Zombies

by Otto Penzler

  And now the girl spoke, and her voice was as soft as the wind blowing through willow trees. “Yes,” she whispered. “We are hungry. Oh, so hungry.” Her jet black hair hung in ragged pennants to her shoulders. Simon dropped to his knees beside her and groped for her pulse. The grey skin of her wrist was as cold as that of a dead fish.

  At his back the door was pushed open unobtrusively, but it gave a slight creak which was sufficient to make him turn his head. The doorway appeared to him to be filled and crowded with people. Emanuel Louis, who was grasping a revolver in his hand, the immense Negro in the pale suit, Marianne Dorville, saucer-eyed with apprehension, and behind her the craning necks and dusky terror-stricken faces of a tableau of other men and women.

  Emanuel Louis’ face was stiff and contorted by rage. “Get out!” he said. “Leave this room immediately. I will not have my artistes upset by such behaviour. If you must know, they are suffering from fever, from grippe, but it is not serious. It has happened before, and they are under my personal supervision. You are committing a trespass, and if you refuse to take yourself off at once, I will summon the police. Your actions are insupportable—beyond all reason. Get out! Get out! Will you leave, or must we throw you into the street?”

  Simon got to his feet. “That will not be necessary, Monsieur Louis,” he said. “And you can put that thing away,” he added, pointing to the revolver. “I must warn you, however, that it is illegal to carry weapons in this country. And also that you have two very sick people on your hands.”

  “Go,” said Louis, “and should you try to return I warn you that I will not hesitate to have you arrested.” He was so choked by his fury that he could scarcely speak.

  Simon said no more. He walked over to the doorway, and the rows of black faces divided to let him pass. He was shaking as he got into his car.

  In the evening he visited the Princess Theatre for a second time, standing at the back of the dress circle. Both Tebreaux and Helene Chauvet were dancing, and their performance was as good as the one which they had given on the first night.

  David Roberts must have been right. Perhaps, after all, they were dope addicts. But Simon was by no means satisfied. There was a story here, and he was determined to get it.

  IT WAS AFTER midnight when Simon reached the Presscott. No lights showed, and he walked round to the tradesmen’s entrance and down a flight of steps leading to an area. Here there was a glow from a curtained window of what he took to be the kitchen. There was a bell in the surround and he pressed it.

  It was opened by a mulatto in his shirt sleeves and a tattered pullover, who stood there waiting for him to speak.

  “I know it’s very late,” Simon said, “but I wondered if you could by any chance oblige me by letting me have a room? It would be for tonight only. I arrived from Cornwall an hour or so ago and I can’t get a bed anywhere.”

  The mulatto stared at him with mistrust. “No,” he said, “I can’t. I am full up. This hotel is for coloured people.” He made as if to shut the door in Simon’s face.

  “I don’t mind that at all,” Simon said. He produced his wallet, from which he extracted a five-pound note. “I only want somewhere to sleep, and perhaps a cup of coffee in the morning.”

  The man eyed the note. Then he turned away. “Olive!” he called. “Come here a second, will you? There’s a bloke out here who wants a bed. He’s a white feller.” He pushed the door nearly shut once more, and Simon could hear a muttered colloquy coming from behind it. There was a lighter step, and through the crack he was aware that a fair-haired woman was inspecting him.

  Apparently satisfied by what she saw, she said: “Come in, won’t you? As my husband told you, we are full up, but if it’s only for one night, and you don’t mind roughing it, I daresay we could let you have Ivy’s room. She’s my living-in maid, and a lazy slut. Her mother’s been taken poorly, or so she says, so she won’t be coming back until tomorrow afternoon. ‘Clinging Ivy’ I calls her, the way she throws herself at those black chaps. She’ll get what’s coming to her one of these fine days if she doesn’t look out. They’re only human, aren’t they, same as the rest of us? Girls are so inconsiderate these days. But you can’t pick and choose, more’s the pity, you can’t by any manner of means, and well they know it! No luggage?” she finished sharply, looking at his empty hands.

  “I’m afraid not.” Simon thrust the note towards her. “Will that do instead?”

  “Not on the run, are you?” she asked him suspiciously. “We don’t take that sort here.”

  “No,” said Simon, “I’m not on the run.”

  Olive’s hand closed on the five pounds. “It’s just to oblige,” she said. “We don’t usually accept men without any luggage. Certainly not at this time of night. If you’ll follow me, I’ll show you your room. It’s nothing very grand.”

  He went up behind her to the top floor, and to a door that had no number. “The bed’s not bad,” said the woman defensively. “And it’s clean. You’ll find no bugs in my house. What time would you be wanting calling in the morning?” They had encountered no one on their way up.

  “Half-past seven?” Simon suggested, knowing that long before that he would be gone.

  “Righty-oh. Whatever you say.” She glanced around her. “Ivy’s left her things, I see. Still, you won’t be needing cupboard space, having brought no luggage. Well, good night.” Her pin heels clattered away down the staircase.

  Simon took off his coat and removed his shoes, and stretched out on the bed, which protested loudly under the weight of his fourteen stone. He would give his landlady and her husband half an hour in which to retire. He must have dozed, for when he looked at his watch it pointed to a quarter to three.

  Jumping up he crossed in his stockinged feet to the peg on which he had hung his coat, and took from its bulging pocket a packet of sandwiches, which had been thickly stuffed with nearly raw beef. He had remembered the whisper of the girl in room 13. “We are hungry. Oh, so hungry.”

  Their room must be on the floor below his own. He stuck his head over the stair-well. There was a dim bulb burning on each landing. Cautiously he made his way down, hoping that there would be no loose treads. On the landing he stood listening. From behind the door nearest to him came the noise of rhythmic snoring.

  He reached number 13 and slipped inside, for it was not locked. It was in darkness, but he could hear no breathing. He might have been in a tomb. He had satisfied himself that there was no transom, so he fumbled for the switch and turned on an unshaded light.

  The man and the girl were lying just as he had last seen them. “Do not be afraid,” he said in a whisper. “I was here to see you yesterday and this time I have brought you food. There is no reason for you to be afraid of me.” He leant down and closed first the girl’s cold fingers and then those of the man round the gift that he had brought them.

  Their fingers gripped like pincers into the soft bread, and slowly they raised it to their mouths. Simon looked at them with compassion. Drugs, he thought, that is what it is. The pupils of their eyes had dwindled to pin-points. They were chewing on the meat convulsively, their mouths crammed.

  And now they were stirring and raising themselves up from the mattresses, and their eyes were changing. The sadness and hopelessness was fading, and a fierce intense hatred was taking its place. Appalled by what he saw Simon jack-knifed to his feet, but quick as he had been, they too had leaped up and were upon him.

  Mathieu closed with him and his scrawny arms had in them all the strength of steel. Exerting every ounce of his considerable force Simon was barely holding his own with his assailant. And then the girl, uttering a piercing shriek of passionate and diabolical rage, snatched up a curved knife from the altar and clawed herself up upon his back.

  Simon knew that he was being overpowered and had no chance and, weak with fear for the first time in his life, started to shout for help. The girl had twisted her hand into his hair and was forcing back his head, exposing his throat. And the kn
ife flashed once in the light from the unshaded bulb. Simon’s cries ceased, silenced by the bubbling blood that gushed into his windpipe.

  There came the patter of running feet, and of calling, and amid a great confusion and tumult the door was burst open and Emanuel Louis ran into the room. Almost at his feet lay the body of Simon Cust, the throat from which his lifeblood was pouring had been slit from ear to ear like that of a sacrificial animal.

  Emanuel’s eyes passed on to the dirty matting on the floor where a beef sandwich was oozing from its torn wrapping. It was clear to him what had taken place. His charges had been fed meat. Meat and salt; those were the forbidden foods of zombies, the keys which would give them back their memories, and the interfering fool had not known it. So they had turned and rent the first man they had seen, judging him to have been responsible for their final degradation.

  The two occupants of the shabby room, blood spattered and with their arms hanging loosely by their sides and nearly to their knees, brushed past him blindly. Along the passage, lined with horrified Negroes, they went, and passed unmolested down the stairs and out into the deserted street.

  Emanuel Louis let them go, for it was useless to try to stop them, and then in his turn he paced through the waiting and watching men and women and went down to the hall and to the telephone. As he reached it a woman began to wail from above and soon all had taken it up in a weird and uncanny lament.

  Having made his call, Emanuel Louis sat on a hard chair by the booth and waited. He had not long to wait. In a very few minutes there was a screech of tyres as a squad car braked to a halt in front of the house and there was a roar of motor bicycles, and the hall became filled with policemen, two of them middle-aged and in plain clothes, and a uniformed constable, and a young Hercules in crash helmet and leather-encased legs who stood behind them with his hands planted on his belt. From the street more men could be heard arriving.

  Emanuel Louis led them up to the room where Simon Cust was lying, and for a moment the men stood in a shocked semi-circle eyeing the body. The smaller of the plain clothes men was the first to speak. “Stop those damned niggers making such a bloody din, can’t you?” he said. “It’s enough to turn your stomach.”

  His companion also swivelled round to face Emanuel Louis. “Well,” he said, “are you going to tell me which one of you is responsible?”

  The plump little man stared back at him sorrowfully. “I am going to tell you,” he said. “Those who have done this thing have gone. They have gone I do not know where, but it will be to the west.”

  “What’s that?” demanded the police officer. “You admit that you know the identity of the murderers? Why the hell did you let them get away?”

  “They will be making for the west,” said Emanuel Louis once again, scarcely seeing the stern and stolid faces that surrounded him, “for when the Living Dead realize what they really are, they always head for the graves from which they have been dragged.”

  AN ASTONISHINGLY DISTINGUISHED and demanding career as a physicist and aeronautical scientist has not prevented Geoffrey A. Landis (1955– ) from producing eighty short stories, fifty poems, a novel, and more than three hundred learned papers on scientific subjects. His fiction has been translated into twenty-one languages.

  Born in Detroit, Michigan, Landis led a peripatetic life as a child before attending the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, receiving degrees in physics and electrical engineering, then receiving a Ph.D. in solid-state physics from Brown University. He has worked for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration on such projects as planetary (particularly Mars and Venus) exploration and interstellar propulsion.

  His first published short story, “Elemental,” appeared in the December 1984 issue of Analog, and his fiction, mainly in the area of hard science fiction but extending to fantasy and horror as well, has enjoyed exceptional success. He has been nominated for six Hugo Awards, winning in the short-story category in 1992 for “A Walk in the Sun” and again in 2002 for “Falling onto Mars.” He also has been nominated for six Nebula Awards, winning for Best Short Story in 1989 for “Ripples in the Dirac Sea.” His first novel, Mars Crossing (2000), won the Locus Award.

  “Dead Right” was first published in The Ultimate Zombie, edited by Byron Preiss and John Betancourt (New York: Dell, 1993).

  ALI DANCED LEFT, right, but I had his number, I had the unbeatable combination; I hit him where he dodged and dodged him where he hit. Not even the Champ at his prime could stand against me. He danced back—as expected—and I started into the knockout sequence, counting under my breath (Left! Left! Duck!) to keep the timing (Cross! Half pace back!) and there!

  Muhammad Ali froze in mid-punch and the lights came on. I took off the glasses and looked at the tally screen: Ali by knockout. “What?”

  Jim Mallok was standing in the door. “You were a quarter-second late on the A3 sequence, and a half-second on the C3. A fighter like Ali, you have to be right in the groove; the bandwidth is too tight for anything else.” He flipped a switch, and the video image of Muhammad Ali vanished into the sweat-filled air. A punching bag stood forlorn where he had been. “What the hell you doing fighting Ali, Dave? You got real work to do.”

  “Yeah, I know. Just sharpening up my moves.”

  “Can’t you sharpen ’em up on your own time? This is business, not a video arcade. We got work to do.”

  I shrugged. “Can’t train against this Sobo guy until you get some videos of him fighting.”

  “You can still practice your basics. Forget the fancy stuff; you’re not going up against Ali. Practice knocking down some real human beings like you might see in the ring.”

  “Yow-SUH, Mr. Boss-Man suh! Ah’s working, Ah’s working jes as hard as I can.”

  Jim smiled.

  I USED TO fight golden-gloves when I was in high school. I was pretty good, but—let’s face it—golden-gloves Minneapolis isn’t quite the same league as golden-gloves New York or Chicago. The kids who hung out at the gym were dead-enders from the projects, kids whose only ways to leave the inner city were with their fists or on a slab. I liked it anyway; the jive talking and no-nonsense attitudes were a welcome change from the suburban intellectuals of high school. And besides, there is a pure visceral satisfaction in going into the gym and beating the hell out of a speed bag, walloping the thing until you fall into the flow, a rhythm that goes on effortlessly, until suddenly you wake up covered with sweat and tired right down to your kneecaps.

  I boxed at the Naval Academy, too, at least until they told me I was too tall to go into flight training and I opted out to finish my degree at Cleveland State. State didn’t have boxing, so while I still kept in shape working out at the Y, I stopped fighting. I didn’t think I missed it. Boxing is a young man’s sport anyway.

  I figured that was the end of my fighting career. Just goes to show how wrong you can be.

  I met Mallok during my first, and last, year in grad school, the year I spent slowly discovering that I didn’t have any desire to spend the rest of my life as an electrical engineer. I used to go over to the west side to the bouts down on Worthing Street every Saturday afternoon. Alone, of course: the girl I was dating considered any hint of macho something unutterably gauche and the fights absolutely barbaric. One of those Saturdays—a welterweight match—I ran into Mallok. I’d seen him around the fights, but never really noticed what he’d been doing. He was sitting right up by the ring, flicking his attention from the fight to his laptop computer and back, tapping frenetically at the keyboard. I came over to watch, and soon we got to talking fights. By the end of the evening Kid Rutano had downed Corregio with an overhand right, and Mallok had invited me back into his place, a gym and computer lab in one, to look over his fight analysis software.

  Until he’d failed to get tenure and dropped out of academia, Jim Mallok had had all the Air Force contracts he could handle. He’d been big in computer conflict modeling, based on a network theory of games. Network theory says that every suff
iciently complicated system must have poles and zeros. Put simply, this means that every strategy has a weakness, every opponent has a blind spot. If he knew the physiology and the tactics of a boxer, Mallok said, he could find a strategy that would put him down as easily as tapping him on the shoulder.

  I tried a couple of rounds with the video-boxing simulator he’d hacked together, and tried some of the combinations he showed me. It wasn’t as realistic as the one he trained me on later, but it was still surprisingly effective. The computer pulled images from a CD-ROM library, and twin video projectors put a separate image onto each eyepiece of a set of special glasses. Anybody looking at me would see me circling around a video projector, but to me it looked like the video image had puffed up and started throwing punches.

  We made a peculiar pair, Mallock and I; him short and dapper and full of enthusiasm, dark hair slicked back; me the ex-jock in faded sweatshirts, stocky and slow speaking, but always moving. We complemented one another perfectly.

  WE WERE AT the ring, and Mallok still hadn’t gotten any videos of this Sobo. I was ready for him, though, limbered up and ready with a hatful of winning combinations.

  I was dressing down when Sal walked back to the car to get his kit and Jim had gone to talk business with some backers. An old black man in a beat-up felt hat sidled up to me, grabbed my biceps, and looked me earnestly in the eye. “This Sobo, he bad baka,” he said, with an odd lilting accent that it took me a few seconds to understand. “You understand? He not person. No heart. You fight him, he going kill you. Better you drop out, you sick.”

  I yanked away, disgusted. “Thanks, guy. I’ll do okay.” A lot of weird stuff goes on in the fight game. Drugs, legal and illegal, and bribes of all kinds, of course, but not just that. Anything for an edge. Had Sobo’s trainer put this guy up to this, or did he have money on the fight? Either way, I wasn’t going to buy into it.