Good .

‘There you are.’

Julie heaves herself up the ladder and stands on the roof of my new home, watching me. I glance at her, then put my face back in my hands.

She makes her way over, cautious steps on the flimsy sheet metal, and sits next to me on the roof edge. Our legs dangle, swinging slowly in the cold autumn air.

‘Perry?’

I don’t answer. She studies the side of my face. She reaches out and brushes two fingers through my shaggy hair. Her blue eyes pull on me like gravity, but I resist. I stare down at the muddy street.

‘I can’t believe I’m here,’ I mumble. ‘This stupid house. With all these discards.’

She doesn’t respond immediately. When she does, it’s quiet. ‘They’re not discards. They were loved.’

‘For a while.’

‘Their parents didn’t leave . They were taken.’

‘Is there a difference?’

She looks at me so hard I have no choice but to meet her gaze. ‘Your mom loved you, Perry. You’ve never had to doubt that. And so did your dad.’

I can’t hold the weight. I give in and let it fall on me. I twist my head away from Julie as the tears come.

‘Believe that God discarded you if you want to, fate or destiny or whatever, but at least you know they loved you.’

‘What does it even matter,’ I croak, avoiding her eyes. ‘Who gives a shit. They’re dead. That’s the present. That’s what matters now.’

We don’t speak for a few minutes. The cold breeze pricks tiny bumps on our arms. Bright leaves find their way in from the outer forests, spinning down into the Stadium’s vast mouth and landing on the house’s roof.

‘You know what, Perry,’ Julie says. Her voice is shaky with hurts all her own. ‘Everything dies eventually. We all know that. People, cities, whole civilisations. Nothing lasts. So if existence was just binary, dead or alive, here or not here, what would be the fucking point in anything?’ She looks up at some falling leaves and puts out her hand to catch one, a flaming red maple. ‘My mom used to say that’s why we have memory. And the opposite of memory — hope. So things that are gone can still matter. So we can build off our pasts and make futures.’ She twirls the leaf in front of her face, back and forth. ‘Mom said life only makes any sense if we can see time how God does. Past, present and future all at once.’

I allow myself to look at Julie. She sees my tears and tries to wipe one away. ‘So what’s the future?’ I ask, not flinching as her fingers brush my eye. ‘I can see the past and the present, but what’s the future?’

‘Well…’ she says with a broken laugh. ‘I guess that’s the tricky part. The past is made out of facts and history… I guess the future is just hope.’

‘Or fear.’

‘No.’ She shakes her head firmly and sticks the leaf in my hair. ‘Hope.’

The Stadium rises on the horizon as the Dead stumble forward. It looms above most of the surrounding buildings and consumes several city blocks, a gaudy monument to an era of excess, a world of waste and want and misguided dreams that is now profoundly over.

Our cadaverous cadre has been walking for a little over a day, roaming the open roads like Kerouac beats with no gas money. The others are hungry, and there’s a brief, mostly wordless debate between M and the rest before they stop at an old boarded-up town house to feed. I wait outside. It’s been more days than I can remember since my last meal, but I find myself strangely content. There’s a neutral feeling in my veins, balanced precisely between hungry and sated. The screams of the people in the house pierce me more sharply than in all my days of hands-on killing, and I’m not even anywhere near them. I’m standing far out in the street, pushing my palms into my ears and waiting for it to be over.

When they emerge, M avoids my gaze. He wipes the blood off his mouth with the back of his hand and shoots me just one guilty glance before brushing past. The others are not quite there yet, not even to M’s level of conscience, but there is something a little different about them, too. They take no leftovers. They dry their bloody hands on their pants. They walk in uneasy silence. It’s a start.

As we get close enough to the Stadium to catch the first whiffs of the Living, I go over the plan in my head. It’s not much of a plan, really. It’s cartoonishly simple, but here’s why it might work: it’s never been tried before. There has never been enough will to make a way.

A few blocks from the entry gate, we stop in an abandoned house. I go into the bathroom and study myself in the mirror like the former resident must have done a thousand times. In my head I jog through the maddening repetitions of the morning routine, getting into character. Alarm-shower-clothes-breakfast. Do I look my best? Am I putting my best foot forward? Am I stepping out the door prepared for everything this world has to throw at me?

I run some gel through my hair. I splash some aftershave on my face. I straighten my tie.

‘Ready,’ I tell the others.

M sizes me up. ‘Close… enough.’

We head for the gates.

Within a few blocks, the smell of the Living is nearly overpowering. It’s as if the Stadium is a massive Tesla Coil crackling with storms of fragrant pink life-lightning. Everyone in our group stares at it in awe. Some of them drool freely. If they hadn’t just eaten, our loosely constructed strategy would collapse in an instant.

Before we get within sight of the gate, we take a side street and stop at an intersection, hiding behind a UPS truck. I step out slightly and look around the corner. Less than two blocks away, four guards stand in front of the Stadium’s main entrance doors, dangling shotguns over their shoulders and chatting among themselves. Their gruff, military sentences use even fewer syllables than ours.

I look at M. ‘Thanks. For… doing this.’

‘Sure,’ M says.

‘Don’t… die.’

‘Trying… not to. Are… ready?’

I nod.

‘Look… alive… out there.’

I smile. I brush my hair back one more time, take a deep breath, and run for it.

‘Help!’ I scream, waving my arms. ‘Help, they’re… right behind me!’

With my best possible balance and poise, I run towards the doors. M and the other Dead lumber after me, groaning theatrically.

The guards react on instinct: they raise their guns and open fire on the zombies. An arm flies off. A leg. One of the anonymous nine loses a head and goes down. But not a single weapon points in my direction. Painting Julie’s face on the air in front of me, I sprint with Olympian focus. My stride is good, I can feel it, I look normal, alive , and so I snap neatly into a category: ‘Human’. Two more guards emerge with guns drawn, but they barely even look at me. They squint, they take aim at their targets, and they shout, ‘Go! Get in there, man!’

Two more zombies hit the ground behind me. As I slip in through the doors, I see M and the remaining Dead veer off and retreat. As they go, their gait suddenly changes. They lose their stumble and run like living things. Not as fast as me, not as graceful, but with purpose. The guards hesitate, the gunfire falters. ‘What the fuck… ?’ one of them mutters.

Inside the entrance is a man with a clipboard and a notebook. An immigration officer, ready to take my name and have me fill out a stack of request forms before most likely tossing me out. The Dead have depended on this man for years to provide us with the defenceless stragglers we eat in the ruins outside. He comes towards me, flipping through his notebook, making no eye contact. ‘Close call, eh, friend? I’m going to need you to—’

‘Ted! Look at this shit! ’

Ted looks up, looks through the open doors, sees his fellow soldiers standing dumbstruck. He glances at me. ‘Wait right here.’

Ted jogs out and stops next to the guards, staring at the eerily animate zombies dashing off into the distant streets like real people. I imagine the look on the men’s faces, their stomachs bubbling with the queasy sensation that the earth under their feet is moving.