by Shock Totem
“We lost thirty to them before the general alarm was sounded. There’s no fighting back. We haven’t had a good supply of ammunition in so long. Some of the guns we do have bullets for don’t even work.”
They hid in their houses and hoped the zombies would leave. Eventually, after a month, that’s just what happened. A new scent on the shifting winds drew them north and they left en masse. But not before the Yellow Zone’s population endured a bitter culling. We try to comprehend depictions of slow, agonizing starvation; of people locked inside their homes without food or water, with no means of reaching either the community stockpiles or the rough gardens in their backyards. Everything about the Yellow Zone shocks us. These people stand half-naked or wear leprous clothes. We by comparison look shiny and new.
“How many of you are left?”
A man answers with a bitter laugh.
“I see,” Stacy says.
We count seventy people. Twelve are children younger than we were when we entered Drama Club. But at least they are children. Their existence is a salvo against the Decay.
To bolster them, we describe the Blue Zone with its food and security, its self-sufficiency, its school for the children. The people beg to join us. But how should they go, except on foot? There are not even bicycles to be found that are not decades past repairing.
We find their communication equipment. A Medusa’s head of wires, stripped and mangled, hang from the open back of the receiver. This jury-rigging, too, is past repairing. We have to take one man at his word on this. We have no training in electronics to know for sure.
“We can’t even let the Council know what has happened.”
“Regardless, we won’t leave these people here.”
“But escorting them back was never in the Council’s plans.”
We go back to their gathering, where they beseech us.
“Take us with you!”
Kevin nods, his expression grim—
“Tonight in Harfleur will we be your guest;
Tomorrow for the march are we addressed.”
They stare at us.
• • •
That night, alone in a vacant house, we sit in the dark in a circle.
“I hate the Blue Zone,” Allen says.
This shocks the rest of us.
“Why?”
“We aren’t prepared for this.”
“But our training—”
“Training? How can we defend seventy people traveling on foot? We don’t have the skills to help them. The Council has specialists they could have sent. Someone to repair the equipment. People to rebuild the barricade.”
“The Council can’t risk the resources.”
“But they can risk us?”
We are depressed.
Norm says, “It’s a matter of learning to improvise.”
“How?”
“Like this. Here: I am Prince Hal. It is 1 Henry IV, Act 2, Scene 4. We are not in this house. We are in The Boar’s-Head Tavern.”
Catching on, Stacy puffs out her stomach and deepens her voice. “How now, mad wag?”
“Falstaff, is that you? Is that your huge hill of flesh I see? Where have you been?”
“Killing zombies.”
“How many?”
“I have peppered two of them; two I am sure I have paid. Two zombies in buckram suits.”
“Oh?”
“Four zombies in buckram—”
“What, four? Thou saidst but two even now.”
“No, he said four.”
“It was not four. We eight set upon some dozen—”
“A dozen?”
“If I were not at half-sword with a dozen of them—nay, sixteen, at least.”
“Why, does a dozen become sixteen so soon?”
“If I fought not with fifty of them, I am a bunch of radish.”
We laugh. Falstaff’s exaggerations teach us to be flexible and fluid. No scene is unchangeable. We will improvise to protect the people of the Yellow Zone as we escort them to the Blue.
What choice is there?
In the morning the people gather again. Their seemingly cheery faces belie their situation. Listening to them talk, it’s clear they spent the night dreaming of the Blue Zone. It must seem like a glorious island to them, a place protected by warm seas. Oh, for a sorcerer like Prospero to help us now. We have many Calibans to face.
We inventory their pitiful provisions, the raw and dirty vegetables ripped from the ground that very morning and thrust into any available crude sack. No one carries more than a canteen’s worth of water. We exchange dire glances, remembering how hard it was to scavenge for supplies. Most places near the highway had been picked clean in the forty years since the Decay. But we were a small band, young and healthy and needing little. We return as a much larger—and much older—group.
Last night’s vows of adaptability and improvisation now seem like a lot of rotten talk. We seek our training for a scenario to fortify us. These people are not unlike Henry V’s men, starved, sick and dispirited, wishing themselves in Thames up to the neck. But Kevin, so fast to play Hal before, disinclines now. We all agree that if we survive the journey, we will understand Henry V much better than before.
“Be brave,” Norm says. “Our Agincourt awaits.”
“It is time,” Stacy tells the gathering.
To the march.
• • •
We lose two on the first day, an elderly couple who are the slowest and frailest of the group. The man says, “We know we’ll never make it. We’ve decided to go back and die where we lived.”
“You won’t have any protection.”
“We won’t need any.”
“I’ll escort you back,” Norm says.
“No. Thank you for giving us some hope before we die. You’ve done us fine.”
They leave hand in hand.
Days pass without a single zombie encounter. Our pace matches our dwindling provisions. Three of us stay on our bicycles to scout ahead at all times. The rest of us walk ours beside the crowd. The people of Yellow Zone get nervous when we’re all riding. They still think we’ll abandon them. We attempt to show them our loyalty by entertaining them with recitations and scenes. They shrug off our efforts and complain they don’t understand us.
We stop often and send forth riders to loot the decrepit buildings farther off the highway. The world before the Decay had such abundance and it maddens us to think that undiscovered stockpiles of food and water exist nearby. One day, dulled by another long wait under the hot sun while Stacy, Allen, and Norm raid a nearby town, we stir to Allen’s distant screams. He and Stacy pedal standing up on their bicycles, storming toward us down the long highway.
This could not happen at a worse time. The refugees are a few hundred yards off the highway, washing in a pond.
“Kevin, bring them up here fast.”
Allen and Stacy reach us. They pant out what happened.
“The ambush of our friends be strong!”
“They came out of the town. Thousands of zombies. A swarm.”
“Thousands! Where is Norm?”
“We had to make a decision while the road was still clear. We split up. Norm is riding on to the Blue Zone.”
“By the rood! We must set against these hordes.”
“It would take many hundreds of performers to neutralize so many zombies. Our only relief will come from the Blue Zone reaching us. We cannot reach them.”
“If the road ahead is blocked, then let us leave the road. We will go around them.”
Stacy says, “Their numbers stretch too far. I don’t see how we can manage.”
The refugees come to us in terror. They believe they will die here. All that keeps them from insurmountable panic is the daylight. When night comes, darkness and imagination will turn the zombies into millions, and the people will flee.
We still have time to avoid a panic.
“I still say we try to go around them. The land is flat enough. We can swing b
ack to the road once we’re clear.”
“A group this large can’t do it. Perhaps we can hide. The zombies will pass by or go in another direction eventually, just like they did when they invaded the Yellow Zone. Then we proceed.”
“That could take days or weeks. We’re near starvation. The only guaranteed food is in the Blue Zone. Any step toward that is vital. We have to punch through somehow.”
We search our training. We all agree there’s no help for us there. Then Jill gasps, seizing an idea.
“Birnam Wood!”
We smile.
The refugees think we’re insane when we explain how Macbeth was tricked by the witches into believing he would not be defeated until the trees of Birnam Wood moved to his castle at Dunsinane Hill.
A man says, “We don’t understand what you’re talking about!”
We attempt another explanation.
“Camouflage. Is that what you mean?”
He says what that is.
“Yes! That’s just what we mean.”
We lose over half of the Yellow Zone at that moment. They turn and run, despite our pleas. A woman says, “If you people represent the Blue Zone, it’s no place I want to be. Might as well be a zombie if I’m going to go crazy!”
Are we failures? What would Our Director say? We push these questions away for another time.
We still have twenty-five people to protect. Twenty-five who have not lost faith and put their hope in us.
“Let us make costumes,” we say.
• • •
There are no heavy forests near us, but the nearby trees provide ample material for just twenty-five. Before nightfall we manage to hack and hew over a hundred good branches, many still pliant from Spring. We spend the night off the road and nearer the thickest outcropping of trees, striving always to read the wind and keep our scent away from the hungry gathering on the horizon. We sleep in turns. Those who don’t sleep talk in low voices, wondering about Norm. He must be so alone and hungry. He is a fast and strong rider, but it will take days of hard peddling to reach the Blue Zone.
Three zombies come into view. They are on the road and would have passed by, but for a child’s scream. His mother cannot stifle it fast enough. The zombies leave the road and come at us.
The zombies have blue flesh and bluer cataracts, oddly beautiful but always ill met by moonlight. We could dispatch them outright, but this is a chance to prove our powers to the faithful. They have not seen us engage zombies. Demonstrating our abilities now will bolster their courage.
“We will handle this.”
We all walk toward the zombies.
Behind us, we hear a plaintive whisper. “What the hell are they doing?”
When the three zombies are within fifty yards of us, Jill enters her role:
“Give me your hand: you are now within a foot
Of the extreme verge: for all beneath the moon
Would I not leap upright.”
The zombies stop.
Triumphant, we glance back, expecting expressions of awe on the refugees’ faces. They are all disguised to varying degrees with the limbs and leaves of branches, as much as we could uniform them before sunset. Instead of awe, it looks like a small forest is shaking their fingers at us.
“They’re talking to the zombies! That’s their plan? Why did we put our lives into the hands of these idiots?”
“We should have left with the others. Run! Run!”
“Nay,” Kevin says. “Behold! The undead are undone!”
Branches and leaves fall to the ground as the remaining people of the Yellow Zone lose all faith in us. We call out to fleeing shadows, begging them to stop. How have we been so stupid? How have we miscalculated their reaction? Before we can debate, we hear the growl of the zombies, released from our spell when we failed to keep acting. We turn just as the first zombie bites Kevin’s shoulder. Jill screams. We draw swords and behead Kevin’s attacker, but Stacy takes a bite from the second before it and the third are dispatched.
We sit with them until daybreak. They tremble, holding each other. They say they can feel a poison acting inside them as if, like Gertrude, they have drunk from the cup of the tainted pearl. We gnash our teeth and cry for them. We hate the Yellow Zone and the Blue Zone, we hate bicycles and Our Director. We hate this horrible world, this wretched stage.
Kevin and Stacy calm us down. We are friends. We will never abandon each other, though we know what must be done.
Kevin talks through chattering teeth. Mere minutes separate his bite from Stacy’s, but his condition seems far worse. Gasping, he manages to say, “Friends, let Stacy and I perform for you. Then use your swords.”
Stacy clings close to him as we weep. Then she closes her eyes and plays her part. Gazing, Kevin caresses her cheek.
“Ah, dear Juliet,
Why art thou yet so fair? shall I believe
That unsubstantial death is amorous,
And that the lean abhorred monster keeps
Thee here in dark to be his paramour?”
We cannot bear this. Act 5, Scene 3 of Romeo and Juliet. Though we have all rehearsed and performed it several hundred times, we watch with genuine and new feeling.
Kevin continues:
“O true apothecary!
Thy drugs are quick. Thus with a kiss I die.”
He closes his eyes. There is more to the scene before Juliet can wake, but none of us are able to say the necessary lines. Stacy opens her eyes and skips to her conclusion.
“Yea, noise? then I’ll be brief. O happy dagger!
This is thy sheath; there rust and let me die.”
She works herself into an embrace with Kevin, who does not move. We know he is no longer acting. He has achieved what all actors seek and fear, complete emergence with character.
“I shall see you anon,” Stacy says.
• • •
Rescuers from the Blue Zone reach us a week later. We know it is a dreadful waste of their resources. The rescue party consists of fifty men on bicycles, led by Our Director and Norm in a van. Our Director speaks entire scenes through a loudspeaker mounted to its roof. Even through the dreadful acoustics, the power of his performance freezes substantial numbers and gives us an opening.
We are brought back to the Blue Zone and given a hero’s welcome, despite the complete failure of our mission. Our Director cries during the parade that honors us. He shakes his head as we pass. We are so attuned to his voice, we hear him even if he means to whisper.
“They weren’t ready.”
Loud enough to be overheard, the Council leader says, “You did your job, Marcus. We are proud of them.”
A month passes before we come together again. But we can never be whole. We live apart. Our parents hug us. Sometimes, when zombies approach the Blue Zone’s fine gates, we give a performance to freeze them and then we cut their heads off. Ammunition is saved. All is well that ends well.
But in this world we were born into, nothing ends well.
Sean Eads is a writer from Denver, Colorado. He has a master’s degree in literature from the University of Kentucky. His favorite past time, after writing, is playing golf. His favorite authors include Ray Bradbury, Cormac McCarthy, Flannery O’Connor, and Kafka. His first novel, The Survivors, will be published in October by Lethe Press. You can follow him online at www.seaneads.blogspot.com.
HOWLING THROUGH THE KEYHOLE
The stories behind the stories.
“In Deepest Silence”
I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that I’m the first writer you’ve ever read who started a horror story note with “I’m a big H.P. Lovecraft fan.” What? Not the first? Well, surely only the second, then.
I’ve been a fan of HPL for a few years now; I came to him as an adult, after several failed attempts to get into his writing when I was younger. I’m fascinated by the ideas of his incomprehensible cosmic/alien horrors—but as a writer, I also find them unsatisfying unless they’re extremely well execut
ed. It’s really easy to throw in terms like those Lovecraft used, but it’s not nearly so simple to do so effectively. As I’m sure you can imagine, it’s a challenge, even for good writers, to write about things that can’t be described.
And it was when I was thinking about this that the idea for “In Deepest Silence” came to me. Why not try to write a Lovecraft-inspired story where visual description was not only unnecessary, but impossible? Once that thought occurred, the idea of setting it in a sub—which is already innately claustrophobic and designed to travel to the most alien environments on Earth—pretty much birthed itself. The story itself wasn’t that simple—I really wanted to get the sub terminology at least mostly right, without bogging the story down with too much technical detail—but the idea was one of the clearest I’ve ever had.
I don’t pretend that this is a Lovecraft pastiche—I didn’t try to write like him or anything—but I hope that those of you who are fans of his style of horror find something worthwhile here.
–Ari Marmell
“The Girl and the Blue Burqa”
Pablo Picasso once responded to a question about the meaning of one of his paintings by saying, and I’m paraphrasing, “It’s a painting. Had I wanted to write a story, I would have done so.” I unfortunately did not paint a painting, and so regardless, or as some say, irregardless, of how I feel about story notes, I should probably tell you something about the story.
Without ruining what I just want to be a fun tale, there are, woven into the fabric of the “The Girl and the Blue Burqa,” themes of intellectual arrogance and moral presumption. Americans live in an extremely well-schooled society. I say schooled because the current de rigueur, right-to-a-college-degree culture doesn’t, I believe, necessarily equate with education. One thing in particular that many of us have difficulty learning, I think, is tolerance.
