Zombies: The Recent Dead

by Paula Guran

  “I’m not really that good a shot.”

  “I’m sorry,” Jebidiah said, and struck another match along the length of his pants seam, then with his free hand, drew one of his revolvers. He got down on his hands and knees again, stuck the match in the hole and looked around. When the match was near done, he blew it out.

  “Ain’t you gonna need some light?” the deputy said. “A match ain’t nothin’,”

  “I’ll have it.” Jebidiah removed the remains of the Bible from his pocket, tore it in half along the spine, pushed one half in his coat, pushed the other half before him, into the darkness of the burrow. The moment it entered the hole, it flamed.

  “Ain’t your pocket gonna catch inside that hole?” the deputy asked.

  “As long as I hold it or it’s on my person, it won’t harm me. But the minute I let go of it, and the aura of evil touches it, it’ll blaze. I got to hurry, boy.”

  With that, Jebidiah wiggled inside the burrow.

  In the burrow, Jebidiah used the tip of his pistol to push the Bible pages forward. They glowed brightly, but Jebidiah knew the light would be brief. It would burn longer than writing paper, but still, it would not last long.

  After a goodly distance, Jebidiah discovered the burrow dropped off. He found himself inside a fairly large cavern. He could hear the sound of bats, and smell bat guano, which in fact, greased his path as he slid along on his elbows until he could stand inside the higher cavern and look about. The last flames of the Bible burned itself out with a puff of blue light and a sound like an old man breathing his last.

  Jebidiah listened in the dark for a long moment. He could hear the bats squeaking, moving about. The fact that they had given up the night sky, let Jebidiah know daylight was not far off.

  Jebidiah’s ears caught a sound, rocks shifting against the cave floor. Something was moving in the darkness, and he didn’t think it was the bats. It scuttled, and Jebidiah felt certain it was close to the floor, and by the sound of it, moving his way at a creeping pace. The hair on the back of Jebidiah’s neck bristled like porcupine quills. He felt his flesh bump up and crawl. The air became stiffer with the stench of burnt and rotting flesh. Jebidiah’s knees trembled. He reached cautiously inside his coat pocket, produced a match, struck it on his pants leg, held it up.

  At that very moment, the thing stood up and was brightly lit in the glow of the match, the bees circling its skin-stripped skull. It snarled and darted forward. Jebidiah felt its rotten claws on his shirt front as he fired the revolver. The blaze from the bullet gave a brief, bright flare and was gone. At the same time, the match was knocked out of his hand and Jebidiah was knocked backwards, onto his back, the thing’s claws at his throat. The monster’s bees stung him. The stings felt like red-hot pokers entering his flesh. He stuck the revolver into the creature’s body and fired. Once. Twice. Three times. A fourth.

  Then the hammer clicked empty. He realized he had already fired two other shots. Six dead silver soldiers were in his cylinders, and the thing still had hold of him.

  He tried to draw his other gun, but before he could, the thing released him, and Jebidiah could hear it crawling away in the dark. The bats fluttered and screeched.

  Confused, Jebidiah drew the pistol, managed to get to his feet. He waited, listening, his fresh revolver pointing into the darkness.

  Jebidiah found another match, struck it.

  The thing lay with its back draped over a rise of rock. Jebidiah eased toward it. The silver loads had torn into the hive. It oozed a dark, odiferous trail of death and decaying honey. Bees began to drop to the cavern floor. The hive in Gimet’s chest sizzled and pulsed like a large, black knot. Gimet opened his mouth, snarled, but otherwise didn’t move.

  Couldn’t move.

  Jebidiah, guided by the last wisps of his match, raised the pistol, stuck it against the black knot, and pulled the trigger. The knot exploded. Gimet let out with a shriek so sharp and loud it startled the bats to flight, drove them out of the cave, through the burrow, out into the remains of the night.

  Gimet’s claw-like hands dug hard at the stones around him, then he was still and Jebidiah’s match went out.

  Jebidiah found the remains of the Bible in his pocket, and as he removed it, tossed it on the ground, it burst into flames. Using the two pistol barrels like large tweezers, he lifted the burning pages and dropped them into Gimet’s open chest. The body caught on fire immediately, crackled and popped dryly, and was soon nothing more than a blaze. It lit the cavern up bright as day.

  Jebidiah watched the corpse being consumed by the Biblical fire for a moment, then headed toward the burrow, bent down, squirmed through it, came up in the grave.

  He looked for the deputy and didn’t see him. He climbed out of the grave and looked around. Jebidiah smiled. If the deputy had lasted until the bats charged out, that was most likely the last straw, and he had bolted.

  Jebidiah looked back at the open grave. Smoke wisped out of the hole and out of the grave and climbed up to the sky. The moon was fading and the pink on the horizon was widening.

  Gimet was truly dead now. The road was safe. His job was done.

  At least for one brief moment.

  Jebidiah walked down the hill, found his horse tied in the brush near the road where he had left it. The deputy’s horse was gone, of course, the deputy most likely having already finished out Deadman’s Road at a high gallop, on his way to Nacogdoches, perhaps to have a long drink of whisky and turn in his badge.

  About the Author

  Joe R. Lansdale is the author of over thirty novels and numerous short stories. His novella,Bubba Hotep, was made into an award-winning film of the same name, as was Incident On and Off a Mountain Road. Both were directed by Don Coscarelli. His works have received numerous recognitions, including the Edgar, seven Bram Stoker awards, the Grinizani Prize for Literature, American Mystery Award, the International Horror Award, British Fantasy Award, and many others.

  Story Notes

  I reckon this here story might’ve left y’all are hankering to hear more about The Reverend Jebidiah Mercer.

  You are in luck as he appears in several of Joe. R. Lansdale’s stories and the novel Dead in the West, a zombie western. The novel and four stories—one never before collected, one brand new—are being republished as Deadman’s Road by Subterranean Press.

  Bitter Grounds

  Neil Gaiman

  1

  “Come Back Early or Never Come”

  In every way that counted, I was dead. Inside somewhere maybe I was screaming and weeping and howling like an animal, but that was another person deep inside, another person who had no access to the face and lips and mouth and head, so on the surface I just shrugged and smiled and kept moving. If I could have physically passed away, just let it all go, like that, without doing anything, stepped out of life as easily as walking through a door, I would have. But I was going to sleep at night and waking in the morning, disappointed to be there and resigned to existence.

  Sometimes I telephoned her. I let the phone ring once, maybe even twice before I hung up.

  The me who was screaming was so far inside nobody knew he was even there at all. Even I forgot that he was there, until one day I got into the car—I had to go to the store, I had decided, to bring back some apples—and I went past the store that sold apples and I kept driving, and driving. I was going south, and west, because if I went north or east I would run out of world too soon.

  A couple of hours down the highway my cell phone started to ring. I wound down the window and threw the cell phone out. I wondered who would find it, whether they would answer the phone and find themselves gifted with life.

  When I stopped for gas I took all the cash I could on every card I had. I did the same for the next couple of days, ATM by ATM, until the cards stopped working.

  The first two nights I slept in the car.

  I was halfway through Tennessee when I realized I needed a bath badly enough to pay for it. I checked in
to a motel, stretched out in the bath, and slept in it until the water got cold and woke me. I shaved with a motel courtesy kit plastic razor and a sachet of foam. Then I stumbled to the bed, and I slept.

  Awoke at 4:00 am, and knew it was time to get back on the road.

  I went down to the lobby.

  There was a man standing at the front desk when I got there: silver-gray hair although I guessed he was still in his thirties, if only just, thin lips, good suit rumpled, saying, “I ordered that cab an hour ago. One hour ago.” He tapped the desk with his wallet as he spoke, the beats emphasizing his words.

  The night manager shrugged. “I’ll call again,” he said. “But if they don’t have the car, they can’t send it.” He dialed a phone number, said, “This is the Night’s Out Inn front desk . . . . Yeah, I told him . . . . Yeah, I told him.”

  “Hey,” I said. “I’m not a cab, but I’m in no hurry. You need a ride somewhere?”

  For a moment the man looked at me like I was crazy, and for a moment there was fear in his eyes. Then he looked at me like I’d been sent from Heaven. ”You know, by God, I do,” he said.

  “You tell me where to go,” I said. “I’ll take you there. Like I said, I’m in no hurry”

  “Give me that phone,” said the silver-gray man to the night cle-rk. He took the handset and said, “You can cancel your cab, because God just sent me a Good Samaritan. People come into your life for a reason. That’s right. And I want you to think about that.”

  He picked up his briefcase—like me he had no luggage—and together we went out to the parking lot.

  We drove through the dark. He’d check a handdrawn map on his lap, with a flashlight attached to his key ring; then he’d say, “Left here,” or “This way”

  “It’s good of you,” he said.

  “No problem. I have time.”

  “I appreciate it. You know, this has that pristine urban-legend quality, driving down country roads with a mysterious Samaritan. A Phantom Hitchhiker story. After I get to my destination, I’ll describe you to a friend, and they’ll tell me you died ten years ago, and still go round giving people rides.”

  “Be a good way to meet people.”

  He chuckled. “What do you do?”

  “Guess you could say I’m between jobs,” I said. “You?”

  “I’m an anthropology professor.” Pause. “I guess I should have introduced myself. Teach at a Christian college. People don’t believe we teach anthropology at Christian colleges, but we do. Some of us.”

  “I believe you.”

  Another pause. “My car broke down. I got a ride to the motel from the highway patrol, as they said there was no tow truck going to be there until morning. Got two hours of sleep. Then the highway patrol called my hotel room. Tow truck’s on the way. I got to be there when they arrive. Can you believe that? I’m not there, they won’t touch it. Just drive away. Called a cab. Never came. Hope we get there before the tow truck.”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  “I guess I should have taken a plane. It’s not that I’m scared of flying. But I cashed in the ticket; I’m on my way to New Orleans. Hour’s flight, four hundred-and-forty dollars. Day’s drive, thirty dollars. That’s four hundred-and-ten dollars spending money, and I don’t have to account for it to anybody. Spent fifty dollars on the motel room, but that’s just the way these things go. Academic conference. My first. Faculty doesn’t believe in them. But things change. I’m looking forward to it. Anthropologists from all over the world.” He named several, names that meant nothing to me. “I’m presenting a paper on the Haitian coffee girls.”

  “They grow it, or drink it?”

  “Neither. They sold it, door to door in Port-au-Prince, early in the morning, in the early years of the century”

  It was starting to get light, now.

  “People thought they were zombies,” he said. “You know. The walking dead. I think it’s a right turn here.”

  “Were they? Zombies?”

  He seemed very pleased to have been asked. “Well, anthropologically, there are several schools of thought about zombies. It’s not as cut-and-dried as popularist works like The Serpent and the Rainbow would make it appear. First we have to define our terms: are we talking folk belief, or zombie dust, or the walking dead?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. I was pretty sure The Serpent and the Rainbow was a horror movie.

  “They were children, little girls, five to ten years old, who went door-to- door through Port-au-Prince selling the chicory coffee mixture. Just about this time of day, before the sun was up. They belonged to one old woman. Hang a left just before we go into the next turn. When she died, the girls vanished. That’s what the books tell you.”

  “And what do you believe?” I asked.

  “That’s my car,” he said, with relief in his voice. It was a red Honda Accord, on the side of the road. There was a tow truck beside it, lights flashing, a man beside the tow truck smoking a cigarette. We pulled up behind the tow truck.

  The anthropologist had the door of the car opened before I’d stopped; he grabbed his briefcase and was out of the car.

  “Was giving you another five minutes, then I was going to take off,” said the tow-truck driver. He dropped his cigarette into a puddle on the tarmac. ”Okay, I’ll need your triple-A card, and a credit card.”

  The man reached for his wallet. He looked puzzled. He put his hands in his pockets. He said, “My wallet.” He came back to my car, opened the passenger-side door and leaned back inside. I turned on the light. He patted the empty seat. “My wallet,” he said again. His voice was plaintive and hurt.

  “You had it back in the motel,” I reminded him. “You were holding it. It was in your hand.”

  He said, “God damn it. God fucking damn it to hell.”

  “Everything okay there?” called the tow-truck driver.

  “Okay,” said the anthropologist to me, urgently. “This is what we’ll do. You drive back to the motel. I must have left the wallet on the desk. Bring it back here. I’ll keep him happy until then. Five minutes, it’ll take you five minutes.” He must have seen the expression on my face. He said, “Remember. People come into your life for a reason.”

  I shrugged, irritated to have been sucked into someone else’s story.

  Then he shut the car door and gave me a thumbs-up.

  I wished I could just have driven away and abandoned him, but it was too late, I was driving to the hotel. The night clerk gave me the wallet, which he had noticed on the counter, he told me, moments after we left.

  I opened the wallet. The credit cards were all in the name of Jackson Anderton.

  It took me half an hour to find my way back, as the sky grayed into full dawn. The tow truck was gone. The rear window of the red Honda Accord was broken, and the driver’s-side door hung open. I wondered if it was a different car, if I had driven the wrong way to the wrong place; but there were the tow truck driver’s cigarette stubs, crushed on the road, and in the ditch nearby I found a gaping briefcase, empty, and beside it, a manila folder containing a fifteen-page typescript, a prepaid hotel reservation at a Marriott in New Orleans in the name of Jackson Anderton, and a packet of three condoms, ribbed for extra pleasure.

  On the title page of the typescript was printed:

  This was the way zombies are spoken of. They are the bodies without souls. The living dead. Once they were dead, and after that they were called back to life again.—Hurston, Tell My Horse

  I took the manila folder, but left the briefcase where it was. I drove south under a pearl-colored sky.

  People come into your life for a reason. Right.

  I could not find a radio station that would hold its signal. Eventually I pressed the scan button on the radio and just left it on, left it scanning from channel to channel in a relentless quest for signal, scurrying from gospel to oldies to Bible talk to sex talk to country, three seconds a station with plenty of white noise in between .

  . . . Lazarus, w
ho was dead, you make no mistake about that, he was dead, and Jesus brought him back to show us—I say to show us . . .

  . . . what I call a Chinese dragon. Can I say this on the air? Just as you, y’know get your rocks off, you whomp her round the backatha head, it all spurts outta her nose. I damn near laugh my ass off . . .

  . . . If you come home tonight I’ll be waiting in the darkness for my woman with my bottle and my gun . . .

  . . . When Jesus says will you be there, will you be there? No man knows the day or the hour, so will you. be there . . .

  . . . president unveiled an initiative today . . .

  . . . fresh-brewed in the morning. For you, for me. For every day. Because every day is freshly ground . . .

  Over and over. It washed over me, driving through the day, on the back roads. Just driving and driving.

  They become more personable as you head south, the people. You sit in a diner, and along with your coffee and your food, they bring you comments, questions, smiles, and nods.

  It was evening, and I was eating fried chicken and collard greens and hush puppies, and a waitress smiled at me. The food seemed tasteless, but I guessed that might have been my problem, not theirs.

  I nodded at her politely, which she took as an invitation to come over and refill my coffee cup. The coffee was bitter, which I liked. At least it tasted of something.

  “Looking at you,” she said, “I would guess that you are a professional man. May I enquire as to your profession?” That was what she said, word for word.

  “Indeed you may,” I said, feeling almost possessed by something, and affably pompous, like W.C. Fields or the Nutty Professor (the fat one, not the Jerry Lewis one, although I am actually within pounds of the optimum weight for my height). “I happen to be . . . an anthropologist, on my way to a conference in New Orleans, where I shall confer, consult, and otherwise hobnob with my fellow anthropologists.”