closely you can see one of them has a gun in his hand; something I never noticed or even vaguely remember from the real event. But there it is, pictures don't lie.

The big car that's spun out and on the other side from the two other cars you can see, by the shattered window, that's a Pontiac Bonneville of a make and model that's nearly exactly like the old Bonneville I used to drive around when I lived back in the Midwest.

#13.

Picture of our neighbor's door. Note the scratch marks: I think the doors were made of metal so whoever put their shoulder into this one had to have messed himself up.

Although there are Christmas decorations on the door, it says less about the time of the year that all those awful events happened and more about just how odd my neighbors were. I never knew their names. I saw them once or twice. Seemed like nice people. But the fact that they put up the Christmas decorations in December and then never bothered to take them down... well, it seemed a bit curious.

#14.

Picture of Bradley and Mr. Sumpter. Thankfully, most of the blood here is Mr. Sumpter's, but the b.a.s.t.a.r.d nearly took both of us down. He was hiding in the trash bin and leapt out, clawing at my face. We'd been alerted by this awful odor and were all keyed up what with all the blackouts and weird events in the city the two days before. Or we were just d.a.m.ned lucky.

Anyways, Bradley has poor Mr. Sumpter propped up here and is crouching next to him. He looks a lot more exuberant than we were, the camera sort of caught him in this smile so he looks more wide-eyed and mad than he was. Even in death, Mr. Sumpter's muscles have a certain rigidity, like they all do. Just look at his neck. It's crazy.

#15.

Some National Guardsmen, smoking cigarettes on the Fillmore bridge over Geary Street Across the street and over the bridge you can see some buildings and some graffiti up there, and that little blues club. I think the Guardsmen were there to keep us from looting too much, which, now that I think of it, would have been a pretty good idea. None of us thought of it, though.

You can just barely read the headline on the newspaper in the rack, it reads "CHAOS!" Depending on what you read or which radio station you hear, the cause is all sorts of things. You know, a virus or some kind of biological warfare gone wrong, or G.o.d's vengeance or a comet or...I don't know. Everything. They've got all sorts of excuses for this mess.

May was with me. We were heading down the street to find a good corner store and to see if the ATMs were working again: sometimes we had service, other times we didn't. We would have gone to the supermarket just a block back but the Guard had camped out in the parking lot. There was another one a few blocks away on Eddy Street but I'd never been there, and besides, I heard that the projects had gotten hit really hard and figured it'd be better to stick to routes I knew.

#16.

Bradley and me with our makeshift weapons. At that point I spent a lot of time wishing I was a gun nut like my cousin back in Ohio. Of course, ten to one he got turned into one of those monsters and is using his prize semiautomatic AR-15 "that the Government will never take away" as a st.u.r.dy club.

Bradley's weapon you can see is brightly colored-I think he had this weird idea that they were attracted to bright colors, like bulls or something. The whole idea being since they're essentially ex-humans, creatures who have abandoned their intelligence for some razor sense of cunning, that they'd be somehow animalistic. In practice it never worked too well. Confused the h.e.l.l out of one for a moment, though, which was just enough time for me to bash its head in.

Mine was my Louisville Slugger. You see, when I came to San Francisco, I had this idea I'd meet all these young, active people and every Sat.u.r.day we'd hit the park and toss around a few b.a.l.l.s or something and enjoy being in the California sun. It never happened. Too foggy, and everyone was always too d.a.m.ned stressed out about work.

Guess I found a use for the bat after all.

#17.

Kind of hard to tell what's going on here. I took this picture while running. To one side, those bright yellow blobs right there? I think that's the flash from guns. The blur on the left side is someone else running away as well.

The Guard dragged us out of our homes and there was a ton of us milling about in the middle of the street. That's when a bunch of the creatures attacked-and quickly, too. Like cheetahs jumping into a herd of gazelle. I saw two of them literally rip a woman in half before the Guard started opening up on them.

The Guardsmen were firing into the crowd. They didn't even care.

#18.

This one's blurry. The picture is tan, there's some sort of large dark object in the center.

I don't know how this one ended up here. I think I took the picture by accident. But I keep it anyways.

#19.

Group shot of refugees in a truck. That's May there, frowning and looking directly at the camera. May was p.i.s.sed that I wasn't going with her, but there wasn't a lot of room on the truck anyways. She'd stolen my favorite tee shirt of my collection and was wearing it on the truck. I'm not sure if it was extortion to try to get me to go, or if she wore it out of spite, knowing I'd probably want to stay.

Word was, that the Presidio camps were only temporary. The Government already set up bigger, more permanent facilities in the old internment camps they put all the j.a.panese-Americans in during the Second World War. I heard about the slaughters in those camps, but every once in a while I can imagine her up by Mt. Shasta or someplace like that, working in a field. Maybe doing laundry, I dunno.

#20.

Shot of Bradley. Like the first shot of him, the flash has sort of bleached out a lot of the color here. Look at the beginnings of a beard he has. Sometimes I look at this picture and picture #5 right next to each other. It's hard to think that only a few weeks have pa.s.sed between the two shots, because he looks so much older in this one. It's set in his face, a kind of constant panic.

And, yeah, his neck muscles are taut here. And his emotionless grin, too: I'm pretty sure that's the muscles in his face constricting. When I woke up, he was stuck that way.

I slashed his throat a few minutes after taking this picture. It seemed to take forever. I cut into his neck, and nothing happened at first, and this dark blood began to flow, and I remember flinching back, like this was the first time or something. Then...then he started screaming like he woke up and the panic hit me like a flurry of fists. I shut my eyes and stabbed over and over again until the screaming stopped.