The New Dead: A Zombie Anthology

by Christopher Golden

  I pressed my fingers to her face, wanting somehow to feel the moment of her consciousness, that current of thought trapped under ice, incubated. In my asphyxiating daze, I saw where two thousand miles north the frozen corpses of long-lost Arctic explorers now faced their eternal second consciousness without hope for motion, not until the ice caps melted off. I saw the bones of the decades-dead that hummed in their buried coffins but couldn’t lift the lid, cursed instead to ruminate in that cramped and noiseless dark. I saw Ukrainian nuclear towns where cancers bred wild and where fetuses presumed to be stillborn were quickening again in their mothers’ wombs. I saw African genocide fields of dead rising up like wheat at dawn, the burning pits spewing forth their charred offspring—

  —and then I reared my head from the sea and breathed.

  The five men had puttered their boat to within a few yards of us, two men at the fore peering down over the gunwale to catch sight of obstructions - street signs, the roofs of underwater houses. Behind them the dark skies brewed thicker shadow. The men were smoking cigarettes, so they were not among the dead. Unwelcome news for Dolly and me. One of them stood and pointed toward me and said ‘There!’ A moment later, the boat veered more precisely toward us.

  The waves rushed harder now. They slapped my face and worked to shove me off my feet and drag me away on a riptide. I stole more oxygen and dipped back underwater with Dolly. I brought her face within inches of mine to see her more clearly. All at once her body lurched and her legs scissored through the churning current.

  I turned back toward shore. My shoes sought vainly for traction on the underwater pavement. Hardly five feet deep and the sea believed it could claim us. The backwash rushed against Dolly as I held her. She clutched at my jacket lapel. I didn’t want to rise up and give those men a clear sign of my whereabouts.

  I moved forward with each surge and held my ground as best I could. I kicked off one shoe and with a socked foot dug my toes into pavement cracks. When my lungs clenched for air again, I stood upright. My chin barely broke the surface, and panic hit. I was farther from shore than I’d been before.

  An outward swell upended us. I was tumbling with her. Some impulse told my arms they had to fight, they had to let go, but even as she was sliding out of my grasp, I resisted.

  Even Dolly kicked, flailed her arms. This was not the birth I had hoped for her. I screamed into the surf and got a windpipe full of saltwater for it. I coughed and gasped and thought, Somebody’s backyard pool, a hotel Jacuzzi, even a warm shower could’ve done the trick. But like always, I’d overreached for the sake of the dramatic.

  My arms clutched at nothing. Dolly gone. Lungs heaved. No breath. I spun and lost my sense of up as the storm dark draped down over.

  Grips like fishhooks jammed under my armpits. I was caught and hoisted. I squeezed my fist with something inside it - flesh and bone that was, mercifully, Dolly’s wrist. I had her, but someone else had me, lifting, a clamp along my gut so sudden I gagged away the water I had breathed. Hands pulling at my jacket, hands ushering me onto the speedboat deck. I sprawled across a thwart. The shirtless men dragged Dolly from the sea. She was onboard with the rest of us.

  Above, spirals of grey churned inside the purple clouds like coiling, electric eels flashing their charges through the ether. The boat tossed and men bellowed, and the rain on my face brought stinging pain with its drive. I smelled smoke and gasoline and the acrid sweat of men who hadn’t bathed in quite some time. One of them slapped my face around. ‘You all right, buddy? You with us?’ His bearded face blotted out the sky.

  ‘All right,’ I said, coughing. ‘The girl?’

  The bearded man cringed at the rain bearing down on us. We were rushing toward shore, but the sea yet grabbed for us, crested over the hull, strived to capsize.

  Someone said, ‘Jesus—’

  And: ‘She’s not - she’s dead - she’s one of the Dead—’

  I tried to sit upright, but something held me down against the cushioned thwart.

  ‘Leave her alone!’ My voice.

  ‘Look at her wrists. She ain’t breathing. God, her eyes—’

  Even with their shouting, the roar of the sea, and the boat engine, even with the constant thunder overhead - all that noise and still I heard something else coming on, like a lake of water coming to a boil.

  ‘Aw, God,’ somebody said, ‘hail.’

  A surge of men’s bodies hit the deck not wide enough to hold us all. I reached out to where I saw the knuckled curve of Dolly’s spine. The wall of hail pummeled the boat and riddled the water surrounding us. It bashed into the wet naked flesh on the backs of these men. It punched rapid-fire against my shoulders, and the hardest hits were enough to knock my breath away. Each pellet was a hard-packed snowball bursting into slush against the pool of water on the floor of the boat. The men, hunched where they sat, laced their hands over the backs of their heads to guard their skulls from impact.

  A wave crested white behind us as the boat scraped aground. The engine died with an electric snap. We lurched portward, aft end wrenched around toward the sea to catch the brunt of another raging wave and the slantwise barrage of frozen hail. The storm was bathed all in purple fog, and the lightning plunged its bright nervous membranes into the deep.

  The boat upended and threw us all haphazard back into the surf. I was under, mouthful of water, someone’s foot stomped into my gut. But my hands found solid ground, and I crawled and breathed and squeezed out the salt in my eyes. Dolly, naked, was already scrambling ahead of me out of the water. She was like a mermaid testing land with the legs she had wished for. There were no welts where the hail stones struck her, just the pale bluish cast of her back and rear and thighs. A tattoo was on her waistline, though I couldn’t decipher it.

  Our ambulance was ahead, but the tide had advanced in mere minutes to roil around the wheel wells. Hail pinged off the windshield and the hood and beat away the film of bug guts. Both my shoes were missing now. A hail-stone grazed my cheek so sharply that I cried out, slapped my hand there, and found blood. Some of the other men were already crawling in the swash. They were lunging, desperate against the ice that would surely beat us all soon enough to death.

  I rushed the land, howling like a beach-stormer off a landing craft. When I overtook Dolly, I grasped her by the elbow and yanked so abruptly that she almost collapsed on her uncertain legs.

  One of the men ran beside us. He was wide open, unsuspecting. I swung my fist at his neck. He gagged and slapped his throat and buckled at the knees. I was feral, spittle at the mouth. Hail bashed my head, but it brought no pain. ‘Come on, come on, come on,’ I chanted.

  We reached the ambulance, wrenched the passenger door open. Dolly’s face - her bleached-out irises so dilated in surprise, so lively. The gape of her mouth was almost a smile.

  No time left to circle around to the driver’s door. The other men were upon us. I lunged through the cab and wrenched Dolly inside behind me. No strength left to pull her onto the seat, but she seemed to understand now, as she hoisted herself up from the wet ground. I was sprawled across the bench with Dolly on my legs, one hand to crank the starter key and the other to slap down the driver-door lock. The bearded man - he’d saved my life - was there at the window bashing with both fists, moaning God knows, blood slashed across his forehead.

  I grabbed the gearshift underhanded and wrenched it into reverse. Still lying prone with Dolly’s weight on me, I couldn’t see through the windshield and my feet weren’t within reach of the accelerator. So I slapped it with my palm instead. The ambulance revved backward out of the flood, a few more yards away from those desperate men, shirtless and bloody like biblical nomads.

  I struggled into a proper driver’s position, shifted back into forward. The men were dark blurs behind a windshield fogged and slushed and bug strewn, but I kicked the gas and their shapes leaped aside from the onrushing headlight beams. The most dogged of their posse reached out and grazed the driver’s-side mirror. He kept firm hold
of it as I spun a wide U-turn away from the raging sea.

  It was the bearded man again, the persistent prophet, furry face against the glass and feet skating along on the ground. I was fixing to unroll the window and congratulate him, but the side mirror broke loose and the stowaway disembarked with it.

  There was clear road ahead, and when I turned to Dolly, I saw that she was as ashamed as Eve after tasting the fruit, legs dawn up against her nakedness. Her chin shuddered from cold or fear as she gazed on me. I’d be a liar if I claimed she looked anything else but horrified.

  But this is how we’re born, naked and afraid.

  ‘Happy birthday, Dolly,’ I said.

  SECOND WIND

  BY MIKE CAREY

  Here’s my problem with dead people: they fall apart.

  Okay, I grant you, the transition to being a stiff is a shock to the system. You wake up one morning, and you feel like shit - death warmed over, as they say, or rather death cooling rapidly toward background ambient. You feel for a pulse - not verifiably present. But is that because it’s not there, or because you’re a klutz and you can’t take a pulse?

  Okay, you can’t feel a heartbeat, either. That’s ominous, because you’re so fucking scared by this time that your heart should be racing, not parked at the curb with the hand brake on.

  You draw a ragged, stressy breath . . . and it just stays there. Nowhere to go. Your body isn’t metabolizing oxygen any more, and your formerly autonomic functions are all unplugged from the board. The pressure doesn’t build. You could keep that breath pent up behind your teeth for a minute, an hour, a day and a half, and you’re never going to feel the slightest need to let it out again.

  The sign on the door just flipped, from OPEN to CLOSED. This is it. Grammatically, you can never start a sentence with ‘I am’ again. It’s ‘was/not-was’, all the way.

  But that’s no reason to let up, is what I’m saying. Too many people use death as an excuse, and I’m sick of hearing it. The world’s still out there, people. It’s not going away. The rules of the game didn’t change because you croaked and, like they say, if you don’t get back in the saddle, you’re gonna end up trampled and covered in horseshit. Your choice.

  I used to be a stockbroker, which is probably what killed me. Or rather, being a great broker is what killed me - having the kind of obsessive edge that took me to the top of the NASDAQ while most of my respected peers were still flossing their teeth and picking out a tie that matched their hand-stitched braces.

  It’s a tough gig, don’t mistake me. When you’re playing a bunch of DAX-listed storm-troopers off against a third-party boiler room, taking a trim on buy and sell at the same time, and cutting your T+3s so tight there’s no skin left on your fingertips, it’s a bit like riding a log flume must be. There are hundreds of millions of euros rolling under you, behind you, and you know damn well if you lose the flow and try to stop it before it’s ready, you’ll go down and never see daylight.

  So, yeah, there’s a certain level of stress that you live with. I won’t say ‘thrive on’, because that’s macho bullshit: the adrenaline surge is pleasant for about a half an hour, tops. After that your body starts shaking itself to pieces and you’re swallowing heartburn. A day in the dealing room is a day in the slaughter house: you come out of it with other people’s blood and sweetmeats spattered on your shirt, and that’s if you’ve done okay. If you’ve fucked up, it’s your own.

  I had my first heart attack when I was twenty-six. I usually tell the story so it happened on my actual birthday, but in fact it was the day after. I’d been out all night, flying high on wings of coke and frozen Stolichnaya, then I showered, popped a few dexies, and went back to work. The two guys I was with, they did the same thing, more or less, but they flaked out in the course of the morning - sneaked off to the room with the folding beds that the management lays on for quitters, to keep the crash at bay with a snatched half hour of sleep. I kept right on going, because I was on one of those flux-market rolls where nobody knows what’s happening and you can squeeze the shit from one exchange to another to ride lag on a price you already know is falling. Too good to miss.

  But like in a bad movie, I start to get a reverb on my hearing. Well, okay, what the fuck? I don’t need to hear properly to see the numbers scrolling up the screen. I’m low-pointing, I’m settling, I’m re-staking dead buys, I’m making those Tokyo asswipes breathe my farts and think it’s good fresh air.

  And then I was on the ground with a couple of invisible sumo wrestlers sitting on my chest. Tokyo’s revenge, I thought, as I blacked out.

  Three days at the Portland Clinic on caviar and tenecteplase. Back in the saddle, clip-clop, clip-clop. Because the guys who stop never start again, and that’s the gospel truth. I’ve seen it enough times to know that it’s a natural law.

  The second attack caught me by surprise, because this time I wasn’t even working: I was with a woman - using with to denote the act of coitus. Normally I’m pretty good at sex; I can reach a plateau and stay there for as long as I like until my partner of choice is ready to join me for the final pull toward the summit. On this particular occasion, however, the lady had to struggle out from underneath my inert body and call the emergency services. I’d been wearing her panties as a party hat, and I still was when I woke up - not at the Portland but at the Royal Free. Fucking paramedics. They ripped off my diamond cufflinks, too, but how the hell do you prove it? When you’re unconscious, people can take all the liberties they like.

  So that was two, and the doctors said I should expect strike three to come over the plate pretty damn soon if I didn’t change up and get myself some Zen-like calm. I didn’t waste any time on that prescription: I am what I am, and I play to my strengths.

  So I looked death square in his poker face, I saw what he was holding, and I implemented plan B.

  Look, this isn’t just me talking big, okay? I don’t need to impress a Z-list shmuck like you, and in any case, it’s basic. Basic stuff. Anyone with any sense can take the temperature and pack for the weather they know is rolling in.

  The dead started coming back a few years ago now, around the turn of the new millennium. Actually, it probably started a whole lot earlier than that, but that was when the trickle turned into a flood. Some of them come back in the spirit, some in the body. An acquaintance of mine who makes what he humorously calls a living as an exorcist says it’s all the same thing: zombies are people whose ghosts cling to their own dead flesh out of fear or stubbornness or sheer habit, and they learn by trial and error how to get things moving again. You hear crazier stories, too - human ghosts ram-raiding animal bodies and doing a little forcible redecorating. ‘Formative causation’, they call it, or some other bullshit periphrasis: You look like what you think you should look like, at least most of the time. But the animal soul is still in there with you, and when you’re at your weakest, it will try and slip out from under. That, the so-called experts tell us, is what werewolves are.

  Ghost, zombie, or loup-garou - those were the options I was looking at, assuming I didn’t just ‘go gentle into that good night’ like some passive-aggressive moron. So I planned accordingly, in between strike two and strike three. I had a shed- load of money put by already - salted away against a retirement I clearly wasn’t going to live to enjoy. Now I put some of that cash to work, although first of all I set up a Celtic knot of offshore- registered shelf companies to handle my assets. Dead men can’t legally own jackshit, but corporations are immortal. I bought a lot of real estate, because the property bubble had finally burst around about then, and you could pick up some really sweet deals. Partly I was just diversifying my holdings, but I was also looking for a place where I could set up postmortem. What I needed was a piedà-terre that was both huge and invisible - standing on its own grounds, because nosy neighbors would be the last thing I needed.

  I settled on a disused cinema in Walthamstow - the Gaumont. It was going for a song, despite having a Cecil Masey facade and most of the
interior fixtures and fittings still intact. It was 1930s vintage and had never been either burned out or turned into a bingo hall. It had been a porno theater, briefly, but I wasn’t too worried about sticky carpets. In fact, I wasn’t worried about the auditorium at all. I stripped out the projection booth and fitted it with a bespoke arrangement of air-conditioning and freezer units. Temperature and humidity control were going to be key.

  Somewhere around then was when my personal extinction event happened. RIP, Nicholas Heath - no flowers or known grasses, by request. But I’d been expecting it. It was, you know, a bump in the road. Nothing more. I’d already decided which kind of dead man I was going to be, and I’d made sure that the funeral parlor would hold off on the burial for at least a week, to give the other shoe a chance to drop.

  To be honest with you, I don’t like to talk about that part of it. Some people say they see tunnels, blinding white lights, heavenly messengers or moving stairways. I didn’t see anything. But I did have the sense of not being completely in control, and that fucking scared me. I mean, for all I knew, it could be a lottery. Maybe you didn’t get to choose which way the ball would bounce. I might find myself looking like Casper the friendly fuckwit, or Lassie, or in some other stupid, inconsequential, unworkable shape. Or nothing. Nothing at all. Not all the dead come back, even now.