The house was probably bigger than would be comfortable, or safe, for a single volunteer or even two. Peace Corps Admin had made some weird decisions in the past about security on that score, not that it mattered now. I’d learned fast during training to take care of my own safety as much as possible; in fact, Josie and I had bonded then over our cynicism about some Peace Corps policies. We’d been in Community Development before the outbreak, if you can believe it.
We busted into the house fast, machetes and matches out. We thought we were ready for what we’d find.
We weren’t.
The house had an open plan to allow for the February heat in the middle of the dry season. It had three bedrooms coming off a huge, airy living room that shaded off into a back porch with big clay pots, round and red.
In the middle of the living room, near a wooden couch that had been turned over and smashed, lay a zombie. It had been staked down with a metal spike through the ribs. Impressive. Whoever had done it must have used a sledgehammer. The zombie kept trying to get itself free, but couldn’t do so without ripping itself in half. Even so, it was still trying, scrabbling feebly at the cement floor.
It took me at least a minute to recognize Roger. His face had bloated up and slid sideways in the heat. His guts had burst out onto the floor. He had to have been dead for most of the past two weeks. The soiled t-shirt gave him away. We’d been in training together and he was still wearing the shirt our group had designed, along with the usual Peace Corps uniform of jeans and hiking boots that we were wearing for the job. A lot of volunteers eventually went native in their clothing styles, switching to cooler tailored cotton pajamas and flip-flops. Not Roger.
“Sweet Mary Mother of God,” Josie said, recognizing him at the same moment. She looked ready to puke. I wasn’t surprised. She and Roger had dated for about a week in training before she found out he was an asshole. Training relationships usually burned fast and furious, then guttered out just as fast.
“That’s one way to put it.” I could see her having a few issues walking in on a zombified person she’d once fooled around with.
As our voices echoed, I realized that the house seemed awfully quiet, as if someone was hiding further in, holding his or her breath. If Cyndi had been zombified, why would she be hiding from us? Why not attack? Where the hell was she?
I sidled up to Josie. Sound really carried off gloss-painted walls and polished floors. I leaned close and whispered, “I think Cyndi’s still in here.”
She nodded and whispered back, “You think we should check before we clear the house and start burning?” Cyndi had never liked Josie, being a tad jealous about the training fling, but Josie was a pro. She wasn’t going to let that stop her from finishing the job.
“Well…yeah.” At the very least, we’d need to make sure we’d located every zombie in the place or we might not get paid. Somebody had staked Roger to the living room floor, somebody who seriously didn’t want to die or get zombified. It was probably Cyndi, but that didn’t mean she was still human.
We catfooted down the hallway toward the bedrooms, covering each other. Machetes can be pretty effective, especially considering how much practice we’d gotten in with them. But they were close-up weapons, which meant we could get infected by body fluids or a bite if we didn’t watch it. No way in hell did I want to get infected and end up like Roger. Or that gendarme on the road from Ngaounderé.
Josie came behind me, watching my back. One of the fun parts of being a guy was getting to be on point. As I snuck down the hallway, I thought I heard a noise. I stopped dead, Josie ramming into my back.
“What the hell is that?” I whispered. Josie was practically clinging to my shoulders. Then I heard it again. It was a whimper. It came from down the hall.
We edged into the room. The noise was coming from the closet. Somebody was hiding in there.
We eased up to either side, machetes raised high. Then, at a signal from Josie, I yanked open the door.
Good thing we didn’t stand right in front of it. Whoever it was came right out of the closet, flailing around with a big spear. We almost hacked her to pieces right there, even as I recognized Cyndi. But then she started screaming at us. Actual words, mostly curses.
“Hey!” I yelled, backing up fast from the spear. “Hey, Cyndi! Calm down! It’s Bruce and Josie!”
Cyndi didn’t seem to notice. Josie and I had to dodge and hop around the room until I managed to hack the spear in half with my machete. Josie clomped Cyndi over the head with the butt of hers. That dazed Cyndi long enough that we were able to get her down and tie her up. I guess she finally realized then that we weren’t zombies—they don’t tie you up, just eat you raw. She started to cry, so we stopped trying to tie her up. We chivvied her out of there, checking the backyard to make sure it was clear and burning everything flammable as we went. We managed to save a photo album and some letters, though we weren’t sure if they belonged to Cyndi or Roger.
Last, we torched Roger. Or I did, that is. On the front porch, Josie sat on top of Cyndi to squash her ongoing hysterics and to keep her from watching while I went back into the living room to take care of the thing that used to be her boyfriend.
“Sorry about this, Roger,” I said. Just because he’d been an asshole when he was alive didn’t mean he deserved this. Nobody did. I doused him with kerosene, coughing at the smoke oozing through the house while he grunted and snapped at my hands. Then I lit a match. It took five or six, but he went up. The grunting didn’t get any more intense as the flames took him. If anything, it died down. He moved aimlessly around while he burned. Finally, something popped or broiled or I-don’t-know-what inside what was left of his brain and he settled down on the floor to smolder, mostly in silence, aside from the odd pop and crackle. And that was the end of Roger. The second end. The final one, I hoped. I backed away with a shudder and went out onto the porch, leaving the doors open to get better circulation for the fire. That sure as hell wasn’t how I wanted to close out my Peace Corps service.
We took Cyndi back to the taxi park after an alcohol bath, got our money from the sousprefet and caught a car taxi back with no other passengers. It cost a little extra to get the whole car, but it was worth it. We were covered with dried sweat already, the heat of late morning wringing out more, and Cyndi was acting pretty claustrophobic. About halfway home, Cyndi started to get semi-coherent and more than thankful. That was actually worse because then she had to tell us all about how Roger had been bitten by a zombie rat out of nowhere and turned a few days later. How she’d survived the past two weeks being chased around the house by her zombie boyfriend, afraid to go out in case she was attacked by more zombies. Damn. That was almost as bad as ending up like Roger.
On the way back, the driver took a detour to pick something up from his house, so we ended up coming in on the same road we’d taken the day before from the train station in Ngaounderé. The remains of the dead gendarme our taxi had hit lay all over the road. The limbs still moved feebly.
Suddenly, I needed a really stiff drink, but we’d used up all my gin for disinfectant purposes. I’d have to go dry until we got back to the house.
“Arrêtez!” I shouted to the driver. “Stop! Stop the car!”
The driver thought I was nuts, but he pulled over. We hadn’t paid him the full fare yet. He wouldn’t leave.
“What’re you doing?” Josie said, getting out with me. Cyndi just huddled in the back seat of taxi.
“I’m not leaving that poor bastard in the road.” I started getting the kerosene and matches out.
“Ahhh,” she said, following my line of sight to the twitching arms and legs.
We didn’t even bother to gather the body parts together, too much risk of infection. We just went up and down the road in the noon heat, pouring kerosene on the pieces and setting them on fire. I hoped that somehow it gave that gendarme some peace. I hoped I’d never have to do the same thing to Josie. And I hoped that if I got unlucky, too, someone would giv
e me the same mercy.
The Anteroom
By Adam-Troy Castro
Adam-Troy Castro’s work has been nominated for several awards, including the Hugo, Nebula, and Stoker. His novels include Emissaries from the Dead and The Third Claw of God, and two collaborations with artist Johnny Atomic: Z Is for Zombie, and V Is for Vampire, which comes out in October. Castro’s short fiction has appeared in such magazines as The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Science Fiction Age, Analog, Cemetery Dance, and in a number of anthologies. I previously included his work in The Living Dead and in Lightspeed Magazine. His story collections include A Desperate, Decaying Darkness and Tangled Strings.
People throughout history have had many different conceptions of what an afterlife might look like. The Greeks imagined the sunny fields of Elysium and the unending drudgery of Hades. The Vikings imagined that great warriors would go to an endless kegger in Valhalla. Dante imagined Hell as a massive multi-tiered pit. (The image of the underworld as a place of fire may have been inspired by the volcanic island of Crete, and the word Gehenna, associated with Hell, is named after a fiery garbage pit outside Jerusalem.) But what sort of an afterlife might await those who have been transformed into zombies?
“The most bone-chilling horror of the zombie sub-genre has always been that the plague turns us into things we don’t want to be, things capable of committing depraved acts that would have appalled the people we used to be,” Castro says. “We laugh when the hero of a zombie story blows away the shambling rotter in his path...but we tend to forget that the rotter used to be a person, and might have even been a human paragon. Stephen King wrote about his rabid St. Bernard Cujo, from the novel of the same name. You can’t hate the dog. The dog always tried to be a good dog. But something got into him, something that eliminated free will from the equation. How would Cujo feel if somebody returned to him the capacity to understand what he’d done? How would a human being?”
Your mercy killer, who knew you well in life and weeps for you even as he does what he must, presses the rifle barrel against your forehead with a gentleness that renders the gesture more a goodbye kiss than a murder. He even apologizes to you, calling you by name and telling you how sorry he is. You do not understand the apology or recognize your name or even appreciate that you are being put out of your misery. You only know that you have been prevented from shuffling forward, the atavistic impulses that drive your rotting limbs still urging you toward the very man who is about to end you. You don’t attempt to evade the bullet, because that kind of problem-solving is beyond you. You simply moan in protest. And then he pulls the trigger and the world fills with fire and your head comes apart in an explosion of bone and blood and brains. The wall behind you drips with everything good you were in life and everything obscene you became in death.
Your best friend will tell himself that you’re in a better place now. And here we leave him, wishing him well, whether he manages to survive or at least dies without becoming infected. Because his story is unremarkable. There have been many thousands just like it, in the world plagued by the living dead.
But your own story is not yet done.
In fact, your story might never be done. And this is why.
You wake an infinite distance away, blinking on your back beneath a sky that is neither dark nor light, but rather a shade of gray that reminds you of sheets that have gone unwashed. You are naked, to the kind of air that raises goose bumps on your skin and assures you that you’re once again alive. You are hungry, but it is not the hunger that you have been feeling in the days since the contagion turned you into a thing neither alive nor dead; it is the hunger a human being feels, the hunger of skipped meals, the hunger of a body beginning to tremble from need but not yet forced to desperation. It is not pleasant, but it is better than what you felt as a corpse: a gnawing, painful emptiness powerful enough to drive ambulatory meat.
It’s cold. The air has the kind of chill only possible in caves. The dirt against your back feels dry, and so solid that it might as well be concrete, but there is no warmth in it, no sense that it has ever known sun or sprouted so much as a weed.
But that’s not the force that makes your face contort in pain. A flood of unwanted memories has reminded you of the man you were, in the world before everything turned to shit, and taken you through every shambling step of the journey you began when you rose as one of the living dead. You recall facing people you’d once known, and seeing only meat; hearing the screams of somebody who had been wounded and left behind, and feeling only hunger; digging with your bare hands through the steaming belly wound of a victim who begged you to finish her off, and knowing only the compulsion to shovel more of her sweetmeats into your idiot maw. You remember exactly the long minutes she lasted, and you remember failing to see her as a living thing, even when she called you Daddy. You remember losing interest in her after her heart stopped, staying near her only out of indecision, walking away after she sat up a thing hollowed out both body and soul, noticing but not caring that she tried to follow you but fell behind with every step.
As a mindless walking corpse, preying on the warm, you were spared these memories. As whatever you are now, something capable of knowing what they mean, you will never be able to escape them. You will never be able to forget what it had been like, before, to watch that bulge in your wife’s belly grow until it became a great big promise of imminent life; to hold the squirming little miracle in your hands, unprepared for the sheer intensity of the love that seized you as you looked into the baby’s indignant face; to feel that wonderment again the first time she smiled at you; to live for the moments when she laughed; to watch her run around you in circles, her laughter like music; to hold her in your arms as the world turned to shit and the skies filled with soot and everything you saw became an atrocity, clutching for you both. You will never be able to forget the way she’d fallen into a lasting silence well into the plague after your wife died from a simple fever, one that killed without forcing her to rise. You will never be able to forget watching your daughter’s exhausted sleep while foul things moaned on the other side of a flimsy wall. You will never be able to forget telling her, without waking her, that you would never let the bad things get her, that you would never become one of them, that you would never let her become one of them either. You will never be able to forget the long weeks of bitter struggle that followed. You will never be able to forget the moment when your own chances ran out, or the way she regained her powers of speech and called you Daddy just before you put an end to her.
You weep until you have to stop from sheer emotional exhaustion.
Only when you fall silent, for a moment, do you register the many other wails in the wind.
Standing hurts. The ground is covered with a thin layer of concentrated grit that irritates your skin where it adheres to the soles of your feet. You wipe the particles away with a brush of your hand, but more accrues with your next step, which makes a nasty crunch as you sink a millimeter or so into the surface. Your body’s going to have a hard time generating enough warmth to replace what the dirt leeches from your flesh; and while you should be better off standing than you were lying flat on your back, the air is no real improvement. It’s thin, frigid, and tasteless. Your lungs derive no nourishment from it.
The surrounding landscape is just as barren. The gray plain extends to a gray horizon that feels farther away than any you would have found in any desert on Earth; there seems no obvious dividing line between dirt and sky, no border drawn that mitigates this emptiness by establishing any kind of limit. There are no distant hills, no sense that any one direction is preferable than any other. If you had to guess you would say that there might, might, be a dull glow somewhere off to what you arbitrarily decide to be east. But that might be imaginary, too. It might just be your eyes, imposing detail on a landscape that otherwise offers none.
This is not the same thing as calling this flat purgatory uninhabited. Because it happens to imprison many thousand
s of other people, crouching or sitting or lying down, as far as your eyes can see. Wherever they come from—and you can only assume that it must be the same place you have come from—they have been plopped down at equal distances, hundreds of paces apart, and they all remain alone, unwilling to expend the energy it would cost to get up and form groups. There are many weeping and many screaming, but most are just stewing in their own silence, finding enough torment within the confines of their own skulls.
Another memory comes to you: a man who had been shot in the knee. The round had turned his leg to a broken twig, trailing along at a sickening angle as he used a rifle butt to lever himself across a city street strewn with corpses and garbage and broken glass. For some reason you had been the only one of your kind still ambulatory, and this promised great things for you as you shambled toward him, announcing your approach and your intent with a low moan that made the doomed figure try to crawl faster. By the time you were within twenty paces of catching up with him, he was looking back over his shoulder once for every yard he managed to crawl. By the time you’d halved that distance he was shouting empty obscenities, calling you a stinking bastard. When you halved the distance again he was swinging his ruined rifle like a club, offering a threat that deterred you not at all. Once you came within reach of him he clubbed you in the belly, knocking you on your back; and he cried out with the savage glee of a Neanderthal who had just managed to spear the attacking tiger.
He spent the time it took you to get up dragging himself another five yards, but then collapsed, gasping. Another sweep from that rifle put you down a second time, but this time he only managed to retreat half the distance before you were on him again. Too late he decided to do what he should have done the first time, which was club you in the skull and hope he could do enough damage to your brain to smash the terrible miracle that kept you moving. But by now his strength was fading. He only succeeded in flattening your nose, adding your own clotted blood to the gore already painting your lips. You fell down again and got up again. This time he had only crawled a foot. He swung the rifle again and this time did not knock you down, but only drove you back a step or two, which was not far enough at all.
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