by J M Lassen
“Good-bye,” Miles said at last. It almost looked as if he wanted her to shake his hand, but when she sent out a length of her hair, he turned and ran. It was a little disappointing. And the dead girl couldn’t help but notice that he’d left his shoes and his bike behind.
The dead girl walked around the cabin, picking things up and putting them down again. She kicked the Monopoly box, which was a game that she’d always hated. That was one of the okay things about being dead, that nobody ever wanted to play Monopoly.
At last she came to the statue of St. Francis, whose head had been knocked right off during an indoor game of croquet a long time ago. Bethany Baldwin had made St. Francis a lumpy substitute Ganesh head out of modeling clay. You could lift that clay elephant head off, and there was a hollow space where Miles and Bethany had left secret things for each other. The dead girl reached down her shirt and into the cavity where her more interesting and useful organs had once been (she had been an organ donor). She’d put Miles’s poetry in there for safekeeping.
She folded up the poetry, wedged it inside St. Francis, and fixed the Ganesh head back on. Maybe Miles would find it someday. She would have liked to see the look on his face.
We don’t often get a chance to see our dead. Still less often do we know them when we see them. Mrs. Baldwin’s eyes opened. She looked up and saw the dead girl and smiled. She said, “Bethany.”
Bethany sat down on her mother’s bed. She took her mother’s hand. If Mrs. Baldwin thought Bethany’s hand was cold, she didn’t say so. She held on tightly. “I was dreaming about you,” she told Bethany. “You were in an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical.”
“It was just a dream,” Bethany said.
Mrs. Baldwin reached up and touched a piece of Bethany’s hair with her other hand. “You’ve changed your hair,” she said. “I like it.”
They were both silent. Bethany’s hair stayed very still. Perhaps it felt flattered.
“Thank you for coming back,” Mrs. Baldwin said at last.
“I can’t stay,” Bethany said.
Mrs. Baldwin held her daughter’s hand tighter. “I’ll go with you. That’s why you’ve come, isn’t it? Because I’m dead too?”
Bethany shook her head. “No. Sorry. You’re not dead. It’s Miles’s fault. He dug me up.”
“He did what?” Mrs. Baldwin said. She forgot the small, lowering unhappiness of discovering that she was not dead after all.
“He wanted his poetry back,” Bethany said. “The poems he gave me.”
“That idiot,” Mrs. Baldwin said. It was exactly the sort of thing she expected of Miles, but only with the advantage of hindsight, because how could you really expect such a thing. “What did you do to him?”
“I played a good joke on him,” Bethany said. She’d never really tried to explain her relationship with Miles to her mother. It seemed especially pointless now. She wriggled her fingers, and her mother instantly let go of Bethany’s hand.
Being a former Buddhist, Mrs. Baldwin had always understood that when you hold onto your children too tightly, you end up pushing them away instead. Except that after Bethany had died, she wished she’d held on a little tighter. She drank up Bethany with her eyes. She noted the tattoo on Bethany’s arm with both disapproval and delight. Disapproval, because one day Bethany might regret getting a tattoo of a cobra that wrapped all the way around her bicep. Delight, because something about the tattoo suggested Bethany was really here. That this wasn’t just a dream. Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals were one thing. But she would never have dreamed that her daughter was alive again and tattooed and wearing long, writhing, midnight tails of hair.
“I have to go,” Bethany said. She had turned her head a little, towards the window, as if she were listening for something far away.
“Oh,” her mother said, trying to sound as if she didn’t mind. She didn’t want to ask: Will you come back? She was a lapsed Buddhist, but not so very lapsed, after all. She was still working to relinquish all desire, all hope, all self. When a person like Mrs. Baldwin suddenly finds that her life has been dismantled by a great catastrophe, she may then hold on to her belief as if to a life raft, even if the belief is this: that one should hold on to nothing. Mrs. Baldwin had taken her Buddhism very seriously, once, before substitute teaching had knocked it out of her.
Bethany stood up. “I’m sorry I wrecked the car,” she said, although this wasn’t completely true. If she’d still been alive, she would have been sorry. But she was dead. She didn’t know how to be sorry anymore. And the longer she stayed, the more likely it seemed that her hair would do something truly terrible. Her hair was not good Buddhist hair. It did not love the living world or the things in the living world, and it did not love them in an utterly unenlightened way. There was nothing of light or enlightenment about Bethany’s hair. It knew nothing of hope, but it had desires and ambitions. It’s best not to speak of those ambitions. As for the tattoo, it wanted to be left alone. And to be allowed to eat people, just every once in a while.
When Bethany stood up, Mrs. Baldwin said suddenly, “I’ve been thinking I might give up substitute teaching.”
Bethany waited.
“I might go to Japan to teach English,” Mrs. Baldwin said. “Sell the house, just pack up and go. Is that okay with you? Do you mind?”
Bethany didn’t mind. She bent over and kissed her mother on her forehead. She left a smear of cherry ChapStick. When she had gone, Mrs. Baldwin got up and put on her bathrobe, the one with white cranes and frogs. She went downstairs and made coffee and sat at the kitchen table for a long time, staring at nothing. Her coffee got cold and she never even noticed.
The dead girl left town as the sun was coming up. I won’t tell you where she went. Maybe she joined the circus and took part in daring trapeze acts that put her hair to good use, kept it from getting bored and plotting the destruction of all that is good and pure and lovely. Maybe she shaved her head and went on a pilgrimage to some remote lamasery and came back as a superhero with a dark past and some kick-ass martial-arts moves. Maybe she sent her mother postcards from time to time. Maybe she wrote them as part of her circus act, using the tips of her hair, dipping them into an inkwell. These postcards, not to mention her calligraphic scrolls, are highly sought after by collectors nowadays. I have two.
Miles stopped writing poetry for several years. He never went back to get his bike. He stayed away from graveyards and also from girls with long hair. The last I heard, he had a job writing topical haikus for the Weather Channel. One of his best-known haikus is the one about tropical storm Suzy. It goes something like this:
A young girl passes
in a hurry. Hair uncombed.
Full of black devils.
%/{}
THE DAYS OF
FLAMING
MOTORCYCLES
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
To tell you the truth, my father wasn’t really that much different after he became a zombie.
My mother just wandered off. I think she always wanted to do that, anyway. Just set off walking down the road and never look back. Just like my father always wanted to stop washing his hair and hunker down in the basement and snarl at everyone he met. He chased me and hollered and hit me before. Once, when I stayed out with some boy whose name I can’t even remember, he even bit me. He slapped me and for once I slapped him back, and we did this standing-wrestling thing, trying to hold each other back. Finally, in frustration, he bit me, hard, on the side of my hand. I didn’t know what to do—we just stared at each other, breathing heavily, knowing something really absurd or horrible had just happened, and if we laughed it could be absurd and if we didn’t we’d never get over it. I laughed. But I knew the look in his eye that meant he was coming for me, that glowering, black look, and now it’s the only look he’s got.
It’s been a year now, and that’s about all I can tell you about the apocalypse. There was no flash of gold in the sky, no chasms opened up in the earth, no pale riders with silver scythes.
People just started acting the way they’d always wanted to but hadn’t because they were more afraid of the police or their boss or losing out on the prime mating opportunities offered by the greater Augusta area. Everyone stopped being afraid. Of anything. And sometimes that means eating each other.
But sometimes it doesn’t. They don’t always do that, you know. Sometimes they just stand there and watch you, shoulders slumped, blood dripping off their noses, their eyes all unfocused. And then they howl. But not like a wolf. Like something broken and small. Like they’re sad.
Now, zombies aren’t supposed to get sad. Everyone knows that. I’ve had a lot of time to think since working down at the Java Shack on Front Street became seriously pointless. I still go to the shop in the morning, though. If you don’t have habits, you don’t have anything. I turn over the sign, I boot up the register—I even made the muffins for a while, until the flour ran out. Carrot-macadamia on Mondays, mascarpone-mango on Tuesdays, blueberry with a dusting of marzipan on Wednesdays. So on. So forth. Used to be I’d have a line of senators out the door by 8:00 a.m. I brought the last of the muffins home to my dad. He turned one over and over in his bloody, swollen hands until it came apart, then he made that awful howling-crying sound and licked the crumbs off his fingers. And he starting saying my name over and over, only muddled, because his tongue had gone all puffy and purple in his mouth. Caitlin, Caitlin, Caitlin.
So now I drink the pot of coffee by myself and I write down everything I can think of in a kid’s notebook with a flaming motorcycle on the cover. I have a bunch like it. I cleaned out all the stores. In a few months I’ll move on to the punky princess covers, and then the Looney Tunes ones. I mark time that way. I don’t even think of seasons. These are the days of Flaming Motorcycles. Those were the days of Football Ogres. So on. So forth.
They don’t bother me, mostly. And okay, the pot of coffee is just hot water now. No arabica for months. But at least the power’s still on. But what I was saying is that I’ve had a lot of time to think, about them, about me, about the virus—because of course it must have been a virus, right? Which isn’t really any better than saying fairies or angels did it. Didn’t monks used to argue about how many angels could fit on the head of a pin? I seem to think I remember that, in some book, somewhere. So angels are tiny, like viruses. Invisible, too, or you wouldn’t have to argue about it, you’d just count the bastards up. So they said virus, I said it doesn’t matter, my dad just bit his own finger off. And he howls like he’s so sad he wants to die, but being sad means you have a soul and they don’t; they’re worse than animals. It’s a kindness to put them down. That’s what the manuals say. Back when there were new manuals every week. Sometimes I think the only way you can tell if something has a soul is if they can still be sad. Sometimes it’s the only way I know I have one.
Sometimes I don’t think I do.
I’m not the last person on Earth. Not by a long way. I get radio reports on the regular news from Portland, Boston—just a month ago New York was broadcasting loud and clear, loading zombies into the same hangars they kept protesters in back in ’04. They gas them and dump them at sea. Brooklyn is still a problem, but Manhattan is coming around. Channel 3 is still going strong, but it’s all emergency directives. I don’t watch it. I mean, how many times can you sit through The Warning Signs or What We Know? Plus, I have reason to believe they don’t know shit.
I might be the last person in Augusta, though. That wouldn’t be hard. Did you ever see Augusta before the angel-virus? It was a burnt-out hole. It is a burnt-out hole. Just about every year, the Kennebec floods downtown, so at any given time there’s only about three businesses on the main street, and one of them will have a cheerful We’ll Be Back! sign up with the clock hands broken off. There’s literally nothing going on in this town. Not now, and not then. Down by the river the buildings are pockmarked and broken, the houses are boarded up, windows shattered, only one or two people wandering dazed down the streets. All gas supplied by the Dead River Company, all your dead interred at Burnt Hill Burying Ground. And that was before. Even our Wal-Mart had to close up because nobody ever shopped there.
And you know, way back in the pilgrim days, or Maine’s version of them, which starts in the 1700s sometime, there was a guy named James Purington who freaked out one winter and murdered his whole family with an axe. Eight children and his wife. They hanged him and buried him at the crossroads so he wouldn’t come back as a vampire. Which would seem silly, except, well, look around. The point is life in Augusta has been both shitty and deeply warped for quite some time. So we greeted this particular horrific circumstance much as Mainers have greeted economic collapse and the total disregard of the rest of the country for the better part of forever: with no surprise whatsoever. Anyway, I haven’t seen anyone else on the pink and healthy side in a long time. A big group took off for Portland on foot a few months ago (the days of Kermit and Company), but I stayed behind. I have to think of my father. I know that sounds bizarre, but there’s nothing like a parent who bites you to make you incapable of leaving them. Incapable of not wanting their love. I’ll probably turn thirty and still be stuck here, trying to be a good daughter while his blood dries on the kitchen tiles.
Channel 3 says a zombie is a reanimated corpse with no observable sell-by date and seriously poor id-control. But I have come to realize that my situation is not like Manhattan or Boston or even Portland. See, I live with zombies. My dad isn’t chained up in the basement. He lives with me like he always lived with me. My neighbors, those of them who didn’t wander off, are all among the pustulous and dripping. I watched those movies before it happened and I think we all, for a little while, just reacted like the movies told us to: get a bat and start swinging. But I’ve never killed one, and I’ve never even come close to being bitten. It’s not a fucking movie.
And if Channel 3 slaps their bullet points all over everywhere, I guess I should write my own What We Know here. Just in case anyone wonders why zombies can cry.
What Is a Zombie?
by Caitlin Zielinski
Grade…well, if the college were still going I guess I’d be Grade 14.
A zombie is not a reanimated corpse. This was never a Night of the Living Dead scenario. The word zombie isn’t even right—a zombie is something a voudoun priest makes, to obey his will. That has nothing to do with the price of coffee in Augusta. My dad didn’t die. His skin ruptured and he got boils and he started snorting instead of talking and bleeding out of his eyes and lunging at Mr. Almeida next door with his fingernails out, but he didn’t die. If he didn’t die, he’s not a corpse. QED, Channel 3.
A zombie is not a cannibal. This is kind of complicated: Channel 3 says they’re not human, which is why you can’t get arrested for killing one. So if they eat us, it wouldn’t be cannibalism anyway, just, you know, lunch. Like if I ate a dog. Not what you expect from a nice American girl, but not cannibalism. But also, zombies don’t just eat humans. If that were true, I’d have been dinner and they’d have been dead long before now, because, as I said, Augusta is pretty empty of anything resembling bright eyed and bushy tailed. They eat animals, they eat old meat in any freezer they can get open, they eat energy bars if that’s what they find. Anything. Once I saw a woman—I didn’t know her—on her hands and knees down by the river bank, clawing up the mud and eating it, smearing it on her bleeding breasts, staring up at the sky, her jaw wagging uselessly.
A zombie is not mindless. Channel 3 would have a fit if they heard me say that. It’s dogma—zombies are slow and stupid. Well, I saw plenty of people slower and stupider than a zombie in the old days. I worked next to the state capitol, after all. Sometimes I think the only difference is that they’re ugly. The world was always full of drooling morons who only wanted me for my body. Anyway, some are fast and some are slow. If the girl was a jogger before, she’s probably pretty spry now. If the guy never moved but to change the channel, he’s not gonna catch you any time soon. And my father still knows my name
. I can’t be sure but I think it’s only that they can’t talk. Their tongues swell up and their throats expand—all of them. One of the early warning signs is slurred speech. They might be as smart as they ever were—see jogging—but they can’t communicate except by screaming. I’d scream, too, if I were bleeding from my ears and my skin were melting off.
Zombies will not kill anything that moves. My dad hasn’t bitten me. He could have, plenty of times. They’re not harmless. I’ve had to get good at running and I have six locks on every door of the house. Even my bedroom, because my father can’t be trusted. He hits me, still. His fist leaves a smear of blood and pus and something darker, purpler, on my face. But he doesn’t bite me. At first, he barked and went for my neck at least once a day. But I’m faster. I’m always faster. He doesn’t even try anymore. Sometimes he just stands in the living room, drool pooling in the side of his mouth till it falls out, and he looks at me like he remembers that strange night when he bit me before, and he’s still ashamed. I laugh, and he almost smiles. He shambles back down the hall and starts peeling off the wallpaper, shoving it into his mouth in long pink strips like skin.
There’s something else I know. It’s hard to talk about, because I don’t understand it. I don’t understand it because I’m not a zombie. It’s like a secret society, and I’m on the outside. I can watch what they do, but I don’t know the code. I couldn’t tell Channel 3 about this, even if they came to town with all their cameras and sat me in a plush chair like one of their endless Rockette-line of doctors. What makes you think they have intelligence, Miss Zielinski? And I would tell them about my father saying my name, but not about the river. No one would believe me. After all, it’s never happened anywhere else. And I have an idea about that, too. Because people in Manhattan are pretty up on their zombie-killing tactics, and god help a zombie in Texas if he should ever be so unfortunate as to encounter a human. But here there’s nothing left. No one to kill them. They own this town, and they’re learning how to live in it, just like anyone does. Maybe Augusta always belonged to them and James Purington and the Dead River Company. All hail the oozing, pestilent kings and queens of the apocalypse.