When the doors slide open, the screams escape. Saul is summoned from his security podium by the researchers’ howls, and he slides in his formal uniform shoes until he finds them caged in an elevator open to the atrium-style lobby. A young man hauls a woman from the back of the elevator and slams her to the floor. Oh no, she has lost her shoes. The young man tears into the raw meat expanse of her neck with his teeth, ripping strips of flesh and spitting them next to her, he plunges his hands through her body, digging into her guts, and then he snaps his head and he sees Saul and he runs so fast How could anything run that fast and Saul fires his gun When did I reach for my gun and the head collapses on itself until nothing remains. Is that supposed to happen? What’s left of the man drops to its knees, where it wobbles in an eerie circle as if choosing where to land. It finally tumbles backward.
When the body on the floor of the elevator sits up, Saul doesn’t give her a chance to lumber to her feet. Saul shoots her, too. She claws at her ruined throat, insistent and incessant, shoving her hands into the cavity of her own neck, wheezing a piercing whine, and Saul shoots her again. Her body crumples flat to the waist and dissolves. That definitely isn’t supposed to happen. The cacophony of noises from the elevator, crying, laughing, gasping, praying; the sun beaming through the curtain wall; the way the blood refuses to spread; his own swollen, foolish hands. These things imprison Saul, and in turn, Saul keeps his gun trained on the researchers incarcerated in the elevator until the police arrive twenty-seven minutes later.
While they wait, Saul tells himself he looked for a trace of anything human, he had not reacted out of fear and adrenaline, he had made a decision—a fast one, granted, but he had chosen. Anyone could be forgiven for merely retaliating. But he hadn't. He had surveyed the scene and selected a resolution from a series of available options. And the right one.
He will tell himself this all the time.
The evening after Saul becomes a hero, nothing special happens. In fact, anyone who has ever changed the world will arrive home afterward and close the door gently behind them, and the world will be outside that door, and they will still be left to the simple work of brushing their teeth and washing their own asshole. For just a second, Saul revolts against this reality and tells himself no, the day you stop the zombie apocalypse should be special. It should be special from dawn to dusk, or at the very least there should be a clear demarcation, like stepping into Oz, one side gray and the other technicolor, to indicate a before and an after, a then and a now.
But of course, that's silly. Saul shot them so everything could remain the same.
These are the things Saul thinks when he microwaves a burrito in his empty apartment and burns his fingers on the hot dish as he carries it to his painted-shut window. Nothing changes. Ruth still left him weeks ago (I don't want to build at my age, Saul. I'm fifty-five years old. I'm a project manager, I own a home, I'm built). He remains unbuilt. His phone sits silent on the kitchen counter, and it dawns on Saul he may not even make the news. It didn't seem possible to run a reel saying "Breaking! Tomorrow will be the same as today, except for those five minutes when it almost wasn't."
Dropping bits of tacky rice down his shirt, Saul looks over the apartment complex. The perfectly rectangular buildings, not too high, not with Babel pretensions. The neat rows of windows, square and sealed. Precise. Sturdy. Saul thinks, I did it because I love you all, as he chews.
When the phone chimes, it takes Saul a second to recognize the sound, but the chiming becomes more insistent; the phone vibrates and slips across the counter. With his most curious heart suddenly present in his chest, Saul balances the plate with half a burrito on the radiator and shuffles across the room. Messages, texts, calls, even Twitter alerts. Saul dutifully tweeted his thoughts about every last Red Sox game for years and tapped the little heart on other people's posts, but he has never had a Twitter alert before. Flashes of text pop up and are swallowed by other flashes:
Saul it's mom
Hey buddy saw you
Turned on the news, and like
Hey man, I know we haven't talked since high
Soul, I'm a reporter with
Fucking zombies
Is this true
Is this you
Saul
Saul
Saul
Saul
It takes Ruth less than forty-eight hours to text him and less than forty-eight minutes from the text until she’s picking her way over the apartment threshold with her impossibly long legs, spindle-thin and kinky-kneed like a spider. She braces both hands on a stack of Liquid Death cases and shuffles sideways into the tiny foyer.
"I didn't buy those," Saul says. "But I like that Joe Manganiello. He's a nice kid."
"Mmm," Ruth says.
"I didn't buy any of it." Saul gestures at a stack of Nike shoeboxes piled to the ceiling, and several cases of Doritos with Our Thanks printed in the brand font and a green cartoon zombie peeking through the triangle logo. Ruth clutches her brown leather purse in front of her and tilts her head like a bird. Saul notices the thin-heeled, pointy-toed shoes adorning her feet. He takes in the stockings clinging to her ankles, netting her shins and calves. He realizes.
He leads her to the bedroom where he dutifully pulls her legs over the side of the mattress and laps at her carefully until she comes, at which point, as expected, she climbs on top of him and bounces until he grunts and comes. She extricates herself from him and waddles directly to the bathroom to take a shower without saying a word. Like always. And Saul lays in bed, listening to the patter of the shower, wondering about the miry ease of patterns, his dick shrinking in the cold, and Saul thinks, I love you all.
Ruth doesn’t quite move in this time the same way she didn't quite move in last time. For several weeks, she treats her house more like a store, picking up deodorant after work, grabbing more comfortable shoes. But like last time, the fetching trickles to a stop and the situation reverses itself. Ruth only comes to Saul's apartment to fetch something left behind, making excuses for why she won’t be staying. For some things, she doesn't bother. Apparently, she never really liked that brown leather purse, and a toothbrush is a small price to pay when trying to disappear.
Saul feels like he should mourn, but he doesn't. He only loves the steady certainties of her; that is all he can love because that is the only part of her he knows. That hasn't changed either.
Most people forget Saul's face within a few weeks. The slaps between the shoulder blades and requests for selfies stop. The new barista at his coffee shop is young, doesn't know who he is, charges him for his black coffees again. He only gets texts from his mother and a few friends from the synagogue with whom he plays weekly games of Apples to Apples. They want to make sure he'll still be coming to the games. Saul is.
Online, however, Saul becomes a kind of folk hero. #ThanksSaul trends after every episode of The Walking Dead. Saul has always tweeted rather a lot, but now people talk back to him. He's attached to his identity as The Guy Who Stopped It, the platform glued to his feet. His "Verdugo shoulda caught that" is retweeted two thousand times, commented on seven hundred times, liked in the hundreds of thousands. When someone asks Saul to describe what it was like when the elevator doors opened, Saul replies "Scary!" A hundred thousand retweets of this prompt a flock to his comments, calling him Uncle Saul and asking him for advice: Uncle Saul, I asked out a girl I really like and she said no. How do I win her over? (You don't.) Uncle Saul, I'm pretty sure I'm gay. (Mazel tov!) Uncle Saul, how do I tell my parents I switched my major from pre-med biology to journalism? (I switched my major from pre-med biology to journalism.) Uncle Saul, what's your favorite movie? (Night of the Living Dead! More than horror. V socially aware film!!)
Saul finds himself awake late into the night, bathed in the glow of the phone, a bit delirious from exhaustion, but helping, helping, helping. Saul is equal parts enamored and uncomfortable, but he accepts the job with both hands, absent father to a thousand children he will never meet.
He loves all of them, too. He pictures them as baby birds, waxy mouths agape, bug-eyed and sick-skinned.
The insurance agent works in absolute silence, forcing Saul to nervously say "Hello? Are you still there?" into the phone more times than he'd like. He wishes she’d hum or tlock her tongue or even put him on hold to listen to a tinny rendition of “Hold My Hand,” but instead she leaves him to listen to nothing and apologize for disturbing her when he coughs.
"Okay, so you'd be entitled to therapy for a year for a qualifying event, but it looks like this isn't qualifying," she finally says.
"That can’t be right. I read all this paperwork, and one of the covered incidents is ‘An incident which results in the loss of human life.’”
"Our internal investigation determined you weren't involved with the loss of human life. They weren't human so the contingency doesn't apply."
"What?"
"They ceased being human the moment they were infected. It's more akin to needing to shoot a rabid dog."
She doesn’t disturb the following silence, either, and never says “Sir? Sir, are you still there?” She waits for Saul to return to his body, and Saul opens and closes his mouth several times, discards thought after thought, response after response, until he settles on "Okay. What. What. What am I entitled to?"
"For that, we offer a discount on four therapy sessions if all sessions are completed in the same month. It will be seventy-five dollars a session instead of one hundred fifty."
"Thanks." Saul hangs up.
Now an update on the shooting of two researchers infected with what experts are calling a "zombie virus." Thirty-four-year-old Gregory Babajanian and twenty-eight-year-old Heather Summers, both working as research assistants at the ODHS high containment laboratory, lost their lives in the event. The pair were shot by security guard Saul Friedman after exhibiting erratic behavior, allegedly as a result of accidental exposure to the unnamed pathogen.
Heather Summers and Gregory Babajanian. Gregory had been the first, the one who ran. Heather the second, the one who sat up. Gregory’s body couldn’t decide where to fall. Heather let out the ear-splitting whistle. Gregory had torn Heather apart with his hands and eaten her guts. Heather’s fists disappeared into her own gashed throat.
Erratic.
Today Gregory's mother filed suit against ODHS, as well as several researchers working on the floor. Mrs. Babajanian alleges her son sent her several months of texts, calls, and emails revealing a disturbing work environment, where senior investigators had the pair of assistants complete the most dangerous tasks, ones that would lead to pathogen exposure, without checking their safety gear.
Saul attempts to write this reality over the screaming faces in the elevator, to weave it between the piss-stained leggings and the screamed-raw throats. One of the gentlemen, Saul’s age but in a fitted gray suit and cleanly pressed tie, looked like he could have been a senior investigator. He may have sown but not reaped. One of the women, too, maybe, but it was hard to tell with the women who dyed their hair and exfoliated their faces. But she was wearing stockings, what his mother would have called nylons. She thanked Saul, one of the first to stumble out of the elevator and clasp his hand. He wonders whether any of the texts were about her.
He had seen Heather and Gregory go by every day. What would he have seen if he looked harder? That Gregory lost weight? That the skin around Heather’s eyes had thinned, shrank, taken on a purple tinge? Were there skipped lunches? Larger coffees? Later nights? Slumped shoulders? Saul missed so much.
She is seeking an undisclosed amount in damages.
Saul pushes the power button on the remote control and the fake leather recliner squeaks when he droops. His fingers wind around each other in his lap, and Saul entangles them first left over right, changes his mind, and slots them together right over left. The phone chimes, then again and again. Saul slaps his knees and stretches his back before he paddles into the kitchen and turns off the phone. The chair waits for him in the darkened living room, and Saul sits there until morning.
Saul discovers that, strictly speaking, having a float in Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade is not as exciting a prospect as one would hope. He sits like a toad at the top of the ODHS float, and on rungs below him, Rockettes dressed in positive pressure personnel suits dance with syringe canes wound in silver tinsel. He's in the middle of the parade, a respectable distance from both Garfield and Santa, and nobody waves. Cameras already recording stay recording, but nobody whips out their phone to capture him, and when he gingerly waves at the crowd, they look anywhere but at him.
Now and then when the parade stops, he can hear several voices ask "Who is that?" in tandem, and when they get the answer, they shuffle and scroll until he passes. Saul is a hero, but he’s also a reminder of how quickly it could all go away, and while everyone is polite, nobody really wants to see him.
This is why he didn't even want to go on the float, but ODHS insisted because his absence might "telegraph a disconnect." People want to know Saul is still involved, protective, like Batman.
Of course, he's not.
Saul has been excused from ever returning but will draw his salary until he dies. ODHS said it was the least they could do. And they are right. It is the least. But the truth is, the one Saul won't admit to himself, not when he's looking into his mother's worried and proud eyes and not when he's laying alone at night in the heavy dark, it seems easier to just agree, like any other course of action would cause energy to be destroyed, like resisting makes the world a little smaller.
That is how Saul found himself on the float and how he found himself reaching for a gun he didn't have. The lurching stumble, arms dangling like a gorilla, catches his eye first, the familiarity of the movement stops the breath in his throat, a fat, formless ache. It had been for nothing. It had gotten out anyhow.
When the first stream of vomit splashes on the pavement, Saul squints. There is no blood. There are no screams. A drunk kid with lank hair and dirty jeans stumbles away from the first splash and lurches toward a garbage can. A girl appears holding a bottle of water and rubs the young man’s back.
Saul sits back. For the rest of the parade, he smiles but does not wave.
Saul dreams of crowds of headless people, riding a Metro escalator surrounded by people with no heads having conversations, carrying lattes, dragging wheeled briefcases.
Saul dreams of bushes becoming human, of winding vines around his throat.
Saul dreams of hail-white mice with red eyes raining from his ceiling, pouring themselves from the faucets.
Saul dreams of mannequin legs marching up the stairs to the apartment building, slithering through the doorway, and standing in judgment at the foot of his bed.
Saul dreams of eggs hatching bloody skinless chicks, of needles, fluorescent lights, bony hands, shiny navy-blue shoes.
Saul dreams of getting dressed in his uniform, fixing his belt over his paunch, and driving to work in such realistic detail that he wakes up disoriented, confused about how he got home.
Unfettered Saul, sick, sick and carrying it on his back, can’t stop dreaming.
The first thing Saul notices about the letter is that it's a letter. The envelope is slightly wrinkled, the address written in script and ink, and Saul is sure this letter was sealed by someone licking the adhesive strip with their tongue. No sponges were involved. Saul can't tell the difference between the paper and his fingers, both dry and frictionless, like powder.
The letter begins, "Thank you for killing our children."
There are details, Saul is pretty sure, but he can't absorb them. The words refuse to stick. He reads again. He mutters some out loud, and those are more permanent. Mostly words of forgiveness, of assurance, some details. Gregory's younger sister Sosi would like to go to school for biochemistry and continue his work. Heather's fiancé Evan has started a foundation in her name for women in STEM.
He stops reading.
Though Saul will read and remember all of these words later—he will actually read them over and over, commit them to memory, recite them to himself when he is lying in bed watching the halo of the streetlights, think of the implications of the smallest details, craft a thousand letters in reply he will never send—right now he can only understand one sentiment. The sacrifice was necessary.
ODHS looks the same as it always did, a shining obelisk reaching into the clouds. From far away, the glass facade reflects the parking lot and ecosystem of cafes and shops that sprung up around it to serve the employees, but once you haul yourself close enough, the mirror clears, reflecting a hive of activity.
Saul finds his usual parking spot near the back open, and he slides in like a foregone conclusion, watching his car waver and stutter in the reflective windows. He's wearing street clothes, and he experiences himself oddly in this setting without the protective carapace of his security uniform. His white sneakers look wrong against the glittering slate and asphalt, refusing to shimmer in the same way his shined uniform shoes did. As he closes in on the building, Saul sees himself reflected in the panes of glass, an old man in belted jeans, squinting behind rimless glasses balanced on a nose with a slight bulb swelling at the tip. Saul pats his hair down in the wind and, feeling less like an interloper with each step, strides toward the building until it reveals its mysteries.
Another man sits at Saul's podium, the navy-blue uniform identical, down to the gun on his hip. The new man nods curtly at two women who flash their lanyards at a glowing disk on the wall and disappear into the waiting mouth of the elevator. Is it the same elevator? Did they tear out the car and replace it with an identical one or just clean it? Saul tries to rearrange the lobby, to place all the horror of the day back on the stage, the body on the floor. Heather. Gregory’s lurch. The huddled researchers crying, even the men, especially the men. Saul frozen with his gun trained on them. As hard as he tries to recreate the scene in his mind, it eludes him. He can only see the lobby as it is now, a bustling anthill leading to a series of laboratories, full of life, coffees on every desk, etched nameplates next to the more important offices. The work continues.
Saul stares up at the tower, tries to determine which floor it is. He isn't sure of the criteria. Does one seem less busy than the others? Or more nervous and careful, nobody leaning back in their chairs? The New Saul notices him, leaning forward and talking discreetly into his company phone the way they were both taught. New Saul has no idea who Saul is, has no idea he's New Saul, and when the Director of Facilities and Security comes down, he will slap Saul on the back and explain to New Saul the reality of his position. The Director will invite Saul to lunch, but won't invite Saul inside. Saul will never be allowed inside again. This he knows.
Above him, the colony of researchers continues to operate.
Saul heads back to his car, touches the reflective expanse with his gaze before he drives off, cloaked in doubt.
