One of the six Hunters stepped forward. He raised his broadsword and swung it.
Some kind of liquid splattered Steven’s face as the zombie’s head was severed from the rest of its body. He’d heard about living blood but had never known it to exist until now.
The Hunters took the zombie’s body away. Steven was taken back home, where his parents scolded him. His father said some very mean things. His mother cried but shed no tears. They sent him up to his room and told him he wasn’t to come out until they said so.
Sitting on his bed, the cube in his lap (he’d managed to hide it from the Hunters and his parents), Steven stared out his window at the rising sun. It was gray just like the sky. Just like the trees. Just like everything.
The cube-shaped rock in his lap continued to pulse. The sound was so loud it almost drowned out his parents’ arguing downstairs.
He placed his hands on the cube and held it tight. The cube pulsed even more. And slowly, so very slowly, the cube began to dissolve until there was nothing left at all.
Steven closed his eyes. None of it made sense. The sound was gone but still he felt the beating—which now came from within his chest.
He opened his bedroom door with caution and tiptoed the length of the hallway toward the steps. Somewhere downstairs his parents continued arguing, and though he only caught a few words, he knew their dispute involved him. They were worried—not only had their son tried to run away tonight, but he had almost been expired by a zombie—and they wanted to protect him but weren’t sure just how to do it.
He stood at the top of the stairs much longer than he’d intended, staring at the pictures on the walls, at the carpet, even the boarder that ran near the ceiling. Each was a different color, a different shade. Nothing like the gray he’d become accustomed to his entire existence.
Everything had changed the moment he realized his heart had started beating. His body had somehow absorbed the life inside the cube. A warm tingling in his chest had spread throughout his entire body, down his legs to his toes, down his arms to his fingertips, and when he opened his eyes again he had watched with a kind of wonder as the black and white and gray of the world began receding around him, until the floor, the walls, the ceiling, everything was painted with color.
He had fallen back onto the bed then, his body shutting down for a couple of seconds, the muscles and tendons which had never really been used before having to recharge. Even his lungs had begun to work, and he breathed oxygen for the first time, taking large gulps of air until he became acquainted with this new function and began breathing regularly.
As he lay there he sniffed the stale air, could smell what he somehow knew internally was a mixture of dust and decayed skin and hair and laundry detergent. He knew other things internally now too, as if a door to new information in his brain had just been opened.
Somewhere below him now, probably in the kitchen, his parents continued their argument, though there was less intensity now, less gargled and guttural shouting. He knew what they were arguing about. His father wanted to send Steven away for psychiatric help, while his mother wanted to just ignore it, pretend like the entire thing hadn’t happened. Eventually they would arrive to a decision and come to see him. And when they did, what would they find?
Their son—a monstrosity, a crime against nature.
A zombie.
He shuddered at the thought, feeling a chill race through his soul, and found it both terrifying and exhilarating at the same time. It was a feeling he’d never experienced before, and he wanted to feel it again. How many more feelings were there? How many more colors? He remembered the zombie mentioning something about smells and tastes. How many of those were there?
A gasp pulled him away from his thoughts.
He glanced down the stairs to find his parents standing at the bottom. Unlike Steven’s skin which had become pale and smooth, theirs was decayed and brownish gray, their eyes and hair pitch black.
Steven’s mother had been the one who gasped. She held her hand to her mouth and stared up at him with wide black eyes. His father stood beside her, slowly shaking his head.
“I’m very disappointed in you,” he said, his voice scratchy and rough. The sound of his words caused another shudder to pass through Steven’s body, though this one wasn’t as pleasing.
“Oh sweetie,” his mother said, “what have you done?”
When Steven didn’t respond, his father said, “I have no choice. I have to call them.”
He turned away and disappeared from Steven’s sight, leaving only his mother to stand there with her hand still to her mouth. She shook her head, her dull eyes expressing no emotion—though Steven thought that if she were alive they’d show sadness, maybe even tears.
She opened her mouth to speak. Steven expected to hear her gargled voice again, but nothing came out. She shook her head and waved him toward her.
He started down the steps, taking them one at a time, finding the sound his sneakers made on the wood pleasant in a strange sort of way. When he reached the landing his mother fell to her knees. She gripped his shoulders, wrapped her arms around him. Her body reeked of rot and decay and Steven tried to step out of the dead embrace.
“I’m so sorry,” she said, holding onto him tightly. Her breath, he knew internally, smelled of rancid fish. “Your father’s calling the Hunters. They’ll be here any minute. Why would you do this? Didn’t we raise you properly? Didn’t we give you everything you ever needed? Why, Steven? Why?”
He stared into her dead eyes and tried to find something there, some kind of life. He had no answer for her and simply shook his head.
His father returned.
“They’ll be here soon, Steven. Make it easy on yourself and don’t try to fight them.”
Body now trembling, he felt wetness underneath his arms and something churning in the pit of his stomach. His mother’s dead hands squeezed his shoulders briefly once more and he glanced back into her dry colorless face, into her black depthless eyes.
Her cracked lips moved, forming just one word, and though she didn’t use her damaged voice, he heard the word clearly in his mind: Run.
Steven hesitated. He glanced at his father and saw that his father had seen what just passed between mother and son. His father’s black eyes became impossibly large. “No,” he said, and started forward, and Steven backed out of his mother’s embrace, bolted for the door.
The first thing that struck him outside was the sunlight, and he had to pause, had to allow his eyes to adjust to the sudden brilliance. He lifted his face to the sky, closed his eyes, enjoyed the warmth for only an instant before he remembered he should be running. Opening his eyes, he saw that indeed the sky wasn’t gray but blue, lighter than his T-shirt, speckled with white puffs of clouds, and all around him was green—in the trees, in the grass, even on some houses.
Scents wafted through the air, mixed scents his new internal mind picked out and pieced apart and gave names to: fresh grass, motor oil, dog shit, dandelions.
Across the street, two dead children played in a front lawn. Steven had once known their names but they, much like his own parents, were now strangers to him. They’d been running around, using large plastic broadswords to play Henry the Hunter, neither noticing him until one paused and stared across the street, then said something to the other and pointed.
Two sets of wide dead eyes stared back at him.
The door behind him opened. He heard his mother’s voice, begging his father to stop, to please let her baby go. His father told her to shut up, that he would deal with her later. Then there was the sound of his father’s heavy footsteps on the porch, his father yelling at him to stop.
Steven ran.
The two children across the street saw him coming and screamed, their voices harsh and flat as they scrambled away.
He reached the street and paused, uncertain where to go next. He thought about the zombie from last night. It had been old, about Steven’s father’s age. How had it
survived so many years?
Sunlight glinted off of something shiny down the street. It was a Humvee, one that he had seen only hours before when it had brought him home. The Hunters were coming.
He turned and sprinted in the other direction, hearing shouts from houses where the dead inside saw him and cried out. Sweat ran down his face, as did tears, tears he now shed because he knew it was hopeless, that he wouldn’t outrun the Hunters, that he could never outrun them.
The street came to an end, a bright red stop sign signaling that the driver must either turn left or right. Beyond the bisecting street were trees and bushes and tall grass.
Steven continued forward.
He glanced back after he’d passed a couple dozen trees, saw the Hunters back there, all spread out, all heading in his direction. Before him the woods stretched on for miles, seemingly endless, taunting him with the promise of freedom. He tried keeping his focus on what lay before him but he kept glancing back over his shoulder, each time finding the Hunters gaining more and more ground.
Steven ran, tears and sweat in his eyes, until suddenly there was no ground beneath him. A rut, a simple hole, and it twisted his ankle, caused him to fall.
He tried getting up but fell back down, his ankle denying him any support. He glanced back, saw that the Hunters were even closer.
Fresh tears came, forced by the pain—by real pain—by the realization that he was soon going to die, but also forced by a surreal form of happiness. He didn’t know how many minutes had passed since his body had absorbed the life inside that cube, but he wouldn’t change it for anything, even if given the chance.
The sound of thunder grew stronger as the Hunters neared.
Steven tried getting up once more before falling back down. He looked around him for some kind of help but only saw the grass, the trees … and he noticed a bush he hadn’t seen before, a green bush covered with many small white and yellow flowers. Something inside him whispered they were honeysuckles, and without thinking he crawled the few yards to the bush and reached out, took one of the flowers from its branch and brought it to his nose, to his tongue.
The Hunters surrounded him, their broadswords drawn and ready. The lead Hunter—the one that had taken the zombie’s head only hours before—stepped forward.
Steven hardly noticed. The sweet pure scent and taste of the flower was more than anything he had ever wished for. Despite the pain, despite the tears, despite the knowledge of his impending death, he closed his eyes and tried to keep this moment fresh in his mind, tried to keep it with him forever.
AUTHOR INTERVIEW
On May 8, 2011, Bill Nelson of wezombie.com published this interview with Robert Swartwood about The Dishonored Dead.
Bill Nelson: Thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts with us. Your book, The Dishonored Dead, is a fascinating and unique book that was very hard to put down. How long have you been writing, and what kind of works have you written outside of the zombie genre?
Robert Swartwood: First, thank you for taking the time to read The Dishonored Dead and have me here on your website. I’ve been writing for almost fifteen years now, ever since middle school. I started writing horror stories but enjoy writing pretty much any genre, be it literary or crime or even science fiction. The novel I released before this most recent one was called The Calling, which is a supernatural thriller in the vein of Dean Koontz and Peter Straub. My new novel, which I hope to release very soon, is called The Serial Killer’s Wife and is a straight-up thriller in the vein of Harlan Coben and Michael Connelly.
BN: It’s obvious from reading The Dishonored Dead that you have quite the imagination—the book crosses into new territory that we haven’t seen before, and it’s full of unexpected surprises. How did you come up with the idea of creating a book where the dead are the norm and humans are hunted? What was the development process and how long did it take you to write the book?
RS: The novel’s inception is an interesting one, at least to me. It all started with the story idea of a boy who hears this strange music coming from somewhere in his backyard. And then, when I sat down to actually write the story, that changed to this first line: “Like everyone else he knew, Steven’s heart did not beat.” And the story that grew from there—“In the Land of the Blind”—was a world where the majority of people were dead but the world still had some life left in it, and of course that life was a threat to the dead and needed to be destroyed. That story won one of the ChiZine short story contests. Later, after it was published, a friend told me his wife had read the story and loved it but said she wished it was longer. At the time I said something along the lines that I didn’t think I was ever going to expand the story, but, as is often the case with us writers, the story stayed with me and I wondered what might happen if I tried to tell a longer story from one of the zombie hunters’ point of view.
The story that I had in mind would be nothing more than a novella (I never outline but can usually gauge the length of a story in my head). But then as I started writing it, a character appeared out of nowhere, a very minor character that was nothing more than stage decoration. While the protagonist and another character were leaving a building, they passed a janitor. Why there had to be a janitor there, I had no idea, but the janitor appeared in my head and so I placed him there. And it wasn’t until a few chapters later did the real reason for the janitor’s appearance become apparent, and suddenly what had only been a novella-length work turned into a full-blown novel. The first draft ended up at around 120,000 words and that only took me a few months to write. Then, after a major revision a few years later, it came down to a respectable 100,000 words. Eventually I signed with a new agent who loved the book and he went out with it but, unfortunately, none of the major publishers wanted to take a chance on it as it wasn’t your typical zombie novel.
BN: Well, that is interesting—writing without an outline—seems to work for you, though. I think the publishers made a mistake by not taking on the book. We don’t need another typical zombie story; we need a book like yours with fresh thoughts and a new plot idea. Your main character in the book, Conrad, just keeps running into trouble at every turn. Did you have to add in-law and marriage problems along with everything else he had to deal with?
RS: Isn’t it a rule of fiction that you don’t want to make it too easy for your protagonist? :-) As it was many years ago when I first wrote this book, I honestly don’t remember if it was a conscious decision to go so in-depth with Conrad’s wife and sister-in-law. Actually no, that’s not true. When that particular scene I mentioned before with the janitor happened and turned the work into a full-fledged novel, I knew it was important to find out more about Conrad’s wife. And when I did, I found this character who was stuck in this seemingly unhappy marriage. She became a fascinating character in and of herself, and the more I wrote about her, the more I realized just how important it was to show the dynamic of Conrad’s life when he wasn’t hunting zombies. After all, he just wanted to be happy, at least as much as a dead person like him could be happy.
Also, in retrospect, I think Conrad needed the wife and sister-in-law to help show just how different he was from Philip, who eventually becomes the novel’s antagonist. Conrad and Philip are both zombie hunters but are completely different. The thing I’ve always found most interesting about Philip is that he is, obviously, a product of his upbringing. He may be extreme in his methods, but he is just following along with exactly what he had been taught to do, which was to track down and kill the living. I found that, after writing the novel, there was a subtle hint of social commentary about our world and, well, terrorists. Why do they hate Americans? Because that’s what they’re taught from the very beginning. They know no other way.
BN: In the book, the living dead are the normals, and the living are the zombies. I noticed you made sure that your character’s dialogue made sense, for example, “I should expire you right now” instead of “I should kill you right now” (since they are already dead), an
d also they never said anything about their “life”—instead it was their “existence.” Was it hard keeping the dialogue consistent while writing the book?
RS: From what I remember, it wasn’t too difficult to keep these straight. I knew right away that they obviously wouldn’t say the same things the living humans would say and had to think of something to switch them out with. And “existing” and “expiring” seemed to make the most sense, and I think they work pretty well. But I should note that it wasn’t until I read through the novel again recently to prep it for this e-book did I notice that I had previously referred to the dead’s living rooms as … living rooms. It was such an obvious mistake I couldn’t believe I’d missed it before and quickly went and changed them to the proper “existing rooms.”
BN: Do you think a zombie apocalypse is likely to happen? Would you be a survivor?
RS: A year ago I would say no, a zombie apocalypse would not be likely to happen, but then you have something like the recent earthquake in Japan and what happened at the nuclear plant and you have to wonder if something like that could happen again, but even more terrible, and if too much radiation was given off … well, it’s something I definitely don’t want to think about. But would I survive? Sure, I remember all the rules Jesse Eisenberg’s character came up with in Zombieland.
BN: If you were starting over, knowing what you know now about the book, is there anything you would do different? Is there something you wish you would have included in the book? Something you wish you would have left out?
The Dishonored Dead: A Zombie Novel Page 33