The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 22

by Stephen Jones

  I will die alone. My wife and I will have separated, not the way married couples do when disaffected, but for our own safety, since we will both know what would inevitably happen to her if I were to die by her side, or to me, should she predecease me while I remained within her reach. Neither of us will want to chance that risk of being the first to go, and since the only other way to eliminate that possibility would be a suicide pact, one which we will not trust ourselves to properly effectuate in order to avoid the anticipated horrors, we will, as we sense our individual ends approaching, know that we have to part. I will remain in our home in West Virginia, while she will move to her mother’s home in Maryland, which will, at that time, have been empty. Her mother will have been the lucky one, avoiding with impeccable timing what will someday occur. Our parting will be emotional, as we have been together since we were children. At least, that’s the way it’s always seemed. I will not share the details of that separation here; some things should remain private. The exodus from our home will not be easy for her, as any journey in that future time will have its dangers, but still, it will be safer for her to be a state away rather than here, remaining beside me while we counted down the days, wondering which of us would be the first to fall only to then rise up into a frenzy. Neither one of us will want to shuffle off to what should have been a long sleep with the other still alive beside us, only to have that sleep interrupted, to wake and then begin to feast on the one we love. A solitary death, as painful as that would be, would be preferable.

  I will die in my own bed. It will bear no relation to the end I had expected. I will have always assumed that I would be attacked and eaten by a bear that wandered over from Sleepy Creek, or else find myself flying through the windshield of my Jeep at dusk after hitting a deer. Or, if I was to be lucky enough to have a death less violent than that, I expected it to be out in the garden. I would clutch my chest – perhaps among the bamboo, the spot which brings me the most happiness – and fall to my knees, tottering a moment before my face hits the earth. But it will prove to be none of those. I know this. I will have tucked into my own bed, which will have suddenly grown to the size of a continent. I will have patted the place where my wife’s shape could still be felt, and then fallen into a deep sleep. I will be dreaming of her, missing her, acting out within my mind a scenario in which she is still beside me, in which we are forever young, and in which the nightmare we faced had been replaced by a desired dream, when something will burst in my brain. All bodily functions will stop, but only for a little while . . . then some of them will start up again. Some, but not all, and I, like so many others, will be reborn.

  I will not suffer from Alzheimer’s, but I will look at my world as if I did. When I rise again, in that most miraculous way, I will stare blankly at my surroundings. I will look at the bookshelves filled with people and worlds I had loved, populated by universes created by others and then carefully collected by me, and I will not remember any of them. On other shelves, I will see the books and magazines filled with words I had written and not know that they had ever been mine. I do not even think that books and magazines will any longer register as meaningful objects. They will just be the random static of a world I will no longer be capable of hearing. I will look at the paintings on the walls, many of them created by my own father, and not recognise them, or remember him. I will look at the photographs also hanging there, and see only strangers. Perhaps I will not even be capable of that, of categorising human beings. Perhaps I will only see those photographs as advertisements for feasts which will be beyond my reach. My conscious mind will be gone, and I will be nothing but a moving tropism, a thing of urges alone. Eventually, once my desire manifests, it will only have one true destination.

  I will not immediately be hungry. This will not surprise me, however, as I will be beyond surprise. I will have assumed, based on many news reports I watched to fulfil my final days – which will prove to be as inaccurate on this matter as they proved to be during my lifetime on so much else – that I would leap up instantly ravenous, and feel caged by the four walls surrounding me. I will have imagined that I would instantly stumble wildly about, lusting for a living target on which to feed. But instead, my waking will be slow, with the birthing of my body first long before my desire, and so, at the start of my second chapter, I will move calmly through the house. That will perhaps be a side effect of the fact that my wife and I had arranged events so that I would be reborn alone. If she would still have been at my side, perhaps her scent would have roused my hunger immediately. But I will never have a chance to learn if that is so, to contrast those two possibilities. One rebirth is the most any of us can expect in our lifetimes.

  I will not be as favourably situated as I would have been had I never left New York. In the rural location I have chosen, the pickings will be slim, while back in the city of my birth, the possibilities would have been infinite. Candidates to feed upon would have been easily found. But because I have remained here, I will stumble about the house, bouncing off the walls – literally, for once, rather than metaphorically – unable to sense a scent, not understanding how to turn a doorknob in order to get outside and begin whatever journey it is I will be destined to make. As I do those things, I will spot the skittish movement of a deer in the yard, and will mistake its blur for the motion of an escaping human. I will crash through one of the glass doors at the back of our house, an action which, though freeing me from the confines of this home I love, will serve only to frighten the animal away. That loss will not make me sad, or angry, or give rise to any other disappointed feelings, for, separate from the fact that I will be beyond those emotions, I will understand, in a place beyond consciousness, as the creature speeds off, that it had not been human, and I will know, with an awareness beyond intelligence, that only human flesh will henceforth be able to feed my hunger.

  I will not be killed so quickly as I would have thought. What neighbours I should have had will be gone. Their houses will be abandoned, the doors left ajar. Inside the nearest homes, the ones I will mindlessly enter, will be such total emptiness as to signal that the previous occupants assumed they would never be reclaimed. But I will not be able to interpret that, nor will I any longer have the slightest idea where those neighbours could have gone. If I could have breached the barrier between my far future self and the most recent future former self, that living self of mere days before, I would have asked and learned this – that some of Earth’s survivors will have banded together and fled, seeking safety at the government compounds, while others will have gone even more deeply into the woods, seeking to hide high on mountains which they will feel the undead will not be able to climb. Still others, even more fearful of what they are sure is to come, will kill themselves in such ways they feel will prevent return. (At least, that is what they will hope. And in some cases, they will be correct. But not in all.) I will not know any of this, nor will I be able to realise how I am benefiting from those actions, for these disparate decisions of others will keep me alive my first few days of life after death. I am unmolested in my aimless wandering, instead of becoming the immediate object of target practice as I would have been had my neighbours not scattered, or if I had remained in that distant city of my birth.

  I will not be helped by any of the research I will have done. I will not even remember having done it. But even if I had somehow managed to retain all of the supposed facts of the undead, that knowledge would not have helped. Yes, I will need no sleep, but what good will knowing that do me? And I had once known, but was no longer aware, that the only way for this new self to die would be by a shot through the head, one which would sever the brainstem, but once reborn, this would not help me either, not to live and not to die. And I will not need to be told to seek the living, for finding flesh will be paramount. The knowledge of that will be embedded within me, and I will have no need of instruction from my late, living self to tell me so. I will have no need of knowing because I will be busy being. But there is one fact which my f
ormer study had not revealed that I would have found fascinating, if only I could reach back to pass it on. One thing I will not have known, and therefore I could not have told myself, is that having been reborn, I will head directly for her. For my wife. For my love. She whom I sent away. So I will have forgotten what will have come before, and all I will know is – I must head for her.

  I will not think of my parents. I will have been thinking about them often during those final days leading up to my death, which will mean that they will be paramount among the many things of which I will not be thinking then, of which I will no longer be able to think. I will have been glad that they had left this world before the uprising will have begun, because the worrying I will have done about them before they died in their normal, though still sad and tragic ways, will be as nothing when compared to the fears added to the menu of our anxiety once death was no longer an option. The world, once everything changed, will have become a place in which we no longer wrestled with letting go as our loved ones were taken, but instead were horrified at the thought that to be merciful, we might have to take part in their final erasure from the Earth. We will have become more than mere bystanders to the deaths of our parents, children, and friends. We will have been forced to become reluctant participants. Some will try to reject that by instead choosing to engineer their own deaths, but it will not always work. Those five stages of grief which had been hammered into us – denial, anger, bargaining, and so on – had a new more horrible stage grafted on to the end, one which I will have been spared having to endure, at least as far as my parents were concerned. As I will be pulled in the direction of Maryland, shambling closer toward the scent of my wife, I will not be conscious of any of this. The world will be made up of only two families then, the living and the living dead, and as I will be part of the latter group, I will not be concerned with the intricate social constructs of the former. When those I’ve left behind come to mind at all, it will only serve to enflame me toward one ravenous purpose.

  The ability to swim will have been stripped from me. By the time I reach the spot at which a bridge once crossed over to Maryland, that span will no longer exist. My former living self would have recognised the signs that the bridge’s destruction had been deliberate, but the me which will eventually be all that remains will not, will not remember the explosions that had occurred and which I had heard and noted the month before I died, nor will recall my inability then to interpret them. Gunfire in my neck of the woods is common, but I’d never before heard explosions of that magnitude, and had no idea what they could have meant. Whether this action will have been taken to keep the undead from crossing to Maryland from West Virginia or to West Virginia from Maryland, I will not know, or even be able to contemplate, or care. I will arrive at what remains of the bridge and continue walking, out onto bent struts and then beyond, until there is nothing but open air beneath me, and I will fall forward, tumbling into the icy Potomac River below. I will not bother to flail my arms as I drop, and I will emit no sound. Once I hit the water, I will sink, for the dead do not float, but it will not matter. I will keep putting one foot in front of the other, the river bottom no less foreign than the roadway. I will occasionally clamber over rocks, making a slow and clumsy progress, until I reach the other shore. My head will rise slowly out of the water. I will pause there for a moment, still submerged from the neck down, waiting for a sign, waiting until I sense my wife again. Only once she registers will I continue on.

  My first kill will be made in confusion. As I move closer to dry land and come up out of the water, I will startle a fisherman, who, as he backs violently away from me once he discovers what I am and what I am not, will slip and crack his skull amid the wet rocks. I will, at first, not know quite what to make of his contortions as he twitches there briefly, then stills. I will be momentarily frozen, driven to kill, yet at the same time unable to tell whether the prize of that kill has been taken from me, for I may only feast upon living flesh. I will have a hunger, and I will have known even before that hunger became mine how that hunger would manifest, and how I was meant to assuage it. Somehow, even though I will know so little, I will know that. Since I can only get what I need from those who still breathe, from those who have not yet become like me, when I fall to my knees, I will be uncertain as to what comes next. It won’t be until I surge onward uncontrollably, biting through the man’s abdomen, and until I then pull back, his intestines in my teeth still pulsing, his blood continuing to flow against my face, that I will realise, as a flower realises that it has been watered, that I will not have been too late.

  As I travel, my life will pass before me, but it will not be a life I am able to recognise. Moving on from the river’s edge, on from my first feast, I will amble slowly across Maryland, heading back to her. Even though the undead will have but one intention for the living in this particular instance, I will not know toward what end. I will pass through places infused with meaning, but I will be walled up beyond the reach of that meaning. I know now that I will not, in my peregrinations, revisit all of the places which were the settings for the pivotal plot points of my life, as most of those will have occurred in New York, before the age of thirty, but still, there will be enough settings overflowing with emotion to have made me weep, if only I will have been capable of remembering them. But I will not. I will not even know this, and that will be in actuality a more devastating loss than the initial loss of life itself. As I move across the map, here will be the office in which a diabetic boss raged while waving his fingers in my face, with my only response being a shoving of my hands into my pockets to avoid slugging him. There will be the park at which my wife and I passed several contemplative hours one afternoon deciding whether to make an offer on our first home. Here will be the highway entrance ramp at which the car ahead of me swerved and then flipped, narrowly missing me, almost creating a world in which this story could not be written and the future I am relating will not be played out. There will be the restaurant at which my wife and son and I had shared many joyful and voracious dim sum lunches. I will also pass through settings I will not want to remember, places the future absence of same from my memory will not be so much a theft as a gift, proving it possible that death, even in that odd, unwelcome guise, will still possess its benefits. All will be gone, all gone. The wise and the foolish, the transcendental and the cringeworthy, the shameful and uplifted, it will be as if they had never happened. And if I will no longer be able to bring them back, did they?

  I will be alone, but I will not be lonely. The country roads, highways and suburban streets across which I will shamble will be strangely deserted, only I will not know that then. I will have no past, and so be incapable of comparisons. I will not know that my path had ever been any different, and so will not know enough to ask myself the question, “Where is everybody?” Nor would I have the consciousness necessary to theorise an answer. I will not know then what I know now, what I learned in my last few living days, that many killed themselves in ways designed to discourage an undead outcome, others fled far from urban or even suburban areas in search of more sparsely populated, and therefore hopefully more protected, places, while others barricaded themselves in basements, believing that what they were enduring was not the end times, but something that would pass, something survivable, something endurable, something temporary. (After all, even holocausts pass, and even jihads end; but not this.) Those upon whom I do feed along my journey to my wife will not be any of those. My only meals will be made up of the confused, the uncertain, and the uncaring. I will gorge myself only on those who have given up, or gone mad. But I will neither notice nor care about the psychological makeup of my meals. Their flesh satisfies, and that will be enough.

  Others of my kind will be invisible to me. As we stagger alone together across a landscape which for the most part seems entirely ours, at times escaping collisions by inches, at times careening off each other like pinballs, we will be on different journeys, so their presence will be meaningless t
o me. I might as well be the last animated creature in the world. I see that now, but then, later, I will not be able to make comparisons to the way I had lived before, to know whether my previous passages across that landscape had been similar or different. I will just, in answer to the call, a call I had been preparing for since I’d first met my wife, keep putting one foot in front of the other. But even though the feet upon which I move propel me with machinelike efficiency, they do not, however, go unscathed.

  I will not remain whole, and I will not care about the parts which go missing. Occasionally, my attempts at feeding will not go smoothly, and someone will retaliate successfully, lashing out before they inevitably go down, gouging me, or severing a finger, or hacking off a chunk of flesh. But even if I will notice the loss the moment it occurs, I will not care that it occurred, and soon be unable to remember that I was anything else but. The undead will not be haunted by the lingering of phantom limbs which tormented the living. Loss will no longer scar us in that way. As I have already shared, there will be only one injury which could possibly end my journey, and none of those left for me to eviscerate – none save one – will have the presence of mind to either remember it or act upon it. Except for the effect on my balance which will be caused by the results of certain of these attacks, it will be as if they’d never occurred.

  I will not be aware of the passage of time. I will live in a kind of eternal present, neither caring about the regrets of yesterday nor the worries of tomorrow. There will be only one day for me, and that will be whatever day I occupy. I will move continuously, having no need of sleep or even rest, which is something I will not have expected, since books and films which tried to imagine what I would become always told us that the undead would only rove during night-time hours. But I will never lay myself down. I will not even count each transition from day to night to day again. Though I will be heading toward a goal, and in some subconscious place be aware of the end to my story, I will not be actively measuring my progress, any more than a mountain measures its progress as it is thrust skyward by the shifting of tectonic plates. If my task will take forever, I will not mind, both because I am beyond the minding of anything, and also because I, barring a misstep which will allow a human the upper hand, will actually have forever in which to accomplish it.