Zombies: The Recent Dead

by Paula Guran

  She didn’t answer me straightaway. “Danny’s gone to sort the batteries out,” I explained, assuming she was worried about the power being out; then I looked at her more closely, and realized it was something more than that. She was shaking from head to toe—quite literally shaking, gooseflesh standing out on her bare skin.

  I was ashamed of myself. It had been a long fifteen minutes or so since we’d first had an inkling of something floating out there in the water: we’d all been through the mill a bit, emotionally speaking. No wonder Claire was still a bit freaked. I put my arms around her, but she didn’t stop shivering. “What’s the matter?” I muttered into her soft-smelling hair. “No need to worry now. It’s all right.”

  She put her hands on my biceps and held me slightly away from her. “No it’s not, Will,” she whispered urgently. “It’s not all right—you don’t know the half of it.”

  “What is it?” I could tell it was bad from the intensity of her response. “Why are you shaking like that?”

  A huge reflexive tremor shook her all over. “It’s down there.” She indicated the short companionway with a glance. “It’s . . . it’s cold. Don’t you feel it?”

  Now she mentioned it, I did. It was pleasantly cool in the wheelhouse, but standing at the top of the companionway was like being in front of an open walk-in fridge. “It’s water-level down there,” I explained, less than sure of my own explanation. “The water’s always a few degrees colder than the ambient air temperature.”

  “It’s not that.” Claire shook her head vehemently, lips pursed. I had the feeling she knew very well what she wanted to say, but couldn’t quite bring herself to say it: it was like watching someone with a stutter trying to spit it out. “It’s . . . ” she glanced back down the steps, “it’s him.” She hissed the last word, lips almost touching my ear.

  “What do you mean?” I was whispering too.

  Again she glanced down below; shook her head. “Not here,” she said, and practically manhandled me backwards out of the wheelhouse: I had to brace my foot against the gutters to avoid going overboard. From aft came the clashing sounds of metal on metal, and of Jack and Danny arguing down the engine hatch. Claire and I went and knelt down on the foredeck, face-on to each other, knees touching.

  “Should we be out here?” I wanted to know. “I don’t think we ought to leave Andy on his own.”

  Claire took a deep breath. “Listen,” she said, “that’s the trouble. I’ve been down there with him just now, and there’s something not right.”

  And here we were with the radio down, I thought. Brilliant. “How do you mean? Is he injured? Has he gone into shock or something?”

  “Worse than that,” she said, and my heart sank. “Didn’t you feel anything down there?”

  I looked at her, trying to work out what she was getting at. “Feel anything? Like what? I don’t know: I was still a bit hyper from getting him out of the water and all that, you know?”

  Claire frowned. “You were sat the other side of the table from him, weren’t you?” I nodded. “So you couldn’t—” A seagull swooped low over the boat sounding its harsh staccato alarm cry, a flash in the darkness over our heads. Claire jumped; if I hadn’t been holding on to her she’d have probably gone over the side. She held on to me for a moment or two, then tried to tell it another way. “Listen. When you and Danny went up Jack was fussing round him like an old mother hen. He got him to take his clothes off and put dry ones on, towel himself off and what have you. I picked up the wet clothes; I was going to put them in one of the lockers, but I didn’t like to—the touch of them . . . ” She paused, controlled herself and carried on. “They were coming apart, Will; they were rotting away.”

  I didn’t know what to say. “We were grabbing on to his clothes when we were trying to fish him out. I think we tore a few of the seams . . . ”

  “I didn’t say torn,” she said; “they were rotten, Will. Like they’d been in the water . . . I don’t know. A long time.”

  “How long?” The voice behind me made me flinch. Danny had crept up on me again. I wished people would stop doing that; it had been a long night already, and I was getting edgy. Claire looked up. I could see the whites of her wide round eyes.

  “The fabric was . . . disintegrating,” she said. “A long time.” Danny nodded. He seemed to be about to say something, but Claire went on:

  “And that’s not all. Jack got me to look him over, see if he was injured at all.” Again the full-body reflex tremble. “It was like touching dead meat: he didn’t have any warmth in him whatsoever. What his core temperature would have been . . . I was shivering just touching him, but he wasn’t.” She glanced between the two of us, to make sure we registered her emphasis. “He wasn’t shivering, the way you would be if you’d been hauled out of the water in the middle of the night. He never shivered, not once. He was just sitting on the bench, looking at us . . . ” She started to shake again, and I tightened the grip of my arm around her. She squeezed it gratefully, and continued:

  “Then Jack followed you up into the cabin thing, and I was left down there with him.” She clutched at both her shoulders, arms crossed tightly across her chest. “He hadn’t put the dry clothes on or anything; he was just looking around, as if—as if he’d never seen anything quite like that before, you know? As if there was something he couldn’t get his head around; like when you’re in a dream, and the details are just, I don’t know, out . . . wrong somehow. And everything’s slowed down, and your reactions are like, you’re trying to move, but everything’s going like this—” She mimicked slow-motion, moving her head laboriously from side to side.

  Yes, I thought, that was it; Claire had put her finger on it. I could see it now, the way he’d looked with a stupefied sort of incomprehension from one to the other of us as we’d gathered round him down below; the way he’d gazed at the lanterns hanging from the bulkheads, at the pictures of mermaids on the ceiling up above. Beside us on the deck Danny was nodding; he’d recognized it too.

  “So, “Claire resumed: “I said to him, come on, better get these dry clothes on, or you’ll catch your death. And he just; he looked round at me, and he nodded, but it was as if he couldn’t really work out what I was asking him to do. I thought he might’ve taken a knock to the head or something, maybe he was still concussed, so I said, here, I’ll help you, and I went over to him and sort of got his arms up above his head, you know, like when you’re trying to put a jumper on a little kid?

  “I was trying not to touch him too much, ’cos—” she looked at me, and I nodded yeah, go on—“and I got the dry jumper and slipped it over his head, and then . . . ” She started shivering again, her voice suddenly tremulous. “And then I felt the back of his head, and there was all his hair, you know, all long and wet, and underneath it—” the words came out all in a rush “—underneath it there was this big dent in the back of his head, it was huge, like the size of my fist, and it was like the whole back of his head had been caved in, and you could feel the edges of the bones grinding together.” She wrung at my arm, as if to make my own bones grind. “And I snatched my hand away, and I thought there’d be blood, but there wasn’t any blood, and he just kept on looking at me, like he didn’t understand . . . ” She was crying by now, and I hugged her, as much to stop myself from shaking as to stop her.

  Danny was still nodding his head. “I was trying to tell Jack down the engine hatch just now,” he said slowly, and if he’d been drunk or stoned before, he sounded dead straight now. Scared out of his wits, but straight. “I heard something about a lad going missing off one of the Bangor boats—I couldn’t think of the name, though. It might have been the Wanderley.” He stopped.

  “When did you hear that?” It didn’t sound like my voice; it sounded like the voice of someone much younger and much, much more nervous.

  “ . . . Two or three days back,” said Danny miserably, and none of us said anything for a minute or two there on the foredeck. Eventually I broke the silence.<
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  “He can’t . . . that can’t be him. No way.”

  “You didn’t touch his skin,” said Claire stubbornly. “I did. He’s been out the water fifteen minutes now, and he still hasn’t got any body heat. That’s not natural. Even in the middle of winter that wouldn’t be natural. It’s summer, a hot summer night. And he’s freezing.”

  “You saw him,” was all Danny said to me. “You saw what he was like.”

  “So he’s still cold—so he’s a bit out of it still—so what?” I was only resisting for fear of what might follow, because even to admit the possibility of what Claire and Danny were suggesting would be to kiss goodbye to anything resembling sanity, or safety. “He can’t get warm. It doesn’t make him a fucking zombie.” Well, the word was out now.

  Danny was shaking his head. “You don’t last three days in the water, Will. If he went off that boat Saturday night, he’d ’ve been dead for Sunday. Sunday at the latest—and even then he still wouldn’t ’ve been lying round waiting for us to come by. The coast guards would’ve been crawling all over this stretch, and the choppers from RAF Valley: they’d have got him if he’d been floating on top of the water, man . . . what is it?”

  My mouth must have been open; it’s a bad habit I have. I was thinking about back before in the wheelhouse, when Claire and I had been necking, and she’d asked me what was that thing going beep. The fish-finder, I’d said; and now I remembered it, that large echo we’d all thought was a seal. By the time we asked Jack, it was already up on the surface; but before that—I swallowed. Before that, it had been rising, slowly, from off the sea-bed. That’s what corpses do, after a day or so. The gases balance out the dead weight, and they rise . . .

  “What?” We were all extremely nervous now, Danny as much as anyone. “Spit it out, for Christ’s sake.”

  “This is the Llys Helig stretch, isn’t it?” My voice was steady, just. “We were talking about it, just before. What was it your dad used to say about this stretch?”

  Danny was nodding before I’d finished. Clearly he’d been thinking along the same lines. “It was all along the banks here.” He gestured out across the waves. “All the old fishermen; they said the sea was twitchy from here out to Puffin Island.” Twitchy; that had been it. Strange word to use. “They said . . . they said it would spit out its drowned.” He glanced back towards the wheelhouse unhappily.

  “Yeah,” I said, looking straight at Claire. I was going to tell her she was right, if I could find the bottle to come out with it, but in the end I just nodded. She didn’t say anything; but she put a hand to my face and I held it, very tight.

  “What are we gonna do—” began Danny, but then Jack shouted from down the engine hatch, “Oy! Knobber! Hand down here? Jesus . . . ”

  “Okay,” I said, deciding I’d be the grown-up on this boat. “Look, whatever we do, we’ve got to get moving again. You go and get those diesels started up, Danny.”

  He was half-way over to the hatch before he remembered who was supposed to be playing captain. “What about you two? What are you going to do?”

  “We’re going to take care of the other thing,” I said. In all my years on boats I’d never been seasick; but I came close to it then, thinking about what the two of us would have to do next.

  Claire and I talked it over for five minutes or so. It wasn’t that we disagreed on the crux of it—I think part of her had sensed the truth about Andy almost from the start, and I was all the way convinced by now—but she wasn’t happy with what I proposed doing about it.

  “It’s murder,” she said, and I said, “How can it be? He’s dead already.” Saying it like that was awful; as bad as touching him would have been, knowing what we knew now, as bad as the thought that what you’d touch was . . . not alive, not in any way that you could recognize. But something in her balked at doing the necessary thing. I tried to argue my case, to convince her, but the trouble was, what I wanted to do had nothing with reason or logic. It was as instinctive as treading in something and wiping your foot clean; as brushing a fly off your food.

  But she knew that as well, every bit as much as I did. More so, because she’d been down in the cabin with him, had laid hands on his bare skin and felt . . . what she’d felt. I think those scruples we were both wrestling with were actually something more like nostalgia, a longing for the last few remnants of the everyday shape of things. Maybe in situations like that, you’ll hang on to anything that says, this isn’t happening, everything is perfectly normal, you can’t seriously be going to do this . . .

  But we were going to do it, because it had to be done. We couldn’t have taken that back to harbor with us—we couldn’t have walked him off the boat, taken him back to his dad in Conwy and said, look, here he is, here’s your lad Andy back safe and sound. That would have been a hundred times crueler than what we were about to do now. So yes, I felt bad; but it was the lesser of two evils. I was completely sure of that, just as sure as I was that come the daylight, I would probably feel like the shittiest, most cowardly assassin in all creation. But it was hours yet till the daylight, and below decks we had a dead man who didn’t know he was dead yet. So I went into the wheelhouse, stood at the top of the companionway and called “Andy?” The first time it got swallowed up in a sort of gag reflex; I gulped, and called out again, “Andy?”

  No answer from below decks; just the slow pinging of the fish-finder. This was what I’d been afraid of. Gingerly, I grabbed the woodwork of the companionway hatch, and lowered myself into the space below decks. I was ready to spring back if anything happened; what, I didn’t know. But I knew that I didn’t want to do this; didn’t want to look now into the lantern light and see—

  He was sitting just as we’d left him. The jumper Claire had tried to put on him was ruched up around his chest; he had one arm still caught in the arm-hole, and I think it was that—something as banal and stupid as that—that finally convinced me, if I’d really needed convincing. A child could have poked his arm through that sleeve—would have done it, out of pure reflex; but Andy hadn’t.

  I stepped down, till there was just the table between us. “Andy?” I said again, and he looked up. I was already making to look away, but I couldn’t help it, our eyes met. His eyes were so black, so empty; how could I have looked into them and thought him alive?

  I’d meant to say something else, but what came out was, “You all right?” It was crazy enough on the face of it, but what would have been normal? He nodded; I could see him nodding, as I stared down at my feet. “Cold,” he said; that was all. Then, out of nowhere, I found myself saying, “Come on: let’s get your arm through there.”

  Considering what I had in mind, seemed like the height of hypocrisy; but I think it was a kinder instinct than I gave myself credit for at the time. Steeling myself, still not looking him straight in the face, I reached across and lifted the folding table up. I stretched out the wool of the jumper with one hand and slipped the other into the sleeve. Feeling around inside, my fingers touched his: he was making no attempt to reach through and hold on, which was probably just as well. Cold? More than cold; it was as if he’d never been warm, as if he’d lain on that ocean bed for as long as the sea had lain on the land. Fighting to keep my guts down, I dragged his arm through and let go the jumper. Released, his arm fell back down by his side; dead weight.

  Doing that helped me with what came next, with the physical side of it at least. “Right,” I said, in a ghastly pretence at practicality; “let’s get you up on deck, shall we?” He looked up blankly. I had to look, had to make sure he was going to do it. Those eyes: I couldn’t afford to look into them for too long. God knows what I would have seen in there; or what he might have seen in mine, perhaps. “Come on,” I said, turned part-way away from him. “They’re waiting for you up on deck.”

  In the end I had to help him to his feet. He was like a machine running down, almost; I hate to think what would have happened if we’d actually tried to take him back to dry land. Even through the
layer of wool I could feel a dreadful pulpiness everywhere that wasn’t bone. Again the gag came in my throat; I clamped my jaw shut and took him under one arm, and he came up unresisting, balanced precariously in his squelching shoes. A little puddle of rank seawater had collected around his feet. The smell—I was close enough to get the smell now, but I don’t want to talk about it. I dream about it, sometimes, on bad sweating nights in the hot midsummer.

  I motioned him ahead. Obediently, he stepped forward, and as he passed me I saw the horrible indentation in the back of his skull. The hair which had covered it before had flattened now, and the concave dent was all too clearly visible. No one could have taken a wound like that and survived. Just before I looked away, the bile rising in my throat, I thought I saw something in there; something white and wriggling. I came very near to losing it entirely in that moment.

  If he’d needed help getting up the companionway, I would’ve had to have called Danny through—there was no way I could have touched him, not after seeing that wound in the back of his head. As it was, he put one foot on the steps, then, after what seemed ages, the next, and trudged up into the wheelhouse. I tried to focus on the normal things: on the feel of the wooden rail as I stepped up behind him into the wheelhouse; on the brass plaque that said Katie Mae, there beside the wheel; on the ping of the fish-finder in the silence. As Andy paused, silhouetted against the dim starlight of outside, waiting for me to tell him what to do next, I took several deep breaths. “Now?” I said, and waited for Claire’s voice.

  “Now,” she said, a small voice from out of the darkness, and I ran forwards with both arms straight out in front of me. Andy was in the act of turning round, and I just glimpsed his eyes; there was a greenish phosphorescence to them in the dark, and Claire said later that I screamed out loud as my hands made contact with his shoulder-blades.

  He was standing in the wheelhouse doorway. Ahead of him was just the narrow stretch of deck that linked fore and aft, and then the low side of the boat. Claire was crouching beneath the level of the wheelhouse door; on my signal she’d straightened up on to her hands and knees as I came up on Andy from behind. My push sent him careening forwards; he flipped straight over Claire’s upthrust back and out over the side of the boat. There was a solid, crunching impact as he hit the water; Claire was up off her knees and into my arms as the cold spray drenched the pair of us.