Cahill lived in the Flats with about twenty other guys in a place that used to be an Irish bar called Fado. At the back of the bar was the Cuyahoga River, good for protection since zombies didn't cross the river. They didn't crumble into dust, they were just stupid as bricks, and they never built a boat or a bridge or built anything. Zombies were the ultimate trash. Worse than the guys who cooked meth in trailers. Worse than the fat women on WIC. Zombies were just useless dumbfucks.
"They're too dumb to find enough food to keep a stray cat going," Duck said.
Cahill was talking to a guy called Duck. Well, really, Duck was talking and Cahill was mostly listening. Duck had been speculating on the biology of zombies. He thought that the whole zombie thing was a virus, like Mad Cow Disease. A lot of the guys thought that. A lot of them mentioned that movie 28 Days Later, where everybody but a few people had been driven crazy by a virus.
"But they gotta find something," Duck said. Duck had a prison tattoo of a mallard on his arm. Cahill wouldn't have known it was a mallard if Duck hadn't told him. He could just about tell it was a bird. Duck was over six feet tall, and Cahill would have hated to have been the guy who gave Duck such a shitty tattoo, 'cause Duck probably beat him senseless when he finally got a look at the thing. "Maybe," Duck mused, "maybe they're solar powered. And eating us is just a bonus."
"I think they go dormant when they don't smell us around," Cahill said.
Cahill didn't really like talking to Duck, but Duck often found Cahill and started talking to him. Cahill didn't know why. Most of the guys gave Duck a wide berth. Cahill figured it was probably easier to just talk to Duck when Duck wanted to talk.
Almost all of the guys at Fado were white. There was a Filipino guy, but he pretty much counted as white. As far as Cahill could tell there were two kinds of black guys, regular black guys and Nation of Islam. The Nation of Islam had gotten organized and turned a place across the street–a club called Heaven–into their headquarters. Most of the regular black guys lived below Heaven and in the building next door.
This whole area of the Flats had been bars and restaurants and clubs. Now it was a kind of compound with a wall of rubbish and dead cars forming a perimeter. Duck said that during the winter they had regular patrols organized by Whittaker and the Nation. Cold as shit standing behind a junked car on its side, watching for zombies. But they had killed off most of the zombies in this area and now they didn't bother keeping watch. Occasionally a zombie wandered across the bridge and they had to take care of it, but in the time Cahill had been in Cleveland, he had seen exactly four zombies. One had been a woman.
~ First page and a half of "The Naturalist", from After the Apocalypse, © 2011 by Maureen F. McHugh. A very good collection of weird fiction and sci-fi. Here's the rest of the story as read by Julie Day (Not Paul Harvey) for those interested with the preference of being read to: https://smallbeerpress.com/not-a-journal/2012/02/20/small-beer-podcast-6-maureen-f-mchughs-the-naturalist/ I can't speak to the quality of it. I'm really bad at audiobooks.
~ Images from Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Kairo (Pulse), 2001
McHugh also wrote China Mountain Zhang (1992). I very much enjoyed it in my previous life. It's a fix-up* novel. She was a little ahead of the curve writing multicultural, LGBTQA-friendly science fiction. Small Beer Press (run by the awesome Kelly Link) has kept some of her work in print despite the odds.
Random fun-ish fact: A very young Joan Didion used to retype Hemingway's novels in an attempt to learn to write like him. Did it work? What do you think?
* Several previously published stories and/or novellas "fixed up" into a single novel. Usually not tightly plotted as a consequence. If you've read a lot of genre fiction, you've probably read a fix-up at some point. The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury, The Gunslinger by Stephen King, To Your Scattered Bodies Go by Philip José Farmer are some famous fix-ups you may have read.
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