LIFE
will cure CANCER.
I scoff at the graffiti marking the side
of the decrepit bridge. We’ve only been here a couple times, but it always makes
me laugh. A mirthless laugh, of course. Obviously it was written before half of
humanity was slaughtered. I still haven’t figured out what cancer is—I assume it
was a disease of some sort. Well, LIFE certainly did cure it.
By killing off everyone that had it.
My eyes scan the red spray-painted
letters and then survey the surrounding area for any signs of other people. It’s
rare, but sometimes you come across rival marauders. Today I’m not in any mood
to fight—if we see anyone, we’re running. The buildings in the background look
a lot older than they are. They have only been abandoned for about ten years,
but it would be easy to mistake them for being centuries-old ruins. We normally
don’t venture into the larger buildings, even though they probably have a lot
of things we could use to our advantage. Tools, weapons, maybe scraps of food
if we looked hard enough. But there could be other things haunting those
buildings, judging by the array of the structures. We would rather not find
out. Sometimes it’s better to starve.
The air is thick and rancid around here
because of the old river’s residue, but not rancid enough for a gas mask. I
have smelled worse things than the black sludge crawling patiently underneath
the bridge.
A laugh behind me makes me turn around
and my gaze falls on Juno, doubling over into a plastic brown box. It’s blackened
and melted in some areas. Looks like it survived a minor fire. It wasn’t here
the last time we were. “Jenesis,” she says, her voice slightly echoed by the
container. “Look what I found.”
I jaunt toward her and take a look at
what she has in her hand. “Wow,” I say, taking it when she offers it to me. I turn
through the fragile pages, my fingers gripping the hard cover. It’s an antique. I didn’t think there were
any paper books left—at least not out here.
“Look at the cover,” Juno tells me, her
pale green eyes sheening with amusement.
I close the book and brush my obstructing
bangs from my sight. How to Survive a
Zombie Apocalypse. The laugh I release is different than Juno’s. She was
entertained by the title. I find it ironic. This is how we know the world has
been predicting zombies centuries before it happened. I’ve heard the old
theories—a lot of them were off. Neurological parasites, mutated viruses,
violence-inducing prions. All scientifically sound, but nobody considered the “zombie
apocalypse” to start from a lack of responsibility on the scientists’ part. They
never thought that maybe life itself would bring about the living dead. Not a
disease. Not a virus.
Not life, either. Not really. LIFE, to
be exact—Lab-Initiated Fabricated Entities. Feigned life. Hostile life.
I drop the book back into the plastic
box. Zombies are extinct now. Zombies are no longer the monsters that keep us
awake at night, frightened and vulnerable in the darkness. The clatter of the
book’s fall accompanies the high-pitched gasp from Juno’s lips, and she stoops
into the container to retrieve it. “Don’t treat it so badly,” she says. “We
should keep it. It could be worth something.”
“Who’s going to want that?” Nobody, that’s
who. It’s hard enough trying to forget the zombies without their remnants
haunting every building and infecting every being.
Juno looks at me with wide eyes for a moment,
the expression tugging out the child in her, but drops the book back into its
original place. She only gives her vulnerable expressions to me. If anybody
else were to see her make those faces, they would kill her on the spot—or rape
her, depending on their level of sadism—mistaking her for a weak individual.
And she is—physically. She’s smaller than I am, tiny bones protruding within
her skin, accentuating her hunger. She keeps her platinum hair no longer than
the nape of her neck so she can pass as a boy when she needs to. Which is
often. She’s pretty; that’s her only problem. But she’s tough. In some ways, a
lot tougher than I am. She was able to kill one of her former allies with her
bare hands.
My brother had to kill himself because I
was too weak to do it for him. I couldn’t shoot a gun for a long time after
that. The popping explosion would always bring back the memory of that gaping
wound in his head. Even now, somewhere around three years later, I shudder as I
recall the blood reaching out along cement as though searching for a new body.
“Look for something more useful,” I instruct
Juno. I’m able to. We have decided that I am older, not only because I am so
much taller, but because I look older. We don’t know our exact ages, but we made
our decisions based on the other’s judgments. When she found me, she said I
looked about sixteen. I thought she looked fourteen or fifteen. It’s been over
three hundred days since then, so we can safely assume I am seventeen and she
is around sixteen.
“There isn’t anything,” she responds,
looking around with a hopeless shrug. Her eyes make their way over to what used
to be the river. Now it’s just a cement basin, too deep for the slime that runs
through it. She’s imagining water. We know what clean water looks like because
of the rain—we catch it in cupped palms, glass containers, makeshift bowls. The
yellowish color is a lot better than the brown of the rest of this world’s water
sources.
I turn away from her and shuffle through
a pile of loose rubble—I suspect some people attempted to clean up the city by
hiding some of the debris under a bridge. They didn’t get very far before
giving up. Less for me to dig through. Last time we were here, I managed to
find some metal poles. I used them to keep the doors of our mall permanently
locked—the last thing we needed was another stranger raiding through our
belongings. There is bound to be another useful object for us to take this time
around. I need a new spring for my gun. It jammed the other day and I lost the
stupid thing trying to fix it.
“There’s nothing important in this box
thing,” Juno says, half to herself. She adopts a new tone when she talks to
herself. Slower, a few syllables drawn out. “Could we just empty it and take
the box?”
“Yeah, do that.” Boxes can be good. More
containers for water. I move through the piles of building fragments. I found
the poles here last time, maybe I could find a little spring. I ignore the slim
chances of that happening. Behind me, I hear Juno carefully emptying the
container, dropping one item to the ground at a time, and I twitch my eyebrows
in slight amusement. If it was me, I would have overturned the whole thing and
gotten the job done in half a second. But I leave Juno to her odd ways.
Then she stops, and I know it’s not
because the box is empty. If it was, she would have dragged it over to where I
am and asked what I was doing. But it’s dead quiet all of a sudden; a stillness
that cools the air.
“Oh God,” she murmurs.
Panic.
The muscles in my back stiffen.
“Jenesis.”
She’s quiet and collected, but it’s
there, the throat-wrenching fear that clobbers her tone. I know what to expect
when I turn around, and even as I do, my blood turns into ice water.
It’s on the other side of the mucky
river, the transparent silhouette of a girl, as motionless and whist as death. The
same fear that strangled Juno’s words attacks me, because I know it’s watching
us. There are no eyes, no way of knowing exactly what it’s looking at, just a
black face like a shadow against an invisible wall. But Ghosts don’t regularly
take form. They are a gaseous mass of cyan vapor, like the glowing pulse
exuding from the silhouette’s chest. Where the heart should be, as if these
monsters could ever have one. The only time they appear to be anything other
than vapor is when they’ve noticed something that strikes their interest.
Only once have I seen a Ghost adopt a
human form. Two days before my brother shot himself, I saw one turn into his shadow.
Matched his body perfectly.
Now it’s matching Juno’s body.
It sways like it’s deciding on a move,
and my insides constrict, my legs getting ready to pounce on Juno if I have to.
I am closer to her than the Ghost is. Even though Ghosts are faster, I may be
able to beat it. I spare a glance at Juno. The mortification in her face is nearly
enough to drive me to run at the Ghost, if only to save her, to give her a
chance to run to safety. But I can’t leap out to save her. If I die, who will
watch over her?
“Jenesis,” she whispers again. She doesn’t
know if I’ve turned around, her eyes frozen on the shaded death in front of
her. One hand is poised in the air like she could ever ward off a creature of
malignant vapors. The other clasps onto the plastic container, her bony
knuckles glowing with her tight grip.
“Juno,” I say, trying to keep my voice
calm. I want to tell her not to move, but she’s not stupid. Neither am I.
Neither is the Ghost.
