by Kit Reed
There there, Suze, I said. Don’t feel bad.
She only cried louder.
Now we know who loves you the most.
She just kept on crying.
I tried to cheer her up by making a joke. Maybe it found a cheap date.
She howled and wouldn’t speak to me.
So I looked at her naked, heaving shoulders and I thought: Aren’t you going to apologize? I was afraid to ask but I had to say something; after all, she was my wife.
Don’t be ashamed, Suze. We all get carried away at least once in our life.
When she would not stop crying I thought it must have been one of those one-night stands, if the Thing cared about her at all it would be tearing the house down to get to her. She would get over it, I thought. But she would not be consoled. There there, I said, there there. When this blows over I’ll buy you a car.
Fat lot I knew. It was a tactic. All the Thing had to do was lay back and wait for her to get loose. Which I discovered shortly before dawn when I woke to an unusual sound. I sat up and saw her moving among the bedroom curtains, trying to unlock the sliding door. Was the Thing in the bushes, waiting? Would she run outside with cries of delight? I was afraid to find out. I sprang up and tackled her, after which I laid down the law. She didn’t argue, she only wept and languished. It was terrible. I had tried to arm against the enemy outside and all the time I had this enemy within. I called us both in sick at work after which I marched her with me to the hardware store and surveilled her the whole time I was buying locks. Then I barred the doors and put extra locks on all the windows. The Thing was so smart it wasn’t going to show itself. It was just going to sit tight and wait. Well, two could play at that game, I thought. When it got tired of waiting and showed itself I would blow it apart.
I suppose I was counting too much on her. I thought sooner or later she would clean herself up and apologize and we could go back to our life. Not so. We went from vacation time into leave without pay and she was still a mess. She would not stop crying and she wouldn’t speak to me. She just kept plastering herself to the windows with this awful look of hope. In addition to which, there was the smell. It would fill the room when I least expected it. My Susie would lift her head and sniff and grin and if I tried to lay a hand on her, look out! It was enough to make a grown man weep.
I had to act.
So what I did was put her in the cellar and lock her up, after which I put on my hunting clothes and located the equipment; rifle, knife, rope. The tape recorder, she had smashed. I didn’t know how far I would have to stalk the Thing or what I would have to do to make it show itself but I was sick of the waiting game. Damn right I was scared. I took the double bar off the back door and went down the steps.
I tiptoed across the night garden, and over to the trees. I know you’re in there, I said in a reasonable tone. If you don’t come out I’m coming in after you.
There was nothing, only the smell. I thought I would pass out.
Homewrecker. Bastard, come on. Right, I was getting mad. I cocked the rifle. In another minute I was going to spray the trees.
Then it showed itself. It just parted the maples like swinging doors and walked out.
Huge? Yes, and that fetor, wow! The hair that covered it, the teeth … You’ve heard tales brought back by hunters. You can imagine the rest. The Thing stood there in the moonlight with its yellow teeth bared while I kept my rifle trained on its chest. It just stood there snuffling. I was, all right, I was overconfident. I yelled: Are you going to leave Susie and me alone or what?
At which point it sprang. Before I could even squeeze the trigger this great big monstrous Thing sprang right on top of me after which I don’t remember much except the explosion of my rifle, the kick. So it must be wounded, at least, which I suppose means it has left a trail of blood, but Lieutenant, I don’t want to press charges. The thing is, my Susie left me of her own free will and now that all is said and done I understand.
No, I can’t explain, not exactly, except it has to do with the thing, no, I mean, Thing: the stench, the roar, the smack of its prodigious flesh. It must have squeezed the daylights out of me and thrown me into Malcolm’s grape arbor, which is where I woke up. They were gone and he was calling the police.
I’m letting her go, Lieutenant, and with my blessings, because I learned something extraordinary in that terrible embrace. There are things we don’t want to want but that doesn’t stop us wanting them, even as we beg forgiveness. Life lets us know there is more than the orderly lines we lay out, that these lines can flex so we catch glimpses of the rest, and if a thing like this can happen to my Susie, who am I to say what I would do if it happened to me?
—Asimov’s SF, 1984
The Zombie Prince
What do you know, fool, all you know is what you see in the movies: clashing jaws and bloody teeth; raw hunger lurching in to eat you, thud thud thud. We are nothing like you think.
The zombie that comes for you is indifferent to flesh. What it takes from you is tasteless, odorless, colorless, and huge. You have a lot to lose.
The incursion is gradual. It does not count the hours or months it may spend circling the bedroom where you sleep. For the zombie, there is no anxiety and no waiting. We walk in a zone that transcends disorders like human emotion. In the cosmos of the undead there is only being and un-being, without reference to time.
Therefore your zombie keeps its distance, fixed on the patch of warmth that represents you, the unseemly racket you make, breathing. Does your heart have to make all that noise, does your chest have to keep going in and out with that irritating rasp? The organs of the undead are sublimely still. Anything else is an abomination.
Then you cough in your sleep. It is like an invitation.
We are at your bedroom window. The thing we need is laid open for us to devour.
For no reason you sit up in bed with your heart jumping and your jaw ajar: what?
Nothing, you tell yourself, because you have to if you’re going to make it through the night. Just something I ate.
Hush, if you enjoy living. Be still. Try to be as still as me. Whatever you do, don’t go to the window! Your future crouches below, my perfect body cold and dense as marble, the eyes devoid of light. If you expect to go on being yourself tomorrow when the sun comes up, stay awake! Do it! This is the only warning you’ll get.
One woman alone, naturally you are uneasy, but you think you’re safe. Didn’t you lock the windows when you went to bed last night, didn’t you lock your doors and slip the dead bolt? Nice house, gated community with Security patrolling, what could go wrong? You don’t know that while you sleep the zombie seeks entry. This won’t be anything like you think.
Therefore you stumble to the bathroom and pad back to your bedroom in the dark. You drop on the bed like a felled cedar, courting sleep. It’s as close as you can get to being one of us. Go ahead, then. Sleep like a stone and if tonight the zombie who has come for you slips in and takes what it needs from you, tomorrow you will not wake up, exactly.
You will get up. Changed.
When death comes for you, you don’t expect it to be tall and gorgeous. You won’t even know the name of the disaster that overtakes you until it’s too late.
Last night Dana Graver wished she could just bury herself in bed and never have to wake up. She’d rather die than go on feeling the way she does.
She wanted to die the way women do when the man they love ends it with no apologies and no explanation. “I’d understand,” she cried, “if this was about another girl.” And Bill Wylie, the man she thought she loved—that she thought loved her! Bill gave her that bland, sad look and said unhelpfully, “I’m sorry, I just can’t do this any more.”
Her misery is like a bouquet of broken glass flowers, every petal a jagged edge tearing her up inside. She would do anything to make it stop. She’d never put herself out—no pills, no razor blades for Dana Graver, no blackened corpse for Bill to find, although he deserves an ugly shock.<
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She’d never consciously hurt herself but if she lies on her back in the dark and wills herself to die it might just accidentally happen, would that be so bad? Let the heartless bastard come in and find his sad, rejected love perfectly composed, lovely in black with her white hands folded gracefully and her dark hair flowing, a reproach that would haunt him for the rest of his life. Look what you did to me. Doesn’t he deserve to know what it sounds like to hear your own heart break?
Composed for death, Dana dozes instead. She drops into sleep like an ocean, wishing she could submerge and please God, never have to come back up. She …
She jerks awake. Oh God, I didn’t mean it!
There is something in the room.
With her heart hammering she sits up, trembling. Switches on the light.
The silent figure standing by the dresser looks nothing like the deaths a single woman envisions. No ski mask, so this is no home invasion; no burglar’s tools. It isn’t emblematic, either, there’s no grim reaper’s robe, no apocalyptic scythe. This isn’t SARS coming for her and it isn’t the Red Death. The intruder is tall and composed. Extremely handsome. Impeccable in white. The only hint of difference is the crescents of black underneath the pale, finely buffed fingernails.
She shrieks.
In ordinary incursions the victim’s scream prompts action: threats or gunshots or knife attack, the marauder’s lunge. This person does nothing. If it is a person. The shape of the head is too perfect. There is something sublime in its unwavering scrutiny.
Chilled, Dana scrambles backward until she is clinging to the bedstead. She throws the lamp at it, screaming. “Get out!”
It doesn’t move. It doesn’t speak.
There is only the crash as the glass lamp base shatters against the wall behind the huge head. The light itself survives, casting ragged shadows on the ceiling. The silence spins out for as long as Dana can stand it. They are in stasis here.
When she can speak, she says, “What are you doing here?”
Is it possible to talk without moving your lips? The stranger in her room doesn’t speak. Instead, Dana knows. Uncanny. She knows.
—Good evening. Isn’t that what you people say?
She does what you do. She opens her throat and screams to wake the dead.
—Don’t do that.
“I can’t help it!”
—I’m sorry. I’m new at this.
“Who are you?”
—You mean the name I used to have? No idea. It left me when I died …
“Died!”
The intruder continues —and I would have to die again to get it back, and you know what death brings. Dissolution and decay. Sorrow.
“What are you?”
—For the purposes of this conversation, you can call me X. Every one of us is known as X.
“Oh my God. Oh, my God!”
The great head lifts. —Who?
“Get out.” Higher. Dana sends her voice high enough to clear the room and raise the neighborhood. “Get out!” When she uncovers her face the intruder hasn’t advanced and it hasn’t run away.
It hasn’t moved. It is watching her, graceful and self-contained. As if her screams are nothing to it. —No.
“Get out or I’ll …” Groping for the empty pistol she keeps under the pillow she threatens wildly. “I’ll shoot!”
—Go ahead. So calm. Too calm! —It won’t change anything.
“Oh.” Noting the fixed, crystalline eyes she understands that this is true. “Oh my God.”
The bedroom is unnaturally still. So is the intruder. Except for the trembling Dana can’t control, except for her light, irregular breathing, she too manages to stay quiet. The figure in white stands without moving, a monument to patience. There is a fixed beauty to the eyes, a terrifying lack of expression. They are empty and too perfect, like doll’s eyes: too pale to be real, blue as blown flowers with stars for pupils. —Don’t be afraid. That won’t change anything either.
Dana isn’t afraid, exactly, she is too badly hurt by the breakup with Bill to think much about anything else, and this? What’s happening here in her bedroom is too strange to be real. It’s as though she is floating far above it. Not an out-of-body experience, exactly, but one in which everything changes.
The intruder is impeccable in a white suit, black shirt, bright circle of silver about one wrist—silver wire braided, she notes in the kind of mad attention to detail that crisis sparks in some people. The rapt gaze. Like an underground prince ravished by its first look at the sun. The attention leaves her more puzzled than frightened. Flattered, really, by that gaze fixed on her as if she really matters. As if this strange figure has come to break her out of the jail that is her life. Bill’s betrayal changed her. She was almost destroyed but even that is changing. She can’t forgive Bill but with this magnetic presence in her room, for seconds at a time she almost forgets about Bill.
The dark hair, the eyebrows like single brushstrokes, the pallor, are eerie and sinister and glamorous. She doesn’t know whether to flirt or threaten. Better the former, she thinks. Let Bill come in and find us, that will show him. Unless she’s stalling until her fingers can find bullets and load the gun. As if she could make a dent in that lustrous skin. “What is this?” she asks, overtaken. “Why are you here?”
The answer takes too long coming. It is not that the stranger has stopped to choose its words. It exists without reference to time. When the answer comes, it isn’t exactly an answer. —You are my first.
“First what?” First what, she wonders. First love? First kill? The stranger is so gorgeous standing there. So courteous and so still. Impervious. None of her fears fit the template. If Dana’s clock is still running, she can’t read the face. Unnerved by the absence of sound—this intruder doesn’t shift on its feet, it doesn’t cough or clear its throat; she doesn’t hear it breathing!—she whispers, “What are you?”
—Does the word undead mean anything to you?
“No!” It doesn’t. Nice suit, cultivated manner, he’s a bit of a mystery, but the handsome face, the strange, cool eyes lift him so far out of the ordinary that the rules don’t pertain here. He’s here because he’s attracted to her. “You don’t look like a …”
—Zombie?
Then it does! Images flood the room, blinding her to everything but the terror. Dana flies out of bed, rushing the door, ricocheting off the stranger’s alabaster facade with her hands flying here, there. Screaming, she hurls herself at the sealed bedroom window, battering on the glass.
—Or walking dead.
“No!” A zombie.
—If you prefer.
This is a zombie. “No, no! Oh my God, don’t touch me!”
—Hold still. It has an eerie dignity. —I’m not going to eat you.
Idiot human. If you’re afraid of getting your face gnawed off or your arm ripped out of its socket and devoured, you’ve seen too many movies. Your body is of no interest to us, not me, not any. We don’t hunt in packs nor do we come in pairs. The zombie travels alone and the zombie takes what it needs without your knowing it. What I take can be extracted through the slightest opening; a keyhole, the crack under your bedroom door. Like a rich man the morning after a robbery, you may not even know what is missing.
“Don’t.” Sobbing, Dana retreats to the bed, pulling the covers up in a knot. All her flailing, her failed attempts to escape, all that screaming and the intruder hasn’t advanced a fraction of an inch. So calm and so very beautiful. In a way it’s everything she wants, she thinks, or everything she wants to be. Unless it’s everything she’s afraid of. She is a tangled mass of conflicting emotions—grief and terror and something as powerful as it is elusive. “What do you want?”
—Zombies do not want. They need.
“You’re not going to …” She locks her arms across her front with an inadvertent shudder.
—Do you really believe I want to chew your arm off?
“I don’t know what I believe!” This is not
exactly true. In spite of what it says, Dana is afraid it’s here to devour her. Doesn’t have to be me, she thinks cleverly. Odd what rejection does to you; her heart congeals like a pond in a flash freeze. Why not pull a switch and buy her safety with a substitute? In a vision of the fitness of things she sees Bill broken in two for his sins; she hears Bill howling in pain as the zombie’s pale, strong hands plunge into his open chest, and when this happens? Maybe she and her elegant zombie will make love while Bill dies and that’ll show him, that will damn well show him. “If you want to eat,” she says in a low voice, “I can feed you.”
—If that was what I came for you’d be bare bones by now.
She does what you do in ambiguous situations. She asks a polite question. “How … How did you get this way?”
—No idea. Zombies do not remember.
This brings Dana’s head up fast. “You don’t remember anything?”
—No.
Thoughtfully, she says, “So you don’t remember how it happened.”
—No. Nothing from before. The silence is suddenly empty, as though the thing in her bedroom has just walked out and closed the door on itself.
Nothing, it is the nature of our condition. There was a name on my headstone when I got up and walked, but I had no interest in reading it. There was this silver bracelet on my wrist that must have meant something to me once. Engraving inside, perhaps, but I don’t need to read it. Who gave it, and what did I feel for her back when I was human? Human I’m not. There is no grief in the zone where I walk, There is no loss and no pain, and yet …
I came out of the grave wiped clean. I came out strong and powerful and insentient. Yet there is this great sucking hole at my center. It burns. I need. I need … What?
“But all this time you’ve been dead. I mean, undead. You must be starved.” Clever Dana’s fingers creep toward the phone. She can’t imagine what she needs to say to please him. “I can get you somebody. Somebody big. Practically twice my size.”
—No thank you.
