Spend the next few hours wandering from place to place, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, accomplishing nothing. But still drawing breath. Never forget that. Let the part of you still capable of caring about such things count that as a major victory.
At mid-afternoon pass the place where a school bus lies burned and blackened on one side. A small group of Living had trusted it to carry them to safety somewhere outside the city; but it didn’t even get five blocks through the obstacle course of other crashed vehicles before hundreds of Dead had imprisoned them in a cage of groping flesh. You were a block and a half away, watching the siege, and when the people in the bus eventually blew themselves up, to avoid a more horrific end, the heat of the fireball singed the eyebrows from your face. At the time, you’d felt it served you right for not helping. These days, if you were capable of forming an opinion on anything, you’d feel that the Living were silly bastards.
It’s stupid to resist. Only the Living resist. Resistance implies will, and if there’s one thing the Dead don’t have it’s will. Exist the way they do, dully accepting everything that happens to you, and you stand a chance.
That’s the one major reason your brother Ben is dead. Oh, you can’t know what happened to him. You know what happened to your wife and kids—you know because you were watching, trapped behind a chain-link fence, as a lurching mob of what had once been elementary school children reduced them to shredded beef—but you’ll never ever find out what happened to Ben. Still, if you ever did find out what happened to him, you would not be surprised. Because he’d always been a leader. A fighter. He’d always taken charge of every crisis that confronted him, and inspired others with his ability to carry them through. He was always special, that way. And when the Dead rose, he brought a whole bunch of naive trusting people down into his grave with him.
You, on the other hand, were never anything special. You were always a follower, a yes-man, an Oreo. You were always quick to kiss ass, and agree with anybody who raised his voice loudly enough. You never wanted to be anything but just another face in the crowd. And though this profited you well, in a society that was merely going to hell, it’s been your single most important asset in the post-plague world that’s already arrived there. It’s the reason you’re still breathing when all the brave, heroic, defiant, mythic ones like your brother Ben and the people in the school bus are just gnawed bones and Rorschach stains on the pavement.
Take pride in that. Don’t pass too close to the sooty remains of the school bus, because you might remember how you stood downwind of their funeral pyre, letting it bathe your skin and fill your lungs with the ashes of their empty defiance. You might remember the cooked-meat, burnt rubber stench… the way the clouds billowed over you, and through you, as if you were far more insubstantial than they.
Don’t let that happen. You’ll attract Dead from blocks away. Force it back. Expunge it. Pretend it’s not there. Turn your mind blank, your heart empty, and your soul, for lack of a better word, Dead.
There. That’s better.
Still later that afternoon, while rummaging through the wreckage of a clothing store for something that will keep you warm during the rapidly approaching winter, you find yourself cornered and brutally beaten by the Living.
This is nothing to concern yourself with.
It’s just the price you have to pay, for living in safety the way you do. They’re just half-mad from spending their lives fleeing one feeding frenzy or another, and they have to let off some steam. It’s not like they’ll actually kill you, or hurt you so bad you’ll sicken and die. At least not deliberately. They may go too far and kill you accidentally, but they won’t kill you deliberately. There are already more than enough Dead people running around, giving them trouble. But they hate you. They consider people like you and Suzie traitors. And they wouldn’t be able to respect themselves if they didn’t let you know it.
There are four of them, this time: all pale, all in their late teens, all wearing the snottily evil grins of bullies whose chosen victim has detected their approach too late. The closest one is letting out slack from a coil of chain at his side. The chain ends in a padlock about the size of a fist. And though you try to summon your long-forgotten powers of speech, as their blows rain against your ribs, it really doesn’t matter. They already know what you would say.
Don’t beg.
Don’t fight back.
Don’t see yourself through their eyes.
Just remember: the Living might be dangerous, but the Dead are the real bastards.
It’s later. You’re in too much pain to move. That’s all right. It’ll go away, eventually. One way or the other. Alive or dead, you’ll be up on your feet in no time.
Meanwhile, just lie there, in your own stink, in the wreckage of what used to be a clothing store, and for Christ’s sake be quiet. Because only the Living scream.
Remember that time, not long after the Dead rose, when there were always screams? No matter how far you ran, how high you climbed or how deep you dug, there were always the screams, somewhere nearby, reminding you that though you might have temporarily found a safe haven for the night, there were always others who had found their backs against brick walls. Remember how you grew inured to those screams, after a while, and even found yourself able to sleep through them. And as the weeks turned to months, you found your tolerance rewarded—because the closer the number of survivors approached zero, the more that constant backdrop of screaming faded away to a long oppressive silence broken only by the low moans and random shuffling noises of the Dead.
It’s a quiet world, now. And if you’re to remain part of it, you’re going to have to be quiet too. Even if your throat catches fire and your breath turns as ragged as sandpaper and your sweat pools in a puddle beneath you and your ribs scrape together every time you draw a breath and the naked mannequins sharing this refuge with you take on the look of Nina and Mark and Kathy and Ben and everybody else who ever mattered to you and the look on their faces becomes one of utter disgust and you start to hear their voices saying that you’re nothing and that you were always nothing but that they’d never known you were as much as a nothing as you’ve turned out to be. Shut up. Even if you want to tell them, these people who once meant everything to you, that you held on as long as any normal man could be expected to hold on, but there are limits, and you exceeded those limits, you really did, but there was just another set of limits beyond them, and another beyond those, and the new world kept making all these impossible demands on you and there were only so many impossible things you could bear. Be silent. Even if you hear Nina shrieking your name and Mark telling you he’s afraid and Kathy screaming for you to save her. Even if you hear Ben demanding that you stand up like a man, for once.
Endure the pain. Ignore the fever. Don’t listen to what your family is trying to tell you.
Why should you listen to their advice? It didn’t help them.
No, this is what you should keep in mind, while you’re waiting to see if you’ll live or die:
On the off-chance you are still alive when you stumble to your feet tomorrow, don’t look at the fitting mirror on the wall behind you. It’s the first intact mirror you’ve encountered in months. Nothing unusual about that, of course: there just isn’t much unshattered glass left in the world these days. But the looters and the rioters and the armies and the Living Dead have left this particular mirror untouched, and though it’s horrendously discolored by dust, it still works well enough to destroy you.
If you don’t look at it you’ll be okay.
If you do look at it you’ll see the matted blood in your tangled shoulder-length hair and the flies crawling in your long scraggly beard and the prominent ribs and the clothes so worn they exist only as strips of rags and the dirt and the sores and the broken nose and the swollen mouth and the closed slit that was until recently your left eye and you’ll realize that this is as close to being Dead as you can get without actually being there, and that it sucks, and you’l
l be just in the right frame of mind, after your long night of delirium, to want to do something about it.
And you’ll stagger out into the street, where the Dead will be milling about doing nothing the way they always do and you’ll be in the center of them and you’ll be overcome with a sudden uncontrollable anger and you’ll open your mouth as wide as you can and you’ll scream: “Hey!”
And the Dead will freeze in something very much resembling a double-take and slowly swivel in your direction and if you really wanted to you could bury everything burning you up inside down where it was only a minute ago and you won’t want to and you’ll scream “Hey!” again, in a voice that carries surprisingly far for something that hasn’t been used in so long, and the Dead will start coming for you, and you won’t care because you’ll be screaming “You hear me, you stinking bastards? I’m alive! I think and I feel and I care and I’m better than you because you’ll never have that again!”
And you’ll die in agony screaming the names of everybody you used to love.
This may be what you want.
And granted, you will go out convinced you’ve just won a moral victory.
But remember, only the Living bother with such things; the Dead won’t even be impressed. They’ll just be hungry.
And if you let yourself die, then within minutes what’s left of you will wake up hungry too, with only one fact still burning in its poor rotting skull: that Suzie’s faking.
ZORA AND THE ZOMBIE
by Andy Duncan
Andy Duncan’s fiction has appeared in magazines such as Asimov’s Science Fiction, Realms of Fantasy, Conjunctions, Weird Tales, and SCI FICTION, and in anthologies such as Starlight 1, Eclipse One, Mojo: Conjure Stories, and Wizards. Much of his short fiction has been collected in Beluthahatchie and Other Stories, which won the World Fantasy Award. Duncan won the World Fantasy Award, again, for his story “The Pottawatomie Giant” and won the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for “The Chief Designer.” He also co-edited (with F. Brett Cox) the anthology Crossroads: Tales of the Southern Literary Fantastic. When not writing, Duncan teaches in the Honors College of the University of Alabama and works as a senior editor at a business-to-business magazine.
This story was a finalist for both the Stoker and Nebula awards. It was also reprinted in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, and in that volume, Duncan is quoted as saying that he’d been inspired by the work of Zora Neale Hurston for years, but that this story was the first time he’d attempted to write about her. “I marvel that many readers, judging from their comments, never heard of Hurston,” he says. “Had I realized beforehand that this story would be many readers’ introduction to her I wouldn’t have dared write it.”
“What is the truth?” the houngan shouted over the drums. The mambo, in response, flung open her white dress. She was naked beneath. The drummers quickened their tempo as the mambo danced among the columns in a frenzy. Her loose clothing could not keep pace with her kicks, swings and swivels. Her belt, shawl, kerchief, dress floated free. The mambo flung herself writhing onto the ground. The first man in line shuffled forward on his knees to kiss the truth that glistened between the mambo’s thighs.
Zora’s pencil point snapped. Ah, shit. Sweat-damp and jostled on all sides by the crowd, she fumbled for her penknife and burned with futility. Zora had learned just that morning that the Broadway hoofer and self-proclaimed anthropologist Katherine Dunham, on her Rosenwald fellowship to Haiti—the one that rightfully should have been Zora’s—not only witnessed this very truth ceremony a year ago, for good measure underwent the three-day initiation to become Mama Katherine, bride of the serpent god Damballa—the heifer!
* * *
Three nights later, another houngan knelt at another altar with a platter full of chicken. People in the back began to scream. A man with a terrible face flung himself through the crowd, careened against people, spread chaos. His eyes rolled. The tongue between his teeth drooled blood. “He is mounted!” the people cried. “A loa has made him his horse.” The houngan began to turn. The horse crashed into him. The houngan and the horse fell together, limbs entwined. The chicken was mashed into the dirt. The people moaned and sobbed. Zora sighed. She had read this in Herskovitz, and in Johnson too. Still, maybe poor fictional Tea Cake, rabid, would act like this. In the pandemonium she silently leafed to the novel section of her notebook. “Somethin’ got after me in mah sleep, Janie,” she had written. “Tried tuh choke me tuh death.”
Another night, another compound, another pencil. The dead man sat up, head nodding forward, jaw slack, eyes bulging. Women and men shrieked. The dead man lay back down and was still. The mambo pulled the blanket back over him, tucked it in. Perhaps tomorrow, Zora thought, I will go to Pont Beudet, or to Ville Bonheur. Perhaps something new is happening there.
“Miss Hurston,” a woman whispered, her heavy necklace clanking into Zora’s shoulder. “Miss Hurston. Have they shared with you what was found a month ago? Walking by daylight in the Ennery road?”
Doctor Legros, chief of staff at the hospital at Gonaives, was a good-looking mulatto of middle years with pomaded hair and a thin mustache. His three-piece suit was all sharp creases and jutting angles, like that of a paper doll, and his handshake left Zora’s palm powder dry. He poured her a belt of raw white clairin, minus the nutmeg and peppers that would make it palatable to Guede, the prancing black-clad loa of derision, but breathtaking nonetheless, and as they took dutiful medicinal sips his small talk was all big, all politics—whether Mr. Roosevelt would be true to his word that the Marines would never be back; whether Haiti’s good friend Senator King of Utah had larger ambitions; whether America would support President Vincent if the grateful Haitians were to seek to extend his second term beyond the arbitrary date technically mandated by the Constitution—but his eyes, to Zora who was older than she looked and much older than she claimed, posed an entirely different set of questions. He seemed to view Zora as a sort of plenipotentiary from Washington, and only reluctantly allowed her to steer the conversation to the delicate subject of his unusual patient.
“It is important for your countrymen and your sponsors to understand, Miss Hurston, that the beliefs of which you speak are not the beliefs of civilized men, in Haiti or elsewhere. These are Negro beliefs, embarrassing to the rest of us, and confined to the canaille—to the, what is the phrase, the backwater areas, such as your American South. These beliefs belong to Haiti’s past, not her future.”
Zora mentally placed the good doctor waistcoat-deep in a backwater area of Eatonville, Florida, and set gators upon him. “I understand, Doctor Legros, but I assure you I’m here for the full picture of your country, not just the Broadway version, the tomtoms and the shouting. But in every ministry, veranda and salon I visit, why, even in the office of the director-general of the Health Service, what is all educated Haiti talking about but your patient, this unfortunate woman Felicia Felix-Mentor? Would you stuff my ears, shelter me from the topic of the day?”
He laughed, his teeth white and perfect and artificial. Zora, self-conscious of her own teeth, smiled with her lips closed, chin down. This often passed for flirtation. Zora wondered what the bright-eyed Doctor Legros thought of the seductive man-eater Erzulie, the most “uncivilized” loa of all. As she slowly crossed her legs, she thought: Huh! What’s Erzulie got on Zora, got on me?
“Well, you are right to be interested in the poor creature,” the doctor said, pinching a fresh cigarette into his holder while looking neither at it nor at Zora’s eyes. “I plan to write a monograph on the subject myself, when the press of duty allows me. Perhaps I should apply for my own Guggenheim, eh? Clement!” He clapped his hands. “Clement! More clairin for our guest, if you please, and mangoes when we return from the yard.”
As the doctor led her down the central corridor of the gingerbread Victorian hospital, he steered her around patients in creeping wicker wheelchairs, spat volleys of French at cowed black women in white, and told her the story she already kne
w, raising his voice whenever passing a doorway through which moans were unusually loud.
“In 1907, a young wife and mother in Ennery town died after a brief illness. She had a Christian burial. Her widower and son grieved for a time, then moved on with their lives, as men must do. Empty this basin immediately! Do you hear me, woman? This is a hospital, not a chickenhouse! My pardon. Now we come to a month ago. The Haitian Guard received reports of a madwoman accosting travelers near Ennery. She made her way to a farm and refused to leave, became violently agitated by all attempts to dislodge her. The owner of this family farm was summoned. He took one look at this poor creature and said, ‘My God, it is my sister, dead and buried nearly thirty years.’ Watch your step, please.”
He held open a French door and ushered her onto a flagstone veranda, out of the hot, close, blood-smelling hospital into the hot, close outdoors, scented with hibiscus, goats, charcoal and tobacco in bloom. “And all the other family members, too, including her husband and son, have identified her. And so one mystery was solved, and in the process, another took its place.”
In the far corner of the dusty, enclosed yard, in the sallow shade of an hourglass grove, a sexless figure in a white hospital gown stood huddled against the wall, shoulders hunched and back turned, like a child chosen It and counting.
“That’s her,” said the doctor.
As they approached, one of the hourglass fruits dropped onto the stony ground and burst with a report like a pistol firing, not three feet behind the huddled figure. She didn’t budge.
“It is best not to surprise her,” the doctor murmured, hot clairin breath in Zora’s ear, hand in the small of her back. “Her movements are… unpredictable.” As yours are not, Zora thought, stepping away.
The doctor began to hum a tune that sounded like
The Living Dead Page 50