They seem sad to see that it’s nothing exciting. It’s strange to watch them looking disappointed; you don’t know what will happen to them when there are no real people left.

(You have already given up hope. They will win. They are patient.)

When you step into the ocean, the water is already cool on your ankles. By nightfall it will be cold. You don’t know how far you can swim in cold water.

(Not far enough.)

You take another step. The water soaks into your shoes, your pants. The next step is more difficult than the last one.

Behind you, they are coming, sloshing dutifully into the water the way they remember doing. They will not make way for you to turn around. You cannot go back now.

You think about the moment before the child falls into the pool.

(You must look straight ahead.)

The Price of a Slice by John Skipp & Cody Goodfellow

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.”