Dead World Resurrection

by Joe McKinney

  Sandra was doubled over on her side, holding her gut with both hands and moaning like one of the zombies outside.

  Jim was sitting next to her, stroking her hair.

  “I’m dying,” she said.

  “You’re not going to die,” Jim said. “You’re just sick. This’ll pass.”

  She looked up at him, and there was pain and fear in her eyes, but also acceptance. That acceptance was hardest thing for me to see, for I had seen it before, on the others that we’d already eaten. And when people started to get that look in their eyes, it was a self-fulfilling prophecy.

  It was only a matter of time.

  “I’m dying, Jim. I know it.”

  He didn’t say anything, for I think he knew it too.

  “Promise me,” she said. Her voice was weak, raspy.

  “Anything,” he said, still stroking her hair.

  For a moment, as she strained to look toward Brad Owens, who was sitting against the opposite wall, the acceptance and fear in her eyes changed to hatred.

  “Don’t let he him eat me. I don’t want some liberal bastard eating me. I can’t die knowing some liberal sack of shit lived another day because of me.”

  She wanted to say more, but another wave of pain shot through her gut and she let out a choked scream.

  “She’s delirious,” Jim said to me.

  But when he put his hand back on her face and pushed the hair out of her face, she was dead.

  “Sandra?” Brad said. “Sandra, no, baby, no!”

  He lifted her head and cradled it in his lap, rocking her corpse gently, like a child he was trying to put to sleep.

  §

  An hour or so later, Brad came over to him with the piece of metal from one of the seats that we’d been using to carve meat off of our friends.

  “It’s time,” he said.

  “Fuck off,” Jim said. “You’re not touching her.”

  “Jim,” Brad said. “Please don’t do this. We have to survive.”

  “She didn’t want a sorry sack of shit like you touching her. No worthless Democrat is going to touch her.”

  “I’ve as much right to her corpse as you do.”

  “Like hell.”

  I knew what was going to happen even before they lunged at each other. Jim knocked the blade from Brad’s hand and the next instant they were rolling around on the ground, their hands at each other’s throats.

  I took complete notes of what happened during the fight, but I guess that really doesn’t matter now. The end result was that they strangled each other. Democrat and Republican, neither would quit until they’d snuffed the life out of the other, and now they’re both dead.

  So I sat there, the only member of the Young Americans left alive.

  And a short while later, I picked up the blade and started eating.

  §

  I was rescued by the Chinese Army a week later.

  They hadn’t planned on finding me there. They hadn’t planned on finding anyone alive, I don’t think. Someone told me they were looking for the train, that they had spotted it from the air and went in to retrieve it because they needed it to deliver troops across the country. The zombie apocalypse, they told me, had been contained. For the most part. A few pockets of zombies remained, but those were being taken care of. I was lucky to be alive, they told me, but I could tell they didn’t think much of me for it. The first soldiers to board the train had taken one look at me, and at the pile of bones surrounding me, and had turned their heads to vomit.

  News of what had happened went ahead of me.

  The Chinese Army put me on a cargo ship and sent me back to the States. The ship’s crew seemed to already know everything about me, and that made meal times rough. As soon as I would enter the mess hall, the others would get up to leave. No one, it seemed, could stomach watching me eat.

  No one, it seemed, even back in the States, could watch me eat.

  Live with that long enough, and it hardens you.

  That’s why I live here, on this farm in Georgia, where I grow my own food and raise my own livestock.

  I live alone, and I like it just fine.

  That way, there’s nobody to turn up their nose if I like to eat the occasional steak raw. Besides, it’s nobody business but mine.

  This is still the goddamned U.S. of A., for Christ’s sake.

  Author’s Notes

  Resurrecting Mindy

  Faking it is nothing new in zombie stories. The idea that you can evade a horde of zombies by pretending to be one of them is compelling in that it makes possible a great deal of metaphoric frontloading. It’s also a great way to capture the mood of your piece. For example, it was done with great humor in Shaun of the Dead, and with equal parts horror in The Walking Dead. My favorite example of faking it is in Adam-Troy Castro’s story “Dead Like Me,” in which conformity is treated as the ultimate act of self-loathing. “Resurrecting Mindy” was written for an anthology of Christmas-themed horror stories. When I sat down to write the story, I knew I wanted to riff on O. Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi,” arguably one of the most famous Christmas stories outside of the Gospel of Luke. I knew I also wanted to write my own faker story. So I did both with “Resurrecting Mindy.”

  Dating in Dead World

  Most of the stories in this collection were written for a particular magazine or anthology. “Dating in Dead World” was written just because I felt like it. I had this idea for a guy who made his living delivering messages between compounds in a world long-since overrun by zombies, and the story just took off from there. I sat down to write it early one morning in September, 2005, and when I quit for the day later that afternoon, I had finished it. I think I went through it a couple of times after that, just to polish it, but the story pretty much came out fully formed. I love it when they do that.

  Bug Out or Hunker Down

  Attitudes are changing toward zombies. More and more, otherwise “normal” people are surprising themselves with a newfound appreciation for the undead du jour. Friends of my parents, for example, will approach me in hushed tones (because they know I write this stuff) and say, “Have you seen that show, The Walking Dead? That’s pretty good, isn’t it?” I smile and nod. The Walking Dead, both the graphic novel and the television show, has done wonders for the zombie’s public image. But there are the literary snobs out there who refuse to see beyond the vast droves of poorly written zombie stuff currently floating around out there. They read something crappy and assume the rest of the genre must be like that too. Inevitably, one of these literary snobs will level the accusation that most of this stuff is just a sick fascination with survival. While I don’t condemn zombie fiction for that fascination, I kind of see their point. In fact, I’ve come up with a name for that trend in the genre. I call it Survival Porn because, in many of these stories, the contents of one’s bug-out bag, or the weapons one carries, are described with an almost pornographic thrill. I don’t do much in that vein, but this piece certainly qualifies. Also, I’ve had a number of requests to turn this into a novel. Who knows? I might do that one day. I just need to come up with some pornographic-style title. Maybe I’ll call it Jugs and Big Guns.

  Bury My Heart at Marvin Gardens

  This one was never supposed to be published, at least not publicly. In 2011, I lost a very good friend named Jon Michael Freiger. Jon was one of the kindest human beings I’ve ever known. We loved playing Monopoly, and our conversations always worked their way around to horror, another mutual love of ours. When Jon died unexpectedly, leaving a wife and a young baby, his widow asked me to write a zombie story for him that would go into the program they’d pass out at the funeral. Well, I wrote the story, this story, but after much discussion we decided not to put it into the program. Jon’s friends would get it, and some of his family probably would too, but we decided most of those in attendance would simply find it weird and out of place. So, I put it in a drawer and left it there. For a long time it was too private to do anything with. But som
e time has gone by since his death, and while I still feel his absence keenly, I decided to put his story into this collection because it really does capture the great times I had with him. And remembering those good times is probably the best way to honor those who matter most. Miss you every day, my friend.

  Zombies and Their Haunts

  This little bit of non-fiction was written for Tor.com as part the publicity tour for John Joseph Adams’ The Living Dead 2. I got a lot of great feedback from it, so I decided to put the piece into this collection. Hopefully, you’ll never look at an abandoned building the same way again.

  The Day the Music Died

  Back in the early days of my police career, I would, from time to time, work overtime jobs as security at concerts and stuff like that. For the most part, the money was good, and I got to watch some free shows to boot. But then, for one show, my assignment was back stage, escorting a certain rock star (who I shall not name because he’s one of my mom’s favorites) from the stage to the limo. My job was, I thought, pretty straightforward. Keep the weirdoes from mobbing Mr. So and So. Easy enough. But then this guy’s manager or whatever he was pulls me aside and tells me there are some special conditions I have to follow. No one, he said, including me, was to speak with Mr. So and So unless spoken to. And no one, he said, including me, was to look Mr. So and So in the eyes. “You can’t be serious,” I said, unable to keep from laughing. “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.” He didn’t laugh, though. He told me he was completely serious, and that if I couldn’t follow those instructions, they would find somebody who would. I told them good luck and farewell and went on with life. Years later, I was asked to do a zombie story for an anthology arranged around holidays, and for some reason, that rock star’s manager popped into my head. What sort of things, I wondered, must a manager like that do for his client? This story grew out of that question.

  Survivors

  “Survivors” was written for an anthology I edited with Michelle McCrary called Dead Set. The idea for the story came from something I saw while driving my police car through the plaza in front of the Alamo—a location, by the way, that figures prominently in another story in this collection. Anyway, I’m driving my police car through downtown, when a sudden gust of wind kicked up a wall of dust that rolled down the street like a big, brown wave. As the dust began to settle, I saw people stumbling across the street, half choked and nearly blind from the dust. After seeing that, this story practically wrote itself.

  Suburbia of the Dead

  One of my favorite horror stories of all time is Joe R. Lansdale’s “The Shaggy House.” I love the idea that a house can kill a neighborhood by polluting it like a cancer. Well, last year, I happened to be driving through one of the desolate neighborhoods east of downtown San Antonio. Many decades ago, that area was the retreat of San Antonio’s über-wealthy. On every hill there is a mansion—they are decrepit wrecks now, but most are still there. Looking at those ruined mansions, I got to thinking how a neighborhood dies. Joe R. Lansdale’s story came back to me at that point, and so, one morning, just after breakfast, I sat down at the kitchen table to write my version of “The Shaggy House.”

  Paradise of the Living Dead

  One of the greatest stories ever told is Cabeza de Vaca’s Adventures in the Unknown Interior of America. This guy was shipwrecked during a hurricane off the coast of Galveston, waded ashore, and spent the next four years wandering Texas and parts of the modern-day American Southwest. During that time, he fought both for and against the many Indian tribes there, was taken hostage several times, held and traded as a slave, threatened with execution dozens of times, was spared for his knowledge of medicine and astronomy, and was eventually revered as a god before finally making his way back to Spain. Seriously, Daniel Defoe couldn’t have come up with a better tale of survival. The origin of “Paradise of the Living Dead” is a chapter in Cabeza de Vaca’s memoirs in which he describes coming ashore after the shipwreck. It seems there were these clams in the water, and their shells were so sharp they cut up the survivors, even though most were wearing armor. All I did was add a nasty little defense mechanism to those clams.

  Jimmy Finder

  One of the most common gripes I hear about my book Dead City is that characters keep stepping into seemingly empty streets, only to find it crawling with zombies the next instant. Now I usually don’t pay attention to criticisms, but that one really aggravated me because, as a cop, I’ve seen empty streets suddenly flood with people. Hell, it even happens in the middle of the night. Someone will get shot, or a car will get wrapped around a tree, and the next thing you know, that quiet little street is standing-room only. When I wrote the zombie scenes in Dead City, I was coming at it from that angle. But I get that some people need a more concrete explanation, so, when I got an invitation to write a zombie novella for IDW’s ongoing series, Zombies vs. Robots, I thought I would give the people what they want and explain once and for all why zombies do what they do.

  Bugging Out

  I was on a zombie panel a few years ago when this guy in the audience stands up and says, “Mr. McKinney, you’ve got to see the compound I’ve built. Man, I’ve got everything me and my family needs to survive the zombie apocalypse. We’re ready!” This actually happens pretty regularly at conventions, I’m told, and it got me thinking about how easy it would be to fall in love with the idea of surviving the zombie apocalypse. Then I happened to catch an episode of Hoarders, and this story was born.

  Ethical Solution

  After Dead City had been on the shelves for a few months, I started getting emails from people who loved Ken Stoler. And just as many from people who hated him. No one, it seemed, was on the fence about him, which is exactly how I hoped he would come across. Ken Stoler generated so much attention, in fact, that I decided to put his ideas to the test.

  But, as in “Survivors,” which would come along two years later, I sensed that Ken Stoler wasn’t the right person to take that test. At the end of Dead City, Ken Stoler has gone on speaking tours and manages to make quite a few friends, and just as many enemies ...much as his character did with Dead City’s readers. The way I looked at it, I had created a wide world outside the confines of Dead City’s covers: Why not bring in a fresh batch of characters, nearly all of whom are caught up in Ken Stoler’s cause? Sending them back into San Antonio would give me a chance to color a little doubt into Eddie Hudson’s version of events, and it would also give me a chance to show how the rest of the country had been affected by the Outbreak.

  And it would give me a chance to introduce a man destined to become one of the most important characters in the whole Dead World series.

  Ben Richardson is single, mid-thirties, smart, but not pompously so. He’s a staff writer for The Atlantic. He was born and raised in Port Arthur, Texas, just like Janis Joplin, and when the first reports of cannibalism started coming out of Houston right after Hurricane Mardell, Ben went into action. He decided right then to write the definitive history of the Outbreak, covering every aspect of the zombie plague, from the lofty but ultimately empty, speeches on the White House lawn to the plight of the lowliest individual hiding out in the back alleys of a ruined town.

  Just before the events in “Ethical Solution,” which takes place about eight months after Eddie’s ending to Dead City, Ben Richardson gets wind of an English professor from the University of Texas at Austin named Dr. Sylvia Carnes. Dr. Carnes has bought Ken Stoler’s cause hook, line and sinker, and now she plans to take a chartered bus through the military quarantine that surrounds San Antonio. She has about forty students with her, each one a member of the local chapter of People for an Ethical Solution, and a court order authorizing her to enter the quarantine zone. The idea, she tells Ben, is to show the rest of the country that the infected—she refuses to call them zombies—can be handled in a humane way by normal people. This, she hopes, will open the door to meaningful research into a cure.

  Ben Richardson is naturally skeptic
al. He and Sylvia Carnes fall on opposite sides of the issue, but he nonetheless maintains an open mind and convinces her that he should come along on her expedition into San Antonio.

  One of the complaints I got from San Antonio locals who read Dead City was that I didn’t mention many of the city’s wonderful landmarks, such as the Alamo. Well, okay, I said. You want the Alamo, I’ll give you the Alamo. So the basic plot of “Ethical Solutions,” if you know anything about the Battle of the Alamo, wasn’t hard to imagine. The more important part of that story was the way the debate between Sylvia Carnes and Ben Richardson develops. They cover quite a bit of ground during “Ethical Solutions,” but even still, neither character is any closer to winning over the other by the end.

  Real agreement, in fact, wouldn’t happen for another eight years—and three books—later, when the two of them met again in the crumbling ruins of St. Louis.

  But that’s a different story.

  Swallowed

  Snakes creep me out. Plain and simple, they make my skin crawl. So when I read the reports coming out of the Florida Everglades that people had been releasing boa constrictors into the wild, and that those snakes were eating deer and alligators and growing to enormous sizes, I knew what I had to do... sic a zombie on them!

  Sabbatical in the Ohio Methlands

  Just about everybody, I think, has seen those websites that show the way people deteriorate under a meth addiction. Well, back in my patrol-officer days, I had to deal with meth heads all the time, and I’m here to tell you, those websites aren’t exaggerating. There were times, when dealing with a dozen or so meth heads at once, that I felt like I was in the middle of a real-life zombie apocalypse. I channeled that when Bruce Boston and Marge Simon asked me to write a flash fiction piece for their stint as guest editors over at The Pedestal Magazine. The only trouble was that I was on a camping trip at Enchanted Rock when the invitation came in, and I ended up having to write this story on my cell phone. That was the first time I ever wrote a story on my phone, and here’s hoping that it will be the last!