Journal:Jonathan Frey

Volume One: Minority Report

This story is part of the Malton Chronicles. This story is fan-made, and is not officially part of any background history for Urban Dead.

I like to compare writing a survivor diary to writing for television.

Each week, you have to come up with new material, a new take, a new vision. You've got to build themes, and just as quickly abandon them. You have to write off the top of your head a lot, introducing symbolic characters, and keeping dialogue realistic and engaging. You hope it keeps making sense, and of course, no one's breathing down your neck to make sure their multi-million dollar investment is recouped.

You've got a bag of tricks to work from and your imagination. Other than that, you live and die by the ratings.

And here they diverge. In television, numbers alone carry you. Your survivor diary, on the other hand, only readers who deign to enter insults or comments in the form of bloody handprints carry you through. Entries are viewed (if at all) when they're at the top of the list, the most recently created vision. After that, they're just as soon forgotten.

Now wait a minute, I said to myself. Television has DVD's now. Why can't the Survivor Diary have something similar?

Good point, myself answered. I'll do that.

So here it is. The equivalent of the Volume One DVD. Properly numbered, Volume One ends July 2007, the one-year anniversary of my accidental discovery of Urban Dead.

The collected writings of Malton's lone mutant in his turbulent first year. There would be 52 entries, but I left Urban Dead for a couple months to write a novel.

Lucky you. I'm back.

Sincerely,

The Man Behind The Goggles

Cigarettes

In Malton, it's not the cancer that will kill you.

I wake, and in the darkness, I can feel the other survivors.

It's hot in the summer nights. A year after Black July, the air conditioning is merely another betrayal to the waiting masses outside. No one bothers anymore.

My lungs cry out for nicotine, and I rise, and pick the pack and matches up off the bar. I walk up the creaking steps that lead to the roof. One year into the seige, no one wakes up for creaking stairs. The sound of a smashing barricade is the only alarm clock anyone recognizes.

The stairs lead to the door to the roof. I push it open and stand for a moment, trying to tame the sudden feeling of intense vertigo. Being outdoors when your extra-sensorily blind is like being dropped out of an airplane into a flaming cartoon neon wonderland.

Your other five senses (four, if you're normal) pick up the difference, but there's very little sense of scale or distance. Without that, it's easy to lose yourself in the rush of intense smells, sounds, feels, tastes and tingles.

I let the rush by, and suddenly, I'm myself again.

I can tell from the breeze and the hush, it's night. The air smells different, heavy with the prospect of dew. When I could see, I used to love looking at the moon.

I light the match, push it into the end of the cigarette, and inhale the smoke deep into my riotous lungs. They calm, relax, let the toxins in. I cough, and then everything is smooth.

The smoke is familiar, comforting. Like meeting and old friend you thought was dead. Or sleeping on a musty, mouse-ridden couch.

The others in Malton don't understand. In their uncomprehension is their comfort, their crutch.

"Taking years off your life," they say. "Perfectly good waste of matches."

"You could get cancer, and then you'd really be screwed," they say.

In Malton, it's not the cancer that will kill you. In Malton, the dead walk, and they're hungry.

A quarter of the way through my cigarette, the cherry splutters for a moment, and the taste of burning blood fills my mouth. There was a survivor in this bar, and his blood spilled on my cigarettes, then dried. It's an all-too-familiar taste now.

The dead don't want the cigarettes. They want the sweet flesh in the center of your skull. They kill the breathers and leave drops on the cigarettes.

Animals.

I lean over the edge of the building and spit the bloody smoke taste out of my mouth, onto the head of a passing corpse.

I can't see the corpse, but my sixth sense, the one you don't have and your friend don't have, tells me it's a collection of nerve cells, and from the random way they're firing, I know it's a corpse.

Only a thin membrane separates that corpse from me. For all I know, it's some poor bastard on his way to a "clinic" to get the antidote to the virus shot in through the base of his skull, using what little free will he has to stave of the cravings.

But he'll stay on the other side of the barricades, on the off-chance he's hungry, and I won't have to put the poor bastard out of his misery.

It's the best I can do, for now.

Jumping The Shark

Our day is their night, the time to move about in search of supplies, to take them down one at a time.

Dawn comes, and utters the silent command to travel.

No one talks in Malton anymore. Some people cling to radios and cell phones the way I cling to cigarettes, a familiar old friend that causes cancer and makes a difference. In this family of strangers, there's never a lot to talk about.

Compare this to early days of the seige. Talking was a kind of currency. You'd tell your story to make yourself distinguishable from the huddled masses of the living.

Life in the siege is dominated by a pert, ugly silence, broken only by hand guestures. The way to get healed is to wordlessly point to your wounds. The way to get food is to wordlessly point to your mouth.

Dawn speaks in an inaudible voice. Take to the streets, find the stragglers from the great hordes, kill them, and retreat from sunset's cry. Our day is their night, the time to move about in search of supplies, and to take them down one at a time.

I climb the steps again, onto the roof, and out the door. The vertigo returns, but I'm focused. I climb onto the lip of the building and light another cigarette, waiting. The vertigo passes.

The sun brings the stench. Thousands of walking corpses, rotting slowly in the sun. Their flesh decays, and draws flies, which plant eggs, which hatch into maggots. The more cognizant dead swat them away. The dedicated ones prefer a terrible squirming visage. The stench brings its own kind of dizziness.

In the moments after it leaves, I reach out with the sixth sense, through the earth's magnetic field, to the castings of metal and stone interruptions that represent the buildings of Malton. I can tell north without a compass. I can feel metal from the ever-so-slight electrical current it generates.

The military scientists that analyzed me when they wanted to me to steal government secrets for them said sharks have the same sense I do. Sharks use it to hunt for prey when their other senses fail them. They use it to travel long distances, orienting themselves to the earth's natural magnetic north, and using that to travel other directions for several thousands of miles through an ocean full of hooks, bigger sharks, and edible fish.

This morning, I am that shark.

I feel the next building. It's a decrpit abandoned warehouse. The distance isn't that great. Five feet from one roof to the next. I focus on the roof, on the tracings of metal shingle, the angle they make against what my sixth sense is telling me is the ground. The angle is steep, forbidding.

I pitch my cigarette butt over the edge, bend my knees, and am airborne.

The feeling of weightlessness consumes me, and lasts forever. Is this it? Is this the time I'll be wrong? Was I thrown off by an iron ore concentration, or a pile of demolished, rusting cars? There's no way to tell.

I'm prone through the air, and the wind in my face rustles my fur, pushes my long ears flat back against the nape of my neck. My sightless world cascades around me. In the weightless moments, there is no hard truth, only a chorus of quantum possibilities that sing together at once in my mind's eye: I over-shoot and tumble to the streets and the waiting hords, I break my ankle on the roof, I slide in through a window, beheading myself on a piece of large glass.

Contact.

I live to make the jump to the next building, onto a factory one story higher than the warehouse. My muscles are up to the task. I gauge the distance, and am airborne again within seconds. I imagine the startled faces of survivors watching me through an opening in the warehouse roof. I am the sudden, uninvited monster, the holy terror.

I am the shark.

The last jump on today's trip is the worst — on to the imposing gothic facade of what used to be an upscale hospital. It's a jump that requires a three-story vertical leap, and the only handhold from the roof of the mall, where I'm standing below is in the mouth of a snarling, overhanging gargoyle. There's space for only one hand, and the space of inches means the thin membrane of death will envelope me.

I've made this trip several times before, but the evil chorus returns, and fills my head with twisted song.

My muscles are up to the task. I pull myself onto the roof, kick in the door, and enter.

There are other survivors here. A few of them stare. I can feel their panic the same way I can feel the corpses and the buildings. I feel their shocked signals shooting through their brains. Their scents change. They recoil and gasp audibly.

I brush past them. I don't want their approval, only the gauze, disinfectant, antibiotics, suture thread, needles, anything I can find that will heal their cuts and infections and remind me what it is to be a human being.

It's a tedious task. I stalk down long halls and rip open cabinets and nursing stations to get at stockpiles of supplies. I encounter more survivors, more anguish, more fear and more hopelessness.

I walk for hours before I finally find an unlooted cabinet at a nursing station in what the braille by the door tells me used to be the ICU. I find enough to heal ten sets of bites and cuts, then hit the stairwell to the roof, underneath the sky and the cloud of rotting flesh and the buzz of millions of flies.

I walk to the edge, light another cigarette and pause, reading the next jump onto the roof of the mall complex below. I grimace at the blood smoke in my cigarette, adjust my leather carrying pouch around my shoulder, flex my knees, and leap.

I am the shark.

The Human Condition

Sometimes I think a zombie uprising was just what this town needed.

She tells me her name is Dorothy.

She's an elderly, stern-sounding woman in a rustling dress that hasn't been washed in days. I can feel the panic in her brain, and it's scent in my nostrils. When I reach out with helping hands, she recoils. Beneath the scent of panic, I can smell blood.

"How do I know you're not going to eat me?" she says. "How do I know you're not some kind of monster?"

We're standing near the barricades at the south fountain in the mall. Survivors move hurriedly by, rushing from the abandoned Kay Bee Toys to the Gander Mountain to The GAP. Someone stops and stares for easily the twentieth time this morning.

Malls are the only place where the silence doesn't reign. The talking feels forced, hollow. It echoes flatly off the tile walls.

"Monsters aren't real," I say.

I detest the dound of my voice. It's a low, hissing snarl that forms a mockery of human words. Before the rising, when I worked as a telemarketer, I used a computer voice modulator to do the talking for me. It was very strictly Against The Rules.

Fuck the rules. They say people should stay dead.

"Neither are zombies," she shoots back. "For all I know, you're some kind of vampire."

"It's daytime," I say. "If I were a vampire, I'd be dead right now."

"That's what you'd want me to believe, isn't it?" she snaps.

I sigh, and slide the cigarette from one end of my mouth to the other.

"Look Dorothy -- if that's even your real name -- I can tell from your smell that you're bleeding, and I can tell from your nervous system that it's somewhere near femoral artery," I say. "It doesn't smell like it's infected, but in the early stages, I can't sense it at all. We can either do this or we can not."

"Not," she says, and storms off.

It's the fifth person that's done the same thing. I decide to stop counting. Dorothy stopped more from idle curiosity, look at the freak-show, than anything else. I'm losing patience with the morons in these malls. The flock here like starry-eyed teenagers to meet and pick up a pistol they don't know how to use, a GPS that will tell them they're exactly in the middle of fuck-all, or a newspaper that's a year out of date. Once inside, they yokel around and dream fondly of all the shit they left behind. Once, I actually watched a man bleed to death while he stood looking at The Disney Store, muttering "Mickey Mouse" to himself over and over again.

Sometimes, I think a zombie uprising was just what this town needed.

I'm getting frustrated and tired, easily agitated by the doltishness of the people looking at me while they bleed even now, reading my little cardboard sign that says "First Aid," looking back at me, and passing by. I'm tired, and I worked hard just to get to the point where I could lift this damn stuff from the hospital, much less smear it on ungrateful mall rats.

I snarl and kick the sign across the mall floor.

That's when I smell the little girl.

She's looking at me, but not afraid. Her scent is more diffident, and curious. Her nerves are calm. Her brain is a bit lower to the ground and smaller thant the adults, and it's got the peculiar skittish nerve energy of a child.

"Hello," she says. "Can you help me?"

Below the other scents of the mall, and her general odor, I catch a whiff of blood. Lots of blood, and a whiff of something else, something more cloy and malicious. It's the scent of infection, and it's been festering for a while.

"I tried to go to the other adults for help, but they all crowd around and don't see me because I'm small," she says, starting to sob. "I lost my friend in the rush. Please -- buh, buh -- please help me."

"What's your name?" I say.

"Sarah," she says.

"Sure," I say. "Have a seat."

She sits on the edge of the empty, silent fountain, and I kneel in front of her and reach into my bag.

Her wound is bad, a long scratch that ends in a bite where the corpse struggled to lock it's lower jaw into place. The bite is on the lower right side of her torso. I can feel where the nerves cry out.

"Okay, Sarah," I say. "I'm going to have to touch it beause I can't see. It might hurt a little, but I'm trying to make it better, okay?"

"Are you blind?" she asks.

"Yes," I say. "But I can smell you and hear you and touch you enough to heal you. My hands are my new eyes, and I have to see how your boo-boo is shaped."

"Don't say boo-boo," she says. "That's stupid."

"Huh," I say absently, lightly probing with my fingers, the wound is round, with a chunk of flesh missing. "How old are you, Sarah?"

"Twelve," she says, and shivers at my clumsy fingers.

"Okay," I say. "I'm going to have to put alcohol on it, and it's going to hurt like -- "

"Hell?"

"The dickens," I finish. "Hell, yeah, whatever."

"Keep talking," she says. "It doesn't hurt so much."

"I don't like my voice," I say. "It's ugly. Why don't you talk?"

"Okay," she says.

There is a long ugly silence while I pour alcohol on to cotton swabs.

"So go ahead," I say.

"Now?"

"Yeah," I say. "I'm about to put stuff on there, and if it helps to talk, you should talk."

"Well, I don't know what to talk about," she says.

"Fine," I say. "I'll talk."

"My name is Jonathan, I'm 22 years old -- "

"Are you a monster?" she says.

"No," I say, swabbing the cotton along the edge of the wound and then probing deep into it. "Yes. Kind of."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"I'm a mutant," I say. "A random freak accident of nature. I've been hairy and ugly since I was born."

I toss bloody swabs of cotton into the fountain, and pull out a long gauze bandage. I bind the wound around her torso, careful to avoid making it too tight or too loose, and trying as much as possible not to touch her. Little kids always creep me out.

"I'm not a monster that eats people, but I am ugly and I don't wear clothes and I'm blind and I've got great giant fangs, so I'm a monster," I say.

"No you're not," she says authoritatively. "Monsters eat people."

"That's what I say," I say. "People don't like that so much. They especially didn't like it in the beginning. They though I was the one running around killing people. I've never killed anyone in my life.

"It makes it easier to tell people I'm a monster. It's what they expect, what they're comfortable with."

"Huh," she says. "You know, that didn't hurt that much."

"We're not done, " I say. "I've got to give you a shot."

"Why?" she asks.

"It's an antibiotic," I say. "It helps with the infection."

"I've got an infection?" she sounds panicked, and her nerves light up, irritating my senses.

"Yep," I say. "The shot will help, though. It'll kill the bacteria from the zombie's mouth."

"Were you a doctor?" she asks.

"Nope," I say, pulling out a syringe.

"Then how do you know?"

"I was in the army," I say, then lie. "They teach you stuff like that in the army."

"Bullshit," she says solemnly.

"It's helped in the past. It helped me," I say. "What do you want from me kid?"

"Just keep talking," she says.

"I don't see many kids around," I say, plunging the needle into a bottle of antibiotics. "What the hell are you doing here?"

"The first wave of the monsters ate all my family," she says, ignoring my joke. "They got torn apart, limb from limb."

"Huh," I say. "They didn't come back, then, did they?"

"Nope," she says. "I just kind of followed the crowds, and then this old man grabbed me and pulled me into this apartment -- oooh."

She hisses as the needle goes in.

"Almost done," I say. "I'm sorry about your family."

"That was a long time ago," she says. She pauses. "I've cried out all my tears since then."

"Well, Sarah, it looks like we're done here," I say. "Hold on a sec, though."

I dig through my leather pouch, and towards the bottom, I find it. It's a lollypop I found under the bar.It's broken in two places, but it's still a lolly.

"Here you go," I say, shoving it into her hand. "See the doctor, get a lollypop."

I hear the wrapper crinkle, and the clack of hard candy against young teeth, and I realize she's crying from the salt smell of tears.

"You got any place to -- " I begin.

"The old man looks after me," she says and sniffles. "His name's Steve, and he lost all his family, too. We look out for each other. I'll find him again. He wouldn't leave without me."

"Well, good luck, kid," I say. "I'm leaving, because I never really liked malls in the first place."

I turn and head for the stairs. There's a roof entrance through a broken skylight in The Banana Republic, and I can feel the daylight waning through the big broken skylight in the main concourse of the mall. Time to get back to the bar.

But Sarah isn't done.

"Hey Jonathan," she calls to my retreating back. "I like your voice."

Animals, Part One

Many of the crowd have lost friends, relatives, family to savage murderers — riots, the radio calls them — and I'm playing the dutiful part of murderer.

I'm having the dream again.

It's always the same. I'm on top of the car, in front of the angry mob. The moon is brighter than normal, glaring like a spotlight onto my face. In the manner of dreams, it becomes a spotlight.

Its the sighted memory of what I should have seen, but didn't.

"In the name of God," says the voice, whispering in my ear. "We commit this poor soul to your judgment and eternal mercy, Amen."

The voice belongs to Father Gilmore, the priest at the local parish. I'd been to his confession booth three or four times under the cover of darkness, if only to have conversations. The Good Father was a bit heavy with the bottle, and I was his only regular Wednesday night appointment, so he obliged me with drawn-out talk until the wee hours.

The crowd had dragged him from his rectory in the middle of the night to administer the Last Rights.

The rope tightens around my neck, and a hush falls over the crowd. There is a long pause. The executioner speaks in archaic, grandiose terms, distorted into a sneer by the loathing in his voice.

"Would the prisoner like to make any last words?" he says.

Like the day it happened, I don't beg for mercy. I know my protestations will only be met with contempt. To the faces in the crowd, I'm just an animal.

"Fuck you," I snarl. "Fuck you all for doing this. If there is a God, he'll —"

"My little girl," cries the faceless despairing mother. "KIll him!"

There are other mutters. Many of the crowd have lost friends, relatives, family to savage murders — riots, the radio called them — and I'm playing the dutiful part of murderer.

"He's an animal!" somone else cries out. "Kill him!"

That's when the screams start, and where the dream ends.

I always wake in a cold sweat, my fur matted and clinging. Sometimes, I scream and cry. Sometimes, another survivor will kick me and put a finger to their mouth, the universal sign for silence.

This time, I'm only breathing heavily. I scan the nervous systems in the room. They're all asleep. I've woken no one.

I retrieve the pack and matches from the bar. The pack's nearly empty, and it's the second one I've gone through today. I'll have to open another carton before long, and that means going into the back storeroom, where the pieces of the last bartender rot in the musty darkness.

I climb the stairs to the roof, tiptoeing despite the sound sleeps of the other survivors. I alk the path to the edge of the building, and light up. The smoke clouds my sense of smell, blocks out the veiled world around me. I go back to the top of the car, with the angry crowd and the rope around my neck.

I was smoking then, too.

It was just after 10 p.m. when they came for me, bearing torches I could smell but not see, and asking me politely to come along with them. At first, I refused, and then the executioner pulled out a handgun, stuck it under my nose, and politely insisted.

On that day, the screams didn't end. Confusion sped through the crowd as the dead lumbered out of the shadows, grabbing, slapping, biting, clawing, groaning. The first blood was spilled and the scent of it filled the wind.

The real animals had come to rescue me.

The executioner must have seen it all, because he jumped off the top of the car without so much as a word, and I never ran into him again, not during the siege and not at any of the malls.

The car shook as the crowd stampeded away. I heard the sound of feet crashing over metal. On the ground in front of me, a man was trampled to death by the surging crowd, and groaned. His brain went out like a candle or a burned-out light bulb.

I didn't know the wordless moaners were corpses then. For all I knew, they were PCP addicts or gang members or any of the other scum on the streets of Malton. The reality would come later.

I did know I didn't want them to get me. Escape was made difficult by my bound hands, but the noose had to be tied to something solid, probably a streetlight.

I leapt straight up, slammed my head into the thing, and crashed back down onto the car. My ears rang, and my eyes started watering. The darkness of my blindness flashed with stars and funny geometric shapes. It was a streetlight, probably cast-iron.

One of them grabbed me.

I kicked it hard, shoving it away. His nervous system felt funny, somehow, random. It was the first corpse I sensed, and I assumed he was on hardcore drugs. I heard more groans, and shuffling feet drawing nearer.

I leapt again, jumping over the streetlight and coming down on top of it.

Confused groans rang out below me. I heard more shuffling and sniffing, and then something hit the streetlight. It shook hard.

Desperate, I felt around for the now-slack noose and began gnawing it with my fangs. It became a sort of sordid race. The dead were trying to push over the street lamp. I was trying to gnaw through the rope before they could topple it.

Whang.

The individual strands parted, but remained connected. There were five.

Whang.

The first strand parted, and bits of rope drove into my mouth. My gums were bleeding from where the rope was scraping against them, the taste of blood ran down my throat. I ignored it.

Whang. Creak.

The light bend and buckled, but snapped upright. I bit down on the rope, trying not to let it slip away.

The groans grew excited below me, the shuffling and the sniffing picked up. The second and third strands parted simultaneously as I bit down on the rope. I started gnawing the fourth strand.

Whang. Creeeaaaaak.

The streetlight bent again, and I slid down a few feet. The fourth strand broke, and the fifth strand was fraying. This was good, because the streetlight had been damaged, and was bending from my weight.

Slowly, surely, the streetlight bent under my weight, dangling me like a pinata over the groaners and shriekers. Finally, I toppled off onto the ground and rolled into a crouch, chewing rope with animailstic intensity.

They were all around me, clawing and kicking and scratching and punching. One bit into my bicep, but didn't take flesh away. I head butted him with the rope still in my mouth. The jarring blow parted the fifth strand. I was free.

I gathered all of my remaining strength, and jumped blindly, vaguely sensing and opening upwards through the reaching hands and snarling mouths.

I erupted skywards from the crowd, the frayed strands of my hangman's rope flapping behind me, my arms behind my back. I heard astonished groans from below me.

Straight up and towards the nearest building, more than fifty feet straight into an office building.

I shattered through the plate glass window, and landed unconscious on the floor of a corner office.

I hear the groans of the dead below me. They drag me back from the dim corridors of memory, and I spit cottonmouth over the edge at them. I toss my cigarette butt, and it lands on a corpse. The sound of pained groaning makes me smile.

The people in that crowd weren't animals. I wasn't an animal. Animals eat people to survive. Animals obey instinct.

The dead are the only animals left in Malton.

Next to them, I'm Mother Theresa.

Our Better Angels

Blood is everywhere, and it covers the moon.

The heat on my face tells me it's daytime again.

I've been nosing about behind the bar since before sunrise, looking for whiskey or something else to kill the pain from last night's nightmare. Most of the bottles have been smashed, and the ones that haven't been smashed have been looted, either by me or by someone else. I've cut my fingers twice already, and I'm on the brink of giving up, when my hand closes around a cylinder that feels heavy and liquid.

There's no way to tell what kind of liquor is inside, so I feel up to the neck of the bottle, screw off the cap and pour a tiny amount into my mouth.

Cheap, warm raspberry vodka. Blech.

I tilt the bottle back further, and the stream thickens on my tongue, killing of taste buds with it's sweentness. I pretend I'm drinking Kool-Aid or raspberry juice, and cough at the searing after-burn.

The warmth travels up through my stomach and into my head. I giggle like a child, and set the bottle down for a minute. It must be at least half-full.

"Got enough to share?"

The whisper is almost inaudible, even to my heightened senses.

"Sure," I hiss back. I set the bottle on top of the bar. "Compliments of the house."

An involuntary snigger comes back, and I hear the sound of the bottle sliding across the bar.

"So who are you?" the whisper comes back. "What are you doing here?"

"Drinking," I joke. "Actually, I'm trying to help people."

"Really?" comes the whispered reply.

"Yeah," I say. "I can't do much, but I'm able to make a hospital run and help people out. I patch them up okay, and I'm getting better and better at it."

"What about fighting them?"

This whisper is louder, and excited.

From time to time, survivors in the bar have gone out into the streets, guns in hand, and fired on the dead, a futile guesture of defiance. Sometimes, this meant the barricades would be breached and the enraged dead would storm in. I had been lucky so far...away on supply trips or foraging for cigarettes when the worlds collided.

A few mall citizens bragged they'd killed hundreds of corpses, which always seemed a bit of an oxymoron to me. A few had the tell-tale brain signs and scent of liars. Some believed that they actually had, which was proof enough for me. Even fewer had the scent of fresh blood on their clothes.

I think carefully about my answer. I've forgotten most of what I learned in BT, but I'm still very strong. The military scientist who told me my closest genetic cousin was the Great White Shark also told me my body produces a unique muscle protein that enhances my strength and agility. It also causes my fur, a fine silver fuzz that clings tight to my body.

"I'm not sure," I whisper back. "I've had to heal people that went out and tangled with them. It wasn't pretty."

"Neither are you," comes back the whisper.

I hear the bottle slide back across the bar, and reach out and grab it.

"Fair point," I hiss, anesthatized to the subtle dig by the liquor. "There's a lot of stupidity all around, though. I'd be willing to fight if it were handled properly."

"We'd train you," the whisper comes back. "Us. The Malton Civil Defense Unit."

"Whosat?" I whisper. "Sounds like one of those moral leagues, like Upstanding Mothers Against Rock and Roll Music, or the Christian Youth Association."

"Huh," comes back the noncommittal grunt. It has a tenor of understanding to it.

The whisper makes it impossible to tell whether it's a woman or a man, a young person or an old person. My sixth sense is good at telling me whether someone is looking at me or not, and what their intention is, but it's impossible to tell sex from the nerve cells. It's a subtlety to human experience I pine for.

"How many?" I whisper.

"About 75 of us right now," the whisper comes back. "Some veterans, some just angry civilians. A few doctors."

"Where the hell have you been?" I say. "I've been dancing over the heads of thousands of corpses for at least six months now, and this is the first time I've heard of you."

"We're small, but we're determined," the voice says. "We want to fight, but we don't want to take any unneccesary risks. We want the city back, and we all want to go home."

"Ha," I whisper back. "Everyone wants that, the whole damned town. That doesn't set you apart that much."

I set the bottle down and slide it to the sexless, faceless entity. It's plucked out of my grasp.

"Nope," it whispers. "The Academy sets us apart."

There's the dim sound of heavy swallowing, a bit of a cough, and that's all.

"Ok, I'll bite," I say. "What's the Academy?"

"A school to train for fighting them," it whispers back.

"School?" I echo incredulously. "You have got to be kidding me."

"It's at an old cinema to the northwest," the voice says. "You can't miss it. We've tagged the outside in day-glo orange."

"Clever," I say. "Does it have a dinner bell, too?"

"Maybe," it says. "Maybe."

The bottle slides back onto the table.

"What do you teach at the school?" I ask.

There's no reply. I reach out to grabe the bottle. The voice is gone, and so is the vodka.

I shake it off and go get my leather bag from the used-to-be corner booth that I sleep in each night. It's time to go shopping.

I travel the rooftops to the hospital without incident. I find supplies, which is a small wonder. It's crowded in this part of town, and it's getting harder to find simple things, like medical gauze.

Then, on the way back, I slip.

As falls go, this one isn't bad...only two stories. and by the time I've landed, my legs are already moving, springint along the ground. I don't hear anyone or see anything, but I can feel them. They heard my involuntary shout. The animals are coming.

I'm winded, and tire easily. The damn cigarettes weigh like lead on my pulse, but adrenaline melts them.

I turn a corner, and they're there.

Five of them, staring at me and moaning. Their shattered nerves register surprise. One is asleep. Three others are smashing at the creaking barricades, and distracted. The fifth is Sarah, the little girl from the mall. Her nerves register indifference when she sees me. Indifference, and hunger.

In my startled anguish, I am slow to react.

She's on me in a minute, and lets out a loud growl. Her small jaws close around my wrist and won't let go.

I'm dazed and disoriented. The vodka is making things worse. Something keeps poking me in the ribs.

The older ones are slower to react, slower to anticipate. They're unnerved by my demonic appearance. They shuffle closer. The smell of rotting flesh and dried blood is overwhelming. Something is poking me in the ribs.

I try to scream, but can't. The one with nerves like a senior citizen -- it must be Steve -- digs his fingers into the soft flesh of my stomach. The sleeping corpse wakes up, and starts to move in my direction. Something is poking me in the ribs.

Finally, the reptillian survival instict takes over. I grab the thing that's poking me in the ribs.

My free hand closes around a narrow wooden shaft. It feel like an axe, but it's stuck in something. As one of them chmps down on my bicep, digging teeth into skin and flesh, I feel along the shaft to the end. It is an axe. It's stuck in Sarah's shoulder.

I'm losing blood, and the vodka is getting stronger with each drop that flows out of my veins. It's getting hard to think, hard to move.

I yank the axe out of Sarah's shoulder and swing mightly. The fist stiff swings are wild, and I strike only air. Then I connect with something solid and fleshy. A wet squish rends the air.

The other corpse let go immediatley, and flee, terrified, out of the range of my senses.

I feel around on the ground, looking for the thing I struck. My hands feel fresh blood, and the shaft of my axe. I grope down into the blade, and the bloody mess attached to a small, limp body.

I let out a small, slow moan. I've killed Sarah.

It's better, I tell myself, as I limp into a nearby building, collapsing in exhaustion onto the floor in front of terrified strangers. She wouldn't want to have lived that way. I was right to kill her, and I was right to dismember the body afterwards.

But I dream again that night, and in my dream, I hack the small body of the child to pieces over and over again. Blood is everywhere, and it covers the moon.

When I wake up, I make a decision.

As I bind my wounds, I decide I will fight.

I will fight for her.

The nightmares are just beginning.

Et In Arcadia Ego

In this world, there are animals, and then there are zookeepers.

I'm at the Academy less than six minutes before I manage to piss someone off.

In terms of relating to the people in the military or paramilitary organizations, it's a personal best.

The man who calls himself Walking Needle meets me outside a non-descript building just west of the cinema. I sense a hum-drum activity inside, and hear people moving about, laughing and talking. The sound of normal human conversation startles me, like the memory of a dream. It also terrifies me, and I glance back over my shoulder several times.

The streets are vacant, and I turn back to a brain that is rife with disappointment.

"You must be Jonathan," he says. "You're blind."

"Yep, that's me," I say.

"How much medical supplies do you have?" he says.

"How many?" I say. "I don't have any. I came here to learn how to fight, not to heal people."

"Healing is part of the fighting," he says. "You'll need first aid gear, and lots of it. I get guys with bites, cuts and scrapes all the time. We'll work up to the fighting."

I reach into my leather carrying pouch and pull out a cigarette. I light up and sigh, frustrated.

"I was hoping to start killing them right away," I say.

Disappointment rapidly devolves into anger.

"Oh, so you don't have room for medical supplies, but you've got room for cigarettes?" he barks.

"I thought I'd be fighting."

"You ever see a zombie smoke?" he shoots back.

"Nope," I say.

"Then quit," he says. "Go loot some Nicorette or something. That's just gonna' draw more of them."

The cigarette is plucked from my mouth, and I hear a leather-soled shoe grinding it out. No one has ever dared to do such a thing or talk to me this way. The last man that did was a seargant in the military, after the docs had stopped experimenting on me. I broke his jaw and three ribs, and got discharged.

So much for the military.

"Did you become a dick when you started running the Academy, or were you born that way?" I say.

There is an awkward pause.

"Go get medical supplies, and don't come back until you do," he says. "If you don't want to, you're free to go."

"Whatever, 'Needs," I say.

I leap four stories onto the roof of a nearby bar. The slanted heat and the stillness tell me it's nearing twilight, and it's almost time to find a new home.

I wander away, jumping aimlessly, half of me watching for a new safehouse, and the other half marveling at the balls on Walking Needle. I sigh. I'm tired and angry, and I should go back and apologize, but part of me wants to just keep going, to leap off some steam and breathe smoke.

I feel the survivors in each building. Most are barricading or getting ready to sleep. In almost every building, I sense the alert and terrified night watchman. Back at the bar, we were never that organized.

I'm crossing the extended ceiling of what must be some sort of low-slung office building, when I sense a noise from inside, and an unusual bustle of activity.

I feel my way around to a broken skylight, and stick my head in to get a good earful, nose-full and faceful of what is going on inside.

The sound of a running generator patters off of tile walls. I hear men and women speaking, but their voices are muffled, almost as if they're all wearing scarves or masks. Heated air blows out of the vent and onto my face. The air tastes and smells like heavy disinfectant.

I grab the lip of the skylight, and drop down into the building. The scent of cigarette smoke trails behind me, and I drop the butt onto the floor.

Six brains in the room. Five register disgust and shock.

Unexpectedly, one registers surprise and recognition. The entity seems hauntingly familiar.

"Brthr," the voice says.

"What?"

I hear the snap of an elastic band and a deep gulp of air.

"Silver," the voice says. "What an unexpected pleasure."

At the greeting, memories fire across my own brain, images of chemicals, indoctrination, and restraints. I know this voice, but not the brain.

Silver was what they called me. It was an animal's name, a dog's name, a project's name. It was a way for them to go home and get drunk and fool around with their wives.

"Doctor," I say coldly.

"Now, now," he says. "We're not in a military prison any more. Call me Alan."

He wasn't always Alan. In the dim shadows of the facility, when the doctors would come with an injection or a stimulation or a new physical challenge, he was the Head Doctor, and the only one who spoke. His mind was always swathed in shadow then, a trick of chemicals or concentration or some kind of disrupting device.

"I'll call you whatever I damn well please," I say. "What are you doing in Malthon?"

"I'm doing God's work," he says. I can hear the ugly sneer in his voice.

Using the sound of his voice as a map, I punch him in the face. I feel his nose break under my fist, feel the blood stream warm onto my knuckles. A week ago, I would have been horrified. Now, I just smile.

I feel the others trying to move in, then retreat, as the Doctor speaks.

"Back off," he says. "This is between us."

He laughs, and I hear him wiping his face with a nasally 'ugh.'

"That wasn't uncalled for," he says. "Your tests were one big mistake. Are we even?"

"Not by a long shot," I say. "But I'm calm enough now to actually talk."

"Right, then," he says. "I'm working for Necrotech."

"Doing what?"

"Healing the sick," he says. My fists ball up. "Please don't punch me."

"Okay," I say. "What sick?"

"An interesting question," he says. "Them. The dead. The zombies. Whatever you call them. It's not magic that's causing this, but a virus."

"They're animals," I say quietly. "They don't deserve to be healed."

"Ah, but it's such fascinating work," he says. "It's more fascinating and humane than what we did to you."

I experience a peculiar feeling of vertigo, like a bug under a magnifying glass. I imagine his eyes roving over the concealed surgical scars on my body, evaluating, appraising, approving.

Another voice, with a Brooklyn accent, interrupts his monologues.

"Doctor, the patient is..."

"Just a minute," he says. "Silver, if you're going to beat the living shit out of me, you'd better get a move on. I haven't got all day."

Behind him, a random jangling of nerve cells gels into a semi-consciouss entity.

"I'm not going to do that to you," I say. "He is."

I turn away, and the terrified screams of the nurses ring deafeningly in my ears. I smile, climb out through the skylight, and am gone.

How could I be so cold? It's simple.

In this world, there are animals, and then there are zookeepers. An animal feeds, and that is all. A zookeeper feeds the animals, and that is all. I can only hope that in killing all the zookeepers, the animals will starve. There may be good doctors working to fight the plague out there, but Alan the Doctor was only a zookeeper, interested in keeping his animals alive long enough to use what he learned for his own twisted ends.

A long time ago, when I was in the army, I volunteered for a simple medical diagnostic test. I was assigned a code name: Silver. I was subjected to tests, injections, and torture in the name of science, and in the hope that I could one day steal secrets from other governments. In return for my sacrifice, the zookeepers fed me and treated me with the contempt befitting an animal.

I repaid them in kind, and was left to fend for myself.

When I return to the Academy that night, I'm empty handed.

The Needle is standing guard when I thud onto the roof of his building.

"Hey 'Needs," I say. "I didn't get medical supplies, but I did get some humility. Apart from tonight, I'm ready to obey orders. I'm ready to fight."

"Oh yeah?" he says. "And will that humility heal any wounds?"

"It might," I say. "It might."

Animals, Part Two

In the dark, a new dream haunts me.

The folks at the academy tolerate my nightmares.

I sleep in a separate room ,where my screams don't wake them. In the morning, they cheerfully inquire about them, as if having such nightmares were of no more importance than the weather. One, a former clinical psychologist, pesters me annoyingly. She worries I might have post-traumatic stress disorder.

"We all have that," I say. "We're living in an old movie theater under siege by the living dead. If that's not post-traumatic stress disorder, I'm a gecko."

"What's a gecko?" she asks.

"A kind of lizard that climbs on walls," I say. "They live in Hawaii. The point being, everyone has nightmares about last July."

"Yeah," she says. "They don't wake us all up, though."

"Look, Anne, I'm fine," I say. "Shouldn't we be healing the latest round of casualties?"

I can hear two or three of them muttering under their breath. One of them mutters something about a line, and between the five people gathered in a small group, I smell a lot of blood.

"Sure," she says. "But we're not done here."

"I bet were not," I say, groping delicately up the right leg of a slim, you ng female patient. She shivers at my touch. I don't need a sixth sense to tell me she finds the experience of being felt up by a talking bat revolting.

Women.

As the day wears on into the evening, a grim procession of bites, gouges, fractures, and sprains parades before me. I've healed so many wounds, I'm able to tell them almost without touching them. It's dull, frustrating work, but it silences the memory of the screams.

Around a campfire, that night, the others avoid me. I move to one fire, thinking they'll ignore me, but on by one, they sidle away to other fires. Finally, I'm alone, and Anne comes up to the fire. She sits across from me in silence. I can tell she's formulating words.

I ignore her, letting her make the first move.

"They're not avoiding you because you're a mutant," she says.

"I didn't think it was that," I say. "I thought it was because you told them to."

"It was," she says, and I hear the smile in her voice. "I need to talk to you alone."

"About what?" I ask, but I already know.

"What do you dream about?" she asks. "What's the story? What happened to you.

I sigh.

I gasped. I winced. It hurt to breathe.

I woke on the floor of the office building as the first refugees were filing past. I could hear the tramp of feet, and the light crackle of two-way radios. I smelt general purpose office cleaner. It was about noon, from the heat of the sun.

I climbed down the office stairs, five flights, trying to cradle my wounded left arm through the rope that binds them behind my back. I didn't feel any other cuts, mainly just bruises where "rioters" had punched and kicked me.

The last flight of stairs was smashed in, and jumped ten feet down, onto a pile of wooden boards. I fell, rolling down the boards and through the fire exit, setting off the alarm.

Sudden, overwhelming senses attacked me. I heard screams, the wail of the alarm. I sensed fear. I sensed aggression. Vertigo sang out in a falsetto voice.

"Halt!" a voice barked, indisputably the snarl of a command. "Put your hands on your head and lie on the pavement."

I moaned weakly. I was already lying on the pavement. I can't put my hands on my head, so I roll onto my stomache, face down, on the pavement.

As my sense came roaring back from dissonance, I heard leather boots slap against the pavement at a rapid pace. A gun barrel prodded me in the ribs.

"State your name," the voice said.

"Jonathan Frey," I said. "I live in Tapton, about a mile away from here. I'm a mutant, and I want to get out of here."

There was a pause, and I heard the leather boots circle around me. I felt the aggression relax, and heard the whump of rifles being stuck into back holsters. Someone lit a cigarette. They stood in a circle, around me, and decided my fate.

"We're headed to the wall," one of them said. "We can take him out through the checkpoint."

"It's dangerous," another said. "The others won't like it."

"What the hell option to we have?" another soldier said. "We're supposed to get as many survivors out as we can. It doesn't matter if they look like people or Sasquatch."

"Hey, I can hear you," I mutter.

"We could at least cut the rope," said the youngest voice. "Somebody bring up some stuff for his arm...it looks infected."

"What's going on?" I said. "Why are those people rioting? One of them bit me."

There was an awkward silence.

"My God, he doesn't know," one of them said wearily.

"I'm blind," I offered. "I didn't see what they looked like."

"Well, no shit," the younger voice said.

I felt a knife parting the strands that bound my hands behind my back. Rough hands thrust and alcohol swab into my wound, and then moved around the outside quickly and professionally.

"I need you to stay as calm as possible when I tell you this," said the young voice attached to the arm cleaning me. "The dead rose. We're in the middle of the apocalypse. The people that got you weren't rioters. They were some kind of zombies."

His brain and scent didn't register the tell-tale signs of a liar. If anything, my nostrils picked up a sickly fear, masked by the strong scent of sweat and canvas.

"Well," I said. "That's new."

"I need you to do better than that," the voice said. The hand grabbed my arm and lifted me to my feet. "I need you to get in line with the group of people and walk with us. Parts of Malton are being evacuated, and we need you to come with us."

"Sweet Jesus," I said, swaying unsteadily on my feet.

"Come on, buddy," the young voice said. "I've got a little brother named Alexander, and he's blind. I need you to focus. I'll be right here with you the whole time."

"What's your name?" I asked.

"Roger," he said. "Roger Billups. Turn left here"

He was a practiced guide, so I let him lead me like his little brother, and pumped him for information.

"How did it happen?" I said.

"Nobody's sure at this point," he said. "We were just told there were rioters, and then we saw them."

His voice wavered unsteadily.

"They're rotted," he whispered. "Some of them even have maggots. A few others were eating people."

"What outfit are you with?" I asked.

"9th Infantry," he said. "British Army."

"I'm a vet myself," I said.

"Oh yeah?" Roger said. "What oufit?"

"U.S. Army," I said. "That was a long time ago."

We resumed walking in silence.

I don't know how long the silence lingered. It felt like several miles. I could tell from the sun we were going north and west.

Suddenly, a ham fist struck me in the back of the skull. The darkness split with intense, agonizing pain, red bands that wavered and burned the constant night. I staggered, suddenly dizzy.

"Oi, mutie," a voice snarled. "Wait 'till your bloody seein' eye dog leaves you alone."

"Fuck off," I yelled. "Look around you. Am I eating people?"

"You're on their side, you fucking dog!" another voice yelled.

A gunshot rudely interrupted.

"Anyone who's got a problem with Mr. Frey better say it to my face," Roger barked, and I heard him shift his rifle back into his shoulder.

As if in answer, a loud, roaring groan echoed off the concrete.

"Oh shit," Roger muttered to himself.

I sensed them then, with a new taste for what they were. The nerve cells jangled, like a PCP addicts, but more rapidly, and intermittently. Dozens of them moved in and around the buildings, stalking us. Ther presence was mesmerizing, powerful, malicious and malevolent. The sniffed an shambled, and hunted for food.

Like animals.

"Billups!" a distant voice called. "Front and center. "Everybody else, take five."

About a hundred people settled to the ground without a sound, and an odd rustle of wordless movement. Nerves lit up with an intense, incandesent fear.

He'd been gone about thirty seconds when a steel-toed worker's boot struck me square in the face.

"We wasn't done talking, was we mate?" the same low voice taunted.

I sensed fear and aggression, and I felt blood running down my face from a sudden cut in my forehead.

I grinned.

"Oh sure," I said, standing. "Lot's to talk about."

"What would I say -- "

I swung tightly, driving my fist straight from the shoulder and into the soft area of muscle below where his voice originated from. My first blow caught him in the solar plexus. He was a good head taller than me.

Pain travelled along his stomach into his brain, and he doubled over. I knee'd his conveniently lowered face, breaking his nose, and then I shoved him to the ground. For a moment, I stood victorious over my fallen foe.

"Why can't you just leave me the hell alo -- " I began.

A spear tackle knocked me to the ground, and blows rained down on me from a dozen fists. Once again, I found myself surrounded by the smells and painful feel of a mob. Then someone smashed a bottle over my head, and I inhaled sharply and fell into silence.

"What happened then?" Anne asks breathlessly.

"Well, I woke up," I say. "I didn't know it then, but I was about a block from where the army would build the West wall of the quarantine zone, the very edge of the outbreak. It was the closest to freedom I've been before or since."

"What did you do then?" she asks. "Did you just wander around? How did you avoid them?"

I don't want to hurt Anne's feelings, but it's really none of her business.

"I'm tired," I say. "Can we pick this up tommorrow?"

"Okay, sure," she says. "I'm not letting you off, though. You have to tell me the rest."

"Of course," I say, lighting the day's last cigarette, next to the fire so the smell doesn't disturb the others. "You're the boss."

However, in the dark, a new dream haunts me. I'm crawling on my hands and knees, moving through a gutter. Blood matts my fur against my body, and I feel both the living and the dead bearing judgment against me, seeking to extinguish me like a tortured rat. I crawl for a lifetime, and I see the moon again, and it's red with blood. My hands feel something smooth and hard, and it's blocking a hole.

I pause for a moment, then fall away from the city streets, away from the mobs, away from light and consciousness, and into the darkness.

Let The Dead Bury The Dead

That leaves but faith, hope and love. And the greatest of these is love.

The sound of a scream is the worst alarm clock.

However, for the first time in a month, it’s not the sound of my own scream that puts every hair on my body on end, grinds my teeth together and catapults me to my feet.

It’s Anne’s.

One of the animals grips her ankle through the barricades. The scream is the third last thing we hear of Anne. The sound of breaking glass is second last.

Feeble, painful moans and sobs the last.

A man whose name I don’t know slams the barricade shut with an iron barrel before I have a chance to object.

"Back to sleep," he says. "We’re moving tomorrow."

The value of human life in the long days of autumn is reckoned somewhere between those of gold and water. If you can save someone, you fight hard to save them. If you lose someone, they’re gone. Period.

I hesitate a moment in the doorway to my private quarters in the old projection room. I’m uncertain whether to break out laughing or break down and cry.

In the weeks since our first session, I had shunned her company. I’m not a public man. Shrinks are shrinks, and sane people are sane people. On the other hand, I’ve not slept a full night in thirty days, and maybe I’m starting to crack and I need a shrink.

Which is why I leave campus the next day.

I tell no one. There are others to handle the wounded. There is no ‘I’ in ‘team,’ especially when the ‘I’ decides he has to find a shrink so he can get a full six hour rest instead of bits and pieces of two and three hours.

I soar across the buildings, the breeze in my face, the sun on my back. It’s early September, the waning days of summer. My mind travels back to my horrors.

I only dimly remember the manhole. It was black and dark and wet. I fell in and lay neglected in filth. Rats climbed across my body. I faded in and out of consciousness, shivering in heat and chill, swatting away the rats with leaden, rebellious arms.

The months after the manhole are hazy, too, a kaleidoscope of sensation. Mainly, there is a dull ache in my stomach and a dry cotton mouth. The feel of a struggling, biting rat in my hand. The taste of its blood seeping down my throat, and small gelatin chunks of organs. The sound of running water, the gradually fading smell of excrement and filth as the sewers dried out, and the final discovery of run-off water from the street with the sweet, existential tang of asphalt and the slightest hint of blood.

There is no sense of time associated with these rumors of a memory. They jangle and swirl around, like bits of broken glass floating on water in my head. Was the dead rat after the water? Which dead rat? Which sleepless night? Which shrinking, fear-soaked day? How many rats? How many days? How many nights?

In those months, in that moment, in those hours, I was what I most feared.

I became an animal.

It was, I think, June or July when I passed under an open manhole at high noon. The sensation of sun-warmed fur. I climbed towards it, clawing at the metal rungs that lined what would become a second birth canal, into the city of the damned.

The memory of the warm sun carries me back to this day.

It’s time to stop day dreaming. It’s time to start planning.

The place I’m heading will require my full attention.

The House of Lost Soles used to be a re-sale shop run by Seventh Day Baptist church down where Apple Street runs into Windsor Lane. Brother Xavier LaSalle thought the name was terrifically clever. For six days they’d sell shoes, and on Saturday night and the seventh day they’d hold the rowdiest revival services you’ve ever seen. Gospel singers, and a drum kit and electric organ. Hooting and hollering. I used to climb across the buildings and sit on a fire escape over the alley and listen to the music coming out on Saturday night. It was my own dose of brimstone, torment-free.

Brother Xavier still runs the revivals, but his congregation is a little less lively these days.

I can smell the place about a mile off. The House of Lost Soles has become The House of Lost Souls. It’s the place the dead go for their salvation.

The roof of the building is hot black tar, baking in the last warm day of the summer. It scratches at my feet, and I hop awkwardly across the top, thumping as I go.

Brother Xavier’s at the roof entrance doorway before I take more than three steps.

"Brother Jonathan!" he shouts, over the moans from below. "I was hoping I’d see you soon. Did you bring comfort for the sick?"

Dutifully, I hand him a roll of gauze tape, a bottle of peroxide and three boxes of Band Aides. I could be a mute, for all Brother Xavier cares. His revival work consumes him.

"I need to see you inside!" I shout, and point in the general direction of the roof door.

He nods, shoves my arm into the crook of his arm and leads me through the door and into the bowels of salvation.

The stench of decay inside the one-story converted strip mall is overpowering. Brother Xavier doesn’t care. His "ministers," an assortment of disgruntled doctors and surgeons, all bearing rustling lab coats, all wear facial masks. I hear their murmured complaints. Brother Xavier babbles cheerfully on, ignorant of the stench of disease around him.

"What can I do you for, Brother?" he asks, pulling me into what used to be a janitorial closet from the reek of disinfectant. A sort of nest stretches from one end to the other, his bed. He also managed to fit a small plastic table and two small, broken chairs into the closet I can feel them with my bare feet and bump repeatedly into the table. It’s his office and confessional. For Brother Xavier, it’s home.

"I need a needle," I say. "I need a needle and I need to know how to use it."

"Why?" Xavier asks.

"Someone I know lost their way," I say, using his religious terms. I’m not religious, but I need him to believe I am. It’s the quickest way to get what I want.

"They must be saved," I say.

"Would they want to be saved?" he asks. His brain reeks of gentle suspicion. "It’s like an addiction for some of them."

"Not her," I said.

"Was this someone you loved?" he says. "Someone dear to you?"

"Yes," I say. "I’m desperate."

"Okay," Brother Xavier says. "You have three chances at salvation left."

He pulls a Bible out from the middle of the nest.

"1 Corinthians 13:13," he reads. "That leaves but faith, hope and love. And the greatest of these is love."

Beneath 1 Corinthians is a hollowed-out repository filled with small rattling plastic syringes, attached to hollow, longer stabbing implements. These are the needles, a precious commodity in a world full of lost friends, souls and the cries of the tormented.

"Salvation begins with a sacrifice," he says. "Just like in the old days. In order to save the dead, they must ransom themselves to Christ."

He guides my hand in a mock stabbing motion to where I can sense is the base of his skull.

"When the needle’s in, you plunge the syringe," he says. "Pray for a day over the body, and tend to the wounds when they rise."

He stands and silently hands the needle to me.

"And John," he says. "Be careful. The Devil’s snares are all around."

"Amen," I say.

For a week, I scrambled across the roofs of Malton, feeding off of pigeons when I could get them and scraps of food where I could find them. I couldn’t return to the sewers for fear of the dead below. I couldn’t enter the buildings for fear of the living. I slept under the invisible summer stars, a feral shudder on the roof to the living and a flitting shadow on the moon and the whiff of brimstone to the dead.

This memory is nearer, sharper.

One night, in late July, I fell through a decaying section of roof and into a dream.

It was the smell of the place that brought me back: stale cigarettes, body odor and unwashed dishes. The stuffy feel of a studio apartment that’s been unventilated for far too long. In the year since I’d left, my apartment had miraculously survived untouched. My animal brain started and fled at the smell, and I found myself, me, Jonathan Frey, standing in my bedroom. Suddenly, I sat on the bed and started weeping.

I wasn’t one of them. I was a person once. I felt over to the dresser and grabbed the picture off the dresser. It was in a crummy frame, made of cardboard and glued with shells. At the bottom, my fingers ran over the familiar wording.

I’d lain in the dark and rubbed my fingers along the bottom of the frame thousands of times in the year since I’d left America. It was home.

"Jonathan Frey," it read. "Age seven."

The picture was of me playing at the beach as a home-schooled second-grader, oblivious to the stares of the sunbathers. New Jersey, 1991.

I’d been a person once.

I’d be a person again.

So would Anne. I catch her scent — looted perfume and worry – and track her to a cemetery about four blocks away. The cemetery is in the middle of the open ground. There are no roofs, no safety.

I set my carrying pouch on the roof and clench the needle in my teeth, pirate-style. I take a flying leap off of top of a Domino’s Pizza, and sprint directly at Anne’s corpse.

She does not try to resist, but bends her head so I can jab the needle.

"Mrh?" she says.

I stab.

The Dead Man's Tale

Cloud's silver lining torrent downpour chance of optimism...Twenty percent.

Fourscoreandservitude...

How's it ever come to brains and conglomerates of syllables. Brains brains brains is that all you ever brains? Sway buzz sway buzz sway buzz sway buzz. Heroic epics sang to a large metal street under the moon. No blood.

I can see. I can see. I can see.

Tear goggles, throw off chains, rise, Chinese people stand up.

I can see.

See her. Fear. Smell. Hungry. Mustn't...that way lies madness.

I can see.

Stand, swaying, buzzing, swaying. Weak must feed.

She's fast like Mercury in a thermometer's winged feet. Moving away away away, gone. Alone. Mrrrrrrrrrrh's abound. Let the Lord Deadbury bury the dead, foul liquor of blood.

Arraaaaanaaggg, bellows I. Arrarraararraranng, carm beeark.

Bound, gagged, writhing, I wriggle after, under the moon. Beren Von RIPtoffen. Ha. Bitter laughter.

Smell her. Smell her fear. Can't see. Can see. I can see.

Shambleshuffle forthwith, dead pennyloavers.

I can feel my people the dead my friends all is vanity. Animals is as animals does.

The moon...fair Dianna. How long, huntress? Darkness, darkness is spreading. Cloud's silver lining torrent downpour chance of optimism.

Twenty percent.

Animals! Animals! Animals!

Around me they stand hindered groaning mute tongues of fire untoward no mind is paid hunger I join them.

Shamble on pop culture warrior. Shamble on. Shamble on.

Small narrow light under the moon looks familiar glinting like Atlanta in the rising sea.

Needly needly needle I needly needly a needle

Song sung to sang the sing. Time. Passing.

Needly needly needle I needly needly a needle

House of Soul must erstwhile wander the highways byways myways to the House of Soul. Lines of damned stretch uncounted like the stars, moaning psalms of gentle praise, a continuous chorus of myrrh, myrrh, frankincense and myrrh. Slander not the house of the lord and you will not be trespassed forbidden.

Brer Jonathan, other say. Tears, weeping. Brer Jonathan, why have you lost.

He saved me, other say.

Arrrarrang, say I. Arrranng, I wassrs teerrell yoush omerrathang. Myrrh! Myrrh!

Bows I in malfeasance to the dark god. Myrrh!

Pain jabbing pain jabbing pain throbbing.

Where have you gone, Pontoffle Pock?

Silencio.

I gasp, and wake on a bed of what feels like oily rags. For a minute, the sighted memory of a nightmare consumes me. Adrenaline pours through my body and into my brain.

I open my eyes.

Seering, blinding white light. It burns into my head, and splits my skull like a melon. Used to unexpected encounters with sunlight, I shut my eyes immediately, but the instant of exposure is enough to tingle the base of my neck and burn my head. It's as if a symphony of hangovers had issued single thunderous major chord.

"Ah," I hiss. "Ahhhaaah. Shit."

My goggles are missing.

I reach out with my senses, and feel a metal frame building, only a story high. In the next room, nerves janle and gush in the manner of a zed, and another, more concrete presence, filled with disgust and boredom. The jangling cells go out as if switched. From the growing trickle of nerve energy, I divine not a murder, but a salvation.

I am in the House of Lost Souls.

Someone is in the room with me. I smell stolen perfume and worry. Her brain is dark. She is sleeping.

I stir, and feel around with my hands, looking for my goggles. I inadvertently bump into her, and she wakes.

"Jonathan!" she says. "You're alive!"

"What happened?" I say. "I was saving you. Where am I?"

"The House of Lost Souls," she says. "Hold still."

Delicate hands traverse my body, until they find a small wound in my upper thigh. It flares with sudden, intense pain. I squirm away.

"It's infected," she mutters. "Hold still."

"How did I get here?" I say. "Why do I remember seeing you?"

"You saw me?" she asks. "Hold still."

"Yeah," I mutter. "You're blonde, and your eyes are black. You've got a tattoo on your left forearm...a butterfly."

"The blonde is a dye job," she says. "It's nearly gone now."

"I know," I say. "You should really get that touched up."

"If only I could find a salon that caters to the living," she says, sighing.

"Wait, what happened?" I say. "Tell me."

There is a an awkward silence. A door swings open.

"Brother Jonathan!" a booming voice says. "You've been twice redeemed! Praise be to our Lord and Savior."

"What am I doing here?" I snarl, starting to get up. "What have I done?"

"Jonathan!"

"I need to get out of here," I yell. I'm on my hands and knees, roaring, scrambling desperately for a way away from the truth. "Get me the fuck out of here!"

"Brother Jonathan!" a voice thunders.

A heavy blow rains down on my shoulders. I slump face down into the pile of oily rags, and tast the grime of the floor. My eyes swim

"I have welcomed you into this house of the Lord," Brother Xavier yells. "Pray show a little courtesy of the tongue."

The blow lingers in the suddenly tense air. I feel suffocated, I gag, and vomit onto the floor.

"Jonathan, you got turned into...into one of them," Anne says. Her voice is tense, strangled. "You saved me, and when I woke up, you were dead."

Ugly silence. I dig my face into the rags, away from the light. Unbidden, tears spring to my dead eyes.

"Where are my goggles?" I mutter.

"What?"

"My goggles," I snap. "I need my damned goggles. Without them, I can't open my eyes."

"I went searching and found a pair," Brother Xavier says.

They're thrust into my hand. I pull the familiar back straps over and around my narrow head, behind my long, trianglular ears. The facepads fall into the familiar groove in the fur around my face, and I open my eyes to the eternal darkness. I turn to face Anne.

"Take me back to the Academy," I say. "Now."

"Jonathan, I — "

"Now, dammit!" I yell. "Take me back to the movie theater."

She takes my hand, and gently leads me, past the seething, angry Brother Xavier. She leads me through the benevolent, chanting masses of rotting pilgrims, down the street. I imagine I'm being led over the roofs of the buildings, over the concrete wall of the quarantine zone. I pass through the realms of the living and the dead, to a great white light in the sky, and beyond, to the cosmos, to the gates of perception. My mind travels past the grime and stench of the city, and into a sighted heaven with soft light, a clean bed, and a gentle, loving smile.

Civilization. A myth. A fragment of a dream. A flood of half-memories storms unbidden into my mind. Television. The rough voice of the cabbie that drove me to the airport. A lazy Sunday afternoon spent in pajamas, listening to soccer and wishing it were football. The quiet, assured voice of my computer narrating a web site to me, an e-mail message from my parents. My mom. My dad.

It's too much. I fall to my knees, suddenly, and she waits, but pulls firmly on my wrist after only a few moments.

"We need to keep going," she says. "We need to get to the Academy before sundown."

"I need a moment," I say. "Just a moment's rest."

"When you were dead, could you really see me?" she whispers. Fear shakes her voice.

"Yeah," I whisper back. "I could see everyth — "

Guilt drives the memory from me. Beauty wanes for those that take pleasure in a state of abomination. I am only a blind fool.

"What?" she asks.

"Nothing," I say. "I saw nothing."

Animals, Part Three

It started with the edges of things.

The Academy is getting ready to move.

I hear the dim bustle of shuffling feet and the terse murmur of commands through the walls of the projection room. I am laying on my back, and gnats are buzzing around my nose. I would give anything for some bug spray. I've already given myself a nose bleed twice — the frustrated man swats too hard. The blood mats his fur.

The noise annoys me. Standard academy procedure dictates all trash be collected and disposed of. Normally, I'm the one who climbs through the broken window in the lobby and over onto the roof to dump the garbage over the edge. I volunteered, because I don't want the others to get hurt.

The truth is, I've grown weary of this world. I've grown tired with "standard academy procedure." I have learned all I'll ever learn from the Malton Civil Defense Unit. It's time I carried my own fight to the dead. Six months of target practice and the incessant procession of wounded dead survivors and the incessant rigors of authority, bureaucracy, of rank and file and knowing your place...it's a wonder I made it as long as I did.

The knock comes at the door like always. I don't answer, like always. The knock persists, like always. I get up, and walk over to the door, like always. It's Anne, like always.

"Were moving out," she says.

Six weeks of this routine have not wrung the undercurrent of worry out of her voice. She's wearing perfume again, and it clouds my nostrils, catches at the back of my throat.

I cough.

"Come with us, Jonathan," she says.

I point my head at her voice and shake it emphatically left and right. No. No I won't go with you. No, you can just get the hell right out of here with your academy friends, and I can lie in wait for death, then life, then death, then life, then death again.

"Talk to me," she says.

The volume of her voice increases, desperation, anger. The glimmer of her mind wiggles and squirms.

"What do you want me to say?" I snarl. I only snarl nowadays.

"Tell me the truth," she says.

It started with the edges of things.

I was eight, home-schooled, living with my parents. Mom was a tall red head, big black frames of glasses. Dad was a short, bald man, not thinning, but cue ball bald. Mom was the carrier for the gene, the doctors said. Dad didn't mind; he had a son. A furry, monstrous son, but a son nonetheless.

We lived in an apartment somewhere in New York. The recollections of the place are hazy, the way you remember your first dog or the first day of third grade. We moved to South Jersey after I turned 18. My parents worried about a blind man in the city, even though I told them I didn't need the cane.

But that came later.

I glanced at the television during Sunday morning cartoons, and I couldn't see where one character began or ended. I moved closer to the television.

"Easy there, J-Man," Dad said. "You'll ruin your eyes."

"I can't see," I told him. "I have to move closer."

"Oh yeah? How many fingers am I holding up?"

"Three," I said.

"There's nothing wrong with your eyes, then," he said.

"I didn't even look, Dad," I said. "You always hold up three fingers. I just can't see the cartoon characters like I used to."

"Well, take it easy, then old-timer," Dad joked. "Maybe we ought to fit you with glasses, eh?"

After that, it was little things. I'd step off the curb the wrong way and twist my ankle. At night, I'd fumble for the car door after a movie. The time I was twelve, I couldn't see the black board in school anymore. They took me to the eye doctor.

"Is there anything wrong, doctor?" Mom said.

The eye doctor peered into my eyes with bright lights and asked me to read numbers and letters off the wall.

"Is there anything wrong, doctor?" Mom repeated.

"You'd better answer her," I told the eye doctor. "She gets mad when you ignore her."

Mom made a face. The doctor — Dr. Mike — looked at her, and cast me an aside wink.

"Well, ma'am," he said. "Your son is covered in hair and has bat ears."

I laughed. Mom made another face.

"I mean his eyes," Mom said.

"He's got macular degeneration," the doctor said. "He's going blind."

"Knock it off," mom said.

"I did," the doctor said. "He's got severe macular degeneration, and the cost to his eye sight has already been detrimental. I can fit him with glasses, but he should be seeing a specialist, although it might have something to do with his other conditions."

Dr. Mike's voice was cracking.

"I'm so, so sorry, kid," he said to me. "We can make it work for a while, but eventually you're going to go blind."

And that's why I liked Dr. Mike. He told you the truth.

Then, at sixteen, the headaches started. By then, all I could see was very dim blur, and bright, bright lights. I started wearing sunglasses to block out the light, but they continued. Dr. Mike fit me with some special dark shades, but the headaches continued.

I became a vampire, waking up at night when it was dark, and sleeping during the day when the sun was up. For a while, that worked. But then the moon started to hurt, and then the stars.

Finally, when it became too much, I groped my way down the hall to the elevator and across the street one night. I wandered into a construction site, without a clue where I was. Finally, Dad woke up for work, and saw me wandering blindly on the grounds of the building. He rushed down and grabbed me.

"Jonathan, you scared me," he yelled. "What the hell are you doing?"

"I wanted to get out of the apartment," I said. "I need fresh air. I don't want to stay cooped up in that place."

When Dad got angry, he breathed hard. When he breathed hard, he snorted.

He snorted.

"Do you even know where you are?" he said. "You could have been killed?"

"Huh?"

"You're in a damned construction site," he said. "You could have fallen into a hole or God knows what else."

"I'm sorry," I said. Involuntary tears sprang into my eyes. "I just hate it so much."

He stopped snorting. A long time passed. The night was cool and a little dewy. I could smell breakfast cooking at the cafe around the corner.

"You want to go back now?" he said, eventually. "If they find us wandering around down here, they'll arrest us."

"Yeah, okay," I said. "I'm sorry about the whole mess."

"You got nothing to be sorry for," he said. "Just let me know next time and —"

"What is it?"

"I have an idea," he said.

He handed me something rubbery and plastic.

"What is it?"

"Welding goggles," he said. "Try them out."

I slid the goggles over my head, and pulled the strap tight against my fur. I opened my eyes.

"How is it?"

"I still can't see," I said. "But my eyes don't hurt."

"Well, sometimes that's enough," Dad said. "C'mon."

He grabbed my hand and led me back to the apartment.

"Why are you telling me this?" Anne asks.

I shake my head. I'm not done yet.

"The last thing I saw was her flowers," I say. "Mom's flowers on the windowsill. I mean, there were probably other things, parts of things, but that's the last thing I remember."

"Huh," Anne says. "Why are you telling me this?"

"Because, I could see," I say. "When I was, uh, dead. I could see you, and I could see the moon and I could see everything. And it wasn't fuzzy or anything. I could see the streets and the whole deal."

"What does this have to do with anything?"

The thought makes my fists clench. I light a cigarette.

"What if we're wrong?" I say. "I mean, what if being a zombie is the way it was supposed to be? What if I actually murdered Sarah? What if — "

She grabs my hand in hers, shoves her lips against mine, bangs our teeth together. My fang cuts her lip, and she pulls away.

"Ow," she says.

"What the hell was that?" I say.

"That was supposed to be a kiss on the forehead," she says quickly. "You moved."

An awkward pause passes. Her brain is telling me she's lying.

"So, Dr. Shrink, what do you say?" I'm snarling again.

The weird lying vibration is replaced with ennui.

"I don't know," she says. "We're all supposed to struggle. That's kind of the point of life."

"Well, I'm struggling away," I say. "When the Academy leaves, I'm heading north."

"Let me stay with you," she says.

When she says it, her mind shimmers, and I'm not sure which one of us is more surprised.

"Why?" I say.

"Because," she says. "I love you."

Love In The Time of The Damned

From the bus station, many groans answer.

Six days past the Academy, Anne turns to me and says;

“So what now?”

She slows me down. She doesn’t stop professing her love for me. She keeps asking that question. She’s frayed all my nerves, and is instead now driving me down a narrow bridge to a cliff, over which lies madness. For the first time in six days, instead of ignoring her or arguing with her, I have formulated an answer.

“I don’t know,” I say. “My first instinct was to get away from authority. Now I’m away, and there aren’t any easy answers.”

We’re standing on the roof of what Anne says is an upscale club along Vine. The neighborhood used to sicken me. Gated communities, towering condominiums. Every third car was a BMW or a Lexus or a Benz. Enough to make you sick to your stomach. Not even a decent domestic beer within five miles in every direction.

Now, the bourgeois eateries and upper-middle-class apartments are quiet. Even the security alarms have fallen silent, bereft of looters to torment them. The boutique where I was “politely encouraged” never to shop again is about three blocks up. The city bus stop where I used to rest on my evening walks is two blocks north of here.

“Well, you can’t just wander around aimlessly,” Anne says. “I mean, you’ve got to have some function in life, right? Gah!”

Anne yelps; she’s unaccustomed to the sight of the dead, even after almost two years among them.

“What is it?” I say.

“One of them,” she says.

I reach out, and find the telltale glimmering signs, the creaky sporadic nerve firings.

“He’s alone,” I say. My muscles tense. “I’m going to take him.”

Zombies are all ‘he,’ and not just to my particular brand of sightless sex discrimination. Survivors characterize zombies as male in almost all discourse, the way you’d talk about dogs or sharks. It’s a peculiarity of speech I looked upon with disdain, until I joined the academy and found myself describing the universal movments of “him.”

Except one zombie, and I dismembered her a long time ago.

Anne grabs my shoulder.

“Don’t,” she says.

“Why not?”

“You might get hurt,” she says.

“So what?” I say. “I might die, too, and we all know how that’ll end.”

“I don’t want to lose you,” she says. “I love you.”

“Stop saying that!” I say. “You don’t love me.”

“The fuck I don’t,” she says. “How the hell would you know, anyway?”

“Look, are you some kind of fuzzy or something?” I say.

When I was thirteen, my parents took me to an amusement park. A man wearing the adorable suit of the mascot propositioned me. So much for the amusement park.

“That’s fucking insulting,” she says. “Honestly, love me or don’t, but don’t say I’m some kind of freak when I’m trying to be sincere. Anyways, you see any other women lining up to go out with a silver-haired blind naked bat-man?”

“It takes a freak to love a freak,” I say. “If you’re not a freak on the outside, you’ve got to be one on the inside. Say what you will about me, but at least I’m normal in here.”

I point at my head.

An eery silence descends. The random screaming has cued the corpse ot our presence. It shambles over to the edge of the building, and begins to speak in consonentless groans, the conversations of a dead man.

“Oh God,” Anne says. “He’s trying to give us love advice.”

I chuckle, and then snicker, and then before long, I am laughing. Water streams down my face, not tears, because the blind don’t cry, but water from my tear ducts. Ann collapses on her back.

The corpse groans angrily, loudly. From near the bus stop, many groans answer.

Our laughter is silenced. My blood runs cold.

“We need to get out of here,” I say. “Fast.”

“We’ll have to go back the way we came,” she says. Her voice is taught with fear. “It’s too far to jump to the opposite corner.

“That’s what you think,” I say.

I sweep her off her feet, turn and take two running steps, soaring off over the street.

Her touch is electric.

Radio, Radio

If nothing else, the hordes have that last way of reaching through the barricades, into our lives, withering relationships into dusty, meaningless carnality on the floorboards of rotting buildings.

Sex is never quite what you expect the first time.

I can't see. But when Anne and I finally cave into our passions, my head fills with horrible mental images of what it must look like, how horrible it must be for her. I think of all the nice men she must have been with, and the madness that drove her to this encounter, in this place, in this time. She deserves better.

I had always expected a nice warm bed with a faceless blind woman tolerant of my body hair and propensity to wake up in the middle of the night. Nothing is ideal anymore.

Sex is a tawdry affair in Malton two years after Black July. They say nothing else affirms life in the face of death. It's not quite as life-affirming when death has lost its meaning. If nothing else, the hordes have that last way of reaching through the barricades, into our lives, withering relationships into dusty, meaningless carnality on the floorboards of rotting buildings.

When we are done, she rustles back into her clothes and lays beside me on the stale-smelling mattress in the back of the bar and asks me for easily the thousandth time.

"So what's next?"

I light a cigarette. The smoke goes up my nose. I sit up, sneeze.

"I'm not sure," I say. "Everything's becoming really detached."

"What do you mean?" she says.

"You, me, this thing," I say. "I don't know whether to kill zombies or go out and give them flowers. A couple of months ago I'd be out killing as quickly and mercilessly as I could. Now, I'm sleeping with a shrink in the back of a bar, basically just trying to stay out of the way."

"You say shrink like it's a bad thing," she says.

"I can't help it," I say. "It's the way I was raised."

"I know," she says. "You know what?"

"What?"

"Ever notice how you don't ever hear the word 'honey' anymore?"

"Huh?"

"Well, even husbands and wives, you know? They have this whole other secret language...snookums, honey, turtle dove."

"Yeah, in Retardsville."

"No one says that anymore," she says. "No one says 'honey' anymore."

"Do you want me to call you honey?"

"I don't think so," she says. "Not until you take me out to dinner and a movie. Plus, it's kind of demeaning."

"Good point," I say. "Do you hear something?"

It's a low hum, kind of a dim vibration near the base of my skull.

"No," she says. "Wait...no."

"I could swear I hear something," I say. "I'm going up on the roof and checking it out."

"I'm coming, too," she says.

I start up the creaking stairs. It's a different bar, in a different part of town. Why does it feel so much like starting over again?

Anne follows behind me. She's winded easily, a function of being slightly overweight and the new lifestyle of scurrying around only once every few days to find a new place to sleep.

The humming is louder on the roof, audible even over the momentary blur of disorientation.

"Hey, I hear something," Anne says. "Just barely."

"What do you see?"

"There's some kind of tower on the building across the street," she says. "It's got blinking lights and...can you see it?"

"No," I say. "But I can feel it."

Suddenly, Anne beeps.

"What was that?" I ask.

"My cell phone," she yells. "My fucking cell phone is working."

Her brain is a glimmer of happiness and excitement. She leans over and kisses me on the mouth.

"I'm calling my parents," she says. "Do you have anyone you want to call?"

The suddenness of the moment takes me back. A line out, a window home. A way to get help or at least let someone know I'm okay. I wonder if Mom and Dad still live in New Jersey, or if they've moved.

"Hey, can you place international calls on that thing?"

"No," she says. "I'm not even sure the damn things going to work, I mean, I haven't paid my bill in like forever."

I hear a the phone's number pad beeping, and with my giant bat ears, I can hear the quiet whir of the ring tone.

"It's ringing!" she says. "No wait, it's — "

"What?"

"It says all the network circuits are busy," she says. "Dammit."

"Try again," I say. "Be right back."

I walk over to the edge of the building and leap off, onto a car, and then back up to the roof of the two story building. Up close, the tower hums with it's own kind of energy, and the sound of vibration is deafening. My magnetic eye goes screwy. I can barely register Anne's disapointment, and her attempt to try again.

I feel along the base of the tower, where two wires have been hooked into a small vibrating motor.

"I'll be damned," I mutter to myself.

That night, I can't sleep or even lay down. Anne is dialing her parents number for the hundredth time, and I'm pacing back and forth, smoking cigarettes like water, and it hits me.

"I know what's next," I say.

"Oh yeah?" she says. "Dammit. My thumb is sore. Well, what's next?"

"We're going to get the towers working," I say. "All of them. And I'm going to put a generator in every building I can."

"Why?" she asks. "You can't even see."

"Yeah," I say. "Well, really, it's you. You were so happy and excited when that happened up there. Maybe if we get them working we can all call home. It's a far cry from going home, you know? But we can at least try."

"That's fantastic," she says. "Come to bed."

When you know what to expect, sex is great.

North To Eden, Part One

I'm unaccustomed to carrying so much weight, and the jump carries me into a skylight in the middle of a factory.

SUNDAY

I fly across the roofs of buildings with the greatest of ease. I am the man on the flying trapeze.

I can dimly feel the rising summer from the way the sun shines, from the unseasonable warmness. Mainly, it's the smell, the smell of green grass on the few remaining lawns, and the occasional tree. Late spring is the best time to be in Malton. Nights are too cold to allow the stench to get too bad. Days are warm and amiable. In the late days of summer, things get atrocious.

I thud onto the roof of an old abandoned dance club and unshoulder the heavy backpack I carry nowadays. Time was, I could fit all my worldly goods and everything I needed into a simple page boy pouch. Anne calls it my man purse.

Anne packed me a lunch, stale Cheetohs from the bar's back storage closet and some stale Grenadines mixed with a little water. Perishable food has been hard to come by for the last two years, but I'm thinking of starting a tomato garden on the roof of the bar, something small, if I can find some seeds.

Fortunately, my body is good about turning anything into useable food. I worry about Anne's nutrition, about the food that's available around here in general.

I pull the cell phone out of the bottom of the pouch. We haven't yet figured out how to attach it to my fur. I might have to start wearing clothes, or at least pants or something.

I dial Anne's number and the message goes through.

"Hey, this is Anne, leave a message," the phone says.

"Can you hear me now? I'm going to move a couple miles north and try again. Gimme a call when the sun goes down. This is Jonathan."

Lunch is over before it begins, a couple quick bites, licking cheese powder off my fingers, and carefully stowing the empty Grenadine's bottle in a side pocket. A capped bottle is an important tool to keep with you; you never know when you'll get water or other drinking fluids. The water mains haven't shut down, but pipes work only about half the time.

I turn and leap off the side of the club onto the top of a long-abandoned Mercedes-Benz, pause, and leap six stories straight up to the top of the apartment complex next door.

On the ceiling, of the six story building, I turn north, towards the dim magnetic glow, listening for cell towers.

SATURDAY

"Are you sure you want to do this?" Anne said.

"Oh yeah," I said. "You need to call your folks, and I need to keep busy."

"So do you," Anne said. "You need to call your folks, too."

I didn't answer. Instead, I lit a cigarette. The blood spots were more frequent in this suburb; a big fight or a massacre in the bar.

"I just meant, you know, it's dangerous," Anne said. "You'll be away from anything familiar for a long time."

"That's the plan," I said. "I'll be fine."

"It's not you I'm worried about," she said. "It's me."

I haven't tried to make facial expressions in a while. I shoot for perplexed, but I think it just comes off as angry.

"You can go so many places," she said. "You can practically fly. I'm stuck here, cowering in a building, praying you'll come back."

"You know the way to the nearest hospital, though," I said. "You can help out. You can keep busy. I'm better for this kind of thing."

"I could go with you," she said.

"I don't think so," I said. "Two generators in the back pack, four gas cans strapped around my waste, and the cell phone and all the rest. If I'm lucky, I'll be able to make it to the top of a six story building from the ground. Add you, and I might as well walk."

"Well, couldn't you?"

"I've thought about that," I said. "But as much as the day gives us an advantage, we can still get into trouble out on the streets easily. It's better I go alone, on the top. Neither one of us is at risk that way."

She exhaled sharply. She did not like this.

"I don't like it, either," I said. "There's holes. If I get stuck in a town without a phone tower working, we can't talk, and if you get in trouble then, I won't be able to help you. I'd go absolutely nuts."

"So would I," she said. "You have to call me every night, even if it means moving at night."

"The only thing I'm worried about is getting exhausted," I said. "It's not like I need the light to see."

She sighed again, but I could sense she's growing accustomed to the idea.

"I never wanted to be a trucker's wife," she said.

"I never wanted to be a trucker," I said. "But this has to be done."

"Well, then," she said. "You're not leaving today, are you?"

"Nope," I said. "Tomorrow, as soon as I wake up."

"Good," she said. "The question is, what do we do until then."

Her heart beat picked up, and her scent changed from relaxed to aroused.

"I can think of a few things, ma'am," I said.

SUNDAY (AGAIN)

I'm breezing along towards the next cell town and the next cell tower, making good progress. The GPS beeps, letting me know I'm close to the coordinates we programmed into it.

"A mile north," it says. "Two blocks east."

Dutifully, I begin to move north.

I pause on the spire of a church and reach out with my senses, surveying the road ahead. It's an old industrial complex. The jump is more of a drop down onto the roof of the main factory floor, but I have to angle it right, give it the right forward momentum or else I'll fall into the street below. There are corpses there, a larger group than usual. I spit down on them, gauge the distance and push off.

I'm unaccustomed to carrying so much weight, and the jump carries me into a skylight in the middle of a factory. I crash through on my back, and hook my feet on a beam. The beam spins me around, and I fall face first, down twenty feet onto the floor.

Thud.

Stunned, I lay face down on the ground. It feels like I've chipped a fang. I pray the generators aren't broken, that the fuel bottles aren't squashed. Mainly I pray the horde outside hasn't found a way in, isn't swarming around me. Pain moves up my kneecaps to my brain.

I try to get up, but several weights press down on me. A hand grabs the fur at the back of my head, and a sharp metal edge is thrust under my throat.

"Don't move," a gruff voice snarls into my ear. "Don't move or you're a dead man."

North To Eden, Part Two

They open up on the encroaching hoards with assault rifles and grenade launchers. Fifteen minutes later, it's over.

It is dark, and then again light.

I close my eyes, not quickly enough to shut out the pain. It worms into my skull like flaming maggots. The metal door creaks open, a warning that comes too late to protect me from the casual brush with the light.

I'm standing in a closet or some kind of very small room. In the last hours, I have felt around every nook and cranny, and discovered that there isn't enough room to lie down in this room. Three walls and the floor are made of concrete, and the door is made of some kind of plate steel.

I can sense the survivors moving around outside the doors. There are seven of them. They are terrified, none so much as the one who just opened the door.

"Who are you?"

The voice has a British accent, a man in his late thirties. The voice sounds dimly mustachioed.

"Who are you?" he asks again. "What are you?"

I don't know how long it's been since I plummeted through the skylight and onto the floor of the factory, how many hourse since they shoved a knife under my throat and then dragged me to the closet. They took everything, including my goggles. It didn't matter before because the door was closed, and it was comfortably dark.

I clear my throat.

"My name is Jonathan Frey, and I'm a person, a mutant" I say. "Give me my goggles."

"Now hold on," mustache says. "You don't make demands. We've got you holed up here. We make — "

"You've been asking questions," I say. "I won't answer another one until I get my goggles. You give me the goggles, I'll tell you my mom's maiden name, if you want to know. Without the goggles, I don't talk."

Mustache sighs. The door slides shut and bolts, and moments later opens again. Something small, plastic and metal and rubber strap, hits me in the chest. I claw at the goggles, but they fall to the floor. I paw around, find them, and strap them over my face, and open my eyes to the welcome darkness.

"I'm sorry," I say. "I'm legally blind. Any light hurts like hell."

"You're a mutant?"

"How'd you know?" I say. "Now, let me out of here."

"You need to stay quarantined," mustache says. "I can't have you infecting my men."

"It's not transmitted through the air," I say. "It's transmitted through saliva. Why don't you know that? Who are you?"

"Well," mustache says. "We're part of a top secret intelligence task force from — "

"Wait, forget it," I say. "I just remembered I don't care. Let me out of here."

I shoulder past him and into the main floor of the factory. The space is big enough to make me dizzy, and I take two small steps. In the background, I hear a low continuous pounding sound: the dead are outside thumping at the barricades. They know someone is inside. The charade won't last long. My knee feels sprained...it hurts with every step.

"Where's my gear?" I say. "I need my cell phone and my generators."

"The generators didn't make it," mustache says, following me out of the closet. "We've got two back ups."

"Dammit," I say. "What about the cell phone?"

"It's around here somewhere," mustache says. "I think Firanza's using it to call his mom."

He whistles.

"Firanza!"

Firanza comes over. He is scared. They are all scared. In a few minutes, they will all be dead. I can hear the barricades creaking, hear the outer wreckage giving way. Why don't they run?

"What about your gas cans?" mustache says. "Three of them are still okay."

"Can't carry them," I say. "I'm injured. Will somebody give me a goddamn cigarette?"

"We got a few cartons," mustache says. "We were hoping to trade them for information, but I'm sorry we locked you up. Take one."

Firanza slides the long smooth box into my hand.

"What brand are they?" I say.

"Marlboro's," Firanza says.

"Just freaking great," I snarl. "No generators, nothing but a cell phone and a carton of off-brand cigarettes."

I turn my face upward, looking for the skylight. The pounding at the door has picked up, increasing urgency. Finally, I find it, a patch of fresh air and sunlight warming my face.

"What's going on?" Firanza says.

He's looking over at the barricades.

"They're coming," I say. "You can't just set up in a place like this with a generator and expect them not to find you. I'd say you've got half the non-breathing suburb banging at the gates. They'll be in in about five minutes. Good luck."

I crouch and launch, a feeble wobble, but enough to clear the skylight and get on to the roof.

Below me, the last level of wreckage gives way and a dozen howling growns soar past, followed by stampeding feet.

In return, the men's fear evaporates. They open up on the encroaching hoards with assault rifles and grenade launchers. Fifteen minutes later, it's over.

"Status!" mustache barks out.

Calls of "clear!" come back from the four corners of the factory.

"Get those barricades back up," mustache barks. "Get to dismembering them. I don't want a single one of them standing up again."

I shove a cheap cigarette into my mouth and flip open the cell phone, dialling Anne's number from rote memorization.

My blood runs cold.

"The number you have dialled is out of service," the message says. "No further information is available about —"

I drop the cell phone. I am flying, the wind rushing over my face, skimming over buildings, heading back the way I came, going south and downhill. My knee wrenches painfully with each landing, and stings with each launch. I am ignoring it. I am panicked. I am panting. I am running. I cut my foot, and then I am bleeding. I am sweating. I am calling her name.

I am too late.

76 Trombones

Her scent tears all of the lies apart. It's the right place. I'm a fool. I feel like weeping again.

She is gone again when I get back.

The barricades spell out the story for me: the inside of the bar has been completely destroyed. Glass from a dozen bottles lies across the floor. A giant hole has been torn in one wall where the pinball machine used to be. The glass digs into my bare feet, cutting, and the blood feels warm against the exposed bar floor.

It's the day after I arrive and the weeping is over. The fur under my eyes is matted with tears. The sorrow has passed.

The rage is beginning.

I kick in the door to the back room, where we slept, where the dirt-stained matress still carries the scent of her perfume. The other scents are gone; the trail is cold. She kept a small wardrobe of clothes in unkempt piles on the floor. I dig my face in, smelling her, missing her.

Stupid. I was stupid. Why did I think this would work? How did I think this could be avoided? I'll march out into the great unknown. Sure, why not? Nothing will happen to us. I'll call ever day. I'll start a tomato garden on the roof of the bar. We'll light candles and hold hands and sing kumbiyah.

Bullshit.

I sink onto the floor. I have no option left but to start looking, but I don't know where to begin. I haven't eaten in three days, I don't know what day it is, and I haven't had any water for a day. Maybe I'm in the wrong building. Maybe the cripple got it wrong. Her scent tears all of the lies apart. It's the right place. I'm a fool. I feel like weeping again.

Something beeps.

I dig around after the sound, and I find Anne's cell phone near the bottom of the pile. I open it up, and it automatically dials the voice mail. I listen to my own voice coming through the tinny speaker into my ear. That was Saturday. I haven't placed a call since then. She's been gone since Saturday evening.

The hole in the wall means corpses, dozens of them, a horde. The hordes tear everything apart. If I can find some local survivors who remember, I can maybe get a direction, a way forward.

When I'm folding the cell phone shut, I notice something is taped to the back. Scotch tape, an envelope. It positively reeks of her perfume. Anne wanted me to find this. Her last article of love.

I pull the envelope off of the cell phone, uncertain of what to do. I dig through the wreckage, and near the bottom, I find my old leather carrying case, with it's brass buckles. I put the phone and the envelope into the case, shoulder it, and turn to go.

The mall is three blocks away. I walk quickly, then leap onto the top of the nearby church, and onto the roof. It's the only way to get in: zealous mall rats have made it impossible to get in.

I go and sit down by the fountain and wait. It is dark, and I can sense people sleeping in the shops. I light one of the cigarettes Mustache gave me back at the factory and wait for dawn.

Doubts assail me again, spoken by an angry voice that grinds and bites at my head. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

And then another voice answers those doubts. It is Anne's voice. How could I have known? The plan would have worked. What would I have done if I was there? We're all responsible for ourselves, after all.

I want to believe this voice.

Absorbed in thought, I don't notice the night watchman has come to check me out until he speaks to me.

"So, you're back, then?" the voice says.

I startle and jump to my feet.

"Don't worry," he says. "I know what you are. I've seen you here before."

"I'm sorry," I say. "You surprised me."

He chuckles.

"I do that a lot," he says. "I'm pretty quiet."

His voice is elderly and reassuring. I sit back down. Several minutes of silence pass.

"What are you doing here at this time of night?" he says.

"I need some help," I say.

I pull the letter out of my bag.

"I need someone to read this," I say. "For obvious reasons."

"I can do that," the night watchman says. "Name's Steve, by the way."

"Jonathan," I say, handing him the letter.

"Well, let's see here," he says. "The outside says Jonathan, I guess that's you, and there's this drawing of a heart."

I hear the crinkle of paper, and Steve clears his throat and begins to read.

"Dear Jonathan," he says. "I hope you find this. Right now, they're right outside the door. I'm trying to hide, but I'm pretty sure they'll find me. It's just a matter of time.

"I know you always worry about what I think of you. I know you worry that there are other men, nicer men, I could find, that I'm settling for something bad when I could have something good.

"I have never met anyone as full of life as you are, as concerned for other people as you are. I know sometimes the people around you aren't very considerate, that they persecute you, and call you an animal, when you try to help them.

"I hope this finds you because I think you are a good man. When you find me, I hope I can be as good a woman for you. I am scared by the monsters on the other side of the wall, but nothing scares me as much as the fact that I might never see you again. I know you are not religious, but I am faifthful you will find me again, even if we are in Heaven when it does happen.

"I love you."

"Anne."

My heart catches in my throat, and for once, I am glad that the goggles will hide my tears from the world. They can't hide my sobs.

Steve says nothing, but folds up the letter into the envelope and hands it to me, pushing it into my open palm. The sun has risen high enough to peer in through the skylight.

"You'll find her," Steve says. "You'll get her back. Nothing stays dead forever, here."

As if on cue, the barricade gives way at the far end of the mall. I can smell the animals, the decaying corpses, pouring through the hole, feel them grabbing the nearest people, and watch dozens of sleeping brains wink out of existance. Steve recoils in terror, and I turn to run, to find a way up to the skylight and away.

I am turning to run when the scent catches me. I turn to see Steve's brain wink out, and the think that is eating him, pouring his blood and organs and the muscles down his throat, smells of looted perfume. It turns to glower at me, and lets out a roar, and the dead begin to advance towards me.

It gets closer and closer, and I can smell the perfume and the desperation and the anger. I have no needles, no help to offer it.

The thing that used to be Anne does not want help. The thing that used to be Anne wants food.

I turn away and flee, driven by terror, into the hot afternoon sun.

The cloying sweet smell of perfume follows me.

Volume Two: Forgive Us Our Sins

Okay, okay, so I'm jumping the gun a bit.

As it stands right now, I haven't actually written any of Volume Two yet. But I figured I'd get this little introductory part out of the way while the vision is still fresh in my brain. After that, when I've screwed it all up, I'll edit this part to say it was all intentional, that I am, in fact, a genius. Luck? I know no luck.

I guess it will come as no surprise to say that Volume One dealt with isolation, and being alone. The general cause of all this solitude, was, of course, Jonathan Frey's mutation, the inception of a character alone even when hordes of the living dead drive the last remnants of Malton together to make a united stand, a kind of lion-with-the-lamb-wolf-with-the-kid paradise, but with zombies. Even then, Frey is on the outside.

It's a theme I hope appeals to the younger people who play Urban Dead (younger than me, anyways) who might feel isolated within their high schools or such, by dint of music they listen to or the admittedly silly-looking clothes that they wear. My generation gave birth to Columbine. My generation gave birth to Virginia Tech. Forgive me some moralistic preaching, but I'm sick of watching the news to find that another member of the generation that is absolutely going to tear the world a new asshole someday got sent home in a body bag. After all, we have motor cars to run us over and wars to tear us limb from limb. We don't need to start killing each other, not over that, at any rate.

To that target audience: If you can stand the bullshit for a little bit longer, life gets better. I don't have any massive evidence to support this (not without breaking the fourth wall), but trust me, it does. So put your father's hunting rifle back in the closet, grit your teeth, and go back to school without it. Because your Anne is still out there somewhere, happiness is attainable, and isolation is but a passing shadow.

Volume Two is about forgiveness. Volume Two is pretty well a blatant rip-off of Buffy The Vampire Slayer Season Two (though legally distinct from said show). Like I said, I haven't written even a word yet, but I have a zeitgeist and a direction and a character to die for.

So stick around. Year Two is going to be one hell of a ride.

Sincerely,

The Man Behind The Goggles.

As It Is In Heaven

"...and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. Amen." Thump.

Thump.

Metal shingles adorn the roof of the church. Possibly lead, probably tin. Three of them clatter off when I land and slide down the pitch, off the gutter and onto the ground, one by one. The cacophony splits the night into two pieces. One struggles to maintain its balance on the roof of the old building. The other stands frozen in horror, watching the shadowy motions of malice and glee as the other brain winked out of existence, re-smelling the sudden whiff of blood and viscera, and re hearing the soft wet squish of muscle tissue, a viciously innocuous sound, as if someone had tread in a wet tennis shoe.

Thump.

The roof of the ex-restaurant is black tar, embedded with some kind of sand that chafes roughly at the soles of my feet. My chest heaves and suddenly, I am bent double, vomiting explosively onto the roof of the building, and wondering if the sound will echo the way the shingles did. I need a cigarette. I need a shower. I need a thousand things.

I straighten up, wipe my mouth and fish into the bag, pulling out the stale off brand cigarettes that mustache gave me back at the factory. My hand is shaking so badly that I singe the hair on my upper lip before I can light the cigarette.

I used to look to Malton as a new future. I used to think an extrasensorily blind mutant could make a living here as a telemarketer, in a flat, away from home, away from America. On the heels of that thought comes another; this is too absurd. None of this is happening. None of it is real. I slow down and the memories dance suddenly through my brain, a slow waltz of sensation. All of it was fabricated. Walking undead: it's like something out of an absurd zombie movie. And the bit with my girlfriend the shrink, and Brother Xavier and the House of Lost Souls. I laugh sickeningly.

All made up, perhaps by sickening elves, squirming with parasites and pus and sharp teeth and narrow fingers and peering black pupil-less eyes. A cosmic joke.

A distant groan stills the laugh at my lips. Ah, vexing reality. I drag heavily on my cigarette.

When I was young and could still see, I read comic books. They all started the same way: there's nothing like a good "We join our hero moments away from death..." or "Last episode..." My favorite was always "The story thus far..."

The. Story. Thus. Far.

Four simple words.

The groan sounds again, closer. I flip the cigarette away and climb to the edge of the building. We'll have time for madness later.

They have been following me. That in itself is strange. The dead do not follow the living. They lurk in the shadows and in the streets and reach out with angry hands and conniving teeth to get at you. They roam.

Not these dead. These dead march.

I can swear beneath the odor of rotting flesh I can smell perfume, just the slightest faint whisper of nostalgia for what was.

They are closer now. It will be tricky.

The building shutters under the carefully timed shove of the dead. I fall to my knees, springing back up, run to the edge and leap off the opposite direction. I start to pray quietly.

I have not prayed in years.

"Our Father, who art in heaven..."

The roof of the ex-restaurant gives way as I jump, and they follow, to the next building, a transitory stop before I jump onto the roof of what feels like another restaurant, then up to an office building.

"...hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven..."

I leap off of the office building, a three story drop onto the surface of a mini-mall, a fifty yard dash across, and a quick leaping jump onto the roof of a whorehouse motel, and then over the fence and onto a pile of cars in a junkyard. They can't match the speed, but I can't run like this forever.

"...Give us each day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us..."

The story thus far; the psychologist I used to date has turned into a monster, and not the benign kind, the malevolent angry eat flesh and bone and shred skin kind. Just another day in the city of the damned. Just another day at the office. The office flashes below me again and I sprint across an alley, into a back kitchen of a Chinese restaurant, past startled, frightened faces. Up the stairs, onto the roof of a bar, and onto the next building. She is not just one monster; she marches at the head of hundreds.

"...and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.

Amen."

Thump.

Family Circle

I give them the usual explanation. It takes longer because the first voice keeps asking questions.

Someone slaps me in the face.

"What is it?" a voice says. "Is it dead?"

I inhale, snort, and sit bolt upright. As I do, a weight scrambles off my chest. Asleep. I was asleep. The smell of disinfectant assaults my nostrils, and the heavy, papery smell of a white-collar workplace. I catch just the barest echo of tile flooring, and musty smell of decomposing potted fern.

"It can't stay here," another voice says. "Tell it to go."

My exhaustion-numbed brain swims into focus. My hand swims down into my pouch and pulls a pack of cigarettes from the carton mustache gave me.

Six brains watch me carefully. They are wreathed in suspicion and paranoia. Two of them are children. The other four are adults.

"What is it?" the first voice says again.

I light a cigarette and rub my head.

"You know, it's kind of rude to talk about people that way," I say, and drag in deeply.

In the awkward silence that follows, I try to reconstruct the hazy threads of memory. I remember running. I remember my lungs burning. I remember finally letting go, giving up in despair and falling down into a black, exhausted chasm. I dimly remember hitting the ground from a height of about two stories.

I fell asleep. In the streets. My jaw locks into place, my hands tremble. Was I one of them? How much time have I lost?

"Who are you?" another voice asks. It is male, deeper. "What are you?"

I give them the usual explanation. It takes longer because the first voice keeps asking questions. There are six; a family with an elderly grandmother and a man who reeks faintly of leather and cologne. The wife asks all the questions. The husband grunts and interjects. The grandma adds long rambling stories. The two kids are silent. So is the cologne man.

"John, he can't stay here," the second voice says.

"I know," John and I say together in perfect unison.

"You said that already," I add, trying to distinguish myself.

"Well it's true," the voice repeats. It is a bit shriller this time. "You need to go."

"Why?" John says. "He's a person, just like us. He deserves a place to stay."

"I still don't understand why you dragged him in here in the first place," the voice says. "You should have just left him in the street."

"Well, he's not a zombie," John says. "Look at him. He talks. Do any of them talk?"

"Yes," she says. "They do."

"How did you get close enough to tell?"

An awkward silence fell across the room. The husband's timorous voice speaks up.

"John," he says.

"Yes?" we both say together.

"Person John," he says.

"What?" we both say.

"Non-mutant John," he says.

I light my new cigarette with the old one. John answers him.

"What?"

"They don't just eat people, if you know what I mean."

"No, I don't," John says.

"One of them was, uh, intimate, with my wife," the husband repeats.

The silence this time is colossal. My mouth yawns so far open, the cigarette tumbles into the floor and rolls down the slightly tilted floor. I try to feel around for it. I knock over what feels like a potted plant, and the rattle of the plastic pot is deafening.

"Don't bother with that," John says. "It rolled under a crack in the door."

"Sure thing," I say, and pull another cigarette out of the pouch.

"John," the husband says again.

"Yes," we both say. Then, in perfect unison. "This is getting really old."

"Just call me Frey," I tell them. "Call him John."

"Thank you, Jon," he says.

"Which one?" John says.

"I think I saw this bit in a Monty Python movie one time," I say. "Look, I know they do horrible things sometimes, but I'm really not one of them. If I was, do you think one of you could stop me? I'm a person, just...different."

"That's not exactly reassuring, Frey," the husband says.

In an instant, I can sense it. The air is poisoned. The kid brains move closer to the mother's brain. Even John's brain waffles, uncertain of the new information.

"Fine, I'm out of here," I say. "Thanks for dragging me out of the street."

I stalk towards the stairwell, my senses now completely recovered, able to sense the iron, to read the blue prints of the building. John follows me up the stairs.

"Hey," he says. "Can I bum a smoke?"

"Yeah, sure," I say. "Not my brand anyways."

"Look, I think you're okay," he says. "It's just Tina, the mom. She gets antsy around the kids."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah," he said, and I hear the flick of a lighter, the small papery crackle of a cigarette and the whiff of acrid smoke. "Which is strange, considering they're not even her kids."

"Huh?"

"She found them out wandering alone," he says. "I think they had problems with, uh, fucking."

"Huh," I say. "Listen, and listen good. You need to get the hell out of here now."

"Why?"

"Because I have a bunch of them chasing me."

"A horde?"

"Yeah, whatever. Look, you need to run now, because they'll come here next, looking for me."

"Okay."

"Don't just blow me off," I say. "You need to take this seriously."

"Look, I've seen a bunch of zombies before," John says. "I know how to handle myself."

"If you say so," I say. "Just, whatever happens, look out for the kids."

"I will," he says. "Good luck."

"You'll need it more than I will," I say.

We've climbed to the top of the office building. I can sense the gathering horde at the bottom. It has swelled, drawing together jangling nerves in a vertigo whirlpool of motion, like staring into an ant's nest of swirling suns.

"I'm going to draw them off," I say. "Not all of them will come. You have to make sure the kids make it out okay."

"I know, I know," John says. "Give my regards to Broadway."

"Right, Broadway," I say.

I reach out, find the roof of the next tallest building and jump down, right as the first wave starts to smash into the barricades. In a few moments, they are through. From the roof of the hospital, I listen to the groans and watch as one by one, the brains in the building wink out, except for John's, which stays, pulsating, glowing, whirling, a lone start in the middle of a dark night.

I turn and swirl away across the quantum landscape, tears in my dead eyes.