The Living Dead 2

by John Joseph Adams

  We searched the place, now that we had daylight. We didn’t find any water, but we found a whip, lashed to the wall below deck. (Whether it was a full-sized whip, or just to scale, I don’t know.) It was big. I went to show off and hit myself in the ear. It didn’t even snap.

  Back when phones and the Internet still worked, people on Twitter had said that you could use whips to control the zombies. That, and how zombieism was an STD, incubating before it turned its victims. Those people had to be zombies by now, due to their total lack of bullshit detectors. But we were thirsty enough to try anything. Juicy took the whip from me. She switched it without hitting herself. It popped like when Indiana Jones does it. She called for Kelly.

  A few minutes later, Kelly bobbed up out of the water. So maybe zombies could swim. Maybe they were just lazy. They needed external motivation. Juicy talked to him, using the whip for punctuation. She said his name. He still responded to it, which didn’t bother any of us, though maybe it should have. He knew our names at one point. Someone did.

  Kelly climbed up the rope we dangled down for him. He stood, dripping onto the deck, eyeing us as if we were a hundred dewy virgins. He looked that way at all of us, which probably upset Juicy. He didn’t seem to remember that they’d been together. But it was nice to have him back. I told him so, but he didn’t say much.

  “We need you to attack them,” Juicy said, pointing. She’d picked out a nice little motorboat, the kind that has a cabin with refrigerators and beds and a big-ass water tank. Kelly made a noise like the Incredible Hulk, and wiggled his hips like Elvis. I think he still loved Juicy.

  She told him to go wait in the water, and act like he was drowning. With luck, he wouldn’t look dead that way. He smiled at Juicy, and he went.

  It was like bioterrorism, what we were doing. It was like giving smallpox-infected blankets to the Native Americans. It was like taking someone else’s towel off the hook on the locker room wall when they’re in the shower because yours got wet—it was just plain mean.

  We waved to the motorboat. We pointed to Kelly. We pointed at the rigging. Or the spar. Or the mizzenmast. Whatever the sail was attached to. There was no wind.

  The elderly couple understood, and they motored over to where Kelly bobbed and waved. They seemed like such nice people, helping out a stranger like that. We reminded ourselves that it was us or them.

  The couple threw out a rope. They pulled Kelly out of the black water, and by the time they dropped the rope and backed away, he was wiggling onto their deck. And then it was like an L. L. Bean catalog gone terribly wrong: flannel tearing and sensible shoes flying.

  While Kelly ate, we argued about whether we should have done something differently.

  We called our new home the SuperBall. It’d had a different name before, but the paint got messed up when Juicy pulled the boat up next to the Niña. She’s never been good at parallel parking. But you should have seen her, boldly swimming over to get the boat, with the whip in her teeth, her clothes all wet and clingy. It was all Highwater and me could do not to jump on her, once we got aboard the boat. I saw the way he looked at her, and he saw the way I looked at her. We were both ashamed of ourselves, going after Kelly’s girl. Although it wasn’t like he was taking care of her anymore. And he’d always been flirting with other girls. Rumor had it he’d been screwing around.

  We let the old couple stay. They obeyed the whip, like Kelly, and it was their boat, after all. We started calling them Homer and Marge, which are terribly old-fashioned names when you think about it. Their hair was thin and fine and pale, and both of them were balding. They wandered around on the deck, moaning. They were always together. Groping each other, even. Kelly followed them around, but they ignored him.

  Us pirates stayed inside the cabin. That way, all of the other boats that went past would think that we were already a ghost ship. We would be safe.

  Back on shore, it would be like every zombie movie you’ve ever seen. Here it was peaceful. We played with the Ouija board we found, but we couldn’t contact any ghosts. You’d think with this many dead people around we could find a ghost willing to talk. We checked the radio, but no one would talk to us on that either. Or maybe the batteries were dead. I taught Juicy some hymnals that I remembered from O Brother, Where Art Thou? Also the chorus of a screamer by this band Lordi called “The Night of the Loving Dead.” I couldn’t remember any of the words except for the title, but I sang it and she smiled.

  Even then I knew. She’d already chosen Highwater. They hadn’t even kissed yet, not in front of me, but I knew. It shouldn’t have bothered me, but it did.

  Juicy asked me to go outside. The look she gave me when she closed the door told me she knew how I felt. Her eyes were wet with desire. Or maybe grief. Or need. She couldn’t stop herself; she was trying to tell me.

  I paced, waiting for her to open the door. I wanted to call out her name—her real name—but the only one I could remember was Kelly’s. I opened my mouth to say it, just in case. Then I heard grunting and moaning and wet smacking.

  The Crocodiles

  By Steven Popkes

  Steven Popkes is the author of two novels: Caliban Landing and Slow Lightning. His short fiction has appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Twilight Zone Magazine, Science Fiction Age, Realms of Fantasy, SCI FICTION, and in the annuals the Year’s Best Science Fiction, The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction, and Year’s Best Fantasy. His story “The Color Winter” was a finalist for the Nebula Award. He is currently working on a novel about flying witches.

  When it comes to horror, Nazis and zombies are like peanut butter and chocolate—very evil peanut butter and chocolate, that is. Dr. Mengele’s gruesome experiments on living subjects, German technological prowess—as demonstrated by the V2 rockets—and Hitler’s obsession with supermen and the occult make it all too easy to imagine fiendish Nazi experiments reanimating dead soldiers. A well-known example is the video game Wolfenstein, in which you play a lone American agent who must penetrate secret Nazi labs crawling will all manner of grotesque monstrosities. The recent horror movie Dead Snow—which features a memorable scene in which one of the heroes chainsaws off his own arm after it is bitten by a zombie—is about a group of tourists who inadvertently awaken a colony of frozen Nazi zombies left over from World War II. It must be said that these examples, and several others we could name, are pretty campy, with Nazis used as a convenient shorthand for faceless evil.

  Our next tale is a completely different sort of story. This is a tale told from the point of view of a World War II-era German scientist, a man who loves his wife and child, which makes his inhuman detachment about his work all the more chilling. This is Nazi zombies as high art, a tale so full of plausible-sounding scientific and historical detail that you’ll start to wonder if maybe these sorts of experiments were real after all.

  I could not make a silk purse from a sow’s ear. But I went over the data again to see if I could find a tiny tatter of bright thread in the otherwise disappointing results. There had to be a better use of a well-educated chemical engineer than cannon fodder. Willem, my wife’s uncle, called me.

  “Max,” he said, a happy disembodied voice over the phone. “Very sorry about your work and all that. How was it going?”

  It didn’t surprise me he already knew. “We didn’t get the results we’d hoped for,” I said. “But there are other areas in the war effort where fuel filtration research would be entirely applicable. Aircraft engines, for instance—”

  “No doubt,” he said, chuckling. “However, by an astonishing coincidence I was planning to call you anyway. I have a good use for your skills.”

  “Oh, really?” I said with a sinking feeling. I had no desire to work for the Gestapo. Uncomfortable work at the very least.

  “Yes. There’s a Doctor Otto Weber doing some very interesting biological work in Buchenwald. He can use your help.”

  “What sort of work?”

 
“I’m sure I’d be the wrong person to discuss it with you, not being a scientist or an engineer. I’ll work out the details of the transfer and send round the papers and tickets.”

  “I really ought to find out how I can be of service—”

  “There’s always the regular army. I’m sure a man of your caliber—”

  “I’ll be looking for your messenger.”

  “Fine. Oh, and Max?”

  “Yes?”

  “Weekly reports. On everything and everybody. All right?”

  “Of course,” I said.

  You don’t argue with the Gestapo. Even my Elsa’s uncle.

  Otto Weber was a thin, elderly gentleman. Once he had been quite tall. He was now stooped with age. His eyes were washed out and watery, like blue glass underwater. But his hands were steady as he first lit my cigarette, then his own.

  Weber called them tote Männer. Once he showed me their decomposing condition and single-minded hunger, I thought the term apt.

  Weber was brought the first host in 1938 and had to keep the disease alive with new hosts from the Gestapo—which they were always willing to supply, though in small lots so he never had more than a few laboratory subjects at a time. He was never told where that first host came from but he surmised South America. Later, in 1940 when the laboratory was at Buchenwald, the Gestapo supplied him with a slow but steady trickle of Gypsies.

  What he had discovered when I joined the project in 1941 was that infection was only successful by fluid transport from the infected host, infection was in two phases, and there were at least two components to the disease.

  In one experiment, Weber took fluid from a toter Mann and filtered three samples, one through a 100 micron filter, one through a 50 micron filter, and one through a Chamberland filter. The 100 micron wash caused full infection. The 50 micron also caused a partial infection involving quick and sudden pain, followed by an inevitably fatal stroke. He called this partial infection type I-A. The Chamberland wash caused a particularly quick and virulent form of rabies—Weber referred to that as type I-B. Hence, Weber’s hypothesis of two components for a full infection, one large and the other the rabies virus. He had isolated a worm as the possible large component in that, when collected and washed of any contaminants, it seemed to cause an I-A infection similar to the infection caused by the 50 micron wash. When the Chamberland wash was recombined with the worm, full infection ensued.

  Weber had even characterized the partial infections and the stages of the full infection. I found it interesting that the partial infections were both dismal, painful affairs, while the full infection showed up first as euphoria, followed by sleepiness and coma. The subject awoke in a few days as a toter Mann.

  Even so, I was surprised that there hadn’t been more discovered in four years. After all, Weber had the tote Männer themselves and their inherent ability to infect others. The Gestapo was willing to provide a constant, if limited, supply of hosts. But Weber’s horror of contagion was so strong that every step had to be examined minutely until he had determined to his satisfaction that he could properly protect himself and his staff. Dissection was a long and tedious process; vivisection was almost impossible. I suppose I could not blame him. Even a partial infection would be fatal and full infection always resulted in another toter Mann. No one wanted to risk that.

  Thus, my first task was the design and construction of a dissection and histology laboratory where Weber could disassemble the subjects in safety. It was not a difficult task. I came to Buchenwald in July. By the end of the month I had the design and began construction. Weber dissected his first wriggling subject by the first of September.

  My fuel work had been much more interesting. It was exacting, exciting work with great applications. Here, I was barely more than a foreman. The war in Russia seemed to be going well and I wondered if I should have protested more to Willem.

  But Elsa and our son Helmut loved Weimar. The city was pretty in a storybook way. It didn’t hurt that the bombers left Weimar largely undisturbed, instead striking in Germany proper. It lent the city a relative calm. Several young couples had taken over the empty housing. This was early in the war and food and petrol, though rationed, were still plentiful.

  I didn’t work weekends and the three of us spent many summer days in the Park on the Ilm. It occurred to me, during those pleasant hours watching Helmut playing in front of Goethe’s House, that this was, perhaps, a better use of my time than the factory or the lab.

  Within a week of opening the new facilities, Weber made some astonishing discoveries. Histological examination of the brain tissue of the tote Männer showed how the worms nested deep in the higher functioning brain—clearly explaining why there were only tote Männer and not tote rats and tote cats. He speculated that there could be tote gorillas and tote chimpanzees and went so far as to request animals from the Berlin Zoo. The Zoo was not cooperative. Weber reconsidered his New World origin of the disease and attributed it to Africa or Indonesia where the great apes lived. It stood to reason that a complex disease found suddenly in humans would require a similar host in which to evolve prior to human infection.

  However, the worms were only one half of the disease. The virus followed the nervous system through the body, enabling worm entry into the brain but also enabling the growth of strong cords throughout the body. This was further proof of the two-component infection model Weber had developed. In the case of partial infections of the worm or the virus, the process only went so far. Forced by the absence of the virus to remain within the body’s major cavities, the worm caused fevers and paralysis, blocking blood vessels mechanically, causing a heart attack or stroke. The virus enabled the worm to penetrate directly into the brain, leaving the heart and circulatory system intact—at least for a while. Without the worm, the virus merely crippled the nervous system, causing fevers, seizures, and great pain. The cords only appeared when both were present. Weber was convinced by the pathology of the disease that the tote Männer virus was a variant of rabies, but the biological history of the virus, the worm, and the virus-worm combination was mysteriously speculative.

  I dutifully reported this to Willem, along with descriptions of Weber, his assistant, Brung, and his mistress, Josephine, whom we had met at dinner in Weimar earlier in the summer. Unsure whether Willem’s desire for detail extended to the subjects, I included the names of the last couple of Gypsy hosts left from the Buchenwald experiments and the newer Jews we had appropriated from the main population of the camp. Weber was curiously reluctant to use the handicapped and mentally deficient and he hated using Poles. Perhaps this stemmed from some event in his past of which I was unaware.

  Willem paid his niece a Christmas visit, visiting our laboratory only coincidentally. He was impressed with our progress. “With the tote Männer we will crush Russia,” he said over drinks that evening.

  Weber paled. “There will be problems using the tote Männer in winter,” he said obliquely.

  “Eh?” Willem looked at me. “Speak plainly.”

  “The tote Männer cannot thermoregulate. This doesn’t show up in laboratory conditions but below ten degrees Celsius the worms do not function properly. By freezing they die and the host dies with them.”

  Willem considered that. “We can clothe them.”

  Weber grew excited. “They do not generate enough heat. Humans maintain temperature. Cats maintain temperature. Crocodiles do not. They do not eat—the hunger for brains is no more than the desire of the disease to perpetuate the infection—the way horsehair worms cause crickets to drown themselves. They do not consume what they put in their mouths. Metabolism keeps the body temperature above ambient somewhat like large lizards. Clothing lizards would have no more effect than clothing tote Männer.”

  “I see,” Willem said. He patted down his vest until he located his cigarettes and lighter. “I’m going out on the porch for a smoke. Max, will you join me?”

  Weber looked as if he’d swallowed a lemon. He rose as if to joi
n us but Willem waved him back. “Don’t bother. This gives Max and me a chance to exchange a little gossip.”

  Outside, we lit our cigarettes and watched the snow fall.

  “It’s true what Weber said? We can’t use them as soldiers?”

  I thought for a moment before answering. “Comparing them to crocodiles is apt. You can’t make a soldier out of an animal. And it’s too cold for them in the east.”

  “Then what good are they? Is this all for nothing?”

  “I did not say they could not be a weapon.”

  “Tell me.”

  “The crocodile simile is better than you know. They are very fast and very strong. There is so little to their metabolism that they are hard to kill. And they are terrifying—you’ve seen them. You know. We must be able to make some use of them.” I shook my head. “I don’t know enough yet. I need to perform some experiments. Weber has discovered the basic science. Now it is time to apply some German engineering.”

  Willem nodded. “I’ll do what I can.” He grimaced. “Two weeks ago the Japanese attacked the Americans. The Americans declared war on Japan. We declared war on each other. They allied themselves with the British, which brings them into the war in Europe.”

  “The Americans are too far away. They don’t have the strength of mind to make much difference.”

  “So we thought in the last war. The point is I may not have much time to give.”

  The goal was to deploy tote Männer to a suitable front and have them wreak havoc on the enemy while leaving our own troops alone. The tote Männer would terrify and demoralize the enemy. Our troops would march in behind them, clearing the area of enemy soldiers and tote Männer alike. Simple.