THERE IS LITTLE conversation as the three of us make our way toward the community centre. The two women are usually as talkative as I am taciturn, and I’m used to floating behind them in their conversational wake. But today they say nothing, so nothing is said. It’s so awkward I’m about to do something unthinkable like comment on the weather, when Julie finally breaks the silence.
“By the way, Nora,” she says, as if making a brief aside in the flow of a busy dialogue, “can you stop saying ‘you guys’ when you’re talking about zombies? R isn’t a zombie.”
Nora chuckles and doesn’t reply.
“Nora. I’m serious.”
“Am I offending you, R?” Nora asks with mock earnestness.
I shrug.
“You’re offending me,” Julie says.
Nora sighs. “My apologies to you both. You’re not a zombie, R, I’m sure your dick gets rock hard.”
Julie stops walking. “What is your problem?”
Nora stops a few steps ahead. “I just didn’t think people got offended by trivial shit anymore.”
“It’s not trivial to him.”
“He just shrugged, didn’t he?”
“He always shrugs. He’s a shrugger. But he fought hard to pull himself out of that hell and he’s still fighting it every day, so you could at least give him the courtesy of calling him a human being.”
Nora purses her lips. She looks chastised, but there’s something boiling in her that won’t let her cede. “Fine. Sorry for dehumanising you, R.” She wiggles her left hand’s four remaining fingers. “Eat a few of these and call us even?”
She walks off without waiting for a response and we stare at her back. The last time either of us saw Nora, she was helping Rosso with some Citi planning issues and getting ready to start full-time work at the Morgue. She was stressed, a little anxious, but mostly excited. Like Julie, like all of us, she watched the steady stream of recovering Dead trickling in from the city and saw it as the beginning of a coup against death’s cruel regime. Like all of us, she was brimming with hope and couldn’t wait to join the fight. But since we last saw her—two weeks ago? Maybe three?—something has changed. Is it just the strain of her new job? She’s a half-trained medical student thrust into the most horrific ER in history. Yet I’m doubtful it’s anything so simple. Nora has weathered too much horror in her life to be undone by work stress.
“Well,” Julie sighs as Nora disappears into the community centre, “this day’s off to a great start.”
Helicopters rumble in the distance like deep, distorted laughter.
• • •
The stadium never intended to be a city. It began with a few scared refugees throwing blankets on the field, then building a few shanties, then bigger and bigger shanties that became a mass of primitive high-rises. But there was never a blueprint. Nothing about the place is well-planned or logical, least of all the community centre: an architectural chimaera cobbled together from pieces of countless other buildings. No two surfaces match, and one wall of the meeting hall clearly belonged to a McDonald’s—the mural of a coal-eyed clown leading an army of mutated foodstuffs can be distracting during meetings, but today’s builders can’t say no to a free wall.
Despite its patchwork construction and the fact that it sits in the middle of a football field, it’s remarkable how much the place feels like an actual community centre. There’s a volleyball court, a foosball table, a nursery full of children screaming for parents who may or may not come back, and a vending machine full of birth control. It serves most of the traditional functions of a community centre, providing a place for the stadium’s youth to gather and a town hall for the adults to debate the issues of the day, but these issues tend to be more urgent than they were in the past. Does the park need a new gazebo? has become Do we have enough food to last the winter?
Julie has attended more than a few of these meetings throughout her life, first as General Grigio’s daughter and later as herself, and there’s a familial affection in the faces that gather around her.
“Afternoon, Julie.”
“Good to see you, Julie.”
“Sorry for your loss, Ms. Grigio.”
Friends of her father or of Rosso, and several of her own. Julie usually has no trouble crossing generation gaps, either younger or older, but today I see her struggling. It’s the condolences, still flowing two months after her father’s surreal suicide; her smile strains into a grimace. These folk come from a time before death was a daily fact dwarfed by grander horrors. They expect it to shatter her, maybe even want it to, but she isn’t here to cry for them.
“Thanks, Taylor,” she says. “Thanks, Britney. How about those helicopters, though?”
Her more age-appropriate acquaintances clog our path as we work our way toward the meeting hall. Teens from the foster homes, twenty-somethings from the salvage crews, and a few whose age I can’t pinpoint, ambiguous like me.
Unlike me, all of these people have a place here, a history, and I envy the ease of their greetings.
“Hey, Julie.”
“What’s up, Jules?”
“Been a while, Cabernet.”
I strain to recall their names. If I’m ever going to become a part of Julie’s world, I have to at least manage that. Her life is not a fresh first chapter like mine but a story already in progress, filled with unfamiliar characters and confusing subplots.