Zombies

by Otto Penzler

  The sound of a wheelchair rolling in behind her. She turned and watched as the old woman grabbed each side of her ancient-looking, spasming head. The head continued its insistent no no no even as the hands and arms increased their pressure, the old lady’s body quaking from the strain. Then suddenly the no no no stopped, the arms lifted up on the now-motionless head, and pulled it away from the body, cracking open the spine and stretching the skin and muscle of the neck until they tore or snapped apart like rotted bands of elastic. The old woman’s fluids gushed, then suddenly stopped, both head and body sealing the breaks with pale tissues stretched almost to transparency.

  The new face on the old woman’s body was withered, pale, almost hairless, and resembled the old face to a remarkable degree. The new eyes sagged lazily, and Elaine wondered if this body might be blind.

  The old woman’s head gasped, and was still. The young male body picked up the woman’s dead head and stuffed it into its hairy mouth. Its new, pale pink lips stretched and rolled. Elaine could see the stomach acid bubbling on those lips, the steadily diminishing face of the old lady appearing now and then in the gaps between the male body’s lips as the body continued its digestion. The old woman’s denuded skull fell out on the linoleum and rattled its way across the floor.

  Elaine closed her eyes and tried to remember everything her mother had ever told her. Someone dies and you don’t know them anymore. It’s just a dead body—it’s not my friend. My friend lives in the head forever. Death is a mystery. Stay away from crowds. Crowds want to eat you.

  She wanted Mark here with her. She wanted Mark to touch her body and make her feel beautiful. No. People can’t be trusted. No. She wanted to love her own body. No. She wanted her body to love her. No. She tried to imagine Mark touching her, making love to her. No. With dead eyes, mouth splitting at the corners. No. Removing his head and shoving it deep inside her, his eyes and tongue finding and eating all her secrets.

  No no no, her head said. Elaine’s head moved no no no. And each time her vision swept across the room with the rhythmic swing of her shaking head, the bodies were closer.

  BORN IN PRINCETON, West Virginia, Dale Bailey (1968– ) began writing as a very young child, producing his stories in booklet form to give to family and friends. After receiving his Ph.D. in English, he taught that subject at Lenoir-Rhyne College in North Carolina but continued to write. Most of his work has been in the weird menace category, combining elements of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. Many of his twenty-five or so short stories have been published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, but other publications in which his work has appeared include Amazing Stories and Pulphouse.

  Bailey won the International Horror Guild Award for his novelette Death and Suffrage in 2003, the same year that he was nominated in the Best First Novel category for The Fallen. He has written two other novels, House of Bones (2003), which is reminiscent of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, and Sleeping Policeman (2006), written with Jack Slay Jr. The title story of his collection The Resurrection Man’s Legacy and Other Stories (2003) was nominated for a Nebula Award and has been optioned by 20th Century Fox for a motion picture. His doctoral thesis was slightly rewritten and published by Bowling Green University’s Popular Press as American Nightmares: The Haunted House Formula in American Popular Fiction (1999), the theme of which inspired his novel House of Bones.

  Death and Suffrage was originally published in the February 2002 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

  IT’S FUNNY HOW things happen, Burton used to tell me. The very moment you’re engaged in some task of mind-numbing insignificance—cutting your toenails, maybe, or fishing in the sofa for the remote—the world is being refashioned around you. You stand before a mirror to brush your teeth, and halfway around the planet flood waters are on the rise. Every minute of every day, the world transforms itself in ways you can hardly imagine, and there you are, sitting in traffic or wondering what’s for lunch or just staring blithely out a window. History happens while you’re making other plans, Burton always says.

  I guess I know that now. I guess we all know that.

  Me, I was in a sixth-floor Chicago office suite working on my résumé when it started. The usual chaos swirled around me—phones braying, people scurrying about, the televisions singing exit poll data over the din—but it all had a forced artificial quality. The campaign was over. Our numbers people had told us everything we needed to know: when the polls opened that morning, Stoddard was up seventeen points. So there I sat, dejected and soon to be unemployed, with my feet on a rented desk and my lap-top propped against my knees, mulling over synonyms for directed. As in directed a staff of fifteen. As in directed public relations for the Democratic National Committee. As in directed a national political campaign straight into the toilet.

  Then CNN started emitting the little overture that means somewhere in the world history is happening, just like Burton always says.

  I looked up as Lewis turned off the television.

  “What’d you do that for?”

  Lewis leaned over to shut my computer down. “I’ll show you,” he said.

  I followed him through the suite, past clumps of people huddled around televisions. Nobody looked my way. Nobody had looked me in the eye since Sunday. I tried to listen, but over the shocked buzz in the room I couldn’t catch much more than snatches of unscripted anchor-speak. I didn’t see Burton, and I supposed he was off drafting his concession speech. “No sense delaying the inevitable,” he had told me that morning.

  “What gives?” I said to Lewis in the hall, but he only shook his head.

  Lewis is a big man, fifty, with the drooping posture and hangdog expression of an adolescent. He stood in the elevator and watched the numbers cycle, rubbing idly at an acne scar. He had lots of them, a whole face pitted from what had to be among the worst teenage years in human history. I had never liked him much, and I liked him even less right then, but you couldn’t help admiring the intelligence in his eyes. If Burton had been elected, Lewis would have served him well. Now he’d be looking for work instead.

  The doors slid apart, and Lewis steered me through the lobby into a typical November morning in Chicago: a diamond-tipped wind boring in from the lake, a bruised sky spitting something that couldn’t decide whether it wanted to be rain or snow. I grew up in Southern California—my grandparents raised me—and there’s not much I hate more than Chicago weather; but that morning I stood there with my shirt-sleeves rolled to the elbow and my tie whipping over my shoulder, and I didn’t feel a thing.

  “My God,” I said, and for a moment, my mind just locked up. All I could think was that not two hours ago I had stood in this very spot watching Burton work the crowd, and then the world had still been sane. Afterwards, Burton had walked down the street to cast his ballot. When he stepped out of the booth, the press had been waiting. Burton charmed them, the consummate politician even in defeat. We could have done great things.

  And even then the world had still been sane.

  No longer.

  It took me a moment to sort it all out—the pedestrians shouldering by with wild eyes, the bell-hop standing dumbfounded before the hotel on the corner, his chin bobbing at half-mast. Three taxis had tangled up in the street, bleeding steam, and farther up the block loomed an overturned bus the size of a beached plesiosaur. Somewhere a woman was screaming atonally, over and over and over, with staccato hitches for breath. Sirens wailed in the distance. A t.v. crew was getting it all on tape, and for the first time since I blew Burton’s chance to hold the highest office in the land, I stood in the presence of a journalist who wasn’t shoving a mike in my face to ask me what had come over me.

  I was too stunned even to enjoy it.

  Instead, like Lewis beside me, I just stared across the street at the polling place. Dead people had gathered there, fifteen or twenty of them, and more arriving. Even then, there was never any question in my mind that they were dead. You could s
ee it in the way they held their bodies, stiff as marionettes; in their shuffling gaits and the bright haunted glaze of their eyes. You could see it in the lacerations yawning open on the ropy coils of their guts, in their random nakedness, their haphazard clothes—hospital gowns and blood-stained blue jeans and immaculate suits fresh from unsealed caskets. You could see it in the dark patches of decay that blossomed on their flesh. You could just see that they were dead. It was every zombie movie you ever saw, and then some.

  Gooseflesh erupted along my arms, and it had nothing to do with the wind off Lake Michigan.

  “My God,” I said again, when I finally managed to unlock my brain. “What do they want?”

  “They want to vote,” said Lewis.

  THE DEAD HAVE been voting in Chicago elections since long before Richard J. Daley took office, one wag wrote in the next morning’s Tribune, but yesterday’s events bring a whole new meaning to the tradition.

  I’ll say.

  The dead had voted, all right, and not just in Chicago. They had risen from hospital gurneys and autopsy slabs, from open coffins and embalming tables in every precinct in the nation, and they had cast their ballots largely without interference. Who was going to stop them? More than half the poll-workers had abandoned ship when the zombies started shambling through the doors, and even workers who stayed at their posts had usually permitted them to do as they pleased. The dead didn’t threaten anyone—they didn’t do much of anything you’d expect zombies to do, in fact. But most people found that inscrutable gaze unnerving. Better to let them cast their ballots than bear for long the knowing light in those strange eyes.

  And when the ballots were counted, we learned something else as well: They voted for Burton. Every last one of them voted for Burton.

  “IT’S YOUR FAULT, ” Lewis said at breakfast the next day.

  Everyone else agreed with him, I could tell, the entire senior staff, harried and sleep-deprived. They studied their food as he ranted, or scrutinized the conference table or scribbled frantic notes in their day-planners. Anything to avoid looking me in the eye. Even Burton, alone at the head of the table, just munched on a bagel and stared at CNN, the muted screen aflicker with footage of zombies staggering along on their unfathomable errands. Toward dawn, as the final tallies rolled in from the western districts, they had started to gravitate toward cemeteries. No one yet knew why.

  “My fault?” I said, but my indignation was manufactured. About five that morning, waking from nightmare in my darkened hotel room, I had arrived at the same conclusion as everyone else.

  “The goddamn talk show,” Lewis said, as if that explained everything.

  And maybe it did.

  The goddamn talk show in question was none other than Crossfire and the Sunday before the polls opened I got caught in it. I had broken the first commandment of political life, a commandment I had flogged relentlessly for the last year. Stay on message, stick to the talking points.

  Thou shalt not speak from the heart.

  The occasion of this amateurish mistake was a six-year-old girl named Dana Maguire. Three days before I went on the air, a five-year-old boy gunned Dana down in her after-school program. The kid had found the pistol in his father’s nightstand, and just as Dana’s mother was coming in to pick her up, he tugged it from his insulated lunch sack and shot Dana in the neck. She died in her mother’s arms while the five-year-old looked on in tears.

  Just your typical day in America, except the first time I saw Dana’s photo in the news, I felt something kick a hole in my chest. I can remember the moment to this day: October light slanting through hotel windows, the television on low while I talked to my grandmother in California. I don’t have much in the way of family. There had been an uncle on my father’s side, but he had drifted out of my life after my folks died, leaving my mother’s parents to raise me. There’s just the two of us since my grandfather passed on five years ago, and even in the heat of a campaign, I try to check on Gran every day. Mostly she rattles on about old folks in the home, a litany of names and ailments I can barely keep straight at the best of times. And that afternoon, half-watching some glib CNN hardbody do a stand-up in front of Little Tykes Academy, I lost the thread of her words altogether.

  Next thing I know, she’s saying, “Robert, Robert—” in this troubled voice, and me, I’m sitting on a hotel bed in Dayton, Ohio, weeping for a little girl I never heard of. Grief, shock, you name it—ten years in public life, nothing like that had ever happened to me before. But after that, I couldn’t think of it in political terms. After that, Dana Maguire was personal.

  Predictably, the whole thing came up on Crossfire. Joe Stern, Stoddard’s campaign director and a man I’ve known for years, leaned into the camera and espoused the usual line—you know, the one about the constitutional right to bear arms, as if Jefferson had personally foreseen the rapid-fire semi-automatic with a sixteen-round clip. Coming from the mouth of Joe Stern, a smug fleshy ideologue who ought to have known better, this line enraged me.

  Even so, I hardly recognized the voice that responded to him. I felt as though something else was speaking through me—as though a voice had possessed me, a speaker from that broken hole in the center of my chest.

  What it said, that voice, was: “If Grant Burton is elected, he’ll see that every handgun in the United States is melted into pig iron. He’ll do everything in his power to save the Dana Maguires of this nation.”

  Joe Stern puffed up like a toad. “This isn’t about Dana Maguire—”

  The voice interrupted him. “If there’s any justice in the universe, Dana Maguire will rise up from her grave to haunt you,” the voice said. It said, “If it’s not about Dana Maguire, then what on Earth is it about?”

  Stoddard had new ads in saturation before the day was out: Burton’s face, my words in voice-over. If Grant Burton is elected, he’ll see that every handgun in the United States is melted into pig iron. By Monday afternoon, we had plummeted six points and Lewis wasn’t speaking to me.

  I couldn’t seem to shut him up now, though.

  He leaned across the table and jabbed a thick finger at me, overturning a Styrofoam cup of coffee. I watched the black pool spread as he shouted. “We were up five points, we had it won before you opened your goddamn—”

  Angela Dey, our chief pollster, interrupted him. “Look!” she said, pointing at the television.

  Burton touched the volume button on the remote, but the image on the screen was clear enough: a cemetery in upstate New York, one of the new ones where the stones are set flush to the earth to make mowing easier. Three or four zombies had fallen to their knees by a fresh grave.

  “Good God,” Dey whispered. “What are they doing?”

  No one gave her an answer and I suppose she hadn’t expected one. She could see as well as the rest of us what was happening. The dead were scrabbling at the earth with their bare hands.

  A line from some old poem I had read in college—

  —ahh, who’s digging on my grave—

  —lodged in my head, rattling around like angry candy, and for the first time I had a taste of the hysteria that would possess us all by the time this was done. Graves had opened, the dead walked the earth. All humanity trembled.

  Ahh, who’s digging on my grave?

  Lewis flung himself back against his chair and glared at me balefully. “This is all your fault.”

  “At least they voted for us,” I said.

  NOT THAT WE swept into the White House at the head of a triumphal procession of zombies. Anything but, actually. The voting rights of the dead turned out to be a serious constitutional question, and Stoddard lodged a complaint with the Federal Election Commission. Dead people had no say in the affairs of the living, he argued, and besides, none of them were legally registered anyway. Sensing defeat, the Democratic National Committee countersued, claiming that the sheer presence of the dead may have kept legitimate voters from the polls.

  While the courts pondered these issues in si
lence, the world convulsed. Church attendance soared. The president impaneled experts and blue-ribbon commissions, the Senate held hearings. The CDC convened a task force to search for biological agents. At the UN, the Security Council debated quarantine against the United States; the stock market lost fifteen percent on the news.

  Meanwhile, the dead went unheeding about their business. They never spoke or otherwise attempted to communicate, yet you could sense an intelligence, inhuman and remote, behind their mass resurrection. They spent the next weeks opening fresh graves, releasing the recently buried from entombment. With bare hands, they clawed away the dirt; through sheer numbers, they battered apart the concrete vaults and sealed caskets. You would see them in the streets, stinking of formaldehyde and putrefaction, their hands torn and ragged, the rich earth of the grave impacted under their fingernails.

  Their numbers swelled.

  People died, but they didn’t stay dead; the newly resurrected kept busy at their graves.

  A week after the balloting, the Supreme Court handed down a decision overturning the election. Congress, meeting in emergency session, set a new date for the first week of January. If nothing else, the year 2000 debacle in Florida had taught us the virtue of speed.

  Lewis came to my hotel room at dusk to tell me.

  “We’re in business,” he said.

  When I didn’t answer, he took a chair across from me. We stared over the fog-shrouded city in silence. Far out above the lake, threads of rain seamed the sky. Good news for the dead. The digging would go easier.

  Lewis turned the bottle on the table so he could read the label. I knew what it was: Glenfiddich, a good single malt. I’d been sipping it from a hotel tumbler most of the afternoon.