Warm Bodies

Stadium’s main entrance doors, dangling shotguns over their shoulders and chatting among themselves. Their gruff, military sentences use even fewer syllables than ours.

I look at M. ‘Thanks. For… doing this.’

‘Sure,’ M says.

‘Don’t… die.’

‘Trying… not to. Are… ready?’

I nod.

‘Look… alive… out there.’

I smile. I brush my hair back one more time, take a deep breath, and run for it.

‘Help!’ I scream, waving my arms. ‘Help, they’re… right behind me!’

With my best possible balance and poise, I run towards the doors. M and the other Dead lumber after me, groaning theatrically.

The guards react on instinct: they raise their guns and open fire on the zombies. An arm flies off. A leg. One of the anonymous nine loses a head and goes down. But not a single weapon points in my direction. Painting Julie’s face on the air in front of me, I sprint with Olympian focus. My stride is good, I can feel it, I look normal, alive, and so I snap neatly into a category: ‘Human’. Two more guards emerge with guns drawn, but they barely even look at me. They squint, they take aim at their targets, and they shout, ‘Go! Get in there, man!’

Two more zombies hit the ground behind me. As I slip in through the doors, I see M and the remaining Dead veer off and retreat. As they go, their gait suddenly changes. They lose their stumble and run like living things. Not as fast as me, not as graceful, but with purpose. The guards hesitate, the gunfire falters. ‘What the fuck… ?’ one of them mutters.

Inside the entrance is a man with a clipboard and a notebook. An immigration officer, ready to take my name and have me fill out a stack of request forms before most likely tossing me out. The Dead have depended on this man for years to provide us with the defenceless stragglers we eat in the ruins outside. He comes towards me, flipping through his notebook, making no eye contact. ‘Close call, eh, friend? I’m going to need you to—’

‘Ted! Look at this shit!’

Ted looks up, looks through the open doors, sees his fellow soldiers standing dumbstruck. He glances at me. ‘Wait right here.’

Ted jogs out and stops next to the guards, staring at the eerily animate zombies dashing off into the distant streets like real people. I imagine the look on the men’s faces, their stomachs bubbling with the queasy sensation that the earth under their feet is moving.

Momentarily forgotten, I turn and run. I run through the dark entry corridor towards the light on the other end, wondering if this is a birth canal or the tunnel to Heaven. Am I coming or going? Either way, it’s too late to reverse. Hidden in the gloom under a red evening sky, I step into the world of the Living.

The sports arena Julie calls home is unaccountably large, perhaps one of those dual-event ‘super-venues’ built for an era when the greatest quandary facing the world was where to put all the parties. From the outside there is nothing to see but a mammoth oval of featureless walls, a concrete Ark that not even God could make float. But the interior reveals the Stadium’s soul: chaotic yet grasping for order, like the sprawling slums of Brazil if they’d been designed by a modernist architect.

All the bleachers have been torn out to make room for an expansive grid of miniature skyscrapers, rickety houses built unnaturally tall and skinny to conserve the limited real estate. Their walls are a hodgepodge of salvaged materials — one of the taller towers begins as concrete and grows flimsier as it rises, from steel to plastic to a precarious ninth floor of soggy particle board. Most of the buildings look like they should collapse in the first breeze, but the whole city is supported by rigid webs of cable running from tower to tower, cinching the grid tight. The Stadium’s inner walls loom high over everything, bristling with severed pipes, wires, and spikes of rebar that sprout from the concrete like beard stubble. Under-powered street lamps provide dim orange illumination, leaving this snow-globe city smothered in shadows.

The moment I step out of the entry tunnel my sinuses inflame with an overwhelming rush of life-smell. It’s all around me, so sweet and potent it’s almost painful; I feel like I’m drowning in a perfume bottle. But in the midst of this thick haze, I can sense Julie. Her signature scent peeks out of the noise, calling out like a voice underwater. I follow it.

The streets are the width of sidewalks, narrow strips of asphalt poured over the old AstroTurf, which peeks through any unpaved gaps like garish green moss. There are no names on the street signs. Instead of listing off states or presidents or varieties of trees, they display simple white graphics — Apple, Ball, Cat, Dog — a child’s guide to the alphabet. There is mud everywhere, slicking the asphalt and piling up in corners along with the detritus of daily life: pop cans, cigarette butts, used condoms and bullet shells.

I am trying not to gawk at the city like the backwoods tourist I am, but something beyond curiosity is gluing my attention to every kerb and rooftop. As foreign as it all is to me, I feel a ghostly sense of recognition, even nostalgia, and as I make my way down what must be Eye Street, some of my stolen memories begin to stir.

This is where we started. This is where they sent us when the coasts disappeared. When the bombs fell. When our friends died and rose as strangers, unfamiliar and cruel.

It’s not Perry’s voice — it’s everyone’s, a murmuring chorus of all the lives I’ve consumed, gathering in the dark lounge of my subconscious to reminisce.

Flag Avenue, where they planted our nation’s colours, back when there were still nations and their colours mattered. Gun Street, where they set up the war camps, planned attacks anddefences against our endless enemies, Living as often as Dead.

I walk with my head down, keeping as close to the walls as I can. When I meet someone coming the other way I keep my eyes straight ahead until the last possible moment, then I allow brief contact so as not to seem inhuman. We pass briskly with awkward nods.

It didn’t take much to bring down the card house of civilisation. Just a few gusts and it was done, the balance tipped, the spell broken. Good citizens realised the lines that had shaped their lives were imaginary and easily crossed. They had wants and needs and the power to satisfy them, so they did. The moment the lights went out, everyone stopped pretending.

I begin to worry about my clothes. Everyone I encounter is wearing thick grey denim, waterproof coats, mud-caked work boots. What world am I still living in where people dress for aesthetics? If no one realises I’m a zombie, they may still call in a report on the stylish lunatic roaming the streets in a fitted shirt and tie. I quicken my pace, sniffing desperately for Julie’s trail.

Island Avenue, where they built the courtyard for the community meetings, where ‘they’ became ‘we’, or so we believed. We cast our votes and raised our leaders, charming men and women with white teeth and silver tongues, and we shoved our many hopes and fears into their hands, believing those hands were strong because they had firm handshakes. They failed us, always. There was no way they could not fail us — they were human, and so were we.

I veer off Eye Street and start working my way towards the centre of the grid. Julie’s scent grows more distinct, but its exact direction remains vague. I keep hoping some clue will emerge from the chanting in my head, but these ancient ghosts have no interest in my insignificant search.

Jewel Street, where we built the schools once we finally accepted that this was reality, that this was the world ourchildren would inherit. We taught them how to shoot, how to pour concrete, how to kill and how to survive, and if they made it that far, if they mastered those skills and had time to spare, then we taught them how to read and write, to reason and relate and understand their world. We tried hard at first, there was much hope and faith, but it was a steep hill to climb in the rain, and many slid to the base.

I notice the maps in these memories are slightly outdated; the street they’re calling Jewel has been renamed. The sign is newer, a fresh primary green, and instead of a visual icon it has an actual word printed on it. Intrigued, I turn at this intersection and approach an atypically wide metal building. Julie’s scent is still distant, so I know I shouldn’t stop, but the pale light coming through the windows seems to prick some wordless anguish in my inner voices. As I press my nose against the glass, their musings go quiet.

A large, wide-open room. Row upon row of white metal tables under fluorescent lights. Dozens of children, all younger than ten, divided by row into project groups: a row repairing generators, a row treating gasoline, a row