Joey sank to the floor of the platform and turned his head to watch the tracks as they disappeared mile after mile behind them. They crossed an open plain now, dry and dusty and barely covered over with rustling grasses.
She came down to sit beside him. She said in a soft voice, "It's an epidemic."
He did not understand. He didn't know if he wanted to.
"This bite of the wolf, it's spreading across continents, infecting too many for counting. No one believes it, that's why it isn't talked about. It's made into a myth, a boogeyman story to tell children. To keep from coming into the cities, some of your kind have taken cattle and disemboweled them. The silly Americans, they blame it on aliens, on starships! Inside the cities there are cases of violent crime that go unsolved. Again, it's your kind, the wolf rampaging, incapable of mastering their wild animal urges. The authorities think these deaths are caused by other men, but they're wrong."
Cattle. He had cattle on his farm. It was probably what had drawn the Thing to them. And he--he could have gone after them when he'd been raging with hunger and left his...his family? Had he truly done harm to...his family?
"There's a wise saying..." She placed a hand on his arm to make sure he would listen. "'There are no intruders or strangers in the world. A man at times is a shapeless pygmy that walks asleep in the mist.' That's what your kind does. I had to teach my sister to wake from her sleep, to dispel the mist so she could decide between right and wrong. So must you, my friend."
He saw the moon now kissed the edge of the horizon. It was sinking fast, taking with it the night, taking away his courage and replacing it with regret, taking his strength, and giving him back the weak limbs of a gangly boy. He raised an arm and saw his long delicate fingers emerging from the rounded paw. His fingers were small in comparison to the great claws that had been his only hours earlier. He felt his muscles shrinking in his arms, and the cover of fur vanishing even as he watched. He felt of his face and found it smooth, hairless, flat and small. Human again.
He hung his head in overwhelming grief. Not for the killing he had done. But for the freedom and animal thrill he had felt for so few scant moments of time.
"I'm sorry," she said. "I know the sorrow morning brings. You see, my sister accidentally made me a beast the same as she. Would you come with me to meet my sister and the others? There's a group of us on the train. About every six months we migrate from the lower Americas northward. We're on our way to Alaska where it's sparsely populated. And there are still wild things to eat."
Joey looked at her, at Marta, and saw the faintest layer of dark down on her cheeks. It slowly disappeared as the light of dawn changed from dim yellow to rose in the sky.
"Will you come? Will you join us or go on living this way, taking down the innocent along with the guilty?"
He should go with her. Maybe it would be all right, after all. He had found another family, a better one. As the engine whistled a warning up ahead and the land blew past the train, Joey took Marta's arm and climbed over the safety rail into the cabin of the passenger car. In there he would find others escaping their pygmy selves lost in the mist and learn from them how to do it, how to control the rage, the destruction, the indiscriminate killing.
Also--and this thought buoyed him--he didn't think there would be farms in Alaska. And, moreover, there was night there that lasted for months on end.
He growled low, ran his tongue over his lips. When Marta patted his arm, he tried to smile in a way that hid the power lurking inside.
The train whistle screamed. The scream hung in the air like a promise.
And Joey shuffled behind Marta into the shadowy passenger car, feeling good again, feeling free, his smile as predatory as an animal's. He would make Marta sorry she had brought him along, he knew that deep down inside where truth lives. He would make her and the others sorry.
He would make them scream.
THE END
THE LONELY WALK
A Zombie's Notebook
Copyright @ 2012 by Billie Sue Mosiman
First published in the anthology, ARMAGEDDON, Baen Books, as "A Watery Silence."
June 4
I have been five days dead.
Nietzsche was right. God is, also, dead. Or God never was. If there were a God, He wouldn't have let humankind suffer in this manner. I would have rather there had been a God in heaven and a Lucifer below, I would have rather burned on red-hot coals for my sins for eternity than to live this everlasting death. I only tell you the truth. If you think I'm going to varnish it or pretty it up, look somewhere else.
I'm leaving these pages for the living so they'll know what they face if they join me. No one before me has chronicled what this life-in-death is like and it's important for the world to know.
The plague that swept across continents and infected millions has also infected me. So far as I know I am the only one who understands my predicament. I'm searching for another. I don't want to be alone much longer. I fear my mind is slipping, has slipped, will continue to slip, into madness.
It all began five days ago...
But, wait, just a minute now...
I lifted my arm and brought my flesh close to my face because I thought I might smell something. I pressed my nostrils directly against the skin, felt its tightness against my cheek, slid out my tongue and tasted. It's a little sweet, my flesh, not very salty, and cool. Cold. There is the faint scent of some bits of me rotting down below the layer of muscle. I'm corrupting, but at a slower rate than I would have thought. Especially in this tropical climate. Miami, Florida. A splendid paradise for dying.
So let me continue. After lying dead for five days, an uninfected man would have bloated, stiffened with rigor mortis, and gone soft again, turned to jelly, gaseous and purple as a plum. I'm not that way. Not yet.
It was Saturday when I died. In May. When I had everything to live for. But we all do, always. I tell you this, and you have to remember it every minute you live and draw breath. There is everything to live for. Treasure every second. Lift up your face and see the sun and touch your loved ones and capture and hold onto any little joy that burbles in your heart. Life is never so bad that death--any death, but particularly this death--could ever be thought remotely preferable.
Saturday. "Carrie," I said. "We need milk. We have to get milk for the baby." My daughter had barely survived for eight days on water strained from oatmeal and she needed more nourishment than that. I couldn’t stay barricaded in the house any longer.
Carrie begged, "Please don't go outside, please don't leave us! The provisions will be here on Monday." Teardrops collected on the lower rims of her eyes. She had never cried so easily before, never been so emotional and raw. I wanted to take her into my arms, but I couldn't, not this time.
The army truck would bring our neighborhood milk and cheese and meat and vegetables, enough to last another month--but it never did, it never lasted, not for a growing child. Margaret is just four months old. I delivered her myself, held that tiny wonder in the palms of my hands and saw her take her first breath, held her against my chest and felt her heartbeat flutter wildly, fighting to live. I stood holding her, that naked little life, praying she would make it.
For a week it was all right. Then Carrie had no milk, her malnourishment drying her breasts before the baby could gain a hold on life. I couldn't stand to watch Margaret waste away, grow listless, her blue eyes fading to slate, her lips blindly, softly sucking at the stained water when I could do something, by God, I was her father, wasn't I? I couldn't let her die, could I?
But I have to make you understand this. I didn't want my daughter to die, but there was more than her life in the balance. I wanted her to live for me. I knew if the baby died, Carrie would soon follow. She was already slowly losing her mind, and with the baby's death, I knew she'd give up. In the end I'd be living alone in an echoing house, alienated from any human touch or voice or kindness.
Carrie threatened, "I'll call in and report you! This is ab
andonment, you can't leave us alone."
She was so afraid of losing me to the zombies. I couldn't let her know my fears of losing first the baby and then her, so I said with a cold edge in my voice, I said go ahead, call, turn me in, have me put into some prison camp for leaving the house, then you can watch our baby die alone, if that's what you really want, goddammit.
It took that kind of cold fury to deal with Carrie those days. She didn't listen unless I turned my back on her and spoke with a roughness I didn't really feel toward her.
I took a thirty-ought-six with me and a machete hanging from my belt. I thought I could protect myself, make it to downtown Miami and back again. I forgot the car wouldn't start. Carrie's pleading had made me lose all sense of reality. Battery dead. I should have known, I must have known, but I only wanted to find the milk and watch the light return to my little girl's eyes so my family, my sanity could once again be secure.
And I wanted to be outdoors. I was stir crazy, itching all over to be out in the sunshine. God, how I wanted to feel the ocean-washed breeze on my face, to smell the mimosa, to touch the grass, to pretend, just for a little while, that the world was as it had been once.
I had to walk. It was four miles. I made three of them before I was attacked.
Surrounded by monsters who lusted to bring me down.
I killed a few out of sheer terror. My heart rocked against my ribs and I could hear myself screaming. But I didn't kill nearly enough. They came from abandoned houses and buildings. They came from broken storefronts and the front seats of wrecked cars still littering the curb sides. They crawled from bushes and from beneath porches and fell from trees like writhing snakes. The sounds they made were worse than anything I ever heard outside our house where they scratched fitfully against the doors and boarded windows at nights, moaning unintelligibly. The sounds I heard when they had me flat on my back and unarmed were deep growlings and stirring grunts of hunger. They filled my head so that I couldn't hear my own high-pitched screams anymore.
I don't remember the dying part. I had thought I would. If they ever caught me, I imagined at least I would be present at my own dying. But in the last moments I realized if there is a God that's all the good he managed to lend me--a forgetfulness. I woke feeling...different. Oh, very different. Numb. That hasn't changed and I don't expect it to. My limbs are like lead weights and I haven't yet learned how to make my legs and arms swing the way they should. I can't yet pass for a living man. I'm still trying to learn how.
My vision was strange. I had trouble focusing. At first my eyes watered and tears ran down my face because of the sun. My nose wouldn't stop dripping; it was as if I had stuffed truckloads of cocaine up my nostrils for a solid year. For some time I lay on the sidewalk where they'd left me, trying to believe I had been granted a reprieve. I was still alive.
So what if my flesh felt wooden and I couldn't see clearly? What matter was it that when I tried to move, my joints popped and it felt as if my ligaments were being stretched to their limits? I feared to feel for my heart, to check for a pulse. I feared to bring my hand to my mouth to see if I could discern air rushing from my lungs.
I had to be alive. I was thinking. I knew what had happened to me. I had a memory and a past. Zombies didn't think. We all knew that. They were automatons, hardly more than corpses in motion, possessed by the virus with an instinct to move and keep moving, to destroy the living, and to eat. If their brains had died and mine had not, then that was proof! I was not hungry in the least, not for food or for the flesh of my kind. Why should I doubt my good fortune, why check my pulse, feel for my heartbeat? I would not tempt fate, never again. I would get up and hurry back to my home, there to stay behind the walls until the army told us it was all right to come out. If it took two more years of waiting---the time minimum we'd been promised before there was a vaccine available--I didn't care, I'd never venture out again.
I could move a little, though the creaks and cracklings of my bones sent small thrills of worry through my brain. My clothes were torn and there was a nasty rippling series of bites on my legs and arms, even one on the back of my neck, and I could see congealed blood, but I wouldn't think about the infection. I thought I must be immune.
The only immune man in all the world because I was alive, surely I was alive for I felt alive. Dead wasn't just a numbness and a watering of the eyes and a few ligament strains, was it? Wouldn't my soul have fled had I really died? Wouldn't I be traveling through a tunnel toward light and peac€e and find those who had gone before me--my mother, my father, my two brothers, my grandparents?
Death could not be so simple as this.
Yet it was. It was.
But I didn't know that--or admit the possibility--for most of Saturday and Saturday night.
June 6
I crept to my house today. It was the first time I'd been back since my death. For days I couldn't do anything, but hide in shadows and dribble and beat the palms of my hands against my forehead. Once at my house, I joined the others at the door and stood there patting, patting at the wood, pressing my cold face there, moaning, trying to cry.
I cannot cry. I would weep all the time if I could. My eyes won't water anymore. My nose is dry. My juices are building inside, that's all I can think. Seeping all together inside, commingling, organs and blood coming together in one wet soggy mass.
Oh sweet Jesus.
I could not bear to speak, to tell Carrie inside that it was me, that I had joined in the ranks of the dead and that I could never again be with her or see my daughter's face. Because she wouldn't have me. Though I'd never hurt them! I have noticed a hunger awakening, but I intend to ignore it. It's a small hunger, a marble-size coal in my belly, and a sizzling in my brain. But I will ignore it forever. I hope never to sink so low as to feel a compulsion to betray my own kind, to cannibalize them. But there's no way for Carrie to know that or to trust me.
I had thought--let me tell you--I had thought the zombies created by the infection that took their lives yet let the bodies walk and terrorize the rest of us...I had thought there must be a soul and their souls had left them. I am not so sure now. I think there must not be a soul since there is no God, there is no hereafter, no tunnel of light, no meeting with dead loved ones, and no reward, good or bad. There seems to be nothing, but this aching, this wondering horror at what it has all come down to, this sad, unconquerable impetus to go on no matter what. And this gently gnawing hunger for the taste of blood on my tongue.
There was real death and darkness before the virus that has devastated the world and now there is walking death that has taken its place. But there is no soul.
I wish I didn't have to tell you this.
I wish it were not true.
I would die forever and enter that darkness except there is something that causes me to nurse the wish to survive. At all costs. Even though I am cold and numb, I can't cry and I can't find joy again. I still want to go on with this tired old beaten body for as long as I can. You see, I have this hope. A small one, but it keeps me out of the soldiers' line of fire and away from the depots where they congregate in platoons readying for search-and-destroy missions. My hope is that there might be another zombie like me. Somewhere. One who understands that he or she is dead and what it means. If there is just one more of us, it might portend a change in the direction the virus takes. Perhaps...there could be a reversal? A coming alive again?
No. I don't suppose that would happen. The blood is clotted and impure. The heart rots and curls into a knot. Each night I lie down to rest (not sleep, for I do not sleep), my muscles contract, and I'm forced to stretch them out again before I can even walk. I know this will never be put right again. Nothing modern medicine could invent would make the physical entity pink and pliant and warm once more.
But something makes me careful. I feel this powerful craving to preserve myself. I believe I have discovered something important about the infection. Part of the reason men who are dead still walk and become dangerous i
s that they are propelled by instinct. The instinct to survive. The memory of life. Even unto and beyond death. It is as if they walk in their sleep, hunting for relief. Or revenge for the injustice done them.
But why can they not think any longer? Or why can I? There is no fresh blood circulating in my body. I did finally check, late that first night, huddled with my coat pulled around my neck while cowering, fearful, waiting in the night behind a tall hedge of blooming hydrangea. The need to know took on a life of its own, dragging my thoughts back to my body. Throat. Heart. Was there a pulse or wasn't there? It became a circular, obsessive question. Was there a pulse or wasn't there?
I couldn't take it any longer. My fingers brushed against the artery at my throat, the carotid, and I jumped as if I had been branded. Fear caught me round with steel bands and for some seconds I couldn't move. I didn't want to know! Not for sure.
But it was too late. I had already felt the stillness there. The perfect quiet. My blood was not rushing through that artery or any other. And hunched there in the dark, scared of the many shadows slipping through the trees and around the sides of the buildings, I realized with a shock that I had not taken a breath since I woke. That involuntary element of life was gone. My chest had never expanded, had never even moved except with exertion when I twisted or turned or pulled myself up.
I lay then, down on the spongy wet grass behind the wild blue noddng heads of hydrangea, and pushed my face into the earth, and for the first time moaned just like the rest of them, the dead ones, moaned deep, without air, with sheer misery vibrating the vocal cords.
I was one of them. It was true. There could be no greater horror.
CREATURES Page 2
