Warm Bodies

‘Do you think it’s stupid?’

‘What?’

‘To fall in love.’

He pauses, then puts his walkie away. ‘What do you mean, Pear.’

‘Like… now. The way things are now. I mean, everything’s so uncertain… is it stupid to waste time on stuff like that in a world like this? When everything might fall apart any minute?’

My dad looks at me for a long time. ‘When I met your mom,’ he says, ‘I asked myself that. And all we had going on back then was a few wars and recessions.’ His walkie starts crackling again. He ignores it. ‘I got nineteen years with your mom. But do you think I would’ve turned down the idea if I’d known I’d only get one year? Or one month?’ He surveys the construction, shaking his head slowly. ‘There’s no benchmark for how life’s “supposed” to happen, Perry. There is no ideal world for you to wait around for. The world is always just what it is now, and it’s up to you how you respond to it.’

I look into the dark window holes of ruined office buildings. I imagine the skeletons of their occupants still sitting at their desks, working towards quotas they will never meet.

‘What if you’d only gotten a week with her?’

‘Perry…’ my dad says, slightly amazed. ‘The world isn’t ending tomorrow, buddy. Okay? We’re working on fixing it. Look.’ He points at the work crews below. ‘We’re building roads. We’re going to connect to the other stadiums and hideouts, bring the enclaves together, pool our research and resources, maybe start working on a cure.’ My dad claps me on the shoulder. ‘You and me, everyone… we’re going to make it. Don’t give up on us yet. Okay?’

I relent with a small release of breath. ‘Okay.’

‘Promise?’

‘Promise.’

My dad smiles. ‘I’ll hold you to that.’

Do you know what happened next, corpse? Perry whispers from the deep shadows of my awareness. Can you guess?

‘Why are you showing me all this,’ I ask the darkness.

Because it’s what’s left of me, and I want you to feel it. I’m not ready to disappear.

‘Neither am I.’

I sense a cold smile in his voice.

Good.

‘There you are.’

Julie heaves herself up the ladder and stands on the roof of my new home, watching me. I glance at her, then put my face back in my hands.

She makes her way over, cautious steps on the flimsy sheet metal, and sits next to me on the roof edge. Our legs dangle, swinging slowly in the cold autumn air.

‘Perry?’

I don’t answer. She studies the side of my face. She reaches out and brushes two fingers through my shaggy hair. Her blue eyes pull on me like gravity, but I resist. I stare down at the muddy street.

‘I can’t believe I’m here,’ I mumble. ‘This stupid house. With all these discards.’

She doesn’t respond immediately. When she does, it’s quiet. ‘They’re not discards. They were loved.’

‘For a while.’

‘Their parents didn’t leave. They were taken.’

‘Is there a difference?’

She looks at me so hard I have no choice but to meet her gaze. ‘Your mom loved you, Perry. You’ve never had to doubt that. And so did your dad.’

I can’t hold the weight. I give in and let it fall on me. I twist my head away from Julie as the tears come.

‘Believe that God discarded you if you want to, fate or destiny or whatever, but at least you know they loved you.’

‘What does it even matter,’ I croak, avoiding her eyes. ‘Who gives a shit. They’re dead. That’s the present. That’s what matters now.’

We don’t speak for a few minutes. The cold breeze pricks tiny bumps on our arms. Bright leaves find their way in from the outer forests, spinning down into the Stadium’s vast mouth and landing on the house’s roof.

‘You know what, Perry,’ Julie says. Her voice is shaky with hurts all her own. ‘Everything dies eventually. We all know that. People, cities, whole civilisations. Nothing lasts. So if existence was just binary, dead or alive, here or not here, what would be the fucking point in anything?’ She looks up at some falling leaves and puts out her hand to catch one, a flaming red maple. ‘My mom used to say that’s why we have memory. And the opposite of memory — hope. So things that are gone can still matter. So we can build off our pasts and make futures.’ She twirls the leaf in front of her face, back and forth. ‘Mom said life only makes any sense if we can see time how God does. Past, present and future all at once.’

I allow myself to look at Julie. She sees my tears and tries to wipe one away. ‘So what’s the future?’ I ask, not flinching as her fingers brush my eye. ‘I can see the past and the present, but what’s the future?’

‘Well…’ she says with a broken laugh. ‘I guess that’s the tricky part. The past is made out of facts and history… I guess the future is just hope.’

‘Or fear.’

‘No.’ She shakes her head firmly and sticks the leaf in my hair. ‘Hope.’

The Stadium rises on the horizon as the Dead stumble forward. It looms above most of the surrounding buildings and consumes several city blocks, a gaudy monument to an era of excess, a world of waste and want and misguided dreams that is now profoundly over.

Our cadaverous cadre has been walking for a little over a day, roaming the open roads like Kerouac beats with no gas money. The others are hungry, and there’s a brief, mostly wordless debate between M and the rest before they stop at an old boarded-up town house to feed. I wait outside. It’s been more days than I can remember since my last meal, but I find myself strangely content. There’s a neutral feeling in my veins, balanced precisely between hungry and sated. The screams of the people in the house pierce me more sharply than in all my days of hands-on killing, and I’m not even anywhere near them. I’m standing far out in the street, pushing my palms into my ears and waiting for it to be over.

When they emerge, M avoids my gaze. He wipes the blood off his mouth with the back of his hand and shoots me just one guilty glance before brushing past. The others are not quite there yet, not even to M’s level of conscience, but there is something a little different about them, too. They take no leftovers. They dry their bloody hands on their pants. They walk in uneasy silence. It’s a start.

As we get close enough to the Stadium to catch the first whiffs of the Living, I go over the plan in my head. It’s not much of a plan, really. It’s cartoonishly simple, but here’s why it might work: it’s never been tried before. There has never been enough will to make a way.

A few blocks from the entry gate, we stop in an abandoned house. I go into the bathroom and study myself in the mirror like the former resident must have done a thousand times. In my head I jog through the maddening repetitions of the morning routine, getting into character. Alarm-shower-clothes-breakfast. Do I look my best? Am I putting my best foot forward? Am I stepping out the door prepared for everything this world has to throw at me?

I run some gel through my hair. I splash some aftershave on my face. I straighten my tie.

‘Ready,’ I tell the others.

M sizes me up. ‘Close… enough.’

We head for the gates.

Within a few blocks, the smell of the Living is nearly overpowering. It’s as if the Stadium is a massive Tesla Coil crackling with storms of fragrant pink life-lightning. Everyone in our group stares at it in awe. Some of them drool freely. If they hadn’t just eaten, our loosely constructed strategy would collapse in an instant.

Before we get within sight of the gate, we take a side street and stop at an intersection, hiding behind a UPS truck. I step out slightly and look around the corner. Less than two blocks away, four guards stand in front of the