Ted is a Chinese exchange student. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why he chose Ted as his American name. Then he tells me his mother gave him teddy bears every year for his birthday, and that he has a huge collection of bears from all over the world at his parents’ house in Hong Kong. Suddenly I see why he chose it. Alone in the U.S., starting college and living with a complete stranger in a ten-by-ten closet … I would choose a name with a warm association too.
Huh. I guess that would leave me with the name Emma or Hermione.
Ted is an undergrad studying biochemistry at the university. He has that look about him—the studious, terrifyingly intelligent look that we literature majors, even the grad student–level ones, fear. Like Phil, Ted seems to me like he’s come from another planet. He mumbles formulas in his sleep. He says it helps him drown out the banging and groaning outside the door.
C-six, H-six benzene, A-G-two-O silver oxide, C-U-Fe-S-two copper iron sulfide …
Iron. That reminds me: we only have two weapons.
Two doesn’t sound like much, but I’m actually impressed that we managed to find that many in this store. We don’t even leave the box cutters in easy-to-reach places. Someone held up a bakery down the street with a pair of garden shears last year and ever since, Phil has been paranoid about keeping sharp objects hidden. This paranoia may have cost a few people their lives the other day. Thankfully, in the back storeroom I found a little treasure I had walked by and ignored for months and months. A fire alarm and a glass case with a bright red ax become part of the landscape after a while.
You just don’t notice these things until there’s screaming from every direction and windows shattering and blood creeping down the green and ivory–tiled aisles …
Well, I noticed it. I noticed it just in time. Phil put me on one of the most unpleasant tasks in the store: cleaning the storeroom shelves. The shelves go right up to the ceiling with about a foot-and-a-half gap between each one and they get unbelievably dusty after weeks of neglect. I have no clue where all the dust comes from, but 90 percent of it settles on these fucking shelves. Phil doesn’t care that I have dust allergies; he won’t make the assistant managers do the chore so it’s me, only me.
Sending me to the back room probably saved my life. It put me by that fire alarm and just a few feet away from an old, forgotten ax.
* * *
When I sit and watch the monitors there’s an infected creature I recognize. I recognize her for three reasons:
1) Her name is Susan. Because she was—is—a regular. She bought six copies of The Shack. Six. I shit you not. She is shaped like an old, bruised pear and she wears the ugliest pair of glasses I’ve ever seen; these babies would look more at home on the Hubble than a human face.
2) The Thing-Formerly-Called-Susan was in the Christian section when it all started. The floor-to-ceiling window behind her imploded, sending shards of glass the size of stalactites crashing onto the floor. I watched her try to run toward me, through Biography and Home & Garden. She didn’t get very far. Some of the glass had hit her ankle and she was bleeding all over and limping. A gnarled, dripping gray thing came in the window and caught up to her, limping harder than Susan, propelled forward with a terrible kind of hungry speed. It draped itself over her neck and they fell to the floor. I saw clumps of her hair flying between the bookshelves and her blood seeping fast toward me across the grout in the tiles. The blood overtook the book she had been carrying and it tumbled out of her arms and landed with the spine mangled and open.
The Longest Trip Home.
3) Susan should have been dead. You don’t lose that much blood, and that much of your neck, and walk it off. But she did exactly that. She just sort of shrugged off the decaying person on her back and got to her feet. Shuddering, she inflated like an accordion pulled up off the floor by its handle. Her legs straightened unnaturally and then she slumped down, hunched over with a big, raw hole torn down the side of her neck.
It’s hard to remember too many details, but I know I could smell the coppery too-sweet stench of the figure at her back. Suddenly I didn’t mind that she bought so many copies of The Shack. I wanted right then to take her up to the register and help her buy six more. But she slid past the book she had dropped, smearing her own blood across the floor with her feet, feet that were turned in too much. She was walking like a toy duck that had been hastily assembled by a two-year-old. Susan came at me, not fast, but my brain was still trying to compute what I had just seen. Then there was a little flash of red in the corner of my vision. It was the ax, the dear, beautiful ax with its highly polished, gleaming handle and red, curved head. It was so bright, so perfectly red, like a new coat of lipstick just before a night out. There was a hard little hammer hanging down next to the glass case—BREAK IN CASE OF EMERGENCY. Fucking hell, I thought, this certainly applies. Like I said, the memory is fuzzy from panic, but I think my fist did more of the breaking than the hammer. Still, my hand didn’t feel a thing, not until it was gripping the ax. And then I had both hands on the handle and I was running for the front of the store but Susan, poor, ugly Susan, was in the way. I swung, hard, a big, overhead swing that came down at her shoulder. I took off her right arm at the joint and it came away easier than I had expected. She seemed soft somehow, hollow and boneless.
I didn’t stop to see if that had finished her off. I kept hold of the ax and sprinted to the front of the store where Phil was ushering Matt, Janette and Hollianted toward the break room. I remember now that Phil had a bat. I never knew we had a bat in the store. I found out later that Phil hid it under a loose board in the cabinet beneath the cash register. Phil swung the bat wildly as he caught sight of me, beckoning me with a bloody hand. I never thought I’d be so happy to see that silly bastard waving me over. He was shouting at me; screaming, actually. I knew what he saw behind me, I knew Susan wasn’t down for good.
Now I see Susan on the monitor from time to time. We don’t call her Susan anymore, we call her Lefty.
Tomorrow I’ll have to confront Lefty again. We’re running out of food and we need to raid the refrigerators out by the register. We might even need to ransack the café if we can get that far. We’ll have to leave the safety of the door. We don’t have a choice.
September 20, 2009—In Defense of Food
“Do you think we should save him some Doritos?” Ted asks.
In unison we glanced at Phil’s office, the closed door, the quiet man hidden inside. “No,” I tell him. “He’ll come out for food when he’s good and ready.”
I’m really starting to miss Phil’s go-getter attitude.
Phil’s become suddenly vacant, as if all the goodwill and energy he had saved up from many blissful years of excellent customer service has deserted him. I was expecting him to volunteer for Recovery Duty (which is the very serious and important name I’ve given the task), but instead he’s been sulking in his office all morning, scrunched up against the cupboards, clutching a framed photo of his kids. Janette and Matt are silent on the subject but Ted can’t seem to shut up about it.
“He’s lost it.”
“You know what, Ted? How about you lay off him and get back to me when you have kids of your own to miss,” I say. He turns his head away, pushing his glasses up his nose. Ted wears tortoiseshell Oliver Peoples glasses. I can’t quite tell if they’re supposed to be an ironic statement. One of the lenses is cracked and it makes him look like a battered child. His inky black hair falls in messy shocks over the rim of his glasses, dangling like a beaded curtain over the lenses.
“Look, I just need one other person to come with me,” I go on. Janette, Matt and Hollianted were all sitting at the round conference table. I stood near the door, the trusty ax leaning against my knee.
“We can hold out for another day,” Matt says. He wears glasses too but they are definitely not an ironic statement, they are thick and bookish. Matt has all the riotous energy of a basset hound, which is to say none, and he also has the drooping eyes and downtrodden expressio
n. I don’t doubt Matt cares about some things, but that passion is pure speculation as he never raises his voice above an indifferent mumble.
“And what about after that?” I ask.
“After that someone will come for us,” Holly says matter-of-factly, speaking without prompting for the first time in memory. Ted looks at her, a strange light in his eyes.
“Holly,” I say, “I agree that we shouldn’t give up hope but … we need food, we need to stay healthy and strong.”
I don’t want to point out to her that the streets outside the building are ominously silent. The first hour or so after the infected showed up you could hear police sirens and fire engines screaming down the street outside. After that the noises stopped except for the occasional scream and what sounded like a car accident. From what I could make out on the monitors (only one of which caught any of the world outside the store) there wasn’t much to see except a rolling pillar of smoke that filled up the space between our store and the other side of the street. It’s impossible to tell whether it’s sunny or overcast, rain or clear.
“Phil should go,” Ted points out, nodding and placing his open palm on the tabletop. It’s meant as a solemn gesture but Ted doesn’t have the kind of adult authority to pull it off convincingly, especially with his silly cracked lens.
“Yes, Phil should go but he’s indisposed at the moment,” I say. Without planning it, all of us turn to glance at his office. Through the window only the top of his dark head was visible. “So I’ll need someone else to volunteer. I’m sure one of you can swing a baseball bat well enough.”
“I guess. I did judo for six years,” Ted says, shrugging his bony shoulders. He was skinny before, but a few days of nothing but diet cola and rationed snack food has made him absolutely skeletal. Sparrows have meatier frames, and with his fluffy black hair he’s looking more and more like a bespectacled scarecrow.
“Congratulations,” I tell him, “you’ve just volunteered yourself.”
Ted rolls his eyes but gets up anyway. I get the feeling he wanted to go but didn’t want to look too eager. Holly makes a grab for his wrist, her big amber eyes filling up with tears. We’re all emotional these days but Holly’s demeanor turns on a dime. One minute she’ll be whistling show tunes to try and keep us optimistic and the next she’s bawling into Ted’s arms.
“He’ll be fine,” I say, grabbing Ted by the other arm and giving a tug. “I checked the monitor this morning, there’s fewer out there than ever.”
I don’t say the obvious thing, the thing I know she’s thinking: zombies, there are zombies out there.
“I really don’t think this is a good idea,” Matt says, getting slowly to his feet. His beard has come in shaggy and uneven and he looks like a retired lumberjack in his faded plaid shirt and ill-fitting jeans. He’s using his assistant manager voice, the one with the snide sarcastic bite.
“What’s the alternative?” I ask.
“Yeah, what’s your brilliant solution?” Ted asks. I like Ted more every minute.
“I don’t have one,” Matt replies, “but I think we should all just stay here. We don’t know anything about those things. We don’t know how it spreads. It might be something in the air.”
Matt, unfortunately, is a conspiracy theorist. This is not the appropriate time for him to regale us with his interpretation of which government is responsible for the infected. But he’s going there, I can feel it. I mentally recall our heated discussions of the pyramids and the Aztecs and decide that this is a conversation that must be avoided at all costs. He’s glaring at me now over the top of his glasses. He has what we employees affectionately call a “death stare,” which means that he has a shifty, deeply unnerving gaze that says he not only knows that you did, in fact, do something wrong, but that he will rain down furious punishment for said infraction.
“I appreciate the concern, Matt, but we have to eat.”
“Don’t go out there with your mouth and nose uncovered,” he says, unbuttoning his shirt, revealing a stained white T beneath. “It’s a bioweapon, it’s probably in the air.” He hands the shirt to Ted and when Ted won’t take it, Matt comes over and begins wrapping it around the kid’s face, squishing Ted’s broken glasses into his eyes.
“Well, considering the vents in here aren’t sealed we’re all pretty much fucked already then,” I say. I’m hoping Janette will say something, that she’ll make Matt sit down, make him shut up. But she just sits there staring up at him, her expression blank and frozen, her dirty blond hair hanging limp around her hunched shoulders.
Ted, putting his expensive biochemistry degree to work, weighs in with, “Shit, man, it’s not a bioweapon. No one on earth has the technology for this kind of bullshit.”
“Oh, is that your expert opinion?” Matt asks and I know he’s prodding.
Holly stands up then, going to stand beside Ted in solidarity. “He would know!” she shouts. She takes the shirt off Ted’s face and fixes his glasses.
“Wow, okay, let’s keep it down,” I say. “We don’t know what gets them excited and since Ted and I are going out there, we need it as clear as possible.”
“Fine, whatever!” Matt says. “I’m just stating for the record that I think this idea sucks.”
“I’ll keep that in mind when we get back and ration the food.”
It only takes us a minute or two to get ready. At Matt’s continued urging we agree to cover our noses and mouths; it’s really not a half-bad idea since we might have to defend ourselves. The last thing I want is their goo flying all over my face and Matt is, admittedly, correct in pointing out that we don’t exactly know how the infection spreads. I get the feeling Matt is angry and frustrated, but—like always—he’s all simmer and no boil.
I tell Ted to make sure his mouth is covered and I put on a pair of sunglasses from the break room. We look ridiculous, Ted with Matt’s flannel shirt wrapped around his head, his cracked brown glasses peering out, and me with Holly’s studded black sweatshirt wrapped in the same way.
Hollianted cling together before we leave. It should be a romantic moment, and it might have been, but Ted looks so outrageously stupid that it can’t be taken seriously. This is the new face of romance, I think, giving his shoulder a gentle squeeze of encouragement. He peels himself off and we remind Matt to stay by the door and listen for our knock, which he agrees to do, lording over the sacred keys with his furious grimace. Matt’s keeping the keys in case anything happens to us, the discussion of which plunged Holly into another wail of agony.
Ted takes up Phil’s bat and I grab the ax and we’re ready to go. We’ve each got four empty plastic bags to fill with loot. I feel like a boxer waiting in the corner of the ring: I want to go, want to start, but half of me wants to stay behind and cower.
Two steps out of the door and I see her.
Lefty.
Sorry, old girl, I’m not going for a limb this time.
Ted and I have come up with a vague strategy: go for the head—barring that, the chest. I’m not entirely confident Ted has a strong enough arm to really do much damage, but he acquits himself admirably with Lefty, slamming her in the chest while I take a sloppy swing that connects with her neck. Her windpipe collapses with that same, weird hollow feeling. It doesn’t even feel like I’m hurting a person—no human is that soft, that destructible.
Lefty’s decaying, oozing head stares up at me from the ground while her body crumples into a headless heap. She’s still wearing that damn T-shirt, the one with the dancing daisy and the words “World’s Best Mom” in little kid’s handwriting scribbled underneath. I know I should keep moving but I can’t help looking at her eyes. There’s no person there, no identity, just a startling hunger that persists even after I’ve lopped off her head. Ted pulls on my sleeve, the end of his bat coated in a black sludge. He nods to our right, to the short staircase leading up to the cash registers and the coolers.
Our destination.
I glance out the windows on our left. Most of
the glass is gone and what remains is just a jagged barrier along the bottom edge. There’s a pile of shards on the floor just inside the store and I can make out the letters BRO and ODY from the shattered sign. Outside, the street is almost completely obscured by a haze of thick, ashen smoke. The smell, even through the head wrap, is indescribable. I can’t help but imagine a graveyard, a cemetery with all its graves and tombs opened up at once and the decay and death thrown into the wide-open air. It chokes and stings.
Ted and I bound up the stairs and immediately two more zombies come at us. One is Mr. Masterson, the dementia-ridden golden oldie who lives above the shop. He’s got his baseball cap and tan Windbreaker on but it’s stained black and gray down the middle, and part of his lung is trying to escape through the gaping hole in his chest. He sees us—or smells us, or whatever it is these things do—and lurches toward Ted, groaning as if Ted is the most desirable piece of ass he’s ever seen. I intercept him with a blow to the legs. He’s tall and this gets him on my level, a perfect position to go for the head. Ted’s now somewhere else, taking care of the monster teetering around behind the counter.
Mr. Masterson is laid out and I jump over his squirming, headless corpse to the cooler in front of the counters. It’s mostly intact but a few bottles of water are missing. I’m amazed the thing hasn’t been pillaged altogether. I go for the water first and then the diet soda and the juice. There are some sports drinks in there too so I grab those and the monstrous vegan cookies that are, thank God, still in their wrappers. Ted is having trouble with the zombie behind the counter so I go to help him. Together it’s not a problem, and soon Ted is going for the upright cooler behind the counter where we keep the extra bottles.
“Water first, moron!” I shout through the muffling of the head wrap. He was reaching for a Mountain Dew.
While Ted fills up his bags, I go back out around the front of the counter where there’s junk food. I reach blindly for whatever I can get, shoveling candy bars and gum and chips into a new plastic bag. Once the display is empty I turn to help Ted. Out of the corner of my eye I see something, something I can’t resist. It’s stupid, I know it is, but like one of Pavlov’s dogs drooling over the mere tinkling of a bell, it can’t be helped.