Three Zombie Novels

by David Wellington

  “I know it,” Marisol told her, “because if you do, you’ll never see your father again. I’ll pull him out of that tower and I’ll make him my example.”

  Hope fell inside Sarah like cold liquid draining to her toes.

  She had just talked herself into a corner.

  11

  She didn’t sleep anymore. She would never sleep again. As the night came on Ayaan’s eyes began to feel sore and dry. She rubbed and rubbed at them until her skin started coming away. After that she forced herself not to rub.

  One by one the cultists headed off to beds, hammocks, old mattresses with the dust and insects beaten out of them. They drained away into the dark storefronts and broken-down hotels, stretching their arms, yawning.

  The moon came up and found Ayaan still waiting, waiting for sleep to come, and knowing it never would. Something else found her, too. The lipless lich. Semyon Iurevich, who saw all, who knew all. He wrapped his bathrobe tight around striped pajamas a size too big for his gaunt frame. “Come,” he said, and he lead her away from the bonfire in the middle of Ocean Avenue. Away from the light and the few zealots standing guard who remained at least partially awake.

  She watched the lich’s back as he moved away from her, the pale stretch of robe across his shoulders like a beacon drawing her into the grid of darkened streets. She watched his feet shamble forward, ungainly but unflagging, she saw the complicated engineering of his shriveled ankles, all the knobs and spars and bits of bone, and the stretched sinews over them. When he turned to look back at her his face was a death mask, leather pulled far too tight over unyielding bone. His eyes were so large in their sockets.

  She was vaguely aware that she was paying far too much attention to the lich. She thought perhaps that she was subconsciously horrified by him not because of his dire appearance but because she knew she would be like him soon enough, that her own body would dry up, slim down, exude horrible chemicals. Rot.

  Then again it was possible he was merely hypnotizing her. She didn’t know the extent of his psychic powers. She only knew that he could see inside of her heart. And that he had lied to his master on her behalf.

  “Yes, is right,” he told her. They had stopped moving. They were inside a tiny room with stripes of light slanting in through wooden jalousies. She didn’t remember entering the building, which was probably a bad sign. She stretched out her hands to try to get a literal grasp on where she might be but she clutched only cobwebs. “I lied, for you. You understand? Is lie I told, that you are trustable. Harmless. Bah!”

  She looked for him but could only see his teeth in the filtered moonlight. Teeth bared in eternal rictus—the lips had pulled back, away from his mouth. His gums stood out from his face, pink like wounds. “We both know, you are assassin. We are both knowing who should you kill! He is dangerous, more than anyone know. I see his heart! His black and dead heart!”

  Ayaan nodded, and licked her own lips, checking they were still there. She had very little saliva in her mouth and her tongue felt like a cat’s as it rasped over her flesh. Her hand went up to touch her neck, where her tattooed ward wrapped around her like a fence.

  “Yes, he has control. Control of you. You must be caution, in all things. Together, though. Together we kill. Your friend, the ghost.” A smile, a frown, they were the same on his face. “He has friend in me. We work together.”

  She blinked.

  It was daylight and her mind was clear. It happened that quickly. The night was gone—day had broken. She was standing in the middle of a street.

  Behind her a horn thundered out a prolonged bass chord and she jumped.

  She turned slowly and found herself looking at a vehicle that was a cross between a hot rod and a Land Rover. It had four enormous balloon tires and a cab that could easily seat five. Its engine was exposed to the air, all chrome pipes and dancing pistons. Its grille looked like a gothic arch stolen off a cathedral. Multi-toned flames decorated the cab. The hood ornament was a skull done in chrome and the cargo bed was full of corpses, held down with bungee cords. Ayaan looked closer. The naked bodies in the back had been surgically adjusted. They had neither hands nor lips. Their torpor, she imagined, would only be temporary—their metabolisms had been dialed back by the green phantom. She looked up and saw him on the roof of the truck, tied into a lawn chair bolted in amongst a wide array of fog lights. He grinned down at her when he saw her jump in surprise.

  The passenger side door of the truck swung open. The werewolf sat in the driver’s seat and he slid across to reach down and give her a hand up. He showed her how to use her seat belt and how to adjust the air conditioning and the CD player. This was necessary since the dashboard was so long he was unable to reach those instruments while belted into the driver’s seat.

  “This is the... the job the Tsarevich offered me?” Ayaan asked.

  The werewolf replied in English, his voice muffled and distorted by the fur inside his mouth. “This is just the easy part. Later on you might have to fill up the gas tank. Hi, we haven’t been properly introduced.” He held out one hand, a furry appendage ending in five inch-long, razor-sharp claws. They weren’t like fingernails at all, more like the talons of a bird, conical and slightly curved.

  Ayaan figured out a second too late that he was offering the hand to shake. She reached for it even as he was pulling it back and the claws slid across the skin of her palm. The skin parted like torn silk. At least there was no blood, just a dry spill of dark powder.

  He looked embarrassed, though it was hard to tell. Even if he could have blushed his face was hidden under a dense growth of hair that covered his nose and made his mouth a dark slit. His eyes were surprisingly soft and kindly, though. “I don’t have any ‘powers’ in the traditional sense. My body does this weird thing, though. It doesn’t breathe, it doesn’t perspire, or do anything you would think a living thing might do, but it keeps producing keratin—that’s the protein that makes, well, hair and nails. I have to shear myself head to foot every couple of days or my hair would grow so long I’d trip over it.” He put his hands on the steering wheel, making an obvious gesture of it—he meant her no harm, he was saying. “My name’s Erasmus, by the way.”

  She smiled for him. “Ayaan.”

  “Sure, sure, I know all about you. I’m German, if you can’t tell from the accent.” Whatever accent the werewolf might have came from the mass of fur inside his mouth, Ayaan thought, but she let him talk. He clearly needed to tell the story. “Believe it or not the Tsarevich didn’t create me. I want you to know that, so you’ll understand a little. I was in Leipzig when the world ended. It was bad there. The local authorities had heard already what happened to New York and Paris. They mostly fled when the first ghouls came wandering into town. I took refuge in a hospital, hoping to outlast the Epidemic, but of course it just kept coming and coming. I starved to death, afraid to leave my little locked ward, watching shadows move outside the blinds, knowing they could get in any time if they just tried hard enough.”

  He closed his eyes and his face became an oblong of hair. “When it gets down to the end, when your body is breaking down from hunger, you can feel it. It hurts. I took all the drugs I was locked in with, took anything that would get me high. In the last days I discovered that if you breathed pure oxygen it got you wasted.” He chuckled. “I had no idea what I was doing. I just fell asleep one day and when I woke up I was rolled up in a cocoon of hair. I could barely move.”

  Ayaan’s stomach grumbled. She didn’t like all this talk of starving—it just made her hungry.

  “I ended up walking to Russia. I had no idea what I was, no idea why any of this had happened. Then I was approached by the Tsarevich’s agents. I... ate one of them, I’m sorry to say. It was an honest mistake. The others assured me it was alright. They told me what I was, a lich, and they told me that when I ate a human being I released his soul. No more horror, no more apocalypse for that man. They made it sound like I did him a favor. I don’t
want you to think I’m an idiot. I don’t buy half of what the Tsarevich says about souls and the afterlife. But he has something real to offer. If anyone can rebuild what we had before, if anyone can end all the suffering, it’s our boy. You see? We’re not all brainwashed religious freaks. I need you to know that.”

  Ayaan nodded meaningfully. “Oh, of course. Certainly,” she said. She was thinking that when the Tsarevich wanted to demonstrate his remote control, the one that could set her head on fire, it was the werewolf who had turned the knobs.

  She jumped again when she heard a rhythmic thumping on the roof of the cab. It had to be the green phantom, she decided, sending a signal with his femur staff.

  Erasmus turned the ignition key and the truck thundered to life. He looked out at the road when he spoke next, failing altogether to make eye contact. “Anyway,” he said. “Thanks for listening.”

  “You got it,” she told him.

  12

  The boat touched a broken retaining wall with a hollow thud, a noise like a very deep drum being struck just once. The boat drifted a few feet further, its side rattling against the remaining blocks of the wall, and then it slid up onto sand or gravel that made a noise under the hull, a hissing, and then it stopped, beached on land. Sarah lifted her oar out off the water and looked at the tip of Manhattan. She just sat there, the oar still in her hands, and looked at the place where the wall had fallen away. Where mud had slipped down into the water, making a perfect ramp up into the open space of Battery Park.

  She could have thought about how that was the city up there that had killed her father, or that it was the place that nearly killed Ayaan, but she didn’t. She didn’t think about anyone else at all. She watched the ground, the slope, as if it were still moving, as if she could see it sliding down into the sea. Her breath hitched. A flash of pain, very sharp but very brief, ran through the muscles at the small of her back.

  That was just fear, she knew. She was so scared it hurt.

  In a second she would step out of the boat, step up onto the land and then she would have to face her fear. Ghouls, cultists—even liches might be up there but she wasn’t thinking about them, either. She was thinking about what it meant to step up onto that muddy slope. She was thinking about what it meant to enter denied territory, as Jack might put it. In a second she would do it. In a second.

  “Oh, wow,” she said, which was pretty stupid but it was all she could think of. Careful of the boat’s rocking, mindful of the weapons strapped to her back, Sarah stood up in the boat and put one foot down on the mud. It sank in half an inch but then it gave her enough purchase to get her other foot up. Instantly she started sliding down, her feet slipping, and she threw herself forward, dug her fingers into the yielding earth, shoved her left foot up onto a protruding stone. She scrambled and cursed and grabbed and hauled her way up into Battery Park before she could really think about what she was doing and then suddenly she was there.

  She had entered Manhattan, and she was alone.

  Battery Park’s once verdant lawns were covered in grey growth. Mushrooms, enormous wood ear mushrooms the size of sleeping horses in serried rows lined the park, slopped over onto the concrete walkways. They lay like soporific alien pods, like the drowsing bodies of hibernating animals. She was certain they never grew that big in nature. She could see their gills, the tender wet veins they kept hidden from the sun. The air was yellow with their spores, a constant vaporous discharge that spread out over the water and swept across Governors Island with the prevailing wind.

  She kicked one. Big mistake. Its wet, fleshy meat broke apart in strands that wrapped around her shoe. Spores burst up around her like brown smoke and she had to clamp her eyes, her mouth, her nose shut or be suffocated. When the cloud finally moved on she looked down and saw the fungus knitting itself back together, so fast she could actually watch it happen, the filaments flopping against one another, sticking to one another. She yanked her foot free with a sense of real disgust.

  Which was just silly. Who knew what real danger lay inside the city, and she was freaking out over a mushroom. Sarah drew her Makarov but left the safety on. She moved toward a mansion, a confection of brick and columns now slathered with yellow mold. Its antiquity and decrepitude bothered her for some reason and she moved past it quickly.

  Beyond the mansion the towers of Manhattan started up almost immediately, leaping up into the air like impossible trees or—or mountains—or straight-sided pyramids, maybe, she had actually seen the Great Pyramid. It was the closest reference point she had, but it meant little. The flat sides of the buildings looked wrong to her, the metal and glass construction only softened by a heavy growth of moss and dark slime. The windows kept snagging her eyes. Ayaan had taught her to look at openings, at windows and doors, anywhere an enemy might hide. But there were hundreds of windows to keep an eye on—thousands! Clearly urban warfare required a different mindset than what she’d known before.

  She knew one thing that still made sense. Stick to the shadows. Keeping her head down she ducked into the shade of an enormous tower and jogged down a sidewalk towards an intersection. Trees that reached four or five stories high clotted the crossroads. Sarah slid in between their close-growing trunks and hunkered down to have a good think, to plan her next move.

  A ghoul emerged from a doorway nearby and sniffed the air.

  It happened just like that—she had just ducked down, was still, in fact, in the process of sitting and getting comfortable, when the ghoul appeared. He had no hands, just wicked claws, and he wore a flat doughboy helmet. It had to be a museum piece, judging by the rust and the flaking metal at its brim. It cast the ghoul’s eyes in darkness so she could only see its surgically altered jaws and the broken lump of cartilage which had been its nose. It sniffed again—she wondered how good its sense of smell could be with that damaged lump of meat in the middle of its face. Maybe if she stayed perfectly still it wouldn’t notice her.

  From up a street to the west she heard the sound of an air horn. The blast jumped from one building facade to another and shook the leaves of the trees, made the glass of the few unbroken windows rattle in place. The broken-nosed ghoul stood up straight and moved its stumpy arms in front of it briefly as if it were a boxer ready to guard against a blow. Slowly, on stiff legs, it moved toward the noise of the horn. Slowly—this was not one of the super-speedy dead she’d seen in Egypt. At least she had that.

  Once the ghoul was gone she stood up and moved to the doorway it had vacated. There was no movement beyond and she stepped into a tiny shop, its front of plate glass obscured by vines and fungus so that only a few rays of green light slipped inside. In the back a pile of cardboard boxes had transformed over time, losing their shape, bursting open at the sides, and now small round greasy knobs of fungal life were devouring them. Nothing. She turned around to leave the shop and found herself surrounded.

  It must have been an ambush. The first ghoul must have smelled her after all, and the air horn had been a signal for reinforcements.

  Too shocked to scream she lifted her pistol and started firing. Ghouls filled the broad space between the buildings, dozens of them moving left or right, some of them toward her, some away. They were organized. Controlled by an intelligence. One of them came at her, his grey body naked but his head covered in a brightly-painted motorcycle helmet. “Fuck,” she screamed, lacking the time to be more inventive. She shot at his knees but it wasn’t enough—he was on her, his stink smeared across her senses, his bony forearms weaving in the air over her, an incantation of death. One arm swung down in a wide arc and knocked the pistol out of her hand. Doom pressed hard on her sinuses, the taste of adrenaline filling her mouth.

  Then something weird happened.

  He crouched over her, his spikes mere inches from her skin, and then he stopped. He stopped stock still, his chest not even heaving for breath. He was so still he might have been no more than a pile of badly decomposed meat, or perhaps a picture of a dead t
hing. Sarah looked up and saw the others, the other ghouls, had all stopped as well. They were facing her, a crowd of them facing her and not moving. Sarah could hear water running somewhere, and she could hear the leaves of the trees rolling in a gust of wind, but that was all. Nobody moved a muscle.

  “They join us if so wish.” The voice came out of the ghoul on top of her. It sounded mostly like a human voice with a touch of a Russian accent. There was a whistling sound underneath it, though, as if breath were leaking out of punctured lungs even as the ghoul tried to talk. “The ones on island. You, as well, join us if you wish. Only death otherwise. I spare you for this, to make choice. Is good to have choices. You be herald, take good news to island peoples. Take news of choice.”

  “You must belong to the Tsarevich,” Sarah said, so frightened she thought she might piss her pants. She could still talk. It was pretty much all she could do. “I’ve heard he recruits the living.”

  “I work not for our Lord,” the ghoul said. It didn’t shake its head or use any gestures. Its arms remained around her, ready to scratch her skin, but it just spoke to her in that flat tone. “I belong to his Lady.”

  One of the trees in the square rolled over. No, not a tree. Something huge and plant-like though, something vaguely humanoid in shape but enormous, dark, covered in patches of filamentous mold and club-like fungi. A walking compost heap. It moved a yard or two closer and Sarah felt an odd prickling between her toes, in the places where her shirt bunched up against her side. Something tickled her throat and she coughed.

  “Is not by intention, but only is because she is near. You die in seconds, if don’t choose right,” the ghoul told her. “Our Lady’s touch is bad thing for living. So you say what?”

  “I... I say,” Sarah said, and coughed again, coughed and coughed, a long, asthmatic series of coughs that brought up dark mucus. “I say...”

  A bright flash of light swooped up the sidewalk and smashed in the ghoul’s face with one bandaged fist. The dead man’s maxilla shattered and dried brains flew from his ruined head. The ghoul’s body fell away and Sarah was free. Ptolemy’s painted face turned to look at her.