Amid the sound of the bumper cars, you walk out up the ramp, under a banner printed in bright block letters: Deno’s Wonder Wheeclass="underline" Open This Year, and the Next, and the Next, and the Next, and the Next…
At the top of the ramp you risk a look behind you; the girl is still standing at the Wonder Wheel. Now she’s milky-eyed, one hand on the lever, the other hanging slack at her side. The top of her head has been opened like a soft-boiled egg.
You turn away too fast; you have to steady yourself before you keep walking out and up to the boardwalk.
(Don’t glance over. You must look straight ahead.)
On the boardwalk, the adults are absently feeding the children, their little mouths mechanically chewing. It looks like funnel cake, but you know better by now what they eat, and you don’t investigate.
The sun is blazing. The whole place is starting to smell like a fish market.
Out on the beach it’s easier to walk the way you should; the sand sucks at your feet, forces you to be slow and careful.
Some of them are walking out into the water. They walk straight out until the water’s too deep to stand in, and when the current takes them they give in, float with arms and legs loose.
(You remember, suddenly, the summer you were ten years old and the kid a few doors down from you drowned in the pool in his backyard. For the rest of the summer none of the neighborhood kids were allowed to go out of sight of their parents, which ruined everything your friends had planned all year.
They moaned all summer about how boring it was to have to stay so close to the house. You agreed.
You were tired all that summer, because whenever you closed your eyes at night you imagined that kid in the moment before he fell into the water, when he had just begun to lean forward, when it wasn’t too late for someone to pull him back and save him.)
You walk towards the surf, picking your way over the ones on the beach. Where they have laid out flat in the sand, white eyes turned to the sun, there’s the rancid smell of eggs gone bad.
You wonder how long you can last this way, sneaking amongst them. Will you have to go back on the train, make it through the city, head south on the highway walking one mile an hour? How far will you have to go before you reach someplace where this hasn’t happened?
(You will never find that place. There are more of them every minute.)
By now there’s a web of them across the water, floating akimbo. In some places they’re locked together tight as puzzle pieces. If you were brave enough, you could walk across them.
Behind you, someone has figured out how to start the Cyclone. There’s the crank of cars on the way up the rails, a collective off-key moan as they plummet. On the stretch of boardwalk behind you, some of them turn to look at the sound, lose interest when they recognize what it is.
They seem sad to see that it’s nothing exciting. It’s strange to watch them looking disappointed; you don’t know what will happen to them when there are no real people left.
(You have already given up hope. They will win. They are patient.)
When you step into the ocean, the water is already cool on your ankles. By nightfall it will be cold. You don’t know how far you can swim in cold water.
(Not far enough.)
You take another step. The water soaks into your shoes, your pants. The next step is more difficult than the last one.
Behind you, they are coming, sloshing dutifully into the water the way they remember doing. They will not make way for you to turn around. You cannot go back now.
You think about the moment before the child falls into the pool.
(You must look straight ahead.)
The Price of a Slice by John Skipp & Cody Goodfellow
If George Romero is the father of zombie cinema, then surely John Skipp is the father of zombie literature. He, along with Craig Spector, edited the first all-original zombie fiction anthologies in the ’80s: Book of the Dead and Still Dead, then, more recently (and on his own), Mondo Zombie and Zombies: Encounters with the Hungry Dead. He is also the author of several novels, such as the splatterpunk ecocidal classic The Bridge (co-written by Craig Spector) and The Emerald Burrito of Oz (with Marc Levinthal).
Cody Goodfellow’s novel, Perfect Union, was published earlier this year, and his short fiction has appeared in Bare Bone, Black Static, Shivers V, and Dark Passions. Skipp and Goodfellow’s collaborative novel Fruiting Body, publishes in December.
If you’ve read the first The Living Dead anthology, you may remember a searing science fiction tale called “Meathouse Man,” one in a series of stories by George R. R. Martin that concern remote-controlled zombies being used as slave labor. Our next tale brings the same concept to a decaying near-future San Francisco, and concerns not only zombie laborers but also soldiers.
In our own present, war by remote control is becoming increasingly commonplace, as detailed in P. W. Singer’s recent nonfiction book Wired for War, which delves into some of the issues surrounding soldiers who pilot Predator drones into combat in Iraq or Afghanistan from the safety of a cubicle in Colorado or Nevada. The book describes the unease felt by many elite pilots, whose training has cost upward of a million dollars, as they watch missions similar to their own being flown by teenagers sitting at computer monitors. One drone pilot describes the physical qualifications needed for his job as not being able to do a hundred pushups, but rather having “a big butt and a strong bladder”-literally being able to sit at the controls for an extended period of time.
War is changing before our eyes, though as this next story reminds us, the more things change the more they stay the same. Workers and soldiers may be replaced by remote-controlled zombie slaves, but somebody’s still got to deliver the pizza.
I.
(Excerpted from WHY WE STOOD: THE NEW UTOPIA by Jerrod Unger III):
“A city is to a planet what a person is to a city. One out of many. A star shining in a firmament filled with constellations. With some shining a little bit brighter, more beautiful or otherwise luckier than the rest.
“By any standard, San Francisco was one of the luckiest, and the most beloved. To those who called her home, San Francisco was The City-the quintessential, the only real city.
“She was a survivor. Of booms and busts, earthquakes and plagues. In the face of every disaster, she always found a new way to thrive, and came back smarter, grander and richer than ever before.
“Few others could claim the same.
“When the dead rose up, most of the world’s cities died just like their people. Winking out, then blindly rising to attack their neighbors.
“Like very few others-and Tokyo came closest-San Francisco kept the lights on throughout the crisis, and shone a beacon to the world. The New San Francisco would not just be the last city on Earth, she would be the greatest.
“We never set out to merely rebuild the old order; we used the breakdown to sweep away old mistakes, and make the kind of world we always knew we should have.
“And while the rest of the world sank deeper into chaos, we toiled and dreamed and dared to grow our City for three hard, uncertain years, until-as viewed from space-she was clearly the brightest light yet emanating from our godforsaken planet, and the only real, living city left on Earth.
“History is full of tough, rotten choices and unfair judgments. And few will be more unfair than the condemnation of what we made, by those who failed even to keep the lights on in their own homes.”
II.
4:47 a.m. Down at Candlestick Park, twenty miles outside the Green Zone, the predawn gloom gave way to icy castles of toxic fog. “The Bargain of Kali Yuga,” his Master had called it, once again proving his divine prescience.