The Dishonored Dead: A Zombie Novel

by Swartwood, Robert

  “You have a zombie here.”

  The scientist sat back in his wheelchair, his elbows on the armrests, his hands clasped together in front of his face. Slowly he nodded.

  “Actually we have twelve, counting Gabriel. We did have thirteen until two days ago, but … well, you know what happened.”

  Conrad frowned.

  “He was the zombie you hesitated in killing,” Albert said.

  “What do you mean he was the zombie I hesitated in killing?”

  Albert stared at Conrad for a long moment, his hands still clasped before his face. “I’ll answer your question, but first I want to tell you a story. It’s about a boy who many believed would expire before his tenth animation day. Even his parents believed this. He had contracted a parasite which was eating away at his feet, at his legs, working its way up to the rest of his body, and the boy and the boy’s parents and the boy’s doctors had to make a very important decision. In the end they decided to take the boy’s legs, to tear them from the rest of the boy’s body, to try to save what was left.”

  Albert moved his chair out from behind his desk, turned so he faced Conrad. He reached down and rapped both of his legs with his knuckles, the sound of hollow wood momentarily joining the humming and bubbling.

  “That boy was me, of course. I was the one everybody thought would not last until he was ten. In fact, if it had been up to my parents and doctors, that parasite would have continued eating away at my body until there was nothing left. It was my decision, and I actually had to fight for it, an eight-year-old boy arguing with adults not to expire. In the end they took my legs, managed to stop the parasite, and here I am today. I might not be much to look at, but at least I’m here, and I’ll tell you—right after it happened, that surgery, I had a new appreciation for this … well, we call it existence, but I like to think of it as life. We are dead but somehow we continue living, even though almost all of our major organs have shut down.”

  The scientist moved back behind his desk, rested his hands on the desktop.

  “So I had this new appreciation, and I started studying the living. I went to the Internet, one of the few things that survived the Zombie Wars, and I started researching what you and almost everyone else on this planet call zombies. Long ago the Government went through and deleted all the sites about the living, but some still do exist. And from these I learned about them, their history, who they were. Yes, we did evolve from them, they are our inferiors, but still … Conrad, how much do you really know about the living?”

  Conrad was silent.

  “Do you know that they see colors? That to them the world is not just black, white, and gray. According to Gabriel, there are thousands of colors, different shades, different mixtures. And did you know the living can actually taste things? They can smell things, too. They have actual feelings. Verbs such as sad, happy, and angry are just words to us, but to the living they actually feel these things. And they dream, Conrad. They actually dream while they sleep.

  “Now I’m not going to answer your questions just yet, but instead ask you a question of my own. Here it is. How are zombies created?”

  The question caught Conrad off guard. So far he’d sat there, listening, trying to follow what the scientist was saying, but now this question caused him to quickly sit up in his seat. He heard the continuous bubbling of the fish tank and found his gaze shifting to where it was in the corner, those dead tropical fish moving through the water, and he remembered the fish tank in the zombie’s cell, those living tropical fish, and for an instant his dead mind played a very cruel joke and overlapped those two images, a perverted, unnatural snapshot that Conrad had to rapidly blink away.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “Don’t you think that’s strange? That through all your training, all your time at Artemis, and all the years you’ve been a Hunter, you never once learned how the things you hunt are created?”

  “I know that only children are vulnerable. Those around the age of ten.”

  “But do you know why?”

  Conrad shook his head.

  The scientist picked up the phone from off the desk, pressed a button, and said, “Bring it in.” When he set the phone back in its cradle, he stared at Conrad for another long moment before speaking.

  “The living are created two ways. The first is what you had mentioned, though there is more to it. Yes, it seems that children around the age of ten are the ones susceptible, but it’s more than sheer randomness. The second is simple reproduction—a living male and a living female come together the same way a dead male and dead female would come together, and nine months later a living infant is born.”

  “But that’s impossible,” Conrad said. “Zombies almost never live to full adulthood.”

  Albert said nothing. He only stared back at him, his stiff face never changing, and after a moment Conrad got it.

  “You’re talking about Heaven, aren’t you?”

  The scientist nodded. “Despite what the Government tells the public, the place does exist. We just don’t know where it is.”

  For the longest time Conrad was silent. He was having a hard enough time accepting everything else he’d seen and heard so far—and that scene in the zombie’s room, the zombie extending its hand for Conrad to shake, kept haunting him—but now this was starting to become too much. Yes, he’d heard about Heaven before—what dead person hadn’t, especially a Hunter?—but every time it was mentioned there was always that silent acknowledgment that the story was nothing more than a myth.

  Mostly the stories came from those pro-living extremists who believed that the zombies weren’t evil at all, adults who actually encouraged their children to try to become living when they turned ten. These were the people who hated Hunters, who tried everything they could to destroy them, and who very recently tried expiring Conrad.

  As the myth went, after the Zombie Wars, when the dead began to conquer the planet and began rebuilding, those living that were left created for themselves a society. Those that believed the place actually existed said that it had to be underground, as countless satellite images showed all over the world no city or town or even village that was not inhabited by the dead. It was in this place, what someone long ago named Heaven and by which name the city had been referred to ever since, that the zombies had built a community where they lived and breathed and did everything a zombie did.

  It was where, according to Albert, infant zombies were born.

  Before Conrad could say anything, the office door opened. A woman in a long white coat entered, carrying a small black container. The container looked to be made of plastic, about the size of a shoebox. She took the container to the desk, set it carefully on top, and slowly backed away.

  Albert nodded, thanked her, and the woman left.

  “This,” Albert said, and gently laid a hand on top of the black container, “is the other way zombies are created.”

  Chapter 9

  There were latches on all four sides of the container. Albert undid each, as gently and carefully as the woman had placed it on the desk, and opened the lid. He set the lid aside, paused to take a breath, and slowly reached inside the container.

  Conrad hadn’t realized he was sitting on the edge of his seat, inching closer and closer to see what was inside, until he almost fell off.

  But the scientist did not bring anything out of the container. He seemed to pause, reconsider, then brought his hands out empty. He said, “I apologize, but before I show you this, I have one final question. What do you know of the Zombie Wars?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “How long did they last?”

  “About two months.”

  “And the outcome?”

  “We destroyed almost all of the living. We conquered the world.”

  Keeping his gaze level with Conrad’s, Albert said, “Yes, that is what the Government wants all the dead children in the world to learn. But would you be surprised if I told you that information is
far from the truth?”

  Conrad said nothing, now staring intently at the black container.

  “The Zombie Wars actually lasted two years,” Albert said. “And it was not an easy campaign for either side.”

  “Why are you telling me this?” Conrad asked. His impatience was growing, so much so he was ready to shoot out of his chair just to get a glimpse of what was inside the black container.

  “I’m telling you this in the hope that it’ll be easier for you to understand. At the end of the Zombie Wars, both sides started using weapons of … well, mass destruction. Chemical bombs, hydrogen bombs, atom bombs, and in some areas even nuclear bombs. Much of the continental earth was affected. And somehow—we’re still not able to understand this fully—this assault changed the substrata of our planet. It created pockets of contained energy. And what is life, Conrad, but a form of energy?”

  Albert reached back into the container. This time he didn’t pause, didn’t reconsider. Without hesitation he pulled a black rock from the container, held it up for a moment, then gently set it down.

  A joke. It had to be a joke. Some elaborate joke being put on him for screwing up the other night, for hesitating in killing that zombie. Only, as he stared at the rock, Conrad quickly realized the thing before him wasn’t a rock. It looked like one, yes, but it wasn’t. What it was—and this was the best his dead mind could come up with—was some kind of dark crystal cube.

  Conrad whispered, “What is that thing?”

  “We call them Pandoras. A scientist once equated these cubes as boxes which contained terrible evil, and so the comparison to Pandora and her box made sense and it has stuck ever since.”

  “Who’s Pandora?”

  “It doesn’t matter, Conrad. What matters is that these cubes come straight out of the earth. That is where they were formed and that is where many of them have stayed for over a thousand years.”

  Conrad couldn’t take his eyes away from the cube. It wasn’t very big. The fluorescents above shined brightly off its top and sides, causing it to shimmer. For some reason he thought it looked familiar but couldn’t tell why.

  “The closet organic base we’ve managed to establish is quartz. Each Pandora is made up of the same substance. Each is roughly the same size, a near-perfect three-inch cube. It fits right in the palm of your hand, though I wouldn’t recommend touching one.”

  Conrad asked, “Just how dangerous are they?”

  “Very. We’ve been studying these rocks for almost five hundred years and still know very little about them. Believe it or not, there is no way for us to get to the energy inside. The quartz itself is like an egg, protecting it. In fact, each Pandora emits a kind of … pulse. If Gabriel were here right now, he would hear it.”

  “What does it sound like?”

  “A heartbeat.”

  Conrad found himself staring at the Pandora again. “The energy inside can be released somehow though, can’t it?”

  Albert nodded.

  “How?”

  “That isn’t the question you should be asking yourself, Conrad. First ask yourself, out of all the zombies you’ve killed, what were most of them.”

  “Children.”

  “That’s right. And roughly how old were those children.”

  Thinking briefly of his son, Conrad said, “Ten.”

  “Correct. Now ask yourself, why only children of ten years.”

  Conrad didn’t answer right away. He just sat there and listened to the fluorescents humming and the fish tank bubbling. Finally he said, “I don’t know.”

  Albert raised his hands, palms up. “Then you know just about as much as we do. Our only theory is that puberty plays a major factor in the process. Children of ten years are on the threshold between childhood and adolescence. Their bodies are developing, going through changes. And somehow—maybe something in their minds, maybe something in their genes—allows them to become aware of these Pandoras. They sense the energy somewhere around them. Sometimes they even hear the pulse. The window seems to be open for only about a month or two. Most children ignore what they hear, probably because the closest Pandora to them is too far away. The energy and pulse is too faint. But some children live close to a place where a Pandora is buried in the ground. And if they go looking for that energy and dig it up …”

  The scientist paused there, no doubt hoping Conrad could fill in the blank. But Conrad wasn’t thinking about the man’s words. He was staring at the Pandora in front of him and thinking about where he’d seen it before.

  “Wait a minute,” he said, and glanced at Norman. “That boy from the other night …”

  Norman just stared back at him.

  “There was a rock just like this one on the ground, right beside the hole. That boy had dug it up, hadn’t he?”

  “I couldn’t have told you the truth then,” Norman said. “You never would have understood.”

  “But the boy,” Conrad said, his mind racing now, “he wasn’t a zombie.”

  “No,” Albert agreed, “he wasn’t. He must have just finished digging the Pandora up when Lewis approached him. Not enough time had passed for his body to absorb the energy inside the rock.”

  “But you said—” Conrad paused, took a breath. “But you said they couldn’t be opened.”

  “They can’t, no. Well actually, that’s not completely true, but we’ll come back to that. Anyhow, as I’ve explained, children ten years old are able to sense these Pandoras. And these children, if they find a Pandora, are also able to absorb the energy inside. It’s a remarkable phenomenon, to be completely honest with you. The child needs to hold a Pandora in his or her hand for at least thirty seconds. Most times it takes a minute. After a few seconds, the energy inside the rock begins to fluctuate and the rock starts to glow. Then, if a child has not yet released the Pandora, the energy inside it is absorbed into his or her body, turning them from the dead into the living.”

  This last point was a little too much for Conrad to take. He focused his mind instead on Scott, one of the eight he’d graduated with on that prestigious day so long ago, and asked Albert, “What is a Tracker?”

  Smiling, Albert told him exactly what a Tracker was. How it was a very important employee of Living Intelligence. How every night all around the world, while everyone else slept, a Tracker went out with a fellow Tracker to follow one of the living. That was the purpose of most of the zombies in this facility: besides allowing the scientists to study them, every evening after midnight a few of the living were taken out into the city or suburbs, mostly in parks or woods, and they would walk around listening for the sound of the pulse. They would find where the sound came from, and there the Trackers would mark it for the Diggers who would arrive soon after, dig it up, box it in a plastic container such as the one now on Albert’s desk, and take it away.

  Conrad said, “Where do the Diggers take these boxes?”

  “I’m sure you saw the building you passed on the way in here?”

  Conrad remembered that large white windowless building, the place Norman had called the Warehouse.

  “That’s where we keep the found Pandoras. And before you ask, Conrad, no, we can’t destroy them. The thought has crossed our minds more than once, and a few times we even came close to attempting it, but in the end we decided it was much too dangerous. After all, we can’t guess what might happen to the energy inside them.”

  “So how are the Pandoras stored?”

  “A long time ago, even before Living Intelligence was formed, the Government had knowledge about these stones. After all, at almost every construction site at least one or two Pandoras would be dug up. The Government found that these rocks couldn’t be destroyed, and so they decided to store them in places that they thought would never be found. There are no doubt places even in Olympus, such as in subbasements, where a handful of Pandoras now rest. In fact, I’m certain about that, but it’s impossible to scour the city looking for something the Government will deny exists, something it does not w
ant the public to know about, even though it is a major threat.”

  Conrad shifted uneasily in his chair. “What do you mean, ‘a major threat’?”

  Albert gestured at the dark crystal cube shimmering on the desk. “This Pandora here? It can only be opened by a ten-year-old child, and only in that month or two when his or her body and mind is vulnerable to it. If a child were to touch a Pandora, that Pandora would somehow become theirs. The energy inside senses that child, and will not be absorbed by anyone else. There have been incidences where we have caught a child right before he or she opens a Pandora.”

  “So that boy from the other night,” Conrad said, and even though his eyes were open and staring back at the scientist he was seeing the dead child standing by the freshly dug hole, the shovel in his hands, the square rock on the ground, “the zombie never infected him with any parasites, did it?”

  “No,” Albert said. “But as far as the parents and everyone else is concerned, it did. We couldn’t take the risk of letting the boy tell his parents what Lewis had told him. His dead mind had already been tainted by living thoughts, so we had no choice.”

  Conrad realized this was the second time the name Lewis had been mentioned. He asked who this was.

  “He was the living you … well, hesitated in killing. He was a good, kind zombie, but it’s not surprising that he managed to escape our Trackers. He had attempted it before. And when it was clear our Trackers weren’t going to recapture him, they had no choice but to make an anonymous call into you. You see, normally we have two Trackers go out with one of the living each night, though after this most recent mishap we have decided to step it up. That’s why you’re here now, Conrad. We are going to start putting together teams of four Trackers every evening, to ensure that what happened the other night never happens again.”

  “Let’s backtrack,” Conrad said. “You still haven’t explained what you meant by ‘a major threat.’ ”