Dead Walking

       On the whole, Carol had been better.

True, she was likely to live forever, or for as close to forever as chemicals could allow. But it hardly felt worth it when she would never look good in her favorite blouse again. Yes, countertreatment after countertreatment could preserve the body for a good, long while, but no one had said it would be pretty. Carol groaned and lurched on another top. Gray, corpsey skin didn't suit her.

It might have been less pleasant- she could have waited on the formaldehyde and gotten spoiled and bloated. As it was, her vocal cords were still intact, which was a lucky shot. She could have had to spend eternity as a fat, rotten, moaning cow with disconnected nerves and a senile brain.

She shuffled downstairs and found her John sitting at the table with a glass of orange juice. Of course, juice didn't taste like much anymore, so having it out was a sort of novelty. Like a flower arrangement, in a way: there to make things seem nicer and more the same. And the body feel less hungry. It was easy to remember juice. Or it would be if she didn't skip formaldehyde.

"Good-morning, love," said her husband. "Did you sleep?"

"No, John. It's official. We can't sleep."

"That's too bad."

"I know."

All of their conversations had been like that, lately. Then again, there wasn't much to talk about anymore. A new treatment, maybe, or that their neighbor had stood on his lawn for three days without moving, or that some celebrity had self-debrained, unable to cope.

"I miss television," said Carol.

John stared at her across the table. "I miss eating."

Hungry, Carol agreed.

"It's official. There's no more live ones for anyone. And animals don't taste. Or plants. Only live ones, and there's no more," complained John. "I guess we'll go hungry forever."

"I'm sure it won't be as bad as all that," Carol said. "In a few years, we'll never notice it. And if what's left is willing to watch, maybe we'll have television again."

"No one famous is pretty enough for cable anymore."

Carol knocked away the glass of orange juice and it splattered the floor alongside sticky bloodstains. "You're rotting in here," she said. "Let's go out."

"There's no reason to. No one drives."

"We'll walk. We need a good walk."

She crossed the room, took her dusty coat from the hall closet and suddenly thought better of it. She didn't need it anymore. After a few minutes fumbling with the doorknob clumsily, she opened up to the front porch, but stopped to carefully slip on her rubber rain boots. Coat or not, she could still wear bare feet to stubs and hardly notice for lack of pain.
"I don't want to," said John.

"You don't want anything anymore," said Carol. "Don't you have the conviction to be at least the walking dead?"

She dropped John's hiking boots on the kitchen table. The empty white plate in front of him cracked, smudged with sand from the last time he'd worn boots. They were dusty, and through the puff of grime the shoes stirred up Carol and stared at her husband expectantly. Defeated, John put them on with extreme difficulty, struggling with the laces until he gave up and just tucked them inside the shoes. His bones creaked as he stood, but sure enough he took one step after another out of the chair he had been sitting in for the past seventeen hours. Together, they shuffled to the open door. The sun was bright outside, they shambled down their front steps with an ungainly gait, not bothering to close the door behind them. It wobbled in the cold draft; if it mattered that a spring morning would invade their house, they wouldn't be able to feel much of it anyway.

Their lawn was overgrown with brown weeds, the mailbox set lopsided where a downed power line had hooked it. A sedan sat unloved in the driveway, the gasoline leaking away slowly. The windows were broken, and bees had begun to nest inside the leather seats.

A minute to the sidewalk. "Where will we go?" asked John, apprehensive of the cracks in the asphalt.

"Anywhere. We've got all day."

"We always do."

"No one ever said immortality would be easy," Carol scolded. "I'm tired of standing around hungry."

They went left and had to stumble around a crashed car and the remains of a tall wooden privacy fence. Both had stopped burning a month ago, but still were stained an oily gray from the smoke and fumes. They waved a tired hello at their next-door neighbor, who had slumped into a sinkhole in his lawn. They moved on without a response, leaving him busy staring up at the sky, circled by hungry crows.

"It's quiet," Carol said, trying to liven up the tone. Her husband didn't reply either, but looked back at the murder mobbing their neighbor of ten years, and then to a discarded femur lying in a gutter. Carol didn't try to speak much on the walk after that.

Instead, she paid attention to exactly how quiet it was, though it could have just been her senses dulling. But there was no one on the highway, any highway in the world probably. No planes in the air. No screaming children in the streets-- there had been plenty of those, or at least until they had begun to taste good.

They'd begun to taste good once the pulse was gone from most everybody, and it hadn't been much of a cause for concern. John had gone first, of course, and Carol could remember getting bitten by him, and locking herself in the bathroom until she ran out of food and gave in to join him in the worldwide rampage. John had been relieved in the beginning, of course-- the compulsion to crack open the head of one's wife and eat her wasn't particularly good for peace of mind, but since all the live ones had gone, he'd gotten complacent in hunger. Carol couldn't see why. It wasn't as if he was the one who had starved to death.

Hours passed and the couple tirelessly arrived downtown-- they'd seen the lights in the distance, maintained a weak hope that maybe there were still live ones for them there. But no, it was only the hum of backup generators-- others like them had set them to working, tried to maintain a semblance of organized life. They opened stores, but there was no money, so customers simply wandered in and traded old things for new. Food stores sat forgotten, but music shops blared out every track in their collection, trying to make use of it all.

It was there that Carol exchanged her old rain boots for a new pair of shiny wellingtons, dragging her husband over the broken glass and stained linoleum of street stores. An hour passed shuffling from front to front,  laying eyes on everything that was shiny and new, and free to take. Even if she didn't need much more than a pair of boots, Carol tried to convince her love to stay-- but the noise drove him away.

"Look at them all, acting like nothing has changed," he said to her. "Half of them are rotting in their shoes and they go on this way. It's disgusting."

"It's all they have."

"I'll tell you what it is, it's tragic," he said vindictively. "They don't need any of this-- why do you think there's no more hospitals, no more restaurants? We don't need anything."

"But it's all right to want, you know."

John couldn't make facial expressions anymore, but he could try. The result was a impenitent  snapping of the jaw as he tried to speak too quickly. After a few inarticulate moans, he managed to gather himself again.

"This will run out too, love."

Carol didn't argue, and they passed the downtown, passed the overgrown street trees and the crashed buses. Every now and again, the rats would scurry up from the sewers to drag down what had been a man's arm, or emerge from a grocer with a full belly of rotten vegetables. The subway tunnels had flooded, pushing water into the street that the two waded through. The surface glittered with swirling wings of slick motor oil.

Briefly, or at least for the half an hour it took them to leave behind the crumbling storefronts, they passed several disreputable bars. The red-light district was empty; the hookers had been some of the first to go, and by 'go,' most left on earth meant 'die.' Nobody ever seemed to stay dead anymore, so the term had lost its function in all practical use. So had the hookers, now that Carol thought about it.

They walked long into the afternoon, watching the city buildings shrink around them and the noise quiet again as they passed. For a while they rested at a ransacked gas station, not for tired feet but to take for straining tight, awkward muscles. Pull one, Carol said, and you'd never walk with it again. Unlife was a tiring, tedious thing, she said, sort of like taking care of a baby. One moment not paying attention to where a limb was, or if one had shoes on or not, and the unfortunate would lose a hand or a leg.

After coaxing, Carol managed to get her husband up again, and they set off in a new direction. The light grew slanted as they walked on, past parks and knotty gardens full of exalting deer. The gardeners were nothing but bones, of course, but plants didn't care about their fertilizer and the deer never noticed.

When the sun drew low, they reached a lonely hill by the side of the road where children had once sledded in winter, and rolled down in the summer. It had taken close to an hour to climb but finally they stood at the top, looking back west at the city they had just cleared in the space of a day. For unsteady legs, it had been quite a feat. The sunset was a lovely one, with plumes of orange and pink that licked the clouds and washed them with bloodstains. Birds flew home to roost on the high buildings, black spots against the sky. Dead eyes could stare directly at it without flinching.

"You'd have never seen it rotting into that chair," said Carol. "It's still beautiful."

He groaned. Carol wasn't sure if it was agreement or acknowledgment.

"Carol?"

"Yes?"

John looked at her with his unflinching face, tightened his jaw. "Do you still...?"

Carol didn't let him finish, moved her arm to close up his mouth and he couldn't resist. "You've been very right today about most everything. Nobody has very much anymore. Except for maybe hunger."

She removed her withered hand, so thankful her lips hadn't gone. She planted an earnest, if  mechanical kiss on his cheek. She couldn't smell him, but would probably only have been formaldehyde, anyway.

"But I still have you, and I'll keep that," she said. "I don't see why we need to make being dead any more lonely than it has to be."

He wrapped a stiff arm around her, and for the first time since he'd bitten her things felt almost nice between them.

"Let's keep going," he said to her.

"To where?"

He moaned a sigh. "Who knows? As far as what we've got left can take us."

---

Sometime in the future, about five years later, a man and a woman stood on a beach in California. The woman's Wellington boots were worn to shreds, and the man's hiking shoes were raw in the soles. Both of them were long, long dead, but they were also quite happy.

They'd left the east coast, traveled on the highways until they had managed to find a compass. From there, they had cut directly west. They'd cut into Pennsylvania and Ohio, saw the cold and silent houses of a hundred empty towns. They'd crossed the Mississippi River by flooded dams, seen it break free of every canal and begin to snake again like the history books had said it once had.

Two summers were spent stumbling through overgrown fields of corn and wheat, watching swarms of sparrows get fat on the discarded harvest. By that time the roads had long overgrown, the compass was the only navigation they had apart from rusting signs where the highway broke through a carpet of grass and weeds.

The days had long stopped being counted by the time they'd reached the Rocky Mountains. Over time they'd seen fewer and fewer wanderers like themselves, and their own vocal cords had since atrophied. But for Carol and John, there really weren't any words left to be said. With their tireless shuffle, they covered the breadth of the mountain range in contented silence.

Five years after they set out one miserable afternoon, they stood at the cusp of the Pacific Ocean, the border marking that they could go no farther. Cold had weakened them, heat had savaged them, and the chemicals had run out, so there was nothing for it. Half-blind eyes shared one, final glance at each other. Their roasted skin cracked as they managed to share a smile.

They laid in each others' arms and finally let the seagulls take them.