In England, the cows, when fed cow bits, became mad: cows like to eat grass, not the bonemeal of their cousins. The people who ate the mad cows got sick and died. A sickness in the brain.
III
My friend’s mother came over for dinner. She lived across town. She didn’t get out much.
My friend’s mother usually cooked for herself, but he was worried about her, so all three of us were going out to a restaurant together. She sat on the couch. She was one of those people who did not lean back on couch cushions but sat up perched on the very edge. In another life, she was surely a small bird. She watched out the window at an old man walking down the sidewalk using a silver walker. Then she turned to us, bright-eyed, in her scarf with what looked like hard-boiled eggs on it.
So, she said. What do we want for dinner?
My friend thought about it, tapping his fingers on the table. But I couldn’t help cringing, over by the bookshelves. A kind of thick, sludgy rage gargled through me.
My friend was listing restaurants. After ten, he trailed off.
I don’t know, I said slowly, when they turned their heads to me. Where do you want to go?
We might like Italian, she said cheerfully.
But do you? I said. Do you want Italian?
She looked at me, quizzical.
Or are you, perhaps, a queen? I asked. My friend shot me a look.
She extended her neck, higher.
A queen? she said. I don’t understand. If we don’t want Italian, what might we like instead? Are we hungry? Do we prefer French?
I ran out of the apartment. I ran screaming down the street. I called her later to apologize. I never asked what they ate.
IV
There is a movie written by an unusual screenwriter from the final year of the previous millennium in which a portal opens in the city and people can slide down it and enter the brain of a famous actor. It is a world unto itself. Later in the movie, the famous actor himself finds the portal and slides down it and enters his own brain. This causes such disruption in the system that while he’s in there, everyone forgets how to talk and they can only say his name, over and over again. It is all they know how to say.
V
Usury, says the man on the radio, is money that makes money.
It is money that climbs on top of other money to make more money, but there is no service rendered. The interest rate is exorbitant. Most world religions outlaw it; it is a bad sign of greed, of the avaricious nature of a financial situation gone awry. What people need are services or products: now those are a worthy exchange. It is, they say, one of the foundations of the current economic crisis, because we are living off debt, off credit-card offers from banks so eager they mail applications addressed to pets, off mortgage-loan mismatching, off corporate loan errors and sketchy pricing for risk, off all these questions about regulation, off mountains of promises made based on air.
VI
The big zombie who ate zombies?
He ate and ate and ate.
But more decay cannot reverse decay, and eventually he grew sick. He was large and used to be strong, and he lay in a park, breathing hard. The other zombies feared him, but when they saw he was ill, they surrounded him in a circle.
They grunted. They shambled. They swayed. After a while, they grew bored and lumbered off. Alone, Big Zombie died, again. He was reanimated shortly after. This time, worse. He was too hungry to look for another zombie, so this time he ate his own arm. His own leg. His own head, all eating, until he started to digest himself, until all that was left was a mouth and a GI tract. A mouth, an esophagus, a stomach, intestines.
VII
And, finally - a true story.
I was at the house of a man who had recently gotten divorced. He was sixty years old, and his wife had kept the household together for forty years, and then all of a sudden decided she was done with him. She left him, all at once. He did not know how to boil an egg. He did not know where to buy toothpaste.
A friend recommended he have people over, since he was dying of loneliness, of the sounds in the new house that felt like the clanging of death bells. At sixty, the rest of his life was a vacancy. He’d met one woman online who seemed like she might be willing to take over his life for him, but the woman moved in after two days and he found her rifling through his wallet and looking too closely at his stock statements, and about money he was clear, so he threw her out. He put her piles of shoes in rows in the hallway. She yelled at him from outside. She forgot his correct name and called him the name of her ex-lover, by accident.
He had five of us over to watch TV together, a show. I knew him from work; others knew him from church. We ate pizza and drank beer and watched TV and talked.
At the end of the show, he looked around the room.
Thank everyone for coming, he said.
We all nodded and smiled.
You’re welcome, we said, filing out. Thank you for having us.
But it stuck in my head, a little, walking down the stairs to my car. What had he said?
The show was a series, so we were back again the next week. Each of us needing somewhere to go on Wednesday nights.
Thank everyone for coming, he said again, at the end.
I waited a week, to be sure. The following week, the same.
I drove home. The traffic lights were green. The city, black silhouettes. Golden lights in front windows.
Thanks, I thought. It should have been thanks.
Thanks, everyone, for coming.
But he had said: Thank everyone for coming.
Why?
The bugs, inside. The jittery bugs. The lurch, the shamble, the arms, the groan.
Two miles from my apartment, stalled at a red light, I had an idea.
He was a smart man, and English was his first language. He surely knew the correct verb and grammar. He spoke fluidly at all other times. The only explanation I could find was that this is what he had been told to say to guests. Most likely, they had had people over for years. She had invited the people. She had made the food. She had picked out his clothes. At the end, she told him, John, go thank everyone for coming.
And he had so fully stepped out of his own point of view that he simply echoed her words, exactly. He was so far gone from himself that he did not do the natural act of conjugation that would make the words fit his point of view.
They say it’s all fantasy - zombies? It’s all made-up goofiness? It’s all silliness we create for our own delightful fear?
GHOST TRAP
BY RICK HAUTALA
Although it was often part of his job, Jeff Stewart hadn’t been expecting to find a body today. It was Saturday morning, and he was doing some diving for his friend and drinking buddy, Mel ‘Biz’ Potter. A storm had passed through the night before, and they were looking for some of Biz’s lobster pots that had broken off their buoy ropes in the rough seas. Locals called such lost traps ‘ghost traps’ when they lay on the bottom of the ocean, where a lobster could still scuttle inside. If more than one lobster ended up in a trap, the bigger, stronger one would kill and eat the others, but that only prolonged its captivity until, eventually, it died of starvation.
Even on the sunniest day, there was no light down as deep as Jeff was. Today, following the storm, the sky was as grey as soot, the seas choppy. Even at six or seven fathoms, Jeff could feel the powerful tug of the tide. He’d agreed to help Biz out - like he did once or twice a summer - for the comradeship and the simple pleasure that diving gave him. No matter how much Marcie, his girlfriend, bitched about him screwing around on the one day of the week they had to spend together, Jeff took advantage of any and all excuses to dive. He relished the freedom, the sense of weightlessness and total isolation.
His day job was working search, rescue, and recovery for the U.S. Coast Guard, so Jeff had seen more than his fair share of drowned bodies - ‘sinkers’, as he and his coworkers called them. When this one came into view, illuminated by the diffused beam of Jeff’s
underwater light, he couldn’t help but be startled.
Most drowning victims, if you found them soon enough - say, within twenty-four to forty-eight hours, before the lobsters, crabs, and other scavengers scurrying around on the bottom of the ocean started to consume the dead meat - ended up the same way. Once they were dead, the blood pooled in their rumps and lower legs, weighing them down so they were sitting on the ocean floor with their legs splayed out in front of them. Their arms invariably would be raised and extended, like they were reaching for something to cling to, something solid so they could hoist themselves back up to the surface.
In all his years of diving, the one thing Jeff had never been able to get over - the single most fascinating thing - was the dead person’s face . . . especially the eyes. Once the blood drained out of the head and upper body and settled into the lower trunk, the puckered skin turned as white and translucent as marble. Winding traces of veins stood out like faded tattoos just beneath the skin. Of course, someone with darker skin wouldn’t be as white as alabaster, but the effect - at least on every body Jeff had ever recovered - was as fascinating as it was gruesome. The eyes - if some sea creatures hadn’t gotten at them yet - would be wide open and staring with an expression of stunned surprise. It was as if the victim still couldn’t believe he or she had actually drowned.
But it was one thing when Jeff was fifty or more feet below the surface of the ocean looking for a drowning victim. Finding one when he wasn’t ready for it sent a startled rush through him, like an electric jolt to the groin. He drew back involuntarily, waving his arms and kicking his legs to keep his orientation. His heart was pounding like a drop-forge hammer, and a thick, salty pressure throbbed behind his eyes. The flashlight almost slipped from his hand, but he clutched it tightly. After the initial shock began to subside, he trained the beam back onto the drowned man. Kicking easily and still trying to force himself to calm down, he approached slowly.
Judging by the clothes on the corpse, he looked like he’d been down here quite a while. Tattered remnants of a plaid work shirt and protective yellow rubber coveralls - something all lobstermen wore when working - were covered with thick strands of green slime and were rotting away. The man was sitting with his legs out in front of him, his toes pointing upward. Jagged black shreds of rubber boots still clung to his feet and lower legs. His arms were extended and swaying from side to side like thick fronds of kelp moved by the deep-sea currents. The man’s hands were extended, his fingers hooked. Long yellowed fingernails looking like chipped old porcelain stuck out from the ends of the withered, bone-white hands.
Jeff couldn’t help but think the man looked like he had been waiting patiently for him . . . or someone . . . to come along and find him in the darkness seven fathoms below the surface.
Tiny pinpricks of light squiggled across Jeff’s vision. He realized he was still breathing too fast for safety and consciously slowed his breathing. He willed his racing pulse to slow down while he considered who this might be . . . what might have happened . . . and how long he’d been underwater. To the best of his knowledge, no one had gone missing at sea recently. This man might have been swept overboard during the recent storm and not been reported missing yet, but the condition of his clothes and skin seemed to eliminate that as a possibility. The only people who’d been lost at sea so far this summer season had been a couple of lobstermen out of Vinalhaven, whose bodies had washed up on the Nephews, an island due east of the Cove. Jeff didn’t know of anyone else who’d gone missing.
As he drew nearer, Jeff noticed something peculiar. There was something wrapped around the man’s waist. It was difficult to tell what, lost as it was in the dark folds of slime and the man’s rotting clothes, but it looked like the heavy links of a chain. Following it outward, Jeff found one end of the chain tied to a cement block. Barnacles encrusted the corroded iron and cement block, further evidence that whoever this was, he had been down here for a long, long time.
It finally dawned on him that what was bothering him was something about the man’s eyes.
They shouldn’t still be there in his head.
No matter how long or short a time someone had been underwater, the eyes were the first to go. Fish and crabs and other ocean scavengers went after the softest, juiciest parts first. After a few days or weeks, the eyeballs would be gone, leaving nothing but empty sockets.
But this man’s eyes were still intact, even though he had clearly been underwater long enough for barnacles to attach to the chain and the cement block holding him down.
After swimming around the corpse, taking a last good look at it, Jeff tilted his head back, gave a few powerful kicks, and started back to the surface. He made sure he rose slowly, keeping pace with the bubbles of his exhaled breath. When he broke the surface, he swept his mask back and tore the regulator from his mouth. Biz’s boat was less than fifty feet away from where Jeff’s diving marker bobbed up and down in the steep swells. He raised a hand and waved while shouting until Biz saw him and started up his engine. Jeff clung to his diving marker until Biz pulled up alongside him and cut the engine.
‘Toss me a rope,’ Jeff said, gasping so hard it hurt his throat. He took in a mouthful of seawater and spit it out. ‘I gotta go back down.’
Biz regarded him quizzically for a moment or two, but he didn’t say a word before darting to the cabin and returning with a coil of rope.
‘You find a ghost trap?’ Biz asked, as he leaned over the side rails and handed the rope to Jeff.
‘Worse ’n that,’ Jeff said. He took in another mouthful of water and couldn’t help but swallow some.
Biz’s frown deepened.
‘There’s someone down there,’ Jeff said.
At first, Biz reacted like he wasn’t sure what Jeff meant. Then his eyes widened and he said, ‘You mean you found a person?’
Jeff nodded grimly.
‘I wanna mark him so’s we can come back out ’n’ find ’im easily. We gotta report this to the state.’
‘For fuck’s sake,’ Biz said. He didn’t look at all pleased to be involved in anything like this, but Jeff ignored him as he fumbled to get the regulator back into his mouth and pulled his mask down. After adjusting everything, he tied one end of the rope to his diving marker and uncoiled the rope. With one last look at Biz, he did a quick surface dive. As he dropped back down into the depths, his heart felt like a cold, tight fist in his chest.
‘I’ll betcha I know exactly who it is.’
Like most nights, Jeff was drinking with his buddies down at the Local. He had a glass of beer - his fifth so far tonight - raised halfway to his mouth when Jim ‘Pappy’ Sullivan spoke up. He hadn’t even realized Pappy was listening as he told three of his drinking buddies - Ralph, Johnny, and Flip - about what he’d found this morning. Lowering the glass to the bar, Jeff nudged his Red Sox baseball cap back on his head and turned on his barstool to look directly at Pappy.
‘You do, do yah?’
‘Ay-yuh. Sure as shit.’
A wide smile of satisfaction spread across the old man’s face. Pappy relished being the center of attention, even though he had a reputation for being full of shit as often as not. Now that he had Jeff and everyone else’s attention, he seemed to wait for a cue to continue. When the wait got too long to bear, Jeff said, ‘So . . . you wanna tell me?’
Pappy grinned from ear to ear, exposing the row of missing teeth on his bottom jaw.
‘I’ll bet my left nut-sack you found Old Man Crowther.’
‘I don’t want your fuckin’ left nut-sack,’ Jeff said, smirking, ‘but what makes you so goddamned sure it’s Old Man Crowther?’
‘How long’s he been missing?’ Pappy said.
‘Damned if I know,’ Jeff said. ‘I don’t even know who the fuck he is.’
An unlit cigarette was stuck behind Pappy’s right ear, held in place by a snarl of wiry grey hair. He’d probably bummed it from the barmaid, Shantelle. He reached up and took it, rolling it between his grease-staine
d fingers as he nodded toward the barroom’s back door.
‘Step on outside with me whilst I have a smoke,’ he said, sliding off his barstool, ‘ ’n’ I’ll tell yah.’ He paused, cocking his hips to one side as he fished in his jeans pocket for his lighter. ‘Goddamned fucking law that won’t let me smoke in a bar. Like I come here for my goddamned health!’
While this was going on, Jeff glanced back and forth between his friends. They seemed to have no opinion as to what he should do, so he picked up his beer and followed Pappy out the back door. Out behind the Local was a deck that looked out over the harbor. The screen door slammed shut behind them, sounding like a gunshot in the night. The sound made Jeff jump, and he wondered why he was so keyed up. He had enough beer in him to feel convivial, but he was still a little freaked out by what he had found this morning.
The New Dead: A Zombie Anthology Page 32
