I can tell by the way they stagger that the Dead in this arena are starving. They must know where they are and what’s going to happen to them, but they are far beyond what little self-control they ever had. They lunge for the boy and he aims his shotgun.
The outside world had already sunk under a sea of blood, and now those waves were lapping over our last stronghold –we had to shore up the walls. We realised that the closest we’d ever get to objective truth was the belief of the majority, so we elected the majority and ignored the other voices. We appointed generals and contractors, police and engineers; we discarded every inessential ornament. We smelted our ideals under great heat and pressure until the soft parts burned away, and what emerged was a tempered frame rigid enough to endure the world we’d created.
‘Wrong!’ the instructor shouts at the boy in the cage as the boy fires into the advancing Dead, blowing holes in their chests and blasting off fingers and feet. ‘Get the head! Forget the rest is even there!’ The boy fires two more rounds that miss entirely, thudding into the heavy plywood ceiling. The quickest of the three zombies seizes his arms and wrenches the gun out of his hands, struggles with the pulse-checking safety trigger for a moment, then throws the gun aside and tackles the boy into the fence, biting wildly against the helmet’s faceguard. The instructor storms into the cage and jabs his pistol into the zombie’s head, fires a round and holsters the gun. ‘Remember,’ he announces to the whole room, ‘the recoil on an automatic shotgun will drive the barrel upwards, especially on these old Mossbergs, so aim low or you’ll be shooting blue sky.’ He scoops up the weapon and shoves it into the boy’s trembling hands. ‘Continue.’
The boy hesitates, then raises the barrel and fires twice. Bits of gore slap against his face-guard, spattering it black. He rips the helmet off and stares at the corpses at his feet, breathing hard and struggling not to cry.
‘Good,’ the instructor says. ‘Beautiful.
We knew it was all wrong. We knew we were diminishing ourselves in ways we couldn’t even name, and we wept sometimes at memories of better days, but we no longer saw a choice. We were doing our best to survive. The equations at the roots of our problems were complex, and we were far too exhausted to solve them.
A snuffling noise at my feet finally tears me away from the scene in the window. I look down to see a German shepherd puppy studying my leg with flaring wet nostrils. It looks up at me. I look down at it. It pants happily for a moment, then starts eating my calf.
‘Trina, no!’
A little boy rushes up and grabs the dog’s collar, pulls her off me and drags her back towards the open doorway of a house. ‘Bad dog.’
Trina twists her head around to gaze at me longingly.
‘Sorry!’ the boy calls from across the street.
I give him an easy wave, no problem.
A young girl emerges from the doorway and stands next to him, sticking out her belly and watching me with big dark eyes. Her hair is black, the boy’s is curly blond. They are both around six.
‘Don’t tell our mom?’ she asks.
I shake my head, swallowing back a sudden reflux of emotions. The sound of these kids’ voices, their perfect childish diction . . .
‘Do you . . . know Julie?’ I ask them.
‘Julie Cabernet?’ the boy says.
‘Julie Gri . . . gio.’
‘We like Julie Cabernet a lot. She reads to us every Wednesday.’
‘Stories!’ the girl adds.
I don’t recognise this name, but some scrap of memory perks at the sound of it. ‘Do you know . . . where she lives?’
‘Daisy Street,’ the boy says.
‘No, Flower Street! It’s a flower!’
‘A daisy is a flower.’
‘Oh.’
‘She lives on a corner. It’s Daisy Street and Devil Avenue.’
‘Cow Avenue!’
‘It’s not a cow, it’s the Devil. Cows and the Devil both have horns.’
‘Oh.’
‘Thanks,’ I tell the kids and turn to leave.
‘Are you a zombie?’ the girl asks in a shy squeak.
I freeze. She waits for my answer, twisting left and right on her heels. I relax, smile at the girl and shrug. ‘Julie . . . doesn’t think so.’
An angry voice from a fifth-floor window yells something about curfew and shutting the door and not talking to strangers, so I wave to the kids and hurry off towards Daisy and Devil. The sun is down and the sky is rust. A distant loudspeaker blares out a sequence of numbers, and most of the windows around me go dark. I loosen my tie and start to run.
The intensity of Julie’s scent doubles with each block. As the first few stars appear in the Stadium’s oval sky, I turn a corner and halt below a solitary edifice of white aluminium siding. Most of the buildings seem to be multi-family apartment complexes, but this one is smaller, narrower, and separated from its tightly packed neighbours by an awkward distance. Four storeys tall but barely two rooms wide, it looks like a cross between a town house and a prison watchtower. The windows are all dark except for a third-floor balcony jutting out from the side of the house. The balcony seems incongruously romantic on this austere structure, until I notice the swivel-mounted sniper rifles on each corner.
Lurking behind a stack of crates in the AstroTurf backyard, I hear voices inside the house. I close my eyes, luxuriating in their sweet timbres and tart rhythms. I hear Julie. Julie and another girl, discussing something in tones that jitter and syncopate like jazz. I find myself swaying slightly, dancing to their conversational beat.