Zombies: Shambling Through the Ages

by Неизвестный

  Wilde recomposes himself, brushes the flower’s remains from the buttonhole and retreats several steps, coolly checking the Webley to find it loaded and in good working order. In the days before his downfall in England, when Bosie’s father the Marquess of Queensberry threatened to assault him, Wilde threatened in turn to shoot him on sight. It had been a bluff—and Wilde was a very good bluffer. There was genuine fear in the little old bully’s eyes when he thought the towering Irishman might kill him there and then. I should have, Wilde thinks. But in 1893 he was another man, civilized, Bosie’s devoted fool. Wilde has been—and been with—many different men since then. Every dead incarnation of his being lives in whatever man he is now. But perhaps men always remain, inside, with the first person they ever loved, and remain the men they were at the time of that love’s experiencing. Why else is he out here once more avenging Bosie’s honor?

  Bosie’s father died many months ago. His passing did nothing to ease Wilde’s troubles at the time. It did not elicit the strange recall to life he feels now. His greatest pleasure, before he shoots the nearest Lazarus man in the head, is imagining it is 1893 again and that Queensberry is charging toward him. A bullet would have undone much misery.

  Wilde smiles and returns the first resurrected man to his rest. He dispatches the second and third attacker in short order, aiming at Queensberry’s face each time. It will take more than Christ to bring these Lazari back now. But perhaps resurrection was always the devil’s own work.

  Behind him, Ayat has troubles. He is a genius with the blade and a fine physical specimen, though Wilde cares little for the curly moustaches that age the Frenchman’s face past its twenty-four years, hanging off his lips like wilted petals on an otherwise vibrant flower. Careful and strategic in most circumstances, diagonal in his feints and parries—a chess-piece bishop with the sword of a chess-piece knight—Ayat has miscalculated. Wilde knows the root of his difficulties is the ladies and his eagerness to impress them. The young fencer leapt into the fray without realizing how the narrow confines and the Lazari’s sheer numbers cheat his sword of its principal attribute—length. Now nearly encircled, he cannot swing or stab his way free. A smitten fool, Wilde thinks. But Ayat looks too wholesome and fresh to garner further opprobrium. The fencer’s youth and vitality have made Wilde’s heart his Piste.

  He reaches into his left coat pocket for bullets to feed the Webley and then steps forward unflinching, gun outstretched. He sees Queensberry’s right and left profile; he sees the back of Queensberry’s head. Imagining well is the best revenge and the Lazari sate his imagination. Several minutes later, when the last resurrected man is returned to the dust, Wilde can only marvel at the Webley, saying, “The pen may be mightier than the sword, Ayat, but I believe I should like to compose only with this henceforth. There are several critics I have been meaning to send letters.”

  “Must you be so impossible, Oscar?”

  “It is an impossible situation, Ayat.”

  The ladies rush toward them, their white gloved hands waving in welcome little surrenders to both men. The French women are very unlike the British, Wilde notes, especially in moments of excitement. Their initial hysterias are the same, but French ladies seem immune to fainting spells and are surprisingly adaptive to scenes of gore. Consider how they stand around these rotting corpses unfazed now that the danger has passed. Wilde accepts their praise, acknowledging his growing reputation as the knight-errant of this, the disturbed Exposition Universelle. It is as if no one remembers his dank, weary form haunting the city’s cheapest cafés, a penniless, friendless alcoholic and shamed bugger, embracing a long and pathetic public suicide. Most likely some of these same women spat at him on the street only a month ago as their fine, intact parasols darkened him with shadow.

  Their scorn was well deserved and earned, Wilde thinks, shuddering at an image he conjures of himself lying insensate in a gutter. It has been over three years since he completed the jail sentence that destroyed his soul. Disgraced, humiliated, divorced, he has lived these years in European exile, determined to conclude it here in Paris. There had been presumptive talk among his friends that he should write again—that his wit would be a magic balm to erase the past and soar him to even greater heights. None of them understood, not even his dear and loyal friend Robbie Ross, the impish boy who first seduced Wilde and unlocked the key of his being, stirring fresh life from an existence that was dead for reasons Wilde could not articulate to himself. He had a wife and darling children and yet he was not a living man until Robbie embraced him—Robbie who seemed to understand everything in the world in spite of his youth, or perhaps because of it. No, not even Robbie understood the prison experience, the years of hard labor, the hideous conditions that yet held sway over his mind. When Wilde dreams, he is there again, in the prison yard watching fair-haired youths bruised and worked until they shamble about so very much like the creatures he and Ayat just put down.

  Yet each man kills the thing he loves

  By each let this be heard.

  Some do it with a bitter look,

  Some with a flattering word.

  The coward does it with a kiss,

  The brave man with a sword!

  Wilde shudders again and the women mistake it for something else and offer their comfort. A glance at Ayat’s dripping blade makes him remember the conclusion of his poem, his only attempt at writing since his release. “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” had been an anonymous hit with the public and it had pleased him, the master of paradoxes, that everyone had missed the poem’s ultimate paradox. Even Robbie and Bosie had missed the intent of that line—For each man kills the thing he loves. Had Wilde not also said, “To love oneself is the start of a lifelong romance?” The poem was a statement of intention, a suicide note that announced he planned to kill himself by living.

  He had embarked on this plan by drinking and whoring as much as he could, each day a meaningless and wincing preamble to a long and stuporous night. He wanted only to rot where he stood and decay as he walked, until nothing remained. Yes, it was a prolonged suicide, and a successful one until the phenomenon of the Lazarus men. Wilde may have seen the very first of their kind, three weeks ago. He had fallen into a gutter across from a man who seemed quite dead, no doubt a murdered tourist. Wilde had even slurred a question to him about what it was like. Then the dead man rose and stumbled into the crowded night. A hallucination or mere mistake, Wilde thought at the time, though now he is certain it was a Lazarus man and he wonders if his drunken impotence then bears some responsibility for the present chaos. And for poor Bosie’s condition.

  “These ladies are lovely, are they not, Oscar?”

  Ayat gallantly swipes the sword’s blood across his right pants leg and then kisses the hand of the girl he has decided, Wilde assumes, is the loveliest. The ladies are quiet and indeed all of Paris seems so. How many of its citizens have been killed—and killed again? He thinks of Bosie, stripped half-naked and sweating in his sheets at the hotel, his throat bandaged from the bite that happened three days ago. He hears the young aristocrat calling out, fading away. The auditory vividness of it startles Wilde. What am I doing out here, attempting to avenge a death that has not even happened—and won’t happen! He wonders if this self-assurance is a bluff or a mad reliance on a technicality. There is one point of universal agreement in these days of penumbral confusion: a Lazarus man’s bite is fatally transformative. Bosie will die and yet he will not die.

  Wilde considers how best to excuse himself. Ayat will want to accompany him. Even the allure of beautiful, willing women is not enough to sever the sudden warrior bond between them. They have now fought four battles together, Ayat having sought Wilde out for his renewed fame. Wilde was, of course, quite drunk when the first incidents occurred and multiplied. The attack at the Velodrome de Vincennes supposedly killed over three hundred people, though it had not proven easy to distinguish victims from attackers in many instances. Wilde realizes, from what little he can remember, that n
othing short of divine providence acquitted his escape at the simultaneous attack on the Champ de Mars. For he had defended a child using the heavy cane of someone already felled. Wilde was a very large man, not athletic but powerful all the same. Fueled by alcohol and rage, a powerful anti-societal vengeance suddenly electric in his spine, Wilde bashed heads with such furor that no less than ten skulls were certified split open from his blows. Reflecting on it in later sobriety as he wittily held court before admiring Frenchmen and the child’s injured mother (bitten, poor creature, but at the time this was no cause for alarm), he realized he had no idea if the people he had struck—men only, there was at least that balm—were innocent people or their resurrected assailants.

  He has not touched a drop of alcohol since.

  “See the ladies to safety, Ayat. I have urgent business elsewhere.”

  The Olympic fencer protests but there is nothing he can do. Wilde holds up an imposing, callused hand. “We will find each other later, dear boy. You may rest assured.”

  “Yes, Oscar.”

  Ayat is breathless now in a different way as he turns back to the women. Wilde smiles, wondering if the ladies are in even more danger now. But the Frenchman is young and no doubt lacks expertise. A pity, he thinks, checking the Webley again before starting off. Youth is wasted on the inexperienced.

  He could expect a tedious walk to the Hôtel d’Alsace under normal circumstances, Paris’ population having swelled by many thousands on account of the Exposition and the Olympics. Now the streets are shockingly deserted and the Eiffel Tower, which Wilde considers an appropriate idol to worship if these are indeed the Last Days, stands a lonely sentinel’s watch from across the way. He walks faster than he has in years and his heart feels it. He thinks of what he will say when he re-enters their room. He knows he must sound self-assured and fluid. Somehow he believes only a display of great confidence will keep Bosie alive. Bosie, you must not die and you will not die as long as you have my love. Therefore, Bosie, I can assure you of a splendid immortality.

  Truth be told, while he has always been known as an amazing speaker, with wit at will, his speech is seldom as extemporaneous as it sounds. He has held imaginary conversations with himself since he was a boy, working on lines and rehearsing clever dialogue and bons mots to summon only slightly altered according to need. His employment and delivery is so quick and seamless that it truly feels spontaneous. But true ease in talking comes from art, not chance, to paraphrase Pope, and he believes Pope is always better paraphrased than taken directly. When faced with subjects he cannot even conceive of, much less practice for, Wilde knows he sounds like a stuttering fool, even a simpleton. Bosie’s charming torment is his ability to create hour after unbroken hour of such instances, and Wilde humiliates himself in base incoherencies for the sake of love.

  The entrance to the d’Alsace is like that of other hotels since the crisis, barricaded and patrolled by three armed and watchful men. Their guns train on Wilde before he is ever properly in shooting distance. Wilde stops and adjusts his posture and bearing to make sure neither in any way resembles the stumbling shuffle of the Lazari. He calls loudly to them in his Irish brogue and their fingers relax off the triggers. “Monsieur Wilde,” one says, nods politely and clears a path for him.

  “If only decent theatres could afford armed gunmen to keep out the public, plays might finally be performed in their perfection before absolutely no one. I’ve always said the unfortunate fact of drama is that it must be witnessed.”

  “Oui, Monsieur,” another guard says, and gives Wilde a glare that reminds him not everyone has buried his past with the risen dead.

  He hurries up to their room—Bosie’s room, really, since he pays for it with money inherited from his father’s estate. In bed, Bosie’s head thrashes right and left, dank blond tresses sweated heavily to his forehead. Death’s skeletal hand has gift-wrapped his throat in thick white gauze over a necrotizing bite wound. The rest of his body does not move and this horrifies Wilde. It is as if the Death has asserted dominion everywhere else and what life there remains has gathered in Bosie’s head for a doomed last stand.

  Shots fire from outside the window. Wilde looks in that direction, sweating.

  “So cold,” Bosie says.

  Wilde whips off his topcoat and presses it like a blanket of fire across the slight body.

  “Dear boy,” Wilde says. “Have you been unattended all this time? I left specific instructions—”

  “Don’t leave me again,” Bosie whispers.

  Wilde swallows. How those four words recall memories both tender and hard! Bosie once had the flu and Wilde nursed him devotedly, never leaving his side as he suffered. Then suddenly Bosie recovered and Oscar was stricken by the same malady. From the open window of his sickroom in their rented lakefront house, he endured the sound of his restored lover frolicking jubilantly with several local youths, Bosie having left him to sweat out his own illness in parched solitude.

  Wilde forces his hands to open. He has clenched more fists in the last two weeks than he ever did during his three trials or even in prison itself, when the indignities and outrages he’d experienced built into a bitter torrent he directed entirely at Bosie—through a letter. The prison guards had finally allowed him to write something, and the resulting unsent letter presented an accusation, an entire trial and a sentencing of Bosie for his crimes. He had fallen so far, and for what? Bright blue eyes, a pretty face that launched and sank exactly one ship—Wilde’s own? Writing the letter released a rage he would not know again until his moment on the Champ de Mars. A love letter to my messiah, Wilde thinks to himself in derision. It was longer than any letter composed by the Apostles. Here in bed before him is his love’s Laodicean church.

  “I can’t breathe,” Bosie says. His chest heaves in short demonstrative bursts.

  Wilde touches the handsome youth’s forehead. “Bosie, as long as you have my love, you will not die. I promise you immortality. Splendid immortality, Bosie.”

  “Oh, Oscar,” Bosie says, coughs once, and dies.

  Fifteen minutes later, men carry the body outside, Wilde protesting. There is fierce debate about what comes next. A German doctor staying at the d’Alsace wants the corpse left inside for observation. Wilde too wants Bosie left in bed. In truth, he is anxious to return the body upstairs because he intends to disrobe and sleep with it, holding Bosie until he feels the life return again. He has seen this happen with his own eyes. The resurrection starts with a tremendous shiver and shake, like the uncoiling of some terrific spring inside the body cavity. The arms shoot up and the knees bend as an extension of that energy. Meanwhile a hissing noise comes from the mouth as dry, inflexible and now unnecessary lungs try to fill. From Bosie’s lips the hiss will sound soft as poetry.

  One can survive everything, nowadays, except death. Wilde cannot remember when he said or wrote that. It does not matter—the Lazari have rendered it false.

  Hurry back to me, Bosie.

  “Le corps doit être brûlé.”

  Wilde stirs from his grief and hope, rethinks what he has just heard and translates. His hands move forward, shaking. “My Bosie is to be burned? I’ll not allow that!”

  “It is the government’s orders. All dead must be cremated.”

  When I am dead cremate me.

  Wilde rubs his temples, fighting unwanted memories of Bosie’s father. Around him an argument ensues between the hotel’s manager and the armed guards. The rapidity of the exchange and Wilde’s inner distractions trouble his ability to understand. The gist is who shall take Bosie’s corpse to the designated place of disposal. The crematorium is apparently not close and transportation has become exceedingly difficult and confused. The government has commandeered all the motor vehicles and there are things happening in the streets that have startled the horses. All serviceable horses are also government requisitioned, and the Lazari are known to prey on them when human meat does not present itself. A coach now out of the question, the one choice s
eems to be carrying Bosie across the city on a stretcher.

  “I will not allow my staff to be exposed to such risks. I hired you specifically—”

  “You hired us to guard the door. Well, we’re guarding it.”

  “How much more do you want?”

  “Couldn’t pay us enough. Defending a fixed position is easy. Being out in the open, a moving target? Find yourself a few Americans. They seem foolish enough.”

  “Brave enough,” Wilde says, bringing all attention where it properly belongs, on him. “I have been to that exotic land, gentlemen, and dwelt among their roughnecks. I have met recently a young man from a place called Arkansas—how I should love to flee there one day. Americans themselves do not flee. They are a people blessed by the music of Apollo and the ingenuity of Hephaestus. They—”

  One of the gunmen strikes a match and holds it over Bosie’s body. “No need to risk the crematorium. Get kerosene. We’ll burn the body right here.”

  “In front of the Alsace? My god, the stench! No, my patrons cannot be exposed to such—”

  The gunmen’s leader just smiles. “To such what? Barbarism? Indelicacy? Inhumanity? It will be much worse when they see this thing rise to drink our blood.”

  “I believe you are confusing this hideous condition with vampirism. If you read the celebrated novel by my friend and countryman Stoker, you will realize they are not the same,” Wilde says.

  “He’s an English aristocrat, isn’t he? He was a vampire in life. What he returns as won’t be so different. Get the kerosene.”

  Wilde’s gaze shifts to the manager’s reaction. The little Frenchman’s forehead blisters with beads of sweat, telling Wilde that he has already decided to acquiesce. Before the manager can take a step, Wilde produces the Webley. The unexpected quickness of his hands combined with his great height and bulk stupefy them all. No guard even attempts to raise a weapon as Wilde’s aim alternates fast before each face.