After

The movies got one thing right, though, the pirate DJ says, his chin still stubbly against that metal screen.

The part about nothing ever being the same again.

The part about how people, we always find a way to live.

None of them ever mentioned the sky though.

That, with the dead crawling over the face of the earth, the skies would be empty again. Just a quiet place to look, always there if you needed to lose yourself for a moment. For a day.

It matters.

And below that sky, all of us.

A hulking young man, say. He’s not so complicated. His hair hasn’t been shaved down to whitewalls yet. He’s standing over his mother’s bed, the one she’s had since she was a girl herself, Juliet woodburned in flourishes into the headboard. Her wrists and ankles tied with shoestrings and thick rope, and they need to be tied. The knots are knotted over and over. An axe is in that young man’s hand, and his eyes are red, and the door’s closing behind him, because he needs his privacy for this.

Another guy, short and wiry, ragged from days of fighting to live, he’s bursting into a church, a zombie priest looking up from its bloody meal, that wiry dude not even hesitating, just tearing a giant cross from the wall, running at the priest with it, the priest’s mouth and chin and chest bloody, strings of meat matted in, the wiry dude yelling so that that’s all there is to hear anymore.

And more.

A congregation of dusty, headless parishioners, waiting for mass.

A young guy with angry pink hair, shooting flames up a hill, a young girl up there on the wall, touching her own scalp, in memory.

A wife sitting in her living room, the house’s windows boarded up, the news on like always, but she can see her husband’s reflection in it too. Can see him approaching from the kitchen, soup in one hand, a pistol unsure in the other, but he loves her, she knows he loves her, so she doesn’t turn around, doesn’t want this to be hard for him.

And there’s a hammer, rusting in the tall yellow grass at the foot of a tall silver water tower, the seedheads swaying above it, rustling.

A glass coffin in a dark bar, a drink set on top of it, a slow, desiccated hand reaching up as if to hold that glass, keep it from falling through.

Three tall white priests at night, walking through the tall door of a reinforced fence, a writhing sea of bodies waiting for them on the other side.

There’s a mom rushing through school, finding her daughter—it’s a Friday, so she’s in uniform—a terror rolling up the hall behind them, the mom at the last instant opening a locker, standing her daughter up inside. Kissing that locker after it’s closed and then looking up into a sea of death, already splashing at her ankles.

She could have been any of us. She’s all of us.

And, and. A tall man in a deep cell, hugging a grimy arm cast to his face, never letting it go, and—and on the seventh day, in the upper world, after lights out, a new recruit is rolling through the AM band, the veteran calling down from the top bunk to give it up, that there’s nothing tolerable on anymore, this new recruit looking back to the dial anyway, sure he heard something the other night, something good.

It was about before. The past.

And then he pulls it down from the atmosphere, the veteran swinging his legs off the top bunk, his hands clamped to the side of that thin mattress, his shirt tied around his head like a turban.

“No, no, there,” the veteran says, and the new recruit turns it up, looks out the open door of their bunkhouse for anybody who might be walking by, a habit that used to get him in trouble at school, and then the pirate DJ who doesn’t know the mic that well, he’s on again.

The story tonight’s a continuation of last time.

A faceless father from the past, impossibly tall, and thin, frail almost, answering the door.

It’s two military police, and, between them, a military man, a certain faceless hero of a general, and his neck, it’s been torn open in the most crude way, like with a shiv made from a plastic spoon or something, so this general’s had to pack it with gauze, then tape that gauze down. But still it’s bleeding through.

“He’s got long arms, right?” this father says to the general, about his wound. “Can reach farther than you’d think?”

The general’s too exhausted for this.

The father leans sideways, eyeing all the olive drab machinery at his curb.

“You brought the army,” he says.

“I am the army,” the general says back, his face grim in the sunlight, the plastic skin around his eyes drawn tight.

The father nods, kind of knew this.

“I don’t know where he is,” he says, his voice so fake.

“We know he had a, a girlfriend,” the general says.

“Heard he might have a special someone,” this father says, like offering condolences, then shrugs one thin shoulder. “Beijing?” he asks. “London, Cameroon, St. Petersburg? Edmonton? New York?”

“Son,” the general says.

“Sir,” this father says back, and, after a standoff that’s never going to go anywhere, the general turns, walks back to his convoy, the father’s son stepping into the doorway now, to stand in front of the dad, the cast on his arm still new, except one signature—B R I A N.

“Is he there yet, Dad?” the son asks, and the father looks at his watch, out to the east, and says, “Right about now,” and goddamn if he isn’t right. Halfway around the world, a ridiculously tall, white door is opening for a man just as tall, a dark woman running through, into his arms, one of that place’s priests stepping out to chaperone this reunion, his skin mummied in gauze so that there’s only his black-rimmed eyes, looking up into the sky. Into the future.

And then the rest.

The planes falling into buildings, the cities burning, a child running into the night for his mother, his back flayed open to the night.

It’s the story we all know, except this time, this time it ends with a crater up in Residential, a crater that used to be a wide, low house, the soldiers walking away from it, their red dots scratching the surface of the ground all around them.

This is where the world almost ended again.

And where it begins.

There’s a huge white egg buried in those warm ashes, see, its shell shiny, once fabric, a miracle of technology.

A damaged man, a father himself, tears his way up from that shell, stands into the night and peels his antique goggles off, looks around at a world made new, then walks off into it, to spread the gospel, to whisper it into the airwaves, infect mankind with something new—the truth. That’s what’s going radioborne tonight, this DJ says.

“Shit,” the new recruit says, looking up to the veteran, this reprobate, who’s smiling now, biting his lower lip.

He shakes his head no to this baby torch, says, “He wouldn’t—he wouldn’t want you to talk like that, man.”

“What are you saying?” the new recruit says, looking to the door again. Out into the world. “You mean, is he—is that—?”

The veteran laughs, folding his shoulders around it, and slides down from his bunk, stands at the door, his bare back scarred deep and regular, a game he was never supposed to have lived through, a game that makes the young recruit lick his lips, look away.

“Give em hell, Teach,” this veteran says out into the night. “Give em hell, man.”