Zombies: The Recent Dead

by Paula Guran

  “How dependent you are,” Zora said, “on men.”

  As Freida stepped onto the veranda, the old man in the wheelchair cringed and moaned. “Hush, child,” Freida said. She pulled a nurse’s cap from her pocket and tugged it on over her chestnut hair.

  “Don’t let her take me!” the old man howled. “She’ll make me a Zombie! She will! A Zombie!”

  “Oh, pish,” Freida said. She raised one bare foot and used it to push the wheelchair forward a foot or so, revealing a sensible pair of white shoes on the flagstones beneath. These she stepped into as she wheeled the chair around. “Here is your bocor, Miss Hurston. What use have I for a Zombie’s cold hands? Au revoir, Miss Hurston. Zora. I hope you find much to write about in my country . . . however you limit your experiences.”

  Zora stood at the foot of the steps, watched her wheel the old man away over the uneven flagstones.

  “Erzulie,” Zora said.

  The woman stopped. Without turning, she asked, “What name did you call me?”

  “I called you a true name, and I’m telling you that if you don’t leave Lucille’s Etienne alone, so the two of them can go to hell in their own way, then I . . . well, then I will forget all about you, and you will never be in my book.”

  Freida pealed with laughter. The old man slumped in his chair. The laughter cut off like a radio, and Freida, suddenly grave, looked down. “They do not last any time, do they?” she murmured. With a forefinger, she poked the back of his head. “Poor pretty things.” With a sigh, she faced Zora, gave her a look of frank appraisal, up and down. Then she shrugged. “You are mad,” she said, “but you are fair.” She backed into the door, shoved it open with her behind, and hauled the dead man in after her.

  The tap-tap was running late as usual, so Zora, restless, started out on foot. As long as the road kept going downhill and the sun stayed over yonder, she reasoned, she was unlikely to get lost. As she walked through the countryside, she sang and picked flowers and worked on her book in the best way she knew to work on a book, in her own head, with no paper and indeed no words, not yet. She enjoyed the caution signs on each curve—“La Route Tue et Blesse,” or, literally, “The Road Kills And Injures.”

  She wondered how it felt, to walk naked along a roadside like Felicia Felix-Mentor. She considered trying the experiment, when she realized that night had fallen. (And where was the tap-tap, and all the other traffic, and why was the road so narrow?) But once shed, her dress, her shift, her shoes would be a terrible armful. The only efficient way to carry clothes, really, was to wear them. So thinking, she plodded, footsore, around a sharp curve and nearly ran into several dozen hooded figures in red, proceeding in the opposite direction. Several carried torches, all carried drums, and one had a large, mean-looking dog on a rope.

  “Who comes?” asked a deep male voice. Zora couldn’t tell which of the hooded figures had spoken, if any.

  “Who wants to know?” she asked.

  The hoods looked at one another. Without speaking, several reached into their robes. One drew a sword. One drew a machete. The one with the dog drew a pistol, then knelt to murmur into the dog’s ear. With one hand he scratched the dog between the shoulder blades, and with the other he gently stroked its head with the moon-gleaming barrel of the pistol. Zora could hear the thump and rustle of the dog’s tail wagging in the leaves.

  “Give us the words of passage,” said the voice, presumably the sword-wielder’s, as he was the one who pointed at Zora for emphasis. “Give them to us, woman, or you will die, and we will feast upon you.”

  “She cannot know the words,” said a woman’s voice, “unless she too has spoken with the dead. Let us eat her.”

  Suddenly, as well as she knew anything on the round old world, Zora knew exactly what the words of passage were. Felicia Felix-Mentor had given them to her. Mi haut, mi bas. Half high, half low. She could say them now. But she would not say them. She would believe in Zombies, a little, and in Erzulie, perhaps, a little more. But she would not believe in the Sect Rouge, in blood-oathed societies of men. She walked forward again, of her own free will, and the red-robed figures stood motionless as she passed among them. The dog whimpered. She walked down the hill, hearing nothing behind but a growing chorus of frogs. Around the next bend she saw the distant lights of Port-au-Prince and, much nearer, a tap-tap idling in front of a store. Zora laughed and hung her hat on a caution sign. Between her and the bus, the moonlit road was flecked with tiny frogs, distinguished from bits of gravel and bark only by their leaping, their errands of life. Ah bo bo! She called in her soul to come and see.

  About the Author

  Andy Duncan’s stories have won two World Fantasy Awards and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award and been nominated multiple times for the Hugo, Nebula, Stoker and Shirley Jackson awards. His latest novelettes are a supernatural romance set in Western Maryland, The Night Cache (PS Publishing, 2009); and “The Dragaman’s Bride,” a revisionist Appalachian folktale that concludes The Dragon Book, edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois (Ace, 2009). His first collection is the award-winning Beluthahatchie and Other Stories (Golden Gryphon Press, 2000); a second, The Pottawatomie Giant and Other Stories, is forthcoming from PS Publishing. Recently published is a revised and expanded second edition of his non-fiction guidebook Alabama Curiosities (Globe Pequot, 2009). A graduate of the Clarion West writing workshop in Seattle, Duncan has taught at both the Clarion and Clarion West workshops; he also teaches interdisciplinary literary seminars on twenty-first-century science fiction and fantasy in the Honors College of the University of Alabama. He is a juror for the 2010 Philip K. Dick Award. Having taught undergraduates for seventeen years, Duncan lives in Frostburg, Maryland, where he is an assistant professor of English at Frostburg State University.

  Story Notes

  Andy Duncan was fascinated with Zora Neale Hurston’s description and photo of the “zombie” Felicia Felix-Mentor in her 1937 book, Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica. He based his fictional Zora on the real author but has noted the story is more about the U.S. pop cultural idea of the zombie from the 1930s and 40s than about Haitian zombies.

  [You’ll find another story in this volume, Neil Gaiman’s Bitter Grounds, that references Hurston, too.]

  As for the zombie herself, Louis P. Mars, M.D., a professor of psychiatry at the School of Medicine and of Social Psychology at the Institute of Ethnology, Port-au-Prince, in the Republic of Haiti, a Member of the Societe Medico-Psychologique of Paris, and a Haitian Public Health Officer wrote in Man: A Record of Anthropological Science (Vol. XLV, no. 22. pp. 38-40. March-April, 1945):

  At first [the Mentors, who believed the woman to be a long-dead family member] had based their belief on the fact that the woman was lame. Before the real Felicia Felix Mentor died, she was lame as a result of a fracture of her left leg.

  Her physical appearance and lameness in addition to the deep belief in the country that sometimes the dead come back to life, induced the Mentors to believe that the strange woman was indeed their late sister Felicia.

  I made an X-ray examination of both legs at the Central Hospital in Port-au-Prince. There was no evidence of a fracture and the lameness could therefore be attributed to muscular weakness due to undernourishment. This may be said to be the cause since, after she had a normal diet for two months, the lameness disappeared. She also gained weight.

  This is evidently a case of schizophrenia and gives us an idea of how cases of similar nature are likely to arouse mass hysteria . . . The case under discussion was reported by Miss Zora Neale Hurston in her book Tell My Horse, in which she stated emphatically ‘I know that there are Zombis in Haiti. People have been called back from the dead.’ This American writer stated specifically that she came back from Haiti with no doubt in regard to popular belief of the Zombi pseudo-science.

  Miss Hurston herself, unfortunately, did not go beyond the mass hysteria to verify her information, nor in any way attempt to make a scientific explanation of t
he case . . .

  Dr. Mars doesn’t mention it, but Hurston also offered a “scientific explanation” herself: “If science ever gets to the bottom of voodoo in Haiti and Africa, it will be found that some important medical secrets, still unknown to medical science, give it its power, rather than gestures of ceremony.” [Hurston, Zora Neale. Dust Tracks on a Road. 2nd Ed. (1942: Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984, p. 205)]

  Obsequy

  David J. Schow

  Doug Walcott’s need for a change of perspective seemed simple: Haul ass out of Triple Pines, pronto. Start the next chapter of my life. Before somebody else makes the decision for you, in spades.

  He grimly considered the shovel in his grasp, clotted with mulchy grave dirt. Spades, right. It was the moment Doug knew he could not go on digging up dead people, and it was only his first day on the job. Once he had been a teacher, with a teacher’s penchant for seeing structure and symbols in everything. Fuck all that, he thought. Time to get out. Time to bail, now.

  “I’ve got to go,” he said, almost mumbling, his conviction still tentative.

  Jacky Tynan had stepped down from his scoop-loader and ambled over, doffing his helmet and giving his brow a mop. Jacky was a simple, basically honest guy; a spear carrier in the lives of others with more personal color. Content with burgers and beer, satellite TV and dreams of a someday-girlfriend, Jacky was happy in Triple Pines.

  “Yo, it’s Douglas, right?” Jacky said. Everybody had been introduced shortly after sunrise. “What up?” He peeled his work gloves and rubbed his hands compulsively until tiny black sweatballs of grime dropped away like scattered grains of pepper.

  “I’ve got to go,” Doug repeated. “I think I just quit. I’ve got to tell Coggins I’m done. I’ve got to get out of here.”

  “Graves and stuff getting to ya, huh?” said Jacky. “You should give it another day, at least. It ain’t so bad.”

  Doug did not meet Jacky’s gaze. His evaluation of the younger man harshened, more in reaction against the locals, the natives, the people who fit into a white trash haven such as Triple Pines. They would hear the word “cemetery” and conclude “huge downer.” They would wax prosaic about this job being perverse, therefore unhealthy. To them, digging up long-deceased residents would be that sick stuff. They all acted and reacted strictly according to the playbook of cliché. Their retinue of perception was so predictable that it was almost comically dull. Jacky’s tone suggested that he was one of those people with an almost canine empathy to discord; he could smell when something had gone south.

  Doug fought to frame some sort of answer. It was not the funereal atmosphere. The stone monuments, the graves, the loam were all exceptionally peaceful. Doug felt no connection to the dearly departed here . . . with one exception, and one was sufficient.

  “It’s not the work,” Doug said. “It’s me. I’m overdue to leave this place. The town, not the cemetery. And the money doesn’t matter to me any more.”

  Jacky made a face as though he had whiffed a fart. “You don’t want the money, man? Hell, this shit is easier than workin’ the paper mill or doin’ stamper time at the plant, dude.” The Triple Pines aluminum plant had vanished into Chapter Eleven a decade ago, yet locals still talked about it as if it were still a functioning concern.

  The people in Triple Pines never saw what was right in front of them. Or they refused to acknowledge anything strange. That was the reason Doug had to eject. He had to jump before he became one of them.

  One of them . . .

  A week ago, Doug had not been nearly so philosophical. Less than a week from now, and he would question his own sanity.

  Craignotti, the job foreman, had seen Jacky and Doug not working-that is to say, not excavating-and already he was humping his trucker bulk over the hilltop to yell at them. Doug felt the urge to just pitch his tools and helmet and run, but his rational side admitted that there were protocols to be followed and channels to be taken. He would finish out his single day, then do some drinking with his workmates, then try to decide whether he could handle one more day. He was supposed to be a responsible adult, and responsible adults adhered to protocol and channels as a way of reinforcing the gentle myth of civilization.

  Whoa, dude, piss on all that, Jacky might say. Just run. But Jacky rarely wrestled with such complexities. Doug turned to meet Craignotti with the fatalism of a man who has to process a large pile of tax paperwork.

  A week ago, things had been different. Less than a week from now, these exhumations would collide with every one of them, in ways they could not possibly predict.

  Frank Craignotti was one of those guys who loved their beer, Doug had observed. The man had a relationship with his Pilsner glass, and rituals to limn his interaction with it. Since Doug had started haunting Callahan’s, he had seen Craignotti in there every night—same stool at the end of the bar, same three pitchers of tap beer, which he emptied down his neck in about an hour-and-a-half. Word was that Craignotti had been a long-haul big-rig driver for a major nationwide chain of discount stores, until the company pushed him to the sidelines on account of his disability. He had stepped down from the cab of his sixteen-wheeler on a winding mountain road outside of Triple Pines (for reasons never explained; probably to relieve himself among Nature’s bounty) and had been sideswiped by a car that never saw him standing there in the rain. Presently he walked with a metal cane because after his surgery one leg had come up shorter than the other. There were vague noises of lawsuits and settlements. That had all happened before Doug wound up inside Callahan’s as a regular, and so it maintained the tenuous validity of small-town gossip. It was as good a story as any.

  Callahan’s presented a nondescript face to the main street of Triple Pines, its stature noted solely by a blue neon sign that said BAR filling up most of a window whose sill probably had not been dusted since 1972. There was a roadhouse fifteen miles to the north, technically “out of town,” but its weak diversions were not worth the effort. Callahan’s flavor was mostly clover-colored Irish horse apples designed to appeal to all the usual expectations. Sutter, the current owner and the barman on most weeknights, had bought the place when the original founders had wised up and gotten the hell out of Triple Pines. Sutter was easy to make up a story about. To Doug he looked like a career criminal on the run who had found his perfect hide in Triple Pines. The scar bisecting his lower lip had probably come from a knife fight. His skin was like mushrooms in the fridge the day before you decide to throw them out. His eyes were set back in his skull, socketed deep in bruise-colored shadow.

  Nobody in Triple Pines really knew anything bona fide about anybody else, Doug reflected.

  Doug’s first time into the bar as a drinker was his first willful act after quitting his teaching job at the junior high school that Triple Pines shared with three other communities. All pupils were bussed in from rural route pickups. A year previously, he had effortlessly scored an emergency credential and touched down as a replacement instructor for History and Geography, though he took no interest in politics unless they were safely in the past. It was a rote gig that mostly required him to ramrod disinterested kids through memorizing data that they forgot as soon as they puked it up on the next test. He had witnessed firsthand how the area, the towns, and the school system worked to crush initiative, abort insight, and nip talent. The model for the Triple Pines secondary educational system seemed to come from some early 1940s playbook, with no imperative to change anything. The kids here were all white and mostly poor to poverty level, disinterested and leavened to dullness. Helmets for the football team always superseded funds for updated texts. It was the usual, spirit-deflating story. Doug spent the term trying to kick against this corpse, hoping to provoke life signs. Past the semester break, he was just hanging on for the wage. Then, right as summer vacation loomed, Shiela Morgan had deposited herself in the teacher’s lounge for a conference.

  Doug had looked up from his newspaper. The local rag was called the Pine Grove Messeng
er (after the adjacent community). It came out three times weekly and was exactly four pages long. Today was Victoria Day in Canada. This week’s Vocabulary Building Block was “ameliorate.”

  “Sheila,” he said, acknowledging her, not really wanting to. She was one of the many hold-backs in his classes. Hell, many of Triple Pines’ junior high schoolers already drove their own cars to battle against the citadel of learning.

  “Don’t call me that,” Sheila said. “My name’s Brittany.”

  Doug regarded her over the top of the paper. They were alone in the room. “Really.”

  “Totally,” she said. “I can have my name legally changed. I looked it up. I’m gonna do it, too. I don’t care what anybody says.”

  Pause, for bitter fulfillment: One of his charges had actually looked something up.

  Further pause, for dismay: Sheila had presented herself to him wearing a shiny vinyl mini as tight as a surgeon’s glove, big-heeled boots that laced to the knee, and a leopard top with some kind of boa-like fringe framing her breasts. There was a scatter of pimples between her collarbones. She had ratty black hair and too much eye kohl. Big lipstick that had tinted her teeth pink. She resembled a hillbilly’s concept of a New York streetwalker, and she was all of fourteen-years-old.

  Mara Corday, Doug thought. She looks like a Goth-slut version of Mara Corday. I am a dead man.

  Chorus girl and pin-up turned B-movie femme fatale, Mara Corday had decorated some drive-in low-budgeters of the late 1950s. Tarantula. The Giant Claw. The Black Scorpion. She had been a Playboy Playmate and familiar of Clint Eastwood. Sultry and sex-kittenish, she had signed her first studio contract while still a teenager. She, too, had changed her name.

  Sheila wanted to be looked at, and Doug avoided looking. At least her presentation was a relief from the third-hand, Sears & Roebuck interpretation of banger and skatepunk styles that prevailed among most of Triple Pines other adolescents. In that tilted moment, Doug realized what he disliked about the dunnage of rap and hip-hop: all those super-badasses looked like they were dressed in gigantic baby clothes. Sheila’s ass was broader than the last time he had not-looked. Her thighs were chubbing. The trade-off was bigger tits. Doug’s heartbeat began to accelerate.