Zombicorns Part 3

One thing about the Aze: The stars have come out in a big way. The Milky Way, which I always suspected was an elaborate fiction or else a sight reserved for citizens of the past, wrapped a band around the night sky, a thin moon rising on the clear night. Mr. President and I walked a few blocks over to Sunnyside Road, then up to a roof deck of what had been a new single-family home in the city. There were wooden Adirondack chairs up there, and I sat down and stared at the sky, thinking about the number of the stars, and the smallness of this failed experiment, feeling again that hopeful impulse: Maybe even after there are people on earth, there will be someone to discover us, to cut away the kudzu and reveal our monuments and ma.n.u.scripts, someone to display our skeletons in their museums.

But what did I have left to contribute? Just this? Just being the last known pair of truly human eyes to look up into the sky and experience the fleeting flush of hope? Being a person, I had come to realize, is a communal activity. Dogs know how to be dogs. But people do not know how to be people unless and until they learn from other people.

Which got me to wondering whether it's possible to learn how to be a person in a world where all the people are dead.

Sitting there in the Adirondack chair drinking directly from the bottle with Mr. President's overly-skinned trunk flush against the roof deck's hardwood floor, I started thinking about this famous German soldier in World War II, Josef Schultz. My dad always talked about Josef Schultz. Schultz was part of a platoon that captured eleven Yugoslavian soldiers. They were ordered to blindfold the prisoners, then they lined them up and Schultz was part of the firing squad who was going to shoot these unarmed prisoners of war, but then he dropped his rifle and took off his helmet and marched into the line of prisoners in solidarity with his enemy and then the firing squad fired anyway, killing all of the soldiers and Schultz, too.

Anyway, they've got a statue of Schultz in Yugoslavia somewhere, or at least they did in the Beez, and my dad would always talk about Schultz, and I remember one time he got in a huge fight with a drunk guy at the Brauhaus over it, this guy screaming at my dad in German and my dad answering back in the calm but st.u.r.dy way he had, and then when we were walking home, I asked him what they'd fought about, and my dad said, "The guy was saying Schultz was an idiot, because his death accomplished nothing. He said that if Schultz had wanted to be a real hero, he could've poisoned his unit and started fighting the n.a.z.is. He said Schultz wasn't a hero because he didn't save anyone's life."

"And what'd you say?" I asked. It was a cold night, but I was bundled up, still a kid, still my daddy's girl. How you love your heroes when you are young and safe and the world has not ended.

"I told him they built a statue of Schultz, and then he said that a monument is cold comfort to a dead man, and then I said that the statue was built not for Schultz, but for us-to remind us how to be human."

The starlight was beautiful. Innumerable pinp.r.i.c.ks in the ether. Brightness behind. But it was not enough, I decided as I drained the bottle. I looked down at Mr. President, who slept next to me. I couldn't decide if he'd be better off if I let him go or shot him first.

Chapter 15.

We swam to the bank of the Chicago River just north of Diversey, near the old Jo Ann fabric store and the Home Depot. The place was completely z'ed out; we'd swum to a parking lot but the other side of the river was several acres of z-tended corn, and Diversey was a huge Z thoroughfare because it provided easy access to the lake, and we were completely unarmed. We spent a few minutes trying to dry our guns out, but then noticed a gaggle of Z's on the opposite river bank shucking ears of corn-ears they clearly intended to shove down our throats.

"Home Depot," I said quickly.

"K," Caroline said.

As we jogged across the parking lot, I said, "We need a car," and she said, "It could take hours to find a car with both gas and keys. We need guns."

We jogged through the blown-out gla.s.s doors of the Home Depot and each grabbed carts. Caroline said, "We need to split up. Grab anything that could help and we'll meet back here in five minutes."

"No splitting up," I said, following her.

"You're wasting time. They're coming for us, Mia."

"Yeah and we've got a better chance if we don't split up."

Caroline sighed, annoyed. "Fine," she said after a second.

The things we placed in our shopping carts: 1. Three four-foot long pressure-treated two-by-twos.

2. A package of four green plastic lighters 3. Wasp repellant 4. duct tape.

5. wood glue 6. three blades unscrewed from walk-behind Honda lawn mowers found overturned in the (totally empty) Miracle Gro and soil additive aisle.

7. Eight gla.s.s bottles of syrupy-looking wood cleaner We hid in the back of the store amid the faux Persian rugs and Caroline quickly, silently, unscrewed the wood cleaner, doused the rags with the cleaner, which reeked of alcohol, then stuffed the rags into the bottle to serve as stoppers. Meanwhile, I used my knife to carve notches into the two by two and then wedged the blades from the lawnmower into the crevice I'd created, then lashed the affair together with some duct tape and, for good measure, a generous application of wood glue. The resulting devices looked like ghetto versions of the grim reaper's scimitar. I didn't even look up until I was finished. Caroline was standing above me, her backpack too big for her.

"We may have to slightly fight our way out here," she mumbled.

I stood, scanned the aisles for any humanids, and saw none.

"Lighting," Caroline said quietly, and there they were, amid the unlit lamps and can lights. I counted six shuffling toward us.

Caroline took a step toward them but I grabbed her shoulder. "We are not well-armed," I pointed out. "Don't be stupid. The corn fields are full of the brave and underprovisioned."

"The only way out is through," Caroline said.

I turned her soldiers toward the back wall of the store. "We run through the carpets, past the doors, then go down the lumber aisle. They'll never see us. We find a car, get back to the Corvette, then get the h.e.l.l home."

Caroline nodded. "You're right," she said. She flipped her backpack off one shoulder, unzipped it a bit, and pulled out a wood cleaner molotov c.o.c.ktail. She rezipped the backpack. I handed her a scimitar and picked up two for myself, then we started walking, shoulders slumped, against the back wall of the Home Depot. I was leading Caroline for once, and it felt good.

"Mia," she whispered. I turned around. "What?" I whispered back.

She smiled at me a little. "LEEERRROOOY JEEENNKKIINNNSS!" she shouted, then spun around and ran toward the Z's in the lighting section.

"Oh G.o.d d.a.m.n it, Caroline!" I shouted behind her. For a moment, I considered leaving Caroline to her fate, but she was my friend, and I figured that counted for something, so I ran after her.

I was a step or two behind her when she lit the edge of the molotov c.o.c.ktail rag and smashed it into the face of the closest Z, then nearly beheaded a second with a single swing of the scimitar. "Sharp," she commented, impressed.

"I do good work," I noted from behind her while slicing a middle-aged heavily bearded Z across the face with the scimitar in my right hand. I reached my left hand up and slashed a plastic wire above us holding a string of ceiling fans, which came crashing down onto two more Z's. I stood above each of them in turn and sliced their necks and watched them smile as the blood pooled on the polished concrete below them.

"Entirely unnecessary violence," I said.

"I LOVE IT!" Caroline shouted. "GIVE ME MORE! I NEED NO GUNS WHEN I HAVE MIA'S MAGIC LAWNMOWER BLADES!"

I walked past Caroline, who was still slicing at a clearly completed Z. "Stop," I said. "It's done."

"Just making sure."

"You're being cruel," I told her. "You were an idiot to go after them in the first place and now you're just being a b.i.t.c.h." I walked past her out into the too-bright afternoon light of my dear, deserted city. There were a few cars in the parking lot, and I tried each of them but didn't find anything. I walked out onto Elston because you're more likely to find cars with keys in them on a road: Drivers who got out to attack some Z's and got Z'ed up. I found a Chrysler minivan with keys in it but the engine wouldn't even turn over. Six months into the Unraveling, fewer and fewer cars started, and I knew it could be a long and b.l.o.o.d.y road home if I couldn't get a motorized vehicle.

I was leaning into the rolled-down window of a white SUV when Caroline caught up with me, shouting, "THEY DID THIS, MIA! They made us like this! They are responsible for the end of the G.o.dd.a.m.ned world, and it is our sympathy, our pathetic humanness that led to their victory," and I thought about Schultz and the marginal utility of what we call compa.s.sion, and all this stuff was going through my head but I couldn't explain what I was thinking.

"Well but you would rather be dead than be them, right?"

"Of course!" she said. And this was perhaps all that unified us-in a world where millions had given in and committed zuicide, we two believed death was preferable to a life in service to d131y.

"When you torture them, you are them," I said.

"Ridiculous," she said. "Ridiculous! They're NOT PEOPLE, Mia. They are the destroyers of people. They are anti-people!" I noticed her cammo pants were soaked in blood-blood visibly indistinguishable from human blood. I looked down at my own jeans, and saw the blood on them and on my once-gray Chucks. I realized that Caroline and I had a philosophical disagreement, but we were both soaked in the same blood.

"Let's just find a car, okay?" I asked.

"Fine," she said. She scanned up and down Elston. There were several dozen cars visible on the street, although many had been plowed into the sidewalk to keep the road pa.s.sable. "Try that Town Car," she said, pointing to a black Town Car with a crumpled trunk and its front two wheels up on the curb. I walked over there and, sure enough, keys in the ignition. It started immediately. Caroline came around to the pa.s.senger side and got in, tossing her scimitar and backpack into the back seat. The gas tank was a quarter full-astonishing even then.

"How'd you know?" I asked.

"People don't check wrecked cars. So you gotta find a car that's wrecked but still runs, and it's likely to have some gas. Let's pick up the Corvette."

So we picked our way up Elston, then turned left onto Damen and drove past the cemetery-what a luxury it is to bury the dead-and then made it finally to the Corvette, on the tiny street by the river. I drove the Town Car up onto the sidewalk to keep the road clean, and we were driving back down, past the Brauhaus and my whole former life when Caroline said, "We should go to Canada," and I said, "I'm a Chicagoan all the way through," and she said, "I'm tired of killing them. You're right, Mia. We need to go where they aren't. The time has come to retreat."

I didn't say anything for a while. "I can't," I said finally.

"If we go north, maybe we can gather an army," she said.

"You know there's no one up North."

"No, I only know there's no one here. We've gotta try," Caroline said. "Trying is the only difference between us and them." (This struck me as plausible in the moment, although upon further reflection it was wrong.) "There's no one up there," I said.

"Okay, maybe there isn't," she said. "But if we can get to a place that's too cold for corn, maybe there won't be any Z's either. Maybe we can live in peace, you know?"

"Go without me," I told her. "I'm staying."

If only she had.

Chapter 16.

Last bottle, friends. Even warm, you can tell that it's as good as German whites get, a luxury that I am perhaps the last person on earth to enjoy. I'm drunk already, talking to Mr. President about where we should make our graceful exit. The obvious choice, of course, is home.

Caroline would want me to go out in a blaze of glory, to kill ten thousand zombies by starting a raging corn fire or something, but in spite of everything, I still find myself short on bloodl.u.s.t.

Around midnight, I leash up Mr. President and load the AR-15 with the last clip it'll ever fire, feeling a weird nostalgia not for the broken world but for this little gun that has saved me over and over, that heroically recovered from drowning in the Chicago River, that stuck by my side lo these many months while everyone else save Mr. President abandoned me. It's a mad, mad world when your best friend is a dog and your second-best friend is an automatic rifle, but such was life in the Aze.

Chapter 17.

We made it back to the Harold Washington Library before dark and rearmed from Caroline's astonishingly complete a.r.s.enal. I slept like the dead and woke up the next morning around 8:30. Caroline was already gone-to the library to read about the great white north or the history of corn or the philosophical implications of violence or whatever-so I changed clothes, applied some deodorant in lieu of a bath, and took Mr. President and a sombrero pinata up to the Brauhaus in the Corvette, just like every morning. I tossed the sombrero into the darkened doorway of the Brauhaus, drove down Lincoln a bit, spun a U-Turn, and opened the door without getting out to let Mr. President out on the leash to relieve himself.

Like clockwork, Holly shuffled across Lincoln and knelt down to tear into the sombrero, which contained Mounds bars and Werthers Originals and all manner of yum. I could still see my little sister. It was the best part of every day.

And then the gunfire rained down on Holly as she knelt there eating, her body spasming as the bullets filled her up, animating her ever so briefly until the gunfire stopped and she did too, her body hideously still, cuddling the sombrero, bleeding out onto the candy I'd brought her. I tugged on Mr. President's leash, pulling him into the car, and then got out myself, c.o.c.king the pistol I'd acquired from Caroline's arms stash the night before.

I thought Holly was howling in pain until I realized it was me. She was my sister. My little sister. Running, I made it to Holly in seconds and held her as she died, her jaundiced eyes blinking up at me. I don't pretend that she knew her sister was holding her, but I hope to G.o.d she knew that someone was holding her, that in those last moments she was not alone. I held out the hope that somehow she knew that I loved her for as long as I could, and then longer.

I stayed with her for a minute after I knew she was gone, her Z'ed up body limp in my arms, the last of her blood pouring out of the countless holes in her body, like the night sky pinp.r.i.c.ked with stars. And then I laid her to rest on her back in the shadow of the Brauhaus, pressed her eyelids closed, and crossed her skinny little girl arms across each other, so that it looked like she was giving herself a hug.

After looking at her like that forever, I finally stood up and walked across Lincoln Avenue to Cafe Sel Marie.

Caroline sat in a steel-latticed chair beneath a tattered, wind-beaten umbrella, M-16 at her side, the casings all around her. "I had to do it," she explained. "She wasn't a person anymore, Mia. This game needs teams. I can't go north alone, and there's no one else to go with, but we need to go. There is no survival here, Mia. Maybe there's survival up north and maybe not, but we're definitely not gonna find it here. I did it for you, you know. I did it because you couldn't, and I hope you'd do the same for me."

I raised the pistol from my hip and shot Caroline once in the face. The chair fell backwards with her in it and I stepped forward. She started to say something or at least her mouth was moving, and I shot her twice more in the head to make it quick.

My regret was immediate and permanent and useless.

Chapter 18.

Sitting on familial couch in my living room alone with Mr. President, I find myself thinking about what Caroline said: This game needs teams. It was true, of course: Before I knew Caroline, I bounced around from team to team, always seeking other humans so that I might be part of an us to fight the mighty infected them. Why had I gone to the Bean in the first place that Spring morning? It had been to find Caroline, of course.

She was crazy, but who isn't? We were friends of convenience, the kind of friends I'd had in the Aze who I ate lunch with because they shared the same cafeteria period as me and weren't reprehensible. But we were still friends. And I still killed her, making me finally a murderer after more than a year of relentless killing.

The game needs teams, and I've been without one ever since, and that is what's brought me here to say goodbye. Goodbye to the Aze, to memories of air that smelled like air. Goodbye to my great city, my big-shouldered city finally hunched by Zapocalypse. Goodbye to the streets of Lincoln Square, the final resting place of everyone I loved. Goodbye to my home, and to this couch, stained a hazy brown with the memory of my father's blood.

When I began this re/accounting, I wanted to understand the relentlessness of human hope, my insane refusal to stop being what I considered human. I wondered who was running the show, why I wanted what I wanted, which great and terrible master lay behind it all, steering me toward hope like the Z is steered toward corn.

The Z is the end of an evolutionary process: Corn found a way to shape the desires of man. But what was shaping our desires before corn? What made my dad want rainflow showerheads and granite countertops? What made me fight and claw to continue the idea of humanness I'd been taught to believe in? And what made me shoot my only friend in the face as punishment for the sin of killing my already-dead sister? The great and terrible master of these desires still lies undiscovered, but as I sit here trying to gear myself up to shoot myself, I find myself still beholden to humanity.

And so. And so I choose to go on serving it. I choose to go north, even though like every other direction, it is rationally without hope. This game needs teams. My best shot at finding teammates is North. When I'm done writing this, I'll go outside, spraypaint A RE/ACCOUNTING OF HUMAN LIFE POST-VIRUS ON THE COFFE TABLE INSIDE on the vinyl siding of my house, and I will suck gasoline out of cars until I can get the Corvette half-full of gas, and then I will drive north with Mr. President, lighting out-in the great and failed tradition of my people-for the territories.

It's hopeless, of course, which is why I leave this re/accounting here. But if somehow this gets found: The green room of the Harold Washington Library's auditorium is safe, and if you go there, you should be able to find a stockpile of weapons and a baby monitor with plenty of batteries.

THE END.

[1] The era Before Zombification (BZ) is known locally and colloquially as, "the Beez." The current era is known as the Aze.

[2] There are many, many schools of thought about cars in the Aze-given that basically any vehicle is available to you, choosing a car is one of the very few unambiguous joys of the whole affair. Some people go for the big SUVs that can in a pinch mow over a gaggle of Z's; some argue that you want tinted windows because Z's are too stupid to know cars are driven by humans unless they can see the human. Anyway, there are a lot of theories about which cars are safest. I drive a 1997 canary yellow Chevrolet Corvette because it's fast as h.e.l.l and turns on a dime.

[3] In the Beez I had been what is known as a "big girl." Definitively overweight but not by any standard fully obese. I was, for point of comparison, a size 12. Zombie Apocalypses have a nice way of thinning a girl out, and on the Caroline day I was wearing girls jeans, size 6, and a medium t-shirt extolling the talents of a band that had long since disbanded due to a desire to pursue new opportunities, specifically the opportunity to plant, water, cultivate, and harvest d131y maize. Anyway, in the Aze big girls are totally beautiful (so are big guys) because the Z's look like silver bags of bones, and the opposite of Z-ness-full, soft, warm-has, natch, become desirable. A good rule of thumb is that as I change, the understanding of hotness definitionally changes, because the ancient master has previously decided that the meaning of hotness is "not you."