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.