What else is out there, beyond this edge of the world I live on? Who else is out there? Are there real reasons to be as afraid of the world as I’ve been?
I was thinking all this when I woke up the next morning and stared at the black spot on my ceiling. That could be a map of seventeen, too. Nothing but white around it, and nothing to show for hiding myself away. Mom was right. Though I was jealous of Tommy’s ability to live life so freely, he was following a path all his own, a difficult one, and needed as many people who loved him to help him do it. I could help him and Tristan both probably just by being more friendly and supportive than suspicious and untrusting. I could start by putting aside Tommy’s weirdness about Tristan being a cursed son of Melusine and do like Mom and Dad: just humor him. He’s an artist after all.
So I got up and got dressed and left the house without even having breakfast. I didn’t want to let another day go by and not make things okay with Tommy for going away all those years ago. Through the back field I went, into the woods, picking up speed as I went, as the urgency to see him took over me. By the time I reached the edge of the pond’s clearing, I had a thousand things I wanted to say. When I stepped out of the woods and into the clearing, though, I froze in place, my mouth open but no words coming out because of what I saw there.
Tommy was on the dock with his easel and palette, sitting in a chair, painting Tristan. And Tristan—I don’t know how to describe him, how to make his being something possible, but these words came into mind: tail, scales, beast and beauty. At first I couldn’t tell which he was, but I knew immediately that Tommy hadn’t gone insane. Or else we both had.
Tristan lay on the dock in front of Tommy, his upper body strong and muscular and naked, his lower half long and sinuous as a snake. His tail swept back and forth, occasionally dipping into the water for a moment before returning to the position Tommy wanted. I almost screamed, but somehow willed myself not to. I hadn’t left home yet, but a creature from the uncharted world had traveled onto my map where I’d lived the past seventeen years. How could this be?
I thought of that group show we’d all flown to New York to see, the one where Tommy had hung his first in the series of American Gothic alongside those odd, magical creatures he painted back when he was just graduated. The critic who’d picked him out of that group show said that Tommy had technique and talent, was by turns fascinating and annoying, but that he’d wait to see if Tommy would develop a more mature vision. I think when I read that back then, I had agreed.
I’d forgotten the favor I’d promised: not to come back while they were working. Tommy hadn’t really lied when he told me moving here was for Tristan’s benefit, to get away from his family and the people who wanted him to be something other than what he is. I wondered how long he’d been trying to hide this part of himself before he met Tommy, who was able to love him because of who and what he is. What a gift and curse that is, to be both of them, to be what Tristan is and for Tommy to see him so clearly. My problems were starting to shrivel the longer I looked at them. And the longer I looked, the more I realized the dangers they faced, how easily their lives and love could be shattered by the people in the world who would fire them from life the way the school board fired Mr. Turney for actually teaching us what we can know about the world.
I turned and quietly went back through the woods, but as I left the trail and came into the back field, I began running. I ran from the field and past the house, out into the dusty back road we live on, and stood there looking up and down the road at the horizon, where the borders of this town waited for me to cross them at the end of summer. Whether there were dragons waiting for me after I journeyed off the map of my first seventeen years didn’t matter. I’d love them when it called for loving them, and I’d fight the ones that needed fighting. That was my gift, like Mom had told me, what I could do with my will. Maybe instead of psychology I’d study law, learn how to defend it, how to make it better, so that someday Tommy and Tristan could have what everyone else has.
It’s a free country after all. Well, sort of. And one day, if I had anything to say about it, that would no longer be a joke between Tommy and me.
THE NATURALIST
MAUREEN MCHUGH
Maureen McHugh was born in Loveland, Ohio, and received a B.A. from Ohio University in 1981, where she took a creative writing course from Daniel Keyes in her senior year. After several years as a part-time college instructor, she spent a year teaching in Shijiazhuang, China. It was during this period she sold her first story, “All in a Day’s Work,” which appeared in The Twilight Zone Magazine. She has written four novels, including James Tiptree, Jr. Award winner and Hugo and Nebula Award nominee China Mountain Zhang, Half the Day Is Night, Mission Child, and Nekropolis. Her short fiction, including Hugo Award winner “The Lincoln Train,” was collected in Mothers and Other Monsters, which was a finalist for the Story Prize. She is currently a partner at No Mimes Media, an Alternate Reality Game company, and was a writer and/or managing editor for numerous projects, including Year Zero and I Love Bees.
Cahill lived in the Flats with about twenty other guys in a place that used to be an Irish bar called Fado. At the back of the bar was the Cuyahoga River, good for protection since zombies didn’t cross the river. They didn’t crumble into dust, they were just stupid as bricks and they never built a boat or a bridge or built anything. Zombies were the ultimate trash. Worse than the guys who cooked meth in trailers. Worse than the fat women on WIC. Zombies were just useless dumbfucks.
“They’re too dumb to find enough food to keep a stray cat going,” Duck said.
Cahill was talking to a guy called Duck. Well, really, Duck was talking and Cahill was mostly listening. Duck had been speculating on the biology of zombies. He thought that the whole zombie thing was a virus, like Mad Cow Disease. A lot of the guys thought that. A lot of them mentioned that movie, 28 Days, where everybody but a few people had been driven crazy by a virus.
“But they gotta find something,” Duck said. Duck had a prison tattoo of a mallard on his arm. Cahill wouldn’t have known it was a mallard if Duck hadn’t told him. He could just about tell it was a bird. Duck was over six feet tall and Cahill would have hated to have been the guy who gave Duck such a shitty tattoo cause Duck probably beat him senseless when he finally got a look at the thing. “Maybe,” Duck mused, “maybe they’re solar powered. And eating us is just a bonus.”
“I think they go dormant when they don’t smell us around,” Cahill said.
Cahill didn’t really like talking to Duck, but Duck often found Cahill and started talking to him. Cahill didn’t know why. Most of the guys gave Duck a wide berth. Cahill figured it was probably easier to just talk to Duck when Duck wanted to talk.
Almost all of the guys at Fado were white. There was a Filipino guy, but he pretty much counted as white. As far as Cahill could tell there were two kinds of black guys, regular black guys and Nation of Islam. The Nation of Islam had gotten organized and turned a place across the street—a club called Heaven—into their headquarters. Most of the regular black guys lived below Heaven and in the building next door.
This whole area of the Flats had been bars and restaurants and clubs. Now it was a kind of compound with a wall of rubbish and dead cars forming a perimeter. Duck said that during the winter they had regular patrols organized by Whittaker and the Nation. Cold as shit standing behind a junked car on its side, watching for zombies. But they had killed off most of the zombies in this area and now they didn’t bother keeping watch. Occasionally a zombie wandered across the bridge and they had to take care of it, but in the time Cahill had been in Cleveland, he had seen exactly four zombies. One had been a woman.
Life in the zombie preserve really wasn’t as bad as Cahill had expected. He’d been dumped off the bus and then spent a day skulking around expecting zombies to come boiling out of the floor like rats and eat him alive. He’d heard that the life expectancy of a guy in a preserve was something like two and a half days. But
he’d only been here about a day and a half when he found a cache of liquor in the trunk of a car and then some guys scavenging. He’d shown them where the liquor was and they’d taken him back to the Flats.
Whittaker was a white guy who was sort of in charge. He’d had made a big speech about how they were all more free here in the preserve than they’d ever been in a society that had no place for them, about how there used to be spaces for men with big appetites like the Wild West and Alaska—and how that was all gone now but they were making a great space for themselves here in Cleveland where they could live true to their own nature.
Cahill didn’t think it was so great, and glancing around he was pretty sure that he wasn’t the only one who wouldn’t chuck the whole thing for a chance to sit and watch the Sox on TV. Bullshitting was what the Whittakers of the world did. It was part of running other people’s lives. Cahill had dragged in a futon and made himself a little room. It had no windows and only one way in, which was good in case of attack. But he found most of the time he couldn’t sleep there. A lot of time he slept outside on a picnic table someone had dragged out into the middle of the street.
What he really missed was carpet. He wanted to take a shower and then walk on carpet in a bedroom and get dressed in clean clothes.
A guy named Riley walked over to Cahill and Duck and said, “Hey, Cahill. Whittaker wants you to go scavenge.”
Cahill hated to scavenge. It was nerve-wracking. It wasn’t hard; there was a surprising amount left in the city, even after the groceries had been looted. He shrugged and thought about it and decided it was better not to say no to Whittaker. And it gave him an excuse to stop talking to Duck about zombies. He followed Riley and left Duck sitting looking at the water, enjoying the May sun.
“I think it’s a government thing,” Riley said. Riley was black but just regular black, not Nation of Islam. “I think it’s a mutation of the AIDs virus.”
Jesus Christ. “Yeah,” Cahill said, hoping Riley would drop it.
“You know the whole AIDs thing was from the CIA, don’t you? It was supposed to wipe out black people,” Riley said.
“Then how come fags got it first?” Cahill asked.
He thought that might piss Riley off but Riley seemed pleased to be able to explain how gay guys were the perfect way to introduce the disease because nobody cared fuckall what happened to them. But that really, fags getting it was an accident because it was supposed to wipe out all the black people in Africa and then the whites could just move into a whole new continent. Some queer stewardess got it in Africa and then brought it back here. It would kill white people but it killed black people faster. And now if you were rich they could cure you or at least give you drugs for your whole life so you wouldn’t get sick and die, which was the same thing, but they were still letting black people and Africans die.
Cahill tuned Riley out. They collected two other guys. Riley was in charge. Cahill didn’t know the names of the two other guys—a scrawny, white-trash-looking guy and a light-skinned black guy.
Riley quit talking once they had crossed the bridge and were in Cleveland.
On the blind, windowless side of a warehouse the wall had been painted white, and in huge letters it said:
Hell from beneath is moved for thee to meet thee at thy coming.
Isaiah (ch. XIV, v. 9)
This same quote was painted at the gate where the bus had dumped Cahill off.
There were crows gathering at Euclid and, Riley guessed, maybe around East Ninth, so they headed north towards the lake. Zombies stank and the crows tended to hang around them. Behind them the burned ruins of the Renaissance hotel were still black and wet from the rain a couple of days ago.
When they saw the zombie there were no crows but that may have been because there was only one. Crows often meant a number of zombies. She fixed on them, turning her face towards them despite the blank whiteness of her eyes. She was black and her hair had once been in cornrows, though now half of it was loose and tangled. They all stopped and stood stock still. No one knew how zombies “saw” people. Maybe infrared like pit vipers. Maybe smell. Cahill could not tell from this far if she was sniffing. Or listening. Or maybe even tasting the air. Taste was one of the most primitive senses. Primitive as smell. Smelling with the tongue.
She went from standing there to loping towards them. That was one of the things about zombies. They didn’t lean. They didn’t anticipate. One minute they were standing there, the next minute they were running towards you. They didn’t lead with their eyes or their chins. They were never surprised. They just were. As inexorable as rain. She didn’t look as she ran, even though she was running through debris and rubble, placing her feet and sometimes barely leaping.
“Fuck,” someone said.
“Pipes! Who’s got pipes!” Riley shouted.
They all had pipes and they all got them ready. Cahill wished he had a gun but Whittaker confiscated guns. Hell,he wished he had an MK 19,a grenade launcher. And a humvee and some support, maybe with mortars while he was at it.
Then she was on them and they were all swinging like mad because if she got her teeth into any of them, it was all over for that guy. The best thing to do was to keep up a goddamn flurry of swinging pipes so she couldn’t get to anyone. Cahill hit other pipe mostly, the impact clanging through his wrist bones, but sometimes when he hit the zombie he felt the melon thunk. She made no noise. No moaning, no hissing, no movie zombie noises, but even as they crushed her head and knocked her down (her eye socket gone soft and one eye a loose silken white sack) she kept moving and reaching. She didn’t try to grab the pipes, she just reached for them until they had pounded her into broken bits.
She stank like old meat.
No blood. Which was strangely creepy. Cahill knew from experience that people had a lot more blood in them than you ever would have thought based on TV shows. Blood and blood and more blood. But this zombie didn’t seem to have any blood.
Finally Riley yelled, “Get back, get back!” and they all stepped back.
All the bones in her arms and legs were broken and her head was smashed to nothing. It was hard to tell she had ever looked like a person. The torso hitched its hips, raising its belly, trying to inchworm towards them, its broken limbs moving and shuddering like a seizure.
Riley shook his head and then said to them. “Anybody got any marks? Everybody strip.”
Everybody stood there for a moment, ignoring him, watching the thing on the broken sidewalk.
Riley snarled, “I said strip, motherfuckers. Or nobody goes back to the compound.”
“Fuck,” one of the guys said, but they all did and, balls shriveled in the spring cold, paired off and checked each other for marks. When they each announced the other was clear, they all put their clothes back on and piled rubble on top of the twitching thing until they’d made a mound, while Riley kept an eye out for any others.
After that, everyone was pretty tense. They broke into an apartment complex above a storefront. The storefront had been looted and the windows looked empty as the socket of a pulled tooth, but the door to the apartments above was still locked which meant that they might find stuff untouched. Cahill wondered: if zombies did go dormant without food, what if someone had gotten bit and went back to this place, to their apartment? Could they be waiting for someone to enter the dark foyer, for the warmth and smell and the low steady big drum beat of the human heart to bring them back?
They went up the dark stairwell and busted open the door of the first apartment. It smelled closed, cold and dank. The furniture looked like it had been furnished from the curb, but it had a huge honking television. Which said everything about the guy who had lived here.
They ignored the TV. What they were looking for was canned goods. Chef Boy-ar-dee. Cans of beef stew. Beer. They all headed for the kitchen and guys started flipping open cabinets.
Then, like a dumbshit, Cahill opened the refrigerator door. Even as he did it, he thought, “Dumbass.”
> The refrigerator had been full of food, and then had sat, sealed and without power, while that food all rotted into a seething, shit-stinking mess. The smell was like a bomb. The inside was greenish black.
“Fuck!” someone said and then they all got out of the kitchen. Cahill opened a window and stepped out onto the fire escape. It was closest and everyone else was headed out into the living room where someone would probably take a swing at him for being an asshole. The fire escape was in an alley and he figured that he could probably get to the street and meet them in front, although he wasn’t exactly sure how fire escapes worked.
Instead he froze. Below him, in the alley, there was one of those big dumpsters, painted green. The top was off the dumpster and inside it, curled up, was a zombie. Because it was curled up, he couldn’t tell much about it—whether it was male or female, black or white. It looked small and it was wearing a striped shirt.
The weird thing was that the entire inside of the dumpster had been covered in aluminum foil. There wasn’t any sun yet in the alley but the dumpster was still a dull and crinkly mirror. As best he could tell, every bit was covered.
What the fuck was that about?
The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume 5 Page 46
