“At last,” the aristocracy cries, “we have reason to bury all the elder bipartisan hatreds. Even within Apocalypse can the wise find Shangri-La.”
In certain hard-to-locate bars, frequented only at night, meatboys and meatgirls sit bolted immobile into wooden chairs, mouths clamped shut, while surgically implanted shunts drain off pituitary extract. The runoff collects in receptacles over gas flames, then is channeled into intravenous drips. Coded bathroom graffiti informs the careful reader that this technology is the work of Dr. Amway, as means of controlling the restless and ill-contented living. By 3:00 a.m., the only sound comes from dozens of groaning meatfolk, each bar filled with comatose warmbloods in their grave-spangled purgatorial trances, heavy inside with the cindery burnt comet empathic visions of those on the far side of the perimeter. It is their new lives we wonder and worry about, their eternities.
I am without choice on a biological level. Sit down next to grimacing meatboy hookah and plug in. Avoid the eyes and find the vein … before long I may be confusing the order in which things are done. But paradoxically, I will die, if it’s the last thing I do. Hard to get that wrong … but then, look at the meatfolk, though I am not so sure they deserve quite all the blame.
*
SUBJECT 92
He occupied a suite of rooms on the top floor of the Tartarus Clinic for Applied Research. In the eyes of the staff, “Subject 92” replaced his given name of Leland Lovejoy, and behind him laid the terrible abattoir of misfortune which had led to his residency at the clinic, where he hobbled about with some assistance.
Subject 92 had lost various bodily parts in nine separate attacks by the walking dead. While drunk on a potent concoction of sterno and Gatorade, the then-itinerant Leland Lovejoy was set upon by a trio of corpses who chewed his left leg off at the knee before he fought them away. While sedated in an emergency room, he then awoke to find a newly-deceased woman from an adjacent room drooling into his face, after which one eye was sucked from its socket like a cocktail onion. In later attacks over the coming months, several of which were alcohol-related, he lost an ear, a flap of scalp, three fingers, his surviving baby toe, most of his right bicep, half of one cheek, plus assorted divots of flesh estimated to total seven pounds.
“Well, I used to hate them,” he frequently told his attending staff, speaking of the ambulatory corpses who had so bedeviled him, “but then I realized, no matter what, it’s still nice to be wanted. And they’ve done a lot for me, in their way. Three squares a day and a roof over my head and a fistful of remote controls, you think I ever had it this good when I was on the streets?”
“But the price you paid to be here,” said one of his nurses. “Some people would call what you lost an exorbitant fee.”
Subject 92 dismissed all misgivings with a noxious cloud of cigar smoke and a wave of a four-fingered hand. “Lemme tell you something. They left my pecker and my nuts alone. They’d’ve taken those, yeah, I might be singing a different tune. But everything vital’s still in place, and what’s gone, I can’t say I miss all that much. Hey, you know anyone needs a kidney? I got one to spare.”
Subject 92’s usefulness came as a result of his being the only known living human to sustain bites in one, let alone nine, attacks and then fail to succumb to infection by the Quayle-Beta virus. The Tartarus Clinic for Applied Research was an inevitable destination, as medical science had long known that if you want to learn how to defeat a disease, study who does not have it.
He was much beloved by Dr. Amway, who routinely had Subject 92 brought down to the labs, where they would freely, and with great exuberance, converse on topics as diverse as cheap alcohol substitutes, sightings of the Virgin Mary within foodstuffs and bathroom mildew stains, and post-amputation phantom pains.
“Excellent progress, we’re making excellent progress with you. You really are quite the miracle man,” Dr. Amway would tell him, and praise him effusively for his courage. “In fact, we’re making such excellent progress that I am almost ashamed to inform you that we need a few more tissue samples for further analysis.” He would then toy with a sterile, gleaming scalpel and surgical spatula.
And Subject 92 would look at him with an inaudible whimper, remember his home several floors above, with all its fine and expensive trinkets, sigh, and roll up the skin of his stump.
*
THE PARKING LOT
Thad in his suit, gray, Savile Row and tailored to a perfect 40-Regular frame. Always told, be a model, Thad smiling with mild indulgence but flushed with flattery. Bess in her Dior strapless, a diaphanous sweep to just below her perfect knee. Had turned down eleven proposals of marriage, but the night was young. Each were with friends at different richly cultured oases in the same plaza of trends, where rehabbers made killings and the dead were not allowed. This was where the beautiful could still come for a night devoid of worries, while they still could, here at civilization’s last stand, at least any civilization that truly mattered.
A determined, intermittent blare muscled through the refined chime of crystal and china and harp, and Thad saw the world through a red mist of irritability as he left the table.
“Pardon me,” to his companions. “My car, I believe. If someone’s dinged it, I’ll bring back a foreskin as a trophy.”
The plaza oozed smug propriety beneath a sick orange sodium haze, cars in orderly rows like rounded steel hummocks, or burial mounds, their windshields gleaming with indifference. It was not a light to flatter human faces, but Thad found her lovely just the same. Bess stretching to delicate tiptoe, craning her neck after her rush down from her own dinner, own drinks. Thirty feet and four cars away from him, and he knew love all over again. From somewhere in the assembly of cars, a horn droned its repetitive pattern, three quick toots, then two longer ones, over and over, loud as gunfire.
“My mistake,” Thad called over to her. “I thought it was my car!”
“And I mine.” A vision, she was. “I guess we’re both wrong.”
Standing tall and tottering on stiffened legs, they scanned the lot again for the trumpeting car.
“There it is!” She pointed. “See the lights flashing?”
“Come along,” and dazzled, he took her by the wrist as they hurried between cars like mischievous trust fund heirs, until they stood beside the empty, convulsing auto. One fender appeared stricken with a fresh wound. No one else was in sight.
“And it’s only a Mazda,” Bess said. “Some people, you wonder what goes through their minds.”
Thad held her surrendered hand, turned the diamond ring down, and directed her reach toward the windshield where, together, they etched in the glass: CLEAN THE WAX FROM YOUR EARS, YOU FUCKING CRETIN LOSER, after which they laughed and fell into each other’s arms. Some nights it really was possible to love a lifetime’s worth in five minutes.
But then the dead crawled from beneath a dozen cars, Beemers and Mercedes and Volvos, and surrounded them in a stinking ring of gray sodium putrefaction and maggot runoff. Even their clothes were as ragged as their skin. Who knew they were smart enough to set traps? Who knew they possessed the skills of pack hunters?
Thad and Bess were brought down in screams and threats of litigation, evoking the names of lawyers and aldermen, as business cards spewed like feathers in molt. Their buttocks were eaten away, until denuded pelvic bone showed through the tears in pants and dress, but the dead stopped when Bess groaned, newly revived, and they recognized in her a kindred lack of soul.