Apocalypse Yesterday Read online

  Apocalypse Yesterday

  A Novel

  BROCK ADAMS

  For Katla

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  There came a point while writing this book that I typed THIS IS BULLSHIT AND YOU KNOW IT and shut my laptop. I didn’t look at the story again for nearly two years, and then I dug it out and sent it to Paul Lucas, my agent, who assured me it wasn’t bullshit—it was pretty good, in fact, and needed to be finished. So, first and foremost, a heartfelt thank-you to Paul, who has fought for me and encouraged me through seven years and two books. Apocalypse Yesterday would not exist without him.

  Thank you to Terri Bischoff at Crooked Lane for snatching the story up, and to everyone else at the publisher—Madeline Rathle and Melissa Rechter in particular—for their passion and hard work. I’m also grateful to Rachel Keith for her insightful editing.

  Here’s a weird one: Thanks to everyone at the Thomas E. Hannah YMCA, particularly the amazing Childwatch staff. I did most of my writing and revision in the break room at the Y while Childwatch took care of my daughter. I’d never have had the time to get this done if it hadn’t been for that invaluable two hours a day.

  Last but most important, I am grateful to my wife, Jill. She is a writer too, and a better one than me. She is my first and most trusted reader because she calls me on my bullshit. She pushes me. I rarely want to write, but I do it for her, for us, and it makes me better. She makes me better. I am there and she is there and together we are a force of nature.

  SATURDAY, OCTOBER 26

  Imagine the machete in your hand and the sky on fire. The blade feels like an extension of your arm, a bone grown long and honed to the finest edge—a part of you as much as your teeth, your boots, your scars. Now imagine the feeling when that blade hits home, when you catch a zombie right in the middle of its skull and open it up like a watermelon on the Fourth of July. Can you feel it?

  But it isn’t just the killing; it’s the little things. The stars spread like shattered glass blinking through rents in the smoke-screened sky. A bonfire of busted-up beach chairs burning on the concrete while you drink warm beer with your friends. No—your family. And the woman you love, the fiercest fieriest woman alive, asleep beside you, the two of you in your pirate-ship palace in the water park, your kingdom, the zombies held at bay on the other side of the lazy-river moat. Your subjects asleep around you, each in their own special place—under the big fiberglass mushrooms, tucked into the bottom of the spiral tube slide, cozy on a bed of inflatable rafts spread out in the abandoned margarita hut. All of them safe because of you. Looking up to you. Depending on you. Their king.

  You see it now, don’t you? You see it.

  Imagine they took it all away from you.

  It’s the kind of thing that makes you want to die, but you can’t die now, not after everything you’ve survived. So instead you just want to scream at the sky and tear the rebuilt world down around you. You’d do anything to have it back. Anything.

  I would, anyway. I did. That’s what got me here. Middle of the night at an Air Force base with two zombies banging around in the back of a landscaping trailer and a twentysomething security guard pointing an M16 at my head.

  “Get on the ground!” he says.

  I hold my hands out in front of me, take a step back. “Hang on,” I say.

  “On the fucking ground!”

  “We gonna die, Rip,” Rodney says. He’s already facedown on the asphalt, hands laced around the back of his head. “This was so stupid. The stupidest goddamn thing.”

  “We’re not going to die,” I say to him. Then, to the guard, “Look, just let us go. We’re almost out. Let us go, and you’ll never see us again.”

  The gun is shaking in his hands. His upper lip twitches like a rabbit’s. One of the zombies roars inside the trailer, and it echoes and vibrates against the metal and the guard says, “Down! Now!”

  So I get on my knees and put my hands behind my head and the guard takes a step forward, and then I see Mo. He comes around the other side of the trailer and he’s got his decapitator in his hands, the moonlight glinting on the blade, that monster blade nearly as tall as the guard, and Mo raises it like he did before cleaving so many zombies in two, and the guard turns but too late and I know now that we are well and truly fucked.

  TUESDAY, OCTOBER 22

  “She’s a part of me, man,” I say. “You can’t take her away.”

  “Her?” says the cop. He’s standing over my booth at McDonald’s, looking down at me, at the machete resting on the table next to my burger.

  Everyone else in McDonald’s is looking at me too. The kids over in the play area, their faces all lit up as they press against the window and point at me. Some mom grabs one by the wrist and drags him away. Behind the counter, the cashier is laughing. She snaps a picture with her phone. And this old woman two tables over, face like a crumpled paper bag. I watch her out the corner of my eye as she eats her fries like a turtle, three, four bites per fry. Staring. Judging. She’s the one that called the cop. I know it.

  “Santana,” I say.

  “What?” says the cop.

  “Machete’s named Santana, if you want to know.” I touch her black blade with my finger and the cop shifts, rests a hand on his gun. I put my hands in my lap. “I know you carried. Everyone did. That gun, I bet. It was a part of you, wasn’t it?”

  The cop sighs. “What’s your name?” he says.

  “Rip.”

  He sits down across from me in the booth. He’s a few years younger than me—thirty, maybe—but it’s hard to tell; everyone aged weird during the outbreak. Four months with the grid shut down and zombies trying to eat you. Some people grew old. Their hair shot white and the struggle etched heavy lines in their faces. Others came out younger. Tan and lean and brimming with verve. I’m one of those. This cop is one of them too. Scar running down the left side of his face, worn skin on his knuckles, but supernovas swimming in his eyes.

  We know each other. We know.

  “Listen, Rip,” he says. “You gotta put the knife away.”

  “Santana.”

  “It doesn’t matter. I don’t need to know her name. I don’t need to know your story. I just need to do my job.” He looks over at the old woman, who pretends to be real interested in her fries. Then he rests his elbows on the table, puts two fingers on Santana’s hilt. He speaks low. “It’s not fair, I know. I get to carry. I’ve got the gun, the baton. I can’t imagine what it’d be like if they took them away. So I feel you, man. I feel you. But I got to do my job, and you’re freaking people out.”

  “They carried too,” I say. We all did. Everyone and their weapons in some symbiotic relationship, each making the other stronger. Like Rodney and his knuckles, his actual knuckles that he’d used for fighting his whole life and the spiky brass things he wore later, the logical evolution of a brawler’s fists. Or Bob’s shotgun, the big-ass boomstick as loud and bombastic as he is. Mo’s decapitator, a hunk of steel torn from its machine and reforged into something far deadlier, just like its owner. “They had their weapons. Wouldn’t be alive if they didn’t.”

  “And they’ve put them away. They’re following the law.” He lingers on the hilt a moment and I feel this tightness inside of me like he’s got his hands on my woman, and I guess he kind of does. Then he pushes her across the table to me. “You got to follow the law too. It’s been two months since the U.S. all-clear. Three weeks since the new weapons ordinances. We can’t let you skate by any longer.”

  “It’s that old woman called you, isn’t it?”

  “I can’t say.” He rolls his eyes, smiles. “Time to hang her up, Rip,” he says, and he gets up and leaves.

  I put Santana in my bag next to my work stuff and
my go-bag stuff, the canteen and the easy-pack food and the cash. Feel that old woman’s smirk from across the room.

  I want to leave then, but I finish the burger because I paid for it, goddamn it, paid twice what I should have because who knows what they’re going through to get that meat to my plate. Most of the cows are dead. Zombies tore them up, easy food when they’d eaten all the low-hanging fruit people-wise. Plus some of the roads are still busted up from strafing runs from the A-10s and the Apaches, so the trucks have to drive all over hell and back to get here. And there’s the lack of manpower: a bunch of people doing jobs all up and down the chain—sunburned migrants pulling tomatoes from the vine, aging white women standing on assembly lines at a bun bakery in California, CEOs and marketing execs arguing in half-empty boardrooms—are dead, their brains gobbled up. So much ruin, but already we’ve got burgers again, except now they cost six bucks. ’Course I’m going to finish the son of a bitch.

  Might not be cow meat in the burger, come to think of it, unless they’re shipping it in from the NewSSR. Tastes like it, though, so good enough, because god you miss burgers when you’re eating whatever canned stuff you can scrounge for four months in a row.

  I shove the last bite in my mouth and go to the door and feel the heads swivel to follow me. I’m naked without her. Santana. Her weight tugging on my belt, the tunk tunk as she bounces off my leg when I walk. I’m sorry, girl.

  Outside the sun is bright white in the sky and the blue stretches around it forever. The smoke and haze that smothered everything all summer has blown away. Can’t look at the sun without it burning your eyes. Used to be it was orange up there behind the veil; you could watch it track its way through the half-light, like some old man carrying a lantern through a swamp. Could smell it, the light working on the smoke, acrid particles of ash flaming up in miniature under the spindly sunbeams. Lit your nose like smelling salts, like cocaine. Made all the cylinders in your brain fire at once.

  Now it’s October and the only smell in the air is the late-blooming honeysuckle. Maybe some salt and seaweed from the bay just down the road. But the smoke is gone. Never knew I’d miss it so much.

  I wait at the light to cross the street. A school bus goes by, kids laughing playing in the back on their way to a midday field trip. The light turns and I walk and the traffic doesn’t move. Horns honk and I see that the woman in front of the line of traffic is texting, and there’s more honking and she leans out the window and says, “Just hold on a fucking second!” and then people are tearing around her, laying on the horn, cussing back at her. Like this is the worst thing that’s ever happened.

  Two months. Two months since the all-clear.

  Back in front of the call center, this low, squat building with no windows. Down near the corner it’s still charred up where a car crashed into it in the first week of the outbreak. Black flames creeping up the stucco. I rub my hand on the soot shadow and my fingers come away black. I hold them to my face and sniff and it’s rapturous; all the memories at once flood through me, synapses like lightning screaming fire and war and victory and Davia, so I press my face right up against the wall and inhale like I’m drowning, about to go under.

  It smells like destruction, like death. It smells like heaven.

  “The fuck you doing?”

  It’s Rodney. He’s standing at the door to the office, paper cup of coffee in his hand. Behind him my other coworkers are coming back from lunch, talking among themselves, laughing. The cars buzz by and the streets are full of the noise of the day.

  “You coming, Rip?” Rodney says.

  “Yeah,” I say. I put my hand on the stucco. It’s warm, rough. The soot pungent, the inside of a spent shotgun shell. “Yeah, I’m coming.”

  We are civilized and innocent again and I wonder what the world is coming to.

  BACK THEN

  Killed my first one in a grocery store. First one I saw, matter of fact. It was late and the store was empty except for me and the kid at the checkout counter. He was all tired and didn’t look at me and dragged my stuff across the electric eye beep beep so slow like no one had anywhere else to be.

  It was after midnight and the fluorescents were burning white like midday desert sun.

  She came in through the automatic doors. Girl, nineteen maybe. A blonde, thin, hair in sort of a pixie cut. She stops a few feet inside and the doors start to close, but the sensor picks her up again and they jerk back open. Close and open like that a few times while she sways in the doorway and the checkout kid keeps scanning my stuff. Soup, most of it. Pop-Tarts. Shit like that. Beep.

  Girl is looking at the mat beneath her feet where it says Welcome to Arnie’s!

  Door does the open-close thing again and checkout kid turns around. “In or out,” he says.

  She looks up now. Something with her eyes—out of whack, like she’s looking at some invisible thing hanging in the air way past me and the kid. A little reddish. Brown stuff smeared on her cheek.

  “Come on,” kid says, “you’re letting the AC out.”

  Then the girl goes urrrrrrrgggh and lurches our way and the kid turns to push her away but she’s on him, and she’s smaller than this kid but she’s wrapped around his chest, her arms her fingers digging into him and she’s climbing him like she’s a spider monkey and he’s a tree in a cloud forest in Costa Rica. She bites him on top of the head. Bites hard, and the kid is screaming and beating at her and there’s blood running down the side of his face and she’s tearing into him, rips an ear off and chews. He throws her off and tries to run but slips on his own blood, and then she’s on him again, and goddamn, the way he’s screaming.

  I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do, if I still have to pay if she eats him or if I can just go. Got to bag my own stuff now, I guess. Start putting the soup in the bag.

  Kid’s on the ground, blood coming out of his head, his neck, and he’s still trying to push her away but not very hard.

  Girl looks up at me. Eyes like they’re cut loose from whatever hangs them in her skull.

  “I’m gonna go,” I say.

  She jumps up on the checkout counter. Her foot hits the switch that controls the conveyor belt, and the belt starts moving and it pulls her off her feet and she falls on her side and goes raaaarrrrgh! I try to step back, but she’s got me by the shirt collar and she’s clawing like a feral cat gone crazy, rabid, yowling and staring at me with those weird eyes, and the kid’s blood is all over her teeth and her lips. Belt keeps moving, and every time she wants to get up it sweeps her back down, but she’s still chomping at me with those red teeth.

  “Let go!” I yell at her. “Fucking let go!”

  Rooooaaarrraaahh!

  I’ve got this can of soup in my hand. Campbell’s, so familiar, red on white like a baseball. Heavy, the edges fierce. I grip it in my fist and swing it at her. I’m the caveman from that movie with the spaceships and I just discovered tools; I’m the one, the first to make the leap from beast to man with this tool, the first tool a weapon, of course, because isn’t every tool a weapon—a weapon against another man or against hunger or nature or whatever?

  I clock her in the head with it, leave a bean-with-bacon-shaped hole in her skull. She goes grrroooaag? and I hit her again, again, until she’s still. The belt keeps whirring by and she bleeds onto it. Blood streaks the belt, goes under the counter, comes back up the other end.

  The electric eye is painting a red X on her chest and I put the can in front of it. Beep.

  Kid’s still gurgling on the floor, but there’s a lot of blood. Don’t know what I’m supposed to do about that, so I bag up my stuff and get.

  TUESDAY, OCTOBER 22

  So this email says:

  I wasn’t halfway through my can of Pringles when I came across one broken in half. By the time I reached the bottom of the package, the chips were nothing more than crumbs. If the can is designed to keep the chips whole, I ought to receive a full can of whole chips. I didn’t pay for crumbs. Please reimburse my $1.49
immediately.

  This is what I look at all day long. Our company makes just about everything, it seems, and people buy their shit from us and then they complain. You know those numbers on the side of the box where you call for questions and comments? Used to be the number went to a call center in India, but people kept calling the call center to complain about the accents of the people at the call center, so now the complaints come to me. The emails, anyway. Boss put me on emails because she says my writing skills are better than my oral ones. Don’t know if that’s a compliment or not.

  The job made some sort of sense before everything, I guess. Now every email pisses me off. This guy’s emailing from Pennsylvania. Half his state got overrun in the first month and they evacuated and firebombed Pittsburg, and now the world’s barely back to normal and he’s complaining about his broken chips.

  I look up and Rodney’s beside my desk. He’s flipping the pages on my calendar.

  “Leave it,” I say.

  “You’re like six months behind.”

  “I like the picture.” Tell the truth, I’m not crazy about the picture. Some cliffs in Ireland or somewhere, all tall and black beside the ocean. But it’s the March picture, and March is when it all started, and I like to look at it and think maybe it’s all going to start again.

  “Bungalow?” Rodney says.

  Bungalow’s our bar.

  Rodney’s drumming his fingers on top of my cubicle wall. He looks like LeBron James’s little brother, tall but not that tall, fit but not that fit. Looking at him now makes me think of the real LeBron and how it took half of LA to bring him down. That was one of the last things the media covered before the power went out: Zombie LeBron stalking around outside the arena, still in his Lakers jersey, and man, it was something to see. People coming at him and him swiping them away like gnats. News played it over and over, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t impressed. He was like the LeBron James of zombies.