Zombies: Shambling Through the Ages

by Неизвестный

  “If Lord Douglas must go, then so shall I.”

  “You’d carry him alone through these streets?”

  “They seem quite deserted now.”

  The manager attempts to plead with him, though Wilde knows this is only for the sake of politeness. Removing the body is his chief concern and Wilde was a considerable headache to him before the crisis. In his view, if Wilde leaves with the body, so much the better.

  Wilde holds the Webley out a moment longer and then pockets it. He stoops, gathers Bosie into his arms, and like some self-saddling mule Wilde slings him over his right shoulder. The weight stoops him and antagonizes his back, but Bosie feels most familiar to him as a burden to bear. Wilde realizes he did harder labor in prison and ponders that God laid him low in order to toughen him for the present nightmare. It is a perfectly Protestant fantasy, but Wilde is determined to die a Catholic. He takes one step and then another. It will be a slow journey but the weight is not unmanageable. Nothing truly is except for checking accounts.

  “I shall entertain you, my dear resting Bosie,” Wilde says some ten minutes into the journey. His pace is slowed even more because he stops constantly to turn and check his blind spots. The streets remain empty but the Lazari have a way of suddenly swarming in spaces that were clear only moments ago. They move with no grace at all, but so slow and inexorable that their footfalls are soundless. Those wearing shoes make a telltale scraping noise, but most come barefooted. The long dead come only on bone. They lumber, Wilde thinks. It is an odd word to describe a walking style and he wonders at its etymology. He assumes it means wooden and stiff, without joints, as how a tree might stalk its prey. But that association is too obvious, especially for English diction. Probably the meaning evolved from a root word long dead and resurrected in fifty other disparate expressions having little to do with one another. The paradox of dead meanings existing parasitical and hidden in living words pleases him.

  Wilde smiles, remembering his promise to entertain Bosie. He begins to gallop a bit, as if he bore one of his own small children on his back (but no, he shall not think of them now, their mother is dead and it is too horrifying to imagine them alone in another country and surrounded by Lazari). His voice booms out, turning the street into a stage—

  “Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! my gorge rims at it.”

  Wilde stops, winded, and kneels to gentle Bosie’s body to the ground. He pants for air as he strokes the angelic face and adjusts the white gauze that has slipped to reveal the wound. Looking at the purple and red gouge, Wilde only now realizes own lips were not the last to feel the heat and pulse of Bosie’s throat before he died.

  “Alas, poor Yorick,” he whispers to himself. A famous speech from a play with many famous speeches—but why did his mind select that one? He is a living Yorick looking at his dead Hamlet. Suddenly he is certain the world has gone terribly wrong, that Bosie should live many decades more and that, by standing here breathing, Wilde is a resurrected man as unnatural as the Lazari. I was dying and every part of me deserved the death. He feels, even in the face of Bosie’s end, the complete bloom of health and vitality. This flower he’ll keep in his buttonhole at all costs. He looks down at his lover and repeats Hamlet’s speech up to the point he set Bosie down. As Wilde’s fingertips stray into Bosie’s sweat-stiffened hair, he finishes: “Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft.”

  He bends to kiss them now and forces himself not to recoil at their cold, rubbery texture. Bosie’s mouth does not open and Wilde’s tongue encounters a barricade of teeth as perfect as prison bars.

  “Come back to me, Bosie. Wake.”

  How long will it take? Hours? Days? He pushes back from the body and ponders. Vaguely he hears the wounded gait of four, perhaps five, of the resurrected approaching from the east. Blinking away a few tears, Wilde straightens his back and turns to look over his right shoulder. Nine, he counts in astonishment. Six appear quite fresh—they wear fashionable clothes and are obviously recent victims of the very Lazari they have now become. The other three have spent at least ten decades in the ground, garbed as they are in shreds of Jacobin simplicity that doubtlessly resembled rags even a hundred years ago. Complete decomposition of the genitals at least manages to keep them from being altogether indecent.

  As he stands, the Webley trembles in his grip. He has already imagined the prospect of reloading. His fingers rub against each other in the left coat pocket—the pocket is empty. He does not have enough bullets for the situation. How could I have made such an oversight? So many things never occur to him until it is too late; sometimes his life seems nothing more than a string of neglected chances at foresight and planning. He thinks of Ayat, leaping into action without thinking. Who in Hades am I to criticize his judgment?

  Wilde closes one eye, raises the gun and prepares to duel. The pistol’s strong recoil sends a bolt of pain through his broad wrist as the closest attacker drops, a third eye newly minted in its forehead. Wilde retreats three steps and then automatically circles closer, like an indecisively suicidal man. The brave imperative to assert himself between the Lazari and Bosie waxes and wanes against his terror.

  His second shot isn’t good enough—the shoulder. The impact flings the Lazarus woman onto her back and the entire right arm disconnects and shatters into splinters. Maybe it will be enough. But no—the remaining body rises a moment later, oblivious to its loss. The left arm juts out, fingers opening and closing, a hideous mimic of the creature’s lipless mouth.

  “You’re nearly as stubborn as Sarah Bernhardt,” Wilde says, firing his third shot into her head.

  He shoots again and again, more careful with his aim. The bullets find and fell their targets. But five more Lazari approach.

  And one bullet remains.

  For myself, Wilde thinks, and even turns the gun around to stare down the barrel. A head shot will assure he stays down. But does he want that? The question surprises him so much he spares a second to consider it. In that space, he imagines himself rising, finding Bosie waiting on him. Is there love among the Lazari? There is clearly greed and gluttony and endless hunger. Is love so different than these things? Is love, as he’s known it, any less base?

  Sweat breaks across his face and pools on cheeks that have become sallow and pitted with age. So hideous, he thinks, staring at the monsters as he backpedals. The notion that he could become one of them willfully, that he would be mindless in his carnal pursuits . . . my God, he realizes: he already mirrors them. He has lived their existence even before his reputation and his fortune fractured. He had only better skin on a better public face.

  The gun goes to his temple, his eyes wincing shut against the planned violence. Then he hears a familiar whistle and looks to see the head of the Lazari farthest from him go flying across the street. The decapitated body drops, revealing Ayat in all his glory, holding a sword so ostentatious that Wilde can only marvel. He brings the sword back to him and leaps into a pose—a la coquille. Wilde cries out, drops the Webley, falls to the ground and kicks away from a lunging Lazarus man. The remaining four step over Bosie and swipe down at Wilde’s clothes.

  “Now it is my turn to save you, dear Oscar,” Ayat shouts as he thrusts the blade through the next man’s neck. An elegant twist turns the blade flat and with the slightest flick the steel sweeps away bone and flesh. The head lolls backward and tumbles atop the body that collapses underneath it.

  “Oscar, what are you doing? Move!”

  Wilde has scrambled back as far as he can go. The Lazari have forgotten him, pivoting to indulge Ayat’s fervor. Move, he thinks. He looks for the Webley. It is there—out of immediate reach. His gaze trains on Bosie.

  The great coil has sprung inside him. The body twitches with new energy, a scene such as only Mary Shelley could imagine. For the second time in half an hour, Wilde thinks of a scene
out of literature and inverts his role inside it. Aesthete, poet, playwright, doomed martyr—all the identities he has created for himself—and in reality he is Bosie’s construction entirely. He is the Creature watching his Creator come to life.

  He bares his neck for Bosie’s teeth.

  “Oscar!”

  Somehow Ayat has lost his sword. It rattles across the ground with a sound that makes Wilde wince. It is a sound like a perfect gem being dropped on the floor and stepped upon until it powders.

  Bosie hisses and sits up.

  “Dammit, Wilde, your gun! Shoot something!”

  Ayat is breathless again. His French is so hard to understand. Wilde takes a deep inhale, wondering if he’ll miss it—breathing. Not here, perhaps. The air is wonderfully poisonous in Paris. He much prefers England where they show their toxins with more discretion, in the heart.

  Bosie’s eyes are pale blue cataracts that fix on Wilde’s slumped body. He crawls, still hissing, his body so lithe and exotic and seductive that Wilde’s erection actually hurts in his pants. Take me, consume me, he thinks. There seems so little remaining to him that Bosie has not already devoured, why shouldn’t the flesh yield too? Wilde begins to undo his shirt.

  Ayat meanwhile dodges one clumsy blow and throws himself along the ground, rolling to escape being surrounded. He rolls all the way to his fallen sword and takes it up. Wilde’s attention flickers a moment at him. Beautiful, daring Ayat—so much more worthy than Bosie in nearly everything, a man of hard effort and harder employment, not the bratty, untalented poet son of a crazed aristocrat, himself possessed of terrible poetic pretensions and sensibilities. When I am dead cremate me.

  He looks at Ayat and then back at Bosie and wipes away a tear with the back of his hand. Poor boy, raised by such a tyrant and likely touched by inherited madness. It excuses everything. It must.

  Ayat beheads the remaining Lazari. The last one he toys with, dancing just out of reach as leisured swipes sever the right hand and then the left, followed by both arms at their shoulders by making an exaggerated, cleaving swing. He whittles away the Lazarus man, clipping extremities as a tailor might break off an excess of buttons. It is an unexpectedly cruel performance only Bosie could appreciate.

  “Do you know what sword this is, Oscar? It is the Austerlitz Blade—the personal sword of Emperor Napoleon, forged by the great Biennais! How I longed to hold it as a boy every time I saw it at the Army Museum. I am a God with this weapon. I am—who is it to you British?”

  “I am not British, dear boy.”

  “I remember now—yes, I am St. George!”

  He delivers the decisive blow and then waxes on, addressing his enthusiasms to the blade at such lengths that it takes a minute to realize Wilde’s silence. He turns—and shouts something Wilde cannot understand. Gibberish is gibberish in any language, though he wonders how it must look, with Bosie nearly on top of him and Wilde shirtless, waiting for the dry teeth, imagining how his own blood will warm his lover’s cold mouth.

  “Oscar!”

  Ayat rushes toward them. Wilde realizes his intent and something in Bosie realizes it too. His muscles still have strength and quickness to them. He turns in to Ayat’s charge, dodges at the last moment and bites into the Frenchman’s leg. The Austerlitz Blade strikes the building a mere inch from Wilde left ear and again falls abandoned. “No, Bosie,” Wilde cries. His lover smothers over the shrieking fencer, whose arms flail in impotence without a weapon.

  “No!”

  Wilde staggers up, a walrus in his movements. He seizes Bosie by the waist and literally throws him to the side. He finds Ayat on the ground, coughing up blood. Bosie had started to bite his throat open.

  “Not like this,” Ayat manages. “Kill me, Oscar. I don’t want to . . . come back.”

  All men kill the thing they love.

  Bosie rolls over. The cataract gaze locks onto them as he hisses.

  “I—I can’t, Ayat.”

  “If you love me,” Ayat says.

  The brave man with a sword.

  “But I am not brave, Ayat,” Wilde says, his melodious voice cracking. “I’m not like you, I cannot use the sword.” The fencer has no idea what he’s talking about. “I cannot even give you a kiss. But here,” he says, forcing the Webley into the Frenchman’s hand as Bosie manages to stand and shuffle toward them.

  “Oscar.”

  “We’ll do it together. I shall help you, if you lend me your strength. Oh, I am a fool. What strength have you left to lend? I am a pitiless borrower, Ayat. Here, both our fingers on the trigger—”

  Ayat’s face shatters with the blast.

  Wilde does kill Bosie afterwards, but not straight away. He takes up Ayat’s stolen blade and breaks into the nearest building and climbs the stairs. From the second floor window, he watches Bosie walk about in what appears to be stunned circles for twenty minutes before he suddenly decides on a direction. From his vantage point, Wilde detects the reason for this sea change—a child, lost and terrified, is standing in the middle of the road a block over. Bosie has caught the scent. Wilde’s breath hitches and he knows what must come next. He cannot permit such an outrage.

  The memory of the deed lingers and refuses to stale. What’s so horrifying is the freedom each sunrise brings since Bosie’s beheading. He is at first philosophical about it, telling himself that he now realizes death is merely the state in which the striving mind finally perceives the Nothingness it has always suspected was there. He is a delight among the refugees fleeing across France to the Channel, an absurd entertainer, a legend, a perfect Christ. “The best way to conquer death is by not dying,” he says, and somehow to the people who have lost their friends and families, their very future, to the Lazarus plague, this statement proves the very essence of cheer.

  There are rumors everywhere. The horrors that infected France have moved across Europe and there are reported outbreaks in England itself. This news makes the Channel crossing very tense, as someone announces the British military will either sink the vessel before it docks or else execute them all as soon as they got off. This image is so vivid to mad minds that several men and women jump overboard at the halfway point and are soon out of sight, swimming, swimming.

  Wilde however hopes the outbreak has happened in England. He counts on it, for Bosie’s death troubles him with freedom. He senses his past life with Bosie no longer counts and that he can now live unfettered—almost. One chain remains about his neck, and perhaps around Bosie’s too, if his spirit lingers. But Wilde knows how to break it, and so he crosses back to the country that persecuted him.

  All of Western Europe seems to be accompanying him, and nothing stanches the invasion. Wilde encounters no Customs clerk to whom he can declare his genius or Ayat’s sword or the more precious thing he carries in a black satchel. Wilde steps onto English soil three years after vowing to never return. In a way, he has not broken his pledge. The Wilde who made it no longer exists.

  When I am dead cremate me.

  Months ago Wilde heard—and delighted in—a rumor that Bosie’s father, despite the wishes stated in his absurd poem, was not cremated but instead buried vertically with his head pointing down, his gaze directed at more eternal fires. If true, his plan may work. Queensberry’s body is still far away, on the estates of Kinmount House in Scotland. It will be an arduous affair getting there, especially if every city in England and its countryside teem with Lazari. He already knows this must be the case. The wind is tainted with a familiar chill and scent, even this close to the sea. Survivors call it the Lazari’s Breath and it is a combination of mass, mobile decomposition, and a sweating terror.

  Wilde watches the refugees flock west—thousands of them with thousands more on the way. They are heading for larger ports with ships they will storm, if necessary, to seek shelter in America. Wilde remembers his own trip there decades ago as he stalks northward, stopping just once to set the satchel down so he can grasp Ayat’s sword with both hands. It did belong to Napoleon, after
all—who is Wilde to deny anyone a thwarted dream? (And perhaps the Emperor too has risen and even now stumbles and slouches through the Arc de Triomphe in an abandoned Paris, his hand still famously tucked into his shirt, disconnected from any arm.) With a cry, he takes the sword and plunges it into the ground, releasing it to quiver like a living thing reveling in territorial conquest and triumph. Wilde admires the weapon’s grace and beauty, forged from steel and silver, shining with gold gilt but bronzed with dried blood.

  Taking up the sword again as he retrieves the satchel, he says, “Bosie, we are on our way.”

  The journey takes weeks. The sword conquers armies of Lazari. Wilde lacks Ayat’s skill but his stamina and ruthlessness, powered by a monomaniacal fixation, keep him moving. It is more exciting, more electrifying, to dispatch British Lazari. He no longer even sees the business as gruesome—each is a small revenge and freedom leading to the greater one ahead.

  If doubts possess him, he need only sleep to have all confidence restored. Each night his dream is exactly the same. He stands in Reading prison watching a young man’s execution. He cannot remember the man’s name, only that Wilde has sworn eternal love to him. The youth is hanged until death and then his body is lowered to the ground. Almost at once the body resurrects and becomes vibrant. Shocked, the prison officials hang him again. The body thrashes on its rope endlessly and the warden and all the guards flee in terror. The gates are left open and everyone escapes except Wilde, who stands pressing his forehead against the man’s bound legs and weeping.

  “We are here, Bosie.”

  The grave of Bosie’s father, John Sholto Douglas, Marquess of Queensberry. When I am dead cremate me. Perhaps the monster’s wishes were carried out after all—perhaps digging will reveal a vessel of ashes where the body should be. Wilde strikes his spade into the earth, snarling at the labor of it, willing the dirt to yield.