EDEN
A Zombie Novel
by Tony Monchinski
Eden
Tony Monchinski
Published by Permuted Press at Smashwords.
Copyright 2008 Tony Monchinski
Preface
I first met Tommy Arlin at an open mic night in downtown Raleigh, North Carolina, a monthly event dubbed The Cypher. I’d started to attend these as an outlet for pent-up energy and as a way to meet women. I didn’t meet many women—to be exact, one lesbian and one certifiable hottie who came up to me with her boyfriend in tow after I read to let me know how much she’d liked what I’d read (the boyfriend liked my shit too), but I’m sure my natural shyness didn’t help matters (nor, for that matter, did the presence of said boyfriend). So I didn’t meet any women, which only added to all that pent up energy, but I did meet the author of this book in your hands.
The Cypher wasn’t your usual run-of-the-mill open mic night. This was no Barnes & Noble, and the poets weren’t forty-something, cappuccino-sipping, beret-wearing, suburbanite Beatnic-wannabies trying to look anything but. There was something special about The Cypher, something I might not be able to articulate in words. A vibe. Something always went down at The Cypher.
Anyway, that night was shaping up to be a memorable one. Shirlette Ammons got up there and tore shit up, Paradox’s set had people scratching their heads from the heavy mental he’d dropped, and I’d done my thing about my fictional neo-beat poet and rake Stanislaus Kaerevsky and his sidekick in crime and rhyme Incognito Willy.
Then this guy got up on the microphone, looked like a homeless bum. Turns out he was a homeless bum. He reached into a pocket of the raincoat he was wearing—it was a humid summer night outside, I have no idea why he was decked out in a full length raincoat unless he spent his free time as a sex pervert flasher—anyway, this guy reaches into the pocket of his stained musky raincoat and fishes out a crumpled-up, discolored scrap of loose-leaf paper which he precedes to unfold. “They call me Dirtbag Brown,” he announced. This was not Tommy Arlin. Taking a swig from the bottle in the paper bag he had on stage with him, drooling half its contents onto the head of the microphone, risking electrocution—how it didn’t happen I don’t know—he proceded to hurl invective and scorn upon all of us in the audience.
There were “bitch-ass” this and “jive-ass honkey” thats, insults aimed at the crowd in general. At least two or three women turned and walked out of the joint when Dirtbag Brown leered at them and stammered some half-discernable lewd comments their way, and a couple of college boys made a big show of having to be held back by their buddies from charging the stage.
Whoever and whatever Dirtbag Brown was, he was for real. I found out later his first name was Euripedes. Euripedes. I shit you not. After he had managed to offend nearly every race, creed, sexual orientation and color in the joint, Dirtbag Brown poured some of his drink onto the stage—“for the dead homies”—and staggered off into a corner where he dropped trough and pissed his bladder dry. All were aghast and parted for him as he left like the Red Sea around Moses.
“This poem here is about something very special to me, one of my favorite things in the world,” a new guy had stepped into the shocked silence and taken the mic. “It’s called The Pussy.” This was Tommy Arlin.
If there could be a polar opposite of Dirtbag Brown this man was it. Arlin was tall, clean, apparently scabies-free, and didn’t look homeless. I would later come to learn that he was homeless, though by choice, in his “global nomad” phase. Anyway, Arlin had his shit together and his shit was tight that night. He was up there ripping off lines about the vagina—“the P, the U, the double S, yes!, the Y, why ask why, the pussy do defy imagination”—but in a nonthreatening, tongue-in-cheek manner that didn’t put anyone off. In fact he quickly had the crowd laughing and cheering him on and not a few ladies looked like they might swoon. Arlin’s piece ended with the audience laughing and clapping and ignoring the stink of Dirtbag Brown’s piss puddled in the corner, a new sense of calm and security having settled back in.
“I want to talk to you about Stanislaus Kaerevsky.” Arlin sidled up next to me at the bar where I was trying to imbibe enough liquid courage to get up the nerve to walk over to this hot goth chick and her friend and talk to them. Bars and clubs were never my scene to meet women. I worked best when they could get to know me, be it work situations or a college class. Arlin, I soon found out, had a knack for picking up women anywhere. He turned out to be an insufferable ladies man, and despite poems with titles like The Pussy, there was nothing nasty or misogynistic about him. He just liked having sex with women, which I did too. Arlin just got more of it than me. He may not be doing so at the present time however, as he is quite possibly dead. Which helps explain this introduction.
Anyway that night I met Tommy Arlin and almost fell headlong under his spell—they should have his picture in the dictionary under the entry for charismatic—but I also immediately started to notice hints that Arlin wasn’t everything he was cracked up to be or wanted people to think he was.
The night ended with Arlin and me with two women back in the double wide trailer I shared with my roommate, empty cans of beer and a fifth of Vodka littering the carpet, the girls bent over our knees while we took turns spanking them with a blue rubber whale my roommate’s girlfriend had won at the state fair. Arlin had seen something like it on the Howard Stern show and was eager to give it a try. He also thought it was beyond-words great that me and my roommate had a disco ball hanging from the trailer’s living room ceiling, but that’s besides the point.
Anyway, I started to realize Tommy Arlin’s brand of happy horseshit might be just that when early the next morning the women woke me up demanding payment they claimed Arlin had promised them. I had no clue what they were talking about. Arlin took one of the women to my roommate’s bedroom in the back while the other, suddenly unfriendly if not downright hostile, sat on the couch under the disco ball alternating glares at me and the rug. Whatever transpired Arlin must have settled it because when they came out his girl told her protesting friend “let’s go” and dragged her from there, seemingly satisfied, never mentioning the dough. My roommate, fortunately, was away for the weekend.
Arlin didn’t say a word to me about the women, just launched into some monologue about Snuffalufagus being the least appreciated resident of Sesame Street while he collected the empty cans from the carpet into a plastic black lawn and leaf bag. He asked me if I could drop him off downtown by the University and I agreed. I was a bit shocked when we spotted Dirtbag Brown pushing his stolen shopping cart down Hillsborough Street, and then dumbfounded further when Arlin bade me farewell, hopped out of the still moving car, ran up to the guy and high-fived him like they’d known each other since forever.
My last image of Arlin that day was in my rear view mirror walking side by side with Dirtbag Brown, the black garbage bag of recyclable cans slung over one shoulder, seemingly not a care in the world.
And we had not discussed zombies at all.
***
I encountered Tommy Arlin again in the West Indies, during his gigolo phase. I was a Peace Corps volunteer on the Third World side of the island nation of St. Vincent, living in an apartment without air conditioning or hot water, and infested with furry spiders the size of my palm, while wealthy honeymooning tourists frolicked amongst the Grenadines’ white sand beaches. This was before they filmed the Pirates of the Caribbean movies down there.
Off on my own I was hiking through the rainforest up Mount Soufriere, the island’s dormant volcano. I was one of fourteen American volunteers on the island—only three of whom were male—and all our females had promptly hooked up with locals. The American women from the Medical School wouldn’t look twice in my sweaty, grungy, volunteer-assed direction. I’d dated a few nationals here and there but found it difficult to make conversation with someone who had no more than a fifth grade education. So I found myself alone on a day off doing what I’d done four or five times before: hiking Mount Soufriere.
I’d come to a little clearing where I sat upon a log and drank from one of the three two-liter bottles of water I stowed in my backpack when Tommy Arlin came out of the rainforest like he’d always been there.
Tommy was wearing cargo shorts, a t-shirt with a marijuana leaf printed on it, hiking boots, a camel back over his shoulders and a camouflaged boonie hat. I was surprised to see him but he didn’t seem surprised to see me and, in retrospect, I guess he wasn’t. A week or two after the night in the trailer I’d gotten a letter from him in the mail which started an on-again, off-again correspondence, he with a string of forwarding addresses from various spots around the world, usually in the name of some woman. Arlin knew I was in the middle of my first year of a two-year stint in the Caribbean and his travels had taken him to the island nation where I was stationed. He explained that he’d blown into port on a Catamaran with a wealthy older Ellen Barkin look-alike.
We hiked to the top of the over four thousand foot high volcano together and looked down from the mists into the crater and the lake of water that had pooled there. Arlin assured me that the volcano had not erupted since 1979 and down we went into the crater, backwards along a seemingly vertical slope clinging to a thick rope that had been secured there long before us for just such purposes. The temperature on top of and inside the volcano was a good twenty degrees cooler than the rest of the island, and it always came as a relief to me. The heat and a lack of seasons would eventually make the Caribbean unbearable for me.
We squatted beside the lake and I shared my lunch with Arlin, who produced a whole pound of skunky weed he’d bought off some Rasta farmers on the other side of the volcano and proceeded to role a series of thin little joints. Of course, like our president at the time, I didn’t inhale. Arlin explained to me that when he first came upon the Rastas’s secret fields on the side of the volcano they’d looked at him warily, probably high with legitimate CIA paranoia to boot, but once he’d gotten close enough and they’d seen the pot leaf ironed on his t-shirt they’d broken into wide smiles and “all tings were irie.” Incidentally, Arlin at a later date would remark to me that he “never appreciated” Russell Banks until he’d been to the West Indies. I also suspect it’s why one of the first zombies we see in Eden is a Rastafarian.
I asked Arlin what he was really doing in the Caribbean and he said he was scoping out its revolutionary potential. Walter Rodney was long dead, Fidel was a decade away from his intestinal woes, and the revolution, if there ever was going to be one, didn’t look like it was going to be televised. Arlin and I shared a passion for left wing political theory and small ‘d’ democracy, though I’d put myself more along the lines of the libertarian socialist—anarchist—camp while Tommy allied himself with the authoritarian communists (though he wouldn’t describe them, or himself, with that adjective). I don’t know how or why it came up but looking out onto the lake I mentioned a film I’d seen as a little boy, Shock Waves, starring Peter Cushing, about Nazi zombies that rise from the ocean bottom to terrorize a Caribbean island full of vacationers.
Arlin, as it turned out, had seen the movie and it was here we discovered our mutual love of zombie cinema. We talked about zombie movies in general and Italian zombie movies in particular. We discovered our mutual infatuation for Italian actress and scream-queen Anna Falchi (circa the mid-1980s) and agreed to continue to both love her from afar and across time. Arlin told me about a novel he was writing, an action-horror zombie gore-fest with the working title Dead World. There was no good zombie fiction of the time and it would be at a later date when we discussed Max Brooks and Brian Keene. For the record, I’m a Brooks fan where Arlin wasn’t (for reasons you’ll be able to figure out below); I’m not keen on Keene where Arlin (go figure) was; but we both agreed that Jamie Russell’s Book of the Dead: The Complete History of Zombie Cinema, was a necessity for the zombie cineophile.
Several hours later I asked Arlin if his dowager wouldn’t be missing him. He ignored his watch and looked regretfully at the sun and agreed she would. We climbed out of the crater and back down the side of the volcano. I got to meet his doyenne that night when she took us out to eat at the fanciest restaurant on the island, and I have to admit I was jealous: she did look like Ellen Barkin. Was Tommy really scouting out the area’s likelihood for revolution or merely cadging off the MILF? I suspect some of both. They set sail the following morning.
It wasn’t the last time I’d see Tommy Arlin, nor was it the last time we’d discuss zombies.
***
Tommy loved (loves?) zombie films, but he was a purist, a fundamentalist if you will. A Taliban of living dead cinema. Where I could enjoy the lighter-stuff like Return of the Living Dead and even Australia’s Undead—until the aliens come in anyway—and viewed the release of more recent films like Fido and Shaun of the Dead as positives, as an evolution and extension of the genre, Tommy was disturbed and alarmed. He felt there was nothing inherently funny about zombies and there shouldn’t be anything funny about zombie films. He failed to see the black humor in even his favorite zombie films, including Romero’s, though as a socialist he was the first to play up the scant and often thinly-disguised social commentaries.
For Tommy, zombies were terrifying, and a world inhabited by the undead couldn’t be anything but a horrifyingly bleak place. “Shopenhauer’s wet dream” as he called it, though in retrospect given what I know of Arlin and what little I know of German pessimistic philosophy, I have no idea if Tommy knew what he was talking about of if it just sounded good.
This is why Eden reads as dark as it does. Tommy was frank that he’d borrowed the opening conceit—the doomed protagonist—from Rudolph Mate’s 1950 film D.O.A. (film noir being his third favorite genre behind westerns, though my second), but he remained adamant that he socked it to the reader more quickly as to Harris’ fate than the original film did to Edmond O’Brien’s Frank Bigelow. And indeed, looking back, the reader knows within the first two sentences of Eden what end will befall Harris. Yet throughout the novel, Arlin pummels the reader, again and again. I mean, Hasidic zombies? For me the hardest hit is the turn he takes with the character of Bobby Evers, the good natured and sentimental Irishman. I took that as a distinct fuck you from Tommy to the reader, just a reminder that less we forget, the world Eden takes place in is Tommy’s world, and its one ugly, malevolent place.
But what terrifies me most about Eden are the unanswered questions, the uncertainty. We’re never given a clue as to the cause of the outbreak. What reason do the dead come back to life? Radioactive space dust? Peacenik hippies releasing an animal virus across the globe? Microsoft? Arlin won’t specify. Further, we never learn the fate of many of the major characters. What happens to Raquel or Mrs. McAllister or Daffy for that matter? I’d guess in a real world, cataclysmic catastrophe uncertainty is the way of things. What happened to that hysterical woman in the crowd, to the firefighter rushing into the building, to the man with blood streaming down his face staggering past? I guess we’d never really know in real life, and I assume that’s the effect Tommy was going for here. Closure obviously isn’t a cure-all for the pain, but it does lend a sense of finitude to matters from whence we can trudge on. That said, I find it ironic that as to the whereabouts of Tommy Arlin the man, there is no clue today.
***
The last time I saw Tommy Arlin he gave me the manuscript for this book and told me to feel free to try and get it published or throw it out. He was packing his camel back and said he was going to continue walking the earth, which Jules had said in Pulp Fiction and Kane before him in Kung Fu. I haven’t heard from Arlin since. I have heard rumors. That he had assumed another name and was ghost writing a autobiography for Rocket Jackson, the adult industry icon. That he had compiled a group of singers, poets, and performance artists called the New Tribe Collective and that they sojourned from town to town and city to city, performing in coffee houses and student unions on college campuses. That he had joined a band of private contractors and was hunting Osama bin Laden in the badlands of Pakistan. In fact, the last letter I received from him was post-marked Pershawar. That was three years ago.
Why did Arlin entrust this novel to me? I think there are a couple reasons. For one thing, Tommy knew I loved zombies and zombie-movies almost as much as he did. We both kept scratching our heads wondering when some big publishing house was going to drop a major zombie novel. If I tell you that over two dozen major publishers rejected this novel with impersonal form letters I’m not exaggerating.
Tommy also knew I was starting to get published more and more, first in magazines and then academic texts, and he thought that was cool and hoped I’d make some connections that could help him out. Though I’ve had a few (nonfiction) books published and another in the works, my own novels gather dust in a filing cabinet in my basement. Perhaps Tommy’s faith was misplaced. But I refused to let this book die. No, even if it meant publishing it myself through a vanity press, and then the major problem would be distribution. A little research, I found out about Permuted Press, and here we are.
The title Dead World already being taken, I thought simply calling it Eden; a liberty Tommy wouldn’t mind. I find it suitably ironic that the agnostic Arlin named humanity’s fictional last redoubt after the biblical epicenter for humankind’s everlasting damnation. Why not let the place take front and center stage as the title? I suppose if he is alive he’s somewhere in the world trying to bring about that revolution he always dreamt and spoke of. I suppose if he is I will run into him again. I suppose if I should we will talk about zombies.
Tony Monchinski
Peekskill, NY
2008
Chapter 1
The bite woke him up.
“Motherfucker—!”
Harris exploded out of bed, naked—Julie, his woman, startled awake beside him sitting up blinking. He bodily drove the rotten, undead thing that had invaded their bedroom and attacked him in their sleep, propelling it across the room, ramming the creature with his shoulder hard enough to drive it half through the dry wall. Something inside the beast broke audibly on impact, its teeth still gnashing, straining to taste flesh, jagged black finger nails clawing at Harris.
He felt no pain. His senses were nearly overpowered, so much washing over him at once: the low inhuman moans, the stink of necrotic, mottled flesh, the shambling forms stumbling through their bedroom. Harris’ last night on earth was behind him for ever.
Weak, pre-dawn trails of sun leaking in through the blinded windows. The stench of putrid flesh everywhere, nauseating. What were once human beings, now dead things, lurching through their bedroom, coming for him, coming for Julie.
“Harris!” Julie yelled.
Bull-fucking-shit! Seeing white, pure rage, his fist balled, aiming three feet past the head of the undead pinned against the wall, the monster struggling to dislodge itself, Harris punched it with everything he had and then some. The soft, decaying skull collapsing under his clenched fist, he wrist deep in its head, pulling back, gore and grey matter clinging to his hand, stuck between his fingers, gobs of it dripping off his hand.
The thing was truly dead now: a death it wouldn’t be coming back from.
Julie was fully awake, her revolver retrieved from the bedside—Boom! Boom! —the sound deafening, the hammer dropping repeatedly in the confines of the bedroom. What feeble sun light filtering into the room illuminating each blast from the Magnum, a zombie body jerking, headshot, skull contents spraying off into the shadows, the thing dropping, a troupe of them surrounding the bed, reaching for her, she dispatching them one by one, methodically.
The light battling the darkness of the false dawn, so many more black stains on walls already shadowed.
Another undead, this one moving fast, loping, wearing dreadlocks under a tam, charging as Harris yanked the sheet from the bed, draped it over his shoulder, his nudity awkward, uncomfortable, vulnerable. Harris capable of coherent, linear thought again, no longer only reacting to a waking nightmare.
The zombie made noises, clacking what teeth it had, intent on making a meal of him.
A guttural roar from Harris, something human but only just, primal fury unleashed as he launched himself forward to meet it, colliding with the thing in a half tackle, both of them sprawling.
He scrambled around on the floor, got above it, punching down on its head repeatedly, this one’s skull solid, refusing to yield.
The undead shifted its weight, dislodging him. It clawed its way around the bedroom floor, losing the tam, ratty dreadlocks splaying around its head, the thing greedily seeking its prey, looking to grab onto a foot, a limb, to sink its teeth into human flesh. Its hunger insatiable, driven by instinct, the beast was without fear.
Looking up it saw the man with the bed sheet about his torso and shoulder like an improvised toga.
Harris with the 12-gauge, the pump always kept barrel up beside the bed. He thumbed the safety, no need to trombone the slide. As the undead creature sprang shrieking from the floor towards his throat Harris squeezed the trigger—
The headless thing flopping onto the floor. Cordite and gunpowder competing with fetid putrescent flesh. Harris pumped the shotgun, vaulting atop the bed where Julie—the revolver emptied, using it as a club to bat at two of the zombies groping for her on the other side—grunting as she kicked and swiped at zombie heads, fighting silently for her life, determined not to—
The shotgun blast devastating in the confines of their bedroom yanking both undead from their feet, slamming one against the wall, the brunt of the buckshot buried in its torso. The second beast dumped on the floor, half its face and the entire jaw missing.
Harris tromboned the shotgun and stepped down from the bed, the empty shell bouncing off the mattress and clattering across the hard wood floor.
“Are you okay?” he asked Julie.
She cool and calm in her actions, quietly reloading the revolver from one of the speed loaders on the nightstand aside their bed. The key to survival is to keep one’s head straight at all times in all situations, Julie was aware of this. Only her voice betrayed her, trembling, barely concealing the shock and revulsion gripping her.
“I’m okay,” she lied. “I’m fine.”
“Okay.” Harris breathing deep, working one foot then the other into his low-rise hikers, the Chukkas loosely laced from the night before.
He could hear them coming, more of the zombies beyond the bedroom door. Creeping down the hallway, searching for them. Leveling the shotgun in the direction of the door Harris skirted the bed to the bureau. The chair there toppled in the confusion of the early morning melee, his shoulder holster with the twin nine millimeters somewhere on the floor.
A faint rustling, an undead—its spine severed by the shotgun blast—slapping with one hand at the wall against which it lay. Its eyes followed first Harris, then Julie. The zombie couldn’t move any more than to pound the wall with an open palm, a fish out of water, doomed to flop about on solid ground.
Julie flicked on the lamp at her nightstand, Harris spotting his shoulder rig and pistols under a corpse. He pulled the leather strap from beneath the limp body, slinging the holster across one shoulder the way Buddy used to with his saddle bags.
A soft moan from the doorway, the zombie revealed in the light from the lamp. A nurse it had been, stained uniform bearing a smudged nametag. Harris with no inclination to know its name, thinking such a thought a strange one to have anyway. Whatever once constituted its humanity long absent. The thing staggered into the room looking for breakfast.
Julie put it down clean, one between the eyes.
“I’ll clear out the rest of the house,” Harris told her. He worked as he spoke, retrieving his utility belt with the holstered .45, the extra magazines, the sheathed machete, strapping it onto himself around the bed sheet at his waist. “You stay here. Stay safe. Let me see what the hell is going on downstairs.”
“Harris.”
He looked at her questioningly.
“Don’t go pulling a Richard Simmons on me.”
He raised his eyebrow at her.
She gestured.
“Your balls.”
He adjusted the sheet.
The paralyzed undead, propped up in the corner, a streak of blood and viscera dripping down the wall above it, eyes darting between them. Though it appeared grievously injured it felt nothing, darting a marbled tongue in and out of its drooling mouth.
Harris espied himself by the light of the lamp in the full length mirror. Another situation, he would have laughed at how he looked now, decked out as he was, bristling with guns, a foot long machete. In another situation.
A bandolier of shotgun shells went over his shoulder, the one covered by the bed sheet.
Harris knew he’d been wounded, bitten. He just didn’t want to think about it yet.
Four easy strides took him to the bedroom door. They were out there, a lot of them. He could see two of the undead bouncing against the walls, reeling down the hall towards him. The first wore jeans, an open flannel shirt over nothing, its bloated belly sagging. They would eat until their stomachs burst and then they would keep eating.
The second wore a bathrobe and one slipper. Harris wondered how it’d managed to keep the one slipper all this time.
Behind the two on the landing a third undead spied Harris and howled at the top of its lungs, something evil and intelligent in its gaze.
The first two caught sight of him and also started to make noise, impatient. The sounds they made never ceased to send chills up Harris’ spine.
He pumped the 12-gauge, all business. Thumbed another shell into the slide.
He looked back at Julie.
“Honey,” he said, motioning at the thing on the floor, the zombie impotently palming the wall. “Do me a favor, take care of that one.”
“I will,” said Julie. Shorts and one of his t-shirts on, she checked the safety of the tricked-out black rifle. Collapsible stock, vertical fore grip, rail mounted flip-up front site, M-7 bayonet, the carbine length free floating rail system lending the AR-15 a ventilated look.
They always slept with their guns next to their bed, fully loaded. It was what one did.
Harris turned back to the hallway, stepping out onto the cool carpet, determined to drive the undead invaders from their home.
His curse had woken her, saved her. Julie had only heard Harris curse once before. She wouldn’t describe him as a prude. He claimed his job taught him patience, to temper his tongue. He reserved what he considered strong words for situations that required them.
Julie had heard Harris curse only once before. His curse had accompanied actions she considered out of character for the man she knew better than anyone else.
Julie spread her legs above either side of the felled beast, the thing spastically flapping its one hand against the wall faster than before, excited. She lunged with the AR-15, embedding the fixed bayonet into its braincase under one eye. Julie jiggled it there, feeling the tip of the bayonet scraping the back of the zombie’s skull. The hand limp in its lap.
She pulled the bayonet free, the eyeball collapsing farther back into the socket.
Harris walked the house, dispatching undead, clearing rooms. He could hear gunfire from outside as the residents of Eden joined the fray. It seemed like there were dozens of zombies in his house. He wondered how many had breached their walled enclave.
Five of them had Mr. Vittles trapped under the entertainment center in the living room.
“Vittles,” Harris called, alarmed, the zombies looking up at him from where they crouched and squatted, swiping at the cat in his hideaway. Vittles hissed from somewhere unseen, presumably safe, still in the fight.
Propping the shotgun against the living room wall and unsheathing the machete, Harris waded into the zombies, their arms outstretched and reaching for him, dropping to the hard wood floor, skulls cleaved.
The zombies moaned outside amid whoops, human sounds, and between the staccato gunfire.
Harris brought the cutting edge down as hard as he could, missing the skull, splitting a zombie from sternum to mid-chest. It was unfazed, wrapping its arms around Harris’ knees, threatening to take him to the floor, to grapple him. Harris wrenching free from its embrace, bringing his booted foot down once, twice, again, its head mashed into the floor, an eyeball dislodged from its orbit, the skull cracking, still Harris pummeling it, switching to his other foot now, all sorts of gore adorning the steel toed Chukkas.
Most of its skull contents pooling on the hardwood around it, Harris stepped back, lookied over the scene, bent, wrenched the machete free from where it was lodged in the unmoving nasty’s trunk.
Vittles poked his head out from under the entertainment center, and shot like a bolt into the kitchen, out of sight again.
Harris breathing heavy as he scabbarded the blade, taking up the shotgun, reloading it from the bandolier. Two more stumbling over each other to get through the doorway into their house. Harris put them both down, thumbed two more shells into the shotgun, one last look around, made his way outside.
The firefight in the street was intense. The wall had been breached and hundreds of the undead plodded about. Eden’s denizens fought back, firing their assault rifles on semi-auto, always aiming for the head, conserving ammo, keeping it together as they set about their grim task.
Julie sat in a window on the second floor, sniping at the undead with the AR-15.
It looked like their house had been the first hit, which meant the break had to be near. Harris stood in his doorway and fired the shotgun, pumped it, fired, pumped and fired until he emptied it. Close enough that each blast scored a head shot.
A scream, and a zombie came at him full speed, Harris raising the shotgun and clubbing it over the head. The thing puddled on the steps to his porch and Harris drew one of the twin nines and sent a single bullet into its head.
Harris closed the door to the house and buttressed the shotgun against it.
He worked his way down the street towards the wall, both nine millimeters filling his hands. Harris waited until he couldn’t miss, walking right up to each undead and firing. One thing he had learned fast about shooting a gun: even in close quarters, most of your shots missed. What seemed now like a lifetime of fighting for his survival had steadied Harris’ hand and his aim was true.
Pop. One in the temple, the thing down. Pop. Another through the mouth, the back of a skull lifting off. Pop. In one ear, out the side of its head. And so on.
“Howya, Harris!”
Bobby Evers, his neighbor in Eden. Bobby with a flame thrower, hosing the undead down under a withering stream of fire. Evers, some other men and women in a line, making their way towards Harris and his house, herding the zombies back towards the wall before them. They moved in a staggered enfilade, covering one another as they reloaded, such tactics drilled and practiced.
Harris dropped the mags in the nine millimeters, sliding home fresh ones, nodding in Bobby’s direction. Neither Bobby nor any of the others were fully dressed but none of them was wrapped in a bed sheet either.
A steady stream of rifle fire from above. Julie paused only to switch magazines. She concentrated on the zombies outside the shepherding gunfire and blaze, those lurching about wildly, some alight and flailing, screaming in their immolation.
Julie tried to lead one zombie which was lurching wildly, a caterwauling torch. A round from the AR-15 pocked the asphalt, another disappeared into the flaming mass as the thing made the sidewalk, a third bringing up cement dust from the walk. The zombie collapsed burning, draped over a fire hydrant, wailing the whole time until Julie breathed, sighted afresh and placed a fourth round into the flaming head region. It shuddered once and slipped off the hydrant, gobs of its melted self clinging to the casement of the discharge pipe.
One by one they collapsed in the street and on sidewalks to burn silently and smolder.
Harris and Evers found the breach. When the wall around Eden had been constructed—before Harris or Julie or Bobby had arrived—the residents had failed to build gates. They were more concerned with keeping the dead out and had no intention of risking leaving their haven. When those first inhabitants ran out of food, foraging missions were led through the sewer system. The monsters outside their walls seemed unable or unwilling to navigate the miles of extensive tunnels beneath the city streets. After several unfortunate, jarring incidents, and after much arguing and discussion, the walls of Eden had been rebuilt, revamped to include gateways this time.
The break-in had occurred at one of the doors. The wall itself rose twelve feet above the street. Though some undead remained extremely agile, none could scale it. This particular door was a heavy duty security door taken from a Home Depot. Before the world had gone to shit, people who lived on these blocks in this outer borough neighborhood would have installed such a door to protect themselves from crimes like burglary. That long before anyone had to worry about dead hungry for human flesh.
Harris and Bobby Evers reached the door together, and it was unlocked and wide open. They would have looked at each other but they were preoccupied, Harris squeezing off round after round, Evers dousing the undead with flames. Some undead dropped, others were driven back outside past the gate.
His nine millimeters out, Harris made a mad dash for the door, the machete loosed, hacking at undead heads and outstretched arms, severing limbs and cleaving skulls, firing the .45 in his right hand, allowing for the recoil that jerked his arm up slightly with each shot.
Thrusting the machete like a rapier before him, Harris drove it through the jaws of a particularly rotten undead, the blade lodged, the beast impelled back, through the gate, out into the no man’s land beyond where thousands of its kith thronged, Harris slammed the door shut, leaning his full bodyweight against it.
He leaned against the door, waiting while Bobby Evers slipped out of the flamethrower harness. Evers retrieved the cross bar from the cement and a zombie, charred black, reached for him with hands the fingers of which had been fused together in a blistery welding. The Irishman brought the cross bar down on its skull twice. By the time the steaming mass stopped twitching on the street the cross bar was affixed, the door secured.
Evers, his back against the door, sliding down to a seated position, huffing, his asthma catching up to him. Harris stepped back, mopping his brow with a forearm, contemplating the morning’s events, their implications.
“Looks like you done lost your machete,” Bobby noted.
“Looks like,” Harris, panting.
“The fookin’ gate, Harris,” Bobby said what was on both their minds. “Go way outta that! How in the hell did this happen?”
Harris stooped down and picked something from the ground.
The gunshots within Eden petered out, those alive within its walls finishing off those who were not.
“You’re a fookin’ mess, Harris. You okay?” A look of genuine concern on Evers’ face, Harris looking like something that spent its days crawling around the floor of a slaughterhouse.
Bobby was one of the good guys. Harris never doubted Bobby.
“None of it’s mine.”
“By the way, grand outfit.” Bobby winked.
“Harris!”
Julie was coming down the block, hair drawn back and kerchiefed, cradling the black rifle, the .357 holstered on her hip looking too big for her lithe frame.
Harris hugged her, ignoring the muck and gore, and she hugged him back.
“Julie.”
In their bathroom, the door locked, Harris set about cleaning and inspecting himself. The plumbing did not work, hadn’t since before he moved in. Jugs of rainwater in the bathtub facilitated the clean-up. Communal baths erected on the opposite end of the block had hot water. Julie was there now.
Harris didn’t care to be seen as he peeled out of the damp blood-stained bed sheet, letting it fall to the cool tiles.
The bite on his upper right arm, shoulder almost. Not even such a bad bite: the skin was broken, but only just. His kid brother had been attacked by a dog once when they were young, one bite, one way worse-looking than this, but his brother had been fine. A shot from the doctor, a few stitches, a hug from mom, dad tousling his hair, and James was good as new.
Harris understood it wouldn’t be this way for him. The rules had changed. He knew what this bite meant.
If I ever get bitten, Buddy once told him, and I can’t do it myself, you do it for me, okay?
He sighed. He had always figured it would end like this.
If I can’t do it myself. The only hint of weakness Buddy had ever let on.
He’d told Buddy to be quiet, not to talk like that. Buddy persisted. Buddy always persisted.
Promise me, Harris. You put one in my head if I can’t do it myself. Promise me.
To shut the other man up, get them off the topic, Harris promised he would.
Harris looked at himself in the mirror. It is always strange to gaze at oneself in the glass, to see oneself as others do, and not as we imagine. Hadn’t shaved, hadn’t cut his hair since… Since it all began. How long ago was that? A year and a half ago? Maybe more? Time no longer meant what it once did.
You don’t shave or cut that hair of yours, Buddy had told him, You’re gonna wind up looking like Charlton Heston in Planet of the Apes.
Harris had taken it as a compliment. Raquel always thought Heston hot in that movie.
Skull fragments entangled in his hair.
Feeling old, forty-four now, perhaps time to feel that way, at least once in awhile. Already feeling a bit unwell, not himself. How much that due the bite versus the circumstances surrounding the bite, of being jolted from sleep, undead cannibals ferociously attacking him and the woman he loved, Harris could not discern.
He knew what would happen, what was bound to happen.
What had to happen.
He’d turn into one of those undead things after degenerating, come back as something that would try to eat Julie and Bobby and anyone else it could. No matter how much they begged, no matter how much they implored and cried about what had been, the thing he would become would ignore their words and feast, insatiable.
How would Buddy respond if he were here now. What would the big man say to him in a situation like this? What would Buddy say?
If it’d been Buddy, Harris had no doubt the man would have gone off on his own somewhere, eaten a bullet.
The skin around the bite was discolored, purple.
You da man, Buddy would have clapped him on the shoulder—the other shoulder. They’d have gone for a walk, Buddy’s idea, and as much as it might hurt him to do so Buddy would have raised his silenced nine millimeter when he thought Harris unaware and dispatched him to whatever came after this life or the nothingness in its absence.
And Harris would not have blamed him.
For the first and only time, Harris was glad Buddy wasn’t around at that particular moment. There was one thing he knew he had to do.
He reached down, picking up the object found outside, next to the door in the wall. Knowing what it was as soon as he saw it, knowing whose it was.
The door in the wall had been unlocked. Someone had let zombies into Eden. Purposefully. Malignantly. The lock on the door to his and Julie’s house broken open. Someone intending them the next human happy meal for the undead parade.
Why, Harris had his ideas. Who, he was more solid on. No doubt there.
Harris flicked the wheel on the Zippo lighter he held, watching the blue yellow flame flare up, catch. It was Thompson’s Zippo lighter, the one the nineteen-year-old fancied.
This Harris knew.
Chapter 2
“Joey, don’t forget,” Joy Noddings reminded the 10th grader as he left her Math 2R class.
“What’s that Ms. Noddings?” Joey was a good-looking kid, popular with the girls.
“Do your homework.”
Joy knew Joey wouldn’t do his homework. Joey didn’t do homework.
“For shnizzle,” he still good enough to go through the motions, act like he cared. Maybe he did.
Joy Noddings in her first year of teaching high school, fresh from a Masters degree program. The Hillcrest Alternative School took a chance, hired her to teach math.
The school was small, a dozen staff members serving thirty children labeled “emotionally disturbed” and “learning disabled.” Though located in the upscale New York City suburb of Bedford Hills, the student body itself was quite diverse. Hillcrest had earned its reputation as the last stop for students who couldn’t cut it on the main high school campus across town.
The staff provided a more therapeutic setting than that available to these kids at the regular high school, where over sixteen hundred students packed the halls, an institutional setting where the traditional Hillcrest kid found herself in trouble, more often than not.
Joy was still surprised Hillcrest had taken her on.
Nervous at her interview, she went home doubting herself, wondering how badly she’d bumbled the questions. To this day she wasconvinced she had the job due to the good graces of Hillcrest’s principal. He was a couple decades older than Joy in her estimation, attractive, the type of guy women and his peers would describe as distinguished in a few more years. Besides his good looks and his tough but fair demeanor with the often trying students of Hillcrest, Joy admired her principal’s professional attitude.
Joy was used to drawing stares, the occasional cat call from the men on the corner waiting for work, relieved that her principal never crossed any lines with her. He was so much unlike the math teacher, she wasalways noting how the eyes of that one went right to her chest in conversations. Joy was relieved that her principal wasn’t that way, yet somewhat disappointed.
Ed was the boyfriend she’d been dating for going on three years now. A nice enough guy, Joy figured she’d probably wind up marrying Ed when he asked. She honestly believed there was no one better out there. Her principal was married anyway.
Three years already and when was he going to ask? Joy found it ironic that if she had made up her mind to “settle” she’d have to wait for the man to whom she’d resigned herself to propose already. Settle was an unfair word, too harsh. Ed was a good man, though lacking that edge others had.
Three months into her first academic year at Hillcrest, Joy fit right in with the rest of the staff, some of which had beenwith the program for years. The job was challenging because of students such as Joey, the job frustrating but rewarding in its own ways. Kids like Joey, with so much to offer, they could sit attentive in class, absorb information, use it to pass exams, even state exams at the end of the year, but these same students were unmotivated, never turning in assignments, never cracking a book open at home, not once attempting to capitalize on the god given gifts in their possession.
Still, Joy knew that without Hillcrest, many of them had no hopes of graduating. They’d fall through the cracks. No child left behind, right?
Fourth period was a free one. Joy considered going upstairs to the staff office. There were a couple of parents she needed to call. Alex was continuing to take his meds when he woke in the morning, meaning he spent most of his first three periods off the wall, driving his teachers nuts. Kid needed to take the medication before he went to sleep. She had had this conversation with Alex's mom more than once before.
Shanice, on the other hand, persisted in wearing clothing way too revealing—belly shirts and spaghetti straps—causing a distraction in Joy’s seventh period math skills lab. Joy thought back to when she’d been in high school, not that long ago really, when you wore a belly shirt if you didn’t have a belly. Today these girls wore whatever they wanted, whatever they looked like.
I can call later. Joy decided she’d walk across the street, buy herself lunch at the deli. She hadn’t anything to eat since a protein shake before she left the apartment. Thin, in shape, Joy worked hard to keep herself that way, so that she could wear belly shirts when she was out with Ed. A turkey breast sandwich wouldn’t be so bad.
Boar’s Head low sodium. And American cheese. Yellow.
Joy locked her door, walked down the hall, admonishing a few stragglers to get to their next class before they were so late they received cuts from their teachers.
Out on the street a beautiful early November day. There’d been a brief cold spell at the end of October—Ed persisting in keeping the window open when he slept over, claiming he “breathed better”, Joy always prevailing, the window always eventually closing—the cold followed by a return of warmer weather. Close to sixty degrees when it should have been much cooler. A late summer’s last hurrah, an Indian summer.
The sky was beautiful, blue, limpid for the most part, some puffy cumulous clouds over in the distance.
Joy walked down the street towards Gary’s deli. Hillcrest’s location in downtown Bedford Hills put it in the middle of the shopping district. Quaint little stores, dog groomers, Judaica, a consignment shop, a Cold Stone Creamery. Off campus privileges, a draw of the program, once earned granted students the ability to spend their lunch hour eating in one of the delis or pizzerias, checking out the latest arrivals at the video game store, or browsing the CDs at Borders. Hopefully they weren’t off smoking weed somewhere.
Weed. Joy smirked. Buddha, ganja, moocah, funk, chillums, hay, she heard new ones everyday between the kids and the rap music Ed liked to listen to. The low level dealer she dated her freshman year in college called it Aunt Mary or Baby Bhang. No one called it weed anymore.
Gary’s deli was adequate but Walter’s two blocks down better. The extra two blocks was not something Joy felt she wanted to commit to. Gary’s was competent enough to put together a turkey and American sandwich. On whole wheat. With lettuce, tomatoes, maybe a little mayo. But not too much. Better the light Hellman’s. She had spin class at the gym tonight.
“Joy!”
Susan McGreevy, a teacher’s aid at Hillcrest for the last six years, was well liked by the students. Middle forties, married with three boys. Susan was always up on the latest gossip, from Hollywood celebrity to Hillcrest staff member.
“Hi, Susan.”
The other woman looked spooked.
“What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know—I was in the deli and I heard something on the radio, rioting in the city or something.”
“What?” Joy said, not comprehending.
“It’s bizarre. They interrupted the music, said the National Guard was called in to put down some kind of gang violence or something. It was spreading up Fifth Avenue, from downtown.”
“I haven’t heard anything,” Joy said, realizing it was a dumb thing to say. Of course she’d not heard anything. She had been in the classroom teaching all morning, going over factoring with her students.
“If you find anything else out, let me know.” Joy could tell Susan was antsy, wanted to get going,
Saying she would, Susan made her way back towards Hillcrest, Joy resuming her walk, thinking. Rioting in New York City? Moving up Fifth Avenue? Gangs? What the hell is going on?
She stopped, breathing in the November air. Not as cool and crisp as it should be yet, the way Ed liked it. That would come.
Something about Susan’s story bothered her.
Ed worked on Fifth Avenue. Up between forty-fourth and forty-fifth. His building was well protected with its own security. Ed himself was on the sixtieth floor, away from any street protest turned violent, away from anything that was going on.
Still…
The turkey sandwich not as tempting as had been a few moments before, even with the thought of mayo.
Joy turned, heading back towards Hillcrest, picking up her pace. Not running, but moving ahead with determination in her stride.
Her cell phone was locked in her desk.
Inside the building, Joy was relieved to find the halls empty. The kids were all in their classes.
She let herself into her room, letting the door close behind her, not locking it.
Sitting down in the executive chair at her desk, unlocking the drawer where she kept her valuables during the day. Joy liked most of the kids at Hillcrest, but she didn’t want to put them in a position where they were tempted to rifle through her purse.
The ten seconds it took her phone to power up when she thumbed it on felt more like ten minutes.
Joy checked the digital display, pressing the keys, Ed’s office number stored in her phone’s memory. No messages.
The tiny screen: Connecting…
The phone beginning to ring.
“Hello?”
“Ed, listen, it’s Joy, what’s going on?”
“Joy, Jesus, you’re not going to believe this shit. Things are fucking crazy out there, on the street. I’ve never seen anything like it. Turn on the news. Joy, they’re fucking eating people—”
“Ed? Ed?”
Disconnected.
Redial. A quick succession of beeps, a ring, then a recorded voice, all circuits busy.
Exhaling, she redialed again.
All circuits busy.
Snapping her phone shut, she walked across her classroom and out into the hall, not bothering to close the door. Directly to the staff office on the second floor, redialing twice more, getting the same message, Joy found her principal making some copies on the Xerox machine.
“Joy, what’s up?” He read the concern in her face.
“Can we talk in your office?” She gestured.
Her principal cast a quick look around the staff room. Hillcrest’s secretary was on the phone, on hold, ordering supplies. The English teacher was surfing the net.
“Sure, come on.”
The principal’s office adjoined the staff room.
He shut the door behind them, the secretary holding the phone out and looking at it quizzically, “Huh?”
On the edge of the couch, leaning forward with her hands clasped together on her knees Joy motioned to the television set on the shelf. A TV/VCR combo, anyone who needed it for class was free to sign it out.
“Does that thing get any local channels?”
From out in the staff office they could hear the English teacher say to the secretary, “Holy Christ. Check this out.”
“Yeah, it does,” said Mr. Harris, already moving.
“Turn it on, please.”
He did so.
Chapter 3
“Listen, Harris,” Buddy said, taking his friend over to the side, away from the others, out of earshot.
Overcast spring morning, an intermittent moan from the undead beyond the wall reaching their ears, the stink of them wafting in, ever present.
“What’s up?” Harris asked the big man.
“I want you to keep an eye on Diaz,” Buddy said, casting an eye towards the others. A dozen men and women gathering around the manhole in the middle of the block, a rummaging party preparing to head off in search of supplies for Eden.
Diaz was a young buck, born and raised in uptown Manhattan, something he made sure everyone knew. A Dominican flag flew outside his house in Eden. The apocalypse gripping their world hadn’t jarred the piss and vinegar out of him, at least not until this point. If anything, it had just raised his intensity, an intensity always there, sometimes hidden, sometimes exacerbated by all the PCP he toked.
Buddy continued, “He’s going through a lot right now. Not sure what he’s capable of.”
The wind had been blown out of the braggart’s sails the night before, when his girlfriend Shannon was infected. She was in Diaz’s house now, her last hours fading fast, tended by some of the others. Julie couldn’t stand Diaz but set aside her revulsion and went to bring what comfort to Shannon she could. Amazing, everyone said away from Diaz, that Shannon could hold out so long.
Once you were bitten, it was only a matter of time.
The outcome was inevitable.
“You think he’ll come unhinged?” Harris asked Buddy.
Bobby Evers went over a list of supplies with Sal Bianaculli. Harris heard the word “Ibuprofen.”
“Come unhinged?” Buddy raised an eyebrow. “Fucker’s already unhinged if you ask me.”
Harris thinking he knew, asked anyway. “How you mean?”
This was a pattern they’d established. Harris turning to Buddy as something of a father figure. Sometimes a game between them, sometimes earnest on his part.
“Usually young brah all up and at ’em, but notice how quiet he’s become. Withdrawn, even.”
Harris nodded. Diaz was definitely keeping under the radar. When Shannon was wounded Diaz went nuts, screaming his head off, Spanish and English, the Spanish too fast for Harris to get. Harris, Buddy, Davon, four or five of them were forced to subdue Diaz, trying not to hurt him, let Evers, Tina, and Bianaculli’s wife Camille help stop Shannon’s bleeding, get her back into Diaz’s house. After they’d wrestled him down, Buddy asked him, “You alright?” Diaz’s eyes were spacey, hyper-alert; his body limp was under them. This said he was. When he didn’t say anything, they let him up and he went to be with Shannon.
Thompson adjusting an empty knapsack on Panas’ back. The idea was to go out empty, return knapsacks full.
“Plastic wrap,” Sal Bianaculli read from the list.
“Yeah,” Harris said to Buddy, “I know what you mean.”
Buddy chin-nodded him, turned to the group. “All right then, we good?”
Assorted nods, verbal assents, a grunt.
Buddy lifted his saddle bags from the cement, slinging them across his wide shoulders. His shotgun—the big semi-automatic with the cylinder clip that held 12 rounds—hung over his back. Buddy nodded towards Thompson, the younger man prying open the manhole cover with a crow bar.
Thing must have weighed a couple hundred pounds or more. Harris remembered when he’d lived in Queens, before he and Raquel moved out to the suburbs. One night there had been a huge explosion down the block, everyone out of bed, thinking terrorism. Harris had worried an airplane had gone down somewhere near their house. That’d happened before.
Turned out to be an explosion of gas in the sewer system, which had sent a manhole cover skyward. The thing returned to earth through the roof and windshield of someone’s car.
Harris never liked the look of the manhole, a gaping man-made maw in the earth. Made him feel uneasy, like something in a horror movie. Didn’t like going down into the sewer system, but to this point the miles of tunnels somehow remained empty of the undead.
A spiraling undulation passed the wall. They never shut up, even when feeding.
“Okay, lets’ go,” Buddy said, climbing down into the manhole, grasping the ladder below. Harris bent forward, passing him a Maglight.
Buddy was waist deep in the street, setting the flashlight on the asphalt, unholstering his nine millimeter, the silencer not threaded on. Checking to make sure a round chambered, Buddy returned the piece to its holster on his waist, and took his flashlight back up.
“Hey,” Harrissaid, beckoning. Buddy looked up at him from that place.