The Last Weekend Read online

  Also by Nick Mamatas:

  Novels

  Move Under Ground

  Under My Roof

  Sensation

  The Damned Highway: Fear and Loathing in Arkham

  (co-written with Brian Keene)

  Love Is the Law

  I Am Providence

  Collections

  3000 MPH in Every Direction at Once

  You Might Sleep…

  The Nickronomicon

  As Editor

  The Urban Bizarre

  Realms (co-edited with Sean Wallace)

  Spicy Slipstream Stories (co-edited with Jay Lake)

  Realms 2 (co-edited with Sean Wallace)

  Haunted Legends (co-edited with Ellen Datlow)

  The Future Is Japanese (co-edited with Masumi Washington)

  Phantasm Japan (co-edited with Masumi Washington)

  Night Shade Books

  an imprint of Start Publishing

  New Jersey

  Copyright © 2014 by Nick Mamatas

  First Night Shade Books edition 2016

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Start Publishing LLC, 101 Hudson Street, 37th Floor, Jersey City, NJ 07302.

  Night Shade Books is an imprint of Start PublishingLLC.

  Visit our website at www.start-publishing.com.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Mamatas, Nick.

  The last weekend / Nick Mamatas.

  pages ; cm

  ISBN 978-1-59780-842-2 (pbk.: alk. paper)

  1. Zombies—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3613.A525L37 2015

  813′.6—dc23

  2015013630

  Print ISBN: 978-1-59780-842-2

  eISBN: 978-1-59780-582-7

  Cover illustration and design by Jason Snair

  Printed in the United States of America

  For Oliver Panagiotis Borrin Mamatas, a real California boy.

  (1)

  There’s a story so thoroughly circulated that it really isn’t even worth telling anymore, except that it is so common there’s no other way to start.

  San Francisco is . . . okay. The Board of Supervisors for the City and County of San Francisco barred new graveyards, and closed down the cemeteries, way back in the early twentieth century. Successive governments exhumed the dead, moved them to Colma where the dead outnumbered the living 1000-to-1, and to elsewhere in the Bay. It took decades to get every corpse out of town. In the early 1990s, long before I landed here with nothing but a laptop and a suitcase full of aborted novels and stillborn short stories after washing out of Emerson, 700 corpses were found under the municipal golf course at Fort Miley on the southern corner of Golden Gate Park; all ’49ers, or largely ’49ers anyway, some still clutching rosaries. They were dragged off too, eventually. Almost like someone in City Hall knew what was to come thanks to an opium dream from the days of basement dens full of sweating, thrashing Chinamen. Is there a yellow notebook in a file cabinet somewhere, pressed into the hands of every new mayor, photocopied and distributed to each new crop of supervisors? Is that why they killed Harvey Milk, because he threatened to tell the world?

  But we’re okay. There were some bodies under the ground in the Presidio, but some working weapons there as well. The tiny graveyard in Mission Dolores wasn’t a problem either. The last burials had been in the 1880s or thereabouts. Nothing came up. Or if anyone did, maybe the old Spanish of Upper California fell upon their Anglo and Celtic neighbors and the dead did one another in, just as they had when they lived. One of the epitaphs on a crumbling stone in that dump of a yard was repurposed as a pretty common graffito:

  Remember, man, as you pass by,

  As you are now, so once was I.

  As I am now, so you must be;

  Prepare for death, and follow me.

  I’ve recited it myself a few times, for drinks, or to impress a girl.

  The rest—the everyday dead of chicken bones in the throat and panicked shootings and hearts that seem to explode—sure, it was a problem. They don’t explode, you know—hearts—they just run down and the brain feels its own death from quick starvation. But San Francisco is okay. The animated dead don’t move quickly; bones are still weak, muscles still necrotized. It’s a hilly town, San Fran is, and our dead just snapped their ankles and floundered at the bottom of our hills. You remember the footage, right? The new militia of police and criminals commandeering cable cars and hunting the dead the way their great-grandparents hunted bison—from a slow-moving rail. Down Powell, up Hyde. Google it if you’ve forgotten.

  The Mission is on the other side of the streetcar lines. Here in the Mission District, death is still a worrisome acquaintance. I’ve heard the story so many times. It takes place in an old man bar. The kind where nothing’s on tap and nobody orders a wine till after midnight, and then only for the flavonoids. The body demands nutrients, not the consciousness. Old men, some young but old enough, watering down their bellies full of scotch and bourbon and vodka with some of the grape. No food, not even wings. No flat-screens silently showing a Giants game, no radio, no women, no gays except in a moment of stumblebum opportunity in the men’s room.

  A regular asks for a refill, grunting more than speaking. That’s always part of it. The old man bar isn’t a place for a bartender who happily traipses across the barback, keeping everyone fresh in their cups. The last thing anyone wants is a conversation or a smile. Just a stool, a place for two elbows, and a glass to stare into. And the old man is nursing his drink and breathing hard. Hard like a car on the other side of a street, getting closer, louder. His skin is already gray, but so is everyone else’s. Awareness comes like a wave across the room. The help steps back and plants himself by the exit on the far side of the bar. Nobody calls out for a drink, but they wouldn’t even under other circumstances. A bark or a yawp is enough to get these old juicers chucked out onto the concrete. We could take him, probably, but this isn’t a place for brave men. A dozen cowards watch a man die on his stool, evacuate himself, and slump onto the counter. The wheezing rattle of his last breaths take on a different tone. Deeper, chthonic, something older than life. A shoulder jerks, his back straightens, fingers tighten around the tumbler. We can hear the glass crack in his hand, and wordlessly he presents his glass and the bartender, his limbs herky-jerky from autonomic responses more than anything else, pours the new dead another glass and the dead man puts it to his lips and takes a sip. Some of it spills down his chin and onto his pants, but that’s nothing new in an old man bar. And that’s how we spend the night. Finally, someone manages to get a driller on the phone and he comes out to do his job. He can’t believe what he’s seeing. He’s afraid, just like everyone else. Drillers don’t deal with the dead, only the dying, only the human. It’s a fat guy, usually, or else a spidery skeleton of a man—there’s not many people left who aren’t one or the other—and he almost comically tip-toes over to the dead patron who is still running up a tab that won’t ever be repaid and places the drill to the back of the old man’s head, running the bit through with a vzzvvvzzz that ends in a gurgle and the sweet smell of gray matter oozing down the dead man’s back. Nothing to do after that but keep drinking.

  I hear that story a lot, for three reasons. The first reason is that I am a driller for the City, and always on duty. The hardware is strapped to my back, and I have a brick of an old phone hanging off my belt. The second reason is that I am a functional alcoholic, also always on duty and I thus spend a lot of time in bars. My bar is the 500 Club, but I’ll go anywhere for the
sake of business. Drilling is a purely commission-based small enterprise, and my contract is exclusively with the City, so I’ll lurk at the Attic Club, Mission Bar (which has a jukebox and a pool table, and that can attract the wrong kind of crowd), or City Bar (which is at least full of Mexicans and has a sense of humor)—the claw machine is full of porn DVDs (fatties, gay, interracial). I’d even patronize the Elixir, which used to be a saloon and after that was a certified Green Business with a make-your-own Bloody Mary station on Sunday mornings. The return of the dead put all that shit right off, though, and now the Elixir is somewhat acceptable.

  The third reason I get told the story of the dead man and his drink a lot is because sometimes I bring a pad of foolscap and an assortment of pens with me to try to get some writing done, and people want to talk about what they’ve seen, and what they’ve heard.

  (2)

  9/11 is easy to remember. I was in Youngstown, in college. My folks are Greek, so I didn’t go away for college—my mother still did my laundry and cooked what I liked, and my father got a kick out of telling his friends that his son Billy (for Americans) or that Vasilaki (Greek friends, my zillion cousins) is in college, and that I’ll make a living with my brain one day. I majored in English because I liked to read and—why not?—I’d go ahead and be an English teacher one day, though for most English majors that job looms in the distance like an electric chair at the end of a lonely death row corridor. Summers off, union work, sleepwalk through Salinger and Hamlet, grade papers—everyone gets a C—on the bar top till last call each Sunday night, and that’s that.

  I was in the parking lot outside Fedor Hall, just pulling in, when the news broke through on the radio. I sat in my car and rolled down the windows and blasted the volume. “Blasted” is probably the wrong word both for its unfortunate hint at the nature of the events, and because my car was a piece of crap with no speaker system to speak of. But it was loud enough and as other students passed by my car on their way to class or breakfast, I’d watch their faces melt. People I’d never talked to before came around the car—the black kids, the homely girl with a face like a shovel, hefty blondes and their cuter friends, barrel-y boys who’d rather be working down at the mill already except that all the mills in Youngstown closed in 1977—and listened.

  They asked questions: “Was it an accident?” Or answered them: “Fuck no!” or “Maybe it was, you don’t know!” if they had been standing there long enough to hear the news already. Then the second tower was hit and we all knew what was up. Someone said they were going inside to find a TV. Most people thought that was a good idea.

  I didn’t say a thing to anyone; I just drummed my fingers on the steering wheel and rubbed my lip with the side of the forefinger of my right hand. It was a habit I started that day, just to have something to do so I wouldn’t have to talk. My lips are always chapped now, from the rubbing. The crowd dispersed in ones or twos, with more than a few people declaring that they were going to their dorms to watch CNN or get drunk. Nobody wanted to go to class and someone started a rumor that classes would be canceled. I decided to drive back home. On the radio, the towers collapsed in a cloud of atomized concrete.

  At home the footage was on TV and the candles were lit. My mother, frantic, rushed up and hugged me. My father was home too, on the couch.

  “Oh thank God, Vasilis!” my mother said. “I was so worried about you.”

  I made the joke too soon: “Ma, nobody is going to blow up Youngstown. Terrorists only want to destroy something of value.” She slapped me right across the face, then burst into tears. Really, I could have put my fist right through the woman but papa was right there. He got up, and he was a big man, with hands the size of frying pans. We both thought we were in a lot of trouble. He’d never been violent, except the usual shouting and pounding the table. It was always under the surface somewhere; he used to reminisce at the dinner table that my papou used to beat him with a chain and lock him out of the house back in the chorio for any old reason. My kindly papou?

  My father raised one meaty finger. “The CIA did this,” he hissed, his accent and his rage lengthening the consonants. “The CIA is responsible.”

  A couple years later, as a senior, I wrote a short story for my creative writing class. It was about aliens coming down to Earth and this guy who watches the spacecraft on TV; he wonders why he doesn’t have any friends. The idea of aliens so dominates his thoughts that almost every sentence the guy thinks—this was first-person narration, mind you, like these words I am writing now—ends with but the aliens! I got an A on the paper and the teacher encouraged me to submit it to The Penguin Review, a local literary journal run by two poets-cum-wedding musicians he knew. I did and they rejected it because “sci-fi” was against the journal’s “mission statement” and also its “vision statement.”

  The story was called “1/19” because I was a kid and thus an idiot, and also the nineteenth of January happens to be my birthday. I changed the title to something else and sent it off to Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, and I got a formal rejection letter suggesting that my story was a Star Trek rip-off, or had a lot of typos, or that I should subscribe if I really wanted to publish with the magazine. Then thanks to some Googling I found a little online magazine called Infinite and sent the story in. They accepted it four weeks later and told me my story was worth fifty dollars. I whooped it up around the house and my mother laughed and clapped. The check didn’t come for another three months because Infinite was a quarterly publication. When it came out, I printed some copies of the check, and the story, and gave them to professors. I had a dental appointment and put a print-out in my pocket so I could use I’m a writer, I’m a writer, I’m a writer as a mantra to block out the pain while getting my teeth drilled. It almost worked.

  My father calculated that I’d have to sell one thousand stories a year to keep a roof over my head, and that didn’t even include all the money I owed him for the last twenty years of room, board, and “other investments.”

  I don’t remember anything about the day the dead began to rise. I didn’t even notice for the first few days. Most of my memories are borrowed from barstool chatter, what’s left of the Internet, and a few essays I’ve read. We have some good printers here in the city, and a burgeoning zine scene. Sometimes we even get trucker mail from outside, with a length of gold chain wrapped up in paper as a form of hopeful pre-payment for one of every zine in stock.

  It was four days into the end of the world when I was woken up by the door to my apartment falling to the floor and the shouted demand, “ALPHABET!” I opened my eyes. A rifle, pointed at my head. I was on my back, on the sagging couch that had long since warped to fit my shape.

  “A…” My mouth was so dry. I realized that I had a strong chance of dying right then and there. I was tempted to let him just fucking do it, but the request was just too strange—like the last few lines of a Kafka story without the preceding twenty pages of wind-up. So I lifted my hands.

  “I can do it,” I said. “A, B, C. Alpha, beta, gamma. Whatever you want.” The rifle came down. “What’s going on?”

  The . . . police officer? Soldier? They had become one and the same, I was to find out, and you could add National Guard, militia kook, and aging Black Panther remnant to the mix too, depending on neighborhood and time of day.

  “He doesn’t know!” he shouted. “Bring in the social worker.” And just like that, a social worker walked in. She was also in camo, but only had a pistol strapped to her leg, and a gas mask balanced atop her head so her face was visible.

  “Young man,” she said, “the unthinkable has happened.” She found my remote control and markedly ignored the empty vodka bottles and the sticky puddle of booze. “It doesn’t work,” she said after a few unsuccessful clicks. “Did Comcast collapse too?”

  “I just let the bill slide. Next week, maybe. I’m expecting a check.”

  She glared at me, then turned thoughtful. “Do you have a clock radio?”

  �
�Yeah, yeah. Something like one, anyway.” I said. I went to get up, but the couch held me down somehow, in my little groove. The social worker glared at me. “‘Turbulent and dangerous lunacy!’” I fired at her for some reason. “That’s Hamlet, act three, scene one, ma’am.”

  She found the radio without my help—I had one of those clunky flashlight/radio jobs on the fridge, earthquake stuff, and the radio told the story. Reanimated dead.

  Zombies, as impossible to believe as it seems, President missing, Power grids off line in major urban areas, the usual. On every station. In Spanish, too, and Mandarin and Cantonese. With the last two I only heard the word zombie, of course.

  “We’re evacuating survivors in certain neighborhoods. San Francisco has been spared the brunt due to . . . circumstances. Do you want to come with us?”

  “Want to?” Now there were six people in my little room, a place where I used to joke with dates that if we wanted to have sex I’d have to step outside. All were armed. “I can say no? You’ll put the door back and leave?” “We’ll leave.” That was from the guy who woke me up. “It’s a free country.”

  “Thank you, I’ll stay.” And without a moment’s negotiation the social worker dropped a business card on my coffee table and they all left. The radio was still on and I heard the same ten minutes of news for another three hours. I knew I had another bottle somewhere, and it was a good one. Aberlour, twelve year.

  Everyone has their own stories of those first few weeks. The funny thing is that the very worst survival trait in those early days was an expansive social network. Friends and family all but guaranteed death and an inexplicable mockery of resurrection. Whatever the cause of resurrection is, and “the cause” is the precinct of the sort of long-term planning nobody has time for in these latter days of society anymore, it’s very contagious. You have to be hard to brain your children, to keep from tying up your grandmother and trying to get her to the hospital, where rooftop snipers would just cut you down anyway. The social isolates, the outsiders, the third-shifters—we are the ones who lived. I’m not above quoting Nietzsche: “What is the greatest thing a man can experience? It is the hour of great contempt.” Contempt of the self, that is. The syphilitic old proto-Nazi was right about that one thing. Forget guns and canned goods. Dog-eared paperbacks of Dostoyevsky, Henry Miller, Colin Wilson, these were the best survival tools or at least the best marker of a survivor. Call it anti-social Darwinism. Looters and heroes were among the first to die and then die again when Canadian bombers took out whole cities to bury the reanimates.