There she stood and hurriedly waded in the last ten meters to the beach and then turned to look out toward the Zodiac as it slowed and a diver front-flipped over the side, holding onto what looked like a speargun. He was going after Treble, which in a long-short moment of utter clarity Chloe realized was thankfully stupid. The diver would never catch so much as a glimpse of Treble. Chloe had seen that kid swim.
But she couldn’t worry about that at the moment. A bullet whizzed by and hit a large branch of driftwood behind her, spraying woodchips as she glanced back. Close. She turned to see the Zodiac again, hoping to see it turning away and instead it was coming straight on, and now two other Zodiacs had rounded the headland and were coming in fast.
“Chloe!” she heard from behind her, and “In my bag,” said Anodiwa calmly, nodding toward the bag she’d brought to the beach. It was unzipped and Anodiwa had already pulled a pistol from it and was holding it in her right hand with the left hand bracing it as she let off a round. Hopeless, but worth the shot.
So security in Cape Town wasn’t as lackluster as she’d assumed, thought Chloe.
Chloe reached down into Anodiwa’s bag and there was another pistol, a Smith & Wesson Model Three with pearl grips. She laughed. Of course. This looked like the very gun she’d trained on for Annie Oakley and the only gun model she knew how to use. So all this was planned, start to finish. Hah!
She grabbed the revolver, turned to face out toward the Zodiacs, the first one now bouncing along over the outer edge of the low surf-line that Chloe had swum in through. The other two coming hard toward the beach. She needed to be closer. Too much movement. Too far away. She started wading out through the shore break even as Anodiwa, down the beach and up on a large boulder now, began taking pot shots from her vantage point.
Knee deep, Chloe took her first shot, and then another, missing badly both times as far as she could tell. While she was aiming for a third shot she saw one of the figures in the closest Zodiac spin and turn, grabbing at a shoulder. A shot from Anodiwa had found its mark.
But they were firing back now from all three Zodiacs, and bullets began splashing into the water around Chloe. She waded out deeper and fired again and then again, caught up in the moment, no thought of her own safety, just wanting to hit someone out there, when there came a hard punch to her left shoulder and she knew she’d been hit.
She spun down into the water and kept going, submerging to get away from the hail of bullets. Was she seriously hurt? She didn’t know, but the left arm seemed to work all right as she tried to move it.
She tried to look around, but one of the many lies of Hollywood is that underwater shot when the swimmer looks around and sees something. You can’t see anything, really, unless you’re wearing a mask.
Bullets kept zipping into the water around her, and Chloe had the uneasy feeling, crouched on the bottom, that there were more of the damn bullets, and they were stronger as they zipped in, so maybe the Zodiacs were getting close?
And she needed some air. She was in a crouch and she’d have to stand soon.
And then she saw a dark figure coming near. She wished to hell she could see what it was. Not too big, so a penguin or, god forbid, a small shark.
It came right at her. And grabbed her hand. Treble? Yes, Treble! And he tugged on her, moving her away from where she was crouching, and she started to help herself by swimming on her own even as he tugged her. Ten meters away, then fifteen, then they surfaced, away from the bullets, and grabbed a mouthful of air and a quick look around.
The Zodiacs, all three of them, were going right past them and roaring toward the beach. Anodiwa had retreated into the boulders at the edge of the beach and was firing from behind one of them. The attackers were firing at her and looking around for Treble and Chloe.
“C’mon,” said Chloe and held Treble by the hand and started wading in toward the boulders. If they could get behind cover there and hold out for just a few minutes there’d be help arriving. There were drones flying around showing it all live to the world. Flyeyes and gnats were everywhere, and as they waded one of the underwater drones surfaced and blinked its eye as it broadcast them live wading in. It had probably been watching all the underwater struggles the two of them had been through.
Chloe’s left shoulder hurt like hell as they pushed through the water. She felt possessed of madness, a frenzy; filled with anger and anguish combined. She stumbled and fell face first into the water and that capped it. She was furious and determined as she came to her knees, then stood and slowly rose.
She was kaiju! She felt herself changing, morphing, stronger, bigger, faster, scaled and tailed and mean as hell! She stood, and in her mind all those thirty takes back in Hollywood served her well. Kaiju! She roared and raised her arms—ouch! from that left shoulder—and roared again.
Everyone stopped for a long few seconds. Much later, like five or ten minutes after the tubers and the appers and the dotters deepfaked it, there was actually a kaiju that seemed to rise up from the sea. Just like in the movie!
But right there, live in the moment, she was still Chloe, five-foot-seven, fit and muscular, blond hair in a ponytail, that perfect face with the Newman-like penetrating blue eyes. But still just Chloe.
And then a shot rang out, and then more shots, as the Zodiacers renewed the battle and, to be honest, it looked bad for the daring threesome, Anodiwa up in the boulders and Chloe and Treble scrambling out of the water.
Or Chloe scrambling alone, actually. Treble waited, and looked out to sea, and raised his arms and whistled and clicked and on came a dozen, two dozen, a hundred, penguins, all answering the call of The Perfection, the princeling, the mighty Treble.
In thirty seconds it was over, the twelve people from the Zodiacs swarmed by penguins until they couldn’t be seen beneath the scrum.
And then there were chopper blades, and sirens, and police and soldiers and a most exciting time. The ratings were through the global roof: the first time anything had reached an audience of six billion, or three-fourths of the Earthies on the planet.
It is three months later and, look, here they are! It’s Chloe Cary and her pals Twoclicks and the hero princeling Treble, and even Anodiwa Pinaar! Wow! The four of them getting out of the limo right there in front of you, if you were smart and got there early so you could be in the right spot, up close to the restraining ropes. Worth a six-hour wait? Heck, yes! “Kaiju! Kaiju!” you’re yelling, along with everybody else. “Chloe! Treble! Twoclicks! Diwa!”
Now they’re posing together in front of the movie backdrop poster, a huge thinscreen that shows it in 3D as Chloe emerges from the water and becomes that kaiju that saves the world from other monsters, foreign and domestic. It’s the actual vid from the actual moment in the actual False Bay in the actual Cape Town. How cool is that?!
They built that moment right into the movie, which meant building Anodiwa Pinaar right into the movie as Chloe’s sidekick, and figuring out ways to make sense of Twoclicks and Treble. It took extra weeks and cost millions, but will all the reshooting be worth it? You bet, a likely ten billion gross in the first weekend globally!
So there they stand, the fearsome foursome, the most popular actors and the most popular leader and his most popular Perfection, at the front of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard. Colossal III is huge. The biggest! The best!
Chloe is happy it’s all worked out, and she’s holding hands with Anodiwa and that’s worked out fine, too, and she has an arm around her little pal Treble, too, and he’s grinning as his father Twoclicks goes on and on for the media about how brave and wonderful they were and how great the movie is. Chloe wonders, as she stands there, if Twoclicks set this whole mess up? Did he risk his son’s life, not to mention her life? Would he do that?
Yes, she thinks. Sure. Of course he would.
Rick Wilber’s favorite alien, the jovial but deadly Twoclicks of the House of S’hu, has appeared often in stories in Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine, as well a
s in the novels Alien Morning (Tor 2016) and Alien Day: Notes from Holmanville (Tor, forthcoming in fall 2020). Chloe Cary is a central figure in both novels.
Rick has also published novels The Cold Road (Tor, 2002) and Rum Point (McFarland), several college textbooks on writing and the mass media, and more than fifty short stories in major markets, including the Sidewise Award-winning “Something Real,” and the poignant “Today is Today,” reprinted in the Best Science Fiction of 2019 (Prime Books, 2019). Both of those stories are in his new collection, Rambunctious: Nine Tales of Determination (WordFire Press, 2020). The Wandering Warriors, with Alan Smale, is also forthcoming from WordFire.
He is a visiting professor in the low-residency MFA in Creative Writing program at Western Colorado University, and he is director of the Dell Magazines Award for Undergraduate Excellence in Science Fiction and Fantasy Writing.
Z Is for Zombie
Steve Rasnic Tem
Z Is for Zombie
Lee was ill for a long time. Then he felt good again. Then he felt sick again. This cycle went on for at least ten years. After a while he couldn’t always tell the difference, with all the time he spent in bed, and living alone.
Eventually the casting people stopped hiring him. He’d gotten too old, too crippled up with arthritis. He’d never been more than an extra, a background actor in zombie pictures and TV shows—more than a hundred films and episodes. But he’d taken it seriously; he was good at that one thing. He was expert at playing dead.
He tried to convince them his arthritis was an advantage—he argued it made his living-dead stumble more convincing. But he would fall at unexpected times and ruin scenes. He was too unreliable, they said, an insurance risk.
The decayed face in his bedroom mirror wasn’t perfect. Some of the edges weren’t glued down and the paint job was splotchy, and Lee didn’t know how to give his eyes that dead fish look, although the shadows he’d applied did a pretty good job of making them recede. He’d had no training in special effects or make-up, but he’d always watched the professionals while they did their work. Filming always meant much waiting around, and he’d had nothing better to do.
The scar above his left eyebrow rose worm-like off his forehead and fell onto the surface of the dresser. He scooped it up and put it in a tray. Later he would return it to one of the display cases with his other treasures.
He practiced zombie looks, alternating fierce, hungry grimaces with loose-lipped and sometimes zany expressions of brainlessness. He spoke a few lines, if a string of phlegmish gargles could be considered language. They had always been the extent of his permitted on-screen vocabulary.
Lee still rehearsed every day in case he ever got the call again. Lacking his old stamina he quit after an hour or so. His little bungalow had always been shadowy and dim, even when his mother was still alive. As his eyes weakened with age he found he could see very little after a certain hour and mirrors were especially challenging. They possessed depths of gloom he could make no sense of.
He gently transferred his bits of putty, silicone, and rubber to one of the glass cases in the living room. This particular case held make-up items from his early zombie pictures: “The Dead Are Alive,” “The Dead Aren’t Dead,” and “The Dead! The Dead! The Dead!” All low-budget, all primitive in both their effects and working conditions. In each he’d been part of a group of zombie actors who wandered from scene to scene, occasionally changing a ragged shirt or a facial appliance in order to make it seem as if they had a cast of hundreds of undead instead of the twenty or so they could afford. The make-up had been hot and smelly under the summer sun. He’d been denied water and almost passed out more than once. On “The Dead! The Dead! The Dead!” he’d broken his middle finger when his cadre of zombies fell into a ditch. He’d suffered through all three films, but he’d loved the work. He kept the splint from the incident in the case along with whatever make-up bits he was able to squirrel away in his pockets at the end of filming.
That was wrong of course. Lee was fully aware it was wrong. But it didn’t feel unfair. Those bits of zombie make-up—scars and wounds and simulated rotting flesh, decayed organs—were everywhere. Not infrequently they dropped off and you stepped on them during the midst of some rambling zombie advance. He wasn’t paid much, and this was physical evidence of the most important work he’d ever done. His dream job. Still, his mother would have been so ashamed of him if she had known.
He caught a glimpse of something in the tall glass case against the wall. In the glass door or leaning against the bits of rotting wardrobe hanging inside. A skeletal hand maybe, some bony fingers trying to reach in and take what was his.
Lee went over to the case and peered inside. Everything looked to be there, but sloppily arranged, as if it had been rummaged through. Of course, he might have done it himself. He was always taking things out and wearing them, stumbling around the house as he choreographed his moves. He always resolved to put them back the way they had been, but he didn’t always recall the original order. He’d never cataloged his collection, which was a mistake, but he’d never been much good at organizing things. His mother usually did that for him, but she wouldn’t touch his zombie bits—they disgusted her.
Lee did the best he could, but more than once he’d wake up in bed with bits of make-up stuck to the sheets or his pillow. And it wasn’t unusual to step on a make-up piece lying on the floor. He went barefoot around the house, not wanting to damage the delicate pieces with his shoes.
A dead face loomed in the cabinet by the front door. Lee smiled at it, too far away to tell if it smiled back.
He’d always worked hard on these roles and would ask some of the featured actors now and then for tips. Often they brushed him off, but some were nice. “What’s your name again?” they would say, or “What do you want? An autograph?”
Once he’d asked a second unit director about his motivation for a scene. “You’re a freakin’ zombie,” had been the reply. “You have no motivation.”
Although the official line was that zombies were no longer “people,” their souls and personalities gone, leaving only these strangely animated shells behind, Lee never played them that way. Maybe it made no difference in the end, but he never thought of them as dead. He just thought of them as really old people with some rare disease. And, after all these years of playing them, he was at that advanced age himself. Minus the disease, although he hadn’t seen a doctor in a very long time. Even the teenagers and little kid zombies were just old people in his eyes. A bit empty, sadly alone, just walking out of habit because that’s all they knew. Nothing ahead of them and everything behind. Their bodies did rot, the flesh fell off their bones, but that was just a symptom of their disease.
He heard something toward the back of the house. A scratching, or a rubbing. Maybe some shifting weight, poking and prodding, touching his things. Lee was always worried about mice. If a mouse got into one of the cases it could do tremendous damage. Most of the make-up appliances were soft and chewy, just the sort of thing to appeal to rodents.
But it could also be someone trying to break in. He started in that direction, thinking he should at least double-check the locks. He moved carefully. He knew how clumsy he could be and the space between cases was quite narrow with not even enough room to turn around. There wasn’t a chair to sit in or a single piece of furniture unrelated to his career. Most of his house was like this, a museum devoted to his collection.
Lee kept hearing those noises, but his passing reflections in the glass doors and display tops continued to distract him. Sometimes he forgot some of the things he had. All these shredded zombie face masks, rotting cheeks and protruding tongues and broken teeth, staring out at him as he passed, breathing hard through their torn lips, glancing at him with nervous eyes, needing to scream when all they could do was growl.
He stopped in front of a framed article on the wall. The newsprint had yellowed, the edges frayed, but the print was still readable if he got close enough. Lee had
always thought of himself as anonymous—zombies were intended to be anonymous for the most part, unless it was a featured player who had recently turned, because he or she wanted out of their contract or because they had become difficult to work with. But years ago he had been interviewed for the local paper, and he’d been proud of his small moment of recognition.
But it had come with a cost. Fame always came with a cost—he’d learned that from watching the better-known cast members in his various projects. It didn’t matter whether it was the movies or the TV shows; once you became famous you became another sort of creature entirely.
After the article appeared people would show up at his door wanting to ask him questions and see the collection. Younger people mostly—teenagers and college kids. And him with no security in place whatsoever. He’d never put locks on the cases. He’d never thought he needed to. These young people with all their energy and their barely-controlled enthusiasm, they frightened him. What if they took something? He was too old and weak to stop them. He had no idea how to protect himself and his things.
More than a few times he had the urge to bite one of them. Crazy, of course, but biting was something he knew a lot about. A bite could turn an enemy into an ally.
So he started turning people away. And when he had the opportunity, and no one was watching, he went out front and took the house number off the door. He figured the postal carrier must know his house by habit and wouldn’t need a number, not that he ever received any mail. Anyone else would be looking for a house number that no longer existed. But he figured there should be something on the door, some non-identifying identifier, so he took some black paint and wrote “Zed” by the doorknob, and felt pretty clever about it. And he liked the way it looked. If anyone ever asked him where he lived, which they never would, he would tell them “I’m at destination zed,” and feel good about it.
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