No. Oh God. This is not what I wanted.
A tall skinny one is suddenly behind me, grabbing my legs. I fall and hit the table and my vision flashes red. Everything is wrong, but as the red fades to black I still allow an exultant shout, one last selfish orgasm before I go to sleep for ever:
Finally. Finally!
And then—
* * *
‘Perry.’ A jab in my ribs. ‘Perry!’
‘What?’
‘Don’t you go to sleep on me now.’
I open my eyes. An hour of sun glaring through my closed lids has faded all the colours of the world to bluish grey, like an old movie poster in a dying local video store. I turn my head to look at her. She smiles wickedly and jabs me again. ‘Never mind. Go ahead and sleep.’
Beyond her face I see the looming white posts of the Stadium roof arches, and beyond that, the deep cerulean sky. I slowly alternate my focus between her and the sky, letting her face blur into a peach-and-gold cloud, then refocusing it.
‘What?’ she says.
‘Tell me something hopeful.’
‘What kind of hopeful?’
I sit up, crossing my arms over my knees. I look out at the surrounding city, the crumbling buildings, the empty streets and the lonely sky, clean and blue and deathly quiet without its white-sketching airplanes.
‘Tell me this isn’t the end of the world.’
She lies there for a minute, looking up at the sky. Then she sits up and pulls one of her earbuds out of her tangled blonde hair. She gently plugs it into my ear.
The warbled strumming of a broken guitar, the swelling of an orchestra, the oohs and ahhs of a studio choir, and John Lennon’s weary, woozy voice, singing limitless undying love. Everyone playing this song is now bones in a grave, but here they are anyway, exciting and inviting me, calling me on and on. The final fade-out breaks something inside me, and tears squeeze out of my eyes. The brilliant truth and the inescapable lie, sitting side by side just like Julie and me. Can I have both? Can I survive in this doomed world and still love Julie, who dreams above it? For this moment at least, tied to her brain by the white wire between our ears, I feel like I can.
Nothing’s gonna change my world , Lennon chants, over and over. Nothing’s gonna change my world .
Julie sings a high harmony, and I murmur a low. There on the hot white roof of humanity’s last outpost, we look out over our rapidly, hopelessly, irretrievably changing world, and we sing:
Nothing’s gonna change my world. Nothing’s gonna change my world .
I am staring at the airport ceiling again. I drop the last chunk of Perry’s brain into my mouth and chew, but nothing happens. I spit it out like gristle. The story is over. The life is gone.
I find my eyes burning again, craving tears that my ducts can’t supply. I feel as if I’ve lost someone dear. A brother. A twin. Where is his soul now? Am I Perry Kelvin’s afterlife?
I finally drift back to sleep. I’m in the darkness. The molecules of my mind are still scattered, and I float through oily black space, trying to swipe them up like fireflies. Every time I go to sleep, I know I may never wake up. How could anyone expect to? You drop your tiny, helpless mind into a bottomless well, crossing your fingers and hoping that when you pull it out on its flimsy fishing wire it hasn’t been gnawed to bones by nameless beasts below. Hoping you pull up anything at all. Maybe this is why I only sleep a few hours a month. I don’t want to die again. This has become clearer and clearer to me recently, a desire so sharp and focused I can hardly believe it’s mine: I don’t want to die. I don’t want to disappear. I want to stay.
I awake to the sound of screaming.
My eyes snap open and I spit a few bugs out of my mouth. I lurch upright. The sound is far away but it’s not from the School. It lacks the plaintive panic of the School’s still-breathing cadavers. I recognise the defiant spark in these screams, the relentless hope in the face of undeniable hopelessness. I leap to my feet and run faster than any zombie has ever run.
Following the screams, I find Julie at the Departures gate. She is backed into a corner, surrounded by six drooling Dead. They close in on her, rearing back a little each time she swings her smoke-belching hedge trimmer, but advancing steadily. I rush at them from behind and crash into their tight circle, scattering them like bowling pins. The one closest to Julie I punch so hard the bones of my hand shatter into seashell crumbs. His face cracks inward and he drops. The next closest I ram into the wall, then grab his head and smash it into the concrete until his brain pops and he goes down. One of them grabs me from behind and takes a bite out of my rib meat. I reach back, tear off his rotten arm, and swing it at him like Babe Ruth. His head spins a full three-sixty on his neck, then tilts, tears and falls off. I stand there in front of Julie, brandishing the muscle-bound limb, and the Dead stop advancing.
‘Julie!’ I snarl at them while pointing at her. ‘Julie!’
They stare at me. They sway back and forth.
‘Julie!’ I say again, not sure how else to put it. I walk up to her and press my hand against her heart. I drop the arm-club and put my other hand on my own heart. ‘Julie.’
The room is silent except for the low grumble of her hedge trimmer. The air is thick with the rancid-apricot smell of stabilised gasoline, and I notice several decapitated corpses I had nothing to do with lying at her feet. Well done, Julie , I think with a faint smile. You are a lady and a scholar .
‘What… the fuck !’ growls a deep voice behind me.
A tall, bulky form is picking itself up off the floor. It’s the first one I attacked, the one I punched in the face. It’s M. I didn’t even recognise him in the heat of the moment. Now, with his cheekbone crushed into his head, he’s even harder to identify. He glares at me and rubs his face. ‘What are… doing, you…’ He trails off, at a loss for even simple words.
‘Julie,’ I say yet again, as if this is an irrefutable argument. And in a way, it is. That one word, a fully fleshed name . It’s having the effect of a glowing, talking cellphone raised before a mob of primitives. All the remaining Dead stare at Julie in hushed silence, except M. He is baffled and enraged.
‘Living!’ he sputters. ‘Eat!’
I shake my head. ‘No.’
‘Eat!’
‘No!’
‘Eat , fucking—’
‘Hey! ’
M and I both turn. Julie has stepped out from behind me. She glares at M and revs the trimmer. ‘Fuck off,’ she says. She links an arm into my elbow, and I feel a tingle of warmth spreading out from her touch.
M looks at her, then at me, back to her, then back to me. His permanent grimace is tight. We appear to be in a stand-off, but before it can escalate any further the stillness is pierced by a reverberating roar, like an eerie, airless horn blast.
We all turn to the escalators. Yellowed, sinewy skeletons are rising up one by one from the floors below. A small committee of Boneys emerges from the stairs and approaches me and Julie. They stop in front of us and fan out into a line. Julie backs away a little, her bravado flattening under their black, eyeless stares. Her grip on my arm tightens.
One of them steps forward and stops in front of me, inches from my face. No breath wafts from its hollow mouth, but I can feel a faint, low hum emanating from its bones. This hum is not found in me, nor in M, nor in any of the other flesh-clad Dead, and I begin to wonder what exactly these dried-up creatures really are. I can no longer believe in any voodoo spell or laboratory virus. This is something deeper, darker. This comes from the cosmos, from the stars, or the unknown blackness behind them. The shadows in God’s boarded-up basement.
The ghoul and I are locked in a stare-down, toe to toe, eye to eye socket. I don’t blink, and it can’t. What seems like hours pass. Then it does something that slightly undermines the horror of its presence. It raises a stack of Polaroids in its pointy fingers and begins handing them to me, one by one. I’m reminded of a proud old man showing off his grandkids, but the skeleton’s grin is far from grandfatherly, and the photos are far from heartwarming.