Ely thought the world of her. The first time he had met Nitzaniya, she was telling the story of the two boys who had been trapped by a zombie at the top of a tree, one of them offering to throw himself to one side in order to give the other time to save himself, but the other finding a way to trick the zombie into thinking that a boy woven of branches was a real boy, thus saving them both. Ely must have been six, and he had announced that there was no finer profession that that of storyteller.
Daniel had been horrified, but Nitzaniya hadn’t skipped a beat. She’d leaned over on the bench into the gaggle of little boys, pointed at Ely, and told him that she had seen his future. He was destined to become part of the famed Burial Society, just like his father, killing zombies and burying the dead. The other boys had worshipped Ely for days after that.
It was safer hunting zombies than being a storyteller, after all.
And so Ely became his apprentice, years too soon, and knew more about death and rot and murder than anyone else in Goodland but Daniel. He knew the secret of the ipish by the time he was ten, and hadn’t breathed a word of it.
It was a bittersweet thing, to know one’s only son had chosen to follow in one’s well-respected but somewhat outcast footsteps.
—
The storyteller had a house in Goodland, although she wasn’t often home; she had been raised there as a girl, and the city council hadn’t had the heart to take it away from her or burn it, even though it was a haven for rats and other vermin.
The house had no basement, which was probably why it had survived for so as long as it had, without someone to keep it up for her.
Daniel knocked on the front door and heard the storyteller call, “Come in.” He entered and picked his way through the house until he found her, in the ancient, claw-footed bathtub, one wall of the bathroom fallen in and covered with wool blankets, the mildew black upon the tiles. The water was steaming hot and frothed with bubbles. Nitzaniya held a yellowed and precious paperback romance novel in one hand, her middle finger marking her place as two lovers embraced on the front cover. Even though the light was only just dimming, candles had been lit on overturned buckets behind her; there were enough buckets stacked around her to fill two bathtubs or more. Daniel supposed she’d taken another bath already, one to get the grime and ipish off, and the other to ease the feel of the road.
“How are you?” he asked.
“Well enough.”
“Have you seen Ely?”
“He helped Elaine carry water for me. Strong as a behe—strong as an ox. Sorry I ran late. There was a behemah stampede in Mount Horeb. Hell, Daniel. You better watch out for the Madison zombies. They want a direct route to the lakes so they can ship behemah to Chicago and onward, and you’re right in the way.”
“I know,” he said. Nitzaniya’s body was thin and flat and as hard as he remembered it. Her breasts were flat bags that reached almost to her belly, which sagged the way an old woman’s will. She was only fifty, the same age as he was—he could remember a time when that would have meant they were middle aged, rather than old. “We’re too old for this. You should retire.”
“Retire. That’s a word that lost meaning thirty years ago.”
“Twenty-seven. At least come by the house.”
“We both know that’s not a good idea.” She stretched out her legs, raising her toes into the air and spreading them wide. “Now, did you come to make trouble, or are you just here to lust after my body?”
Daniel laughed under his breath. “No, no. Neither.”
Nitzaniya snorted.
“Did you bring it?” he asked.
She took a loud breath, raised the book, and pretended to read a page. Then she lowered the book and looked at him. “You know I did.”
“Why?” he asked.
“I want to be able to give him a future, Daniel. Goodland won’t be here forever.”
“He—”
“I’m an old woman, Daniel. I don’t have anything else to live for.”
“You should write your stories down instead. Let that be your legacy.”
“Oh, he can read now?”
“Or train an apprentice.”
She looked at him; she didn’t say, I don’t want to get anyone else killed, although it was on both of their minds.
“Just get rid of it,” Daniel said. “Please. For Ely’s sake. Or keep it for yourself. Don’t get people started on it. Not here.”
“Don’t you want to know who it’s for?”
He shook his head. He wasn’t the law around here, not unless it was killing someone who had turned; then he was the law above all others.
“Get a move on, then,” Nitzaniya said. “My water’s getting cold, and if you’re not here to lay me, I want to soak in peace.” She sank back into the still-steaming water, pulled up her knees, and let her feet sink under the surface.
There was one more thing he had to know. “You aren’t—eating it yourself, are you?”
Her eyes caught the glint of candlelight off the mirror. Her long, white eyebrows met in the middle of her forehead, and she said, “Get out.”
A breath of cold air rose up behind him, almost as though it were at her command, and he backed out of the room. Either she was eating it or she wasn’t, but she wasn’t about to tolerate him a second longer. She’d be up and out of that tub with a knife in hand in a second if he stuck around, he knew.
—
He met Elaine on his way out. “Hello, Mr. Lieberman,” she said. “I’m afraid that the storyteller is in the bath right now.”
“I found that out in a hurry,” he said. “I guess I’ll get my news tomorrow, like everyone else. Let me or Leah know if she needs anything.”
“Leah made her supper.” Elaine showed him the basket filled with his wife’s home cooking, and his mouth watered. They were all that way, terribly impressed to be able to wait on the storyteller hand and foot—although he wouldn’t have expected it of Leah.
What stories would she tell if she were rich and had no need to go wandering? Would she still wander? She would; he’d offered to marry her, long ago, and she’d refused him. Still, all she had to do was say the word, and he’d support her for the rest of their lives. Unlike storytelling, handling the dead always paid well, even in the years before the plague. But those who did it, although wealthy, were always held aside from the rest of the world, unclean.
Daniel walked the street, listening to the sound of his boots on the broken asphalt and cement. It was wet out and getting colder. It would probably rain all night, wind coming in from the lake, laden with moisture. He rubbed a hand over his stubbled jaw. Funny. All that rain, and he still felt like time was just drying him out.
A few streets later, while he wandered through the sunset more or less at random, he smelled it. He’d broken into a trot before he’d known why, then realized he’d smelled a zombie.
It turned his stomach, as always; he hoped it wasn’t a child. His nose led him deeper into town, into the middle of streets of houses, away from the lake. It started to sprinkle, the wind picking up at his back faster than he could run. Later, he would wonder if he could have really smelled what he smelled, with the wind blowing the way it had. He heard screaming and loosened his revolver in his belt and shrugged his shoulders, gripping the machete sheathed between his shoulder blades to check it.
Clapboard houses with porches out front lined the streets; it was the kind of place that would have been real neighborly, back in the day. It was one of the first neighborhoods to recover from the plagues, with people trying to help each other out, even if it mean blowing their heads off if they started to turn. Ely lived nearby.
He knew every damned one of those houses like the back of his hand.
He followed his nose, his guts, and the screaming until he was almost, but not quite, in front of his son’s house. The zombie was two houses down, in front of a place that used to be lilac but had gone patchy and faded between sunlight and whitewash. A nice young couple live
d there with their elderly father, who was a bit of a bastard, if Daniel remembered right.
The old man—Mac-something, MacIntosh—was standing in front of the house. For whatever reason, here, in the middle of Goodland, years after the last turning inside the palisades, MacIntosh was turning.
Daniel pulled out his revolver. A bunch of idiots surrounded MacIntosh. The light was fading fast, and a lamplighter was standing in the crowd, holding his pole at his side, making no move to light the streetlights in his rush to watch the excitement.
It was just excitement to Daniel; to the people on the street, it was death.
“Get back!” he yelled. He ran toward them as fast as he could. “Get back! Go on, get out of here! Heeya! Get! Get!”
People got out of his way, but they didn’t leave the street. They never did.
“MacIntosh!” Daniel yelled.
The old man looked up. The left half of his face wasn’t working anymore, and his left arm and leg were dangling. His skin was a dull gray, and a rope of spit hung out of his mouth. He moaned.
“You poor bastard,” Daniel said.
The old man held a paper-wrapped parcel in his right hand still. The paper had been ripped off, and a hunk of meat, apparently bacon, was sticking out of one end of it. Behind him lay a woman’s body, a long, bloody rip down one side, probably caused by a dull knife or a pointed pair of scissors. She was kicking, turning herself around in a slow, dirty circle on the ground, bleeding out. The daughter-in-law. He saw another body lying in the doorway, boots facing out and down, and assumed it was MacIntosh’s son.
Daniel reached behind his waist and pulled the machete out of its sheath. He kept it terribly sharp, but it always seemed dull at times like these.
“Stay away from the house,” he yelled. At least he’d reached the old man as he was turning, while his body was still converting from human to zombie. Their nerves tended not to work so well during the transition, leaving them slow and easy to kill. Easier.
With his left, he shot out the man’s right knee, toppling him down to the ground. A few steps later, he was close enough to kick the man’s arm out from under him as he tried to raise himself up again, then step on his back. Daniel hacked with the machete at an angle to get around the ridge of bone protecting the spinal cord. The blade got stuck for a moment, so he drew it out and cut again, this time slicing through the front of the old man’s neck. MacIntosh’s head tilted onto its forehead, then toppled sideways to face the crowd.
With a few more twists and slashes, Daniel cut the arms and legs off and pushed them out where they couldn’t touch each other. Then he checked the woman. She, too, was turning, so he did the same for her, murmuring words of comfort.
People, thinking they were safe, crowded in closer, and he yelled at them. They backed off a tad, and he took the opportunity to climb onto the porch and check the son.
The man was dead, stone dead. Except it wasn’t MacIntosh’s son. It was Ely.
Daniel was too stunned to feel anything except wonder why his son was in the doorway of MacIntosh’s house. Daniel dragged the body down the stairs, then told the lamplighter to send word back that he needed his cart. Daniel had another one of Ely’s neighbors light the lamps.
He had someone fetch and light him a torch, then squatted over the mess on the ground.
With the tip of his machete, he poked the paper-wrapped package still clutched in MacIntosh’s twitching hand and tried to find a label or other sign of where it had come from.
The stuff smelled. It smelled bad, like rotten meat. But it also smelled good, like aged cheese. He’d had lutefisk once as a kid, and it was the same kind of smell—not as fishy, but still there.
It was behemah meat. It was treif, the worst thing you could possibly eat.
And Nitzaniya had smuggled it in.
“What’s that?” a woman’s voice said behind him. He looked over his shoulder; it was another one of Ely’s neighbors, a woman of about seventeen or so, the wife of a farmer who kept her in town so she’d be safer. She was just barely starting to show.
“Evidence,” he said, without thinking.
“Is that what turned him?” she asked, and he cursed himself for a fool. She yelled, “Mr. Lieberman thinks he found what turned Old Man MacIntosh!”
The crowd started to pull in tight, but he waved them back, then pushed the paper over the end of the package as best he could with the machete. He scratched a circle around the bodies and the package with the tip of his machete and said, “No closer. None of you come any closer than this, unless you want to get infected.”
—
It was full dark by the time the cart arrived, pulled by Sheriff Dustry and three deputies. Daniel washed his hands with moonshine from the kit, then lifted two rolls of white gauze from the side boxes.
Dustry said, “I see three there, not two.”
“One of them died too soon to start turning,” Daniel said. “My son.”
Ely’s throat had been cut from ear to ear.
Daniel had been trying to put it together while he waited; it was hard to collect his thoughts with the crowd watching over the bodies inside the ring. The limbs rolled and twitched, the torsos flexed and shuddered; the heads mouthed words endlessly, still trying to communicate. Laughing and crying soundlessly, unintelligibly. He just wanted silence, time to think, and the freedom to pace beyond the direct line of sight of the bodies.
Nitzaniya had brought the treif. She had sworn time and again that it wouldn’t change anyone—it wasn’t infected. It was the dried, cured meat of the behemah that had been rubbed with herbs and rendered brain-grease and smoked over a fire of apple wood and burning bones. Zombies at it all the time, like jerky, except on their main holiday, to celebrate escaping destructions by humans, when they butchered the oldest of the behemah and ate them fresh.
Daniel could remember when the behemah had been human. Like all the Burial Society, he’d been outside the walls, smeared in ipish, to render the dead. Zombies had come up to him time and again to smell him, or rather the ipish, and passed him by.
At first they’d been leading human prisoners, and he’d had to watch the zombies lead them away, lest he be attacked and killed, possibly drawing an attack down on Goodland. Over the years, the prisoners had changed. More hair, fewer clothes. Bigger. Fewer pleas for help, until they lost the ability to talk at all. The dumb, panting, open-mouthed look of them. The smell.
Behemah smelled delicious, like food—the older they were, the better. His mouth watered whenever they passed. Zombies preferred them to human flesh. That was the reason that humans lived at all, he supposed; they were second-best on the menu. How the zombies had changed them so fast, he’d never know.
He’d never eaten any. There were some things you couldn’t do, and remain human.
But if it wasn’t the dried behemah that had done it, what had?
Daniel tried to imagine it: Ely had come to the door, and Old Man MacIntosh, turning into a zombie, had slit him from ear to ear.
No. Zombies didn’t use knives, and they didn’t bother to kill; they just ate. Whatever the plague did to them, it made them hungry until they’d finished turning. They ate more like normal folks did after that—except for what they ate—but at first, they couldn’t eat enough. More like a pregnant woman than anything else, as though they were eating for two.
Ely had to have been killed by a human, for human reasons.
Dustry had the deputies help him wrap the bodies. Fortunately, Ely didn’t have to be chopped up; he hadn’t so much as twitched the whole time. He really had been killed, not infected.
Daniel wrapped the heads and limbs of the zombies and left the torsos for the deputies. Sure, the torsos were the goriest parts, but they were the least likely to turn around and claw you, too. Daniel had on thick leather gloves and an ancient set of goggles with cracked rubber seals and a leather strap that had to be replaced every few years because of how he had to clean it. The deputies had on thick apro
ns made of plastic tarp, which was better than nothing, but not by much.
As each piece was finished, they loaded it into the back of the cart inside a rigid, ancient children’s swimming pool. The cart was heavy, because of the corrugated steel they’d used to cover the back, top and bottom, front and back. The pool took care of most of the drips; the steel took care of the limbs that dug their way out of their bindings and tried to escape. Daniel scraped up the area as best he could, then threw the dirt in a tin pail and slid it into the cart next to the pool. He scattered bleach over the ground, then salt.
Dustry gestured to the deputies to haul the cart away, and the two of them walked next to each other, following the cart, watching for trouble.
Dustry shouted, “Go home now,” at the last of the crowd. There were only a few folks left, most of them having drifted off when the last piece of Old Man MacIntosh—his head—had been tossed into the back of the cart.
As the two of them followed the creaking cart, Dustry said, “I saw the treif. You know what that means, don’t you? We got a smuggler. And that means death.”
“I don’t like it,” Daniel said, which could have meant anything. There was something else bothering him, and he couldn’t put a finger on it while Dustry was distracting him.
“It’s that woman.”
“Nitzaniya?” Daniel asked.
“She’s the only who’s come in lately. But I have to wonder if Ely was involved.”
Daniel exploded. “Ely? How dare you—”
“Hang on now,” Dustry said. “I have to wonder. It’s my job. I’m sure there’s a reason he was over at his neighbors that had nothing to do with the treif. Hell, for all I know, he was sleeping with the daughter-in-law.”
Daniel snorted.
“I know that Elaine was fussing over that woman all day. He could have used it for an excuse to head on over.”
“Not likely.”
They went back and forth over it. Daniel didn’t dare defend Nitzaniya. The treif might not have turned MacIntosh, but it was human flesh. And she was selling it like jerky. No. Whatever had been between them was over.
A Murder of Crows: Seventeen Tales of Monsters and the Macabre Page 10
