The Apocalypse Reader Part 21

'What?' I could not believe him.

'When in doubt,' he told me, 'attack.'

'You're not scared of the enemy,' I said, 'but there's the radiation.'

'I don't know anything about radiation.' He turned in his saddle to watch his men. When they were ready he drew his sabre. They imitated him. I had no sabre to draw.

I was horrified. I pulled my horse away from the road. 'Division Commander Savitsky, we're duty-bound to conserve ...'

'We're duty-bound to make for Angkor,' he said. 'And that's what we're doing.' His perfect body poised itself in the saddle. He raised his sabre.

'It's not like ordinary dying,' I began. But he gave the order to trot forward. There was a rictus of terrifying glee on each mouth. The light from the sky was reflected in every eye.

I moved with them. I had become used to the security of numbers and I could not face their disapproval. But gradually they went ahead of me until I was in the rear. By this time we were almost at the bottom of the hill and cantering towards the mushroom cloud which was now shot through with all kinds of dark, swirling colours. It had become like a threatening hand, while the wind-borne ash stung our bodies and drew blood on the flanks of our mounts.

Yakovlev, just ahead of me, unstrapped his accordion and began to play some familiar Cossack battle-song. Soon they were all singing. Their pace gradually increased. The noise of the accordion died but their song was so loud now it seemed to fill the whole world. They reached full gallop, charging upon that appalling outline, the quintessential symbol of our doom, as their ancestors might have charged the very gates of h.e.l.l. They were swift, dark shapes in the dust. The song became a savage, defiant roar.

My first impulse was to charge with them. But then I had turned my horse and was trotting back towards the valley and the border, praying that, if I ever got to safety, I would not be too badly contaminated.

(In homage to Isaac Babel, 1894-1941?)Ladbroke Grove, 1978

'80s LILIES

Terese Svoboda.

THE CALLA LILIES in New Zealand say we are dead, just step off the jadestrewn, rimed high-tide line here and a wave will rise up like Trigger, like some silent movie stallion, and suck us under, suck us beneath a continental shelf stuck out so far the waves whiten before they break. So too the calla lilies, all white and wild like that, all about to break in the greeny drizzle that the wind whips, all these wild calla lilies that will bear us away.

I see the lilies and I say Let's get off the bus. Then the bus' burring keeps on without us as we stand at the upper ridge of lilies, before they spill off the grave mounds corralled by wooden fences and multiply right on onto the waves. Lilies from old settlers' tombs, I say into the silencing wind with you tucking the baby onto my back and as far as we can see, green drizzle, jade beaches, white cups in clumps flattened by wind.

Mind the waves, she says. They will jump the beach and pull you in.

She comes abreast of us, nearly green-skinned in the green mist with a small-sized boy just as green, tugging at the end of her arm. Does she mean for us to mind those waves-or him, the green monkey among the lilies?

I hold up a rock. Jade? Really jade? I ask.

Tourists, she says in a tone that can't be confused. Tourists don't come here, she says.

Really? They skip this bit? I thumb toward all that various beauty. Those terrible tourists.

She laughs and my husband and I say all the little things against the wind that makes her lean toward us down the length of the beach until we are at her car that she unlocks and leaves in, waving. We wave back, a few more little things on our lips.

The baby takes away our wonder at the place and its people, the baby has his wants. At the end of the road the woman has driven away from sits a pub, curiously free of all the lilies, as if bulldozed free. We order pints there, and then we ask after rooms since the green mist can only give way to dark.

They have rooms.

We remark on the sheep smell of these rooms, and the drizzle-colored pub interior, its darts bent and broken, the dark growlings and the stares from the pub fiends, two steamy gold miners, silent and filthy in their mining gear, flakes of dirt green not gold falling from them onto their table, and we order another pint.

Going to the ladies, with the baby asleep, milk lip aquiver, I trip over huge bones in the corridor, vastly gnarled, prehistoric big grey bones that must be the source of the sheep stink. The dog that gnaws at such bones, as terrible an animal as he must be, thumps and growls from inside some further door when I shut mine, but he's quiet when I emerge, as if he has plans.

I haven't. I haven't said Yes yet to the room or to another pint. I just want to talk about those bones but at our seat there's no one to note my near miss with the bone-guarding dog, no man nor child.

One of the two miners nods to the window, Out there. She has them in her car.

Where else would you be putting up but here? she shouts over new pellmell rain. I have tea, she says.

WE RODE THE ferry that sinks, the ferry with a creche where the children are roped to rockers through the big waves that slap the island apart, the ferry that, however, did not sink when we crossed but allowed us, vomitus, to board that bus.

That ferry's no problem, she says. Look in the phonebook.

I open the phonebook and the first page lists all the calamities: tidal wave, earthquake, floods, volcanic eruptions, and numbers to call. Such a safe place, I say they say, so safe for children.

We are fleeing, we explain, to some safe place. We're sure this time they'll drop it. We thought, Here's a place we'll be safe and gave the airlines our gold card.

They don't laugh, she and her husband. Just the way she doesn't laugh at the green rock I pull out of my bag, the rock, I say, that must be worth money. Their house is full of toys my baby knows and toys my husband can feel the remote of, and books I have read and admired. Her husband has my husband's charm and why not? They do nothing similar for work but charm makes the men match.

The baby inspects all the toys their boy brings so I can talk while she cooks because cooking is the point of visiting, isn't it, she says, a place where everyone meets. Then you can go back, if you like. After tea.

I look out into the pellmell greeny rain and even in the looking, smell sheep, and hear that growl. When real night falls about two drinks after tea-what is surely dinner-when the rain isn't seen but felt, they won't let us go, they make up beds.

Their boy bounces a ball off the baby's head and the baby smiles.

WE VISIT A gold mine in the morning, their idea.

Maybe they wanted to have s.e.x, I whisper to my husband as he settles a hard hat onto his head.

A little late, he says.

We walk deep into the mines posted Do Not Enter and they say, Don't mind the signs, the baby is fine.

This is where we're going when it happens, says her husband. And he explains what he heard on TV yesterday, how it will blow ash all over the globe in ways n.o.body knew. Everywhere will be caught in the grip of its terrible winter.

Winter-you are obsessed with having seasons that don't match ours, I say. I look at my husband. So here is not safe either says my glance.

We walk along in the dark.

I expect a room of gold all aglitter at the end, jutting ore burnished to a sun's strength. What we get to is a small cave lit with mirrors which leave little flashes of faraway light on the dull rock.

Our faces facing the mirrors are just one grey ball, then another.

Their boy drops a rock down a shaft and it doesn't hit bottom. While we wait, the baby wakes as if the rock hits hard, and his wails echo all down the tunnel. We walk back through his wails, it's that physical.

WE STAY ONE more night. We stay up late and my husband says, Maybe the threat will blow over.

Blow over. We all laugh, drinking the wine from the grapes that grow among the lilies. Then we talk movies, all the same ones we have seen as if together.

We really came to see you, I say. Does it matter if we flee if you are here?

IN THE MORNING they tell us they do not write, they will not. No letters.

Consider them written, says my husband.

We take the next bus, a dark cave filled with more miners abandoning mines. The settlers we leave behind, such settlers as they are, wearing our clothes nearly exactly, franchise for franchise, who wave as our bus burrs off past the lilies, the big waves behind them lapping and reaching.

THESE ZOMBIES ARE NOT.

A METAPHOR.

Jeff Goldberg.

WHEN THE FULL-SCALE zombie outbreak finally occurred I was the only one prepared. I don't mean with supplies and weapons and secure shelter-though, yes, that is a part of what I mean-but, more importantly, I had the proper mental fortification.

Baxter said to me, "These zombies are a metaphorical scourge upon the Earth. They represent all that is evil in humankind." Then he went outside, got bitten, and turned into one of them.

I held a meeting with the rest of my housemates. "Let's be very clear," I said. "These zombies are not a metaphorical scourge upon the Earth. These zombies are an actual scourge upon the Earth." I pointed out the window. We could see the hordes of walking dead in the streets, tearing into the flesh of the living. "These zombies do not represent all that is evil in humankind. They do not represent anything except zombies."

Yes, yes, Manny and Jeannine nodded at me, blank affirmative stares, eager for leaders.h.i.+p in the uncertainty of the world's end.

A half-decayed, blood-smeared face smashed itself up against my metal-barred bulletproof gla.s.s window. I flipped a switch and activated the electric current. "Not an allegory, an a.n.a.logy, or an allusion," I said. "This is not the foreshadowing of the downfall of man. This is the downfall itself."

Yes, yes, my housemates all nodded. But they didn't understand. With the apocalypse upon us, the human race appeared unequipped to process the bad news. So these few survivors were both my wards and my prisoners. I couldn't let them out of my sight for a moment or they'd shut down the defenses, wander outside.

I turned my back to work on the water purification system and Jeannine started fumbling with the locks on the front door. As I pulled her away she said she just wanted to pop out for some Starbucks. "Starbucks is gone," I said to her, "There is no more Starbucks."

She lowered her head. "Reliance on foreign investors puts American corporations at risk in the global marketplace."

That was when I started locking them in the bas.e.m.e.nt.

I'd go down to give them meals and sometimes play a round or two of bridge. It got boring single-handedly holding off the zombie mult.i.tude.

Zombie Baxter turned up a few days later. His gray, withered skin; his barren, pus-filled eyes; the shreds of human flesh in his teeth: good old Baxter. I wouldn't have recognized him except he started banging on the front door and shouting "It's me, Zombie Baxter!" I eyed him through the peephole, one hand poised on the switch to activate the electric current.

"I didn't know zombies could talk," I said through the safety of my steel-reinforced door.

"What's there to say, really?"

"I'm not letting you in," I said.

"Come on, I want to eat your brains."

"No."

"What about Jeannine?"

"No."

"Manny?"

I said, "No," but he sensed my hesitation.

"Just give me Manny," he said, "Please."

"I'm going to activate the electric perimeter now."

"Go ahead," Baxter said, "We've built up a resistance to electricity."

"Really?" I asked.

"No," he admitted, "But our best zombie scientists are working on it. It's only a matter of time."

I flipped the switch and Baxter jolted away from the front door, then lurched off down the street. Either he flipped me the bird or his pointer and ring fingers were missing.

He was right: it was only a matter of time. But that was the point. I didn't expect to survive; I just wanted to hold out as long as possible.

Down in the bas.e.m.e.nt Manny and Jeannine had managed to use their teeth and nails to pry the wooden boards away from the one small window. Now the room was crawling with zombies. I couldn't tell if the moaning, undead horde staggering around the former rec room included my housemates. No one seemed to be in a talking mood.

I ran a hose from the kitchen sink, stuck it under the door and started filling the bas.e.m.e.nt with water.

THE RAPID ADVANCE.

OF SORROW.

Theodora Goss.

I SIT IN one of the cafes in Szent Endre, writing this letter to you, Istvan, not knowing if I will be alive tomorrow, not knowing if this cafe will be here, with its circular green chairs and cups of espresso. By the Danube, children are playing, their knees bare below school uniforms. Widows are knitting shapeless sweaters. A cat sleeps beside a geranium in the cafe window.

If you see her, will you tell me? I still remember how she appeared at the University, just off the train from Debrecen, a country girl with badly-cut hair and clothes sewn by her mother. That year, I was smoking French cigarettes and reading forbidden literature. "Have you read D.H. Lawrence?" I asked her. "He is the only modern writer who convincingly expresses the desires of the human body." She blushed and turned away. She probably still had her Young Pioneers badge, hidden among her underwear.

"Ilona is a beautiful name," I said. "It is the most beautiful name in our language." I saw her smile, although she was trying to avoid me. Her face was plump from country sausage and egg bread, and dimples formed at the corners of her mouth, two on each side.

She had dimples on her b.u.t.tocks, as I found out later. I remember them, like craters on two moons, above the tops of her stockings.