Zombies - Encounters with the Hungry Dead Part 22

"We pa.s.s it from tribe to tribe. Depending on the season."

"You mean, Custer, like, 'Custer's last stand' Custer? The general?"

"The government wants it back, so we pa.s.s it, tribe to tribe, keep it safe in a medicine bag."

Roger drove, he pushed 100. The feel of the car changed; eventually felt right. He checked for reception-as he pa.s.sed through the h.e.l.lgate, reception returned, and Roger redialed.

Roger left San Francisco shortly before Vivienne married Martin. Martin's family thought it rude that Roger left town before the wedding, and one of Martin's aunt's was foolish enough to say so in Vivienne's presence. Vivienne didn't lose it, in the way she'd lost her mind from time to time while living with her brother, but she did explode, at first delivering a rich a.s.semblage of Czech profanities, followed by an eerily calm explanation of Roger's importance in her life and of his right to do just exactly what he felt had to do, and concluded with an un-invite of Martin's aunt, which was not reversed, as everyone on Martin's side of the family-even Martin though he never admitted as much-a.s.sumed would happen. As Roger was never discussed by his own family, he was never discussed by Martin's.

The phone connected to Martin's phone, and Roger heard noise like people arguing. Roger shouted his brother-in-law's name, shouted, "Vivienne!" A voice, high and hysterical. Roger said, "Vivienne?" But it wasn't Vivienne. "Martin. Shut up. Stop carrying on." A clatter, as if in the phone, the phone must have been dropped. Martin's voice, Martin apologized. "Fine," Roger said. "What's going on with Vivienne?" Martin's explanation made little sense. He said something like: "The doctors don't know. An epidemic. Hardly any staff here at all. Vivienne is sick, man, sometimes she seems okay and sometimes she loses her mind. And that's what the doctors say, too, that people are losing their minds, like, not crazy, like, their minds are dying. You gotta get us out of here. We can't get out. And Vivienne wants to go."

A scream, Vivienne's, for sure. An animal loped onto the highway. At 100 miles per hour, Roger could not stop for it, dropped his cell phone, gripped the steering wheel so as to keep the car steady, and drove into the animal. Its pliant body burst over the hood of the car, a dog, perhaps, or even a wolf. The car skidded a little, but Roger kept control. The wipers cleared the windshield adequately. When he found the phone, the connection was gone, and no reception.

Roger slowed to navigate the winding roads of Idaho, but was in Washington in less than an hour. Out this way, Route 90 was rarely heavily trafficked, but there was simply no traffic. A couple times Roger swerved to avoid an abandoned vehicle, but he no longer worried about oncoming traffic, and straddled both lanes, preferring to stay clear of the shoulder, where many cars were either abandoned or was the site of unwholesome activity, peripheral glimpses of writhing and bloodied men and women. He crossed into Washington state. Soon, Spokane was below him. Here, he pa.s.sed cars and trucks, people driving slowly to survey the damage, people heading east. He pa.s.sed one car headed west, a little Rabbit that quickly receded in his rearview mirror, a red speck on faded gray highway.

Past Spokane, he stopped again for gas. He didn't look for an attendant. He was grateful the pumps were on. He considered the very good possibility that gas stations would dry up, maybe not in the next few days, maybe not in a week, but soon enough. He thought maybe he'd find a gas can and fill it. Maybe grab some food, too, though for now what he'd bought in Billings was plenty. Roger's freezers, back in Decker, were still humming, drawing power from the generator shed. Peter, who'd volunteered to drive Roger's route, didn't make it out of the driveway, crashed Roger's truck into a tree; Peter's head smashed open against the steering wheel.

A man, "Hey, man."

Roger's shotgun lay across the roof of his car.

"Hey man, can you give me a lift?"

The man was not dead, he was a young guy in torn jeans and a waffle shirt, with a dusty pack and dusty boots. Roger weighed the pros and cons of a pa.s.senger.

"This pack is killing me." The man dropped his pack between his feet, which revealed a bleeding wound on his shoulder. "I feel terrible, too. Look at this bulls.h.i.t." The man pointed to his shoulder. "There's some f.u.c.ked up s.h.i.t going on."

Roger remained cool, determined to wait until the pump clicked off, then to fill the neck. No gas can, though. Roger sighed. No time, now.

The man asked, "Where are you headed?"

"Seattle."

"Great!"

"To see my sister."

"Seattle's great."

"She's sick. In the hospital."

"Sorry to hear it, man. But that's good for me. I could get this s.h.i.t looked at, maybe get something for this d.a.m.n headache."

The pump clicked. Roger squeezed the pump trigger, once, twice, then locked the cap.

"No," Roger said.

"'No' what?"

"I won't give you a ride."

"Why not, man?"

"You're sick."

"You're going to a hospital!"

"You're sick and you're going to die."

"Why the f.u.c.k would you say that?"

"How does it feel?"

"I feel pretty bad, that's how I feel."

"No. How does it feel?"

Roger lifted the shotgun from the roof of his car.

"You gonna shoot me? You're f.u.c.ked up, you know that? Stay the f.u.c.k away from me. I'll get a ride from a human being. So just stay the-"

And Roger saw it happen. A moment of confusion, a jerky step back, a tremor that traveled the spine to the eyes.

"-f.u.c.k-"

Discharging his shotgun at the gas station would be stupid, and the man was no threat. Roger put the shotgun on the pa.s.senger seat, and brought out the tire iron.

"-away-"The man shook his head, as if to clear it.

There was plenty time for Roger to get into his car and drive away. The man saw what Roger held and stepped back, appeared to struggle with himself, took another step back. "Just let me go, man."

With the iron raised, Roger closed the distance between himself and the man, brought the iron down, let its own weight do most of the work, splitting open the left side of the man's head. Not rotten yet, Roger thought. The man jumped, something electric lifted him from the ground, and Roger swung again, up from his leg, and knocked the man to the dirt with a blow to the man's shoulder. He's still alive. Another blow, to the chest, broke ribs. The man cried out. Roger leaned over the man, beating him with the iron, beating him to death.

Roger tossed the tire iron into the pa.s.senger-side foot well, and drove away, his interest in the man gone, his need to reach his sister all the more keen.

When Roger left San Francisco, he quit a lucrative job and sold most of what he owned shortly after he learned of Martin's competent handling of a suicide attempt by Vivienne. Martin had returned from work and found Vivienne on the floor of their bathroom. He called for help, removed what pills were still in her mouth, and kept her awake. Once Vivienne was out of the hospital, Roger fully expected Martin to break up with Vivienne, leaving her once more in Roger's care. Instead, Martin took her on a short vacation and proposed. Roger waited for a little while after, suffered quietly and admired Vivienne's ring when she came home, which wasn't all that often. The night before Roger left, he and Vivienne spent one last evening together. They fell asleep together, in Roger's room, warmed by a fire and with no fuss at all.

Roger drove the rest of Washington in a haze. Deep forests. The falls of Snoqualmie. A white barn painted with the word "Cherries." All the energy it took to make the drive came from Roger's body, a knot of anger and l.u.s.t and confusion untied from Decker to the bridge to Seattle. Route 90 terminates as a long bridge that crosses Lake Washington into Seattle. He would not be able to drive into the city. The sun was up, the sky, clear. Not blue, exactly. More-white. The bridge was crowded with people, a great, sluggish crowd, biting and clawing at each other and at nothing, spitting blood, smeared with blood, coated and crusted with blood. Roger thought of his sister. Maybe. He needed to get across the bridge. He filled his pockets with sh.e.l.ls. He would clear a stretch of the bridge, get back into his car and drive until he needed to clear another stretch. He would drive across a bridge of corpses. When the path became too narrow for the car, he would walk. I am ready to destroy whatever monsters lie between me and my sister and I'm ready to keep her alive forever. He unlocked the door, stepped onto the bridge, and took aim.

14/ Mehitobel Wilson The.

Quarantine Act.

I REFUSED THE INJECTION. I said nothing, held my ground, stood firm. I raised my chin against them and set my jaw and did not say anything as void as, "I have rights." I just stared at them.

They looked at me, at their handheld computers, and at my wife. One looked at my car.

Everyone looks at my car. That's why I bought it. But no man in full Anti-Biohazmat cadmium yellow had appraised it through a polarized facemask before, and the fact that this one did, it made sense, and it f.u.c.ked all thought of rights clean out of my head.

So I'm here with the orange carpet and the dead language, in quarantine. There is closed-circuit television in the school. All news, all the time. I watch one of the regular loops meant to ill.u.s.trate the dangers. This one shows a teenager. The surface of his skin shines with fluid when the rare light strikes it. His ever-open eyes are dry and do not shine. He grinds his teeth. I call him Gnashing Jack.

My own eyes, too, are dry, but I believe that I am still healthy. My eyes are dry because I stare through the darkness, trying to see what has happened to us, what we have done. The darkness itself is better than the truth, I think.

It was a shock the first time I saw someone I knew on television. That made me wonder, all over again. Annie. "Slopface."

The confinement, even with the flickering likes of Gnashing Jack and Slopface Annie and the others, might be better than the truth.

I'm clean, still. Alive, though? That's a question if there ever was one. Depends on what you mean by alive.

Slopface Annie (yeah, I'd called her that well before the ratification of the Act, and before the needle squads. .h.i.t the streets, and before the infection spread)- Slopface Annie knelt before me in her beige motel room, her chapped lips scouring my c.o.c.k as she smeared fishy dimestore lipstick along its length and back again. She kept frowning and shifting her unshaven legs. I'd tracked bits of gravel in with me from the parking lot and her knees ground into the tiny rocks. It hurt her-the princess and the pea-and made her frown. I liked how the frown hardened her lips as she worked, liked it a lot.

I pulled back. "Open your mouth and smile like a donut," I said, and she did. That's why she was Slopface, then.

Not now.

"Aim for the chin," she said, exaggerating the words so that her blurred mouth was very wide as she tossed her head back and faked royal joy, as she probably did with every John.

Don't get the wrong idea, here. Yes, Annie was a wh.o.r.e. Yes, I treated her like a wh.o.r.e when I f.u.c.ked her. But we went way back, and there was real affection between us. We'd gone to college together. I lasted, she didn't.

She wasn't technically a wh.o.r.e until the time I paid her, I guess, but once that hurdle had been pa.s.sed, she hit the streets and went whole hog.

"You need money," I had said.

"Of course I do, we all do. You do too. With all you have, do you still want more?" She'd been laying beside me, but pushed herself up then, sweeping her corkscrewed bleach-dead curls over her shoulder so they scratched my face.

"Sure. That's why I go to the office every day. But it wouldn't kill me to give you five hundred bucks, and it wouldn't kill you to take it."

"Five hundred?" Annie's dark brown eyes counted every bill in thin air and compared each to her rent. "h.e.l.l, if you're giving, I'll take." And she winked and sent her palm down to pay howdy to my b.a.l.l.s, and added, "And I'll give, too."

And she did.

Maybe it did kill her, that money, after all.

Then again, maybe it didn't kill her at all. A wh.o.r.e's a wh.o.r.e. If enough money talks, even the dead can walk.

My wife, she didn't get the vaccine. She's not in quarantine, either, not Julia. Her value to society is different than my own, and than Annie's.

I can't love her anymore. That, too, is my choice. It's my necessity. No sense loving what's gone.

She's a pragmatic girl, my Julia. There is no doubt that she feels the same way as I do.

The a.s.signations with Annie, and with all the others, ended the moment I noticed that I loved Julia. Just to be clear, there.

Julia was a good excuse to avoid Annie, anyway. I'll admit that now why the h.e.l.l not? Annie made me feel guilty for having turned her into a wh.o.r.e.

Scratch that. No matter how much I stare into the darkness here, trying to see the truth of monsters past it, I can't see past myself. So, fine. I was guilty about Annie only when I reminded myself that I ought to be guilty about Annie. I was guilty only when I thought, "You called her 'Slopface.' That was your pet name and you called her that aloud. You p.r.i.c.k. You should feel awful."

But I had to tell myself to feel awful. Because the first thing I felt when I thought of Annie then was disgust.

Now, in Quarantine, I tell myself to feel guilty about my disgust for her, there on the television screen. I think, ho ho ho, ol' Slopface is aptly named-I sure called that one! And then I try to stop, but can't, because the disgust is real.

The sounds that came from the set, the sounds of her chewing off her own tongue and loving it, seem real, too.

Julia and I had arrived home from dinner, two months ago, on a Monday night. She had worn backseamed stockings with her skirt, and I only noticed this when she ascended the steps of our house, just before she pivoted a bit on her black patent heels and waited for me to unlock the door. She'd dashed in ahead of me, darling sharkskin-skirted a.s.s all a-wiggle, and disabled the alarm system.

"Tapioca," she whispered, "and beer!" and off she went, stepping out of her heels mid-prance, to get them.

I met her in the living room, our good, dim place, fragrant with the vanilla of her perfume and lit only by her quiet aquarium. She pressed a dry, cold long-neck into my hand and gave me a flirty look through the little dark veil of her bangs, and said, "We should watch the news first."

First.

She nipped the lip of her own bottle and I heard a tiny clink of tooth enamel on gla.s.s, and "first" seemed like a death sentence, right then. Now was much better than waiting for "first" to end.

Pretty little fingers, gray in the dimness, picked up the remote and, good girl, handed it to me. News, on.

A clean-shaven government spokesman stood at a podium. He didn't look quite wealthy enough to be Federal; I a.s.sumed he was a member of state government. "... thirty-eight percent failure rate, Professor Schneider notes, is a lower failure rate than that of the Polio vaccine, or of the prescribed drug courses for AIDS and HIV control."

"That's not true," I said. I remember saying that.

"Shhh," Julia said, pressing her beer to her cheek.

The bland man at the podium squared his shoulders and looked straight ahead; this didn't work particularly well for our channel's cameraman, who was lensing from the side. The effect made the Spinmaster look distant, and wholly untrustworthy.

But maybe I was just impatient with him for being First, when Julia was wearing backseamed stockings over there on her side of the sofa.

The Spin guy said, "All of that is good news. In addition, as you're likely aware, the State Emergency Health Powers Act was pa.s.sed in December so that our state and our Governor would be prepared to protect you, the citizens."

Julia tongued tapioca from her spoon, held upright like a lollipop, and shot me a quizzical look. I returned it: this Health Powers Act thing was a new one on both of us, it seemed.

"Tonight I must announce that the State Emergency Health Powers Act must bear fruit immediately. The SEHPA was born of extreme and prudent wariness on the part of your Governor, and all of us, and all of you, fervently hoped we might never have to move forward. Though we do, I expect you're all as grateful as I that we have measures already in place."

"What measures?" Julia asked the television, her voice sharp. The spoon was no longer upright; her fingers were slack and the spoon drooped across them. A pearl of tapioca dressed her knuckle.

"Tomorrow at noon we will present another conference which will include further details. In addition to this, all citizens with state-issued identification or state income tax information on file, and all others whose addresses were taken during the last Federal census, will receive packets in the mail which include information and your appointment cards. Rest a.s.sured that we have full immunization supplies for everyone, and that we'll all be back to life as usual within a week or two. Thank you, and good night."

Our pretty blonde news anchor appeared onscreen; behind her was a graphic bearing the letters SEHPA and a syringe superimposed over our state flag. "Similar announcements have been made in all states that pa.s.sed SEHPA, or their version of it. California, which had refused the terms of the Act when it was initially recommended by the CDC and other contributing departments, is holding an emergency session tonight to reconsider their decision. On a lighter note, California's governor also spoke today about a new environmental toxicity report which concluded that 40 percent of the detrimental carbon dioxide emissions in the atmosphere are caused by the exhalations of the world's human population."

The co-anchor, also blonde and pretty, casually turned to the anchor. "Didn't they make laws last year to reduce the carbon dioxide emissions from cars?"

"Yes, they did, Sheila! You have to wonder what laws they'll make to reduce our own emissions!"

"Talk about bad breath!" laughed Sheila.