“Coffee shops were the problem to begin with,” they told him. “We got too soft. The zombies wiped out half a nation. How can a bunch of shuffling drooling merloks take out half a nation unless it’s a nation of leisure-softened mewling eloi? Answer, Chicago.”

“A bad analogy. The merloks gave the eloi paradise. These zombies were just a plague.”

“You read too much, Chicago. But you’re right. A plague, a fire, and now the forest will grow again in the fertilizing ashes. No more coffee shops, no more poems. There’s a broken leg in waiting room four.”

He shuffled to waiting room four. The sharp stink of antiseptic, iodine and salt. There is a reason for everything, he said to himself. All things have a purpose. You were alone to contemplate your loneliness, and it hurt, to make you objective, Chicago. The zombies, they came to make us stronger. You’re a doctor now, to examine visceral pain. This broken leg. Don’t set it too badly. Try, Chicago.

In the room, a boy, a woman. Clearly lovers. You could see it in the hatred, palpable; thick, mist-drenched spiderwebs hung around them. They stared at him when he entered. He stared back.

“My name is Chicago. Broken leg then?” But the boy was holding his arm. His legs looked fine.

“Chicago? But...”

“Yes,” he said. “I took the name for the city. The one they burned, to end the plague. After I became a doctor. What’s wrong with your arm.”

“She shot me.”

“Come now.”

“No, Doctor, it’s true. I shot him. “

“Whatever for?”

“Whatever for? Who talks like that? I am in pain!” He held out his arm. His coat sleeve was stained.

“I see. Take off your coat?”

“No. Not until she leaves. She wants me dead.”

“It’s true, doctor, I want him dead. So I won’t leave.”

Doctor Chicago sighed. So this is my lot, he thought.

The boy had insisted: no police. Whatever police there even were. So Chicago cut off the boy’s sleeve, dug out the bullet, packed the hole with gauze, sent them on their way. The whole process seemed to take about 27 years.

Later, in the burned out hollow of a coffee shop, Chicago met her again. A coincidence. This time she was the one who had been shot. An accident- she was scavenging, licensed to scavenge by the temporary government, but a squatter had mistaken her for a zombie.

“That’s how old I am, doctor, I am twenty seven. Can you believe that? Do you look at my face and think, she is only 27? I look twice that. But I’ve only lived half that. They took everything, doctor. Not the zombies, but the men who used them to do with us as they’ve always wanted to. Oh I don’t mean sex. Sex was never something they knew what to do with. No, I mean all of the other things. Stifling our ideas. Making us feel stupid. Making us feel like they were doing us a favor, protecting us! Are you doing me a favor, digging a bullet out of my leg? Is that what you think?”

“Maybe it’s karma,” he said. Her eyes, did she ever blink? He had to resort to the kind of poetry he had written when he was only 13. Sticky, lumpy, soppy stuff.

“What? You mean for Vick? No, Doctor, there is no karma. And if there was, I was only it’s instrument that day. And not a good one. If there was karma, my bullet would not have missed.”

“Still,” he said.

“Don’t tell me to be still.”

He wanted to kiss her. “That’s not what I meant.”

“I know. I tend to antagonize the ones that mean the most to me.”

“You’ll make me blush. And no, I don’t believe it, not one little bit.”

“I do. I shot Viktor, Doctor Chicago, I abandoned my lover for him, my Paul, and now Paulie’s dead. Broke his heart, went off to fight the zombies, became one of them. I’ll never forget his face.” She gazed up at him. “Oh, doctor. What were we talking about?”

“How old you are. How I don’t believe you.”

“No one believes women anymore. That’s our job, it’s always been our job.”

“Does it hurt?”

“I’m used to it.”

“No, your leg.”

“I know.”

They had one night. A party to celebrate the new government, a crowded room, her eyes never blinking. They couldn’t deny themselves, meeting randomly like this all the time. The slipped away to a different burnt-out coffee shop. No one was shot this time.

“I have a nipple ring,” she said, before disrobing. She was shivering.

“Why are you telling me this.”

“Because what if you don’t like them.”

“You think too much.”

Once is you, twice is me, three times is torture, four times: destiny. She found him in the hospital, working by lamplight, a three year-old, some kind of rash, the kind only an overbearing mother can give.

She was with her boy, less a boy now, thicker in jowl, broader in shoulder, a cocky gleam in his eye, as if to say, I can eat whatever I want. “Doctor,” he said.

“Viktor.”

“Oh, Chicago, isn’t it wonderful! They’ve opened it again.”

“Opened what?”

“Chicago! Your home! They’ve been rebuilding, restoring, remaking! And Viktor can send us there.” She threw her arms around him. Her chest felt hot. Her arms were vices.

“Chicago? But….”

Viktor smirked. “Shakespeare was right. You should have killed all the lawyers. But we held on and now we’re the government. A favor for an old friend.”

She socked him in the arm, playfully, right where she’d shot him years before. He didn’t even wince.

“Viktor’s got our papers together. They have a train running, now, we can leave tomorrow. It’ll be dangerous, isn’t that exciting? Zombies everywhere, outside the city walls, thick, like buffalo, and the train will smash through them. You’ll be a doctor there, they need doctor’s so badly.”

“Just a moment.” Chicago finished with the child, handed the mother a tube of cream. “Twice a day. No more, no less. And let him play outside now and again. Germs aren’t always bad.” They left.

“Where do you live? I will go with you. I will help you pack.”

Doctor Chicago nodded his head. “Yes, okay. But I cannot go tomorrow.”

Now Viktor winced. “I can’t hold the train, doctor. And I don’t know if I can put you on it when it comes back. It’s tomorrow, or maybe never.” He sniffed.

“Okay. Yes. I will meet you there. At the, the train station.”

She looked up at him. Her eyes were wet. “If you don’t, I will come find you. I will come find you and kill you, doctor.”

“I know you will. Now go. I have to finish a few things here. Go, I will be there in the morning.”

He had to time it just right. Had to make sure she was on the train. He watched from a distance, the soldiers in their mismatched uniforms, forcing everyone on. She disappeared, then reappeared, leaning out of a window. Too small for her to jump through.

At least the train was moving, with screams and rattles. When it had some speed, he began to run after it. She saw him immediately. Her never blinking eyes. A world in them, fear and regret, sorrow and longing, and cold comfort that she was now going to be forever alone. It broke his heart as his chest heaved, catching fractured breaths, reaching out with one hand to touch her fingers as the train picked up speed. He didn’t even know her name.

Kneeling at the end of the pavement, where the concrete gave way to gravel, and after a while to grass, and then to dirt, and then to the oblivion of the edge of time. He wept. Great heaping wet sobs. He wept and wept and waited for the soldiers to arrest him for trespassing. They never came.

Weeks later, he heard the news: the train had made it, was ripped to pieces for parts, Chicago’s infrastructure.

The government assigned him a wife, told him how many children to have. He tried to teach them poetry, but they only wanted to hear stories about the zombies, to grow up and become policemen.

The burnt-out coffee shops were converted to offices and holocaust museums. Each with its own slice of recent history. Doctor Chicago developed a cough, a juicy face-reddening cough, and shuffled between house and hospital. One of the holocaust museums began to serve cups of thin tea. Chicago sat and had one when he could.

“I am that city,” he thought. “That Chicago the poets won’t let us forget. I am a butcher. Stethoscope and scalpel, hammer and chisel, tools to brand the sick. One loaf for my education, I parcel out morsels of temporary healing to the multitudes. They built that railroad for me, me, my shoulders bearing lightning and bad rain storms, wild winds connecting what ever was with what ever will be. And I am wicked. I fix up the women so they can break little boys, turn them into monsters with guns and free bullets. I am that city, mocking men and their hunger, I sing to them, my voice a coxswain urging the slave boat to row faster, a dog with mange, covered in soothing shit, no one will fight me so I never lose, I laugh and I laugh and I laugh, my shoulders shaking, crackling static electricity, breaking bread, butchering anyone who seeks me out for succor.”