Jews vs Zombies

by Rena Rossner

  ‘Burn it,’ said K. ‘The grass is spring grass, the fire won’t spread.’

  ‘Waste the petrol?’ returned Ash.

  ‘Jacob will be back soon,’ said K. ‘The others will be back soon. They’ll bring more.’

  ‘And if they don’t?’ Ash replied, adding hastily, lest he be misunderstood, ‘Don’t bring more petrol?’ In case anybody thought he meant don’t come back.

  ‘We can’t just leave it here,’ said Daniel. ‘I’ll get an axe, take its head off.’

  ‘There’s another!’ called Elisheva, pointing. Everybody looked. Not one but two Zayinim were shuffling round the margin of the lake. Further off were half a dozen more, also approaching. With a nice sense of the incipiency of the drama, the breeze suddenly woke up. It began shaking the willows, which moved their branches sluggishly as if waving the people away. There were, of course, no birds.

  ‘Back inside,’ said Daniel, aiming his bolt-gun downwards. ‘I’ll try and take out the rest of this one’s brains.’

  The others started back towards the camp. Ash started off first, and straightaway, with a booming yell, he fell. The long grass swallowed him. ‘There’s one here!’ he hollered.

  Daniel reacted quickest, leaping nimbly over the supine zombie at his feet and hurrying to Ash. There was a jarring bang as he discharged his weapon, and the next thing Jonie saw was Ash being helped back to his feet, blood all over his old head.

  ‘They’re in the grass,’ mother cried. ‘Scores of them! They’ve been creeping up!’

  ‘Back to the compound,’ bawled Daniel. He turned, and shot again at the ground. ‘They’re everywhere.’

  Jonie felt her heart go dabbity-dabbity in her chest. She set off running for the compound, but at once the whole world swung about the axis of her right ankle, and the earth smacked her hard in the face. It took a moment to comprehend what had happened. Grabbed. Its undead hand around her ankle. She twisted in its grasp, aimed her weapon and fired it – missed. Its ghastly bifurcated head turned to her, and its mouth opened. She saw then that its teeth were not teeth at all, but fingernails.

  ‘It returns,’ the creatures hissed at her, in weirdly accented English. ‘Eternally it returns. And – ’

  Her second shot did not miss.

  The zombie flopped back, its whole face horrible compressed and distorted where the bolt had punched its way in, at the mid-point of its nose. But it did not let go its grip. She put the gun down to free both hands, and tried to prise the fingers off. The creature was still moaning, or trying to make words, or something – but its fingers were set like a stone bracelet around her leg. It twitched and tried to rise again, and Jonie felt a nauseous sense of panic coil in her stomach. The creature’s free hand grabbed her left wrist. With her right hand she scrabbled behind her for the bolt gun – but with only one hand she could hardly reload it. Shuffling her position, she tried to bring her feet to bear. To kick out. The thing’s mouth was still going. ‘It,’ it hissed. ‘Always,’ it hissed. ‘Returns,’ it hissed.

  Drums sounded, or maybe it was an earthquake. Sunlight flashed, as if her soul were leaving her body. But she was free, and she hauled herself backwards. The light flashed again. The drums were the hoof beats of a horse, and her father was on the horse. The flash was his sabre, cutting through the two arms of the Zayin.

  ‘Go,’ he bellowed.

  She got up and began running, still wearing the clamped hands of the creature, one on her wrist, one by her elbow. The only thought in her head now was to get back to the gateway. When the force caught her and lifted her from behind she did cry out, terrified that another one of the beasts had her. But it was her father, hoisting her up into the saddle behind him, as they galloped over the undulating ground.

  4

  For several hours they were all too busy in defence for thought. Jacob’s party had not found any petrol, but the assault was on such a scale as to necessitate using their flame-throwers anyway. Ash cut away the two still twitching hands from Jonie, and burnt them in the fireplace. Then she went and took her place in the tower with most of the others, and picked her shots, and tried not to think about how horrible her experience had been.

  By dusk the assault had been beaten back. The scale of it was alarmingly unprecedented: dozens of zombies, coordinating their attack. ‘Not so stupid,’ said Esther. ‘I’ve always said so.’

  ‘One spoke to me,’ Jonie said, but nobody seemed to hear, and she didn’t press the point. Because, once she’d said it, it sounded stupid. How could they speak?

  ‘They followed us back,’ said Jacob. ‘They tracked us. We rode day and night, and day again, and they followed the whole way.’ How tired he looked! ‘And more will be along soon. We have to pack up. We must go.’

  He had departed with three men and three women. The women were all right, but only two of the men returned. This fact only occurred to Jonie after sunset, when everybody gathered in the yard to wash and snatch food under the spotlight. ‘Where’s Beuys?’ she asked.

  Nobody answered this question. A particular answer would have been worse than no answer. It wasn’t as if they needed to ask, actually.

  Daniel was sitting on his strange shooting stick, smoking. So clearly Jacob had found some supplies, including tobacco. But no petrol. ‘It’s getting harder and harder to forage round here,’ said Charley, one of the women in the party. ‘We’re going to have to move.’

  Feeling bitter and angry and weary and depressed Jonie went back to her room. As if calling the back of a truck with tarpaulin for a ceiling a ‘room’ made it one! Her mouth was full of ashes. It was pointless. They should give up. What was the point in going on?

  She slept for a while, and woke up from a nightmare, and slept again. In her dream she heard hoof beats again, but it was not her father’s horses; the horses themselves were undead, chasing her down. She was running through long grass, and the undead horses were just behind her. She had time to think: they must have tried out the serum on animals as well, there must be zombie animals as well, when she woke sharply.

  ‘Jonie?’

  It was her father’s voice. The hoof beats were him knocking on the slats at the end of the truck. He always knocked, politely, before disturbing her in her room.

  She put her head out. The sky directly above was pre-dawn pale, mother-of-pearl, and a broccoli-bunch of rainclouds was squatting by the horizons. ‘Dad,’ she said, and jumped down.

  Jacob was not a great one for hugs, but he clapped hands to her shoulders and kissed her quickly on her forehead. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘It was such chaos yesterday, I did not have the chance properly to greet you.’

  She looked around: everybody was busy. They were packing up. ‘Do we have somewhere actually to go?’ she asked. Her voice was still croaky with sleep.

  ‘We cannot stay here,’ replied Jacob, nodding slowly. ‘Come. We foraged some coffee.’

  ‘What a treat!’ she said; and then felt immediately sorry for looking forward to the coffee when Beuys was dead.

  ‘I will take a cup with you, my daughter,’ said Jacob, with characteristic pompousness, ‘and then we must both help with loading the trucks.’ He was looking old, Jonie thought. Everyone around her was old. Except Beuys, and he wouldn’t get any older..

  Somebody had already folded away the tables, and stacked them ready for loading. But between them, Jonie and her father pulled out the legs and set one up again. Jacob poured two cups of coffee, and stirred in sugar, and they sat at the table opposite one another and drank.

  Behind her father, away to the east, the rim of the world was starting to glow red. The sun returning. The sun always returned. But then, so did the night. That was the nature of return.

  ‘I’ve been reading one of Daniel’s books,’ she told him, unsure what else to say. Obviously it was impossible to talk about Beuys.

  ‘Oh yes?’

  ‘I think it has the answer,’ she told him, and as soon as the words came out she felt their infinite
foolishness.

  ‘The answer to what?’ her father asked, with ingenuous seriousness.

  She couldn’t back away now. ‘To all this. To us, and to – them.’

  Jacob raised one of his impressively horticultural eyebrows. ‘There’s an answer?’

  ‘We have to go beyond us and them,’ she said, uncertain where the words were coming from, or where they were going. ‘It’s always the same thing, and that’s a kind of slavery. The struggle to turn the wheel is a kind of slavery. We have to break the wheel. Or – no, wait. Unpack it, unroll it. Squirl it out into a moebius strip. Or …’ She took refuge in the mug, and drained the last of the coffee. Some of the sugar had formed a crusty sludge at the bottom, and she dipped her pinkie finger into this. ‘When we fight the Zayinim, we become Zayinim. The difference between us and them is that we can choose not to be Zayinim. But that means going beyond the fight. Making peace of some kind.’

  The eyebrow was still up. Behind Jacob the sky was starting to acquire the same golden-brown sweetness as she knew the sugar possessed. The storm clouds were away to the north, and – who knows? Maybe they would stay there. The light that suffused the heavens was also in her bloodstream now.

  ‘We can’t go on like this,’ she said.

  The eyebrow came down. She had said something to which her father could relate. ‘We cannot,’ he agreed.

  They were silent for a while, and the sky grew more gloriously honeyed in its clarity.

  ‘Daughter,’ said Jacob, putting the cup down. ‘I have rebuked Esther.’

  ‘It wasn’t her fault,’ Jonie said, automatically.

  ‘She should not have let you out. I have rebuked her, and she assures me she will not be similarly delinquent in the future.’

  ‘Dad!’ Jonie squealed. The sunlight had vanished from inside her. Now she felt only resentment and a kind of dull panic. Stuck inside! Stuck inside for ever.

  He held up his hand. ‘We cannot afford to take risks with you, daughter. You are the future. The only future.’ He meant babies, of course. She hated when he referred to this, although he was never very explicit. She hated the sense of responsibility, not just for her, but for the whole of humanity. ‘Which brings me to my news: we met another tribe.’

  This was huge news. ‘You did?’ A whole new group of people? Some handsome young guy her own age?

  ‘Not a large tribe, and with no… no young people, I’m afraid.’

  This was a disappointment. ‘None at all?’

  ‘I’m sorry. But they said they had heard tell of a larger community, away to the north on the coast. My worry is that we lack the petrol to move the whole camp there. But we must try. The island…’

  The island was Jacob’s long-term plan: to move onto an island large enough to support them, cleanse it of any Zayinim that might be there, and build a New Jerusalem. But there was no point in doing that with only 13-year-old Jonie old enough to bear children, and the only men around capable of impregnating her close family. The goal was to gather together a viable number of different families, including youngsters. That had been the goal for as long as Jonie could remember. With the certainty granted only to the very young, she was convinced it would never come to anything.

  ‘We must look to the future,’ he said.

  Jonie wanted to reply: yet we spend all our time looking to the past! But the sun had risen now, and he was standing up, so she stood up too. They washed the cups together, and folded the table away. ‘The youngest,’ Jacob said, ‘was fifty-nine.’

  ‘The youngest?’

  ‘Of the tribe we met. Seven people – not a viable number. Two women in their seventies, the rest old men. My age, or older. The youngest was a man called Ephraim, and he was fifty-nine.’

  With that he went off to help Daniel and mother with the crane on the back of the biggest truck, to move the fence portions. Jonie went off to help the others, packing trunks, checking the horses were all right. It only occurred to her much later that Jacob might have given her that information because some manner or type or kind of discussion had taken place about wives and husbands. Who else but her as the wife? But the very idea was so ghastly she put it away, behind her, and refused to think of it. There was a needle voice, inside her head, and it went: what’s the alternative, ducky? What’s the alternative, my little brood mare?

  What’s the beyond? Good question.

  They were halfway through packing the fence portions onto the big truck, and had folded down the tower into its lorry-back, when Ash called out that he could see Zayinim in the field.

  It was a horribly vulnerable time for them to attack, but sometimes it happened that way. Daniel, father, mother and K. mounted their horses and rode off as the others doubled their efforts. The sky brightened with early morning, and then darkened again as the rainclouds rolled over. Half an hour after setting off, the rider returned.

  ‘Something off,’ mother told the group. ‘We put a few down, but they’re not attacking.’

  ‘Why not?’ K asked.

  ‘Never mind why not,’ Daniel called. ‘Let’s just get packed up and head out before they change their minds.’

  They finished up the fence sections just as the first rain began to fall. They air chilled and went bluer than before, and big nut-sized raindrops splattered onto the dusty windscreens and dry tarps. Within moments it was a heavy downpour, lines sketching the air all around, hissing hard into the long grass with the sound of somebody frying up food.

  They tied down the last of the cargo, hitched the cart to the back of the smallest lorry, tethered the horses behind the medium truck and set off. Jonie rode in the big truck; mother driving, with Daniel and Esther. They had to wait a minute because the steaming bodies of the passengers misted up the windshield, and they had to run the air-blowers to clear their view. But eventually they were off, driving in first-gear (as always), moving forward at a horse’s walking pace.

  The drove through the grass easily enough, and had an alarming moment going up the slope when the wheels slid intermittently on the new mud. But they crested the top, and if the big truck could do that, the rest would manage.

  It was true, though: the field was full of Zayinim. It was the weirdest thing. Indeed, in all her short life Jonie had never seen anything like it. Two rows of zombies formed a kind of blank-eyed honour guard as they drove down the middle. They made no attempt to attack. They did not move at all, in fact. At one point Daniel climbed into the roof of his cab and put a few down with his rifle, but mother called to him to stop – why antagonise them? And they didn’t seem bothered.

  The clocklike tick and tock of the windscreen wipers.

  Jonie watched. This one tall, hirsute, with too many ears and the arms hanging at his sides so long they reached almost to his ankles. This one had been a woman once, naked, with her skin covered either in scales or perhaps boils, Jonie couldn’t see very clearly. This one stocky, muscles, with fangs like a tiger poking through the skin of his lips. This one black, this one white, this one with a third arm sprouting from a cankerous looking mass on its shoulder, this other long and smooth and genital-less as a doll. All standing, and just watching them as they rolled by.

  ‘Spooky,’ opined Esther.

  The rain stopped. Soon enough the clouds moved away, and the sun came out.

  ‘I’m always struck,’ said mother, as the steering wheel, ‘that the earth must be heavier after a rainfall than it was before. Isn’t that a striking thought?’

  Finally they reached the end of the Zayinim row and passed it, and left the whole grisly crew of them far behind. But the very last individual was the most unsettling of all, for he was dressed in clothes. They cannot have been the clothes in which he had dressed before; for those threads must have long since crumbled to powder. He must have dressed himself – or been dressed. Of all the zombies she had seen, he was the least deformed (unless the deformities were hidden beneath the clothes) – a stack of white hair on his head, and an ageless face. In the sunli
ght his eyes glinted a clear blue, and he looked straight through the window at Jonie with what seemed like intention. But it can’t have been – of course. He almost looked handsome. If he hadn’t been a zayin, he would have been handsome: with his strong nose, and white-blond hair, and primrose eyes. His head turning slowly, so that his gaze could follow her. A dressed zombie? Wearing his smart suit, and gazing forlornly as the squire’s own daughter passed by. I mean, obviously not that. Obviously not. But it was weird.

  ‘Have you ever seen them act like that before?’ Jonie asked Daniel.

  ‘They act weirdly,’ was Daniel’s opinion. ‘Weird is the height and breadth and depth of them.’ To celebrate the fact that they’d gotten away without further mishap he took out a cigarette and lit it. His sigh of contentment was not the sort of noise a human usually made.

  It was hard for her to put the intensity of the creature’s blue gaze out of her head. So she took out the book, the Beyond book, from the inside of her leather jacket, and tried to settle to reading it again. There was an answer in there somewhere, she knew.

  CONTRIBUTORS

  RENA ROSSNER is a graduate of the Writing Seminars program at The Johns Hopkins University, Trinity College Dublin and McGill University. She works as a foreign rights and literary agent at the Deborah Harris Agency in Jerusalem. Her poetry and short fiction has been published in a variety of online and print magazines and journals. Her cookbook, Eating the Bible, was recently published by Skyhorse Publishing.

  OFIR TOUCHE GAFLA was born in 1968 in Israel. He has written five novels (The World of the End, The Cataract in the Mind’s Eye, Behind the Fog, The Day the Music Died and The Book of Disorder) that garnered great acclaim. He won the Geffen and Kugel awards for his first novel and in 2014 won the Creation award for Writers. He has also written numerous short stories which featured in different anthologies and magazines. He teaches creative writing at Sam Spiegel School of Film in Jerusalem, and is currently a visiting professor at the University of Texas in Austin.