Zombies: The Recent Dead

by Paula Guran

  “They have avowed never to strike a dead thing. They make a pact with their ancestors, you see. They will not harm the dead, which is sin, and in exchange, the dead will let them survive.”

  “The dead know nothing of treaties and compacts,” Winona said, a little of her old uppity pride glowing behind her eyes. I guess maybe she was going to be all right. “Such foolishness. Such evil.”

  Now a Roadie may never judge those she trades with. So I kept my peace.

  The ghoul found us again the next evening, just as the sky started turning orange. Maybe he got a meal out of the wild folk. Maybe they outran him. It didn’t matter. He had my smell in his dead nose and he couldn’t not come for me. He was a thing of nature, as pure, if not as innocent, as the smile on the face of the paper-signing slack.

  For days he tracked me. For days I tried to give him the slip. It was for naught. We were like two arrows launched in the air at the same target. At some point our paths would cross. Smart as I am, I decided I would choose when it might happen.

  I smelled him and then I heard him. I readied myself for him. I put Winona in an old storm cellar and locked the door behind me. Then I walked out into the middle of a suburban street with my spring-lance loose in my hands. I spread my legs a little, kept my knees unlocked. I tried to sense where he was, what direction he might be coming from.

  He surprised me, as they do. He came from behind and I barely had time to pivot on my left foot, my right foot high to kick out at him. I caught him in the stomach and knocked him backwards. It gave me a splinter of a moment to bring the lance around.

  His hands came for me, his broken jaws, his whole body swimming through the air as time slowed to a near standstill. My eyes focused on his head until every little detail stood out. The dark veins beneath his cheek. The ragged hole in the side of his head where my spring-lance had caught him before, like a second, rotten ear.

  His fingers caught at my belt, wove themselves through the cord to anchor himself to me. The next blow would tear my flesh open and make me bleed.

  At least it might have, if I’d been a trace slower. I pressed the end of the coffee can against his forehead. It was a centered strike, a perfect placement. His own momentum pressed his face against my spring-loaded weapon. The coffee can slid backward and released the hidden latch. The spike jumped forward, its glinting point emerging from the back of his skull and catching the moonlight.

  He fell on me, all spark of animation fleeing, and I might have been pinned by a collapsing chimney. His body sputtered out its last spastic movement and then stopped.

  I rolled out from under him and lay looking up at purple clouds that stretched in thick bands across the whole of the sky. I waited a while, to catch my breath, before I stood again.

  Atop three flagpoles in the Home Depot’s parking lot long Mylar banners snapped in the air, welcoming us to our destination. At the loading dock a party of warriors in orange smocks waited to receive us. They wore circlets carved of rosewood on their temples and had gold and silver chains wrapping their forearms like vambraces. The General Manager himself stood silhouetted in the doorway, a fire behind him throwing long shadows down toward us. He was a gray-haired old man with a white scar running across the full length of his chest. He wore nothing but a pair of tight-fitting elastic shorts, black and satiny with gold piping. Beads and bones and jewels were woven in his long hair. He smiled to see Winona, and he gestured to her to come into his arms, to come to his bed, perhaps.

  “He doesn’t waste his time,” I said. We were still out of earshot. I’d planned on giving the girl a final lecture in what a beastly little hardship she’d been. Instead I wondered if maybe I shouldn’t turn around and get back on the road with her.

  “It is a grand destiny, to make the heirs who will rid the world of the monsters,” Winona announced. She looked a bit scared, but not of the bulge in the General Manager’s underwear. Something else had her in its teeth.

  She turned to look at me with those eyes the color of old glass bottles. “He’ll know,” she said. “He’ll know I’m not intact.” Her voice was very small.

  I stared at her. I stared and stared. I didn’t like her. I never would. But I knew what they would do to her if they found out she’d been had by the wild folk. It was none of her fault but that wouldn’t enter their calculations. They would be Full Up, if they found out.

  We were women, both of us. Women of the world now. I sighed and took my water bottle from my pack. It was gummy inside with rabbit’s blood. I filled it a little way up with good water and swirled it around, then pushed it into the girl’s hand.

  I hissed instructions at her. “You ask him to undress in private, and maybe he’ll let you. You make it sound like you’re shy, like you’re just a little girl. Some men like that. When he’s gone, you spill this out on the sheets and lie in it.” I stared right into her eyes, for the last time. “Do it right, do it secretive and he’ll never know.”

  She held my gaze and she nodded and then she looked away. Step by step she walked away from me, and toward her destiny.

  The people of Home Depot owed me dinner at the very least but I didn’t bother taking it. I was back in Dead Man’s Land before I knew it, and glad to be there.

  About the Author

  David Wellington is the author of seven novels. His zombie novels Monster Island, Monster Nation, and Monster Planet (Thunder’s Mouth Press) form a complete trilogy. He has also written a series of vampire novels including (so far) Thirteen Bullets, Ninety-Nine Coffins, Vampire Zero, and Twenty-Three Hours. He began a werewolf series (with Three Rivers Press), starting with Frostbite (2009) and continuing with Overwinter (2010). Wellington began his publishing career by serializing his horror fiction online, posting short chapters of a novel three times a week on a friend’s blog. Response to the project was so great that in 2004 Thunder’s Mouth Press contracted to publish Monster Island and its sequels in print. His novels have been featured in Rue Morgue, Fangoria, and theNew York Times. For more information please visit www.davidwellington.net.

  Story Notes

  Post-apocalyptic fiction often posits humanity returning to a primal society. That often bodes poorly for most female characters, but Wellington balances the powerless “girl as commodity” image nicely with a strong woman “Roadie” who negotiates a life for herself by strength, cunning, and a distrust of the living as well as the dead.

  In “Dead Man’s Land,” Wellington also applies the world “ghoul” to the walking dead—which gives me a chance to mention something about ghouls.

  In the original Night of the Living Dead, the titular creatures are never referred to as zombies, but they are called ghouls as part of a news report on television. Others have used “ghoul” and “zombie” interchangeably as well, but the two are not traditionally synonymous.

  Ahmed K. Al-Rawi (“The Arabic Ghoul and its Western Transformation” Folklore, Vol. 120, Issue 3. December 2009) describes the original idea of a ghoul as:

  . . . a kind of devilish genie . . . part of beliefs held by Arabs long before the advent of Islam and was a perceived reality for most people living in Arabia . . . Throughout different historical and religious periods, the character of the ghoul remained the same, being represented as an ugly human-like monster that dwelt in the desert and secluded locations, in order to delude travellers by lighting a fire and thus leading them astray. In some cases, this creature was said to have killed travellers. However, when Antoine Galland translated the Arabian Nights into French in the eighteenth century, some features were added to the ghoul in order to intensify its fearful characteristics. For example, Galland emphasised that the ghoul used to dig graves and eat corpses if it needed food, an idea that was never mentioned in any of the Arabic sources. Accordingly, numerous English writers followed Galland’s description and further fantasised in their works about the viciousness of this creature.

  The “further fantasizing” resulted in several variants from human grave robbers to humans
who are morbidly fascinated with death or the dead to supernatural creatures that lurk in graveyards to feed on or defile mortal remains. Occasionally, ghouls appear in horror literature as beings who devour the living. Modern variants include humans who come back from the dead but do not eat human flesh and are distinct creatures unlike any form of zombie. Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s legendary vampire Saint-Germain has a ghoul servant, Roger. Roger is an undead immortal who prefers his meat raw, but otherwise appears to be human.

  Brian McNaughton, in his 1997 collection The Throne of Bones, created a unique world of ghoulery. His creatures shared many traits one usually associates with vampires, but they also ate humans. If these ghouls managed to devour enough of a victim’s brain, they acquired his or her memories and could even assume the physical appearance of whomever they digested.

  Ghouls seem, no matter the variety, seem to me to be a different breed of beastie than the zombie.

  Disarmed and Dangerous

  Tim Waggoner

  Gleaming steel talons came streaking toward my face, and though my reflexes aren’t what they used to be, I managed to dodge to the right in time to keep from losing anything more than my left ear. I wasn’t particularly concerned. An ear’s not all that important, and I could always get it reattached later. Assuming that the demon on the other end of those talons didn’t turn me into shredded zombie flakes first.

  The steel talons—possibly a surgical augmentation since the rest of the creature appeared organic—sank into the alley wall, neatly pinning my ear to the brick in the process. The alley walls were covered with leech-vine, but luckily for the demon, its talons had sunk into a patch of brick where the vine was thin. Even luckier, the inorganic substance of its talons didn’t prod the vine into attacking. The demon grunted in frustration and the scale-covered muscles on its arm tightened as it fought to pull its hand free. This would have been an excellent time for me to turn and run like hell—or in my case, do a shuffling half-walk, half-run—away from the demon. But I had unfinished business with the damned thing. Besides, it had my ear.

  A variety of specialized weaponry comes in handy in my line of work, and I reached into the outer pocket of my suit jacket and withdrew one of my most useful tools.

  With a final yank the demon managed to pull its hand loose, and it turned to face me, shark teeth bared in a savage snarl, my bloodless ear still stuck to one of its talons. When it saw the weapon I held aimed at the corrugated hide directly between its eyes, the snarl became a chuckle.

  “A squirt gun?” Its voice sounded like ground glass being shaken in a coffee can. “Are you insane? Real bullets wouldn’t do much more than tickle me!”

  “I know.” I tightened my finger on the plastic trigger and began pumping streams of holy water into the demon’s face.

  The creature howled in pain as its facial scales began to sizzle and smoke. The demon threw up its hands to protect itself, the motion dislodging my ear and sending it flying. I didn’t see where it landed; I was a bit busy. I’d look for it later—assuming I survived. I kept firing, if that’s the right term to use when your ammo is liquid, hoping to at least disable the demon, if not kill it. Unfortunately, the demon had other ideas.

  Bellowing in agony, eyes squeezed shut and weeping blood, the creature lashed out and fastened its thick fingers around the wrist of my gun hand. Before I could react, the demon yanked, and my right arm came out of the socket as easily as a greasy wing parting from an overcooked chicken. I had only a single thought.

  Not again!

  “I have to warn you, Matt. This isn’t the prettiest work I’ve ever done. I’m a houngan, not a surgeon.”

  “Don’t worry about it. I got over being vain about my appearance about the same time I stopped breathing. Look at it this way: you have an important advantage over a medical doctor. You don’t have to worry about your patient dying if you screw up.”

  It was late afternoon, and my confrontation with the demon lay several hours in the future. I was sitting on a stool in Papa Chatha’s workshop, shirt off, holding my right arm in place with my left hand while Papa, seated next to me, played seamstress. His brow was furrowed in concentration, and small beads of sweat had gathered on the mahogany skin of his smoothly shaven head. His white pullover shirt and pants were splotched with stains that looked too much like blood. None of if was mine, though. I hadn’t bled for a long time. One of the advantages to being a zombie.

  Another benefit was that I felt no pain as Papa sank the bone needle into the gray-tinged flesh of my shoulder. I could feel pressure as the pointed tip emerged from the ragged skin of my left arm, felt the tug as Papa pulled the thread through, but that was all. I looked away, but not because I found it uncomfortable to watch someone reattaching a limb that had once been part of my body. I’ve gotten banged up quite a few times since I came to Nekropolis, and Papa’s usually the one who gets stuck trying to put the pieces back together. I didn’t want to watch because seeing Papa at work reminded me that not only couldn’t I experience pain, I couldn’t experience pleasure, either. Not physically, at any rate.

  I scanned the shelves in Papa’s workroom, taking in the multitude of materials that a professional voodoo practitioner needs to perform his art: wax-sealed vials filled with ground herbs and dried chemicals, jars containing desiccated bits of animals—rooster claws, lizard tails, raven wings—books and scrolls piled on tabletops next to rattles and tambourines of various sizes, along with pouches of tobacco, chocolate bars, and bottles of rum. Papa said he used the latter three substances to make offerings to the Loa, the voodoo spirits, and while I had no reason to doubt him, over the years I’ve noticed that he tends to run out of rum before anything else.

  “There.” Papa broke off the thread with his ivory-white teeth then tied the end into a knot. I turned back and examined the result. The stitching looked tight enough, but the pattern was uneven, to put it kindly. Papa hadn’t been kidding about the aesthetic qualities of his sewing. You’d think a guy who makes as many voodoo dolls as he does would be a better seamstress.

  “Give it a try,” Papa said.

  I made a fist with my right hand and flexed the arm. It moved stiffly, but that had nothing to do with Papa’s repair job and everything to do with the fact that I was dead.

  I lowered my arm. “Feels good. Thanks.” I rose from the stool and went over to the chair where I’d draped my shirt, suit jacket, and tie. Most zombies wear whatever rags they died in, but I’m not your run-of-the-mill walking dead man. I’m still self-aware and possess free will. Before I came to this dimension, back when I was alive, I worked as a homicide detective in Cleveland. I wore a suit on the job then, and I still wear one now. Makes me feel more human, I guess.

  Papa continued sitting on his stool while I got dressed. “Sorry I couldn’t do more for the skin, but the spells I used to fuse the bone and muscle back together should last for about a month before they need to be reapplied,” he said. “That is, assuming you don’t irritate any more cyclops.” He frowned. “Cyclopses? Cyclopsi?” He shrugged. “Whatever.”

  I finished with my tie and slid on my jacket. “You know Troilus. Always trying one scam or another to make easy money. This time it was a protection racket.” I lowered my voice to a bass monotone in what I thought was a passable imitation of the cyclops. “ ‘Pay me a hundred darkgems a week or you might end up taking a bath in Phlegethon.’ ”

  Phlegethon is the river of green fire that surrounds Nekropolis and separates the city’s five sections. It’s a cold fire that burns the spirit instead of the flesh, but its waters are home to giant serpents called Lesk who are only too eager to use their sharp teeth to take care of what the flames can’t.

  Papa grinned. “I assume you were hired to encourage Troilus to pursue alternative methods of securing an income. Your employer anyone I know?”

  “A vampire named Kyra who has a tattoo parlor on the other side of the Sprawl, not far from the Bridge of Forgotten Pleasures. She uses living ink, and th
e tattoos she creates move through their wearer’s skin. It’s a striking effect.”

  Papa nodded. “This is the first time I’ve heard her name, but I’ve seen her work before. So what did you do?”

  “I decided on the subtle approach. I tracked down Troilus and told him that if he didn’t stop threatening people, I’d poke his eye out.”

  Papa laughed. “Very subtle! Let me guess: in response, Troilus yanked your arm out of the socket.”

  “That’s right. But I’m nothing if not professional. Instead of getting angry, I calmly asked Troilus to give me my arm back. People like him are used to getting what they want through violence, and he was so surprised by my lack of reaction that he just looked at me with that basketball-sized eye of his for a moment before doing as I asked.”

  “And what did you do after that?”

  “Undead or not, I’m a man of my word. An arm doesn’t have to be attached to be useful, you know.” I looked at the fingers on my right hand and frowned. “I think there’s still some vitreous fluid under my nails.”

  Papa grinned and shook his head. “One of these days, Matt, you’re going to get yourself torn into so many bits that not even Father Dis will be able to put you back together.”

  “Let’s hope that day’s a long time coming.” I reached into the inner pocket of my suit jacket and took out a handful of darkgems. My fee for helping Kyra. I hadn’t charged her much, but even though I was dead and no longer needed food or drink, I still needed money to cover the rent on my apartment and to pay Papa Chatha for his services. Not only for today’s repair, but for the regular application of the preservative spells that keep me from rotting and smelling like Lake Erie at low tide.