The Piggly Wiggly had been looted, but was empty now, broken windows shivered lightly by the building wind. There was a car in the parking lot, a blue Toyota slewed defensively diagonal before the phone stand. It was empty as well.

How much time had pa.s.sed, for him, for the world? Had everyone died? And if they had, where were they now?

Inside the store there was a radio, cheap and forgotten under the counter. He turned it on, sat atop the counter to listen while sorting through the contents of his wallet; he could not read any of the various identification, but he recognized himself on the driver's license.

Apparently the plague, the infestation, had finally reached downstate; they had all said it could not happen, that the Army, the National Guard had the outbreaks contained to the heavily populated metro areas, that if you stayed away from the big cities you would be okay. The usual smug rural paranoia, glaringly reinforced by daily newscast scares, closer and closer until there were sightings, here and there, more and more but no actual deaths. Stay out of the cities, they said. Lock your doors. Of course now they had been proved completely wrong, but then again they probably no longer cared. The only question left half-worth wonder was Who; who finally brought the death, who rode the pale horse; and did it matter?

No. Of course not.

He killed and ate a pregnant teenager that afternoon; her bones snapped in his hands like fragile clasps of cheap jewelry. Soon afterward he walked in front of a truck, a quarter-ton pickup driven by two women whose vast and rolling eyes were almost blinded by outrage and terror, and found what it was like to fly.

It was possible to walk a long way without feeding. He tried to go as long as he could, and as far. He was moderately successful.

He had forgotten that his name was Peter, that he was a cost accountant, that he had no close friends and a wife who did not particularly like him.

He thought he might live forever.

Did you use alcohol? Did you use prescription drugs? Stimulants or anti-depressants of any kind? How about non-prescription drugs? Cocaine? Amphetamines?

No.

Were you ever diagnosed as having hypertension? Diabetes? AIDS? MS? CP? Huntington's? Hodgkin's? All the brain diseases, finally, which at least made some sense if not enough: no, he told them. I was perfectly healthy. I didn't even smoke cigarettes regularly.

Senses: enhanced olfactory, to a level of sophistication comparable only to the most advanced carnivores. Enhanced night vision. Auditory unchanged. Tactile senses deteriorated to a large degree. They never asked about his sense of taste.

Angry eyes. Notations. Without adequate medical records, without a formal autopsy they were reduced to that old fallback standby, asking questions. They asked the same questions a lot. He wondered if they knew that.

They smelled so good.

Irony: having died once, stupid and fast and too dumbfounded for real awareness as he crossed the line from life to hyperlife, now all he wanted was to die again, pa.s.sing this time into the fullness of erasure; to unbecome. Irony once more, but one infinitely warmer: in his first life he was not much, in fact he was nothing and no one, no one, his problems, the sorrows of his emptiness less than cliche and his heart too dull to even notice the rolling time sucked from him by cold attrition; but now in death, the answer.

The vessel must be emptied before it can be filled.

He had not been transformed, as if from frog to royalty, all in a moment, in fact it took him the better part of a season, warm to cold, to realize that he had changed. Again. In his dark vagabond travels, street to street to highway and death after death after death, he a.s.sumed of the others he saw, the ones he watched without joining, an aimlessness informed by innocence and more than equal to his own. At last, shy and stealthy, he followed and then joined a trio met outside what had been a parochial school, standing blanched and faintly steaming in blind yellow streetlight circles.

He told them, haltingly in their silence, of his theories-he had a lot of theories then, many of them to prove subsequently untrue, one or two in the next few minutes-and spoke of his ideas, his belief that there must be a different way to live, that this course of wandering, of empty killing, was wrong. Death is good, he told them earnestly; it should not be randomly bestowed, there should be a purpose, a reason behind it. Kill and eat, yes, it had to be done and was in its way perhaps not so bad, perhaps not even as bad as the old way which was the same thing, really, wasn't it? Hadn't it been? Just disguised. It had still been eater and eaten, but without blood, and maybe this new way was better. Cleaner, because everyone gained, wasn't it so?

Wasn't it?

It was like talking to the light poles. No answering. No talking.

No thinking.

No nothing.

He remembered trying again, simpler words, louder in his frustration, louder until he was screaming at them, right there in the parking lot, they were nothing, less than animals, stupid eating machines; in the bland reflection of their eyes was his first serious consideration of suicide. The last immortal man on earth. What a joke. He left them there and promised himself he would live-and die if he had to-alone, he would never come near any of them again, he was different.

He stayed different.

He became lonely.

Eventually, after nights in the snow, curled like a sad surly insect in a bitter coc.o.o.n, he realized what was happening, had been, what he had truly become.

Was it a coincidence that he alone retained the gift of awareness, of a consciousness more severely tempered and refined than even those who had never died? Was it a coincidence that he alone understood what a gift it all was?

No. It was not. There is more in heaven and earth, more than the dead and the living: there was a place inside him that death did not hamper nor life release, that had blossomed now in this terrible half-life to make of it, and him, something new.

And there was work to do.

He cried then, he was so happy.

We transcend death, we are death, we are the afterlife. His message, preached to a herd begun as worse than cows, grisly cud and slack stares. Quite the congregation, cl.u.s.tered together like flies around a sore, wandering away, then back to stand as stupid as before. But they had listened, he knew they had. Because even those eyes could widen, even there was the echo of the place inside him: Emptiness fined calling to the guttering void of others: Here is what you need. Be filled. And eventually, through reservoirs of patience and demand, they learned. Not much, even after all his efforts, but enough to rise at least a step or two above the level of simple slaughtering machines, dumb animals feeding at the living trough of the ever-lessening pool of victims-because of course the others, the ones left alive, were learning too, after a shockingly long period of numb terror that decimated them through its fostering of stupid theories, ruinously reckless modes of action; that vaccine, for example, what a disaster that had turned out to be.

Not for him, though, or his people. For them it was not apocalypse but transformation, a changed order of being. Fruit of his relentless teachings, as slow as they, finally he had guided them in choice of their victims-who in deepest fact were truly victims no longer: choose not the healthy but the ill, the old, the sleepers on benches, the hiders in crevices too small for living eyes to find: take from them the sorrows life has forced upon them; empower them all. They are empty: fill them. And painlessly, it must be done painlessly: no ugliness, no s...o...b..ring feast, just a seamless entrance to the infinite. And his people, relieved now of the burden of total senselessness, restored in some distant way to the habit of order, had responded with tenacity collective, a dark unconscious charity that absolved, rather than bestowed, pain. They had given all that was left for them to give, they had given of themselves, not taking but making, no longer the heedless gobble it had been-although unfortunately that continued, there were still some he could not reach, usually the ones gone so far for so long that nothing but a well-placed bullet could get their attention-now the process had become more than a process, it had evolved into nothing less than the sacramental.

But in the end what difference had it made? They all died again at last, painfully, in clumps and lowing droves; he had never taught them a way to save themselves; it had not seemed necessary. Why fear death when death is what you are? His own survival had been almost a comic fluke, found as he was pinned beneath an unused refrigerator in the bas.e.m.e.nt of an abandoned community center, their summer's hive, lair, church; he had tried to block the door, found his strength distracted until it was too late, and lay there stunned as an idiot bug, unable to escape the grim combat faces in their hypersterile suits, saved only-irony again-by his sudden terrified cries of Please. Over and over: Please, please. Ask nice, his mother used to say. The inability to do so had killed his people, sent them en ma.s.se to crematoria, their bewildered cries of hunger and unease unmarked by him, incarcerated as he was in this monolithic facility, unable to hear or help.

Still he had loved them, in away, and needed them certainly, and certainly they needed him. G.o.d help us if they ever get smart-if he had heard it once in the days before his own sloppy exit, he had heard it a million times, and twice that afterward. Well, he was smart, and more than mere intelligence: he was aware. By his being he brought epiphany; from emptiness, the first intelligence of what it meant to be full. He had enough brains for all of them.

And now he was all of them, all by himself.

How long had it been, they wanted to know, since he had eaten real food? As opposed, he supposed, to the synthetic humanity they fed him, the hideous fake flesh. G.o.d. Real food. Don't make me laugh, he said. That was the real food. Realer than dead animals and dead fish. You drink blood too, you just call it gravy.

They hadn't liked those answers, liked others even less, liked least of all his answers incomplete, his silences that fed their frustration, boiling to a shout, We have to know! We have to find out.

Why do you ask me? Yelling now himself. Why me.

Because you're the only one whose brain didn't turn to neuron puree, you're the only one who still has an IQ. Because there isn't another one like you.

Slowly, there in his prison, he came to new theories, black knowledge seeping as cruel and inevitable as infection through the blood. The zombie epidemic, the reign of the rapturous dead, was effectively over. What few shambling wanderers remained-none of them his, he was sure-were walking a very short line thanks to the Army's new improved a.s.sembly line techniques, practice evidently having finally made perfect.

So. Why then were the doctors, the NIH bullies, so greedy to find out what differed in his post-death physiology, what possible difference could it make at this late date? And why do it with such idiotic Twenty Questions sloth, for G.o.d's sake? Why not just perform a lengthy slice and dice, study each cell individually if that was what it took to get where they wanted to go?

Where did they want to go?

He had a theory for that, too, and the more he pondered it the more correct he knew himself to be. They wanted to make themselves like him. Immortal. But without struggle, or pain. Or work, real work, his work, the plumb and scorch of the heart, the soul. No. They were doctors, they didn't believe in souls. Just find out what he has so we can get it too, synthesize it, something. We have the greatest concentration of experts in the history of medicine, for f.u.c.k's sake, we ought to be able to do something. He's just a zombie. He's just a zombie.

Stropping his wrists against the restraints, a slow and antique care, trying to slough to the bone. No, he told them. I won't cooperate with you anymore. There is nothing more for me to do here, and I want to die.

They did not answer. If he wished to eat, he could not help but cooperate, and they all knew it, he most of all in the warm depths of his degraded capitulation. He had tried to starve himself once; they had not permitted it. They had their own lengths, how far they would go.

But they would never let him go.

His people, such as they were, had been-and even if they had been nothing, they had still been his-were all dead forever, pa.s.sed beyond that second life into the only place he wanted now to be, the last fulfillment, the final step taken. So easy, with access to the right weapons, weapons nothing, the right mindset. Goad the wrong orderly, presto. But that was for dreary daydreams, he never in fact saw any orderlies, any nurses, anyone other than the increasingly sullen doctors and he had goaded them plenty already, they were unimpressed with his reasonings, his message and pity writ large; they wanted bodily fluids, they wanted to measure his eyeb.a.l.l.s, they wanted him to flex his right arm twenty times and twenty times again, they wanted to see if he remained capable of a bowel movement, of a rise in temperature, of an erection. How human are you, they asked with their tests. How are you still like us?

Too much, he thought, and told them so.

"Why don't you just kill me?"

The doctor, young, thin; swift gloved brown hands, faintly cool pink palms. Large eyes that said nothing at all.

"You know why."

Tears. He could still cry. "I want to die. Please just let me die."

Swabbing at his restraints, swiping lubricant beneath to keep the friable flesh intact. "It's not up to me." Making notes on the file, it was already War and Veace, what else was there to say? How long was this going to go on?

"Please," he said. "Let me go. Tell them to let me go."

Cold eyes, now. "Did you give your victims-pardon me, your converts- did you give them any choice? Did you ask them if they-"

"Yes! Yes, I did." Earnestly. "I asked them all, I never forced anybody. Once I explained to them how it was, that death is inevitable, they understood and they-"

"Let me explain something to you. You didn't bring anybody to a better life, you just killed them, all those people, you and that Salvation Army you organized, as if they weren't bad enough on their own."

And in his eyes, the question. The how.

Still, forever the unspoken how: when it was only why that mattered: how did you do it, how did you train them, how are you different? Weakness, calling to weakness, made for it, weak himself unto a loathing so pure it had gone for so long unrecognized that it became part of his body, his inner skin, did no one understand what it was to be nothing? "I did it for them," he said, and felt the truth of it, elemental as the taste itself; but how explain the helpless beauty of smell to the noseless and the blind?

Leaning down, now, and close, right in his face like they never did. "Who the h.e.l.l do you think you are, anyway? Jesus? The Second Coming? If Jesus saw you he would puke. You killed people, and you ate them, and you knew what you were doing! All the time!"

And did he realize, that young doctor, did he begin to understand how the sudden fresh gust of his scent was in and of itself so incredible, so overwhelming, that those angry words were lost in it, contempt drowned delicious in the river of that smell, he was so close- "G.o.d, look at you!" in new horror and disgust, actually leaping back, away, far away so his scent dwindled to a faint sweet ribbon, gone entirely when he left the room.

And left behind, abashed, his mouth weeping helpless drool, to turn his trembling head away.

To sink into nervous proto-dreams, thrashing against the restraints to rejoin his people, whom he had tried to save, empower by emptiness: his happy twice-dead people in the painless landscape of Nox, a heaven of endless night unfolding now before him in the s.p.a.ce behind his eyes as in the cubicles and offices beyond his room that day's conclusions, findings, results unto minutiae were entered into list after list, as the lights above his twisting body glowed continuous blue, a pitiless illumination for his helplessness and grief, extinguished by immortality to the status of the everlasting dead.

23/ Eric Shapiro Call Me Doctor.

BY NATURE, YOU ARE NOT A MAN OF ACTION. You were the one, in the cla.s.sroom, who sat and watched quietly.

You were the one whom the teachers suspected were judging them. Their perceptions were accurate. You knew you were brighter.

And yet, although the world contains men of mind, it remains a thing of action, and so- you're going to drive to the house on the red rock street.

You're going to come to a modest, stout home. You'll be wearing a suit, this in spite of the sun. You'll be dressed like New York, even though it's New Mexico. You will knock at the door; your heart will knock at your chest. Mrs. Gomez will greet you. She will hold out her arms.

Your eyes will bear the iced tea. They will bear the wall clock. They will bear all of the things of the Gomez abode, provided that you don't have to look at one thing. It is chafing and moist. It's what brought you here.

Not for you were the jobs where you woke with the sun. Not for you was the life where the cuff links just clinked. For your cuff links chime. For you is red wine. For you are the evenings when your wallet squares off with the city.

And the wife, yes. All yours. Without her, you might have misplaced your heart. For she's the one who nods and says, "You can do this, Max. You can go on."

And says, "I love you."

And, "I believe in your mission."

Your trainers, too, they believed in the mission. On a practical level, it makes excellent sense. The ones who bear the virus are to be your central targets. For to let them beat the virus is to let them spread it 'round.

And to let it be spread is to let us fall dead.

For you, then, came the gun, came the holster, came the badge. Came the dark gla.s.ses. The headaches. The hundred-hour nights.

But you will still chat with Mrs. Gomez. You will chat with Mrs. Gomez, and you will look her (anywhere) in the eye (but there).

You will chat with Mrs. Gomez because you know that there are cabinets in your kitchen. And you know that those cabinets are meaningless without the fluff of bread upon their shelves.

And to get the bread, you must perform the task.

"Finish your drink!"

This is Mrs. Gomez. Her mouth's deformed. It's a nice deformity; they call it a "smile." But it doesn't belong there. It was born out of lies. Like the ones which emanate from your bedside-manner mouth: "You'll be fine in several days..."

This you say, despite your gut.

"Fortunately, our new medicinal supplements can cut this off at the pa.s.s..."

This you recite, courtesy of the manual.

Despite the gun at your breastbone.

And the false label screaming from your badge.

"Doctor?" you asked him.

"Doctor," he said.

You looked at your badge. Then back at your trainer. You said to him, "But how can...?"

"We have the authority."

A grin 'round his lips. A pat at your shoulder. As he walked off, whistling.

No medical school, not for one single day. And yet they called you doctor, these people. All people. The ones at the firm. At the town hall gatherings. All around your lime-gra.s.s neighborhood.

And needless to say, in the dim swell of those living rooms where you chattered, week after week after week...