Horror Warm bodies

[Angel]

UPDATE 10
Ten minutes later, the storm has launched into its big opening movement, and we are getting soaked. The convertible was a poor choice for a day like this. Neither of us can figure out how to put the top up, so we drive in silence with heavy sheets of rain beating down on our heads. We don't complain, though. We try to stay positive.

'Do you know where you're going?' Julie asks after about twenty minutes. Her hair is matted flat on her face.



'Yes,' I say, looking down the road at the dark grey horizon.

'Are you sure? 'Cause I have no idea.'

'Very . . . sure.'

I prefer not to explain why I know the route between the airport and the city so well. Our hunting route. Yes, she knows what I am and what I do, but do I have to remind her? Can we just have a nice drive and forget certain things for a while? In the sunny fields of my imagination we are not a teenager and a walking corpse driving in a rainstorm. We are Frank and Ava cruising tree-lined country lanes while a scratchy vinyl orchestra swoons our soundtrack.



'Maybe we should stop and ask directions.'

I look at her. I look around at the crumbling districts surrounding us, nearly black in the evening gloom.

'Kidding,' she says, her eyes peeking out between plastered wet clumps of hair. She leans back in the seat and folds her arms behind her head. 'Let me know when you need a break. You kinda drive like an old lady.'

As the rain pools into standing water at our feet, I notice Julie shivering a little. It's a warm spring night, but she's saturated, and the cab of the old convertible is a cyclone of freeway wind. I take the next exit, and we ease down into a silent graveyard of suburban grid homes. Julie looks at me with questioning eyes. I can hear her teeth chattering.

I drive slowly past the houses, looking for a good place to stop for the night. Eventually I pull into a weedy cul-de-sac and park next to a rusted mini-van. I take Julie's hand and pull her towards the nearest house. The door is locked, but the dry-rotted wood gives way with a light kick. We step into the relative warmth of some long-dead family's cosy little nest. There are old Coleman lanterns placed throughout the house, and once Julie lights them they provide a flickering campsite glow that feels oddly comforting. She ambles around the kitchen and living room, looking at toys, dishes, stacks of old magazines. She picks up a stuffed koala bear and looks it in the eyes. 'Home sweet home,' she mumbles.

She reaches into her messenger bag, pulls out a Polaroid camera, points it at me and snaps a shot. The flash is shocking in this dark place. She grins at my startled expression and holds up the camera. 'Look familiar? I stole it from the skeletons' meeting room yesterday morning.' She hands me the developing photo. 'It's important to preserve memories, you know? Especially now, since the world is on its way out.' She puts the viewfinder to her eye and turns in a slow circle, taking in the whole room. 'Everything you see, you might be seeing for the last time.'

I wave the picture in my hand. A ghostly image begins to take shape. It's me, R, the corpse that thinks it's alive, staring back at me with those wide, pewter-grey eyes. Julie hands the camera to me.

'You should always be taking pictures, if not with a camera then with your mind. Memories you capture on purpose are always more vivid than the ones you pick up by accident.' She strikes a pose and grins. 'Cheese!'

I take her picture. When it rolls out of the camera she reaches for it, but I pull it away and hide it behind my back. I hand her mine. She rolls her eyes. She takes the photo and studies it, tilting her head. 'Your complexion looks a little better. The rain must have cleaned you up a bit.'

She lowers the photo and squints at me for a moment. 'Why are your eyes like that?'

I look at her warily. 'Like . . . what?'

'That weird grey. It's nothing like how corpse eyes look. Not clouded over or anything. Why are they like that?'

I give this some thought. 'Don't know. Happens at . . . conversion.'

She's looking at me so hard I start to squirm. 'It's creepy,' she says. 'Looks . . . supernatural, almost. Do they ever change colour? Like when you kill people or something?'

I try not to sigh. 'I think . . . you're thinking . . . of vampires.'

'Oh, right, right.' She chuckles and gives a rueful shake of her head. 'At least those aren't real yet. Too many monsters to keep track of these days.'

Before I can take offence, she looks up at me and smiles. 'Anyway . . . I like them. Your eyes. They're actually kinda pretty. Creepy . . . but pretty.'

It's probably the best compliment I've received in my entire Dead life. Ignoring my idiot stare, Julie wanders off into the house, humming to herself.

The storm is raging outside, with occasional thunderclaps. I'm grateful that our house happens to have all its windows intact. Most of the others' were smashed long ago by looters or feeders. I glimpse a few debrained corpses on our neighbours' green lawns, but I'd like to imagine our hosts got out alive. Made it to one of the Stadiums, maybe even some walled-off paradise in the mountains, angelic choirs singing behind pearl-studded titanium gates . . .

I sit in the living room listening to the rain fall while Julie putters around the house. After a while she comes back with an armful of dry clothes and dumps them on the love seat. She holds up a pair of jeans about ten sizes too big. 'What do you think?' she says, wrapping the waist around her entire body. 'Do these make me look fat?' She drops them and digs around in the pile, pulls out a mass of cloth that appears to be a dress. 'I can use this for a tent if we get lost in the woods tomorrow. God, these folks must have made a fancy feast for some lucky zombie.'

I shake my head, making a gag face.

'What, you don't eat fat people?'

'Fat . . . not alive. Waste product. Need . . . meat.'

She laughs. 'Oh, so you're an audiophile and a food snob! Jesus.' She tosses the clothes aside and lets out a deep breath. 'Well, all right. I'm exhausted. The bed in there isn't too rotten. I'm going to sleep.'

I lie back on the cramped love seat, settling in for a long night alone with my thoughts. But Julie doesn't leave. Standing there in the bedroom doorway, she looks at me for a long minute. I've seen this look before, and I brace myself for whatever's coming.

'R . . .' she says. 'Do you . . . have to eat people?'

I sigh inside, so exhausted by these ugly questions, but when did a monster ever deserve its privacy?

'Yes.'

'Or you'll die?'

'Yes.'

'But you didn't eat me.'

I hesitate.

'You rescued me. Like three times.'

I nod slowly.

'And you haven't eaten anyone since then, right?'

I frown in concentration, thinking back. She's right. Not counting the few bites of leftover brains here and there, I've been gastronomically celibate since the day I met her.

A peculiar little half-smile twitches on her face. 'You're kind of . . . changing, aren't you?'

As usual, I am speechless.

'Well, goodnight,' she says, and shuts the bedroom door.

I lie there on the love seat, gazing up at the water-stained cottage-cheese ceiling.

'What's going on with you?' M asks me over a cup of mouldy coffee in the airport Starbucks. 'Are you okay?'

'Yeah, I'm okay. Just changing.'

'How can you change? If we all start from the same blank slate, what makes you diverge?'

'Maybe we're not blank. Maybe the debris of our old lives still shapes us.'

'But we don't remember those lives. We can't read our diaries.'

'It doesn't matter. We are where we are, however we got here. What matters is where we go next.'

'But can we choose that?'

'I don't know.'

'We're Dead. Can we really choose anything?'

'Maybe. If we want to bad enough.'

The rain drumming on the roof. The creak of weary timbers. The prickle of the old cushions through the holes in my shirt. I'm busy searching my post-death memory for the last time I went this long without food when I notice Julie standing in the doorway again. Her arms are folded on her chest and her hip is pressed against the door frame. Her foot taps an anxious rhythm on the floor.

'What?' I ask.

'Well . . .' she says. 'I was just thinking. The bed's a king-size. So I guess, if you wanted to . . . I wouldn't care if you joined me in there.' I raise my eyebrows a little. Her face reddens. 'Look, all I'm saying - all I'm saying - is I don't mind giving you a side of the bed. These rooms are kinda spooky, you know? I don't want the ghost of Mrs Sprat crushing me in my sleep. And considering I haven't showered in over a week, you really don't smell much worse than I do - maybe we'll cancel each other out.' She shrugs one shoulder, whatever, and disappears into the bedroom.

I wait a few minutes. Then, with great uncertainty, I get up and follow her in. She is already in the bed, curled into the foetal position with the blankets pulled tight around her. I slowly ease myself onto the far opposite edge. The blankets are all on her side, but I certainly don't need to stay warm. I am perpetually room-temperature.

Despite the pile of luxurious down comforters wrapped around her, Julie is still shivering. 'These clothes are . . .' she mutters, and sits up in bed. 'Fuck.' She glances over at me. 'I'm going to lay my clothes out to dry. Just . . . relax, okay?' With her back to me, she wriggles out of her wet jeans and peels her shirt over her head. The skin of her back is blue-white from the cold. Almost the same hue as mine. In her polka-dot bra and plaid panties, she gets out of bed and drapes her clothes over the dresser, then quickly crawls back under the covers and curls up. 'Goodnight,' she says.

I lie back on my folded arms, staring up at the ceiling. We are both on the very edges of the mattress, about four feet of space between us. I get the feeling that it's not just my ghoulish nature that makes her so wary. Living or Dead, virile or impotent, I still appear to be a man, and maybe she thinks I'll act the same as any other man would, lying so close to a beautiful woman. Maybe she thinks I'll try to take things from her. That I'll slither over and try to consume her. But then why am I even in this bed? Is it a test? For me, or for her? What strange hopes are compelling her to take this chance?

I listen to her breathing slow as she falls asleep. After a few hours, with her fear safely tucked away in dreams, she rolls over, removing most of the gap between us. She's facing me now. Her faint breath tickles my ear. If she were to wake up right now, would she scream? Could I ever make her understand how safe she really is? I won't deny that this proximity ignites more urges in me than the instinct to kill and eat. But although these new urges are there, some of them startling in their intensity, all I really want to do is lie next to her. In this moment, the most I'd ever hope for would be for her to lay her head on my chest, let out a warm, contented breath, and sleep.

Now here is an oddity. A question for the zombie philosophers. What does it mean that my past is a fog but my present is brilliant, bursting with sound and colour? Since I became Dead I've recorded new memories with the fidelity of an old cassette deck, faint and muffled and ultimately forgettable. But I can recall every hour of the last few days in vivid detail, and the thought of losing a single one horrifies me. Where am I getting this focus? This clarity? I can trace a solid line from the moment I met Julie all the way to now, lying next to her in this sepulchral bedroom, and despite the millions of past moments I've lost or tossed away like highway trash, I know with a lockjawed certainty I'll remember this one for the rest of my life.

Sometime in the pre-dawn, as I lie there on my back with no real need to rest, a dream flickers on like a film reel behind my eyes. Except it's not a dream, it's a vision, far too crisp and bright for my lifeless brain to have rendered. Usually these second-hand memories are preceded by the taste of blood and neurons, but not tonight. Tonight I close my eyes and it just happens, a surprise midnight showing.

We open on a dinner scene. A long metal table laid out with a minimalist spread. Bowl of rice. Bowl of beans. Rectangle of flax bread.

'Thank you, Lord, for this food,' says the man at the head of the table, hands folded in front of him but eyes wide open. 'Bless it to our bodies. Amen.'

Julie nudges the boy sitting next to her. He squeezes her thigh under the table. The boy is Perry Kelvin. I'm in Perry's mind again. His brain is gone, his life evaporated and inhaled . . . yet he's still here. Is this a chemical flashback? A trace of his brain still dissolving somewhere in my body? Or is it actually him? Still holding on somewhere, somehow, somewhy?

'So, Perry,' Julie's dad says to him - to me. 'Julie tells me you're working for Agriculture now.'

I swallow my rice. 'Yes, sir, General Grigio, I'm a - '

'This isn't the mess hall, Perry, this is dinner. Mr Grigio will be fine.'

'Okay. Yes, sir.'

There are four chairs at the table. Julie's father sits at the head, and she and I sit next to each other on his right. The chair at the other end of the table is empty. What Julie tells me about her mother is this: 'She left when I was twelve.' And though I've gently probed, she has never offered me more, not even while we're lying naked in my twin bed, exhausted and happy and as vulnerable as any two people can be.

'I'm a planter right now,' I tell her father, 'but I think I'm on track for a promotion. I'm shooting for harvest supervisor.'

'I see,' he says, nodding thoughtfully. 'That isn't a bad job . . . but I wonder why you don't join your father in Construction. I'm sure he could use more young men working on that all-important corridor.'

'He's asked me to, but ah . . . I don't know, I just don't think Construction is the place for me right now. I like working with plants.'

'Plants,' he repeats.

'I just think in times like these there's something meaningful about growing things. The soil's so depleted it's hard to get much out of it, but it's pretty satisfying when you finally do see some green coming through that grey crust.'

Mr Grigio stops chewing, blank-faced. Julie looks uneasy. 'Remember that little shrub we had in our living room back east?' she says. 'The one that looked like a skinny little tree?'

'Yes . . .' her dad says. 'What about it?'

'You loved that thing. Don't act like you don't get gardening.'

'That was your mother's plant.'

'But you're the one who loved it.' She turns to me. 'So Dad used to be quite the interior designer, believe it or not; he had our old house decked out like an IKEA showroom, all this modern glass and metal stuff, which my mom couldn't stand - she wanted everything earthy and natural, all hemp fibre and sustainable hardwoods . . .'

Mr Grigio's face looks tight. Julie either doesn't notice or doesn't care.

'. . . so to fight back, she buys this lush, bright green shrub, puts it in a huge wicker pot, and sticks it right in the middle of Dad's perfect white-and-silver living room.'

'It wasn't my living room, Julie,' he interjects. 'As I recall we took a vote on every piece of furniture, and you always sided with me.'

'I was like eight, Dad, I probably liked pretending I lived in a spaceship. Anyway, Mom buys this plant and they argue about it for a week - Dad says it's "incongruous", Mom says either the plant stays or she goes - ' She hesitates momentarily. Her father's face gets tighter. 'That, um, that went on for a while,' she resumes, 'but then Mom being Mom, she got obsessed with something else and quit watering the plant. So when it started dying, guess who adopted the poor thing?'

'I wasn't going to have a dead shrub as our living room's centrepiece. Someone had to take care of it.'

'You watered it every day, Dad. You gave it plant food and pruned it.'

'Yes, Julie, that's how you keep a plant alive.'

'Why can't you admit you loved the stupid plant, Dad?' She regards him with a mixture of amazement and frustration. 'I don't get it, what is so wrong with that?'

'Because it's absurd,' he snaps, and the mood of the room suddenly shifts. 'You can water and prune a plant but you cannot "love" a plant.'

Julie opens her mouth to speak, then shuts it.

'It's a meaningless decoration. It sits there consuming time and resources, and then one day it decides to die, no matter how much you watered it. It's absurd to attach an emotion to something so pointless and brief.'

There are a few long seconds of silence. Julie breaks away from her father's stare and pokes at her rice. 'Anyway,' she mumbles, 'my point was, Perry . . . that Dad used to be a gardener. So you should share gardening stories.'

'I'm interested in a lot more than gardening,' I say, racing to change the subject.

'Oh?' Mr Grigio says.

'Yeah, ah . . . motorcycles? I salvaged a BMW R 1200 R a while ago and I've been working on bulletproofing it, getting it combat-ready just in case.'

'You have mechanical experience, then. That's good. We have a shortage of mechanics in the Armoury right now.'

Julie rolls her eyes and shovels beans into her mouth.

'I'm also spending a lot of time on my marksmanship. I've been requesting extra assignments from school and I've gotten pretty good with the M40.'

'Hey, Perry,' Julie says, 'why don't you tell Dad about your other plans? Like how you've always wanted to - '

I step on her foot. She glares at me.

'Always wanted to what?' her father asks.

'I don't - I'm not really . . .' I take a drink of water. 'I'm not really sure yet, sir, to be honest. I'm not sure what I want to do with my life. But I'm sure I'll have it figured out by the time I start high school.'

What were you going to say? R wonders aloud, interrupting the scene again, and I feel a lurch as we swap places. Perry glances up at him - at me - frowning.

'Come on, corpse, not now. This is the first time I met Julie's father and it's not going well. I need to focus.'

'It's going fine,' Julie tells Perry. 'This is my dad these days, I warned you about him.'

'You better pay attention,' Perry says to me. 'You might have to meet him someday, too, and you're going to have a much harder time winning his approval than I did.'

Julie runs a hand through Perry's hair. 'Aw, babe, don't talk about the present. It makes me feel left out.'

He sighs. 'Yeah, okay. These were better times anyway. I turned into a real neutron star when I grew up.'

I'm sorry I killed you, Perry. It's not that I wanted to, it's just -

'Forget it, corpse, I understand. Seems by that point I wanted out anyway.'

'I bet I'll always miss you when I think back to these days,' Julie says wistfully. 'You were pretty cool before Dad got his claws into you.'

'Take care of her, will you?' Perry whispers up to me. 'She's been through some hard stuff. Keep her safe.'

I will.

Mr Grigio clears his throat. 'I would start planning now if I were you, Perry. With your skill set, you should really consider Security training. Green shoots coming through the dirt are all well and good but we don't strictly need all these fruits and vegetables. You can live on nothing but Carbtein for almost a year before cell fatigue is even measurable. The most important thing is keeping us all alive.'

Julie tugs on Perry's arm. 'Come on, do we have to sit through this again?'

'Nah,' Perry says. 'This isn't worth reliving. Let's go somewhere nice.'

We're on a beach. Not a real beach, carved over the millennia by the master craft of the ocean - those are all underwater now. We're on the young shore of a recently flooded city port. Small patches of sand appear between broken slabs of sidewalk. Barnacled street lamps rise out of the surf, a few of them still flickering on in the evening gloom, casting circles of orange light on the waves.

'Okay, guys,' Julie says, throwing a stick into the water. 'Quiz time. What do you want to do with your life?'

'Oh, hi, Mr Grigio,' I mutter, sitting next to Julie on a driftwood log that was once a telephone pole.

She ignores me. 'Nora, you go first. And I don't mean what do you think you will end up doing, I mean what do you want to do.'

Nora is sitting in the sand in front of the log, playing with some pebbles and pinching a smouldering joint between her middle finger and the stub of her ring finger, missing past the first knuckle. Her eyes are earth brown; her skin is creamy coffee. 'Maybe nursing?' she says. 'Healing people, saving lives . . . maybe working on a cure? I could get into that.'

 

[Angel]

UPDATE 11

'Nurse Nora,' Julie says with a smile. 'Sounds like a kids' TV show.'

'Why a nurse?' I ask. 'Why not go for doctor?'



Nora scoffs. 'Oh, yeah, seven years of college? I doubt civilisation's even gonna last that long.'

'Yes it will,' Julie says. 'Don't talk like that. But there's nothing wrong with being a nurse. Nurses are sexy!'

Nora smiles and pulls idly at her thick black curls. She looks at me. 'Why a doctor, Pear? Is that your target?'

I shake my head emphatically. 'I've already seen enough blood and viscera for one lifetime, thanks.'



'Then what?'

'I like writing,' I say like a confession. 'So . . . I guess I want to be a writer.'

Julie smiles. Nora tilts her head. 'Really? Do people still do that?'

'What? Write?'

'I mean, is there still like . . . a book industry?'

I shrug. 'Well . . . no. Not really. Good point, Nora.'

'Sorry, I was just . . .'

'No, I know, but you're right, it's dumb even for a fantasy. Colonel Rosso says only about thirty per cent of the world's cities are still functioning, so unless the zombies are learning how to read . . . not a great time to get into the literary arts. I'll probably just end up in Security.'

'Shut the fuck up, Perry,' Julie says, punching me in the shoulder. 'People still read.'

'Do they?' Nora asks.

'Well, I do. Who cares if there's an industry behind it? If everyone's too busy building things and shooting things to bother feeding their souls, screw them. Just write it on a notepad and give it to me. I'll read it.'

'A whole book for just one person,' Nora says, looking at me. 'Could that ever be worth it?'

Julie answers for me. 'At least his thoughts would get out of his head, right? At least someone would get to see them. I think it'd be beautiful. It'd be like owning a little piece of his brain.' She looks at me intently. 'Give me a piece of your brain, Perry. I want to taste it.'

'Oh my,' Nora laughs. 'Should I leave you two alone?'

I put my arm around Julie and smile the world-weary smile I've recently perfected. 'Oh my little girl,' I say and squeeze her. She frowns.

'What about you, Jules?' Nora says. 'What's your pipe dream?'

'I want to be a teacher.' She takes a deep breath. 'And a painter, and a singer, and a poet. And a pilot.

Nora smiles. I secretly roll my eyes. Nora passes the joint to Julie, who takes a small puff and offers it to me. I shake my head, knowing better. We all gaze out at the glittering water, three kids on the same log watching the same sunset, thinking very different thoughts while white gulls fill the air with mournful calls.

You're going to do those things, R murmurs down to Julie, and he and I swap places again. Julie looks up at me, the corpse in the clouds, floating over the ocean like a restless spirit. She gives me a radiant smile, and I know it's not really her, I know nothing I say here will ever escape the confines of my own skull, but I say it anyway. You're going to be tall and strong and brilliant, and you're going to live for ever. You're going to change the world.

'Thanks, R,' she says. 'You're so sweet. Do you think you'll be able to let me go when the time comes? Do you think you'll be able to say goodbye?'

I swallow hard. Will I really have to?

Julie shrugs, smiling innocently, and whispers, 'Shrug.'

In the morning the storm has passed. I am lying on my back in a bed next to Julie. A sharp beam of sunlight cuts through the dust in the air and makes a hot white pool on her huddled form. She is still wrapped tightly in the blankets. I get up and step out onto the front porch. The spring sun bleaches the neighbourhood white, and the only sound is rusty backyard swing sets creaking in the breeze. The dream's cold question echoes in my head. I don't want to face it, but I realise that very soon this will be over. I will return her to her daddy's porch by dark, and that will be it. The gate will boom shut, and I'll skulk away home. Will I be able to let her go? I've never asked a harder question. A month ago there was nothing on Earth I missed, enjoyed or longed for. I knew I could lose everything and not feel anything, and I rested easy in that knowledge. But I'm growing tired of easy things.

When I go back inside, Julie is sitting on the edge of the bed. She looks groggy, still half asleep. Her hair is a natural disaster, post-hurricane palm trees.

'Good morning,' I say.

She groans. I try valiantly not to stare at her as she arches her back and stretches, adjusting her bra strap and letting out a little whimper. I can see every muscle and vertebra, and since she's already half naked I imagine her without skin. I know from grim experience that there is a beauty to her inner layers, too. Marvels of symmetry and craftsmanship sealed away inside her like the jewelled movements of a timepiece, fine works of art never meant to be seen.

'What are we doing for breakfast?' she mutters. 'I'm starving.'

I hesitate. 'Can probably . . . get to . . . Stadium . . . in hour. Going to . . . need gas . . . though. For Mercey.'

She rubs her eyes. She begins to pull her still-damp clothes back on. Once again I try not to stare. Her body wiggles and bounces in ways Dead flesh doesn't.

Her eyes suddenly flash alert. 'Shit. You know what? I need to call my dad.'

She picks up the corded phone, and I'm surprised to hear a dial tone. I guess her people would have made it a priority to keep the phone lines running. Anything digital or satellite-based probably died long ago, but the physical connections, cables running underground, those might endure a little longer.

Julie dials. She waits, tensed. Then relief floods her face. 'Dad! It's Julie.'

There is a loud burst of exclamations from the other end. Julie pulls the phone away from her ear and gives me a look that says, Here we go. 'Yeah, Dad, I'm okay, I'm okay. Alive and intact. Nora told you what happened, right?' More noise from the other end. 'Yeah, I knew you'd be looking, but you were way off. It was that small hive at Oran Airport. They put me in this room with all these dead people, like a food locker or something, but after a few days . . . I guess they just forgot about me. I walked right out, hot-wired a car and drove off. I'm on my way back now, I just stopped to call you.' A pause. She glances at me. 'No, um, don't send anyone, okay? I'm in the suburbs down south, I'm almost - ' She waits. 'I don't know, somewhere close to the freeway, but Dad - ' She freezes, and her face changes. 'What?' She takes a deep breath. 'Dad, why are you talking about Mom right now? No, why are you talking about her, this is nothing like that. I'm on my way back I just - Dad! Wait, will you listen to me? Don't send anyone, I'm coming home, okay? I have a car, I'm on my way, just - Dad!' There is silence from the earpiece. 'Dad?' Silence. She bites her lip and looks at the floor. She hangs up.

I raise my eyebrows, full of questions that I'm afraid to ask.

She massages her forehead and lets out a slow breath. 'Can you go find the gas by yourself, R? I need . . . to think for a minute.' She doesn't look at me as she speaks. Tentatively, I reach out and put a hand on her shoulder. She flinches, then softens, then suddenly turns and embraces me hard, burying her face in my shirt.

'I just need a minute,' she says, pulling away and recovering herself.

So I leave her there. I find an empty gas can in the garage and begin working my way around the block, looking for a vehicle with a full tank to drain. As I kneel beside a recently crashed Chevy Tahoe with the siphon tube gurgling in my hand, I hear the sound of an engine starting in the distance. I ignore it. I focus on the taste of gasoline, harsh and astringent in my mouth. When the can is full I walk back to the cul-de-sac, closing my eyes and letting the sun flood through my eyelids. Then I open them, and just stand there for a while, holding the red plastic can like a belated birthday gift. The Mercedes is gone.

Inside the house, on the dining-room table, I find a note. Something is written on it, letters I can't assemble into words, but next to it are two Polaroids. Both pictures are of Julie, taken by Julie, with the camera extended at arm's length and pointed at herself. In one of them, she is waving. The gesture looks limp, half-hearted. In the other one, she is holding that hand against her chest. Her face is stoic, but her eyes are damp.

Goodbye, R, the picture whispers to me. It's that time now. It's time to say it. Can you say it?

I hold the picture in front of me, staring at it. I rub my fingers on it, smearing its fresh emulsion into rainbow blurs. I consider taking it with me, but no. I'm not ready to make Julie a souvenir.

Say it, R. Just say it.

I set the picture back on the table, and leave the house. I don't say it.

I begin walking back to the airport. I'm not sure what's waiting for me. Full-death? Quite possibly. After the commotion I caused, the Boneys might simply dispose of me like infectious waste. But I'm alone again. My world is small, my options are few. I don't know where else to go.

The journey of forty minutes by car will be a day-long trip on foot. As I walk, the wind seems to reverse direction, and yesterday's thunderheads creep back onto the horizon for an encore. They spiral over me, slowly shrinking the circle of blue sky like an immense camera aperture. I walk fast and stiff, almost marching.

I walk off the freeway at the next exit and climb into a triangle of landscaping between the road and the off ramp. I crash through the brush and duck into the little cluster of trees, a mini-forest of ten or twelve cedars arranged in a pleasing pattern for overstressed commuter ghosts.

I curl into a ball at the base of one of these trees, achieving some degree of shelter under its scrawny branches, and close my eyes. As lightning flickers on the horizon like flashbulbs and thunder rumbles in my bones, I drift into darkness.

I am with Julie on the 747. I realise it's a dream. A real dream, not just another rerun of Perry Kelvin's syndicated life. This is coming purely from me. The clarity has improved since the blurry sludge of my brain's first attempt back in the airport, but there's still an awkward, shaky quality to everything, like amateur video to Perry's slick feature films.

Julie and I sit cross-legged, facing each other, floating above the clouds on the plane's bright white wing. The wind ruffles our hair, but no more than a leisurely ride in a convertible.

'So you dream now?' Julie says.

I smile nervously. 'I guess I do.'

Julie doesn't smile. Her eyes are cold. 'Guess you had nothing to dream about till you got some girl problems. You're like a grade-school kid trying to keep a diary.'

Now we're on the ground, sitting on a sunny green suburban lawn. A morbidly obese couple barbecues human limbs in the background. I try to keep Julie in focus.

'I'm changing,' I tell her.

'I don't care,' she replies. 'I'm home now. I'm back in the real world, where you don't exist. Summer camp is over.'

A winged Mercedes rumbles past in the distant sky and vanishes in a muffled sonic boom.

'I'm gone,' she says, staring me hard in the eyes. 'It was fun, but it's over now. This is how things go.'

I shake my head, avoiding her gaze. 'I'm not ready.'

'What did you think was going to happen?'

'I don't know. I was just hoping for something. A miracle.'

'Miracles don't exist. There is cause and effect, dreams and reality, Living and Dead. Your hope is absurd. Your romanticism, embarrassing.'

I look at her uneasily.

'It's time for you to grow up. Julie has gone back to her position, and you will go back to your position, and that is the way it is. Always has been. Always will be.'

She grins, and her teeth are jagged yellow fangs. She kisses me, gnawing through my lips, biting out my teeth, gnashing up towards my brain and screaming like a dying child. I gag on my hot red blood.

My eyes flash open and I stand up, pushing dripping branches out of my face. It's still night. The rain is still pummelling the earth. I step out of the trees and climb up onto the overpass. I lean against the railing, looking out at the empty freeway and the dark horizon beyond it. One thought pounds in my head like a migraine of rage: You're wrong. You fucking monsters are wrong. About everything.

Out of the corner of my eye, I glimpse a silhouette on the other side of the overpass. The dark form moves towards me with steady, lumbering steps. I hunch my muscles together, preparing for a fight. After wandering alone for too long, the unincorporated Dead will sometimes lose the ability to distinguish their own kind from the Living. And some are so far gone, so deep into this way of life, they just don't care either way. They will eat anyone, anything, anywhere, because they can't fathom any other way to interact. I imagine one of these creatures surprising Julie as she stops the Mercedes to get her bearings, wrapping filthy hands around her face and biting down on her slender neck, and as that image ferments in my head, I prepare to tear this thing in front of me to unrecognisable shreds. The primordial rage that fills me every time I think of someone harming her is frightening. The violence of killing and eating people feels like friendly teasing compared to this consuming bloodlust.

The towering shadow staggers closer. A flash of lightning illuminates its face, and I drop my arms to my sides.

'M?'

I almost fail to recognise him at first. His face has been torn and clawed, and there are countless small chunks bitten out of his body.

'Hey,' he grunts. The rain streaks down his face and pools in his wounds. 'Let's . . . get out of . . . rain.' He walks past my leaky trees and climbs down the slope to the freeway below. I follow him to the dry space under the overpass. We huddle there in the dirt, surrounded by old beer cans and syringes.

'What . . . doing . . . he . . . out . . . out here?' I ask him, fighting for the words. I've been silent less than a day and I'm already rusty.

'Take . . . guess,' M says, pointing at his wounds. 'Boneys. Drove me out.'

'Sorry.'

M grunts. 'Fuck . . . it.' He kicks a sun-faded beer can. 'But guess . . . what?' Something like a smile illuminates his mangled face. 'Some . . . came with me.'

He points down the freeway, and I see about nine other figures moving slowly towards us.

I look at M, confused. 'Came . . . with? Why?'

He shrugs. 'Things . . . crazy . . . back home. Routines . . . shook.' He jabs a finger at me. 'You.'

'Me?'

'You and . . . her. Something . . . in air. Movement.'

The nine zombies stop under the overpass and stand there, looking at us blankly.

'Hi,' I say.

They sway and groan a little. One of them nods.

'Where's . . . girl?' M asks me.

'Her name is Julie.' This comes off my tongue fluidly, like a swish of warm camomile.

'Ju . . . lie,' M repeats with some effort. 'Okay. Where's . . . she?'

'Left. Went home.'

M studies my face. He drops a hand onto my shoulder. 'You . . . okay?'

I close my eyes and take a slow breath. 'No.' I look out at the freeway, towards the city, and something blooms in my head. First a feeling, then a thought, then a choice. 'I'm going after her.'

Six syllables. I have broken my record again.

'To . . . Stadium?'

I nod.

'Why?'

'To . . . save her.'

'From . . . what?'

'Ev . . . rything.'

M just looks at me for a long time. Among the Dead, a piercing look can last several minutes. I wonder if he can possibly have any idea what I'm talking about, when I'm not even sure I do. Just a gut feeling. The soft pink zygote of a plan.

He gazes up at the sky, and a faraway look comes into his eyes. 'Had . . . dream . . . last night. Real dream. Memories.'

I stare at him.

'Remembered . . . when young. Summer. Cocoa . . . Puffs. A girl.' His eyes refocus on me. 'What . . . is it like?'

'What?'

'You've . . . felt. Do you know . . . what it is?'

'What are . . . talking about?'

'My dream,' he says, his face full of wonder like a child's at a telescope. 'Those things . . . love?'

A tingle runs up my spine. What is happening? To what distant reaches of space is our planet hurtling? M is dreaming, reclaiming memories, asking astonishing questions. I am breaking my syllable records every day. Nine unknown Dead are with us under this overpass, miles from the airport and the hissing commands of the skeletons, standing here awaiting . . . something.

A fresh canvas is unfurling in front of us. What do we paint on it? What's the first hue to splash on this blank field of grey?

'I'll . . . go with,' M says. 'Help you . . . get in. Save her.' He turns to the waiting Dead. 'Help us?' he asks, not raising his voice above its easy rumble. 'Help save . . . girl? Save . . .' He closes his eyes and concentrates. 'Ju . . . lie?'

The Dead quicken at the sound of the name, fingers twitching and eyes darting. M looks pleased. 'Help find . . . something lost?' he asks in a voice more solid than I've ever heard from his tattered throat. 'Help . . . exhume?'

The zombies look at M. They look at me. They look at each other. One of them shrugs. Another nods. 'Help,' one of them groans, and they all wheeze in agreement.

I find a grin spreading across my face. I don't know what I'm doing, how I'm doing it, or what will happen when it's done, but at the very bottom of this rising siege-ladder, I at least know I'm going to see Julie again. I know I'm not going to say goodbye. And if these staggering refugees want to help, if they think they see something bigger here than a boy chasing a girl, then they can help, and we'll see what happens when we say Yes while this rigor mortis world screams No.

We start lumbering north on the southbound freeway, and the thunder drifts away towards the mountains as if it's scared of us.

Here we are on the road. We must be going somewhere.

 

[Angel]

UPDATE 12

I am young. I am a teenage boy aflame with health, strong and virile and pounding with energy. But I get older. Every second ages me. My cells spread themselves thinner, stiffening, cooling, darkening. I am fifteen, but each death around me adds a decade. Each atrocity, each tragedy, each small moment of sadness. Soon I will be ancient.

Here I am, Perry Kelvin in the Stadium. I hear birds in the walls. The bovine moans of pigeons, the musical chirps of starlings. I look up and breathe deep. The air is so much cleaner lately, even here. I wonder if this is what the world smelled like when it was new, centuries before smokestacks. It frustrates and fascinates me that we'll never know for sure, that despite the best efforts of historians and scientists and poets, there are some things we'll just never know. What the first song sounded like. How it felt to see the first photograph. Who kissed the first kiss, and if it was any good.



'Perry!'

I smile and wave at my little admirer as he and his dozen foster-siblings cross the street in a line, hand in hand. 'Hey . . . buddy,' I call to him. I can never remember his name.

'We're going to the gardens!'

'Cool!'



Julie Grigio grins at me, leading their line like a mother swan. In a city of thousands I run into her almost every day, sometimes near the schools where it seems probable, sometimes in the outermost corners of the Stadium where the odds are slim. Is she stalking me or am I stalking her? Either way, I feel a pulse of stress hormones shoot through me every time I see her, rushing to my palms to make them sweat and to my face to make it pimply. Last time we met, she took me up on the roof. We listened to music for hours, and when the sun went down, I'm pretty sure we almost kissed.

'Want to come with us, Perry?' she says. 'It's a field trip!'

'Oh fun . . . a field trip to where I just spent eight hours working.'

'Hey, there aren't a lot of options in this place.'

'So I've noticed.'

She waves for me to come over and I immediately comply, while trying my best to look reluctant. 'Don't they ever get to go outside?' I wonder, watching the kids march in clumsy lockstep.

'Mrs Grau would say we are outside.'

'I mean outside. Trees, rivers, etc.'

'Not till they're twelve.'

'Awful.'

'Yeah . . .'

We walk in silence except for the burble of child-speak behind us. The Stadium walls loom protectively like the parents these kids will never know. My excitement at seeing Julie darkens under a sudden cloud of melancholy.

'How do you stand it here,' I say, barely a question.

Julie frowns at me. 'We get to go out. Twice a month.'

'I know, but . . .'

She waits. 'What, Perry?'

'Do you ever wonder if it's even worth it?' I gesture vaguely at the walls. 'All this?'

Her expression sharpens.

'I mean, are we really that much better off in here?'

'Perry,' she snaps with unexpected vehemence. 'Don't you start talking like that, don't you fucking start.'

She notices the abrupt silence behind us and cringes. 'Sorry,' she says to the kids in a confidential whisper. 'Bad words.'

'Fuck!' my little friend yells, and the whole line explodes with laughter.

Julie rolls her eyes. 'Great.'

'Tsk tsk.'

'You shut your mouth. I meant what I said to you. That's evil talk.'

I look at her uncertainly.

'We get to go outside twice a month. More if we're on salvage. And we get to stay alive.' She sounds like she's reciting a Bible verse. An old proverb. As if sensing her own lack of conviction she glances at me, then snaps her eyes forward. Her voice goes quiet. 'No more evil talk if you want to come on our field trip.'

'Sorry.'

'You haven't been here long enough. You grew up in a safe place. You don't understand the dangers.'

Dark feelings flood my belly at this, but I manage to hold my tongue. I don't know the pain she's speaking from, but I know it's deep. It makes her hard and yet so terribly soft. It's her thorns and it's her hand reaching out from the thicket.

'Sorry,' I say again and fumble for that hand, nudging it out of her jeans pocket. It's warm. My cold fingers wrap around hers, and my mind conjures an unwelcome image of tentacles. I blink it away. 'No more evil talk.'

The kids gaze at me eagerly, huge eyes, spotless cheeks. I wonder what they are and what they mean and what's going to happen to them.

'Dad.'

'Yeah?'

'I think I have a girlfriend.'

My dad lowers his clipboard, adjusts his hard hat. A smile creeps into the deep creases of his face. 'Really.'

'I think so.'

'Who?'

'Julie Grigio?'

He nods. 'I've met her. She's - hey! Doug!' He leans over the edge of the bulwark and yells at a worker carrying a steel pylon. 'That's forty-gauge, Doug, we're using fifty for the arterial sections.' He looks back at me. 'She's cute. Watch out though; seems like a firecracker.'

'I like firecrackers.'

My dad smiles. His eyes drift. 'Me too, kid.'

His walkie-talkie crackles and he pulls it out, starts giving instructions. I look out at the ugly concrete vista under construction. We are standing on the terminating end of a wall, fifteen feet high, currently a few blocks long. Another wall runs parallel to it, making Main Street into an enclosed corridor that cuts through the heart of the city. Workers swarm below, laying concrete pour-forms, erecting framework.

'Dad?'

'Yeah.'

'Do you think it's stupid?'

'What?'

'To fall in love.'

He pauses, then puts his walkie away. 'What do you mean, Pear.'

'Like . . . now. The way things are now. I mean, everything's so uncertain . . . is it stupid to waste time on stuff like that in a world like this? When everything might fall apart any minute?'

My dad looks at me for a long time. 'When I met your mom,' he says, 'I asked myself that. And all we had going on back then was a few wars and recessions.' His walkie starts crackling again. He ignores it. 'I got nineteen years with your mom. But do you think I would've turned down the idea if I'd known I'd only get one year? Or one month?' He surveys the construction, shaking his head slowly. 'There's no benchmark for how life's "supposed" to happen, Perry. There is no ideal world for you to wait around for. The world is always just what it is now, and it's up to you how you respond to it.'

I look into the dark window holes of ruined office buildings. I imagine the skeletons of their occupants still sitting at their desks, working towards quotas they will never meet.

'What if you'd only gotten a week with her?'

'Perry . . .' my dad says, slightly amazed. 'The world isn't ending tomorrow, buddy. Okay? We're working on fixing it. Look.' He points at the work crews below. 'We're building roads. We're going to connect to the other stadiums and hideouts, bring the enclaves together, pool our research and resources, maybe start working on a cure.' My dad claps me on the shoulder. 'You and me, everyone . . . we're going to make it. Don't give up on us yet. Okay?'

I relent with a small release of breath. 'Okay.'

'Promise?'

'Promise.'

My dad smiles. 'I'll hold you to that.'

Do you know what happened next, corpse? Perry whispers from the deep shadows of my awareness. Can you guess?

'Why are you showing me all this,' I ask the darkness.

Because it's what's left of me, and I want you to feel it. I'm not ready to disappear.

'Neither am I.'

I sense a cold smile in his voice.

Good.

'There you are.'

Julie heaves herself up the ladder and stands on the roof of my new home, watching me. I glance at her, then put my face back in my hands.

She makes her way over, cautious steps on the flimsy sheet metal, and sits next to me on the roof edge. Our legs dangle, swinging slowly in the cold autumn air.

'Perry?'

I don't answer. She studies the side of my face. She reaches out and brushes two fingers through my shaggy hair. Her blue eyes pull on me like gravity, but I resist. I stare down at the muddy street.

'I can't believe I'm here,' I mumble. 'This stupid house. With all these discards.'

She doesn't respond immediately. When she does, it's quiet. 'They're not discards. They were loved.'

'For a while.'

'Their parents didn't leave. They were taken.'

'Is there a difference?'

She looks at me so hard I have no choice but to meet her gaze. 'Your mom loved you, Perry. You've never had to doubt that. And so did your dad.'

I can't hold the weight. I give in and let it fall on me. I twist my head away from Julie as the tears come.

'Believe that God discarded you if you want to, fate or destiny or whatever, but at least you know they loved you.'

'What does it even matter,' I croak, avoiding her eyes. 'Who gives a shit. They're dead. That's the present. That's what matters now.'

We don't speak for a few minutes. The cold breeze pricks tiny bumps on our arms. Bright leaves find their way in from the outer forests, spinning down into the Stadium's vast mouth and landing on the house's roof.

'You know what, Perry,' Julie says. Her voice is shaky with hurts all her own. 'Everything dies eventually. We all know that. People, cities, whole civilisations. Nothing lasts. So if existence was just binary, dead or alive, here or not here, what would be the fucking point in anything?' She looks up at some falling leaves and puts out her hand to catch one, a flaming red maple. 'My mom used to say that's why we have memory. And the opposite of memory -hope. So things that are gone can still matter. So we can build off our pasts and make futures.' She twirls the leaf in front of her face, back and forth. 'Mom said life only makes any sense if we can see time how God does. Past, present and future all at once.'

I allow myself to look at Julie. She sees my tears and tries to wipe one away. 'So what's the future?' I ask, not flinching as her fingers brush my eye. 'I can see the past and the present, but what's the future?'

'Well . . .' she says with a broken laugh. 'I guess that's the tricky part. The past is made out of facts and history . . . I guess the future is just hope.'

'Or fear.'

'No.' She shakes her head firmly and sticks the leaf in my hair. 'Hope.'

The Stadium rises on the horizon as the Dead stumble forward. It looms above most of the surrounding buildings and consumes several city blocks, a gaudy monument to an era of excess, a world of waste and want and misguided dreams that is now profoundly over.

Our cadaverous cadre has been walking for a little over a day, roaming the open roads like Kerouac beats with no gas money. The others are hungry, and there's a brief, mostly wordless debate between M and the rest before they stop at an old boarded-up town house to feed. I wait outside. It's been more days than I can remember since my last meal, but I find myself strangely content. There's a neutral feeling in my veins, balanced precisely between hungry and sated. The screams of the people in the house pierce me more sharply than in all my days of hands-on killing, and I'm not even anywhere near them. I'm standing far out in the street, pushing my palms into my ears and waiting for it to be over.

When they emerge, M avoids my gaze. He wipes the blood off his mouth with the back of his hand and shoots me just one guilty glance before brushing past. The others are not quite there yet, not even to M's level of conscience, but there is something a little different about them, too. They take no leftovers. They dry their bloody hands on their pants. They walk in uneasy silence. It's a start.

As we get close enough to the Stadium to catch the first whiffs of the Living, I go over the plan in my head. It's not much of a plan, really. It's cartoonishly simple, but here's why it might work: it's never been tried before. There has never been enough will to make a way.

A few blocks from the entry gate, we stop in an abandoned house. I go into the bathroom and study myself in the mirror like the former resident must have done a thousand times. In my head I jog through the maddening repetitions of the morning routine, getting into character. Alarm-shower-clothes-breakfast. Do I look my best? Am I putting my best foot forward? Am I stepping out the door prepared for everything this world has to throw at me?

I run some gel through my hair. I splash some aftershave on my face. I straighten my tie.

'Ready,' I tell the others.

M sizes me up. 'Close . . . enough.'

We head for the gates.

Within a few blocks, the smell of the Living is nearly overpowering. It's as if the Stadium is a massive Tesla Coil crackling with storms of fragrant pink life-lightning. Everyone in our group stares at it in awe. Some of them drool freely. If they hadn't just eaten, our loosely constructed strategy would collapse in an instant.

Before we get within sight of the gate, we take a side street and stop at an intersection, hiding behind a UPS truck. I step out slightly and look around the corner. Less than two blocks away, four guards stand in front of the Stadium's main entrance doors, dangling shotguns over their shoulders and chatting among themselves. Their gruff, military sentences use even fewer syllables than ours.

I look at M. 'Thanks. For . . . doing this.'

'Sure,' M says.

'Don't . . . die.'

'Trying . . . not to. Are . . . ready?'

I nod.

'Look . . . alive . . . out there.'

I smile. I brush my hair back one more time, take a deep breath, and run for it.

'Help!' I scream, waving my arms. 'Help, they're . . . right behind me!'

With my best possible balance and poise, I run towards the doors. M and the other Dead lumber after me, groaning theatrically.

The guards react on instinct: they raise their guns and open fire on the zombies. An arm flies off. A leg. One of the anonymous nine loses a head and goes down. But not a single weapon points in my direction. Painting Julie's face on the air in front of me, I sprint with Olympian focus. My stride is good, I can feel it, I look normal, alive, and so I snap neatly into a category: 'Human'. Two more guards emerge with guns drawn, but they barely even look at me. They squint, they take aim at their targets, and they shout, 'Go! Get in there, man!'

Two more zombies hit the ground behind me. As I slip in through the doors, I see M and the remaining Dead veer off and retreat. As they go, their gait suddenly changes. They lose their stumble and run like living things. Not as fast as me, not as graceful, but with purpose. The guards hesitate, the gunfire falters. 'What the fuck . . . ?' one of them mutters.

Inside the entrance is a man with a clipboard and a notebook. An immigration officer, ready to take my name and have me fill out a stack of request forms before most likely tossing me out. The Dead have depended on this man for years to provide us with the defenceless stragglers we eat in the ruins outside. He comes towards me, flipping through his notebook, making no eye contact. 'Close call, eh, friend? I'm going to need you to - '

'Ted! Look at this shit!'

Ted looks up, looks through the open doors, sees his fellow soldiers standing dumbstruck. He glances at me. 'Wait right here.'

Ted jogs out and stops next to the guards, staring at the eerily animate zombies dashing off into the distant streets like real people. I imagine the look on the men's faces, their stomachs bubbling with the queasy sensation that the earth under their feet is moving.

Momentarily forgotten, I turn and run. I run through the dark entry corridor towards the light on the other end, wondering if this is a birth canal or the tunnel to Heaven. Am I coming or going? Either way, it's too late to reverse. Hidden in the gloom under a red evening sky, I step into the world of the Living.

 

[Angel]

UPDATE 13

The sports arena Julie calls home is unaccountably large, perhaps one of those dual-event 'super-venues' built for an era when the greatest quandary facing the world was where to put all the parties. From the outside there is nothing to see but a mammoth oval of featureless walls, a concrete Ark that not even God could make float. But the interior reveals the Stadium's soul: chaotic yet grasping for order, like the sprawling slums of Brazil if they'd been designed by a modernist architect.

All the bleachers have been torn out to make room for an expansive grid of miniature skyscrapers, rickety houses built unnaturally tall and skinny to conserve the limited real estate. Their walls are a hodgepodge of salvaged materials - one of the taller towers begins as concrete and grows flimsier as it rises, from steel to plastic to a precarious ninth floor of soggy particle board. Most of the buildings look like they should collapse in the first breeze, but the whole city is supported by rigid webs of cable running from tower to tower, cinching the grid tight. The Stadium's inner walls loom high over everything, bristling with severed pipes, wires, and spikes of rebar that sprout from the concrete like beard stubble. Under-powered street lamps provide dim orange illumination, leaving this snow-globe city smothered in shadows.



The moment I step out of the entry tunnel my sinuses inflame with an overwhelming rush of life-smell. It's all around me, so sweet and potent it's almost painful; I feel like I'm drowning in a perfume bottle. But in the midst of this thick haze, I can sense Julie. Her signature scent peeks out of the noise, calling out like a voice underwater. I follow it.

The streets are the width of sidewalks, narrow strips of asphalt poured over the old AstroTurf, which peeks through any unpaved gaps like garish green moss. There are no names on the street signs. Instead of listing off states or presidents or varieties of trees, they display simple white graphics - Apple, Ball, Cat, Dog - a child's guide to the alphabet. There is mud everywhere, slicking the asphalt and piling up in corners along with the detritus of daily life: pop cans, cigarette butts, used condoms and bullet shells.

I am trying not to gawk at the city like the backwoods tourist I am, but something beyond curiosity is gluing my attention to every kerb and rooftop. As foreign as it all is to me, I feel a ghostly sense of recognition, even nostalgia, and as I make my way down what must be Eye Street, some of my stolen memories begin to stir.

This is where we started. This is where they sent us when the coasts disappeared. When the bombs fell. When our friends died and rose as strangers, unfamiliar and cruel.

-- --

It's not Perry's voice - it's everyone's, a murmuring chorus of all the lives I've consumed, gathering in the dark lounge of my subconscious to reminisce.

Flag Avenue, where they planted our nation's colours, back when there were still nations and their colours mattered. Gun Street, where they set up the war camps, planned attacks anddefences against our endless enemies, Living as often as Dead.

I walk with my head down, keeping as close to the walls as I can. When I meet someone coming the other way I keep my eyes straight ahead until the last possible moment, then I allow brief contact so as not to seem inhuman. We pass briskly with awkward nods.

It didn't take much to bring down the card house of civilisation. Just a few gusts and it was done, the balance tipped, the spell broken. Good citizens realised the lines that had shaped their lives were imaginary and easily crossed. They had wants and needs and the power to satisfy them, so they did. The moment the lights went out, everyone stopped pretending.

I begin to worry about my clothes. Everyone I encounter is wearing thick grey denim, waterproof coats, mud-caked work boots. What world am I still living in where people dress for aesthetics? If no one realises I'm a zombie, they may still call in a report on the stylish lunatic roaming the streets in a fitted shirt and tie. I quicken my pace, sniffing desperately for Julie's trail.

Island Avenue, where they built the courtyard for the community meetings, where 'they' became 'we', or so we believed. We cast our votes and raised our leaders, charming men and women with white teeth and silver tongues, and we shoved our many hopes and fears into their hands, believing those hands were strong because they had firm handshakes. They failed us, always. There was no way they could not fail us - they were human, and so were we.

I veer off Eye Street and start working my way towards the centre of the grid. Julie's scent grows more distinct, but its exact direction remains vague. I keep hoping some clue will emerge from the chanting in my head, but these ancient ghosts have no interest in my insignificant search.

Jewel Street, where we built the schools once we finally accepted that this was reality, that this was the world ourchildren would inherit. We taught them how to shoot, how to pour concrete, how to kill and how to survive, and if they made it that far, if they mastered those skills and had time to spare, then we taught them how to read and write, to reason and relate and understand their world. We tried hard at first, there was much hope and faith, but it was a steep hill to climb in the rain, and many slid to the base.

I notice the maps in these memories are slightly outdated; the street they're calling Jewel has been renamed. The sign is newer, a fresh primary green, and instead of a visual icon it has an actual word printed on it. Intrigued, I turn at this intersection and approach an atypically wide metal building. Julie's scent is still distant, so I know I shouldn't stop, but the pale light coming through the windows seems to prick some wordless anguish in my inner voices. As I press my nose against the glass, their musings go quiet.

A large, wide-open room. Row upon row of white metal tables under fluorescent lights. Dozens of children, all younger than ten, divided by row into project groups: a row repairing generators, a row treating gasoline, a row cleaning rifles, sharpening knives, stitching wounds. And at the edge, very near the window I'm staring through: a row dissecting cadavers. Except of course they aren't cadavers. As an eight-year-old girl in blonde pigtails peels the flesh away from her subject's mouth, revealing the crooked grin underneath, its eyes flick open and it looks around, struggles briefly against its restraints, then relaxes, looking weary and bored. It glances towards my window and we make brief eye contact, just before the girl cuts out its eyes.

We tried to make a beautiful world here, the voices mumble. There were those who saw the end of civilisation as an opportunity to start over, to undo the errors of history - to relive mankind's awkward adolescence with all the wisdom of our modern age. But everything was happening so fast.

I hear the noise of a violent scuffle from the other end of the building, shoes scraping against concrete, elbows banging sheet metal. Then a low, wet groan. I traverse the building, searching for a better viewpoint.

Outside our walls were hordes of men and monsters eager to steal what we had, and inside was our own mad stew, so many cultures and languages and incompatible values packed into one tiny box. Our world was too small to share peacefully; consensus never came, harmony was impossible. So we adjusted our goals.

Through another window I see a big open space like a warehouse, dimly lit and scattered with broken cars and chunks of debris as if simulating the outer city landscape. A crowd of older kids surrounds a corral of chain-link fencing and concrete freeway barriers. It resembles the 'free speech zones' once used to contain protesters outside political rallies, but instead of being crammed full of sign-waving dissidents, this cage is occupied by just four figures: a teenage boy armoured head to toe in police riot gear, and three badly desiccated Dead.

Can the Dark Ages' doctors be blamed for their methods? The bloodletting, the leeches, the holes in skulls? They were feeling their way blind, grasping at mysteries in a world without science, but the plague was upon them; they had to do something. When our turn came, it was no different. Despite all our technology and enlightenment, our laser scalpels and social services, it was no different. We were just as blind and just as desperate.

I can tell by the way they stagger that the Dead in this arena are starving. They must know where they are and what's going to happen to them, but they are far beyond what little self-control they ever had. They lunge for the boy and he aims his shotgun.

The outside world had already sunk under a sea of blood, and now those waves were lapping over our last stronghold - we had to shore up the walls. We realised that the closest we'd ever get to objective truth was the belief of the majority, so we elected the majority and ignored the other voices. We appointed generals and contractors, police and engineers; we discarded every inessential ornament. We smelted our ideals under great heat and pressure until the soft parts burned away, and what emerged was a tempered frame rigid enough to endure the world we'd created.

'Wrong!' the instructor shouts at the boy in the cage as the boy fires into the advancing Dead, blowing holes in their chests and blasting off fingers and feet. 'Get the head! Forget the rest is even there!' The boy fires two more rounds that miss entirely, thudding into the heavy plywood ceiling. The quickest of the three zombies seizes his arms and wrenches the gun out of his hands, struggles with the pulse-checking safety trigger for a moment, then throws the gun aside and tackles the boy into the fence, biting wildly against the helmet's faceguard. The instructor storms into the cage and jabs his pistol into the zombie's head, fires a round and holsters the gun. 'Remember,' he announces to the whole room, 'the recoil on an automatic shotgun will drive the barrel upwards, especially on these old Mossbergs, so aim low or you'll be shooting blue sky.' He scoops up the weapon and shoves it into the boy's trembling hands. 'Continue.'

The boy hesitates, then raises the barrel and fires twice. Bits of gore slap against his face-guard, spattering it black. He rips the helmet off and stares at the corpses at his feet, breathing hard and struggling not to cry.

'Good,' the instructor says. 'Beautiful.

We knew it was all wrong. We knew we were diminishing ourselves in ways we couldn't even name, and we wept sometimes at memories of better days, but we no longer saw a choice. We were doing our best to survive. The equations at the roots of our problems were complex, and we were far too exhausted to solve them.

A snuffling noise at my feet finally tears me away from the scene in the window. I look down to see a German shepherd puppy studying my leg with flaring wet nostrils. It looks up at me. I look down at it. It pants happily for a moment, then starts eating my calf.

'Trina, no!'

A little boy rushes up and grabs the dog's collar, pulls her off me and drags her back towards the open doorway of a house. 'Bad dog.'

Trina twists her head around to gaze at me longingly.

'Sorry!' the boy calls from across the street.

I give him an easy wave, no problem.

A young girl emerges from the doorway and stands next to him, sticking out her belly and watching me with big dark eyes. Her hair is black, the boy's is curly blond. They are both around six.

'Don't tell our mom?' she asks.

I shake my head, swallowing back a sudden reflux of emotions. The sound of these kids' voices, their perfect childish diction . . .

'Do you . . . know Julie?' I ask them.

'Julie Cabernet?' the boy says.

'Julie Gri . . . gio.'

'We like Julie Cabernet a lot. She reads to us every Wednesday.'

'Stories!' the girl adds.

I don't recognise this name, but some scrap of memory perks at the sound of it. 'Do you know . . . where she lives?'

'Daisy Street,' the boy says.

'No, Flower Street! It's a flower!'

'A daisy is a flower.'

'Oh.'

'She lives on a corner. It's Daisy Street and Devil Avenue.'

'Cow Avenue!'

'It's not a cow, it's the Devil. Cows and the Devil both have horns.'

'Oh.'

'Thanks,' I tell the kids and turn to leave.

'Are you a zombie?' the girl asks in a shy squeak.

I freeze. She waits for my answer, twisting left and right on her heels. I relax, smile at the girl and shrug. 'Julie . . . doesn't think so.'

An angry voice from a fifth-floor window yells something about curfew and shutting the door and not talking to strangers, so I wave to the kids and hurry off towards Daisy and Devil. The sun is down and the sky is rust. A distant loudspeaker blares out a sequence of numbers, and most of the windows around me go dark. I loosen my tie and start to run.

The intensity of Julie's scent doubles with each block. As the first few stars appear in the Stadium's oval sky, I turn a corner and halt below a solitary edifice of white aluminium siding. Most of the buildings seem to be multi-family apartment complexes, but this one is smaller, narrower, and separated from its tightly packed neighbours by an awkward distance. Four storeys tall but barely two rooms wide, it looks like a cross between a town house and a prison watchtower. The windows are all dark except for a third-floor balcony jutting out from the side of the house. The balcony seems incongruously romantic on this austere structure, until I notice the swivel-mounted sniper rifles on each corner.

Lurking behind a stack of crates in the AstroTurf backyard, I hear voices inside the house. I close my eyes, luxuriating in their sweet timbres and tart rhythms. I hear Julie. Julie and another girl, discussing something in tones that jitter and syncopate like jazz. I find myself swaying slightly, dancing to their conversational beat.

Eventually the talk trails off, and Julie emerges onto the balcony. It's only been one day since she left, but the sense of reunion that surges in me is decades strong. She rests her elbows on the railing, looking cold in just a loose black T-shirt over bare legs. 'Well, here I am again,' she says, apparently to no one but the air. 'Dad clapped me on the back when I walked in the door. Actually clapped me on the back, like a fucking football coach. All he said was, "So glad you're okay," then he ran off to some project meeting or something. I can't believe how much he's . . . I mean, he was never exactly cuddly, but . . .' I hear a tiny click and she doesn't speak for a moment. Then another click. 'Until I called him he had to have assumed I was dead, right? Yeah, he sent out the search parties, but how often do people really come back from stuff like this? So to him . . . I was dead. And maybe I'm being too harsh but I absolutely can't picture him crying over it. Whoever told him the news, they probably clapped each other on the back and said, "Soldier on, soldier," and then went back to work.' She stares at the ground as if she's seeing through it, down into the hellish core of the Earth. 'What's wrong with people?' she says, almost too quiet for me to hear. 'Were they born with parts missing or did it all fall out somewhere along the way?'

She is silent for a while, and I'm about to show myself when she suddenly laughs, closing her eyes and shaking her head. 'I actually miss that stupid . . . I miss R! I know that's crazy, but is it really that crazy? Just because he's . . . whatever he is? I mean, isn't "zombie" just a silly name we came up with for a state of being we don't understand? What's in a name, right? If we were . . . If there was some kind of . . .' She trails off, then stops and raises a mini-cassette recorder to eye level, glaring at it. 'Fuck this thing,' she mumbles to herself. 'Tape journaling . . . not for me.' She fast-pitches it off the balcony. It bounces off a supply crate and lands at my feet. I pick it up, tuck it into my shirt pocket and press my hand against it, feeling its corners dig into my chest. If I ever return to my 747, this memento will go in the stack closest to where I sleep.

Julie hops onto the balcony railing and sits with her back to me, scribbling in her battered old Moleskine.

Journal or poetry?

Both, silly.

Am I in it?

I step out from the shadows. 'Julie,' I whisper.

She doesn't startle. She turns slowly, and a smile melts across her face like a slow spring thaw. 'Oh . . . my God,' she half giggles, then hops off the railing and spins around to face me. 'R! You're here! Oh my God!'

I grin. 'Hello.'

'What are you doing here?' she hisses, trying to keep her voice down.

I shrug, deciding that this gesture, while easy to abuse, does have its place. It may even be vital vocabulary in a world as unspeakable as ours.

'Came to . . . see you.'

'But I had to go home, remember? You were supposed to say goodbye.'

'Don't know why you . . . say goodbye. I say . . . hello.'

Her lip quivers between reactions, but she ends up with a reluctant smile. 'God, you're a cheeseball. But seriously, R - '

'Jules!' a voice calls from inside the house. 'Come here, I wanna show you something.'

'One sec, Nora,' Julie calls back. She looks down at me. 'This is crazy, okay? You're going to get killed. It doesn't matter how changed you are, the people in charge here won't care, they won't listen, they'll just shoot you. Do you understand?'

I nod. 'Yes.'

I start climbing up the drainpipe.

'Jesus, R! Are you listening to me?'

I get about three feet off the ground before I realise that although I'm now capable of running, speaking and maybe falling in love, climbing is still down the road for me. I lose my grip on the pipe and fall flat on my back. Julie covers her mouth, but some laughter slips through.

'Hey, Cabernet!' Nora calls again. 'What's going on? Are you talking to somebody?'

'Hang on, okay? I'm just doing a tape journal.'

I stand up and dust myself off. I look up at Julie. Her brows are tight and she bites her lip. 'R . . .' she says miserably. 'You can't . . .'

The balcony door swings open and Nora appears, her curls just as thick and wild as they were in my visions, all those years ago. I've never seen her standing, and she's surprisingly tall, at least half a foot above Julie, long brown legs bare under a camouflage skirt. I had assumed she and Julie were classmates, but now I realise Nora is a few years older, maybe in her mid-twenties.

'What are you - ' she starts, then she sees me, and her eyebrows go up. 'Oh my holy Lord. Is that him?'

Julie sighs. 'Nora, this is R. R . . . Nora.'

Nora stares at me like I'm Sasquatch, the Yeti, maybe a unicorn. 'Um . . . nice to meet you . . . R.'

'Likewise,' I reply, and Nora slaps a hand over her mouth to stifle a delighted squeak, looks at Julie, then back at me.

'What should we do?' Julie asks Nora, trying to ignore her giddiness. 'He just showed up. I'm trying to tell him he's going to get killed.'

'Well, he needs to get up here, first of all,' Nora says, still staring at me.

'Into the house? Are you stupid?'

'Come on, your dad's not back for another two days. Safer for him in the house than on the street.'

Julie thinks for a minute. 'Okay. Hold on, R, I'll come down.'

I go around to the front of the house and stand at the door, waiting nervously in my dress shirt and tie. She opens it, grinning shyly. Prom night at the end of the world.

'Hi, Julie,' I say, as if none of the previous conversation happened.

She hesitates, then steps forward and hugs me. 'I actually missed you,' she says into my shirt.

'I . . . heard that.'

She pulls back to look at me, and something wild glints in her eyes. 'Hey, R,' she says. 'If I kissed you, would I get . . . you know . . . converted?'

My thoughts skip like a record in an earthquake. As far as I know, only a bite, a violent transfer of blood and essences, has the power to make the Living join the Dead before actually dying. To expedite the inevitable. But then again, I'm fairly sure Julie's question has never, ever been asked before.

'Don't . . . think so,' I say, 'but - '

A spotlight flashes at the end of the street. The sound of two guards barking commands breaks the night quiet.

'Shit, the patrol,' Julie whispers, and yanks me inside the house. 'We should get the lights out, it's after curfew. Come on.'

She runs up the stairs and I follow her, relief and disappointment mixing in my chest like unstable chemicals.

Julie's home feels eerily unoccupied. In the kitchen, the den, the short halls and steep staircases, the walls are white and unadorned. The few pieces of furniture are plastic, and rows of fluorescent lights glare down on stainproof beige carpets. It feels like the vacated office of a bankrupt company, empty echoing rooms and the lingering scent of desperation.

Julie turns lights off as she goes, darkening the house until we reach her bedroom. She switches off the overhead bulb and flicks on a Tiffany lamp by her bed. I step inside and turn in slow circles, greedily absorbing Julie's private world.

If her mind were a room, it would look like this.

Each wall is a different colour. One red, one white, one yellow, one black, and a sky-blue ceiling strung with toy airplanes. Each wall seems designated for a theme. The red is nearly covered with movie ticket stubs and concert posters, all browned and faded with age. The white is crowded with paintings, starting near the floor with a row of amateur acrylics and leading up to three stunning oil canvases: a sleeping girl about to be devoured by tigers, a nightmarish Christ on a geometric cross, and a surreal landscape draped with melting clocks.

'Recognise those?' Julie says with a grin she can barely contain. 'Salvador Dali. Originals, of course.'

Nora comes in from the balcony, sees me with my face inches from the canvases, and laughs. 'Nice decor, right? Me and Perry wanted to get Julie the Mona Lisa for her birthday because it reminded us of that little smirk she's always - there! Right there! - but, yeah, it's a long way to Paris on foot. We make do with the local exhibitions.'

'Nora has a whole wall of Picassos in her room,' Julie adds. 'We'd be legendary art thieves if anyone still cared.'

I crouch down to get a closer look at the bottom row of acrylics.

'Those are Julie's,' Nora says. 'Aren't they great?'

Julie averts her eyes in disgust. 'Nora made me put those up.'

I study them intently, searching for Julie's secrets in their clumsy brushstrokes. Two are just bright colours and thick, tortured texture. The third is a crude portrait of a blonde woman. I glance over at the black wall, which bears only one ornament: a thumb-tacked Polaroid of what must be the same woman. Julie plus twenty hard years.

Julie follows my gaze and she and Nora exchange a glance. 'That's my mom,' Julie says. 'She left when I was twelve.' She clears her throat and looks out the window.

I turn to the yellow wall, which is notably unadorned. I point at it and raise my eyebrows.

'That's, um . . . my hope wall,' she says. Her voice contains an embarrassed pride that makes her sound younger. Almost innocent. 'I'm leaving it open for something in the future.'

'Like . . . what?'

'I don't know yet. Depends on what happens in the future. Hopefully something happy.'

She shrugs this off and sits on the corner of her bed, tapping her fingers on her thigh and watching me. Nora settles down next to her. There are no chairs, so I sit on the floor. The carpet is a mystery under ancient strata of wrinkled clothes.

'So . . . R,' Nora says, leaning towards me. 'You're a zombie. What's that feel like?'

'Uh . . .'

'How did it happen? How'd you get converted?'

'Don't . . . remember.'

'I don't see any old bites or gunshot wounds or anything. Must've been natural causes. No one was around to debrain you?'

I shrug.

'How old are you?'

I shrug.

'You look twenty-something, but you could be thirty-something. You have one of those faces. How come you're not all rotten? I barely even smell you.'

'I don't . . . um . . .'

'Do your body functions still work? They don't, right? I mean, can you actually still, you know - ?'

'Jesus, Nora,' Julie cuts in, elbowing her in the hip. 'Will you back off? He didn't come here for an interrogation.'

I shoot Julie a grateful look.

'I do have one question, though,' she says. 'How the hell did you get in here? Into the Stadium?'

I shrug. 'Walked . . . in.'

'How'd you get past the guards?'

'Played . . . Living.'

She stares at me. 'They let you in? Ted let you in?'

'Distrac . . . ted.'

She puts a hand to her forehead. 'Wow. That's . . .' She pauses, and an incredulous smile breaks through. 'You look . . . nicer. Did you comb your hair, R?'

'He's in drag!' Nora laughs. 'He's in Living drag!'

'I can't believe that worked. I'm pretty sure it's never happened before.'

'Do you think he could pass?' Nora wonders. 'Out on the streets with real people?'

Julie studies me dubiously, like a photographer forced to consider a chubby model. 'Well,' she allows, 'I guess . . . it's possible.'

I squirm under their scrutiny. Finally Julie takes a deep breath and stands up. 'Anyway, you'll have to stay here at least for tonight, till we can figure out what to do with you. I'm going to go heat up some rice. You want some, Nora?'

'Nah, I just had Carbtein nine hours ago.' She looks at me cautiously. 'Are you uh . . . hungry, R?'

I shake my head. 'I'm . . . fine.'

''Cause I don't know what we're supposed to do about your dietary restrictions. I mean, I know you can't help it, Julie explained all about you, but we don't - '

'Really,' I stop her. 'I'm . . . fine.'

She looks uncertain. I can imagine the footage rolling behind her eyes. A dark room filling with blood. Her friends dying on the floor. Me, crawling towards Julie with red hands outstretched. Julie may have convinced her that I'm a special case, but I shouldn't be surprised to get a few nervous looks. Nora watches me in silence for a few minutes. Then she breaks away and starts rolling a joint.

When Julie comes back with the food, I borrow her spoon and take a small bite of rice, smiling as I chew. As usual it goes down like styrofoam, but I do manage to swallow it. Julie and Nora look at each other, then at me.

'How's it taste?' Julie asks tentatively.

I grimace.

'Okay, but still, you haven't eaten any people in a long time. And you're still walking. Do you think you could ever wean yourself off . . . live foods?'

I give her a wry smile. 'I guess . . . it's possible.'

Julie grins at this. Half at my unexpected use of sarcasm, half at the implied hope behind it. Her whole face lights up in a way I've never seen before, so I hope I'm right. I hope it's true. I hope I haven't just learned how to lie.

Around 1 a.m., the girls start to yawn. There are canvas cots in the den, but no one feels like venturing out of Julie's room. This gaudily painted little cube is like a warm bunker in the frozen emptiness of Antarctica. Nora takes the bed. Julie and I take the floor. Nora scribbles homework notes for about an hour, then clicks off the lamp and starts snoring like a small, delicate chainsaw. Julie and I lie on our backs under a thick blanket, using piles of her clothes for a mattress on the rock-hard floor. It's a strange feeling, being so utterly surrounded by her. Her life scent is on everything. She's on me and under me and next to me. It's as if the entire room is made out of her.

'R,' she whispers, looking up at the ceiling. There are words and doodles smeared up there in glow-in-the-dark paint.

'Yeah.'

'I hate this place.'

'I know.'

'Take me somewhere else.'

I pause, looking up at the ceiling. I wish I could read what she's written there. Instead, I pretend the letters are stars. The words, constellations.

'Where do . . . want to go?'

'I don't know. Somewhere far away. Some distant continent where none of this is happening. Where people just live in peace.'

I fall silent.

'One of Perry's older friends used to be a pilot . . . we could take your housejet! It'd be like a flying Winnebago, we could go anywhere!' She rolls onto her side and grins at me. 'What do you think, R? We could go to the other side of the world.'

The excitement in her voice makes me wince. I hope she can't see the grim light in my eyes. I don't know for sure, but there is something in the air lately, a deathly stillness as I walk through the city and its outskirts, that tells me the days of running away from problems are over. There will be no more vacations, no road trips, no tropical getaways. The plague has covered the world.

'You said . . .' I begin, psyching myself up to express a complex thought. 'You said . . . the . . .'

'Come on,' she encourages. 'Use your words.'

'You said . . . the plane's not . . . its own world.'

Her grin falters. 'What?'

'Can't . . . float above . . . the mess.'

She frowns. 'I said that?'

'Your dad . . . concrete box . . . walls and guns . . . Running away . . . no better . . . than hiding. Maybe worse.'

She thinks for a moment. 'I know,' she says, and I feel guilty for crashing her brief flight of fancy. 'I know this. It's what I've been telling myself for years, that there's still hope, that we can turn things around somehow, blah fucking blah. It's just . . . getting a lot harder to believe lately.'

'I know,' I say, trying to hide the cracks in my sincerity. 'But can't . . . give up.'

Her voice darkens. She calls my bluff. 'Why are you so hopeful all of a sudden? What are you really thinking?'

I say nothing, but she reads my face like a front-page headline, the kind that announced the atomic bomb and the Titanic and all the World Wars in progressively smaller type.

'There's nowhere left, is there,' she says.

Almost imperceptibly, I shake my head.

'The whole world,' she says. 'You think it's all dead? All overrun?'

'Yes.'

'How could you know that?'

'I don't. But . . . I feel.'

She lets out a long breath, staring at the toy planes dangling above us. 'So what are we supposed to do?'

'Have to . . . fix it.'

'Fix what?'

'Don't know. Ev . . . rything.'

She props herself up on one elbow. 'What are you talking about?' Her voice is no longer quiet. Nora stirs and stops snoring. 'Fix everything?' Julie says, her eyes sparking in the dark. 'How exactly are we supposed to do that? If you have some big revelation please share, 'cause it's not like I don't think about this literally all the time. It's not like this hasn't been burning my brain every morning and night since my mom left. How do we fix everything? It's so broken. Everyone is dying, over and over again, in deeper and darker ways. What are we supposed to do? Do you know what's causing it? This plague?'

I hesitate. 'No.'

'Then how can you do anything about it? I want to know, R. How are we supposed to "fix it"?'

I'm staring up at the ceiling. I'm staring at the verbal constellations, glimmering green in distant space. As I lie there, letting my mind rise into those imaginary heavens, two of the stars begin to change. They rotate, and focus, and their shapes clarify. They become . . . letters.

T

R

'Tr - ' I whisper.

'What?'

'Truh - ' I repeat, trying to pronounce it. It's a sound. It's a syllable. The blurry constellation is becoming a word. 'What is . . . that?' I ask, pointing at the ceiling.

'What? The quotes?'

I stand up and indicate the general area of the sentence. 'This one.'

'It's a line from "Imagine". The John Lennon song.'

'Which . . . line?'

'"It's easy if you try."'

I stand there for a minute, gazing up like an intrepid explorer of the cosmos. Then I lie down and fold my arms behind my head, eyes wide open. I don't have the answers she's asking for, but I can feel their existence. Faint points of light in the distant dark.

 

[Angel]

UPDATE 14
Slow steps. Mud under boots. Look nowhere else. Strange mantras loop through my head. Old bearded mutterings from dark alleys. Where are you going, Perry? Foolish child. Brainless boy. Where? Every day the universe grows larger, darker, colder. I stop in front of a black door. A girl lives here in this metal house. Do I love her? Hard to say any more. But she is all that's left. The final red sun in an ever-expanding emptiness.

I walk into the house and find her sitting on the staircase, arms crossed over her knees. She puts a finger to her lips. 'Dad,' she whispers to me.



I glance up the staircase towards the general's bedroom. I hear his voice slurring in the dimness.

'This picture, Julie. The water park, remember the water park? Had to haul ten buckets up for just one slide. Twenty minutes of work for ten seconds of fun. Seemed worth it back then, didn't it? I liked watching your face when you flew out of the tube. You looked just like her, even back then.'

Julie stands up quietly, moves towards the front door.

'You're all her, Julie. You aren't me, you're her. How could she do it?'

-- --

I open the door and back out. Julie follows me, soft steps, no sound.

'How could she be so weak?' the man says in a voice like steel melting. 'How could she leave us here?'

We walk in silence. The drizzling rain beads in our hair and we shake it out like dogs. We come to Colonel Rosso's house. Rosso's wife opens the door, looks at Julie's face, and hugs her. We walk inside into the warmth.

I find Rosso in the living room, sipping coffee, peering through his glasses at a water-stained old book. While Julie and Mrs Rosso murmur in the kitchen, I sit down across from the colonel.

'Perry,' he says.

'Colonel.'

'How are you holding up?'

'I'm alive.'

'A good start. How are you settling into the home?'

'I despise it.'

Rosso is quiet for a moment. 'What's on your mind?'

I search for words. I seem to have forgotten most of them. Finally, quietly, I say, 'He lied to me.'

'How so?'

'He said we were fixing things, and if we didn't give up everything might turn out okay.'

'He believed that. I think I do, too.'

'But then he died.' My voice trembles and I fight to squeeze it tight. 'And it was senseless. No battle, no noble sacrifice, just a stupid work accident that could have happened to anyone anywhere, any time in history.'

'Perry . . .'

'I don't understand it, sir. What's the point of trying to fix a world we're in so briefly? What's the meaning in all that work if it's just going to disappear? Without any warning? A fucking brick on the head?'

Rosso says nothing. The low voices in the kitchen become audible in our silence, so they drop to whispers, trying to hide from the colonel what I'm sure he already knows. Our little world is far too tired to care about the crimes of its leaders.

'I want to join Security,' I announce. My voice is solid now. My face is hard.

Rosso lets out a slow breath and sets his book down. 'Why, Perry?'

'Because it's the only thing left worth doing.'

'I thought you wanted to write.'

'That's pointless.'

'Why?'

'We have bigger concerns now. General Grigio says these are the last days. I don't want to waste my last days scratching letters on paper.'

'Writing isn't letters on paper. It's communication. It's memory.'

'None of that matters any more. It's too late.'

He studies me. He picks up the book again and holds the cover out. 'Do you know this story?'

'It's Gilgamesh.'

'Yes. The Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the earliest known works of literature. Humanity's debut novel, you could say.' Rosso flips through the brittle yellow pages. 'Love, sex, blood and tears. A journey to find eternal life. To escape death.' He reaches across the table and hands the book to me. 'It was written over four thousand years ago on clay tablets by people who tilled the mud and rarely lived past forty. It's survived countless wars, disasters and plagues, and continues to fascinate to this day, because here I am, in the midst of modern ruin, reading it.'

I look at Rosso and don't look at the book. My fingers dig into the leather cover.

'The world that birthed that story is long gone, all its people are dead, but it continues to touch the present and future because someone cared enough about that world to keep it. To put it in words. To remember it.'

I split the book open to the middle. The pages are riddled with ellipses, marking words and lines missing from the text, rotted out and lost to history. I stare at these marks and let their black dots fill my vision. 'I don't want to remember,' I say, and I shut the book. 'I want to join Security. I want to do dangerous stuff. I want to forget.'

'What are you saying, Perry?'

'I'm not saying anything.'

'It sounds like you are.'

'No.' The shadows in the room pool in the lines of our faces, draining our eyes of hue. 'There's nothing left worth saying.'

I am numb. Adrift in the blackness of Perry's thoughts, I reverberate with his grief like a low church bell.

'Are you working, Perry?' I whisper into the emptiness. 'Are you reverse-engineering your life?'

Shhhhhh, Perry says. Don't break the mood. I need this to cut through.

I float there in his unshed tears, waiting in the salty dark.

Morning sun streams through the balcony window of Julie's bedroom. The green constellations have faded back into the blue sky of the ceiling. The girls are still asleep, but I've been lying here awake for all but a few uneasy hours. Unable to stay motionless any longer, I slip out of the blankets and stretch my creaky joints, letting the sun baste one side of my face then the other. Nora sleep-mumbles a bit of nursing jargon, 'mitosis' or 'meiosis', possibly 'necrosis', and I notice the dog-eared textbook resting open on her stomach. Curious, I hover over her for a moment, then carefully lift up the book.

I can't read the title. But I immediately recognise the cover. A serenely sleeping face offering its throat of exposed veins to the viewer. The medical reference book, Gray's Anatomy.

Looking nervously over my shoulder, I whisk the heavy tome out into the hallway and start flipping through its pages. Intricate drawings of human architecture, organs and bones all too familiar to me, although here the filleted bodies are shown clean and perfect, their details unblurred by filth or fluids. I pore over the illustrations as the minutes tick by, racked by guilt and fascination like a pubescent Catholic with a Playboy. I can't read the captions, of course, but a few Latin words pop into my head as I study the images, perhaps distant recalls from my old life, a college lecture or TV documentary I absorbed somewhere. The knowledge feels grotesque in my mind but I grasp it and hold it tight, etching it deep into my memory. Why am I doing this? Why do I want to know the names and functions of all the beautiful structures I've spent my years violating? Because I don't deserve to keep them anonymous. I want the pain of knowing them and, by extension, myself: who and what I really am. Maybe with that scalpel, red hot and sterilised in tears, I can begin to carve out the rot inside me.

Hours pass. When I've seen every page and wrung every syllable from my memory, I gently replace the book on Nora's belly and tiptoe out onto the balcony, hoping the warm sun will grant some relief from the moral nausea churning inside me.

I lean against the railing and take in the cramped vistas of Julie's city. As dark and lifeless as it was last night, now it bustles and roars like Times Square. What is everyone doing? The undead airport has its crowds but no real activity. We don't do things; we wait for things to happen. The collective volition bubbling up from the Living is intoxicating, and I have a sudden urge to be down in those masses, rubbing shoulders and elbowing for space in all that sweat and breath. If my questions have answers, they must certainly be down there, under the pounding soles of those filthy feet.

I hear the girls chatting quietly in the bedroom, finally waking up. I go back inside and crawl under the blankets next to Julie.

'Good morning, R,' Nora says, not quite sincerely. I think speaking to me like a human is still a novelty for her; she looks like she wants to titter every time she acknowledges my presence. It's aggravating, but I understand. I'm an absurdity that takes some getting used to.

'Morning,' Julie croaks, watching me from across the pillow. She looks about as un-pretty as I've ever seen her, eyes puffy and hair insane. I wonder how well she sleeps at night, and what kind of dreams she has. I wish I could step into them like she steps into mine.

She rolls onto her side and props her head on her elbow. She clears her throat. 'So,' she says. 'Here you are. What now?'

'Want to . . . see your city.'

Her eyes search my face. 'Why?'

'Want to . . . see how you live. Living people.'

Her lips tighten. 'Too risky. Someone would notice you.'

'Come on, Julie,' Nora says. 'He walked all the way here, let's give him a tour! We can fix him up, disguise him. He already got past Ted, I'm sure he'll be okay strolling around a little if we're careful. You'll be careful, right, R?'

I nod, still looking at Julie. She allows a long silence. Then she rolls onto her back and closes her eyes, releasing a slow breath that sounds like consent.

'Yay!' Nora says.

'We can try it. But, R, if you don't look convincing after we fix you up, no tour. And if I see anyone staring at you too hard, tour's over. Deal?'

I nod.

'No nodding. Say it.'

'Deal.'

She crawls out of the blankets and climbs onto the side of the bed. She looks me up and down. 'Okay,' she says, her hair sticking out in every direction. 'Let's get you presentable.'

I would like my life to be a movie so I could cut to a montage. A quick sequence of shots set to some trite pop song would be much easier to endure than the two gruelling hours the girls spend trying to convert me, to change me back into what's widely considered human. They wash and trim my hair. They wear out a fresh toothbrush on my teeth, although for my smile anything above a coffee-addicted Brit is not in the cards. They attempt to dress me in some of Julie's more boyish clothes, but Julie is a pixie and I rip through T-shirts and snap buttons like a bodybuilder. Finally they give up, and I wait naked in the bathroom while they run my old business-casual through the wash.

While I wait, I decide to take a shower. This is an experience I had long forgotten, and I savour it like a first sip of wine, a first kiss. The steaming water cascades over my battered body, washing away months or years of dirt and blood, some of it mine, much of it others'. All this filth spirals down the drain and into the underworld where it belongs. My true skin emerges, pale grey, marked by cuts and scrapes and grazing bullet wounds, but clean.

This is the first time I have seen my body.

When my clothes are dry and Julie has sewn up the most noticeable holes, I dress myself, relishing the unfamiliar feeling of cleanness. My shirt no longer sticks to me. My slacks no longer chafe.

'You should at least lose the tie,' Nora says. 'You're about ten wars behind the fashion curve in that fancy get-up.'

'No, leave it,' Julie pleads, regarding the little strip of cloth with a whimsical smile. 'I like that tie. It's the only thing keeping you from being completely grey.'

'It sure won't help him blend in, Jules. Remember all the stares we got when we started wearing sneakers instead of work boots?'

'Exactly. People already know you and me don't wear the uniform; as long as R stays with us he could wear spandex shorts and a top hat and no one would mention it.'

Nora smiles. 'I like that idea.'

So the tie remains, in all its red silk incongruity. Julie helps me knot it. She brushes my hair and runs some goo through it. Nora thoroughly fumigates me with men's body spray.

'Ugh, Nora,' Julie objects. 'I hate that stuff. And he doesn't even stink.'

'He stinks a little bit.'

'Yeah, now he does.'

'Better he smell like a chemical plant than a corpse, right? It'll keep the dogs away from him.'

There is some debate about whether or not to make me wear sunglasses to hide my eyes, but they eventually decide this would be more conspicuous than just letting that ethereal grey show itself.

'It's actually not that noticeable,' Julie says. 'Just don't have a staring contest with anyone.'

'You'll be fine,' Nora adds. 'No one in this place really looks at each other anyway.'

The final step in their remodelling plan is make-up. As I sit in front of the mirror like a Hollywood starlet getting ready for her close-up, they powder me, they rouge me, they colourise my black-and-white skin. When they're done, I stare at the mirror in amazement.

I am alive.

I am a handsome young professional, happy, successful, in the bloom of health, just emerging from a meeting and on my way to the gym. I laugh out loud. I look at myself in the mirror and the joyful absurdity of it just bubbles out.

Laughter. Another first for me.

'Oh my . . .' Nora says, standing back to look at me, and Julie says, 'Huh.' She tilts her head. 'You look . . .'

'You look hot !' Nora blurts. 'Can I have him, Julie? Just for one night?'

'Shut your dirty mouth,' Julie chuckles, still inspecting me. She touches my forehead, the narrow, bloodless slot where she once threw a knife. 'Should probably cover that. Sorry, R.' She sticks a Band-Aid over the wound and presses it down with gentle strokes. 'There.' She steps back again and studies me like a perfectionist painter, pleased but cautious.

'Con . . . vincing?' I ask.

'Hmm,' she says.

I offer her my best attempt at a winning smile, stretching my lips wide.

'Oh, God. Definitely don't do that.'

'Just be natural,' Nora says. 'Pretend you're home at the airport surrounded by friends, if you people have those.'

I think back to the moment Julie named me, that warm feeling that crept into my face for the first time as we shared a beer and a plate of Thai food.

'There you go, that's better,' Nora says.

Julie nods, pressing her knuckles against her smiling lips as if to hold back some outburst of emotion. A giddy cocktail of amusement, pride and affection. 'You clean up nice, R.'

'Thank . . . you.'

She takes a deep, decisive breath. 'Okay then.' She pulls a wool beanie over her wild hair and zips up her sweatshirt. 'Ready to see what humanity's been up to since you left it?'

 

[Angel]

UPDATE 15
In my old days of scavenging the city I often gazed up at the Stadium walls and imagined a paradise inside. I assumed it was perfect, that everyone was happy and beautiful and wanted for nothing, and in my numb, limited way I felt envy and wanted to eat them all the more. But look at this place. The corrugated sheet metal glaring in the sun. The fly-buzzing pens of moaning, hormone-pumped cattle. The hopelessly stained laundry hanging from support cables between buildings, flapping in the wind like surrender flags.

'Welcome to Citi Stadium,' Julie says, spreading her arms wide. 'The largest human habitation in what used to be America.'



'There are over twenty thousand of us crammed into this fishbowl,' Julie says as we push through the dense crowds in the central square. 'Pretty soon it'll be so tight we'll all just squish together. The human race will be one big mindless amoeba.'

Why didn't we scatter? Head for high ground and plant our roots where the air and water were clean? What is it we needed from each other in this sweaty crush of bodies?

As much as possible I keep my eyes to the ground, trying to blend in and avoid notice. I sneak glances at guard towers, water tanks, new buildings rising under the bright strobe of arc welders, but mostly my view is of my feet. The asphalt. Mud and dog shit softening the sharp angles.

'We're growing less than half what we need to survive,' Julie says as we pass the gardens, just a blurry dream of green behind the translucent walls of the hothouses. 'So all the real food gets rationed out in tiny servings, and we fill the gaps in our diet with Carbtein.' A trio of teenage boys in yellow jumpsuits hauls a cart of oranges past us, and I notice one of them has strange sores running down the side of his face, sunken brown patches like the bruises on an apple, as if the cells have simply collapsed. 'Not to mention we're burning through a pharmacy worth of medicine every month. Salvage teams can barely keep up. It's only a matter of time before we go to war with the other enclaves over the last bottle of Prozac.'

-- --

Was it just fear? the voices wonder. We were fearful in the best of times; how could we cope with the worst? So we found the tallest walls and poured ourselves behind them. We kept pouring until we were the biggest and strongest, elected the greatest generals and found the most weapons, thinking all this maximalism would somehow generate happiness. But nothing so obvious could ever work.

'What's amazing to me,' Nora says, squeezing past the strained belly of a morbidly pregnant woman, 'is that despite all these needs and shortages we have, people keep pumping out kids. Flooding the world with copies of themselves just because that's tradition, that's what's done.'

Julie glances at Nora and opens her mouth, then closes it.

'And even though we're about to starve to death under a mountain of poopy diapers, no one's brave enough to even suggest that people keep their seed in their nuts for a while.'

'Yeah, but . . .' Julie begins, her voice uncharacteristically timid. 'I don't know . . . there's something kind of beautiful about it, don't you think? That we keep living and growing even though our world is a corpse? That we keep coming back no matter how many of us die?'

'Why is it beautiful that humanity keeps coming back? Herpes does that, too.'

'Oh shut up, Nora, you love people. Being a misanthrope was Perry's thing.'

Nora laughs and shrugs.

'It's not about keeping up the population, it's about passing on who we are and what we've learned, so things keep going. So we don't just end. Sure it's selfish, in a way, but how else do our short lives mean anything?'

'I guess that's true,' Nora allows. 'It's not like we have any other legacies to leave in this post-everything era.'

'Right. It's all fading. I heard the world's last country collapsed in January.'

'Oh, really? Which one was it?'

'Can't remember. Sweden, maybe?'

'So the globe is officially blank. That's depressing.'

'At least you have some cultural heritage you can hold on to. Your dad was Ethiopian, right?'

'Yeah, but what's that mean to me? He didn't remember his country, I never went there, and now it doesn't exist. All that leaves me with is brown skin, and who pays any attention to colour any more?' She waves a hand towards my face. 'In a year or two we're all gonna be grey anyway.'

I fall behind as they continue to banter. I watch them talk and gesticulate, listening to their voices without hearing the words.

What is left of us? the ghosts moan, drifting back into the shadows of my subconscious. No countries, no cultures, no wars but still no peace. What's at our core, then? What's still squirming in our bones when everything else is stripped?

By late afternoon, we've come to the road once known as Jewel Street. The school buildings wait for us ahead, squat and self-satisfied, and I feel my stomach knotting. Julie hesitates at the intersection, looking pensively towards their glowing windows. 'Those are the training facilities,' she says. 'But you don't want to see in there. Let's move on.'

I gladly follow her away from that dark boulevard, but I stare hard at the fresh green sign as we pass. I'm fairly sure the first letter is a J.

'What's . . . that street called?' I ask, pointing to the sign.

Julie smiles. 'Why, that's Julie Street.'

'It used to be a graphic of a diamond or something,' Nora says, 'but her dad renamed it when they built the schools. Isn't that sweet?'

'It was sweet,' Julie admits. 'That's the type of gesture Dad can manage sometimes.'

She takes us around the perimeter of the walls to a wide, dark tunnel directly across from the main gate. I realise these tunnels must be where sports teams once made their triumphal entries onto the field, back when thousands of people could still cheer for things so trivial. And since the tunnel on the other end is the passage into the world of the Living, it seems fitting that this one leads to a graveyard.

Julie flashes an ID badge at the guards and they wave us through the back gate. We step out onto a hilly field surrounded by hundreds of feet of chain-link fencing. Black hawthorn trees curl towards the mottled grey-and-gold sky, standing guard over classical tombstones, complete with crosses and statues of saints. I suspect these were reappropriated from some forgotten funeral home, as the engraved names and dates have been covered over with crude letters stencilled in white paint. The epitaphs resemble graffiti tags.

'This is where we bury . . . what's left of us,' Julie says. She walks a few steps ahead as Nora and I stand in the entry. Out here, with the door shut behind us, the pulsing noise of human affairs is gone, replaced by the stoic silence of the truly dead. Each body resting here is either headless, brain-shot, or nothing but scraps of half-eaten flesh and bones piled in a box. I can see why they chose to build the cemetery outside the Stadium walls: not only does it take up more land than all the indoor farmlands combined, it also can't be very good for morale. This is a reminder far more grim than the old world's sunny yards of peaceful passings and requiem eternum. This is a glimpse of our future. Not as individuals, whose deaths we can accept, but as a species, a civilisation, a world.

'Are you sure you want to go in here today?' Nora asks Julie softly.

Julie looks out at the hills of patchy brown grass. 'I go every day. Today's a day. Today's Tuesday.'

'Yeah, but . . . do you want us to wait here?'

She glances back at me and considers for a moment. Then she shakes her head. 'No. Come on.' She starts walking and I follow her. Nora trails an awkward distance behind me, a look of muted surprise on her face.

There are no paths in this cemetery. Julie walks in a straight line, stepping over headstones and across grave mounds, many still soft and muddy. Her eyes are focused on a tall spire topped by a marble angel. We stop in front of it, Julie and I side by side, Nora still lingering behind. I strain to read the name on the grave, but it doesn't reveal itself. Even the first few letters remain out of reach.

'This is . . . my mom,' Julie says. The cool evening wind blows her hair into her eyes, but she doesn't brush it away.

'She left when I was twelve.'

Nora squirms behind us, then wanders away and pretends to browse the epitaphs.

'She went crazy, I guess,' Julie says. 'Ran out into the city by herself one night and that was that. They found a few pieces of her but . . . there's nothing in this grave.' Her voice is casual. I'm reminded of her trying to imitate the Dead back in the airport, the overacting, the paper-thin mask. 'I guess it was too much for her, all of this.' She waves a hand vaguely at the graveyard and the Stadium behind us. 'She was a real free spirit, you know? This wild bohemian goddess full of fire. She met my dad when she was nineteen, he swept her off her feet. Hard to believe it, but he was a musician back then, played keys in a rock band, was actually pretty good. They got married really young, and then . . . I don't know . . . the world went to shit, and Dad changed. Everything changed.'

I try to read her eyes but her hair obscures them. I hear a tremor in her voice. 'Mom tried. She really did try. She did her part to keep everything together, she did her daily work, and then it was all me. She poured it all into me. Dad was hardly around so it was always just her and the little brat. I remember having so much fun, she used to take me to this water park back in - ' A tiny sob catches her by surprise, choking off the words, and she covers her mouth with her hand. Her eyes plead with me through strands of dirty hair. I gently brush it out of her face. 'She just wasn't built for this fucking place,' she says, her voice warbling in falsetto. 'What was she supposed to do here? Everything that made her alive was gone. All she had left was this stupid twelve-year-old with ugly teeth who kept waking her up every night wanting to snuggle away a nightmare. No wonder she wanted out.'

'Stop,' I say firmly, and turn her to face me. 'Stop.' Tears are running down her face, salty secretions shooting through ducts and tubes, past bright pulsating cells and angry red tissues. I wipe them away and pull her into me. 'You're . . . alive,' I mumble into her hair. 'You're . . . worth living for.'

I feel her shudder against my chest, clinging to my shirt as my arms surround her. The air is silent except for the light whistle of the breeze. Nora is looking our way now, twisting a finger through her curls. She catches my eye and gives me a sad smile, as if to apologise for not warning me. But I'm not afraid of the skeletons in Julie's closet. I look forward to meeting the rest of them, looking them hard in the eye, giving them firm, bone-crunching handshakes.

As she dampens my shirt with sadness and snot, I realise I'm about to do another thing I've never done before. I suck in air and attempt to sing. 'You're . . . sensational . . .' I croak, struggling for a trace of Frank's melody. 'Sensational . . . that's all.'

There's a pause, and then something shifts in Julie's demeanour. I realise she's laughing.

'Oh wow,' she giggles, and looks up at me, her eyes still glistening above a grin. 'That was beautiful, R, really. You and Zombie Sinatra should record Duets, Volume 2.'

I cough. 'Didn't get . . . warm-up.'

She brushes some of my hair back into place. She looks back at the grave. She reaches into her pocket and pulls out a wilted airport daisy with four petals remaining. She sets it on the bare dirt in front of the headstone. 'Sorry, Mom,' she says softly. 'Best I could find.' She grabs my hand. 'Mom, this is R. He's really nice, you'd love him. The flower is from him, too.'

Even though the grave is empty, I half expect her mother's hand to burst out of the earth and grip my ankle. After all, I'm a cell in the cancer that killed her. But if Julie is any indication, I suspect her mother might forgive me. These people, these beautiful Living women, they don't seem to make the connection between me and the creatures that keep killing everything they love. They allow me to be an exception, and I feel humbled by this gift. I want to pay it back somehow, earn their forgiveness. I want to repair the world I've helped destroy.

Nora rejoins us as we leave Mrs Grigio's grave. She rubs Julie's shoulder and kisses her head. 'You okay?'

Julie nods. 'As much as ever.'

'You want to hear something nice?'

'So badly.'

'I saw a patch of wild flowers by my house. They're growing in a ditch.'

Julie smiles. She rubs the last few tears out of her eyes and doesn't say anything more.

I peruse the headstones as we walk. They are crooked and haphazardly placed, making the cemetery look ancient despite the dozens of freshly dug graves. I am thinking about death. I'm thinking how brief life is compared to it. I'm wondering how deep this graveyard goes, how many layers of coffins are stacked on top of each other, and what portion of Earth's soil is made from our decay.

Then something interrupts my morbid reflections. I feel a lurch in my stomach, a queer sensation like what I imagine a baby kicking in the womb might feel like. I stop in mid-step and turn around. A featureless rectangular headstone is watching me from a nearby hill.

'Hold on,' I say to the girls, and begin climbing the hill.

'What's he doing?' I hear Nora ask under her breath. 'Isn't that . . . ?'

I stand in front of the grave, staring at the name on the stone. A queasy sensation of vertigo rises through my legs, as if a vast pit is opening up in front of me, drawing me towards its edge with some dark, inexorable force. My stomach lurches again, I feel a sharp tug on my brainstem . . . I fall in.

 

[Angel]

UPDATE 16
I am Perry Kelvin, and this is my last day alive.

What a strange feeling, waking up to that awareness. All my life I have battled the alarm clock, pummelling the snooze button over and over with mounting self-loathing until the shame is finally strong enough to lever me upright. It was only on the brightest of mornings, those rare days of verve and purpose and clear reasons to live that I ever sprang awake easily. How strange, then, that I do today.



Julie whimpers as I extract myself from her goosebumped arms and slip out of bed. She gathers my half of the blankets around her and curls up against the wall. She will sleep for hours more, dreaming endless landscapes and novas of colour both gorgeous and frightening. If I stayed she would wake up and describe them to me. All the mad plot twists and surrealist imagery, so vivid to her while so meaningless to me. There was a time when I treasured listening to her, when I found the commotion in her soul bitter-sweet and lovely, but I can no longer bear it. I lean over to kiss her goodbye, but my lips stiffen and I cringe away from her. I can't. I can't. I'll collapse. I pull back and leave without touching her.

Two years ago today my father was crushed under the wall he was building, and I became an orphan. I have missed him for seven hundred and thirty days, my mother for even longer, but tomorrow I will not miss anyone. I think about this as I descend the winding stairs of my foster home, this wretched house of discards, and emerge into the city. Dad, Mom, Grandma, my friends . . . tomorrow I won't miss anyone.

It's early and the sun is barely over the mountains, but the city is already wide awake. The streets are crawling with labourers, repair crews, moms pushing knobby-tyred strollers and foster-moms herding lines of kids like cattle. Somewhere in the distance someone is playing a clarinet; its quavery notes drift through the morning air like birdsong, and I try to shut it out. I don't want to hear music, I don't want the sunrise to be pink. The world is a liar. Its ugliness is overwhelming; the scraps of beauty make it worse.

I make my way to the Island Street administrative building and tell the receptionist I'm here for my seven o'clock with General Grigio. She walks me back to his office and shuts the door behind me. The general doesn't look up from the paperwork on his desk. He raises one finger at me. I stand and wait, letting my eyes roam the contents of his walls. A picture of Julie. A picture of Julie's mother. A faded picture of himself and a younger Colonel Rosso in proper US Army uniforms, smoking cigarettes in front of a flooded New York skyline. Next to this, another shot of the two men smoking cigarettes, this time overlooking a crumbled London. Then bombed-out Paris. Then smouldering Rome.

-- --

The general finally sets down his paperwork. He takes off his glasses and looks me over. 'Mr Kelvin,' he says.

'Sir.'

'Your very first salvage as team manager.'

'Yes, sir.'

'Do you feel ready?'

My tongue stalls for an instant as images of horses and cellists and red lips on a wine glass flicker through my mind, trying to knock me off course. I burn them like old film. 'Yes, sir.'

'Good. Here is your exit pass. See Colonel Rosso at the community centre for your team assignments.'

'Thank you, sir.' I take the paperwork and turn to leave. But I pause on the doorway threshold. 'Sir?' My voice cracks a little even though I swore I wouldn't let it.

'Yes, Perry?'

'Permission to speak freely, sir?'

'Go ahead.'

I moisten my dry lips. 'Is there a reason for all this?'

'Pardon me?'

'Is there a reason for us to keep doing all these things? The salvages and . . . everything?'

'I'm afraid I don't understand your question, Perry. The supplies we salvage are keeping us alive.'

'Are we trying to stay alive because we think the world will get better someday? Is that what we're working towards?'

His expression is flat. 'Perhaps.'

My voice becomes shaky and very undignified, but I can no longer control it. 'What about right now? Is there anything right now that you love enough to keep living for?'

'Perry - '

'Will you tell me what it is, sir? Please?'

His eyes are marbles. A noise like the beginning of a word forms in his throat, then it stops. His mouth tightens. 'This conversation is inappropriate.' He lays his hands flat on his desk. 'You should be on your way now. You have work to do.'

I swallow hard. 'Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.'

'See Colonel Rosso at the community centre for your team assignments.'

'Yes, sir.'

I step through the door and shut it behind me.

In Colonel Rosso's office I conduct myself with utmost professionalism. I request my team assignments and he gives them to me, handing over the envelope with warmth and pride in his squinty, failing eyes. He wishes me luck and I thank him; he invites me to dinner and I politely decline. My voice does not crack. I lose no composure.

Marching back through the community centre lobby I glance towards the gym and see Nora staring at me through the tall windows. She's wearing snug black shorts and a white tank top, as are all the pre-teens on the volleyball court behind her. Nora's 'team', her sad attempt to distract a few kids from reality for two hours a week. I walk past her without so much as a nod, and as I start to push the front doors open I hear her sneakers slapping the tile floor behind me.

'Perry!'

I stop and let the doors swing shut. I turn around and face her. 'Hey.'

She stands in front of me with her arms crossed, her eyes stony. 'So today's the big day, huh?'

'I guess so.'

'What area are you hitting? You got it all planned out?'

'The old Pfizer building on Eighth Ave.'

She nods rapidly. 'Good, that sounds like a good plan, Perry. And you'll be all done and home by six, right? 'Cause remember we're taking you to the Orchard tonight. We're not letting you spend today moping alone like you did last year.'

I watch the kids in the gym, bumping-setting-spiking, laughing and cursing. 'I don't know if I'll make it. This salvage might go a little later than usual.'

She keeps nodding. 'Oh. Oh, okay. Because that building is crooked and full of cracks and dead ends and you have to be extra careful, right?'

'Right.'

'Yeah.' She nods towards the envelope in my hand. 'You checked that yet?'

'Not yet.'

'Well, you should probably check it, Perry.' Her foot taps the floor; her body vibrates with restrained anger. 'You need to make sure you know everyone's profiles, strengths and weaknesses and all that. Mine, for instance, because I'm on there.'

My face goes blank. 'What?'

'Sure, I'm going, Rosso put me on yesterday. Do you know my strengths and weaknesses? Is there anything on your agenda you think might be too hard for me? 'Cause I'd hate to jeopardise your very first salvage as team manager.'

I rip the top off the envelope and start scanning the names.

'Julie signed up, too, did she mention that?'

My eyes flash up from the page.

'That's right, fucker, will that be a problem for you?' Her voice is strained to breaking. There are tears in her eyes. 'Is that a conflict at all?'

I shove open the front doors and burst out into the cold morning air. Birds overhead. Those blank-eyed pigeons, those shrieking gulls, all the flies and beetles that eat their shit - the gift of flight dumped on Earth's most worthless creatures. What if it were mine instead? That perfect, weightless freedom. No fences, no walls, no borders; I would fly everywhere, over oceans and continents, mountains and jungles and endless open plains, and somewhere in the world, somewhere in all that distant untouched beauty, I would find a reason.

I am floating in Perry's darkness. I am deep in the earth. Somewhere far above me are roots and worms and an inverted graveyard where the coffins are the markers and the headstones are what's buried, piercing down into the airy blue emptiness, hiding all the names and pretty epitaphs and leaving me with the rot.

I feel a stirring in the dirt that surrounds me. A hand burrows through and grabs my shoulder.

'Hello, corpse.'

We are in the 747. My piles of souvenirs are sorted and arranged in neat stacks. The aisle is softened with layers of oriental throw rugs. Dean Martin croons on the record player.

'Perry?'

He's in the cockpit, in the pilot's chair with his hands on the controls. He's wearing a pilot's uniform, the white shirt stained with blood. He smiles at me, then gestures at the windows, where streaks of clouds flicker past. 'We are now approaching cruising altitude. You're free to move about the cabin.'

With slow, cautious movements, I get up and join him in the cockpit. I look at him uneasily. He grins. I rub a finger through the familiar layers of dust on the controls. 'This isn't one of your memories, is it?'

'No. This is yours. I wanted you to be comfortable.'

'Is it your grave I'm standing on right now?'

He shrugs. 'I suppose. I think it's just my empty skull in there, though. You and your friends took most of me home for snacks, remember?'

I open my mouth to apologise again, but he shuts his eyes and waves it away. 'Don't, please. We're past all that. Besides, that wasn't really me you killed, that was older-wiser Perry. I think this is mostly junior-high Perry you're talking to, young and optimistic and writing a novel called Ghosts vs. Werewolves. I'd rather not think about being dead right now.'

I eye him uncertainly. 'You're a lot more cheerful here than in your memories.'

'I have perspective here. It's hard to take your life so seriously when you can see it all at once.'

I peer at him. His reality is very convincing, pimples and all. 'Are you . . . really you?' I ask.

'What does that mean?'

'All this time I've been talking to you, are you just . . . leftovers from your brain? Or are you really actually you?'

He chuckles. 'Does it really actually matter?'

'Are you Perry's soul?'

'Maybe. Kind of. Whatever you want to call it.'

'Are you . . . in Heaven?'

He laughs and tugs his blood-soaked shirt. 'Yeah, not exactly. Whatever I am, "R", I'm in you.' He laughs again at the look on my face. 'Fucked up, isn't it? But Older-Wiser went out of this life pretty darkly. Maybe this is our chance to catch up with him and work some things out before . . . you know. Whatever's next.'

I look out the window. No glimpse of land or sea, just the silky mountains of Cloud World spread out below us and piled high above. 'Where are we headed?'

'Towards whatever's next.' He lifts his eyes to the heavens with sarcastic solemnity, then grins. 'You're going to help me get there, and I'm going to help you.'

I feel my guts twist as the plane surges and drops on erratic air currents. 'Why would you help me? I'm the reason you're dead.'

'Come on, R, don't you get this yet?' He seems upset by my question. He locks eyes on me and there's a feverish intensity in them. 'You and I are victims of the same disease. We're fighting the same war, just different battles in different theatres, and it's way too late for me to hate you for anything, because we're the same damn thing. My soul, your conscience, whatever's left of me woven into whatever's left of you, all tangled up and conjoined.' He gives me a hearty clap on the shoulder that almost hurts. 'We're in this together, corpse.'

A low tremor rumbles through the plane. The control stick wobbles in front of Perry, but he ignores it. I don't know what to say, so I just say, 'Okay.'

He nods. 'Okay.'

Another faint vibration in the floor, like the concussions of distant bombs.

'So,' he says. 'God has made us study partners. We need to talk about our project.' He takes a deep breath and looks at me, tapping his chin. 'I've been hearing a lot of inspirational thoughts prancing around in our head lately. But I'm not sure you really understand the storm we're flying into.'

A few red lights blink on in the cabin. There is a scraping noise somewhere outside the plane.

'What am I missing?' I ask.

'How about a strategy? We're wandering around this city like a kitten in a dog kennel. You keep talking about changing the world, but you're sitting here licking your paws while all the pit bulls circle in on us. What's the plan, pussycat?'

Outside, the cotton clouds darken to steel wool. The lights flicker, and my souvenir stacks rattle.

'I don't . . . have one yet.'

'So when? You know things are moving. You're changing, your fellow Dead are changing, the world is ready for something miraculous. What are we waiting for?'

The plane shudders and begins to dive. I stumble into the co-pilot chair, feeling my stomach rise into my throat. 'I'm not waiting. I'm doing it right now.'

'Doing what? What are you doing?'

'I'm trying.' I hold Perry's gaze and grip the sides of my seat as the plane shakes and groans. 'I'm wanting it. I'm making myself care.'

Perry's eyes narrow and his lips tighten, but he doesn't say anything.

'That's step one, isn't it?' I yell over the noise of wind and roaring engines. 'That's where it has to start.'

The plane lurches and my souvenir stacks collapse, scattering paintings, movies, dishes, dolls and love notes all over the cabin. More lights flare in the cockpit, and a voice crackles on the radio.

R? Helloooo? Are you okay?

Perry's face has gone cold, all playfulness gone. 'Bad stuff is coming, R. Some of it's waiting for you right outside this graveyard. You're right, wanting change is step one, but step two is taking it. When the flood comes, I don't want to see you dreaming your way through it. You've got my little girl with you now.'

Okay, you're creeping me out. Wake up!

'I know I didn't deserve her,' Perry says, his quiet murmur somehow rising above the noise. 'She offered me everything and I pissed on it. So now it's your turn, R. Go keep her safe. She's a lot softer than she seems.'

God damn it, you asshole! Wake up or I'll fucking shoot you!

I nod. Perry nods. Then he turns to face the window and folds his arms across his chest while the controls shake wildly. The storm clouds peel apart and we are diving to Earth, hurtling directly towards the Stadium, and there they are, the infamous R and J, sitting on a blanket on the rain-soaked roof. R looks up and sees us, his eyes open wide just as we -

My eyes open wide and I blink reality into focus. I am standing in front of a small grave in an amateur cemetery. Julie's hand is on my shoulder.

'Are you back?' she asks. 'What the hell was that about?'

I clear my throat and look around. 'Sorry. Daydreaming.'

'God, you're weird. Come on, I don't want to be here any more.' She strides briskly towards the exit.

Nora and I follow her. Nora keeps pace with me, eyeing me sideways. 'Daydreaming?' she asks.

I nod.

'You were talking to yourself a little.'

I look at her.

'Some pretty big words, too. I think I heard "miraculous".'

I shrug.

The waterfall noise of the city rushes into our ears as the guards open the doors and we step back into the Stadium proper. The doors have barely slammed shut behind us when I feel that baby kick in my stomach again. A voice whispers, Here it comes, R. Are you ready?

'Oh, this is lovely,' Julie says under her breath.

There he is, marching around the street corner in front of us: Julie's dad, General Grigio. He strides directly towards us, flanked on each side by an officer of some kind, although none of them wear traditional military attire. Their uniforms are light grey shirts and work pants, no decorations or rank insignias, just pockets and tool loops and laminated ID badges. High-calibre side arms gleam softly in their belt holsters.

'Be cool, R,' Julie whispers. 'Don't say anything, just, um . . . pretend you're shy.'

'Julie!' the general calls out from an awkward distance.

'Hi, Dad,' Julie says.

He and his retinue stop in front of us. He gives Julie's shoulder a quick squeeze. 'How are you?'

'Fine. Just went to see Mom.'

His jaw muscle twitches, but he doesn't respond. He looks at Nora, gives her a nod, then looks at me. He looks at me very hard. He pulls out a walkie-talkie. 'Ted. The individual who slipped past you yesterday. You said it was a young man in a red tie? Tall, thin, poorly complected?'

'Dad,' Julie says.

The walkie squawks. The general puts it away and pulls a pair of thumb cuffs from his belt. 'You are detained for unauthorised entry,' he recites. 'You will be held in - '

'Jesus Christ, Dad.' Julie steps forward to push his hands away. 'What is wrong with you? He's not an intruder, he's visiting from Goldman Dome. And he almost died on the way here so cut him some slack on the legalities, will you?'

'Who is he?' the general demands.

Julie edges in front of me as if to block me from responding. 'His name is . . . Archie - it was Archie, right?' She glances at me and I nod. 'He's Nora's new boyfriend. I just met him today.'

Nora grins and squeezes my arm. 'Can you believe what a nice dresser he is? I didn't think guys knew how to wear a tie any more.'

The general hesitates, then puts the cuffs away and forces a thin smile. 'Pleased to meet you, Archie. You're aware of course that if you want to stay any longer than three days you'll need to register with our immigration officer.'

I nod and try to avoid eye contact, but I can't seem to look away from his face. Although that tense dinner I witnessed in my visions couldn't have been more than a few years ago, he looks a decade older. His skin is thin and papery. His cheek-bones protrude. His veins are green in his forehead.

One of the officers with him clears his throat. 'So sorry to hear about Perry, Miss Cabernet. We'll miss him very much.' Colonel Rosso is older than Grigio but has aged more gracefully. He is short and thick, with strong arms and a muscular chest above the inevitable old-man paunch. His thin hair is wispy and white, blue eyes big and watery behind thick glasses. Julie gives him a smile that seems genuine.

'Thanks, Rosy. So will I.'

Their exchange sounds proper but rings false, as if paddling above deep undercurrents. I suspect they have already shared a less professional moment of grief somewhere away from Grigio's officious gaze. 'We appreciate your condolences, Colonel Rosso,' he says. 'However, I'll thank you not replace our surname when addressing my daughter, whatever such "revisions" she may have embraced.'

The older man straightens. 'Apologies, sir. I meant nothing by it.'

'It's just a nickname,' Nora says. 'Me and Perry thought she was more of a Cab than a . . .'

She trails off under Grigio's stare. He pans slowly over to me. I avoid eye contact until he dismisses me. 'We have to be going,' he says to no one in particular. 'Good to meet you, Archie. Julie, I'll be in meetings all night tonight and then heading over to Goldman in the morning to discuss the merger. I expect to be back at the house in a few days.'

Julie nods. Without another word, the general and his men depart. Julie examines the ground, seeming far away. After a moment, Nora breaks the silence. 'Well, that was scary.'

'Let's go to the Orchard,' Julie mutters. 'I need a drink.'

I'm still looking down the street, watching her father shrink into the distance. Just before rounding a corner he glances back at me, and my skin prickles. Will Perry's flood be of water, gentle and cleansing, or will it be a flood of a different kind? I feel movement under my feet. A faint vibration, as if the bones of every man and woman ever buried are rattling deep in the earth. Cracking the bedrock. Stirring the magma.

 

[Angel]

UPDATE 17
The Orchard, as it turns out, is not part of the Stadium's farming system. It's their one and only pub, or at least the closest thing they have to a pub in this new bastion of prohibition. Reaching its entrance requires an arduous vertical journey through the Stadium's Escheresque cityscape. First, we climb four flights of stairs in a ramshackle housing tower while the residents glare at us through their cracked apartment doors. This is followed by a vertiginous crossing to a neighbouring building - boys on the ground try to look up Nora's skirt as we wobble over a wire-mesh catwalk strung between the towers' support cables. Once inside the other building, we plod up three more flights of stairs before finally emerging onto a breezy patio high above the streets. The noise of crowds rumbles through the door at the other end: a wide slab of oak painted with a yellow tree.

The place is packed, but the mood is eerily subdued. No shouting, no high-fiving, no woozy requests for phone numbers. Despite the speakeasy secrecy of its obscure location, the Orchard doesn't serve alcohol.



'I ask you,' Julie says as we push our way through the well-behaved crowds, 'is there anything sillier than a bunch of ex-Marines and construction workers drowning their sorrows at a fucking juice bar? At least it's flask-friendly.'

The Orchard is the first building I've seen in this city with some trace of character. All the usual drinking accoutrements are here: dart boards, pool tables, flatscreen TVs with football games. At first I'm amazed to see these broadcasts -does entertainment still exist? Are there still people out there engaging in frivolity despite the times? But then, ten minutes into the third quarter, the images warp like VHS tape and switch to a different game, the teams and scores changing in the middle of a tackle. Five minutes later they switch again, with just a quick stutter to mark the splice. None of the sports fans seem to notice. They watch these abbreviated, eternally looping contests with blank eyes and sip their drinks like players in an historical reenactment.

A few of the patrons notice me staring at them and I look away. But then I look back. Something about this scene is burrowing into my mind. A thought is developing like a ghost on a Polaroid.

'Three grapefruits,' Julie tells the bartender, who looks vaguely embarrassed as he prepares the drinks. We settle in on bar stools and the two girls start talking. The music of their voices replaces the jangling classic rock on the jukebox, but then even this fades to a muffled drone. I'm staring at the TVs. I'm staring at the people. I can see the outline of their bones under their muscles. The edges of joints poking up under tight skin. I see their skeletons, and the idea taking shape in my head is something I hadn't expected: a blueprint of the Boneys. A glimpse into the their twisted, dried-up minds.

--

The universe is compressing. All memory and all possibility squeezing down to the smallest of points as the last of their flesh falls away. To exist in that singularity, trapped in one static state for eternity - this is the Boneys' world. They are dead-eyed ID photos, frozen at the precise moment they gave up their humanity. That hopeless instant when they snipped the last thread and dropped into the abyss. Now there's nothing left. No thought, no feeling, no past, no future. Nothing exists but the desperate need to keep things as they are, as they always have been. They must stay on the rails of their loop or be overwhelmed, set ablaze and consumed by the colours, the sounds, the wide-open sky.

And so the thought hums in my head, whispering through my nerves like voices through phone lines: what if we could derail them? We've already disrupted their structure enough to incite a blind rage. What if we could create a change so deep, so new and astonishing, they would simply break? Surrender? Crumble into dust and ride out of town on the wind?

'R,' Julie says, poking me in the arm. 'Where are you? Daydreaming again?'

I smile and shrug. Once again my vocabulary fails me. I'm going to need to find a way to let her into my head soon. Whatever this thing is I'm trying to do, I know it can't be done alone.

The bartender returns with our drinks. Julie grins at me and Nora as we appraise the three tumblers of pale yellow nectar. 'Remember how when we were kids, pure grapefruit juice was the tough-guy drink? Like the whiskey of kiddie beverages?'

'Right,' Nora laughs. 'Apple juice, Capri Sun, that stuff was for bitches.'

Julie raises her glass. 'To our new friend Archie.'

I lift my glass an inch off the bar and the girls clang theirs down against it. We drink. I don't exactly taste it, but the juice stings my mouth, finding its way into old cuts in my cheeks, bites I don't remember biting.

Julie orders another round, and when it arrives she hefts her messenger bag onto her shoulder and picks up all three glasses. She leans in close and gives me and Nora a wink. 'Be right back.' With the drinks in hand, she disappears into the bathroom.

'What's . . . she doing?' I ask Nora.

'Dunno. Stealing our drinks?'

We sit there in awkward silence, third-party friends lacking the connective tissue of Julie's presence. After a few minutes, Nora leans in and lowers her voice. 'You know why she said you were my boyfriend, right?'

I shrug one shoulder. 'Sure.'

'It didn't mean anything, she was just trying to deflect attention away from you. If she said you were her boyfriend, or her friend, or anything to do with her, Grigio would've grilled the fuck out of you. And obviously if he really looks at you . . . the make-up's not perfect.'

'I under . . . stand.'

'And by the way, just so you know? That was a pretty big deal that she took you to see her mom today.'

I raise my eyebrows.

'She doesn't tell people that stuff, ever. She didn't even tell Perry the whole story for like three years. I can't say exactly what that means for her, but . . . it's new.'

I study the bar top, embarrassed. A strangely fond smile spreads across Nora's face. 'You know you remind me a little of Perry?'

I tense. I begin to feel the hot remorse boiling up in my throat again.

'I don't know what it is, I mean, you're sure not the blowhard he was, but you have some of that same . . . sparkle he had when he was younger.'

I should stitch my mouth shut. Honesty is a compulsion that's damned me more than once. But I just can't hold it in any more. The words build and explode out of me like an uncontainable sneeze. 'I killed him. Ate . . . his brain.'

Nora purses her lips and nods slowly. 'Yeah . . . I thought you might have.'

My face goes blank. 'What?'

'I didn't see it happen but I've been putting two and two together. It makes sense.'

I look at her, stunned. 'Julie . . . knows?'

'I don't think so. But if she did, I'm pretty sure she'd be okay.' She touches my hand where it rests on the bar. 'You could tell her, R. I think she'd forgive you.'

'Why?'

'Same reason I forgive you.'

'Why?'

'Because it wasn't you. It was the plague.'

I wait for more. She watches the TV above the bar, pale green light flickering over her dark face. 'Did Julie ever tell you about when Perry cheated on her with that orphan girl?'

I hesitate, then nod.

'Yeah, well . . . that was me.'

My eyes dart towards the bathroom, but Nora doesn't seem to be hiding anything. 'I'd only been here a week,' she says. 'Didn't know Julie yet. That's how I met her, actually. I fucked her boyfriend, and she hated me, and then time passed and a lot happened, and somehow we came out the other side as friends. Crazy, right?' She upends her glass over her tongue to catch the last drops, then pushes it aside. 'What I'm trying to say is, it's a shitty world and shit happens, but we don't have to bathe in shit. Sixteen years old, R - my meth-head parents dumped me in the middle of a Dead-infested slum because they couldn't feed me any more. I wandered on my own for years before I found Citi Stadium, and I don't have enough fingers to count all the times I almost died.' She holds up her left hand and wiggles the half-gone finger like a bride-to-be showing off her diamond. 'What I'm saying is, when you have weight like that in your life, you have to start looking for the bigger picture or you are gonna sink.'

I peer into her eyes, failing to read her meaning like the illiterate I am. 'What's . . . the bigger picture . . . of me killing Perry?'

'R, come on,' she says, mock-slapping the side of my head. 'You're a zombie. You have the plague. Or at least you did when you killed Perry. Maybe you're different now, I sure hope you are, but back then you didn't know you had choices. This isn't "crime", it's not "murder", it's something way deeper and more inevitable.' She taps her temple. 'Me and Julie get that, okay? There's a Zen saying, "No praise, no blame, just so." We don't care about assigning blame for the human condition, we just want to cure it.'

Julie emerges from the bathroom and sets the drinks on the bar with a sly grin. 'Even grapefruit juice can use a little kick sometimes.'

Nora takes a test sip and turns away, covering her mouth. 'Holy . . . Lord!' she coughs. 'How much did you put in here?'

'Just a few minis of vodka,' Julie whispers with girlish innocence. 'Courtesy of our friend Archie, and Undead Airlines.'

'Way to go, Archie.'

I shake my head. 'Can please . . . stop calling me . . . ?'

'Right, right,' Julie says. 'No more Archie. But what do we toast to this time? It's your booze, R, you decide.'

I hold the glass in front of me. I sniff it, insisting to myself that I can still smell things besides death and potential death, that I'm still human, still whole. A citrus tang pricks my nostrils. Glowing Florida orchards in summer. The toast that enters my head seems unbearably corny, but it comes out anyway. 'To . . . life.'

Nora stifles a laugh. 'Really?'

Julie shrugs. 'Unbearably corny, but what the hell.' She raises her glass and clinks it against mine. 'To life, Mr Zombie.'

'L'chaim!' Nora bellows, and drains her glass.

Julie drains her glass.

I drain my glass.

The vodka slams into my brain like a round of buckshot. This time it's no placebo. The drink is strong and I feel it. I am feeling it. How is that possible?

Julie orders another round of grapefruits, then promptly converts them into Greyhounds, and she is generous with the pours. I expect the girls to be as lightweight as I am, since alcohol is contraband here, but I realise it's probably quite routine to visit the liquor store while out salvaging the city. They quickly outpace me as I sip my second drink, marvelling at the sensations that swirl through my body. The noise of the bar fades and I just watch Julie, the focal point in my blurry composition. She is laughing. A free, unreserved kind of laugh that I don't think I've heard before, throwing her head back and letting it just cascade out of her. She and Nora are recounting some shared memory. She turns to me and says something, inviting me into the joke with a word and a flash of white teeth, but I don't respond. I just look at her, resting my chin in my hand, my elbow on the bar, smiling.

Contentment. Is this what it might feel like?

After finishing my drink I feel a pressure in my lower regions, and I realise I have to piss. Since the Dead don't drink, urination is a rare event. I hope I can remember how to do it.

I wobble into the bathroom and lean my forehead against the wall in front of the urinal. I unzip, and I look down, and there it is. That mythical instrument of life and death and first-date back-seat fucking. It hangs limp, useless now, silently judging me for all the ways I've misused it over the years. I think of my wife and her new lover, slapping their cold bodies together like poultry in a packing plant. I think of the anonymous blurs in my past life, probably all dead or Dead by now. Then I think of Julie curled next to me in that king-sized bed. I think of her body in that comically mismatched underwear, her breath against my eyes as I study every line in her face, wondering what mysteries lie in the glowing nuclei of her each and every cell.

There in the bathroom, surrounded by the stench of piss and shit, I wonder: Is it too late for me? Can I somehow snatch another chance from the skymouth's grinding teeth? I want a new past, new memories, a new first-handshake with love. I want to start over, in every possible way.

When I come out of the bathroom the floor is spinning. Voices are muffled. Julie and Nora are deep in conversation, leaning close and laughing. A man in his early thirties approaches the bar and makes some kind of leering comment to Julie. Nora glares at him and says something that looks sarcastic, and Julie shoos him away. The man shrugs and retreats to the pool table where his friend is waiting. Julie calls out something insulting and the friend laughs, but the man just grins coldly and calls back a retort. Julie looks frozen for a moment, then she and Nora turn their backs to the pool table and Nora starts whispering in Julie's ear.

'What's . . . wrong?' I ask, approaching the bar. I can sense both men at the pool table watching me.

'Nothing,' Julie says, but she sounds shaken. 'It's fine.'

'R, could you give us a quick minute?' Nora asks.

I look back and forth between them. They wait. I turn and walk out of the bar, feeling too many things at once. On the patio I slump against the railing, the streets a dizzying seven floors down. Most of the city's lights are out, but the street lamps flicker and pulse like bioluminescence. Julie's mini-cassette recorder is an insistent weight in my shirt pocket. I pull it out and stare at it. I know I shouldn't but I'm . . . I feel like I just need -

Closing my eyes, swaying gently with one arm on the railing, I rewind the tape for a moment and press play.

' - really that crazy? Just because he's . . . whatever he is? I

mean, isn't "zombie" just a silly name we - '

I press rewind again and it occurs to me that the gap between the beginning of this entry and the end of the previous one comprises the entire time I've known Julie. Every meaningful moment of my life fits inside a few seconds of tape hiss.

I press stop, then play.

' - thinks no one knows but everyone knows, they're just afraid to do anything. He's getting worse, too. He said he loved me tonight. Actually said those words. Said I was beautiful and I was everything he loved about Mom and if anything ever happened to me he'd lose his mind. And I know he meant it, I know all of that's really there inside him . . . but the fact that he had to be raging shitfaced drunk to let any of it out . . . it just made the whole thing seem sick. I fucking hated it.'

There is a long pause on the tape. I glance over my shoulder at the bar door, feeling ashamed but desperate. I know these are confidences I should have to earn through months of slow intimacy, but I can't help myself. I just want to listen to her.

'I've thought about making a report,' she continues. 'March into the community centre and make Rosy go arrest him. I mean, I'm all for drinking, I love it, but with Dad it's . . . different. It's not a celebration for him, it seems like it's painful and scary, like he's numbing himself for some horrible medieval surgery. And yeah . . . I know why, and it's not like I haven't done worse stuff for the same reasons, but it's just . . . it's so . . .' Her voice wavers and breaks off, and she sniffles hard like a self-rebuke. 'God,' she whispers. 'Shit.'

Several seconds of tape hiss. I listen closer. Then the door flies open and I whirl around, tossing the recorder out into the dark. But it's not Julie. It's the two men from the pool table. They stumble out the door, jostling each other and laughing through the sides of their mouths as they light up cigarettes.

'Hey,' the one who was talking to Julie calls to me, and he and his friend start ambling in my direction. He's tall, good-looking, his muscular arms sleeved in tattoos: snakes and skeletons and the logos of extinct rock bands. 'What's up, man? You Nora's new guy?'

I hesitate, then shrug. They both laugh like I've made a dirty joke.

'Yeah, who ever knows with that chick, right?' He punches his friend in the chest while continuing to saunter towards me. 'So you know Julie, man? You Julie's friend?'

I nod.

'Known her long?'

I shrug, but I feel a coil inside me tensing.

He stops a few feet away from me and leans against the wall, taking a slow drag on his cigarette. 'That one used to be pretty wild, too, a few years back. I was her firearms teacher.'

I need to leave. I need to turn around right now and leave.

'She got all pure after she started dating that Kelvin kid, but man, for a year or so she was ripe fruit.' His exhalations form a haze of smoke that stings my dry eyes. 'A hundred bucks won't even buy a pack of cigarettes any more, but it sure went a long way with that bitch.'

I lunge forward and crack his head into the wall. It's easy, I just palm his face and thrust forward, punching the wall with the back of his skull. I don't know if I've killed him and I don't care. When his friend tries to grab me I do the exact same to him, two big dents in the Orchard's aluminium siding. Both men slump to the ground. I wobble my way down the stairs and out onto the catwalk. Some kids leaning on the support cables smoking joints stare at me as I shove past them. Excuse me, I try to say, but I can't seem to find the syllables. I slide down the four apartment floors and lurch out onto Fairy Street or Tinkerbell Street or whatever the fuck it's called. I just need to get away from all these people for a minute, collect my thoughts. I'm so hungry. God, I'm starving.

After a few minutes of wandering, I'm completely lost and disorientated. A light rain is falling and I'm alone on some dark narrow street. The asphalt glitters black and wet under the crooked street lamps. Up ahead, two guards converse in a rain-flecked cone of light, grunting to each other with the affected toughness of scared boys straining to be men.

'. . . out in Corridor 2 all last week, pouring foundations. We're less than a mile away from Goldman Dome but we've barely got a fuckin' crew any more. Grigio keeps pulling guys off Construction and dumping 'em into Security.'

'What about the Goldman crew? How's their end coming?'

'Goldman is shit. They're barely out their front door. I've been hearing the merger's in bad shape anyway, thanks to Grigio's bad diplomacy. Starting to wonder if he even wants the mergers any more, the way he handled Corridor 1. Wouldn't surprise me if he arranged the collapse himself.'

'You know that's bullshit. Don't be spreading that story around.'

'Yeah, well, either way, Construction's gone to shit since Kelvin got squished. We're just digging holes and filling 'em in.'

'I'd still rather be out building something than playing rent-a-cop in here all night. You get any action out there?'

'Just a couple of Fleshies wandering out of the woods. Pop, pop, game over.'

'No Boneys?'

'Haven't seen one of them in at least a year. They stick to their hives now'days. Fuckin' bullshit.'

'What, you like running into those things?'

'Hell of a lot more fun than Fleshies. Fuckers can move.'

'Fun? Are you shitting me? Those things are wrong; I don't even like touching 'em with my bullets.'

'Is that why your hit rate's one in twenty?'

'Doesn't even seem like they're human remains any more, you know? They're like aliens or something. Creeps the shit out of me.'

'Yeah, well, that's probably 'cause you're a pussy.'

'Fuck you. I'm going to take a leak.'

The guard disappears into the dark. His partner stands in the spotlight, pulling his parka tighter as the rain comes down. I'm still walking. I'm not interested in these men; I'm looking for a quiet corner where I can close my eyes and gather myself. But as I approach the light, the guard notices me, and I realise there's a problem. I'm drunk. My carefully studied gait has been replaced by an unsteady stagger. I lumber forward, my head lolling from side to side.

I look like . . . exactly what I am.

'Halt!' the guard shouts.

I halt.

He moves towards me a little. 'Step into the light please, sir.'

I step into the light, standing on the very edge of the yellow circle. I try to stand as straight as I can, as motionless as I can. Then I realise something else. The rain is dripping off my hair. The rain is running down my face. The rain is washing away my make-up, revealing the pale grey flesh underneath. I stumble back a step, slightly out of the lamplight.

The guard is about five feet away from me. His hand is on his gun. He moves closer and peers at me through slitted eyes. 'Have you been drinking alcohol tonight, sir?'

I open my mouth to say, No, sir, absolutely not, just a few glasses of delicious and heart-healthy grapefruit juice with my good friend Julie Cabernet. But the words evade me. My tongue is thick and dead in my mouth, and all that comes out is, 'Uhhhnnn . . .'

'What the fuck - ' The guard's eyes flash wide, he whips out his flashlight and shines it into my grey-streaked face, and I have no choice. I leap out of the shadows and pounce on him, knocking his gun aside and biting down on his throat. His life force rushes into my starved body and brain, soothing the agony of my hideous cravings. I start to tear into him, chewing deltoids and tender abdominals while the blood still pulses through them - but then I stop.

Julie stands in the bedroom doorway, watching me with a tentative smile.

I shut my eyes and grit my teeth.

No.

I drop the body to the ground and back away from it. I can no longer hide behind my ignorance. I know now that I have a choice, and I choose to change no matter what the cost. If I'm a thriving branch on the Tree of Death, I'll drop my leaves. If I have to starve myself to kill its twisted roots, I will.

The foetus in my stomach kicks, and I hear Perry's voice, gentle and reassuring. You won't starve, R. In my short life I made so many choices just because I thought they were required, but my dad was right: there's no rulebook for the world. It's in our heads, our collective human hive-mind. If there are rules, we're the ones making them. We can change them whenever we want to.

I spit out the meat in my mouth and wipe the blood off my face. Perry kicks me in the gut again and I vomit. I lean over and purge myself of everything. The meat, the blood, the vodka. As soon as I straighten up and wipe my mouth, I'm sober. The fuzz is gone. My head is clear as a glossy new record.

The guard's body begins to twitch back to life. His shoulders slowly rise, dragging the rest of his limp parts with them, as if he's being pinched and pulled upwards by unseen fingers. I need to kill him. I know I need to kill him, but I can't do it. After the vow I've just made, the thought of tearing into this man again and tasting his still-warm blood leaves me paralysed with horror. He shudders and retches, choking and clawing the dirt, straining and dry-heaving, his eyes bulging wide as the grey sludge of new death slithers into them. A wet, wretched groan escapes his mouth, and it's too much for me. I turn and run. Even in my bravest moment, I am a coward.

The rain is in full force. My feet splash in the streets and spatter mud on my freshly washed clothes. My hair hangs in my face like seaweed. In front of a big aluminium building with a plywood cross on the roof, I kneel in a puddle and splash water on my face. I wash my mouth out with dirty gutter run-off and spit until I can't taste anything. That holy wooden 'T' looms overhead, and I wonder if the Lord might ever find cause to approve of me, wherever and whatever he is.

Have you met him yet, Perry? Is he alive and well? Tell me he's not just the mouth of the sky. Tell me there's more looking down on us than that empty blue skull.

Wisely, Perry doesn't answer. I accept the silence, I get off my knees, and I keep running.

Avoiding street lights, I make my way back to Julie's house. I curl up against the wall, finding some shelter from the balcony overhead, and I wait there while the rain pounds the house's metal roof. After what seems like hours, I hear the girls' voices in the distance, but this time their rhythms stir no joy in me. The dance is a dirge, the music is minor.

They run towards the front door, Nora with her denim jacket pulled over her head, Julie with the hood of her red sweatshirt cinched tight on her face. Nora reaches the door first and rushes inside. Julie stops. I don't know if she sees me in the dark or just smells the fruity stench of my body spray, but something draws her to look around the corner of the house. She sees me huddled in the dark like a scared puppy. She ambles over slowly, her hands stuffed into her sweatshirt pockets. She crouches down and peeks out at me through the narrow opening of her hood. 'You okay?' she says.

I nod dishonestly.

She sits next to me on the small patch of dry ground and leans against the house. She takes off her hood and lifts the wool beanie underneath to brush wet hair out of her eyes, then pulls it back down. 'You scared me. You just disappeared.'

I look at her miserably, but I don't say anything.

'Do you want to tell me what happened?'

I shake my head.

'Did you, um . . . did you knock out Tim and his friend?'

I nod.

A smile of embarrassed pleasure creeps onto her face, as if I've just given her an over-large bouquet of roses or written her a bad love song. 'That was . . . sweet,' she says, holding back a giggle. A minute passes. She touches my knee. 'We had fun today, didn't we? Despite a few sticky moments?'

I can't smile, but I nod.

'I'm a little buzzed. You?'

I shake my head.

'Too bad. It's fun.' Her smile deepens and her eyes become far away. 'You know, I had my first drink when I was eight?' There is just a faint slur in her voice. 'My dad was a big wine buff and him and Mom used to throw tasting parties whenever Dad was between wars. They'd bring all their friends over and pop a prized vintage and get pretty well toasted. I'd sit there in the middle of the couch taking little sips off the half-glass I was allowed and just laugh at all the silly grownups getting sillier. Rosy would get so flushed! One glass and he looked like Santa Claus. He and Dad arm-wrestled on the coffee table once and broke a lamp. It was . . . so great.'

She starts doodling in the dirt with one finger. Her smile is wistful, aimed at no one. 'Things weren't always so grim, you know, R? Dad has his moments, and even when the world fell apart we still had some fun. We'd take little family salvage trips and pick up the most crazy wines you can imagine. Thousand-dollar bottles of '97 Dom. Romane Conti just rolling around on the floors of abandoned cellars.' She chuckles to herself. 'Dad would have absolutely lost his shit over those back in the day. By the time we moved here he was kinda . . . muted. But God, we drank some outrageous stuff.'

I'm watching her talk. Watching her jaw move and collecting her words one by one as they spill from her lips. I don't deserve them. Her warm memories. I'd like to paint them over the bare plaster walls of my soul, but everything I paint seems to peel.

'And then Mom ran off.' She pulls her finger out of the dirt, inspecting her work. She has drawn a house. A quaint little cottage with a smoke cloud in the chimney, a benevolent sun smiling down on the roof. 'Dad thought she must have been drunk, hence the alcohol ban, but I saw her, and she wasn't. She was very sober.'

She is still smiling, as if this is all just easy nostalgia, but the smile is cold now, lifeless.

'She came into my room that night and just looked at me for a while. I pretended I was asleep. Then right as I was about to pop up and yell "boo" . . . she walked out. So I didn't get the chance.'

She reaches a hand down to wipe away her drawing, but I touch her wrist. I look at her and shake my head. She regards me silently for a moment. Then she scoots around to face me and grins, inches from my face.

'R,' she says. 'If I kiss you, will I die?'

Her eyes are steady. She's barely drunk.

'You said I won't, right? I won't get infected? Because I really feel like kissing you.' She fidgets. 'And even if you do pass something to me, maybe it wouldn't be all bad. I mean, you're different now, right? You're not a zombie. You're . . . something new.' Her face is very close. Her smile fades. 'Well, R?'

I look into her eyes, splashing in their icy waters like a shipwrecked sailor grasping for the raft. But there is no raft.

'Julie,' I say. 'I need . . . to show you something.'

She cocks her head with gentle curiosity. 'What?'

I stand up. I take her hand and start walking.

The night is still except for the primeval hiss of the rain. It drenches the dirt and slicks the asphalt, liquefying the shadows into shiny black ink. I stick to the narrow back-streets and unlit alleys. Julie follows slightly behind me, staring at the side of my face.

'Where are we going?' she asks.

I pause at an intersection to retrace the maps of my stolen memories, calling up images of places I've never been, people I've never met. 'Almost . . . there.'

A few more careful glances around corners, furtive dashes across intersections, and there it is. A five-storey house looms ahead of us, tall, skinny and grey like the rest of this skeletal city, its windows flickering yellow like wary eyes.

'What the hell, R?' Julie whispers, staring up at it. 'This is . . .'

I pull her to the front door and we stand there in the shelter of the eaves, the roof rattling like military drums in the rain. 'Can I . . . borrow your hat?' I ask without looking at her.

She doesn't move for a moment, then she pulls it off and hands it to me. Over-long and floppy, dark blue wool with a red stripe . . .

Mrs Rosso knitted this for Julie's seventeenth birthday. Perry thought she looked like an elf in it and would start speaking to her in Tolkien tongues whenever she put it on. She called him the biggest nerd she'd ever met, and he agreed, while playfully kissing her throat and -

I pull the beanie low over my face and knock a slow waltz on the door, eyes glued to the ground like a shy child. The door opens a crack. A middle-aged woman in sweatpants looks out at us. Her face is puffy and heavily lined, dark bags under bloodshot eyes. 'Miss Grigio?' she says.

Julie glances at me. 'Hi, Mrs Grau. Um . . .'

'What are you doing out? Is Nora with you? It's after curfew.'

'I know, we . . . got a little lost on our way back from the Orchard. Nora's staying at my house tonight but um . . . can we come in for a minute? I need to talk to the guys.'

I keep my head down as Mrs Grau gives me a cursory appraisal. She opens the door for us with an annoyed sigh. 'You can't stay here, you know. This is a foster home, not a flop house, and your friend here is too old for new residency.'

'I know, sorry, we'll . . .' She glances at me again. 'We'll just be a minute.'

I can't endure formalities right now. I brush past the woman and into the house. A toddler peeks around a bedroom door and Mrs Grau glares at him. 'What did I tell you?' she snaps, loud enough to wake the rest of the kids. 'Back in bed right now.' The boy disappears into the shadows. I lead Julie up the staircase.

The second storey is identical to the first, except there are rows of pre-adolescents sleeping on the floor on small mats. So many now. New foster homes pop up like processing plants as mothers and fathers disappear, chewed up and swallowed down by the plague. We step over a few tiny bodies on our way to the stairs, and a little girl grasps feebly at Julie's ankle.

'I had a bad dream,' she whispers.

'I'm sorry, honey,' Julie whispers back. 'You're safe now, okay?'

The girl closes her eyes again. We climb the stairs. The third floor is still awake. Young teens and patch-beard semi-adults sitting around on folding chairs, hunched over desks writing in booklets and flipping through manuals. Some kids snore on stacked bunks inside narrow bedrooms. All the doors are open except one.

A group of older boys look up from their work, surprised. 'Wow, hey, Julie. How's it going? You holding up okay?'

'Hey, guys. I'm . . .' She trails off, and her ellipsis eventually forms a period. She looks at the closed door. She looks at me. Gripping her hand, I move forward and open the door, then shut it behind us.

The room is dark except for the faint yellow glow of street lamps through the window. There is nothing in here but a plywood dresser and a stripped bed, with a few pictures of Julie taped to the ceiling above it. The air is stale, and much colder than the rest of the house.

'R . . .' Julie says in a quivery, dangerous voice. 'Why the fuck are we here?'

I finally turn to face her. In the yellow dimness, we look like actors in a silent sepia tragedy. 'Julie,' I say. 'That theory . . . about why we . . . eat the brain . . .'

She starts to shake her head.

'True.'

I look into her reddening eyes a moment longer, then kneel down and open the bottom drawer of the dresser. Inside, under piles of old stamps, a microscope, an army of pewter figurines, there is a stack of paper bound together with red yarn. I lift it out and hand it to Julie. In so many strange and twisted ways, I feel like the manuscript is mine. Like I've just handed her my own bloody heart on a platter. I am fully prepared for her to claw it to shreds.

She takes the manuscript. She unties the yarn. She stares at the cover page for a full minute, breathing shakily. Then she wipes her eyes and clears her throat.

'"Red Teeth,"' she reads. '"By Perry Kelvin."' She glances down the page. '"For Julie Cabernet, the only light left."' She lowers the manuscript and looks away for a moment, trying to hide a spasm in her throat, then steels herself and turns the page to the first chapter. As she reads, a faint smile peeks through the tear tracks. 'Wow,' she says, wiping a finger across her nose and sniffling. 'It's actually . . . kinda good. He used to write such dry and detached bullshit. This is . . . cheesy . . . but in a sweet way. More like how he really was.' She glances at the cover page again. 'He started it less than a year ago. I had no idea he was still writing.' She flips to the last page. 'It's not finished. Cuts off in the middle of a sentence. "Outmanned and outgunned, certain of death, he kept fighting, because - "'

She rubs her thumbs into the paper, feeling its texture. She puts it near her face and inhales. Then she closes her eyes, closes the manuscript, and reties the yarn. She looks up at me. I am nearly a foot taller than her and probably sixty pounds heavier, but I feel small and featherweight. Like she could knock me down and crush me with a single whispered word.

But she doesn't speak. She sets the manuscript back in the drawer and gently slides it shut. She straightens up, dries her face with her sleeve, and embraces me, resting her ear against my chest.

'Thump-thump,' she murmurs. 'Thump-thump. Thump-thump.'

My hands hang limp at my sides. 'I'm sorry,' I say.

With her eyes closed, her voice muffled by my shirt, she says, 'I forgive you.'

I raise a hand and touch her straw-gold hair. 'Thank you.'

These three phrases, so simple, so primal, have never sounded so complete. So true to their basic meanings. I feel her cheek move against my chest, her zygomaticus major pulling her lips into a faint smile.

Without another word, we shut the door on Perry Kelvin's room and leave his home. We descend the stairs past beleaguered teens, past tossing and turning kids, past deeply dreaming babies, and out into the street. I feel a nudge low in my chest, closer to my heart than my belly, and a soft voice in my head.

Thank you, Perry says.

I would like to end it here. How nice if I could edit my own life. If I could halt in the middle of a sentence and put it all to rest in a drawer somewhere, consummate my amnesia and forget all the things that have happened, are happening, and are about to happen. Shut my eyes and go to sleep happy.

But no, 'R'. No sleep of the innocent. Not for you. Did you forget? You have blood on your hands. On your lips. On your teeth. Smile for the cameras.

 

[Angel]

UPDATE 18

'Julie,' I say, bracing to confess my final sin. 'I need . . . to tell you . . .'

BANG.



The Stadium's field halogens flare like suns and midnight becomes daylight. I can see every pore in Julie's face.

'What the hell?' she gasps, whipping her head around. A piercing alarm further shatters the night's stillness, and then we see it: the Jumbotron is aglow. Hanging from the upper reaches of the open roof like a tablet descending from Heaven, the screen plays a blocky animation of a quarterback running from what appears to be a zombie, arms outstretched and clutching. The screen blinks between this and a word that I think might be:

BREACH

'R . . .' Julie says, horrified, 'did you eat someone?'


I look at her desperately. 'No ch . . . no choi . . . no choice,' I stutter, my diction collapsing in my state of panic. 'Guard . . . stopped me. Didn't . . . mean. Didn't . . . want.'

She presses her lips together, her eyes boring into me, then gives a single shake of her head as if banishing one thought, committing to another. 'Okay. Then we need to get inside. God damn it, R.'

We run into the house and she slams the door. Nora is at the top of the stairs. 'Where have you guys been? What's going on out there?'

'It's a breach,' Julie says. 'Zombie in the Stadium.'

'You mean him?'

The disappointment in her reply makes me wince. 'Yes and no.'

We hurry into Julie's bedroom and she turns out the lights. We all sit on the floor on the piles of laundry, and for a while nobody speaks. We just sit and listen to the sounds. Guards running and shouting. Gunfire. Our own heavy breathing.

'Don't worry,' Julie whispers to Nora, but I know it's for me. 'It won't spread much. Those shots were probably Security taking them out already.'

'Are we in the clear, then?' Nora asks. 'Will R be okay?'

Julie looks at me. Her face is grim. 'Even if they think the breach started from a natural death, that guard obviously didn't eat himself. Security will know there's at least one zombie unaccounted for.'

Nora follows Julie's eyes to mine, and I can almost imagine my face flushing. 'It was you?' she asks, straining for neutrality.

'Didn't . . . mean. Was . . . going . . . kill me.'

She says nothing. Her face is blank.

I meet her stare, willing her to feel my crushing remorse. 'It was my last,' I say, straining to force language back into my idiot tongue. 'No matter what. Swear to the skymouth.'

A few agonising moments pass. Then Nora slowly nods, and addresses Julie. 'So we need to get him out of here.'

'They shut everything down for breaches. All the doors will be locked and guarded. They might even shut the roof if they get scared enough.'

'So what the hell are we supposed to do?'

Julie shrugs, and the gesture looks so bleak on her, so wrong. 'I don't know,' she says. 'Once again, I don't know.'

Julie and Nora fall sleep. They fight it for hours, trying to come up with a plan to save me, but eventually they succumb. I lie on a pile of pants and stare up at the starry green ceiling. Not so easy, Mr Lennon. Even if you try.

It seems trivial now, a thin silver lining on a vast black storm cloud, but I think I'm learning to read. As I look up at the phosphorescent galaxy, letters come together and form words. Stringing them into full sentences is still beyond me, but I savour the sensation of those little symbols clicking together and bursting like soap bubbles of sound. If I ever see my wife again . . . I'll at least be able to read her name tag.

The hours ooze by. It's long after midnight, but bright as noon outside. The halogens ram their white light against the house, squeezing in through cracks in the window shades. My ears tune to the sounds around me. The girls' breathing. Their small shifting movements. And then, sometime around two in the morning, a phone rings.

Julie comes awake, gets up on one elbow. In some distant room of the house, the phone rings again. She throws off her blankets and stands up. Strange to see her from this angle, towering over me instead of cowering under. I'm the one who needs protecting now. One mistake, one brief lapse of my new-found judgement - that's all it took to unravel everything. What a massive responsibility, living as a moral being.

The phone keeps ringing. Julie walks out of the bedroom and I follow her through the dark, echoing house. We step into what appears to be an office. There is a large desk covered in papers and blueprints, and on the walls various kinds of telephones are screwed to the Sheetrock, different brands and styles, all from different eras.

'They rerouted the phone system,' Julie explains. 'It's more like an intercom now. We have direct lines to all the important areas.'

Each phone has a name-tag sticker stuck below it, with the location Sharpied onto the blank. Hi, my name is:

GARDENS

KITCHENS

WAREHOUSE

GARAGE

ARMOURY

CORRIDOR 2

GOLDMAN DOME

AIG ARENA

LEHMAN FIELD

And so on.

The phone that's ringing, a pea-green rotary dialler covered in dust, is labelled:

OUTSIDE

Julie looks at the phone. She looks at me. 'This is weird. That line is from the phones in the abandoned outer districts. Since we got walkie-talkies nobody uses it any more.'

The phone clangs its bells, loud and insistent. I can't believe Nora is still asleep.

Slowly, Julie picks up the receiver and puts it to her ear. 'Hello?' She waits. 'What? I can't under - ' Her brow furrows in concentration. Then her eyes widen. 'Oh.' They narrow. 'You. Yeah, this is Julie, what do you - ' She waits. 'Fine. Yeah, he's right here.'

She holds the phone out to me. 'It's for you.'

I stare at it. 'What?'

'It's your friend. That fat fuck from the airport.'

I grab the phone. I put the earpiece to my mouth. Julie shakes her head and flips it around for me. Into the receiver I breathe a stunned, 'M?'

His deep rumble crackles in my ear. 'Hey . . . lover boy.'

'What's . . . Where are you?'

'Out in . . . city. Didn't know . . . what would get with . . . phone, but had . . . to try. You're . . . okay?'

'Okay but . . . trapped. Stadium . . . locked down.'

'Shit.'

'What's . . . going on? Out there.'

There is silence for a moment. 'R,' he says. 'Dead . . . still coming. More. From airport. Other places. Lots . . . of us now.'

I'm silent. The phone wanders away from my ear. Julie looks at me expectantly.

'Hello?' M says.

'Sorry. I'm here.'

'Well, we're . . . here. What now? What should . . . do?'

I rest the phone on my shoulder and look at the wall, at nothing. I look at the papers and plans on General Grigio's desk. His strategies are all gibberish to me. I have no doubt it's all important - food allocation, construction plans, weapon distribution, combat tactics. He's trying to keep everyone alive, and that's good. That's foundational. But like Julie said, there must be something even deeper than that. The earth under that foundation. Without that firm ground, it's all going to collapse, over and over, no matter how many bricks he lays. This is what I'm interested in. The earth under the bricks.

'What's going on?' Julie asks. 'What's he saying?'

As I look into her anxious face, I feel the twitch in my guts, the young, eager voice in my head.

It's happening, corpse. Whatever you and Julie triggered, it's moving. A good disease, a virus that causes life! Do you see this, you dumb fucking monster? It's inside you! You have to get out of these walls and spread it!

I angle the phone towards Julie so she can listen. She leans in close.

'M,' I say.

'Yeah.'

'Tell Julie.'

'What?'

'Tell Julie . . . what's happening.'

There's a pause. 'Changing,' he says. 'Lots of us . . . changing. Like R.'

Julie looks at me and I can almost sense her neck hairs standing on end. 'It's not just you?' she says, moving away from the phone. 'This . . . reviving thing?' Her voice is small and tentative, like a little girl poking her head out of a bomb shelter after years of life in the dark. It almost quivers with tight-leashed hope. 'Are you saying the plague is healing?'

I nod. 'We're . . . fixing things.'

'But how?'

'Don't know. But we have to . . . do more of it. Out there . . . where M is. "Outside".'

Her excitement cools, hardens. 'So we have to leave.'

I nod.

'Both of us?'

'Both,' M's voice crackles in the earpiece like an eaves-dropping mother. 'Julie . . . part of it.'

She eyes me dubiously. 'You want me. Skinny little human girl. Out there in the wild, running with a pack of zombies?'

I nod.

'Do you grasp how insane that is?'

I nod.

She is silent for a moment, looking at the floor. 'Do you really think you can keep me safe?' she asks me. 'Out there, with them?'

My incurable honesty makes me hesitate, and Julie frowns.

'Yes,' M answers for me, exasperated. 'He can. And I'll . . . help.'

I nod quickly. 'M will help. The others . . . will help. Besides,' I add with a faint smile, 'you can . . . keep yourself safe.'

She shrugs nonchalantly. 'I know. I just wanted to see what you'd say.'

'So you'll . . . ?'

'I'll go with you.'

'You're . . . sure?'

Her eyes are distant and hard. 'I had to bury my mom's empty dress. I've been waiting for this a long time.'

I nod. I take a deep breath.

'The only problem with your plan,' she continues, 'is that you seem to be forgetting you ate someone last night, and this place is going to stay clamped shut until they find and kill you.'

'Should we . . . attack?' M says. 'Get you . . . out?'

I put the phone back to my ear, gripping the receiver hard. 'No,' I tell him.

'Have . . . army. Where's . . . battle?'

'Don't know. Not here. These are . . . people.'

'Well?'

I look at Julie. She looks at the ground and rubs her forehead.

'Just wait,' I tell M.

'Wait?'

'A little longer. We'll . . . figure it out.'

'Before . . . they kill you?'

'Hopefully.'

A long, dubious silence. Then: 'Hurry up.'

Julie and I stay up for the rest of the night. In our rain-wet clothes we sit on the floor in the cold living room and don't say a word. Eventually my eyes sag shut, and in this strange calm, in what may be my last few hours on Earth, my mind creates a dream for me. Crisp and clear, alive with colour, unfolding like a time-lapse rose in the sparkling darkness.

In this dream, my dream, I am floating down a river on my housejet's severed tail fin. I am lying on my back under the blue midnight, watching the stars drift by above me. The river is uncharted, even in this age of maps and satellites, and I have no idea where it leads. The air is still. The night is warm. I've brought only two provisions: a box of pad thai and Perry's book. Thick. Ancient. Bound in leather. I open it to the middle. An unfinished sentence in some language I've never seen, and beyond it, nothing. An epic tome of empty pages, blank white and waiting. I shut the book and lay my head down on the cool steel. The pad thai tickles my nose, sweet and spicy and strong. I feel the river widening, gaining force.

I hear the waterfall.

'R.'

My eyes open and I sit up. Julie is cross-legged next to me, watching me with grim amusement.

'Having some nice dreams?'

'Not . . . sure,' I mumble, rubbing my eyes.

'Did you happen to dream up any solutions to our little problem?'

I shake my head.

'Yeah, me neither.' She glances at the wall clock and bunches her lips ruefully. 'I'm supposed to be at the community centre in a few hours to do story time. David and Marie are going to cry when I don't show up.'

David and Marie. I repeat the names in my head, savouring their contours. I would let Trina eat my whole leg for the chance to see those kids again. To hear a few more clumsy syllables tumble from their mouths before I die. 'What are . . . you reading them?'

She looks out of the window at the city, its every crack and flaw brought into sharp relief by the blinding white light. 'I've been trying to get them into the Redwall books. I figured all those songs and feasts and courageous warrior mice would be a nice escape from the nightmare they're growing up in. Marie keeps asking for books about zombies and I keep telling her I can't read non-fiction for story time but . . .' She notices the look on my face and trails off. 'Are you okay?'

I nod.

'Are you thinking about your kids at the airport?'

I hesitate, then nod.

She reaches out and touches my knee, looking into my stinging eyes. 'R? I know things look bleak right now, but listen. You can't quit. As long as you're still breath - sorry, as long as you're still moving, it's not over. Okay?'

I nod.

'Okay? Fucking say it, R.'

'Okay.'

She smiles.

'TWO. EIGHT. TWENTY-FOUR.'

We jolt away from each other as a speaker in the ceiling blares out a series of numbers followed by a shrill alert tone.

'This is Colonel Rosso with a community-wide notice,' the speaker says. 'The security breach has been contained. The infected officer has been neutralised, with no further casualties reported.'

I release a deep breath.

'However . . .'

'Shit,' Julie whispers.

'. . . the original source of the breach remains at large within our walls. Security patrols will now begin a door-to-door search of every building in the Stadium. Since we don't know where this thing might be hiding, everyone should come out of their houses and congregate in a public area. Donot confine yourself in any small spaces.' Rosso pauses to cough. 'Sorry about this, folks. We'll get it taken care of, just . . . sit tight.'

There's a click, and the PA goes quiet.

Julie jumps to her feet and storms into the bedroom. She pulls open the blinds, letting the floodlights burst through the window. 'Rise and shine, Miss Greene, we're out of time. Do you remember any old exits in the wall tunnels? Wasn't there a fire escape somewhere by the sky box? R, can you climb a ladder yet?'

'Wait, what?' Nora croaks, trying to shield her eyes. 'What's happening?'

'According to R's friend, maybe the end of this shitty undead world, if we don't get killed first.'

Nora finally comes awake. 'Sorry, what?'

'I'll tell you later. They just announced a sweep. We have maybe ten minutes. We need to find . . .' Her voice fades and I watch her mouth move. The shapes her lips make for each word, the flick of tongue against glistening teeth. She is holding onto hope but my grip is slipping. She twists at her hair as she talks, her golden tresses stiff and matted and in need of a wash.

The spicy smell of her shampoo, flowers and herbs and cinnamon dancing with her natural oils. She would never say what brand she used. She liked to keep her scent a mystery.

'R!'

Julie and Nora are staring at me, waiting. I open my mouth to speak, but I have no words. And then the front door of the house bangs open so hard it resonates through the metal walls all the way to where we're standing. Heavy, booted footfalls pound the stairs.

'Oh Jesus,' Julie says in a panicked breath. She herds us out of the room and into the hallway bathroom. 'Get his makeup back on,' she hisses to Nora, and slams the door shut.

As Nora fumbles with her compact and tries to re-rouge my rain-stained face, I hear two voices out in the hall.

'Dad, what's going on? Did they find the zombie?'

'Not yet, but they will. Have you seen anything?'

'No, I've been here.'

'Are you alone?'

'Yeah, I've been here since last night.'

'Why is the bathroom light on?'

Footsteps pound towards us.

'Wait, Dad! Wait a second!' She lowers her voice a little. 'Nora and Archie are in there.'

'Why did you just tell me you're here alone? This is not a time for games, Julie, this is not a time for hide-and-seek.'

'They're . . . you know . . . in there.'

There is the briefest of hesitations. 'Nora and Archie,' he shouts at the door, his voice compressed and extremely loud. 'As you just heard on the intercom there is a breach in progress. I cannot begin to imagine a worse time for lovemaking. Come out immediately.'

Nora straddles me against the sink and buries my face in her cleavage just as Grigio yanks the door open.

'Dad!' Julie squeals, flashing Nora a quick look as she jumps off me.

'Come out immediately,' Grigio says.

We step out of the bathroom. Nora straightens her clothes and pats down her hair, doing a pretty good job of looking embarrassed. I just look at Grigio, unapologetic, limbering up my diction for its first and probably last big test. He looks back at me with that taut, angular face, peering into my eyes. There are less than two feet between us.

'Hello, Archie,' he says.

'Hello, sir.'

'You and Miss Greene are in love?'

'Yes, sir.'

'That is wonderful. Have you discussed marriage?'

'Not yet.'

'Why delay? Why deliberate? These are the last days. Where do you live, Archie?'

'Goldman . . . Field.'

'Goldman Dome?'

'Yes, sir. Sorry.'

'What work do you do at Goldman Dome.'

'Gardens.'

'Does that work allow you and Nora to feed your children?'

'We don't have children, sir.'

'Children replace us when we die. When you have children you will need to feed them. I'm told things are bad at Goldman Dome. I'm told you are running out of everything. It's a dark world we live in, isn't it, Archie?'

'Sometimes.'

'We do the best we can with what God gives us. If God gives us stones when we ask for bread, we will sharpen our teeth and eat stones.'

'Or make . . . our own bread.'

Grigio smiles. 'Are you wearing make-up, Archie?'

Grigio stabs me.

I didn't even notice the knife coming out of its sheath. The five-inch blade sinks into my shoulder and pokes out the other side, pinning me to the drywall. I don't feel it and I don't flinch. The wound doesn't bleed.

'Julie!' Grigio roars, stepping back from me and drawing his pistol, his eyes wild in their deep sockets. 'Did you bring the Dead into my city? Into my home? Did you let the Dead touch you?'

'Dad, listen to me!' Julie says, holding her hands out towards him. 'R is different. He's changing.'

'The Dead don't change, Julie! They are not people, they are things!'

'How do we know that? Just because they don't talk to us and tell us about their lives? We don't understand their thoughts so we assume they don't have any?'

'We've done tests! The Dead have never shown any signs of self-awareness or emotional response!'

'Neither have you, Dad! Jesus Christ - R saved my life! He protected me and brought me home! He's human! And there are more like him!'

'No,' Grigio says, abruptly calm. His hands stop wavering and the gun steadies, inches from my face.

'Dad, please listen to me? Please?' She takes a step closer. She is trying to stay cool but I can tell she is terrified. 'When I was at the airport, something happened. We sparked something, and whatever it is, it's spreading. The Dead are coming back to life, they're leaving their hives and trying to change what they are, and we have to find a way to help. Imagine if we could cure the plague, Dad! Imagine if we could clean up this mess and start over!'

Grigio shakes his head. I can see his jaw muscles tightening under his waxy skin. 'Julie, you are young. You don't understand our world. We can stay alive and we can kill the things that want to kill us, but there is no grand solution. We searched for years and never found one, and now our time is up. The world is over. It can't be cured, it can't be salvaged, it can't be saved.'

'Yes it can!' Julie screams at him, losing all composure. 'Who decided life has to be a nightmare? Who wrote that fucking rule? We can fix it, we've just never tried before! We've always been too busy and selfish and scared!'

Grigio grits his teeth. 'You are a dreamer. You are a child. You are your mother.'

'Dad, listen!'

'No.'

 

[Angel]

UPDATE 19
He cocks the gun and presses it against my forehead, directly onto Julie's Band-Aid. Here it comes. Here is M's ever-present irony. My inevitable death, ignoring me all those years when I wished for it daily, arriving only after I've decided I want to live for ever. I close my eyes and brace myself.

A spatter of blood warms my face - but it's not mine. My eyes flash open just in time to see Julie's knife glancing off Grigio's hand. The gun flies out of his grip and fires when it hits the floor, then again and again as the recoil knocks it against the walls of the narrow hall like a ricocheting Superball. Everyone drops for cover, and the gun finally spins to rest touching Nora's toes. In the deafened silence she stares down at it, wide-eyed, then looks at the general. Cradling his gashed hand, he lunges. Nora snatches the gun off the floor and aims it at his face. He freezes. He flexes his jaw and inches forward as if about to pounce anyway. But then Nora pops out the spent ammo clip, whips a fresh one out of her purse, shoves it into the gun and chambers a round, all one liquid motion without ever taking her eyes off his. Grigio steps back.



'Go,' she says, her eyes flicking to Julie. 'Try to get out somehow. Just try.'

Julie grabs my hand. We back out of the room while her dad stands there vibrating with rage.

'Goodbye, Dad,' Julie says softly. We turn and run down the stairs.

'Julie!' Grigio howls, and the sound reminds me so much of another sound, a hollow blast from a broken hunting horn, that I shiver in my damp shirt.


We are running. Julie stays in front, leading us through the cramped streets. Behind us, angry shouts ring out from the direction of Julie's house. Then the squawk of walkie-talkies. We are running, and we are being chased. Julie's leadership is less than decisive. We zigzag and backtrack. We are rodents scrambling in a cage. We run as the looming rooftops spin around us.

Then we hit the wall. A sheer concrete barrier laced with scaffolding, ladders and walkways to nowhere. All the bleachers are gone, but one staircase remains; a dark hallway beckons to us from the top. We run towards it. Everything on either side of the staircase has been stripped away, leaving it floating in space like Jacob's ladder.

A shout flies up from the ground below just as we reach the opening. 'Miss Grigio!'

We turn and look down. Colonel Rosso is at the bottom of the steps, surrounded by a retinue of Security officers. He is the only one without his gun drawn.

'Please don't run!' he calls to Julie.

Julie pulls me into the hallway and we sprint into the dark.

This inner space is clearly under construction, but most of it remains exactly as it was abandoned. Hot-dog stands, souvenir kiosks and overpriced pretzel booths sit cold and lifeless in the shadows. The shouts of the Security team echo behind us. I wait for the dead end that will halt us, that will force me to turn and face the inevitable.

The hallway ends. In the faint light creeping through holes in the concrete, I see a sign on the door:

EMERGENCY EXIT

Julie runs faster, dragging me behind her. We slam into the door and it flies open -

'Oh shhh - ' she gasps and whips around, grabbing onto the door frame as one foot dangles out over an eight-storey drop.

Cold wind whistles around the doorway, where torn stumps of a fire escape protrude from the wall.

Birds flutter past. Below, the city spreads out like a vast cemetery, high-rises like headstones.

'Miss Grigio!'

Rosso and his officers roll to a stop about twenty feet behind us. Rosso is breathing hard, clearly too old for hot pursuit.

I look out the door at the ground below. I look at Julie. I look down again, then back at Julie.

'Julie,' I say.

'What?'

'Are you sure you want . . . to come with me?'

She looks at me, straining to force breath through her rapidly constricting bronchial tubes. There are questions in her eyes, maybe doubts, surely fears, but she nods. 'Yes.'

'Please stop running,' Rosso groans, leaning over, hands on his knees. 'This is not the way.'

'I have to go,' she says.

'Miss Cabernet. Julie. You can't leave your father here. You're all he has left.'

She bites her lower lip, but her eyes are steely. 'Dad's dead, Rosy. He just hasn't started rotting yet.'

She grabs my hand, the one I shattered on M's face, and squeezes so hard I think she might break it even further. She looks up at me. 'Well, R?'

I pull her to me. I wrap my arms around her and hold tight enough to fuse our genes. We are face to face and I almost kiss her, but instead I take two steps backwards, and we fall through the doorway.

We plummet like a shot bird. My arms and legs encircle her, almost completely enveloping her tiny body. We crash through a roof overhang, a support bar tears into my thigh, my head bounces off a beam, we tangle in a cellphone banner and rip it in half, and then, finally, we hit the ground. A chorus of cracks and crunches shoots through me as my back greets the earth and Julie's weight flattens my chest. She rolls off me, choking and gasping for breath, and I lie there staring up at the sky. Here we are.

Julie raises herself on hands and knees and fumbles her inhaler out of her bag, takes a shot and holds it, supporting herself against the ground with one arm. When she can breathe again she crouches over me with terror in her eyes. Her face eclipses the hazy sun. 'R!' she whispers. 'Hey!'

As slow and shaky as the day I first rose from the dead, I lift myself upright and hobble to my feet. Various bones grind and crackle throughout my body. I smile, and in my breathy, tuneless tenor, I sing, 'You make . . . me feel so young . . .'

She bursts out laughing and hugs me. I feel the pressure snap a few joints back into place.

She looks up at the open doorway. Rosso is framed in it, looking down at us. Julie waves to him, and he disappears back into the Stadium with a swiftness that suggests pursuit. I try not to begrudge the man his paradigm - perhaps in his world, orders are orders.

So Julie and I run into the city. With each step I feel my body stabilising, bones realigning, tissues stiffening around cracks to keep me from falling apart. I've never felt anything like this before. Is this some form of healing?

We dash through the empty streets, past countless rusty cars, drifts of dead leaves and debris. We violate one-way streets. We blow stop signs. Ahead of us: the edge of town, the high grassy hill where the city opens up and the freeway leads elsewhere. Behind us: the relentless roar of assault vehicles gunning out of the Stadium gate. This cannot stand! declare the steel-jawed mouths of the rule makers. Find those little embers and stomp them out! With these howls at our backs, we crest the hill.

We are face to face with an army.

They stand in the grassy field next to the freeway ramps. Hundreds of them. They mill around in the grass, staring at the sky or at nothing, their grey, sunken faces oddly serene. But when the front line sees us they freeze, then pivot in our direction. Their focus spreads in a wave until the entire mob is standing at attention. Julie gives me an amused glance as if to say, Really? Then a disturbance ripples through the ranks, and a burly, bald, six-foot-five zombie pushes his way into the open.

'M,' I say.

'R,' he says. He gives Julie a quick nod. 'Julie.'

'Hiiii . . .' she says, leaning into me warily.

Our pursuers' tyres screech and we hear a rev of engines. They are very close. M steps up to the peak of the hill and the mob follows him. Julie huddles close to me as they sweep in around us, absorbing us into their odorous army, their rank ranks. It could be my imagination or a trick of the light, but M's skin looks less ashen than usual. His partial lips seem more expressive. And for the first time since I've known him, his neatly trimmed beard is not stained with blood.

The trucks barrel towards us, but as the swarm of the Dead rises into view on the hilltop, the vehicles slow down, then grumble to a stop. There are only four of them. Two Hummer H2s, a Chevy Tahoe and an Escalade, all spray-painted military olive drab. The hulking machines look small and pitiful from where we stand. The Tahoe's door opens, and Colonel Rosso slowly emerges. Clutching his rifle, he scans the row upon row of swaying bodies, weighing odds and strategies. His eyes are wide behind his thick glasses. He swallows, then lowers his gun.

'I'm sorry, Rosy,' Julie calls down to him, and points at the Stadium. 'I can't do it any more, okay? It's a fucking lie. We think we're surviving in there but we're not.'

Rosso is looking hard at the zombies arrayed around him, peering into their faces. He's old enough that he's probably been around since the beginning of all this. He knows what the Dead are supposed to look like, and he can tell when something's different, no matter how subtle, subliminal, subcutaneous.

'You can't save the world by yourself!' he yells. 'Come back and we can discuss this!'

'I'm not by myself,' Julie says, and gestures at the forest of zombies swaying around her. 'I'm with these guys.'

Rosso's lips twist in a tortured grimace, then he jumps in his vehicle, slams the door, and revs back towards the Stadium with the other three right behind. A brief respite, a quick suck of breath, because I know they aren't quitting, they can't quit, they're just gathering their strength, their weapons, their brute-force determination.