Zombies - Encounters with the Hungry Dead Part 23

"That's right!" laughed the anchor.

"What was all that about?" I asked, and Julia downed the rest of her beer, then just gripped the empty bottle.

"In weather news, Tropical Storm Hando is still under watch for a potential upgrade. Scientists now suggest that the storm is not purely a meteorological occurrence, but may have been prompted by the release of gases from a fault in the ocean floor. More on this from News Four's meteorologist, Tom Danner."

Julia plucked the remote from my hand and thumbed the channel b.u.t.tons, scanning for more information on this SEHPA thing. No luck. She flung the remote back at me; it hit my thigh. Her frustrations always managed to find some painless but annoying projectile, which in turn always found some part of my body. I was used to it and let it pa.s.s.

I turned off the television and she followed me through the dark house, to bed.

"First" was out of the way, and her stockings were still s.e.xy, but even when I'd anch.o.r.ed my fingers under her black silky garters and started licking that taut tendon inside her thigh, I was too distracted over the news to really notice.

So was she.

We paid just enough attention to each other to get off (or just end it, at least) and then, still in our own heads, we each feigned sleep.

If you're wondering, yes, it was the last time we touched one another. It was absentminded and terrible and it was the last time, ever.

The next day, I kept the radio in my office tuned to the news station. Environmental extremists were all over the talk shows, braying about the toxic breath of humankind. Seems every sigh makes the earth die, and s.h.i.+t like that. The BBC reported that a group of loonies had done their part to clear the air by ceremoniously pulling plastic bags over their heads, then snapping rubber bands around their necks.

At lunchtime, I knocked on each door that I pa.s.sed. "The SEHPA news conference is about to start, and I'm going to watch it in the conference room," I said, over and over. Everyone looked blank, everyone of them. "Just come watch, they're going to give us details," I said.

Apparently the salad bars and secret martinis were more appealing than any news conference, though, because I watched it alone.

And my skin crawled.

Crawling skin, they said, was a symptom.

Never before was I a conspiracy theorist, but once your mind trips a conspiracy switch, vistas of paranoia and open inside you, warrens of hatred, and all of it makes sense.

And then you blow up, knowing that every possibility is founded on an "if" of some kind, "If their goal is this, then they're going to do that," and you realize that all of your "ifs" are based on things They have told you, which can't be true in the first place, if you distrust Them that much.

So the vistas become voids, and you're crippled-and all of this can happen in the s.p.a.ce of a single lunch hour.

Because surely, surely there isn't some pervasive infectious agent on the scene that zombifies all its victims. No one said "zombies," they said truly stupid doublespeak things instead-the one that made me laugh until I gasped for breath was an acronym for a chain of words that included the word "consumer" (because, you see, they consume the flesh of others)-but they meant zombies.

I've seen my share of zombie movies, and the IMCCs and OARKs and all the other s.h.i.+t they called our new national threat seemed worse. The pathogen (which they speculated came from the fault under the ocean, but who cares?) was transmitted through fluids such as saliva and perspiration; just an infected host brus.h.i.+ng against you, and you were doomed to walk and rot and crave the taste of live flesh.

But they were full of s.h.i.+t. Zombies. It was a joke, such a joke that they had to figure we'd buy it. Who would, though?

It didn't matter if we bought it or not, however.

Enter SEHPA.

The breakdown: the State Emergency Health Powers Act gave the governor of each state the absolute power, in the event of a bioterrorist attack or other epidemic threat, to mandate inoculations for all citizens. Though, in a cute concession to our Const.i.tutional rights, refusal of the vaccine for religious or any other reason was legal, all those who refused were to be quarantined in prepared housing facilities.

Appointment cards would be issued to us all; upon receiving the inoculation, each person would receive a card that included a digitized fingerprint. Air travel and interstate travel of any kind was "on hold until further notice." Checkpoints would, within hours, be erected on many roads, and all police officers and deputized CDC officials had been issued print scanners so they might stop anyone, at any time, to verify that they'd been immunized.

Zombies couldn't be real-but SEHPA shouldn't have been real, either.

Yet it was.

So the vistas opened, and then my cell phone rang.

"h.e.l.lo?"

"Did you see?" Julia asked, her voice shrill. "On TV?"

"Yes, I just watched it here," I said. Her own words overran mine.

"-last night they said thirty-eight percent failure rate. If everyone gets the shot, thirty eight percent will die, right?"

"Dear G.o.d," I said, but still she talked over me.

"-and forty percent of carbon dioxide, air pollution they say, is caused by us breathing, right? Which we won't do when we're DEAD, right?"

"Do zombies breathe?"

Vistas in other minds had opened. "f.u.c.k the zombies, look at the shots! Look at the shots!"

"And what will they do with the property of those quarantined? Burn it? Impound it?"

I hadn't thought about that. What would they do with it?

Julia's voice was loud. "Come home, right now. I'm leaving, meet me at home right now, Alan, please."

"I can't do that. No one else here watched, no one knows."

"Well, tell them, then!"

"They wouldn't believe me."

"So f.u.c.k them and come home. Your job is nothing compared to this. Thirty-eight percent of them will be dead soon anyway! Come home!"

Then I heard a cracking sound on the line, and I knew she'd thrown the phone across the room.

And I went home.

Julia was a hurricane, storming through the house and raving, then pausing from time to time to croon at her fish or heave little wistful sighs at me. Her fingers worried her hair, snapping off split ends, leaving a drift of half-inch brown strands on her shoulders. She picked up my cell phone and flung it at me-"Call one of your friends, you've got to know someone!'

I did know someone. I knew the General.

He'd offered to sell me guns before, but I had been against personal gun owners.h.i.+p. I had been a jacka.s.s, hadn't I. But he'd forged a number of personal doc.u.ments for certain folks I'd wanted to hire, and he'd done an excellent job. He even had my prints on file.

If I was lucky, he'd have some pharmaceuticals around, too. It might not hurt to have some anti-anxiety meds on hand in case Julia never calmed down.

"We have a Lexus," she whispered as I dialed the General's pager number and entered the ID code he'd a.s.signed me. "They're going to want that. They're going to want everything."

I ignored her, and prayed that he would recognize the code.

Three hours later, he called back.

At five o'clock in the morning, Julia and I met him at a gas station. He fingerprinted us again, hiding our hands under his own ma.s.sive paws as he rolled our fingers across the pad before giving us each pre-moistened wipes to clean the ink from our skin. He's a thoughtful man, the General is. He'd be cast as a big gray Maine lobsterman if someone made a movie; he'd then be fired for boiling his lines down to one or two words each. I've never met anyone as gruff as the General.

I'm not certain that he ever was a General, or even in the military at all; he might have been a professor at some point, or a hit man.

He called Julia "madam."

She was somber throughout the transaction.

"Two days, I'll call," he said, and closed up his chocolate crocodile case. We went back to the Lexus and he climbed into his black van, and the noise of his engine starting covered the s.h.i.+very sound of the General's bottled pills in my coat pocket.

Julia didn't come to bed after we got home from our meeting with the General. It's just as well; I didn't fall asleep for a long while, myself, but didn't feel like listening to whatever came out of her mouth every time a new one of those magical, paranoid vistas cracked wide within her formerly screwed-on head.

But in the morning, when I woke after sleeping late, I smelled coffee.

She'd been right about the job; now was not the time to worry about corporate bulls.h.i.+t. Maybe I'd thought of myself as a philanthropist, helping ex-felons and a certain caliber of illegal alien get a leg up in my world by hiring them via paperwork conjured by the General, but bulls.h.i.+t smells a lot different when you walk up on it from downwind, instead of just sitting smack in the middle of the loads you generate day after day.

Those pills the General had given me were tempting. Julia might end up with one or two slipped into her coffee, but a couple wouldn't kill me, either.

Why be disgusted with the world, when you can be disgusted with yourself?

Oh, yes. Yes. Yes, that's what let all this happen, let SEHPA mosey on in and p.i.s.s all over the sofa, that very tendency of Americans to sink into self-absorption and masturbatory loathing.

Pitiful personal melodramas always ground emotions to depths sicker than any that could be plumbed by doc.u.mentaries, or by monster movies.

Monsters-I wasn't thinking about them, not yet. If any thought of them crossed my mind, it was with disgust that the government had so little respect for its herd of citizen cattle that it thought we'd actually buy zombies as a great excuse to get vaccinated.

I slipped into the tacky velour robe Julia'd given me, my favorite, the Sheik robe, and walked barefoot down the hall and into the kitchen.

It could have been any lovely Sunday morning, but it was a sunny Tuesday, and the world was a joke.

In a way, that made it lovelier. For once, instead of barely taking note of them, I felt an actual fondness for the moist-petaled pink peonies piled in a basket on the oak table, and the symmetry of the two comfortable chairs squared across from one another there. The waxed wood glowed in the morning light. I appreciated the coolness of the clean white tiles underfoot. I wanted to sit in one of those chairs, roll my heels on the cool tile, rest my elbows on the sun-warmed wood, and smile over the fragrant pink flowers at my wife, while we drank coffee together.

Why had we never done that before? Not once. And here, the stage was set for it every day, and-not once had we done it. It would have been nice. She would have thought so, too. I just don't think it ever occurred to either of us to do something so simple.

From the living room, I heard the television tube fire up and the speakers blare forth unfamiliar voices. Their cadences were standard newscaster fare, and I dashed coffee into the mug Julia had left out for me, and hurried into the living room to join her. To check on her.

Julia sat erect on her side of the couch. She wore chinos and a clean white tank top, and her mountain boots, the ones with serrated soles. Her heels were aligned and her hands were on her thighs. She looked solid, military. Her hair was twisted hard and pinned to the back of her head, and without turning, she cut her eyes at me when I walked into the room.

"Paranoia," she spat, "is a symptom, they say now."

"They said the same thing about anxiety and alarm last night. They said the sensation of crawling skin was a symptom." I sipped the good, hot coffee and watched her carefully.

Julia glanced back at the television, then turned fully toward me, took a breath. She was very serious. "They showed footage of zombies. They called them something else, but they count as zombies in my book. SEHPA s.h.i.+t aside, I've spent the morning thinking: what if this is real?"

I had no answer. My morning had just begun, and I hadn't yet reached the point where I could put the SEHPA s.h.i.+t aside.

But I hadn't watched the news.

"There's one," she said. She leaned forward, gripped her khaki knees, and stared hard at the screen. "I really can't tell. Either it's a great makeup job, or one motherf.u.c.k of a disease. They're saying it spreads exponentially. I don't expect to see a herd of these guys on TV for a couple of days yet, but that might also be because the effects labs need a few days to get that much makeup ready. I doubt there's a secret government makeup lab, they'd have to contract out." Her fingertips pinched the creases of her slacks, slipped along them from mid-thigh to knee to mid-calf, released, began again. Still she watched the television.

I realized something then, something that made me want to touch her, but that welled so large within me that touching her seemed disrespectful: Julia truly, completely loved me. Trusted me. She trusted our transaction with the General-my plan to save us from SEHPA-so implicitly that SEHPA was no longer a worry to her at all.

And I felt terrible about the little pistachio-colored pills, that I'd even considered medicating her just to shut her up. Because that's what it was, at the heart of it.

The afflicted man onscreen looked like any standard movie zombie, and since he was on TV, he may as well have been one. I was unmoved. Julia's clinical rationale had probably encouraged my own distance, but there it was.

He had an expensive, if mussed, haircut. His suit was a tailored charcoal number that b.u.t.toned high, which was cutting-edge. This suggested to me that he was young enough to care about such things, or newly-salaried at a brokerage firm, or maybe an entertainment agency. There was no way to determine his precise age, though. Above the wilted white collar stained with septic fluid sat a slick wreck of a face, mottled cheeks and temples too hollow, eyelids and lips too fat. He was slightly in profile. The one gray sclera the camera caught seemed to be peeling. There was a dark brown bulb of matter protruding from his nostril; it did not move, suggesting either that the brown was solid, or that the man did not breathe.

His greased lips were curled to reveal beautiful teeth, Hollywood teeth.

Julia said, "All of the ones they've shown have been like this, upscale guys. There was one black woman-well, gray, anyway-but she was in a business suit. And tennis shoes, like she was on her lunch break. They were soggy around the ankles."

"They're trying to show us that it's going to happen to the best of us, which means it's definitely going to happen to the worst of us." I knew that we counted among the bests, and the knowledge meant little.

"Well, the vaccination clinics are mobbed by the worst of us. Guys with pieces of lumber with nails sticking out. Teenagers jumping around behind the reporters, waving their validation cards and showing off the ink on their fingers. Pressing their thumbs on their foreheads before the ink dries to leave a mark there."

I laughed at that. "We ought to do that. Call the General."

Julia shook her head. "I'm not looking forward to leaving the house, even to meet him," she said. "I'm more afraid of the vaccine mobs than I am of any zombies."

We watched the news all day, and I had to agree with her about the mobs.

We made no plans. There was no way to plan in the face of this; it was all too big to consider, really. Now and then the vague notion of flight would swim up into my forebrain, then meet my recollection of closed highways and locked airports.

So we watched the news, each gripping opposite arms of the sofa, exchanging little comments now and then, nothing either of us heard. We were thinking too hard with no solid ideas to grasp.

Julia remembered that we should eat. She made tuna salad with pickles for lunch, and used too much Chinese mustard, but I may have liked it anyway. The crumbs from the toast stayed on my lap until dinner. We opened a bottle of wine, some decent Cab, maybe, but didn't drink it, or even remember that it was there for us to drink.

We ate at the table. Chicken b.r.e.a.s.t.s and steamed broccoli. I think it was good. Hard to say. Hard, really, to remember if it was broccoli. Something green, I know that.

I wish I'd paid more attention.

Something that I do recall about that day, though, was the total absence of commercials on TV But I don't recall if either of us remarked upon that. If even the events that were so overwhelming didn't matter, simply because they were too large for comment, the lack of commercials probably didn't either.

Which means one of us probably did mention it, because those little random things are the only ones about which we can muster a word, it seems. Like how I'm thinking about it now, when I can smell the gun oil on the guards posted outside my cla.s.sroom.

I am in a high school. The building, from the '70s, is arranged in pods: each one is a circle within a circle. The inner circle is a central common office that housed each department. I am in the Foreign Language pod. I am in the Latin cla.s.sroom. Six wedge-shaped cla.s.srooms radiate off from the center office. On the narrow end of the wedge, a windowless door leads to the office. On each corner of the wide end, a door leads to the halls. Each door has a window of plexigla.s.s-encased metal grilles, but they look into the halls, not out to the world. It is often dark here.

Now a unit of sixteen heavily armed soldiers occupies each inner office, and at least one soldier in biohazard gear guards each outer door. So I was told upon my incarceration here.

There are twenty-six pods in the school.

I a.s.sume there are more people like me-maybe infected, maybe Gnas.h.i.+ng Jack and Slopface Annie in the flesh-in the school.

I'm supposed to a.s.sume that.

The carpet here is hot orange, that hard-knotted industrial carpeting from which you can sc.r.a.pe chewing gum without so much as fraying a fiber. It is stain-resistant. It would not, I doubt, withstand the leakage from Annie, or from that teenaged boy.