Zombies-More Recent Dead

by Paula Guran (ed)

  Was that all it would ever be, from now on?

  She was bone now. Bone and some sort of spectral, invisible flesh that netted her limbs into order and gave her the power of sight. She moved her fingers and they clacked and clicked against the planes of her face as she tried to touch whatever held her together.

  Opposite her a standing mirror, green-lit, presenting her rippled and obscured as though drowning. Her skull, wavering in the reflection, capped with a tiara—a golden hawk, wings stretched out to cup the bone.

  Wolf was there past the mirror, pressed against the wall of the chamber. Watching her with loyalty. Whatever she became, he would follow. It was reassurance. She would always be a leader, no matter what.

  Truly a monster now. She would have to give up some of her illusions: the pretense of meals and cosmetics and clothing. What good would armor be, except to hang on her as though she was some sort of display rack?

  “I have made you a present, my dearest,” Balthus said. His fingers stroked her skull, bumped along her teeth. He released her and stepped aside.

  Undead, skin already graying. Ah, the fine dark hair, the silver strands like penmarks in reverse. The once-piercing eyes now blue and cloudy marbles.

  Marbles full of hate and spite and helpless malice. Hers forevermore, her handsome toy, given her by her master, perhaps to torment, perhaps from love and an impulse to please. Would she ever know his motives, would she ever understand if she was puppet or lover, source of amusement or font of something else?

  Endless days stretched before her, in which she would never find the answer.

  Present

  Nicole Kornher-Stace

  Now the infection hits the news and Gabriela’s mom babysits Jack while Gabriela and her dad go to Wal-Mart for supplies. When it isn’t the end of the world, her parents are very local-food, free-range, hundred-mile-diet types, but today the Wal-Mart’s the only place left open and even Gabriela’s mom makes that concession, though she won’t set foot inside herself. As Gabriela’s dad drives the four miles out of suburbia into town, Gabriela watches the boards go up in people’s windows, the padlocks go on doors, the cases of soup cans disappear inside. (Leaving, her dad had grabbed the reusable shopping bags, laughed a little derisive laugh at himself, said Fuck it, and left them in the hall.)

  On the way back, the pickup bed and also her lap and footwell full of shopping bags—cans of chili and chickpeas, boxes of cereal, jars upon jars of peanut butter, diapers, multivitamins, cases of ramen, granola, half a dozen can openers—she has a brief panic that they’d get home and the infection would have reached their house already, she’d find her mom gone empty-eyed and gore-mouthed, find Jack lurching instead of toddling. But her dad pulls into the driveway and it’s just like when she was a kid, helping him with groceries every Saturday after cartoons, her mom coming out onto the doorstep to help relay stuff to the kitchen, like a fire brigade with pails of water to a burning house. Except now there’s Jack perched on her hip, there’s a kitchen knife stuck in her belt, and while they rush the bags inside they’re watching their neighbors over their shoulders, and their neighbors, rushing bags into their own houses, are watching Gabriela and her parents over theirs.

  Now she wakes up, stretches, says good morning to Jack waking up beside her, and something kicks her in the gut: she remembers what day it is. It’s the first day of the future, and the sun comes through the cracks between the two-by-fours across her window, shines down on her futon and Jack’s racecar pajamas and the new huge red backpack resting against a bookcase. Her parents each have a backpack just like it upstairs. They packed them together last night. Each one is full of energy bars and Gatorade, a first-aid kit, a flashlight, a pocketknife, pepper spray. Hers also has pull-up diapers and fruit snacks for Jack. Jack has a little backpack himself, and in it he has board books, Matchbox cars, more fruit snacks. Each bag except Jack’s has two full bottles of Advil and one of dirt-cheap vodka, in case the time comes and they can’t bring themselves to use the knives.

  Gabriela’s got Jack on the potty and she’s already pulling on her yoga pants and sneakers for their morning walk before she remembers morning walks are not happening anymore. She’s trying to decide whether she wants to brave taking Jack four doors up the road for playgroup anyway when she hears something upstairs, something like footsteps, something not like footsteps. The not-footsteps approach the basement door, begin descending, slow, uncertain, like whoever it is remembers there being something down here, something worth coming down the stairs for, but couldn’t quite remember what it was or why they wanted it to start with. But since she had Jack and moved from her childhood bedroom down to the finished basement where there was room for his stuff, her parents never come downstairs that early in the morning, not when Jack might still be sleeping.

  Mom? she says, uncertain.

  Then another sound comes from midway up the stairs, a sound like maybe someone gargling mouthwash, only it sounds thicker than mouthwash, and it’s like they’re trying to talk through it, except that it keeps sloshing out when they try.

  For about two seconds she deliberates, hand held out to the door. Then her flight instinct starts firing, that pressure in the small of her back starts shooting through to her navel, her legs start tensing, and the next thing she knows she’s got the backpack on one shoulder, Jack hoisted on the other, and she’s taking the back door sideways, awkward, and it’s hitting her in the ass on her way out, just like the saying says not to.

  She’s forgotten Jack’s backpack, all his board books, Dr. Seuss and Goodnight Moon and The Very Hungry Caterpillar. She wonders how the hell she’s supposed to get him to sleep now.

  Now she’s got Jack on her shoulders and going as slow as she can along the treeline back of town, staying off the roads, keeping a clear line of sight with the maples at her back. If any of them come up through the woods things’ll get interesting, but the town is by far the greater risk, and besides she’s faster than they are and she’s got Jack as a lookout. They’re playing a game called Who Can Be the Quietest. He wins automatically if he sees anyone and pulls her hair to tell her so.

  She’d ventured up into town earlier, hugging the back walls of shopping plazas, looking to replenish her stores. She’d only left home two days ago, but Jack was tearing through his fruit snacks like a machine and there was no power in the universe that could get him to swallow so much as one lousy calorie of an energy bar. She’d come around behind the supermarket and found someone’s legs hanging out of a dumpster, and the puddle on the concrete strongly suggested the rest of that someone was elsewhere. The delivery door was ajar, streaked at shoulder height with what could have been fingerpaint. She opened the knife, got it in a fist at hip level, took two steps for the door, stopped, looked at Jack, looked around and found nowhere safe to put a wanderlusty three-year-old while she went off to get herself killed over fruit snacks. It did not escape her notice that if this were a movie, this would be the Door the Audience Is Telling the Bimbo Not to Go Through. Well, she’s not anybody’s goddamn bimbo. Sorry, kid, she murmured, and tousled his hair as best she could with her knife-hand. I promise I won’t let you starve.

  He’s a good kid, her Jack. He didn’t throw a tantrum, hungry as he was. Sometimes she even thinks he understands the depth of shit they’re in, knows not to make it worse.

  They moved on.

  Now she’s walking beneath the maples and the sunshine and the summer-smell of grass and the roadkill-smell coming off the town, she’s walking and she’s humming softly to Jack to keep his mind off the sounds in the distance, she’s walking and she’s thinking about zombie movies again. Thinking how ridiculous it is that they’re made to be so fast. It doesn’t make any sense. She never could figure out why corpses were supposed to suddenly be faster or stronger than they were in life, like some kind of consolation prize for shambling around with your skin plopping off. She’s read something about how people only use ten percent of their brains while awake, and it
’s got her wondering if maybe death—undeath—is supposed to be some kind of loophole that unlocks the other ninety, to let them do ridiculous things like outrun sprinters, chew through walls. She’s thinking about it being June, how infections spread faster in the heat, how dead things decompose faster too. She wonders which happens first.

  It’s not just zombie movies. It’s horror stories in general. She remembers back when she first started reading them, huge doorstop anthologies of them that her dad would get at the thrift shop for a dime. She must’ve been ten or so. They scared her sleepless. One thing she got to noticing in them, though, was how if a story was written in present tense then the protagonist probably survived it, unless there was some kind of twist at the end, but if it was written in past tense then the guy was pretty much screwed.

  She’s wondering what tense her story’s written in. Whether she dies in the dirt with someone’s face in her guts. Whether she rides off into the sunset. Whether she wakes up and it was all a dream.

  She’s wondering where the fuck she’s supposed to go before she gets there.

  Now she’s taken to calling him Jack the Snack, because she has to convince herself it’s funny or she’ll go stark raving batshit and there’s no coming back from that. The treeline ran out yesterday and she’s back among the buildings, old brick townhouses with delis on the corners. There are lots of broken windows on the ground floor, trashed and smeared. There’s no glass on the ground. She looks for movement in the windows and sees none. She’s so close to breaking down and screaming, hoping the good guys find her first.

  The silence is oppressive. The noises are worse. For two days now she’s smelled fire but can’t find it, fire and a smell like rancid bacon frying. An oily smoke hangs in the air, like what comes out the back door of a diner in July. She’s wearing a hole in her shoe. She’s cut holes in the backpack, one for each of Jack’s legs, and it’s a nice hiking backpack so he’s pretty stable up there, the backpack strapped around her at chest and waist. His bare toes jostle at her ass with every step.

  There are two things that keep her going.

  One is Jack’s face pressed against the back of her neck. She can’t even complain about the way her shoulders cramp in place to carry him, the way she has to stop every half hour and convince him to pee pottyless, the weight of his heavy little butt on her back. The lack of it would weigh much more.

  Two is the perverse hope that she’ll come across someone she knew in high school, any of the girls who called her Slut or Skank or Maternity Leave when her belly started to round out, any of the boys who’d elbow each other and grin when she walked by, any of the teachers who assumed she was stupid because she’d made one bad call, never mind that she was pulling in the top five percent even through the first trimester when she’d puke till she was dizzy, sit and stare at the wall and wait to die. That weight on her arm again, that face at her shoulder. Bad call? Fuck them. She pictures each of them in turn, maybe pulped into warm jelly by infection, maybe uninfected, healthy, and being torn unceremoniously to bits.

  It keeps her going, one foot in front of the other. It keeps her from thinking about her fate. About Jack’s. How slow he made her. What would happen when it came to it. Could she let them take him? Could she do it before they got the chance?

  You’re going to get us killed, kid, she whispers, and he looks up at her uncomprehending, doesn’t even know what it means for the mosquitoes when she slaps them off his arms, not really, and he nods at her, all solemnity, fruit snacks on his breath.

  Now she’s standing in a parking lot over a pair of corpses. No sign of infection on them. Seems that what’s done them in is that their throats and most of their abdominal cavities have been emptied out. Last night she wiped the clots off somebody’s aluminum baseball bat and now she’s holding it at the ready while she toes the larger corpse. The corpse doesn’t move. For the millionth time she wonders how it works, the zombie virus or whatever they’re calling it on the news now, if there’s any news left to call things anything on. She doesn’t understand why, when they attack you, there seems to be a magic threshold, on one side of which you get bitten and turn into one of them, on the other side of which you get bitten and die. She’s seen a number of them now wounded bad enough they should be dead, they should never have changed to begin with, just went down and stayed down, like these ones. It doesn’t even make sense in the movies, what chance does she have to logic it out here?

  She doesn’t check its pockets. What good will anybody’s wallet do her now? There’s something clutched in the corpse’s hand, though, and when she squats down to get a closer look she sees it’s a rosary. She’s not sure why she takes it, but she does.

  Then there’s the smaller corpse. It’s not much bigger than Jack. She can’t tell if it was a boy or a girl, before. Corpse, she has to use the word corpse, or she’ll start wondering what its name was, its favorite color, whether it wanted a puppy, whether it hated macaroni and cheese as much as Jack does.

  She glances around. The place is dead empty. Sets Jack down on his feet, just beside her, where a parked car casts a piece of shade on the boiling blacktop. She wonders if the car belonged to the corpses. No key in sight. She starts up a little singsong as she goes to work on the smaller one’s shoe. Look at this doll, sweetie, someone got it all messy, you wouldn’t make a mess like that, it must have been some baby, they’re so messy, you’re a big boy now and you would never.

  The other shoe’s on the other leg a couple of meters away. She waves the flies off, turns upon the bright green sock a calculating eye. Cold toes, she thinks inanely, and leaves it where it is. Out of the corner of her eye she sees Jack pulling at a stuffed penguin in the corpse’s hand. Somehow it’s lying in the clear of the worst of the blood. The corpse just won’t let go. Me, he shouts at it, annoyed. She bites her lip a second, then kneels and pries the corpse’s fist open. Wipes her fingers on her yoga pants and takes his free hand. They stand together, the three of them, looking down.

  Say thank you, she whispers.

  Thank you, he sings out, and plants a big kiss on the air.

  That night, she barricades them in somebody’s cellar and reads Jack Goodnight Moon from memory, adding in a few extras (goodnight creepy stairs, goodnight dehydration headache, goodnight dead field mouse in the corner, goodnight racecar pajamas that are getting sort of nasty). She keeps adding extras until whatever’s happening in the distance stops, it’s unlike anything she’s ever heard or wants to hear again and she has to keep on talking so he doesn’t hear it too, babbling nonsense with her mouth right up to his ear, he’s always been so sensitive to others’ pain, she can’t so much as cut her nails in front of him or else down goes his little brow into little furrows and he’s grabbing her hand and kissing it and saying mommy ow, mommy ow.

  Still she can’t keep talking all night, he needs the sleep and her throat’s so very dry. The second she stops he hears it, points toward the wall, toward outside, and asks.

  Don’t they sound silly? she says. Just some people being silly, making silly sounds. Let’s snuggle.

  And they do.

  Once he’s asleep, she pulls out the rosary. It smells of blood and cedar and perfume. Her parents are lapsed Catholic, she’s only been into a church once and that was for a rummage sale, and she has no idea how to use the thing, feels like a jackass for even framing the notion in those terms, but she finds herself counting the beads of it, one by one, keeping her thumb over the one she’s just counted, just how she’s teaching Jack to do, so he doesn’t count the same thing twice.

  As she touches each bead, she’s whispering under her breath. It’s stupid, she knows it’s stupid, it obviously didn’t save the woman in the parking lot with the footprints tracking through her guts four feet to either side, but it keeps unspooling out of her, she’s blubbering and she can’t make it stop. Hail Mary. Hail anybody. I could really use some help here. He’s only three and he’s run out of pull-ups and I wanted to know what he’d g
row up to be. I don’t know where my parents are. I think they might be . . . sick. I ran so I could save him. So I could save him from them. I’m running out of water. I don’t know where I’m going. Is there anywhere I can go that’s better? What will happen to us? I can’t kill him don’t make me kill him but if it comes to it let him . . . let him go in his sleep, just get him the fuck out of here, they can have me, just get him out, let him find a safe place, don’t make him do this. I’m seventeen, I wanted to be a marine biologist, I have a baseball bat and a fucking flashlight and I can’t do this, how can I do this, every time I close my eyes I see them pulling him away from me and he’s shrieking mommy, all done, mommy, mommy, help, and what am I supposed to do and I can’t, I can’t, I fucking can’t.

  Now they’ve hit the farmland outside town, out where she took Jack apple picking last fall, and this time of year the strawberries are fruiting, acres of them, and she can’t smell the fires from here, just the hay and the sun and the strawberries and it strikes her for a dizzy moment that the listing world has righted. She steps over the few scraggly rows on the end and sets Jack down in the middle of a clump of berries and they’re huge, pristine, untouched, and swollen on the sun. She’s found a pistol with three rounds in it and it’s jammed down in her waistband and the aluminum bat doesn’t leave her swinging hand. She keeps watch. Jack is picking berries and cramming them in with both hands and the juice is running down his chin and then she’s down in the rows with him, one eye scanning, one hand picking. She only allows herself a moment. She needs to be alert, not drunk on summer and a bellyful of sugar after days of crumbs. Jack, seeing this, pauses in his cramming to offer up two berries, one in each fist, both bruised with clumsy picking. Eat mommy! he says, red around the mouth and reaching out to her, and her breath hitches in her throat, and she knows that if she were in a movie this’d be Foreshadowing, or the Calm Before the Storm, but then she starts laughing and laughing because she doesn’t know what else to do with herself except start screaming and she can’t do that, she has to make him believe it’s a game or he’s going to lose it and then they’re done. Anyway it’s almost funny. For the first time all week, he looks just like everybody else.