The Living Dead

by John Joseph Adams

  Melanie got behind the wheel of the Audi and took off, hoping that some innate psychic sense would take her to the person that brought her back from the grave.

  It didn’t. She took out her cell phone and dialed 411.

  “Hello, can you give me the name of a necromancer?” she asked the operator.

  “I’m sorry, we don’t have that listing.”

  “Try surrounding cities, anything in Los Angeles County,” Melanie said. She’d never heard of someone looking up necromancers in the yellow pages, but there were apparently a lot of things she’d never heard of which existed.

  “Sorry, ma’am. Nothing.”

  “How about ‘witch-doctor’?” she asked.

  “I’m sorry, we don’t have that—” The phone flew out of her hand and her already damaged face smacked the steering wheel.

  Melanie touched her face, and her hand came away sticky. Steam rose from the front of her car, the hood crumpled into an M. Great, that was just what she needed, to rear-end someone. The little Geo Metro ahead of her had also been crumpled, its frame bent around the base of the tire.

  Well, at least it wasn’t an expensive car.

  And it was her fault. She used to make calls while driving all the time, but now that she was decomposing, her reflexes had slipped.

  She pulled her car to a gas station on the other side of the intersection.

  “My baby! You hurt my baby!” The other driver had neglected her car in the intersection and walked towards Melanie, despite the fact that traffic whizzed by them.

  Melanie didn’t see a car seat in the other vehicle, but a bat-eared Chihuahua’s head peered out of the woman’s arms, and she realized the woman was talking about her dog.

  How ridiculous. The woman had been in a car accident, just survived it, and she was worried about her stupid pet?

  “I’m going to sue! My baby has whiplash!” The woman shook the dog at Melanie’s side window to demonstrate. “Do you hear me? Whiplash!”

  Melanie turned the engine off and fumbled on the floorboards for her cell phone. She’d hoped she’d be able to get out of this without calling the cops, but that didn’t look like it was going to happen. She put on her sunglasses, unbuckled her seat belt, and opened the door.

  “Eww!” the woman said audibly, as if Melanie stunk like old garbage. She put her hands to her nose, except she was still holding the dog, so it went too.

  Melanie decided she didn’t like the Chihuahua woman. True, she hadn’t had a shower in a few days, but the woman was rude. “Get your car out of the road, so you don’t block traffic.”

  “Oh, my God,” the woman said, in a horrified gasp. “Your face!”

  “What?” Melanie wrenched the rear view mirror to inspect herself. The steering wheel had torn flesh away from her forehead, exposing bone. She almost cried. Her beautiful face, gashed open. Make-up wouldn’t fix that.

  Her lip started to quiver, and her throat closed up as if she were about to sob. She had known this would happen someday—she was finally losing her looks.

  The Chihuahua wriggled out of its owner’s grasp and scampered forward, its bark like the bark of a real dog played at 78rpm. When it reached Melanie’s leg, it chomped into her lower calf, shaking its head back and forth until it tore off a chunk. The rat-dog sank its teeth in, gnawing as though it had found a delectable morsel.

  “Bitsy! Bitsy, stop it!” The woman picked up her Chihuahua and pulled the piece of flesh out of its mouth. “That’s dirty, don’t eat that.”

  “Dirty!” Melanie wailed. That was it. She wasn’t going to deal with this bitch’s problems. Rat-dog woman would have to deal with the mess herself. “Screw you!”

  She stormed off, crossing the street without even bothering to look for traffic. Cars screeched and honked, one missing her by inches, but she didn’t care. Peace and quiet, though…

  Oh, and to find whoever had raised her from the dead, but since there weren’t any warlocks in her social circle, there was the horrifying possibility that it was an old boyfriend from high school or someone she barely even knew, but whoever it was, he could find her on his own.

  She was done with living people. The living were so rude, so… judgmental about the least bit of decay.

  She looked around, getting her bearings. She’d started driving without any goal in mind, and realized she’d driven north of Van Nuys, not too far from where she’d lived as a child. Hills rose ahead of her. She and her sister used to climb to the top of those hills to see the sunset when they were younger.

  She took the crow’s path, cutting across lawns and parking lots and once over a chain-link fence despite a “No Trespassing” sign. What was the point of following city ordinances when you weren’t even obeying the laws of nature?

  Flesh was falling off faster now. She’d been buried more than a week earlier, after all, and the temperatures had to be in the nineties. Flies clustered around her wound, each carrying off a small mouthful. She thought of them as lightening her load.

  The tendons in her legs weren’t working as well as they had, and her gait slowed to a weary shuffle, but since she didn’t have to sleep or rest or eat (though she wouldn’t have minded a glass of wine) she was able to travel all afternoon and through the night. She didn’t mind.

  By dawn she’d reached far enough up the hill that she could see pinkish light creep over the town. She carefully sat down, her back against the concrete support of a power line, and watched the sun rise.

  Time ceased to have meaning. The sun rose and set, animals carried on their daily business, and the trees got older. Her flesh rotted away, her skin and eyes dried and shrunk, and her lips pulled back. Her hair stayed blonde, her teeth were still white and straight, and her breasts still defied gravity (those silicone implants would last forever) but she didn’t care much about that any more.

  She’d grown lazy and peaceful, now that she didn’t have anyone to impress. Whatever magic animated her left her able to think and see, even without eyes and a brain. On the day her sister hiked up the hill, she was still able to wave.

  Jessica was boyishly thin and dirty, hair hanging around her face in walnut-colored dreadlocks. She had loose cargo pants, a tiny tank top, and a haversack made of Guatemalan fabric with Peace Corp written on it. Her neck was hung with bone and shell beads strung on thongs, and she had lines on her face even though she was only in her mid-thirties. She was more beautiful than anything.

  Jessica sat down next to her gracefully, not winded from the climb up the hill.

  “Oh, my God,” Jess whispered. “I am so, so sorry.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “No, I mean it. When I came back for the funeral, I had no idea. I mean, it was such a shock for me that you died in the first place, what with you being so young, and I completely forgot about the shaman. I’m sorry.”

  “Really, Jessica, it’s okay.”

  “You can yell, it’s okay, I deserve it. You must be so mad at me.”

  “No. I’m not mad. I’m happy.” Jess was the only one who had been nice to Melanie since she died. How could she yell at someone who apologized to a corpse? “What happened?”

  “It was this shaman, see, at least, he said he was a shaman, and he asked me if I wanted to live forever.” Jess sat cross-legged with her elbows on her knees, as though she were used to sitting on the ground. “I said no, but my sister would, because you once said you were more afraid of getting old than anything else. It was kind of a joke.”

  Melanie waited for the rest of the story, but Jess stopped and leaned back. Melanie belatedly realized she’d been too silent. “Go on.”

  “I thought he was kidding. He was kind of drunk, you know? And then as soon as I got home from the funeral, I got an email from you, and then from Brandon, saying that you’d been wandering around scaring people, and I realized I’d really screwed things up. It took a month or so before I could get my visa sorted out and come back to the States again, or I would have been here earlier.” J
ess sighed. “I’m so sorry. It must have been horrible for you.”

  “No, not bad.” Melanie said. It was getting harder to talk now that she didn’t have lips. “Happens to everyone.”

  Jess pulled one of the bead and bone necklaces off. She laid it on the ground beside Melanie’s bony hand. “I got him to give me this. This will let you die the second time, when you’re ready.” She kissed Melanie on the skull.

  “Thanks,” Melanie said. She didn’t reach for the necklace yet, since she had all the time in the world. “But I’m going to enjoy the view for a while.”

  DEAD LIKE ME

  by Adam-Troy Castro

  Adam-Troy Castro is the author of the novel Emissaries from the Dead—an interstellar murder mystery, not a zombie novel, despite the title. He’s also written three Spider-Man novels and a pop culture book called My Ox is Broken! about the television show The Amazing Race. His short fiction has appeared in such magazines as The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Science Fiction Age, Analog, Cemetery Dance, and in a number of anthologies. His work has been nominated for several awards, including the Hugo, Nebula, and Stoker.

  “Dead Like Me” is a set of instructions, to a hapless protagonist, about how to survive the zombie plague by joining it. The question that prompted it was: Zombies don’t breathe, so how do they track their victims? “Certainly not by scent,” Castro says. “If not by scent, how? If we know the method, can we fool them? And from there I got to: What will it cost?”

  So. Let’s summarize. You held out for longer than anybody would have ever dreamed possible. You fought with strength you never knew you had. But in the end it did you no damned good. There were just too many of the bastards. The civilization you believed in crumbled; the help you waited for never arrived; the hiding places you cowered in were all discovered; the fortresses you built were all overrun; the weapons you scrounged were all useless; the people you counted on were all either killed or corrupted; and what remained of your faith was torn raw and bleeding from the shell of the soft complacent man you once were. You lost. Period. End of story. No use whining about it. Now there’s absolutely nothing left between you and the ravenous, hollow-eyed forms of the Living Dead.

  Here’s your Essay Question: How low are you willing to sink to survive?

  Answer:

  First, wake up in a dark, cramped space that smells of rotten meat. Don’t wonder what time it is. It doesn’t matter what time it is. There’s no such thing as time anymore. It’s enough that you’ve slept, and once again managed to avoid dreaming.

  That’s important. Dreaming is a form of thinking. And thinking is dangerous. Thinking is something the Living do, something the Dead can’t abide. The Dead can sense where it’s coming from, which is why they were always able to find you, back when you used to dream. Now that you’ve trained yourself to shuffle through the days and nights of your existence as dully and mindlessly as they do, there’s no reason to hide from them anymore. Oh, they may curl up against you as you sleep (two in particular, a man and woman handcuffed together for some reason you’ll never know, have crawled into this little alcove with you), but that’s different: that’s just heat tropism. As long as you don’t actually think, they won’t eat you.

  Leave the alcove, which is an abandoned storage space in some kind of large office complex. Papers litter the floor of the larger room outside; furniture is piled up against some of the doors, meaning that sometime in the distant past Living must have made their last stands here. There are no bones. There are three other zombies, all men in the ragged remains of three-piece suits, lurching randomly from one wall to the other, changing direction only when they hit those walls, as if they’re blind and deaf and this is the only way they know how to look for an exit.

  If you reach the door quickly they won’t be able to react in time to follow you.

  Don’t Remember.

  Don’t Remember your name. Only the Living have names.

  Don’t Remember you had a wife named Nina, and two children named Mark and Kathy, who didn’t survive your flight from the slaughterhouse Manhattan had become. Don’t Remember them; any of them. Only the Living have families.

  Don’t Remember that as events herded you south you wasted precious weeks combing the increasing chaos of rural Pennsylvania for your big brother Ben, who lived in Pittsburgh and had always been so much stronger and braver than you. Don’t Remember your childish, shellshocked hope that Ben would be able to make everything all right, the way he had when you were both growing up with nothing. Don’t Remember gradually losing even that hope, as the enclaves of Living grew harder and harder to find.

  The memories are part of you, and as long as you’re still breathing, they’ll always be there if you ever decide you need them. It will always be easy to call them up in all their gory detail. But you shouldn’t want to. As long as you remember enough to eat when you’re hungry, sleep when you’re tired, and find warm places when you’re cold, you know all you need to know, or ever will need to know. It’s much simpler that way.

  Anything else is just an open invitation to the Dead.

  Walk the way they walk: dragging your right foot, to simulate tendons that have rotted away; hanging your head, to give the impression of a neck no longer strong enough to hold it erect; recognizing obstructions only when you’re in imminent danger of colliding with them. And though the sights before you comprise an entire catalogue of horrors, don’t ever react.

  Only the Living react.

  This was the hardest rule for you to get down pat, because part of you, buried deep in the places that still belong to you and you alone, has been screaming continuously since the night you first saw a walking corpse rip the entrails from the flesh of the Living. That part wants to make itself heard. But that’s the part which will get you killed. Don’t let it have its voice.

  Don’t be surprised if you turn a corner, and almost trip over a limbless zombie inching its way up the street on its belly. Don’t be horrified if you see a Living person trapped by a mob of them, about to be torn to pieces by them. Don’t gag if one of the Dead brushes up against you, pressing its maggot-infested face up close against your own.

  Remember: Zombies don’t react to things like that. Zombies are things like that.

  Now find a supermarket that still has stuff on the shelves. You can if you look hard enough; the Dead arrived too quickly for the Living to loot everything there was. Pick three or four cans off the shelves, cut them open, and eat whatever you find inside. Don’t care whether they’re soup, meat, vegetables, or dog food. Eat robotically, tasting nothing, registering nothing but the moment when you’re full. Someday, picking a can at random, you may drink some drain cleaner or eat some rat poison. Chance alone will decide when that happens. But it won’t matter when it does. Your existence won’t change a bit. You’ll just convulse, fall over, lie still a while, and then get up, magically transformed into one of the zombies you’ve pretended to be for so long. No fuss, no muss. You won’t even have any reason to notice it when it happens. Maybe it’s already happened.

  After lunch, spot one of the town’s few other Living people shuffling listlessly down the center of the street.

  You know this one well. When you were still thinking in words you called her Suzie. She’s dressed in clothes so old they’re rotting off her back. Her hair is the color of dirty straw, and hideously matted from weeks, maybe months of neglect. Her most striking features are her sunken cheekbones and the dark circles under her gray unseeing eyes. Even so, you’ve always been able to tell that she must have been remarkably pretty, once.

  Back when you were still trying to fight The Bastards—they were never “zombies” to you, back then; to you they were always The Bastards—you came very close to shooting Suzie’s brains out before you realized that she was warm, and breathing, and alive. You saw that though she was just barely aware enough to scrounge the food and shelter that kept her warm and breathing, she was otherwise almost completely catatonic
.

  She taught you it was possible to pass for Dead.

  She’s never spoken a word to you, never smiled at you, never once greeted you with anything that even remotely resembled human feeling. But in the new world she’s the closest thing you have to a lover. And as you instinctively cross the street to catch her, you should take some dim, distant form of comfort in the way she’s also changed direction to meet you.

  Remember, though: she’s not really a lover. Not in the proper emotional sense of the word. The Dead hate love even more than they hate Thought. Only the Living love. But it’s quite safe to fuck, and as long as you’re here the two of you can fuck quite openly. Just like the Dead themselves do.

  Of course, it’s different with them. The necessary equipment is the first thing that rots away. But instinct keeps prodding them to try. Whenever some random cue rekindles the urge, they pick partners, and rub against each other in a clumsy, listless parody of sex that sometimes continues until both partners have been scraped into piles of carrion powder. The ultimate dry hump.

  So feel no fear. It doesn’t attract their attention when you and Suzie grab each other and go for a quickie in the middle of the street: to knead your hands against the novelty of warm skin, to smell stale sweat instead of the open grave, to take a rest from the horror that the world has become. Especially since, though you both do what you have to do, following all the mechanics of the act, neither one of you feels a damn thing. No affection, no pleasure, and certainly no joy.

  That would be too dangerous.

  Do what you have to do. Do it quickly. And then take your leave of each other. Exchange no kisses, no goodbyes, no cute terms of endearment, no acknowledgement that your tryst was anything but a collision between two strangers walking in opposite directions. Just stagger away without looking back. Maybe you’ll see each other again. Maybe not. It really doesn’t matter either way.