Bob-bob-bob. They all three did it. All at the same time.
Every couple of minutes they’d do it again. It was—communal. Animal-like. They did it for a couple of hours, and then they stopped. The one on the other side of the fire never did it at all. The fire burned low enough that the fourth one came over and worked on the remnants of the corpse, and the first three just stood there.
Cahill didn’t know what the fuck they were doing, but it made him strangely happy.
When they came to evacuate him, Cahill thought at first it was another air strike operation—a mopping up. He’d been sick for a few days, throwing up, something he ate, he figured. He was scavenging in a looted drug store, hoping for something to take—although everything was gone or ruined—when he heard the patrol coming. They weren’t loud, but in the silent city noise was exaggerated. He had looked out of the shop, seen the patrol of soldiers, and tried to hide in the dark ruins of the pharmacy.
“Come on out,” the patrol leader said. “We’re here to get you out of this place.”
Bullshit, Cahill thought. He stayed put.
“I don’t want to smoke you out, and I don’t want to send guys in there after you,” the patrol leader said. “I’ve got tear gas, but I really don’t want to use it.”
Cahill weighed his options. He was fucked either way. He tried to go out the back of the pharmacy, but they had already sent someone around, and he was met by two scared nineteen-year-olds with guns. He figured the writing was on the wall and put his hands up.
But the weird twist was that they were evacuating him. There’d been some big government scandal. The Supreme Court had closed the reserves, the president had been impeached, elections were coming. He wouldn’t find that out for days. What he found out right then was that they hustled him back to the gate, and he walked out past rows of soldiers into a wall of noise and light. Television cameras showed him lost and blinking in the glare.
“What’s your name?”
“Gerrold Cahill,” he said.
“Hey, Gerrold! Look over here!” a hundred voices called.
It was overwhelming. They all called out at the same time, and it was mostly just noise to him, but if he could understand a question, he tried to answer it. “How’s it feel to be out of there?”
“Loud,” he said. “And bright.”
“What do you want to do?”
“Take a hot shower and eat some hot food.”
There was a row of sawhorses, and the cameras and lights were all behind them. A guy with corporal’s stripes was trying to urge him toward a trailer, but Cahill was like someone knocked down by a wave who tries to get to his feet only to be knocked down again.
“Where are you from?” “Tell us what it was like!”
“What was it like?” Cahill said. Dumbshit question. What was he supposed to say to that? But his response had had the marvelous effect of quieting them for a moment, which allowed him to maybe get his bearings a little. “It wasn’t so bad.”
The barrage started again, but he picked out, “Were you alone?”
“Except for the zombies.”
They liked that, and the surge was almost animalistic. Had he seen zombies? How had he survived? He shrugged and grinned.
“Are you glad to be going back to prison?”
He had an answer for that, one he didn’t even know was in him. He would repeat it in the interview he gave to the Today Show and again in the interview for 20/20. “Cleveland was better than prison,” he said. “No alliances, no gangs, just zombies.”
Someone called, “Are you glad they’re going to eradicate the zombies?”
“They’re going to what?” he asked.
The barrage started again, but he said, “What are they going to do to the zombies?”
“They’re going to eradicate them, like they did everywhere else.”
“Why?” he asked.
This puzzled the mob. “Don’t you think they should be?”
He shook his head.
“Gerrold! Why not?”
Why not indeed? “Because,” he said, slowly, and the silence came down, except for the clicking of cameras and the hum of the news vans idling, “because they’re just … like animals. They’re just doing what’s in their nature to be doing.” He shrugged.
Then the barrage started again. “Gerrold! Gerrold! Do you think people are evil?” But by then he was on his way to a military trailer, an examination by an army doctor, a cup of hot coffee, and a meal and a long hot shower.
Behind him the city was dark. At the moment, it felt cold behind him, but safe, too, in its quiet. He didn’t really want to go back there. Not yet.
He wished he’d had time to set them one last fire before he’d left.
SPECIAL ECONOMICS
“What are you doing?” a guy asked her.
“I am divorced,” she said. She had always thought of herself as a person who would one day be divorced, so it didn’t seem like a big stretch to claim it. Staying married to one person was boring. She figured she was too complicated for that. Interesting people had complicated lives. “I’m looking for a job. But I do hip-hop, too” she explained.
“Hip-hop?” He was a middle-aged man with stubble on his chin who looked as if he wasn’t looking for a job but should be.
“Not like Shanghai,” she said, “Not like Hi-Bomb. They do gangsta stuff, which I don’t like. Old fashioned. Like M.I.A.,” she said. “Except not political, of course.” She gave a big smile. This was all way beyond the guy. Jieling started the boom box. M.I.A was Maya Arulpragasam, a Sri Lankan hip-hop artist who had started all on her own years ago. She had sung, she had danced, she had done her own videos. Of course M.I.A. lived in London, which made it easier to do hip-hop and become famous.
Jieling had no illusions about being a hip-hop singer, but it had been a good way to make some cash up north in Baoding where she came from. Set up in a plague-trash market and dance for yuan.
Jieling did her opening, her own hip-hop moves, a little like Maya and a little like some things she had seen on MTV, but not too sexy, because Chinese people did not throw you money if you were too sexy. Only April, and it was already hot and humid.
She had borrowed the English. It sounded very fresh. Very criminal.
The guy said, “How old are you?”
“Twenty-two,” she said, adding three years to her age, still dancing and singing.
Maybe she should have told him she was a widow? Or an orphan? But there were too many orphans and widows after so many people died in the bird flu plague. There was no margin in that. Better to be divorced. He didn’t throw any money at her, just flicked open his cellphone to check listings from the market for plague trash. This plague-trash market was so big it was easier to check online, even if you were standing right in the middle of it. She needed a new cell phone. Hers had finally fallen apart right before she headed south.
Shenzhen people were apparently too jaded for hip-hop. She made fifty-two yuan, which would pay for one night in a bad hotel where country people washed cabbage in the communal sink.
The market was full of secondhand stuff. When over a quarter of a billion people died in four years, there was a lot of second-hand stuff. But there was still a part of the market for new stuff and street food, and that’s where Jieling found the cell phone seller. He had a cart with stacks of flat plastic cell phone kits printed with circuits and scored. She flipped through; tiger-striped, peonies (old lady phones) metallics (old man phones), anime characters, moon phones, expensive lantern phones. “Where is your printer?” she asked.