The Dead and Empty World

by Carrie Ryan

  It would be so much easier if she knew Patrick lied to her. If she could believe that he knew all along that his brother was infected. But she knows her heart and her heart knows his, and this is how she is sure that Patrick told the truth.

  And yet it doesn’t matter that she believes him: belief is irrelevant in the face of fact. He brought the infection. She allowed it to happen.

  “I will take care of the infected child,” she says softly. She looks at the other women in the room—really looks at them. At how soft some of them appear. How old and tired. How they devote their lives to God and leave nothing for themselves.

  How unlike Tabitha. She who lusted. She who put desire for a different life—for a man, for her dreams—before God. She who almost brought down her village.

  “And the older brother?” the head Sister asks. For the first time Tabitha realizes the hesitation in her voice. She realizes how weak this woman is to be in charge of not just the Cathedral, but the fate of the village. She wonders if any of the rest of them knows of the journal downstairs, know of the legacy of their survival.

  Tabitha thinks about taking Patrick’s hand and leading him down the path and away from the village. Of banishing herself and him together. She smiles, letting the dream roll around in her mind.

  “Him I will take care of as well,” Tabitha says.

  “About the circumstances in which the older boy was found ...,” the head Sister begins, leaving an opening for Tabitha to fill in the blank.

  Tabitha stands and squares her shoulders. She keeps her chin level and her voice even as she says, “It is none of your concern.” She sweeps toward the door, black tunic floating around her ankles. She waits for the head Sister to challenge her, to maintain her authority and dress Tabitha down in front of her peers for what she has allowed to happen. But the old woman is silent.

  “What will you do?” one of the other Sisters asks, as if this is some sort of democracy where everyone can voice a thought.

  Tabitha pauses in the doorway, examining them, meeting their eyes one by one. Establishing her control. “I will do what is necessary,” Sister Tabitha responds.

  The boy is small and broken and weak. His mewls are those of a newborn kitten. Tabitha steps into her room and walks toward the window easily avoiding his reach. He starts to pull himself across the floor toward her and she stands and stares at the Unconsecrated outside, past the fences.

  So much useless death. Such a waste.

  When the boy is closer Tabitha kneels and cups his cheeks in her hands. He tries to squirm, tries to twist and turn so that he can taste her. “May God show mercy on us both,” she whispers before snapping his neck and bashing his small fragile head against the stone floor.

  For a while she looks at him. If only Patrick had asked her to go away with him. If only they’d been on the path when the boy turned, he could have infected them both. They could have woken up dead, entwined together forever.

  As she unties Patrick’s ropes she avoids his eyes.

  But he grabs her and makes her look at him. “I didn’t know he was infected,” he says, his voice hoarse and lips dry. “My mother gave him to me, told me to take him away. I never knew.”

  Tabitha nods. “I believe you,” she says. And it’s true.

  “I would never lie to you, Tabby. I love you too much.”

  She nods again. She understands this as well.

  She tells him they put his brother in a special room—a safe place where Patrick can say good-bye. After he does, she tells him, she will lead him back into the Forest and away from the village and together they will find a way to live and love beyond this constricted world.

  He doesn’t question her as she pulls him down the stairs into the basement, or when she pulls aside the curtain and unlocks the hidden door. He follows her blindly as she leads him down the dark tunnel. She stops at the stairs climbing from the ground at the far end.

  They face each other and Tabitha inhales deeply, the scent of him mingling with the smell of old smoke and rot. She closes her eyes, trying to sear it into her memory. Slowly, she runs a hand up his arm, along his collarbone and around his neck until her fingers dig into his hair.

  She thinks about the kiss they almost—but never—shared and she wonders if his lips could have been a part of her, if the two of them could have left this world before his infected brother Returned. If their love had been pure, maybe they’d have been able to stop time.

  “I will love you always,” she says, pulling his lips to hers.

  Through her kiss she tries to explain everything that words cannot. About love and duty and God and need and choices and memory and history. She wants him to taste her and understand her. In that kiss is everything she was and could be, all that she’s giving up in her life.

  She needs to take this part of him with her because it’s the only way she can go back to the life she must live. To her duty to village and God.

  When she pulls away she’s crying, and Patrick reaches up to her cheek and catches a tear on his finger. He doesn’t realize she’s saying good-bye to him. “I will love you always,” he says, and she smiles, sad and aching.

  She gestures for him to go up the stairs first and he pushes open the door. Without having to look she picks up the rope leading to the gate outside and twines it around her wrist. Before he disappears aboveground she presses her fingers to her lips and then against his spine. She pulls the rope and then he’s gone and she closes and locks the door behind him.

  She huddles on the top step and listens to him bang and call for her and then to the sound of the moans. She tears at her clothes and her body, raking her nails against her flesh, hoping to let the agony pulsing inside her escape, but nothing can dull the torment.

  Her hand shakes as she dips the pen into ink and holds it above the page. The printed words are impossible to decipher through the tears trembling from her eyes. Her body is wracked with sobs. Still, she writes: There is always a choice. Choice is what makes us human. It is what separates us from the Unconsecrated. But that does not mean that choice cannot turn men into monsters. I have chosen survival over life.

  In her life, Tabitha has felt consuming desire only during those too-short moments with Patrick. She watches him along the fences with the others now, watches the way he grabs at the metal links and pleads and begs. She touches the old note from him, tucked against her breast under the cross she wears around her neck.

  A part of her likes to believe that he’s different from the others, that he doesn’t moan for anyone but her. That he spends his days and nights trying to return to her.

  He is always there for her, always waiting. The most constant companion anyone could pray for. One of these days she will return to him. She will feel that desire again, that need beyond human comprehension, and they will be together forever.

  • ♦ •

  BONUS CONTENT

  ON ZOMBIES

  I wish I could remember what JP, then my boyfriend and now my husband, said to convince me to go to opening night of the Dawn of the Dead remake. I’m not a scary movie person and haven’t been since my babysitter turned out all the lights and made me watch Poltergeist with her when I was five (during which time she never failed to point out the similarities between me and the girl being chased by ghosts—same name, same hair, same closet full of stuffed animals). And yet, the seats filled to capacity, the movie began and I spent the next two hours alternately gripping his arm (finally understanding why boyfriends everywhere like to take girlfriends to scary movies) and checking the time on my cell phone mentally trying to calculate how much of the movie I had left to endure.

  It terrified me.

  And thrilled me.

  Walking out of the theater that night I couldn’t stop talking about it, wondering what I would do faced with the same situation. Because at one point, while watching the worst of the worst parts of the movie, I wondered if I could do it, if I could really survive. Or if I would give up.

 
; Thus began my love of zombies. JP brought home Max Brooks’ Zombie Survival Guide and read aloud from it during slow law school evenings (of which there were many). He promised to warn me of the scary parts when we watched 28 Days Later. We devoured the original Romero movies, the remakes, the spin-offs. We bought the books, the graphic novels, the television shows, the games.

  But I was still writing chick-lit YA books. It just never occurred to me to write about a post-apocalyptic world even though that’s what I was reading, watching, and dreaming about.

  Until one day when JP and I were at lunch and we started to talk about the idea of a story set in a village surrounded by a forest full of zombies. I became mesmerized by the thought of it. I imagined a world generations after the zombie apocalypse – well past the point where the zombies had become an accepted part of everyday life (though a threat nonetheless). With no access to outside information or resources, the people in the village would have forgotten everything beyond the forest: history, the ocean, even the cause of the Return. It would have been as though the village had regressed to an almost Puritanical lifestyle and belief system.

  Even with all of that in mind, I still didn’t consider putting pen to paper until one day months later when I lamented to JP that I didn’t know what project to work on for National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo).

  He told me to write what I love.

  I laughed and said, “You mean the zombie apocalypse? No one wants to read about zombies.” And that was that, until I was walking home from work a few days later and the line, “My mother used to tell me about the ocean,” popped into my head. I liked the line so much that I emailed it to myself so I wouldn’t forget. When I got home, I opened up a blank document and started writing.

  By the time JP arrived home a few hours later, I’d drafted the first chapter and I read it out loud to him. He loved it and wanted to know what happened next. So did I, which drove me to keep writing.

  Writing the book became a sort of love letter to JP. Which may seem a bit odd since it’s about zombies and several people die in it. But the story encompassed all the movies we’d watched together, all the books we’d read, all the walks we’d taken imagining worlds and characters. I was convinced the book would never sell, but that didn’t stop me from writing it because this was a story JP and I shared and loved. Which is why it was particularly meaningful that I was able to dedicate The Forest of Hands and Teeth, my debut novel, to him.

  Since then, it’s been thrilling to see zombies rise in popularity not only because it’s allowed me to keep writing stories I love, but because it means I get to read/watch/play those stories as well (after all, I was a zombie fan first).

  The thing about zombies is that as a metaphor, they can be used in so many ways. Look at George Romero who used them to criticize consumerism and our inability to work together to solve global issues. Danny Boyle used zombies to chronicle fear and/or mistrust of scientific experiments in 28 Days Later. In Isaac Marion’s Warm Bodies, the zombies are essentially emotionless shells.

  I tend to think of zombies as representative of a fear of life unlived or unexamined. When we refer to someone as a zombie at work or school, we mean that they’re just going through the motions. There’s no thought or passion or even purposeful intent in their actions. At least in my own writings, zombies exist for existence’s sake. All they do is occupy space: they don’t think or love or feel or care or plan. How is that different from a lot of the living who wake up and go through the motions of life without conscious thought? Without questioning?

  More than once, people have remarked that my stories tend to be very dark. Perhaps that’s true: my characters face some pretty steep challenges. But so do most people. Maybe those challenges aren’t the living dead, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t overwhelming at times. What amazes me about humanity is that even in the darkest periods of history, people found a way to do more than just survive – they found ways to love, have friends, make art, raise families. Dream.

  Ultimately, that’s the foundation that underlies almost all of my stories set in the universe. Yes, the world has changed and sometimes brutally so. But there can still be joy and beauty in life if we choose to see it.

  The undead may breach the barriers tomorrow, but until then, life is for the living – not the dead.

  EASTER EGGS

  The last paragraph of “Hare Moon” is a nod at Sister Tabitha’s fate in The Forest of Hands and Teeth. “One of these days she will return to him” (return being the word for coming back as a zombie), and “feel that need beyond human comprehension,” (hunger as a zombie). As macabre as it sounds, I like the idea that once she turns, Tabitha and Patrick are finally together.

  • ♦ •

  Sister Tabitha has two friends in “Hare Moon,” Ruth and Ami. Both names mean “friend” (Ruth is of Hebrew origin and Ami is French origin).

  • ♦ •

  Anne, the little girl Sister Tabitha talks to about belief in "Hare Moon," is Mary's mother. I chose the name Anne because that's the name of Mary's mother in the Bible.

  • ♦ •

  Tabitha is the name of a woman raised from the dead by St. Peter in the Bible (Acts 9:36).

  • ♦ •

  At the end of "Hare Moon," Tabitha writes, "There is always a choice. Choice is what makes us human. It is what separates us from the Unconsecrated," in the margins of the Scripture. In The Forest of Hands and Teeth, when Tabitha threatens to send Mary into the Forest she tells her, "There is always a choice, Mary. It is what makes us human, what separates us from them." However, the next line Sister Tabitha wrote was "But that does not mean that choice cannot turn men into monsters," which is a nod not only to her own future, but to plot in The Dark and Hollow Places.

  • ♦ •

  The book Patrick gives Tabitha in "Hare Moon" is Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier.

  • ♦ •

  In the first draft of “Scenic Route,” Margie killed Calvin. Then my husband read it and pointed out that most of the male love interests in my stories end up dead (by the heroine’s hands) and he wondered whether he should be concerned for his own safety.

  • ♦ •

  One of my original intentions with the short stories was to tie them together with one over-arching story. Therefore, many of them take place in the same community with overlapping characters. In “Flotsam & Jetsam” the friends left behind on the cruise are named Francis, Omar, Leroy, Margaret, Nancy, Micah, and Tamara. In “A Game of Firsts,” Julie talks about having once snuck out to attend a party at Leroy’s house and that she lost her virginity to Micah. In “Almost Normal” (in the anthology Defy the Dark edited by Saundra Mitchell), one of the characters mentions going to a Halloween party with Micah, Guy, Leroy, Omar, Calvin (from “Scenic Route”), as well as Danny and his younger sister Julie (from “Game of Firsts”).

  • ♦ •

  Actually, in “Almost Normal” I accidentally referenced Danny’s younger sister as Sally because I’d confused the character names (Julie is the younger sister in “A Game of Firsts.” Sally is the younger sister in “Scenic Route.”) Oops!

  • ♦ •

  Though he isn’t named in the actual story, Guy is the narrator in “Flotsam & Jetsam.”

  • ♦ •

  However, there’s no connection between the Jeremy in “Flotsam & Jetsam” and the one in “Scenic Route.” I’d already written the former when I went on the Smart Chicks Tour where we chose names from the audience members to incorporate into our stories. The name I chose from a hat: Jeremy West (who has also helped me pull this collection together – sorry for making you a murderer in my story!)

  • ♦ •

  Whenever my husband and I would play the video game Left for Dead, the character of Francis (always controlled by the game) would steal credit for most of our big kills. We took to saying, “Fucking Francis,” every time it happened, and I added that line to “Flotsam & Jetsam,” as a nod to that. To date, it’s the o
nly time I’ve used the F-word in print.

  • ♦ •

  The cabin in “Scenic Route” is loosely based on my in-law’s house in Brevard, NC, and the garage in “A Game of Firsts,” is based on my own garage. The Blue Room in “Bougainvillea,” is an actual location my husband and I visited while on vacation in Curaçao; same with the Paw Paw tunnel in West Virginia mentioned in “Scenic Route.”

  ALSO BY CARRIE RYAN

  The Forest of Hands and Teeth

  The Dead-Tossed Waves

  The Dark and Hollow Places

  What Once We Feared: An Original Forest of Hands and Teeth Story

  Infinity Ring Book 2: Divide and Conquer

  EDITED BY CARRIE RYAN

  Foretold: 14 Tales of Prophecy and Prediction

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Carrie Ryan is the New York Times bestselling author of the Forest of Hands and Teeth trilogy and Infinity Ring: Divide and Conquer as well as the editor of Foretold: 14 Tales of Prophecy and Prediction. Currently, she’s working on The Map to Everywhere, a four book middle grade series co-written with her husband, John Parke Davis, the first book of which will be out from Little, Brown Books for Young Readers in November 2014, and Turnabout, a romantic thriller, which will be released by Penguin Random House in 2015. A former litigator, Carrie now lives in Charlotte, NC with her husband, two cats, and dog. They are not at all prepared for the zombie apocalypse. You can visit Carrie online at www.CarrieRyan.com.