“This must’ve been them,” Julie mumbles, taking in the details of this sprawling still life. “The ‘Remakers.’ ”
Scattered throughout the space are long workshop tables covered in the tools of various artistic trades. Chisels, brushes, silk screens, pencils, paint cans, knives, crochet needles, a drum kit in the corner, a pile of guitars, a podium, and a mic stand. And on one of the walls, a mural, or a blend of a dozen murals, their starkly contrasting styles somehow intertwining into a jungle of colors and figures, from crowds of tiny people to hundred-foot giants.
“They were building a different kind of city, Mom said.”
I can’t place the emotion in her voice, a dissonant chord of anger, sadness, and love.
“Something based on different values. Different measures of success. It was supposed to be a message to the world.”
The mural reaches to the very top of the wall, where a solar panel once powered a single yellow bulb, now dark.
“I wonder how long it lasted.” She cranes her neck to look at the bulb. “I wonder what killed it.”
I follow a few steps behind her as she walks the perimeter of the space, running her hands along the brick walls. “We could have ended up here instead. We were so close. Ten miles, the sign said . . .” Her voice is hard but faint, like she’s shouting from a great distance. “Dad wouldn’t take the exit. Mom was screaming at him, but . . .” She turns in a slow circle, staring up at the mural, the inert remains of a movement. “Was this what she needed to make her hold on?” Her chin quivers. “Did she leave us for this?”
“Julie.” I say it so softly it gets her attention. “Why are we here?”
She looks at me. She opens her mouth like she’s finally going to answer. Then she freezes. She cocks her ear. And I hear it.
Engines. Tires snarling on gritty pavement.
Someone in this ghost town is alive.
We emerge from the courtyard just as the vehicles disappear around a corner: two windowless white cargo vans, unmarked except for the geometric mandala stenciled on their sides.
My mind clicks dry like an unloaded gun. Did they really follow us a hundred miles from the border? Or were they already here?
I glance at Julie. Her face reveals nothing, just a trembling, round-eyed blankness.
She runs after the vans.
I shout, “Wait!” but I know she won’t, and I’m already following her.
The vans pause in the middle of the next block, and two more pop out from a side street to join them. These ones have windows, and just before they all drive off in a line, I catch a glimpse of their cargo. People. About a dozen in each van, packed together like miserable ride-share commuters.
This isn’t a search party—at least not for us. We have stumbled into other business.
Julie follows the vans’ cloud of dust. It curls through a route that’s clear of debris, like a well-worn animal trail in a forest, leading deeper into the city. I keep trying to catch her eyes, hoping to decipher her intent, but she stares straight ahead, utterly opaque. And then, just as the dust is getting too vague to follow, we emerge from an alley into the back lot of a large building, and the vans are right in front of us.
For a moment I worry Julie will charge at them like they’re figments in a dream, but she’s lucid enough to duck behind a dumpster. Gagging on the smell of whatever’s inside, I listen to barked commands and shuffling footfalls. The vans are backed up against the building, blocking my view of their activity, but it’s clear they’re unloading passengers. A minute later the doors bang shut and the vans drive off and we’re alone in the empty parking lot.
“Julie,” I whisper. “Need to go back. Get the others.”
She shakes her head.
“We don’t know what’s in there. Can’t just—”
She leaps to her feet and marches toward the building. Gritting my teeth, I go after her, attempting to channel Abram Kelvin and Evan Kenerly and all their militant paranoia, scanning windows for snipers and maximizing my situational awareness. But everything is quiet.
Julie stops in front of the entrance. The entrance is a staircase. A steep, narrow well leading down into darkness.
She descends.
“Julie, wait!”
Her legs sink into the shadows, then her waist, then her shoulders.
“Julie!”
For an instant her head is disembodied, a mass of golden hair floating on a black pond. Then the blackness swallows it.
I TEETER ON THE EDGE of the staircase, frozen in irrational panic. I can’t see the bottom. It’s just a flight of stairs, just the storage basement of some dull municipal building, but it stretches. It deepens and steepens until it’s no longer a staircase but a bottomless well, its slick stone walls lined with hideous books, blood writing and claw etchings, cold and damp and—
I don’t want to go down there. But Julie is down there. Whatever it is I’m afraid of, she’s alone with it.
I plunge into the depths.
My legs buckle under me when I reach the bottom, finding solid floor where they expected another stair. A memory from childhood, step after stumbling step, learning the art of walking—except it’s not from childhood. Long legs in black slacks, stumbling through a forest, away from a dead woman—
“Julie!” I hiss.
“What?” Her voice echoes back to me through the narrow tunnel, soft and toneless like the mutterings of a sleepwalker. As my eyes adjust to the darkness, I notice a pale glow bobbing ahead.
I run up alongside her. She holds a flashlight limply, illuminating her feet and not much else.
I decide to try an indirect route. “Where’d you get the flashlight?”
“It was Abram’s.”
She keeps a brisk pace, just short of a run, her eyes fixed on the pavement that passes through her oval of light.
“You stole his flashlight?”
“Sometimes I steal things.”
I hesitate. “Why?”
“Because the world steals from me. It takes everything.” She blinks twice, and I notice her eyes are wet, despite their blank stare. “Feels good to be on the other end for once.”
She stops. The passage has opened up into some sort of basement storage area. Stacks of boxes aged into brittle papyrus, ancient beige computer monitors—the typical contents of an office building, with one notable exception: a rolling steel tray piled with scalpels and hooks and scissors and saws, all sticky with dark fluid. The floor is thick with dust except for a trail of footprints that leads to an upward staircase.
Julie draws her shotgun from its plaid holster. There’s a door at the top of the stairs, and I’m about to make another plea for caution but she doesn’t even pause. She kicks the push bar, the door flies open, and she rushes through in a tactical crouch, her gun braced in low ready position.
I lumber in behind her, unarmed, untrained, unprepared. But no high school combat class would have prepared me for this.
We are in what appears to be the library of a university. A soaring ceiling, stained glass windows, tables and shelves of dark oak. It was majestic once, a profound place for profound pursuits, but its grandeur has been destroyed—not by age and decay but by utilitarianism. Fluorescent lights in aluminum cases hang from the ceiling to obviate the bronze lamps on the walls. Rich wooden tables have been supplemented by rows of folding metal ones, their white Formica tops mocking the antiquity around them. And of course the stained glass windows are protected by sheets of plastic.
But perhaps I’m burying the lead. Perhaps I’m avoiding the room’s more salient features because I’m weary of processing such images. Perhaps a detour into decor is a needed respite from the hair-tearing insanity of this world.
Because the library is full of zombies. At least two hundred of them, naked, their necks locked in rubber collars, steel cables fastened to walls, shelves, anything solid enough to hold them as they writhe and lunge, although many are eerily calm. The tables are littered with an incongruous as
sortment of equipment: glittering steel implements of medicine or torture sit alongside portable stereos, makeup kits, televisions, toys, and jars of fresh human fingers.
The dangling fluorescents are turned off; the only light comes through the stained glass, a dismal blue glow that leaves the huge chamber thick with shadows. Julie begins a perimeter check and I follow her. The Dead are everywhere. Not just the crowd in the reading area but lone specimens tucked away in the aisles like backups. My estimate climbs toward three hundred, diverse in age, race, and sex, but with one trait in common: freshness. Most are wholly unspoiled, with only the leaden eyes and pitiful groans to give away their status. A few have injuries—bullet holes, bites, a missing limb or two—but their flesh is always pale and smooth, like they died yesterday.
Julie prowls along the walls, methodically scanning the aisles. Her face has slipped into yet another mask that’s unfamiliar to me: the grim efficiency of a soldier. I think of the night we sat on the roof of our new suburban home and traded stories from our youths. All I had to offer were vague vignettes from my early corpsehood, lacking context or continuity—trying to eat a deer, walking with a boy, watching a girl sing a song—but her memories were colorful and crisp, like she’d kept them all these years in a climate-controlled vault. Her life in Brooklyn, watching the waters rise, the tanks in the street, but also stickball games and schoolyard crushes and some lingering aromas of happiness. Wine parties on the apartment’s tarry rooftop. Her mother laughing in a white dress, throwing empty bottles at the abandoned building next door and screaming with delight when she hit a window. Lawrence and Ella making out on the fire escape. Even her father cracking a smile, chugging a priceless vintage and belting a few bars from one of his band’s songs . . .
Her shotgun moves with her body like an extra limb, tracing the contours of the room with mechanical precision. She steps around the corner of the last aisle and she stops. Her gun falls to the floor.
. . . her old bedroom, its chaos and color pulsing against the emptiness of her father’s gray fortress. The sky-blue ceiling, the clothes-covered floor, the walls like the wings of a museum—red for relics of old-world passions, movie tickets and concert flyers, magazines and poems, white for her private collection of looted masterpieces with a few sheepish contributions of her own, yellow for good dreams yet to be realized, a wall that was and still is unadorned—and the black wall. A wall whose purpose I never learned, because I was afraid to ask. Because it held only one decoration. A photo of a woman who looked a lot like Julie, adrift in that dark expanse.
Julie falls to the floor as gracelessly as her gun, arms hanging at her sides, eyes wide and already filling with tears. She doesn’t flinch as long fingernails swipe inches from her face. She kneels in full surrender while the woman from the photo strains against her collar, hissing and groaning and reaching for her daughter’s throat.
IT OCCURS TO ME that Julie might want to die. The scars on her wrists prove she has danced with the desire, but I’ve always believed it was a thing of her youth, a defanged fossil buried beneath miles of time.
Will this unearth it?
She kneels like a penitent begging God to take everything, and the woman in front of her seems eager to oblige. She has knocked most of the books off the shelf that holds her; it moves slightly with each lunge. I grab Julie under the armpits and drag her back a few feet. Her body is a loose pile, far heavier than it should be. She stares ahead blankly like her emotions have shattered.
Was she expecting it? Could she possibly have known? A mad hope, perhaps, a fevered wish festering in her heart, but I can’t believe she ever imagined the reality of this.
Her mother. Dead but not dead. Stepping out of dreams and into a nightmare.
This woman died a long time ago, but I wouldn’t have guessed from her appearance. Whatever inner fire allowed me to stave off the rot through all my years of roaming, Julie’s mother must have it too. She is gray, emaciated, her blond hair a mass of scabby dreadlocks, but her face retains the graceful beauty I saw in that photo. It’s twisted by her ravenous sneer, her rows of yellowed teeth, but it’s there. My sentimental mind swells with visions of her returning to the Living, whisking Julie away from the orphanage and healing all her bruises.
But then my eyes deliver a more rational report. Like all the Dead in this place, Julie’s mother is naked. Her skin bears constellations of knife and bullet wounds, the inevitable result of a life sustained on violence. Comparing them to M’s injuries, I feel confident that Nora could repair them on the joyous day they begin to bleed. But this woman didn’t die from bullets. This woman peeked into her daughter’s room, saw that she was asleep, and wandered into the city alone. Perhaps she walked in solemn silence, or perhaps she spit and howled at the night, tearing her clothes and her hair, screaming at the Dead to come and take what they destroyed the world to get.
And the Dead obeyed.
Although her face is unscathed, her body has been gnawed like meat left out for rats. Large chunks are missing from her calves and thighs and I can see the exposed muscles spasming to produce her lurching movements. Any of these bites would have been enough to convert her, but she could have recovered from them too if she ever shook off the plague. What is draining the sunny glow from my fantasies is the gaping absence where the left half of her rib cage should be. I can see her remaining lung drooping against her spine, tinted gray from the pallor of death and black from too many cigarettes. I can see her lifeless heart.
This hole, of course, is where Julie’s gaze has settled. She has already done the math. Her face remains still except for the glimmer of tears streaming down it.
I want a god to curse. I’ll take any of them, all of them; I’ll scream and blaspheme till lightning shuts me up. Someone has to answer for such preposterous cruelty, such monstrously drawn-out torture. But I am pounding on the door of an empty house. It’s just us. It’s just me, Julie, and her mother. And the three men in beige jackets marching toward us down the aisle.
“Who the hell are you?” one of them shouts. “How did you get in here?”
Julie shoves past me and strides down the aisle. Her shotgun is back in her hands and it’s firing—pump—firing—pump—firing.
The cavernous space rumbles with low reverberations. Three men lie dead on the floor, their brains mingled in a puddle between them, perhaps sharing a final confused thought.
I watch Julie search their bodies. She looks faraway and somehow removed from the room, like I’m watching her through a telescope. I know that Julie has killed people. She’s told me about some of them, from her first at age ten—stabbing a man in the back while he was choking her father—to her most recent less than a year ago: a standard rapist-in-the-bushes situation. But this is the first time I’ve watched her do it, and I’m troubled by how much it shakes me. Like I didn’t truly believe her until now.
She pulls a set of keys out of one of the guards’ jackets and walks past me to her mother. She unlocks the padlock on the cable, freeing it from the bookshelf. Her mother hisses and lunges toward her.
Julie punches her.
“Stop it,” she says in a hard, flat voice. “I’m your daughter. You’re Audrey Maude Arnaldsdóttir and I’m your daughter.”
Audrey stares at her with wide eyes and an open mouth. Then she lunges again.
Julie punches her so hard she falls back into the bookshelf.
“And you’re a coward,” Julie continues, her voice beginning to tremble. “And a quitter. And a fucking child. But you’re a human being, and you’re going to fucking act like one.”
Audrey rests against the bookshelf with her jaw hanging open, her eyes roaming around the room, refusing to meet Julie’s gaze. It’s impossible to tell if she understood anything Julie said, let alone whether it sparked any remembrance, but she seems momentarily pacified.
“Watch her,” Julie says to me, and steps out of the aisle.
Audrey and I share an uncomfortable silence while Julie clatt
ers around the library.
“I’m R,” I mumble, putting my hand out to her in an absurd reflexive gesture.
Audrey’s head tilts. Black fluid trickles down her chin.
Julie returns with a soiled lab coat and a long steel rod with a ring on the end. She wraps the coat around her mother, forcing her arms through the sleeves while her mother squirms. Once it’s buttoned up, hiding the grisly mess of her body, the appearance of humanity rushes back in. Just an overworked doctor in need of a shower.
The transformation seems to catch Julie off guard. Her stiff-lipped determination falters and the tears return as the creature in front of her suddenly becomes the woman from her memories. For a moment, I think even Audrey feels it. Recognition flickers over her face, the savagery softening into gentle astonishment. Then it passes and she starts hissing again.
Julie connects the ring on the end of the rod to a clamp on her mother’s collar. I suddenly understand her intent.
“Julie,” I say as she leads her mother by the neck like a rabid dog, the pole keeping her at a safe distance.
“What.” She exits the aisle and heads deeper into the university, toward the exit.
I follow her, avoiding eye contact with the pitiful prisoners writhing around us. Should we free them too? And then what? I hear the fallen guards’ walkies squawking. The voice of reinforcements, reinstatement, repetition. Whatever is happening here, it will keep happening until someone silences that voice. We can’t save everyone tonight.
I watch Audrey’s coat billowing freely through the gap in her side. We can’t save anyone tonight.
“What?” Julie says again, glancing back at me. “Say it.”
It sticks in my throat. No, her mother can never come back to her. Yes, it’s insanity to take her with us. And yes, of course we’re going to anyway. I’d be a monster to think otherwise.