Who are these creatures? What do they want? Why aren’t they afraid? Do they know the turmoil inside of him? The thousand opposite urges throttling each other in his head? They visit him every few days, tiptoeing into his living room and attempting conversation as he sits in the dark, staring at their reflections in his television screen, trying to understand why he isn’t eating them.
He remembers a day when something changed. He felt a shift in the breeze and an interruption in gravity, a cool, clean stream flowing into his dust-crusted soul in the form of a simple question: Why are you here? That was the day he stood up from the warm corpse he was chewing and walked out of the airport. He found this house. He sat in this chair. He continues to sit in this chair, thinking but not quite doing. Wanting but not quite taking. Waiting and watching television.
He glances away from the endlessly looping feed of disjointed imagery—a tense football game cuts to a woman in a bikini emerging from a pool, then a sunset and a soothing voice reciting an inspirational quote, then a pulled-pork sandwich—and looks through his open front door as his neighbors drive past in their sputtering junk heap of a car. His eyes don’t move when the car is gone. They rest lazily on the grass of his lawn, which is wild and gone to seed, yellowing in the summer sun.
Other eyes watch the Mercedes as it works its way through the neighborhood and out onto the open highway. B has many neighbors. New ones arrive every day, some from the airport, others from elsewhere, stumbling into town and squinting at streets and houses with traces of recognition, faint remembrances of something lost.
Death’s army is large and strong and deals harshly with deserters, but there are rumblings. Uncertain corpses sit in their houses and stand in the streets, thinking, watching, waiting. And they hear a noise in the distance. A low, pulsating drone.
In the blue-brown haze of the eastern sky, three black shapes are growing larger.
I
I AM CONCENTRATING FIERCELY on the art of driving—the contour and condition of the road, the speed and inertia of the car, the intricate interplay of throttle and clutch—so Julie hears them first.
“What is that?” she says, glancing around.
“What?”
“That noise.”
It takes me a few seconds to hear it. A distant hum, three slightly offset pitches forming a dissonant chord. For a moment I think I recognize this sound, and fear stiffens my spine.
Then Julie twists around in her seat and says, “Helicopters?”
I check the rearview mirror. Three black shapes approaching from the east.
“Who is it?” I wonder aloud.
“Nobody we know.”
“Goldman Dome?”
“Working aircraft are practically mythical these days. If Goldman had helicopters, they would’ve told us.”
The choppers roar over our heads and into the city. I am still new to Julie’s world and not well-informed on the current political landscape, but I know the Dead are not the only threat, and unexpected visitors are rarely a welcome sight.
Julie pulls out her walkie and dials in Nora’s channel. “Nora, it’s Julie. Come in?”
Instead of traditional radio static, soft and organic, the walkie emits a distorted shriek. I don’t need to ask Julie for a refresher to recall this piece of history: the BABL signal. The old government’s last desperate attempt to preserve the nation’s unity by smothering every argument. I can just barely hear Nora through the jammer’s wall of noise, the ghost of a bygone era refusing to release its grip.
“—you hear me?”
“Barely,” Julie says, and I wince as she raises the volume. “Did you see those choppers?”
“I’m at work but I—eard them.”
“What’s going on?”
“No idea. Rosso—alled a meet—ill you—there?”
“We’re on our way.”
“I’m at—ork, come—me before—eeting—want to show—omething—”
The sound of nails on a chalkboard enters the mix, and Julie cringes away from the walkie. “Nora, the jamming’s too bad, I think there’s a surge.”
“—amn—ucking surges—”
“I’ll see you soon. Cabernet out.”
She drops the walkie and watches the helicopters descend into the streets around the dome. “Maybe Goldman’s scouts salvaged them from an old base?” she offers feebly.
We plunge into the city, the corpse of a forgotten metropolis that most people call Post and a few thousand call home. The choppers disappear behind crumbling high-rises.
? ? ?
The cleanup crew has done a good job erasing the mess my old friends made of the city. All the bones and bodies have been cleared, the craters have been filled, and the walls of Corridor 1 are almost finished, leaving a clear and relatively safe highway to the stadium. But far more significant is the construction on Corridor 2, which has resumed from both ends after years of stagnation. The two largest enclaves in Cascadia are reaching across the miles that separate them. In practice, the merger is about nothing more meaningful than the safe exchange of resources, but I allow myself to imagine neurons in the brain of humanity attempting to forge a synapse.