Zombies

by Otto Penzler

  “I serious.” His look was intense, almost fearful. Maybe he owed money to the mob, needed to win a bet. “Sobo, he different. You not know his type in America. He once dead man, no can die.”

  Jim had promised that we would be different, we wouldn’t play those games, and I wasn’t going to be played with, either. “Go away, old man, or I call security. You shouldn’t be here.”

  “I just ignorant man, sir,” he said. “But, please, you think it, okay? You be smart.”

  Sal pushed through the door and stopped. He took one look at me, then threw the tape down on the floor in disgust, and grabbed the man with one hand on his collar and the other on the seat of his pants. “You. Out.” He shuffled the man toward the door and gave him a boost outward, then turned to me. “You shouldn’t let guys like that talk trash to you, kid. What did he want, ask you to throw the fight?”

  I held out my hands to be taped up, and shook my head slightly. “Just trying to scare me, I think,” I said. “Didn’t work. We don’t play those games.”

  THE DAMN RING was too hot, and I was sweating before I’d even stood up. Sobo looked tough. He was a tall, stringy guy, skin black as graveyard dirt, thin as a cadaver, but with plenty of reach. He sat there unmoving as his trainer fussed over him, staring straight forward as if he’d forgotten how to use his eyelids. I’ve seen ’em like that before, brain damaged from too many punches, but still, something about the complete emptiness in his eyes unnerved me. What the old black man had said still ran through my head. “You heard anything about this guy Sobo?” I whispered to Sal.

  He didn’t look up. “Not much.” He continued to rub oil into my back, loosening me up for the bout. “Hasn’t been in the country long. Fought twice, won ’em both by wearing the other guy down.”

  “Umm.” I probably knew more than he did; I’d read the dossier. But Sal had street smarts, and we didn’t have a good lock on this guy. I’d been hoping for something better.

  Sal slapped me on the back. “You can take him, kid. Show him how a red-blooded American fights.”

  The trainer was muttering to him. From across the ring I could barely hear it, unusual, urgent cadences in a whispered, distorted Creole. At the same time he was wiping Sobo down. I squinted. What was that fluid he was wiping him with? It glistened with an evil shine on Sobo’s preternaturally black skin.

  The ref made the announcement and I stood up. We looked at each other for a moment, and then the bell rang. Sal punched me softly. “Kill ’im, kid.”

  Sobo moved out slowly, with a trace of hesitation between movements giving him a jerky look. I memorized that. If he moved with the same rhythm in the ring, I’d have to compensate, or I’d be punching in places where he wasn’t.

  He had a slow guard, and barely even tried to duck punches. I did the basic sequence: one, two, pause, three, four, down! I stepped back to let the ref in as he fell.

  Sobo was still on his feet.

  Whap, whap, whap; I licked out a few fast lefts to the face. He raised his guard. Whap, whap; I hit him a couple of times in the stomach. He lowered his guard. He didn’t seem to notice, just kept plugging away with his right, pumping like a slow piston. Mostly I blocked ’em, but he put in a couple every now and then.

  In the clinches his skin felt cool and squishy. I was breathing hard now, and sweating like a horse. Sobo didn’t seem to be sweating at all. Nor breathing, either, as far as I could tell. And he had that same dead, impassive expression on his face. His eyes were funny—flat, almost dusty. No matter where I dodged, he stared straight ahead. I was wearing myself out hitting him, and he didn’t even seem to notice it.

  This was no projection. This was the real thing, and I didn’t like it.

  I hate these sleazy, second-rate arenas. The lights hang down low, the air is stagnant and full of smoke; you get hot and soaked in sweat in no time. I was beginning to tire, but Sobo hadn’t slowed down a whit. He didn’t seem to notice any of my blows, though I was landing three for every one he hit me with. My hands were beginning to hurt. I was sweating rivers, but he hadn’t started to sweat at all. The bell rang, at last. I gave him one final lick where the ref couldn’t see, then headed back to my corner.

  “I gotta talk to Mallok, Sal.” When Jim came over, I said, “Got anything new?”

  Jim shook his head.

  “I got a bad feeling about this one, Jim. He’s not responding right.”

  “Keep on it, Dave. We’ll get a make on him yet. We got the technology, dig it? Hang in there.”

  “I got a bad feeling, Jim.” Then the bell rang, and I was back in the ring.

  Second round was worse. I was killing him on points, but he was wearing me down. The combinations I used had been optimized and fine-tuned and should have been able to knock over a horse, but he kept on moving. I’d gotten in one good one to the face and cut him bad over one eye, but instead of blood, the open edges of the wound oozed a sickly pale yellow fluid, and he took no notice. My throat was raw from panting; bile like stale piss burned in the back of my mouth. I couldn’t stand up any longer, and then the bell came.

  Third round was worse yet. Sal was yelling advice—“Hands high! Head down!”—but I was too tired to keep up. My hands were too heavy, sliding down of their own will. My nostrils were clogged with the tang of sweat and linament, but under those familiar smells was another, a rank odor of decay, like a whiff of rotten meat. I was beginning to feel an awful certainty about the word the old man had been too frightened to say. The bell rang, and I called for Jim.

  “He’s a zombie, Jim! I mean, a real, live zombie! I mean, a dead one! From Haiti. He’s not alive!”

  In the opposite corner Sobo stared unmoving, unblinking, the voodoo man chanting over him and rubbing his skin with fresh blood.

  Jim didn’t even blink. “Isn’t that some sort of blowfish poison they use? Should slow him down—what’s the problem?”

  “No, Jim. I don’t mean some poor drugged-out crazy. I mean, he’s a zombie. Dead, and I mean D-E-A-D, dead.”

  “Zombie, like the walking dead? I don’t think I believe in zombies, kid.”

  “You’ve been updating the program, right? What have you come up with?”

  He shook his head. “According to my model, he should be dead twice over by now. Just keep hitting him in the same places, and sooner or later—”

  “Negative, Jim. It’s voodoo. He is dead. Feed it into the computer. Tell me—how can you knock out a fighter who’s already dead?”

  The bell rang. He blinked, and nodded. “I’ll try.”

  THE JOB MARKET for people to play around with computers, the only profession I was decently prepared for, had quietly gone soft while I was wasting time flunking out of grad school. My girlfriend had drifted off with a vague, “We’ll stay friends, okay?”; my secondhand Plymouth vanished when the bank noticed I hadn’t made any payments for six months. I didn’t have any idea of what to do next. I certainly hadn’t planned to go back into the fight scene, never even considered going pro. But that summer there was nothing, not even any openings flipping burgers, and I was getting desperate. I’d been hitting the bags at the Y when Jim caught up with me and made his offer. Jim believed that fighting was a thinking man’s sport, and he wanted a partner who could think as well as fight.

  I could barely believe him. Unless you’re up there with Ali, prizefighting is a lousy way to make a living. On the bottom of the card it’s hard work and constant training for a shot at a hundred, maybe two hundred dollars. He wasn’t even a trainer, not a real trainer, he was an ex-professor with a theory.

  His theory was simple. He claimed that network theory guaranteed that for any system, there was an input that it couldn’t respond to. For every fighter there exists some combination of moves that he can’t respond to, that leaves him waltzing right into the knockout blow. He could input videotapes of a fighter’s past fights into the computer, and have it model the fighter and tell us the moves.

  With a piece of software that co
uld train any boxer to beat anybody, he could just name his price, right?

  Wrong. An out-of-work college professor? Just who was he trying to scam, anyway? Before he could win fights, he had to win some fights. He needed a demo model.

  Me.

  I was in no condition for extended bouts, but that made little difference to his strategy.

  The computer was programmed with all the great fighters of the past . . . and videos of all the fighters I was going to meet. I was programmed, too: programmed with the moves to beat them.

  It was crazy to accept it, but what else did I have? I told him I’d think it over. The next day he’d hired Sal, an old guy who’d been working the corner since the forties, until he got squeezed out by the mob. Sal came in for nothing but a cut of the prize and Mallok’s promise that we were going to play straight. When I came by that afternoon to tell him I was in, he was already setting up for the first bout.

  The first few fights were upsets—surprise victory by knockout in the first round. It had been so easy it surprised even me; I knew what they were going to do before they did, and they walked into my knockout punch like they were following a script. Suddenly we were getting the attention Mallok needed. With one more win to show that the first two were more than a fluke, I’d be able to get out of the ring and the money would start rolling in. But we were stymied with Sobo. No videos. Most boxers were glad to supplement their income with the little bit of money they’d get from selling videos, but there was a wall of secrecy about the new Haitian fighter. We were going in blind.

  No big deal, since we still had the physiology, the nerve connections and blood flow. If you hit him right, not even necessarily very hard, just right, any fighter would have to go down. Any fighter alive.

  We had never counted on meeting a fighter who wasn’t.

  HIS SMELL WAS making me retch; something in my hindbrain said that it was wrong, evil, unclean. I was in shape for a sprint, and the match had turned into a marathon. I’d barely stayed upright last round, much less done any damage, and he’d been impassive, steady as a stiffened corpse. As I collapsed onto the stool, I could hear the voodoo man start to mutter his chant in the opposite corner. Jim’s voice seemed to come from far away. “I’ve got it set. Get him off balance to the left, and then knock him over with an A3-A3-B13 combination.”

  I blinked. A3-A3 was a classic feint combination, footwork opposite to left jab, which would certainly get him off balance—this guy Sobo was no Fred Astaire when it came to dancing—but a B13 wouldn’t do anything. Knock him over? Possible, even likely, but tripping him wouldn’t hurt him any. What was the point, when he would just get back up again punching? I started to say something when the bell rang.

  “Go!” Sal lifted me up off the bench and pushed me toward the ring. Somewhere I found enough energy to stagger forward.

  Sobo stepped forward, pistoning away tirelessly. I stepped left, he stepped left, I crossed and jabbed, and then whacked him. It was a soft blow, I was too tired; I had no power left to put behind it. He tripped over his misplaced feet, and his own momentum carried him down. He started to get up—

  “Stop the fight!”

  The ring medic jumped the rope and ran to Sobo. Sobo was already stumbling to his feet, his right still pumping away, even though I wasn’t anywhere in range. “Stop the fight!” The ref looked confused, and then the medic pulled out a hypodermic.

  Sobo’s trainer shrieked.

  The ring medic had to hold Sobo down to examine him. He didn’t have a pulse, and his flesh was cold as a shock victim, but he was still trying to get up when the medic jabbed him full of adrenaline to restart his heart.

  SOBO MAY OR may not have been clinically dead when he entered the ambulance. For certain, though, after the paramedics tried adrenaline injections, CPR, electroshock, and all the rest in a frantic effort to restart his heart, he was good and dead by the time he got to the hospital.

  There was a big commotion for a while—that’s how I picked up the nickname “Killer”—but the coroner’s statement said Sobo had been in such bad shape that he never should have been in the ring in the first place. “I don’t understand why he was even walking, much less fighting,” the doctor said, and nobody ever quite figured out how he’d ever won his first two fights. His trainer was deported back to Haiti as an undesirable alien.

  I was feeling nothing: no triumph, no pity, no pain. Just weary. Jim came in as Sal was cutting the tape off my hands. I looked up slowly. “So?”

  “So he was already dead. It wasn’t exactly illegal, kid. We heard what you said. We figured, if he was a zombie, he couldn’t stand up to even a cursory med exam. Sal had to bribe the ring medic to get him to jump in in the middle of the fight, but once he got close to Sobo, the show was over. We didn’t intend to kill the guy, but, hell, he was already dead. Should of figured it. Stands to reason, if he was dead to start with, starting his heart wouldn’t do him any good.”

  “What do you mean, not exactly legal?”

  “So, new philosophy: if you can’t win by the rules,” he shrugged, “bribe an official.”

  I winced as Sal touched up a ripening bruise. “I thought we didn’t play that way.”

  “Hell, kid, you think they were playing by the rules? They must of paid to get somebody to look the other way.”

  “Then the program’s wrong.” I just looked at him.

  There’s a lot of weird stuff that goes down. Fighting a dead man was a new one, but it wouldn’t be the weirdest thing to happen in the ring, or outside of it.

  “Well, of course. I mean it’s not exactly wrong, it’s just . . . it’s that it couldn’t . . . it . . .” He paused. “Yeah. Wrong. Dead wrong.”

  I nodded. “So you know.”

  We looked at each other, but I was tired, too dead tired to think now, too tired to make fine moral distinctions. In the morning I’d see it clearly.

  “I think,” Jim said, slowly, “we have some work to do.” And, after a long while, he began to laugh.

  BORN IN EDINBURGH, Graham Masterton (1946– ) began his career as a journalist, first as a newspaper reporter, then as editor of the men’s magazine Mayfair, followed by the same position for both Penthouse and Penthouse Forum in Great Britain. This led, perhaps inevitably, to a prolific career as a writer of sex books, with more than two dozen titles published, including How to Drive Your Man Wild in Bed (1976), which sold more than three million copies worldwide.

  Masterton also became a prolific author of horror, adventure, thriller, and historical fiction, publishing more than a hundred books, beginning with The Manitou (1975), which he claims to have written in ten days. The story of a Native American shaman who is reborn in the present day to wreak revenge on white people, it became a bestseller and has had five sequels. It was filmed in 1978, produced and directed by William Girdler; it starred Tony Curtis, Susan Strasberg, Burgess Meredith, Michael Ansara, Stella Stevens, and Ann Sothern. Three of his stories were filmed for the television series The Hunger. His novel Charnel House (1979) was nominated for an Edgar Allan Poe Award. Two historical sagas, Rich (1979) and Maiden Voyage (1984), were New York Times bestsellers. He has frequently written for children, and the seven books in the Rook series for young adults have an avid following.

  “The Taking of Mr. Bill” was originally published in The Mammoth Book of Zombies, edited by Stephen Jones (London: Robinson Publishing, 1993).

  IT WAS ONLY a few minutes past four in the afternoon, but the day suddenly grew dark, thunderously dark, and freezing-cold rain began to lash down. For a few minutes, the pathways of Kensington Gardens were criss-crossed with bobbing umbrellas and au-pairs running helter-skelter with baby-buggies and screaming children.

  Then, the gardens were abruptly deserted, left to the rain and the Canada geese and the gusts of wind that ruffled back the leaves. Marjorie found herself alone, hurriedly pushing William in his small navy-blue Mothercare pram. She was wearing only her red tweed jacket and her long black pleated skirt, a
nd she was already soaked. The afternoon had been brilliantly sunny when she left the house, with a sky as blue as dinner-plates. She hadn’t brought an umbrella. She hadn’t even brought a plastic rain-hat.

  She hadn’t expected to stay with her uncle Michael until so late, but Uncle Michael was so old now that he could barely keep himself clean. She had made him tea and tidied his bed, and done some hoovering while William lay kicking and gurgling on the sofa, and Uncle Michael watched him, rheumy-eyed, his hands resting on his lap like crumpled yellow tissue-paper, his mind fading and brightening, fading and brightening, in the same way that the afternoon sunlight faded and brightened.

  She had kissed Uncle Michael before she left, and he had clasped her hand between both of his. “Take good care of that boy, won’t you?” he had whispered. “You never know who’s watching. You never know who might want him.”

  “Oh, Uncle, you know that I never let him out of my sight. Besides, if anybody wants him, they’re welcome to him. Perhaps I’ll get some sleep at night.”

  “Don’t say that, Marjorie. Never say that. Think of all the mothers who have said that, only as a joke, and then have wished that they had cut out their tongues.”

  “Uncle . . . don’t be so morbid. I’ll give you a ring when I get home, just to make sure you’re all right. But I must go. I’m cooking chicken chasseur tonight.”

  Uncle Michael had nodded. “Chicken chasseur . . . ,” he had said, vaguely. Then, “Don’t forget the pan.”

  “Of course not, Uncle. I’m not going to burn it. Now, make sure you put the chain on the door.”

  Now she was walking past the Round Pond. She slowed down, wheeling the pram through the muddy grass. She was so wet that it scarcely made any difference. She thought of the old Chinese saying, “Why walk fast in the rain? It’s raining just as hard up ahead.”