nora at inkstain

We lag behind Lily and Aidan, who are energetic today. They slept last night.

We didn’t.

Lily’s snores woke me up. You’re just an insomniac. We spent the night out of our gender-segregated beds, talking as quietly as we could. Talking abut life before the zombies. Who we used to be. Who we planned to become.

I’ve never heard so much hopelessness in my own voice. I wanted to be asleep.

I’m amazed that I’m operating today.

We turn a corner, following Aidan’s voice. He and Lily are doing a duet from Avenue Q. I have a headache.

You try to smile at me. Wherever we are, it’s rained lately. I’ve given up on keeping track of our location, since I can just ask you. I’ll dedicate that part of my brain to the shotgun under my arm.

I step in a puddle. A part of me is amazed that the rest of the world hasn’t stood still for this crisis, that something as normal as weather is still happening.

Lily yells for us to follow, says she found something. We do, but slowly. You’re meandering, trying to amuse me, and I’m too drained to do anything but follow a step behind you. You reach up and grab an apple from a tree in a yard we pass, handing it to me. I smile and take a bite. It’s sour.

We follow Lily, who’s found an abandoned toy store with almost everything intact. I curl up on a giant Uglydoll to take a nap as you, as wide-eyed as a little kid, pull out every set of Lego Mindstorms.

“I’m always convinced, every time you give me something, that it’s laced,” you say, taking the tea I hand you.

“Why would I do that?” I ask, rolling my eyes. “Just drink it. That jump beat you up pretty bad, this’ll help.”

“Help with what?”

“You need rest. It’ll help you sleep.”

“You’re putting me to sleep so you can kill me!”

I just look at you, eyes narrowed, feeling one corner of my mouth twitch into a smile. “That’s exactly it. I’m just trying to kill you so I can face the zombie apocalypse alone. Just drink the damn tea and get some rest.”

“You probably work for some other government! Or for the people who made the zombies!”

I raise an eyebrow.

“I don’t know. I’ll find out sometime. But the viewers, they know already.”

I grin at you, tossing you a pillow. “Get some rest.” I grab the shotgun and head upstairs, ready to take up the watch.

More zombie stories– more second person, but male POV this time.

I am playing out a monologue at you in my head. “I told you Texas was a bad idea,” I say, glaring at you.

You do not reply, because it is a monologue. Also, you are a figment of my imagination since I blew off your infected head last week.

I’m not sure why I ran in here, why I thought they wouldn’t be able to chase me. I’m climbing the stairs, running up them. I didn’t used to be able to take them more than one at a time. I grew up slow, the shortest boy in my class, until I hit puberty– a little late– and shot up to over six feet. Most of that is in my legs.

It was useful, at the time– I didn’t used to be able to reach the top shelf– I was grabbing canned peaches and wine glasses for my sisters as soon as I hit fourteen.

I was not expecting it to be useful like this. I take the stairs two at a time, sometimes three. They’re close behind me. I am still upset with you for telling me to get out of Arizona, for crossing the godforsaken desert of southern New Mexico.

I get to the top of the stairs and shut the door behind me.

It’s beautiful. The sun finished setting while I was in there, and the city– the deserted, desolate city– stretches out forever in every direction.

I look up. Same stars as home. We used to drive out of the city for camping trips on weekends, drive up to Utah, see the painted desert. My parents loved the dramatic colors of the sand, the rocks. I liked seeing the stars, something we never got at home.

Now I’ve got the city below me, the lights all out, and the sky above me dark enough to make out every little star. Most of them are dead now, I think. Dead before their light reaches us.

I fumble with the stupid handgun you gave me. Maybe this wasn’t such a bad idea. At least there’s a beautiful sky. That’s something.

The door hatch onto the roof opens and there they are– more throngs. Bang bang.

I’m out of bullets.

Dead before the light reaches us, I think, stepping back, eyes widening as the throng of undead comes toward me. Dead before I hit the ground–

A part of me realizes that my feet aren’t going to find purchase if I step back once more. I drop the useless weapon. I apologize to you in my mental monologue. I don’t want this to end on a bad note.

I look up at the dead sky as I step backwards. I wonder if I’ll feel anything when I hit the ground.

Kelsey loaned me his copy of Scott McCloud’s Zot! and i just finished it this morning.

There was one part about this comic book series that really struck me, and that was the dramatic shift in storytelling within a genre story over the course of it. The progression from a cute, but not necessarily noteworthy, superhero comic, where the protagonists are almost personifications of disillusionment and optimism, to a series of short character pieces looking at various cast members who just happened to have superheroes hanging around them– it was fun to watch.

There’s only one other thing I’ve read/watched that did something similar, and that was Neon Genesis Evangelion. That series went from a mech anime to a strange, half-sketched out, semi-Freudian look into the head of the main character.

I don’t really know what I’m getting at here, except that it’s the kind of shift you don’t often see in professional work, and it’s sort of refreshing to see a story that changes genre– or storytelling method, whatever– part of the way through.

Same characters as the last one– I guess they made it out of White Sands.

The mile tickers fly by on the side of the road as I skip most of Pinkerton, not remembering El Scorcho’s track number. “About how much of the time do you think you’re honest?”

You told me yesterday that I didn’t do the same hesitant noises that most people do, and I’m thinking now that you don’t do what most people do that makes them have to indicate they’re thinking with a “hmmm” or “uhh”, which is rephrasing and explaining. As if they might not be responding because they’re offended or confused.

You know I understand the question, I know I don’t need to tell you “I’m thinking”. We’ve been having this conversation for the past 3 days, if not the past 13 years.

“What do you mean?” I ask.

“Saying everything that’s on your mind.”

“One percent of the time. If that,” I say. “Why?”

“Just wondering.”

“You?”

“About the same, I guess.”

“We’re thinking a lot of crazy shit. And I think we’re all thinking the same weird perverse shit as everyone else. Plus, there’s a lot you can’t actually express with words.”

“Like what?” It’s a genuine question, the kind of thing that would probably be a come-on from anyone but you.

“Like– I don’t know. Vague thoughts about my characters. Shit like that.” I look ahead. “Slow down,” I say, rolling the window down and leaning out the window, shotgun pointed out.

I shoot, and the zombie’s head blows up. He falls down before he can get to the road, get in the way of the car.

“Like that. There’s no way to word shit like that. As soon as you try to express it as anything– zombie-shooting-need-to-feeling– you’ve muddled it, it’s just a vague inability to express yourself in words.”

“The Germans probably have a word for it,” you say, and I smile, watching the clouds move in slow motion out the window.

White Sands flies past us on the right. The closer we got to Texas, the scarier things seemed to get, so now we’re headed back toward home, if only as some kind of default.

We’ve got the windows down if only because this is the first place without the stench of death. You’re driving, I’m controlling the music, which is playing the new Hold Steady album, stolen from a half-ruined Hastings in Alamagordo. “We are our only saviors, we’re gonna build something this summer…”

“Look at that,” you say, pointing to the right, and I look. The freshly wet sand of one of the dunes has spilled over the side of it.

“I guess nature’ll get over everything we create, eventually.”

“Maybe there is hope for Texas, then,” you say. “Want to stop? You’ve never seen White Sands before, right? I can turn around if you want to go look.”

“Nah, we’ll get another chance,” I say.

“I doubt it,” you say, looking in the distance. I follow your gaze– the dunes back off from the road at that point.

“Alright, then,” I say, and you get into the left hand lane, turning around at the first opportunity. We fly past an abandoned border control checkpoint before you turn around again.

You grab the shotgun– it never hurts to be safe, even if it does seem like we’re the only people in this desert for miles– as I take off my sandals to walk barefoot across the dunes.

We’re sitting upstairs, on my bed, looking at each other with those sleepy, contented eyes that we haven’t gotten in a long time. We’ve just finished a raid and there haven’t been any zombie sightings in a few days. We’ve had time to calm down a bit, and instead of the crashing, horrific realizations we were expecting we’d become sleepy, lazy, and alternately silly or contemplative.

“Whatcha thinkin’ about?” you ask me, opening the eye that isn’t hidden by the pillow to look at me, your bangs falling almost in your eyes but not quite.

I yawn. “Facebook,” I say.

“What?”

“Well, I was thinking about what I was doing a few weeks ago, when I got the news to run, and that was one of the things I was playing with. I was thinking about getting updates on people I know, to figure out who went were, who ended up undead, you know.”

You prop yourself up on your elbow, smiling at me. “And you were thinking maybe you should just look them up on Facebook.”

“See how they’re doing.”

“Don’t think we’re gonna get wifi access here, somehow,” you say, smiling, and you tuck a stray lock of hair behind my ear.

“You came back.” Your voice is turned up, a little surprised, and I’m a little insulted.

“Of course I did. I brought some food. I got some tea, too.” I slung the bag down, sitting on the floor. “They had soap and lotion and some bandages and stuff. Ammo, too.”

“Finally,” you said, looking in the bag. “So why didn’t you stay with them?”

“I didn’t want to,” I said. “I don’t trust them.”

“And you trust me?”

“I don’t trust you not to hurt me,” I say, pulling a soda out of the bag and popping it open, throwing another to you. You catch it easily. “But I trust you to keep me safe.”

“I never thought I’d miss getting up in the morning for classes,” I said, lowering the bloodstained sword. I was covered in sweat and dried gore, my lips were chapped and as sunburned as the rest of my skin, which alternated between vivid red and peeling white. My elbows were both scabbed over from falling. No matter how I moved, my skin rippled and cracked, and with the consistent layer of dried sweat I felt oddly reptilian.

He turned around, looking me up and down. He was off just as badly as I was. His shirt was cut up and the scab on his knee– the scab from hurting himself being a stupid teenager a few weeks before in a world that seemed a thousand years different– was open, occasionally cracking and sending more blood down his leg to dry in a crusted film. It hurt a little to look at him. He moved toward me and moved my hands on the sword, adjusting my grip. “I still don’t,” he said, shielding his eyes with a hand to look west.

“Hm?”

“I don’t miss getting up in the morning.” He started walking and I followed him, my whole body feeling almost too heavy to carry. “You know, I sort of thought I would miss it– miss sleeping in my same bed every night, miss consistently having something to eat in the fridge. I don’t.”

“Well, if the world is stuck like this, we might as well make the best of it, right?” I asked, nervousness edging my voice.

“It’s not just that,” he said. He held an arm out in front of me, pointing at the horizon. It was another group, a small throng of undead. He unsheathed his sword, stepping in front of me, and I– as always– fell into a careful step behind him.

“I think this is what I was born for.”

The Mountain Goats have a fictional codependent, alcoholic couple that lives in Tallahassee that gets an entire album (Tallahassee) as well as a lot of songs. All the non-Tallahassee songs have Alpha in their title, so they’re called the Alpha Couple. In an homage to that, I’m calling the boy and the girl on the boat that are running away from the flooded Albuquerque and the zombies the Beta Couple. Here’s another one.

“You told me that getting solar cells for the iPod was a stupid idea,” you tell me, grinning. We are tethered to the top of the cottonwood, our canoe bobbing lightly. We’re having salvaged canned pears, jerky and cheerios, your earbuds split between us, playing Explosions in the Sky.

“I can’t believe I saw them last week,” you say, cutting a peach with your spoon. “Or that someone good actually came out of Texas.”

I don’t tell you that most of Texas was destroyed in the first wave of bioagents. The heavy silence as you stare at your spoon tells me you already know.

We unfasten the boat and I rub my bare, sunburned shoulders. We’ll have to raid a Walgreens and get some aloe once we get to a city that isn’t as submurged as our home. At least the sun was going down– we watch it vaguely as it shoots the skies with the colors that the sky should, by all rights, have been for the past two weeks. Pink and orange and surreal.

A tire and a soggy cardboard box float past. We see a movement in the trees and you reach for the shotgun. I think of indie bands with their skin hanging off of their arms, knocking over their microphones and keyboards to get at their audiences. Bassists for brains.