Julie draws her shotgun from its plaid holster. There’s a door at the top of the stairs, and I’m about to make another plea for caution but she doesn’t even pause. She kicks the push bar, the door flies open, and she rushes through in a tactical crouch, her gun braced in low ready position.
I lumber in behind her, unarmed, untrained, unprepared. But no high school combat class would have prepared me for this.
We are in what appears to be the library of a university. A soaring ceiling, stained glass windows, tables and shelves of dark oak. It was majestic once, a profound place for profound pursuits, but its grandeur has been destroyed—not by age and decay but by utilitarianism. Fluorescent lights in aluminum cases hang from the ceiling to obviate the bronze lamps on the walls. Rich wooden tables have been supplemented by rows of folding metal ones, their white Formica tops mocking the antiquity around them. And of course the stained glass windows are protected by sheets of plastic.
But perhaps I’m burying the lead. Perhaps I’m avoiding the room’s more salient features because I’m weary of processing such images. Perhaps a detour into decor is a needed respite from the hair-tearing insanity of this world.
Because the library is full of zombies. At least two hundred of them, naked, their necks locked in rubber collars, steel cables fastened to walls, shelves, anything solid enough to hold them as they writhe and lunge, although many are eerily calm. The tables are littered with an incongruous assortment of equipment: glittering steel implements of medicine or torture sit alongside portable stereos, makeup kits, televisions, toys, and jars of fresh human fingers.
The dangling fluorescents are turned off; the only light comes through the stained glass, a dismal blue glow that leaves the huge chamber thick with shadows. Julie begins a perimeter check and I follow her. The Dead are everywhere. Not just the crowd in the reading area but lone specimens tucked away in the aisles like backups. My estimate climbs toward three hundred, diverse in age, race, and sex, but with one trait in common: freshness. Most are wholly unspoiled, with only the leaden eyes and pitiful groans to give away their status. A few have injuries—bullet holes, bites, a missing limb or two—but their flesh is always pale and smooth, like they died yesterday.
Julie prowls along the walls, methodically scanning the aisles. Her face has slipped into yet another mask that’s unfamiliar to me: the grim efficiency of a soldier. I think of the night we sat on the roof of our new suburban home and traded stories from our youths. All I had to offer were vague vignettes from my early corpsehood, lacking context or continuity—trying to eat a deer, walking with a boy, watching a girl sing a song—but her memories were colorful and crisp, like she’d kept them all these years in a climate-controlled vault. Her life in Brooklyn, watching the waters rise, the tanks in the street, but also stickball games and schoolyard crushes and some lingering aromas of happiness. Wine parties on the apartment’s tarry rooftop. Her mother laughing in a white dress, throwing empty bottles at the abandoned building next door and screaming with delight when she hit a window. Lawrence and Ella making out on the fire escape. Even her father cracking a smile, chugging a priceless vintage and belting a few bars from one of his band’s songs . . .
Her shotgun moves with her body like an extra limb, tracing the contours of the room with mechanical precision. She steps around the corner of the last aisle and she stops. Her gun falls to the floor.
. . . her old bedroom, its chaos and color pulsing against the emptiness of her father’s gray fortress. The sky-blue ceiling, the clothes-covered floor, the walls like the wings of a museum—red for relics of old-world passions, movie tickets and concert flyers, magazines and poems, white for her private collection of looted masterpieces with a few sheepish contributions of her own, yellow for good dreams yet to be realized, a wall that was and still is unadorned—and the black wall. A wall whose purpose I never learned, because I was afraid to ask. Because it held only one decoration. A photo of a woman who looked a lot like Julie, adrift in that dark expanse.
Julie falls to the floor as gracelessly as her gun, arms hanging at her sides, eyes wide and already filling with tears. She doesn’t flinch as long fingernails swipe inches from her face. She kneels in full surrender while the woman from the photo strains against her collar, hissing and groaning and reaching for her daughter’s throat.
IT OCCURS TO ME that Julie might want to die. The scars on her wrists prove she has danced with the desire, but I’ve always believed it was a thing of her youth, a defanged fossil buried beneath miles of time.
Will this unearth it?