Cameron Pierce - Abortion Arcade

Pym’s mouth opens in a scream that is silenced by the helicopter’s deafening roar.

The zombie swings level to her.

Climb, Pym, climb. It’s not over yet.

The zombie punches her in the face. Her left hand loses grip of the ladder. The zombie reaches for her right hand as she struggles to regain her balance. If only she were stable, I could lift the helicopter and pull her up. Now it’s too late.

Robbie grabs my hand and squeezes tightly. He smiles and drops my hand. I want to ask him what the fuck he thinks he’s doing, but he jumps out of the helicopter before I get the chance.

Robbie plummets with his arms outspread like wings.

He crashes into the zombie attacking Pym. The undead aggressor tries to hold on but falls after Robbie, leaving two rotted arms clutching the ladder.

Robbie and the armless zombie explode in a shower of blood on impact.

I’m staring at the mess they’ve left behind when Pym puts herself into the helicopter. I smile at her and set the helicopter into motion.

My bad leg feels like it’s burning to ash on the inside.

Will she bleed to death?

Followed by countless dead in their flying machines, we head east toward the risen sun.

The zombies in their helicopters close in around us, blasting fireballs and diminishing our survival rate by the second. We clear the great wall. If we die now, at least Pym and I will die together in the free world. The flames dance under us like a field of grass in summer. The gigantic zombies loom ahead and above. I press some dials on the control panel and the helicopter veers upward in a vertical ascent. We’ll never make it. The people houses are too tall.

I grab Pym’s left hand and close my eyes, bracing myself to explode in a rain of fire and blood. “I love you,” I shout, but my voice is sucked from my mouth by the din of the helicopters.

I remember a lesson about death that Bill once taught.

“Dying feels good, studies report,” he said. When someone said they knew firsthand that dying hurt, Bill shook his head and sighed and said, “It feels good because we fear it so damn much, and then we learn in our last gasp that it’s easy. It’s getting there that’s hard and scary. That hard and scary part is only life.”

I open my eyes to a scratchy wetness against my cheek.

Pym is licking my face. I look at her questioningly. She smiles, shrugs. Seeing her smile, I no longer feel scared. I smile back at her. I guess it must be easier to get through all the hard and scary parts that make up a life if you have someone to share them with.

The zombies regulated our mating habits not only to produce the best genetic crop, but to alienate us from our essential nature, the throbbing, aching muscle that stirs our blood into a frenzied howling panic. When you have no one to turn to, no one to play games with, then you’re no better than the undead. We are all so much worse alone, and aren’t we always alone? Not me anymore. I’m in love.

Pym’s wounds appear to have healed. The bleeding has stopped, at least. I don’t want to ask her how it happened.

Prodding this miracle might ruin the magic.

The zombie giants are moving now. They swing their massive hands in our direction, blocking out the sun and pitching the bright morning into darkness. I think they are going to crush us or slap us out of the sky, but their hands go on flying by, swirling up gusts of wind that rock our helicopter off its course.

We careen end over end as gargantuan hands and faces pass by. In the fragmentary rearview glimpses I get as we flip, I see that the zombie houses are uprooting themselves entirely from the ground. They swim together as a mass bigger than the sky, and they prevent the pursuing helicopters from passing. Maybe the giants retained some memory of when they were human. Whatever the reason, they have saved us.

The zombie trees are thinning now. In the distance, tall dark forms jut out from the horizon like so many wedding towers.

“Do you think there are more giants?” Pym says. Now that the army of helicopters has fallen far behind us, we can speak and hear each other.

“No,” I say.

We’re so rattled there isn’t anything more to say, until the zombie trees vanish entirely from the ground beneath us. We’re flying over a flat gray field. The dark forms we saw in the distance rise taller in our view, rising high as the zombie trees. The dark forms do not look alive. They look like the wedding tower, only sadder and taller. These buildings are thin, wavering rusty things with broken windows.

Crashed helicopters and other broken machines lie in decaying heaps on the ground like the scars of a broken face.

A yellow circle crossed over by straight yellow lines is painted on the top of each tall building. I recognize these as helicopter landing pads from the identical markings on the hands of the giants.

I press a few buttons and take the helicopter in for a landing. My guts settle back into their proper place as the helicopter slows down and descends. Flying must be disastrous for a person’s health.

After we land, Pym and I sit still in the helicopter for a minute, silent and shocked that we have walked out on our old life, but we are here. We are alive.

We crawl out through the same side, hand in hand, afraid to part from each other for even a second. We walk to the edge of the building and look out on a dead skyline. We can see for miles, and in those miles we see nothing move.

“This must be City,” Pym says.

I pull her away from the edge, feeling cold and vaguely disappointed. She’s right.

This must be City, but where are the people? Where is the civilization Bill spoke so much about? All gone. Dead, I suppose.

Pym and I walk to the other side of the rooftop, where an open doorway leads into the building like a tight black mouth.

We walk down some stairs until we come to a red door.

We open the red door, which leads down some more dark stairs, which lead to another red door, which leads to more dark stairs, which lead to another red door, which leads to more dark stairs, which leads to a white door that looks as if it is made of clouds.

“Do you remember playing Cloud Castle?” Pym asks.

I open the cloud door and pass through the doorway first. I’m not ready to confess to her how much our little games still mean to me. I want that to be a special moment. Maybe we can play Cloud Castle again, now as adults with a real future together.

We both gasp as we look around at the things piled in the room. I’d half-expected the doors to continue leading to staircases forever, but the cloud door has led us somewhere special. We’re in a room stacked wall to wall, floor to ceiling, with magical glittery packages marked FOOD.

We will finally eat what people eat. We will finally eat a meal that isn’t made of people.

“Do you think it’s safe to eat?” Pym asks.

“Of course,” I say. “It’s food, isn’t it?”

She flashes a skeptical smile and kisses me on the cheek before moving toward the nearest wall of packaged foodstuffs. It takes us a few minutes to figure out how to open the packages, then we’re tearing them open as fast as we can manage, examining the food before casting it aside.

We’re too afraid to put any of this stuff in our mouths. The food looks so strange and unfamiliar, but the packages are so much fun to open.

“Wait,” Pym says. “This seems wasteful. For all we know, this is the last food in all of City. We can’t burn through our whole supply. Why don’t we gather up the food we think looks best and then have a feast? It will be like a wedding feast.”

“Our wedding feast?” I ask.