The guards react on instinct: they raise their guns and open fire on the zombies. An arm flies off. A leg. One of the anonymous nine loses a head and goes down. But not a single weapon points in my direction. Painting Julie’s face on the air in front of me, I sprint with Olympian focus. My stride is good, I can feel it, I look normal, alive, and so I snap neatly into a category: ‘Human’. Two more guards emerge with guns drawn, but they barely even look at me. They squint, they take aim at their targets, and they shout, ‘Go! Get in there, man!’
Two more zombies hit the ground behind me. As I slip in through the doors, I see M and the remaining Dead veer off and retreat. As they go, their gait suddenly changes. They lose their stumble and run like living things. Not as fast as me, not as graceful, but with purpose. The guards hesitate, the gunfire falters. ‘What the fuck . . . ?’ one of them mutters.
Inside the entrance is a man with a clipboard and a notebook. An immigration officer, ready to take my name and have me fill out a stack of request forms before most likely tossing me out. The Dead have depended on this man for years to provide us with the defenceless stragglers we eat in the ruins outside. He comes towards me, flipping through his notebook, making no eye contact. ‘Close call, eh, friend? I’m going to need you to—’
‘Ted! Look at this shit!’
Ted looks up, looks through the open doors, sees his fellow soldiers standing dumbstruck. He glances at me. ‘Wait right here.’
Ted jogs out and stops next to the guards, staring at the eerily animate zombies dashing off into the distant streets like real people. I imagine the look on the men’s faces, their stomachs bubbling with the queasy sensation that the earth under their feet is moving.
Momentarily forgotten, I turn and run. I run through the dark entry corridor towards the light on the other end, wondering if this is a birth canal or the tunnel to Heaven. Am I coming or going? Either way, it’s too late to reverse. Hidden in the gloom under a red evening sky, I step into the world of the Living.
The sports arena Julie calls home is unaccountably large, perhaps one of those dual-event ‘super-venues’ built for an era when the greatest quandary facing the world was where to put all the parties. From the outside there is nothing to see but a mammoth oval of featureless walls, a concrete Ark that not even God could make float. But the interior reveals the Stadium’s soul: chaotic yet grasping for order, like the sprawling slums of Brazil if they’d been designed by a modernist architect.
All the bleachers have been torn out to make room for an expansive grid of miniature skyscrapers, rickety houses built unnaturally tall and skinny to conserve the limited real estate. Their walls are a hodgepodge of salvaged materials – one of the taller towers begins as concrete and grows flimsier as it rises, from steel to plastic to a precarious ninth floor of soggy particle board. Most of the buildings look like they should collapse in the first breeze, but the whole city is supported by rigid webs of cable running from tower to tower, cinching the grid tight. The Stadium’s inner walls loom high over everything, bristling with severed pipes, wires, and spikes of rebar that sprout from the concrete like beard stubble. Under-powered street lamps provide dim orange illumination, leaving this snow-globe city smothered in shadows.
The moment I step out of the entry tunnel my sinuses inflame with an overwhelming rush of life-smell. It’s all around me, so sweet and potent it’s almost painful; I feel like I’m drowning in a perfume bottle. But in the midst of this thick haze, I can sense Julie. Her signature scent peeks out of the noise, calling out like a voice underwater. I follow it.
The streets are the width of sidewalks, narrow strips of asphalt poured over the old AstroTurf, which peeks through any unpaved gaps like garish green moss. There are no names on the street signs. Instead of listing off states or presidents or varieties of trees, they display simple white graphics – Apple, Ball, Cat, Dog – a child’s guide to the alphabet. There is mud everywhere, slicking the asphalt and piling up in corners along with the detritus of daily life: pop cans, cigarette butts, used condoms and bullet shells.
I am trying not to gawk at the city like the backwoods tourist I am, but something beyond curiosity is gluing my attention to every kerb and rooftop. As foreign as it all is to me, I feel a ghostly sense of recognition, even nostalgia, and as I make my way down what must be Eye Street, some of my stolen memories begin to stir.
This is where we started. This is where they sent us when the coasts disappeared. When the bombs fell. When our friends died and rose as strangers, unfamiliar and cruel.
It’s not Perry’s voice – it’s everyone’s, a murmuring chorus of all the lives I’ve consumed, gathering in the dark lounge of my subconscious to reminisce.
