The chiaroscuro images flickered on the aged television set, as Walter Neff looked up at the spectacle of Phyllis Diedrichson, her shapely leg and the anklet bracelet on it. Nearby, Alicia gasped at the spectacle: “Oh wow. This is it, isn’t it? Double Indemnity, the film noir classic they told us about at film school this week? Where did you get it from, Karl?”

From the bed, her thin and rangy boyfriend Karl smiled: “I scored it from the debris of a specialty video shop down when we were doing conscript duty in Christchurch. Good thing too- rather someone who treasured it, not one of those Restorationist shitheads.”

Alicia nodded: “Yeah, I had a discussion with mum about them the other day. I hate those idiots. If it was up to them, film noir, hard-boiled detective novels and Jacobean revenge tragedies would all be banned, just because they can’t face that prewar society wasn’t some marvellous squeaky-clean utopia.”

“So what did Captain Maynard have to say about it?”

“She’d kill you if she heard you call her that, you do realise? Try not to when we have dinner with her next week.”

“Hell no, I respect your ma too much, Leese. So does everyone. In a wheelchair and still seriously bad-arse. So, what did she say?”

“Well, I said that censorship was how we got into this whole Zedwar bullshit in the first place. She hugged me and said that she was proud that I could think for myself. And you should hear her when the Restos appear on telly or the web.”

“Like mother, like daughter.” Alicia turned toward the bed and crept up the covers, kissing Karl firmly on the mouth, settling down alongside him to watch the rest of Double Indemnity.

She liked this dude. He wasn’t a musclebound macho idiot, like most guys his age, and he thought about things. And Ma approved of him, which was even better. And he respected her, which wasn’t unusual, but they had really bonded at their last dinner together when Karl offered to do a documentary about the lives of post-Zedwar disabled vets and how they were dealing with civilian lives.

Former NZAF TaskForce D Captain Bianca Maynard finished her night’s work, closed down her laptop and stretched her arms.

It was almost ten o’clock and she had to get up early for her job at the Ministry for Veterans Affairs tomorrow. At the moment, she was convening a conference on Disabled Zedwar Vets and Reconstruction. Huh. It was good to be able to write those words down on her laptop.

And although she’d never hear the end of it if Leese caught her with the clove ciggie, she wheeled herself to the balcony and lit it, exhaling with pleasure. Shame that tobacco had been one of the chief casulties of the Zedwar, given the priority that had to be accorded to food crops and intensive cultivation.

Bianca propelled her wheelchair toward the adjacent bedroom, leant forward and grasped the bed’s support rails, levering herself into the warmth- stone hotwater bottles were undergoing a resurgence, given rubber supplies were so uncertain because South-East Asia and Africa’s jungles were still saturated with zombies.

Muggins, her trusty ginger and white cat, jumped up and snuggled down alongside her feet, a thankful source of warmth on a cold night. One side-advantage of the Zedwar was that the RSPCA actually now had a shortage of animals to serve as companions to those who had lost loved ones during hostilities. She couldn’t bear the thought of the grizzled but friendly tabby tom being euthanised.

She gazed at the photographs of her, her daughter as an infant in her arms…and Mike. Mike. And as ever, her tears began again. She thought back to his long, lean body, the spiralling dragon tattoo down his back, and his taut arse as he emerged from the shower and signed, where’s the towel? and then realised, You’ve hidden it again, haven’t you? She had smiled mischievously and replied, but Mike honey, you look so damned good without it… He had laughed and gathered her up in his strong arms and swept her back to bed.

And at some point during that evening, within her womb, two microscopic pieces of meat collided, fused and formed a growing embryo that would become their daughter.

A lump came into his throat, as she reached for her video remote and her television flickered into life. There he was again, Leesie’s father. She had always loved the magical way that his hands flew and shuttled as he signed.

She’d seen him at the 2020 Toronto Paralympics and liked the way he moved. And that television interview with him in the changing room had turned her into a damp storm of rampaging woman-hormones. Hot, hot hot. She wanted him. And best of all, he lived in Wellington!

After she’d pulled a few strings and got invited to the civic reception to celebrate the Deaf Blacks gold medal haul at the Paralympics, they finally met each other. It turned out that he’d heard of her and admired the work she’d done on ending the insurance discrimination loopholes within the Human Rights Act. Mmm, hot body and good brain. At the end of the evening, it was obvious that there was mutual attraction and passion, given the long smouldering kiss between the two of them. And one thing led to another and it turned out that he’d had wheelie lovers before and knew exactly how to turn her on and what her erogenous zones were, and that she actually had some.

Granted, she’d had to put up with the perpetual in-jokes at Disability Action that she’d deliberately learnt Sign to communicate with the studly Deaf rugby player. Huh. No thank you, she’d learnt it at high school, thank you very much. Mind you, it did help that she was able to have him all to herself. Ah, the joys of multilingualism in the boudoir!

And then there was that magic night when Mike had leant over her in the wheelchair, kissed her and signed, let’s go to bed. Ooh, yes please, she signed in response.

Alicia had resulted from that frenetic moment of pleasure and lust. Mike had been overjoyed to become a dad, moved in immediately, went to prenate classes with her and was there in the delivery room. She’d thought their happiness was complete, but…

But then the Zombie War had come and they both signed up.

Funny thing, that. People tended to assume that just because you were in a wheelchair, you had low prospects of survival- but that was wrong, given that mobility and access bred ingenuity and strategies to overcome such ‘impairments.’ For one thing, like most disabled professionals did, she kept in shape through a sports wheelchair and it had a high-speed option. For another, there’d been diversification in the terrain suitability of chairs before the Zombie War, so wheelies didn’t have to rely solely on the basic model anymore.

She wasn’t the only disabled person who had been able to work what the foolish might have considered the ‘miracle’ of survival amidst their specific circumstances of adversity.

Others had grabbed their guns, primed their chairs and blasted away with the best of them, or had their Shieldware active as they coursed between the hordes of zeds. It had originally been crime and accident prevention software, but it turned out to be ideal to keep out unwelcome undead interest. Some of the more technically minded fitted retractable spikes to their Shieldware, or blades. Amputees had customised legblades which rendered them faster than able-bodied people fleeing zombie incursions in some instances, and the Deaf had the advantage of not being able to hear the screams of zombie victims, or the sounds of collapsing civilisation around one.

There were exceptions. Institutionalised people with psychiatric disabilities were abandoned as their medical caregivers fled, although so were many elderly resthome residents. Not many had survived the early phases of the apocalypse, nor had people with cognitive, behavioural or learning disabilities. In this new, Darwinian world, only the strong and smart lived on. However, like most other Kiwis, disabled New Zealanders are tough bastards to kill off.

And then there was the other stereotype- that if you were in a wheelchair now, you had to have been disabled during the Zombie War, for much the same reason. She didn’t mind explaining otherwise, although it did tire her out after a while. That was why she’d responded so eagerly when Karl, Alicia’s boyfriend, had expressed interest in a documentary about the lives of disabled vets- and had been intelligent enough not to assume that she’d been in a chair because of the war.

Turned out that he’d had an uncle who had been a wheelie beforehand, same as her, and had survived because he’d barricaded himself in a mountaintop retreat and rigged up the CCTV system in the hotel to monitor zed incursions from below the snowline.

But anyway, nope. Which was why her MVA work as a counsellor was so damned valuable. She found herself talking to younger men and women who were in exactly that situation, soldiers who had been newly disabled as a result of injury during the Zedwar’s closing phases, depressed and sometimes on the verge of suicide.

She didn’t always get to them in time, though.

She glowered at the Assisted Suicide Drug Dispensary advertisement in the paper. She hated it, and if she’d had her way, euthanasia would never have been decriminalised. Like most other disabled people, she’d never really liked the way that they depicted wheelies as pathetic, dependent and longing for death. Yeah, right. She looked at the banner from one of Disability Action’s old demos that she’d carried, and the motto- Impairment is A Social Construct. I Just Ran Over It in My Chair!

And while she was the child of trade unionist parents and agreed with them that “Tory” was an obscene four letter word, she’d crossed the floor to vote with the bluejackets when it had come to the Assisted Suicide Law Reform Bill during her last term as a Green List MP.

Not because she was some sort of holy roller godbotherer- she didn’t like the way they viewed wheelies and other disabled people as pathetic, vulnerable and charity objects either. Seriously nineteenth century. They were as bad as each other. What those new wheelie vets needed were rehab services and trauma counselling, but there was a skilled labour shortage. Fortunately, she’d turned out to be an excellent, empathetic peer counsellor when she retrained after the Zombie War.

Darkly, she thought:

Fuckin’ death merchants. I told the politicians this would happen, that those assisted suicide bastards wouldn’t be content with just the terminally ill, but did they listen?

Muggins could tell she was upset, and her cat moved closer to her human.

And then the Battle of Paekakariki flashed onscreen and her memories came flooding back.

Paekakariki had been a prewar seaside resort town and beachfront outlying Wellington suburb, thirty kays from the main city. Unlike Porirua closer in, it had no harbour, just a beach, so it had had to host a partially motorised evac barge. To prove themselves as a combat unit, Task Force D had requested the evacuation assignment when an old people’s housing complex in neighbouring Paraparaumu upcountery had been breached and about one hundred zeds had been newly minted.

Thus, D had been sent in to retrieve a group of children and surviving elderly people stranded at a hotel as Paraparaumu’s zeds closed in on them. It was supposed to have been comparatively easy, given that Paekakariki was a tiny suburb, with most of it clustered around an unobstructed main turnoff from State Highway One.

With heavy covering fire, they’d gotten most of the incipient refugees to their evac barge, then the motorised troop carrier had stalled, about two hundred metres from the barge. The sands ran red with the blood, bone and gore of humans and zeds alike, but the children were on autopilot, deadened to additional increments of suffering in the world around them. They had already been through so much pain- the loss of parents, grandparents and siblings.

Bianca and Mike were left with two or three greyheads, and she had kissed him, signing to Mike to care for their baby, back at the base. But then, he’d unbolted her combat wheelchair, and it rolled forward, out of the van, as her man gave them covering fire as Bianca and the others ran and hobbled to the barge. When the last of them was onboard, Bianca wheeled around, guns blazing, trying to get back to the motorised vehicle up the road, but by then it was far too late, as the outlier zeds had reached his position.

As they growled and reached for him, clawing and moaning in what would have been frustration if they had still retained any vestiges of humanity, he dispatched another three before he ran out of bullets. Before they could crowd in through the entry hatch and drop over the edge, he signed, I love you. Look after Alicia. Tell her the truth. He unpinned a grenade as the cadaverous hands reached forward and she screamed: “MIKE! NO!”

And in a few acheing moments, her man perished, but on his own terms, and not before he’d taken about five zombies with him.

Numbed, she watched four or five more lurching toward the evac barge just over the railway tracks at the entrance to the town. Then, collecting herself, she gunned up the evac barge engine and put back out to sea. From the shore, the zeds clustered, as sharks threshed between the departing evacuation barge and themselves, attracted by the organic debris within the water. Bianca left part of her heart burning within Mike’s funeral pyre on the beach.

When she reported back to base about the equipment failure, the responsible mechanics had been courtmartialled for the equipment failure and Mike got a hero’s funeral at the end of it.

She had sat in barracks, gazing at a razorblade and asking herself whether or not she wanted to join Mike in oblivion.

When she’d been on the verge of giving up, her mother phoned and told her Leesie had started walking. She had gone over to her mum’s place and watched the happy, smiling and oblivious toddler as she spotted her mother and ran over to her. Bianca leant forward and took the little one in her arms, realising that after all, she did have someone to live for.

Sometimes, even film noirs can have happy endings, however bittersweet and ambiguous.