nora at inkstain

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.

This one’s really two stories that are connected. It’s a bit longer than I’ve usually been doing, too. Enjoy.

I lay there, eyes closed, running my fingernails along his back. “I don’t know, it doesn’t always feel quite right,” he says.

I lean over and kiss him, quickly, our lips brushing for only a moment, but when I move away he pulls me back, to him, one hand in the small of my back, the other in my hair.

“It feels pretty perfect right now,” he murmers.

“Well, if that’s all it takes,” I say, a grin on the edge of my voice.

He laughs and I kiss him again, this time moving to his ear, then his neck, then his clavicle. He gasps at the same time as I look up, distracted.

“What was that?” I ask, and he looks up at me, confused.

“Huh?”

“I heard something outside.” I get up, pulling my dress over my head, and look out the window. Sure enough, they were gathered outside. “Well, shit.”

“They won’t be able to get in,” he says.

“I know, but–” I pause. “I guess this qualifies as ‘not perfect’.”

“I kind of think it always will,” he said, sighing, and crawled back into bed.

I sigh, grabbing the shotgun, and open the window. There are a lot of them outside and I was surprised at how easy it was to make all of the shots– I hit each one spot on in the head, leaving a heap of (undead? redead?) outside.

I put the shotgun down and look at the bed. I don’t know how he managed to sleep through the gunfire but there he is, looking not peaceful but like this is the first real sleep he’s gotten in days. Maybe weeks.

Maybe it was.

I put the shotgun down, sinking to the floor beneath the windowsill, head in my hands, thinking about perfection and how much easier things would be without the zombies.

—-

“Oh, shit. Get up,” I say, coming in from the stairwell. “I don’t know how they got in–”

He looks at me, groggy, and I throw him his clothes, then his machete.

“We don’t have much time.”

Wordlessly he dressed in the dark while I fastened a rope to the edge of the windowsill, throwing it outside. Nothing below– not anymore, at least– and I thanked a god I didn’t believe in for that.

He climbs down first and I slip on my Vans and follow him, climbing down the rope as quickly as I could, but the zombies got into what we were using as our safe spot before I was safely on the ground.

“Jump!” he says and, seeing no other choice, I do, letting him catch me and set me on the ground.

I stand there for a moment, his hands still on me, and look around. No sounds, nothing. “Let’s go. If we hurry we can probably get a car or something.”

We do hurry, but we don’t manage to find a car we could use before more zombies show up. We run, for a while, then– when we were about to be cornered– we stand back to back and beat the undead shit out of them, his machete soaring through the air with far more grace than my aluminum baseball bat.

“Not bad,” I say, shielding my eyes from the sun with a hand as I scan the area for more zombies. “You okay?”

“Yeah, I’m fine,” he says. “I think we can get on the roof over there. That’ll work for a little while, at least until we’ve got things planned out.”

“Yeah. Okay,” I say, and I follow him up the ladder.

We reach the roof and I sit cross-legged, the gravel digging itself into the skin on my legs, and I wish for the thousanth time that I had worn something other than a sundress with the apocolapse came. “About last night–”

“You know what I’m going to say,” he says, voice sad. I move toward him and move my hand to his face. He tries to brush me off but I take a piece of zombie flesh from his hair and drop it onto the ground.

“I wish things could be simple,” he continues.

“You make them complicated,” I say. “I don’t know how I feel either but–”

“But it’ll just make things more complicated,” he says.

I sigh. “We’re the last two people in the city. Maybe the world. How much simpler can it get?”

If you were wondering, Blastoise shoots water a lot, which would work well both to power hydroelectric dams and to bring water to the ever expanding, thirsty metropolis that is Albuquerque. I just solved all of the problems with Mesa Del Sol with a Facebook application and so probably deserve a fucking medal. You can Photoshop it onto my delightfully androgynous new default picture, thank you very much.

I’ve been bad about posting these every week, so you might get a few more over the next few days.

“I never issued any goddamn ultimatums,” I said, slashing the machete in front of me, sending already rotted zombie guts through the air. My voice came out muffled– they don’t usually tell you about the smell of the zombies and I had taken the scarf out of my hair, putting it over my mouth and nose in my best attempt to keep the scent of undeath out of my nose.

“You did,” he said, and I could hear that he was short of breath too. I could feel his back against mine, the heat of his body adding to the dead heat of midday summer in New Mexico. “You did and I still don’t know if I made the right decision.”

“I know you still saw Ryan. You called me from his house once. I’m not stupid, and besides, you’re too honest to hide anything from me.” I wiped rotted blood that had splattered across my face on my shoulder, spitting on the ground. They were still coming, but there was an end to the tide– I could see that.

“You might be right– look, they’re easing up on this side. Let’s go.” I heard the crack as his baseball bat collided with a zombie skull and he grabbed my arm, running for the street.

I ran a few steps behind him, through the surreally empty streets of North UNM Campus. The only sound was a stubborn car alarm in the distance and the low moan of the city’s collective undead.

We reached the golf course and rested in the shade of a dying tree, panting, the dry heat making sweat pour from our foreheads. I felt the sting of it in my eye and took the scarf off of my mouth to wipe my forehead. “I think we lost them for a little while,” I said.

“Not all of them,” he said, wide-eyed, and I followed his gaze, looking at the sole figure shambling toward us.

“Ryan?”

For anyone interested in a “rabbit hole” of a possible new alternate reality game that JC Hutchins found, check this out. I know some of you are clever/obsessive enough to be interested in this kind of a game, but I don’t have any ideas of where to go with the information given so far.

This is a really cool YouTube video of a woman introducing herself in 21 different accents:

I think mine is closest to the Seattle accent, which is funny since I was raised by Californians. We don’t do the up thing? where your statements? sound like questions? though.

(hat tip: BoingBoing)

I’m working on a short origin story of one of my novel characters. I wrote about 2.5k on it today. Here’s a short excerpt:

The lights of the forbidden city stretched before me. Growing up I always thought they were beautiful, like the obsidian teardrops I would find walking outside the compound, and later like the quartz I learned to imprison light in. I wondered if that was how the made all of those sparkles, if they were just hovering above the city. They used the powerful magic, that was what I had been told. The hell magics.

Hell was probably beautiful, too, from a distance.