Three Zombie Novels

by David Wellington

  So it was a lot bigger than the tug. Well, no surprise there. “How far away?”

  “We’ll see it in a moment. You’d better get your boyfriend out of sight. We know this bunch don’t care for mummies.”

  Sarah understood. She touched the soapstone and asked Ptolemy to go below decks, just in case anyone was watching them even then. The mummy acquiesced without a word of complaint. Osman took his wheel in both hands and adjusted their course a hair. “Do you see it?” he asked.

  She knew he wasn’t asking if she could see something visually. She stared out over the boat’s prow, trying to ignore the flapping canvas of the backup sails, letting her eyes focus on the rising and falling swells off in the distance, the occasional scrap of foam drifting on the waves. “Nothing,” she said. There was no energy out there, living or dead. She imagined there were probably some fish but the water blocked her special sense.

  Osman just nodded. He’d stared out over enough empty seas in his life, Sarah imagined, to recognize when something was about to appear. He didn’t speak, didn’t move, didn’t breathe as far as she could tell. And then—

  No. It was nothing, a trick of the light. She could have sworn something was there and then it just wasn’t. “Maybe a whale,” she said, thinking it might have dived at the sight of them.

  “Bullshit,” Osman said, and opened up his throttle a little. He picked up a microphone for the tug’s radio set and clicked it on. “Hey,” he said. “Hey, we’re alive over here. We are not dead.” He repeated this simple message in Arabic, in Farsi, in Greek.

  Sarah turned to look away, her eyes glazed over by the sight of the endless sea constantly moving, and found herself looking into a periscope. She fell backwards against the tug’s wheel but Osman caught it before she could turn the boat. “Submarine,” she said, when she had caught her breath.

  It surfaced with a great pitching of the sea, a boiling white explosion that rolled the tug around like an ice cube in a blender. Saltwater lapped up over the side and splashed Sarah’s bare feet.

  On top of the waves the submarine dwarfed the tug, its enormous curved black side slick with water and glaring with sunlight. On its deck they saw what looked like an acre’s worth of photovoltaic cells and a heavy machine gun on a pintle mount. Its barrel pointed away from them. Something wrapped in tarpaulin, about half the size of a human being, was secured to the deck with heavy lines. It dripped a steady stream of water as the submarine rolled under the sun.

  A hatch in the stubby conning tower opened up and a white woman with golden hair and a wet suit stepped out onto the pitching deck. She rolled with the motion of the submarine as if her feet were nailed down. “Ahoy,” she called, no more than ten meters from where Sarah stood on the tug. She had a pistol on her belt.

  “Hi,” Sarah replied. “I’m... sorry. You’re not the woman I’m looking for.”

  The woman spoke English with a Scandinavian accent. “That depends,” she said, her face a mask of consternation. “Is your name Sarah?”

  16

  Ayaan dipped her sponge in the murky tub and then squeezed it between her two hands so it wouldn’t drip. The liches in the officers’ mess were quite particular about their windows. There was little in the way of entertainment available to them onboard—those who could read had already worked their way through the scant magazines and books left behind by the previous crew. Looking out at the waves was hardly the pinnacle of excitement but it had a hypnotic power, especially in the twilight hours. The hairy lich, the one Ayaan had begun to think of as a werewolf, could stand by the window for whole days at a time. It seemed that being dead changed your brain chemistry, made you less anxious at the passing away of time, of the waste of your life. Of course maybe it was just the fact that the liches were functionally immortal. If she knew she had centuries, millennia to pass, Ayaan knew, she would feel a lot less urgency to carpe every diem, herself.

  “Look, Amanita’s come out for some sun,” the werewolf said. His voice was muffled and distorted—the weird growth of hair lined all of his orifices, his tongue covered in what looked like sodden felt—but Ayaan could understand his simple English. Along with the other liches in the room she stepped over to where he pointed, his furry finger smearing grease on the window pane. Ayaan silently grumbled: she would have to clean that mark.

  Amanita, the creature the werewolf had seen, was often spoken of by the cultists but Ayaan had never seen her before. She had, she remembered, seen mushrooms and puffballs growing in profusion at the refinery on Cyprus, so she must have been very close to the Tsarevich’s most accomplished lieutenant. Still she wasn’t prepared for what she saw through the window. Atop the tower where the liches kept their quarters Amanita stood naked in the sun, perhaps two and a half meters tall. She made no attempt to cover her genitalia but then she hardly needed to. A thick layer of fungal growth covered every square centimeter of her skin. Long, filamentous mycellia made her hair while her shoulders and back were studded with yellow chytrids. Dark hairy mildew draped from her breasts while rows of bright orange Judas’ ear mushrooms ringed her distended belly and mold dripped from her fingers.

  She had the power, they said, that made grain sprout from the earth, that made creeping vines twist across Siberian tundra. She had the ultimate green thumb, she could make anything vegetative to flourish wherever a dried-up seed or a crystallized spore or a half-gnawed rhizome still lingered in the ground. They said she had saved entire villages from starvation after the unceasingly hungry ghouls had devoured all their crops. Her true love, though, was not in green things but in blights and rots and molds and especially mushrooms. The name she’d chosen sounded pretty enough. It was the Latin name for the mushroom commonly called the Destroying Angel.

  What she might be doing atop the tower was anyone’s guess. “I wonder if this has anything to do with your friend,” the green phantom said, turning to look directly at Ayaan.

  Ayaan held the sponge carefully with both hands so it wouldn’t drip on the floor. She tried to look like she had no idea what he meant. It wasn’t hard—she didn’t.

  “You know, the girl. The girl on the flying bridge. I think she’s one of the navigators. Isn’t she one of your co-conspirators?” The green phantom smiled, his desiccated skin stretching whitely across his sharp jaws.

  Ayaan dropped the sponge and ran. She expected to feel his power wrapping icy chains around her heart at any moment as she stumbled down the stairs, down toward the foredeck. She was just trying to get away from him. Strangely enough, he let her go.

  She rushed out onto the deck, dodging between cook fires and capstans. She saw the Least ahead and knew she would have to avoid him. Beyond that she had no plan. What was he doing? He kept jumping up and down. The whole deck vibrated as he collided with it again and again. Hiding behind an enormous bollard she peered out to see what he was up to. He was trying to touch the end of the ship’s main crane, an enormous long boom made of girders that loomed out over half the deck. Something dangled at the end of the crane, a piece of bloody meat or—

  It was the Turkish girl, of course. Ayaan swallowed in horror. They had cut her wrists and her ankles, punched holes in her until her blood ran in sheets down her body but they hadn’t killed her. She was still moving, a spasm here, a twitch there in between long pauses to rest and regain what little strength remained to her. She was still alive.

  Just the way the Least would want her.

  Ayaan slapped her own cheeks to try to get her blood moving again and hurried aft. There was still a chance, a chance to do some good. Without the girl on the flying bridge they couldn’t release the underside compartment hatches, they couldn’t flush the Tsarevich’s army of undead. They could still—the fire—

  Ayaan had never known the girl’s name. It had been intentional—in case any of them were caught they couldn’t give each other away. It just seemed horrible now. She had gotten the girl tortured to death, might as well have fed her to that brute
herself and for what? For—Ayaan stopped herself. The liches were still all up in the superstructure, in the mess she had just left but the Tsarevich and Amanita were in the tower. If the liches knew about the girl they certainly knew about the Siberian and the plan to torch the tower. They could catch her at any moment, they could kill her from a distance. If she acted quickly enough, however, if she didn’t stop to think, maybe she could still sell her life dearly.

  He was there—the Siberian—standing outside the tower as she drew near. Just standing there, waiting for her to come and tell him what to do. She rushed up waving her hands and yelling at him, not caring who might hear, screaming at him to start the fire but he just stood there, looking at her, his face empty of emotion.

  She got close enough to touch him but she didn’t. She knew something was wrong. He opened his mouth to speak and then he started coughing, spasmodically, horribly, gagging and choking and spitting. Dark clouds of spores erupted from his mouth, stained Ayaan’s clothing where they flecked across her. The sea breeze tore the rest of them out and away to float over the ocean. The Siberian’s skin darkened, started to turn blue. Not from anoxia, though he was clearly suffocating. It was a creeping kind of mold, like Penicillin growing on bread, that changed his color. It swarmed up and over him, dry smut dripping from his tear glands, furry mold sprouting from his ears, from his nose. He was dead before he hit the ground.

  Cicatrix walked out of the deck-level entrance to the tower. She had the doctor, the hand surgeon from the stern, on an actual leash attached to a dog collar around his neck.

  “Tell her what you do to her,” Cicatrix demanded, and forced the man to his knees.

  He stammered and sobbed and tried to look up at Ayaan but he couldn’t, he didn’t have the strength.

  “Tell her!” Cicatrix screamed, and kicked the man in his ribs.

  “Stop. I know what he did,” Ayaan told her. Clearly he had divulged her secrets. Given away her grand plot. She couldn’t blame him, either. He had a badly-sutured wound on the end of his right arm where one of his hands used to be. He probably begged them to leave the left one intact. Ayaan wondered if he had told them how many bones were in his hand, how many muscles.

  A wave of revulsion for the broken man swam up through her innards, blossomed in her throat. He should have died, he should have thrown himself over the side of the boat before confessing. It was what she would have demanded of herself. She tried to tell herself that the threat of death would make this man do anything—anything to survive. It was hardly a unique perspective. It wasn’t hers, though. Ayaan had grown up listening to stories of glorious martyrs, of those who traded their worldly lives for the greater good. She was old enough to know better but she didn’t suppose she would ever have real sympathy for such a coward.

  Her mouth filled. She spat on him.

  “You’ve caught me,” she told Cicatrix. “I won’t apologize. As one living woman to another all I ask for is a clean death.”

  Cicatrix smiled at her. “It was clever plan,” she said, ignoring Ayaan’s request. “We talk about it, all this day, Tsarevich and myself. We were quite impressed and entertained.”

  Clearly Ayaan wasn’t going to get the swift resolution she wanted. She glanced sideways at the taffrail. She could be over it in a second. It would take only a heartbeat before she hit the water. Ayaan couldn’t swim—it would be over quickly enough. She’d heard unpleasant things about death by drowning, and it wouldn’t keep her from coming back as a ghoul but. Still. It would be a better exit. A cleaner way to go.

  She sprang for the rail. Got one foot up.

  Then she felt the energy draining out of her limbs, her muscles, her bones. She could barely keep her eyelids open. Any moment she would... she would collapse... she knew the... green phantom... had her...

  “We like you,” Cicatrix said, bending over her, smiling down at her. Ayaan had fallen to the deck without realizing it. “We think you are fun.”

  Ayaan’s vision closed down like a black shutter falling across Cicatrix’s face.

  17

  Magna helped Sarah down the narrow ladder into the belly of the FNS Nordvind, the most advanced submarine in the Finnish Navy. There wasn’t much competition anymore. “He found me,” she told Sarah, talking about her husband. He had been a warrant officer onboard the Nordvind when the Epidemic began. He had also been the submarine’s sole survivor. “They put into port with the dead already coming over the fence. He deserted when he saw what was happening. Well, they all deserted. He came and found me—I was on the roof of the Officer’s Lounge. He came and found me and he hasn’t spoken a word since.”

  The two women passed forward into the bridge of the submarine. Magna’s three children, none of them over ten, scrambled out of their way. The oldest, a girl wearing a captain’s hat with maroon bars, folded up the periscope handles and raised into a locked position.

  “They’re adorable,” Sarah said, watching the blonde children studying the submarine’s instruments.

  “They’re my angels.” Magna touched the springy yellow curls of the youngest, a girl who sat at the chart table with her feet dangling from the chair. Then she brought Sarah to a small room ahead of the bridge, a briefing room for the captain. Her husband Linus sat at a low table there, a plate of salted cod untouched next to him. His hair and beard were pure white and draped down over his shirt, clean and carefully brushed. He didn’t look up when Ayaan entered. “Lover,” Magna called, but that elicited no response, either. “He’s like this all the time. He’ll eat, if I feed him. He’ll do just about anything if I talk him through it but he would just sit there forever if I let him.” Magna gave him a tiny smile, her face folding in on itself as she hugged her own arms. “Catatonic Stupor, they call it. I don’t have the drugs to treat him but I can look up their names in my Physician’s Desk Reference.”

  Something occurred to Sarah, something she didn’t want to consider too closely. If the man had been catatonic for twelve years, and his eldest daughter was only ten at the most... well. People got lonely. Sarah knew a little bit about manners, so she didn’t ask.

  “Normally we stay surfaced for the fresh air and the sunlight. We only dive when someone comes by. I’ve kept us alive this long by cultivating my antisocial behaviors. I fish over the side most days, and some days I just lie in bed and conserve my energy,” Magna told her. “I have a little garden down here, under some ultraviolet lamps. The submariners used those when they went on polar missions, to avoid Seasonal Affective Disorder. Sometimes I need them too.”

  “You dive whenever anybody comes by?” Sarah asked. “Does that happen often?”

  Magna nodded absently. “There are a surprisingly large number of people like me. People who have surrendered dry land to the deaders. Most of them aren’t as well kitted out as I am. A lot of them are borderline personality types, do you understand? Pirates.”

  “But you surfaced for us.”

  Magna smiled, a smile so wry and complicated it looked like a frown. “Only because you happen to be the friend of a friend. I dragged him from the sea one week ago. It wasn’t the first time I netted a floating deader. I’ve never caught one who could talk, before. He told me things. Comforting things. These days I take my validation where I can get it. Here, will you help me with this?” She handed Sarah a folding patio chair. “I’d let you to talk to him down here but the smell... I’m sure you understand. He must have been floating for weeks when I found him. I don’t know who he is when he’s at home but right now he’s terrifically whiffy.”

  Together the women climbed back up to the deck where they set up the two patio chairs under a sun umbrella. Magna put out a pitcher of ice water (the submarine had its own desalinization plant, she explained proudly) and a single glass. Sarah’s guest wouldn’t need one. Then Magna untied and unwrapped the tarpaulin-covered mass at the back of the deck. Frowning and holding her face very tight she brought her burden over and dumped it unceremoniously
in the second patio chair. “If you need me, shout,” Magna told Sarah. “I’ll be below watching series four of Prime Suspect on DVD. I’ve seen it so many times the perspex has worn right off the disk but I never get tired of Helen Mirren.”

  There were words in that sentence Sarah had never heard before.

  Magna finally put her pistol down next to the pitcher of ice water and left Sarah alone with Jack. What was left of his borrowed body, anyway. Fish had been at it leaving little that looked human. He had a torso and most of two arms. A head like a boiled chicken with some matted hair on the top. No eyes, nose or lips at all.

  “You look like hell,” she said.

  “In Finland they call hell Tuonela, at least they used to. It wasn’t supposed to be so bad. A city under the ground where you went to sleep forever. When you arrived you were still pretty active and there was a welcoming party, they gave you a big beer stein. It was full of frogs and worms but it made you groggy and when you were finished they found you a nice soft patch of ground to lie down on. Sounds better than how it actually worked out, hmm?”

  “I suppose,” Sarah said. It was tough to look at him. She’d seen plenty of corpses in her day but this was bad. He stank of stale brine and sun-baked skin.

  “I didn’t have much choice in bodies,” he explained, “and I needed to talk to you. It’s urgent, Sarah. There are things you need to know. Things you have to know before you go any further.”

  She bit her lip and nodded. “I know that rescuing Ayaan isn’t going to be easy. I’m committed, though, and I’ve got Osman to go along with me. Ptolemy wants revenge, I can work with that—” She stopped. “Ayaan is dead. That’s what you’re here to tell me,” she guessed, her breath very cold in her lungs. “I mean, you would know, somehow.”

  “Yes,” Jack replied. He looked a little like he was melting. “They’re all down in here with me. All the dead people. If she was dead I would be able to find her, and I can’t.”