by Stant Litore
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Text copyright © 2011 Daniel Fusch
Stant Litore is a pen name for Daniel Fusch.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by 47North
P.O. Box 400818
Las Vegas, NV 89140
ISBN-13: 9781612185828
ISBN-10: 1612185827
For all our forebears who labored in pursuit of a better world
CONTENTS
Historian’s Note
First Day: Truth at the Bottom of the Well
Second Day: If All God’s People Were Prophets
Third Day: Wind in the Dark
Third Night: As Papyrus Burns
Acknowledgments
A Note on Names
About the Author
HISTORIAN’S NOTE
THE CRISIS created by an outbreak of the walking dead offers a telling diagnostic of those flaws in the human condition that resurface, century upon century: our tendency to let problems fester untended until they become crises, our frequent inability to work together for a common good, our quickness to forget the lessons our grandparents learned at the cost of much sweat and blood, and the extent to which our privileged classes ignore and deny responsibility for the plight of the impoverished and the disinherited. Our ancestors often described the attacks of the hungry dead as acts of either divine retribution for human sins or divine abandonment in utter grief at human evil, and in at least one sense they may have been correct: the rapid rise of an outbreak is nearly always a consequence of our own failings.
Even across a gap of millennia, those scrolls attributed to the prophet Yirmiyahu (whose name we anglicize as “Jeremiah”) retain their power both to evoke the memory of one of history’s most tragic outbreaks of the zombie plague and to move our hearts with one of history’s most eloquent appeals for social justice. A minimum of historical context may suffice to set the stage for our narrative. As a levite’s son, Yirmiyahu was a member of the privileged class of the priesthood, though he was born in a small village; moving early in his life to the more urban center of Yerusalem, Yirmiyahu was apparently appalled at the level of poverty he witnessed there. Taking up the role of a prophet—a navi, or bringer of words from God—he began to preach in the streets and on the Temple steps, demanding that the city dwellers return to the terms of their ancestors’ Covenant with their deity—specifically, communal provision for orphans and widows, monotheism, abstention from human sacrifice, clean burial for the dead, and the observing of a periodic year of yovel in which all slaves and indentured workers would be released from their bondage or their debts.
At about the same time, the youthful king of the Hebrews, Zedekiah, ceased paying tribute to Babylon in the east—and then used the savings in large part to garrison the city against a possible invasion. That invasion came swiftly, and Babylon established a lengthy and debilitating siege. Food stores within the city ran low, and in the overcrowded conditions created by the hurried evacuation of the surrounding countryside prior to the siege, an outbreak of the dead (who had never fully been cleaned out of the city’s back alleys) surged unchecked. Yirmiyahu believed that this situation, taken together with the injustice and corruption of Yerusalem’s leaders, made holding the city untenable—and that the only course of action that would merit God’s favor and forgiveness would be to surrender the gates of the city and beseech the aid of the Babylonians in cleansing the city of the dead and feeding its famished populace. Yirmiyahu’s very public voicing of this opinion did not make him popular with the king and the merchant class, who in a surrender would lose everything.
In this crisis there was a terrible irony, one likely not lost on the prophet. A century earlier, Yerusalem had faced a similar siege and its population had been similarly outnumbered and locked within the city’s narrow walls; yet the earlier siege had crumbled when the pestilence raged through the enemy camp, so that the enemy turned and devoured one another. The walls of Yerusalem had sufficed to keep out the enemy, both living and dead. In the generations since, these events had become a bedside story of divine deliverance that mothers related to their children.
Doubtless, the king and the merchant class in Yirmiyahu’s time trusted that this story would be repeated, but to Yirmiyahu two factors in the current emergency must have appeared strikingly and appallingly different.
First, the king of a century earlier, unlike the current monarch, had been one who maintained programs caring for the city’s poor and who outlawed religious practices of foreign origin.
Second, this time the dead were not outside but inside the walls. The living and the dead, both starving, were locked in together.
One personal note before we begin. The scrolls of Yirmiyahu are often treated as the first jeremiad, an outpouring of rage and gnashing of teeth against a city’s injustice and decay. But there is a lake of emotion, cold and dark, beneath those quick bursts of anger. These scrolls are a lamentation (to me, a poignant one), a wrestling with the likelihood of despair. Historians know that the city fell after a bitter and protracted siege and that the few survivors were led away in chains, their temples looted and burned, their abandoned homes loud with the moans of the dead. Yirmiyahu’s recorded sayings come to us as cries in the dark; pleas for justice that fell, at the time, on deaf or frightened ears. His story confronts us with the horror that our greatest efforts to heal and preserve our communities may not be enough. In the end, there may only be hunger, illness, and a slow death that brings neither peace nor rest.
The horror of what Yirmiyahu saw and what he endured is nearly too much for me. In reencountering his words, we can do one of two things. We can flinch away—turn our back on the suffering and eat, drink, and be merry, leaving death until tomorrow. Or we can gaze on the horror with unblinking eyes and listen with shuddering hearts, and make the choice Yirmiyahu demands, searching within ourselves or asking of God whether we have the courage to live lives of hope and action even when faced with almost certain failure, letting our efforts burn hot as a sun in a universe that appears governed (though we hope and trust that it isn’t) only by the law of entropy.
FIRST DAY: TRUTH AT THE BOTTOM OF THE WELL
BY THE time they lowered Yirmiyahu into the old well behind the king’s house, the city around them was already dying. Neither the king nor the priests would admit it, but there were more dead every day, and some of those dead were walking.
It was an empty well, nearly dry; yet when Yirmiyahu reached the bottom he found mud, and for a moment he panicked, his throat seizing up—he didn’t know how deep the mud might be; his legs sank into it. Then there was solid earth under his feet. The mud was higher than his knees, a cold, wet suck around his legs. He shivered and shrank against one of the cistern’s stone walls as the guards pulled the rope back up. He thought about clutching it, realized it would be useless. They would only lower him back in—or haul him halfway up and drop him, claiming an “accident.”
The men above were laughing as they left; he could hear echoes of it, distorted in the long shaft of the well. He gazed up. A circle of sunlight, pale and distant, far above him, a reminder that somewhere above this hole in the ground there was light and deity. He lifted his hand, shaking a little. Even if he could not reach that light, he could perhaps be heard. “God!” he cried. “Help me out of here. Don’t let me per
ish like this.”
The echoes of the guards’ mockery had faded, and no voice of God or man answered Yirmiyahu from that high circle. His heart quailed; he drew a shuddering breath and stilled the shaking of his hands.
Well. He was here.
He forced his gaze down. The mud lay quiet in these shadows unless he moved. He’d smuggled half a crust of bread into his loincloth—the only clothing they’d left him. His back and arms were scraped and sore from the times he had swung against the stones as they lowered him. His hair and beard had not been cut in long months, while he’d been locked in a cell in the cellar of the king’s house; he must look like a nazarite, like Samson of old, who slew a thousand walking corpses with only a donkey’s jawbone.
The stones against his back were cold so he stood in the middle for a while, his legs trembling. He’d almost forgotten how to stand in the last dark months. Closing his eyes, he felt the still air, listened, listened. He might yet hear God’s voice again—he might hear her even in this dark well. He might. That silence above him was as terrifying as the darkness in which he stood—this clinging, tangible hoshekh, a darkness that touched both body and spirit. For once, no divine words welled up within him. Perhaps God had already turned away from the decaying city, and from Yirmiyahu within it.
He breathed, and listened, tried to slow the beating of his heart. Tried to remember how to think. He was a levite; though others of the priestly caste disowned him as a troublemaker and a rabble-rouser, he was still a levite, a dedicate; a levite must have the deepest commitment to God and to the Covenant (that he’d learned from his father) and to the People (that he’d learned from his wife). They might throw him in a well; still, he was a levite and a prophet. In the street or in a well, he would hold to his covenant with God.
He hungered but did not eat. He didn’t know whether Zedekiah the king had ordered him into the well for only a day or for two days or three, or if he’d been left here to die. He didn’t know how long he’d already stood here in the mud. He glanced up. The light above looked more pale than before. Besides that far circle, he saw where there was light on one side of the well below it; the sun had been above him when they lowered him into this place, but now it must have swung across the sky. I will know how many days pass, he thought. The chill was creeping inside him, making him shake. He might not last the night without clothing to cover him. Up there, the heat baked every hint of favor and life out of the city, but down here it was cold as dream country. His lips felt dry. “We are People of the Covenant,” he whispered. “Each of us made in the likeness of God.” He repeated it, words that comforted though they did not warm him. In the silence of God, Yirmiyahu murmured the words his God had given him before, words whispered to him in the dark, over the past few years. The words that mattered. “We are People of the Covenant. We are the spouse of our God.”
He thought of the city, the heat making the air over its walls ripple. He thought of its quiet gardens with their dry beds where once there had been pools of quiet water, its stone paths, its treasure-houses. The palace of the king, with this deep well in one of its lower courtyards. And the crowded back streets, where Yirmiyahu had taken to living these past months, after sending his wife away from the city before the siege. These were the dry streets of an unreplenished city relying on dried or drying wells, where bands of orphans hunted for scraps or broke into smaller houses to tear food from the larders. He had seen a young child dying in one street, her skin stretched too tight over her ribs, her eyes wide and unseeing. In the next street, mothers who could still afford bread baked cakes for Astarte, the most popular of Yerusalem’s foreign goddesses, and pretended they could not hear others’ children begging for food at the door or crying in the night.
“I know your ways,” he whispered, reciting the words God had found for him, words she’d sent, through him, to priests who didn’t wish to hear. He trailed his fingers through the mud. It had been a season since he had felt the ground wet. There was a sheen of dirt over his body. “I know your ways. You’ve relied on broken and dried cisterns rather than the well that nourishes. God says: You were my branches, beautiful with good fruit, well watered and tall. But drought will come with a roar from the desert, and the branches are withering.”
How strange, this cold mud under his fingers, earth that had become full of water yet grew nothing. Yirmiyahu lifted his hand toward his eyes but could no longer see his fingers. Everything was dark. He looked up again. There were stars there, beautiful though faint, too far away to give him light. His stomach snarled like a lion, and he took the bread crust from his loincloth, lifted it to his mouth. It was hard and dry and had no flavor. It hurt his teeth to chew it; he thought of dipping it in the mud to moisten it, decided not to. He kept chewing slowly and at last swallowed a little bit of it. That made him thirsty, which was worse. He kept eating.
Something moved against his leg and he jumped, almost dropping the bread. With a sob he leaned back against the wall and finished the crust. Only a worm, or some snake. He was not alone in this mud, then; some other living creature God had birthed into the world was here with him. He tried to calm his breathing, take comfort from that. He looked at the stars again. Other people in the city, and in the land, were perhaps gazing up at those same remote stars. Even his wife might be standing at this moment at the door or the window of a house in the village he’d sent her back to, her face tilted up and bathed in starlight. Yirmiyahu moaned and leaned against the well’s cold stones.
Up there, beneath those same stars, an army was camped about the city, keeping its people trapped inside the walls, in narrow streets between buildings of stone or dried mud with sunbaked white roofs; and, inside the walls where food and water were already short, the plague. A few unclean dead, or many (their number grew so fast), were hunting in the alleys. He thought of the shambling corpses, their hands scratching at doors, pulling at the fragile wood. A few months ago, he had seen two—one had been a priest, a priest, one of his own caste, still clad in the simple white robes of the levites who kept the Temple—he’d seen those two tear down a door and drag a woman out into the street. He had run at them, crushed one’s head with a shovel he’d taken from a worker at the wall. But the other—the priest—had sunk its teeth deep into the woman’s shoulder. He remembered her cry of pain, the wildness of her eyes, her terror. He remembered the way the walking corpse that fed on her looked up at him when he came at it, its eyes with nothing in them but hunger and animal hostility. He remembered its wavering moan.
After the priest lay unmoving in the dust, Yirmiyahu killed the woman. Gasping as he leaned over the shovel, gazing down at her broken body. No one else came. He had stood there a long time, shaking, gazing in horror at the woman he’d killed. The body would otherwise have risen to hunger and eat in the dark—yet this had been a woman’s body, a sacred and life-giving body, shaped in the likeness of God herself. Yirmiyahu gazed at the woman’s eyes, glazing already in death. It was too terrible for tears; he just stood and shook.
Now, in the well, he wrapped his arms around himself and stumbled in slow circles through the mud, trying to stay on his feet, trying to keep warm, though he was so weary, though in this darkness he felt as though his mind might come apart as easily as a bread crust soaked in mud. “We are the People of the Covenant,” he said hoarsely in the dark, “each of us made in God’s likeness.” He kept saying it; it was good to hear words, though speaking made his throat more dry.
He had barely been a man when he first heard those words, newly come to Yerusalem from his father’s village, a few short years past, with a small pack of white clothing and gifts from his grandmother, and a lovely and laughing wife walking beside him. He’d meant to study with the levites at the Temple; in fact, he had just secured his small house in the city with the coin his father had sent with him. He meant to go to see the priests at the Temple steps in the morning, the long lines of them with their austere faces.
Then God had spoken in a voice that made
the hot night air tremble. Yirmiyahu had been dressed in a loincloth then, as now, for it had been the middle of the night. He’d stepped out of his new house into the street and listened, while Miriam dreamed in their bed. The stars had been as far away then as they were now, but all around him was the looming presence of the lives of the people of that new city, in their hundred stone houses.
Yirmiyahu, the voice called. My Yirmiyahu.
“Are you calling me, adonai?” he whispered.
There was a silence. Then the voice was at his ear. Before you were in your mother’s womb, I knew you. The voice became a whisper, as though sharing a secret between the two of them. Before you were born, I set you apart, called you as my navi, my prophet.
That word rushed through Yirmiyahu like a sudden wind through the door of a house, knocking aside his carefully placed furniture and pulling curtains and veils aside from the openings to inner rooms. The navi, the prophet, the bringer of niv sefatayim, the fruit from God. There had been many in the history of the land, men and women who could hear God and who carried God’s words to the People, words as full and round and fertile as fruit. There had been many, but Yirmiyahu didn’t know of any who now spoke or did healing in the land. Navi, navi: he trembled.
“Yes, adonai,” he breathed, his eyes wide. He knew there could be no other answer, not to the One who now spoke. He knelt, there in the street, his heart shaking within him. “But adonai, I am young, I am—”
