Soma (The Fearlanders)

by Joseph Duncan

  “I know you’re right,” Soma said. “And I did eat meat before. It’s just…”

  “I can cook it up for you if you want. I got some propane in the tank outside, but it won’t be as good for you. Heat destroys most of the nutrients. You’ll be hungry and hurtin’ again in a couple hours.”

  “No… No, I can eat it.”

  She picked up the rabbit and brought it to her lips, closed her eyes, bit into the flesh.

  Near orgasmic pleasure exploded in her mouth at the taste of the meat. The pleasure scintillated through her body in waves. Her heart seemed to shudder in her breast. Her arms and legs tingled. The sensation was so intense, so all consuming, she would have been embarrassed if she were in full command of her faculties. But she was not. At the first taste of raw flesh, the red haze descended, and the pleasure of it swept all rational thought away. Quite before she knew what was happening to her, she awoke to find herself gnawing on the thighbone of the animal, the entire carcass picked clean, bones torn apart and scattered across her side of the table.

  “Oh! Oh, goodness, I’m so sorry,” she said, taking the bone from her mouth. “You must be horrified.”

  She looked across the table at her host and put her hand to her mouth. Perry hunched over his plate, mouth and fingers bloody, gnawing the last bits of the flesh from the animal’s bones with noisy little grunts and smacks. His face was slack but for his snapping teeth. His eyes had rolled back in their sockets so that only the whites were visible.

  He continued like that for a minute or two, then his fingers went lax and the rabbit’s bones dropped to his plate with a clink.

  “Perry?” she said.

  His eyelids fluttered, and he grinned at her drunkenly. “Feels… good, don’t it?” he slurred. “’S only time… it doesn’t hurt…”

  Soma looked inwards and noted that, yes, the pain had abated. It hadn’t gone away completely, but it was much reduced. She held her desiccated hand before her eyes and flexed her fingers. Perhaps it was her imagination, but it seemed her dried stick fingers moved more easily now. The joints didn’t crackle as loudly when she bent them.

  “See?” Perry said. “I told you.”

  She smiled at him and nodded. “I feel like the Tin Man after Dorothy oiled his hinges.”

  Perry blinked his eyes and shook his head. “Whoa!” he said, looking down at the mess on the table, the blood dried on his hands. “Always make a mess when I eat.” He rose and walked to the sink with quick, sure strides. “You want a washcloth to clean up?” He washed his hands in the sink, and when Soma nodded he grabbed a wet rag out of the soapy water and tossed it to her. Leaning against the counter, he mopped his face with a second washcloth. “We have to be careful when we eat,” he said. “We slip when we eat. Slip back into the… the red fog. The feeding frenzy. Whatever you want to call it.”

  “Red fog sounds about right,” Soma said. “

  “Some folks are dangerous when they eat. They’ll attack other Resurrects.” He walked to the table then and scraped the bones together with his hands. The bones went in a wastebasket. He wiped the table off with the rag, talking the whole while. “I’m not that bad. Just make a mess. Get kind of loopy for a few minutes. You, too, I guess. You have enough to eat? You want any more?”

  “I’m fine, thank you,” she said.

  “Don’t mind me,” he said, still scrubbing energetically. “I’m sort of a clean freak. I was a little OCD when I was alive. It kind of followed through.”

  Soma smiled. “My husband was the same way.”

  “Soma, huh? That’s an unusual name. You don’t talk like a foreigner.”

  “I’m half-Pakistani. My mother was from Pakistan. My father was American. My mother’s family disowned her when she married my father. She was fluent in Punjabi and Sindh, but after her family cast her out, she refused to speak anything but English. I might look Paki, but I’m an all-American girl. Hot dogs and apple pie, baseball and Jesus. That’s why I don’t have an accent.”

  Perry laughed. “And your husband?”

  “He’s Pakistani,” she smiled. “We met in college. We were the only two Pakis at the university, aside from his sister. Crazy, huh?”

  “I’ve heard crazier,” he said. He finished cleaning the table and tossed his rag into the sink. He leaned against the counter again, looking at her. It was a thoughtful look, not lewd or threatening. She could see he was thinking and let him have a moment. Finally, he said, “So I promised to tell you what’s happened while you were in the dead zone, but I need to know when you died. What’s the last thing you remember before you kicked the bucket?”

  Soma looked back through her memories. “Well… I remember the Phage. Everyone was panicking. The government was trying to quarantine the infection, but they couldn’t keep a lid on it. It kept spreading. I was a nurse, worked in the ER at Saint Francis Hospital. I guess it was late October. Almost Halloween. We were just starting to see some of the infected in the emergency room. People were coming in sick, feverish. Several people had been bitten. A few were delirious, combative, had to be restrained. It was turning into a real madhouse. My husband came in about noon that day and pulled me out of work. Forced me to leave. Wouldn’t take no for an answer. He literally dragged me out of there. I was furious, of course. I don’t like being manhandled. But he grabbed me by the shoulders in the parking lot and said he’d seen tanks rolling past his office building. They were going to quarantine the city. No one in or out. They were already setting up roadblocks, he said. We had to get our daughter out of there. Well, that was all it took. I jumped in the car and we took off. Nandi had already packed. Aishani was in the back. He’d taken her out of preschool. Everyone was grabbing their kids out of school that morning.

  “We couldn’t use the interstate. There was nothing but cars lined up, bumper to bumper, as far as the eye could see. None of them were moving. People were abandoning their cars, taking off on foot. Nandi knew a lot of the back streets, though. He knew the town like the back of his hand. Used to deliver pizzas before he got his degree. We got out just in time. We headed to my parent’s home up north. My father had retired, owned a big farm up by Brookville Lake. As we were driving away, we saw several jets fly past us, heading for the city. A couple minutes after they passed, we heard what sounded like thunder coming from that direction. I guess they bombed the city.”

  “What city was it?”

  “What?” Soma said, blinking her eyes. For a moment she was still in the past, experiencing their narrow escape all over again. Nandi driving at breakneck speed along neglected blacktops and rutted country roads. Aishani crying in the backseat. Then the jets shooting past overhead. Five of them, flying in delta formation. They were low enough to the earth to make her eardrums throb when they roared past.

  “What city was it?”

  “Oh, uh, Dearborn. Dearborn, Indiana. It’s about twenty miles southwest of Cincinnati. More of a suburb, really. Just across the state line.”

  Perry smiled. “You know where you ended up?”

  “Where?” Soma asked, leaning forward intently. That was one of her primary concerns. Where she was. How far she was from her family.

  “Stone Ridge, Illinois. Just west of a little town called Harrisburg.”

  She shook her head. “Never heard of it.”

  “You wandered nearly two states from home while you were dead,” he said. “There’s a deader in town that wandered all the way from Arkansas. That’s the record holder locally. But two states is pretty good.” He laughed. “I didn’t even make it out of my bedroom!”

  “Is that Southern Illinois, or Central?” Soma asked. Illinois was a large state, one of the biggest in the United States, with Chicago at the head and Petticoat Junction at the tail.

  “Oh, Southern Illinois. Near the Illinois Ozarks.”

  “Ah.”

  Not far from home then. Not as far as she had feared. She did some quick math in her head and decided her father’s farm was only five or s
ix hours away by car. Of course, that was rate of travel before the Phage. It would take considerably longer now, she suspected, depending on what obstacles a person ran into: bad roads, collapsed bridges, abandoned and wrecked vehicles. Nevertheless, it was close enough to fall within the realm of feasible.

  “But finish your story,” Perry said. “I interrupted.”

  Soma foundered for a moment, forgetting where she had left off.

  “Your father’s farm…?” Perry prompted.

  “Oh, yes. Well, I’m afraid there’s not much to tell after that. We made it to my father’s farm, and that’s where we stayed. We went into his bunker when they nuked New York, but eventually we came out. The fallout had drifted out to sea, I suppose. When spring came, we planted. We never really had too much trouble -- with zombies or the survivalist groups. My father’s farm is pretty remote. There was a bit of strife between my father and Nandi. Nandi wanted to fortify the property. My father sometimes bartered with outsiders for supplies, or just gave them food if they had nothing to trade, and Nandi was afraid some militant group would try to seize the property. My father didn’t agree. He was a pacifist. Is a pacifist. He believed we’d be safe so long as we shared freely with the other survivors. ‘They will only attack us if we make walls to keep them out,’ he said.”

  “Your husband was right,” Perry said. “There are still militant groups riding around the Zombie Nations, raping and pillaging. I thought I heard gunfire yesterday, but I couldn’t tell where it was coming from. It’s why I keep the windows covered. You have to keep an eye out for the living and the dead around here. Survivors will shoot you in the head and steal your belongings, and the deadheads will attack and eat us if they’re starved. It’s like living in the Wild West. You got to watch out for the outlaws and the Indians.”

  “So there’s no law, no government?” Soma asked.

  “No law but what we make for ourselves,” Perry said, crossing his arms. “Oh, the tribes have their various treaties. There’s a trifling little town government over in Stone Ridge. If you want, you can go to town and sign their register and they’ll swear you in as a citizen. There’s a sheriff and some deputies, a mayor and selectmen. But you have to live in town and you have to do what the big kahunas tell you to do. Outside of that, though, it’s like frontier living all over again. Mad Max with zombies.”

  “And these tribes you mentioned?” Soma asked.

  “After the deadheads started waking up, they naturally began to seek one another out. Eventually they banded together into communities. Started calling themselves the Zombie Nations. I suppose you could call it a confederation, sort of like the Native American tribes before the US Government rounded them all up and stuck ‘em on reservations.”

  “And that’s the only form of government now. This Zombie Nation?”

  “Well, there’s Home.”

  “Home?”

  “The city of the living,” Perry said.

  “A city of living people?” Soma said excitedly.

  “Yeah, but we aren’t allowed there. Only living folk can live there. They blast any Resurrects that come anywhere near the city. It’s up north. The city used to be called Peoria. They say there’s about fifty thousand living people there. They’ve got a deal with the Zombie Nations. The tribes leave them in peace and in return they give their dead to the Nations. You know, for food. They’ve got an army and they’ve got nukes. I guess you’d call it a Mexican standoff.”

  “Home…” Soma said, tasting the word. It was such a beautiful word. To say it you had to shape your lips as if you were kissing someone. Perhaps her family was living there, safe and secure. She could only hope, though she would never be able to see them again if they were.

  “So tell me how you died,” Perry said.

  It startled her, Perry’s mention of death while she was thinking of the living.

  “It’s kind of silly, really. Almost embarrassing,” she said. “It was early fall. We’d been living with my mother and father about a year. We all had our chores. Even little Aishani. One of my chores was emptying the potty. We didn’t have running water, so we had to use a five-gallon bucket with a toilet seat on top of it. It was my job to carry it out to the edge of the yard and dump it every day. That’s what I was doing when I got attacked.”

  She went on: “I guess I was careless. We’d had so little trouble there. Nandi had used my father’s backhoe to dig trenches all around the property. He’d sharpened stakes and stuck them in the walls of the trenches pointed outwards. Any zombies who wandered in would impale themselves on those stakes.

  “Well, this one had impaled himself, and I guess he had wiggled the stake out of the ground and climbed over the wall. I was emptying the bucket when I heard a crackling sound in the woods. I thought maybe it was one of the dogs, so I called out to him, only it wasn’t. It was a deadhead.

  “He was fast, even with a stake run through the middle of him. He grabbed ahold of me as I ran back for the house and then he bit me, right here, on the shoulder. My dad heard me screaming and grabbed his rifle. He wasn’t too pacifistic with a zombie munching on his only daughter.

  “He blew the zombie’s head off, but it was too late. I’d been bitten.

  “I got sick really fast. By nightfall, I was burning up with fever, delirious, but I made Nandi promise he wouldn’t let me come back. That he’d, you know, fix it so I didn’t return. But he broke his promise. For whatever reason, he couldn’t do it. They must have taken my body out and left it somewhere. I remember woods. That was the first thing I remember when I came back. Woods and darkness. And the hunger. I was so hungry. It hurt so bad. So I got up and started walking. Looking for something to eat. I knew if I ate something the pain would go away. It was the only thing I knew. Everything else was gone.”

  “So you died at the end of year one?” Perry said. He looked shocked.

  “Yes,” Soma said. “So, how long has it been? How long was I… asleep?”

  He looked like he didn’t want to tell her. It was one of those “I’m sorry, but it’s bad” looks doctors give their patients when the prognosis is bleak.

  “Perry?” she said. “Perry, please, tell me!”

  “Five years,” he said.

  “Five years!”

  He nodded. “You were away five years.”

  12

  He didn’t say anything else for a minute or two, just stood there leaning against the counter with a sympathetic (and slightly worried) expression on his face. She didn’t know what he might be wary of. Maybe he was one of those men who didn’t know how to deal with the squalls and rainbows of female emotions. Well, he could relax. She wasn’t going to explode into histrionics. She was shocked, yes. Terribly shocked. She could not quite wrap her brain around the bald data she had just received. But she wasn’t going to fall to pieces over it.

  She had been dead five years.

  Five YEARS!

  Her daughter would be eleven years old this winter. She was a Christmas baby, born on December 22. She was just five years old the last time Soma saw her. Little more than a baby. Nandi would be forty years old. Middle aged! And her mother and father… well, she could never remember exactly how old they were, although she had never forgotten their birthdays, which fell on August 14 and January 12, respectively. They had always seemed timeless to her, but only the dead were truly timeless. The living just went on, ground finer and finer by the millstone of time. They would be in their mid to late sixties. A couple of old fogies now.

  Five years…!

  FIVE YEARS!

  Finally, Perry said, “Are you okay?”

  “Yes,” she answered. “I’m sorry. It’s just kind of a shock. I thought… maybe two years… Three at the most. But not five. Now I know how Rip Van Winkle felt.”

  “It’s why you’re so…” He looked abashed and made an apologetic gesture.

  “Dried up?” she said. “Withered?”

  “You’ll fill out a little if you eat regularly,�
� he said hurriedly. “Your body will regenerate a little.”

  How nice it would be to cry right now, she thought. Tears were a wonderful release. But though her eyes stung, and she could feel the pressure of it in her head and her chest, the tears did not come.

  “Can zombies cry, Perry?” she asked.

  “No,” he said. “We can’t cry. We can’t screw. We can’t sleep. Well, not like when we were alive. You can sort of put yourself in a trance…”

  “So what’s left for us?” she said. “What’s the point of going on?”

  He shrugged. “I like to read.”

  So she could still laugh, and it was a wonderful release of the tension, almost as good as crying.

  He was so earnest and kind!

  “What kinds of books do you like to read?” she asked.

  He looked relieved. “Oh, all kinds,” he said. “I like westerns, detective stories, science fiction. Pulpy stuff, I guess. As long as it’s well written. I go into town every now and then and loot empty houses for books. I’ve raided the library, too. I’m a regular book thief. Do you like to read?”

  Soma nodded. “Yeah.”

  “What do you read?”

  “Uh, horror mostly, I guess,” she said. “Stephen King. Dean Koontz. Anne Rice.”

  He wrinkled his big nose. “I never cared for that stuff. Who likes being scared on purpose?”

  “I used to think it was fun to be scared,” Soma said.

  Perry shuddered, then looked embarrassed. She knew exactly what he was thinking: big guys like him shouldn’t be afraid of anything.

  “Life’s scary enough,” Perry chuckled. “I ain’t paying someone to make it even scarier. Not that I pay for books anymore, but I used to.”