The Living Dead

by John Joseph Adams

  “Father Meyer?” Cardinal Schonbrun pressed, gesturing for him to walk beside him.

  Father Meyer forced back tears. Perhaps he could find another way. He could not believe that in four hours they would actually crucify the pitiful thing.

  “It’s done in movies and things all the time,” Bishop Ahrenkiel murmured as Father Meyer plodded slightly behind the cardinal. “It has been approved by the various humane organizations, the unions, the—”

  “Don’t speak to me.” Father Meyer turned his head away from his old friend.

  “But, Johannes—”

  “Don’t.”

  They sat in the crowded rooms of the Mueller Hotel, among the tourists, who were titillated by the presence of live zombies in their midst. Though long ago the contagion had been stopped, still people held the old fears.

  Maria Mueller, Kaspar’s daughter, brought the priests large mugs of beer and plates of pork ribs and sauerkraut. Though in her forties, she curtsied daintily to the bishop and the cardinal, but pointedly turned her back on Father Meyer. No one in the village had spoken to him since he’d resigned from the Council.

  “It goes well, does it not?” Bishop Ahrenkiel asked her. “Everyone must be so proud.”

  She frowned. “This is our holy obligation, Your Eminence. We don’t do it out of pride.”

  Father Meyer pursed his lips. One of the Lord’s own creatures would be made to suffer horribly this afternoon, for another’s sin of pride.

  They had told him the zombies had no nerve endings.

  Father Meyer sat hunched in his seat with tears running down his cheeks. He clutched his rosary while he watched the creature writhe in agony as they stretched open its palm and slammed the nail through.

  “The movements are being directed with a remote control device, Johannes,” the bishop reminded him, with a hint of pride in his voice. “It really doesn’t feel anything. It’s only made to look that way.”

  The other palm. The sound of the hammer on the nail echoed against the baffles on the walls. Blood spurted in the air and streamed over the end of the cross and onto the stage.

  Chang, whang whang whang!

  The creature struggled. Its mouth opened, closed, opened.

  The hausfrau behind them moaned.

  “Do you see?” Cardinal Schonbrun said to Father Meyer. “This reminds everyone of the suffering of Our Lord. It brings them nearer to God. I’ve never felt such emotion during a Passion Play. The scourging… that was excellent, Bishop Ahrenkiel, was it not?”

  The bishop grunted, neither assent nor dissent.

  Father Meyer brought his rosary to his heart as they hoisted the cross upward. The zombie swayed, then fell forward, pinioned in place by the spikes in its hands and feet. Blood flowed in rivulets from the crown of thorns, some into its mouth. The blue contact lenses gleamed as its—his—eyes gazed toward heaven. Such monumental pain. Father Meyer doubled his fists, feeling upon his own flesh the whip marks, the holes in his hands, the thorns digging into his scalp.

  Unable to suppress a sob, he remembered what he had done that morning:

  Dawn had been hours away. In the high Alps, in his beloved, unheated church, it was freezing.

  He looked at the unmoving figure in the darkened confessional, closed the curtain, and rested his hand against the side of the booth. The swell of an ancient chant, Rorate caeli, masked the thundering of his heart. He inhaled the bittersweet odor of incense and gazed at the crucifix above the altar, at the gentle face carved five, six hundred years before by one of the Oberammergau faithful. The wounds, as fresh and red as at Calvary; the agony, the love.

  “Most wondrous Savior,” Father Meyer whispered, “if I’m doing wrong, forgive me. Please understand, oh Lord, that I believe this to be a child of Thine, and if it—if he—is not, and I do pollute Thy body, as the Church charges… if I offend Thee, I am heartily sorry.”

  He stepped into his side of the confessional and drew the curtain. He sat, took a deep breath, and, crossing himself, began.

  “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been…” He hesitated. Who could say, how long it had been, for the one who sat in silence on the other side of the screen?”

  “…it has been some time since my last confession. These are my sins.” He swallowed hard and thought for a moment. How to proceed? It had been so clear last night, when he’d resolved to do this. So obviously a divine inspiration. But now, now when he was doing it, really risking it, he felt alone, untried.

  But thus had our Savior felt, he thought, and was comforted in his fear.

  “I have had… thoughts, Father. I have had thoughts that were other than those Our Lord would have us think. I have wished for things…”

  He leaned his damp forehead against the screen. Such monumental pride, to speak for another! To dare to dream what was in another’s heart. A heart that didn’t even beat, not really. A mind that didn’t think.

  Nein, he didn’t believe that.

  “Listen,” he whispered to the silhouette he could see through the screen. “I absolve you and forgive you of any sinful thought or deed, in the Name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost, amen.” He squinted through the crosshatches. “Do you understand? Go in peace. God has forgiven—”

  “Father,” came a voice, and Father Meyer started violently. It had spoken! Praise be to God! He knew, he had always believed, he had prayed—

  “It’s Anton,” the voice went on, and he realized it was the Veck boy, standing just outside the curtain. “The cardinal and the bishop are at my cousin’s hotel. They’re asking for you.”

  Father Meyer looked now at the figure on the cross. The figure he had dared to forgive. The stage was set for the climax of the Play, the Passion and the suffering of the Lord. The three crosses had been raised—on the other two, the actors playing the Thieves hung supported by belts beneath their loincloths, as Kaspar Mueller would have been. The Holy Women in their veils and robes clasped their hands and wept. The Roman Centurion stood to one side, pondering. The players gazed up at the wandelnder Leichnam, nailed to Kaspar Mueller’s cross while the old man hid behind a pile of rocks, which would be used later in the Resurrection scene. They spoke to the zombie, and it was Kaspar who answered, in his quavering, old man’s voice.

  Behind the cross, Kaspar cried out, “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani!” and the Pharisees reviled him for calling out to the prophet Elias.

  And the figure on the cross, pale and slight, panted and looked up, then down. Reanimated corpse, Father Meyer’s head insisted.

  His heart replied, An innocent man, doomed to suffer like this ten times. For each zombie was to be used for ten performances: they had devised ways to fill the holes in its—his—hands with wax, to stitch up and conceal the wound in his side. Ten times they would do this to it. For the glory of God.

  And the glory of Oberammergau.

  The soldier offered the sponge of vinegar to the creature when Kaspar Mueller cried out, “I thirst.” And it tasted the bile. Father Meyer was certain of it.

  “Mother, behold thy son,” Kaspar Mueller gasped.

  The zombie looked down at Krista Veck.

  Father Meyer gripped his rosary. He could not let this continue. His holy office required he speak the truth of God as he knew it. As long as he was a priest, he was compelled to act on behalf of the Shepherd’s lambs—

  “It is over,” said Kaspar. The ribcage of the zombie worked furiously. “Into Thy hands I commend my spirit.” Its head drooped forward.

  “Ah,” murmured the cardinal.

  A low, ominous rumbling filled the theater. It was the time in the Play for the earthquake and the rending of the Temple. The crosses jittered on the stage. The zombie’s palms began to bleed again.

  “It is God’s hand on us!” cried the actor who played Enan.

  Blood streamed from its side and hands. Its—his—head bobbed. Father Meyer could abide no more. He rose to his feet and cried, “Ja! It is!”

 
; “Father!” the cardinal said, grabbing his hand.

  Father Meyer shook him off and crawled over him. He ran down the stairs to the front of the stage. Before anyone could stop him, he leaped on it and grabbed the wrist of the startled Centurion.

  “You cannot do this! As a priest of God, I order you to stop!”

  “What? What?” Kaspar demanded, appearing from behind the rocks. He was dressed as the risen Christ, in pure white robes.

  “Blasphemer!” Father Meyer shouted at him. He thrust himself away from the Centurion, pushed Krista Veck and the other Holy Women out of his way, and scrabbled onto the rocks. “Help me get him down! For the love of God, help me!”

  “Get down from there!” The cardinal’s voice rang over the rising voices of the crowd and the actors. “Get Father Meyer off the stage.”

  “Father, please.” Rudi Mangasser, the Centurion, grasped Father Meyer’s ankle. The priest yanked his leg free.

  “For God’s sake, Rudi! I baptized you. Help me!” Father Meyer pulled at the spike in the middle of the Leichnam’s palm. It was hammered in all the way to the bone; blood pooled around it, smearing Father Meyer’s fingers.

  “Help me. Help me.” He stared at the audience, which had leapt to its feet. Angry faces. Looks of horror. Some were backing away, others rushing forward. Others were crying.

  “He is a being! We cannot do this!” He reached across the limp body and yanked off the crown of thorns, bringing skin with it.

  A sudden, piercing chorus of screams erupted from the onlookers. Startled, Father Meyer froze and looked at them. Fingers pointed toward the stage—at him, he supposed. He dug his fingers into the zombie’s palm, straining to pull out the nail.

  The head slowly lifted. Who had the remote control device? Father Meyer wondered vaguely. But the screams grew louder. People turned to run from the theater. The cardinal and the bishop crossed themselves and sank to their knees.

  The head wobbled. Father Meyer took hold of it beneath the jaw to support it. The flesh was hot.

  Hot—

  The head turned. It was covered with large, red sores from which pus flowed like blood.

  “The Pest!” someone shrieked. “It has the Plague!”

  Shaking, Father Meyer stared into the sightless eyes. New sores exploded over the zombie’s body even as Father Meyer watched. They ruptured in a jagged line along the would in its side; they traveled over its chest, its stomach.

  The heavens filled with a rumbling. The earth—not just the stage—began to shake.

  “It’s a trick!” someone shouted. “The priest has the control box!”

  There were cries of outrage now. Krista Veck tore off her veil and shook her fist at Father Meyer while Rudi Mangasser scrambled onto the rocks and pulled him down.

  “Idiot!” Rudi shouted, slapping Father Meyer across the face as they both fell to the stage floor. “What are you doing, you crazy old man?”

  “I? I?” Father Meyer pushed Rudi aside and knelt in front of the zombie. He made the sign of the cross and folded his hands. Two red sores bubbled from his own palms.

  Stigmata. But stigmata of a different sort. Of the New Church. And a New sickness, he supposed, which would cripple the world, as the Old sickness had four hundred years before.

  He burst into tears and opened his arms. “The covenant is broken. God has spoken through one of His children, to tell us of His great displeasure.

  His wounds dropped onto the boards. “A changing corpse? My beloved, my brethren, we are all changing corpses! All!”

  “Get him off the stage!” Cardinal Schonbrun shouted again.

  “No, don’t touch me! I have it already!” Father Meyer warned, but he knew it was too late.

  Then, as one being, the throng roared and flew at him. A hundred hands grabbed him, hitting, punching, crushing. They kicked his shins and aching knees. Someone slammed a fist into his side. A woman he had never seen before wrapped her fingers around his clerical collar and choked him, choked hard until he couldn’t breathe, couldn’t see.

  Then the face of the woman swelled with boils. He watched, horrified, as they burst and a thick, oozing pus ran down her face.

  “She’s got it, too!” shouted a man beside her.

  She grabbed her face and wailed. Sores rose on the backs of her hands, exploded, splattering the man’s face; and everywhere the infection touched him, pustules rose, crusted, split. The man fell to his knees, shrieking.

  The contagion engulfed the crowd like a flood of forty days and forty nights. Cries of terror shattered Father Meyer’s ears. The sky pounded with thunder, the hoof beats of four horsemen; timbers and scenery fractured and crashed. The stage split open, and the ground beneath it, and people screamed and flailed wildly as they tumbled into the pit. All, all tore asunder.

  A jag of lightning slammed into the cross on the stage, igniting it at the base, bonfire-hot. Hellfire-hot. The zombie opened its mouth once, twice. Its head lolled to the side, and its sightless gaze moved, moved.

  It fixed on Father Meyer. Seemed to look at him… yes! Froze there, staring at the priest of the Old Church, the Old love.

  Behold thy son. Behold him.

  Father Meyer raised his hand and blessed him. The zombie bowed his head. The flames engulfed him, and he was gone.

  “He did this to us!” Cardinal Schonbrun cried, and three men grabbed Father Meyer, pulling at him, beating him, weeping with rage.

  Father Meyer stared at the fire as his arms were wrenched from their sockets, as blows and burning splinters rained down on his head. New sores erupted, burst, ran over his other wounds. No pain could be worse; no agony—

  No. No pain could surpass that in his heart.

  No fear could be greater than the fear in his soul.

  He raised his gaze to heaven. “Father, forgive us,” he whispered, with the last breath of his body. “We didn’t know. We really didn’t.”

  ALMOST THE LAST STORY BY ALMOST THE LAST MAN

  by Scott Edelman

  Scott Edelman’s fiction has appeared in a variety of anthologies and magazines, such as Crossroads: Tales of the Southern Literary Fantastic, Postscripts, Forbidden Planets, Summer Chills, and The Mammoth Book of Monsters. When not writing, Edelman edits Science Fiction Weekly and SCI FI Magazine, and in the past edited the fiction magazine Science Fiction Age.

  Edelman is something of a zombie genius. He’s had stories appear in each of James Lowder’s Eden Studios zombie anthologies: The Book of All Flesh, The Book of More Flesh, and The Book of Final Flesh, and he’s been nominated for the Bram Stoker Award three times for his zombie fiction. As I read each of his zombie stories I thought for sure I’d found one to include in the book—that there’d be no way he’d top himself after that story, only to discover that each was better than the last. And that’s without even mentioning his brilliant “A Plague on Both Your Houses,” a five-act Shakespearean play that he describes as a cross between Romeo and Juliet and Night of the Living Dead.

  This story, which is one of his Stoker Award nominees, is not in any way Shakespearean, but one reviewer compared it to the work of another literary legend: W. H. Auden.

  Maybe it would be best to begin this way.

  Let’s start, in fact, on the day that it all started, with Laura already at work in the county library. But here’s the thing—as the day goes by, maybe she won’t even come to realize yet that the dead are suddenly refusing to stay dead, because life happens that way, with momentous things occurring across town while we, in our homes, in our ignorance, clip our fingernails or floss our teeth. Earthquakes roar, floods rise, towers fall… and somewhere on the other side of the globe a man who may not hear of these things for many months, if at all, scrapes with his stick in a small patch of dusty earth and prays for rain. If he ever grows perturbed on that day, it will only be because the rain fails to come, and not due to dark happenings on continents far away.

  For our purposes, let it begin that way for Laura, who did not notic
e her world tilting on its axis. She noticed little that first day of the change because little affected her personally, save that fewer patrons than normal wandered into her branch of the library. The ripples had not yet reached her.

  But still, that small alteration to her routine puzzled her a bit, as over the years she had grown accustomed to the predictable rhythms of her week, but she let that feeling drop, and on the whole, it turned out to be an unusually good workday for her. She was able to spend less of her time that shift reshelving books that had been left on tables, and more of it catching up on paperwork, so she ended the day pleased.

  As she headed back to her apartment that night, she treated herself to Chinese take-out. Maybe when she unpacks her dinner special, she should even find an extra fortune cookie at the bottom of the bag. Now that would cause her to smile. Because there’s something else that you should know about Laura. She’s been using the vocabulary words printed on the back of each fortune to teach herself Chinese, not the best method, perhaps, but still, hers, and the surprise cookie put her one word closer to her goal. See, she was planning to visit China someday. Adding that information just about now should help add poignancy to her tale, considering what we already know is inevitably to come and what she does not.

  And so, later that night, after the additional reward of a very special episode of one of her favorite television shows, during which two estranged sisters are reunited, plus the rush she got from the way she’d been able to avoid a phone call from her mother thanks to caller ID, she would tuck into bed pleased with herself and with the world and ready to fall into a peaceful sleep, knowing nothing of the chaos elsewhere and suspecting less, much as our man working his field with a stick might finally set aside that stick and stretch out on his straw mat to drift away while looking up at the stars, never knowing that he had just lived through a December 7, or an August 6, or a September 11.

  It was only the next day, when Laura slid that morning’s newspapers onto the rods that kept them from getting tattered as they were being read, that she learned there had been anything special about the day before. She wasn’t sure that she believed it, though. The facts of the miraculous resurrection seemed to her as if they should instead be shelved under fiction. She grew angry with herself, and angry with her former ignorance as well, believing that had such a grand difference been born in the universe, she should have been able to feel it. That the rules of life and death should change without her knowledge and permission didn’t seem right.