Zombies: Shambling Through the Ages

by Неизвестный

  “They’re hunting us,” gasped the older man.

  “I know,” panted James, not slowing his pace one bit. “Can’t say if it’s by sight or smell, but if we could make for a stream . . . ”

  “This way,” said Sir George, and with surprising lightness of foot headed into a denser patch of forest.

  Eventually the sound of water reached James’ ears along with the hunting cries of the Wicht-pack. He dared to hope—they might just get away, maybe—but when they charged into the clearing he stopped short, all thoughts of his peril driven from his mind.

  Of all the sights he had expected to see during this trip that had been, at one time, a pleasure-party, he had not dreamed of finding his sister Elinor naked with her face obscenely buried between the bare creamy thighs of the girl who, at one time—a lifetime ago, perhaps—he had hoped to make his fiancée. They writhed and moaned with pleasure atop a makeshift bed of their shed skirts; it was shocking, the juxtaposition of danger and heedless pleasure, and for some reason it made him laugh.

  “James!” cried Elinor, sitting up in alarm at the unexpected intrusion. Her face was smeared with something that glistened in the watery filtered sunlight. “What are you doing here? What—oh no! James!”

  “Run for it, ladies,” cried Sir George, dashing forward and grabbing both girls by their slender wrists. Though naked as the day they were born they followed him, splashing into and up along the burbling stream. James made to follow when his shock wore off, but he tripped over his own feet and landed face down in the forest loam, dazed.

  As claws closed around James’ neck and limbs and he felt multiple sets of soft but persistent teeth champing at various parts of his body, James laughed again. So that was why Aliza had been so eager to affiance herself to a penniless boy like him. Elinor had introduced them, after all, the minx. And here he’d thought he could tell hunter from hunted!

  And then the forest darkened around him, and his laugh became a scream.

  Cinereous

  Livia Llewellyn

  Paris

  October, 1799

  The nails on the heels of Olympe Léon’s boots are the only sounds in the silence of night’s chilly end. Click click click through indigo air, like the metallic beat of a metronome’s righteous heart. As always, when she sees her destination at the end of rue Saint-Martin, rising black and monolithic against the encroaching country and the graying sky, her heart and feet skip beats. She thinks of each single drop of blood, spurting and squirting from the bright flat mouths of the necks, and her small callused hands and wide bowls to catch them all. Olympe, like all the assistants, is very proud of her training, and very afraid of losing her place, very afraid of sinking back into the city’s bowels, never to return. She never misses a drop.

  The building has no name. It never has. Inside the courtyard, men in effluvia-stained coats scurry back and forth to one of the three large guillotines sitting on the worn packed earth. Scientists and doctors and handlers, carrying out their part of the Forbidden Experiment. Olympe and the young assistants are forbidden to venture beyond the warren of labs and rooms on the ground floor. The rules of their mysterious, tight-knit society haven’t stopped her, but after two years, she has still only seen glimpses of the eight labyrinthine stories that loom in a perfect square around the courtyard, occasional flashes of people moving up and down the wide staircases, and the constant winking of the stairwell candle flames high above her like trapped stars in the artificial night. Most floors are reserved for research. The top two floors, merged long ago into a single high-walled prison, are where the Forbidden Experiment has taken place for over twenty years now, and only handlers are allowed inside. Thick-limbed men swathed in heavy layers of leather and chain mail, with animal-faced masks and gloves of unyielding steel, unlock the doors to the top floor once every week, and venture into a metal-bar-ceilinged warren of broken rooms and passages, untamed flora and small creeping fauna, a facsimile and perversion of the natural world, open to the elements yet contained and confined. And after a time, each handler emerges with a young boy or girl who howls and shits and pisses and bites like a wolf, a child who has had no interaction with the civilized world since birth. Enfants sauvages. Some are sent to labs on the middle floors for dissection and vivisection and resurrection, some are taken to the basement levels for electrical and mechanical experiments beyond even Olympe’s delicious imagination. And those tagged for the living head experiments are sent to the courtyard, to the guillotines and to her.

  Olympe hangs her coat up in one holding room, and slips on her laboratory overcoat in another. She cannot describe how proud she feels when she buttons up the faded, fraying fabric. Out there in the world there are women who read books, who study, who are scientists and doctors as much as they can be, considering women are nothing more than failed men, walking fœtuses who never developed into their full male potential. Olympe, the brothel-raised daughter of a long-dead revolutionary and a long-dead whore, is very aware she will never be one of these women, these forward-thinking academic lights of France’s glorious new future, but at least she is more than what awaits her outside the double steel courtyard gates, and it never fails to thrill her. True, the great men who conduct these incredible experiments tend to recruit uneducated yet comely young women and men like herself, who don’t protest when a suck or two is requested of them, but Olympe is pretty and clean and always willing to comply. And she’s smart. As she grabs her copper bowls and heads into the courtyard, she thinks of the top floor, that mysterious jungle of rooms and wilderness, of the cleverly concealed spy holes inserted throughout the rotting passages and hallways through which the scientists can fully observe the enfants sauvages without interaction or detection. Thanks to her strong fingers and nimble tongue, she’s been in those rooms. She’s seen what goes on in the artificial wild, she’s heard what the scientists say. None of the other assistants have. None of them have ambitions quite like Olympe.

  Each slender wood guillotine has a name, and something of its own personality, or so Olympe would like to believe. She’s worked at the bases of La Bécane and Le Massicot, both nimble and efficient apparatuses, but her heart and hands belong to the swift and silent blade that descends through the center of Mirabelle. There’s just something about the sharp low whomp of Mirabelle’s heavy mouton and blade rushing through meat and bone that satisfies Olympe in a way nothing else does. Already Le Massicot has been at work—Nana is at the neck of a sauvage, her copper bowl catching the blood which will later be sent rushing through tubes and vials in some candlelit room upstairs. Étienne stands slightly behind her, one large hand on each side of the head as he holds it still and upright for display. Blood trickles and pools around his shoes. Before him three doctors crouch, touching the head lightly with calipers and other devices, taking notes as they speak in low tones. They are measuring the lingering signs of a life taken so swiftly by the blade that the head often fails to acknowledge the body’s demise. Olympe has seen the eyes of severed heads blink, seen lips twitch and heard gasps and sighs. The doctors hold vials up to the mouth to catch escaping vapors, peer through pieces of glass into the gaping neck, slide lancets and needles into the jelly eyes. The assistants know better than to ask what knowledge they seek, or what use they intend with it. Later, the living heads, as they are called, will be placed in large glass containers filled with viscous liquids, and join other similar containers on the fourth floor. Olympe has seen that secret, many-shelved room as well, seen the hundreds of surprised faces peering out from their amber-colored shells. She knows a good scientist must have a strong stomach and heart, but she has no real desire to return any time soon.

  Mirabelle’s wood frame is dull brown, the same color as Olympe’s carefully pinned and bonneted hair. Lorilleaux is at his usual spot beside her, pulling worn leather gloves onto his long hands. When he clamps his fingers around the sides of each head nestling in Mirabelle’s curved embrace, it’s like watching a monstrous spider clamp down up
on its prey. An executioner stands on Mirabelle’s opposite side, checking the ropes and mechanisms, giving one last polish to the blade. Sometimes the sun makes its way into the courtyard, bouncing between the windows and shining steel until it hurts to see. This morning the sky is cloudy and dull, and a fine haze floats through the air, a mixture of smoke and ash from the building crematorium and furnace fires that are never extinguished. The smell is particularly hideous today—for several weeks, an illness has steadily been making its way through the sauvages, a flesh-destroying disease the doctors have yet to discover the cause of or cure for, a bodily putrefaction that gives an extra tang to the feathery airborne remnants of the dead. It coats the backs of their throats and settles in their chest—everyone who works outside coughs, swallows constantly, drinks water, and spits out discolored globs of phlegm. Olympe stares at the blanket of clouds rolling across the squared acre of sky over her head. It looks like another courtyard, a cold and lifeless mirror of the one below. She lays her copper bowls out on the long table positioned next to the stone platform on which Mirabelle stands. There is always a small space reserved for her, at the end of all the instruments and equipment the physicians and scientists use. Today is busy—there will be three subjects from the top floor coming to each guillotine. And when Olympe isn’t collecting the blood and handing it over to whomever has reserved it, she will be expected to hand instruments to those who need them, refill pens, provide fresh paper, and occasionally bring out trays of coffee and sweets. In her coat pocket, though, is her own small notebook and pen. When time allows she scribbles down her own set of notes, just as any good scientist would, even though she isn’t quite sure how to correctly shape all the letters or spell all the words.

  Lorilleaux lets out a quick gasp, and Olympe turns. Something is wrong, she realizes, and her heart skips another beat. Across the courtyard approaches Mirabelle’s first visitor of the day. A handler has one of the diseased sauvages locked in an iron jacket attached to a long pole at the back, which he uses to push the body forward—a device the handlers created for when the creatures are ill, when they don’t want contact with the body. It lunges and stumbles on twig-thin legs, reaches out with broken-fingered arms, as all the creatures do, but giant strands of spittle hang from the cracked black lips, and its pallor is that of a corpse, as if every particle of health has been siphoned away. And its movements are slow, Olympe notes; sluggish and confused as if fighting off fever or waking from the too-long grip of a terrible dream. One low continual moan issues from deep within its ribcage, not the high healthy roar she’s used to hearing. Around the handler and creature, physicians and scientists scurry, already throwing out theories and furiously writing down notes. One of those physicians is Marie François Xavier Bichet, favorite student to the now-deceased founder of their society, Pierre-Joseph Desault—whose own head, it is whispered, now sits blinking and gaping in some forgotten corner of the building. Bichet never appears in the courtyard unless occasion merits, unless some important discovery is about to be made.

  Olympe steps to the end of the table and grabs a bowl, hugging it to her chest like a shield as the phalanx of chaos approaches. The blade rises to the top of Mirabelle, and the executioner locks the déclic and release handle into place. Lorilleaux is several meters away, on the opposite side of the table. Olympe likes his gentle disposition, but she’s never seen anyone who can make a living lifting heads from dead bodies yet tremble like a girl at the sight of anything worse than a bruise. He’ll never be a doctor. The handler has unlatched the pole from the metal chest plate, and another handler is removing it from the sauvage, who claws and paws at the man’s mask, trying to scrape through the layers of protection to get at the man inside. Seconds later, the man forgotten, it swivels its head like a mad dog, snapping and biting at the soft bits of ash floating around them like dead fireflies. For what reason it does these things, Olympe cannot fathom. The men scribble faster, and Olympe reaches into her pocket, touches her little notebook as a reminder that she’ll do the same thing later, when she has the chance. There is no time, now, though: the first handler is maneuvering the creature’s head into Mirabelle’s curved base while the executioner lowers the lunette over the top of its neck. The second handler stands at the back of the bascule, holding the creature’s constantly flailing legs together with one massive hand as he keeps it still against the plank with another hand flat against its back. For the first time she can recall, Olympe is revolted at the sight of so much physical corruption and decay. Black and blue discolorations entirely cover the almost skeletal body, and there are perhaps a hundred shallow and deep cuts on the creature, yet no bleeding or discharge. Her lips curl slightly—it can’t be possible, but it looks like some of the vertebrae are poking out through the skin.

  And now the first handler steps back, and the executioner motions them forward. Lorilleaux and Olympe take their places, she with her copper bowl to the side, and Lorilleaux with his spidery hands reaching out to clasp the creature’s jerking head. He makes a wet grunt of disgust as his fingers sink into the filthy tangle of hair and soft skin. For once Olympe can’t blame him. Everyone waits. Lorilleaux buries his nose into his shoulder and violently shudders. She knows he’s swallowing his own bile. Beneath his grip, the head keeps moving. Finally he lifts his own, and gives a single definitive nod. The sequence of events is practiced and swift. Once Lorilleaux nods, the executioner shouts out as he pulls the lever, Mirabelle’s blade shoots down swift and straight, right through the creature’s head. Lorilleaux pulls the head away and holds it up for immediate inspection, while Olympe takes one step in and holds her copper bowl under the neck, catching as much of the blood as possible. As she holds the bowl, scientists will switch out the bowls for her, take quick samples from the flow, and attempt to measure the rate, thickness and amount of drainage. It’s all clockwork, performed by them at least a thousand times. Nothing should go wrong.

  Lorilleaux gives his nod. The executioner shouts out, and the head in Lorilleaux’s grasp turns sharp and strong. He lets out a scream. The blade comes down and severs the head, and Lorilleaux drops it, whipping his hands away and shouting in pain. The head comes down on Olympe’s feet, and instinctively, she drops her bowl and reaches down to grab it, her fingers outstretched as she’s seen Lorilleaux do a thousand times. As her hand moves down, the head moves, and suddenly there is pain, unlike anything she has felt before. An animal-like roar erupts from her throat, and she raises her hand, the head still attached, its teeth moving back and forth across her finger like a miniature saw. She can feel the blood in her veins grow cold, the world turn black at the edges, and everything grows dull and murky. Doctors surround her, using the calipers and any other instrument they can find to pry the horrible object from her body. And then it is all suddenly over, and the head is gone. Olympe holds her hand up to her face, steaming rivulets of red running down her trembling flesh and disappearing in the sleeves of her clothes. One finger is crooked, torn and almost bit in half at the knuckle. When she speaks, it’s as if the timorous, childish words are coming from any place other than her mouth.

  —I’ve been bit.

  Activity at the other guillotines has ceased. Olympe finds Nana at her side, guiding her across the eerily silenced courtyard to the holding rooms. Lorilleaux runs ahead, his blood-spattered boots echoing back and forth between the stone walls. The air feels too warm, and the ash, the ever-constant smell of burning flesh, the thick scratch against the back of her tongue—Olympe halts, bends over, and vomits. Bits of black spatter against their boots. A frisson of terror washes through her. Those black clots are her blood, darkened from sitting in her stomach for hours as it curdled into something else. Nana waits until she’s finished, then guides her forward again, through the holding rooms and into a corner of a makeshift medical lab, where a physician is already bandaging up an ashen-faced Lorilleaux. He’ll never be anything more than an assistant. He can’t handle change or pain. Olympe sits down, props her elbow upright
against the table, and studies her finger. Already the edges of the wound are drying out, cracking slightly. Moistening a rag with her spittle, she wipes away the blood, and leans in, squinting. A low moan escapes her lips, barely a feather’s breath. Tiny veins of blue and black thread away from the edges of the bite marks, a network that spreads as she watches, slow but sure. Around the lines, soft gray blossoms up from within. Olympe grabs a roll of linen and quickly begins wrapping her hand. The doctor doesn’t protest. They all know how hard she works, how quick and smart she is. Several tears drop onto the cream fabric as she pins the ends tight, then rolls down her stained overcoat sleeve. She’ll be fine, she tells herself as she rises from her seat, ignoring Nana’s steadying hand. She’s going to go far.

  After a few sips of water, Olympe makes her way back outside and back across the courtyard to Mirabelle. Already the blood has been washed away with buckets of scalding water that sends steam curling into the air, and the remaining assistants and doctors are placing equipment into straw-filled barrows to be wheeled back inside. The tracks of another wheelbarrow lead to the back of the building, where the remains will be sent first to the morgue, and then, in pieces, to other labs on other floors. Bichet and a group of the older scientists gather at the far end of the table, staring at an amber liquid-filled glass container set at its edge. Hair floats in the liquid like seaweed. Normally Olympe wouldn’t dare approach these important men, who know her only as a pair of disembodied hands holding a blood-filled copper bowl. She sidles along the table, her uninjured hand touching the edge casually, as if it’s not necessary to keep her balance. When she gets to the edge of the group, Bichet straightens, and waves her closer. The men move aside: they’re making way for her. Little trickles of sweat run down the sides of her face. She feels like her body is pushing all the fluids out, squeezing out every last drop of moisture, to make room for the gray blooms and the black veins.