Zombies: Shambling Through the Ages

by Неизвестный

Upon approaching the man, Evgeny extended his palms in a gesture of peace. The man brought his shaggy black eyebrows into a squashed point and growled. To Evgeny he very nearly sounded like a revenant himself.

  “Rather than chicken water, how might you like roasted chicken?” he asked the wretch. “And vodka? It is a good stock, believe me.”

  “Why should I believe anyone?”

  “What have you got to lose?”

  “And why should a man like you wish to feed one like me?”

  “Compassion, my brother. I have more than I need and you have nothing.”

  “Then share it with that fucking priest and bugger him after,” barked the man. “I will not be indebted to you.”

  “I am truly sorry to hear that,” said Evgeny with sorrow in his voice. “Should you see me again, my offer remains. Be well, friend.”

  Turning on his heel, Evgeny commenced a fast walk back from whence he came, toward his home in the southern quarter. He was in no way startled by the quick steps that sounded behind him, slapping at the paving stones in his wake.

  “You,” huffed the man. “You—wait.”

  Evgeny halted, turned about, and lifted his mouth in the smallest smile.

  “My brother,” he said softly, and he embraced the man, who did not resist.

  The chicken was tender and moist, almost perfectly browned on the skin. Evgeny himself was no cook—he had plied the man with cups of vodka before stepping out again to procure the bird from the woman at a nearby hostelry. The man, who said his name was Lev, devoured the lion’s share of the chicken, leaving little for his host, and took to cracking the bones open in order to suck at the marrow. His only conversation outside of pleasurable grunts were compliments about the repast.

  “Good, good.”

  Evgeny filled his cup again. Lev poured it down as though it was water.

  “This life,” said Evgeny at great length, “cannot be an easy way.”

  “It is not, brother,” said Lev, adopting the term of endearment now that he was drunk.

  “Tell me, have you prayed for better?”

  “I never pray. No use in it, friend. Once I did, but things only got worse. Now I ignore God and God ignores me. We have an understanding.”

  “I see.”

  For Thou art not a God that hath pleasure in wickedness; neither shall evil dwell with Thee. The Psalmist’s words played through Evgeny’s head like music. Neither shall evil dwell with thee.

  And a man who ignores God . . .

  The carcass was picked clean and the vodka running low when Evgeny poured the last of it between their two cups. The men touched cups and swallowed their liquor, and as Lev wiped his lips dry, his host leaned back on his chair.

  “I should like you to meet someone,” he said. “A man. Someone I believe will make an extraordinary difference with regard to your circumstances.”

  “My circumstances will not change, brother. Some are princes, and some are like me. The street needs men to keep it warm, I reckon.”

  “Must you be that man, Lev?”

  “I don’t know. I think so. I think I must.”

  “Will you at least see this man? Hear what he has to say? Perhaps you will find he offers to you something you have not considered. A way out, I mean.”

  Lev laughed bitterly and ran his tongue along the inside of his cup.

  “The only way out for me, friend,” he said, “is death.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “I know it. Now, I know it.”

  “And until then?”

  “I suffer.”

  “Then if you must suffer, it could not possibly harm you to meet him. Just for a few minutes. See what he has to give you, and if you find you do not want it, you can return to your place on the street.”

  Lev narrowed his eyes to slits and regarded Evgeny for a moment. He then raised his cup and said, “Have you more?”

  Evgeny grinned and rose from the table.

  “I have. Just a moment.”

  He stepped into the pantry and returned with a fresh flagon, from which he filled his guest’s cup to the brim yet again. Lev drank deeply of the vodka, swallowing it all in two gulps, and gasped with satisfaction.

  “All right,” he rasped. “I will meet your man.”

  Evgeny withdrew an iron key from the pocket of his waistcoat as he opened the door. He then bent at the waist to retrieve the lamp from the hallway floor.

  “The matches are in the room, I’m afraid.”

  “What’s the key for?”

  “What this man has to offer is safely secured. I shouldn’t want to give it to just anyone.”

  “No,” agreed Lev. “I’d think you wouldn’t.”

  In a moment, there was the scratch of metal on metal, and then the squeal of moving hinges. Lev shifted his stance. A match struck, close to his face, filling his nostrils with the odor of sulfur. The lamp in Evgeny’s hand came alight, and the light cast a dull saffron glow across the small, musty room. As the sulfur smell dissipated, another, ranker one took its place in Lev’s nose. He frowned, covered his face with his hand. And before he could inquire into the source of the fetid stench his eyes fell upon the open cage on the floor.

  All that he managed to say was, “What’s—?”

  Then Rostislav was upon him, and Lev’s words were transformed into shrieks.

  The revenant sprang from the cell the moment the door swung open; soundlessly, his feet padded over the floorboards, past Evgeny at whom he softly grunted. He eschewed the light—it hurt his eyes—preferring instead to crouch in the shadows. It was from the shadows he noticed the newcomer, the dirty stranger, at whom Evgeny made a gesture of . . . offering?

  A nod. Evgeny stepped back two paces, three. The shadows crept back over the stranger as the lamp retreated from him.

  “What’s—?”

  The revenant lunged. One hand tightened around the man’s throat, the other tore at the filthy rags wrapped around his neck and shoulders. Teeth gnashed. The man struggled. The revenant was stronger. Flesh came apart like well-done meat. Blood pulsed in spurts that filled the revenant’s mouth, warmed his throat. The shrieks did not last long.

  And Evgeny muttered from the doorway, “Good, son. Good, good.”

  Having twice walked the circumference of the royal gardens, Evgeny and Yefim made their way to the riverbank and followed the water beside what few small frigates sailed past.

  “A prison would be best for the boy,” the secretary opined, one hand behind his back and the other worrying his beard. “If indeed he has killed a man, you are obliged to report the murder.”

  “I feel equally obliged to care for Rostislav’s needs,” said Evgeny. “It was I who brought him here, after all. I who separated him from his family and whatever care and limited structure they offered him.”

  “He is not natural. You know he isn’t.”

  Evgeny nodded gravely. “He smells awful now. I suspect he is . . . rotting.”

  “Leprosy?”

  “Something else,” Evgeny said.

  Yefim stopped walking. “Something worse?”

  “Something happened to that boy in the wood where he was found in this condition. His mother did not appear to know what it was, and I believe her. But something happened, which by God’s gracious gifts should have ended his suffering.”

  “Perhaps it not a gift from God that causes him to persist so.”

  “I am no priest nor am I theologian. Talk of devilry is not first among my priorities at this point, Yefim, but . . . ”

  “But Rostislav is no mere madman, is he?”

  “Our Rostislav is a walking corpse. I am certain of this, though I know not how it is possible.”

  “Must you know? Are all of the world’s worst secrets ours to discover?”

  “If I mean to help the boy, then yes.”

  “I say you chain him with stones and throw him in the Fontanka.”

  “Should I become a murd—?” Evgeny swallowed the word, rememberin
g Lev.

  “Can you murder what is already dead?”

  Evgeny shook his head and squeezed his eyes shut. The wretch he had fed to Rostislav deserved what befell him—of this Evgeny was absolutely certain—yet still, Evgeny could hardly go on luring sinners and blasphemers into the revenant’s hungry grasp. People would take notice. Authorities. Worse, he fretted over what effect such a pattern might have on his own everlasting soul.

  Or upon Rostislav’s, if indeed he had one.

  Hidden someplace, in an animal, or an egg.

  “Dear God, what a quandary.”

  The men walked some more in silence until they reached a bend in the river, whereupon Yefim gently guided his superior back round to return to the gardens. At some length, the secretary asked, “Do you suppose he still has a soul?”

  Evgeny froze stiff and bore a wide-eyed gaze at the still waters. In lieu of answering him, he swallowed noisily and whispered, “I must go back to Nebolchi.”

  “And there?”

  “Pray I learn what to do, Yefim.”

  Rather than the ramshackle house to which he first was driven, Evgeny instructed the carriage driver to find the pogost’s church. Daylight remained on the horizon when the modest church came into view, and the wheels had barely time to stop revolving before Evgeny hopped to the ground and hurried to the doors, leaving Yefim in the carriage—beneath Rostislav. As one of the doors opened into the dark church, a haggard priest with a patchy gray beard stepped out into the snow and held up a crumpled letter—Evgeny’s, which had preceded him from St. Petersburg.

  “Tretyakov,” grumbled the priest.

  “The wood, father—will you take me there?”

  The priest drew a deep breath into his chest and moved his cloudy gray eyes up to the carriage, to the iron cage secured to its top. Thick carpets covered the cell almost completely, but there remained a sliver through which empty, yellow eyes stared back at the priest.

  “You will not save him,” the priest growled. “Already he is in Satan’s grasp.”

  At the name of the adversary, he made the sign of the cross and gritted his teeth. White steam trailed out his mouth as he whispered a short prayer.

  “Cannot every man be saved?”

  “Every man, yes. But that—” He gestured with evident repulsion at Rostislav. “—is no man.”

  “He was. Once.”

  “And the Devil was once an angel, Tretyakov. There are crimes against God Almighty that cannot be undone. Come—I will take you.”

  The priest stuffed the letter into his cloak and set off on foot, ignoring the carriage and waiting for no one. Affronted, Evgeny hurried after him and seized the priest by the elbow.

  “Where are you going?”

  “To show you what you want to see, naturally. Those damned woods.”

  Evgeny scrambled to get Rostislav down from his cell in time to catch up with their guide. The boy moaned and squirmed every inch of the way, but Evgeny succeeded in goading him to the ground beside him. A leather collar was secured around the revenant’s neck, attached to a long strap. Evgeny grasped the strap tight and fell into a trot, chasing after the priest. Yefim loped a safe distance behind, his leery eyes fixed on the revenant.

  “Father,” Evgeny cried. “Wait.”

  The old priest dismissed him with a wave of his hand and trudged on. Before long, they neared a dense copse to which the priest raced. By the time Evgeny and Rostislav reached the edge of the trees, the priest was standing stoically with a grim look for his charges.

  “I do not see why you must bring that dydko along,” he groused.

  “Do you know where he was found or do you not?”

  “I know.”

  “Take us, priest.”

  “As you wish, boyar.”

  The father ducked under a tangle of branches and slipped into the shade of the boughs. In a second, he was gone. Evgeny followed, scratching his face on the rough branches, dragging Rostislav behind. When he emerged on the other side, he found himself in a cramped clearing and espied the priest vanishing again into the trees. Evgeny heaved a sigh and glanced back at his ward. The boy’s left cheek was shredded by the branches, the gray skin sloughing off like wax. There was no blood. Rostislav did not appear to notice.

  Evgeny tugged the strap and rushed after the priest.

  Two dozen men in fur hats and kaftans embellished with regimental colors awaited them in the next clearing. A quarter of them were armed with pikes only; another quarter gripped sharp-edged bardiches in their pink, frozen hands. The remaining half held matchlock muskets at the ready. The regiment appeared to Evgeny prepared for war.

  The priest stood a few yards from the tree line, stock still and glaring angrily at the soldiers. Among the armed men, one stepped forward, his face grim and hands unoccupied by any weapon.

  “Leave this place, father,” the officer barked. “Evil lives here.”

  “What good is a priest, if not against evil?”

  “Hunters die here,” replied the officer. “But they do not remain dead. But you know this, do you not?”

  “I know this,” agreed the priest.

  “Then you believe your prayers will cleanse this place?”

  Before the father could answer, one of the regiment cried out, “Look! A dydko!”

  A great commotion broke out among the soldiers as they clattered their arms and moved awkwardly, noisily forward, toward Evgeny and Yefim and their rotting charge. The secretary yelped and moved behind a scrawny tree. Evgeny felt his skin prickle as he widened his eyes and shook his head.

  “I am here in service to the Tsar,” he bellowed, his voice tremulous.

  “Is that then the Tsar’s devil?” shouted back a sneering soldier. “What proof have you?”

  “What is your purpose here?” Evgeny challenged the regiment, ignoring the soldier’s inquiry. “Who is in command? What do you intend to do?”

  “They’ve come to see for themselves,” Yefim muttered from the relative safety of his hiding place. “To see the evil this place brings.”

  Evgeny scowled at his secretary before the clatter of rifles returned his attention to the regiment.

  “No, please. No—I’ve come here to save this boy.”

  The priest twisted at the waist to shoot a blistering glare at him.

  “Be silent,” he hissed.

  “Can the damned be saved?” asked the officer in charge.

  Rostislav growled low in his throat and bent at the knees. Evgeny grimaced, reached out to calm the boy, but the boy’s face twisted into a snarling rage and he snapped his teeth at Evgeny, who jerked back in shock.

  Yefim whined and dropped into a crouch. The priest snorted in contempt.

  Then: a musket bucked with smoke and thunder, startling Evgeny who fell into a squat as Rostislav’s head was halved by the soldier’s iron ball. Crown, brow and right eye were gone in an instant, leaving only the revenant’s gaping jaw, one rolling yellow eye, and a split nose gushing black ooze that once was the boy’s blood.

  Evgeny bellowed with sorrow and rage as Rostislav slumped, his ruined head spilling brains blackened with decay. The officer screamed incomprehensibly, upbraiding the young kaftaned soldier for his pique. And the priest merely walked calmly back to the thick foliage, chuckling bitterly as he murmured an angry prayer to his God.

  “You fool,” Evgeny sobbed at the soldier as he knelt to drape his frock coat over what remained of Rostislav. Even the young soldier himself appeared startled by the smoking musket in his red, cold-raw hands. “You damned fool.”

  As though by way of reply, the wood came alive with a chorus of mournful moans. Evgeny cracked open his swollen, wet eyes to barely make out the silhouetted shapes emerging on all sides from the trees. More shots cracked out and a tightly formed group of six men with pikes and axes separated from the regiment with blades out.

  Some terrified solider cried, “What is this place?”

  At this, Yefim Azhishchenkov crossed himself and
erupted into peals of raspy laughter until a musket ball found his heart and dropped him into the cold, wet snow.

  In the frozen midday air, Evgeny crawled on hands and knees through the slush toward a felled tree blanketed in lichen and snow. On the other side of the rotting wood, a group of four or five figures milled about, sated from their feast. There, the snow was stained black and red by the steaming lumps of flesh and entrails that remained of the regiment, of those who had not made it out of the wood. Upon heaving his cold form up on the downed trunk, Evgeny’s bleary eyes espied three more among the gathering dead, their gray faces buried in the torsos and thighs of the Tsar’s soldiers who had not survived the brief, one-sided battle.

  His mind strained at the impossible task of interpreting what he barely saw. Dead men and women, their skin tight and colorless and flecked with gore, feeding on the hot corpses of a half dozen slain men barely out of boyhood—luckless Yefim among them. His tongue pulsed inside his cold mouth. Focus dissipated like steam.

  What is this place?

  He crept away in the direction from which he had come, more trouble than he was worth to the slavering things whose pantry was well enough stocked for the time being. Heads rose from the outraged corpses of the soldiery, jaws dripping with gore, but the dead were slowed by their satisfaction, their wicked repast. One by one, they all returned to the work at hand.

  Along the path back to the pogost, Evgeny found what was left of the priest. He lay in a tangle of icy brambles, his face chewed away to the bone. A lunatic grin spread across the bloody skull, and a rush of blood to his head forced Evgeny to fold over, whereupon he vomited into the nettles. Behind him, in the clearing, the moans resumed. A cluster of wet, black magpies took flight from the treetops. They too fled the forest of the damned.

  When he staggered out of the wood, Evgeny caught sight of the carriage in the middle distance, still before the humble church. The nags blew white steam from their nostrils that matched the woodsmoke rising from a dozen tumbledown houses spotting the hills. Curling his hands into fists at his sides, he fell into an obdurate march for the carriage, his sights set hard on St. Petersburg. The driver would complain, but Evgeny would refuse to wait another minute. Time was short.

  Areskin had to see.