“You’re quiet,” he says.
“So are you.”
“Yeah, but I’m always quiet.”
“I think,” I say, “that if I was a zombie, I wouldn’t want to remember who I was. It’s not like I could go back.”
I sneak a glance at him through the gloom, but this is a new moon night and it’s dark out here in the way that it never is in town. He plows on up the hill, throws back, “When I’m a zombie, will you want to see me?”
“Lion,” I start, but we’re at the top of the hill, climbing back onto our bikes, and I don’t know what I’d meant to say.
Zombies will kill anyone. They’ll eat anybody’s brains. It doesn’t matter if the brains belong to their dad, or their daughter, or their best friend. I don’t know if this means that they don’t remember, or that they do. And if we find the other Emily, it won’t prove anything. But I’ve never seen a zombie before, however hard I’ve looked. Probably it’s best to start with one that I don’t know.
Lion beats me down the hill. He doesn’t do that often, but tonight he’s pushing hard and besides, I rode my brakes. I leave him alone when I get there, dropping my pack to the grass and digging for the flashlight, but Lion says, “Don’t.”
Dark pools like water at the base of the hill. The creek shivers by and a cricket chir-squeaks and I spook, drop the flashlight before I realize that it’s only Lion who’s caught my other hand. “Don’t do that.”
He’s not listening. He’s staring hard into the night, into the shadows under the trees. We could see every star if it wasn’t cloudy, but this is Illinois and it’s always cloudy here when you could use a little light. Night washes the color out of Lion’s face, out of his bright hair and his red shirt. He could already be dead.
If Lion were a zombie, how would I know?
Someone locks the cemetery gates at night. I don’t know who. It doesn’t matter; the fence is barely waist-high and we hop it, iron slick under sweaty palms as we lift ourselves across. Lion steps deftly around headstones that I can’t even see. I thump a knee twice into stone, fall back and follow instead.
The grass is on the long side of short: tended, but ambivalently, so it hides rocks and holes and things to trip me up. I keep one eye on Lion, one on the ground. I reach out as we skirt the headstone, where the grey of grass gives way to the grey of turned-over earth, and dip the tips of my fingers into the carven E.
“Lion,” I say. “Do you think she’s scared?”
He stops, abrupt, and we almost collide. I skip sideways, sinking my shoes into the soft heavy soil of Emily’s grave. I imagine the shiver of bodies moving, the strong twiggy fingerbone grasp on my ankle. But this patch of ground is already disturbed and not only by worms. The zombies can’t grab you if the zombies have already gone.
“When you’re a zombie,” Lion says, “you shouldn’t have to be scared.”
I don’t think of Lion as scared. He’s too steady, too serious, Lion, my friend. He’s braver about dead things than anyone I know. I guess he’d have to be.
You don’t have to run from zombies. You just have to walk at a brisk pace, and maybe zigzag once in a while. You don’t have to run to catch them either. They’re not that fast. But Lion isn’t waiting, or even walking. I’ve never seen him like this.
This isn’t the first time that we’ve chased a zombie. I keep a list in a notebook that lives in my backpack, and Lion keeps one in his head. We can’t be sure that every disturbed grave has a zombie in it. Probably there are ghouls and ghosts and skeletons, like he said. Probably there are vampires. Possibly there are mummies, too. You’d have to go out of your way to mummify anyone, here, which isn’t to say that it couldn’t be done.
But most of them are zombies if they’re anything at all. You can tell from the prints, from the shuffling gait. You can tell from the town. If we were mostly beset by vampires, I think we’d be paler, colder, lonelier. Instead we move slow and try not to think.
I never thought Lion cared. He’s a smart kid, reads a lot, might have been skipped up a grade if he hadn’t missed so much school. But he’s never seemed to mind the town or to mind not leaving it. He thinks the zombies are kind of neat, but he’s only ever chased them because I do.
But tonight I’m not so much chasing as stumbling along behind as he tracks like a hound. We splash through the creek, no time for stepping stones or for taking off shoes. The bank on the other side is steep. The hill above is steeper. I grab onto slender trees for balance and to pull myself up. I lunge and my right shoelace swings with my stride, sticks soggy to my ankle.
At the top it levels out and opens up. The ditch is filled with fireflies and there’s the highway, empty except when the semis pass, swallowing the miles and spitting out exhaust. They say it runs clear to Colorado, two lanes each direction with reflectors in the stripes. I’ve ridden along it going into the city, or with Lion to see a movie or a band, or going to see my mom’s new place in the city, by the new high school that’s supposed to be mine. I’ve ridden along it, up until now, back again.
This is where we lost her trail before. Tonight he doesn’t pause. He lopes across the highway, crashing into the cornfield and I lose him, hear stalks bending, breaking, but the wind is in the corn, and so am I.
I stop. I can see where the corn’s been pushed down where Lion passed, or the zombie girl, or a deer. I can hear the rattle of the stalks and a weird no-cricket stillness and then the wind as it kicks up again. I step deeper into the field and flattened stalks crunch underfoot like so many bones. I’d left my backpack in the cemetery; I hadn’t expected we’d just take off like this. What would I do, if I found the zombie or if the zombie found me? I could, I think, just walk slowly, carefully, back to town.
But I have to be sure that I don’t get grabbed. In this field, in the dark, I can’t know where she is, or if she’s still here at all. Something moves, off to my left, heavier than the wind, and I whisper, “Lion?” because it didn’t matter. If it’s the zombie, she probably already knows that I’m here. I hold my breath.
And let it out, explosive yelp, as Lion yells, more like a scream, ragged and sharp. I turn blindly into the corn, plow through to the tractor path between fields and, “Lion!” I yell. Another creek ahead, path of least resistance and you can’t see color in the dark, but movement, yes. I run. I stop at the top of the bank, Lion in a heap below and behind me a sound, a staggering heavy tread and a retreating break of corn. I gather myself to turn, to chase, and then I don’t. I couldn’t leave Lion behind.
Endings may not be better with zombies. You can’t have a happy ending and zombies both. Even if the hero survives. Even if her friends do, and let’s face it: they don’t. I skid down the bank on stones and loose dirt, catching an old tree to halt my slide. It’s cooler down here. Heat rises. Fog settles in low-slung spots. And Lion shivers, hands around a twisted ankle, dirty face streaked and smudged. Not that he’d admit to tears. Not that I want him to. But I know I can’t ask, “Are you okay?” and so try, “Did you see her?” instead.
He doesn’t answer. He doesn’t seem to hear. Also, did she see him? She shambled away and left us here. I don’t know what that means. Maybe he wasn’t the only one who could follow a trail. Maybe the zombie girl could, too. Then things would change. There’d be riots. Martial law. Boarded-up doors and baseball bats. I’d have to stay. They’d need me here.
But that’s the other problem about endings with zombies: you only win if you cheat. You can run away if there’s only one. You can dodge around two or smash them with a bat. But there are never just one or two zombies. Instead there’s three, or four, or lots, shambling in cornfields or down the street, and it never really works, holing up and hiding out. I wouldn’t bet against a zombie. Not on my life.
Only, it’s a long walk back and an ankle’s a bad thing to hurt and so even if we get that far, Lion won’t be able to bike. “Did she bite you?” I ask, and he shakes his head, “Not yet,” without any more tears, just that side
kick’s resolve in his eye. I swallow hard. I pull him to his feet and I hug him, fierce, say into his chest, “I’m going to miss you.”
Zombies pretend to be about how there are worse things than death. It isn’t true. Being one is an in-between state, and the way out is pretty much what you’d expect. Zombies are about how there are worse things than life.
Lion’s taller than I am and heavier still, but he leans on my shoulder and limps, more than usual, until we’re back by the highway again. We know where we’re going, have purpose and brains. I think we beat the zombie girl there. I break a low branch from a tree at the edge of the fields and Lion takes it from my hands. It’s the best that we can do. He tries a few practice swings, and maybe baseball players know about zombies, too: you don’t drop the bat unless you’re going to run.
But you do run, in the end. That’s how you get away from zombies. You back away a couple of steps. You say goodbye. And then you turn. You run. You don’t look over your shoulder. You don’t zig, because one too many zags puts you back where you began.
You run because zombies are slow but inevitable, and also because they’re right. There are worse things than life, and zombies are better with everything.
HOME DELIVERY
by Stephen King
Stephen King is the best-selling, award-winning author of innumerable classics, including The Shining, Carrie, Cujo, and The Dead Zone. Each of those books has been adapted to film, as have many of King’s other novels and stories. Other projects include editing Best American Short Stories 2007, and his recent collaboration on a musical with rocker John Mellencamp called Ghost Brothers of Darkland County.King’s latest novel, Duma Key, was published in early 2008. A new short fiction collection, Just After Sunset, is due out in November.
Although King is probably the world’s foremost horror writer, he hasn’t frequently explored the subject of zombies in his fiction. His recent novel Cell, however, is about zombies, and of course, there’s this story. Also of possible zombie relevance is King’s novel Pet Sematary; if not zombies per se, it certainly contains zombie-like things.
This story first appeared in Book of the Dead. As with much of King’s fiction, it takes place in a small town in Maine, and using that point of view examines a menacing supernatural horror. And as with much of King’s fiction, it manages to at once be both horrific and affecting.
Considering that it was probably the end of the world, Maddie Pace thought she was doing a good job. Hell of a good job. She thought, in fact, that she just might be coping with the End of Everything better than anyone else on earth. And she was positive she was coping better than any other pregnant woman on earth.
Coping.
Maddie Pace, of all people.
Maddie Pace, who sometimes couldn’t sleep if, after a visit from Reverend Johnson, she spied a single speck of dust under the dining-room table. Maddie Pace, who, as Maddie Sullivan, used to drive her fiancé, Jack, crazy when she froze over a menu, debating entrees sometimes for as long as half an hour.
“Maddie, why don’t you just flip a coin?” he’d asked her once after she had managed to narrow it down to a choice between the braised veal and the lamb chops, and then could get no further. “I’ve had five bottles of this goddam German beer already, and if you don’t make up y’mind pretty damn quick, there’s gonna be a drunk lobsterman under the table before we ever get any food on it!”
So she had smiled nervously, ordered the braised veal, and spent most of the ride home wondering if the chops might not have been tastier, and therefore a better bargain despite their slightly higher price.
She’d had no trouble coping with Jack’s proposal of marriage, however; she’d accepted it—and him—quickly, and with tremendous relief. Following the death of her father, Maddie and her mother had lived an aimless, cloudy sort of life on Little Tall Island, off the coast of Maine. “If I wasn’t around to tell them women where to squat and lean against the wheel,” George Sullivan had been fond of saying while in his cups and among his friends at Fudgy’s Tavern or in the back room of Prout’s Barber Shop, “I don’t know what’n hell they’d do.”
When her father died of a massive coronary, Maddie was nineteen and minding the town library weekday evenings at a salary of $41.50 a week. Her mother minded the house—or did, that was, when George reminded her (sometimes with a good hard shot to the ear) that she had a house which needed minding.
When the news of his death came, the two women had looked at each other with silent, panicky dismay, two pairs of eyes asking the same question: What do we do now?
Neither of them knew, but they both felt—felt strongly—that he had been right in his assessment of them: they needed him. They were just women, and they needed him to tell them not just what to do, but how to do it, as well. They didn’t speak of it because it embarrassed them, but there it was—they hadn’t the slightest clue as to what came next, and the idea that they were prisoners of George Sullivan’s narrow ideas and expectations did not so much as cross their minds. They were not stupid women, either of them, but they were island women.
Money wasn’t the problem; George had believed passionately in insurance, and when he dropped down dead during the tiebreaker frame of the League Bowl-Offs at Big Duke’s Big Ten in Machias, his wife had come into better than a hundred thousand dollars. And island life was cheap, if you owned your place and kept your garden tended and knew how to put by your own vegetables come fall. The problem was having nothing to focus on. The problem was how the center seemed to have dropped out of their lives when George went facedown in his Island Amoco bowling shirt just over the foul line of lane nineteen (and goddam if he hadn’t picked up the spare his team had needed to win, too). With George gone their lives had become an eerie sort of blur.
It’s like being lost in a heavy fog, Maddie thought sometimes. Only instead of looking for the road, or a house, or the village, or just some landmark like that lightning-struck pine out on the point, I am looking for the wheel. If I can ever find it, maybe I can tell myself to squat and lean my shoulder to it.
At last she found her wheel: it turned out to be Jack Pace. Women marry their fathers and men their mothers, some say, and while such a broad statement can hardly be true all of the time, it was close enough for government work in Maddie’s case. Her father had been looked upon by his peers with fear and admiration—“Don’t fool with George Sullivan, dear,” they’d say. “He’ll knock the nose off your face if you so much as look at him wrong.”
It was true at home, too. He’d been domineering and sometimes physically abusive, but he’d also known things to want and work for, like the Ford pick-up, the chainsaw, or those two acres that bounded their place to the south. Pop Cook’s land. George Sullivan had been known to refer to Pop Cook as one armpit-stinky old bastid, but the old man’s aroma didn’t change the fact that there was quite a lot of good hardwood left on those two acres. Pop didn’t know it because he had gone to living across the reach in 1987, when his arthritis really went to town on him, and George let it be known on Little Tall that what that bastid Pop Cook didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him none, and furthermore, he would disjoint the man or woman that let light into the darkness of Pop’s ignorance. No one did, and eventually the Sullivans got the land, and the hardwood on it. Of course the good wood was all logged off inside of three years, but George said that didn’t matter a tinker’s damn; land always paid for itself in the end. That was what George said and they believed him, believed in him, and they worked, all three of them. He said: You got to put your shoulder to this wheel and push the bitch, you got to push ha’ad because she don’t move easy. So that was what they did.
In those days Maddie’s mother had kept a produce stand on the road from East Head, and there were always plenty of tourists who bought the vegetables she grew (which were the ones George told her to grow, of course), and even though they were never exactly what her mother called “the Gotrocks family,” they made out. Even in years when lobstering wa
s bad and they had to stretch their finances even further in order to keep paying off what they owed the bank on Pop Cook’s two acres, they made out.
Jack Pace was a sweeter-tempered man than George Sullivan had ever thought of being, but his sweet temper only stretched so far, even so. Maddie suspected that he might get around to what was sometimes called home correction—the twisted arm when supper was cold, the occasional slap or downright paddling—in time; when the bloom was off the rose, so as to speak. There was even a part of her that seemed to expect and look forward to that. The women’s magazines said marriages where the man ruled the roost were a thing of the past, and that a man who put a hard hand on a woman should be arrested for assault, even if the man in question was the woman in question’s lawful wedded husband. Maddie sometimes read articles of this sort down at the beauty shop, but doubted if the women who wrote them had the slightest idea that places like the outer islands even existed. Little Tall had produced one writer, as a matter of fact—Selena St. George—but she wrote mostly about politics and hadn’t been back to the island, except for a single Thanksgiving dinner, in years.
“I’m not going to be a lobsterman all my life, Maddie,” Jack told her the week before they were married, and she believed him. A year before, when he had asked her out for the first time (she’d said yes almost before all the words could get out of his mouth, and she had blushed to the roots of her hair at the sound of her own naked eagerness), he would have said, “I ain’t going to be a lobsterman all my life.” A small change… but all the difference in the world. He had been going to night school three evenings a week, taking the old Island Princess over and back. He would be dog-tired after a day of pulling pots, but off he’d go just the same, pausing only long enough to shower off the powerful smells of lobster and brine and to gulp two No Doz with hot coffee. After a while, when she saw he really meant to stick to it, Maddie began putting up hot soup for him to drink on the ferry-ride over. Otherwise he would have had nothing but one of those nasty red hot-dogs they sold in the Princess’s snack-bar.
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