Three Zombie Novels

by David Wellington

  It seemed to surprise no one on the Island that Dekalb could heal them. It was lich magic that had infected their crops, their buildings, their bodies. Of course it was lich magic that would undo the blight. Sarah wondered if they expected her father to clean the mildew off the buildings, too. Did they want him to go around the gardens in the middle of the island and heal each individual stalk of winter wheat?

  “I’m getting hungry,” he said, when she stopped the line momentarily. He had slipped down so far in his chair his arms lay across the ground like discarded bones. His head rolled around on his chest. “But don’t worry, pumpkin, this will all be over in a little. Then we can find a house for you.”

  Sarah stood up and looked at the ones who had already been healed. They were gathered in a joking, laughing knot, their hands on their knees, their mouths open and wet as if they were practicing being healthy again. “You guys,” she said. “Help me out, will you? He needs food. Meat, if you have any.”

  “I’m not wasting my time hunting up grub for some fucking ghoul,” one bearded man shot back. “Not after years of them hunting me.”

  Sarah sighed, exasperated, but her father clasped at her wrist. “Honey, go easy on them. They’ve lost so much. They don’t have what we have now.”

  She left him there with the living still crowding in, demanding their turn with the healer. She headed toward the warehouse buildings at the south end of the Island—there had to be something there for him. On the way she touched the soapstone. “Is he behaving himself?” she asked. She had left Ptolemy in charge of Gary. The skullcrab hadn’t made a threatening move since the time it paralyzed her but she hadn’t lived to the ripe age of twenty by being stupid around the dead.

  he quietly in speaks in riddles and riddles sits speaks in quietly, the mummy told her.

  Sarah let it go. She crossed through the cool, shadowy interior of Liggett Hall, which bisected the island, and came out into the verdant fields beyond. The southern part of the Island remembered what it had been before the Epidemic, a sprawling Coast Guard base. Three piers stood out into Buttermilk Channel, their names drawn from a naval alphabet: Lima, Tango, Yankee. The old ball fields might have been turned into farmland but basketball hoops still stood in the middle of green pastures, listing a little in the sun and the wind.

  To get to the warehouses Sarah had to pass by the strangest of the Island’s structures, the commercial facilities off tango pier. There was a hotel, a laundromat, even a supermarket with shelves bare so long they sagged under their own emptiness. Vending machines once full of ice cold Pepsi stood forgotten or vandalized on every corner. Weirdest of all was the burnt-out shell of a Burger King restaurant, something Sarah had only heard of before in her father’s bedtime tales of a decade earlier. Metal signs creaked in the evening breeze down there and old neon tubes stood lifeless and cold. The soft and rusted shapes of cars lurked in the weed-choked parking lots.

  When the kerosene lamps were turned on up in Nolan Park, in the other half of the Island, they looked natural, they looked normal. In the gingerbread houses a little flickering light was a welcome thing. Down on Tango Pier an open flame looked altogether different. It looked wrong in front of all those broken unpowered light bulbs. It was no surprise people rarely came down so far—the survivors tended to stay on the north side except to work in the fields or if they needed something from the general supplies down on Lima Pier. Even then they usually sent a slack to do the job.

  Sarah was a little surprised then when she saw Marisol standing in front of the main warehouse. The Mayor had a shovel in her hand and a small bundle wrapped in white cloth over her shoulder. Sarah stopped in her tracks and didn’t move, embarrassed for some reason to be caught in such a quiet place.

  They just looked at each for a while, and it wasn’t a particular friendly look. Marisol, after all, had threatened Sarah with summary execution the last time they’d spoken. For her part Marisol’s bundle was readily discernible, from closer up, to be a dead human body.

  “Did you come to help me bury my son?” Marisol asked. Her voice was rough with crying but it lacked much in the way of emotion.

  Sarah sought out her own voice. “He didn’t make it?” she asked.

  “He wasn’t magic, like you. Dekalb’s daughter lives and my Jackie dies. We’re just normal people, you see. He didn’t have any magic.”

  Sarah started to object, to say that she had no magic, but it wasn’t true. Her father could have saved the boy. If he hadn’t rushed to Manhattan to fix her broken arm, he could have stayed on Governors Island and saved Jackie. If he’d even known that he had that power—if Sarah had told him, if she had broken her promise to Gary and told the secret—

  There were too many ways to feel guilty, and too many possible excuses, for Sarah to make any moral sense out of the boy’s death. She said nothing and hoped her silence would sound like solemnity.

  The two of them entered the field of winter wheat and hacked out a narrow space for a grave. The Islanders always buried their dead in their fields, just as a practical measure. The bodies returned certain nutrients to the soil. If the corpses were sunk deep enough the health risks were minimal.

  Marisol dug and Sarah pulled and pushed and carried dirt out of the hole. It was horrible, draining, sweaty work and neither of them had brought any water or food. Sarah’s sweatshirt turned into a stained rag almost instantly. The dirt got into her eyes, into her nose. It coated her lips and stuck to her hair. She didn’t complain once.

  At first she just thought she was being polite. That she was helping Marisol because she’d been asked to do so. She figured it was the right thing to do and she was a good person. She even considered that this would get her in good with Marisol, whose help she would probably need in the future—she was earning credit at the price of her own sweat. After the first hour though when her arms started to burn and her hands cramped up and her back became one fused bar of glowing heat and pain from bending down and then rising up over and over and over, after all that, she stopped thinking about herself.

  Burying Jackie wasn’t a political maneuver or a gesture of apology. It was an ugly task that had to be done and she was there when the time came. It was just one more chore on a list of things that had to get done.

  When the hole was deep enough Marisol just knew it and she put her shovel aside. She held out her arms and Sarah picked up the boy’s tiny body. Jackie weighed next to nothing but he didn’t feel like a corpse in Sarah’s hands. She knew what it was like to hug a skeleton like her father or a mummy but Jackie felt different. His flesh was cold but still soft and pliant. The winding sheet didn’t cover his head very well and she got an unwelcome look inside. She saw the hole in the middle of his forehead.

  Sarah knew what that hole was for. In Somalia, in her first years under Ayaan’s tutelage when she was still too young to carry a gun Sarah had been given the task of sanitizing the dead. She had a little hammer and a chisel for the task and she’d learned to be quick about it—the dead didn’t take long to come back, not long at all. When a soldier fell you paid them the final respect. You sent them off to rest.

  She couldn’t imagine what it would be like to do it to your own flesh and blood. Your only child. Wouldn’t you want, despite all wisdom to the contrary, to just see them move again, to see their eyelids flutter open? Wouldn’t that stay your hand even just for a moment?

  But of course Marisol was tough. Ayaan had recognized it when she’d stood on the Island and looked at the bleak future facing the survivors. Marisol was tough and she could make hard decisions. Sarah handed the woman her son and watched as she laid him down gently in the worm-riddled earth. Then Sarah reached down and helped Marisol climb up out of the grave. Together they pushed the dirt over the boy, concealing him forever from view.

  Marisol didn’t say any prayers or offer the boy a eulogy. Her obvious grief, written in the streaks of dirt on her face, was eloquence enough. Sarah sat and watched her an
d wondered why she didn’t feel just as strongly about Ayaan. Maybe because it wasn’t real to her yet. After about half an hour of just sitting and mourning Marisol turned and looked at her. “What do you want?” she asked.

  Sarah understood what she was being asked. Why had she come to Governors Island, and what would it take to get her to leave? “I won’t lie to you. I’m on a dangerous journey and no good is coming of it. Originally I was on a rescue mission. Now I’m after revenge.”

  Marisol smiled, a quiet, overworked smile. “Jack taught me about revenge. He said it was the only form of suicide accepted by the Church.”

  Sarah shrugged. “Okay, maybe revenge isn’t the word I want. We used to call it sanitation. The woman who raised me is dead now. Undead. It’s my last duty to her to put a bullet in her head.” She looked down at the fresh grave. That had been Marisol’s last duty to her son. It was the same. She wanted to say as much but she knew the words would profane Jackie’s death. “I need guns, and I need soldiers. Right now though I need some meat to feed my father.”

  Her father—wasn’t it also her duty to sanitize him?

  No. She would never think about that again. Anyway. Ayaan had told Sarah a hundred times what she wanted done if she ever turned into one of the walking dead. She had left explicit instructions. Ayaan wanted to be sanitized. Her father seemed to want to go on.

  She refused to explore that thought any further.

  Marisol helped her find what she needed in the main stores. An economy-sized bag of pork rinds, guaranteed not to spoil for decades to come. They brought it north, into the half of the island where a bonfire was already being built, where lights were coming on in the houses and the sound of playful violins and acoustic guitars hung in the air like the music had gotten caught in the tree branches. They found Dekalb slumped forward across his own knees, still sitting in his lawn chair, while all around him living people set about making a communal dinner. The lich took the pork rinds from his daughter and tried to tear open the bag but he just didn’t have the strength. Sarah did it for him. As she handed the bag to her father she looked at Marisol, and Marisol looked back. It was a lot more comfortable, the silence that passed between them, than it had been before.

  “We need to find you a house,” Dekalb said around a mouth of what looked to Sarah like dirty pink styrofoam. “If you’re going to stay here with me you’ll need a proper house. You can’t live in the ventilation shaft with us, it’s not healthy.”

  Sarah’s brow furrowed. “Daddy, I didn’t plan on staying,” she said. “I’ve got work to do. Important stuff.” She felt like an infant as the words came out of her mouth.

  Dekalb shook his head. “It’ll wait,” he told her. “We have way too much catching up to do. And there’s the question of your education. Marisol, what about the officer’s quarters over by the schoolhouse, what’s available over there?”

  “Dad!” Sarah interjected, “I—”

  He pushed his hand into the bag and rustled it in his annoyance. “I will not let you be put in danger again,” he told her. He drew out a handful of rinds and shoved them into his permanently stretched-out rictus. “Who’s the grown-up here, after all?”

  4

  The giant truck rocked up on one set of giant tires as it crushed an abandoned car on the interstate, a thousand tiny glass cubes exploding from the crushed windshield, rotten struts and shocks popping and collapsing and squealing and then it was over. In the bed of the truck Ayaan held onto a roll bar until the truck stopped bouncing and then clicked on her walkie-talkie. “Bring up a wrecking crew,” she said. “The flatbed won’t make it past this one.”

  A few dozen living men in blue paper scrubs came rushing up with prybars and sledgehammers. They made short work of the rusted-out car, taking it to pieces and hurling the wreckage into the undergrowth on either side of the road. They had to move quickly. Behind them the Tsarevich’s flatbed trailer was surging forward, its ranks of wheels turning in fits and starts as the giant vehicle moved forward one staggering step at a time. A hundred corpses heaved it forward with their shoulders, their bent backs, their straining fingers. On top six more ghouls turned the cranks that kept it level and its ride smooth even as it rolled over broken pavement. Living gunners crewed heavy machine guns mounted in pintles at two positions on the flatbed. At its front end the green phantom sat strapped into a chair on a high superstructure from which he commanded a good view of their surroundings and everything that happened in the column of vehicles. At the back of the flatbed the Tsarevich himself reclined in his yurt, quite hidden from view. Among the liches there were rumors that claimed he was actually not in there at all, that the flatbed was a complete ruse and that he was hidden elsewhere. Ayaan wouldn’t have blamed him for being a little cagey.

  The attack on his person had shaken him badly and the death of Cicatrix had left him without a familiar supply of food. Once the Tsarevich had learned of Amanita’s death something had changed. He had gone from being hurt and confused to being galvanized. He had moved quickly to get his people on the road. He’d had plenty of enthusiastic help, too. The living and the dead had worked side by side to get vehicles ready, to pack up their supplies and belongings, and do whatever it took to stay near the prince of the dead. Where they were going and what they would do when they arrived was still a complete mystery. Ayaan found she had too much work to get done to be asking a lot of questions anyway.

  Behind the flatbed a fleet of hundreds of barely-functional cars and buses followed, their engines blowing blue smoke across a landscape that had reverted to the primeval. Ayaan remembered a time when cars were commonplace, even in her native Somalia, but she had forgotten just how noisy they were and how much of a mess they made. Most of the vehicles hadn’t seen use in over a decade and many were so badly rusted they fell to pieces after only a day or two. It didn’t matter. The Tsarevich had all the gasoline he could ever use from his refinery on Cyprus, and there was certainly no shortage of cars.

  Ayaan had been on one of the missions to collect vehicles. Regardless of what she’d lived through and regardless of what she had become it had still spooked her. The cars had been waiting for them, parked in orderly rows outside of shopping malls and airports and stadiums. They had been left there intentionally and their owners had fully expected to come back and reclaim them at short notice. Every vehicle had been personalized in some way—a faded bumper sticker, a graduation tassel hanging from a rear-view mirror, a paint job with simulated flames. Personal effects littered the passenger seats, fast food wrappers were stuffed into the leg wells. The doors were all locked, the windows rolled up tightly. But no one had ever come back. The cars were forgotten. Left for dead.

  It had spooked her not for the presence of any real horror but for the absence of any normality. It was easy to forget, sometimes, that ninety-nine per cent of the world’s population had died in the first months of the Epidemic. Surrounded by ghouls and cultists and liches it was easy to pretend that the world hadn’t been emptied out. Standing in a parking lot bigger than the village where she’d been born, however, watching the sun gleam from every piece of glass and mirror, Ayaan had been forced to accept it, to accept everything that had been lost.

  The cars had been given a kind of afterlife now, she supposed. Each car held a single living person—the driver—and as many handless ghouls as could be stuffed into the rest of the interior, the back seat, the trunk. The green phantom and the Tsarevich kept them docile, but Ayaan kept wondering what the drivers must be thinking. Were they pleased with themselves, were they secure in the knowledge they were doing a holy duty? Or did they worry every single second that one of their passengers would wake up hungry?

  Ayaan looked forward and saw the road obscured ahead by the branches of a weeping willow. The tree’s roots had torn up the asphalt and sent cracks running through the blacktop in every direction. “I need a lumber crew,” she said, and living cultists with chainsaws came running forward. Ayaan tried not
to think about the last time she’d seen a chainsaw.

  Behind the ghoul-filled cars came tow trucks and fuel tankers and 18-wheelers containing mobile mechanics’ shops and crates full of spare parts for the cars as well as kitchens for both the living and the undead. Behind the support vehicles came the stragglers—those living who didn’t know how to drive, mostly, a tailback of them that receded into the distance. They kept up as best they could. The column of vehicles moved forward only a few miles an hour but it never stopped. The wrecking crews and chainsaw teams cleared debris while a pair of steam rollers and road graders were available if the way became truly impassible. Whatever the Tsarevich hoped to find out west he intended to get there in a hurry.

  There would be serious obstacles to come, Ayaan knew. Rivers to ford. Mountains to climb. There would be weeks of slow going ahead of them. So far not a single person had complained.

  Well. There was Semyon Iurevich. Though he didn’t complain so much as beg for forgiveness and for an end to his unlife. Even over the noise of the cars and the chainsaws Ayaan could hear his screams.

  There had been quite a bit of debate over what should be done with the apostate lich. It had been suggested he should be fed to ghouls—the ultimate insult paid to the most vile of traitors. Yet ghouls did not eat their own kind. The dark energy repulsed them far more than the decomposing, suppurating flesh enticed them. It had been noticed that ghouls would quite happily eat dead human meat as long as it wasn’t currently being animated. It would have been simple enough to smash in Semyon Iurevich’s brains and then feed him to the dead, but that lacked an element of dark justice, as far as the Tsarevich was concerned. It lacked torture.

  Behind her on the flatbed Ayaan could have watched, if she so chose, what the Tsarevich had finally deemed fit. Semyon Iurevich was hanging from a gibbet by his neck, his eyes turned upward to the sky. Stripped of his bathrobe his body had been revealed to be quite corpulent. Now a living man with a machete was slicing off thin strips of the lich’s body, starting with the soles of his feet and working his way up. As each slice came off he would drop it in a blender and puree it until its dark energy had completely dissipated. The resulting slurry was dribbled into the mouths of the ghouls who worked so hard hauling the flatbed across New Jersey.