She’s never spoken a word to you, never smiled at you, never once greeted you with anything that even remotely resembled human feeling. But in the new world she’s the closest thing you have to a lover. And as you instinctively cross the street to catch her, you should take some dim, distant form of comfort in the way she’s also changed direction to meet you.
Remember, though: she’s not really a lover. Not in the proper emotional sense of the word. The Dead hate love even more than they hate Thought. Only the Living love. But it’s quite safe to fuck, and as long as you’re here the two of you can fuck quite openly. Just like the Dead themselves do.
Of course, it’s different with them. The necessary equipment is the first thing that rots away. But instinct keeps prodding them to try. Whenever some random cue rekindles the urge, they pick partners, and rub against each other in a clumsy, listless parody of sex that sometimes continues until both partners have been scraped into piles of carrion powder. The ultimate dry hump.
So feel no fear. It doesn’t attract their attention when you and Suzie grab each other and go for a quickie in the middle of the street: to knead your hands against the novelty of warm skin, to smell stale sweat instead of the open grave, to take a rest from the horror that the world has become. Especially since, though you both do what you have to do, following all the mechanics of the act, neither one of you feels a damn thing. No affection, no pleasure, and certainly no joy.
That would be too dangerous.
Do what you have to do. Do it quickly. And then take your leave of each other. Exchange no kisses, no goodbyes, no cute terms of endearment, no acknowledgement that your tryst was anything but a collision between two strangers walking in opposite directions. Just stagger away without looking back. Maybe you’ll see each other again. Maybe not. It really doesn’t matter either way.
Spend the next few hours wandering from place to place, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, accomplishing nothing. But still drawing breath. Never forget that. Let the part of you still capable of caring about such things count that as a major victory.
At mid-afternoon pass the place where a school bus lies burned and blackened on one side. A small group of Living had trusted it to carry them to safety somewhere outside the city; but it didn’t even get five blocks through the obstacle course of other crashed vehicles before hundreds of Dead had imprisoned them in a cage of groping flesh. You were a block and a half away, watching the siege, and when the people in the bus eventually blew themselves up, to avoid a more horrific end, the heat of the fireball singed the eyebrows from your face. At the time, you’d felt it served you right for not helping. These days, if you were capable of forming an opinion on anything, you’d feel that the Living were silly bastards.
It’s stupid to resist. Only the Living resist. Resistance implies will, and if there’s one thing the Dead don’t have it’s will. Exist the way they do, dully accepting everything that happens to you, and you stand a chance.
That’s the one major reason your brother Ben is dead. Oh, you can’t know what happened to him. You know what happened to your wife and kids—you know because you were watching, trapped behind a chain-link fence, as a lurching mob of what had once been elementary school children reduced them to shredded beef—but you’ll never ever find out what happened to Ben. Still, if you ever did find out what happened to him, you would not be surprised. Because he’d always been a leader. A fighter. He’d always taken charge of every crisis that confronted him, and inspired others with his ability to carry them through. He was always special, that way. And when the Dead rose, he brought a whole bunch of naive trusting people down into his grave with him.
You, on the other hand, were never anything special. You were always a follower, a yes-man, an Oreo. You were always quick to kiss ass, and agree with anybody who raised his voice loudly enough. You never wanted to be anything but just another face in the crowd. And though this profited you well, in a society that was merely going to hell, it’s been your single most important asset in the post-plague world that’s already arrived there. It’s the reason you’re still breathing when all the brave, heroic, defiant, mythic ones like your brother Ben and the people in the school bus are just gnawed bones and Rorschach stains on the pavement.
Take pride in that. Don’t pass too close to the sooty remains of the school bus, because you might remember how you stood downwind of their funeral pyre, letting it bathe your skin and fill your lungs with the ashes of their empty defiance. You might remember the cooked-meat, burnt rubber stench… the way the clouds billowed over you, and through you, as if you were far more insubstantial than they.
Don’t let that happen. You’ll attract Dead from blocks away. Force it back. Expunge it. Pretend it’s not there. Turn your mind blank, your heart empty, and your soul, for lack of a better word, Dead.
There. That’s better.
Still later that afternoon, while rummaging through the wreckage of a clothing store for something that will keep you warm during the rapidly approaching winter, you find yourself cornered and brutally beaten by the Living.
This is nothing to concern yourself with.
It’s just the price you have to pay, for living in safety the way you do. They’re just half-mad from spending their lives fleeing one feeding frenzy or another, and they have to let off some steam. It’s not like they’ll actually kill you, or hurt you so bad you’ll sicken and die. At least not deliberately. They may go too far and kill you accidentally, but they won’t kill you deliberately. There are already more than enough Dead people running around, giving them trouble. But they hate you. They consider people like you and Suzie traitors. And they wouldn’t be able to respect themselves if they didn’t let you know it.
There are four of them, this time: all pale, all in their late teens, all wearing the snottily evil grins of bullies whose chosen victim has detected their approach too late. The closest one is letting out slack from a coil of chain at his side. The chain ends in a padlock about the size of a fist. And though you try to summon your long-forgotten powers of speech, as their blows rain against your ribs, it really doesn’t matter. They already know what you would say.
Don’t beg.
Don’t fight back.
Don’t see yourself through their eyes.
Just remember: the Living might be dangerous, but the Dead are the real bastards.
It’s later. You’re in too much pain to move. That’s all right. It’ll go away, eventually. One way or the other. Alive or dead, you’ll be up on your feet in no time.
Meanwhile, just lie there, in your own stink, in the wreckage of what used to be a clothing store, and for Christ’s sake be quiet. Because only the Living scream.
Remember that time, not long after the Dead rose, when there were always screams? No matter how far you ran, how high you climbed or how deep you dug, there were always the screams, somewhere nearby, reminding you that though you might have temporarily found a safe haven for the night, there were always others who had found their backs against brick walls. Remember how you grew inured to those screams, after a while, and even found yourself able to sleep through them. And as the weeks turned to months, you found your tolerance rewarded—because the closer the number of survivors approached zero, the more that constant backdrop of screaming faded away to a long oppressive silence broken only by the low moans and random shuffling noises of the Dead.
It’s a quiet world, now. And if you’re to remain part of it, you’re going to have to be quiet too. Even if your throat catches fire and your breath turns as ragged as sandpaper and your sweat pools in a puddle beneath you and your ribs scrape together every time you draw a breath and the naked mannequins sharing this refuge with you take on the look of Nina and Mark and Kathy and Ben and everybody else who ever mattered to you and the look on their faces becomes one of utter disgust and you start to hear their voices saying that you’re nothing and that you were always nothing but that they’d never known you were as much as a nothing as you’ve turned out to be. Shut up. Even if you want to tell them, these people who once meant everything to you, that you held on as long as any normal man could be expected to hold on, but there are limits, and you exceeded those limits, you really did, but there was just another set of limits beyond them, and another beyond those, and the new world kept making all these impossible demands on you and there were only so many impossible things you could bear. Be silent. Even if you hear Nina shrieking your name and Mark telling you he’s afraid and Kathy screaming for you to save her. Even if you hear Ben demanding that you stand up like a man, for once.