Zombies - Encounters with the Hungry Dead Part 58

He came closer, hesitated, and then moved closer still. She reached out with her hand, beckoning, bidding him to her. The fingers opened, clawed, pulled into a fist, then opened again. In only forty-eight hours she had come to remember Douglas Winter, to want him again, need him again. To love him again.

Her hand waved inches in front of him. The tear at his thigh was nothing, a tender scratch of the knife, the first of the wounds made fresh. He could feel the second cut, the awkward slice he had made from his neck along his shoulder, which took a layer of muscle from just back of the collarbone. Its urgent pain overwhelmed the latest, more cautious carving at his waist, where he had begun to run to fat. She was looking down at this wound, the freshest, where blood clotted in a wet slew against his shirt.

He was conscious of the warmth, the smell of his blood. The warmth came into her hand, moved up her arm, and from there spread to her mouth, her stomach, wherever it wanted to go, with no effort on his part. He kept his silence, watching this quiet power, this queer control.

Her hand spread like a talon, reaching, reaching, and when daunted, snaked back through the wire, fingers thrust into her mouth as if the taste of the air, warm with his blood, were enough.

He noticed all of this, just as he noticed all of her. He could have walked out on this earlier, could still walk. Rationality shrieked at him, but rationality had died long ago. In its place, the old slow song had begun. Somewhere it played, he could hear it, a 45 rpm single spinning inside a plastic-cased GE stereo, voices calling down an empty corridor that he had walked and walked until there was nowhere left to go, except toward Stacie Allen.

"We knew something once," he told her. Hands fumbling with the b.u.t.tons of his shirt. Another sound in the distance, a voice calling, the bark of a guard dog; then the rattle of chain, the shuffle of restless feet, marching, marching.

By then he had reached out, placed his hand against the fence, felt her hand come up, slowly, slowly, to grasp it. Her head followed, the long now of raven hair, now a crop, half curls, half shorn, slivered with the gray of age, the brown of dried blood. Then her lips, peeling back to offer a row of stained and broken teeth and a tongue that darted forward to kiss his hand.

"No." His hand pulled away. "No." Left her hand as she bit at air, chewed at nothing, turning to face him with a hiss of sour spittle. "No." That softened to a purr as she saw him ease open the left side of his shirt, his shoulder and chest hared to her, a swamp of cotton and tape and blood. As he peeled the pressure dressing back, slipped the knife from his belt, cut at the strands of tape.

Three shots came in rapid fire from the distance behind him, whether warnings or kills he did not know, or care to know. Here, on this small island in a sea of gray, the music had started again. A needle scratched at vinyl skin, and the music, spun from its black circle, played. And played. Strange how these songs aged, lost meaning, became the background noise of elevators and doctors' offices, then somehow, in the night, returned.

She felt cold. So did he. But he took her right hand, brought it through the opening in the wire, her fingers moving into the wound at his side, and the pain vanished. Somehow it vanished as her nails clawed at the puddle of blood and muscle. He moved her hand in tighter.

She could smell him, his breath on her face, his meat on her busy fingers. The inescapable smell of a man from whom the veneer of civilization had been stripped forever and who seemed, in every eager part of himself, ready to acknowledge his kinship with the animal.

They danced, slowly, each on their side of the fence. He could feel her hand digging relentlessly into his side, coming away with a piece of him, and then returning, now squirming into his pectoral muscle, somehow searching for his heart, their bodies touching again and again through the wire.

The song ended, but he held on to her, humming that distant melody into her unhearing ear, and they stayed as they were until at last she tore the strand of muscle from his chest. He stifled a cry, of pain, of loss, and leaned into her, face pushed against the wire, his flesh to her lips, and the dance went on and on.

Her hand found his shoulder next, tore at the thin shirt and then tore at him. She was real, this was real, more real than anything he'd ever known. He bent slightly as the nails of her hand tightened, tore, then brought his bounty to her lips.

During the last night they had spent together, in his half-sleep, he thought she had slipped the covers from his chest and kissed at him, gently, tenderly, lips moving over his abdomen and down between his legs. He never knew if it was a dream, or real. Now as he watched her tasting him, he knew that it was a dream. That only this could be real.

There was no denying the feeling. She felt so good to him, her b.r.e.a.s.t.s and stomach and legs rubbing against him. He wanted this to run forever. More old songs, more of his body taken into hers. She had become a woman again, his woman. In a slow, unremitting way, she was turning for home, toward a place they had been and now might never leave.

He was falling into her now. And she into him. The barrier between them was giving way, the wire parting as her hand thrust at him and he pressed back against her. She bit at him, teeth grazing his throat, tongue licking at the vein beneath the skin. She looked up at him with dark, uncaring eyes, and he kissed her, kissed her gray and riven and moldering and pustulent cheek, and she snapped back, biting, biting, razor cuts at his face and at last blood, a silent stream of it that she licked and lapped and drank in thirsty mouthfuls.

The images of their long night together were blurred, obscured by pa.s.sion and pain. He remembered the vague storm of sleep, her body curled against the fence, against him, her face placid, her appet.i.te at last fulfilled, and then her smile, eyes opening slowly to look into him, to drink up this picture, one memory that would last for her brief eternity. When she kissed at him again, he was helpless, could only fall back into the wire as her lips worked on him. And in the midst of it, this fatal act of love, she had whispered the totality of her knowledge to him, spoken that single sentence: "I love you."

With her face buried in his neck, his torn skin open to her, he could smell the old smells, the smells of smoke, could hear steaming trains in that gray gulley, could see soldiers in autumnal camouflage moving steadily along the railhead, the sounds of the night unloading, unloading, urging the sleepwalkers onward, ever onward. Granite City swept over him, again and again and yet again, like a dirty rain that would never end. As he bled into her mouth, he murmured into her unhearing ears, "Oh, Stacie, Stacie... You love me."

She who had ceased consciousness days before paused at the sound of his voice, swallowing. "That was what you told me, wasn't it?" Teeth chewing at air. "Wasn't it?" Then he heard the words she had once whispered to him, now spoken in a voice other than her own. "I love you," he said, to her, for her.

And in that moment, he knew, after so many years, the meaning of love. That was when he began to write this story.

ROOM TO DIE AGAIN.

Douglas Winter wrote without stopping for the next several days. He spent most of his time with her, letting the old wounds, and the new ones, heal. Alcohol helped, poured onto his torn skin and then down his throat. Antibiotics and painkillers were his only other sustenance. Nothing but his story really mattered. The battery of the laptop computer soon expired, then its replacement, and he turned to paper instead, writing with an old pen whose bent nib seemed to weep with words.

Sometimes, when the need struck him, he would take the car on a long drive, finding this place or that, excavating memories, restoring the town to the museum of his mind. He pressed hard on the accelerator, trying to remember and trying to forget, weaving through silent streets on which ash danced like fallen snow, past the abandoned City Hall, the firegutted Public Library, the First Baptist Church and its blood-drenched sanctuary, where he had once walked a long and lonely aisle; where, he often thought, he had first found fear.

She rode with him, side-by-side, restored, like the town, to her youth. She was not a ghost, though only he could see this part of her. He kept wiping at his eyes, the sunlight and the smoke blurred into tears. If the songs could return, why not Granite City, and with it, Stacie Allen? All it took was love.

On the night that he finished writing, they made their new love again, touching at the fence until it was nearly sunrise, her fingers working endlessly at his flesh, her mouth tearing at the gift of his body and blood. Hers was a hunger that would not end. Soon, he knew, there would be nothing left to give.

When this sorrow, this pain that transcended any other pain, swept past the Percocet, past the fever, and into that place of secrets that was his heart, he cried out against the darkness. She did not move, just buried her face in the wire, teeth snapping at the remaining shreds of metal that kept them apart; he stumbled backward, fell prostrate into the dust, spent. Searching for the solace of sleep.

On that other endless night, after she told him that it was over, he wondered how she could sleep, and whether he would ever sleep again. She lay in his bed, wrapped in the covers of some hidden knowledge, while he lay awake, part of him forever torn away. In time he would sleep; in time, he knew, anyone would sleep. But time would heal no wounds. Time would only pa.s.s, and the wounds, once and forever open, would remain for her to touch and savor again.

"Tell them I love you," he had said the following morning, his last, helpless words as she pulled from a long and, until then, silent embrace and ran to the waiting car. He had no idea what those words meant: resignation, protestation, a dismal plea. Or to whom they should be spoken, save perhaps himself; that, whoever she was meant to speak them to, they were probably dead by now.

He imagined that he slept, and that as he slept, his fevered dreams gathered a circle of uniforms around him, dour and dreary faces peering out from beneath their helmets and gas masks with expectancy. He wanted to tell these men and women something, but the words could not be spoken; he had to write them down. When he tried to take the pen from his pocket, he felt what must have been a kick, a combat boot that caught his elbow, then his stomach; but there was no pain. He knew pain, and this was nothing like it. "It's over." Were those his words? His tongue tasted dirt and rock, and he spat out the chalky grit, saw the blood that sprayed from his lips instead. He wanted to waken, at least to roll over and let his body lay more comfortably in the concrete and ash on which he made his bed. More movement; another kick, and he opened his eyes again, watched a rifle b.u.t.t slam down twice into the plastic case of the computer, watched shattered pieces spin away in all directions. He joined in the laughter; at least this time he could hear his voice. Then something hit his head, and the dream faded, far and away, and he found his black sleep.

Toward morning, he raised himself from the sidewalk, saw with muddled vision the stains where his blood had leaked into the earth. He turned anxiously to the holding pen, but she stood there, watching, waiting. He tried to meet her unseeing eyes, asked himself if she indeed could hear his words, understand them as something more than the grunt of an animal. He knew what had to happen, but he had been delaying the moment, wishing it away. The voice that echoed his knowledge was his own. "It's over." The great yards to the left and right were vacant, emptied; even the ranks of her holding pen had thinned. But she was still there, watching, waiting, watching, waiting.

Standing by the picture window on her twentieth birthday, sipping but not tasting a Diet Rite Cola, feeling the weight of the child growing inside her, Sta-cie Allen watched the bright August sunlight and decided that she would no longer imagine. She had looked into the sudden cloud that swelled high above the birch tree, and found a place where the two of them would stand, divided by a barrier more profound than that of marriage or years. The feelings inside her would change, of that she was sure. Sure enough that she would return to that place only once or so a year, and perhaps, if she were lucky, never again.

Her abstinence from imagining had been the first of the concessions. In the early years of her marriage, there had been many more: the new house, the children, the bills, the lack of money, the constant call of the real. She had needed nothing to stop him from coming into her. Until the night, one Halloween, that she saw the movie. The images were warped, fractured, as if seen from a distance through a veil of smoke, a maze of wire and steel. Twenty years forward, and quickly, so very quickly, twenty years back. With a flick of the dial, these frightening dreams, these fantasies, were banished, and she gave herself over to the here and now, marriage and motherhood, Taco Bell and TV, the only reality in which she cared to live.

She knew she was twenty and accepted it, but she could not imagine Douglas Winter being forty. Could not think of it, would not think of it. He was here with her, somewhere inside of her, as palpable as her unborn child. He was here with his long hair and wire-rimmed gla.s.ses and wrinkled fatigue jacket and that knapsack with its frantic sheaf of papers. No other version of him could exist, would exist; certainly not one older or wiser. Or that could be desired.

He hobbled across the uncertain path from the broken concrete to the fence, each few steps bringing the drill bit of pain to play at his chest, his shoulder, his leg, his side. But he wandered through the pain, jazzed by his morning c.o.c.ktail of pharmaceuticals and the vision of her. There was little he could say, but it took some time for him to try to find the words.

"What are we going to do?" he said.

She was silent, walking-dead silent. Then: "I don't know," he answered, softly, for her. But he knew, in that part of him that believed she was inside of him, that knew he was inside of her, that wanted so desperately to believe in another being the two of them had created called "us." They had lost themselves and tried to create something else, something that existed only as an intermingling of the two of them. They were in love.

He pulled the pages of his ma.n.u.script from his back pocket, opened them and brought them to her, a final offering, a piece of him more intimate than flesh or blood.

"You can't come with me, Stacie. To that place, faraway, to that beach, the one in the poster. Virginia. Or anywhere."

Something brought her closer. He willed himself to believe it was the pages, everything that he had written; not the blood, not the sick smell of his life.

"But I can go with you."

He folded the pages into a tight square and slipped them through the break in the wire and into the pocket of her blouse.

There was only one thing left to do. He turned, wincing with the shift of his weight, and made his way back to the car. He opened the door, reached down into his knapsack, pulled free the pistol that had called to him with each new dawn. Knowledge in his eyes. Tears stealing down his cheeks. Gauze webbed around his breast, his side, his left arm; the wrappings of her love.

His hands trembled as he limped toward her, stopped ten feet short of the fence. Finally he flicked the slide of the Glock 17, chambering the first round. Just keep firing until it's empty, his friend Michael had told him once, on a day of blue skies and sunshine that must have been a dream. Until it's empty.

Only this was real: a man, a woman, and the gray hope that clouded over them. But when he readied himself, raising the pistol to stare over its unblinking eye into the face of Stacie Allen, he found that there was one more thing he wanted to do: he wanted to pray. Trying to find the old words, the words that had brought him down the aisle of the Interstate, to the altar of this city, to the faith that at last was his only faith: the faith in the artist, the writer, to tell the truth. And thus to know the truth before it is finally told. He had no faith in those distant, ever-dwindling stars above-the light, they had told him, that flickered through holes in the floor of Heaven.

He knew that he could not pray to that G.o.d above, but only to this idiot G.o.ddess who reigned eternal in the shadows of the mills, the shadows of his heart. Her love would live forever; but his love? His love had to die.

He looked down the barrel, his unsteady hands lining the sight between the empty eyes that stared back at him, and he swallowed a long breath. His finger closed down on the trigger. And in that moment, he saw the same eyes, staring back at him across the gulf of years as he stood beside her desk and asked her name.

"Are you Stacie?" he had said then; and now, again, aloud: "Are you Stacie?"

And at last, swathed in the smoke of this burning world, he found the answer to his riddle, the conclusion of his story. He tossed the pistol aside.

He could not kill that which was already dead.

POSTSCRIPT: THE FURNACE OF.

THE HEART.

As I read the story of Douglas Winter and Stacie Allen, I understood how little any of us knew, or cared to know, about the zombies of Madison County. When I found its final words, there was little choice: I needed to know the truth-or the lie. I talked my way aboard one of the newly resumed commercial flights to St. Louis, and paid whatever it took for an enterprising cabbie to cross one of the precarious bridges laid by the Corps of Engineers to span the wide and swollen Mississippi.

On the Illinois side, a potholed four-lane road veered away from the flat-land of crushed concrete and gla.s.s that once had been East St. Louis and north into ghostly villages named Venice and Madison. There the smoke descended, and with each minute dimmed the red brick houses, the pillaged storefronts, into a long forgotten past. It was like driving into a black-and-white photograph from the 1950s, worn and faded, a mist-shrouded landscape watched over by an anemic sun.

After the gypsy taxi made a confusing series of turns, and then found the wide lanes of Madison Avenue, we faced a phalanx of tanks and armored personnel carriers: the end of my ride, and the beginning of the long walk into h.e.l.l. That the soldiers let me pa.s.s was no surprise; their weapons were pointed away, in the other direction, guarding the world from whatever waited inside.

I needed no guide but the smoke and the flame. I walked in a snow of gray ash, following the curve of Madison Avenue until the great demon of Granite City Steel roared into view. The heat pulsed over me in waves, bringing sweat in December and, in time, tears. In row after row the smokestacks cut into the sky, venting the angry furnaces where once iron and carbon had melted, mated, formed the backbone of a nation, where once the locomotives had hauled in coal, hauled out shining steel. Now no kind word could describe this place; it was no city, no town, but an inferno whose fires had raged throughout eternity. It was where the dream that was America had come to die.

When I reached Nash Street and, at its midpoint, the entrance to the terminal where he had waited with sanguine expectancy, there were no longer civilian guards: I was questioned at length, turned away by a squad of black-bereted Army Rangers. Something was happening; I heard talk of shutting down, a laugh, and then stony silence. The railhead inside was barely visible, a rusted locomotive fallen from the nearest siding like an ancient, toppled monument. There was nothing else to be seen, they told me. Hands gripped at gun-belts; eyes offered a mortal desire. So I turned away, taking the same path he had taken, across 14th Street, following the high fences that stretched down and along Route 203, finally confronting the raging furnaces, the mountains of slag.

At first I believed them: nothing could be seen, nothing but gray. Yet I walked his path, and the smoke walked with me. I searched the miles of wire strung along steel girders that had been driven into the ground at fifty-meter intervals. In time I found the car, the rusted memory of a Ford Mustang, its tires stolen, interior picked over by scavengers. I found a broken angle of sidewalk and scattered pieces of a laptop computer. I even found a pen. And as approached the fence nearby, I found something else: something that was nothing, a s.p.a.ce torn in the wire and painted with dried blood, the s.p.a.ce where, for a time, a kind of love had been made. On the other side of the fence, in what he had called a holding pen there was only dust, slag in endless heaps and mounds, the waste dumped from the furnaces, the grey that had risen from the smokestacks to bleach every inch of the earth with its sadness.

It was the absence, I realized then, that was the presence at Madison County. The absence of life, and the presence, all around me, of every element of death. And at last I saw, I truly saw, where I stood, not just at this place, this moment in time, but in all places, at all times, lost in this burning world.

Standing there before me, he had seen Stacie Allen, or what he thought or wished or dreamed was Stacie Allen; but what he had written there made me see something else: the terrible something that is nothing. The hills, the mounds-there were so many grey rises that to the eye they seemed like so much litter, the refuse of the mills, and though of course they were, the act of seeing was one that for some time defied belief. But the smell could not be ignored. The smell is what made me believe.

The hills nearest to me were made up of shoes, piles and piles of shoes- leather and rubber and Corfam, women's pumps, children's Keds and Nikes, sandals, work boots, high heels and low, all shapes and all sizes, all kinds and all colors, and all of them empty. Whether it was the smell of them or the sight inside, that first instant of understanding, that bent me, I do not know. I simply wanted, so very desperately, to be sick, to vomit out their teaching.

But still I walked on, forced entry through that breach in the wire and into those forlorn hills, where clothing was heaped to the height of houses, sweaters mingled with suits, pyjamas with parkas, anything with everything: dirty, clean, wet, dry, b.l.o.o.d.y, white, synthetic, woolen. At uneven intervals I found troves of cheap jewelry, watches, eyegla.s.ses, belts that curled like sleeping snakes; I stumbled over a prosthetic arm, pink with the tint of blood, and found a torn and empty baby blanket. Still I walked on and on, until I was to the farthest reaches of this place, and of my comprehension: to the dark, unsettled hills that dared me to approach, to know them, to caution me never to forget them. I could not deny their mystery, their gentle weave of brown and black, laced with auburn and gold, gray and white; and when I touched them, felt their silky yet brittle threads-felt my fingers flecked with hair-I did not need to look back to the smokestacks, the furnaces, the ovens, to know what burned inside.

First it was the dead, the things we called zombies, who had pa.s.sed out of what we knew as life and into an existence of their own. But the fires are eager, they are hungry, they burn and they burn and, while we still live to stoke them, they will never stop. It was not long until the living dead would have given way to the legally dead-the prisoners, from the penitentiaries at Marion and Springfield, Leavenworth and Little Rock-and in time to the mental patients from Columbia and Alton, and then the near-dead, the dying, the defective, the disabled, and sooner or later the dissidents, the white-hot ovens forging a new world for a new age of harmony and love. For it was love that brought the zombies, like it brought Douglas Winter, to Madison County-a love made of fragile lies, the love of storybooks and sociopaths who believe in such conceits as love at first sight, a love that lasts forever, a love without consequences; a love without the effort that itself is love. A love that makes for bestsellers and bad movies. A love that denies the certain truth: that love, like any miracle, does not happen; it must be made.

I know these things, of course, because I know that I invented Douglas Winter, that he is just a character in what is, after all, just a story. I created him and the ground on which he walked. It did not take seven days. But now, having found my way to this place that he once called home, this trap of smoke and steel, I wonder how much I understand. The dead and the living, the living and the dead... what difference does it make? In the end they are the same; they are us. Now that I have seen his world, seen through the veil of gray that most of us mistake for clouds or mist or fog, I wonder if perhaps he created me, crafted me from the clay of this place of shadow and sorrow, in order to bring you here with me.

There is no end to his story, only the end of mine. In my dreams I want to believe that he somehow made his way to a world where words may still be spoken freely, if such a place exists-to Toronto or Quebec or some other unlikely Valhalla where he would find an audience that could still know horror, understand its meaning, its lessons. Who would read and perhaps be moved, swayed, cajoled into caring. Into waking, and living.

In my dreams he has found the right weapons. For it is possible that mere words are no longer enough; their powder, wet with so much blood, so many tears, may never again ignite the imagination. It is the time of the gun; perhaps it always has been, and those of us who thought otherwise were indeed poets, dreamers, fools.

In my dreams he lives, and he has finally found the nerve to fire back.

But in my nightmares I know better; I know that he walked with her, hand in hand, into the steaming shadow of the mills, shorn of shoes and clothes and at last of his hair, and then cast, like Daniel, into the flames.

Yet my dreams and my nightmares, like my story, have come to an end, because I know one other thing: I have the courage that Douglas Winter lacked.

I grip the slide of the pistol and chamber the only round I need. The barrel is black and tastes of blood and magazine oil as I press it into my mouth. My hand is steady; my will, not his, be done.

I stand in the smoke of his childhood and I watch the signal fires, a burning world whose only gift is grey. In the ever-darkening sky above, nothing shines down. The stars have gone out; the holes in the floor of Heaven are sealed.

The only light now is the light of man, burning brightly in the furnace of the heart.

for Lynne without whom.

32/ Adam-Troy Castro Dead Like.

Me.

SO. LET'S SUMMARIZE. You held out for longer than anybody would have ever dreamed possible. You fought with strength you never knew you had. But in the end it did you no d.a.m.ned good. There were just too many of the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds. The civilization you believed in crumbled; the help you waited for never arrived; the hiding places you cowered in were all discovered; the fortresses you built were all overrun; the weapons you scrounged were all useless; the people you counted on were all either killed or corrupted; and what remained of your faith was torn raw and bleeding from the sh.e.l.l of the soft complacent man you once were. You lost. Period. End of story. No use whining about it. Now there's absolutely nothing left between you and the ravenous, hollow-eyed forms of the Living Dead.

Here's your Essay Question: How low are you willing to sink to survive?

Answer:.

First, wake up in a dark, cramped s.p.a.ce that smells of rotten meat. Don't wonder what time it is. It doesn't matter what time it is. There's no such thing as time anymore. It's enough that you've slept, and once again managed to avoid dreaming.

That's important. Dreaming is a form of thinking. And thinking is dangerous. Thinking is something the Living do, something the Dead can't abide. The Dead can sense where it's coming from, which is why they were always able to find you, back when you used to dream. Now that you've trained yourself to shuffle through the days and nights of your existence as dully and mindlessly as they do, there's no reason to hide from them anymore. Oh, they may curl up against you as you sleep (two in particular, a man and woman handcuffed together for some reason you'll never know, have crawled into this little alcove with you), but that's different: that's just heat tropism. As long as you don't actually think, they won't eat you.

Leave the alcove, which is an abandoned storage s.p.a.ce in some kind of large office complex. Papers litter the floor of the larger room outside; furniture is piled up against some of the doors, meaning that sometime in the distant past Living must have made their last stands here. There are no bones. There are three other zombies, all men in the ragged remains of three-piece suits, lurching randomly from one wall to the other, changing direction only when they hit those walls, as if they're blind and deaf and this is the only way they know how to look for an exit.

If you reach the door quickly they won't be able to react in time to follow you.

Don't Remember.

Don't Remember your name. Only the Living have names.

Don't Remember you had a wife named Nina, and two children named Mark and Kathy, who didn't survive your flight from the slaughterhouse Manhattan had become. Don't Remember them; any of them. Only the Living have families.

Don't Remember that as events herded you south you wasted precious weeks combing the increasing chaos of rural Pennsylvania for your big brother Ben, who lived in Pittsburgh and had always been so much stronger and braver than you. Don't Remember your childish, sh.e.l.lshocked hope that Ben would be able to make everything all right, the way he had when you were both growing up with nothing. Don't Remember gradually losing even that hope, as the enclaves of Living grew harder and harder to find.

The memories are part of you, and as long as you're still breathing, they'll always be there if you ever decide you need them. It will always be easy to call, them up in all their gory detail. But you shouldn't want to. As long as you remember enough to eat when you're hungry, sleep when you're tired, and find warm places when you're cold, you know all you need to know, or ever will need to know. It's much simpler that way.

Anything else is just an open invitation to the Dead.

Walk the way they walk: dragging your right foot, to simulate tendons that have rotted away; hanging your head, to give the impression of a neck no longer strong enough to hold it erect; recognizing obstructions only when you're in imminent danger of colliding with them. And though the sights before you comprise an entire catalogue of horrors, don't ever react. Only the Living react.

This was the hardest rule for you to get down pat, because part of you, buried deep in the places that still belong to you and you alone, has been screaming continuously since the night you first saw a walking corpse rip the entrails from the flesh of the Living. That part wants to make itself heard. But that's the part which will get you killed. Don't let it have its voice.

Don't be surprised if you turn a corner, and almost trip over a limbless zombie inching its way up the street on its belly. Don't be horrified if you see a Living person trapped by a mob of them, about to be torn to pieces by them. Don't gag if one of the Dead brushes up against you, pressing its maggot-infested face up close against your own.

Remember: Zombies don't react to things like that. Zombies are things like that.

Now find a supermarket that still has stuff on the shelves. You can if you look hard enough; the Dead arrived too quickly for the Living to loot everything there was. Pick three or four cans off the shelves, cut them open, and eat whatever you find inside. Don't care whether they're soup, meat, vegetables, or dog food. Eat robotically, tasting nothing, registering nothing but the moment when you're full. Someday, picking a can at random, you may drink some drain cleaner or eat some rat poison. Chance alone will decide when that happens. But it won't matter when it does. Your existence won't change a bit. You'll just convulse, fall over, lie still a while, and then get up, magically transformed into one of the zombies you've pretended to be for so long. No fuss, no muss. You won't even have any reason to notice it when it happens. Maybe it's already happened.

After lunch, spot one of the town's few other Living people shuffling listlessly down the center of the street.

You know this one well. When you were still thinking in words you called her Suzie. She's dressed in clothes so old they're rotting off her back. Her hair is the color of dirty straw, and hideously matted from weeks, maybe months of neglect. Her most striking features are her sunken cheekbones and the dark circles under her gray unseeing eyes. Even so, you've always been able to tell that she must have been remarkably pretty, once.

Back when you were still trying to fight The b.a.s.t.a.r.ds-they were never "zombies" to you, back then; to you they were always The b.a.s.t.a.r.ds-you came very close to shooting Suzie's brains out before you realized that she was warm, and breathing, and alive. You saw that though she was just barely aware enough to scrounge the food and shelter that kept her warm and breathing, she was otherwise almost completely catatonic.

She taught you it was possible to pa.s.s for Dead.