Pariah

“Yeah. Just a thought.”

Karl ran upstairs and pulled off the shirt, the material stuck to some scabbing spots, making them bleed afresh. He poured some water down his back. He needed something stronger. If the lash wounds were there to appease a cruel God, maybe something to exacerbate the pain would go over well. In lieu of rubbing alcohol, he fetched a bottle of cheap vodka from his cupboard and poured it over the wounds. The stinging pumped tears out of his eyes as if he were rerouting the liquid cascading down his spine through his tear ducts. He stung everywhere and the stench of the liquor overwhelmed the room. It burned his nostrils and singed his injured back. Patting his back dry with a towel, Karl then bound his torso in Saran Wrap to seal in any scent of blood. He popped a couple of pills, pulled on a fresh shirt and his windbreaker, then made his way to Mona’s, his body tingling. Hoping it would further mask his potentially delectable aroma, Karl threw a few items into a knapsack, then slung it over his back. Maybe it was the drugs, maybe it was the booze absorbed through the wounds, maybe it was adrenaline, but his back was numb. He felt no pain, physical or emotional.

As he passed the Fogelhuts’ door he gave it a hard knock. “Wish me luck, old man!” Karl shouted. Silence. He drummed the door with palms flat. No reply.

Fine. Be that way.

“Let’s do this,” was Karl’s mantra all the way down.

Let’s do this.

Let’s do this.

35

Mona paused on the roof of Dabney’s van to watch Karl struggle down the rope. Abe and Dabney aside, the others had all come to see the twosome off and to witness what would happen next. Karl touched down on the roof, losing his footing for a moment. Mona grabbed him around the waist as he steadied himself. Like an overheated radiator venting steam, the onlookers released a collective sigh of relief. Karl’s heart pounded so hard he was afraid the zombies might hear it. Gripped in equal measure by terror and euphoria, Karl surveyed the scene around the van: innumerable undead below, friends and neighbors above, the world everywhere. Karl hadn’t seen the exterior of 1620 in half a year. How could something so prosaic seem so beautiful?

“This is a real Kodak moment,” Alan said.

“True that,” agreed Eddie, as did the others whose hearts labored almost as hard as Karl’s.

“Okay,” Karl said to himself. “I can do this.” He looked up at the sky, which seemed bigger and bluer than it had on their roof, some four stories above. He was eye level with the Phnom Penh Laundromat sign. A pigeon skeleton was nestled between the brick and the sign, a couple of feathers still clinging to the husk. Karl looked away from the tiny carcass to the larger, ambulatory ones at street level. “Oh Jesus,” he gasped. Several were looking in the direction of the van, attracted by the activity. “Oh sweet Jesus.”

“Lemme spread ’em out,” Mona said, hopping down onto the pavement.

With a soft thud, Mona hit the ground. The response from the zombies was almost instantaneous. They began to back away, their sibilant hissing more penetrating at this proximity. It was a sound that traveled up and down Karl’s spinal cord. It lingered, for emphasis, in the lower colon and upper throat, seizing and massaging both with dead, constricting fingers. He could feel liquid collecting beneath his Saran Wrap armor, the brine basting his wounds. His mother used to marinade roasts overnight in the fridge, bound in cling wrap. He hoped he wouldn’t prove to be as tasty to the uninvited guests below. With an iris opened in the crowd, Mona gestured for Karl to join her on the asphalt. It’s now or never, Karl thought. He released his grip on the rappelling rope and eased himself off the van, first sitting on the edge, then lowering his legs until they were straight, then dropping to Mona’s side. The zombies stayed at bay.

“So far so good,” he whispered.

“Mm.” Mona proceeded, noncommittal, taking a step north. Her pace was slow, deliberate-with Karl in tow, slower than usual. She gave the zombies plenty of time to soak up her mojo and make way. Without actually holding onto her, Karl kept close to Mona, walking just slightly behind her. He’d never been this near to the zombies before, and up close, they were even fouler. The countless iterations on the theme of decay were staggering. Some, obvious victims of carnivorous attacks, were little more than haphazard collections of stumps and gristle, barely held together and yet still capable of locomotion. Limbs ended midway. Faces half consumed by rot-or just half consumed, period. Exposed bone. Internal organs that weren’t internal any longer. Karl never realized gums could recede so far. Their skin reminded Karl of overcooked fowl, matte, striated, thick and leathery yet translucent. Yellowed, browned, and blackened. Most eyes glazed by dull gray cataracts. Some stumbled around, sockets bereft of eyeballs. Cavernous nostrils, just vertical openings, black and rimmed with corrosion.

“They’re so horrible,” Karl stated. “They’re so fucking horrible.”

“I s’pose.” The response to a comment on the weather. Banal. But then again, zombies were the weather. A constant. Less interesting than the weather, actually. Weather changed. Karl’s walkie-talkie beeped and he removed it from its holster.

“Just testing,” came Alan’s voice. “How’s it going?”

“Uh, okay, I guess,” Karl said. “They’re hanging back, but it’s, uh, it’s kinda freaking me out, to be honest.”

“Of course,” Alan responded. “How could it not? But you’re out, buddy. You’re actually out there.”

Karl nodded in response, then snapped to and pressed the talk button. “Yeah, I’m out here. I’m out here. Look, I can’t walk and talk. I need to concentrate. Over.”

“Okay, Karl. Understood. Over and out.”

Karl clutched the walkie-talkie to his chest, a talismanic anchor to home. His face burned. They hadn’t even reached the corner and already he was hesitating. He looked back at the others, still in the windows. Ellen gave a very maternal wave of encouragement and Karl felt like he was back at his first day of school, Mom dropping him off, he being brave. Don’t cry, he thought. Please don’t cry.

As they headed north Karl gasped when a naked, hunched, gnomelike zombie edged into view. Its pigmentation was almost human and it bore no disfigurements other than its stooped posture and deep livor mortis in its lower extremities. It cast its nearly hairless head in Karl’s direction and he gasped. Ruth! She must have fallen from the roof and come unwrapped. Karl stood motionless, staring at his former neighbor. Of all the people he never wanted to see naked, Ruth might be number one on the list. He thought of the late Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead.

“What’s the delay?” Mona asked, not impatient.

“It’s Ruth.” He pointed.

“Uh-huh.”

Karl suppressed that urge to chastise Mona. It wasn’t like he’d just pointed out that the sky was above or that water was wet. This was kind of a traumatic big thing, Ruth ambling around. She wasn’t bitten by one of those things. She just came back all on her own. Didn’t that portend the same fate for anyone? For everyone? Regardless? How would Abe feel knowing his wife was scuttling around in the raw amidst the unclean? Tidy, persnickety Ruth Fogelhut in her birthday suit-or would that be deathday suit-loose amongst the natives. It was an ugly sight made uglier. With not a trace of recognition, Ruth’s dead eyes glared in his direction as he felt Mona’s hand tug at his arm.

“C’mon,” she said.

Opting to not radio back this piece of info, Karl nodded and kept step with Mona, whose pace was deliberate, mechanical. She’d likely have made a fine soldier. Maybe she’d been one. Maybe she was some military experiment gone wrong. Or right. She was immune to the zombies. Maybe she was a supersoldier prototype. Maybe her creators were all dead. Or maybe they were still alive in some bunker, monitoring Mona’s progress from a safe distance by means of a tiny tracking chip implanted within her.

How did one go about broaching a topic like that and not seem impertinent? Was “I was just wondering” the correct opening gambit? “So, are you some kind of genetically altered superbeing?” So, am I totally