Things Fall Apart

Things Fall Apart

Sammi Milva barely contained the shudder which threatened to roll up her spine.  Once had been bad, twice had been worse.  But this would have been the third shudder in the five minutes after she awoke, and she thought that that might drive her mad.  Assuming, that was, that she wasn’t mad already.

She sipped at her first cup of coffee; a wonderful brew that had come from a well-stocked kitchen that was almost as big as her house.  Her watch had actually started twenty minutes ago,  but Miguel had let her sleep a little longer.  That was nice of him, she thought, even though all it means is that I’ll do the same for Sarah, and she’ll do the same for Miguel, and we’ll all be right back where we started.

She looked out the window at the vast lawn, and the things walking around on it.  The infestation didn’t seem to be quite as bad today.  Of course, that was like visiting a death camp with only twenty or thirty dead Jews and saying, “hey, that ain’t so bad.”

As she thought this, an image popped into her mind.  A fellow with a cane and a red-banded straw hat, dancing around in his striped suit and crooning: “Heeey, that ain’t soooo baaaaad…”  She almost laughed at this, but bit her lip instead.  Laughing would be worse than shuddering.  Besides, there was no sugar-coating the situation.  If it was two million zombies she was looking at instead of three million, she was still being fed a shit sandwich.  The shuffling dead stretched from the steps of the front lawn all the way out to the Washington Monument (and probably beyond).

The third shudder came anyway, and when her sanity didn’t completely melt away in an instant, Sammi took another sip of coffee.

They were both gone, they weren’t coming back, and that was that.  POTUS, the Prez…whatever you wanted to call him, had boarded Air Force One two weeks ago, assuring them that, while he was leavin’ on a jet plane, he most definitely would be comin’ back again.  The Royal Jackass, Mister Second Fiddle himself, had left three days later aboard AF2, not bothering with platitudes.  Meanwhile, she and what remained of the White House staff were “holding down the fort”.

She had hummed several bars of the song before she realized that she was doing it.  When she did, she was a little amused to find that it was the chorus of an old Elton John song; “Bennie and the Jets”.  She christened it with new words, mumbling them out of a half-smile of exhaustion and fear and tottering sanity, as she watched the zombies:

“P-P-P-POTUS and the Veep!”

 

*    *    *

 

The press conferences had been almost as bad as the problem itself.  She couldn’t remember how many times she’d had to assure reporters that this hadn’t started at Area 51, for example, but it had to have been at least four.  As White House Press Secretary, she’d had to go round after bloody round, sometimes answering the same question two or three times a session.

And the Prez?  Fuck, they’d jumped all over him about it.  Was this some kind of terrorist attack?  If so, how come it seemed to be popping up all over the world all of a sudden?  Did the White House know why (or have anything to do with the fact that) international communications were beginning to black out left and right?  And on and on and on.  She had reflected to the President – a touch grimly – that the only reason the relentless press conferences had eventually stopped was that most of the reporters were finally eaten.

What had been the most maddening thing about it – to Sammi, at least – was that the tone of each conference seemed to be one of finding a place to lay the blame, rather than a solution to the problem.  She supposed that at least part of that could be chalked up to the CDC.  The President’s budget cuts the year before had slapped them right in the face, so it wasn’t too surprising that when they got caught with their pants down, they immediately tossed the hot potato through the Oval Office window.  As if Capitol Hill didn’t have enough on its hands already.  This snowballing clusterfuck was a political, economic, military and religious catastrophe all rolled up into one, and the last thing they needed to have been doing was trying to place blame.

So yes, that was part of the hell of it.  But…not all.  No, the other part was the fear in the eyes of the reporters.  These were, after all, the type of people who would’ve been pushing to get to the front of the line to cover a nuclear holocaust, or to take the first temperature readings on the day that hell froze over.  Barely human themselves, it sometimes seemed to Sammi.

And yet, as two weeks turned slowly into the first month, she had seen the color first fade on their cheeks, then drain away entirely.  Naked fear played across their features, and many began to seem distracted, as if they were only coming to work because there was nothing else for them to do.  And who knew?  For some of them, that was probably exactly the case.  Toward the end – of the press conferences, a week and a half ago – some of them had begun to ask if they could stay.  The White House might not be the absolute best place to be, but it was better than others in that it was at least fortified.  By then, the gas was running out for the press helicopters, and many of them were having to brave the streets to come on foot.  These had not really been press conferences, of course; by that point they were just gatherings for refugees, people somewhere in the valley between name tag and toe tag, a ragged band brandishing digital recorders which no longer had anything to dock with, and staring into the eternally-dark eyes of their i-Phones.

 

*    *    *

 

She set her coffee down on the table, and her fingers brushed the butt of the Walther.  One of the zombies was getting too close.  They were unable to climb stairs, but this guy had made his way over a pile of bodies, and was now stumbling around just a little north of Sammi’s comfort zone.  She brought the pistol most of the way out of its holster – the fingers of her left hand began curling to fit the shape of the door lock – and then she dropped it back.  No sense waking everybody.  Instead, she studied the zombie as it shuffled around, still a safe thirty or so steps below her.

It was the corpse of a very large black man.  Sammi had no doubt that it must have taken at least five or six zombies to have been able to do as much damage as had been done.  The left arm -which hung uselessly at its side – had been chewed down to the bone in most places, although here and there she could see little chunks of meat that had been missed, small hills of sun-browned musculature casting their own unimportant shadows on the blood-bathed expanses of radius and ulna.  The same could be said of the face, which on the same side as the arm was mostly gone.  One whisker from that side of the face curled in a kinky arc, and the tip of it came to rest against the protruding sharp edge of a fractured cheekbone – she realized that she could tell when it was moaning because a ragged chunk of his cheek would jiggle back and forth with the breath of it.

And what terrible breath it must have.  What terrible breath they all must have.  For some reason Sammi could not identify (unless it might be another step on that increasingly short road to insanity), she found this concept to be very funny.  Monsters with bad breath?  Try Colgate!  Try Altoids!  Try Lis-teh-fucking-rine!

She laughed a little, and her own breath reached forward and fogged up a little section of the window.  She realized that she had damn near been pressing her nose to it, watching this guy.  On a whim, she decided to name him.

“Fred?  Do you look like a Fred?” she whispered at the corpse.  It did not hear her, and may not have seen her at all.  Although, why else would it be trying to get up here?  “No, not Fred.  Fred’s a white guy’s name…unless you count Frederick Douglass.  Or that other guy, what was his name?  Frederick the Entertainer?  No, that’s not right…”  She paused ponderously.  Finally, she looked back up, grinning now.

“Fine, fine.  Fred it is.  How ya doin’, Freddie boy?”

The monster made no reply, not even a moan.  At that moment, its gaze wasn’t even fixed precisely in her direction.  It was looking off a little to its right, although she thought that “looking” wasn’t really the word for it.  She didn’t think they did much “looking”.  It was more like…well, just pointing their eyes, in one way or another.  She thought that “looking” implied a little more intelligence than these bastards deserved credit for.  “Looking” was something you did when you had a reason to “look”, right?

But maybe that was just more nonsense.  Maybe it was more madness.  Pretty soon, they’d be hauling her off to the funny farm.  Except, the funny farm didn’t exist any more, did it?

Why of course it does, dear.  Just take a look at the world all around you.  It’s nothing but one big happy funny farm out there, you crazy bitch!

 

*    *    *

 

The reporters hadn’t been the only ones, either.  Refugees from all over D.C. had come off and on, desperately seeking shelter from the onslaught of the undead.  It had been hard to turn them away, and Sammi was grateful that she hadn’t always been the one to have to do it.  The Prez had done it himself, the first few times, citing known shelter areas in the city in which people were more likely to be safe.  These shelter areas – “military zones” was the technical term – had likely been overrun within the first week or so of the outbreak.  That had been before all the data had come forth on preventative measures, and thousands of the infected had slipped past dozens of checkpoints throughout the city.  Could the Prez be blamed for that?  No, probably not.  The information he got on the situation was almost as sketchy as what the rest of them got.  He probably really did think he was sending them to a safer place, at least at first.  Later…well, who was she to hazard a guess?  Besides, all that did was go back to the blame game, and that wasn’t going to help anyone now.

After POTUS and the Veep had gone, it had been up to her.  She was the highest ranking officer in the remaining food chain by then.  And hadn’t she believed that she was doing the right thing by sending them away?  Hadn’t it been in these refugees’ best interests to keep moving, and to try to eventually get out of the city?  Surely that was the case.

And yet…

And yet part of her nagged at that.  Because part of her knew that if they let people in, two new elements would be introduced, one of potential and one of fact.  The potential element was the infected, and if the law of averages was worth a shit, that could almost be counted as an eventual fact, couldn’t it?  Sooner or later, they would let the wrong person or persons through the door, and then it would all be for nothing.  Oh, they might catch one or two in time to do something about it, but wasn’t it more likely that they wouldn’t?  That some poor schmuck would expire in the middle of the night, and then come back as one of those things within the walls of the White House?

The other thing was the food supply.  There was enough food to feed a few people for a very long time.  But a lot of people?  How long would it last then?  How long before they all began to starve?  How long before hunger would drive one or all of them to do something crazy, like try to run away from this place, or worse?  For that matter, what if their hunger drove them to sink to the level of their undead foes, dining on the flesh of one another?  It could never, ever come to that, of course, but…

She was ashamed of herself, mostly because she knew that the predominant reason in her mind during these refusals was not at all concern for the refugees’ safety, but concern for her own.  That was what it all boiled down to, and it was driving her mad.

 

*    *    *

 

Fred was definitely looking at her now.  The sliver of cheek on his face flapped back and forth a little, and she almost thought she could pick out his individual moan over the low drone of the rest of them, as if her ears were capable of picking out the sound of one poorly-tuned instrument in a cacophony of poorly-tuned instruments.  Silly, of course.

Fred’s lips seemed to pull back a little, almost as if he were affecting some kind of hungry sneer.  Sammi returned the gesture, but she found it was almost more of a smile than anything else.  And why not?  Fred was sort of cute, in an undead way.  One part of her mind was suddenly appalled to hear the other part give voice to such a disgusting (and crazy) utterance, but she ignored it.  She allowed herself to wonder what Fred had been like in his life.  He was wearing a business suit, but it was too dirty and too tattered for her to be able to tell if it was expensive or not – usually she could tell about these kinds of things with at least a fair amount of accuracy.

So, all right, she couldn’t tell whether he was wearing Armani or Bill Blass, but that was no big deal.  He was wearing a suit, at least, and that was something.  Also, as large a man as he had been, it almost certainly had to have been tailored.  Guys Fred’s size didn’t usually just walk in and out of The Men’s Wearhouse in thirty minutes, loaded for bear.

Fred resumed his attempt at upward mobility, bringing first one foot forward against the step in front of him, then the other, his useless chewed arm swinging like a horrific pendulum by his side, his other arm reaching toward her as if he would love to fondle her nose.  When the second shoe hit the step, Fred overbalanced and tipped forward.  Sammi wasn’t sure if she had actually heard him moaning above the others, but she was almost positive she could hear his face hit the pavement as he self-administered a curb check.

She started backward, giving off a little shriek as she did so.  Her hands rose to the side of her face, her now-jagged fingernails digging into the skin just beneath her temples.  Was Fred all right?  Had he hurt himself?

What in the blue fuck do you care? another voice in her head asked.  You’d better hope he – it – did.  You’d just fucking better!

But the truth was, she didn’t.  And when Fred began to pull himself back up into a standing position, slowly managing some sort of half balance on his one useful arm, she felt a sigh of relief whistle out from her clenched teeth.  She lowered her hands from her face, and placed the left one against the glass of the window, leaning on it for support as she continued to watch.  She half expected Fred to dust himself off, then give her a goofy grin as if to say “well, I did it again.”  But he didn’t do that.  Instead, he rose to his full height, his eyes staring – well, pointing – off into the nothingness again, as if he had completely forgotten that she existed…which he most likely had.  His face was worse now.  The torn cheek now hung much more loosely off the frame of his face.  His lower lip was torn open, and because no blood had come out of it, she was able to see the broken lower teeth behind it.  As she watched, two or three flecks of those teeth went tumbling out of the V shape that his new lip configuration had created, and bounced on the steps below him.  Again, she half-imagined that she could hear each individual clink as they came slowly to rest.

You poor thing! part of her mind said.  The rest shot back: What?!  What the hell did you just say?!

Her palm began to sweat, and her hand slid several inches down the glass, leaving behind it five damp fingerprint streaks.  She had been leaning heavily on this hand, and now it was her turn to regain balance.  This she did with much more ease than Fred would have or could have, and once she was back in place, she looked out to find that he had seen her again.  This time, the trembling of that torn jowl was more pronounced; it sent the curly beard-hair away for the briefest of seconds, then allowed it to reunite with the cheekbone again.

Fred started forward toward her once again, and once again he fell.  This time, he managed to land atop the corpse of one of his fellow zombies…

 

*    *    *

 

Zombies.  That’s what you have to keep telling yourself.  That’s not a man out there, it’s a living corpse.  And you, little Missy, would be crazy to think anything else of him…it.

Crazy.

But it didn’t seem crazy.  Was it possible to anthropomorphize what had already once been a human being?  Surely that was prohibited under some sort of homo sapiens double jeopardy law, right?

She laughed, this time more than a little titter, but covered her mouth with her free hand to stifle it.  No sense waking the others up, especially when waking them up might mean exposing them to her…well, her little fit.  If it had to have some kind of label, she supposed that should be it.  She wasn’t crazy, after all; she just occasionally had a crazy idea or two.  Like the idea that Fred out there – that zombie out there – was sort of cute, and that he might actually want just to talk to her.

Yes, that was even what it looked like, now that she thought about it.  He seemed to be extending that one working hand in a gesture of friendship, diplomacy.  Anyone, but particularly a White House Press Secretary, ought to be able to recognize diplomacy on sight.  Perhaps he wanted to meet with her, tell her all about the demands of the zombie population.  She could imagine how such an interview might go.

Sammi: Good afternoon, Fred Zombie.  Welcome to the White House.  Can I get you anything before we begin?

Fred: (distortedly) Well, normally I’d take a forearm, but I’m trying to watch my belly.  It sort of gets distended, you know…

Sammi: I understand.  How about some fingers, then?  Just to take the edge off.

Fred: That would be wonderful.

Sammi: Here you go.  Okay, let’s get down to brass tacks, Mr. Zombie…

Fred: (through a mouthful of finger-meat) Please, call me Fred.

Sammi: Thank you, Fred.  You really know how to lighten a tense situation.

Fred: Well, that’s why I’m here, and not some of the others.  I have a tendency to set people’s minds at ease.

Sammi: Well, you’ve set mine.  So let’s get started.  What would you say the core demands of the zombie population are?

Fred: First of all, we’re discussing among ourselves the distinct possibility that the term “zombie” might not be very politically correct…

Sammi: Oh, my apologies, Fred.  Did you have another title in mind?

Fred: (thinks for a moment) We talked about “the Undead”, also “the Living Dead”.  We don’t think the latter applies, really, since we’re not living, after all.  And, let’s face it, “Undead” conjures up a fairly negative association, wouldn’t you agree?

Sammi: Undoubtedly.

Fred: The jury’s still out, of course, but for now let’s work with one of the suggestions from the group: the Posi-Humans.  You know, kinda like antimatter, the positron?  Guy named Craig thought that one up.  He used to be a physicist or something.

Sammi: That sounds just fine, Fred.  All right, what would you say the core demands of the…the…

Fred: Posi-Humans.

Sammi: …the Posi-Humans are?

Fred: (bringing his working hand up to his chest and drumming the fingers there) Well, you’re really probably not going to like them.  First of all, we demand the right to eat humans.

Sammi: Yeah, that’s a pretty tall order.

Fred: (sighing dismissively) You asked.  Second of all…and this really isn’t so much of a demand as a request…we’d appreciate it if the majority of the stalled traffic throughout the city could be moved to allow passage on foot.  We…can’t drive, you see.

Sammi: Yeah, I know.  Now, how are we going to go about moving the traffic if your people – sorry, Posi-Humans – are eating us while we do it?

Fred: (with a nervous laugh) Point for your side, Miss Milva.  I can’t promise that none of your people will be harmed, but after all, you are the superior species in terms of intellect.  Surely you can figure something out.

Sammi: I’ll see what I can do.  Moving on to…

 

*    *    *

 

…the next step.  Sammi blinked, unsure of what she had just seen.  But when her eyes opened again, it was just as true as before she had closed them.  Fred had made it up to the next step.  It was impossible, of course, but it had happened nonetheless.  It wasn’t much progress, and Fred fell down again once he had attained the next step.  But it was shocking nonetheless.

Was it possible that they were beginning to learn?  Surely not.

And yet there he – no, it, dammit!  It’s not a he, you moron! – was, getting back up on the next step.  Sammi’s stomach lurched, and she felt like she might throw up.  The others needed to know about this.  She wanted to turn around and go wake them up.  She desperately wanted that.  But her feet wouldn’t move from their spot.  She was rooted to the floor, staring helplessly out at Fred.

His name’s not fucking Fred!  Quit calling him – it – that!

And an incredible thought occurred to her at that moment.  She could just unlock the door.  Yes, unlock the door and run out to him, run out to Fred.  After all, it was cruel to make him climb the rest of those steps alone!  The man had only one working arm.  How much of a bitch could she possibly be?

“Sammi?” a voice said from behind her.  Sammi had had no formal training in the use of firearms, yet she whirled and produced the Walther from its holster with a speed and ferocity that might have made Clint Eastwood shit his pants.

But it was only Miguel, standing there, pale as a sheet as he stared down the barrel of the Walther.  She lowered it slowly, then uttered a high, tittery laugh.

“They can climb stairs,” she said.  Miguel only stood there.  His eyebrows raised, but the eyes themselves did not leave the lowering gun.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“I mean I saw Fred climb up a fucking stair, you dumb shit!” she yelled, but it only came out as a hoarse croak.

“Who’s…”

“Not Fred!” she said, shaking her head as if to clear it.  “What I mean is, I saw one of the zombies climb a step.”

“Sammi, I don’t think…”

“I fucking saw it, Miguel!  I was watching, and he just…that is, it just took a step up.”  Her eyes blazed, and the hand that held the gun began to move back and forth in a seemingly aimless arc.  Miguel regarded it, a little fearfully.

“All right,” he said, and the reasonable tone in his voice told her that he thought she was cracking up.  “So one of them managed to take a step.  I’m sure it was a coincidence.  These things can happen, you know.”

“Don’t you patronize me, Miguel!” she said, and to her own horror, she raised the gun at him.  His eyebrows shot back up again, and he raised his hands.

“Sammi, what are you…?”

But that was when she shot him.

 

*    *    *

 

Night lay across the D.C. sky like a blanket full of tiny holes; the moon and stars shone down vaguely through it, penetrating the underlying sheet of thin, wispy clouds and illuminating the dead – the Posi-Humans – beneath that.  The moans were louder now, but Sammi guessed that that was because the door was open.

The cold night breeze blew in through it, chilling her and driving her arms up to and around her knees.  She drew them up to her breast, hugging herself tightly as she began to rock back and forth a little.  The feel of the Walther against her thigh was a good one.  It beat the shit out of the feeling on her face, the one the breeze produced when it blew across the tacky surfaces of the blood flecks.  Those had come from Sarah, of course, who had been much closer than Miguel when…

Fred was still down there.  She couldn’t see him now from where she was sitting, but she knew that he was still down there.  And who knew, he might have made another step or two.  She doubted it; she now imagined that Miguel had probably been right about that.  But it was possible.  She rocked back and forth, alternately fighting and embracing the panic, and all the things it brought with it.

Had she been so wrong?  After all, Miguel and Sarah had shot just as many people as she had.  Not zombies, but people.  That last day, when the remaining reporters had stormed the White House, demanding refuge?  What had happened then?  Had she been the only one to open fire on them?  Had she even been the first?

“Fucking right I wasn’t!” she breathed into her knees.  She felt a new wetness on her face, and for a horrible moment she thought it was more of Sarah’s blood, perhaps some that she had missed before.  But of course it wasn’t.  The tears began to stream down, slowly at first, then building up to a torrential flood.  She began to sob wildly, rocking harder and harder until her back was slamming up against the wall she sat near.  Her heels left the floor, banged down on it, left it, banged down again.  The fingers at the ends of her hands began to shake violently, and the Walther clattered to the floor with a clank which was almost noisy enough to block out the loud noise of her sobs and the louder noise of the moans.

Those moans!  Those insufferable, God-forsaken moans!  A thronging chorus of the damned, come to see another soul wing its way downward through the cracks and fissures of the Earth, and into the eternal blissless existence saved only for those burning in the deep fires of hell.

This was Trenton Milva’s little girl Samantha, who had always wanted to grow up to be a singer – at least until her junior year of high school.  The girl who, at seven, had once plucked a bouquet of daisies, and had proceeded to place one on top of each of the gravestones in the Morton Hills Cemetery, which had sat in timbery shadows across the street from the small house where she had lived and where she would continue to live until her nineteenth year.  The girl who had lost her virginity in a broom closet, of all places, and to Gabe Hirsch, of all people.  The girl who had decided late in her high school career that singing was fine, but it wasn’t going to get her where she really wanted to go.  The girl who had, instead of applying at Julliard or the Royal Academy of Music, applied at Harvard and Yale, and who had gotten Yale.  This was the girl who was now a woman, and who had spent the last decade clawing and biting her way toward the top.  And hey, White House Press Secretary was pretty fucking close to the top, wasn’t it?

And now she was, be it ever so humble, at least at the top of the stairs.

But not for long, she thought.

She got up slowly.  The tears were still streaming down her face, and two or three of them fell from her cheek, plopping on the marble floor and shooting up a tiny cascade of saline in all directions.  She grabbed the Walther, not even noticing them.  She tried to walk over to the open door, and found herself hobbling a little instead.  She was thirty-seven, but even at such a tender age, her body didn’t take kindly to her sitting in one position for too long.

Fred was still there, but he hadn’t made it up another step.

“Fucking fluke,” she said idly.  Her voice shook from having sobbed, but her mouth turned up into a horrible, mean grin.  She raised the Walther and pointed it at Fred’s head.  Then, thinking better of it, she lowered it a little, and blew off most of Fred’s useful arm.  Fred did not cry out, but he did fall backward.  He went tumbling down, head over heels, unable to use either arm now to slow his fall (not that he would have).  When he reached the bottom of the stairs, he landed among some of his standing brethren, his legs splayed outward and both of his arms beneath him.  He began to move immediately, and Sammi knew that eventually he would get back up, eager to be back at the task of making it up the stairs to get at her.

“I won’t make you wait, Fred darling,” she said, and laughed into the bitter night air.  She raised the still-hot muzzle of the Walther to her temple, and fired the one shot allowed to a human in such instances.

Moments later, her body did indeed land very near to Fred’s.

 

END.

by J. M. Jennings