Текст книги "Warm Bodies"

Автор книги: Isaac Marion

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Текущая страница: 6 (всего у книги 12 страниц)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Say it, R. Just say it .

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘So you dream now?’ Julie says.

I smile nervously. ‘I guess I do.’

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

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

‘I’m changing,’ I tell her.

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

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

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

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

‘What did you think was going to happen?’

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

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

I look at her uneasily.

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

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

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

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

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

‘M?’

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

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

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

‘Take… guess,’ M says, pointing at his wounds. ‘Boneys. Drove me out.’

‘Sorry.’

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

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

I look at M, confused. ‘Came… with? Why?’

He shrugs. ‘Things… crazy… back home. Routines… shook.’ He jabs a finger at me. ‘You.’

‘Me?’

‘You and… her. Something… in air. Movement.’

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

‘Hi,’ I say.

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

‘Where’s… girl?’ M asks me.

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

‘Ju… lie,’ M repeats with some effort. ‘Okay. Where’s… she?’

‘Left. Went home.’

M studies my face. He drops a hand onto my shoulder. ‘You… okay?’

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

Six syllables. I have broken my record again.

‘To… Stadium?’

I nod.

‘Why?’

‘To… save her.’

‘From… what?’

‘Ev… rything.’

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

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

I stare at him.

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

‘What?’

‘You’ve… felt. Do you know… what it is?’

‘What are… talking about?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

step two

taking

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

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

‘Perry!’

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

‘We’re going to the gardens!’

‘Cool!’

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

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

‘Oh fun… a field trip to where I just spent eight hours working.’

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

‘So I’ve noticed.’

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

‘Mrs Grau would say we are outside.’

‘I mean outside . Trees, rivers, etc.’

‘Not till they’re twelve.’

‘Awful.’

‘Yeah…’

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

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

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

‘I know, but…’

She waits. ‘What, Perry?’

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

Her expression sharpens.

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

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

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

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

Julie rolls her eyes. ‘Great.’

‘Tsk tsk.’

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

I look at her uncertainly.

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

‘Sorry.’

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

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

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

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

‘Dad.’

‘Yeah?’

‘I think I have a girlfriend.’

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

‘I think so.’

‘Who?’

‘Julie Grigio?’

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

‘I like firecrackers.’

My dad smiles. His eyes drift. ‘Me too, kid.’

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

‘Dad?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Do you think it’s stupid?’

‘What?’

‘To fall in love.’

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

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

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

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

‘What if you’d only gotten a week with her?’

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

I relent with a small release of breath. ‘Okay.’

‘Promise?’

‘Promise.’

My dad smiles. ‘I’ll hold you to that.’

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

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

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

‘Neither am I.’

I sense a cold smile in his voice.

Good .

‘There you are.’

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

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

‘Perry?’

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

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

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

‘For a while.’

‘Their parents didn’t leave . They were taken.’

‘Is there a difference?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Or fear.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Ready,’ I tell the others.

M sizes me up. ‘Close… enough.’

We head for the gates.

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

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

I look at M. ‘Thanks. For… doing this.’

‘Sure,’ M says.

‘Don’t… die.’

‘Trying… not to. Are… ready?’

I nod.

‘Look… alive… out there.’

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

‘Help!’ I scream, waving my arms. ‘Help, they’re… right behind me!’

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

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

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

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

‘Ted! Look at this shit! ’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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