Three Zombie Novels Page 2

  “Dekalb! You ask them about my connection! Damn you if you don’t!”

  I nodded, a sort of farewell, a sort of assent. I followed the girl soldier out of the cell and into the sun-colored courtyard beyond. The smell of burning bodies was thick but better than the smell of the latrine bucket in the cell. Sarah pushed her face against my chest and I held her close. I didn’t know what was going to happen next. It could be our turn to get some food, the first we’d had in two days. The girl soldier might be leading me to a torture chamber or a refugee center with hot showers and clean bedding and some kind of promise for the future. This could be a summons to an execution.

  If Geneva was gone, so was the Geneva Convention.

  “Come!” the soldier said.

  I went.

  4

  Six weeks earlier, continued:

  A Chinese-built helicopter stirred up the dust in the courtyard with its lazily turning rotor. Whoever had just arrived must be important—I hadn’t seen an aircraft of any kind in weeks. In the shade of the barracks building a group of huddled women in khimars and modest dresses held their hands over the mortars where they’d been grinding grain.

  The girl soldier lead me past a pair of “technicals”—commercial pickup trucks with heavy machine guns mounted in their beds. A particularly Somali brand of nastiness. Normally technicals were crewed by mercenaries but these had been hastily emblazoned with Mama Halima’s colors: light blue and yellow like an Easter egg. The vehicles belonged to the Free Women’s Republic now. Girl soldiers loitered around the trucks, their rifles slung loosely in their arms, chewing distractedly on qat and waiting for the order to shoot somebody.

  Past the technicals we walked around a corpsefire. It was a lot bigger than it had been when Sarah and I were first brought to the compound. The soldiers had wrapped the bodies in white sheets and then packed them with camel dung as an accelerant. Gasoline was too valuable to waste. The fumes coming off the fire were terrible and I could feel Sarah clench against my chest but our guide didn’t even flinch.

  I tried to summon up my identity, tried to draw some strength from my professional outrage. Jesus. Child soldiers. Kids as young as ten—babies—dragged out of school and given guns, given drugs to keep them happy and made to fight in wars they couldn’t begin to understand. I’d worked so hard to outlaw that obscenity and now I depended on them for my daughter’s safety.

  We entered a low brick building that had taken a bad artillery hit and never been repaired. The dust billowed in the sunlight streaming through the collapsed roof. At the far end of a dark hallway we came to a kind of command post. Weapons lay in carefully sorted piles on the floor while a heap of cell phones and transistor radios littered a wooden table where a woman in military fatigues sat, staring listlessly at a piece of paper. She was perhaps twenty-five, a little younger than me, and she wore no covering on her head at all. In the Islamic world that was a message I was expected to get immediately. She didn’t look up as she spoke to me. “You’re Dekalb. With the United Nations,” she said, reading off a list. “And daughter.” She gestured and our guide went and sat down beside her.

  I didn’t bother assenting. “You have foreign nationals in that cell who are being treated in an inhumane fashion. I have a list of demands.”

  “I’m not interested,” she began. I cut her off.

  “We need food, first of all. Clean food. Better sanitation. There’s more.”

  She fixed me with a glance at my midsection that I felt like a stabbing knife. This was not a woman to be trifled with.

  “If it’s still possible we need to be afforded communication with our various consulates. We need—”

  “Your daughter is black.” She hadn’t been looking at me at all. She’d been looking at Sarah. My mouth filled with a bitter taste. “But you’re white. Her mother?”

  I breathed hard through my nose for a minute. “Kenyan. Dead.” She looked me in the eyes then and it just came out. “We found her, I mean, I found her rooting in our garbage one night, she’d had a fever but we thought she would make it, I brought her inside but I didn’t let her out of my sight, I couldn’t—”

  “You knew she was one of the dead.”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you dispose of her properly?”

  My whole body twitched at the thought. “We—I locked her in the bathroom. We left, then. The servants had already gone, the block was half-deserted. The police were nowhere to be found. Even the army couldn’t hold out much longer.”

  “They didn’t. Nairobi was overrun two days after you left, according to my intelligence.” The woman sighed, a horribly human sound. I could understand this woman as a deadly bureaucrat. I could understand her as a soldier. I couldn’t handle it if she expressed any sympathy. I begged her silently not to pity me.

  Lucky me.

  “We can’t feed you and this installation isn’t defensible so we can’t let you stay here, either,” she said. “And I don’t have time to argue about your list of demands. The unit is decamping tonight as part of a tactical withdrawal. If you want to come with us you have five minutes to justify your keep. You’re with the UN. A relief worker? We need food and medical supplies, more than anything.”

  “No. I was a weapons inspector. What about Sarah?”

  “Your daughter? We’ll take her. Mama Halima loves all the orphan girls of Africa.” It sounded like a political slogan. The fact that Sarah wasn’t an orphan didn’t need to be clarified—if I failed now she would be. It was at that moment I realized what being one of the living meant. It meant doing whatever it took not to be one of the dead.

  “There’s a cache of weapons—small arms, mostly, some light anti-tank weapons—just over the border—I can take you there, show you where to dig.” We’d lacked the money and equipment to destroy the cache when we found it. We’d put the guns in a sealed bunker undergound in hopes of destroying them one day. Stupid us.

  “Weapons,” she said. She glanced at the pile of rifles on the floor by my feet. “Weapons we have. We are in no danger of running short on ammunition.”

  I clutched Sarah hard enough to wake her, then. She wiped her nose on my shirt and looked up at me but she kept quiet. Good kid.

  The officer met my gaze. “Your daughter will be protected. Fed, educated.”

  “In a madrassa?” She nodded. As far as I knew that was the current limit of the Somali educational system. Daily recitation of the Koran and endless prayers. At least she would learn to read. There was something impacted in my heart just then, something so tight I couldn’t relax it ever. The knowledge that this was the best Sarah could hope for, that any protests I made, any suggestion that maybe this wasn’t enough was unrealistic and counter-productive.

  In a couple years when she was old enough to hold a gun my daughter was going to become a child soldier and that was the best I could give her.

  “The prisoners,” I said, done with that train of thought. I had to be hard now. “You have to leave us some weapons when you go. Give us a fighting chance.”

  “Yes. But I’m not done with you.” She glanced at her sheet of paper again. “You worked for the United Nations. You were part of the international relief community.”

  “I guess,” I said.

  “Perhaps you can help me find something. Something we need most desperately.” She kept talking then but for a while I couldn’t hear anything, I was too busy imagining my own death. When I realized she wasn’t going to kill me I snapped back to attention. “It’s Mama Halima, you see.” She put down her paper and looked at me, really looked at me. Not like I was an unpleasant task she had to deal with but like I was a human being. “She has succumbed to a condition all too prevalent in Africa. She has become dependent on certain chemicals. Chemicals we are dangerously short of.”

  Drugs. The local Warlord had a habit and she needed a mule to go pick up her supply of dope. Somebody desperate enough to go and pick up her fix for her. I would do it, of course. No question.
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  “What kind of ‘chemicals’ are we talking about? Heroin? Cocaine?”

  She pursed her lips like she was wondering whether she’d made a mistake in picking me for this mission. “No. More like AZT.”

  5

  Five weeks earlier:

  Mama Halima had AIDS—a condition far too prevalent in Africa, indeed. It was up to me to find the drugs she needed, the combination of pills that could keep her viral load down and keep her from showing weakness. It meant a new life for Sarah, and maybe even for me. They asked me to identify hospitals and supply dumps, the headquarters of international medical aid organizations and clinics set up by the World Health Organization. I did what I could, of course. I drew crosses on maps and then they took me where I had indicated and kept me alive while I looted.

  In Egypt, in the darkness rifles cracked, one by one. Out past the wire bodies spun and fell. I didn’t have to get close enough to see their faces. I was glad for that.

  In the stiff breeze coming off the desert the tents shook on their aluminum poles and ripples passed over them. On top of each tent a red cross had been painted so it would be visible from the air. Inside, by the light of kerosene lamps, girls no older than Sarah overturned crate after crate, pouring their contents out onto the packed earth floor. Plastic bags full of antibiotics, painkillers in foil pouches, insulin in pre-loaded hypodermics. I sorted through the treasures one by one, reading the inscriptions printed in bold-face type on each label. The Red Cross had deserted this place and they’d left a treasure trove behind. How many people out there in the African night were dying in that very second for lack of a few tablets of erythromycin?

  An eighteen year old girl in a military uniform stepped through the flap of the tent and studied my face. I crouched among the spilled drugs and shook my head. “Not yet,” I told her.

  Four weeks earlier:

  Two days outside of Dar Es Salaam we found a field hospital set up by Medecins Sans Frontieres in the remains of a fortified camp. The relief station sat underneath an overgrown hill. Trees screened the narrow bunker-style entrance. Machine gun nests stood guard, now abandoned to the rain. Inside the station, underneath the earth, we shone flashlights into every corner, lit up every surgery, every examination room. In the spooky dimness my light kept catching on things, shadows in the shape of human bodies, glints, reflections of my own face in bedpans, in scrub sinks.

  There was nothing there. Not a pill, not a pinch of medicinal powders. Professionals had taken the place apart, stripped it down and left nothing behind but fear and shadows. We emerged back into the sunlight and suddenly the girl soldiers around me had their weapons out. Something was wrong—they felt it.

  I couldn’t sense anything at all. Then I could—a noise, a crack of twigs broken under the weight of a human foot. A moment later I caught the smell.

  I was beginning to learn a little Somali. I knew what the commander of the girls called for them to protect me at all costs. I wasn’t too flattered. It had been pointed out to me more than once that I was the only one who knew where the drugs were.

  We headed back down to the water in a loose formation with me at its center. From time to time somebody discharged a weapon. I couldn’t see anything through the trees. We made it.

  Three weeks earlier:

  “How many millions of people in Africa suffer from AIDS?” I demanded. “How many of them had the same idea we did?”

  “For your sake, Dekalb, I should hope not all.” Ifiyah, the commander of the teenage soldiers, made a complex gesture. Behind her the troops lined up. Behind us the Oxfam headquarters at Maputo stood dark and deserted. Like every other fucking building in Africa. We had seen some survivors in Kenya, six days earlier. There were none in Mozambique, as far as we could tell. We’d come down by helicopter and as we flew over the jungle we had seen nothing moving, nothing at all.

  The dead were out there. They were probably closer than I would like. Our plan—my plan—had been to hit the Oxfam center hard, and fast, and get out before any undead bastard could smell us and wander over to get a snack. One look inside the facilities at Maputo, however, had convinced us all we were wasting our time. The place had been gutted by fire. Nothing remained of the supplies inside but cold ash and the occasional warm ember.

  “There are no AIDS drugs left,” I shouted at Ifiyah’s back as she stepped away from me. Her rifle swayed on her shoulder but she didn’t turn to face me. “Not here. Not now.” I was too tired to have this fight. I’d been sleeping maybe three hours a night. Not from lack of opportunity. From pure terror.

  “So what is it then that you might suggest?” she asked me. Her voice dangerously soft.

  “I don’t know. I don’t know any place else to look, not in Africa.” Even the Oxfam site had been a stretch. Oxfam was a development organization—they had never stockpiled drugs. “There’s only one place that I know that has what you’re looking for.”

  “A place you are sure of? Why are you not saying it sooner?” She did turn to look at me then.

  “Because it’s about half a world away,” I told her. It was a sick joke, I knew. It was cold comfort I had to offer, the surety that what she wanted existed, even if it was in a place impossible to reach.

  I never thought she would take me up on it. “The UN building,” I told her.

  “Which UN building now? We have seen so many of these, you and I, in one fortnight.” She squinted at me like she knew I was joking but she didn’t get it.

  “No, no, the UN Headquarters building. The Secretariat Building, in New York, in America. There’s a whole medical suite on the fifth floor. I used to go there every year for a flu shot. It’s like a whole miniature hospital in there. They have drugs for every condition you could possibly name, anything a delegate might contract. There’s a whole chronic care ward. HIV medication like you wouldn’t believe.”

  She showed me her teeth and looked confused, but only for a second. “Very well,” she said.

  “Come on, I was just kidding,” I told her an hour later when we were loaded back into the helicopters and headed back for Mogadishu. “We can’t go to New York City for these drugs. That’s crazy.”

  “I will gladly do some crazy thing, to save her,” Ifiyah told me. Her eyes were set, calm. “I will go around the world, yes. And I will touch the face of death, yes.”

  “But think for a second! You can’t just fly to New York anymore. There’s no safe way to land a plane over there.”

  “Then we must take boats.”

  I shook my head. “Even then, even then—how many dead people are there in Manhattan right now?”

  “We can fight them,” she told me. Just like that.

  “You’ve fought dozens of them before. Maybe a hundred at one time. There will be ten million of them in New York.” I was hoping that would scare her. It scared me plenty. She just shrugged.

  “Have you ever been hearing of what infibulation is?” she asked me. “Yes? It is a common practice in Somalia. Or it was.”

  I shook my head, not wanting to get distracted. I knew where this was headed and I couldn’t let the conversation derail. “I know what it is, it’s a kind of female circumcision—”

  Ifiyah interrupted me. “Circumcision of the clitoris is but one first part. Then the men take the vagina and they sew it shut. They leave one small hole for urine and menses to pass. When the girl is married some stitches are torn out, so she can be fucked as the husband pleases. Many girls gain infections from this lovely process. We have many more women die in their childbirth here than most places. Many more who die upon receiving their first period.”

  “That’s horrible. I’ve spent my life working against barbarities like that,” I assured her, trying to get some ground back under my feet.

  She didn’t want to hear it. “Mama Halima kills any man who tries to do this. She made it illegal. It was too late for me, but not for my kumayo sisters.” She gestured broadly at the girls strapped into the crewseats. “They did not
get your barbarity. So if you are asking me, will I do the mad thing, and go to America to get these pills to save Mama Halima, I think you now have an answer.”

  What could I do after that but hang my head in shame?

  6

  Now:

  Gary sat on the floor of his kitchenette, surrounded by wrappers and boxes—all of them empty. He licked the inside of a wrapper that used to hold a granola bar, dug out the tiny crumbs with his tongue. All gone.

  He was hungrier than ever.

  He could feel his stomach distend. He knew he was full, fuller than he’d ever been in life. It didn’t seem to matter. Being among the dead meant always being hungry, obviously. It meant this gnawing inside of you that you could never quench. It explained so much. He had wondered—in his old life—why they had attacked people, even people they knew, people they loved. Maybe they had tried to stop themselves. The hunger was just too great. The need to eat, to consume, was awesome and frightening. Was this what he had consigned himself to?

  Even as he considered this he was rising to his feet, his hands reaching for the cupboards. His fingers were clumsy now. That worried him. Had he damaged his nervous system too much? His fingers obeyed him enough to get the door open. The cupboards were almost empty and he felt a gulf open inside him, a desperate dark place that needed to be filled. Food. He needed food.

  He’d thought he was done with the things of life. That had been the point. The age of humanity was over and the time of Homo mortis had come. The hospital had been in chaos, dying patients rising to grab at the healthy, policemen discharging their weapons in the halls, the power fluctuating wildly. He had walked out the emergency room doors with a laundry cart full of expensive equipment and nobody had even tried to stop him.

  He found a box of rigatoni, took it down from the shelf. The gas stove didn’t work. How was he going to cook it? His thumbnail dug into the carton’s flap anyway. Wishful thinking.

  There had been no other option. You either joined them or you fed them—and they didn’t stop coming, you could run and hide but they were everywhere. There were more of them every day and less places to turn to, fewer sections of the city that the National Guard could claim were safely quarantined. Even after they initiated proper disposal protocol for the dead. The Mayor had given up, they said. Certainly he had left the public eye. The only thing on television was a public service announcement from the CDC about the proper way to trepan your loved ones. Fires burning everywhere outside the police lines. Smoke and screaming. Like September 11th but in every neighborhood of the city at once.