Zombies: The Recent Dead

by Paula Guran

  “Stop,” Justine said, but Pearl kept chortling, her mouth frozen into a rectangle of wet white teeth. Underneath her disguise, Pearl was flushed pink and plush and spotless. Justine went around the table and pulled off her gloves. She bent to touch Pearl’s forehead. It was freezing cold. She drew her hand back. “Oh,” she said.

  “Do I have a fever?” said Pearl plaintively.

  “No. Not really.”

  “I feel really bad.” Pearl closed her eyes. “I’m hungry.”

  “Oh, Pearl,” said Justine. “Just eat something.” She went into the kitchen and looked through the shelves. “Look, there’s tons of food.”

  Pearl shook her head until her disguise almost fell off. “That’s why the other girls died. They couldn’t eat food. Something in them ate them up from the inside.” She started to cry. “I know what to do to feel better. I bet they knew too. But I don’t want to do it. I don’t think I can.” This last word she wailed.

  Do . . . what, exactly? Justine didn’t want to ask. Right now, she needed to keep herself stupid, frozen. She knew she was going to find out sooner or later. The later the better. “Don’t cry,” she said. “It’ll be okay. I’m here for you.” She went to Pearl, putting her hands on Pearl’s shoulders and gripping them gently, remembering Nora. “Pearl?” she said.

  Pearl stopped crying. There was a blankness in her eyes, behind the glasses, and Justine was close enough to see it. Pearl’s face shone with tears, but now the tears looked fake, as if they had just appeared there under her eyes without a history, without reason.

  Then Pearl grabbed Justine’s arm with both hands and held it to her mouth.

  She swiftly bit down on Justine’s fleshy forearm without breaking the skin. Justine was afraid to move, to do anything that would bring her nearer to those teeth. Pearl’s head jerked up, Justine’s arm still in her mouth. They looked at each other.

  Pearl spit out Justine’s arm; the suction made a quiet popping sound. “Just kidding,” she said. She leaned back in her chair.

  Justine wiped her arm on her jeans. There was no spit on it. She said, “Where’s Greg?”

  “He’s out.” Pearl put her head down on the table again.

  “Is that the truth?” Justine said carefully.

  She watched Pearl’s head nod. “But,” Pearl said into the table, “he’ll probably come back again. It’s his apartment. Nice furniture, nice cat, comfortable bed . . . ”

  “You are doing Greg.” Justine tried to say these words without making them mean anything.

  “Maybe,” said Pearl. “For the same reason you did it. You wanted to see if you could. Being beautiful is great.” She made a weird noise, a sigh that went from high-pitched to low and back again. “But it’s tiring.”

  Justine moved to touch Pearl on the back of her head, but thought better of it. “You scare me,” she said, and swallowed. “Why don’t we get out of here? We’ll sneak out of town.”

  Pearl lifted her head and smiled.

  “Fuck you, I’m serious.”

  “Why?” said Pearl. “No, wait. That’s a nice idea. I wish we could do that. But I’m past that point.” She lifted her slender hands, and Justine could see that she no longer had lines on her palms.

  Pearl said, “I hate to tell you, but this thing’s going to catch on. I can feel it.”

  They fell silent. Justine wondered where the kitten was.

  Eventually, Justine said, “Do what you need to do.” She was probably not supposed to say that. “Or, I don’t know. Good luck, Pearl.”

  Pearl laughed. Then she stopped short, as if a switch was flicked inside her throat. “Thank you, Justine,” she said very seriously. “You realize we can’t be friends anymore.”

  “Yes,” Justine said. “It makes me sad.”

  “Me too,” said Pearl.

  Sadness rose up inside them like a plasma, plugging up their throats, pushing their eyeballs out, hurting their chests. Justine wanted to hug Pearl and take her out for dinner at their favorite diner, where they would talk all night and draw on the table with the condensation from their sodas. On nights like those, Justine didn’t feel as young as Pearl, exactly, but she felt as if they had the same amount of future stretching out ahead of them. They would both go home before dawn, and the sun would rise on a normal morning of a normal day. No one would have turned beautiful, and that would be just fine.

  “Can you open the window for me?” said Pearl. “It’s hot.”

  It wasn’t, but Justine went and opened the window. Pearl came and stood next to her.

  “Listen,” Pearl said. “It’s my friends. My other friends are coming over.”

  If Justine tried hard enough, she could make out girls’ voices as they shuffled through town in one big laughing group.

  “Maybe I should get going,” she said.

  “Yeah, dude. You might even want to run.”

  “That bad?” Justine said lightly. It was very important to be calm now. It was very important that she keep all her limbs to herself, as if she was on some junky, deadly amusement park ride.

  “I kinda want a hug,” said Pearl, “but I guess that’s a bad idea.” Her disguise began to slip, but this time she didn’t try to stop the slow elevator slide of the glasses down her nose. Justine knew that she had until when the disguise fell off to leave the apartment. Thank you, Pearl, for this mercy, she thought, and then turned and ran.

  At the threshold to the apartment building, Justine stopped and inhaled, letting the icy air clear away the grime from her brain. There were things she needed to be thinking about. Her life had been yanked out of her hands, remolded, and returned to her twisted and unrecognizable. Now she would have to make something out of it. Down the block, some of the streetlights were broken or burned out. The way home was obvious; what might happen to her in those dark spaces in-between was not.

  She knew her final role in this now: she was going to become the latest in a long, proud line of girls who ran. She would be one of those girls who ran to save their mothers, girls who knew how to cobble together weapons out of household items, girls who could kill without crying, girls who grew up to be women with weathered creases down their cheeks and mysterious, hard-earned eyepatches. Women with pasts, women who could admit everything: That was me. I was there. I did that. Justine got tired just thinking about it.

  Pearl’s role would be entirely different. It struck Justine that Pearl would have been applying to colleges soon. It was all so ridiculous. Pearl had really only wanted to get out of town. Now she didn’t need college anymore; a girl like her could and would go everywhere without it.

  Good luck, Pearl, Justine whispered. Good luck, everyone else in the world.

  She prepared herself. Her leg muscles twitched. She would leap over the sidewalk cracks, ignore the white tents and the rustling bushes full of insects and animals and other things. She would not look for Greg. There would be no hesitation in her body.

  In this way, she might make it home.

  Now Justine really could hear the girls coming. Someone muttering, low and sarcastic, followed by a high-pitched giggle. She couldn’t hear shoes. Maybe they weren’t wearing shoes. Oh fuck, where were their shoes?

  Every molecule in her body fired a starting shot, quick and hot and electric, and then she was off.

  About the Author

  Alice Sola Kim is currently a student in the MFA Writing Program at Washington University in St. Louis. Her short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. “Beautiful White Bodies” was honor-listed for the 2009 James Tiptree, Jr. Award.

  Story Notes

  Zombies are an empty canvas, unmolded clay, a blank screen you can project anything onto. You can accept a disease that turns the dead into walking corpses who want only to devour the living? It’s even easier to believe in zombie virus that turns teenage girls into the societal ideal of the desirable female. Oh yeah, you get pr
etty—then you die. You think the consequence of death would stop most people from wanting to “catch” beauty?

  Glorietta

  Gary A. Braunbeck

  “Pining to live, I was constrained to die,

  Here, then, am I . . .

  “Poor soul; he suffered. But, at end, no child

  Ever more gently fell asleep.

  He smiled.

  As if all contraries were reconciled.”

  —Walter de la Mare, “Epilogue”

  The first questions are always the same, as are the responses:

  Mom? Dad? Sis? Do you recognize me this year?

  Do you like the Christmas tree? Remember when I made this decoration in kindergarten? You liked it so much, Dad. Remember? See, I even strung popcorn.

  Yet another Christmas spent both above-ground and alive. You can’t understand why you still bother, why it is you hang on to a pitiful, even pathetic, shred of hope. Some nights, watching the lights as they blink on the tree and the Christmas music fills the empty rooms of the family home, you can almost—almost—pretend that everything is fine, you’re still ten years old and that this year you will stay awake long enough to catch Santa slipping down the chimney, even if there is a banked fire blazing.

  You’ll listen, as always, and hope for something; a sound, a whisper, a spark of recognition in the eyes. Listen and hope, but all the while know what you’ll get.

  Still, even their silence is a sort-of gift, isn’t it? Because at least they remember enough about their previous lives to come home for Christmas. They remember the house. They remember in which rooms they spent the most time during the holidays. They remember where everyone sits around the tree and how to turn off the lights so only the glow of the tree and tinsel and the fire provide illumination. They remember all of this, all three of them.

  They just don’t remember you.

  At age forty-eight you have learned a new, albeit nearly useless, lesson: something about your disease repels the living dead. The first time you realized this, in the days and weeks following the awakenings, was when you had no choice but to leave the house and go in search of food and medicine. There was still power then, and the unlooted grocery stores and pharmacies still had plenty of supplies, much to your astonishment. You were in the pharmacy, gathering up the boxes of hypodermics, the vials of Dilauded, and the steroids you’d need to keep yourself alive and pain-free. You were almost finished when you decided, what the hell, grab some Percocet and Demerol, as well, because sometimes the Dilauded made you far too weak and woozy. Six large shopping bags you had, filled with enough prescription medicine to keep you going for a couple of years, even if you took more than the prescribed dosage. You were on your way out when you walked right into a group of five of the living dead, gathered around your car in the parking lot. You thought, This is it, as they began stumbling toward you, but as soon as the first one was close enough to touch you, something like a shadow crossed its decomposed features and it pulled away its hand, and then simply stood there staring at you. The rest did the same. After what seemed an hour but was in fact only a minute or two, the five of them turned away from you and shambled on.

  You used to keep a gun, but that’s long been thrown out. They want nothing to do with you. You spent months afterward in search of others who were sick—cancer, AIDS, leukemia—something, anything that marked them as persona non grata to the living dead. You did find a few people, but they were so far gone that there was no community made with them; you even helped a few to end their suffering, and then used their guns to pulp their brains so they wouldn’t come back. The eleven-year-old boy with leukemia thanked you as you sank the plunger, sighing into sleep, dressed in his Spider-Man pajamas. You hated shooting him, but you’d promised, and he’d kissed your cheek before falling asleep for the very last time. You sat there, holding his hand until you were certain he was gone. Then did what had to be done.

  You no longer search out the marked ones. Though you know what you do—what you did—was the right thing, it still hurt too much, caused too many sleepless nights, gave you too many bad dreams and sick-making memories. It’s better this way. You keep telling yourself that. Maybe one of these days you’ll even start to believe it in your heart of hearts.

  And then came that first Christmas after Mom, Dad, and Jenny died in the automobile accident when Dad had swerved to avoid hitting a cat that had frozen in fear. You handled all the arrangements, set up viewing hours, sent notices to the paper. The day before the funeral all of the dead opened their eyes, stood up, and began walking around. You did not see the mangled remains of your family until Christmas Eve, when you awoke from a nap to find all three of them sitting in the living room, staring at the spot where the Christmas tree was usually displayed. So you did what a good son and older brother would do under the circumstances; you went to the basement and dug out the tree and all of the decorations and began setting up everything. A few minutes into your project, your family began removing decorations from the boxes and hung everything exactly, precisely where the traditional decorations always went. Your little sister even arranged the Nativity set on the fireplace mantle.

  But not a one of them looked at you with anything like recognition.

  Still, it was better than being alone. It is always better than being alone—another thing you tell yourself constantly in the hopes that you will one day believe it.

  Merry Christmas, everyone, you say to them every year.

  Merry Christmas.

  This year will be no different. Oh, some of the accoutrements will change—you taught yourself how to make turducken, and your recipe is pretty good, if you do say so yourself, and you’ll set four places at the dinner table, knowing that you’ll be the only one eating. The menthol cream you rub under your nose kills most of your family’s stench, so you at least can keep an appetite, providing you don’t look at them for too long, or too often.

  In the years since the awakenings, you have become a good carpenter, a decent-enough electrician, an excellent plumber, an all-around first-rate handyman. The gas-powered generators keep the electricity flowing into the house, though you’re careful not to waste power. You use only the downstairs, having boarded up and sealed the entrance to the upper floors after removing everything you might need or want.

  You stand in the kitchen watching them decorate the tree, arrange the Nativity set, string the popcorn. It’s a Wonderful Life is playing on DVD in high-definition Blu-Ray, Jimmy Stewart’s face filling the 65-inch flat-screen plasma television you took from an electronics store last year. A digital home theater system guarantees exquisite sound. You couldn’t give less of a damn about any of it right now—although you find that you’ve come to appreciate the middle of the movie much more, the part where it’s all dark and hopeless. You recognize that look of terror and grief and helplessness that is a permanent fixture on Stewart’s face in these sequences. You see something like it every time you glance at your reflection in a mirror. You laugh at the heavy-handed melodrama of that thought. It’s an odd sound, hearing your own laughter at Christmas time. It’s almost like the old days, the good days, the happy-enough days.

  They’ve rotted away so much, you wonder how it is they manage to move around at all, but somehow they manage. They drip, they leak, sometimes sections of flesh or a digit falls off, a tooth drops to the floor, yet they keep going. You wonder if there is something still them in there, some small part of their consciousness that remembers who and what they once were, and is trying to recapture some essence of that former life. Do they dream? you wonder.

  So you ask.

  Do you dream?

  Cornbread or rolls?

  Red wine okay with everyone?

  Did I ever mean anything to any of you?

  No need to get all sugary on me, folks, just a simple yes or no.

  I still love you guys, you know that?

  You move into the living room, stepping around the Christmas paraphernalia, and turn off th
e sound on the DVD player. It’s time for Christmas music. This year, you stole a multi-disc player, one that reads MP3s, and you’ve set up the discs so that you will have twenty-four hours of continuous Christmas music. Dad used to love to sit in the kitchen with the lights turned down and listen to Christmas music while he had a beer or two. You’ve got several cases of his favorite beer. One bottle sets open next to his favorite mug. For a moment earlier, he stared at it as a shadow crossed his face, as if he knew this were something he ought to remember. Mug and bottle are still on the table.

  How do you like the new refrigerator? I got it a couple of weeks ago. Moved it all by myself. Damn thing can hold a ton of food. Do you like it, Mom?

  Hey, why do you suppose doctors never use the word consumption anymore? No, now it’s TB. I think consumption’s a fine word, you know?

  I found the old photo albums. They’re right there on the coffee table. Maybe you want to look through them later? That might be fun, don’t you think? All of us flipping through the images, the years, the memories. Been a while since I took a trip down Amnesia Lane. Sound good?

  Sorry, I didn’t quite catch that.

  That’s okay, you can tell me later.

  You turn around and damn near drop the salad bowl because your little sister is standing right there in front of you, just . . . staring.

  Jenny?

  Jenny, is there something you want?

  What is it, Sis?

  Please say . . . something. Grunt. Sigh, snort, anything.

  You close your eyes and swallow back the feelings that are trying to come to the surface. You knew this year would be no different. Christ only knows what Jen wants in here, what she remembers. You just know it’s got nothing to do with you. You step around her and put the salad bowl on the table. Jen does not move. The oven timer sounds: the turducken is ready to go.

  Dinner’s ready!

  You sit. They sit. You eat. They don’t. On the disc, Greg Lake is singing about how he believed in Father Christmas. This is your favorite Christmas song, even though if you think about it, it’s a damned depressing one—but then so is Elvis’s “Blue Christmas,” so why overthink it?