(… Losing track of time, Daniel feasting on my blood, my insides … Why, God?… Blackness drawing down over me … Why, Lord? Why have you forsaken us? Why?)
Darkness encloses Jasmine. All the sound and odors and echoes in the underground lab cease. The connection falters, flickering in the back of Jasmine’s mind, a weakening signal …
(… Wandering … aimless … so hungry … hungry for warm flesh … never enough … never satiated … always, always hungry…)
The third eye inside Jasmine contracts into itself, her inner mind-screen reaching the end of its programming block, the images in her head shrinking into a single, luminous, cold white pinpoint.
For a moment, the dot hangs in space, the black void around it deepening, sucking every last iota of humanity into its vacuum. In some distant chamber of Jasmine’s soul, she feels an emptying, a leeching of her humanity, the eradication of her ability to love, to laugh, to cry, to reason, to communicate, to appreciate, to empathize, to remember, to be alive, to be human. She senses the seismic shift inside her as the wasp in the jar buzzes in the heart of that icy white spot.
Jasmine increases the pressure on the mangled, turkey-like neck of the former country wife. The creature writhes and wriggles in her grasp like a fish on a hook. The need to fill the void—to put a salve on the hunger, to chase away the emptiness, to self-medicate, to forget—all of it begins to rise up within Jasmine’s wounded soul. In her mind, that ivory-bright spot swells, expands, blazes brighter and brighter. The hunger, the addictions, the need to consume thunders within her, resonating like a massive chord harmonizing with the diseased alpha waves of a dead woman flooding Jasmine’s brain.
The singularity—the big bang of Jasmine’s condition—now ignites, forcing her eyes to pop open, focus, and fix on what exactly is wriggling in her grip.
Food.
– 7 –
Solitary Exit
Jasmine doesn’t hear the far door burst open, the chair skidding across the floor, the barrel of a Beretta M9 poking into the dark lab, gleaming in the shadows like the tip of a divining rod. Jasmine is preoccupied. She’s too busy eating to notice anything else.
The lower part of the farm wife’s face is the most tender. In a gluttonous, mad frenzy, Jasmine bites off the creature’s lips with the hasty flourish of a famished gourmand slurping tendrils of fresh squid. The creature shudders and quivers in Jasmine’s grasp. The soft palate and sinus cavity are next. She spits out a rotten tooth as though it’s a seed. The truth is, Jasmine has always been addicted to, among other things, shellfish, so the process of greedily burrowing her teeth into the former farm wife’s mouth and hungrily chewing through the tongue, the facial and lingual arteries, and the soft tissues of the nose comes naturally.
The fluids and juices, seeping slowly due to the farm wife’s lack of circulatory functions, ooze all over Jasmine.
Within seconds, the creature’s face has been reduced to pulp. But Jasmine keeps gorging on the dead flesh, gobbling her way up into the orbital sockets. She slurps the eyeballs with the intensity of a Cajun sucking the heads of crawfish, oblivious to the two military police behind her, taking their first steps into the room with guns raised, muzzle sites at eye level, weaver positions, safeties off. Jasmine is too absorbed in her binge to notice, the hunger persisting like an ache, an itch that cannot be scratched.
Covered now in black, oily spoor, she starts in on the neck, gobbling through the creature’s slender, gristly cords, chewing through carotid down to the windpipe, hardly pausing to take lusty breaths. The former rural matriarch continues trembling and quivering beneath Jasmine, an engine that just keeps on dieseling even as it’s being dismantled. Jasmine has no idea that she is now in the front site of a nine-millimeter pistol.
The gun roars.
The single blast strikes Master Sergeant Jasmine Maywell two inches above her left ear, silencing her world forever and bringing an end to her own hunger that she was never quite able to slake.
– 8 –
Into the Dark
The second blast penetrates the farm wife’s mutilated head, sending a putrescent cloud of brain matter and skull fragments out the back of her ruined skull. The farm woman—restored in her gruesome death to her mortal self—collapses next to Jasmine.
The two military cops stand motionless in the cloud of cordite fumes for a moment, staring at the remains. The younger one holsters his weapon, then looks at the older one. “What the fuck.”
It’s not exactly a question as much as a commentary on the whole mess that has dropped in their laps over the last forty-eight hours.
The older one—heavier, grayer, his uniform stained in bloody blowback—shakes his head. “What the fuck indeed. I’m going home.”
“Good luck with that,” the younger MP says. “You see the reports? Nobody’s getting in or out of Frederick, it’s a goddamn shit storm out there.”
“We’ll figure it out.” The older one holsters his piece and walks to the door. “Send for cleanup, will ya? Bag and tag these stiffs.”
He walks out, leaving the younger MP standing there, scratching his chin nervously, pondering the connection between the two females lying in a spreading pool of blood on the parquet floor.
With no answers forthcoming, he turns and walks out, shutting the door behind him, leaving the human remains—as well as the world as a whole—in the dark.
IN THAT QUIET EARTH
by Mike Carey
I lingered round them, under that benign sky: watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells, listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass, and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.
—Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights
Later, when the risen dead were at high tide and the world as it used to be was scarcely even visible any more, Richard Cadbury came to see his wife Lorraine’s demise as the first domino, which in toppling had brought down everything else. Though that made no logical sense, on an emotional level it was compelling.
In her passing, Lorraine had tilted the world.
Cadbury rolled with it, to the furthermost edge of existence. In the months following his bereavement he seemed to retreat into a smaller and smaller space, excluding in succession all of the people he knew—friends, family, work colleagues, neighbors—from his interior life. It was not that he ceased to feel affection for them. It was rather the opposite, that he wished to spare them the utter anomie, the lack of meaning and sense and direction that now defined and delineated his life.
These changes in him were profound, but they were hard to see from the outside. Cadbury continued to drive to the lab every day and put in a full day’s work. He took a single day off for the funeral and then returned to his bench, politely declining the offer of compassionate leave and the equally well-intentioned, equally misguided offer of counseling. What he felt he could not utter. Even within his own mind it remained entirely unarticulated. There was, simply, a hole where his heart had been. The rest of him was falling into it in a slow-motion cascade that would probably last until his death.
In a sense, then, death became his vector. Perhaps that was why—despite his profound isolation—he became aware of the risen dead very quickly. He was unable to remember later on where and when he picked up the first hint. It was most probably through a radio item, but he turned on the TV shortly afterward and watched the longer and longer segments devoted to the crisis on the TV news.
He made the journey from skepticism to belief quickly and smoothly.
It was easy to be dismissive at first, when all anyone had to go on were the verbal accounts of inarticulate witnesses remastered into media-speak by bored TV anchors who didn’t believe or care what they were saying. Easier still with those preposterous fragments of found footage, so ineptly framed and focused they screamed amateurishness and implausibility. The men and women lurching around streets and parks looked as though the night before had instantaneousl
y turned into the morning after. No worse than that. No hint of a new ontology, a turning point in the history of life on Earth.
But when Cadbury opened his door the next morning to go to work he saw the lurchers out in the street. Saw them seeing him, and switching their attention to him. Converging on him, even while he got into his car and drove away. Quite an extraordinary length to go to, for a hoax. Some of them had wounds on their bodies that looked very convincing.
He didn’t get into the lab. The receptionist, Sheila, was on the other side of the double doors, throwing herself repeatedly against their shatterproof glass. Her face was a pulped mess in which bloodied teeth worked constantly, as though she could gnaw her way through the glass to get to him.
In the ninety seconds or so that Cadbury stared at her, irresolute, almost a dozen lurchers appeared around the corner of the building or from the alley behind the storage sheds, all stumbling and staggering toward him. The smell of decay came with them on the light breeze, mild but unmistakable.
So then he knew. Knew what everybody else knew, anyway. Death had become a reversible condition, but something was lost in that brief crossing of the threshold. Something profound, evidently. The returned seemed to be neither blessed nor burdened with sentience. They enjoyed a more rudimentary existence, governed by a single impulse.
What that impulse was he saw for himself on his journey home. A number of lurchers had trapped a dog and were devouring it messily even as it struggled to get free of them. Cadbury was distressed by the creature’s suffering but could see no way of alleviating it. Within a few seconds it was borne down, the teeth of a middle-aged woman fastening in its throat. The woman’s handbag still hung from her left shoulder, vestigial and grotesque.
When Cadbury got back home he had to run the short distance from the curbside to the house, keys at the ready. Even so the lurchers scattered around his lawn and his driveway almost got to him before he was able to get the door open and get inside. He slammed it shut on clutching fingers, severing two that seemed from their appearance to come from different hands.
The phone was ringing. He hurried across the room and picked it up.
“Hello?” he said.
“Dr. Cadbury? Richard? Is that you?” It was the senior supervisor at the lab, Graham Theaker, but his voice was so high-pitched and his diction so broken that it took Cadbury a moment to identify who was speaking.
“Hello, Theaker,” he said. “The most astonishing thing is happening. I wonder if you’re aware of it?”
“Aware of it? Dear God, Richard, it’s—it’s the end of the world! It’s the apocalypse! The—the dead! The dead are coming back to life to devour the living!”
“I know that, Theaker. They’ve been talking about it on the news. And when I tried to get into the lab half an hour ago I saw what had happened to Sheila.”
“Sheila.” Theaker sounded close to tears. “She has three children. Sweet Jesus, if she’s spread the infection to them…”
“Is it an infection?” Cadbury inquired. “I wasn’t aware that any explanation had been generally accepted yet.”
Theaker didn’t seem to have heard him. “But it’s not just Sheila, Richard, it’s everyone. Almost. Almost everyone. Dr. Herod. Lowther. Alan…”
“Alan?”
“The intern. He went into Dr. Herod’s office to deliver her mail. She bit him in the throat! He was able to get out of the room and lock her inside, but he died soon after from loss of blood. Or he … he seemed to die. We called for an ambulance, but nobody came. And then an hour or so later he stirred, and got back up again. Harrison had to strike his head off with a fire axe. It was horrible. Horrible!”
“Yes, no doubt, no doubt,” Cadbury agreed. The bulk of his attention was already elsewhere, parsing the meaning of this strange apocalypse. That is, its meaning for himself, and for his dead wife. He tried to offer Theaker some solace, but really he just wanted the call to be over so he could pursue his thoughts to where they seemed to be leading. “You should turn on the TV,” he suggested, “or the radio. The government is coordinating local task forces to deal with the situation. It might be a few days before they get a handle on it, but they’re coming. I would imagine that the best way to survive is to remain in complete isolation until they arrive.”
“Isolation?” Theaker repeated.
“Absolutely. Stay at the lab. It’s more easily defended than your house. Go out once to secure some food and water, if you must, but then barricade yourself in and wait for the all-clear. Use the security shutters, so long as you can fit them without exposing yourself to risk.”
“Of course!” Theaker sounded energized now, and even hopeful. “And you’ll join me, Richard? If you drive your car right up to the doors—”
“I will be working from home,” Cadbury said. “Goodbye, Theaker, and good luck.”
He hung up the phone. When it started to ring again he first ignored it and then unplugged it at the wall. He had work to do.
Obtaining a specimen was the first order of business, and it wasn’t hard. The lurchers converged on the living without hesitation, and every such encounter left casualties. There was a window of time, some few hours, before these casualties underwent the same metamorphosis as their killers. Cadbury cruised around the neighborhood until he found a dead man lying at the curbside. He quickly bound the man’s hands with kitchen twine and muzzled him—after a fashion—with wire mesh taken from a garden center, the loose ends twisted together with pliers.
He drove home with the dead man in the trunk of his car. He didn’t open the trunk until the car was in the garage with the roll-over door drawn down and locked. By that time the dead man was no longer dead. He was squirming and writhing in the trunk, trying to break free of his bonds. Cadbury considered trying to remove him and secure him to a workbench, but thought the risk too great. He got out his circular saw instead and removed the man’s head directly. There was less mess than he expected, possibly because of postmortem changes to the viscosity of the man’s blood. It had not coagulated completely but it had thickened to the consistency of molasses.
Cadbury took the head into his basement, which he had long ago converted into a laboratory both for his own pet projects and for unofficial overtime. He excised the brain and examined its structures on a microscopic level with growing fascination.
They were, for the most part, no longer viable. The brain had already begun to decay, but it seemed that with the quickening back to life that process had been arrested. Even within a head that had been severed from its body, the brain was inexplicably drawing—from the syrupy blood, or the ambient air, or some storehouse as yet unidentified—the nourishment it needed to keep itself alive.
But that word seemed tendentious, in Cadbury’s opinion. Like its opposite, dead, it assumed a binary system in which all things that were not in group (a) must be in group (b). But the risen dead were anomalous. They had a tithe, a fraction of what might be called life, rather than the whole complex extravaganza of thought and feeling, selfhood and sentience. The minds of these revenants should have shut down entirely: instead they were open just a crack, like the door of a child’s room at night before the child has accustomed himself to the dark.
For his second sample he did not remove the head. He searched for a small and manageable corpse, and found one at last after two hours of driving around. She was a woman of very slight build. She began to stir to life while Cadbury was binding her, which was alarming but fortunately not fatal. He was able to keep her pinioned with one knee on her chest while he tied her arms, and then to wrap the mesh around her mouth from behind. She bit him in the hand despite all his precautions, but he was wearing thick gardening gloves and the bite did not break the skin.
With the woman bound in a chair in his basement he measured the electrical flow through her brain using a device of his own manufacture—an encephalometer. He found that most aspects of brain function were no longer present. Instead of the rich three-dimensional eb
b and flow of charge, the endlessly rewoven tapestry of neural connectivity, there was a single cyclical pulse. A powerful stimulus endlessly repeated, like the radio signals sent out by pulsars.
Cadbury remembered the old saw: the fox knows many things, the hedgehog knows one big thing. The risen dead were not cunning. They were not versatile. The panoply of human response had been pared down in them to one impulse, one behavior. It was a minimal, utilitarian sort of resurrection.
Was it, though, in any sense, elective? Could a man enter that state of his own volition, and control his immersion into it?
He thought of Lorraine, awake in the earth, alone. Of his own life, in the free air but still no less entombed. This situation, he felt, was not supportable. He had to go to her. But there was no point in embracing her if she saw no more in him than a warm meal.
Five cadavers later, Cadbury took his research from the universal to the personal. He constructed a machine whose business end was a plastic bucket with layers of padded latex covering most of its open end. He could thrust his head into the bucket and then seal it by means of an adjustable metal collar into which the overlapping pleats of latex were gathered. Oxygen could then be extracted from the air within the bucket by means of a Jessom-Simmonds filter and an electrically operated pump.
The hardest part was the timer. Cadbury needed to be able to calibrate it very finely, but also to adjust it in use without being able to see the numbers on the dial (because his head would be inside the bucket). He taught himself the rudiments of braille and labeled the dial with carefully placed dots of hardened resin.
Over the next two days he subjected himself to 182 near-death experiences. Each was unique, minutely different from the others either in the percentage of oxygen depleted from the air or in the duration of the ensuing suffocation.
His head began to throb after only a dozen of these self-inflicted ordeals, but he did not falter. He made notes, at first in his usual meticulous hand but then in an increasingly messy and uncoordinated scrawl. Orthography was the least of his worries. After the blood vessels in his eyes began to burst it became harder and harder to see what he was writing.
Nights of the Living Dead Page 7
