by Anne Rice
Kent took a deep breath, shook his head vigorously, and stared at the black wall of corn surrounding the house and gardens. “Well, I’m glad that’s over with. Thank you, Bitsy.”
“No problem.”
“So. Who killed my friends, Bitsy, and no more nonsense about the walking dead, curses, and double overtime, all right?”
“Pierre did it.”
“You just said he was dead.”
“He is dead.”
“Bitsy, please. If Pierre did it, why haven’t the police arrested him?”
“ ’Cause he’s dead.”
“Bitsy.”
“No shit, Baron. He come in, called by the drums, kill Sir Ronald and the others.” Her face saddened. “And if you don’t leave, now, you’ll die too.”
“Bitsy.”
The drums.
The corn.
“Bitsy.”
A tear sparkled in the young woman’s right eye.
Kent wiped it gently away with a finger. “Bitsy, listen to me—there are many valid psychological reasons why one says what one says when one’s dear friends are cruelly taken from one. It is a way, you see, of explaining the inexplicable, making sense of nonsense, and doing one’s best to carry on despite the grief and the sorrow,”
She nodded.
He smiled tenderly.
She said, “Well, one is still going to die if one doesn’t get his royal ass out of here pretty soon.”
“Jesus.”
“Hey, are you two done yet?” Lucy called impatiently from the veranda.
Bitsy grabbed his hands imploringly. “Baron, nobody but me knows you are the one who took me out of the gutter and put me through college; nobody knows that you are the one who paid for all the operations my momma had to have before she passed away; and you ought to know by now that I don’t lie to you. Not ever.”
He didn’t want to, but he nodded anyway.
“Hey!”
The corn.
The drums.
Jesus, thought Kent; don’t their arms ever get tired?
Suddenly a horrified scream whirled Bitsy around and made Kent look toward the house where, on the dimly lighted balcony above the veranda, he saw Robert Kenilworth stumble through an open door, struggling with a darkly tanned man a full head taller and many tens of pounds heavier. The man was bare-chested, wearing only a pair of ragged and rather damp jeans, and his eyes were impossibly, unnaturally wide and white.
Kent squinted in the bright moonlight. “Damn, isn’t that—?”
The man effortlessly picked Robert up, shook him violently, and tossed him over the railing.
Lucy screamed and jumped back when the body landed on the grass in front of her.
Bitsy screamed when the man on the balcony turned slowly and strode stiffly back into the house.
Kent didn’t scream, but he yelled a little when even at this distance he recognized the gaunt and expressionless face of Pierre Grumage. Who was, by all accounts, dead; and, if Kent was any judge, not doing a very good job of it, either.
“Zombie,” Bitsy Freneau whispered. “It’s a zombie.”
“Damn,” Kent whispered back.
The drums.
Louder and faster.
Lucy Dane sprinted off the veranda, hurdled Robert’s body, and reached Kent and Bitsy just in time to see Roland Kenilworth stumble backward through the balcony’s open French doors, a gun in his trembling hand.
Pierre stepped from the house.
Roland fired.
Pierre jerked at the impact of bullet against flesh, but he didn’t fall.
Roland braced himself against the railing and fired again twice.
Pierre barely flinched, and kept on moving.
Kent snatched the revolver from Lucy’s hip holster and took careful aim at the center of Pierre’s forehead.
Roland snarled, sneered, fired twice more to no discernible effect, threw the useless weapon at the inexorably approaching zombie, and tried to duck around it to escape back into the house.
Kent couldn’t fire.
Roland couldn’t duck around the zombie.
Pierre grabbed the fat man and lifted him over his head, staggered, fell back against the house, rebounded, staggered to the railing, rebounded, staggered back a couple of steps, staggered forward, and finally tossed the last remaining Kenilworth contemptuously to the ground.
Bitsy excused herself and bolted for the corn.
Lucy stood and stared.
Kent fired.
The drums.
The zombie ignored the bloodless hole in its head, only turned and strode stiffly into the house whence, a few minutes later, came the shrieks and panicked yells of old Denbro Jones, the sound of shattering glass, the sound of an automobile engine firing, the sound of tires squealing on the driveway, the sound of a racing motor swiftly fading in the distance.
“Zombies,” said Kent wearily, “don’t drive, do they.”
Lucy rolled her eyes.
“Right. Then how do we kill this thing?”
She turned to him with an unpleasant smile. “We don’t, Kent. As sure as the sun will come in the morning, he will follow you. Wherever you go. There isn’t a mountain too high or an ocean too deep, to keep … to keep him away.”
Kent felt a trickle of sweat bead its way down his spine. “You mean … he’ll follow?”
She nodded. “He’ll follow.”
He grunted. “So. He’ll follow.”
“That’s right. From now until … I don’t know. Probably forever.”
“Forever?”
“You bet.”
He considered the implications, the speed of the zombie, the direction of the wind that slammed through the corn and whipped the stalks back and forth, the constellations in the sky, and came to a decision.
He gave her back the gun and headed for the corn.
“Where are you going?” she demanded.
“You think I’m just going to stand here and let that walking corpse murder me?” he said over his shoulder. “If I’m going to die, I’m not going to do it in New Jersey.”
“But you’re supposed to try to kill it!” she said.
The drums grew frantic.
Bitsy bolted back out of the corn and grabbed Kent’s arm. “I couldn’t leave without you.”
Lucy stomped after them. “Damn it, Montana, you’re supposed to try to kill the damn thing!”
Bitsy kept tugging.
“What the hell kind of a hero are you anyway? If you’re not going to try to kill it, aren’t you at least going to try to save me? I could die here, you know!”
The drums damn near beat their skins off.
The corn whispered.
“What are we waiting for?” Bitsy demanded, then gasped and dropped his hand, putting her own hand to her mouth to stifle what might have been a scream had she decided to scream. Which she didn’t.
Kent turned. He didn’t want to; he told himself not to; but something deep within him, some highly charged sense of honor and fatalistic inevitability of doing something monumentally stupid instead of running like hell forced him to do it.
The zombie was there.
It stood tall and shadowy and motionless on the veranda.
Lucy slapped her revolver back into Kent’s hand. “Kill it, damn you!” she snarled. “End it once and for all before we all die!”
Kent looked at the gun.
Bitsy looked at Lucy.
The zombie began to move.
“Kent?” Bitsy said nervously. “Kent, this is getting a little too dramatic for my taste, in case you’re wondering.”
Kent sighed deeply and, oddly, sadly.
The zombie came closer.
Lucy slapped Kent’s arm, hard. “Jesus Christ, are you just going to stand there, for God’s sake?”
Kent looked at her, his face touched with bittersweet melancholy. “Lucy,” he said, “you have some explaining to do.”
She sputtered.
“You’ve n
ever forgiven me for leaving you, have you.”
She stammered, then laughed. “I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about, you fool. Now point that—”
“That holiday weekend in Philadelphia, three years ago. You thought I was going to propose. Take you away from all this corn and bring you to my estate in Scotland. Lady of the manor, that’s what you said. You wanted to be the lady of the manor.”
Bitsy gaped.
Lucy, however, backed away and shook her head in disbelief. “What an ego! What a typical male ego, to think that I would have something to do with the murders of my best friends just to get you over here so I could kill you.” She shook her head. “Amazing.”
“Is it?” he asked, the melancholy gone from his voice, replaced by a harsh cold anger. “Is it really so amazing … Momma Holyhina?”
Bitsy gasped as best she could while still gaping.
The zombie came closer.
And held out its arms.
“Oh yes,” he said as he glanced at the flatfooted approach of fairly certain doom. “When you couldn’t have me, and Sir Ronald wouldn’t have you, and the brothers spurned you because all they wanted was Ronald’s money, you steeped yourself in the lore and lure of Jersey voodoo, enticed Pierre to fall in love with you, then drove him to his death by egging him on in his attempt to unionize the corn pickers, the shuckers, and those two huskers from Nebraska I met last time I was here.”
Lucy Dane’s face changed then, from indignation to ugly fury.
“And when Pierre kills me, then Bitsy, will it stop, Lucy? Or will it go on, and on, and on, as that creature goes on and on and on, slaughtering people left and right, destroying innocent lives, sending women and children and old folks to early graves, until someone somewhere finally figures out how to end it. Is that what will happen? Is that it?”
“Well, hell no,” Lucy said with a laugh. “Sooner or later, I’ll die and then it will, too.” Her laugh grew bitter. “The idiot can’t live without me.”
Kent smiled.
Lucy’s eyes widened.
Kent shot her.
Lucy gasped and looked at the spreading messy circle of blood on her blouse, then staggered as her knees began to buckle. She turned as the zombie reached her, swooned into its arms, and they gazed into each other’s eyes until Lucy Dane finally sighed, gurgled, and died.
The zombie lay her tenderly on the grass and lay down beside her, sighed, gurgled, and died again.
The drums stopped.
The breeze stopped.
There was silence in the garden.
Then Bitsy said, “What a waste. What a terrible waste.”
“Indeed,” Kent answered as he tossed the gun into the dark. “Indeed.”
Together, then, they walked toward the house, arm in arm, as the sun began to rise gloriously in the east, and the morning birds chirped in the redolent fields of corn.
“You know,” Kent said as he stepped over Roland’s body and noticed that Robert was rather seriously flattened beneath him, “despite all the carnage and the horror and the terror and the nearly dying until I figured it all out, I’m going to miss this place.”
“You can come back any time you want,” Bitsy Freneau told him.
He stopped. “But aren’t you going back to your law practice?”
“Hell, no.” She waved at the corn. “Sir Ronald left me this place in his will last week. I’m going to be the East Coast Popcorn Queen, make a fortune, get me some studs, live me the life.” She grinned broadly and headed for the fields. “You just go on upstairs, go to bed, take nap, I got work to do. Catch you later.”
Stunned, he watched her hop over Roland and Robert, skip around Lucy and Pierre, and break into a joyful trot.
“Wait!” he cried.
She waved without looking around.
“Wait!”
She vanished into the corn.
He looked at the bodies, looked at the corn, looked at the gardens, looked at the grass, looked at the house. Then he stepped back off the veranda and looked up at the sky.
“You know,” he said sourly, “I am supposed to be the hero here. I risked my life saving the goddamn world from the forces of Evil, killed the bad guys, saved the heroine who can’t even decide what kind of accent she’s going to use, and this is all I get? Go to bed, Kent? Have a nice nap, Kent?”
An airplane flew over, bound for the West Indies.
“This is it?”
Another plane flew over, bound for Monte Carlo.
“One lousy kiss on the chin? From the goddamn Popcorn Queen?”
And the travelers up there, serenely sailing through the azure sky, looked down upon the verdant fields of swaying corn and wondered what it would be like to live in such a lovely, bucolic place, never to know the lethal pressures of the cities or the soulless pressures of corporate life, never to be afraid to walk the streets at night, never to wonder what the twilight shadows held; living instead the simple life, the rustic life, at one with Nature and the joys she provided.
They wondered, and they flew on, shivering just a little when a faint cloud of sadness darkened their worlds for just a moment.
They flew on.
While Kent Montana said, “Nuts,” and went to bed.
THE OHER DEAD MAN
GENE WOLFE
REIS surveyed the hull without hope and without despair, having worn out both. They had been hit hard. Some port side plates of Section Three lay peeled back like the black skin of a graphite-fiber banana; Three, Four, and Five were holed in a dozen places. Reis marked the first on the comp slate so that Centcomp would know, rotated the ship’s image and ran the rat around the port side of Section Three to show that.
“Report all damage,” Centcomp instructed him.
He wrote quickly with the rattail: “Rog.”
“Report all damage,” flashed again and vanished. Reis shrugged philosophically, rotated the image back, and charted another hole.
The third hole was larger than either of the first two. He jetted around to look at it more closely.
Back in the airlock, he took off his helmet and skinned out of his suit. By the time Jan opened the inner hatch, he had the suit folded around his arm.
“Bad, huh?” Jan said.
Reis shook his head. “Not so bad. How’s Hap?”
Jan turned away.
“How’s Dawson doing with the med pod?”
“I don’t know,” Jan said. “He hasn’t told us anything.”
He followed her along the spiracle. Paula was bent over Hap, and Dawson was bent over Paula, a hand on her shoulder. Both looked up when he and Jan came in. Dawson asked, “Anybody left downship?”
Reis shook his head.
“I didn’t think so, but you never know.”
“They’d have had to be in suits,” Reis said. “Nobody was.”
“It wouldn’t be a bad idea for us to stay suited up.”
Reis said nothing, studying Hap. Hap’s face was a pale, greenish-yellow, beaded with sweat; it reminded Reis of an unripe banana, just washed under the tap. So this is banana day, he thought.
“Not all of the time,” Dawson said. “But most of the time.”
“Sure,” Reis told him. “Go ahead.”
“All of us.”
Hap’s breathing was so shallow that he seemed not to breathe at all.
“You won’t order it?”
“No,” Reis told Dawson, “I won’t order it.” After a moment he added, “And I won’t do it myself, unless I feel like it. You can do what you want.”
Paula wiped Hap’s face with a damp washcloth. It occurred to Reis that the droplets he had taken for perspiration might be no more than water from the cloth, that Hap might not really be breathing. Awkwardly, he felt for Hap’s pulse.
Paula said, “You’re the senior officer now, Reis.”
He shook his head. “As long as Hap’s alive, he’s senior officer. How’d you do with the med pod, Mr. Dawson?”
“You want a detailed report? Oxygen’s—”
“No, if I wanted details, I could get them from Centcomp. Overall.”
Dawson rolled his eyes. “Most of the physical stuff he’ll need is there; I had to fix a couple things, and they’re fixed. The med subroutines look okay, but I don’t know. Centcomp lost a lot of core.”
Paula asked, “Can’t you run tests, Sid?”
“I’ve run them. As I said, they look all right. But it’s simple stuff.” Dawson turned back to Reis. “Do we put him in the pod? You are the senior officer fit for duty.”
“And don’t you forget it,” Reis said. “Yes, we put him in, Mr. Dawson; it’s his only chance.”
Jan was looking at him with something indefinable in her eyes. “If we’re going to die anyway—”
“We’re not, Mr. van Joure. We should be able to patch up at least two engines, maybe three, borrowing parts from the rest. The hit took a lot of momentum off us, and in a week or so we should be able to shake most of what’s left. As soon as Ecomp sees that we’re still alive and kicking, it’ll authorize rescue.” Reis hoped he had made that part sound a great deal more certain than he felt. “So our best chance is to head back in toward the sun and meet it partway—that should be obvious. Now let’s get Hap into that pod before he dies. Snap to it, everybody!”
Dawson found an opportunity to take Reis aside. “You were right—if we’re going to get her going again, we can’t spare anybody for nursing, no matter what happens. Want me to work on the longwave?”
Reis shook his head. Engines first, long-wave afterward, if at all. There would be plenty of time to send messages when the ship lived again. And until it did, he doubted whether any message would do much good.
Lying in his sleep pod, Reis listened to the slow wheeze of air through the vent. The ship breathed again, they’d done that much. Could it have been … admiration, that look of Jan’s? He pushed the thought aside, telling himself he had been imagining things. But still?
His mind teetered on the lip of sleep, unable to tumble over.
The ship breathed; it was only one feeble engine running at half force with a doubtful tube, and yet it was something; they could use power tools again—the welder—and the ship breathed.
His foot slipped on an oil spill, and he woke with a start. That had happened years back while they were refitting at Ocean West. He had fallen and cracked his head. He had believed it forgotten….