Aleksandar Hemon: The Making of Zombie Wars

“Alma!” Joshua shouted.

“Alma! Come out!” Stagger went on. “You’re safe now! We’re here to take you home!”

She came out of the bathroom with a towel wrapped around her head and another one around the chest. She now looked like a blooming version of her mother, a lot more of her yet to come, a lot more damage to be done. Alma Except, a debutant at the hurt ball. Her toes were freshly painted pink, pieces of cotton still between her toes. She looked at Stagger in confusion.

“You okay?” Stagger asked. He was concerned; he was a good guy, a true searcher, if crazy, Stagger was. Caring about people and cats came naturally to him.

“Yeah,” she said. “I’m okay. I can take care of myself.”

Bega spoke to her in Bosnian and she looked at Joshua, shook her head, and laughed.

“Speak English!” Stagger demanded. “This is America!”

She went into the bedroom, closing the door behind.

“She’s fifteen, for God’s sake,” Joshua said.

“She is almost sixteen. And she is as old as she wants to be,” Bega said. “It’s not your fucking business anyway. This is not Iraq.”

Whereupon Joshua shoved him right between his cherry nipples and Bega head-butted him in return and Joshua stumbled backward, the spot between his eyes throbbing with blinding pain as Stagger charged from across the room and slammed into Bega like a linebacker and took him down, his howl comprised of injury and fury in equal measures. Joshua hit the floor and stayed down, recuperating enough to witness Bega and Stagger grotesquely wrestling on the carpet, until Stagger, howling still, ended up sitting on Bega’s chest, as Bega fought to wrangle Stagger’s unbroken hand away from his face and throw him off. “Keep his hands down, Jonjo!” Stagger shouted, and Joshua grabbed one of Bega’s wrists and pinned it with his knee; then he grabbed the other one and pulled his hand down, releasing Stagger to hit Bega’s face with the edge of his cast, and it felt good. Alma stepped out of the bedroom to freeze, framed by the door, naked except for the towel turban. Joshua was now holding down both of Bega’s arms, allowing Stagger, groaning with ache and pleasure, to rain mean blows on Bega’s face with care and precision, splitting the lip open first, then the brows, then smashing the nose, until the Bosnian was gurgling blood and Alma was jumping on Stagger’s back for him to throw her off with one twitch of his shoulders. She moved over to Joshua to scratch his face, so he had to let go of Bega’s arms, which were fortunately no longer moving, and sat up to shake her off him, but not before she left a red line across his chin. She flew off and landed hard, her head whiplashing against the floor. Stagger stopped beating Bega and looked in lunatic perplexion toward Alma. She was not moving. They held their breaths. Stagger sat still on top of Bega, his cast completely carmine. Bega looked too peaceful for comfort; his face was pulped, blood running every which way it could, losing itself among his facial hair, treacling toward his ear. When Alma gasped, Stagger punched Bega in the face one more time, presumably to celebrate her return to the world of the living.

“I got handcuffs,” Joshua said and whipped them out from his back pocket.

The exotic carpet was stained with blood. Stagger got off Bega and rolled him over, twisting his arms to fit them on his back. Joshua handcuffed him dexterously, as though he’d been doing it all his life, and, before Stagger high-fived him, threw the key across the room. Let Bega crawl on his face to find it.

Sob by little sob, Alma came to. They made her sit, concussed, on the sofa, her hands in her naked lap, a towel over her shoulders. Her little breasts drooped like runny dough. “Get dressed,” Joshua said as Stagger kicked Bega in the ribs one last time. “We’re taking you home.” Alma didn’t move or say anything. Joshua stripped a case off one of the pillows.

“I want the cat too,” he said. “Let’s get the cat.”

They turned the place upside down, far more than needed to find Dolly. Joshua felt his high come back as a feeling of strength and power: he ripped the paper lantern, kicked the table over, threw the window painting down, watched Stagger smash the few plates in the kitchen. Then Joshua dug through the closets, ripping out shirts and bedding and boxes of photos, while Stagger karate-kicked Bega’s computer off the stand and then demolished the bathroom, smashing the mirror.

“How’s this for a fuck-you!” screamed Stagger, leaning over the unconscious Bega. “You like it? You don’t? No? Well: fuck you!”

They found Dolly cowering under the messy bed, the bedroom now reeking of their perspiration. They shut the bedroom door and lifted the bed together to push it up against the wall, exposing aged, strewn socks and unclean underwear. Dolly desperately slipped out between them but then ran into the cul-de-sac at the shut door. Stagger deftly leapt to step on her tail; Joshua grabbed her, screeching like a banshee, by the scruff of her neck. “Hello, Dolly,” he said and stuffed her in the pillow case.

He threw at Alma the clothes he’d found in the bedroom. She looked up at him, grinding her teeth, anger bubbling up on her lips, still too dazed to say anything.

“Let’s roll,” Joshua said.

* * *

The T-shirt she wore was Bega’s and hung huge on her: IF THERE’S NO GOD, WHO POPS UP THE NEXT KLEENEX? Stagger buckled up this time around and offered his unbroken hand to Joshua for another high five and Joshua slapped it without thinking.

“Man!” Stagger shouted. “A-Team!”

His cast was completely red with blood. What was a wound had become a weapon. Joshua’s forehead hurt and he touched the goiterish swelling where he had been head-butted. Bega had come to and rolled up on his back before they left, attempting pathetically to spit in their direction, a glob of bloody saliva landing on his face, to their merriment.

“Mission accomplished! No casualties!” Stagger cried again. “I gotta tell you something, Jonjo. I’d go to combat with you anytime. It’s a no-brainer. Afghanistan, Rogers Park, Iraq, you name it. Anytime, anywhere. I’d fight with you by my side.”

They could hear the bagged Dolly howling from the car trunk, rolling side to side, back and forth as they made their turns, stopped and started. On their way to the Ambassador they got lost in a maze of one-way streets. Alma looked out the window silently at the kids waiting at a bus stop, at the sunlight reflected in the bagel shop window, at a gas station’s neon sign, pale in the morning light. Everything that had happened had happened so long before this moment that it hadn’t really happened. The Lord reviewed the whole of what he had done and, behold, he couldn’t remember a fucking thing.

“Did you see that operation, girl?” Stagger turned to ask Alma, who resolutely refused to look at him.

“Fuck you!” she said instead.

“What do you have to be angry about now?” Stagger said. “You’re free.”

“I must say,” Joshua said, “I understand why you are angry. Honestly, I do.”

Alma snorted and sighed; she wasn’t going to spend time thinking about what Joshua had to say, now or ever; she was never going to address a word to him again. For her as well, he was forever going to be salmonella. What can you do? Joshua thought. I can’t be liked by everybody. A man must make decisions; people don’t like to make decisions, so they don’t like deciders.

They stopped as the red eye of the streetlight flashed, cars huddled in the center of the intersection. The Ambassador was down the street. “You know what? Fuck all this,” Alma said calmly, opened the door, and slipped out of the car.

“Hey!” Stagger called after her. Joshua turned around in time to see her moving bouncily through the crowd. It would’ve been classy to deliver her home. Stagger unbuckled to follow, but by the time he got out of the car, she was running, fast and light and alive and unstoppable. She stopped at the Western light to wait for a break in the flow of speeding traffic, then ran across in long strides like an antelope. The young Ms. Except. Nobody was ever going to catch her. She was the first person, and she was going to be the last person. In the plain light of day, he understood it was time to let it all go — he saw that he should never see Ana again, as he saw that it was no longer night. He was now too strong for all that drama anyway. Perhaps even strong enough for Kimiko.