Zombies - Encounters with the Hungry Dead Part 57

A story is always something more than its writer; it is also its reader. If you approach what follows, as I did, with the willingness to believe, you may find yourself on a journey that leads inexorably to his unspoken words: The End. You may wonder if you were meant to be entertained. In the increasingly indifferent furnace of your heart, you may even find, as Stacie Allen did, room to die again.

DOUGLAS E. WINTER.

At dawn in late August, in the year of the dead, Douglas E. Winter locked the door of his suburban split-level house in Alexandria, Virginia. He carried a black leather dufflebag filled with handguns and ammunition and pharma-ceuticals, the currency of the day, down a short curve of cement steps to the driveway. There, his 19 71 Ford Mustang, taken from a used car dealer for a song and six clips of Black Talons, was waiting to take him home. The Mustang's once-bright racing blue was tainted red with rust, but its tires were new, and he would ask it only to make one last ride. A knapsack containing notebooks, pens, and a laptop computer snuggled in the tiny back seat among canned goods and bottled water, the box of novels, the sleeping bag, the Coleman lantern, the Mossberg.410 pump shotgun.

He sat in behind the wheel, fed an old Beatles ca.s.sette to the tape deck, and began the long and winding road that would lead, in two or three days, to the heart of the Midwest. Driving through the tranquil streets of Alexandria, he took in the familiar landscape for the final time before heading north on the s.h.i.+rley Highway and then cutting onto the George Was.h.i.+ngton Parkway, which snakes west to the Beltway. Across the Potomac, invulnerable Was.h.i.+ngton, its ghettoes burned and streets patrolled by Marines, shone back its white wisdom: Order has been restored.

Above Langley, the Cabin John Bridge still stood, and took him through an armed checkpoint and out of Virginia. There was no looking back, not now, not after the knowledge, that thief in the night, had come to him and whispered its summons. Something was calling him, some uncomfortable urge that grew with each sleepless night; something he knew, in that place kept for secret knowledge and that now needed to be confirmed. He had grown tired of the movie, the endless replay of images from horror films that flooded the television screen, which with each pa.s.sing day became more unreal, more fictional than the words he would type onto the page. He realized then that he was expendable, that in a world made up of horror, there might be nothing left to tell, no one left who wished to read his words.

He had written books, he had written articles, he had written stories; for nearly twenty years he had scrawled his message on the wall. Often he had written about the human need for horror, the pa.s.sion with which the films, the fiction, had been embraced as his nation slouched toward the Millennium. By then he had quit the law and begun to argue his case alone, facing a computer screen instead of short-tempered judges, recalcitrant witnesses, blank-faced jurors. It was a good life, one in which his pain could be managed, in which he could retreat to the interior world, where everything mattered, and be done with the outside, the surface that the years had lacquered with layer after layer of lies to keep him safe. But then, when the dead rose, nothing could keep him safe. The law had also quit him, its facade of lofty ideals fallen into grim rituals of revenge, at first overseen by lynch mobs and shooting parties, but in time made formal by military tribunals, death squads, detention camps.

The highways were restricted but clear, said the talking heads on the nightly news, for Interstate 70 was the throat for the food and fuel supplies that kept the Northeast, what was left of it, alive. The convoy was formed near Frederick, Maryland, where he pressed the eject on his tapedeck and inserted the soundtrack to Dawn of the Dead. A bored M.P. glanced at his papers and waved him into line. The Mustang clung close to the heels of a pack of vans and eighteen-wheelers. In his rear view he watched an ever-lengthening tail of land rovers and tractor trailers, ridden herd by full-throttled Humvees as helicopter guns.h.i.+ps fluttered overhead. There were detours, delays, diversions, wide and weary loops around the free-fire zone south of Pittsburgh, the ravaged remains of Columbus, but as evening brought down its veil, he made his bed within the gates of Fort Benjamin Harrison, and slept there encircled by the victorious army of the righteous, the living.

He had secured the rarest of commodities, a travel pa.s.s, which, like everyone and everything, had its price. But money, lies, and favors, the fair trade of the nation's capital, meant nothing to him now; their spending loosed him of what had become shackles, imprisoning him first in the law, and then at his writer's desk. Now he had the freedom to know. By mid-morning of the second day, the convoy split at Indianapolis, and he was caught up in a new column that followed the great scythe of 1-70 southwest toward St. Louis, the Gateway to the West and now a mighty fortress for the cause of humanity, spared from the curse of the living dead by a trick of geography and a quick-tempered general who had seized power and levelled, in rapid order, its cemeteries, bridges, and crowded ghettoes.

His destination was there, just a few miles east of St. Louis, on the near sh.o.r.e of the Mississippi. Interstate 70 wove through the last of the Illinois countryside, through Vandalia and Highland, until reaching, just before Edwardsville, a cusp of low hills whose green had faded, the outpost of urban decay, erratic corridors of condominiums and convenience stores, acres of earth torn open, laid bare, mere symptoms of the suffering that lay beyond: the inner-city despair of East St. Louis, the blue-collar barrios of Madison and Venice, and at their crest, his hometown, the great gray ghost of Granite City.

But first he sought the strength that only could be found in pain: the pain of remembering. It brought him from the protection of the armored escort to the two-lane twist of blacktop that carried up into the hills and to the marker, the place of departure and forgetting, the place where he had stopped nearly twenty years before, on the day he left Madison County. His mother was buried there, on a sleepy knoll named Sunset Hills; she had lived long enough to see him as a lawyer, but not to see him happy. When G.o.d in His cruelty took her, he had started to write again.

The cemetery, once secluded, as peaceful and precious as an autumn sunset, was blanketed in black, its innocent fields now cratered char where even the earth was dead, sacrificed on the altar of fuel-air explosives or napalm. He closed his eyes and saw the silver-winged fighter-bombers of Scott Air Force Base, their howling dive and breath of flame, and he prayed that she was there when the airplanes struck, that she suffered only one death-for that, indeed, was enough. He vowed not to think about it again, and then faltered, sitting in the ashes as he began to cry.

He wished for the thousandth time in his life that he had married, and unmade the wish, as he often did, with the thought that it would have meant another betrayal, another loss. Then he asked his mother for forgiveness, and asked his G.o.d, what was left of Him, for the mercy He had not shown to her.

As he returned to the Mustang, he looked to the west, where the sun retreated through a sky he had never forgotten, the sky that shadowed his dreams, his nightmares, his stories: the sky of burnt steel, smokestack lightning, roiling above the mighty forge of Granite City, whose mills, long dead, were alive like the zombies, burning again, burning brightly, churning thunderclouds that never rained. A grey hope once, in the '40s, '50s, and '60s; a gray hope that, like so many American dreams, had turned to dust and despair instead. Foreign imports, labor unions, environmentalists, Arabs and Israelis, Democrats and Republicans, the energy crisis, the recession-he had heard all the stories and in the end believed none of them. For growing up in this burning world, he had seen neither hope nor despair, only gray.

That the shadow lingered still, snuffed out the sun, was no surprise. This place was waiting for him, waiting for his return. If asked, he could not have told anyone why. There was only the knowledge that had come to him that long and lonely night the week before, as he watched the government's video footage from St. Louis, the city of the miracle, the city that had escaped the dead, the city that stood at the banks of a mighty river, the promise of the New America. It was then that he saw this sky, the clouds that were not clouds but the dark breath of smokestacks, lingering in the distance. Just as he saw them now, saw them and felt their call.

At the First Baptist Church of Granite City, a little boy named Doug Winter had stood every Sunday morning, every Sunday night, as the evangelist closed each service with an invitation, arms upraised as if to embrace some invisible giant, Just as I am, without one plea, summoning those in the congregation who had heard the call of blessed Jesus, who had been touched by the hand of G.o.d, But that thy blood was shed for me, to join him before the altar, to join him in salvation, and when that little boy, seven or eight years old, had stumbled forward, down the long and lonely aisle and into that empty embrace, And that thou bids't me come to thee, he did not know why, he did not know what he heard, what had called him, just as he did not know now, or care to know, save that for once he had heeded the call: O Lamb of G.o.d, I come... I come.

STACIE.

Darkness measured time for Stacie Allen, and darkness settled swiftly in this world of shadows. She watched the darkness, looked through it to the tall hurricane fence and its weave of barbed wire, thinking, if indeed there were thoughts, of the man who stood at the other side. Soon he would gesture to her, approach the wire, and soon she would stagger toward him from the crowded interior of the holding pen. Sometimes it was hard for her to walk, and impossible for her to talk; the words she tried to speak coughed from her lips in immutable moans, and however she sought to form them, they meant only hunger. It was hard to remember her name, how she looked, hard to remember the man who waited on the outside, harder still to remember how she had looked to him then, twenty years before. A girl in a red turtleneck sweater, plaid skirt, reel tights, black patent leather shoes, her hair long and dark and alive with the wind as she turned away, eyes wet-with tears or rain, he never knew. She kissed him goodbye, ran to the waiting car and ducked down out of the sudden spring shower, out of his life. Douglas Winter did not know then that she was pregnant with the child of another man, or that two months later she would be married and a housewife in a farm town somewhere in central Illinois. Certainly he did not know that some twenty years after that, he would be facing her again, their eyes still locked in that stare: his eyes filled with hope, hers blank and dead.

That he should find her here, at this time, this place, was the stuff of fiction. It was something that did not happen save in stories, including one that he had written. But it happened in movies, too, and the world, for all its dreaming, had at last become a motion picture.

If she could still read, she would know that she was fiction. His words had found her, or what remained of her, in sullen moments of introspection that he called stories. In their pages, her hair was black, her body lithe, her legs taut and athletic, curving into what her mother had called racehorse ankles; but her face was missing, without description, always in shadow, unseen, unknown-the cipher with raven hair. With three words, she had left him; with thousands upon thousands of words, he had brought her back.

It did not take long to find her. When he left his mother's grave, he followed the state highway down from the low hills and through the decades, past the ghost of the Bel Air Drive-in, whose screen still shone somewhere inside his head, past Pontoon Beach and its polluted pools and streams, past Tri-City Speedway and Bowland and the first of the housing projects, and then stopped at the railroad tracks, where he waited, counting the endless train of pa.s.sing freight cars until, near one hundred, he noticed their cargo. Soon he crossed the web of tracks and was there, on Nameoki Road, driving into his hometown.

Thomas Wolfe was right: You can't go home again. The reason is that you have never left. Douglas Winter may have lived his adult life in places far from Granite City, but Granite City lived on in him. When he saw St. Elizabeth's Church, made the left turn onto Johnson Road, he was not only driving the Mustang, but its immaculate twin, and then a 1968 Ford Galaxie 500, riding in the back of a 1956 Ford Woodie, the front of a Volkswagen Beetle, pedaling a bicycle, running, walking, carried along in his father's arms; it was a journey he had probably taken more often in dreams than in life. Twice he met police cars, first at the sharp turn of Johnson, where he offered his ID, and then at Fehling Road, where he had to offer a fifth of whiskey as well. In the few minutes it took to circle the east of town, going as far as Bellemore Village, he felt the old pains, the ones that cut through him as certain as his mother's cancer: the Ben Franklin five-and-dime where he had bought his first toys, the pharmacy where he had bought his comic books and paperbacks, the confectionary that had become a funeral home, all of them gone, replaced by mocking strip malls and merchandise marts whose windows were smashed, their goods as stolen as his youth.

He drove past Frohardt School, where his mother had taught and he had written his first stories, past all the houses where he had lived, down Lindell Boulevard, over to Franklin Avenue and then the short distance back to Riviera Drive and Miami Court, the town's middle-cla.s.s neighborhood, home to the Catholic merchants, the Jewish dentists and doctors, and the few others, his father among them, who had stepped from the shadow of the steel mills into a life outside. Douglas Winter drove through that shadow, knowing, not knowing, simply trusting in that instinct that had called him home as inevitably as a sparrow in late autumn.

The town had closed in on itself, the homes and shops abandoned, what was left of life waiting in the armed camp that surrounded the smokestacks of Granite City Steel. He found Nameoki Road again, took it south past the high school, where troops in the hundreds were now billeted, then farther along to the sullen projects of Kirkpatrick Homes, where plainfaced men and women in workclothes stared past him with tired and uncaring eyes. And at last he reached the unholy hive in which they labored: the mills, the chemical plants, the furnaces, the pipelines, insectile monstrosities of metal and flame that stalked Route 203 like some vast alien war machines from the science fiction films of his childhood.

He parked the car at the Nash Street entrance of Granite City Steel and sat on the hood, waiting for something to come to him-inspiration, antagonism, admonition-through the smoke and fog of his youth. He bought off the civilian security guards and watched the trains pull through like clockwork. The night brought nothing, so he drank his way into the next day, sleeping when he could, curled in the tiny back seat of the Mustang, the laptop computer hugged to his chest like a firstborn child. When he woke, the faded, dying searchlight of the sun was almost gone. Darkness prowled down, but a brighter light, borne of the blast furnaces, kept his vigil. He could feel its warmth, breathe its fumes, a pungence that burned his lungs more than his brief foray with cigarettes, the smoke that cancelled vision, silenced life, and it moved him as it never had before. Home was a city dressed in gray, forever shrouded, eternally in mourning. A place where even the dead came to die.

In the distance he heard the shuffle of another train, the latest in the ceaseless caravan that hauled restless cargo into the mills. Its whistle mourned a new night of grief, a cry that had echoed down the miles of rail from decimated Minneapolis and St. Paul, Milwaukee and Chicago and all points south, where parentless children, sundered spouses, the childless, the friendless, wept over a world gone so wrong that nothing could put it right but order. If only he had known-known and not seen what waited for him in Madison County-then perhaps he could have lived still in Virginia, watched his television with a bottle in hand like so many others, rested in the embrace of that greater sorrow. But the roaring furnaces burned through him now, heat melting the weariness of years spent in hiding; and he had touched the smoke, which gave back nothing to the world but a stain, a taint, that would never be washed away.

In the shriek of braking metal, the night's wailing engine found its resting place beneath the great burrow of corrugated steel that enclosed the railhead. He wiped the sleep and ash from his face as, in the deepening gloom, soldiers dropped from the cars, exchanged salutes and salutations with their kin at the yard, and then formed up into lazy ranks. The scene had been replayed with minor variations throughout this day, and the day before: the troops dispersing, reforming with weapons ready at the first of the boxcars as the process of unloading began. A huddle of zombies would be herded out of the car and into a jagged run of wooden chutes and fences that funneled and divided them like cattle until, one by one, they emerged into a final chute. There, soldiers with air hammers would hobble them at ankle or knee before letting them stagger into the wide fields of slag that bordered the mills, a makes.h.i.+ft prison secured with wire and cinderblock and steel.

He was too tired to count the zombies, or to count the ma.s.s of undead bodies that already crowded each wide rectangle of fence-work with emigrants from the grave. But he remembered each one of them, fascinated by the faces of the American dead; for here, at last, was a democracy where all men were created equal, mindless husks of grey with little to distinguish them but hair, clothing, shoes-and hunger. The tired, the poor, the huddled ma.s.ses, yearning, yearning... to feed.

In time he watched the last of the pa.s.sengers, what once had been a woman, stumble down the plank of the boxcar. Stop. Head lolling off to the side as if she were sleepwalking. Turn. Eyes raising to him. As if he had been waiting there for her.

And, of course, he was waiting. For her.

It was Stacie Allen.

THE BOOK OF SAt.u.r.dAY.

She could see him, vaguely, in the ever-slowing trickle of memory. Each moment she saw him, saw through him, a patchwork quilt, pieces of time sewn into what once was. He was tall, over six feet, weighted with the beginnings of middle age, and he moved like the smoke itself, tentative, ominous, hovering over her. His eyes were ice blue, now faded to gray, halfmoons of weariness etched beneath them, and there was only the trace of a smile, a mask to tame the world outside.

He was tired, that would have been the word she had tried to form while watching him. Tired for lack of sleep, and for lack of something else. He told her he had been a lawyer, though she knew that, and that his work had been long and hard, trials in distant places, trials about the dead and dying-dreadful accidents, air disasters-but Stacie could no longer imagine what this meant, could only see men in staid suits huddled among the victimized, the guilty, in courtrooms of winedark wood, s.h.i.+fting paper that meant money or life and sometimes both.

Douglas Winter was not meant to be a lawyer; he was a dreamer of sorts, who lived within himself in strange, almost threatening ways. Stacie had sensed as much on that distant Monday, the first day of school in that long-lost enigma of the 1960s, after a president had died but before his brother was killed, when Douglas Winter stopped by her desk in the ninth grade English cla.s.s at Granite City Junior High School and asked if she were Clark Allen's sister.

She had been waiting for him, waiting for this question, for if it went unasked, she would have come to him and told him. She knew that from the moment she saw him. But she would wait, and wish, and across the room at the ringing of the bell he came, looking like a lost boy stepping painfully into that actor called a man.

He smiled, pushed at his gla.s.ses. "Are you Stacie?" A fat stack of books nearly wormed out from his hands. He set them carefully on her desk, and atop the shopping-bag-covered textbooks she could see a paperback novel: The Puppet Masters by Robert Heinlein. When her eyes returned to his, she felt something s.h.i.+ft inside. The eyes, the voice, the face, the stance, the silence, an uncomfortable moment as something new, something disturbing, touches and then breaches the abyss that separates two hearts, makes them beat as one. Stacie knew this moment, though she had never known it before, might never know it again. And there began the thing that would change them both forever.

They spoke about that moment only once, late at night in a house emptied of her roommates, the beginning of a long holiday weekend together at the farthest point she had traveled from home: one hundred miles to college in Charleston, Illinois. She curled against him, naked yet chaste, and asked him if even then he knew that it would come, six years later, to this place where children no longer played at love but began to make love.

He leaned back into the pillow and looked at the poster scotch-taped above her bed, a sunny seascape whose caption told them Virginia Is For Lovers. "I don't know if I want to go back." That he was looking at the poster confused her, but only for a moment. "Back home. To Granite City... to Madison County."

"Yes." Stacie pulled in closer to him, placed her head upon his chest. "I know what you mean." But even then she didn't know. His knapsack, a tattered mangle of surplus-store canvas and rope, huddled on the floor beside the bed. The flap was folded back to expose the sheaf of papers, unkempt manila envelopes and file folders from which typescript pages fanned out. The nearest of the envelopes, thick to overflowing, contained a novel, she knew-a novel that would never end, he said. Even though it was fiction, the novel was called Autobiography, and it was about violence and Vietnam, madness and the Mississippi; most of all, it was about Madison County.

This package of paper that wanted one day to become a book was good. At least the parts she understood. He had read it to her, parts of it, and it had given her an excuse to glance inside him, to those places he had not opened, even to her.

He was going places, she knew that. Law school, lawyer. And what then? Was.h.i.+ngton, he sometimes told her, and that was near Virginia, the place for lovers. People. Power. Wealth. Those words didn't seem to apply to him. He was still lost, and there was little she could do about it except hold him in the night and wait and wait until the day came, and in time it would, when another man would cross another room to ask if she were Stacie Allen.

"Write another poem for me." Douglas Winter had smiled then. "A poem about Virginia."

He had written through the night, sitting on a broken angle of sidewalk, balancing the computer between his knees as his fingers tap-tapped at its keyboard, the arcane code of the storyteller.

He wrote, saved files, wrote again, s.h.i.+fted his body, and talked quietly to her as he worked, forever telling her about her beauty and how much he loved her. "Stacie, I..." Admissions of love. Sometimes he stopped and simply stared at her, a moment of inexpressible rapture.

Her throat was torn open from just beneath the left jawline, a gash that widened as it zigzagged down to a gaping hollow where flesh and marrow had been scooped from above her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Most of her left arm had been chewed away, the forearm dangling on threads of muscle. She was not concerned about the wounds, or the blood that had dried into mudbrown patterns on her ashen skin and foul, torn J.C. Penney clothes.

Douglas Winter asked questions of her, and the words upset her, confused her, until he had whispered, "No, no, please, stay there." Then he held his silence, but after a time he could not help himself. There was so much to say, so little time left in which to say it. He would start to tell her something, then stop and type instead. Sometimes he slipped into moments of self-conversation. But then he would look at her, and his face would fall from its anguish into a kind of peace.

Near dawn, his confused emotions and the battery of his laptop computer were drained. On the spiral of his homecoming tour, he had taken the time to hide his backup battery, along with most of his belongings, in a closet of the house on Lindell Boulevard, sold by his parents late in the '50s, now abandoned, its roof partially collapsed-beneath the weight of time or explosives, it did not matter. He had taken back the house, the neighborhood, and it was home again.

He stood, shaking the aches from his hack and hands, and stepped up to the fence, its heavy links, steel posts, and coiled parapet of barbed wire no barrier to what he first said to her. Then, remembering perhaps, or drawn only by the sound of his footsteps, the smell of his flesh, she came toward him as far as the barrier would allow. Reaching carefully through the small hole that he had cut in the fence, he could almost touch her wounded face. But it was time to leave.

Just short of his car, Douglas Winter stopped, looking back at her as another train sighed out its blast of steam, its aching weight finding rest in the Nash Street terminal. Through the jigsaw puzzle of chain he could see the mountains of slag that still marked the city's southern boundary, the c.o.ke plant and its blast furnaces belching their dirty mist into the dead sky beyond. Stacie was framed in a perfect circle of light, the raging furnaces brighter than the rising sun.

She was about five feet four, and from what he could tell her face had not seemed to age, though her body, like his, had thickened. Two children could do that to a woman. Her physical attraction had been immense, at first, to his teen-aged rage of hormones and happiness. But there was something in Stacie Allen that interested him still. There was no intelligence, he could see that. And there was no pa.s.sion, though he never quite knew if there had been pa.s.sion there for something other than stability, for a house and two cars and two children and a cat or a dog, in a town like Granite City, in a place like Madison County.

Later, he would tell her that in ways undefinable, finding her at the rail-yard that day was the most important moment of his life. Why was not spoken. That was the way he approached his life. He would write, not speak, about what was important, and even then, what he wrote was veiled, hidden, encoded, protected.

"Why is it that you write, exactly-I mean, this stuff."

He looked across another barrier, one no less daunting, to her. She stirred at her Coca-Cola with a straw, wrinkled her nose at the pile of pages on the dining room table between them. In the kitchen, only paces away, her mother made quiet noises, shuffling plates, rinsing silverware, letting them know she was still there.

"If I knew, do you think I would be writing it?" His smile went unreturned. "Sometimes I look down into my typewriter and there's this s.p.a.ce there, white s.p.a.ce, just emptiness. And it has to be filled. Like it's my job, that if these words don't get written down then they will never matter. I will never matter. And sometimes, when somebody, usually you, or my mother, sometimes a teacher, reads them and then looks at me a certain way, sometimes I think I've managed to matter. The rest of the time I'm just having fun. Trying to have fun. So why is it that you read what I give you?"

Stacie hadn't expected him to ask that question. He wondered if she thought before she spoke. She did stir again at her c.o.ke; soon, he thought, the straw might become a cigarette.

"Well, because you gave it to me. So I thought that meant you wanted me to read it. That I was supposed to read it. Or that maybe you had written it for me." Her face brightened, a smile that held, waiting for him to respond.

"What if I didn't care?"

There was truth in there, somewhere. She knew it, and knew, for the first time, that she had looked into the soul of Douglas Winter.

"I'm supposed to say, 'Then I don't care, either.' Which is true, mostly. But I think you care. I think that you think you love me. And that you want me to love you. But you don't want me to love you, not really. You want me to love your poems, your stories. And"-she hesitated, glancing back over her shoulder toward the kitchen and the ghost of her mother-"it's not what I dreamed about as a girl."

Back in the house on Lindell he found the shower still working, though its water was cold and colored with corrosion. He could not remember ever bathing inside these walls. Perhaps the later dwellers had repainted, remodeled, rearranged the rooms. The tile was recent, only a decade or so old. The mirror above the sink was cracked, a jag of lightning that cut his face into a kind of Jekyll and Hyde. Like most people thought of him: Lawyer and writer and never the twain shall meet.

During the last good days, before the dead returned, he had thought, more and more often, of giving in to despair, of writing the John Grisham novel that everyone seemed to expect or demand of him. He had neglected this kind of thinking since the last months of their first love affair, in the Spring of 1971, when he had talked of a novel about the law, about the chaos they witnessed around them, the war in the streets, the war in the jungle. She watched in wonder as he slipped a joint from his pocket, raised it then in half-salute: "To steel mills and c.o.ke plants, Dow Chemical and napalm. Or better yet, to cold, coughed-up mornings in good old Granite City, Illinois."

Stacie said nothing, but looked off to the side of him and hugged herself against something, a chill in bright April, the University of Illinois campus alive with parties and protest. There were four dead in Ohio, and many, many more in Vietnam, and in another month or so he would be receiving his draft notice. He was the love of her past six years and yet a stranger, talking now about peace and justice and freedom, but writing through the night as if alive on the chaos spinning around him, watching the endless stream of helicopters and bodybags on TV, watching nags burn, stomach burning with an ulcer, living hard, drinking harder, now slipsliding to dope. It was the child finally grown, punching his way into manhood, and it was more than she could deal with. She had an answer, but as usual, he was not listening, and gave her his own instead.

"Jesus raised the dead," he told her, summoning up one of the strange songs that sobbed from his stereo. "But who will raise the living?"

He pa.s.sed the joint over to her; she pushed his hand away. And at last she said it: "I've got something to tell you." Words that he could have written, should have written, then. He wished that he could find them now, always thought that he would remember-that, for as long as he lived, he would never forget them.

Words that slipped from her like a confession. "I don't think..." Words that seemed rehea.r.s.ed. "... that I should..." And they were rehea.r.s.ed, of course they were rehea.r.s.ed. "... see you..." Words that gave way to tears, expected tears, scripted tears, soap opera tears."... anymore."

NEW MORNINGS DISTANT MUSIC.

When, in the hour after dawn, he had returned to the house on Lindell Boulevard, its yard of dead gra.s.s was blackened with the curious wash of fading night and oncoming shade. He moved through the uncertainty of that evolving darkness, beer in one hand, pistol in the other, listening for its sound.

Nothing spoke to him, not even bird or insect. He could hear only the distant drumming of the morning trains, arriving from the east with the sun.

Once inside the house, he checked the doors and boarded windows, then took his shower. He replaced the computer battery, printed out what he had written, and placed the pages inside his knapsack, loose and unsettled as ever. Everything obviously had its place, but in a pattern known only to him. He finished the beer and took another with him as he curled on the floor, his knapsack a pillow, and tried for a time to sleep. The sounds of the trains, implacable, mechanical, forever forceful, turning their great wheels around and around and around, lured him toward a calm, a peace, he had not felt in years. In a place where he had not slept for almost four decades, he tried but still could not feel safe.

"You're afraid," Stacie had told him. "You write because you're afraid. Not of the monsters, not of the dark, not of any of this stuff you make up...That isn't real to you, is it? You try to make it real to other people because it gets in their way. So they can't know you. Because that's what you're afraid of. Other people."

It was Christmas. Their last Christmas together. He had given her a sweater, perfume, a poem. She had given him a framed picture of her. It did not do her justice; the angle invoked her brother's face, and her smile was fixed and false. Later he wondered if even then she knew, even then the clock of their love was winding down.

"That's not fear," he said at last. "That's living. I write because each day is like the twist of the handle on a jack-in-the-box. But they tell you that that's G.o.d in the box. You turn the handle, slowly, swiftly, however you live, but you know-or you think you know-that G.o.d is somewhere inside, and that sooner or later He's going to pop out and take you. Or maybe you don't believe in Him, so you keep winding and winding that crank. Maybe the box never opens. Maybe the crank breaks off, or you get tired of turning it. Maybe it just winds on forever."

She pulled the soft wool of her new sweater between her fingers and felt her brow wrinkle, felt a kind of desperate headache push its way up from somewhere deep inside, a guilty place where the hands and lips and c.o.c.k of a phantom had touched her. Stacie supposed that, for Douglas Winter, this was everyday talk. For her, it was the stuff of danger, darkness, plague years. People in Madison County didn't talk this way, about these things. The talk was about weather and the steel mills and the labor problems, the high school wrestling team and the new environmental regulations and the dangerous Negro boys from East St. Louis. Not about art or nightmares. Not about G.o.ds who might or might not exist.

He put the framed photo aside, reached for her and brought her into his arms. She started to cry, for reasons he did not then know, and told him how much she loved him, wanted him, wanted to be with him.

As they kissed, slowly slipping to the floor, to lay entwined as the evening fell into night, he thought about what life would be like in twenty years. About the place on her poster, Virginia, with its sunny seascape, a beach on which a mother, unchanged by time, walked with a leopard's grace, her mane of black hair tied up in a knot, two children scurrying after her, dancing in the wash of salt water and sand, as her husband, their father, a happy man with a law degree and a fistful of novels, stood off-camera, watching.

He kissed her and told her something, something he had never said before. Outside the snow cut through the cloud cover and brought a blanket of white over the grey streets of Granite City. The lights of the Christmas tree twinkled like fallen stars. An angel watched over them. Stacie Allen was nineteen years old, and the Moody Blues sang of nights in white satin. Never reaching an end.

THE USE OF ASHES.

Now what? thought Stacie Allen. But there could be only one thought: Food, always food.

He sat on the same bent angle of sidewalk he had used before and watched her and the city become one. The old ways, the old times, coming back to him again. He wondered at how much had returned; how far he had traveled, only to find himself back here. He wondered how her hair would feel to his touch, how the curve of her back would meet his hand, how she would fit beside him.

The old ways came to him so easily, despite all that was learned, dispensing so quickly with the lessons of the years, the hard rules of growing up and old. He tried to think of something else, writing or even the law. Anything but how she looked, now and then. But he failed and wondered again how it would feel to touch her, to put his face and hands and heart against hers.

He could feel her eyes on him constantly, hear her ceaseless back and forth, here and there, on her side of the barrier made of steel and time. He wanted to know, just as he wanted her to know, how much he cared.

Like the best of lovers, he fulfilled her desires. A newspaper, print blurred with greasy stains, brought from the folds of his knapsack and pa.s.sed through the ragged portal in the wire. There he unfolded the paper for her and let the contents loose. They fell in a scramble at her feet. The air seemed wet, awash with seared metal. Her nostrils flared, head suddenly erect, like a dog capturing a scent.

She knelt, penitent, hands digging into the offering, not so much clutching at the wet meat than fondling it, the slick fat and strips of skin and sinew wound in her fingers as she brought it to her lips. He fell against the fence, the barbed wire cutting into one hand, the other seeking anxious purchase, a steady place, as he watched her eagerly press the meat to her mouth. Strings of fat leaked from her teeth and along her chin like ragged vomit; the sound of her chewing pained his own stomach. At last he turned away, unable to watch the guileless greed of her swallowing.

His uncertain steps trailed after the false beacon of the moon, cloaked in a sky of smoke whose lower reaches s.h.i.+ned with the bloom of blast furnaces, replaying the nights of his childhood, when the mills, ferociously alight, marked the boundaries of his world. He stumbled on, deep breathing the stench, the flurry of ashes, oblivious to the great gray hills that rose all around him. He had seen it all before: the heaps of coal and limestone, rusted metal and slag, all of it fodder or waste, and that the mounds had multiplied, grown taller with the years, meant nothing to him-nothing but the inevitable.

It had been too long since he had taken this kind of a walk, and soon he was short of breath, and his thigh ached, a quiet but lingering lament. He dry-swallowed a Percocet and kept on going. In the distance the civilian guards and soldiers lit cigarettes and spoke of something, nothing. He had taken care of them and their clones on each s.h.i.+ft: cigarettes, ration slips, dollars, drugs- everyone of them had his price, and it was cheap. Enough to buy him the time he needed, though now it was almost gone, as s.h.i.+ft replaced s.h.i.+ft and day followed night, and soon there would be nothing left for him to trade. They would need her for their labors, and with the sound of a morning whistle, an angry foreman or NCO, the scuffle of the swing s.h.i.+ft, a rattle of M-16s, he would awaken from this dream. Now that he had found her, she would be lost again.

Awakening always generated a summons. So did the zombies when they first appeared on the CBS News Bulletin. He had looked with surprise at the television screen, searching through the channels but finding only the same story, the old story, watching these shambling undead creatures rise from the grave as he had so many times before in horror movies-walking out of fields, forests, ruined cities, walking out of film after film and into reality.

For a short time, that first night, he wondered how many people knew that there was a difference, how many had died while watching their television sets, never thinking to look outside. But he lived in the sanctified shadow of the nation's capital: the body counts were for the most part distant, and as the days turned into weeks, and the weeks into months, the dead were simply statistics that tickertaped like stock market quotations beneath CNN broadcasts. He didn't need to be told to stay inside at night, to clean and load his shotgun, to walk calmly into the Drug Emporium and trade a fistful of Krugerrands for a shopping list of prescription drugs-painkillers, antibiotics, antidepressants. By then elements of the Rapid Deployment Force had moved into position, and soon the fifty-mile perimeter was drawn around the capital, while Marine Force Recon units prowled the streets within, shooting first, not even asking later.

Then came the night when the sky over the District of Columbia was lit, a patriotic celebration of superior firepower, a cleansing flame whipped by the wind of hovering helicopters. Just north of the Pentagon, a ruby rain showered down, the first of the guns.h.i.+p a.s.saults on Arlington National Cemetery, where an army of the dead made their encampment. Later there would be airstrikes, napalm; and later, silence. More ashes.

After she walked out of his life, and the Army took him into its embrace, his father bought a car for him, a 1971 Mustang Mach I in racing blue, the sleek stuff of Team McLaren. He liked to drive the Mustang at night, to push the pedal down and down until he hit 100 miles per hour, letting the Interstate lead him into the dark, uncharted territory beyond Madison County. There he would find a dirt road, park on some quiet corner of farmland and wander into the embrace of fields of tall corn, convincing himself that he was lost, that if he went far enough, he could never be found; that no one could ever touch him again. In a year he was driving the car across the country to law school, and within three years more, to Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C.

Without any conscious plan, he reached the end of 21st Street, and looked west down a range of wall and wire as far as he cared to see. Inside were zombies by the thousands, tens of thousands, an inhuman ocean of gray whose restless tide washed up on sh.o.r.es of waste. Past them, across Route 203, the sickly c.u.mulus brewed out from a hundred smokestacks. There, he knew, on the far side of the c.o.ke plant, lurked more avenues of rail, routes spiderwebbing north from Arkansas and Tennessee, Louisiana, perhaps even Texas. He looked up at the long stretch of fencing, the angry furnaces, the eternal ghost dance of fire and smoke, and shook his head at the industry of men. And then he looked back, just before his view would be lost to plateaus and peaks of slag, and he saw her sitting cross legged in the dust, her head in her hands.

By the time he returned to the cut in the wire, his leg taut and forcing him to limp, another dawn wept over them, the sun pulling itself reluctantly into the sky. Stacie said nothing, her eyes simply following a man to whom the idea of darkness seemed important. Empty eyes; accusing eyes. The question, unasked, unanswered, consumed him. The wire that separated her from him was nothing; it was the darkness, most of all, that kept them apart. The darkness defied him; and yet it defined him, made him into someone-someone who played at being a lawyer, who couldn't earn his living with words, so sold his soul to write them. Who once was lost. And who now, in the shadow of the smokestacks, had been found.

Soon she was only inches away. The wire blurred, almost disappeared from sight. Her face was slack, almost saddened; the meal seemed to calm her. Perhaps she was remembering. The image of glowing candles, the mills alight in storm clouds of smoke, had stalked her childhood, too, and now that darkness was returning again. There were so many memories: frail, uncertain flowers of flesh and blood that might blossom in the desert of her consciousness.

He embraced the darkness, wis.h.i.+ng that it were her. "A gray hope," he told her, calmly reciting the words, another song out of another time. And slowly he raised his hand, brought it to the gap in the fence.

She looked up at him, past him. Her face, what was left of it, was without pa.s.sion, without memory, eyes locked in a television game-show stare: all-seeing, never knowing. She remembered nothing, no one, then moonlight, a window, a flight of birds, the cry of a child, the pain of birthing, a gray hope... and then she remembered no more.

"Hope," he said again. Whether this night, alight with its furnaces, or another, it did not matter. There were few words left that mattered, and in the darkness there was only one: "Love."

As if conjured by this word, the halo of a furnace flared over them, loosed by the opening of a distant gate. A team of workers, orange and yellow helmets, plaid flannel s.h.i.+rts, blue jeans and boots, faces and hands dark with grime and nightmare, emerged from the backdrop of flame, then melted into their counterparts, arriving for the morning s.h.i.+ft.

"Love," he told her again, and his fingers touched her, softly, gently, on the curve of her wet cheek. From somewhere over all unseen rainbow rose the sigh of another train, bringing the zombies home.

THE WAFER AND THE WINE.

On that evening of another unnamed, unnumbered day after the Second Coming, Douglas Winter looked steadily at Stacie Allen. She looked back in kind. From ten feet apart, through a web wad of rusted metal, they were locked in to one another, solidly, intimately, and eternally.

A train whistle blew. Still looking at him, she did not move on the first whistle, or the second. In the long silence after the second whistle, and before the third, he took a deep breath and looked down at his pants, the left leg streaked and s.h.i.+ny with new blood. In that instant of inattention, she urged herself forward, fingers twining in the chain links, face pressed against the barbed wire so tightly that her brow was etched and split.