The Living Dead 2

If George Romero is the father of zombie cinema, then surely John Skipp is the father of zombie literature. He, along with Craig Spector, edited the first all-original zombie fiction anthologies in the ’80s: Book of the Dead and Still Dead, then, more recently (and on his own), Mondo Zombie and Zombies: Encounters with the Hungry Dead. He is also the author of several novels, such as the splatterpunk ecocidal classic The Bridge (co-written by Craig Spector) and The Emerald Burrito of Oz (with Marc Levinthal).

Cody Goodfellow’s novel, Perfect Union, was published earlier this year, and his short fiction has appeared in Bare Bone, Black Static, Shivers V, and Dark Passions. Skipp and Goodfellow’s collaborative novel Fruiting Body, publishes in December.

If you’ve read the first The Living Dead anthology, you may remember a searing science fiction tale called “Meathouse Man,” one in a series of stories by George R. R. Martin that concern remote-controlled zombies being used as slave labor. Our next tale brings the same concept to a decaying near-future San Francisco, and concerns not only zombie laborers but also soldiers.

In our own present, war by remote control is becoming increasingly commonplace, as detailed in P. W. Singer’s recent nonfiction book Wired for War, which delves into some of the issues surrounding soldiers who pilot Predator drones into combat in Iraq or Afghanistan from the safety of a cubicle in Colorado or Nevada. The book describes the unease felt by many elite pilots, whose training has cost upward of a million dollars, as they watch missions similar to their own being flown by teenagers sitting at computer monitors. One drone pilot describes the physical qualifications needed for his job as not being able to do a hundred pushups, but rather having “a big butt and a strong bladder”-literally being able to sit at the controls for an extended period of time.

War is changing before our eyes, though as this next story reminds us, the more things change the more they stay the same. Workers and soldiers may be replaced by remote-controlled zombie slaves, but somebody’s still got to deliver the pizza.

I.

(Excerpted from WHY WE STOOD: THE NEW UTOPIA by Jerrod Unger III):

“A city is to a planet what a person is to a city. One out of many. A star shining in a firmament filled with constellations. With some shining a little bit brighter, more beautiful or otherwise luckier than the rest.

“By any standard, San Francisco was one of the luckiest, and the most beloved. To those who called her home, San Francisco was The City-the quintessential, the only real city.

“She was a survivor. Of booms and busts, earthquakes and plagues. In the face of every disaster, she always found a new way to thrive, and came back smarter, grander and richer than ever before.

“Few others could claim the same.

“When the dead rose up, most of the world’s cities died just like their people. Winking out, then blindly rising to attack their neighbors.

“Like very few others-and Tokyo came closest-San Francisco kept the lights on throughout the crisis, and shone a beacon to the world. The New San Francisco would not just be the last city on Earth, she would be the greatest.

“We never set out to merely rebuild the old order; we used the breakdown to sweep away old mistakes, and make the kind of world we always knew we should have.

“And while the rest of the world sank deeper into chaos, we toiled and dreamed and dared to grow our City for three hard, uncertain years, until-as viewed from space-she was clearly the brightest light yet emanating from our godforsaken planet, and the only real, living city left on Earth.

“History is full of tough, rotten choices and unfair judgments. And few will be more unfair than the condemnation of what we made, by those who failed even to keep the lights on in their own homes.”

II.

4:47 a.m. Down at Candlestick Park, twenty miles outside the Green Zone, the predawn gloom gave way to icy castles of toxic fog. “The Bargain of Kali Yuga,” his Master had called it, once again proving his divine prescience.

Everywhere upon the earth, darkness had won. But here, there was still hope.

This house is surrounded by light…

Ajay Watley was on guard duty on top of the east pedestrian ramp of the long-dead athletic stadium, holding down the sacred perimeter. Below him, the parking lot was a ten-acre graveyard of gutted cars and scattered bones he scanned with amped thermal imaging goggles. He had a sixty-caliber Squad Automatic Weapon, a walkie-talkie, and an old iPod blasting his alertness mantra.

This house is surrounded by light…

Ajay had been a devotee of Bhagwan Ganguly for four years before the Master’s prophecies came true, and he had never had reason to doubt. All of the Master’s visions had come to pass, even the date and hour of his death.

But since then, his commands had become erratic, and tended to change, depending on who transcribed them. When he said to move the ashram to the city, Ajay almost risked his karma by raising doubt.

The dead had indeed been swept out of San Francisco.

But their worst enemies here were not the dead…

No birds called, and no fish swam, as the Higgins boat sailed out of the fog and into the lagoon behind the stadium. In this place where hopeless Giants fans in kayaks used to paddle around waiting for Barry Bonds’ home runs, the vintage military ship-to-shore vessel ran aground like a sea lion, unnoticed.

The ramp dropped and slammed the mud.

And the Oakland Raiders came stomping out onto land.

A flurry of movement in the parking lot depths caught Ajay’s sleep-deprived eye. Nobody’d spotted a deadhead in weeks, and the ones still walking around were nothing to waste ammo on.

Cranking up the volume on the Master’s chanting voice, Ajay cracked his knuckles and waited for whatever it was to come into range.

“I am surrounded by light…” he murmured, drawing a bead with the big sixty caliber…

…just as the hot wind brushed him back…

A drone helicopter no bigger than a toy hovered before him. Its miniature fuselage pointed a camera lens, a parabolic mic, and a shotgun barrel at his face.

He blinked, tried to hoist the heavy gun off its bipod.

The shotgun blew off the left half of his scalp.

Ajay yelped and squirted, dropping his machinegun over the railing. “Wake up!” he screamed into his walkie-talkie, belly-crawling down the ramp to the guardhouse, wiping blood out of his eyes.

A hollow, unfamiliar robotic voice hissed back from the handset, “All your base are belong to us.”

The Raiders double-timed it to the gatehouse under scattered wild fire from above. They wore SFPD tactical body armor draped with silver duct tape, Raiders jerseys, and dented football helmets.

The first one through the turnstile set off a homemade claymore filled with bathtub napalm. It set him alight, but did not stop him. Sheathed in flames, he stalked through the atrium yard, raking the guardhouse with a belt-fed automatic shotgun as flares, bricks, and small arms fire rained down.

One crazy devotee jumped from cover and charged, but his M16 jammed. The burning Raider cornered and hugged him as its ammo cooked off.

Aerial recon had the ashram’s sixty-four devotees holed up in the press boxes. Moving as a hedgehog, the Raiders crossed the courtyard and tossed grenades into the spiral pedestrian ramp. They never spoke or cried out when they got shot. They spent their bodies as cheaply as their bullets.

A gang of wild-eyed devotees dressed in dhotis or long underwear charged down the ramp, brandishing machine pistols and howling the Master’s name. Another drone chopper swooped into the open well around which the spiral ramp wound, a toy with twin fléchette cannons in its nose. They sounded like tambourines shaking, but they reduced the defenders to a blizzard of red confetti before they could get off a single shot.

The only effective resistance the Raiders faced was the sluice of gore they slipped in as they climbed the ramp.

On the press level, Ajay ran past a barricaded snack bar with two machine guns.

“Get down!” Sister Sharon bellowed from inside. “Move your skinny ass, Ajay!” And opened fire.

She cut the first Raider in half, blew his torso clean off his hips, but still couldn’t stop him. He dragged himself up to the snack counter while his teammates laid down withering cover fire.

Ajay prayed for a weapon. He prayed for the courage to do something.

The mangled upper half of the Raider crawled right past him. He saw a gray human face behind the facemask, but telescoping goggles covered its eyes. It had no lower jaw. Earbuds in its helmet screamed loud enough for Ajay to hear the Raider’s tinny mantra: “Get some, 49, get some, get some… take that nest, you little bitch.”

The Raider tossed two grenades in through the gun slits. They bounced off the menu board and detonated in Sharon’s lap.

Ajay ran without looking back until he’d hopped the barricades and found them unmanned. He picked up an MP5 off the sandbags, but before he could find the safety, the corridor was engulfed in flames.

The Raiders swept into the luxury skyboxes, where the Master’s favorites were kept. Their guards resisted with pistols that didn’t dent the Raiders’ body armor. Room to room they stalked, giving out headshots or grenades.

Ajay shot one of them in the back without even getting its attention. He almost threw himself upon them with his fists, but he knew it would be suicide, and the Master forbade martyrdom. It would be easier to die than see the end of everything they had built, of everyone he loved.

Ajay went to the window in the owner’s box and looked out on the field. Together, they’d bulldozed the wreckage of a relief center into the cheap seats to make room for a massive tented victory garden, and a parking lot to mirror the one outside.

Hundreds of Jaguars, Rolls Royces, and Bentleys filled the infield.

Before the eye of Kali Yuga opened on the world, the media had mocked Master Ganguly’s weakness for British luxury cars, but the fleet had brought them all here from the ashram in Big Sur quickly and in fine style.

He could get the keys to one of the Range Rovers they kept in the underground VIP parking. He could get away, and live with a coward’s karma. But he heard his brothers and sisters chanting in the big room. If this was truly their karma, they would gather at the Master’s feet to meet it.

Ajay ran into the banquet hall with his hands on his bleeding head. There were at least three dozen of them, and even the women and kids were armed and shooting at the double doorway entrance.

The Master sat at the wheel of his favorite Silver Ghost Rolls on a dais in the center of the room. He gunned the engine and honked the Rolls’ regal horn. The inner circle of devotees locked arms around the car.

A hulking Raider linebacker stepped into the room and got its face shot off. Inside its hollowed-out torso was a veritable Whitman’s Sampler of grenades, RPGs, and a TOW missile.

Even as the hail of lead chewed its helmet and head off, the linebacker fell to its knees and unleashed a holocaust.

The windows and walls blew out of the banquet hall. The secondary explosions brought the upper tier bleachers down on the banquet hall.

But when the smoke cleared, four Raiders were still standing.

“Game over, bitches,” said Ajay’s walkie-talkie. He threw it away and ran for the VIP staircase.

The corridor was choked with burning bodies, but nobody stopped him as he barged through the door and ran down the stairwell.

He got four steps before he crashed into a Raider’s back and hit the stairs on his tailbone. His legs went numb.

DEATH MACHINE, said the name above the number 24 on its shredded jersey. It turned and looked down at him, cocking its head and popping its goggles. Ajay’s skin crawled as he felt someone intelligent looking at him. Someone who was probably miles away.

“I am surrounded by light,” Ajay prayed. “This house is surrounded by light. I am-”

The zombie in the Raiders helmet stopped over him and put a gloved hand on his shoulder, gave his arm a gentle little squeeze. “I’m sorry, dude, but my pizza’s here,” it said.

The gentle hand shoved the nozzle of a flamethrower in his mouth, and pumped a jet of high-octane gasoline down his throat.

“Vaya con huevos, Gandhi,” said Death Machine #24. The jet of gas ignited, and Ajay was surrounded by light.

III.

The Dungeon Master peeled off his VR goggles, and shucked his data gloves. Checked his pulse rate. Breathe, barbarian, breathe.

“Holy shit, that was brutal!” He shivered with a bowel-clenching adrenaline chill, despite the suffocating kiln atmosphere of his server bunker. His muscles tensed and twitched like the dregs of an amyl nitrate rush, still juiced from something that happened to somebody else’s body. He’d sweated right through his silk Deth-klok pajamas. It felt like someone had dumped a cooler of Gatorade on him, from somewhere up above.

Sherman Laliotitis blinked out of his mystic warrior trance and buzzed in the delivery boy, put his hands behind his head and stretched in his ergonomic office chair. His catheter jabbed his semi-tumescent wang as he emptied his bladder. The tube snaked out of his PJ bottoms to join the spaghetti of cables on the floor to the reclamation tub in the closet. Christ, he thought: Life during wartime.

The door thudded shut behind him. “So, uh… Seagull, how much for the pie?” His headset burped in his ear. “Wait. Hold that thought.”

His eyes unfocused as he gritted his teeth and listened to Charlie Brown’s teacher natter in his ear. “Front office is pissed. You’re breaking too many eggs.”

“Excuse me, but you weren’t there, and neither were they! No strategy survives first contact with the enemy-”

“We’re watching the streaming feed now. They wanted to fire you. I told them you knew what you were doing. They’re starting to think you’re doing it on purpose.”

“Wait a goddamned minute! Those eggheads built these teams to take deadheads, but we haven’t seen free-range street-meat in weeks-”

“Calm down, Sherman.”

“No, you calm down! You have no idea what it’s like, running a squad in a hot combat zone! You wouldn’t last two minutes in my fucking chair! Dungeon Master out.”

God damn it. Sherman pushed aside the pill bottles and Hot Wheels cars piled up around his keyboard. He forgot what he was looking for, then remembered he wasn’t alone.

“So who were those guys?” The pizza guy pointed at the screens.

“Those hobgoblins were a doomsday cult from Big Sur. Moved in after we cleansed the city, and started poaching our supply lines, snatching our immigrants. We warned them, but they fed our messenger to their dear leader. That’s him right there.”

With a loaded slice precariously balanced in one hand, Sherman zoomed in on a pasty mummy with a beard down to his knees, licking the windows of the Rolls with a black, cracking tongue. “Watch this, dude.”

Sherman made one of his Raiders punch in the window and feed the mummy a phosphorus grenade. Poom.

“Wow,” said Falcon, or whatever his name was. “I read that dude’s book. So you’re using dead guys against live guys now?”

Sherman killed his Coke and tossed the empty in the trash, found his vasopressin, and shot a blast of synapse-sharpening mist up his nose. Jesus, he was discussing strategy with the pizza boy. Only difference between this bottom-feeder and the meatbags he controlled was that zombies couldn’t ask irritating questions.

His headset bawled like a baby with a dirty diaper. “Hold on. Julio? Sharp air support, dude. Love the way you ghosted my whole op by winging that sentry.”

“Suck it, Halitosis. I didn’t hear you bitching when I saved your team on that ramp.” Julio noisily high-fived somebody, and Sherman almost hung up. God, he hated speakerphone. “Kid, you are making fucking up into an Olympic event.”

Sherman was a sponsored pro gamer on the Xbox Live circuit before he turned fourteen. The Pentagon’s strategic solutions teams all played Necropolis Online, and he pwned their asses daily. Air Force and Army were in a bidding war for his services before he finished high school. If the dead had come a year later, these Navy reserve dipshits would be calling him Sir. “Julio, anytime you want to get promoted out of air support, I always got openings on my team. You’d look good in a Raiders uniform, bro.”

Behind him, Pizza Boy cleared his throat. “Look, man, my other pies are getting cold…”

“Fuck. Hold on, losers.” With a wave of his laser pen over the subcutaneous chip in the hippie’s wrist, he paid for the food.

“Hey, Halitosis,” Julio shouted. “Are you gonna stop jacking off and move your team, so we can clean up this mess?”

The Dungeon Master slapped on his goggles. “Please get out of here now, Pizza Boy.” But he was already gone.

IV.

Jeez, thought Eagle. What a douche. Nice tip, though. Thirty-eight creds. That was the thing about rich motherfuckers. They thought they could pay off their contempt with pocket change. And they were right.

They also all liked pizza.

Eagle’s bike was parked outside the penthouse door. It was a chrome green Moots Gristle-a $6,000 mountain bike-the one he chose out of thousands when they gave him a hero’s parade, and his old job back. Talk about perks.

He took a moment to savor the view from the uppermost inner balcony of the Hyatt Regency: gorgeous tiered ultra-modern architecture, sloping down to reveal 802 luxury rooms, all occupied, thanks to him and his friends. His own was #615, and he could see it from here.

Hey, Ma! he thought and waved. But she was dead. And that wasn’t funny.

Eagle rode to the elevator bank, hopped the glass diving bell down to the lobby. Sheets of illuminated crystal dangled overhead, an indoor aurora borealis that looked awesome when stoned, which he was, waving bye to his friends and neighbors as he hit the domed streets of New San Francisco.

Everybody knew Eagle. That was the great thing. Beneath the sheer poison-and-shatterproof plastic that encased the twenty-block bubble of the Green Zone, roughly 8,000 still moved and breathed, and he saw them all each and every night as he made his rounds through the former financial district, spreading joy with whole-wheat crust, fresh tomatoes and veggies, prewar sausage and pepperoni.

Half the open spaces in the Green Zone were vertical farms now, hydroponically providing for the needs of the city; and thank God they understood that quality weed was every bit as fundamental as rice and beans, in this new economy.

Eagle wheeled around the Embarcadero, past tribal art galleries and acid jazz bars where third-shifters decompressed, downed shots of sketchy bathtub liquor and hoped for the best.

Outside the bubble, the world was still dead. And you could still see it, if you wanted to look. The black ash fields that used to be parks. The ferry terminal mausoleum. The south side of Market Street, where the lights were still off. All just a window away.

But just a stone’s throw from the edge-one block from the Transamerica Pyramid, on the corner of Front and Clay-was Pizza Orgasmica: the only surviving 24-hour gourmet pizza emporium.

“Couple of outcalls, if you want ’em,” said Bud, as he entered for refills. “One code red, and one from somewhere out in the Black. I told him fuck no, but the guy said he knows you.”

“Really?” Eagle said, grinning.

Sometimes it was fun to go outside.

V.

Death Machine #24 stood at attention in the outer courtyard of the defeated enemy objective. He had orders not to move.

#24 followed orders.

Sweep and clear, hold and defend, seek and destroy. #24 had survived eighteen engagements because he hardly needed the voices in his ear to do what he had to do.

He could follow orders almost before they were given.

His armorers and handlers were sure he was a professional athlete or a vet, probably a Marine. Tully Forbes, the machinist who rigged the steel beartrap replacement for his missing mandible, swore that once, when he shouted, “Gimme ten!” #24 assumed the position and did pushups until Tully made him stop with a sleep spike.

But that wasn’t true. #24 could count to ten, and sometimes even higher, when his medpak was working overtime.

Over and over, he tried to count the bodies laid out in front of him. After ten, things got foggy, but he didn’t have to use his fingers. If he used his fingers, he’d only be able to count up to seven.

The bodies were covered in sheets. The cleanup crew dropped color-coded tags on them. Green, red, or black. Hardly any green ones; the sheets over them were only spotted with blood. Lots of red and black. The red ones were a mess, but the black ones were yard sales of loose and charred body parts.

A couple of men and a woman walked down the line. They wore white pressurized biohazard suits, but #24 smelled the bracing stink of their breath and sweat venting out of their gas masks. Even as his medpak kicked down a bolus of tryptophan to make him drowsy, he ached to have them.

The woman was different. She smelled dead, but she walked and talked and the others listened to her angry orders.

The dead-smelling lady came over to review the surviving Raiders offensive line. Her skin was a dull gray-green behind her mask, shot through with black capillaries. He could ignore the itching hunger aroused by her assistants, but her rank aroma screamed at #24 to shoot, burn and behead her, sweep and clear.

But the order never came.

As she inspected them, she snapped over her shoulder, “Who runs these fucking rodeo clowns?”

A flunky checked his PDA. “A civilian contractor, Sherman Laliotitis. He was a professional gamer prewar, the best in the world at squad-based combat simulations.”

“Reliable?”

“He’s a sociopathic little prick, ma’am, but he’d do the work for free. Loves his toys.”

“Get him on the phone. If he still can’t deliver viable candidates, then he’s either incompetent or he’s a saboteur.”

She stopped and looked into the eyes of #24. Her eyes were the color of bile. She never blinked. “Check the headset on this one.”

“We did, ma’am. It sustained no cranial damage during the engagement.”

“Check it again, and double its downers. They’re supposed to be in a coma, and this one’s looking at me.”

A flunky unscrewed the bolts on #24’s helmet with a drill, while the other tugged it off. Several shots had cracked the high-impact plastic helmet, but the Kevlar liner had stopped them from damaging the electrical wiring and neurotransmitter pumps screwed into the dome of his skull.

He wanted to stop them and gut her, but he had orders not to move.

#24 followed orders.

VI.

On the dead side of Market, the Berkeley social science geniuses were building museum dioramas in the old storefronts, re-creating the bustling life of the old City. Celebrating its heroes-both the surviving and the fallen-in frozen pantomimes of earnestly rosy history.

You couldn’t see it at night, but they’d actually sculpted a plaster statue of Eagle and put him on a bike-next to Lester the Professor in his wheelchair and crazy-eyed Emperor Norton II, his courageous freak comrades in that first desperate year of rescues and food runs, before Big Brother came back to take over the job. A plaque at their feet said: They Kept the Embarcadero Lights Burning, And Kept The City Alive.

They’d posed for it together, three unlikely loners who had just tried to stay alive and protect their neighbors, when nobody else could. It was hella fucking surreal, hilarious, and also an incredible honor.

But under the self-deprecation and pride was a creeping sense of having already died. Their purpose fulfilled. Their glory days noted, memorialized, and gone.

Like the boy in the hundred-year-old statue behind him, on the domed-in corner of Montgomery and Market at which Eagle paused, finishing his joint before rolling out into the toxins.

It was a monument erected in 1850, or at least that was the date of the quote on the base. It showed a handsome young fellow in miner’s togs with a pickaxe in one hand, a flag in the other, standing tall against all comers.

The inscription read:

“The unity of our empire hangs on the decision of this day.” W. H. Seward, on the admission of California vs. Senate.

And now, San Francisco was a sovereign nation.

“Pffffft…Thanks, America!” Eagle said. “It’s been fun!” And then coughed up a plume of Master Kush and Kilimanjaro.

The Market Street South airlock was four lanes wide and a city block long, which included the sealed-off BART station just past Montgomery.

He snuffed the roach and swallowed it on his way through the door. No waste in this city. No littering, either.

Eagle’s locker was near the back and the showers, with the rest of the regulars. He suited up, put on his goggles and gas mask, checked the hazmat seals on the pizza cozy one more time.

Then he rode out through the gate and into the Red Zone.

The New City reclaimed the corpse of the old a block at a time. Clearing the wreckage off the streets, purging the buildings of any lingering human wreckage-dead or alive-was only the first step.

They were also repairing infrastructure, and cleaning up the chemical residue from the bombs that had leveled the playing field-or at least cleared it.

Eagle had watched from his bolthole in the Hyatt when the Navy choppers flew over the City that day. He watched the chemical bombs descend, on what they all unofficially called Black Flag Day.

He couldn’t tell what kind of bug spray they dropped this time, but the thousands of loitering dead that filled the streets didn’t respond to the powdery gray clouds like all the other times: getting all tweaked and fidgety, or eating themselves, but still standing.

This time, they just melted. Like the Wicked Witch of the West, an army reduced to runny, rancid meat that pooled in their shoes and overflowed the gutters around their fizzing, blackened bones. Then all was still, and death was dead.

Nearly a million zombies, dispatched in an hour and a half.

Along with every plant, animal, insect or human being that wasn’t safely under glass.

Black stains like Hiroshima victims, silhouettes etched deep into the pavement wherever they dropped. Static shadows of what once was, ghosts of an explosion still lethal two years later…

Eagle rolled over them, coasting the cleared stretch of Market, where the work crews were now opening up the frontier.

A few other cyclists passed Eagle as he hopped the curb and crossed the plaza with its defunct fountain and dead ginkgo groves. They wore elaborate Hopi sacred clown gas masks, and shouted his name as they passed.

The big red City truck was parked at the edge of Civic Center Plaza, with a string of worker trailers behind it. The crews worked in a long line, scrubbing the buckled marble flagstones and shoveling concrete debris into a sinkhole that had gobbled up half of Grove Street.

The workers wore orange convict jumpsuits and skid-lid motorcycle helmets. They played sandblasters over the marble to scour away the black scabs where the dead had melted. A cancerous seagull from somewhere far away wheeled down and perched on the head of one of the workers, pecked at its runny gray eyes.

Eagle saw a few other encouraging signs-sickly yellow weeds pushed through the cracks in the sidewalk, cockroaches ran in the gutter-but the domed palace of the Civic Center still looked like an ancient ruin. He remembered the day he’d delivered twelve pizzas to a wedding feast on the steps, the last weekend gay marriages were legal in the City. All of them now, as dead as the Romans.

The airlock on the back of the truck hissed and irised open as Eagle parked his bike and hefted the thermal pouch with their order in it.

Eagle stepped in and closed his eyes to the spray and blowoff. He kept his mask on until the inner airlock popped. The lucky pizza pies were way better protected than Eagle. A piping-hot message of love in a hermetic polystyrene metaphorical bottle, they would stay warm, yet crispy for at least twenty-four hours. Or until someone opened their boxes.

(Some Navy jerk on Treasure Island had bitched about the soggy cardboard when Eagle shipped a batch of deep dish pies out there; but the next day, he shipped a batch of these space age containers the submariners designed for keeping food hot without noisy microwaves. Another breakthrough for the evolving world.)

“Hey, Eagle,” Ernie cheered. “You remember that pizza place, Escape From New York, over on Van Ness? Ada says they gave you free pie if you could order in Italian. Is she full of shit or what?”

Eagle peeled off his mask, but he was in no hurry to jump into the argument, or breathe the air in there. Ernie Nardello and Ada Glaublich worked Red Zone cleanup 24/7, so they practically lived in the truck. Somebody must’ve pissed in their air recirculator. Hazmat suits, masks, dirty longjohns, and more than a few of Eagle’s special pizza boxes lay ankle-deep on the floor.

“I dunno, Ernie. I never delivered for them.” Popping the seal on the pouch made the truck warmer by five degrees. Garlic and oregano overpowered the truck’s manifold stinks. Even Ada made a noise, and Eagle had never heard her say a word. At least not to the living.

Born Adam Glaublich, the shy civil engineer was on top of the list for sex change surgery when the dead fucked up everything. Ada was a stone bummer, but Ernie loved her, and talked more than enough for both of them.

Ernie cracked the top box and nearly fainted. “Aw shit, I thought you said there was no more pineapple!”

“We got a couple more cans out of the Holiday Inn, so I saved ’em for you.”

“Dude, I could blow you right now.”

Eagle held out his wrist. “I love you, too. But how’s about you just pay me instead?”

Laughing, Ernie scanned him with a light pen. “They don’t pay you enough to come out here, man.”

“No, that’s your job.” He looked at the screens, the fly’s compound eye view of the Civic Center, the sinkhole, his bicycle. “Working hard?”

Ada munched a slice while she monitored their crews. “17, you’re cold,” she purred. “Warm up and work. Shovel faster.” She jogged Ernie’s elbow and pointed at a blinking indicator, but Ernie ignored her.

“This is bullshit busy work, man,” Ernie said. “The Navy says the shit got washed out and neutralized eighteen months ago. That’s why the fuckin’ Bay is dead, right? There’s never gonna be enough live people in this city for them to open the Green Zone this far.”

“I beg to differ, dude,” Eagle said, wiping the steam out of his goggles. “There’re still people out there. It’s our town. You’re cleaning it up, so the people will come back.”

“We’re just polishing rocks for a life-sized museum, but thanks. They’ll have meat puppets good enough to do our jobs by then. Hey, if anybody shows up at the gates who can turn my partner’s hot dog into a taco, let me know, okay? Then I’ll be at peace with the world.”

Ada punched his shoulder. “17’s acting up. Seagull ate his eyes.”

“So shut him down,” Ernie growled. “I’m not suiting up now. I’m eating lunch. You going back to the Bubble?”

“Not right away.” Eagle picked the old boxes out of the mess on the floor. “Got another delivery.”

“Out here? Where?”

“Haight and Stanyan.” Eagle strapped on his mask in the airlock.

Ernie’s eyeballs bounced off his HUD goggles as he dropped the first seal. “Say what?”

“It’s a long story. I gotta go, guys. Take care.”

Eagle popped the outer airlock and jumped down.

The zombie was waiting for him.

#17 stenciled on its helmet. Seagull shit and a sparking wire in its empty eyesockets. It dropped its shovel and lurched at Eagle, who threw the empty pizza boxes in its face and instinctively backed into the gate of the truck, groping in vain for a weapon worth having.

He hated guns, but he always carried one. A cop-issue Glock 9mm with soft hollowpoint rounds hung in its holster on his bike, next to his canteen, about ten unreachable feet away.

“Ernie! Call off your fucking dog!”

Ernie’s voice popped his headset. “What? Oh, holy shit… Ada!”

“MAKE IT STOP!” Eagle shrieked as #17 pawed his gas mask with one work-gloved hand.

Up close, the employed dead-the slave dead-glistened. Hi-tech Glad Wrap vacuum-sealed their skin, locked the sickness in and the freshness out. It was the only way to slow their inevitable decay, and make them humanly tolerable.

Under the industrial worklights, #17 glowed like a leftover angel. But underneath the shrink-wrap was the same old hunger. Its humanity was just a mask.

Up close, Eagle recognized that mask.

#17 had a Kirk Douglas chin. A Bruce Campbell chin. A chin among chins, with a nose to match.

That red-headed guy who used to barback at the Albion… Short-tempered, the regulars called him Fireplug…

I used to deliver pizzas to this guy, he thought.

Ernie and Ada were both hollering in his headset, but Eagle couldn’t hear it. He was lost in the moment. Pushing at #17, both hands on its chest, boxed in tight with no exit room. Watching it stagger back, lurch in, moaning.

“Ada, pop 17! Just do it! We got you, Eagle! Duck and cover, brother!”

Eagle dropped to his knees. The charges in the rogue worker’s head went off like firecrackers in a watermelon, wetware jumping out the top of its skull and spraying all over the fucking place.

“Eagle, you okay? Jesus, man, I’m so sorry!”

#17 wobbled and dropped. Eagle checked himself, wiped a few black specks off his parka. Willed his heart to slow down.

“Yeah, I’m good. Fucking freaked, but good.”

“Okay. We’re okay?”

“We’re okay.”

“Just…”

“Yeah. Just… yeah. Don’t worry about it.”

“You sure…?”

“Not gonna say a fucking thing, all right? We’re good.”

“Thank you, man.” Ernie exhaled, and chugged antacid. “Stay safe, buddy. We got your back.”

Eagle scooped up and stowed the pizza boxes, pocketed his gun and hopped on his bike as two more remote-controlled workers swept in to scrape up the mess.

Working together, making the world a better place.

VII.

The Dungeon Master had just burnt his tongue on the microwaved ricotta in his calzone-at least a three-hit-point wound-when the Love Line rang.

He washed the glutinous lava down with a splash of root beer, checked his hair, and let the phone ring.

For allegedly living humans, the science division sure seemed to enjoy chewing on human asses. When they couldn’t bitch about his kill ratio, they whined that his tactics were overkill; when his meat puppets weren’t lagging and bugging out like an NT server, they were dangerous rabid dogs.

The Love Line blinked faster. His pager trembled and jittered off the edge of the desk into an empty pizza box.

He wondered which of the Brain Trust would be dining on his haunches today. Of the three-headed nerd colossus that ran New San Francisco, he got the least friction from the Livermore geeks. Nasty little crypto-fascist elves, but they made the best toys, and bitched the least about his tactics.

His tongue throbbed and told him everything tasted like sandpaper. Perfect. He might as well throw the rest of the calzone back in the fridge.

Well, he thought, killing his root beer and reaching for another, somebody in the world probably has even worse problems.

He hit the Accept button.

Fuck my eyes, he thought.

Poison Lady.

Sherman sat up in his chair and brushed his oily hair back out of his eyes. “Dr. Childers, you’re looking lovely today.”

Meredith Childers’ gray-green face tightened on the monitor. She wasn’t just the chief researcher on the City’s medical research Brain Trust. She was also their star guinea pig. It was easy to see why the other scientists called her The Hippie. “Sherman… Laliotitis, is it?”

“Round these parts, they call me the Dun-”

“This is not a game, Sherman. You were briefed by your superior about today’s primary objective?”

“To secure the borders of Fortress Frisco against hostile invaders, ma’am. And phase one was a big win.”

“Don’t fuck around with me. You know what we’re doing here. What needs doing.”

Sherman looked around the control room. The Raiders’ POV monitors showed the cleanup crews carting off the last of the bodies. “I, uh… I am sorry if you’re unhappy with my performance, but… you know, capping enemies in the heat of battle isn’t like cutting the heads off guinea pigs in the lab-”

I’ll bet the cultists would’ve done it, he thought. You could’ve paid them in lentils and Bentleys.

The order had come down last night to target all the squatters on the peninsula in a one-day blitz, using all meat-puppet crews. Every squad operator was on duty today or tonight. The machinists pulled double-shifts refitting assault teams and converting run-down workers into walking bombs.

All the targets were armed; most were subhuman freaks, but none of them was an imminent threat to the city. Most of the Green Zone was still half-empty, but they were expanding it again, and the whitecoats always needed more cold bodies to play with.

“I’m just,” he finally said, “trying to do my job, ma’am.”

“If you’re as good as advertised, you should be able to control your team. Do you verbally monitor all of them at once?”

“That’d be impossible. I’m all over them in real-time for the real precise wetwork, but they’re all running a bunch of apps, most of which I wrote myself.”

“You’ve changed their programming for today, though, correct?”

“Well, sure…”

“No more headshots. You will be docked for each non-viable body-”

“Docked?” Sherman sputtered. “How much?”

“How much is a human life worth on the current market? Harden the fuck up and do your job, Sherman.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You’ll have no excuses for me next time?”

“No, ma’am.”

“You’re not the only warm body in San Francisco who’s good at videogames, Mr. Laliotitis. But if you’re not the best in town from here on out-or if I hear of any more leaks in your operation-the machinists will help us discover a whole new world of uses for you. Am I clear?”

“Um, yes, ma’am.” Voice choked. His catheter popped out. Cold piss streamed down his leg.

The line went dead. Motherfucker!

Sherman got an aluminum baseball bat and strode out into the hall, away from the mainframe made from 900 chained PS3s and the banks of refrigerated processors running every zombie in the city.

His eyes alit on the vending machine in the hall, but it was the only one in the whole building that worked.

A janitor pushed a floor waxer in loopy circles in front of the elevators.

He didn’t flinch or look up as Sherman ran up on him and smashed his face in.

The janitor wore a cheap motorcycle helmet with an enormous smiley face sticker on the visor. It took four whacks to crack the helmet, but another twenty to kill the fucking thing.

It never raised a hand to block the blows with its nylon idiot mittens. Just kept stumbling back and back as he pummeled it again and again, driving it into the wall and making doorknobs rattle halfway down the hall.

By the time the shrink-wrap snapped and the septic contents exploded outward, he could barely swing the bat. His lungs vapor-locked, knees went wobbly, but he couldn’t stop until the medpak in its skull cracked open, sprayed a little drugstore everywhere, and it finally spasmed and keeled over.

Sherman fell down hard on his hands and knees next to the bloodless corpse, blowing goat cheese in the beyond-septic waft, streaming snot and tears.

The door behind him clicked and hissed open. Wiping his eyes, Sherman saw a very old, very drunk man in a plush bathrobe hanging on the doorknob as he scowled at the mess. “Was ist passiert? Ist alles in Ordnung?”

Why was everything in the real world so fucking hard?

VIII.

The Black Zone party was down by Golden Gate Park, at the end of Haight. Less than ten minutes out of the Red Zone, as the Eagle flies.

A universe of difference, by any other standard.

But every so often, Pizza Orgasmica would get an urgent call from one of the outlaws who had managed not to melt in the post-human hinterlands, or had snuck back into town after Black Flag Day. There were enclaves dug in all over the City, more than anyone knew. And they loved pizza, too.

These streets were not clear, so Eagle ducked and dodged between the cars: glad the Moots was good on rugged terrain, and thinking about how sweet it was to be seeing some long-lost friends.

If you were a bunch of college dropouts living in an empty metropolis, you would probably think it was the best idea in the world to hole up in the Haight-Ashbury Amoeba Records.

The front windows were boarded up, but a guy waiting on the roof with an M16 shouted, “Pizza man!” and buzzed the front door for him.

Eagle rode into the open floor of the record store. It was an impressive setup. Anywhere else, it might have even had a chance. The front counters were fortified with thick plexiglass from a bank. A portcullis made of wrought-iron spikes was hoisted up to let Eagle in, then dropped behind him.

The ground floor of the record store was still a mess, but someone had been restocking the CDs. Along the far wall, a bunch of young guys and a couple girls sat on stationary bikes wired to car batteries, pedaling and watching cartoons as they kept the lights on and powered the big club soundsystem on a dais in the center of the store, where a pale guy with black dreads and a droopy mustache spun a deepdish dubstep mix. He saluted Eagle as the pizza guy parked and popped the hotbox on the back of his bike. “Hey, Tweak, you got any real music?”

Tweak flipped him off and tapped the sign on the decks: NO GRATEFUL DEAD-PLEASE DON’T ASK.

The second floor was a loft where the DVDs were stored. The new occupants had replaced the old staircase with a cantilevered drawbridge.

A couple semi-feral kids came hopping down the stairs to meet him, chanting, “Pizza! Pizza!” Black circles under their eyes. Bleeding gums. The adults looked worse.

Eagle dropped the stack of pies on the table and immediately wished he’d brought more. Fourteen hungry people converged on the boxes, making noises like Ernie’s broken worker.

“Dude, thanks for coming out,” Lester Wiley rolled over and pumped his hand. “You’re a lifesaver. I don’t have one of those pen things…”

Eagle sat on a milk crate next to Lester’s wheelchair and passed him a fat joint. “No sweat. You got the Sly Stone and Hendrix catalogs on vinyl?”

“If the kids haven’t burned ’em. Little Philistines melted most of the classic rock to make into swords and throwing stars and shit…” Lester’s eyes glistened as he watched his people eat. “Really, thanks for coming out, man…”

“It’s just a couple pizzas, Les. How’re you guys living out here?”

Lester lit up and took a stupendous hit. “It’s not easy, but when was it ever? At least the traffic’s gone.”

“Haven’t seen you in ages. When did you come back?”

Lester sketched out the last year and change since he and his gang left the City to try a commune in the San Joaquin Valley. “Everywhere else was worse, so we came home. But we’re not going back in the Green Zone, man. Don’t know why you stay.”

“Because it’s safe.”

“Nowhere’s safe. At least out here-”

“You’re not safe out here.” You’re not safe from them.

“We’ve been here a couple months, and it was working out pretty good… There’s a cistern in the park, behind Kezar Stadium, and we had gardens on the roof under pressurized tents-”

“What do you mean, you had gardens?”

“Last night, somebody burned us out.”

Gracie took Eagle up to the roof. Rows of burst bubbles and black crops. Gracie spat in the ashes. “Whole thing went up before we got up here. Chimi was on guard duty, but he was huffing something last night. He said he saw-”

Eagle said, “Toy helicopters.” He ran back downstairs.

Lester followed him, passed him the joint. Eagle stubbed it out. “You guys gotta get out of here today. Now.”

Lester coughed. “No way. We’ve got everything we need here. If they’d just leave us alone-”

“They can’t leave you alone. They need you-” He stopped. “Did you hear that? Turn down the music!”

It sounded like thunder.

It was dark in the back of the garbage truck. Soothing miasma of rot inside, pushing out bad thoughts. In the dark, in the stench, #24 couldn’t see the new recruits, couldn’t smell their freshly welded metal and plastic new-corpse stink.

The Commander’s voice recited a litany in his ear, over and over. The pre-engagement medpak spikes made him restless. When that happened, #24 got bored, and he started to picture something else happening, and remembering it, or imagining it. Wishing…

“Hold and contain. Wait for the gas to clear. Target center-of-mass. No headshots. Don’t screw your Dungeon Master, kids…”

On and on. Over and over, like teaching a parrot to talk. If something else happened, anything, it would be better.

One of the Raiders moaned, a low, hungry sound in the dark. The others took it up. They did it every time. The drugs and the voice in their ears wound them up, so they must be getting close.

A flat, deafening boom lifted the truck and stood it up on its back wheels, then dropped it on its side. The Raiders were thrown into a pile. #24 was on top, but he couldn’t move. Static chewed his ears.

The rear hatch hissed. Jerry the handler pried it open with a crowbar.

“Motherfuckers,” he kept saying, like a parrot. Blood streamed from his ears and hundreds of cuts all over his face and chest that shone like rubies-half-melted glass embedded in his skin. “Used our own fuckin’ mines on us, Tooz…” Woozily, he punched #24 in the shoulder. “Fuck ’em up, O-Town!”

“What is the fucking situation out there, over?” The Dungeon Master screamed in their ears. “Gordo, Jerry… where are my dogs, goddamit?”

Jerry sat down in the street and lit a cigarette, started coughing. Blood squirted out of the holes in his neck. The Raiders spilled out of the trash truck. Three of them rushed Jerry and tore him apart. They looked funny to #24, trying to stuff gobbets of steaming meat into their toothless mouths and into their rubber food-tubes.

“Raiders! Sound off, you cocksuckers!”

#24 growled at the PDA duct-taped to his forearm and tapped the touchscreen. Green dots on the map were friends. The red spot on the edge of the map was hot. Move closer, get warmer. Feels good. When you were hot, you got to fight.

“#24, you’re my quarterback, baby! Are you the only one left? Fuck… The transmitter in the truck is toast, I’m rerouting through here. I can’t see shit on the satellites, and my air support is a fuckin’ noob. And I’m pretty much talking to myself right now, huh?”

#24 counted his comrades, tapping the touchscreen six times… Two Raiders still lay in the back of the truck. One flopped from the waist down. The other one’s head was twisted around backwards, and could only bite his own back.

“OK, helmet-cams are live… Fall in, bitches, it’s medication time!”

As one, the Raiders jerked to attention. Their medpaks whined under their helmets, pumping drugs and barrages of electroshock to jump-start sluggish, decaying synapses. Shreds of Jerry’s septic gut dangled from the facemasks of the three backsliders, but they shambled into the huddle.

The new guys were stripped. Slim green metal tanks jutting out of their chests, stuffed with C4 bricks.

They marched in staggered formation along both sidewalks, hugging the scorched brownstone townhouses and concrete lofts that lined Haight Street.

On their screens, the meaningless map glowed red in the direction of west. #24 took point with a sixty-caliber SAW in his hands.

The Dungeon Master spoke in his ear, coaxing them around piles of wrecked cars and booby traps. “Okay, you’re coming up on the park, go left, you’re getting warmer…”

#24 didn’t need directions. His brain glowed, pulsing in time with the Red Zone on the map. The light from the intense shocks sparked behind his dull gray eyes and through the bulletholes in his black and silver helmet, making him look like a wrathful, dick-swinging god of the underworld.

The mix downstairs rudely cut out, and Bob Marley’s “Iron Lion Zion” shook rat turds out of the record store’s rafters. It was their burglar alarm.

The pizza feast disbanded with fire drill discipline. Even the kids grabbed guns. Tweak pulled a metal chain to drop the steel curtains in front of the store, but something roared out in the street and burst through the plywood and plastic windows. It burst in midair before crashing at their feet. A canister flooded the loft with yellow smoke.

Eagle pulled on his mask and pushed Lester’s chair away from the gas. Gracie herded the kids and the pedal-pushers towards the rooftop stairs, but she dropped dead before she could say the words.

Eagle shouted, “Masks! Get your masks-” Most of them had masks or filters around their necks, but the gas rolled over them before they could spit out their pizza. Half a dozen of them died in a sprawling pile at the foot of the stairs. A kid rolled on the floor clawing at her mask, drowning in her own vomit.

Lester slid out of his chair and tumbled to the floor.

Eagle took his gun out and looked for something to shoot. His goggles were fogged up. All he could see was smoke. The white stuff that killed everyone thinned out into cotton candy streamers oozing down the stairs. Black smoke came from the roof. Shooting from outside, but almost all of it was hitting the building.

Eagle charged down the drawbridge stairs just as a car crashed through the portcullis and plowed into the electronica section. Nobody was driving the burned-out Subaru wagon, but four Oakland Raiders were pushing it.

The second the Subaru crashed through the wrought-iron gate, a ring of claymore mines on the cashier’s counters popped up like sprinklers to shoulder height before exploding. Thousands of steel ball bearings flew out like a multiball monsoon in a tight, utterly devastating radius.

Two Raiders stumbled into each other as their perforated heads drained like dribble glasses. Tweak capped a third with a shotgun, but the headless Raider self-destructed and doused the DJ with flaming jelly.

The fourth Raider had dozens of steel pinballs embedded in its armor, but it gamely came over and climbed the stairs. Dragging a huge machinegun on one arm like John fucking Wayne, #24 clomped up the steps as Eagle tried in vain to figure out how to raise the drawbridge.

He looked at the pile of people behind him. Dead kids with guns and pizza in their hands. The roof stairs were on fire. He put away his gun and picked up the last pizza box. Olives, artichoke hearts, and anchovies, less than half-eaten. Why did nobody appreciate anchovies?

“Hey, Sherman, hold up, man! It’s me, Eagle. The pizza guy.” He waved his chipped wrist at the approaching zombie Raider. Like he deserved to live, while these chipless nobodies deserved to get gassed in their own home.

As if the Dungeon Master, looking at him from behind his game console, would see a human being at all.

#24 lifted the gun to Eagle’s head, then froze, looking down. Eagle felt shit pushing at his sphincter. Sweat popped out of his forehead.

“I’m not fighting you,” he told #24. “Nobody here wanted to fight you. They just wanted something to eat.”

#24 scanned the loft, from the neat pile of bodies by the stairs to the harmless, hopeless pizza guy standing in its way. Looking back at the dead bodies for a long moment, it finally turned to Eagle and raised its gun.

“Hey, big guy, you want a slice?” Eagle held out and opened the box.

And he wanted to say, Please, in the head, if you have to. Which was to say, Please, I don’t wanna come back.

Looking past the camera goggles, stared straight into #24’s runny gray eyes. Just pouring his soul out. Being human. The only thing he’d ever been.

#24 gurgled, and a rope of spittle dripped down from its steel-plated jaws.

“Huck… anchowies…” it said.

And Eagle was running even before the barrel dropped, running and laughing with tears in his eyes, thanking God in whatever form it chose for this awful moment of mercy and grace…

…as the Dungeon Master went click click click, stomped his feet. Went click click click again. Repeating it over and over.

Staring furiously at the game that utterly failed to obey him.

Betrayed, with every click.

Fifteen minutes later-as he click click clicked-a text window popped up on his primary screen. MUCH IMPROVED.

Good news. Was good news. It was good to be useful. He got recognition, bonuses and perks all the time. He deserved them. Because he was the best.

And yet, with his free hand, he grabbed at his straggly goatee and tugged until the pain cleared his mind, then reached out and grabbed the joystick again, squeezing and squeezing the trigger.

On the screen, #24 suddenly locked on a worker and shot him in the back, cutting him in half. His crew went on bagging and tagging the bodies, all green tags. Definitely not an equipment failure.

“I shot you,” he said to the screen. “I told you to shoot. I gave you a fucking order…”

The replay of Eagle staring down his favorite Death Machine ran on a corner screen until Sherman kicked it in.

It made his foot hurt like a bastard.

War was just so unfair.