The Centre Cannot Hold

As the October chill swept across the world that year, so too did the zombies. They arose from every shadow along the cruel grey city streets, blank-eyed, dull-skinned and hungry--oh so hungry--for souls.

In those first days we were still innocent. We saw their drunken movements, heard their incomprehensible speech, and thought them harmless. The university pubs brimmed with whispers--but they were only whispers, after all. Depending on who you spoke to it was variously the fault of communists, homosexuals or God, and sometimes all three at once.

For my part I continued as I was. I attended my classes, wrote for the Gazette and went to the pictures, always watching out for the newsreels. Back home the city I loved was caught up in a gang war that threatened to tear it apart, and of course I was rather more interested in that than the distant, surreal threat of corpses risen from their graves.

During that time my old friend Guiying wrote to me a great deal. She described the strung-thin tensions in our streets, the best you tiao stalls near the Huangpu, her family's hushed discussions over dinner—until the letter that was supposed to come that week simply didn't, and three pages into the Guardian there was a small dark image of the rubble that had once been the French Concession.

I stared at that paper for a long, terrible moment, then I tossed it in the skip, went to my room, and shut the door. Outside, they were shutting things up too--the ports, the shops, the motorways. It all seemed so very far away. I finished up the pack of dried mushrooms that I had only brought to humour my aunt. I would have given anything to humour her again.

For a while, I woke to frantic knocks upon my door or screams in the square. After that, there was only birdsong.

At that point, I reasoned I was more likely to die of hunger than anything else, so I grabbed my coat and left.

-

I barely made it a few metres down the street before I had my first brush with the hungry dead. It wasn't a good first impression, to say the least. Long dark hair, matted with blood, obscured its grey face. A chunk of flesh near its rib cage had rotted away, leaving a gaping wound in its wake. The stench of death hovered around it like a twisted halo. At that moment the only thing that came to mind was a mere snatch of a poem long faded from memory: And what rough beast, its hour come round at last / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Pushed up against the wall, terrified and half-starved, I feared all was lost–until the gunshot sounded. The zombie burst like a dying star, dark bluish slime splattering onto my coat. I jerked back, gagging. My gaze flicked to the black tile roofs, where a young man knelt with his tie undone and a gun in his hands.

"Miss Chao!" He broke out into a grin. "You're the dame from the Gazette, aren't you?"

He was the first living thing I'd seen in more than a fortnight. If I didn't know better, I would have called him an angel. As it was, he was just Lucas Roy.

-

The first thing he said after scrambling down from the roof was "You're not from around here."

My hackles immediately rose. I couldn't have counted the times when that innocuous statement was followed by another: What're you doing on campus? Where's your john? I thought they didn't let women like you into America. Roy didn't seem like that sort of fella–he'd saved my life, after all–but the collapse of society did strange things to the best of us. "Shanghai, sir. What's it to you?"

Roy laughed a little and ran a hand through his dark curls. "I didn't mean it like that. I was only thinking how terribly ironic it is for the two of us, of all people, to be the only ones left in this place." I squinted at him. With his golden skin, his sharp suits, and his precise English, he seemed like every other boisterous lad in the Rifle Club that he headed. "My father's from Bombay," he explained, then faltered. "Well. He was from Bombay. God, I don't even know if the city still stands."

I could see something of myself in Roy, then. "Everyone I know is still back there. My mother, my siblings, my best friend—her name's Miss Wu, by the way. Smart as a whip, a xiangqi genius, and the prettiest dame in Shanghai. You would've loved her. Everyone did."

"You'll have to introduce the two of us once all of this is over." He hefted the rifle onto his back. "Now, if you'll excuse me, I must retreat to my temporary accommodation–unless you'd prefer to join me, Miss Chao?" His eyebrow rose.

"Scandalous." I laughed, but I took his hand anyhow.

-

Temporary accommodation turned out to be a dusty corner hidden behind the bookshelves, high up in the oldest library around–good for hiding, better still for reading. On the rare night when we were sure nothing would attack, the two of us would perch on the ancient windowsill overlooking the city. There, we'd pick a book and read it out loud as the sun started to glimmer on the spires and the turrets of the university.

Tonight it was Roy's turn. As the shadows crept across his face, he murmured a poem in Marathi that I'd never truly understand. We didn't know what would come next, or if tomorrow would come at all. Someday we'd run out of food, someday our defences would inevitably be breached. Still, as I listened to Roy's voice, I couldn't silence the choir in my chest that sang the same word over and over again: home, home, home.