I had paid dearly for this event, and I hoped it would make a difference. When it was all over, I would be deep in debt, but I would have saved my marriage if it worked. Money was easier to regain than it was to regain the loss of a good marriage.
The guides came through and told us the basic rules again, gave us reminders, the same stuff I told you about not getting so caught up in the kill that we forgot to watch for the dead slipping through, getting hold of us through the windows. They said everything was very safe, but that it had happened, and they would be outside, on the fringes, with weapons to take down any of the dead that seemed to be getting through the line of fire and presenting a problem.
My hands were sweating. Not from fear of the dead, or even anticipation of the shoot itself, but thinking how it would be between Livia and me when it was over.
“What’s she wearing?” Livia asked.
I was startled out of my thoughts.
“What?”
“I said, what is she wearing?”
“I bought an orange jump suit for her.”
“How does she look?”
“Dark hair, tall . . . well built.”
“That could be me.”
“I suppose that had something to do with it,” I said. “Her reminding me of you.”
“A dead woman?”
I knew then my tact had backfired, and I could have kicked myself.
“Just the appearance,” I said. “But it’s been awhile. And even with refrigeration, she’s gone downhill. She still looks close to being alive. Not as much as before.”
“You mean when you fucked her?”
We were seated pretty close to other hunters, and I glanced to see if any of them had heard her, heard anything we might have said.
They all seemed preoccupied with their weapons and their thoughts and their eagerness, and I realized that Livia wasn’t as loud as I thought she was.
“I don’t know how to describe her so that you will know right off,” I said. “I’ll try and point her out.”
“You do that,” Livia said. “I want to be the one.”
“I know.”
“I thought maybe I’d want you to shoot her, just to show me it didn’t matter, but then I thought that wouldn’t do. I want to shoot her.”
“Of course it doesn’t matter,” I said. “It wasn’t like she was alive.”
“I want to shoot her,” she said.
“It could be anyone that shoots her,” I said. “There’s no guarantees it’ll be you that gets her.”
“It better be me,” Livia said. “You paid to fuck her, now you’ve paid for me to shoot her. It better be me.”
“You don’t just want to shoot her,” I said. “You want to finish her. A shot through the head to destroy the brain.”
“Think I don’t know that? Everyone knows that. And I can shoot. You know I can shoot.”
I couldn’t say anything right. Everything I said was like stepping in shit and being forced to smell my shoe.
“Yes,” I said. “Of course you can shoot.”
The guides were moving back along the aisle of the rail car.
“All right,” one of them said. “We are going to open the cars, and when the dead come out—and listen to me. Do not shoot! Not at first. The beef is in place. You see the yellow chalk line we’ve laid in the grass? You cannot, and will not, shoot until the dead are beyond that, on the beef. If some do not go past the line, the outside guides will work them that way with the push poles, and if they can’t get them to go, they may have to put a few down themselves. After the dead are over the line, you can fire at will. And if they start to come back over the line, you can still fire. But you have to wait until they are first over the line. Does everyone understand?”
We all called out that we understood.
“Any questions?” asked the guide. There were none.
“Then,” the guide said, “ladies and gentlemen, the windows will be lowered. Do not put your rifles out the windows until the dead are all past the yellow line, and when they are, then it is open season.”
The automatic windows rolled down. The windows gave plenty of room for propping the rifles and for laying your elbows on the sill.
We heard the train cars opening on either side of us, and we could hear the dead, moaning. Then we saw them coming out of the cars. The guides had big heavy poles and they pushed the dead with them to make sure they went toward the yellow line. But they didn’t need much pushing. The bloody meat smelled even better than we did to them, and the dead went for it right away.
Livia said, “Point her out. I want to shoot her a few times in the body before I take the head.”
“Someone might beat you to it,” I said.
“Just point her out.”
In that moment I thought about the night I had had with the woman who had no name and was for a while part of the dead brothel down on 41st Street. She was only part of it while she was fresh, and then they had to let her go to the sale market for the hunts, and I was lucky to buy her. I almost didn’t win the bid, and I had to keep raising it, and pretty soon I had my bid way up there and it was really far more than I could afford. But I bought her for the hunt. But even then, she was just mine to place in the hunt, not mine or Livia’s to shoot. That was up to circumstance.
It was said many a husband or wife had bought their dead spouses to shoot at because of past grievances, and it even occurred to me Livia might turn the rifle on me. It wasn’t a serious thought, but it passed through my head nonetheless.
I thought about the dead woman now, of how she had been fastened to the bed and her mouth was covered over with a leather strap; how she had writhed beneath me; not because she enjoyed or felt anything, but because she was trying to break loose and she wanted to bite me. I could hear her grunting with savage hunger under the mask, and it was exciting to know what I was doing. I had paid for her with a charge card, and though the card didn’t say brothel on it, Livia was able to figure it all out. It took her awhile, but she got it doped out and then she confronted me, and I didn’t even try to lie. I think on some level I had wanted her to find out, had wanted her to know.
But the young woman beneath me that night at the brothel was still firm and she wasn’t falling apart. She hadn’t been dead long, and what had killed her was heart failure, some inherited condition that took her out young. When she died the dead disease took her over, and her mother sold her to the brothel then; had them come out and capture her and take her there.
A few years back such a thing would have been thought horrible, but now it happened all the time. It was part of the government plan to dehumanize them after they were dead, to make people think of them as nothing more than empty shells that walked and were a threat and were sometimes entertainment. It was an indoctrination that was starting to take hold.
Yet, when I saw the dead out there, wandering over the line, in all manner of conditions, some fresh, some with their skin falling off, some little more than skeletons with just enough viscera and flesh to hold them together, I felt sick. My parents had died but a few years before the flu came that caused so many to become what these poor people were, and I thought if they had lived just another year, they might have been victims, they might be out there. Someone’s parents, brothers, sisters, husbands, you name it, were out there. It was only luck that had caused us and so many others to take flu shots that year, and the flu shots saved us, even though there had never been a flu like this one. Just that simple thing, a flu shot, had saved many from dying and coming back. Those who hadn’t taken the shot, and got the flu, they got worse, died, and came back.
All of this was running through my head, and then I saw the woman. She had on the orange jump suit I had bought for her, and she was staggering toward the meat on the other side of the line.