“Right.”
She took my hand at the door, a simple handshake, that’s all, but I felt something pass between us, an old connection close with a kind of electric spark. Maybe it wasn’t there at all, maybe I only wanted to feel it—Gwen certainly seemed willing to let me walk out of her life once again—but a kind of desperation seized me.
Call it nostalgia or loneliness. Call it whatever you want. But suddenly the image of her wry glance from beneath the slant of hair leaped into mind.
I wanted to see her again.
“Listen,” I said, “I know this is kind of out of the blue, but you wouldn’t be free for dinner would you?”
She paused a moment. The shadow of the door had fallen across her face. She laughed uncertainly, and when she spoke, her voice was husky and uncertain. “I don’t know, Rob. That was a long time ago. Like I said, I’m a little risk aversive these days.”
“Right. Well, then, listen—it was really great seeing you.”
I nodded and started across the lawn. I had the door of the rental open when she spoke again.
“What the hell,” she said. “Let me make a call. It’s only dinner, right?”
I went back to Washington for the inauguration.
Lewis and I stood together as we waited for the ceremony to begin, looking out at the dead. They had been on the move for days, legions of them, gathering on the Mall as far as the eye could see. A cluster of the living, maybe a couple hundred strong, had been herded onto the lawn before the bandstand—a token crowd of warm bodies for the television cameras—but I couldn’t help thinking that Burton’s true constituency waited beyond the cordons, still and silent and unutterably patient, the melting pot made flesh: folk of every color, race, creed, and age, in every stage of decay that would allow them to stand upright. Dana Maguire might be out there somewhere. She probably was.
The smell was palpable.
Privately, Lewis had told me that the dead had begun gathering elsewhere in the world, as well. Our satellites had confirmed it. In Cuba and North Korea, in Yugoslavia and Rwanda, the dead were on the move, implacable and slow, their purposes unknown and maybe unknowable.
“We need you, Rob,” he had said. “Worse than ever.”
“I’m not ready yet,” I replied.
He had turned to me then, his long pitted face sagging. “What happened to you?” he asked.
And so I told him.
It was the first time I had spoken of it aloud, and I felt a burden sliding from my shoulders as the words slipped out. I told him all of it: Gran’s evasions and my reaction to Dana Maguire that day on CNN and the sense I’d had on Crossfire that something else, something vast and remote and impersonal, was speaking through me, calling them back from the grave. I told him about the police report, too, how the memories had come crashing back upon me as I sat at the scarred table, staring into a file nearly three decades old.
“It was a party,” I said. “My uncle was throwing a party and Mom and Dad’s babysitter had canceled at the last minute, so Don told them just to bring us along. He lived alone, you know. He didn’t have kids and he never thought about kids in the house.”
“So the gun wasn’t locked up?”
“No. It was late. It must have been close to midnight by then. People were getting drunk and the music was loud and Alice didn’t seem to want much to do with me. I was in my uncle’s bedroom, just fooling around the way kids do, and the gun was in the drawer of his nightstand.”
I paused, memory surging through me, and suddenly I was there again, a child in my uncle’s upstairs bedroom. Music thumped downstairs, jazzy big band music. I knew the grown-ups would be dancing and my dad would be nuzzling Mom’s neck, and that night when he kissed me good night, I’d be able to smell him, the exotic aromas of bourbon and tobacco, shot through with the faint floral essence of Mom’s perfume. Then my eyes fell upon the gun in the drawer. The light from the hall summoned unsuspected depths from the blued barrel.
I picked it up, heavy and cold.
All I wanted to do was show Alice. I just wanted to show her. I never meant to hurt anyone. I never meant to hurt Alice.
I said it to Lewis—“I never meant to hurt her”—and he looked away, unable to meet my eyes.
I remember carrying the gun downstairs to the foyer, Mom and Dad dancing beyond the frame of the doorway, Alice standing there watching. “I remember everything,” I said to Lewis. “Everything but pulling the trigger. I remember the music screeching to a halt, somebody dragging the needle across the record, my mother screaming. I remember Alice lying on the floor and the blood and the weight of the gun in my hand. But the weird thing is, the thing I remember best is the way I felt at that moment.”
“The way you felt,” Lewis said.
“Yeah. A bullet had smashed the face of the clock, this big grandfather clock my uncle had in the foyer. It was chiming over and over, as though the bullet had wrecked the mechanism. That’s what I remember most. The clock. I was afraid my uncle was going to be mad about the clock.”
Lewis did something odd then. Reaching out, he clasped my shoulder—the first time he’d ever touched me, really touched me, I mean—and I realized how strange it was that this man, this scarred, bitter man, had somehow become the only friend I have. I realized something else, too: how rarely I’d known the touch of another human hand, how much I hungered for it.
“You were a kid, Rob.”
“I know. It’s not my fault.”
“It’s no reason for you to leave, not now, not when we need you. Burton would have you back in a minute. He owes this election to you, he knows that. Come back.”
“Not yet,” I said, “I’m not ready.”
But now, staring out across the upturned faces of the dead as a cold January wind whipped across the Mall, I felt the lure and pull of the old life, sure as gravity. The game, Burton had called it, and it was a game, politics, the biggest Monopoly set in the world and I loved it and for the first time I understood why I loved it. For the first time I understood something else, too: why I had waited years to ring Gwen’s doorbell, why even then it had taken an active effort of will not to turn away. It was the same reason: Because it was a game, a game with clear winners and losers, with rules as complex and arcane as a cotillion, and most of all because it partook so little of the messy turmoil of real life. The stakes seemed high, but they weren’t. It was ritual, that’s all—movement without action, a dance of spin and strategy designed to preserve the status quo. I fell in love with politics because it was safe. You get so involved in pushing your token around the board that you forget the ideals that brought you to the table in the first place. You forget to speak from the heart. Someday maybe, for the right reasons, I’d come back. But not yet.
I must have said it aloud for Lewis suddenly looked over at me. “What?” he asked.
I just shook my head and gazed out over the handful of living people, stirring as the ceremony got underway. The dead waited beyond them, rank upon rank of them with the earth of the grave under their nails and that cold shining in their eyes.
And then I did turn to Lewis. “What do you think they want?” I asked.
Lewis sighed. “Justice, I suppose,” he said.
“And when they have it?”
“Maybe they’ll rest.”
A year has passed, and those words—justice, I suppose—still haunt me. I returned to D.C. in the fall, just as the leaves began turning along the Potomac. Gwen came with me, and sometimes, as I lie wakeful in the shelter of her warmth, my mind turns to the past.
It was Gran that brought me back. The cast had come off in February, and one afternoon in March, Gwen and I stopped by, surprised to see her on her feet. She looked frail, but her eyes glinted with determination as she toiled along the corridors behind her walker.
“Let’s sit down and rest,” I said when she got winded, but she merely shook her head and kept moving.
“Bones knit, Rob,” she told me. “Wounds heal, if you let them.”
>
Those words haunt me, too.
By the time she died in August, she’d moved from the walker to a cane. Another month, her case manager told me with admiration, and she might have relinquished even that. We buried her in the plot where we laid my grandfather to rest, but I never went back after the interment. I know what I would find.
The dead do not sleep.
They shamble in silence through the cities of our world, their bodies slack and stinking of the grave, their eyes coldly ablaze. Baghdad fell in September, vanquished by battalions of revolutionaries, rallying behind a vanguard of the dead. State teems with similar rumors, and CNN is on the story. Unrest in Pyongyang, turmoil in Belgrade.
In some views, Burton’s has been the most successful administration in history. All around the world, our enemies are falling. Yet more and more these days, I catch the president staring uneasily into the streets of Washington, aswarm with zombies. “Our conscience,” he’s taken to calling them, but I’m not sure I agree. They demand nothing of us, after all. They seek no end we can perceive or understand. Perhaps they are nothing more than what we make of them, or what they enable us to make of ourselves. And so we go on, mere lodgers in a world of unpeopled graves, subject ever to the remorseless scrutiny of the dead.
BLOSSOM
by David J. Schow
David J. Schow is a bit of a legend in zombie circles. He’s the author of the notorious story “Jerry’s Kids Meet Wormboy,” as well as several others, which have been collected in Zombie Jam. He’s also the author of the novels The Kill Riff, The Shaft, Bullets of Rain, and Rock Breaks Scissors Cut. His most recent novel is Gun Work, a hard-boiled crime novel due out in November. Schow co-wrote (with John Shirley) the screenplay for The Crow, and has written teleplays for TV shows such as Showtime’s Masters of Horror. As for non-fiction, Schow has authored The Outer Limits: The Official Companion, and a collection of essays called Wild Hairs. He’s also generally considered to be the originator of the term “splatterpunk.”
In Zombie Jam, Schow says: “‘Blossom’ is a simple story, written in a single day, the process beginning with the image of a beautiful nude woman eating flowers, working backward from that image. Along the way it was decided that the incidental background of the story would address the notion of what it was like in the big cities two nights before the spread of the zombie virus made survival the overriding issue.”
“Each of us has a moment,” Quinn told her. “The moment when we shine; that instant when we are at our absolute best. Just as each of us has an aberration, a hidden secret. Some might call it a perversion, though that’s rather a rough word. Crude. Nonspecific. Is it a perversion to do that thing you’re best at, to enjoy your individual moment?”
Amelia nodded vaguely, watching the older man through her glass of Sauvignon Blanc. He was going to answer his own obtuse question, and the answer he had already decided upon was no. It was the puffery that preceded the crunch—was she going to fuck him tonight, or not? She was positive he had already answered that one in his head as well. Dinner had run to ninety-five bucks, not counting the wine or the tip. Dessert had been high-priced, higher-caloried, chocolate, elegant. Cabs had been taken and token gifts dispensed.
She had worked in loan approvals at Columbia Savings for nine months, riding the receptionist’s desk. Older men frequently asked her out. When Quinn invited her to dinner, a weekend date, she had pulled his file, consulted his figures, and said yes. All the girls in the office did it. He drove a Jaguar XJS and was into condo development.
The dinner part had been completed two hours ago. Now it was his place. When your income hit the high six figures there was no such animal as date rape. Amelia had herpes. It was inactive tonight. Best to stay mum; it was like compensation. To her certain knowledge she had never bedded bisexuals or intravenous-drug users, and in truth she feared contracting AIDS in the same unfocused way she feared getting flattened in a crosswalk by a bus. It could happen. But probably not. There was no way in the world either of them could fit a condom over their mouths, so it was academic. Right?
Quinn’s watery gray eyes glinted as he rattled on about aberrations and special moments. Probably the wine. It had gotten to Amelia half an hour ago, a fuzzy vino cloud that put her afloat and permitted her to tune out Quinn’s voice while staring past him, to nod and generate tiny noises of acknowledgment on a schedule that allowed him to believe she was actually listening. She had disconnected and felt just fine. She took a deep, languorous breath keeping him on the far side of her wine glass, and stifled the giggle that welled within her. Oh my yes, she felt nice, adrift on a cumulus pillow of gasified brain cells. She would look past him, through him, in just this way when he was on top of her, grunting and sweating and believing he had seduced her… just as he now believed she was paying attention.
She rewound back to the last utterance she cared to remember and acted upon it. “I have an aberration,” she said. She added a glowing smile and toyed with a long curl of her copper hair. Just adorable.
His interest came full blast, too eager. “Yes? Yes?” He replaced his wine glass on the clear acrylic tabletop and leaned forward to entreat her elucidation.
She played him like a catfish on a hook. “No. It’s silly, really.” Look at my legs, she commanded.
Through the tabletop he watched her legs recross. The whisper of her stockings flushed his face with blood. His brain was giddy, already jumping forward in time, to the clinch. “Please,” he said. His voice was so cultured, his tone so paternal. He was losing control and she could smell it.
She kept a childlike killer smile precisely targeted. “Well. Okay.” She rose, a slim and gracile woman of thirty-four, one who fought hard to keep what she had and had nothing to show for her effort except a stupid airhead bimbo job at Columbia Savings. So much bitterness, there beneath the manner and cosmetics.
There was a tall vase of irises on an antique end table near the fireplace. Firelight mellowed all the glass and Scandinavian chrome in the room and danced in the floor-to-ceiling wraparound windows of Quinn’s eighth-floor eyrie. He kept his gaze on her. The fire was in his eyes as well.
Every inch the coquette, Amelia bit off the delicate chiffon of the iris. Chewed. Swallowed. And smiled.
Quinn’s face grew robust with pleasure. His old man’s eyes cleared.
“Ever since I was a little girl,” she said. “Perhaps because I saw my cat, Sterling, eating grass. I like the flavor. I don’t know. I used to think the flower’s life added to mine.”
“And this is your…” Quinn had to clear his throat. “Aberration. Ah.” He left his chair to close up the distance between them. It became evident that his erection was making him blunder.
Amelia’s eyes dipped to notice, bemused, and she ate another flower. She had made a point of telling Quinn she liked lots of flowers, and he and his Gold Card had come through in rainbow colors. All over the penthouse were long-stemmed roses, carnation bouquets, spring bunches, mums, more.
Quinn found the sight of Amelia chewing the flowers throat-closingly erotic. His voice grew husky and repeated her name. It was time for him to lunge. “Let me show you my specialty. Dear Amelia. My aberration.”
She had been tied up before. So far, no big deal. Quinn used silk scarves to secure her wrists and ankles to the mahogany poles of the four-poster bed. With a long, curved, ebony-handled knife he halved the front of her dress. Into the vanilla highlands of her breasts he mumbled promises of more expensive replacement garments. His hands lost their sophistication and became thick-fingered, in a big masculine hurry, shredding her hose to the knees and groping to see if she was as moist as his fantasies. Then he was thrusting. Amelia rocked and pretended to orgasm. This would be done in a hurry. No big deal.
He withdrew, still hard, saying, “Don’t be afraid.” She had been falling asleep.
She expected him to go for the knife again, to stroke her nipples with its razor edge or tease her nerve endings with mock danger. Inst
ead, he reached into a headboard compartment and brought out a rubber mask festooned with sewn leather and buckles and shiny gold zippers. It almost made her laugh. She protested. The contraption engulfed her head like a thick, too-tight glove. She thought of getting stuck in a pullover sweater, only this material was definitely nonporous. Her lungs felt brief panic until the thing was fully seated and she could gulp air through the nose and mouth slits.
Then Quinn resumed pushing himself into her, his prodding more urgent now. He broke rhythm only to zip the holes in the mask shut.
Fear blossomed loud in her chest, becoming a fireball. She pulled in a final huge draught of air before he zipped the nose shut, and wasted breath making incomprehensible mewling noises against the already-sealed mouth hole. She could not tell him now of her congenital lung problems, that respiration was sometimes a chore. When the weather was wrong, she had to resort to prescription medication just to breathe. It had never come up, all through dinner. They had been too busy with aberrations and prime moments and eating flowers….
All she could feel now was a slow explosion in her chest and the steady pounding down below, in and out. She began to buck and heave, thrashing. Quinn loved every second of it, battering her lustily despite her abrupt lack of lubrication. The friction vanished when he came inside her.
Panting, he lumbered immediately to the bathroom. When he returned, Amelia had not changed position, and he finally noticed she was no longer breathing.
Sometimes it went down this way, he thought. The price of true passion, however aberrant. But she was still moist and poised at the ready, so he opted to have one more go.
He huffed with surprise when she began to squirm beneath him again. He went aahhh and started stroking rigid and slippery in a fast tempo. That was it—she had fainted. Sometimes it went down that way as well—orgasm put them in the Zone for a while. She would awaken on high-burn and come her teeny secretary brains right out.
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