Zombies: The Recent Dead

by Paula Guran

  Minuscule press zombie anthologies were numerous and the quality of most was, at best, mediocre. Three exceptions were Kim Paffenroth’s The World is Dead and History Is Dead, as well as The Best of All Flesh, a compilation of stories from the three earlier Books of Flesh by editor James Lowder. All three were somewhat uneven, but still stood above their competition.

  Bentley Little published an “old school zombie” horror novel featuring mindless, walking dead zombies: The Walking (2002). Tim Waggoner and Brain Keene overcame a primary problem of developing novels based on zombies—mindless, empty husks, with no personality make for poor protagonists or antagonists—and introduced intelligent zombies in their novels.

  In Keene’s post-apocalyptic world of The Rising [Delirium, limited editions: 2003; Leisure, mass market paperback (2004)] and its sequel, City of the Dead, a government-experiment-run-amok results in an opening to The Void which allows demons through who then possess the dead. The resultant zombies are swift, crafty, and prone to cracking morbid jokes.

  Nekropolis, which was underpublished in 2004 (by Five Star, which caters to libraries with no trade distribution) was, to quote its author “as much a mystery as . . . fantasy and horror (with a little science fiction, and romance sprinkled in here and there).” In the underground city of Nekropolis, the supernatural inhabitants include zombies. Most are enslaved and have no free will, but the hard-boiled, wisecracking private eye protagonist is an unmastered zombie. (A new and expanded version of Nekropolis was published in 2009 in the UK and Australia, and 2010 in the U.S, by angry Robot Books.)

  The “modern zombie” literary icon was inspired by film, and film continued to feed the growing frenzy. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead was remade and released in 2004 as was the horror comedy Shaun of the Dead—both an hommage and a parody. Romero himself returned with the start of a new zombie trilogy, Land of the Dead in 2005 followed by Diary of the Dead (2007). The Resident Evil franchise was revived in 2007 as was 28 Days Later, the sequel to Boyle’s 2002 hit. Romero’s latest zombie movie, Survival of the Dead, is, at this writing, playing in select cities.

  Meanwhile, literary zombiemania—both good and bad—continued to grow, proliferating in fiction of all lengths, not only for adults but for teens and younger readers, cross-pollinating with romance, science fiction, mystery, steampunk, and other fantasy subgenres.

  By the summer of 2010, zombies—in any and all media—were so prodigious that merely keeping track would be a full time occupation.

  So, here we (and zombies) are now, more than a decade into the twenty-first century. As for zombie literature:

  The “traditional zombie” is still with us—as social commentary; as a metaphor for individual emptiness; in some new configuration or with some innovative twist; or simply an aspect of the eternal story of good vs. evil.

  We have Romero zombies—in general, a condemnation of late-twentieth-century values (or lack thereof) that project a bleak apocalyptic ending (probably deserved) for humankind—and post-Romero zombies that still focus on humanity’s flaws, but offer hope of our survival/redemption, usually through some embodiment of community.

  There are also variations on both Romero and post-Romero zombies: zombies that are not mindless or do not shamble or have feelings or vary in some way from the “codified” zombie—but remain acceptable to modern zombie purists.

  There are zombie stories that use the idea of the archetype in original ways that may cause aforementioned zombie purists to foam at the mouth and vent their displeasure that they are not “real zombies”—if they take the time away from their interactive games to read.

  As much as I’d like to forget them, we also have zombie stories and books (print and electronic) that are mostly meaningless exercises in gross-out value. You won’t find examples here.

  We also have zombies that offer comic relief—both tribute and parody to the trope—while still addressing societal concerns. As Simon Pegg (who co-wrote and starred in Shaun of the Dead, 2004) said in an interview: “The great thing about zombies is that they’re ever-changing—because they’re basically us. They can be employed to represent any facet of our development.” [Russell, Mike. “Interview with Shaun of the Dead’s Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright,” CulturePulp: Writings and Comics by Mike Russell. September 23, 2004.]

  And combinations and variations and evolutions of all of the above. And more.

  They Keep Coming Back . . . and Coming Back . . .

  By now it’s pretty clear that the modern zombie mythos has a nasty habit of auto-cannibalizing itself to puke up new generations of dead, deader, and deadest—with the British being the first to port the phenomenon to commercial television in Dead Set (2008), which seems eerily like what might have transpired if Romero’s Dawn quartet had never left the TV station seen in the beginning of the film. Nothing succeeds like excess—where the concept of a “zombie TV show” was played for laughs in the original Book of the Dead (in Brian Hodge’s “Dead Giveaway”), now it has become assimilated. Some say zombies are the new vampires. And the new zombies? No doubt there: To quote the original Dawn again, they’re us. Can a Zombie Channel be far behind?

  Like the hardiest viruses, the zombie subgenre has metastasized from trickle to torrent, and like the best phenomena, it has earned its right to historical documentation, starting with the fiction presented in this volume. All the stories included were published in this first decade (2000 through 2009) of what has become (so far) the Zombie Century—some of it influential, some of it overlooked, all of it worthy of your perusal and debate.

  Even the dead crave entertainment.

  —Paula Guran

  (with further thanks to David J. Schow)

  June 2010

  Addendum: Following the author’s biography at the end of each story, you’ll find comments by the editor. Ignore them, enjoy them, hate them, debate them—just don’t peruse them before you read the story!

  Twisted

  Kevin Veale

  We were driving past Kalamazoo towards the edge of the desert when the withdrawal began to set in. I remember feeling light-headed for moments before phantom weevils scuttled down my spine. Caustic burblings oozed through my gut. Dogwood, my Minister for Lateral Problem-Solving, looked askance at me under his dust-encrusted ski-goggles.

  “We can’t stop again, man.”

  He left it at that, aware I understood the situation. The Minister had insisted on liberating a convertible and driving it with the top down across broken plains that required goggles to shield the eyes. Our holy mission necessitated a certain vibe, he’d argued, and felt this justified grit in the teeth and a car with a dying battery. Besides, it was all right for him: I’d been seeking gastro-intestinal regularity by varying the elements of my drug intake, producing gut-locked stony constipation on one side, and fluid Lovecraftian bowel-horrors on the other.

  Our rationing was forcing me towards Accidental Soiling, and the Minister jouncing us at high speed across the dusty hills towards the yellowing bowl of Lake Michigan didn’t help.

  Dogwood elbowed me then—distracting me from a passing cramp—and pointed out to a ditch ahead of us. It was surrounded by clouds of flies over corpses, like the foaming head on some sun-warmed simmering flesh-beer.

  Not a good place to stop, no.

  Dogwood pawed one-handed at one of our satchels of Supplies as we crested a cracked rise above the sprawling incline of the desert bowl: “I need amyl nitrite. Popper. Just the one. Keep me focused.”

  “Our resolve must be strong, Minister,” I said, thrusting forward a heroic chin.

  “Screw resolve! Gimme!”

  I understood the battery situation, and the Minister understood the drug situation. Then again, he’d also insisted on calling me “Horse,” since he’d learned we intended to cross the desert, and did nothing but giggle when I demanded explanations. I pulled the bag out of his reach as our car picked up speed and caught sight of movement behind us in the wing-mirror. A zombie clambered
out of the flesh-beer like a whale breaching in a thick sea of meat and tried to follow us down the slope. I winced and shook myself—truly, this was a bad scene. I then settled back into my seat just in time for the Minister to guide our descent into an old drier, half-sunk in crusted Michigan mud, the impact smashing us briefly airborne.

  “You did that on purpose!” I cried stridently.

  “An amyl would help me drive.”

  I remember bickering as the corpse behind us fell away in the dust, following our movement since it couldn’t smell us. Dogwood eventually had his amyl, I made vile assertions about his mother, and peace was restored.

  I remember that our mission happened the same year as the infamous Presidential debate between Ozzy Osbourne and Tommy Lee, or would have done if either of them had turned up. Perhaps nobody told them, but it had been a great party nonetheless.

  Our essential problem was that our home town of Bad Axe was not a key pharmacopeia to greater Michigan, and as such the supply of drugs available to we survivors was becoming thin. The Minister and I had realized this and begun to spread the word.

  It had been a clear morning when we saw Smiley Fletcher staggering down the street, haggard and horrified through the pains of withdrawal. When some of the ubiquitous zombies turned toward him in one movement and began to close in, it had all became clear. The Minister crash-tackled Smiley to the ground and held him down while I squirted wood glue—nice and toxic—into a supermarket fruit-bag, hands thick and nerveless with my own drug song. I handed it to Dogwood, who covered Smiley’s face and roared, “You reckless bastard!” as Smiley sucked down the fumes and went limp.

  I remember waving vaguely—I was deep in a Green Shrieker spiral, beatific, wise and spiritually well-hung as Christ on a stump—and declaiming, “Forgive him, Minister, he knows not what he do. Does . . . ? Whatever.”

  The Minister had ignored me, but we each took an end of the man and hustled him away from the zombies activated by his sobriety. I took the time to waft glue fumes around to further mask the scent, and we got him to safety. There is, however, a central problem with the Emergency Glue, or Emergency Drugs as a wider class: it is very difficult to interrogate someone high as a kite.

  So we’d given up.

  Indeed. Ours is an interesting society.

  In the days that followed, the scope of the problem became clear. Drugs, however communal, were running low in Bad Axe. All but the cheapest, nastiest grunge was gone, and it is a truly sad state of affairs when a liberated society dependant on illicit pharmaceuticals for its very survival isn’t having fun. So the Minister and I had scrounged up our supplies along with what anyone else could be persuaded to part with, taking it upon ourselves to quest forth for the common good.

  Dogwood was along as Minister for Lateral Problem-Solving due to his greater experience in escaping lock-up situations. The man kept a spare Zippo in one boot for the express purpose of starting distraction fires, and his inclusion seemed a good idea at the time. I, sterner of vision and focus, was the noble leader.

  As we careened down Lake Michigan I remember noting that the Minister’s horrible hat was still on his greasy head, despite my demands he throw it away. A graying and cracked nacho cowboy hat, serrated at the rim with flaked chips, which the Minister had sprayed with lacquer weeks before as a preservative. The bell of the hat, originally filled with plastic petrochemical cheese, was crusted with dead flies and cigarette ash beneath layers of road dust.

  It was an undying affront to gods and men alike. How could he possibly not know the hideousness of the lamentable hat? Perhaps it had been only to spite me, and had I not mentioned my Hate for the thing it would have slipped the Minister’s mind and been forgotten. And yet here we were.

  I refused to fill our journey with the baboon squeals and high gibbering which would follow a defense of the Hat, so bore its company in silence, hoping it would shake itself apart as Dogwood drove.

  Our immediate mission was but part of a larger path that I had been traveling at the time, Minister Dogwood at my side. We were used to each other, and this helped explain what I was doing stuck in a convertible beside a man wearing a scrofulous nacho hat and filthy ski-goggles. We plummeted on bad suspension towards the damp flats of Lake Michigan, with its treacherous patches of sucking mud and sundered machine hulks like the rising rusted fists of days gone by.

  Night found us on the far side of Lake Michigan in a scrubby wooded area, dying trees around a fire that was objectively dangerous in the dry conditions. As the Minister had said, “Screw it, it’s cold.”

  And it was cold, night in this new pupating desert. Over-irrigation had salted the earth, which had been survivable till the Feds drained our water-table and routed it to wealthier drought-stricken parts of our fair feral nation. Once they had, the salts settled out and nothing new would grow, leaving us with a savage new landform on our doorstep, waiting to be born.

  I had always wondered what it had been like for the Feds when the dead rose. All those DEA guys figuring out that their stockpiles of confiscated drugs could be the key to survival. You’d have straight-laced preppy swine taking precise, measured doses of whatever they had nearby to stave off the hungry dead. Which would have worked great, right until Cookie Monster lunged for them from the dark foot-well of their desk, shrieking in unhallowed tongues.

  That’s the thing, you see. The levels of drugs required for safety aren’t the kinds of demons you can dance with and expect to get away unscathed. They’re going to ride you, scar you, write their initials in your skin . . . and occasionally one is going to climb into your skull, grab the wheel and take you for a ride.

  The Minister, myself, and those like us have enough experience to respect the demons and know that expecting to keep control is folly, leading only to Bad Craziness. Roll with the punches, embrace the demons and surrender.

  The Suits? How they’d have handled it? I wish I could have seen.

  Had a friend called Shanks once whose theory was that the zombies tracked brain activity, and so drugs messed you up enough that they couldn’t find you.

  Then again, this is from a guy who became so monstrously drunk with the technician of his local black-market Augmentation chop-shop that he wound up with a Mister Stun implant where a Mister Stud implant should go, the poor bastard. Heard he found a girl who likes that recently, though. Calls him “Tickler.”

  But that’s beside the point.

  What you need will not play nice, will not play fair, but it means you can sleep without being surrounded by groaning fiends come morning. That was how they got you. Sooner or later you have to sleep. The central benefit of our lifestyle was that when I saw the fetid corpse of my first crush reaching out to tear off my face, I could be practically certain it wasn’t real. It made for an interesting transition period, but after a while the wandering dead fell away into background irrelevance, like parking wardens and homeless people before the world changed.

  Such peace was not always two-way. I remember that our evening’s ration carried the Minister away on a tide of energy and impulse-control problems. We were still clad in our road clothes, the Minister in the Lamentable Hat and a blue Hawaiian shirt decorated in dirty playing cards, with unclean jeans and army boots. Dust and silt ground into his face except for patches left by the goggles, like some demented reverse-raccoon with mania shining in bright eyes. He’d found three or so zombies lurking nearby our fire-pit, and was gleefully diving and swooping around the lumbering beasts, seeking opportunities to tie their shoelaces together and watch them shuffle and stumble about. I can’t recall what I wore myself, just that it was cold so I sought my sleeping-bag early.

  In retrospect this was probably for the best. Soon after that, I worked through the lag you get with decent mescaline and suddenly everything mattered less. I was still aware of the Minister gallumphing around in his untied army boots, but was rapidly distracted by drifts of red, juicy butterflies hanging from tree branches like ripe fruit. What were t
hese things, I remember thinking? Thick, fleshy wings, like ham steaks, flaps of foreskin or perhaps thickly sliced tomato, with no bodies to speak of. In a resonant conundrum, perhaps they were all of these at the same time. This needed more thought, I decided.

  They shivered delicately with every muffled roar or clatter Dogwood produced, the motion echoing in my nervous system like they were under my skin. I understood instantly that his noise offended them, and terror that they might flee thrilled through me. I was considering how best to calm the Minister—couldn’t he see how he frightened these poor things?—when a succession of sharp popping cracks, each one electricity flaring down my skull and out my limbs, filled the air and startled the hamforeskintomatoflies. Then someone screamed.

  I was already on my feet before I consciously thought, Christ, what’s the Minister doing now? And found myself heading towards the source of the noise. I located Dogwood, stripped to the waist but still wearing the Hat, wrestling with a dark woman in combat fatigues. Fallen zombies littered the ground around them, all shot in the head, but more silhouettes were grumbling towards us through the trees.

  “Glue, Horse!” the Minister roared.

  I hiccupped and ran back to the camp on uneven feet as bruised flesh-petals fell in slow flurries, the delicate crimson creatures in the trees coming apart from the stressful vibrations humming all around us. The wood-glue leapt into the plastic bag like an oddly warm, fat voluptuous slug, making me squeal.

  How had this happened, I wondered? Confusing beauty swirled into malevolent slugs and screams in the night, leaving me bewildered and undone.

  The Minister was hustling the woman towards me through the dry and dying trees in a near headlock, one arm twisted behind her back. I held the gruesome pulsating slug-bag to her face, prompting muffled screams and sharp movements as she tried to get away.