by James, Guy
By which she meant the zombies’ days were numbered.
After she gained control, she was going to end all of them, and not because she wanted to help humanity, no, nothing of the sort—she wanted to consume what people were left—but because the fucking things were keeping her closed in, and she needed out of tight quarters, to get out and walk and think and clear her head.
For that, for keeping her in close quarters, she reviled them almost as much as she reviled Mardu and those who believed his lies.
First things first, she reminded herself. First things first.
4
Sister Beth was watching Brother Saul amble toward her. He wasn’t wearing the dark robes of the Order, and, for that matter, neither was she. Instead, they were both dressed in clothes that were similar to those that had been worn by the rec-crews. Sound camo.
The materials were supposed to cover up and dampen the noise they made when they moved. They worked some, but that didn’t stop Sister Beth from summing them up in her mind as dog shit.
Dog turds would probably have done most of the job at least as well. But, she remembered, said droppings, when it came to the fresh variety, were no longer in production. Out of stock, discontinued, and all pooped out.
Saul got closer and smiled, grinning from ear to ear like a perfect idiot.
That’s what he is, after all, Sister Beth thought, an idiot. He’s only here because he’s Brother Acrisius’s pet. She eyed Brother Saul’s marked wrist with open disdain.
He’s a slave, she thought, unworthy of being a brother, and now I have to work with him, to be around his baseness. The notion was loathsome. She’d hated many people in her life—cultivating hatred was one of her favorite pastimes—but few to the degree she hated Brother Saul.
“Greetings Sister Beth,” Brother Saul said cheerfully. “And greetings to you also Brother Remigius.”
Remigius hid a sneer, poorly, and got to his feet. “Good morning, Brother Saul.”
Sister Beth got up too, but she said nothing.
“Well, I’ve got to be on my way to help…prepare,” Brother Remigius said. Then he tried to scrunch his face up into a look of concern for his comrades—it was more raised eyebrows and befuddlement—and added, “Good luck on your mission today, and may the virus be with you.” He went on his way, toward the inner circle of trucks.
“Thank you, and with you also,” Brother Saul said, calling after him and smiling, then, when Remigius was out of earshot, he said to Beth, “He still says that, doesn’t he? May the virus be with you. It’s nice to hear once in a while.” He furrowed his brow slightly. “It seems to be going out of style.”
Sister Beth stared at the ex-slave. How much did he know? Was he trying to screw with her? Because if he was, she’d make sure it was the last screw of his life.
“Don’t worry about things like that,” Sister Beth said. “Just because the lingo’s changing doesn’t mean we believe in the virus any less.”
“Lingo is words, right? Language?”
“Yes,” she said, feeling instantly exasperated. “Yes.”
“I like that word,” he said, then repeating it slowly, pronounced, “Lin-go, lin-go, lingo.”
Sister Beth wanted to strangle him—not that she could if she tried, his neck was wider than her waist. She’d have to settle for shooting him.
Why did he always have to talk so slowly, and enunciate every single fucking syllable? Her gaze wandered down to his wrist, where her eyes often went and liked to linger, to soak in his humiliation.
There was a permanent indentation on his left wrist, much like a notch in a bedpost, Sister Beth liked to think. It wasn’t from being shackled, though he’d worn shackles for much of his stint with the slavers, but it was literally a piece of—not a pound or even an ounce, it was perhaps half an ounce—flesh that had been cut out of the side of his wrist all the way to the bone. It was the mark of the post-apocalyptic slave.
She couldn’t imagine how he could be more beneath her, except he always managed to outdo himself in this regard. Right now, for example, he wasn’t rubbing at the notch on the side of his wrist or bowing down to her or groveling or any like behavior that would have suited him. No, instead, he was standing tall and proud—as if he had anything at all not to be ashamed of—and his hands were at his sides and his hips were thrust slightly forward in a posture that was so open as to verge on the obscene.
Her mind wandered over into a dark sex dungeon, lit by the sultry glow of red lamp-shaded Coleman lanterns, where Brothers Acrisius and Saul played their unspeakable games. The thought was more than nauseating, it actually put a painful squeeze on her liver.
A too-bony hand went to the sore spot. There the fingers met too-prominent ribs, and Beth was reminded that if this was allowed to go on much longer, her bones might actually cut through her skin and breathe in the air. Perhaps that was precisely what her skeleton wanted to do, and maybe that was Mardu’s ultimate plan for all of them, to break like the zombies.
She was hungry, but she refused to subsist on tack and half-rotten vegetables. She would eat meat or starve, and that was precisely why she’d join the cursed Order, whose upper management was clearly no longer qualified to pursue the group’s mission. She looked Saul over again, reminding herself that all of this would soon be solved. The answer was hers to give, and today was the time.
It was the old pervert Acrisius who’d bought Saul in the first place, convincing their great and fearless leader that the overgrown slave would benefit the entire Order, but Sister Beth knew that Saul had been brought on as a plaything for Acrisius, and for little else. He could do some manual labor here and there, but his main role within the Order was—her lips twisted in revulsion—pleasure.
Brother Saul, in his seemingly infinite and dumb optimism, however, was extremely happy to be here, and to have been granted the honor of going with Sister Beth to assist in the Order’s business of the day. If you asked him, he wouldn’t be able to say, not honestly anyway, though he would try if you requested it, that this life was any better or worse than his life with the slavers.
He’d been happy there, and with his previous master, another slaver, before that, and in his pre-outbreak life as a night construction contractor who moved in and around South Carolina, North Carolina, Alabama, and Georgia, following the work.
A night owl of hooting proportions, he’d preferred to work the night shifts building town and county and state roads under the moon’s watchful eye, and sleep during the day, though he could be roused for daytime tasks and didn’t mind them, either.
In that past life, he’d mostly slept outside during the day, finding a way onto the rooftop of the motel du jour or making his way into a field where he could lie undisturbed. Sometimes he’d worn shorts, but often he’d slept naked, taking in all of the sun’s rays into each and every fiber of his being.
Sleeping under the sun, he’d had the best dreams, and maybe that was why he’d been so happy, and continued to be now, because he’d spent so much time outside, wearing little to no clothes and away from electrical distractions.
He’d had no family, having been disowned after he dropped out of high school, and few friends other than a small number of regulars on the night crews, as regulars were quite rare in the first place. He’d been pavement milling the left lane of Highway 20 just outside of Dentsville, South Carolina, when the outbreak reached him.
He was thinking, as he often did, about which of the terms ‘pavement milling,’ ‘cold planing,’ ‘asphalt milling,’ ‘carbide grading,’ or ‘profiling,’ he liked the best for describing his work.
On that day the preferred term for Saul Byron Jeffries II was ‘cold planing.’ He wasn’t sure why, but that was it.
Then the strange people had come for him, and his cold planing days were over for good.
5
It had been a few minutes past midnight and Saul was still in the early part of his shift when they’d started coming. At first, he hadn
’t understood what they were.
How could he have? How could anyone?
The first one seemed to Saul just the run-of-the-mill raving lunatic, though he was more the moaning than the raving sort, until he stumble-ran into Saul’s mill, which proceeded to chew up the lunatic, moans and all, and gladly. Saul was still processing this—and his mill was still spitting out chunks of the man who’d jumped into it—when the next ones came.
There were a good many next ones. Where were all these crazy people coming from? And what was wrong with them?
They ran at him, and he didn’t need to read a pamphlet to know they meant him harm. They were snapping at him like turtles, trying to get up into the mill with him, and they were also trying to stick their nails in him, and there was something very, very wrong with the way they looked, and how they moved, and that grinding, moaning sound they were making. Come to think of it, everything about them was wrong.
Without even thinking about it, he began to bonk them with his wrench. And it was only bonking at first, just to keep them away from him. But it didn’t, and the hands kept reaching, and the mouths, too.
There was no talking to them either, so his bonks became firm blows, and then crushing ones, and when he got down to examine the bodies of the four people—if they were still that and he was beginning to have his doubts—whose skulls he’d smashed in, his body was still vibrating from the rumbling of the mill.
The involuntary trembling made him doubt, though only for a moment, that this was really happening. Dreams could be very convincing at times, especially the vivid ones that Saul had, but he knew that this wasn’t a dream. And the way he knew was the strangest thing of all, perhaps as strange or even more so than what would happen in the coming years, after the virus was fully grown, its puberty and all the awkwardness that came with it stamped into the past.
He knew because—
The way he knew wasn’t something he wanted to think about then.
There were more of these people in the distance, except they weren’t sick, they were what they were: zombies. And they were getting closer to Saul, edging clumsily toward him.
With his thumbs hooked into his pockets and the wrench hanging onto the fingers of one hand, Saul gazed at the group coming toward him. There were eight. Five men, two women, and a child—a little girl who must have been five or six. They were all in their nightclothes except for one of the men, who was completely naked. They were coming from a new housing community growing along the highway where single family homes were popping up like weeds.
Saul saw something then that any good spotter would’ve seen, and that was because he could spot with the best of them, except the term ‘spotting’ hadn’t been thought up yet. To him it was a combination of seeing and feeling, more like sensing than anything else, like perceiving a building pressure by putting your hand on the lid of a heating pot that was just barely beginning to think about rattling.
At that moment, the pressure behind the lid had built up too much, and then it wasn’t a circular lid with some almost-boiling water under it, but a dam with the weight of a great lake on the other side, and fissures were beginning to run through the dam’s skin like precocious roots, and it would only be a short time before the inevitable concrete fragments began to fall, mostly downward at first—slipping and sliding and taking chips with them on their ski down—but then outward, being flung with the force of furious water that had been kept in a container too long. Well, now was its chance, and the whole fucking structure was done for.
Out of the rupturing shell the water went and ate the world, leaving behind strewn splinters of the dam, which, when they’d been part of a whole, had held the evil back.
6
It was clearest on the naked man and the redheaded woman who were stumbling along beside the little girl.
That was another thing: different zombies showed it differently, and the changes in some were more pronounced than in others. Each zombie was unique, just as each person was, even though all the zombies were controlled by the same puppet master.
For one thing, he saw the naked man’s extremities begin to twitch. It was slight, but he caught minute up and down movements in the tips of his fingers, an odd hopping like the cold pavement was pricking his toe pads, and the teeniest of bobs at the end of his penis, like it was starting to retract, then changing its mind, rinse and repeat.
In the redhead, who he’d thought of as Poison Ivy as soon as he saw her, he saw the tips of her fingers and the points of her clavicles and her eyes do the same thing.
When he zoomed out and made his vision a bit fuzzier, he could see that it wasn’t just the super-villainous redhead and the nudist who were doing these things, but all of them were, albeit each in his or her own unique way. Then the smell of putrefaction seemed to grow wings and fly over to him, and the air grew thick with it as if a bellows had sucked all the breathable air into another world.
They staggered closer to him, but their movements were now even more clumsy, and the sounds coming from them were changing too. The moans and grunts were becoming faintly less guttural, softer in a way that only a certain endowed kind of ear could catch.
A good spotter would have seen and heard all of this, and Saul did just that. They were the hints of a coming chain reaction. The flat end of an exponential phenomenon that was just now flirting with the idea of unflattening.
Not much to it, you might say, but oh, yes, yes there was. Most people couldn’t see a thing, and it had more than a little to do with the fact that being composed enough to observe details in this sort of situation was beyond the grasp of most. Just keeping yourself from screaming would’ve been hard enough.
Of course Saul didn’t know that he was supposed to stay quiet at that point, this was all new to him, and he still didn’t quite understand what he was seeing, except that he knew he really was seeing it, and in his waking life, no less.
Then, a spasm took hold of Poison Ivy and her entire body seized up and shook until her eco-terrorist spine did a violent sideways twist and crunched, audibly enough for the sound to carry over to Saul, who was still a good distance away.
Startled, more by the suddenness than by fear, Saul lost his grip on the wrench. It fell and clanked against the flayed nerve endings of the pavement, which he hadn’t finished profiling. There was still a half mile stretch of road surface that needed removal before he could have in good conscience taken so much as a juice break.
The clank seemed to have hit the world’s slow motion button, or Saul’s slow motion perception trigger. Whichever it was, the effect from his perspective was the same. Even on their decelerated reel, the zombies became an explosion of movement.
7
Bones snapped apart into ragged shards and tore through putrefying flesh to breathe in the air for the first time. Saul stared as bone and flesh went in different directions—a hardcore disagreement was being had on where they should live relative to each other. And they were really far apart on terms. The middle ground that they came up with was ghastly, and all Saul could do was watch the negotiation play out.
Bones wanted out. Skin and muscle and internal organs and tendons and ligaments and all the flesh in between, rotting though it was, wanted said bones to stay damned well in their place. It wasn’t so much that the flesh cared about preserving its appearance. No, it was a structural argument, a practical question of how the hell are we going to keep moving around if you break the skeleton all over the place?
Fuck you and your argument and go pound dirt, the bones said, and then they went ahead and did what they wanted. They didn’t have a choice really, because it was what the virus commanded, and in the end, flesh and bone served the same master.
The zombies, unbelievably, after splintering their skeletons as if their bones were made of dried wood, charged at Saul, closing the distance to him at a speed that, quite frankly, was surreal. They’d broken free of their sleep, and they wouldn’t slow again until they’d done their work of s
preading the virus to new hosts, or until the noise coming from the humans in the area stopped, the latter of which usually happened as a direct result of the former, and not on its own, because staying still and quiet long enough in the presence of zombies so that they would forget you were there was, insofar as the outbreak and the months soon after, a challenge that was beyond measure. The rec-crews would master it eventually, the ones who survived, anyway.
The breaking of a large horde was a sight so alien, and so disturbing, that it left many unbitten humans frozen like deer in the headlights, too horrified to move, too involved in trying to process what they were seeing to do anything. And so they were made easy prey.
But not so for Saul, in part because the group of zombies he faced was somewhat short of a horde, and because fully active zombies had already tried to attack him while he sat in the mill, and he’d briefly seen their spines of broken bones poking through, and that had lodged itself somewhere in an active part of his subconscious, which added that element to the slow-moving zombies without any bloody porcupine quills poking through their skin. He’d been able to see that there was something about these zombies that was missing, an unfulfilled promise that had to be kept before they engaged him.
After they slipped into dormancy, their bones would break again when they were reactivated, and the quills on them would jut out further, and new porcupine points would be added, and their bone structures would become more and more abstract, and less human, like what Picasso’s version of a zombie might look like.
Saul had broken into a run—he was very fast, which was impressive considering his great size—after he’d stared, almost too long, at the compound fractures hurtling toward him. Of course the bones couldn’t just be broken. They had to be poking through the dead skin, having fractured so suddenly that it seemed the zombies had sprouted bristles.