Nothing came to him for the longest time. Then he saw Kara North’s mangled hand. The pilot’s severed arm. Buck’s ruined head.
His gut roiled.
He opened his eyes.
The facts seemed irrefutable, but somehow Nathan couldn’t bring himself to leave the compound or, conversely, let the Grimesgirls enter. They were on the beach every night, enjoying themselves, tempting him. Miss November and Miss February sang love songs, serenading Nathan from the wrong side of the glass-encrusted walls. He watched them, smiling his wry smile on the outside, inside despising his cowardice.
He was bored, but he didn’t risk watching television, either. If the networks had returned to the airwaves, he would certainly find himself looking straight into the eyes of living, breathing people, and while he seriously doubted that such a stimulus could trigger the feeding frenzy, he didn’t want to expose himself, just to be on the safe side.
He didn’t want to lose what he had.
So he snorted cocaine and wrote during the day. At night, he watched them. They all came to the beach now, even Teddy Ching. He had no legs; that’s why he’d taken so long to cross the island. But Teddy didn’t let that stop him. He dragged himself along, eagerly pursuing the Grimesgirls, his exposed spine wiggling as happily and uncontrollably as a puppy’s tail. Three cameras were strung around his neck, and he often propped himself against the base of a manchineel tree and photographed the girls as they frolicked on the beach below.
More than anything, Nathan wished that he could develop those pictures. His Grimesgirls were still beautiful. Miss July, her stomach so firm, so empty above a perfect heart-shaped trim. Miss May, her skinless forehead camouflaged with a wreath of bougainvillea and orchids. The rounded breasts of Miss April, sunset bruised and shadowed, the nipples so swollen. The sunken yellow hollows beneath Miss August’s eyes, hot dry circles, twin suns peering from her face with all the power of that wonderful month.
Twin suns in the middle of the night.
She walks in beauty, like the night… in beauty, like the night… of cloudless climes and… starry skies and all that’s best of dark and bright…
And all that’s best of dark and bright…
Nathan couldn’t remember the rest of it. He wrote the words on his yellow pad, over and over, but he couldn’t remember. He closed his eyes, and when he opened them the sea was hard with the flat light of morning.
He hurried inside long before the sunshine kissed the balcony.
The beach was deserted.
PRAIRIE
by Brian Evenson
Brian Evenson is the author of the books Altmann’s Tongue, Contagion, Dark Property, and Father of Lies, among others. In 2005, his collection, The Wavering Knife, won the International Horror Guild Award. Two years later, his novel The Open Curtain was also a finalist, as well as for the Edgar Award. In addition to his own fiction, Evenson has translated the work of others into English, including the novel Electric Flesh by Claro (from the original French). A media tie-in novel, Aliens: No Exit, will be released around the same time as this volume, and Evenson has a new short story collection due out in 2009, called Fugue State.
This story, which originally appeared in the magazine The Silver Web, was inspired by Cabeza de Vaca’s sixteenth century account of crossing North America after being shipwrecked, and Werner Herzog’s movie Aguirre, the Wrath of God which, Evenson says, has a brilliant, mad ending. He says he was interested, too, in thinking about how certain places seem to have a dark but magical quality to them. How zombies entered into it is a mystery, however.
I.
Early evening, still distant from the prairie, we encountered a man with skin flayed half-free of his back. He allowed us to inspect that portion of him, and we saw the underskin, purpled and creased with folds that in their convolution resembled the human brain.
The runds off his back he had tanned and twisted into a belt, which he wore and which our captain tried, unsuccessfully, to purchase of him. When our physician inquired after the particulars of his persecutor, the man answered by unfurling from his rucksack a flapping sheet of skin with a large and hardened callous aswash at one end of it which, upon formal inspection, proved an empty, flavid face.
II.
Our paroch of late has taken to baptizing all we encounter, tallying their particulars on wound scrolls before they are slaughtered. As we walk, he counts the names, phrases aloud before us the petitions he will employ before the Church as, spreading forth his lists of converts, he renders plea for sainthood.
III.
The air is fumid, choking. Near midday we were greeted by a man who made claim to raise the dead. Our captain bared his weapon and lopped the head from Rusk, with whom he has been at odds throughout the voyage, and then bade the man have at his task. The self-appointed Jesus sewed Rusk’s head back onto the frame and then, with shaking fingers, uttered his shallow pronouncements. After ample wait, the captain ordered this fellow’s head struck from his shoulders as well.
We carried the heads spikeshafted and passed onward. Nearing the prairie, they began to mumble, at which we sandsunk their shafts, abandoned them.
IV.
We have reached the prairie, the dead progressing in droves through shackle and quaking grass. We captured one and he was drawn forth with little struggle, falling nearly insensate once raised from the ground. His flesh was dark and stinking. We examined his armature, the way his mouth had been resewn and mandibled. Avelling the membrane lining the chest, we found the internal organs neatly removed, the lower orifices stoppered. With a sleight pressure of his palm, our physician sloughed away the skin that remnanted to the skull, then exposed the upper portion of the braincase by means of a racksaw. The brain had been removed, the emptied interior case showing in its blotchwork signs of siriasis or, as it is commonly called, sideration.
Our physician made severe notes and, when done, asked for the sake of experiment that the body be released. We lowered it to the earth and watched it come animate, stumble away.
V.
During the night, Latour harnessed a dead woman, for we have been long on the road. Devoid of resilience, she came too rapidly asunder beneath his hips. Even with eyes gritted shut he could gain no satisfaction. The paroch refused his confession.
VI.
At times one discovers the living hidden among the dead, the which can be discerned by the color manifest in their flesh, the sentience of their regard. They crouch to the center of a drove, allowing the dead to sweep them along.
One, we managed to capture. When he made pretense of death, the physician pierced him with his instruments until the man could not but grow bloody and roar.
We jointed his limbs, packed them in salt. His eyes shuttered and then opened again, his torso regaining a torpid motion. We watched his body struggle out and away from us. His boxed limbs thumped against the lid, grinding the salt.
VII.
We have consumed the remaining provisions. We eat the living when we ferret them out, and have eaten the horses as well. Still the prairie continues without cease.
The dead prove too festered and rizzared to consume. Instead, we encircle them and employ them as mounts. We tie them by twos front to back and lop free the heads. Sitting on the planed necks and shoulders, we goad them to motion by prodding the forward remnant of the brain’s root.
VIII.
The prairie is subdued in dust and sand, footing given way. The dead are sparser and often balsamated, their armature careful and fresh. There is no sign of who has prepared them.
This morning we saw approaching at some distance a lone figure with a purposiveness that proved him still alive. When he came closer, he was seen to be slung with a large sack, groaning beneath its weight.
He attempted flight, but mounted athwart the dead we soon rode him down. Dropping the sack, he murdered Latour and Broch before being killed himself.
We struck a fire and ate what we could of the newly dead, then slit back the sac
k. Inside were two gray and curled women who stumbled away when released. We rode them down and coupled them severally. Later, we directed their movement by ropes slung about their necks. Later still, we ate their fleshly portions.
IX.
There is no water, no matter how deep we dig. All provision is gone, the dead here shot through with venom so that upon consuming them we die ourselves. Our paroch is mad and wandering. Our physician is dead, and all the others dead too but for five of us.
The physician pursues us with a sentience we have hitherto disallowed the dead. We awoke last morning to find him astraddle the captain, whom he had killed, consuming the fellow’s face. We dragged the physician off, breaking his legs and plucking free his eyes to hinder further pursuit on his behalf. We broke the captain’s legs as well.
There is some discouragement among the men who remain. Yet I have urged them to push forward, and for the instant they comply.
X.
This midday a glister at some distance and the movement of far figures like lice. We rode forward and found there what I must deem a templature for preparing the corpse, hastily abandoned, the heaped organs on its surface still spongy with blood.
I have examined the apparatus at length but can make nothing of it, nor of its functioning, though it has in my awkwardness contrived to lay bare my palm to the bone. The others, seeing my fate, destroyed the device before I could query it further.
XI.
My injured palm swells. I am without water, food. Save myself, the remainder of the party have returned, hoping to reach the edge of the prairie before dying. I have opted to continue, hoping to strive to the center and whatever is established there, if center there be.
There is no satisfaction anywhere. I wander among the dead, awaiting the moment when I shall pass imperceptibly from the stumbling of the living into the stumbling of the dead.
Avaunt.
EVERYTHING IS BETTER WITH ZOMBIES
by Hannah Wolf Bowen
Hannah Wolf Bowen’s fiction has appeared in Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Polyphony 6, Fantasy Magazine, Strange Horizons, Abyss & Apex, Ideomancer, The Fortean Bureau, and Alchemy. She is also currently one of the fiction editors of Chiaroscuro, a webzine devoted to dark fiction.
“Everything Is Better with Zombies” began as a joke. “I had a list of things that everything was better with,” Bowen says. “Monkeys was on the list. Also, pirates. One day in the summer of 2004, I was in a chatroom with several writer friends and I said (for reasons not clear to me now), ‘Everything is better with zombies,’ and then thought, ‘Hmm.’ One of those writer friends, I believe, challenged me to make a story out of it, and so I did.”
The story deals with the idea of loyalty, and with the question of what you do when what seems like the loyal, faithful thing conflicts with what’s the right thing for you. But when it came to researching the story, Bowen just googled a bunch of zombie facts and played a lot of Resident Evil.
Everything would be better with zombies. Take my junior high school graduation. Everything would have been better if zombies had shuffled in to “Pomp and Circumstance.” They would have lurched into the gym, devoured the principal’s brains, and shuffled out again.
There were no zombies at graduation. We walked in line. We took our seats. Living dead.
I’ve long suspected that I might be a zombie. If I were a zombie, how would I know? I study scary and not-scary movies. I read books. I play the relevant video games until my thumbs ache and my eyes grow tired and dry.
My best friend Lionel says that he would know. “You’d walk,” he says, and demonstrates, shambling gait and arms draped in the air. He lists left, which helps to make it work, but Lion’s walked badly for a while now. He’s not doing it for effect. “And you’d go ‘Braaains!’ and everyone would run away.”
Lion scowls and sits down beside me on the crumbly step. He picks at the grass growing up through the cracks. He would be out of luck, if it came to running from the zombies.
Besides, he’s described half the town. If I were a zombie, I don’t believe Lion would know.
There are lots of ways to end up with a zombie. You can start with a dead person, or you can start with a live one, or you can start with a live one and turn him undead. That’s part of what makes it so confusing. I know what a zombie is supposed to be like, but I could be wrong.
I spend my days reading up at the library instead of packing for the move. Late afternoon, I ride my bike past the stoplight to the hardware store where Lion works. He fetches his bike from the alley and we pedal, not talking, up the road, across the tracks, and out of town.
If we lived other than where we do, maybe we could explore. Turn left instead of right. Ride a little further than ever before. Or keep going through the cornfield that’s grown up tall, bumpity-bump to the other side with the wind around us like the sea.
But we live where we live and we have all our lives up until now, and the other side of the cornfield looks a lot like this one. So we stand on the pedals and creak up Salt Hill, then over the spray-painted bridge to gravel-topped Strawberry Road, which curves sharp to the left and down and if you’re not careful, you’ll fly off into the air with the creek down below. I almost did, the first times that we came this way, and then some other times later when I thought I knew how to ride it, but was wrong.
I have it now. I lean and the bike swings left beneath me, and Lion yells but his words are shredded by the wind. I coast all the way down to the cemetery, and there I stop.
You can make a zombie with a disease. You can make a zombie with a potion. You can make a zombie with the right chants and voodoo charms. You may be able to make a zombie in other ways, too. It’s hard to be sure.
What we can be sure of is that some of the graves in the cemetery aren’t as neat as they ought to be. The town isn’t all that big. You’d expect that we’d know everyone, and you’d be right. But sometimes we find headstones we haven’t found before and Lion lingers to read them over and over aloud.
I head down to the creek because the cemetery is a lot like the town and barring unexpected headstones, I know every corner by heart. So I sit on the muddy bank on a rock or on a fallen log and listen to the creek go splish-splashity by.
I see the footprint there. I’m still studying it when Lion comes up, muttering, “Emily Fitzhugh, ’87 to—what’s that?”
He spots the footprint right away. It’s hard to miss. The water is edged in mud, speckled with raccoon fingerprints. But this print is in a smooth empty spot and clear as if I’d stamped it there just now. One left footprint, deeper at the ball of the foot and the toes, like she stepped down from the grassy tree-shaded bank, dropped and sank, pushed off against the yielding muck and landed her right foot in the creek, or on a stepping stone.
“Not me,” I say. “Do you think it’s Emily?” But my name is Emily, too.
Lion gives me a hand up, long chilly fingers wrapping my wrist. I kick off my sneakers and pick my way through the mud to the stepping stones, cool and rough beneath my toes. I crouch down, teetering, to examine the others ahead. There’s another print, imperfect, rubber stamp in need of ink. And on the far bank grass, a smudge of mud on a flattened dandelion. I stand and wave to Lion. “She went this way.”
“You don’t know that she’s a zombie,” Lion says as we walk our bikes back up Salt Hill. The side that sweeps down to the cemetery is steep and we’ve no momentum to carry us up. Instead, we’ll trudge to the top of the hill and remount there. “She could be a ghoul or a ghost or a skeleton. We could’ve made her up.”
“You saw the footprint,” I remind him. “We didn’t make her up.” We’d followed the trail to the highway. We’d paced along the shoulder, searching for the spot where she’d stepped back off the road. We hadn’t found anything. But even Lion had agreed that the print by the creek was beautifully clear. “And if she’d been a skeleton, it would have just been bone. And ghosts wouldn’t leave any prints at all.”
> “They might,” Lion says, “if they were acting out their deaths.”
I shrug. “But a ghoul—”
“You don’t know she’s a zombie. You don’t know she’s dead at all.”
I blink up at Lion and into the sun. It’s sinking now behind the top of the hill, though it’ll be above us still on the way down. Interrupting is an unLion-like thing to do and he’s scowling, staring hard ahead, and so I’m thrown. “Yeah,” I agree at last. “But what kind of freak goes barefoot in a cemetery?”
Lion slants a glance at my sneakers where they hang, laces bound to the handlebars. I shrug again, and he laughs.
Jokes may not be better with zombies. The problem about jokes with zombies is that they all have the same punch line. It all comes down to brains.
Sometimes I wish the rest of life was more like jokes about zombies. But maybe it is. Lion went up to see his doctors today and so I skip Amanda’s end-of-the-summer party, sit out on the porch and count fireflies and pretend not to hear my dad saying we’ll have to hit the road soon, to get me to my mom’s new place before school starts up there. Later, there’s bike tire whir on pavement. Lion coasts to a stop in the porchlight, panting hard. I offer him my lemonade and ask, “What do zombies want with brains?”
“Maybe they’re jealous.” But he says it like he’s not quite paying attention and it’s been, I guess, a not-so-good day. “When you’re a zombie,” he begins, “do you remember who you were?”
I take my lemonade glass back and set it with a thunk down on the porch steps. I fetch my bike and my pack from the side of the house. We ride slowly down the street and my pack lies close against my back and even coasting where I can, my shirt grows sticky with sweat. Over the tracks and out of town and up the hill. We don’t have much momentum. Lion seems tired. We dismount and walk the bikes towards the top.
The Living Dead Page 30