Mamatas - The Last Weekend

Also by Nick Mamatas:

Novels

Move Under Ground

Under My Roof

Sensation

The Damned Highway: Fear and Loathing in Arkham
(co-written with Brian Keene)

Love Is the Law

I Am Providence

Collections

3000 MPH in Every Direction at Once

You Might Sleep

The Nickronomicon

As Editor

The Urban Bizarre

Realms (co-edited with Sean Wallace)

Spicy Slipstream Stories (co-edited with Jay Lake)

Realms 2 (co-edited with Sean Wallace)

Haunted Legends (co-edited with Ellen Datlow)

The Future Is Japanese (co-edited with Masumi Washington)

Phantasm Japan (co-edited with Masumi Washington)

Night Shade Books
an imprint of Start Publishing
New Jersey

Copyright 2014 by Nick Mamatas

First Night Shade Books edition 2016

All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Start Publishing LLC, 101 Hudson Street, 37th Floor, Jersey City, NJ 07302.

Night Shade Books is an imprint of Start PublishingLLC.

Visit our website at www.start-publishing.com.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Mamatas, Nick.

The last weekend / Nick Mamatas.

pages ; cm

ISBN 978-1-59780-842-2 (pbk.: alk. paper)

1. ZombiesFiction. I. Title.

PS3613.A525L37 2015

813.6dc23

2015013630

Print ISBN: 978-1-59780-842-2

eISBN: 978-1-59780-582-7

Cover illustration and design by Jason Snair

Printed in the United States of America

For Oliver Panagiotis Borrin Mamatas, a real California boy.

Theres a story so thoroughly circulated that it really isnt even worth telling anymore, except that it is so common theres no other way to start.

San Francisco is... okay. The Board of Supervisors for the City and County of San Francisco barred new graveyards, and closed down the cemeteries, way back in the early twentieth century. Successive governments exhumed the dead, moved them to Colma where the dead outnumbered the living 1000-to-1, and to elsewhere in the Bay. It took decades to get every corpse out of town. In the early 1990s, long before I landed here with nothing but a laptop and a suitcase full of aborted novels and stillborn short stories after washing out of Emerson, 700 corpses were found under the municipal golf course at Fort Miley on the southern corner of Golden Gate Park; all 49ers, or largely 49ers anyway, some still clutching rosaries. They were dragged off too, eventually. Almost like someone in City Hall knew what was to come thanks to an opium dream from the days of basement dens full of sweating, thrashing Chinamen. Is there a yellow notebook in a file cabinet somewhere, pressed into the hands of every new mayor, photocopied and distributed to each new crop of supervisors? Is that why they killed Harvey Milk, because he threatened to tell the world?

But were okay. There were some bodies under the ground in the Presidio, but some working weapons there as well. The tiny graveyard in Mission Dolores wasnt a problem either. The last burials had been in the 1880s or thereabouts. Nothing came up. Or if anyone did, maybe the old Spanish of Upper California fell upon their Anglo and Celtic neighbors and the dead did one another in, just as they had when they lived. One of the epitaphs on a crumbling stone in that dump of a yard was repurposed as a pretty common graffito:

Remember, man, as you pass by,
As you are now, so once was I.
As I am now, so you must be;
Prepare for death, and follow me.

Ive recited it myself a few times, for drinks, or to impress a girl.

The restthe everyday dead of chicken bones in the throat and panicked shootings and hearts that seem to explodesure, it was a problem. They dont explode, you knowheartsthey just run down and the brain feels its own death from quick starvation. But San Francisco is okay. The animated dead dont move quickly; bones are still weak, muscles still necrotized. Its a hilly town, San Fran is, and our dead just snapped their ankles and floundered at the bottom of our hills. You remember the footage, right? The new militia of police and criminals commandeering cable cars and hunting the dead the way their great-grandparents hunted bisonfrom a slow-moving rail. Down Powell, up Hyde. Google it if youve forgotten.

The Mission is on the other side of the streetcar lines. Here in the Mission District, death is still a worrisome acquaintance. Ive heard the story so many times. It takes place in an old man bar. The kind where nothings on tap and nobody orders a wine till after midnight, and then only for the flavonoids. The body demands nutrients, not the consciousness. Old men, some young but old enough, watering down their bellies full of scotch and bourbon and vodka with some of the grape. No food, not even wings. No flat-screens silently showing a Giants game, no radio, no women, no gays except in a moment of stumblebum opportunity in the mens room.

A regular asks for a refill, grunting more than speaking. Thats always part of it. The old man bar isnt a place for a bartender who happily traipses across the barback, keeping everyone fresh in their cups. The last thing anyone wants is a conversation or a smile. Just a stool, a place for two elbows, and a glass to stare into. And the old man is nursing his drink and breathing hard. Hard like a car on the other side of a street, getting closer, louder. His skin is already gray, but so is everyone elses. Awareness comes like a wave across the room. The help steps back and plants himself by the exit on the far side of the bar. Nobody calls out for a drink, but they wouldnt even under other circumstances. A bark or a yawp is enough to get these old juicers chucked out onto the concrete. We could take him, probably, but this isnt a place for brave men. A dozen cowards watch a man die on his stool, evacuate himself, and slump onto the counter. The wheezing rattle of his last breaths take on a different tone. Deeper, chthonic, something older than life. A shoulder jerks, his back straightens, fingers tighten around the tumbler. We can hear the glass crack in his hand, and wordlessly he presents his glass and the bartender, his limbs herky-jerky from autonomic responses more than anything else, pours the new dead another glass and the dead man puts it to his lips and takes a sip. Some of it spills down his chin and onto his pants, but thats nothing new in an old man bar. And thats how we spend the night. Finally, someone manages to get a driller on the phone and he comes out to do his job. He cant believe what hes seeing. Hes afraid, just like everyone else. Drillers dont deal with the dead, only the dying, only the human. Its a fat guy, usually, or else a spidery skeleton of a mantheres not many people left who arent one or the otherand he almost comically tip-toes over to the dead patron who is still running up a tab that wont ever be repaid and places the drill to the back of the old mans head, running the bit through with a vzzvvvzzz that ends in a gurgle and the sweet smell of gray matter oozing down the dead mans back. Nothing to do after that but keep drinking.