John Adams - The Living Dead 2

Tweak flipped him off and tapped the sign on the decks: NO GRATEFUL DEAD-PLEASE DON’T ASK.

The second floor was a loft where the DVDs were stored. The new occupants had replaced the old staircase with a cantilevered drawbridge.

A couple semi-feral kids came hopping down the stairs to meet him, chanting, “Pizza! Pizza!” Black circles under their eyes. Bleeding gums. The adults looked worse.

Eagle dropped the stack of pies on the table and immediately wished he’d brought more. Fourteen hungry people converged on the boxes, making noises like Ernie’s broken worker.

“Dude, thanks for coming out,” Lester Wiley rolled over and pumped his hand. “You’re a lifesaver. I don’t have one of those pen things…”

Eagle sat on a milk crate next to Lester’s wheelchair and passed him a fat joint. “No sweat. You got the Sly Stone and Hendrix catalogs on vinyl?”

“If the kids haven’t burned ’em. Little Philistines melted most of the classic rock to make into swords and throwing stars and shit…” Lester’s eyes glistened as he watched his people eat. “Really, thanks for coming out, man…”

“It’s just a couple pizzas, Les. How’re you guys living out here?”

Lester lit up and took a stupendous hit. “It’s not easy, but when was it ever? At least the traffic’s gone.”

“Haven’t seen you in ages. When did you come back?”

Lester sketched out the last year and change since he and his gang left the City to try a commune in the San Joaquin Valley. “Everywhere else was worse, so we came home. But we’re not going back in the Green Zone, man. Don’t know why you stay.”

“Because it’s safe.”

“Nowhere’s safe. At least out here-”

“You’re not safe out here.” You’re not safe from them.

“We’ve been here a couple months, and it was working out pretty good… There’s a cistern in the park, behind Kezar Stadium, and we had gardens on the roof under pressurized tents-”

“What do you mean, you had gardens?”

“Last night, somebody burned us out.”

Gracie took Eagle up to the roof. Rows of burst bubbles and black crops. Gracie spat in the ashes. “Whole thing went up before we got up here. Chimi was on guard duty, but he was huffing something last night. He said he saw-”

Eagle said, “Toy helicopters.” He ran back downstairs.

Lester followed him, passed him the joint. Eagle stubbed it out. “You guys gotta get out of here today. Now.”

Lester coughed. “No way. We’ve got everything we need here. If they’d just leave us alone-”

“They can’t leave you alone. They need you-” He stopped. “Did you hear that? Turn down the music!”

It sounded like thunder.

It was dark in the back of the garbage truck. Soothing miasma of rot inside, pushing out bad thoughts. In the dark, in the stench, #24 couldn’t see the new recruits, couldn’t smell their freshly welded metal and plastic new-corpse stink.

The Commander’s voice recited a litany in his ear, over and over. The pre-engagement medpak spikes made him restless. When that happened, #24 got bored, and he started to picture something else happening, and remembering it, or imagining it. Wishing…

“Hold and contain. Wait for the gas to clear. Target center-of-mass. No headshots. Don’t screw your Dungeon Master, kids…”

On and on. Over and over, like teaching a parrot to talk. If something else happened, anything, it would be better.

One of the Raiders moaned, a low, hungry sound in the dark. The others took it up. They did it every time. The drugs and the voice in their ears wound them up, so they must be getting close.

A flat, deafening boom lifted the truck and stood it up on its back wheels, then dropped it on its side. The Raiders were thrown into a pile. #24 was on top, but he couldn’t move. Static chewed his ears.

The rear hatch hissed. Jerry the handler pried it open with a crowbar.

“Motherfuckers,” he kept saying, like a parrot. Blood streamed from his ears and hundreds of cuts all over his face and chest that shone like rubies-half-melted glass embedded in his skin. “Used our own fuckin’ mines on us, Tooz…” Woozily, he punched #24 in the shoulder. “Fuck ’em up, O-Town!”

“What is the fucking situation out there, over?” The Dungeon Master screamed in their ears. “Gordo, Jerry… where are my dogs, goddamit?”

Jerry sat down in the street and lit a cigarette, started coughing. Blood squirted out of the holes in his neck. The Raiders spilled out of the trash truck. Three of them rushed Jerry and tore him apart. They looked funny to #24, trying to stuff gobbets of steaming meat into their toothless mouths and into their rubber food-tubes.

“Raiders! Sound off, you cocksuckers!”

#24 growled at the PDA duct-taped to his forearm and tapped the touchscreen. Green dots on the map were friends. The red spot on the edge of the map was hot. Move closer, get warmer. Feels good. When you were hot, you got to fight.

“#24, you’re my quarterback, baby! Are you the only one left? Fuck… The transmitter in the truck is toast, I’m rerouting through here. I can’t see shit on the satellites, and my air support is a fuckin’ noob. And I’m pretty much talking to myself right now, huh?”

#24 counted his comrades, tapping the touchscreen six times… Two Raiders still lay in the back of the truck. One flopped from the waist down. The other one’s head was twisted around backwards, and could only bite his own back.

“OK, helmet-cams are live… Fall in, bitches, it’s medication time!”

As one, the Raiders jerked to attention. Their medpaks whined under their helmets, pumping drugs and barrages of electroshock to jump-start sluggish, decaying synapses. Shreds of Jerry’s septic gut dangled from the facemasks of the three backsliders, but they shambled into the huddle.

The new guys were stripped. Slim green metal tanks jutting out of their chests, stuffed with C4 bricks.

They marched in staggered formation along both sidewalks, hugging the scorched brownstone townhouses and concrete lofts that lined Haight Street.

On their screens, the meaningless map glowed red in the direction of west. #24 took point with a sixty-caliber SAW in his hands.

The Dungeon Master spoke in his ear, coaxing them around piles of wrecked cars and booby traps. “Okay, you’re coming up on the park, go left, you’re getting warmer…”

#24 didn’t need directions. His brain glowed, pulsing in time with the Red Zone on the map. The light from the intense shocks sparked behind his dull gray eyes and through the bulletholes in his black and silver helmet, making him look like a wrathful, dick-swinging god of the underworld.

The mix downstairs rudely cut out, and Bob Marley’s “Iron Lion Zion” shook rat turds out of the record store’s rafters. It was their burglar alarm.

The pizza feast disbanded with fire drill discipline. Even the kids grabbed guns. Tweak pulled a metal chain to drop the steel curtains in front of the store, but something roared out in the street and burst through the plywood and plastic windows. It burst in midair before crashing at their feet. A canister flooded the loft with yellow smoke.

Eagle pulled on his mask and pushed Lester’s chair away from the gas. Gracie herded the kids and the pedal-pushers towards the rooftop stairs, but she dropped dead before she could say the words.

Eagle shouted, “Masks! Get your masks-” Most of them had masks or filters around their necks, but the gas rolled over them before they could spit out their pizza. Half a dozen of them died in a sprawling pile at the foot of the stairs. A kid rolled on the floor clawing at her mask, drowning in her own vomit.

Lester slid out of his chair and tumbled to the floor.