by Paula Guran
“I have something for you, Louis,” George heard himself saying. “Something very important.”
Louis turned his tangled hair and scraggly beard towards George. The chain seductively winked; George locked his eyes with the entwined chains and followed them down to the rough countertop. Such beautiful things human hands made.
Louis’ gasp took George’s attention back to the world around the necklace.
“Is this what I think it is?” Louis asked, reaching tentatively for it. His wrinkled hands shook as they brushed the chain. George did not look down for fear of being entranced again. He did not feel the slightest brush of Louis’ fingernail against his knuckle.
“What do you think it is?” George asked.
Louis turned back to the counter.
“My brother Jean’s necklace,” Louis said. “On the back of this, it should have engrave . . . ” Louis waved his hand about, “J.P. It is there, no?”
George still didn’t look down.
“I imagine so.”
Louis leaned back and laughed.
“Merde. So far away, so damn far away, and that bitch Jacqueline still has talons. Unlucky? Ha,” he spat. “Do you know my story?”
“No,” George said. “I do not.”
The barkeep finally delivered a mug of beer, the dirty amber fluid spilling over the sides and onto the bar top where it would soak into the wood and add to the dank and musky air. Louis took it with a firm grasp and tipped it back. It took only seconds before the mug contained nothing but slick wetness at the bottom.
Louis smacked the mug down. “Buy me another, damn you,” he ordered. George tapped the counter, looked at the barkeep, and nodded.
Stories, George thought, could sometimes be as interesting as something shiny and new. He would indulge Louis, yes, and himself. He handed Louis the necklace.
“Jean was much the better brother,” Louis said. “I think it broke my father’s heart to hear he died in Haiti. My father locked himself in his study for three days. Did not eat, did not drink. And when he came back out, he put his hand on my shoulder, like this—” Louis draped a heavy arm over George and leaned closer. His breath reeked of beer. “—and he tells me, he tells me, ‘Louis, you must go and take over where you brother has left off.’ That is all he tells me. I never see him again.”
Louis pulled back away. “And Katrina, my wife, she is very, very sad to see me go away to this island. But I tell her it is good that I take over the business Jean created. I will make for her a better husband. My brother has left me a good legacy. Hmmm. I did good business. I made them all proud. Proud! And you know what,” Louis said, looking down at the necklace, “it was all great until Jean walked into my office three month later. It was unnatural . . . I’d seen his grave! There were witnesses . . . ”
“Business was good?” George interrupted Louis. “What did you do?”
Louis ran a thumb around the rim of his glass.
“It didn’t cost much. A boat. Provisions. We bought our cargo for guns . . . and necklaces, or whatever: beads and scrap.” He opened a weathered palm. There was nothing in it.
“What cargo?” George interrupted. This was the point. It was why Mama Jaqi had sent him.
“Slaves,” Louis said. “Lots of slaves.”
“Ah, yes,” George said. Mama Jaqi had been a slave.
“I made money,” Louis said. “For the first time I wasn’t some peasant in Provencal. I had a house with gardens.” Louis looked at George. “I did good! I gave money to charity. I was a good citizen. I was a good businessman.”
“I am sure you were,” George said. He felt nothing against Louis. In another life, he would maybe have sympathized with Louis’ arguments. He remembered using some of them once, a long time ago. A brief flash of a memory occurred to him. George had desperately blabbered some of the same things, trying to defend himself to the incensed Mama Jaqi.
George shook away the ghostlike feel of passion to prod Louis’ story along. “But what a shock seeing your brother must have been.” George was here for the story. He wanted it over quickly. Time was getting on, and George had to open the shop tomorrow. He would have to finish Mama Jaqi’s deed soon.
“I thought some horrible trick had been played on me,” Louis said. “I had so many questions about what had happened. And all Jean would do was tell me I had to leave. Leave the business. Leave the island. I refused.” Louis made a motion at the bartender for more beer. “I was still in Haiti when it all began. Toussaint . . . the independence. I lost it all when the blacks ran us all off the island. I slipped away on a small boat to America with nothing. Nothing.” Louis looked at George, and George saw a world of misery swimming in the man’s eyes. “In France, they hear I am dead. I can only think of Katrina remarrying.” He stopped and looked down at George’s arm.
“What is it?” George asked.
Louis reached a finger out and pulled back the cuff of George’s sleeve. Underneath, a faint series of scars marked George’s wrist.
“Jean had those,” Louis said. The barkeep set another mug in front of Louis, and left after George paid for it. “Do me a favor,” Louis said, letting go of George’s sleeve. “One last favor.”
“If I can,” George said.
“Let me do this properly, like a real man. Eh? Would you do that?”
“Yes,” George said.
Louis took his last long gulp from the mug, then stood up.
“I will be out in the alley.”
George watched him stagger out the tavern.
After several minutes George got up and walked out. The distant cold hit him square in the face when he opened the door, and several men around the tables yelled at him to hurry and get out and shut the door.
In the alley by the tavern, George paused. Louis stepped out of the darkness holding a knife in his left hand, swaying slightly in the wind.
Neither of them said anything. They circled each other for a few seconds, then Louis stumbled forward and tried to slash at George’s stomach. George stepped away from the crude attempt and grabbed the Frenchman’s wrist. It was his intent to take the knife away, but Louis slipped and fell onto the stones. He fell on his arm, knocking his own knife away, then cracked his head against the corner of a stone.
Louis didn’t move anymore. He still breathed, though: a slight heaving and the air steaming out from his mouth.
George crouched and put a knee to Louis’ throat. The steaming breath stopped, leaving the air still and quiet. A long minute passed, then Louis opened an eye. He struggled, kicking a small pool of half-melted snow with his tattered boots. George kept his knee in place.
When Louis stopped moving George relaxed, but kept the knee in place for another minute.
The door to the tavern opened, voices carried into the alley. Someone hailed for a cab and the clip-clop of hooves quickened by the tavern. George kept still in the alley’s shadows. When the voices trailed off into the distance George moved again. He checked Louis’ pockets until he found what he wanted: the necklace. He put it back into his own pocket. Then he stood up and walked out of the alley to hail his own cab.
The snow got worse towards the harbor and his shop. The horses pulling the cab snorted and slowed down, and the whole vehicle would shift and slide with wind gusts. George sat looking out at the barren, wintry landscape. It was cold and distant, like his own mechanical feelings. He could hear occasional snatches of the driver whistling Amazing Grace to himself and the horses.
Mama Jaqi had done well. George felt nothing but a compulsion for her bidding. Obey . . . no horror about what he had just done. Just a dry, crusty satisfaction.
When he got out George paid the driver. He took the creaky back steps up. He lit several candles and sat in his study for a while, still fully dressed. Eventually he put his fingers to the candle in front of him and watched the edges turn from white, to red, to brown, and then to a blistered black. The burnt flesh smelled more like incense than cooked flesh.
&n
bsp; He pulled them away.
Tomorrow they would be whole again.
George pulled the silver necklace out with his good hand. He set it on the shelf, next to all the other pieces of flashy trinkets. Another story ended, another decoration on his shelf.
How many more would it take, George wondered, before Mama Jaqi freed him? How many lives did she deem a worthy trade for the long suffering she knew as her life? Or for the horrors of George’s own terrible past? George didn’t know. She’d taken that ability away from him. In this distant reincarnation of himself, George knew that any human, passionate response he could muster would be wrong.
Even his old feelings would have been wrong.
Long after the candles burned out George sat, waiting.
About the Author
Tobias S. Buckell is a Caribbean-born writer who grew up in Grenada, the British Virgin Islands, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. He has published stories in various magazines and anthologies. His three Caribbean SF novels, Crystal Rain, Ragamuffin,, and Sly Mongoose were published by Tor Books, as well as the New York Times bestselling novel Halo: The Cole Protocol. He is currently working on his next book.
Story Notes
Buckell’s subtle story is yet another interpretation of what a zombie could be. Here, George Petros, an early nineteenth-century New England jeweler, is obviously Mama Jaqi’s zombie—but he is an emotionless “distant reincarnation of himself” with the appearance and demeanor of a normal man and superhuman powers of regeneration. But, as with many zombie stories, the author uses fiction to make a social comment: Mama Jaqi, a slave recently freed in the Haitian Revolution, is taking revenge on slavetraders. George’s last name is of interest, too. In Haitian Voudou, there are two primary types of spirits (loa): Rada and Petwo (or Petro, Pethro, etc.). The Petwo are “hotter” loas than the Rada, and less compromising. They are also associated with the brutal experience of slavery and consequent uprisings against it. In Greek petros means “a piece of rock; a stone.”
Dead Man’s Land
David Wellington
The dead man couldn’t get away, no matter how hard he struggled. Barbed wire wreathed the outer perimeter of the WalMart parking lot, long droopy coils of it that bounced every time he tried to convulse his way to freedom. The blotchy skin of his neck tore open and a little dried blood sifted out. He pulled again, his arm held motionless by the wire and then stopped again, confused, lacking the brainpower to unsnag himself, lacking the energy to panic.
The girl—Winona—threw a rock that bounced off his skull but didn’t crack the bone. She had blond hair pulled back in a braid curled and oiled until it looked like metal and eyes the color of old glass bottles. We stood on the loading dock of the superstore a hundred yards from the dead man. My hair and clothes still smelled like the cookfires burning inside. I couldn’t wait to get out there, onto the road again. My cargo had already thrown one tantrum that morning, demanding she be allowed to stay. Too bad for her.
“Is this enough?” her father asked. He wore a bright orange vest and a baseball hat crowned with a ring of bird skulls. He was an Assistant Manager for WalMart and a man of some importance. He held out to me an orange plastic pill bottle. The label had been worn off long ago and the contents were a mixed assortment of colorful capsules and tablets, some of them crumbled near to dust, all of them decades past their expiration date. I nodded to the manager and grabbed the girl’s hand. “Now you’re mine,” I told her, “and you’ll behave, or else.” Her father pursed his lips but I don’t make my living coddling the civilized folk of the stores. I pointed at the dead man in the wire. “That’s just what we call a slack. Too dumb and too far gone to hunt us, sure. You make too much racket throwing stones, though, and you’ll attract his friends, and they bite.”
She merely stared at me, those green eyes wide and vacant. A look she’d practiced, sure. She didn’t care, wasn’t going to care unless I gave her a reason. I pulled her along behind me as I stormed down the ramp to the parking lot. In my other arm I cradled my spring-lance, the one thing in the world I couldn’t afford to lose.
“If any harm comes to her—” the manager shouted at my back.
I finished the thought for him. “Then you won’t see me again.” It wasn’t what he wanted to hear. Screw him.
There was no gate or door in the barbed wire for us to pass through. Instead a couple of boys who were watching the captive slack dragged out a sheet of plywood and leaned it up against the barrier, making a ramp for us. The girl refused to climb the ramp. Maybe she thought she’d get splinters. “My name is Cher,” I told her. “I’m what your dad calls a Roadie. You know what that means?”
“Half human being, half wild folk,” Winona said, watching the boys instead of me. “You travel between the Stores. You cross Dead Man’s Land, to conduct our trade. That makes you our servant. Do you know what I am? I’m the daughter of a Manager and you’ve been hired to protect me.”
“I suppose that’s so, on this side,” I said. I picked her up by the back of her pants and threw her over the wire. Behind me on the loading dock I heard someone gasp and someone else yell. I ran over the ramp and kicked it back, cutting off the only way in, getting shut of the place. I grabbed her yellow hair and stared into those green, green eyes. I showed her my spring-lance, a coffee can on the end of a wooden pole. The can concealed a spring-loaded steel spike long enough to skewer most heads. “Now we’re in my world, little girl. Now you’re nothing but ghoulbait. Understand?”
Why was I so hard on her? She needed to behave, of course, or she could get us killed. But there was more, a special reason to hate her, and it could be summed up in two words: Full up.
That was what they told my grandfather when he went to the great stores along the New Jersey Turnpike with me in his arms, back when the highways were still crowded with the fleeing going north and going south. “Full up,” they said at Barnes and Noble. Full up at CostCo and TJ Maxx. No room for us who waited too long.
So he took me into the wilds, which at that time were lush and green but no higher than your ankle. The mowed lawns, the abandoned houses of suburbia. We hid where we could and moved on every morning. We lived on canned food and we listened to the radio in the dark, listened to static when that was all there was, hoping to hear of shelter somewhere, real shelter.
Full up. They were all full up before we arrived. Not enough food to go around, not any more room, they told him. He died in the wild and I could have joined a tribe in Montclair, they would have taken me in but instead I crushed his head with a rock before I’d even begun to weep. I would not be a wild woman, a friend to the dead. I would not be a savage.
I didn’t go hungry for long. The Stores needed me and my kind. We meant communication and trade and that meant survival. They let me sleep on their floors. They paid what I asked. And every time I looked one in the eyes I saw those words again, and I hated them all over again. There was no room in my heart for this girl. I was full up, too.
We couldn’t make the thirty miles to Home Depot in one day but I wanted us as far from the WalMart as possible before nightfall. The commotion our leaving made would draw too much attention—probably for days to come Winona’s father would be watching ghouls circle his perimeter, looking for the source of all that noise. He would lock his big loading gates and pray for them to leave him in peace, for his fence to hold them back.
We didn’t have that option. I pushed us hard. I led Winona through a drainage ditch behind the store, through reeds taller than me and water scummed with mosquito larvae. On the far side we had to cross an old asphalt access road, a broken field of smooth black fragments with bright green weeds sticking up in unnatural rectilinear patterns. It took us most of an hour to get to the far side and over the sway-backed fencing there. It would have taken me a quarter of that time, alone. They don’t need proper shoes in the Stores and what she had were old passed-down sneakers so well-used the laces were crusted in place.
Beyond the road t
he woods began, the real dead man’s land. I saw the signs of ghouls everywhere, on every scraped tree trunk, on every broken branch. I was looking for one thing, to convince myself I wasn’t just being paranoid. When I finally found it I felt almost relieved.
In a clearing in the shadow of a creaking utility pylon where the high grass grew yellow and thin I saw a splash of red. I pushed through the sighing vegetation to get closer and bent to touch the ground. A broad swath of grass had been bent back, crushed by the weight of a human being. Blood soaked the ground and turned the long stalks red. I dug around amidst the roots for a moment and came up with a broken leg bone—too long and thin to be human. Probably white-tailed deer. The femur had been cracked open so the marrow could be sucked out.
I squatted and ran a few blades of the grass through my fingers, letting the dried blood powder away like rust. Winona stared at the discarded bone as if it might come back to life at any moment. She’d probably never seen a meat bone before that wasn’t in the bottom of a stew pot.
“There’s one nearby,” I told her, whispering. The dead don’t linger when they’ve eaten and there was nearly no chance of the ghoul still being within earshot. Still I don’t make a habit of raising my voice out in the woods. “He ate recently so he’ll be strong and fast.”
“But so he’s full, then, and he won’t attack us,” she said, her fingers brushing the fibrous surface of the femur. She wasn’t scared. The little idiot.
“A living thing, an animal might not but this is a dead man. If he can’t find human he’ll eat deer or rabbits or mice. If he can’t find meat he’ll chew the bark off of trees and stuff himself full of grass. He doesn’t care if he eats so much he pops, he’ll still want more, even if it just slides down his gullet and out the hole in his belly. The more he eats the hungrier he gets.”
She shrugged and laid back in the grass, probably exhausted after her long hike. I could see it in her eyes. She didn’t need to worry, she thought. I would protect her.
