by Stant Litore
God will forgive us the lives we cannot save.
She scrubbed the back of her hand across her eyes and looked to the sky; it was no longer so dark. In fact, the sky was nearly the blue of morning, and the stars were going out. And the scab-redness of the moon was long, long passed, as though it had never been.
“Forgive me for my mother and for Naomi,” she whispered, not lowering her eyes from the heavens. “This time I do not ask you for a child. Only do not forsake me now. Forgive me. For her. And for my daughter, whose life I couldn’t save.” She bit her lip until she tasted blood.
Holding the Am stone in her hand, she closed her eyes but did not sleep. The memory sprang upon her and this time she did not flee it. She faced it and mourned.
The pale light before sunrise found Devora still sitting with her back to Barak’s cairn, still awake, with Mishpat lying unsheathed across her thighs. Some of the death-reek had faded from the camp, and a gazelle now walked gracefully among the tents, nibbling here and there at a patch of heather. She was a doe, her striped sides moving gently with her breathing. Devora watched her with the kind of hushed fascination a girl might feel, a child who has never seen a doe before. Amid the horrors of the north, Devora’s heart had nearly forgotten such grace and beauty could exist. She had nearly forgotten there were such things as gazelles in the world. Once, the gazelle lifted its head and looked at the navi, its gaze focused and unblinking. Devora hardly dared breathe. At last the gazelle looked away and walked past the fire pit, almost within reach, looking for more heather blossoms to eat.
Devora rolled her shoulders back, breathed deeper.
The land was not dead yet.
She watched the gazelle for a while, but then the doe straightened sharply and turned to stare at the stand of oaks. Her ear twitched. Then with a few quick bounds the doe sprang away between the tents and was gone.
That alerted Devora to the danger. Without taking her gaze from the oaks, she took up some soil from the trampled ground by the fire pit and rubbed the dirt on her palms. What she wouldn’t give for a bath and a safe refuge in which to sleep...
With a grim look, she rose to her feet and stretched her arms and legs thoroughly, ignoring the protest of her stiff muscles and her soreness from the saddle. She lifted Mishpat and swept the cold iron once through the air, letting her arms feel its weight, letting her body get used to it again. She let her weight rest on the balls of her feet and loosened her hips as though she were preparing to dance before her husband.
She recalled how Lappidoth had fought the dead that day, when they came for his cattle at that stream that was now so many desperate miles to the south. How he had ducked and darted among the corpses, swinging his hatchet about as though it were part of him. Devora gazed at Mishpat, recognized the cold necessity of her blade, a thing lethal and cruel, yet a thing as balanced, as beautifully designed in its own way as the Covenant itself. “I intend to see Lappidoth again,” she whispered to the sword. “So you and I must dance together, whether we like each other or no.”
When the dead lurched out of the oaks, arms raised, their skin ashen gray and their eyes wide and unblinking, the navi was ready. She watched the dead stumble toward her. Four of them. Great strips of flesh hung loosely from one’s chest; another still carried a man’s hand in its grasp, chewed off beneath the wrist. One had been male and in life had been a large man and one of some wealth; the tatters of a woolen cloak of many colors still clung to its body. The others had been women. Two were naked, and the third wore a faded green dress and about her waist the blue sash of a midwife. Her gray face was wrinkled; she had lived a long life and had likely brought many lives screaming into the world. Now she took them screaming back out again.
Devora spread her feet a little, crouching slightly, ready to spring to the side or leap forward or back. She held Mishpat before her, both of her small hands on the hilt. “You are unclean,” she called to the dead. “An abomination. We do not want you walking in the land. Lie down and be still.”
The dead midwife made a spitting noise like a furious cat and lurched toward her, with the others close behind.
“Come, then!” Devora cried, her throat dry. Without hesitating, she leapt forward, spinning on her toes and bringing Mishpat gliding through the air with a hum of wind and death; the cold, dispassionate blade sheared through the midwife’s head just above the ears, and the body toppled lifeless to the earth. Devora brought her blade back before her just as the other dead closed on her. They did not fear her blade as the living might; they did not hesitate or slow their lunge toward her. Devora sliced away an arm that reached for her, and as it fell cleanly from its shoulder, no blood spurted, though the stench of rot and uncleanness worsened. She sprang back even as one of the other corpses grasped for her, its fingertips sliding for an instant along her wrist.
One of them opened its mouth in that terrible moan, that wordless, mindless cry that spoke of a hunger that would devour all life and all creation and yet still be famished. The other two took up the moan, and the sound filled the space between the oaks and the tents.
“Shut up,” Devora said coldly.
She ducked low and brought her blade cutting through their legs, first one, then the next. Two of the dead fell and lay moaning and twisting their torsos on the ground, and the other loomed over Devora, its hands fastening on her shoulders. The corpse pulled her up toward its mouth, and even as it ducked its head to bite at her throat, Mishpat slid between its breasts and carved upward, releasing stench, cutting right up through its throat and then through its face, carving the top part of the body in two equal halves. It jerked a moment, then its grip on the navi’s shoulders went limp, and with a cry of revulsion and fury Devora lifted her knee and drove it into the corpse’s chest, knocking it away.
The thing that had been a woman seemed to fall as slowly as a body in a dream. When it hit the earth at last, faceup, its back splattered open and it lay lifeless and tragic in a pool of its own insides.
Devora walked back to the other two, stood over them, sweat running thick as oil over her face, her hair lank and hanging before her eyes. She stayed just out of reach of their flailing arms. They twisted, trying to writhe nearer to her. She felt empty, looking down at them. They were not people, whether Hebrew or heathen. They were not even alive. Their hands and faces were stained with fresh blood, and she thought of Hurriya’s tale of how her child and its father had died. These dead spat and hissed and reached for her, their gray eyes dull but their faces twisted in hunger and hostility and loathing and a longing to end life.
“There is no place in the Covenant for you,” Devora told them quietly, and brought Mishpat, the Judgment, scything down.
The burn of noon found Devora exhausted from raising the new cairns. Yet she did not lie down, she did not sleep. She took up her sword and a bit of cloth from the raiders’ abandoned bags and began cleaning the blade.
She knew what she must do.
She was alive and she had covenants to keep. She would follow the remnant of Barak’s men south. She would make her way as Hurriya had before her through the strange hills where the dead were. Listening for God in the silent places, she would make her way, night after night, toward the heart of the land. Wherever she was forced to halt by an onset of the walking corpses, she would raise cairns over the Hebrew and the heathen dead. She must be hard and silent as the blade, yet not blind to the suffering of those whose homes and kin the dead had taken. They were all strangers in the land, bereft of shelter and beset on all sides by the stench of death. Knowing that she was herself a stranger in the land, unhomed and unclean, no other woman or man could any longer be strange to her. Hurriya had been right—their dwellings, and those of the Canaanites, were threatened alike. And they’d be strongest facing the dead together.
For seven days she would remain unclean, but it might well take those seven to get to Shiloh on foot. She might find the dead all about her. If God meant her to meet them as she now was, alone,
she would do so. Such things had been required before of those God called. Moseh had been sent against the Pharaoh of Kemet and all his chariots and his cities with just a stick in his hand and the promise whispered from a burning bush: ki ehyeh immakh, I will be with you.
Devora did not have even that promise, or any stick that would perform wonders. But she understood now the story of the burning bush as she never had before. It was not enough simply to sit beneath her olive tree and decide what to do about the suffering that was brought before her. The navi must go out into the land and do what she could for the suffering she found there, whether she witnessed it in the eyes of her own people or in the eyes of a bereaved stranger wrapped in a salmah. She could not sit with the Law at her back, for the Law must look into the eyes of the People. The Law must listen to the heart. Otherwise the Law, which was alive like an olive tree, would blight and decay, until it became unable to yield any life-sustaining fruit.
She would deliver Hurriya’s message to the People. And she would blow the shofar, call together the chieftains of the tribes. Tell them what Heber had said. Tell them they were all marching north, and the Ark of God with them. Maybe they would find tens of thousands of hungering dead when they returned to these hills. It didn’t matter. She had to trust that they would see the fire of the shekinah burn like wildfire on the slopes, hotter than any navi had ever been touched by it, hotter than anything made of flesh and bone could endure. That they would see the dead razed from the land, even as they had been razed from Shiloh thirty years ago. But even if the Ark lit no fire, still they must stand together against the dead.
For a moment she looked to the north over the tops of the oaks, where hills mounted higher and higher until she could glimpse the sharp line of the mountains of White Cedars beyond them, where snow fell like white feathers out of the sky. Somewhere north of her was an olive grove where a girl used to watch over her sister from the branches of a high tree.
“I’m sorry, Hurriya,” she whispered. “I don’t know where Anath is or how to find her. But I know she will be all right. You trusted me to help you, you hoped you could trust me when you came to my seat. I let you down then. Maybe I’m letting you down now. My daughter.” Her voice choked. “Please trust me again. She will be all right. Your Anath. I know she will; she survived this camp and she survived the dead and she has a horse that will carry her far. I have to trust her to that horse and to God. I have to. The People need me, Hurriya, both our peoples.”
She turned her back on the oaks and the higher ridges and the distant suggestion of peaks that knew the softness of snow and the seductive death of the extreme cold. She could do nothing more here.
Waterskin and goatskin pouch slung over her shoulder, Devora carried Mishpat at her side and began walking south along the high bank. She listened and watched intently, for it was not a question of whether she would encounter more walking corpses today, but when. She thought of Lappidoth waiting for her in the white tents, but this did not lighten her heart.
Whether God stayed silent or roared loud as thunder in the hills, her longing for rest was a seduction and a luring away from her responsibilities. She was the navi and the judge, but she understood that she too was judged. As she watched the pain of the People, God watched her. She knew she would not rest nor set Mishpat aside until there were no dead walking anywhere in the land. The burden of facing the dead was finally and entirely hers to bear. She would bear it. She had to.
FINIS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
THIS THIRD volume of The Zombie Bible was a long journey through strange hills, and I am intensely grateful for the support and advice of my traveling companions. I offer my thanks...
To Andrew Hallam, for his diligent and enthusiastic reading of my work; to Ever Saskya and JR West for their moral support; to all those who generously gave feedback on excerpts; to my pastor, for his excitement about the series;
To my editor Jeff VanderMeer, who continues to challenge me;
To Alex Carr, who has my back; to Jacque, Justin, Dave, Patrick, Katy, and the rest of the team at 47North, who have been enthusiastic readers and advocates for the series;
To Johnny Shaw, who gave me some of the best writing advice I have ever received over a few beers in New York;
To my wife, Jessica, and to my daughters River and Inara—it can’t always be easy living with a husband or father whose mind wanders with such frequency into daydreams of the hungry undead, or who leaps often from his chair to scribble a note; if it were not for their patience, their laughter, and their love, you would not now be holding this work in your hands;
And to all of you, my readers—it is you who make these stories breathe.
A NOTE ON PLACES
I ASK the forgiveness of any readers who live in Israel for the occasional liberties I have taken with their country’s geography, such as nudging Hazor (Walls) a little nearer the shore of Lake Hula (Merom) and, more severely, lifting the elevation of Merom (a choice originally suggested by the name Merom itself, “high place”).
I have always said that a novel needs to tell the truth and take no prisoners, but in this case I have proven more focused on the truths of the human heart than the truths of topography. I can say only that when I first conceived this story (the first volume of The Zombie Bible that I undertook), my entire means of traveling to that beautiful land consisted of a few colorful but barely sufficient maps, a shelf groaning beneath the weight of historical texts, and the seaworthy if makeshift vessel of my imagination. When I travel there at last, I hope to find that land as lovely in fact as it has proven in my heart.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photograph © Jessica Fusch 2008
STANT LITORE doesn’t consider his writing a vocation; he considers it an act of survival. As a youth, he witnessed the 1992 outbreak in the rural Pacific Northwest firsthand, as he glanced up from the feeding bins one dawn to see four dead staggering toward him across the pasture, dark shapes in the morning fog. With little time to think or react, he took a machete from the barn wall and hurried to defend his father’s livestock; the experience left him shaken. After that, community was never an easy thing for him. The country people he grew up with looked askance at his later choice of college degree and his eventual graduate research on the history of humanity’s encounters with the undead, and the citizens of his college community were sometimes uneasy at the machete and rosary he carried with him at all times, and at his grim look. He did not laugh much, though on those occasions when he did the laughter came from him in wild guffaws that seemed likely to break him apart. As he became book-learned, to his own surprise he found an intense love of ancient languages, a fierce admiration for his ancestors, and a deepening religious bent. On weekends, he went rock-climbing in the cliffs without rope or harness, his fingers clinging to the mountain, in a furious need to accustom himself to the nearness of death and teach his body to meet it. A rainstorm took him once on the cliffs and he slid thirty-five feet and hit a ledge without breaking a single bone, and concluded that he was either blessed or reserved in particular for a fate far worse. Finding women beautiful and worth the trouble, he married a girl his parents considered a heathen woman, but whose eyes made him smile. She persuaded him to come down from the cliffs, and he persuaded her to wear a small covenant ring on her hand, spending what coin he had to make it one that would shine in starlight and whisper to her heart how much he prized her. Desiring to live in a place with fewer trees (though he misses the forested slopes of his youth), a place where you can scan the horizon for miles and see what is coming for you while it is still well away, he settled in Colorado with his wife and two daughters, and they live there now. The mountains nearby call to him with promises of refuge. Driven again and again to history with an intensity that burns his mind, he corresponds in his thick script for several hours each evening with scholars and archaeologists and even a few national leaders or thugs wearing national leaders’ clothes who hoard bits of forgotten past in far countrie
s. He tells stories of his spiritual ancestors to any who will come by to listen, and he labors to set those stories to paper. Sometimes he lies awake beside his sleeping wife and listens in the night for any moan in the hills, but there is only her breathing, soft and full, and a mystery of beauty beside him. He keeps his machete sharp but hopes not to use it.
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