Land of the Dead

by Robert Swartwood

  Norman did his best to ignore the light glinting off the blade, did his best to stare into Philip’s black eyes.

  “That part you mentioned before?” Philip pointed the broadsword back at Norman’s face. “I guess it’s time we start.”

  38

  The night had come on hard and fast, the darkness deep. Only a little moonlight shone through the opening between the trees. The generator had been switched off hours ago, and now the only sounds were the slight susurrations of the wind and insects.

  Conrad sat on the cabin steps. His face pinched, his fist to his mouth, he was doing everything he could to force tears. None came. None ever came, and even though he knew this, even though he understood it was impossible, he still tried crying. It was the only thing he could do now, the only way he could prove that he truly loved and missed his wife and son.

  The door opened behind him. He did not turn to see who it was, and only listened to the soft footsteps pad across the porch.

  Gabriel sat down beside him.

  “Eric was just talking in his sleep,” the zombie said. He sat hunched forward, staring out at the darkness. “He was having a nightmare.”

  Conrad said nothing.

  “You know that boy is incredibly smart. He can do just about anything. But the boy’s plagued by nightmares. Almost every night he’s tossing and turning, mumbling in his sleep. Eric refused to discuss what his dreams are about with Albert. Albert said every time they tried discussing it, Eric shook his head and closed his eyes. And just now, I had to rouse him out of his sleep. I had to hold him like I was his father and tell him everything was okay.”

  Conrad realized he was playing with his wedding band, turning it around and around on his finger. “What is it like?”

  “What is what like?”

  “Dreaming.”

  Gabriel was quiet for a moment.

  “To be truthful,” the zombie said, “I don’t know. I’m so used to dreaming I can’t think of a way to describe it.”

  “I need to leave here.”

  “You will soon.”

  “Not soon. I need to leave now.”

  “Conrad, that’s just not possible. I know how you feel, but you can’t—”

  “You don’t know how I feel,” he said, and immediately realized just how paradoxical that statement truly was.

  “Actually,” Gabriel said, “I do.”

  Conrad looked up at him.

  “You asked before whether it was true I came from Heaven. It is true. I left there when I was twelve years old. I had been studying to become a scholar. And my parents ... they were captured by the Government, along with a dozen other adults in their Scavenging Party. Every month they would travel to Troy to meet with living sympathizers who provided supplies, and ... well, someone sold them out. The next thing I knew the Elders had received a message from the Government telling them that the Scavenging Party had been captured but no harm would come to them if Heaven was willing to give up a living child in return. Apparently they wanted it for research purposes and nothing more, and they even promised no harm would come to that child.”

  When Gabriel fell silent, Conrad asked, “So what did you do?”

  “I disobeyed a direct order from the Elders. They had already announced to everyone in Heaven that they would not bargain with the Government. I had a brother and a sister. There were children of the other parents who had been captured, almost a dozen of them. I couldn’t bear to see them cry anymore. So one night I managed to sneak out. I made it the entire way to Tartarus City without being detected. I got in contact with someone from the Government. I explained who I was and what I was offering. They didn’t believe me at first, but I managed to prove myself. I told them I would offer myself and my services, but that all the adults had to be returned and given safe passage home.”

  “And you actually trusted them to keep their word?”

  In the faint moonlight, Gabriel’s face had become very pale. His eyes glistened.

  “I was young and naïve. I didn’t know any better. But fortunately for me—and for the adults—the Government did keep its word. They were too excited to receive a living child to work with. They picked me up, my parents and the rest of the Scavenging Party were released, and that was it. I was only able to communicate once with Heaven, to make sure they had safely arrived. I spoke to my parents for less than a minute. I don’t even remember what all was said. Mostly we were crying.”

  “What did the Government do to you?”

  “They did mostly what they’ve done to Eric. Run tests, trying to get a better understanding of the living. It was around that time Living Intelligence was officially formed. When Albert took over the Olympus facility, he requested I work with him. Next year would have been thirty years together.”

  “What did you do for him?”

  “Mostly I taught him and the rest of the Trackers about the living. If they had questions, problems, issues regarding the living, they were to bring them to me and it was my job to answer them. Also ... I helped recruit.”

  Conrad heard the hesitancy in the zombie’s voice and looked at him.

  Staring out into the darkness, refusing to meet Conrad’s eyes, Gabriel said, “Before, when you said Albert blamed it all on you, that you were the pebble that caused this Ripple Effect, he was wrong. For the past ten years I’ve been free to look into any Hunter’s file, any Hunter across the world. This was my only way to determine whether a Hunter would be a good fit in becoming a Tracker. When I came across yours, I found that it was locked. Eight years ago, when Eric started progressing in his computer skills, I had him hack into your file and open it.”

  There was a silence.

  “When I saw your file, about your past, my initial plan was to bring you in and try to manipulate you. It was clear they’d blocked out all your memories of your mother and childhood. I wanted to bring them back.”

  Conrad realized he was shaking. Staring down at his hands, he said, “Why?”

  “I don’t even know anymore. Maybe because I thought you might be able to help me.”

  “How would I help you?”

  “Again, I don’t know. But it didn’t matter anyway. Apparently you were one of their best. They couldn’t afford to lose you. Albert said he would keep your name aside, but it was clear the two of us would never meet.”

  Shaking his head again, Gabriel said, “I was just so sick of it. I was sick of being used by the Government for their own ends. When I’d first come to them, I had been under the pathetic notion that there was still a chance for the living and the dead to coexist. I quickly realized that was a false dream. It would never happen.”

  Gabriel took another deep breath.

  “One time I actually tried killing myself. This was maybe fifteen years ago. I was just tired, exhausted by the whole thing. I would lie in bed some days and refuse to get up, because I saw no point in it. Even thinking about getting up would exhaust me. It was then Albert had me treated for depression. He had me take some pills. They helped. I got better. Eventually I stopped taking the pills. I managed to control my depression.”

  “You never again thought about killing yourself?”

  “No, I did. Almost all the time. But I always pushed those thoughts out of my head. I always remembered this.” Gabriel’s right hand moved from his lap to his chest. “No matter how much I’m disgusted with the world, no matter how much I want to die, my heart keeps beating. It’s doing everything it can to keep me alive. Every time I thought about killing myself, I would lie in bed and place my hand on my chest like this, and just feel my heart beating. And ... it was like being a part of a miracle, the miracle of one heartbeat to the next. From the moment I was born—even before—my heart was working. It knew nothing else. That’s its purpose, its only purpose, and knowing that gives me a kind of comfort.”

  Conrad watched the zombie from the corner of his eye, the zombie sitting there beside him with his eyes closed. Without thinking he raised his hand to his ch
est. He placed it over the spot where his own heart lay dead and docile.

  Gabriel opened his eyes, and at once Conrad took his hand away.

  “Also there’s the dishonored dead.”

  The insects continued their dead symphony, the wind continued its rustling of branches and treetops. Somewhere in the dark, an owl hooted.

  “Remember during our third session, those selections I read to you? The third was going to be a poem by Thomas Gray called ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.’ It’s about a man walking through a cemetery in a remote village during sunset.”

  “What’s a cemetery?”

  “A cemetery was where the living kept their dead. It was a way to ... remember them. There would be places in every town where the dead were buried. And sometimes the living went to visit the dead. Now we dishonor the dead by using their salvageable body parts and killing their memory.”

  Gabriel sighed.

  “In the poem, the narrator walks around a cemetery. He looks down at all these grave markers, at the names, and thinks about the people buried there. He thinks about human mortality. About how everything must die, and that when humans die there is no difference between great men and common men. In life all of them have potential for greatness, even evil, but not every one of them uses it. Some are raised to be great. Some fight for it. Some, like the people buried in that churchyard, live all their lives in a small town and never get the chance to show who they are. And now that they are dead, they will soon be forgotten.”

  Gabriel shook his head.

  “But for me it goes deeper. I look at the world now and I think about literature, art, religion, history, and how they have all been destroyed. And I think about all those men and women that produced something, or those men and women who maybe never had a chance to produce anything at all. And now they’re gone. Their memories have been wiped out.”

  Gabriel closed his eyes and placed a hand to his forehead.

  “That was the reason I initially trained to become a scholar. To save those damaged texts. To ... to try to bring honor to all of those forgotten people, both good and bad. Nobody should be forgotten, Conrad. Nobody should be anonymous.”

  Conrad had gone back to playing with his wedding band. There was just enough moonlight that it glimmered on his finger.

  “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking,” he said quietly, “and I’m starting to remember her, my mother. She wasn’t a bad person. She knew what she was getting into when she married my father. She loved him for who he was, but not for his job.

  “She was obviously a zombie sympathizer. She managed to find us a book. She never told me where it came from, just that she had wanted a book for children, and this was a good one. Every night before bed she would read it to me. When I learned to read, I would read it to her. It became our secret. I knew the law. I knew that books were illegal. But I actually liked the book. It was the only one I’d ever read. No matter how many times we read it, I always wanted to read it again.”

  “Do you remember what it was?”

  “I only remember it was called The Princess and the Goblin. I remember the first time asking my mother what a goblin was. She said it was kind of like a zombie. And then she asked me what I thought of zombies. She asked me if I thought they were disgusting and evil. When I said yes, she said that zombies thought the same about us.”

  Conrad looked at the zombie sitting beside him. “They expired her, didn’t they?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know when?”

  “It was right after you attempted to turn. Your father had it done.”

  “That’s what it said in the file?”

  Gabriel nodded. “It also said your father put you in a special psychiatric hospital. The doctors there ... they helped you forget.”

  “Lately, I’ve been remembering pieces of my past.”

  “What brought it on?”

  “The zombie I hesitated in killing had quoted word for word what my mother had said.”

  Gabriel smiled. “I’d once told Lewis about your mother and he absolutely loved that quote. He said it whenever he got the chance.” The zombie paused, looked at him closely. “Do you remember trying to turn?”

  Still staring down at his ring, still turning it around and around, Conrad nodded. “I remember hearing this ... sound. And I wanted to find it. I wanted to know what it was. So I went out looking. Every day I would search the trees behind our house for hours. We lived out in the country because my dad thought it would be the best environment for me to be raised in, to someday become a great Hunter. My mom never asked me where I went. She ... she never tried to force me into turning. I think she knew it had to be my decision.”

  “And you found it,” Gabriel said, “didn’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “How close did you come?”

  “I had just finished digging it up. I had it in my hands—I could see it glowing, I could feel the energy inside it—when my dad came running at me and knocked the rock away. Apparently he’d been watching the entire time. He’d been hoping I would make the right decision.”

  “And did you? Did you make the right decision?”

  Conrad didn’t answer. He just sat there, staring down at the ring, turning it around and around on his finger, and thought about that day. He thought about how his father had appeared from nowhere, had shouted at him, grabbed him, and had pulled him away while the ten-year-old Conrad shouted and cried and pleaded and tried everything he could to fight his way back to what had been buried in the ground.

  39

  In the morning they started out early. Gabriel led them through the woods, carrying the GPS device he’d used the day before. They walked for about an hour. Both zombies had their rifles strapped over their shoulders, Eric also carrying the laptop in a bag at his side.

  They came out of the trees into a clearing. It was a pasture, and in the pasture were some dead cows grazing, their heads bent to the grass. A few looked up to regard the four of them as they walked by.

  “Eric,” Gabriel said as he led them down the pasture, toward a farmhouse and barn, “do you recognize any of this?”

  Eric was silent, keeping his head down as he walked.

  When they reached the farmhouse, Gabriel motioned for them to stay. He turned toward the house and approached the steps. He only made it up two of them before the door opened and a man stepped out, presumably the farmer, looking first at Conrad, then at James and Eric, then finally at Gabriel.

  “You here for the car?”

  Gabriel nodded.

  The farmer gave them another once-over, shrugged, and said, “Follow me.”

  He took them to the barn. It was dark inside, only a modicum of light cutting through the slats, illuminating the floating dust and the shadow of a sedan parked in a stall in the back.

  “Keys are already inside.” The farmer, an old stoop-shouldered man with a withered face, used his fingers to wipe some dust off the hood. “Should run just fine for you. Ran the engine a little every week, changed its oil almost every six months, and that’s about it. Albert never told me to do nothing else to it.”

  Opening the driver’s door, Gabriel said, “It’s fine. Thank you.” He bent in and came back out with the keys, walked back to the trunk and opened it.

  When the farmer stepped over to see what was inside, he whistled and said, “Oh my. I never knew all that was in there. Albert really prepared you for the worst, didn’t he?”

  Gabriel had pulled aside the false bottom to reveal a small arsenal beneath, a dozen assault rifles and pistols and what looked like to Conrad when he stepped forward to peek inside a scattering of plastic explosives. Before his eyes could adjust enough to the dark, though, Gabriel had reached forward, extracted a mobile phone, and slammed the trunk shut. He handed the keys to Conrad.

  “You’re going to have to drive.”

  It was then Conrad noticed that almost all of the car’s windows were tinted. The only window not completely
tinted was the front windshield.

  Gabriel went over to the farmer and shook his hand. He said thank you again, then leaned forward, whispered something into the farmer’s ear. The farmer listened for a moment, his withered face expressionless, before a kind of shocked understanding came to his eyes. His mouth half-open, he slowly regarded Eric.

  “Why, it really is you, isn’t it?” the farmer said. “I wish Lydia was still here to see you. She’d love to see what you’ve become.” He shuffled a step forward but then paused when Eric took a step back. “Don’t you recognize me, Eric? Don’t you know who I am?”

  There was a heavy silence.

  Gabriel stepped forward and placed a hand on the farmer’s shoulder. “Thank you again, but we have to go.”

  The farmer said, “Tell me you’re happy, Eric. Can you at least tell me that?”

  Eric, his face tense, shook his head slowly, looking at Gabriel for help.

  “Come on,” Gabriel said to them, and turned the farmer around, spoke to him once more.

  Conrad watched them as James and Eric got into the back of the sedan, watched Gabriel whispering to the farmer and the farmer nodding and whispering back. When Gabriel shook the farmer’s hand one last time and turned to get in the car, Conrad asked what he had said.

  “Remember how Eric was manufactured?” Gabriel tilted his head back toward the farmer. “That’s the father that raised him.”

  The farmer stood off to the side, watching them, his face pinched with grief. He stood there and was quiet as Gabriel squeezed into the back of the sedan. He stood there and only shook his head slowly as Conrad got into the driver’s seat.

  “Good luck,” the farmer called, “good luck,” and he raised his hand and held it up as the sedan’s engine started; he began waving it as the sedan rolled away, out of the barn, and into the light.