Strangers in the Land (The Zombie Bible)

by Stant Litore

  The girl’s grip on his hand tightened.

  “Come on,” she whispered.

  WHO GIVES AND TAKES AWAY

  A HEAVE, then Barak fell onto the weedy bank, coughing and gasping. He grasped a root and rolled onto his back, straining. Took deeper breaths. The pain had become acute; white fire shot up his leg to his hip, and his breath hissed through his teeth.

  The young woman who leaned over him was lovely in the starlight and naked as though she were his lover or his purchase. Her face had the Canaanite cheekbones and that cast to the eyes. He found he couldn’t take his gaze from her; she was so like Hadassah, though younger and smaller. Her own gaze flicked over his body and she muttered, “Not bitten.” She got to her feet.

  The moans of the dead at the water below were loud.

  Barak scrambled up onto his knees. The girl was walking toward the cluster of tents. A horse was waiting there by a cold fire pit outside the largest pavilion, a small, sleek desert horse so black its hair shone. The girl held in one hand by her leg a wooden teraph, a goddess charred by fire yet recognizable as an Astarte, the goddess of planting and birth and harvest and love. Her other arm held a wolf pelt. There was no breeze, and the girl’s hair hung lank about her face and shoulders, caked with dirt. There were bruises on the girl’s cheek, her breasts, her thighs, her legs. To see her so bewildered Barak, who could not understand why a man would beat a girl so severely, especially this girl. To Barak she was beautiful, lush as the wooden Astarte she held, and the bruises on her body as wrong as the red moon in the sky.

  “Wait!” Barak cried.

  The woman turned, her fingers already curled around a clump of the gelding’s mane. She stood and stared at him. Her eyes caught at him; they shone in the terrible red moonlight. After a moment she swept the wolf pelt about herself, concealing her body.

  “Whose tents are these?” he called.

  “Heber’s.” He heard the hate in her voice and suddenly understood. She had been a raid captive. “The men are gone,” she said. “A boy was left to watch me, but he is gone too.”

  “Who is your mother?” he called softly. It was the traditional call of a man to a village girl he wished to court. “What is your tribe?”

  He could hear the branches of the oaks tossing.

  “I have none,” she said.

  He gazed at her, and in his wonder he realized that she was not the only young woman he had seen these past days who had reminded him of Hadassah. He realized where he had seen this girl’s eyes and cheekbones before. “You’re that girl’s sister,” he gasped. How strange that he should find her here. It seemed miraculous that it should be so, as though this moment had been touched by God. These past days he had seen so few signs of God’s touch, only signs of her absence. Until that mist in the ravine below. Until this bruised girl had reached down her hand to help him up. “You’re Hurriya’s sister.”

  Her reaction to the name was immediate. She turned with her eyes bright and her face alight with hope. “You know her?” she cried. “My sister—you’ve seen her! Where is she?”

  “She took refuge with my camp,” Barak said, and stopped. The light in the girl’s eyes was beautiful; to see it go out would break his heart. That light—that hope—how long had it been since he’d seen that in a woman’s face? In anyone’s face?

  He saw the light start to fade as she guessed the worst from his silence. Everything else had been torn from her; even her goddess had been charred and burned, perhaps tossed carelessly by some raider to the edge of the fire. He could not take this from her too. “No,” he said quickly. “She is well. A few of my men—they led her, and others, west toward the Wide Sea. There are walled settlements there, where she’ll be safe.” Where this girl might be safe too.

  The light blazed again. He saw the girl shaking. “Tyre?” Her voice was breathless. “Or Sidon?”

  “Sidon,” he said.

  “I’m going to find her,” the girl said. Clutching the gelding’s mane, she leapt onto the horse’s back. She winced, for her body was badly bruised, but still she clung tightly to the horse, and her eyes had in them a fierce determination Barak had only ever seen in the eyes of one woman before: the navi of Israel.

  “Wait!” Barak stepped closer. “Tell me your name!”

  “My name,” she whispered. She looked distracted, as though searching for the answer to his question. She hummed a few notes of a melody, very quietly, recalling something to herself, something from before her bruises and her pain.

  Barak knew the melody well. It was Hurriya’s song, and it was Hadassah’s song that she used to sing to their unborn child, holding her belly. His throat tightened.

  “There were standing dead beneath the olives,” the girl said softly. “I found my sister’s hovel empty, blood on the walls. But no bodies. Just—my sister and her baby were gone. So I went to find her. And these men found me. And hurt me.” Her eyes burned with hate. “In their tents I was Ya El. A joke of theirs. I carried the name of a goddess of my people, so they made me carry the name of their God instead. I hope they are all dead, all of them. I hope they were eaten.”

  “Then I’ll not call you Ya El,” Barak told her. “What should I call you?”

  She bent low over her gelding’s neck and kissed the horse’s ear. “Anath,” she said after a moment. “When the sun comes up, I will be Anath.”

  Then, before Barak could say anything more, the girl Anath was riding away, past the tents. He watched her, thinking of that hardness in her eyes, thinking of Inanna riding down the gates of Sheol to rescue her lover in the story the Canaanites told. Half expecting the woman and her horse to crumble away on the still air, a thing of ashes and dreams, not flesh and blood. But still he could see her, galloping away from the riverbank and out over the tumbled, unplowed landscape in the red of the moon, riding up the rising land and into the hills.

  When she had gone, Barak listened a few moments to the moaning of the dead in the river below. He hoped the girl found her way safely to the gates of Sidon. She might barter the horse for food and a room. He hoped so. The thought of it made him strangely calm—that there might be escape, for someone, from this long night of the dead.

  The low wailing in the ravine seemed suddenly sorrowful to him. So many people had died up here. He could still hear Anath’s song in his ears, and he yearned again for Hadassah, remembering the warmth of her in his arms, how she had taken his hand in hers and pressed his palm to her belly the night before her death. She had told him she could feel the baby kicking, and though he couldn’t feel it himself, he had laughed and kissed her ear and told her he could, told her that he was glad she was bearing him such a strong son.

  Forcing himself to take deep breaths, he glanced about at the tents and the oaks behind them. He was far now from his ruined vineyard and the camp of his men, and he didn’t know how his men and the navi had fared against the dead. He hoped the corpses in the ravine below would move on if they could not see him or hear him. He could follow the bank back and look across at that barley field, and if he could do it unseen by the dead, climb down this bank and back up the other. Find and regather his men.

  He considered the tents.

  He needed meat, something to give him the strength he would need to get back. He could hardly stand, he was so weary. And water. He needed water. Yet he was hardly prepared to climb back down to that corpse-filled stream to get it.

  He moved toward the largest of the pavilions grimly. When he drew the flap aside, he could smell the reek of death—that same smell that had surrounded him in the field. But nothing moved within. Nothing shuffled toward him. Nothing moaned at him out of the dark. After a moment, he let the flap fall closed.

  A few unsteady paces took him to the little fire, which was just dead coals now, but there was kindling there and dry straw and flints. In a few moments he had a small blaze and was able to make a torch by shoving a short branch into the fire and letting the dry leaves kindle and burn until the fire reached
the wood and began to sing and crackle in its joy at sating its hunger to devour all things. Lifting the branch, he returned to the tent. He paused for a while with his hand at the flap, unable to bring himself to open it; he shook and sweated as with a fever. He had seen too much tonight. He did not think he could bear to see one more of those—those faces, lifted toward the torch, gray eyes and a bloody mouth opening in a hiss or a low moan.

  Bracing himself, he laid the branch at his feet—he could not bring it too near the fabric of the tent. The whole thing would go up in flames. He drew the tent flap aside, peered within.

  One of the dead was there, but it was not moving. A bronze peg, a tent peg, had been driven through its skull. Its mouth was open in a hunger that was both silent and eternal.

  Slowly Barak let out his breath.

  There was nothing else in the tent but bedding, which smelled of urine and semen—but the scent of decay overpowered the other smells.

  It took great control not to retch, but covering his nose and mouth with his hand, he stepped into the tent and crouched by the body and waited for his senses to adjust to the offensive smell of the tent.

  The tent flap settled behind him. Outside, the branch flickered and burned; its glow passed through the gap between the flap and the tent wall, and the faint red light fell across the dead face. The face was intact; the brow and the skull above it had burst open like an overripe fruit at the passage of that metal peg.

  He crouched there a long time, breathing shallowly through his fingers. Once he reached out and touched the blunt end of the peg with his fingertips. He withdrew his hand quickly.

  He thought of Hurriya’s sister, who looked so much like his wife yet was so fierce-hearted. She was the only living person he had encountered in this camp. And her horse had awaited her by the door of this tent. It must have been her hand that had slain the corpse. Barak thought of that girl lying naked and beaten on these very rugs until that hungering corpse drew aside the flap and peered in at her. He shuddered. He thought of her wrenching that peg from the earth.

  Devora’s words came back to him. You must understand this, Barak. The God of our mothers and fathers will deliver the dead into the hands of women.

  Barak laughed quietly. A woman with a blade no man of the People had ever held. A naked slave girl with a bronze peg. Women had always been strange to him, strange as God herself, unreliable and unknowable. To be wooed, perhaps to be possessed and placed in a man’s tent where they would hopefully stay a while where he put them, where they could be enjoyed and used. But the women he had seen these past few days and nights were stranger than any he’d known. Or perhaps all women were stranger than he’d known. The levites who kept the Law taught that God had made woman to be an ezer kenegdo to man, a help, even as God herself was an ezer, a help to the People, her arms surrounding, embracing, comforting, lifting up whom they held. Barak felt suddenly a yearning to know what an ezer truly was—to know what the levites actually meant. For if a woman could ride at the dead with an iron blade flashing in the red moonlight or drive a bronze peg through a dead man’s skull—and yet weep and lie as weakly as the navi had lain in the weeds during their halt that afternoon, then he did not know what a woman was or what a woman was meant to be.

  And he did not know anymore what a man was.

  He watched the silent face, and a sorrow grew in his heart. He found he could not stand; those lifeless eyes held him. They looked like little river stones with a film of some gray slime stretched thin across their surfaces. His grief for his vineyard and his anger at God suddenly seemed small. He seemed small, his complaint and his fear the cry of a small mouse in a wide field. That face—that face, and the faces he’d seen in the barley and in the riverbed—what was happening to the land, to the People? This creature with the peg driven through its brow—he looked at its lips, saw the blood there. It had been feeding shortly before that girl slew it. He shuddered. This broken thing had moaned with a hunger for flesh that could never fill it, never sustain it, never nourish it. It consumed everything it encountered with a hunger like a god’s hunger but made no covenant with anyone it fed on. It would use the flesh it consumed to make nothing, grow nothing, produce nothing. It would not have any young. It would not grow any vineyards. It would only feed and devour, and give nothing back. It didn’t live: it merely craved.

  Yet this had been a man once.

  A man who’d tended his vines or his herds, then died. A little circle of tooth marks on his arm told the tale of that death. He was not elsewhere chewed; perhaps he had beaten off the corpse or stilled it, then run into the hills to hide from the People. He had been unclean, defiled; he would have known what his fate would be if the others learned of it. Perhaps he had even hidden his arm beneath a heavy robe for a few hours or a day, even in the heat of the Galilee summer; perhaps he had shuddered each time someone brushed against him as he moved about the tents. In the end, the fever would have grown fierce, burning him from within. He would’ve had to flee. And here, in these hills, perhaps in this very valley, he had lowered himself among the stones or in the wild grasses, and shivered and vomited until he was done. Then he’d lain still, completely still, under the wide sky. His eyes empty, his chest sunken in on itself. Time had passed, a wind moving over him through the weeds. Perhaps a small antelope had grazed near him for a while.

  But at some point his chest had moved, filling slowly with air. Beginning to rise and fall. The body had begun to breathe. Then the mouth had begun to move or the fingers to twitch. Only the eyes remained entirely the same, dull and dead. No spirit returning to look out through them at these hills that had known the footprints of God.

  How long had the creature lain there, just breathing?

  How long before it had climbed to its feet and lurched slowly away through the tall weeds?

  That could have been him. Fleeing the dead tonight, only a few strides ahead of their grasping hands, their teeth—that could have been him.

  Barak was shaking. “The land has become strange to me,” he whispered, gazing at that lifeless face frozen in its moment of famished need. “I wanted only evenings in my house and Hadassah in my bed, her breasts in my hands. I wanted only my vineyard, only the ripe grapes, the coolness of them beneath my feet, the taste of wine. The long battle with soil and worm is enough for any man of Naphtali. God, you give and you take away, and we are only ashes. We are only ashes.”

  SH’MA YISRAEL

  THE MOON must have set and the fire must have died down again to coals, for no light fell now on the dead face, and the dark within the tent became oppressive. Barak didn’t know how long he’d sat there. He was numb inside, hollowed out. He tried to recall the comfort he’d felt when the mists rose over the water, the nearness of a God who did not loathe him, a God who might nourish him. He got to his feet and stumbled toward the door of the tent. He had to get back to his camp, his men. It did not matter how bruised and overcome he felt or what kind of God might heal him. There was work to be done and no one else to do it.

  He pulled the flap aside, then caught his breath. A figure was standing there in the dark, a little shorter than he was. It must have been listening right at the door of the tent. Even as Barak realized it was there, the corpse grabbed his wrist in its hands, lifting Barak’s hand toward its lips and ducking its head, biting quickly. The pain was deep and sharp. Barak roared and tried to pull his hand back, but he only pulled the corpse with him.

  With a shout, he turned and pulled the corpse toward the fire pit and slammed it down on the ground, crushing its chest down with his knee. The unclean thing held his wrist tightly, kept tearing at his hand with its teeth. Screaming from the pain, Barak took up one of the fist-sized stones from their ring around the fire pit, and he brought the stone down on the corpse’s skull. And again. And again. Its snarling fell silent, and the thing grew still, one side of its head flattened. Its dead eyes did not change; it simply stopped moving.

  Panting, his back bathed in cold swea
t, Barak dropped the stone and grasped its fingers, breaking two of them as he pulled its hand free of his wrist. Then he tore his hand from its jaws, leaving some of his flesh between its teeth. His face gone the color of maggots, Barak fell back on his rear and sat there by the corpse, gasping. He caught a glimpse of its face; the left side of its face had been chewed almost entirely away. The right side had been the face of a youth, no more than a boy—doubtless the boy Anath had mentioned, the one left to watch Heber’s camp, the one she thought was gone. Barak groaned and leaned back, lightheaded; he glimpsed the stars high above his head. His hand and his arm were pulsing, and he lifted his hand before his eyes, stared at the red gash where a chunk of flesh had been torn free; he supposed that piece of him was still held in the dead boy’s mouth. For a long moment he stared at his hand. Then he began laughing, shaking his head and laughing, as the blood poured down his hand from the bite and ran warm along the length of his arm. It was all too strange, and life too fragile a thing to understand. He kept laughing quietly until he felt too weak to. Then his vision went gray.

  Barak heard the sound of sticks cracking and opened his eyes. It was a moment before he could focus. His face felt dry and hot, and his insides were baking. There was coarse cloth wound about his hand. His heart lurched; he could see a human form sitting in the dark by the cold fire pit. Barak was on his back near the pit. The figure glanced at him, and in the dim starlight he recognized her graying hair and the flash of her eyes.

  “Navi,” he murmured. Not one of the dead.

  “You’ve been bitten,” Devora said. Her tone one of cold resolution. She was taking up sticks from a little pile she must have gathered while he lay senseless. She cracked the sticks and arranged a little tent of them over the coals.