On the wall are four long filleting knives. Three of them are as shiny and clean as the corner of an eye. The fourth hasn’t been cleaned at all and has a crust of blood along its blade, concluding at the tip in a tiny black ball. Fingers have splashed up to grab these knives over and over again, leaving a heavy encaustic of blood on the wall behind their handles. A spotted bare lightbulb is suspended over the bench below the knives. Strips of newspaper are permanently plastered to the wood surface, dozens of bright corners crossed by black angles. Most of what has been done here has been done quickly and sloppily. Some of what has been done here has been carefully executed, caught before it rolled to the floor and wrapped. To the left of the bench along a back wall sits a long white freezer. Its top edge is browned by a dragging apron and the knuckles of a large man, like faint hinges, have stained the seal.
Jimmy is sitting in a corner behind the door on an overturned bucket. He has been staring directly at the lightbulb, trying to blind himself. The light has long stopped hurting his eyes. The brightness eating at the centre of his vision is no longer white. Long green wires whip and shrivel across its surface. Patterns of black zeros rise to the top and blot out the light in a throb before sinking back to burn off. Jimmy hears a scrape on the floor beside him. He looks down and his vision is as solid as a jelly bean. He thinks it must be an animal.
What kind? Rat?
The door opens, and he turns his head to face it. A dark green tower leans off the shattering scales of a gold river coming through the door. Towards him. Jimmy looks down, blinking. No light. Darkness.
“Jimmy? Are you
OK
?”
Julie walks over to the bench and drops a bucket of raspberries on the corner. She swings a hatchet up to rest between the two nails that hold its neck to the wall. Jimmy blinks in a frenzy, trying to find his feet on the floor. The scales that exploded through the room when Julie entered have now fallen to the ground. They lie around him in a carpet of dull orange. Jimmy extends the toe of his running shoe, pushing the scales. A large fly lands in the pile like a fat bomb and vibrates against Jimmy’s foot. Its energy tickles the undersides of his toes. Jimmy presses down, killing the fly.
“It smells in here, Jimmy. Ugh. Fish guts.”
She looks at her brother. Behind him on the wall hangs a wooden board with the prices of fresh fish written in felt pen. Jimmy has an empty space in his saucer-sized pupils. Julie walks over to him and squeezes his little shoulders against her side.
“We can clean this place up. There’s a stove, a freezer. Everything we need, Jimmy. I don’t even care if you never talk again. What’s there to say anyway?”
Jimmy hangs a fistful of shirt off his sister. Colours are returning to the room.
Over the next few days the children are busy, sweeping fish scales from the floor, soaping down the dried blood and creating a pantry of wild foods on shelves over the freezer. They self-consciously copy their parents,
and Julie occasionally calls her brother by his father’s name — “Good morning, George.” Even Jimmy’s silence begins to resemble his father’s. His blunt jerks of the head — “No,” “Yes.” They become a way of telling his wife that
Yes, I am my father.
And by the end of the week they have created a veritable homestead out of the fish-cleaning hut.
One thing, however, is beginning to pose a serious threat to their survival. Their diet is lacking certain food groups, and because of this they are growing weak. By the fifth day Jimmy returns to his bucket. He no longer responds to his sister. A hungry fear has made her frantic. She has begun to hear things and has taken to running outside every five minutes, only to return, asking: “George, did you hear that?”
A few days later, in the afternoon, Julie rose from the floor beside Jimmy and dashed to the door for the sixth time. It opened on a man who had been listening.
Grant Mazzy stood, surprised, looking down at the girl with the burnt, skinny face. He opened his mouth to call out for Greg, when a hatchet whacked his knee, cleaving the cap into free halves. He reached up into the air as the cap halves rolled under skin to meet at the back of his leg. A second whack of the hatchet released a sandwich-sized pair of intestinal loops. He reached down, gloving his hand inside the base of his abdomen. A deep and desperate flex of muscle, still clinging, bent his fingers back. A third whack cleared the hand from his arm, dropping it, like a coin tossed from a balcony, deep into his torso. The hand turned backward off the bottom of his heart and sprang back
up from a mattress of lung, landing, finally, to rest, partially clenched, in a rack of ribs. These ribs lay across the threshold at the front of the hut. The ribs were protecting the hand as best they could as blows reigned down from above, but soon they too collapsed under the silver eye of the hatchet.
Jimmy looks through the fingers that cage his face. Julie’s body is dripping with the blood of the now nearly liquid intruder.
“C’mon, George, gimme a hand here.”
Soon the bottom of the freezer is lined with heavy oblong objects neatly bundled in newspaper. Each bundle is clearly labelled in felt-tip marker:
shoulder, calf, upper arm, lower back, tongue.
In the days that follow, the children lay out elaborate meals on the picnic table in the evening shade of a birch tree behind their home.
At night they go to sleep on the floor as husband and wife, rocking their tiny hips together in sexual intercourse. During the third week of their residence a tiny sperm cell turns on a fatal dime, throws open the front door of a very modern egg, and strolls down the hall where his wife is busy mixing martinis. They kiss and tug at each other’s clothes until they, too, are fucking like happy children.
Greg is certain he’s going insane. He is sitting at the picnic table waiting for Grant, who went around the back of the shack some time ago, to return. His thinking has become deformed in repetition and crude rhymes. He notices his thoughts tear off in directions he cannot control. So he doesn’t control them, including himself instead in an audience that has crammed the stands overlooking a racetrack. Greg allows others to watch the progress of monsters toward the finish line. He discovers that he can survive in this crowd: anonymous, wordless, and undetected. He flicks a seedling from the table and it spins in the air on helicopter wings that carry it to the edge of the fresh graves beside the shack.
I am never going to become an adult.
A film running backwards streaks its tail around the track.
I don’t even think there is such a thing. I don’t think there are any adults anyway. I might as well be dead.
Greg hears his name being called out from behind. He turns toward the road that leads away.
His Higher Power is standing in the half-light. His clothes, usually so crisp and black, are white with dust. His face is streaked with sweat and his hair is hanging in white tips across his forehead. He raises his hands and gestures for Greg to come to him. Greg pushes up from the table and sees a tear fall from his face and drop into wood. It is quickly absorbed, darkening the dry pores only briefly.
I don’t want to die.
“I know.”
The Higher Power is sitting in the middle of the path and Greg is lying with his head in his arms. Dust from the Higher Power’s palm clings to Greg’s cheek and a single tear is held by it.
“You are going to die, Greg. You’re disintegrating. And soon you won’t exist.”
The Higher Power smiles and wipes his wet hand on Greg’s shirt. Greg looks down and pulls the fabric from his chest to look at the smear. He releases the shirt, sighing, and holds his hand over the wrist that rests across his neck.
“And I’m going to stay with you. Right here. We’ll wait here until you die.
OK
?”
Greg looks down to where the shade ends and the sun blazes down on the picnic table. A white moth leaps up from the grass and curves between the seat and the tabletop, disappearing momentarily before reappearing on the other side, where it drops again, almost heavy, into the lawn.
“
OK
.”
They sit in silence and watch a girl walking through the forest on the far side of the shack. She drops down occasionally, pulling at something in the ground. The Higher Power points to her, and Greg looks up to him, smiling.
The Higher Power squeezes Greg’s hand and it collapses limply.
The new summer sky is beginning to screw its harder caps of white down onto the forest. Jimmy is sitting at the picnic table looking down, cross-eyed, at the breath he exhales. Julie is tying a knot in a thick rope that lies across her knee. She stands, leaning against a tree, with one leg raised on a wide stump. Julie has devised a way of catching zombies. She lays a noose in the grass at the base of a tree and slings the rope up, across a branch and down along the tops of short shrubs. She stands with her brother as bait in the doorway. She has listened to the zombies at night, wandering lost, falling on branches and splashing through the stream. She has listened carefully to the quick, skipping syllables of their cry. She imitates this in the doorway with one hand around the rope and the other hand tightly around her brother’s wrist. Usually, within an hour, the children can hear the zombie approaching noisily, frantically, its cry now a panicky series of squeaks. If it steps into the circle, Julie and Jimmy run with the rope to the back of the shed, hurling with all their weight. They can feel the flying limbs of the creature in the jumps of the taut rope. They pull, battling to keep its balance foiled, until the zombie gives up. In that moment the children give a final tug, yanking its leg tight to the trunk of the tree. The cannibal is safely trapped, shaking its shoulders against the ground.
If the zombie doesn’t step into the circle, perhaps
surprising the children by bursting around the corner of the shack, Julie drops the rope and slams the door. The children wait inside, taking dangerous peeks outside, until the zombie, skulking and unable to leave, eventually steps into the trap.
Once it’s safely incapacitated, the children leap through the door and disable the zombie with hatchet whacks to its shins and stunning blows to its head. The rope is secured to its ankle and it’s given a length to move with at the base of the tree. Living, a zombie can be kept for weeks like this, until its meat is needed. There are four zombies tied to trees at edges of the surrounding forest. One of them should be harvested this morning. Julie is trying to figure out which it will be.
The zombie nearest her is a short, plump woman of about fifty years. She is wearing a pale-blue cotton dress, speckled with tiny yellow flowers. Her hair is dyed yellow and gathers, like a stiff nest, around a black matte above her temple. Her legs are thick and dirty. She is sitting on the ankle of a flat, dead foot. The foot had throbbed and burnt painfully at the end of her battered leg, so she ground it under her buttocks. Her shinbone has broken through the skin. She holds it firmly in her fist. She holds her leg still. The only pain now comes from a bright band of infection advancing up her thigh, a tingling light that marks the living flesh from the dead. She notices Julie watching her and lowers her head to scowl. The effort makes her throw up in her lap. Julie looks away.
Not for dinner.
The next zombie is in better shape. A little more appetizing. A teenage boy. A tiny, fresh body. He had
been easy to pull up the tree. There is very little damage and he appears to have recovered. He stands on both legs, alert, with hands slapping at his flat white stomach. When Julie approaches he throws himself onto his back and jerks around the ground in a seizure.
Maybe a little too lively.
Julie stops just beyond his reach. The teenage zombie stops bouncing. He looks up at her. His face is twisted in the affectation of the deranged, and he makes a pleading flinch with his eyebrows.
“Jimmy, can you give me a hand here for a second?”
Jimmy is crouching beside the picnic table around the corner of the shack. He’s balancing a brown-and-white rib cage with the top of his head, onto the black stump of spine. He is tying the joint frantically with binder twine. He moves his head forward carefully, until the ribs rest against the table edge. He brushes his hand across glossy maggot heads that poke out of the back of the cadaver. A complete human being.
He runs around the corner, drops to a crouch, and slides his hands in the grass to clean them.
“Look out!”
Jimmy has crouched within the circle of the first zombie, the woman Julie had just passed by. The zombie springs like a crab from the sand. She folds her arms around Jimmy’s upper body.
“Jimmy! Jimmy!”
Julie skids into the gravel and picks up the hatchet leaning against the wall. The woman has pinned Jimmy to the ground under her. Her twisted leg flaps once against her back, spinning her foot away. It smacks loudly against the shack. Julie raises the hatchet over
the back of the grunting disc that’s trying to devour her brother. She brings her weapon down, cleaving, halving the spine between the shoulders. The zombie’s limbs stop moving, but, against Jimmy’s clasped hands, its head continues sliding and shaking. He punches upward, knocking the zombie off him.
“Oh God! Oh God! Jimmy! Jimmy! Are you
OK
?”
Jimmy sits up, spitting between his knees. He waves his hand,
Yes.
“That one is no good at all. I’m gonna get rid of it.”
Jimmy touches his sister’s leg, leaving a dash of pink zombie vomit.
“What? What do you want?”
Jimmy stands between his sister and the zombie. He points to the picnic table.
“Oh … really? You want this thing at the table?”
Jimmy smiles, a little embarrassed.
“
OK
,
OK
, but let me kill it first.”
Jimmy shakes his head vigorously.
“No? No? You want it alive?”
Jimmy nods. His eyes sparkle. A dream come true.