At this time lived three women, daughters of the king, called Kaššaya, Innin-Etirat, and Ba’u-Asitu, who all owned land in Uruk.
It is said of Kaššaya that she was wise, of Innin-Etirat that she was determined, of Ba’u-Asitu that she was bold.
During the time of the plague, each of the daughters gathered all of the women and children working for her into her main property, each well provisioned with water and grain and dates, and built sturdy defences. There they planned to wait until the plague passed, as all terrible illnesses eventually do. They sought to keep everyone from dwelling on the horrors beyond their walls: Kaššaya organized storytelling competitions, Innin-Etirat led the women and children in song, Ba’u-Asitu invented a new dance every morning.
It was Ba’u-Asitu who noticed three foxes below the walls of her home.
A dead fox, its legs shattered, unable to walk but biting out at anything that passed. Two living foxes pinned it down and ate the remnants of its flesh. You wince, but such is the nature of foxes.
Ba’u-Asitu observed that when the living foxes had torn the flesh from the dead fox, it stopped trying to bite. It lay still, a skeleton, truly dead.
Being bold, she darted from the security of her walls with two other women and with great care and stealth took one of the walking dead men from outside. They covered his head with thick cloth so that he could not bite, and secured the door once they brought him inside. Then with tools they stripped the rotting flesh from him.
The bared skeleton of the man stopped moving. The teeth lay in their sockets like needles in a pouch: sharp but unused.
Ba’u-Asitu sent letters to her sisters, to the temples and to the leaders of the soldiers, telling them of this discovery. Letters were also sent to Babylon and the other cities. From then on, the living were able to fight the dead, although it was not easy and many more died.
The flesh of the dead was immediately burnt. The stench filled the city for weeks. The bones were buried far from the cities, in tracts of desert where none lingered long. The teeth were not touched with bare hands.
Eventually the plague passed, as all terrible illnesses do.
In one oral version of this tale, Ba’u-Asitu becomes so famed for her skill at stripping the flesh from the dead that she is known as Ba’u-Asitu the Fox-Woman: an immortal figure who still hunts under an occluded moon with an army of foxes. Screams in the night are attributed to her work. The plague has never spread far again.
Letter (clay tablet) found in the property of Kaššaya:
To Kaššaya, my lady, and Innin-Etirat, my lady: your servant Šamaš-ereš. May Anu and Ishtar keep you both well!
You write: “No one in Uruk or Babylon can say whether the omens we saw before the plague have appeared before. Is there anything in the ruined cities of the north that will help us understand these omens and how to respond to them?”
Nothing I have found yet will help. I do not think that this plague ever afflicted these old cities. The fox in the well of Aššur may have been alive, signifying a different omen. The omens described on the tablets found by Innin-Etirat’s servant and lost between Babylon and Uruk may have been the same. Nothing I have found suggests that they were important.
I will continue to search the ruins.
Let us hope that this plague never afflicts Babylon again!
Saying uttered by Uruk women when falling ill with any ailment, recorded on a tablet in Eanna temple:
Let the foxes of Ba’u-Asitu watch over us!
What Maisie Knew
David Liss
There was never a time when keeping Maisie in the apartment felt right to me. It was always a bad deal, right from the get-go, but there were no good deals, and this was the least-bad deal going. I couldn’t let her stay out in the world, knowing what she knew, blurting out what she did. It probably would have been fine if I’d left it alone, but I could not live with such a flimsy guarantee. It was the chance that things would not be fine that nagged at me, that kept me awake at night, that made me jump every time the phone rang. I had a wife I loved, and we had a child on the way. I had a life, and I wanted to keep it. A person can’t live like that, waiting for the other shoe to drop, and so I did the only thing I could do—the only thing I could think of. It was the right call, but it just so happened that it didn’t turn out the way I wanted.
It should have been fine. Everything I knew about reanimates told me it should be fine. I’d been around them almost all my life. My parents could barely make car payments, but they rushed out to buy a Series One from General Reanimation when they first came on the market. Kids growing up today can’t even imagine what those early models were like—buggy and twitchy, with those ugly uniforms, like weird green tuxedos. I was only five at the time, and the reanimate creeped the hell out of me when it would lumber into my room to check on me at night or when it would babysit while my parents were out. I still remember watching it shamble toward me, a TV dinner clutched hard in its shaky hands. I wasn’t phobic the way some people are. I simply didn’t like them. Dead people should remain dead. That’s one of those things that always made sense, maybe now more than ever.
So I hated going to that apartment where I kept my dead girl, which, on top of everything else, was hard to afford and which I had to hide from my wife, who managed most of the household finances.
I’d have rather been anywhere else—at the dentist, the DMV, a tax audit, a prostate exam. But I was there, at the apartment. I opened the front door and walked in, smelled the weird chemical smell that reanimates emitted, and the feeling washed over me that I had no business being there. My name was on the lease, but I felt like an intruder.
It was a crappy apartment on the cusp of the very wrong side of town, cheap, but not too dangerous. The place was a one bedroom—more space than Maisie needed, since she supposedly didn’t need any space at all. She wasn’t supposed to, but I always wondered. Sometime when I came to check on her, the chairs around the cheap kitchen table would look out of place. I always pushed my chairs in, but these were pulled out at odd angles or even halfway across the floor, as though advertising that they’d been moved. I supposed there was nothing wrong with her taking a seat or moving things around if that was what she wanted to do, but she wasn’t supposed to want to do it. That’s what bothered me.
When I went in that day, she was standing precisely where I last left her, her back to the far wall of the living area, her face to the door, light from the slightly parted curtains streaming over her. I watched the dust motes dance around her eyes, visible through the mask, wide and doll-like and unblinking.
Maisie was a black-market reanimate, but she wore the green-and-white uniform of a licensed General Reanimation unit, and of course she wore that matching green-and-white mask, which made her look, to my eyes, like a Mexican wrestler. Plenty of people, even people who liked having reanimates around, found the mask a bit disconcerting, but they all admitted it was better than the alternative.
No one wants to check into a hotel and discover that the reanimate bellboy is one’s own dead relative. No one wants to go to a cocktail party and see a dead spouse offering a tray of shrimp pâté on ciabatta.
I hated the uniform—slick and stain resistant, made of some sort of soft plastic. It was oversized and baggy, making it almost impossible to tell that Maisie was female. I hated the full-face mask, but I had her wear it in case there was a fire or the building manager had to send in a repairman to fix something or even if there was a break-in. I didn’t want anyone knowing I owned an illegal reanimate. I didn’t need that kind of trouble.
I stepped into the apartment and closed the door behind me.
“Hello, Maisie. You may take off the mask if you like.”
She remained motionless, as still as a mannequin.
“Maisie, please take off the mask.”
With her left hand, she reached up and pulled it off but held on to it. I hadn’t told her to put it anywhere, and so letting it go would not occu
r to her dead brain. Underneath the mask, I saw her face, pale and puffy, hanging loose from her skull, but strangely still pretty.
She had long, flowing curls of reddish blond hair, her pale blue eyes—I’m sure very arresting in life—dull and cloudy in un-death.
I came to check in on Maisie maybe once a week. I should not have to, of course. I ought to have been able to leave her alone for months, but I knew it was a good idea for reanimates to get some exercise lest they gum up. That was part of it. The other part was that I wanted to be sure she wasn’t up to no good. Reanimates weren’t supposed to have it in them to be up to no good, but if she hadn’t been Maisie, had not acted like herself, she wouldn’t be in the apartment to begin with.
“How have you been, Maisie?”
Of course there was no response. What was left of her brain couldn’t process so abstract a question. That’s what Ryan said, and he seemed to think he knew what he was talking about.
“Maisie, get me a beer from the refrigerator.
I could get my own beer, of course, but I needed to find excuses to make her move. I had to specify one from the refrigerator, because otherwise she might get me a warm one from the pantry or she might end up looking for a beer in the medicine cabinet.
Maisie walked off to the kitchen. I followed but only for something to do. I was always bored and uneasy when I came to the apartment. I felt strange, like I was playacting for some invisible audience, like I was a grown-up furtively trying to recapture the magic of childhood toys. Nothing I said to her or did with her felt natural. Christ, I could talk to a dog and feel less like I was talking to myself.
That’s why I kept the visits so short. I would drink the beer, order her to do some light cleaning, and then get out of there.
I was thinking about how much I wanted to leave, how much I wanted to get back to my wife, when I walked into the kitchen and saw the fresh-cut flowers on the kitchen table. They were a gaudy assortment of cheap dyed daisies, but they were bright and fresh, very new. They’d been arranged carelessly, and water from the vase puddled on the table. Here’s the thing: I had not put the flowers there.
No one else had a key—no one other than the apartment-complex manager or the super. Neither of them had any business in my apartment, and if they did have something important to do, they would have called first. (They had my cell-phone number, since I sure as hell didn’t want my wife to know I had an apartment, let alone an apartment where I kept my black-market reanimate.) Even if they had not called first, neither the manager nor the super was about to leave a vase filled with flowers on my kitchen table.
Maisie was now closing the refrigerator and handing me a beer. She did not open the bottle, because I had not asked her to open it. That was how they worked. They did not do anything you did not ask them to do. So where had these flowers come from?
I twisted the cap off the beer and looked at Maisie, who, in the absence of orders, remained perfectly still. “Maisie, where did these flowers come from?”
She stared at me. It was a difficult question for a reanimate, I realized, even as I spoke it. Too abstract. I tried again.
“Maisie, did you put the flowers there?”
It was a yes-or-no question, and she should have been able to answer it, but she said nothing.
“Maisie, answer the question. Did you put those flowers there?” Again, silence. Dark, looming, unblinking silence. It was like demanding answers from a stuffed animal. No; our genetic, animistic impulses gave speaking to a stuffed animal a sort of logic. This was like demanding answers from a bowl of rice.
I took a long drink from my beer and sighed. This was serious.
More than serious. It wasn’t just that maybe my reanimate, which wasn’t supposed to want anything, somehow wanted flowers. It meant that she had somehow gotten out of the apartment, gone to the store, spent money—money she’d earned from what or stolen from whom? Had she managed to bring it with her from the Pine Box? It meant a whole spiraling vortex of Maisie chaos, and I had to know. I had to.
“Maisie,” I said. “Go into the bedroom, remove your clothes, and lie on your back on the bed.”
The first thing I need to make clear is that I am not a pervert. I don’t have any desire to have sex with reanimates. Given the choice between sex with a reanimate or sex with a real woman, I’ll take the real woman every time. Hell, given the choice between sex with a reanimate and no sex, I’d go without sex—at least for a good long while. Like S&M or rubber fetishes or whatever, if you’re not into it naturally, it’s hard to fake the enthusiasm. If you meet some amazingly hot woman, and she says, “Sure, let’s have sex, only I want to tie you up and stick needles in your dick,” you’re probably going to, with however much regret, take a rain check. Unless you like that sort of thing. Plenty of guys like sex with reanimates. They prefer them to real women. It floats their boat. It does not float mine.
That said, I should point out that in most ways it’s kind of like sex with anyone else. It has some unique qualities but also lacks some things that make sex with a living woman enjoyable—for example, that unique sensation of having sex with someone you know is alive.
So, if you are looking at it objectively, it’s a trade-off. That day, I looked at it objectively. I didn’t want to have sex with her. I wanted to have sex with my wife and no one else. I liked sex with my wife. Sure, I would look at an attractive woman when I saw one on the street, but I wasn’t about to make any moves. There had been some parties, some business trips, where I’d felt opportunities opening, but I never pursued them. I was in love with Tori. I was happy and I didn’t need complications and problems and guilt and lies.
If you are like most people, there are probably a lot of things you don’t know about reanimates. Ryan says you are happier that way.
He says the less you have to think about what they are, the easier it is to ignore them, to enjoy the convenience. Ryan says you probably don’t know much about their history, for example, because there’s no percentage in knowing the history. You also probably don’t know much about their nature, and that’s a whole other thing. There’s a percentage in that one for you. The key thing that I’m getting at is that reanimates have a greater clarity of thought when their feelings are intensified. You can tease out this clarity either with pain or with sex—at least with the females. I’m told it is impossible for the males to have sex, not unless the penis is artificially inflated. There are rumors of male reanimate sex slaves with permanent, surgically crafted boners, but I’m not entirely sure this is true.
Reanimates are totally different creatures during sex. This is a big part of why guys who like to sleep with them get off on it. Also, probably because they are willing and compliant sex slaves whose needs and preferences can be handily dismissed. Then again, some guys just dig the fact that they’re dead. But for most of the true enthusiasts, the main thing is that reanimates are hungry for it. They start to feel things, they start to remember themselves, and they—well, I hate to be crass, but the bottom line is that they fuck hungry and hard, and some guys just love it. Not me. It made me feel unclean, like I’d been exposed to something vile and rotting. Even now I don’t like thinking about it in too much detail, and the less I say about the particulars, the better.
Adulthood, however, means doing things you don’t want to do. So I had sex with Maisie. As soon as I slid into her, it was like a switch flipped inside her soul. She was something else, something vibrant and powerful something that felt not alive but rather live, like a storm of a mass of building electricity. That was how she’d been when I’d had sex with her at the Pine Box. She groaned and moaned and murmured. She thrust her hips up at me with a shocking, awkward violence. I didn’t want to be there any longer than I had to, so I waited until she seemed good and worked up, and then I asked, “Maisie, did you get those flowers?”
“Fuck off, you asshole.”
I guess saying that she surprised me is an understatement. I leaped off of her in astonishment
and fear, and I lost shall we say my will to continue. She, in turn, fell back on the bed like a puppet with her strings cut. Just like that, she faded back to her normal, stupefied, lifeless self—still and naked and slightly bloated, not breathing hard like I was, since reanimates did not respirate looking at nothing, and thinking, I was sure, about nothing.
I began to gather up my clothes. “Maisie, get dressed,” I said, “and come sit at the kitchen table.”
She complied.
I am a nice guy. I like children and animals. I don’t especially like violent movies, so what came next wasn’t something I enjoyed. It wasn’t something that came naturally to me. It was, however, something I had to do. I thought it over. I looked at all sides of it and tried to find another way, but it just wasn’t there.
When Maisie sat at the kitchen table, I told her to place her right arm on the table, on top of a thick bathroom towel. Then I asked her to roll up the sleeve of her uniform. With the puffy, pale flesh of her forearm exposed, I grabbed her wrist in one hand and, with the other, thrust a sharp kitchen knife into her arm, just below the elbow.
I’ve never stabbed a living person, but I’m pretty sure it feels different. Her flesh offered almost no resistance. It was like stabbing wet dough. I felt the knife nick the bone, but it kept going, all the way through, and I felt the tip of the blade make contact with the towel.
Ryan says that pain works as well as sex, but sex, troubling though it is, bothers me less than torture. Anyone who might begin to think that I was a bad person should keep that in mind. I went for pain only when I had no choice.
Maisie did not scream. She did not stand or pull away or fight.
Instead, she looked at me and winced. “You asshole motherfucker.”
“Maisie, did you put those flowers there? How did you get them? How did you pay for them?”
Zombies-More Recent Dead Page 14
