The Widow passed behind the coffin to stand in front of the bay windows. With the light at her back, the girl couldn’t see the woman's face. She was just a shadow or a hole in the brightness coming in from outside.
“Does anyone have a coin?” The Widow said.
One of the little boys stepped off the stair. “I got a nickel. My grandpa gave to me this morning.”
“Well then, put it in her pocket, would you please?”
The child, dark-haired as his uncle had been, took a step down from the stairs. He looked at the nickel in his hand. His fingers curled around it. “Why should I?”
“Go on now.”
The boy walked over to them. It only took a second to find the decorative pocket on the skirt of the girl’s print dress. A second or two to undo the little pearl button that held it closed. The nickel slid into her pocket and she could feel the weight of it. The boy turned away, not looking at anyone, and went back to his place with the others on the stairs.
The Widow stretched her arm out over the coffin to pass the tiny iridescent plate across the belly of her husband.
The girl had to use both hands to hold the plate and keep it from tilting in that passage. Only the crowd breathing together sounded in the room.
The girl began to eat. She ate the meat first, sweet and salty. Then the cornbread, which she took in small dainty bites to keep it from crumbling onto the carpet. Then the tomato, with its scent of bitter stem. Last came the pineapple, slick and sweet. She set the plate on a table beside her and waited.
The Widow passed the beer to the girl, passed it across the white satin and the mahogany and the empty flesh.
The girl looked at the bottle, the familiar brown glass, the foil sticker, the scarlet printing and the black. She wondered if someone had set it out in the sun all morning.
As if she had never used a glass, she raised the bottle, tipped her head back and drank. She refused to hurry. After a moment she paused. She wiped her mouth with the tips of her white fingers. Three times she stopped, using the time to breathe, before raising the bottle to her lips again.
Someone took the bottle and the plate from her hands. Outside the light fell into a reclining angle. Outdoors there would be the evening sweetness and the scent of Russian Olives on the breeze. The girl turned away.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” she said, moving by the line of men standing near the door. They smelled of cigarettes, and Old Spice and bourbon and the taste of salt and hops lay on her tongue. A man in work clothes stepped forward to open the heavy front door. She reached toward the worn green paint of the screen door and saw that her hand would leave a grease mark there.
Pushing the door open, she looked out onto the dusty street and felt a man’s hand lying heavy on the small of her back. She stepped out into the cool of the evening where the sky went lavender and nighthawks called to each other and dove across the sun.
A Word from Stacy Ericson
I have always been fascinated by the tradition of the Sin Eater since I first read Elizabeth Goudge’s Child of the Sea.
The role of the Sin Eater was traditional in English villages until the late 19th century. A designated local outcast, usually a man volunteered to take on the sins of the dead. The Sin Eater, a role often passed down through the generations, consumed a ritual meal of bread and beer standing over the corpse of the deceased. After receiving a coin it was believed that he would bear those sins and lighten the burden of the departing soul. In “The Sin Eater” I asked myself the question: who serves the role of Sin Eater today and imagined what it would be like the first time she moves into society in this new role.
Twenty-first-century zombie imagery reflects today’s cultural anxieties about invasive diseases, but in the previous two centuries zombie themes had more to do with cross-cultural mysteries. It is interesting that both veins of zombie-related narrative reflect tensions and consequences of colonial occupation. Recent speculation about neurotoxins, Taino shamanism, and early zombie traditions aside, these themes have one thing in common—issues of honor and shame, contagion and purity, good and evil, and the uneasy relationship between the living and the dead.
Early anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston interviewed an elderly Jamaican man who addressed succinctly a basic fear found in most cultures: “Everyone has evil in them,” he said, “and when a man is alive, the heart and the brain control him and he will not abandon himself to many evil things, but when the duppie leaves the body it no longer has anything to restrain it and it will do more terrible things than any man has dreamed of so it is not good for the duppie to remain among living folk.”
This idea was as prevalent in European culture as any other and the Celtic tradition of the Sin Eater reflects one attempt to neutralize that unleashed, unrestrained evil using a classic “scape-goat.”
In my story “Sin Eater” I asked myself, who today are the outcasts in society? Who carries our sins and to what extent does that contagion define all of us? To me these are a few of the themes that make zombie stories continually compelling.
Stacy Ericson is a writer, playwright, and photographer living in Boise, Idaho. She now travels primarily in the border colonies of historical and speculative fiction, far away from her origins editing anthropological papers and studying ancient history and religion. She is currently working on a mermaid novella, tentatively titled Sea Legs. For more information on her work, visit her website (www.stacyericsonauthor.info) and join an info list to receive a free story.
The World After
by Angela Cavanaugh
CHAPTER ONE
ELLA AND MARK ate their printed breakfast in silence, waiting for the door to signal that they were allowed to leave. Once the workday started, they had only about a minute to exit the apartment before the solar panel windows would switch from transparent to opaque and plunge the apartment into darkness.
Ella sharpened her knife between forkfuls of carefully balanced cloned-cell protein and fresh vegetables. She liked to keep her weapon ready because she never knew when she'd need to use it. The zombies that worked inside the wall presented little threat. They were kept under constant sedation and feed just enough lab-grown brains to keep them animated. Yet every so often, she'd come across a wild one or someone who had recently turned.
The door emitted a soft beep and a green glow. She folded the blade into its handle and slipped the knife into her boot. A moment later, the door opened automatically and they hurried out into the city.
Their footsteps fell loudly on the travertine paved streets. The entire city was constructed with the strong, fire-resistant stone that could stand for hundreds of years. The stark white of the cityscape and empty streets felt sterile to Ella. Strict curfew and constant monitoring ensured that everyone was either at home or work, without any loitering in between. But despite these precautions, people still went missing and got bit. Every time it happened, the reins tightened. Ella knew it was for their protection, but it felt intrusive.
Sensing her mood, Mark held her hand and squeezed it to remind her she wasn't really alone. Her disposition was more common in older generations, those who had lived through the war. But even born into this city, Ella had the sensation that humans weren't meant to be kept inside of fences. She had never seen further than she could see from the watchtowers, but she was certain the world expanded far beyond the horizon. It had to. She had been taught that once the Earth held billions of people, a number so large that she could hardly wrap her head around it. Her city, the last city on Earth, held a steady population of only about ten thousand.
They crossed through the city center. It was a large, square common ground that hardly got use these days. Ella heard a faint thump. She stopped in place and tugged on Mark.
"What is it?" he asked.
"Listen."
They waited for the noise to come again. The silence was pure at first. Birds and bugs, as well as other species, had an adverse reaction to the Necrovirus. Instead of turning them into
flesh hungry killers, they became suicide bombers, and made themselves extinct.
"I don't hear anything," Mark said.
"Guess I was wrong."
They began to walk, when a loud thud came from far behind them.
"Then again, maybe not," Mark said.
Another bang sounded, followed by softer thump. They followed the noise and found the source a block away. The city had public restrooms scattered through it. This t-shaped cluster had one-stall rooms facing four directions and all but the doors were made of stone.
The thudding had grown softer, but persisted. They identified the stall and Ella tapped on the door.
"Hello? Is anyone in there? Do you need help?" she asked.
A howl of moans and the sound of fingers scratching against the door came from inside.
She took a step back, readied her knife, and motioned to Mark to open the door. He turned the handle and jerked it open, hopping backwards out of the way as he did. As she expected, there was a zombie inside. It tripped as the door flew open and fell to the ground.
Ella sized it up. The zombie was a middle aged man and about two hundred pounds, or would have been if its leg wasn't missing. Its shirt was torn at the collar, and she could see teeth marks by a patch of dried blood. Judging by the decomposition, she expected that it'd been turned less than two days. The hot day wasn't doing any favors for its smell. She took out a pair of one-panel glasses and put them on. The transparent eye-plate spanned the width of her head. The device was useful for a number of things. Currently, she was looking for a tracking device.
She scanned the body and found the information she was looking for. A readout popped up in her display space.
"Darren Gibbs, reported missing almost two weeks ago," she said.
"Two weeks? Where has he been all this time? No way he's been a zombie that long."
The zombie pushed against the ground but couldn't right itself. Ella knelt next to it to study it closer. The zombie lazily bit at her.
"Looks like he hasn't fed in a few days. But he ate something, someone, at some point. But that still gives him almost two weeks of living with the virus before eating. No. He'd have died by then."
Her visor performed a blood analysis. A medical report appeared.
"He had cancer," she said.
"Do you think he did this to himself? Either a suicide by zombie or some messed up attempt to stave off death?"
"Maybe. Could explain why he went missing. He could have been seeking out an opportunity to find a zombie. But his tracking chip is still active. He never should have been missing at all."
"Given his condition, maybe no one was looking for him? Maybe the family knew?"
"I don't know. But I don't like it. We'll need to request an investigation when we file the report."
The zombie rolled onto his back and pawed pathetically at the air.
Ella pressed on the sub-dermal implant on her collarbone and spoke.
"This is Agent Lane. I've got a drifter in section alpha."
"Copy that," The voice came through a speaker implanted just behind her ear. "Threat level?"
"We're not in danger of this one eating anyone and he's damaged."
"Any viability?"
"Total scrap job."
"That's a shame. We need more drifters."
"Seems like we need everything these days," Ella said. "Okay to put him down?"
"Go ahead. We'll send a clean-up crew. But make it quick. You two are needed for your shift at the wall."
The call ended.
Ella pulled the visor onto her head and gripped the five inch blade.
"Sorry, Darren," she said and plunged the knife through its skull.
It didn't even twitch.
"Let's move him out of the way," Mark said.
They each grabbed an arm and dragged the body out of the doorway. Ella turned as the door was closing, and noticed that the zombie's missing leg was in the bathroom. They dropped the body, and Mark went in to retrieve the leg.
"Ella, come here," he called from inside the stall.
She went in, wondering what he could need, and stopped when she saw that the leg was half wedged under a tile.
"What is that?" Ella asked.
Mark didn't answer. He pulled the panel fully open. There was a hole ten feet deep. He jumped in.
"Mark," she said, but he didn't respond.
He disappeared down the tunnel. She wondered if she should go after him, but waited. A few minutes later he returned, wearing his visor and out of breath.
"Were you running?" she asked.
"Yeah, I wanted to see how far it went."
"And?"
"I didn't come close to reaching the end. It gets dark, but I used the light on my visor."
He climbed out of the hole and placed his hand over his collarbone.
"Why are you doing that?" she asked.
He placed his other hand over hers.
"So they can't hear us."
"They can't hear us if we don't press the button."
"As far as we know. I just don't want to take the risk."
"What risk?"
"I think this tunnel goes outside the city," he said.
"You can't know that."
"How else could Darren, a drifter level zombie, disappear for two weeks and wind up in the center of town, in this bathroom, half trapped in this tunnel?"
Ella thought about it.
"Let's say you're right. We have to call this in."
"This tunnel wasn't put here by accident. My guess is that somebody already knows about it. And I don't think we're supposed to."
Ella was about to speak, but a call interrupted her.
"Why are you two still in sector alpha? Are you having trouble with the drifter?"
"No. We found," she paused to think of what to say.
Mark shook her head at her. She wasn't used to withholding information from her bosses at the Center for Zombie Control, but she did as her husband asked.
"We found his leg in the bathroom. We were just moving it. But we're done now, and are on our way."
"Hurry up," the voice said and hung up the call.
Mark covered their implants once more.
"Thank you. Let's just keep this between us for now."
"Okay," she said.
They closed the panel, took the leg outside, and headed to work. They were quiet on the walk there. Ella wondered if Mark was right, and if he was, what else the leader of the CZC might be hiding.
CHAPTER TWO
Ella and Mark stood on the covered platform that was Watchtower Two. The square floor was flush with the top of the fifty foot wall. As Ella scanned the horizon, she braced herself by carefully holding onto the rounded side of one of the spikes that lined the top of the wall.
In the distance, young trees grew along deserted roadsides. Once tall buildings were burned out, collapsed, and long abandoned. Everywhere she looked, the infrastructure that once existed was being reclaimed by nature. The world outside the wall was eerily still, but she hadn't come to expect much else.
She dropped the glasses back over her eyes. The transparent surface would alert her to any distant movement, to the unlikely presence of a heat signature, and enhance her vision if needed. She tried to imagine the ruins as they once were. She suspected that at least a few of those buildings must have dwarfed their wall.
A flashing red light went off in the corner of her display, disrupting her contemplation. She turned her head to look directly at it. The motion sensor showed two bodies moving slowly through the trees. As the figures came closer, a faint heat signature showed. Not warm enough to be a living body, but not cold enough to be a zombie, either. She zoomed in on the figures. They were far away and still blurry. One of the figures had only one arm. The other walked with a bad limp. She pushed the visor to zoom more. The fuzzy images had the coloration of dead men.
"You seeing them?" she asked.
"Yep," Mark said.
"Thi
nk they're the same ones from the other day?"
"Most likely."
"They're carrying something," she said.
Mark could just make out the curved outline of something. One zombie handed it to the other, who then slung it over its back.
"Is that a bow?" he asked.
"I think so."
"Why would a zombie have a weapon?"
"They must be someone's zombies. Do you think that there's someone alive out there, domesticating zombies like we do?"
"No one living could survive out there. Maybe they're ours."
"No tracking signature. Makes sense for the one missing the arm, but if they were ours, they would have given him another. And look at your heat sensor. They're warmer then the surrounding area. And since when to zombies work together? In proximity to each other, sure, but they're usually oblivious of it."
Trying to get a better look, she leaned over the wall, holding the spike but being careful not to touch the tip of it. As she did, a gust of wind kicked up, pushing her towards the pointed edge. She dropped her other hand to the side of another spike and held fast to both, catching herself. The motion forced her to face down. A wild flurry of red lights went off in her visor as it looked directly below. A zombie ran over the decades of bones that lined the base of the wall.
Ella couldn't tell how many bodies lay forgotten there, but her guess was thousands. The bones were mostly from the zombies that had starved to permanent death after running out of humans to feed on. They didn't decay like normal bones, bacteria wouldn't touch them, and there weren't any animals around to scavenge. Below the zombie bones was a layer of dust that had once been the human remains of people trying to gain access to the city to escape the zombies.
Ella steadied herself and stood upright.
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