Strangers in the Land (The Zombie Bible)

by Stant Litore

  There was something familiar about the boy’s face, and Devora watched him, troubled, as she approached the line of bodies. She saw that his eyes were hard; they were not the eyes of a child. In the moans of the dead and the roar of fire, that small boy had learned, in one wrenching of the heart, that the same God gives and takes away.

  She also saw something more. Something in the shape of his face.

  Feeling as though she had stepped off a cliff of stone and was falling through a great expanse of air, Devora made her way to the boy, until she stood before him and his mother.

  “You are Zefanyah’s son,” she said softly.

  The boy didn’t answer her. His eyes remained hard, and he kept his gaze on the bodies.

  “Your father—he is here among the dead?” She could not keep the pain and shock from her voice.

  The boy nodded and looked down at one of the bodies.

  Devora shivered and followed his gaze. The corpse the boy was staring at was charred almost to soot, the face unrecognizable, white teeth and eyeless sockets facing the sky.

  “Zefanyah,” she whispered.

  The boy nodded again. The woman standing behind him made no sign that she’d heard, or indeed that she was capable of seeing or hearing.

  Devora gazed down at that scorched body. How many nights she had dreamed of being held in his arms, being kissed, being his. How in her dreams he and the man she’d seen defending his cattle by the river—how they had become one, youthful, strong, vital. A rock a young woman might lean on. Now all that strength, all that life, all that fierce will and heat, how it had all been doused in the brief dark between the moon’s setting and the sun’s rising. She could not understand. She could not. It had been one thing to carry the body of a tiny boy through the reeds, to feel that boy reduced to mere bones and sinew, but that a man she had seen sweating on the training ground, whose muscles rippled in the sun’s heat, a man who might wrestle a lion to the earth and whose grin lit such fires in her body—that he might now be nothing more than brittle bones within a shroud of ravaged and burned tissue. How could it be possible?

  She drew a breath, and she turned to the boy. The boy and the silent woman Zefanyah had left behind, with none to pitch a tent for them. “What is your name?” she asked the boy.

  “Zadok.” His tone was flat. He didn’t look at her.

  Zadok, the righteous one.

  She took his face in her hands, made the boy look at her. Found his eyes. “Zadok.” She spoke intently, desperately, and after a moment she could see through her tears that the boy saw her, was returning her gaze. “You must find stones. Heavy stones. Ones that hurt to lift. Help the men bury your father. Whenever one of the People dies, you bury them so they cannot rise. You raise a cairn high, high enough that God will see and remember them.” Her voice broke. “Do you understand me?”

  The boy nodded. He looked as though he might cry too.

  Devora straightened, glanced at the woman grieving. “God will remember your husband.” Her voice broke. “God will remember all of them!”

  Then Devora turned and walked along the line of bodies, shaking. Forcing herself to look at the faces. Those whose faces were still recognizable—she knew them all. All of the freshly dead.

  At the end of the line of bodies, a girl sat on the ground with brown fluid and bits of flesh spattered across her nightdress and a knife held loosely in her hand. Devora knew her.

  “Sarai?” she called softly, kneeling by the girl.

  Sarai looked up. Her face was smudged with dirt. “They’re all dead,” she said, without emotion. Her eyes were dazed, in shock.

  “What happened?” Devora whispered.

  Sarai just looked past her, at the lines of bodies. Devora followed her gaze. A young man was moving down the lines with a heavy stave in his hands, and as he passed each corpse, he struck its skull hard.

  Devora flinched and looked back to Sarai’s face. Her friend’s eyes were distant. Devora took Sarai’s face in her hands and pressed her forehead to hers. “Don’t look,” she whispered.

  Sarai brought her hands up, placed them on Devora’s, but made no effort to draw back from her touch.

  “Sarai, it’s all right. It’s all right.” She spoke as softly as she could, though fighting her own horror. “Shh, it’s all right,” she whispered.

  Sarai moaned.

  A hand gripped Devora’s shoulder from behind, startling her, and then a voice she knew, a man’s voice: “Devora, the navi is calling for you.”

  She glanced up. “Eleazar!”

  He looked at her numbly. “Will you come?”

  Devora nodded numbly, rose, and walked beside him, letting him lead the way through the white tents. Zefanyah, Zefanyah dead. So many dead. Where was the navi?

  “Where did they come from?” she whispered.

  Eleazar answered her but didn’t seem to have heard her question. His voice sounded dull, hollow, as though he were speaking from the bottom of a well. “I was sleeping. We were all sleeping. Those things were feeding in the tents by the river—who knows how long before someone blew the shofar.”

  “How many?” Devora felt a sense of unreality closing on her, like a fog descending over the camp and shrouding the carnage. Her head felt curiously light.

  “Fifteen, maybe twenty.” Eleazar’s eyes were bloodshot. “Herdsmen, still wrapped in their wool. Heathen. Canaanites. They stumbled in from the slopes.”

  “Canaanites,” Devora repeated. Anger bit at her.

  “Yes. They bit—so many.” He stumbled, caught himself. Devora looked at him, appalled at his fatigue. He seemed to be on his feet only by sheer effort of will. “The nazarites—they saved me. Some of the others. And I got several priests to the Tent of Meeting and we brought out the Ark. We brought out—and the camp—the camp burst into flame. The dead lit as though they’d been doused in oil, yet they walked about still moaning even as they burned—” His voice dropped and he whispered words of the Law under his breath:

  The people must not be burned with fire

  not consumed with flame

  but buried beneath clean stone.

  “God’s judgment on them was so entire, so complete,” he said. “Some burned away until not even bones were left behind.”

  Devora shivered. She recalled the leaping of flames into the dark as she had seen it from the hill, and the sense she’d had of heat passing across her skin, though the fire was so far away. And how it had felt like the heat that came when she saw things that hadn’t yet happened. Behind the leaping of visions into her waking day there rested a Power and a Presence that might burn the world at a touch. The appearance of the visions was the gentlest of its visitations, as though a great mother bear with teeth the length and lethality of knives had chosen to nudge her hip gently with its nose.

  “Not even bones,” Eleazar whispered. He looked around them at the camp. Men and women were moving past them now, some with bandaged arms or with bloodstains on their robes.

  “We will have to watch for signs of fever,” Eleazar said, in that hushed voice that was so unlike the exuberance of the priest who taught in the evenings. “Some in the camp may be hiding their wounds. Many people touched the dead last night. We have to find out who is clean and who is not.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  Surely Naomi the Old had given orders for everything that needed doing?

  But before the levite could answer, they reached the navi’s tent. Eleazar drew aside the flap and inclined his head respectfully. With a tremor of unease, Devora stepped through.

  Inside, the navi was propped up on cushions, her face pale and damp with sweat. No one else was there with her. Her eyes shone, and her hands trembled where they clutched at the cushions. Her garment had been cut away from her right shoulder, where a livid bite could be seen in the skin above her breast, a fierce half circle of red marks, the marks of human teeth. Devora sucked in her breath as she saw it.

  Naomi looked up, gesture
d her close. Devora hurried to her side and knelt there. She reached for Naomi’s hand, but the old woman cried out, “Stop!”

  Devora stood still. She could feel the heat from her flesh through the air between them, as though the woman lying on those cushions carried hot coals inside her body.

  “I am unclean, girl,” the navi rasped. “Do not touch me.”

  “No,” Devora whispered.

  The navi had to swallow twice before she could speak further. “They brought you to me, the priests. I hoped they would,” she managed.

  “I’m here,” Devora said.

  “The Canaanites brought this on us,” Naomi said quietly. “There will always be strangers in the land, and they will be neglectful of the Law. Until it is too late. You must help the People remember the Law.” She tapped a small clay jar at her side. “Open this,” she whispered.

  Devora did so, careful not to touch Naomi’s hand with hers. Careful to touch only the top part of the jar. In a moment it was open, and the navi lifted it in one shaking hand. “Bow your head, girl,” Naomi said, and then upended the jar over Devora’s head. A little olive oil trickled out over her hair and her forehead. Devora closed her eyes as it ran down her face, slick and sweet-scented.

  “You have been like a daughter to me,” Naomi murmured. “As they all have. But you are the one who sees. I always thought it might be you. The way you remember the mitzvot as easily as other women remember the names of their kin. I wish I’d had the time to prepare you. To tell you things first...I anoint you, Devora. I anoint you the navi and judge of Israel.”

  Naomi lowered the jar, lost her grip on it. It rolled aside until it stopped against the side of a cushion.

  “Don’t die,” Devora whispered. She opened her eyes, and took in the sight of the old woman burning up on her cushions. The reddened bite wound. The fever sheen in the navi’s eyes.

  “Girl,” Naomi murmured. “You’ll have time to mourn me later. Only be strong, for they will look to you. The kohannim know already what you are. I made sure of that. Now we must act, girl. Before this fever takes what’s left of me.” She lifted a hand weakly, pointing at a pile of furs in the corner. “Bring what you find. Be quick.”

  Choking back her anguish, Devora hurried to the furs, knelt there, and tossed them aside, revealing a long, narrow box of plain cedar, no jewelry or adornment, just God’s own wood.

  “Do what needs to be done. With that,” Naomi croaked.

  Slowly Devora slid the lid from the box. Inside she found a long blade with a hilt of bone. The blade was much longer than her arm. She touched the metal gently, heard her fingernails ring quietly against it. “This isn’t bronze,” she breathed.

  “Iron.” Naomi was breathing hard between the words she forced out. “A gift. Sea Coast man—I saved his life. He left me that. Take it, Devora.”

  In anguish, Devora turned and gazed at the navi, whose eyes seemed glassy now. Naomi kept moistening her lips with her tongue, as though to fight the desert heat in her skin the only way she could.

  “I can’t,” Devora gasped.

  “At dusk, the kohannim will.” Naomi’s hand twitched on the cushions. “I would rather it were you. Because you are the navi. And you have seen the threat. As none of them have, not truly. You took that small boy in your arms—” Her breathing was labored. “It is you, Devora. They will look to you for judgment. Because you see what God sees.”

  “I can’t,” Devora cried. She had slept little in the past seven nights; now her hold on the waking world seemed tenuous. Her memories crowded upon her, ready to do her violence: the thing that had been her mother looking in at her through the tent flap. Its mouth open in a hiss. The firm, cool surface of a stone pestle in her palm.

  She made a little noise, like a whimper.

  “Devora.” Naomi held her gaze, though now her entire body had begun to shiver violently. “Listen to me. It is kinder for me to die this way than in the lingering fever. I want to know that my body will not stand from these cushions when I am gone. It is kind, Devora. Listen to me. You have seen how God is a father who burns away what threatens his children, and you and I have felt his heat. But God is also our mother. As a woman, I know this. That her heart is a deep, deep lake dousing all wrath and flame. That she kisses us when we are born. Quickens new life within us when we have become women. God made both Adam and Eve, both in God’s likeness. And if this is true, Devora, what I tell you, what Miriam who was navi when I was a girl told me, then God who is like our mother and has compassion will forgive us the evils we cannot avoid and the lives we cannot save.”

  Naomi moved her shaking hands, folding them weakly over her breast. “Do this for me, Devora.” She closed her eyes, panting softly, her face slick with perspiration. “Do it quickly.”

  Devora’s vision blurred. She had seen this. She had seen a vision of Naomi dying. She had foreseen her own grief at her mother’s death. And in neither case had she been able to save either her mother or the mother of Israel. The tears hot on her face. Try as she might, Devora could not think of God as a mother. Distant, delivering visions and then demanding action, and not maternal, not one who might embrace or hold a grieving, shattered girl.

  Naomi whispered the words of the sh’ma and closed her eyes. For a few moments more, Devora stood shaking, the hilt of the iron sword clutched tightly in both her hands. Naomi did not open her eyes or speak.

  A great cold settled in Devora’s heart.

  This could not be avoided. It could not be delayed. She saw so clearly in her mind the face of her mother, distorted and hissing. If she were to see Naomi like that, it would break her; she would collapse and never again stand.

  “I love you, mother,” Devora cried, and lifted the blade.

  JUDGE OF ISRAEL

  DEVORA STEPPED from the tent, drawing the bloodied sword behind her, the blade’s tip trailing in the dust. The levites and the young women parted for her, standing silently to either side, watching her. Devora’s face was terribly cold. All the heat had been sucked out of her and out of the world. As she walked by, one of the levites began to weep quietly. She didn’t look at him.

  “We need another cairn,” she said softly.

  She walked slowly through the camp, feeling embers crunch beneath her sandals. An occasional metal ringing from the blade as the edge struck some rock along the way. Doubtless there would be some nicks, some damage in the sword; she did not care. She looked about her at the bodies and at the young men already gathering great stones to make the cairns. So many cairns. She looked at them and walked on. Until she stood at the very edge of the camp, gazing out across the reeds by the bank. There were more bodies in the water, she saw, facedown and caught against some rock jutting into the river or dragged half onto the bank. Perhaps some had not caught at the bank but had drifted free, like leaves blown into the water by a high wind. In the confusion of the night, some of these bodies might have escaped, slipping downstream to pollute the Tumbling Water and the fields of their People.

  She did not care.

  She stared out at the reeds and the heather on the high slopes behind and the dark, rising ridges of the Galilee hills to the north. She smelled smoke and burned flesh and decay. She heard weeping and low talk among the men at their work. For a while she recited in her mind the names of those she’d known who were now gone from the land: Mikal with her laughter and her love of mischief; Tabitha, who had dreamed of love and rich herds in the lower valleys; practical Leah, whose hands were so clumsy, though she worked harder than any of them. Even Zefanyah, who she had so admired on the fighting ground. Zefanyah, who had kissed her. Who had given her his waterskin. He too had been among the night’s dead.

  They were gone. All gone, for all time. The land on which they’d stood had been defiled and filthied; it might be a generation before the stink of the dead was gone from Shiloh.

  She recited some of the Law quietly to herself, seeking calm. Most of the mitzvot were stored up in her heart, and reaching for
one was like reaching for a memory of a beautiful summer day. She had replaced most of her memories with mitzvot; how would she ever be able to replace the memories of this night?

  “Devora?” A man’s voice. She didn’t turn her head. Eleazar. He was breathing hard; he came to stand beside her. “Devora?”

  She didn’t answer. She kept looking at the heather, which was moving now, softly, in a breeze.

  “Devora? Navi? Has God shown you what must be done?”

  “You must wait,” she said.

  She said nothing more, and at last the high priest turned back to the camp.

  Devora stood there, weak and faint because she hadn’t eaten. Still, she stood looking across the heather. As the sun slid to the edge of the hills, she whispered, “You are cruel, adonai, but I understand why you must be.”

  The wind picked up in the heather, but there were no words in it. Just the rustle of weeds bending so they would not break.

  She turned her eyes to the hills, saw the way their ridges cut at the sky in the gathering dark. “I will judge the People for you, as she did.” Her voice gathered strength. “I will keep the land clean.”

  It was the only thing she could give Naomi—or any of them. She covered her mouth with her hand and held her feelings tightly within her. Let loose, they would tear at her and devour her as ravenously as the dead.

  She must build a cairn over her feelings, a high cairn, so that she could stand before the People.

  When dawn arrived, Devora turned and walked back into the camp. As she reached the Tent of Meeting she stumbled; two levites caught her by the arms before she could hit the soil. She moaned softly; they brought her unleavened bread and mutton, and after washing quickly to her elbows, she held the bread in both hands and tore at it until she felt like vomiting. They brought her water, but refused to let her drink more than a few quick sips at a time. Her stomach lurched within her. She clutched at her belly with a groan, and they stood patiently by.