The Undead That Saved Christmas Vol. 2 (13 page)

It was less than five minutes before NYPD shock troops swarmed the square, followed closely by FDNY paramedics. The viciousness of the attacks, broadcast live to literally millions of households all over America was stunning. I felt white heat burning behind my cheeks. I said, “This is something new. Oh my god, this is something big.”

“I seen this one before, Jackie,” A.J. said. “Can we turn it off?”

It was big. And despite A.J.’s assertion, none of us had seen anything like it before.

We did turn off the parade coverage. I popped in a DVD of
Home Alone
and left A.J. laughing in front of the television for a quick convocation with the others in the kitchen.

Everyone was clustered around the counter-top television watching the news coverage and speculating on what was going on back East. Tamika was the first one to use the word “zombie.” I remember turning to look at her and knowing she was right.

The epidemic developed quickly, flaring in cities all over the world like bursts of sickening magnesium. We watched television as long as we could get a feed, scrutinizing enormous CDC maps that showed outbreaks all across the globe. Cities went red—the color of Rage—before our eyes: Tokyo, Beijing, Jakarta, Sydney, London, Cairo (where my Mother was working), Chicago, and Toronto. Around the world entire populations succumbed to “the Rage.” We watched helplessly as cities, then nations, and then whole continents were transformed. The last CDC map was broadcast on the Thursday after Thanksgiving, flooding the Emergency Broadcast System with the final chilling self-portrait of an enraged species on the edge of extinction.

Before the satellite feeds went off the air, there was a lot of discussion of symptoms and vectors. The disease was apparently a rabidly aggressive virus that attacked the nervous system, shutting down higher neurological functions by “killing” the host, then reanimating the dead body by occupying the victim’s neural net. One of the guys from the CDC described it as the biological equivalent of computer slaving, where hackers in Latvia or Lithuania would infect personal computers here in the U.S. with carefully crafted viruses that allowed the controller to take over operations of the slave computers for their own nefarious purposes. “Latvia,” he said, “is the central processing station established by the virus inside the victim’s brain. The slave computers are your nerves, muscles, and memories.”

When he said that, the CNN producer cut to video of zombies going about activities from their daily lives: a zombie mother pushed a zombie child in a swing, a zombie in a tattered, bloody shirt made copies at a copy machine, a pair of zombie women shopped in a department store, zombie children waited at a bus stop. The CDC spokesman narrated the images. “What you see here is an imperfect viral control. The virus kills the human host in order to take neurological control, but traces of the individual remain intact, like when you wipe the hard drive of a computer and there are remnants— ghosts—of the files that were stored there. Human brains apparently work the same way when they are wiped like this. What we’re finding is that many compromised individuals are continuing to participate in hard-wired habits—going to work, shopping, exercising, going to school—and of course, many of them are retaining an instinctual need to protect family members, especially spouses and children. It’s truly phenomenal, but we want to be very clear that these are no longer human individuals. Max, can you show that clip from Cincinnati? Right, so what you’re seeing here is a jogger. You can see he’s still wearing the clothes in which he was infected—the white shirt and tie and the remnants of maybe, what are those? Leather loafers of some kind? —but look at him. He looks like he’s out for an afternoon jog, arms loose, legs pounding the pavement. We see none of the characteristic stumbling or jaunty walking in this guy while he’s jogging —okay, now watch this part. Right, my producer is asking me to warn you that this scene may be too graphic for some viewers. Here it is, watch this.” On the screen a sleek collie approached the jogger, sniffing and circling like he was confused by the disconnect between what he was smelling—dead meat—and what he was seeing—a moving human. The dog came too close and the jogger leapt on him with an insect’s agility, tearing the dog apart as the video cam continued to record. “Do you see that? At some point we think the virus overrode the habit-controlled motion of the host and took over. When he leapt on the dog, that was clearly the virus in control and we’re getting more and more reports of people being attacked in the same way. We’re not sure what the trigger is, but we’re thinking there’s some kind of scent trigger. And that’s why we are recommending you keep as much distance between yourselves and these compromised hosts as you possibly can.”

Compromised hosts
, he called them.
Zombies
, Tamika had said.

We watched reports like these in awed silence.

Of course in the end, the CDC guy got some of it wrong. The earliest theories indicated the virus was only transmitted through saliva. While it was true that saliva was a clear and rapid vector of infection, the theory did not explain the astonishing speed with which the virus spread. By the time the German government issued a warning about widespread drinking water contamination and began speculating about a human-engineered supervirus, it was too late.

We watched the world die in seven days.

* * *

From the beginning we bickered about what to tell A.J.. I’d made a conscious effort to prevent him from watching the satellite feeds until I could figure out how to talk to him about the enormity of what was happening outside. Anna said there was no reason to tell him since it would only upset him. Aunt Holly and Belle thought we needed to talk to him and make sure he understood what was going on and what it would mean for all of us. Shangri La had been designed for an eventuality such as this one and, although it was never completed, it seemed likely we could live out the rest of our lives here.

About three or four days into the epidemic I was up in my bedroom watching news coverage from Berlin when Holly and Belle appeared in my doorway.

“Jackie, I think it’s time to talk to A.J.,” Holly said.

“I’m not sure what to tell him yet,” I said.

“Go see him, honey.” Holly’s eyes were glistening and her hand trembled on the doorframe.

I jumped to my feet. “Is he okay?”

“He’s okay, Jack.” Belle answered me. “We just think he knows.”

“How can he
know
?”

“You know how he is.”

Unfortunately I knew exactly how he was. He was an empath, an oracle who dispensed his secrets in musical theater patois.

A.J. had what my mother sometimes called consolation prizes from God. She always sounded a little crass when she said that, or a little maudlin, but what she meant was that although A.J.’s cognitive abilities were seriously impaired he had other skills nobody could really explain. He had a startling ability to store and retrieve data, but only if he valued it, and he mostly valued song lyrics, specifically show tunes. He could sit down and sing the entire libretto from
The Phantom of the Opera
—a wailing, off-key, word-for-word performance—but when you asked him to tell the story, he talked about how the Phantom was sad and angry and then he was in love, but then he was jealous and angry again. Although he had all the words at his disposal, his sense of the narrative was based entirely on emotion. Despite the fact that he seemed unable to connect the lyrics with the plot of his beloved musicals, he often used lines from those very musicals to describe his emotions, providing us with a musical-theater shorthand that could be perplexing to the uninitiated. And sometimes he made miraculous leaps, pulling information out of thin air and conveying it to us in lyrical form.

So I was not surprised to find A.J. sprawled on the floor of the living room in front of the fireplace with his iPod blasting in his ears, sobbing.

I nudged his foot with my own and he sat up, drawing his body into a loose fetal position and staring at me over his knees.

“Give me the iPod,” I said, holding out my hand and pointing.

He pulled the earbuds out of his ears, paused the music, and handed it to me.

“Am I in trouble?” he asked.

“No. I just want to talk to you.”

“Is this ‘bout them people?”

“Is that why you’re crying? About those people?” I asked.

He nodded and wiped his nose with the back of his hand.

“How do you feel about those people?” I asked.

“Empty chairs at empty tables,” he said. A song from
Les Misérables
sung by a man whose companions have all been killed in the streets of Paris during a student uprising.

“So you know what happened?” I asked.

“There’s a pain goes on and on,” he said. Another line from the song.

“That’s right. A lot of people died out there.”

“Are they gonna hurt us?”

“No. We’re safe here.”

He nodded and ran his fingers along the edge of the carpet, his lips moving like he was singing under his breath.

“It’s okay to be sad about the people,” I said.

I was holding his iPod in my hands and watching silent tears stream down his face.

“Did the bad people come to the parade?” he asked.

“Yes. It started at the parade.”

“Mom and Dad are gone, you know.” He looked up at me with clear brown eyes.

We hadn’t heard from them. We tried calling their cell phones, but the lines were jammed and then we had watched Cairo and Munich turn red on the CDC maps without word from either of them.

“I think you’re right, A.J.. I don’t think they’re coming back.”

“They’re
not
coming back.” He was emphatic, resigned. “But about the parade…” He let the sentence dangle for a long time.

I tried to wait him out, but I couldn’t. “What about it?”

“Did the bad people kill Santa Claus?”

“Um…” His question surprised me. He knew there was no Santa Claus, but we had an agreement that if he pretended there was a Santa Claus, he could still get a stocking and gifts every year. He’d been honoring the conceit since we were children.

“We can’t let the bad people kill Santa Claus,” he said.

“Well what the fuck else am I supposed to do?” I was in the kitchen with Anna, Aunt Holly and Belle, Bo and Tamika, and Uncle Danny. A.J. was upstairs in his room listening to “We Need a Little Christmas” from
Mame
over and over.

“You could make do,” Holly said.

“There’s plenty of stuff here to decorate with, Jack.” Anna was stirring a huge pot of chili.

“He wants a tree,” I said. “And lights and stockings and presents. He wants Christmas and we don’t have any decorations or anything here and I don’t want to give him some bullshit substitute.”

“You’re being irrational,” Holly said. “It’s only been three weeks since the Thanksgiving. You know it’s still going to be a mess out there. Can’t we just make do this year and go down the mountain next year?”

“We can find a beautiful Christmas tree up on the mountain,” Tamika said.

I looked at Uncle Danny. “I think we need to go now, load up the delivery truck with all the crap we can haul up here, and while we’re down there we can get the Christmas stuff for A.J.. C’mon Danny, you were talking about this a couple of days ago.”

“I think we should do it,” he said. “We’re going to need some tools and provisions and we need to get out and back before the big snows start—we’re already looking at maybe driving up and down the mountain with chains—”

“Which is exactly why we should wait until spring.” Holly’s cheeks were red and there were tears in her eyes. “You don’t know what’s out there.”

Danny shrugged. “At least if we go now, we know we can make it back before the road becomes impassable.”

“You don’t know that. You don’t know
anything
. There could be a blizzard sweeping down from Canada right now and you would have no way of knowing.”

There was a lot of arguing, tears and recriminations, but in the end both Danny and Bo volunteered to come with me. Aunt Holly’s partner Belle talked Bo into staying behind and letting her take his place in the truck. As a physician and an NRA member she felt like she could be useful on the road and she wanted to get some supplies from the pharmacy while we were in town. So we loaded up the back of the truck with extra fuel, cash (just in case), empty boxes and duffel bags, and headed through the gates of Shangri La for the first time since the end of the world.

We made it down the mountain without incident, driving past a series of dark, deserted houses and gas stations. The day was warmer than we’d expected so the roads, though covered in slush, were not dangerously icy. We made good time, reaching the outskirts of Blessed Prospect just before noon. We drove in silence past deserted houses and stores. There were a handful of abandoned cars—some with open doors, others crashed into buildings or trees—but the town was surprisingly, alarmingly empty. An enormous Christmas tree stood in the central square and strings of Christmas lights crisscrossed the streets. A banner in front of the City Hall advertised the Christmas Carnival.

“Is that tonight?” Belle asked.

“It’s the seventeenth,” Danny said. “But I’m guessing attendance might be off this year.”

We made stops at a Wal-Mart with a pharmacy, two grocery stores, a hardware store, an automotive supply shop, and a small camping outfitters store, loading the truck with supplies without encountering a single person, living, dead, or enraged.

On the far side of town, we busted through the back door of Molly’s Christmas Emporium and loaded the truck with strings of lights, ornaments, stockings, a trio of large, artificial trees, eight singing reindeer, a Santa suit, Christmas dishes, wrapping paper, and ribbons.

When we left Molly’s the sun had dropped low on the horizon, throwing shadows across the streets and giving everything a pink-orange tint. The Christmas tree lights in the square and the lights hanging over the deserted streets glowed cheerfully in the half light.