Nights of the Living Dead

by Jonathan Maberry

  Delaney had a new job now. Tell anybody who would listen that his whole town had been the victim of a lie. A space thing had crashed and dead people had become ambulatory. Cause plus effect equals falsehood. Because a story, any story, was better than the crimson abyss of uncertainty, even if it wasn’t the entire story. The alternative was utter chaos, total breakdown. Everything stops, the end.

  He thought of all the gentle untruths he had told throughout his whole life, his entire career, in order to keep the peace or avoid a bigger clash.

  Dr. Steckler could have told him that the human nervous system requires one-thirtieth of a second to register, and one-tenth of a second to flinch. Nuclear blast waves come in at twice the speed of sound.

  Sheriff Delaney lived long enough to see the flash, but the blood in his brain evaporated before he could feel a thing.

  YOU CAN STAY ALL DAY

  by Mira Grant

  The merry-go-round was still merry-going, painted horses prancing up and down while the calliope played in the background, tinkly and bright and designed to attract children all the way from the parking lot. There was something about the sound of the calliope that seemed to speak to people on a primal level, telling them “the fun is over here,” and “come to remember how much you love this sort of thing.”

  Cassandra was pretty sure it wasn’t the music that was attracting the bodies thronging in the zoo’s front plaza. It was the motion. The horses were still dancing, and some of them still had riders, people who had become tangled in their safety belts when they fell. So the dead people on the carousel kept flailing, and the dead people who weren’t on the carousel kept coming, and—

  They were dead. They were all dead, and they wouldn’t stay down, and none of this could be happening. None of this could be real.

  The bite on her arm burned with the deep, slow poison of infection setting in, and nothing was real anymore. Nothing but the sound of the carousel, playing on and on, forever.

  * * *

  Morning at the zoo was always Cassandra’s favorite time. Everything was bright and clean and full of possibility. The guests hadn’t arrived yet, and so the paths were clean, sparkling in the sunlight, untarnished by chewing gum and wadded-up popcorn boxes.

  It was funny. People came to the zoo to goggle at animals they’d never seen outside of books, but it was like they thought that alone was enough to conserve the planet: just paying their admission meant that they could litter, and feed chocolate to the monkeys, and throw rocks at the tigers when they weren’t active enough to suit their sugar-fueled fantasies.

  Nothing ruined working with animals like the need to work with people at the same time. But in the mornings, ah! In the mornings, before the gates opened, everything was perfect.

  Cassandra walked along the elegant footpath carved into the vast swath of green between the gift shop and the timber wolf enclosure—people picnicked here in the summer, enjoying the great outdoors, sometimes taking in an open-air concert from the bandstand on the other side of the carefully maintained field—and smiled to herself, content with her life choices.

  One of the other zookeepers strolled across the green up ahead, dressed in khakis like the rest of the staff. The only thing out of place was the thick white bandage wrapped around his left bicep. It was an excellent patch job, and yet …

  “Michael!”

  He stopped at the sound of his name, and turned to watch as she trotted to catch up with him. His face split in a smile when she was halfway there.

  “Cassie,” he said. “Just the girl I was hoping to see.”

  “What did you do to yourself this time?” she asked, trying to make the question sound as light as she could. Michael worked with their small predators, the raccoons and otters and opossums. It wasn’t outside the realm of possibility that one of them could have bitten him. If he reported it, it would reflect poorly on him, and on the zoo. If he didn’t, and it got infected …

  There were things that could kill or cripple a zoo. An employee failing to report an injury was on the list.

  “No,” he said, and grimaced sheepishly. “It was my roommate.”

  “What?”

  “My roommate, Carl. He was weird this morning. Not talking, just sort of wandering aimlessly around the front room. I thought he was hungover again. I figured I’d help him back to bed—but as soon as he realized I was there, he lunged for me and he bit me.” Michael shook his head. “Asshole. I’m going to tell him I’m through with this shit when I get home tonight. He’s never been late with his share of the rent, but enough’s enough, you know?”

  “I do,” said Cassandra, with another anxious glance at the bandage. “You want me to take over your feedings for the morning?”

  “Please. I cleaned it out and wrapped it up as best I could. I did a pretty decent job, if I do say so myself. There’s still a chance the smell of blood could get through the gauze, and well…”

  “We don’t need to exacerbate a human bite with a bunch of animal ones, even though the animal bites would be cleaner.” Cassandra frowned. “You’re sure it’s cleaned out? I can take a look, if you want.”

  “No, really, I’m good. I just wanted to ask about the feedings, and it turned out I didn’t need to.” Michael’s grin seemed out of place on the face of a man who’d just been assaulted. “That’s our oracle.”

  “Ha ha,” said Cassandra. “Get to work. I’ll do your feedings after I finish mine.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” said Michael, and he resumed his progress across the green, seemingly no worse for wear. Cassandra frowned. It was entirely like him to brush off something as unusual and traumatic as being bitten by his own roommate, and it wasn’t her place to get involved. At the same time, the situation wasn’t right. People didn’t just start biting.

  “Classic Cassandra,” she muttered. “If you can’t find a catastrophe, you’ll invent one. Get over yourself.”

  She started walking again, trying to shake the feeling that some of the brightness had gone out of the day. The sky was clear; the sun was shining; one little bit of human weirdness shouldn’t have been enough to dampen her enthusiasm. But it was. It always was. Humans were strange. Animals made sense.

  A tiger would always act like a tiger. It might do things she didn’t expect, might bite when she thought it was happy to see her, or scratch when it had no reason to be threatened, but those times were on her, the human: she was the one who’d been trained on how to interact with wild animals, how to read the signs and signals that they offered. There was no class for tigers, to tell them how to deal with the strange, bipedal creatures who locked them in cages and refused to let them out to run. Tigers had to figure everything out on their own, and if they got it wrong sometimes, who could blame them? They didn’t know the rules.

  People, though … people were supposed to know the rules. People weren’t supposed to bite each other, or treat each other like obstacles to be defeated. Michael was a good guy. He cared about the animals he was responsible for, and he didn’t slack off when he had duties to attend to. He wasn’t like Lauren from the aviary, who smoked behind the lorikeet feeding cage sometimes, and didn’t care if the birds were breathing it in. He wasn’t like Donald from the African safari exhibit, either, who liked to flirt with female guests, talking to their breasts when he should have been watching to be sure that little kids didn’t jab sticks at the giraffes. Michael was a good guy.

  So why was she so unsettled?

  Cassandra walked a little faster. Work would make things better. Work always did.

  * * *

  The big cats were uneasy when Cassandra let herself into the narrow hall that ran back behind their feeding cages. They should have been in the big enclosures by this hour of the morning, sunning themselves on the rocks. Instead, they were pacing back and forth, not even snarling at each other, although her big male lion normally snarled at anything else feline that got close enough for him to smell. Cassandra stopped, the feeling of wrongness that had ar
rived with Michael blossoming into something bigger and brighter.

  “What’s wrong with you?” she asked.

  The big cats, unable to answer her, continued to pace. She walked over to the first cage, where her female tiger, Andi, was prowling. She pressed the palm of her hand against the bars. That should have made Andi stop, made her come over to sniff at Cassandra’s fingers, checking them for interesting new smells. Instead, Andi kept pacing, grumbling to herself in the low tones of a truly distressed tiger.

  “You’re not going to delight many families today if you keep hanging out back here,” said Cassandra, trying to cover her concern with a quip. It was a small coping mechanism, but one that had served her well over the years: her therapist said that it was a means of distancing herself from situations she didn’t want to be a part of.

  It was funny how her therapist never suggested anything better. Surely there were situations that no one wanted to be a part of. What were people supposed to do then?

  “All right,” said Cassandra. “I’ll go see what’s going on. You stay where you are.” She pressed the button that would close the tigers in their feeding cages, keeping them from venturing into the larger enclosure. Then she counted noses.

  It was unlikely that she would ever mistake three tigers for four tigers, but it only took once. No matter how much they liked her, no matter how often she fed them, they would still be tigers, and she would still be a human being. They would eat her as soon as look at her if she caught them in the wrong mood, and then they would be put down for the crime of being exactly what nature intended them to be. So she counted noses, not to save herself, but to save them.

  Always to save them.

  The door to the main tiger enclosure was triple-locked, secured with two keys and a dead bolt. It had always seemed a bit extreme to Cassandra, especially since there was the concern that some zoo visitor—probably a teenager; it was always a teenager, on the news—would climb over the wall and scale the moat in order to try to pet a tiger. The number of locks involved would just keep any zookeeper who saw the incident from getting to the fool in time.

  But maybe that, too, was part of the point. All it took was one mauling a decade to keep people out of the enclosures. It could be seen as a necessary sacrifice, letting the animals devour the one for the sake of the many who would be spared.

  Even if that was true, Cassandra didn’t want the sacrifice to involve her charges. Let some other zoo pay the price. Her tigers had done nothing wrong. They didn’t deserve to die as an object lesson.

  The day had only gotten prettier while she was inside, and stepping into the tiger enclosure—a place where tourists never got to litter, where snotty little children never got to chase the peacocks and squirrels into the trees, where the air smelled of big cat and fresh grass—made everything else seem trivial and small. She paused to take a deep breath, unbothered by the sharp, animal odor of tiger spoor clinging to the rocks. They had to mark their territory somehow.

  The smell of rotting flesh assaulted her nostrils. She coughed, choking on her own breath, and clapped a hand over her nose. It wasn’t enough to stop the scent from getting through. Whatever had died here, it had somehow managed to go unnoticed by the groundskeepers long enough to start to truly putrefy, turning the air septic. No wonder the tigers hadn’t wanted to be outside. This was bad enough that she didn’t want to be outside, and her nose was nowhere near as sensitive as theirs.

  Hand still clasped over her nose, Cassandra started toward the source of the smell. It seemed to be coming from the moat that encircled the enclosure, keeping the tigers from jumping out. That made a certain amount of sense. Raccoons and opossums could fall down there, and the tigers couldn’t get to them. If it had fallen behind a rock or something, that might even explain how it had gone unnoticed by the groundskeepers. They worked hard and knew their jobs, but they were only human.

  So was the source of the smell.

  Cassandra stopped at the edge of the moat, eyes going wide and hand slowly dropping from her mouth to dangle by her side as shock overwhelmed revulsion. There was a man at the bottom of the moat.

  He wore the plain white attire of the night groundskeepers, who dressed that way to make themselves visible from a distance. He was shambling in loose, uncoordinated circles, bumping against the walls of the moat and reorienting himself, staggering off in the next direction. He must have been drunk, or under the influence of something less than legal, because he didn’t seem to know or care where he was going: he just went, a human pinball, perpetually in motion.

  From the way his left arm dangled, Cassandra was willing to bet that it was broken. Maybe he wasn’t drunk. Maybe he was just in shock.

  “Hey!” she called, cupping her hands around her mouth to make her voice carry farther. “Are you all right down there?”

  The man looked up, turning toward the sound of her voice. His face was smeared with long-dried blood. Staring at her, he drew back his lips and snarled before walking into the wall again and again, like he could somehow walk through it to reach her. His gaze never wavered. He didn’t blink.

  Cassandra stumbled backward, clasping her hands over her mouth again, this time to stop herself from screaming.

  She had been a zookeeper for five years. Before that, she had been a biology student. She had worked with animals for her entire adult life. She knew dead when she saw it.

  That man was dead.

  * * *

  “Now, Cassandra, be reasonable,” said the zoo administrator. He was a smug, oily man who smiled constantly, like a smile would be enough to chase trouble away. “I believe that something has fallen into the moat of the tiger enclosure, and I’m dispatching a maintenance crew to deal with it, but it’s not a dead man. It’s certainly not a dead man who keeps walking around. Did you get enough sleep last night? Is it possible that this is the stress speaking?”

  “I always get enough sleep,” she said, voice tight. “It’s not safe to work with tigers if you’re not sleeping. I slept, I ate, I drank water and coffee with breakfast, and I know what I saw. There’s a man in the moat. He doesn’t blink. He doesn’t breathe. He’s dead.”

  “But he’s still walking. Cassandra, have you listened to yourself? You have to hear how insane this sounds.”

  Cassandra stiffened. “I’m not insane.”

  “Then maybe you shouldn’t say things that make you sound like you are.” The administrator’s walkie-talkie crackled. He grabbed it, depressing the button as he brought it to his mouth. “Well? Is everything taken care of?”

  “Dan, we’ve got a problem.” The response was faint, and not just because of the walkie-talkie: the speaker sounded like he was on the verge of passing out. “She was right.”

  Dan blanched. “What do you mean, she was right?”

  “There’s a man in the moat.”

  “A dead man?”

  “That’s biologically impossible. He’s up and walking, if nonresponsive to questions. Angela thinks it’s Carl from the night crew. She’s going to get his shift supervisor. But he doesn’t answer when we call his name, and he keeps snarling at us when we try to offer down a hook. I don’t think it’s safe for people to approach him. I think he might get violent.”

  Dan glared at Cassandra as he asked his next question: “But he’s not dead.”

  “That wouldn’t make any sense. Dead men don’t walk.”

  “Roger. Deal with it. I’ll order the path shut down. Call me as soon as you know what’s going on.” Dan put the walkie-talkie aside. “So you were right about the man in the moat. That’s an unexpected twist.”

  “Wait.” Cassandra shook her head, staring at him. “You can’t be serious.”

  “About what?”

  “About shutting the path to the tiger enclosures. People always get around the barricades. They want to see blood. You have to shut down that whole portion of the zoo. Or wait—we haven’t opened yet. Can’t we just … not open? For a little while?”

&nb
sp; “Not open. Are you sure that’s what you want to recommend?” Dan stood. “I can keep people away from that area. I can protect the innocent eyes of children. But admission fees are what pay your salary and feed your precious cats. Do you really want to risk that?”

  “No,” admitted Cassandra. “But the man in the moat … something’s really wrong with him. We shouldn’t let anyone in until we know what it is.”

  “Everything will be fine. Go back to work.” Dan walked to the door and opened it, holding it for her in clear invitation. After a moment’s pause, Cassandra walked out of his office.

  The day seemed less beautiful now, tainted somehow, as if the stranger in her moat had cast a pall over the entire sky. Cassandra walked quickly back toward the tigers, intending to help the rescue crew, and paused when she saw a familiar figure staggering across the grass. Michael was walking surprisingly slowly for a man who had never met a path he didn’t want to jog on. He looked sick. Even from a distance, he looked sick.

  “Michael?” she called, taking a step in his direction. “Are you all right?”

  He turned to fully face her, lips drawing back. Cassandra paused, eyes widening. His eyes … they were like the eyes of the man in the moat.

  He was her friend. She should help him. She should stay, and she should help him.

  She turned, and she ran.

  * * *

  The tigers were still locked in their feeding pens, prowling back and forth and snarling at each other. They were restless. Even for big cats trapped temporarily in small cages, they were restless. It was like they could smell the taint in the air, warning them of trials yet to come.

  “Sorry, guys,” said Cassandra, stopping in the aisle between cages, well out of the reach of questing paws. The tigers didn’t want to hurt her. She was almost certain of that. They still would. She was absolutely certain of that.

  Humans had intelligence, and thought, and the ability to worry about the future. It made them great at things like “building zoos” and “taking over the world,” and it made them terrible at being predators. Humans could plan. Humans could think about consequences. Tigers, though …