by Stant Litore
“Grab him!” Brutus yelled, reaching out himself, seizing Polycarp’s shoulder and pulling him free of the dead, fending off their groping hands with the flames. They still tried to press forward, so many corpses with their mouths open and hungering, their hands grasping for a garment or anything to clutch. Regina took Polycarp’s other arm and then they were dragging the father with them, falling back, the dead closing in from either side. Brutus danced from the left to the right and back, flailing the torch, stabbing with it when one of those things came too close. The smoke from the torch brought no tears to the corpses’ eyes.
Marcus got beneath Polycarp’s chest and heaved the old father up onto his shoulder, his face red with strain. Turning, he ran for the temple door, the dead grasping at his sleeve but not catching it as he passed. Regina hurried after, a glance over her shoulder to see Brutus with the dead half-closed about him. Waving that torch he must’ve plucked from the execution pit. “Go on!” he roared. “I’ll follow! Go!”
Regina ran.
Her breath sobbed; a stitch burned in her side. There were snarling faces, grasping arms everywhere, to either side, a few dead now between her and Marcus and the door; but Marcus ducked and wove through them, staying free of their hands, shouting wordlessly in his fear and desperation. Then he was through and heaving his way up the marble steps, past the blind and unwatching Justitia.
The doors were ahead in their shadowed recess behind great pillars, and they were closing.
“Stop!” Regina screamed, but her voice was hoarse and small. Something grasped at a strip of her nightdress, but the strip tore free and then she was dashing up the steps, barefoot and disheveled, something inside her screaming at the sight of the blood running down Marcus’s back from Polycarp’s body.
Marcus reached the door and thrust his hand into the crack as it closed; a howl of pain, and then he got his other hand in the crack, Polycarp precariously balanced on his shoulder, and he was pulling the door open with a roar. Regina reached him and dug her own small hands into the space, gripping the cool cypress wood and pulling. There were frantic shouts within—jurors and lictors, some hysterical with fear. “No! You can’t bring him in here! You can’t bring him in here!” one of them was shrieking. “He brings the dead! You can’t! You can’t!”
Regina didn’t dare glance over her shoulder; her heart might give out if she saw the moaning dead lurching up the steps behind them, hands outstretched. She put all of her small weight into wrenching open the door. Then a man’s voice at her side growled, “Get back!” and a hand thrust her head down. There was a great shove of the torch past her head and through the half-open door, and screams inside. The resistance against the door fell away and it swung open, and then a great hand on her back shoved her through. Regina tumbled inside into the dimness, crumpling to her knees, her breath rasping. Then Marcus was beside her, laying Polycarp on his back on the cool marble. She heard footsteps as the others inside fled farther back into the temple, away from the door. Brutus was shouting at the door, and there were snarls of the dead, the hiss and crackle of flame through the air, the snap of the door closing. Then a drumming of hands, a beating of dead hands on wood.
Regina was tearing a great strip from her dress, leaving what was left of it in tatters. Polycarp’s life was pulsing out through the great gash at his shoulder—so much blood and life, spilling over the cold marble and then over her hand as she fought to press the cloth into the wound. His eyes, which had been open and gray and barely seeing, now squeezed shut, and the father groaned at the touch on his wound, a sound that terrified Regina with its weakness. She sobbed and pressed the cloth harder. “Help him,” she cried to the others. “God, help him!”
Pain wild and hot at his throat and shoulder—Polycarp spun dizzily in the dark, panting softly. Eyes tightly closed, teeth clenched against the sharpness of the wound. A bit of cloth pressed there by someone’s hand. Nearby there was pounding, relentless pounding, a drumming Polycarp not only heard but felt as a tremor in his body. Thick scents of incense and blood.
Others were crying out, voices moving about.
“Those doors won’t hold!” Marcus’s voice. That was Marcus.
“Quick!” A deeper voice. The guardsman who had grabbed him out there as he stood among the dead. “See if there are torches in the alcoves—we need more fire!”
“Wait! Barricade the doors first! Brutus! They’re coming through!” Marcus’s voice shrill with fear.
A cracking of wood, the guardsman cursing, then frantic slamming of objects against each other.
He was needed. He had to stand up. His master had told him to stand, and now the others needed him on his feet. But the pain beat in his throat and side, and he spun again into the dark.
A touch of gentle fingertips on Polycarp’s cheek; for a moment he thought of his mother, now buried in a hillside plot far away in Thessaly above the fragrant sea. It will take you to the one thing you need today, the one thing you need to do. Trust it.
He coughed, his breath wheezing. Over his mother’s voice he heard another woman’s. He opened his eyes, saw through a haze of pain Regina’s face near his, and above her a low, marble roof. An alcove along the side of the temple’s interior, perhaps. It was dim in here.
He drew in breath raggedly.
“No. Don’t you leave us! Please. Father. Polycarp.” Her voice thick with tears. Regina’s hand pressed cloth firmly into the wound at his throat; swallowing back the pain, he looked at her, saw her disheveled hair, her face shining with sweat, and her left shoulder naked and lovely. She had torn away a great strip of her already ruined nightdress, a wad of linen she now held pressed to Polycarp’s throat; a flap of ragged fabric hung back over her breast, baring the top of it. Her skin shone softly in the faint sunlight coming in from somewhere above and to the right. He gazed at her in wonder, as though at a messenger in a dream. Her beauty and the vulnerability in her eyes had always called to him, had always been a temptation, but he had never known she was this lovely.
Polycarp drew in another breath, hissed at a flare of pain.
“Don’t leave me,” Regina whispered.
“I have done my work in the world,” he rasped. Lifting his hand to her face, he felt the softness of her skin, held her eyes with his. A moment’s regret and yearning swept through him, stronger than the pain, swift and fierce as a fire through wheat, and he almost cried out with the force of it. If he had walked other paths, met her in other circumstances, been other than who he was, she might have been his, and he hers.
But he had no time for regret.
He could feel the last strength leaking from him. He turned his eyes, glimpsed her hand red with his blood. He wet his lips enough to speak again. He could not stand any longer. He was too weak now to carry the Gift. He had to pass it on.
He struggled to speak clearly and to find the lines he must say; the world was still blurred, and that pounding he heard threatened to shake him right out of the world and into the empty dark. “The Apostle’s Gift to me, I pass to you.” He forced the words out, raised his voice loud enough to hear. “It is yours now to face the living and the dead, and bring them peace. I bless you and anoint you, Regina Romae, mother of the gathering in Rome, in the name of the Father, the Anointed One, and the Comforter of Our Souls.”
Her eyes were round and moist. Her lips parted, her face translated in wonder: for the briefest instant Polycarp glimpsed a nimbus of soft light about her, and saw a few strands of her hair rise from her head about his hand. His body felt suddenly lighter.
The Gift had been passed.
Regina drew a shuddering breath; the enormity of it filled her eyes.
“Tell Marcus—the others—to hope,” Polycarp rasped. “Hope.”
“I can’t,” she cried, taking his hand in hers, taking it from her cheek and pressing her lips to his fingers. Tears pooled in her eyes. “We need you,” she whispered.
“What do you believe—Regina? What do you know to be true?�
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The tears rolled down her face, leaving streaks in the sweat and dirt. “Nothing is broken that cannot be remade,” she whispered after a moment, her clasp on his hand tight.
“Yes,” he breathed. He was dizzy; Regina above him blurred. He closed his eyes a moment, opened them. Everything was faint. That pounding. And splintering—and hoarse shouts.
“Nothing is ill that cannot be healed.” Regina’s voice trembled. “Nothing captive that cannot be freed. Polycarp—” Her eyes pleaded with him, with God, with death. “Don’t go—don’t go—don’t go.”
“It’s all right,” he whispered. “If my body wakes, you will give me rest. I do not fear. Now you are needed—at the door. Do not need you here. Regina.” His breathing came in short gasps. The temple had become very cold, both the stone beneath him and the inside of his body, everything cold.
He tasted blood in his mouth. Regina and Marcus grew dim, but he could see, beyond their heads, flitting in the shadows about the edge of the chamber, that red beetle, bright, a beacon. Everything else grew dark. He smiled and got slowly to his feet, cold and light as though he were no more than a head of wheat. That beetle darted along the wall, red as fresh blood, inviting him.
Once, in Thessaly, he’d followed a red beetle through a field of wheat and across a mighty stream. He had done so with no sound of wings in his ears and no sight of any beetle red against the sky. He’d had only the faith that he would find it. Across the stream, in a stand of poplars as old as the world, he’d found the little creature again. He’d been shaking from the cold of his swim, and his skin was scratched and torn from his climb up the bank through that hostile brush whose roots cling to the edges of rivers with the same tenacity one sees in barnacles latched to a galley’s hull. Yet as he stood panting, there was the beetle, quivering on a bit of twig in the thatched roof of a small cottage above the bank. A cottage with a little garden for turnips and beans behind it, and the poplars to break the wind. The tiny beetle was violently red against the gray of the roof, like a shout.
He stood there looking at the beetle for some time. Then his eyes dropped and he noticed the door was open. A short, stout man with a gray beard—an Easterner—stood there, leaning against the jamb, his ears very large, his thumbs hooked into the sash he wore about his drab, foreign clothes. A few kindly wrinkles had taken residence around his eyes to keep them company.
The boy cleared his throat. “I am Polycarp.”
The man nodded. “I am Peter.” The boy heard rolling gravel in the man’s voice, like the rough song of a fishing boat’s keel against the shingle. Peter jerked his head as though to indicate the dark interior of the cottage. “This is the house of Cornelius, and I am a guest in it. But I don’t think he will mind if I invite you in.”
The boy didn’t cast one glance back at the stream he’d forded at peril or at the wheat field behind it; he just glanced up at the beautiful red beetle, whose wings were flicking in and out, in and out, as though it wanted to take flight again but was only waiting on the boy. His heart beat fast, but his body was tired, and his steps were slow as he moved up to the door. The fisherman turned without speaking, and Polycarp the boy followed him into the cottage.
Thinking of that boy, Polycarp the old man laughed once, a dry sound like the clack of two sticks of kindling struck together. Then, having followed his master forty years and six, he stepped off this broken stage of the world into the dark.
FINIS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A PROJECT like The Zombie Bible is a fearful undertaking and requires the aid, goodwill, encouragement, and advice of many people. I offer my deepest gratitude…
To Andrew Hallam, for his diligent and enthusiastic reading of my work; to Jeff VanderMeer, my editor, for his insight; to all those who generously gave feedback on excerpts; to my pastor, for his encouragement and prayer; to Alex Carr and the remarkable team at 47North; and to Danielle Tunstall, for graciously permitting me the use of her art.
To the cast and crew of the good ship Qdoba, who during one critical summer were quick to offer me a quiet corner in which to write during many lunch breaks;
To the many writers who have moved my heart or inspired my mind, not least among them C. J. Cherryh, for Merchanter’s Luck; Gene Wolfe, for Soldier in the Mist; Max Brooks, for World War Z; Kim Paffenroth, for Valley of the Dead; Orson Scott Card, for Seventh Son; and to the many writers, known and unknown, who have labored across so many centuries of time to deliver to us here, this day, that magnificent and often bewildering record and love letter we call the Bible;
To my wife, Jessica, whose thoughts about the early Church formed the seeds for this story, and to my daughters, River and Inara—it can’t always be easy living with a husband or father whose mind wanders with such frequency into daydreams of the hungry undead, or who leaps often from his chair to scribble a note; if it were not for their patience, their laughter, and their love, you would not now be holding this work in your hands;
And to all of you, my readers—it is you who make these stories breathe.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photograph by Jessica Fusch, 2008
STANT LITORE doesn’t consider his writing a vocation; he considers it an act of survival. As a youth, he witnessed the 1992 outbreak in the rural Pacific Northwest firsthand, as he glanced up from the feeding bins one dawn to see four dead staggering toward him across the pasture, dark shapes in the morning fog. With little time to think or react, he took a machete from the barn wall and hurried to defend his father’s livestock; the experience left him shaken. After that, community was never an easy thing for him. The country people he grew up with looked askance at his later choice of college degree and his eventual graduate research on the history of humanity’s encounters with the undead, and the citizens of his college community were sometimes uneasy at the machete and rosary he carried with him at all times, and at his grim look. He did not laugh much, though on those occasions when he did, the laughter came from him in wild guffaws that seemed likely to break him apart. As he became book-learned, to his own surprise he found an intense love of ancient languages, a fierce admiration for his ancestors, and a deepening religious bent. On weekends, he went rock climbing in the cliffs without rope or harness, his fingers clinging to the mountain, in a furious need to accustom himself to the nearness of death and teach his body to meet it. A rainstorm took him once on the cliffs, and he slid thirty-five feet and hit a ledge without breaking a single bone, and concluded that he was either blessed or reserved in particular for a fate far worse. Finding women beautiful and worth the trouble, he married a girl his parents considered a heathen woman, but whose eyes made him smile. She persuaded him to come down from the cliffs, and he persuaded her to wear a small covenant ring on her hand, spending what coin he had to make it one that would shine in starlight and whisper to her heart how much he prized her. Desiring to live in a place with fewer trees (though he misses the forested slopes of his youth), a place where you can scan the horizon for miles and see what is coming for you while it is still well away, he settled in Colorado with his wife and two daughters, and they live there now. The mountains nearby call to him with promises of refuge. Driven again and again to history with an intensity that burns his mind, he corresponds in his thick script for several hours each evening with scholars and archaeologists and even a few national leaders or thugs wearing national leaders’ clothes who hoard bits of forgotten past in far countries. He tells stories of his spiritual ancestors to any who will come by to listen, and he labors to set those stories to paper. Sometimes he lies awake beside his sleeping wife and listens in the night for any moan in the hills, but there is only her breathing soft and full and a mystery of beauty beside him. He keeps his machete sharp but hopes not to use it.
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