The Librarians
The champagne bottle popped. A universal wave of semi-flinch filled the room’s bodies in a wave of excitement despite the expectation the cork would pop. We watched from the side of the crowd. Another year. Another drama. Another opportunity. As they downed their glasses and replenished them, they made sure to snap shots. Just as everyone else, they lost sight of their originality and ability to be present. It was as any other photo of any other person in that same time. Maybe others were in more interesting locations, but they were still dissociated from those who surrounded them, disconnected from a true celebration.
We somehow managed attendance to a more opulent party that year. Friends of friends were helpful in that way, during the covert hypnotism and before the onset of sudden decay. We looked at each other with an internal wink and instead rolled our eyes then quickly, instinctively took what we could. Too sloshed and into their phones, nobody noticed we took a case of champagne with the meat and cheese platters. Out the front door, we went not bothering to cloak our theft in our purses or coats.
That’s what we did. We scavenged when we could, sometimes out of necessity but mostly because we could. My bucket Guatemalan purse was perpetually in tow, despite my fashion sense, for it was useful in carrying forties and books. Four of either could easily fit or a six-pack clinking with each footstep. Instead of a band of thieves jingling with treasure, we were simply a clan of deviants clanking their way out of parties. All that I see, I steal. Anything consumable we took. Check the cupboards. Check the medicine cabinet. If we could get into a bedroom, what’s in the top drawer? My most cherished prize was discovering a canister of nitrous oxide in a closet. We rolled that big score out the back door. We each took a a few hits and then sold it as full at the next party, making sure we didn’t know anybody there well.
They couldn’t track us down if they wanted. We had watches and each other. If we got separated, we’d meet at the library. We left our phones behind years ago in another act of defiance. We relied on our innate connection to navigate the world with each other. The library was our source if we absolutely had to go online. Yet, most of what we were looking for could be found in the books. More could be found in the books. With time, people in the library increased to get a wifi signal for superficial reasons rather than acquiring knowledge. We knew we were slightly silly in our strange rebellion. Yet, we had all we needed; it didn’t matter.
Coincidentally, that immature refusal insurmountably saved us from the decline. It didn’t mean we were free from the attack, but we were immune from being it. Later, as we huddled in the library, by candlelight we read the Reader’s Digest Collection of the Supernatural. There were cases of zombies in Louisiana when plantation farmers would kidnap people by drugging them into zombies, making them mindless slaves as their families thought they were dead. Those same books which filled the building were our outlet for maintaining sanity or destroying it as well as building our survival. How to stave off infection. How to butcher a deer translated into how to butcher a cat. What is the meaning of life? What is starvation?
Since the library moved everything into a digital Dewey Decimal system, it was difficult to find all the zombie fiction works. We started with the comic books and moved on to the horror authors we knew. Three of us scoured the fiction looking for tricks, maintaining strength. The other two were tasked with the easily found computer science books.
It was a new year. There was little thought nor feeling but glee as we packed our new haul into the car that night. Despite the robust amount of books the library had, it was low on public funding and thus lacked sufficient security. We discovered how to break in a couple of years before that night. Deviant geeks that we were, it seemed appropriate we pop bottles by the Millers and Oates…and then return on January 2nd to see the staff baffled by the champagne stains and hoers devours crumbs.
Yet, there was no 2nd to come in the standard sense, the confined by humankind, digital sense. Reminiscent of the plantation farmers zombifying by drugging others into servitude, there was the drugging. Yet, it took place just short of mass extinction. Also unlike the Deep South, these zombies were meant for destruction rather than fieldwork. Who these new farmers were was too distant information that all those books couldn’t tell us. Yet, we speculated after we digested the 000’s, 600’s, and 900’s as well the most recent magazines and newspapers.
We found dark humor in most of the fiction works describing zombie’s consumption habits as either solely brains or whole bodies. Those speculating novelists’ minds adhered to an outline passed through the modern age. They were wrong. Real zombies ate your heart out. That’s all they wanted, the seat of your soul. For what is life without the feeling that makes your brain form memories as good or bad? It wasn’t zombies ate brains because they were mindless. It was they ate hearts because they were soulless. The poetry section helped me see this lyrical juxtaposition as I sought comfort within its pages.
For a week, if there was a thing called a week anymore, I went into a deep bout trying to find meaning in our descent within the spirituality section. I paced around spouting destruction equals creation as my friends wearily overlooked my insanity. Would I take one for the team if I couldn’t live in this madness anymore? Would they eat me? Not my heart, please. I’ll tell them to not eat my heart. How could my friends eat me? I’d eat them if I had to. Or not. It causes neurological disease. Those fuckers can’t have my heart. After I said I was going to burn myself alive like a monk as a fuck you to whatever assholes who started it, my friends banned me from religion, philosophy and most of the self-help. I was allotted one hour every other day listening to Dennis read from a curated pile of thoughtfully selected books.
We started to make notes until we realized it was winter. We didn’t want to burn the books. It was agreed the first to go would be the romance novels, the children’s books and then all of the fiction, if it came to that. It did, all the way into the beginning of poetry. We spent the end of the season in the basement reading Dickinson and Collins out loud, tearing out the pages and watching them burn as an offering for our safety. We sacrificed the wonders of the mind and beauty of its art for the spark from which it originates, life. Poetry in motion as its words flickered above our heads, sustaining us for another night.
One of the basement windows remained cracked on and off for ventilation. Zombies only knew if you were there if they saw you. Deaf, dumb but not blind. As we took turns opening and closing it, we all noticed the smell of other fires but did not dare to find the source. We wondered why no other human life attempted entry into the building. Surely, somebody out there needed knowledge. Perhaps they had the same fear we had, smelling the embers of our literary bonfire. For what had all the zombie films and novels taught us just like Mary Shelley did? Living people are the biggest monsters. They are the true threat in a zombie apocalypse. We all read Frankenstein to remind ourselves of the monstrosity of mankind, lest we forget. It took each of us less than two days to read it. Then it burnt. The history books further cemented that fact which encompasses many works of art: man as a predator, man as the destroyer.
I begged to not burn each of my favorite books as they came in sequence. Or at least let me read it one last time before I died. Some I was permitted until I became too obsessive and frequent with my requests. You can’t burn Robbins because he’s too funny. You can’t burn Oates; she’s too prolific. Dickens is too classic.
We didn’t sleep much out of terror but also from the coffee beans we roasted from the library’s cheap cafe. Once that supply ended, our fervent digestion of literature paced itself to a still high volume but less rapid approach. Amy, who always enjoyed math, occupied herself with alternating between functional knowledge for our situation to mathematics works. She calculated problems in the margins to remain calm. The others had their own devotions to certain pieces. We all had assignments dictated to each other for survival while other times we spent reading what we liked, what made us human. My friends were lucky their inclinations gravitated towards non-fiction whereas I saw what I loved burn.
The doors were barricaded with the tables. The blinds were all pulled. Zombies were lazy. If they can’t see you, you’re not there. Out of sight, out of whatever minds they had, perhaps that of a mosquito. There wasn’t discovery for a zombie, just happenstance. We sometimes peeked through the windows and saw them standing there, dead eyes fixated on the stars. I found it odd for the undead to gaze into the heavens and wondered if they were crying up to their souls. They traded in their phone chargers for the cosmic space powering what brutal battery they had left. They were already zombies before someone made them one. Jordan sobbed in horror one day as he saw his little sister in that inactive zombie pose and damned her Snapchat addiction. In outrage, he smashed most of the computers into remnants of plastic and wire disarrayed about the floor.
Physically, they could not be killed. We first encountered them when we attempted leaving the library. In tipsy merriment, we thought he was a drunken pervert when he lunged at my chest, but it became evident of something sinister as he cannibalistic-ally tore at my breast. Jordan tried to knock him out but that whole folktale of zombies not becoming winded was true: strong, soulless with an appetite never satiated. The others started to beat on him until he was on the ground with his face and brains splattered on the pavement. I didn’t think we had the savagery to curb someone, yet we quickly learned what adrenaline and instinct could do. We simultaneously panicked we killed a person until we noticed his feet and arms were still moving. Looking at each other in disbelief and then down the street to another with the same dead set eyes on our chests, we retreated back into the library and locked the door.
Soon we heard screams from outside. Peeking out, we saw a waif sorority girl type pull out the heart of a local homeless man’s chest and feverishly clench her jaws around the organ like a dog shaking its prey dead. Over the next few days, we heard similar screams and witnessed the same killing. Eventually, we stopped wondering, for we knew. The screams became less frequent to the point that we began to look again at the horror because it had become rare.
We grew up on a fictional basis that zombies created more zombies. Not true; they kill you for your soul. They weren’t going to bite you and your doom was set. They could do damage, mostly to your breast bone. They would grab you, maybe dismember you if you struggled incorrectly, but they went for the heart. Fixated on the stars and craving a human heart, that was their unlife. I found it comforting to know I would never be a zombie. There would be no begging my friends to kill me if I got bitten. It was dead, and I would die someday anyway.
Amy’s scientific mind wanted to catch one and study it. How are you going to study it? With office supplies and cafe equipment? She refrained from the endeavor. We concluded it was the phones by elimination. As we witnessed former teachers and acquaintances ravage one homeless or elderly person after another, it became clear. What happened to the babies and toddlers? What about the kids? I contemplated the terror, yet we didn’t have children, just each other. I thought I heard a child’s faint scream one night and tightly held my hands over my ears. We discussed looking for children, yet our own shortcomings and lack of bravery prevented us from being heroes. When I still believed in God, I prayed someone out there was doing what I couldn’t do. I took the rage from that constraint out on one of the computers Jordan hadn’t destroyed.
A remarkable snowstorm hit midwinter. We saw this an opportunity to go outside with better coverage against the zombies. Jordan and Dennis dressed in layers from the forgotten scarves and mittens in the Lost and Found Box. They weren’t going to venture far. The apartment building next door used to house a few families. We were familiar with those tenants and saw most of them out in the street, undead. We knew it was unlikely any of them were in the building, except what was left of the children. We already covered World War 2 by that time. We knew how essential the death of future generations was. Yet, these remote enemies were cowards by using the parents to terminate their own offspring. They didn’t toss the babies on the bayonet. They fed them to their wolves without witnessing the terror.
Off Jordan and Dennis went hidden behind the snow peaks. Although they both returned with bags full of supplies over a few days, Jordan never came back the same. We didn’t ask what he saw, yet my mind filled with images of bloody cribs and other scenes of hell.
We each went mad in our own ways. Our insanity waxed and waned. When one of us recovered another filled the psychotic void in constant rotation. Who’s turn will it be today? We individually possessed our own mental disintegration niches. Mine was grief over the destruction of the art encapsulated in books, the words which made us human. Jordan’s was the hatred for technology while Amy’s was a wonder of it. Dennis occasionally became silent and spent hours away from us ripping through the storage closets and weeping in the mess.
Joanne couldn’t bear the silence. One day she sat looking at the CD collection. She read over the booklets then stacked them in a pile for us to burn. “I miss music,” she looked up and cried to me as I walked over to the collect the paper. She used to sing and dance when she was feeling jovial, which was often. Breaking out in song and dance was her way of entertaining herself and others.
Later in the day, Dennis surprised us with tambourines, cowbells, and triangles from the children’s section closet. We gathered around the fire that night not knowing what song to sing. We eased into our makeshift group music therapy with “This Little Light of Mine.” Our set list varied as it turned into irony. Joanne began to sing “Don’t Fear the Reaper,” and then wanted some pop. She sang Lady Gaga’s “Monster” by herself. He ate my heart. We laughed at our demented humor. We finished off with “8 Days a Week” on repeat. The Beatles song used to be one of my favorite cheery, light love songs in my prior life.
Love. It capsized from the models we once knew. It was what kept us together but also what we lost as our respective ideals and dreams of it diminished. Before the zombies, Joanne and Dennis were hooking up without telling any of us. Yet, we all sensed it. They never spoke a word of it. As we parted ways every night, those two went together. Like groups of young adults typically interact, we had our caveats of more complicated almost incestuous relationships considering how much a family we were. I had hooked up with Jordan on a drunken night. Afterward, we agreed to it being a mistake and never spoke of it again. Dennis and Joanne were more serious despite the secrecy. They slept clutched together in the library’s basement as not one of us remarked on their closeness. “O load of stress and bother, / Lie on the shells of our backs in a great heap: / It will but press us closer, one to the other. / We are asleep.” Let them have it.
As for me, after each night of mayhem, I had my own habit concerning love in my prior life. Kyle was home most of the time. Of course, he was. He was in bed sleeping or in pretend slumber, waiting on me. I’d tip tap on his bedroom window. Promptly, he signaled for me to go to the door. Rarely, I slept there. I’d eventually leave our strewn sheets after he fell asleep and embark on my walk to my own bed into the quiet street hours slightly before dawn. “And miles to go before I sleep.”
Shortly before Christmas, I had coffee with a friend who was not part of my regular unit. She began the conversation like many initiated in that age. Those three words which prompted discussions concerning gossip and drama, “I saw on Facebook…” I saw on Facebook so and so had a baby. I saw on Facebook so and so broke up. I saw on Facebook so and so hates so and so. I saw on Facebook ten photos of the same thing on five different profiles. “I saw on Facebook that Kyle is ‘in a relationship.’ With who? He’s such a player. It’s shocking.”
I didn’t know with who either. I discovered who that girl was that night as we had a post-coital spliff.
“I heard you’re seeing someone,” I coughed out after an intense hit.
“Yea, you.”
“You know I’m not into the whole social media thing, but somebody told me you are ‘in a relationship’ on Facebook. What does that mean?” At this, he got out of bed in a rush of confusion and anger.
“I’m in a relationship with you.”
“No, you’re not.” What followed was a one-sided discussion of how could I not realize what I meant to him and my lack of realizing it because I was “immature.”
“You and your friends are something else thinking you are revolting with no phones. I never know where you are. I can’t reach you. You guys just go about like you’re stuck in the ‘90s,” he rambled on, “I can get you a cell if you want, if you don’t have the money.”
I had the money. He didn’t understand me nor my friends. I felt free, unchained from societal standards and boyfriends. I knew I was too wild as much as I knew I’d make a terrible girlfriend for that same reason. I thought I was considerate sparing guys the perplexity that was me by exempting myself from serious relationships. Yet, I had turned into a player in her own right with that logic.
That was the last time I saw him. His relationship status probably just as quickly went blank. The guy who broke many hearts got his own broken by me before he started to eat them. Maybe I deserve this for breaking his heart. Those romantic squabbles were something from another time as I reflected on my life before the death of society. How tragic we refused society and got what we wanted in such a terrible way. Those tiny yet loud misunderstandings which annoyed and confused me turned into humanistic interactions I craved and missed. I’d take breaking your heart or you breaking mine over this any day, Kyle.
By the time spring came, we went through the rations we made out of the cafe and the sparse supplies in the lunchroom. Jordan discovered a nest of rats in a storage room. We ate them one by one. They were the occasional treat. The guys brought back seeds during their winter exploration and carefully went outside to gather dirt once the ground became unfrozen. We closed off the room with the most sunlight from the rest of the library and planted the seeds in makeshift pots of children’s toy bins. We watered them and eventually gathered the produce by night making sure to move slowly as to not catch whatever lurking outside’s sight. We also fortified any entrances since our food was in plain view to anybody who walked past. Every morning I woke expecting the windows smashed in our greenhouse. Yet, perhaps, there really weren’t that many people left.
If there ever could be a happy time in this age, it was summer. We had food, and we didn’t need to burn the books unless we came across the occasional meat. The only gripe we had was the few intense heat waves. We simply went into the basement when it became too hot to bear. The guys became more confident with scavenging around the block. Sometimes they returned more startled than usual, yet they always arrived with supplies.
Jordan surprised us during this time with marijuana he saved from our previous lives. When we initially ransacked the library we found some strong pain killers in desk drawers and a couple wine bottles. We went through them in the first week. Soon, the rush of getting high and drunk became a distant memory as we reluctantly sobered. Gleefully, we took hits from Jordan’s bowl and felt the high melt over us. I got the idea to act out a play. The rest were feeling as playful. I chose A Streetcar Named Desire from the book stacks. We read the lines with our best acting efforts and finished the night high, sweaty and maniacally screaming “Stella!” at each other. Our primal, tortured collective scream reverberated against the walls of our domain of tattered literature and knowledge.
It was a still morning filled with smiles of what inventive comfort we attained by late summer. Joanne had a tendency to partially sunbathe through a sliver of sunlight illuminating a corner in the former children’s picture books wing. From downstairs I heard her jubilantly shout, “Chicken!” This alerted the rest of us to her excitement yet did not alarm us as it should until we saw a flash of her body dashing out the door. Dennis and Jordan followed immediately knowing the danger of her going out alone. I thought it was a silly thing among many silly tendencies Joanne had. Why did the chicken cross the road? To be ignored by zombies and not be eaten by Joanne.
My comical outlook on the fiasco altered to bereavement when the guys returned with only the chicken. With tears in their eyes, they flung the squawking thing loose in the library and paced. Dennis punched the wall and retreated elsewhere as Amy and I followed Jordan with our eyes pleading for an answer we already knew. A still morning was suddenly disturbed and permanently altered by a wail of despair. It somehow resolved into a quieter than before. The hit of sudden death ricocheted off the walls and then deafened us into a newer, deeper state of desperate solitude. There would be no more music. Our singer was gone.
The only sound was the chaotic chicken who I wanted to drop kick into the window pane and see its guts smashed for its meager promise of sustenance to Joanne. I replaced this anguish with Joanne’s ill received intention. She wanted chicken. Maybe she wanted eggs. The hysterics I felt inside matched the behavior of the animal although I had learned by then showing my pain and grief did not change anything. I could scream. I could trash something, anything. But it would not make the coffin that was the streets fade nor would it produce anything tenable for survival. Life had become how to overcome one nuisance, struggle or heartbreak after the other, finding rugged joy in being alive efficiently with my friends. One of them may be gone, yet we still had to eat. Time, even in the cruel degradation of it we now experienced continued to lapse. We still had to survive.
Capturing the chicken was not a difficult task. I chased it into the bathroom and shut the door. I knew I had to wait for the others to overcome the shock before we made a decision. Not one word was spoken or read for the rest of that day. That day paused and its loss echoed into the following months. Joanne’s chicken endeavor proved fruitless and punctured our weakened spirits more. The hen was egg bound. It produced one egg. By the time we realized it had an ailment and found the correct book to address the issue, it died. It was a mere hour between knowing it was sick and finding the solution, but it died somewhere in the interim.
Fall quickly came. Our grief made us lazy and indifferent in maintaining the routine we formerly had. We may have been able to stock on more food and supplies. Much like an animal knowing it was going to die and refraining from eating, we sparsely tried to gather food much less ration what we had. We didn’t eat. The zombies weren’t eating. Our dead world was a stagnant, nutrition-less existence. The pangs of hunger were the last reminders we were alive. The books surrounding us had more life in them. All the dreams discovered and adventures recorded within them smote us into forgetting them. We would never get to write our own stories, live our own poetry because of the vicious, imposed catastrophe created by some other author.
Days without food lapsed into what seemed like an eternity. I took what energy I had to practice yin yoga. I learned it in the summer when I was in a better state. It provided the movement I had lost from being confined in the library. I spent most of my short adult life on foot, busy with destinations. The yoga was the only makeshift self-care I could summon that didn’t make me crazed. It was not without emotion when I stretched and breathed. Towards the end, I curled into an earnest child’s pose in complete surrender, prayer to a higher power and cried into my third eye until it was clear the future was blind.
Delirium was slow. Each sunrise came to burden us in another day of burnt pages and words that formerly filled our minds but not our bodies. We became apathetic to all the work and art of men. All those crafts created from the same organ from which the destruction was sourced made us bitter to how terrible the mind could be. We were imprisoned by and with the duplicitous power of the brain. I began to wonder what was worse after we read about starvation. What was worse? My heart destroying itself? Or the undead sinking their ravenous teeth into it? Maybe it’s better to be the consumer rather than the food…
Briefly, after high school I worked in a strip club. I mostly thought it was comical as my friends worried for my well being. I came out to the song “Living Dead Girl.” Years later, locked in the library I reflected on my ill-conceived stripper days and wondered if the song was a self-prophesizing clue into what the future held. Was I truly living as I watched the world outside’s demise and all the words I cherished given to flame and smoke just to keep a dead girl alive for another day of tragedy? We were living but dead in all the ways we thought made us human, walking corpses without the innate violence of those beings who waited outside the doors.
Perhaps it was a collective hallucination. Dennis paced as he manically recited scripture. A glow we hadn’t seen since the old life slightly illuminated past the bookcases to the table we habitually used since we were kids. Huddled with our swollen bellies and worn out minds, we froze in disbelief of that unique glow we had not forgotten but disregarded in our previous lives. Slowly, we rose up in wonder and dread. Among the trashed computer aisles remained one laptop we never trashed. It beamed like a welcoming hello, that mysterious light most men knew less about than zombies. And it flickered goodbye, a farewell for all of us. Control. Alt. Delete.
