The Last: A Zombie Novel (2 page)

"It is like that," he told me, or words to that effect, then went on to make his own comparison which was totally different. "Think of it like diabetes. Once you've got it you can't go back, and one lapse can lead to serious complications."

I decided I would think of it as a saggy balloon from that time forward. I don't have brain-diabetes. I just don't.

"Complications like what?"

"Like more comas. Like death."

I was sitting in my hospital bed, in a lovely clean white ward that at the end looked out over Central Park, a bright green contrast against the hospital's sterility. My family had all come in and out hours earlier, quietly of course, and now I was surrounded by bobbing foil balloons in the shape of skeleton and zombie heads, just my kind of thing. My doctor stood at the end of my bed, and I had this revelation: he doesn't have a clue. He doesn't have a goddamned clue what he's talking about.

"So for the saggy balloon," I said, refusing to talk diabetes, "I should try to keep away from blowing it up. How can I do that?"

He actually took off his glasses then. I suppose this was sincere. He wagged them in his hands as he made his points.

"Your family tell me you were under a lot of stress when it happened. You're an artist, yes?"

I nodded.

"Art is tricky. It does things to the brain we don't understand. You don't seem to have any other risk factors, nothing genetic, nothing in your system, only the stress of what you were working on. Was anything else stressful in your life at the time?"

I cast my mind back, but I couldn't think of anything. It was work; I was making the panels for my biggest project yet, an anthology horror piece I was editing that several online stores had already agreed to feature prominently. I'd set it up, bringing eleven other artists on board. It was a big deal for me.

"There was pressure, but not overwhelming. I can't think of anything else."

He sighed. "You won't like to hear this then. I'll put it bluntly. We think you may be allergic to art."

"What?"

He held up his hands. "I know, that's not possible. But your brain is highly abnormal, Amo. Over the course of your coma we've studied you a lot. Some of the best researchers in the country were here, trying to untangle the maze of contradictory data. For all the world it looked like your brain was a fever map, with lights flashing on and out, changing constantly. Some areas seemed to burn out, the ones we normally ascribe to creativity, then just as quickly they reformed. We thought we saw cancers growing, we were ready to operate, but they receded. You died and you came back multiple times. Your brain is essentially entirely new, having regrown itself many times. We don't understand it at all. You'll be a case study for years to come. I honestly don't know how complications will manifest."

I sat there dumbly.

"So I can only advise," he went on. "I'd advise you to avoid stimulation of any kind, particularly any kind of artistic endeavor, plus the parts of the brain associated with romantic love- they lit up some of the brightest. It was like fourth of July in your head."

I frowned at him. He seemed to regret that last phrase. He put his glasses back on and nodded, as though confirming something I'd said.

"Don't do art," he said. "Don't fall in love. It's what I have to advise. I'd prescribe you drugs, Xanax or another sedative mood-stabilizer, but I've no idea what that might do with your fragile brain chemistry. We can't take the risk."

I mull this over. No art? No love?

"So what can I do then?"

"You can recover. Read old books you've read before. Boredom is your bandage."

"What about movies?"

"If they're very dull, or old. Black and white would be best. I have to also advise you against any act of sex. The stimulation could trigger a relapse. However it may be wise to masturbate once a week, as clinically as you can, to avoid any kind of hormone build up. Again I'd prescribe for that, but I don't think it wise. There's too much risk."

I stared at him. Already the first of the twinges was beginning to kick in. "You want me to masturbate clinically?"

He shifted uncomfortably. "As clinically as possible. Use very soft porn if you must."

"Because if I get too excited, I might die?"

"Or worse."

"Or worse? What could be worse than dying?"

The doctor shrugged. "Some would say a never-ending coma is worse. I've never been in a coma, so I wouldn't know. I imagine if you never wake up though, then you may as well be dead. It's just a horrible, powerless delay."

"I woke up this time."

"You did. Who can say, really?"

"Who can say?" I repeated. I slumped back on my pillows, with the twinge ramping up to migraine proportions.

2 – CERULEAN

For the last hour at Sir Clowdesley I fight off the headache, but it comes anyway, rolling over me in waves. I close my eyes and pretend I'm listening to music, when in fact I've got nothing but white noise coming through my headphones.

Lara pops in and out of my thoughts, bringing twinges of excitement. I can't believe I actually asked her out, taking such risks. It has been an exceptionally boring year.

I leave Sir Clowdesley at 7pm, checking out as mayor before I step through the door. New York awaits me, and 23rd street is chilly for spring, getting dark already. The faint smell of diesel and pizza hangs in the air, mingled with sweet orange blossoms from Madison Square Park a few blocks over. Cars buzz by angrily, a pedestrian flood flows with them, and I fold smoothly into their mass.

Halfway to the subway my phone vibrates in my pocket as a message slots in. I fish it out and bring up the notifications. It's a message from Cerulean, my Deepcraft friend.

The darkness awaits! Fresh bric-a-brac available.

I smile and tap out a quick reply.

Ready to do my duty.

I take the stairs to the subway and descend to the 6-line platform, filled with sweaty commuters irritable after another day's work. Some guy wearing a big headset has his techno playing too loud, and a few complaints have already been fired onto the station's Jeo-locked bulletin board. They can't make him turn it down, but they'll all feel better for venting.

On the platform an advert scrolls lazily across the tunnel wall, for the big superhero movie they've been building to since 2016, the concluding part to the trilogy that took the world by storm: Ragnarok III. They say everyone's going to die. It looks great, but I don't suppose I'll be watching it. I try every now and then with tamer movies that pop up on Saturday mornings, but when I feel a twinge I switch off.

I get on the train and ride it home. Podcasts talk to me about crafting techniques in Deepcraft and the latest mods. It's soothingly mundane. Did I know an augur can drill platinum but it can't drill titanium deposits? Actually I did.

The train arrives in Mott Haven, South Bronx, and I get out. On the street the air feels clearer, with few skyscrapers looming overhead and Willis Playground just across the way. It's a nice place to live.

Soon my redbrick tenement building is in front of me. I rent a room in the top back, a tiny rooftop garret fit for a starving artist, all I need and can afford. I enter and go up the stairs to the fourth floor where my room is tucked into the eaves.

The sloping roof cuts it in half diagonally, with a big skylight and a little window at the end. On the walls I have my street art; a few Banksy prints including the one of the guy throwing a bunch of flowers, a fake Space Invader space invader in yellow and green tile, and one large print of the vinyl faces on Mumbai rooftops by JR. 

Other than that there's my bed, chair, and desk with top-range computer; last vestige of the days when I had a little money to reinvest.

In the kitchenette corner I brew a cup of decaffeinated green tea and warm up some frozen spaghetti bolognese. I don't eat much these days; I just don't have the appetite. I take a hot sip of green tea while the microwave blasts the food. The bitterness is refreshing, and the tannins will surely help with my brain's ongoing detox.

I slot into my chair, tuck into the bolognese, and bring up the darkness. Cerulean is already in there waiting for me. I slide my view screen goggles over my eyes and enter our shared world: a Yangtze shopping fulfillment warehouse, in a private Deepcraft mod.

Deepcraft saved my life. Before Deepcraft though there was Yangtze, and that saved my life too. I owe my life to lots of weird little things.

It was two months in to my convalescence after the coma, hiding out in my parents' dark Iowa basement, reading old comics and in-line skating around the dehumidifier and ping pong table, when I realized that I had a choice to make: man or mouse.

"You'll be with us again soon," my mother would often say, when she brought down my lukewarm milkshakes or diet mayo tuna sandwiches. "Coming back to the land of the living."

I appreciated everything she did, but it pissed me off. I'd been through this terrible thing and here now it was continuing. My brain was weak, my body too, I could hardly stand to be around other people and TV made my brain twinge like crazy, but I wasn't some feeble dying goat incapable of doing anything for myself.

"Baby steps," my doctor said when he discharged me. "Think of it like mental rehab. Your brain has to get re-accustomed to stimulation step by baby step." 

So I got a job.

I researched the least mentally demanding work out there, in the dullest, darkest environment, and came up with picker at a Yangtze online shopping fulfillment center. They're the people who collect the stuff we order on the website, who labor all day in vast windowless warehouses that cover about a square mile each.

I applied and they took me on. Two days later I turned up and nodded through a twinge-inducing but mercifully brief induction. The supervisor gave me a simple gizmo called a 'diviner', which I was to follow as it flashed left-right directions through the warehouse. I picked up the stuff it highlighted then put it on conveyor belts for the packing department, ad infinitum, like a rat in a maze.

I loved it. All day I walked down dark climate-controlled shelving corridors, making no decisions for myself, just following the diviner to pick up limited edition basketballs, sets of tea knives, greetings cards, self-published books from the cranky print-on-demand machines, talking teddies, butt-shaped pillows, and so on. Whatever the diviner demanded, I collected.

It was a lovely monotony. I got back into some kind of physical shape, and built up my stimulation endurance. If any order was too weird, I'd try not to look, and count backwards from one hundred to distract myself. I got good enough that the twinges mostly went away and my thinking cleared up.

I got so good at the job I could anticipate turns even before the diviner told me where to go. With all that extra brain-space, I started to notice the other pickers. They were all weirdos. Hank for example was a bitter redneck who got 'stranded' in Iowa after his community college kicked him out for selling weed, and he washed up on the fulfillment center's shore to make ends meet. In lieu of completing his studies he'd signed up for an online 'sexual mastery class,' and often would try out conversational gambits on me when our paths intersected through the warehouse, like lonely little ants at a scent-trail crossing.

"So when she says her name, you say, 'You should speak a little louder, you must be the shy one in the group'," he told me once.

"It's embarrassing her," I said.

"Right, it's putting her on the spot, meaning you control the spotlight. It's cool stuff man, neuro-linguistic programming from the top artists in the game."

"Does it work?"

"I haven't tried it yet."

Bobby was six foot seven and really into North Korea. Sometimes he wore the red star of North Korea on a T-shirt he'd clearly printed himself, as if daring our overlords to kick him out. I don't think the supervisor ever noticed, he probably thought it was a basketball shoe logo.

Linda from Arkansas was working her way around all the Yangtze fulfillment centers in the US, for a travel memoir she was writing.

"It's like the travel book by the guy who hitch-hiked round Ireland with a fridge," she told me once. "You've got to have a gimmick. This is my gimmick." 

I loved it. Here were weird people, all with their own strange aspirations just like me, and I was handling it. When I needed time apart, I'd turn at a crossing when it looked as if we were going to intersect. A simple shrug of the shoulders and a point to the diviner would explain all.

The gods are rerouting me, that shrug said. It's just my fate.

It was fun to watch them gear up in anticipation of us crossing, preparing some little tidbit of conversation to impart like a chunk of humanity-affirming pollen, only to be disappointed when I turned away. I used to imagine them at their other crossings in the gloom, enjoying hurried exchanges while the diviner's clock ticked down.

It was Lucy on the print-on-demand machines, that clattery industrial corner of the center where books were baked in great X-ray like kilns, who put me onto Deepcraft.

I liked to stay near the printers for as long as I could before the sound made my brain twinge, watching pages slip in and out of the runners, forming up gradually into newly birthed books, their binding still tacky. These were dreams being made, just like my brain was rebuilding itself.

"I print my own here," Lucy told me once. She was a chubby girl with poorly dyed blue hair. We all called her Blucy. "I write romance with Amish vampires in the post-apocalypse. It's a big niche. They let me print them at cost."

I nodded. She showed me one of her books. The cover was awful, just clip-art of something representative of each of those genres horribly overlaid.

I made her one much better that night, stretching my brain's limits to the max. I had twinges for the following week, but she went wild for it. She invited me to play Deepcraft with her.

"It's just like digital Lego, Amo, you can turn down the danger and everything so there's no random events like falling into lava, no roaming zombies, nothing to make you scared or set off stress alarms, just a sandbox to build in. I make weird ruined worlds for my characters to live in. I think you'd get a kick out of it."