Strangers in the Land (The Zombie Bible)

by Stant Litore

  With a roar, Zadok threw himself hard against the door, lending his weight to that of the shorter men, and the lid slammed back into place so sharply that its edge severed the decayed arm. It fell to the ground and lay there like a piece God had discarded when shaping men at the beginning of time.

  Another corpse began climbing out through the lower window, and Devora impaled its head on Mishpat. Breathing raggedly, she realized that the men could not contain the dead in these houses. More corpses would spill into the street at any moment. And though other men were now running to join them with staves and knives and makeshift spears, they would not be enough.

  Omri had let his torch fall in the midst of the street when he had taken up the lid with Barak and the other men; the torch still lay there, blazing in the dirt. Now Hurriya ran from the corner of the burned house and took up the torch, panting as she staggered toward the house, toward where Devora stood at the window the dead had torn open. Realizing her intent with a shock, Devora leapt in her way, seized her arm, wrested the torch from her. “No!” the navi cried. “Not with fire! These were the People! Not with fire!”

  The Canaanite tugged wildly to get her arm free, her eyes intense. “Let me go!” she cried. “We have to! This was my vision. What the gods meant me to see!”

  Devora looked at her in horror, holding the torch away from her, out of her reach. The Canaanite woman’s face was translated in revelation, in sudden, awestruck belief that the gods hadn’t abandoned her, that the blessing or the burden they’d given her was more than just a caprice.

  “We have to burn the houses,” Hurriya shouted. “We have to burn them! As the people here did.”

  “No,” Devora breathed. She glanced suddenly at the torch she held in her hand, at the flames. Words of the Covenant rang in her ears in the deep, calm voice of Eleazar ben Phinehas ben Eleazar ben Aharon:

  The people must not be burned with fire

  not consumed with flame

  but buried beneath clean stone.

  And, faintly, the rasp of Eleazar’s dying words: Don’t let the People be—eaten—or—or burned...

  “We have to!”

  “We are not heathen,” Devora cried.

  Hurriya took her arm wildly, clutching her through the thick wool of her dress. Her eyes alight. “So you Hebrews have ways to keep the dead from rising. Your cairns, your graves, your Covenant. But the dead have risen, navi. And the people here have found ways to deal with them then!”

  “It is a heathen way!”

  “Yes!” Hurriya screamed. “Or we die!”

  Suddenly Devora’s own words from earlier that night were recalled to her mind as clearly as though spoken to her this very moment by God:

  The navi brings men words they need to hear, visions they need to see, not visions they wish to see.

  Hurriya too was a navi, and she’d been given a vision of faces burning.

  A man near her screamed, a shrill cry like a doe when a lion tears into its shoulder with his teeth. Devora looked up in time to see a corpse-gray arm wrapped around the man’s breast and a ghastly head tearing flesh raw from the man’s throat. For the briefest of breaths she met the walking corpse’s eyes and saw nothing there; then the thing had pulled Barak’s man through the window, and his legs were disappearing into the house. Devora leapt for him; her fingers brushed the bronze greave on his leg, then he was gone. Not even another scream. Just gone. She made her decision and with a shriek she thrust the torch through the window and dropped it there before springing back. Other gray faces filled the window, hands reaching out; men sprang past her on the right and on the left, their spears thrusting at the window, shoving the dead back, the way boatmen shove long poles against a riverbank. Then the dead faces were backlit by bright flame; something had caught within.

  “Torches!” the navi cried. “More torches! Burn them! Burn the house!”

  Men improvised torches using bits of wood from shattered doors or from whatever they could find, and Laban swung his torch from one to the next, lighting them. Hurriya retreated to lean against the wall of another house; she took a crumpled leaf—all this time she’d clutched the herbs in her hand—and began chewing on it. She was very pale.

  Devora didn’t watch either the men or the Canaanite; she had eyes only for the burning house, her face twisted in grief. In this place where she could not tell if the living or the dead were Hebrew or heathen, where the mitzvot were hardly kept, where no tithes were sent to Shiloh nor any young men or young women sent to the Feast of Tents, the Covenant had been hacked through and shredded, as though a mad harvester had attacked the crop of the People with a sickle before the crop was ripe. And now she had hacked through the Covenant herself, burning bodies rather than burying them. Yet what else could she decide? The Covenant demanded that she keep the People safe from the dead, keep the land clean—yet the land was now so defiled that sword and clean stone were not enough to mend it. Only fire could cleanse the unclean death from this town.

  Dark smoke poured from the upper window and then flame, licking its way up toward the roof, hungrier even than the dead. The sight of it seared her mind. A burning, an atrocity, this smoke they were sending into God’s sky, the sharp scent of meat burning. Like a perverse, horrible olah, a burnt offering, an atonement for the breaking of Covenant, an atonement for their failure to keep the land clean and undefiled. But this olah must surely reek in God’s nostrils, must surely make their God vomit and heave in revulsion at what was happening in the land he dwelled in.

  Then the men were lighting the house to the left, and Devora could hear the moans of the dead within. The dry cedar cracked and sang its fierce death song as the fire spread faster than tears or prayer. The roof of the first house cracked open with a clap of thunder, then crumpled inward, and the moans within fell silent, buried beneath the broken timbers that crushed them down and covered them like a cairn of wood and charcoal rather than stone.

  Devora spun in a slow circle, taking in the gray, filthy ash drifting down from the blazing rooftops, dark against the firelit air. Some of it fell on her arm and burned her, and she cried out, not knowing whether the ash had come from a burning bed or from one of the bodies of the People. She gazed in horror at the sky, dark with smoke.

  “El!” she shrieked. “Elohim! Adonai!” Anguish tore at her, stripping pieces away from her mind. She screamed for her God. Begged for his mighty hand to return and cover this town and the land.

  The ash fell from the sky. More of it now. Everywhere the cracking of roofs and walls giving away. The shouts of desperate men, the low moaning of the dead who did not feel any pain of fire or spear but only the pain of being unable to feed, unable to fill their hunger.

  The smoke spread out above them, unfurling across the sky like dark wings, like the malakh ha-mavet.

  Devora stopped screaming, her throat hoarse and on fire. Barak was gripping her arm and shouting something, but she could not hear him. Then, after a long moment, sound returned to her world, and she heard the fire and the rattling of doors up and down the street, other dead trying to get out, trying to get at them. The sound clasped her heart in a cold grip.

  “Burn everything!” she hissed. “Burn it all!”

  Then she shook Barak away and ran, her feet pounding over the ground, the ash still drifting down. She reached up and beat it from her hair. She glimpsed Shomar turning in circles in the street, terrified but unsure where to bolt. She cried his name, ran to him, seized his mane and sprang to his back.

  Even as she mounted, she heard a scream that came to her ears piercing above all the rest. Hurriya!

  Devora saw where the dead had broken free of one of the houses and were stepping over the body of a fallen man. Hurriya had taken up the man’s spear in both her hands and was stabbing at the dead. She speared one in the brow and the corpse dropped to its knees, but before the young woman could pull the spear free, another of the corpses grabbed the haft and used it to pull Hurriya close. With a cry, Devora sent
Shomar galloping toward her, the smoke stinging her eyes. Leaning from her saddle, one hand wrapped in Shomar’s mane, Devora caught up Hurriya in her arm and with a desperate strength that would have shocked her on any other night than this, in any other place, she pulled Hurriya up into the saddle before her. The spear was ripped from the Canaanite’s hands and left in the grip of the dead. “I’m getting you out of here!” she cried in the girl’s ear, and Hurriya clung wildly to the horse’s neck.

  “Run, Shomar! Run!” Devora cried, digging her knees in hard. The horse leapt beneath her with a ferocity like something being born. Dead moaned behind her, and dead spilled from a shattered door into the street before her, and Shomar rode them down, permitting the Hebrew and the Canaanite only the briefest glimpse of their sightless, ravenous faces, the white of cheekbones through torn and missing flesh. Then they were riding out of the town, Hurriya bent low over Shomar’s neck, her hair in Devora’s face. Hurriya kept sobbing, “They took my baby, they took my baby—” The navi’s heart pounded as she urged Shomar quickly out along the shore of the lake, everything in her tight and desperate and ready to unravel in grief. Her nostrils seared with the scent of flame and smoke and decay.

  IN THE SILENCE OF GOD

  DEVORA DID not let Shomar slacken his pace until they had ridden some distance across the shingle. Then she halted and gazed out over the water, her heart still racing. The town burned behind them, and Devora could hear the distant crack of wood beams breaking in the flames and the shouts of living men. There were no longer any moans from the dead.

  Suddenly she couldn’t hold it in any longer—the doubt, the anguish, the fury at what she had done and at God for letting it be necessary.

  “God!” she screamed.

  Hurriya tensed in her arms.

  “Ata adonai!” Devora’s rage and despair echoed across the water. The reflected firelight on the lake was strangely beautiful.

  “Where are you?” she screamed. “This—this burning—is not an answer to our need! It’s not an answer!”

  Hurriya whispered, “The dead will hear!”

  “Let them hear,” the navi snapped.

  She urged Shomar back to a canter, heard the splash of water under his hooves as he bore them along the shore. She was riding away from the town and away from the camp, out into the dark and the silence. She could not bear to see the malakh spreading across the sky, hiding God’s stars with its dark wings. She could smell the smoke in her hair.

  “None of the gods are listening,” Hurriya said.

  “God is here,” Devora cried. “He is still here. He is still covering us. He sends you visions.” Lifting her voice, she shouted across the water, “Send me a vision! Send me!”

  “What if he doesn’t?” Hurriya said, her voice brittle with pain. “What then? Will you crawl back to Shiloh?”

  Devora brought Shomar to a halt again, sat breathing hard on his back, felt the horse’s sides moving as he breathed between her legs. Something soft and powdery touched her face, and she looked up in the dark and realized flakes of ash were falling, even here. She shuddered.

  The town behind them was not only silent, it was dead. And she could do nothing, had done nothing. She had barely ridden from the burning houses with the one other life her horse had carried into the town. She had saved no one but Hurriya.

  Vividly she heard Naomi’s words in her heart—Some days a woman can only save one life—but those words seemed empty to her, a riddle without an answer or without any answer she could bear.

  “There were children,” Devora whispered.

  No visions came to her over the water. No answer.

  Hurriya was gazing back at the fire far behind them. She was shaking more violently now, and Devora could feel the heat from her body, a heat that was not one of vision.

  “Chew your leaves, girl,” the navi muttered.

  I lost them.”

  Devora’s heart sank. Perhaps the leaf the girl had been chewing before the dead attacked would be enough to calm her fever for a while. But she didn’t know; she was no midwife or herbalist. They would have to get more. At that, Devora’s momentary fury flickered out, and exhaustion fell over her like a collapsed tent. She slumped a little. She felt old.

  “Those houses,” the girl murmured. “Those houses full of dead. The people—they couldn’t bear to kill the sick. They couldn’t do it. So they locked the sick into the houses on that street. Trusting the doors to hold. That’s what happened. I can see it. No vision, but I can see it.”

  “A corpse is stronger than a living person,” Devora said wearily. “They don’t hold back. They don’t hesitate. They don’t doubt. They don’t care if they destroy their bodies to break a door. They just kill and eat. The People, who are living, are capable of restraint. Of weighing choices and consequences. Of judgment. The dead are not.” She glanced at Hurriya. “To be without restraint, to be without Law, is to be like one of the dead. Without the Law to hold you back, you may break a door, you may shatter some obstacle, but you will break yourself too.”

  “They couldn’t let their dead go,” Hurriya rasped, as though she hadn’t heard. “You can’t either. You aren’t grieving for the dead, you’re screaming out your guilt to them. That’s what was in your voice, when it echoed over the water. You want your God to give you a vision of the next day, or the next, but you’re gazing at the past. Ever since you took me from Shiloh. You’re gazing at the past, and so no visions come to you.”

  The words shook her. Only Lappidoth had ever touched that bruised part of her heart, and he had never done so with words. No one else had ever seen this in her—her guilt, the sense of crushing responsibility, the conviction of all those she’d failed. Zadok’s pain. Her mother’s death and, later, Naomi’s. The many deaths in that burning town. All of them her burdens to bear—and only holding herself and her People strictly to the Law had kept their weight bearable.

  Until now. Glancing up at the smoke that had taken the stars from her—taken even that visible sign of God’s presence and God’s promises—she felt as though even the Law, even the Covenant, had been stripped away, like the roof of a tent torn aside in the wind of a violent storm. She had torn some of it away herself, turning the bodies of the People into ash and dust.

  “You can’t carry the dead with you,” Hurriya whispered out of the dark, and her voice was that of a feverish, suffering woman with a heathen accent. But her voice was also that of the navi, speaking of things she and God had seen that for others remained unseen. “You can’t. If you can’t take some part of them back into your heart as sustenance, take joy in having known them—if you can’t hum a sleep-song to them or talk to them quietly in the evening—if they cannot sustain and nourish you in the water you drink and the fish you eat, then you have to at least do it the Hebrew way. You cannot bear them; you have to bury them.”

  Devora knew Hurriya was right. The dead from her past were like corpses she’d hefted onto her shoulders and now struggled beneath, carrying them in search of a cairn rather than laying them down and going to gather stones. But she did not know how to gather stones for the dead whose presence she felt within her. She didn’t know how. She gazed out over the water and wondered if God too was watching the reflection of the flames on the lake.

  “If God is silent,” she said, “I will act as though he is not. When God sends no visions, when we don’t know if he is with us or if we are left to die in the ash among the corpses, we must still act as though his hand does cover us. Our responsibilities are unchanged. Nothing else will suffice.” Under her breath she added, “I will not demand assurances.”

  She guided Shomar back toward the fire and the distant settlement and, farther along the shore, the tents of the northern men. In the firelight, she glanced at Hurriya’s face and gave a start.

  Hurriya’s cheeks glistened with silent tears.

  Devora felt a pang of remorse. The girl was exhausted. Shomar, huffing softly in the dark, was exhausted too. This was no ti
me to be riding along the shore in the dark, fleeing her night terrors. She put her arm about the girl’s waist and pulled her back against her breast, holding her tightly. “Shh,” the navi whispered.

  “Further north,” Hurriya whispered back. “I have to get further north. I have to find Anath. I have to find her.”

  NO SURVIVORS

  THE RISING sun found Barak walking with the other war-leaders through a strange land of falling ash and ash underfoot and ash in the air they breathed. Omri and Laban spoke in low tones about what to do next, where to lead the men, where to seek the dead, but Barak walked in grim silence. He could not stop thinking about the hours of flame and heat and sweat. His men had worked right there amid the flames, shoving the flaming dead back into the houses, fighting to contain them as they burned and withered.

  Those faces, melting in the flames. Hissing and snapping their jaws even as they burned.

  “How many men died last night?” he whispered.

  The others fell silent.

  “Five of mine,” Omri muttered after a moment. “And eight others.”

  “Mordecai ben Enoch was dragged into the fire.” Laban turned and looked back up the street. “He was a strong man, and he killed twelve of the Sea Coast raiders when they came through the Galilee. Four wives will be watching at the window of his house, but he won’t come home to them.”

  Thirteen. Thirteen men.

  “And how many unclean?” he said.

  “Eight men bitten and lived,” Omri said.

  “Show me,” Barak said.

  Omri and Laban exchanged a look.

  “I know,” Barak growled. “Show me.”

  The eight knelt in a line in the street where the children had died, with two armed men standing guard behind them. As Barak approached with the other chieftains, he saw the navi moving along the line with slow but unfaltering steps, with that wild blade unsheathed and held out to the side. The nazarite, for once, was not at her side. Devora’s face was grimmer than Barak had ever seen a woman’s face before, and she stood straighter and fiercer than any woman he’d known, her posture one of uncompromising duty; she might almost have been a man.