Zombies: Shambling Through the Ages

by Неизвестный

  She cannot afford to wonder if this is how Ruth felt, before she lost control completely.

  They walk for seven miles, perhaps eight. Ruth returns to life and dies twice in the interim; each time, the Chinook toss her bag to the ground and swing their clubs against it until her screaming ends. Margaret wants to cry, but more for Ruth’s hunger than her terrible propensity for dying—they are her ninth, and tenth deaths, respectively, and frankly, Margaret is no longer shocked each time her limbs flail during a resurrection.

  The smell of gunpowder keeps the animals away from the trail, but occasionally Margaret sees the twin rings of an owl’s eyes, starring through a hollow in the trees. When she feels as though she can walk no longer, Chanko breaks her off thick pieces of elk jerky which take so long to chew they lose all flavor before Margaret can swallow them. She washes them down with half-frozen water from the creek, so cold it hurts her teeth.

  She asks where they are going only once, but Chanko presses his palm to her mouth.

  “There are more dangerous things in these forests than bears,” he says.

  They walk until reaching the rocky, uphill paths leading to the foothills of the mountains. This is the farthest Margaret has traveled from her home since infancy. The air here is thinner than on the coast, and Margaret has to breath twice as often to sustain herself. She knows these lands only by the nickname the Chinook have given it, the Wailing Hills. Both she and Ruth had been forbidden to wander this far.

  The Indians do not stop until they reach the mouth of a shallow cave that faces east. The man who is carrying Ruth drops her carelessly to the ground. In the pink light, Margaret can see they stand in a landscape of cliffs and stone towers. There are four more caves within seeing distance, but these have been barricaded shut with rocks and petrified branches. Margaret thinks she hears the muted scream of an animal, but it might just be the crows, rising with the dawn.

  Chanko mutters something in the language of the Chinook as they seal Ruth’s body in with boulders and the cracked bark of an enormous tree. Margaret does not help. She is improperly dressed for the low morning temperatures, and it is difficult to move her wrists and fingers. It helps distract her from the thought of returning to the cabin, and what she will find there.

  “You can never return here,” Chanko says, taking Margaret’s wrist in his hand. The calluses on his index finger hurt her skin. If she tries hard, she can pretend that the high-pitched wail rising up around them is nothing more than the wind moving through the pine trees. “Come with me.”

  Her mother’s body is missing by the time Margaret returns to the cabin, exhausted and weak, late that afternoon. Chanko stares at the irregular brown stain where her body lay earlier for a long time, but he says nothing.

  “I must bury my mother,” Margaret says, when Chanko orders her to collect her clothing and what food and pelts remain from their cabin.

  “Someone has already done it for you,” he tells her, and falls silent when she insists on being taken to the gravesite. In frustration she raises her musket towards Chanko’s chest. She has been a killer once already, after all.

  Chanko moves her gun aside with his hand, and tells Margaret, “If you want to survive the winter, gather your things. Now.”

  Margaret wants the butt of her musket to collide with his face. She wants to run away, run into the forest, and unearth Ruth from the frozen ground. She wants to curse at Chanko, to tell him to go to hell, to tell him that she will never come and live with savage Indians, no matter how much she sees her own dark eyes mirrored in his.

  Instead, she gathers her coats from the floor of her room and piles the beaver pelts in the basement into a rusting wheelbarrow. The muscles hugging her spine ache from walking, and grief. Chanko nods in approval when she appears at the front porch, careful not to let emotion show on her face. She had refused to surrender her musket, and its barrel presses against her shoulders, warmed by the heat radiating off her.

  Chanko walks into the forest. Margaret follows.

  Part III.

  Margaret lives with the Chinook for forty years before she visits her sister again. It is winter once more. The skies are the same silver of the past, but now Margaret is a widow, and the mother of a boy who does not speak English. In the summer, she still swims naked in the creek that runs through their territory, but there is a constant pain in her left knee and a hunger that never entirely leaves her. It is quiet and only resurges in odd moments, when she thinks of her mother, kneeling in prayer before the windowsill, or Ruth, reading by firelight.

  By the time Chanko dies—shot by white traders, who flood their lands after gold has been found in their rivers—Margaret is able to speak to him in his own language. She is there when he passes, their fingers interlocked by the bedside. Margaret prays to St. Joseph, father of Christ, while the Chinook doctor behind her prays to the vast spirits of the mountains that surround them.

  “Whatever you do, never let them go,” he says, with his last halting breath.

  Until now, Margaret has obeyed him.

  The trek to the Wailing Hills nearly destroys her left leg. She is limping by the time she reaches Ruth’s resting place. Margaret slumps against a boulder, cold air forming frost in her lungs.

  For a long time, the landscape is silent. The hills block her from the distant whirr of the Pacific to the west, and the day is too still for the trees to speak in their creaking, secret language.

  Margaret feels her spine curl involuntarily, and draws her cloak around her. She looks like an Indian to the whites now. Her hair dangles down in braids to her waist, equal parts black and gray. As a result of cataracts, she is nearly blind in her right eye, but her hearing is sharper than ever—sometimes in the night, Margaret imagines herself to be an owl, listening to field mice padding through the leaves.

  Margaret closes her eyes, and thinks she hears a faint screaming, like mist rising from the rocks. She tries to ignore the dead raccoon, cradled between two boulders. There are plenty of scavengers in the caves.

  “I’m sorry,” Margaret says, to no one.

  Only the hills answer her.

  Northwestern Oregon

  Present Day

  They find the caves on the third day of their hike, and by then, both Steven and his wife are exhausted, mildly arthritic, and smelling vaguely of wet dog. It has been raining for three days. Their backpacks are sagging and heavy, and the shallow caves are the perfect place to dig out their protein bars and eat, watching the droplets gather in the puddles at the cave’s entrance.

  Later, when the skies clear, they explore the bare, lunar landscape of the hills. Steven finds two femur bones and what is clearly a human molar, tucked away in the rocks.

  “I want to go,” Anne says, when she sees them, clutching at his sleeve. She is from Chicago, squeamish and uneasy in the wilderness. Last night, they’d heard something passing through the ferns around their tent, and she’d slept the rest of the evening with his army knife clenched in her right hand.

  “You know, Indians used to live in this forest,” Steven says, pocketing the tooth. He has a young nephew, back in Illinois, who wants a souvenir from Oregon. “One day, American settlers found their colony empty, except for a few fresh corpses. Smallpox is the official story, but the trappers who found them said it looked like they’d been eaten.”

  Steven grins at his wife’s silhouette in the rain. He loves to make Anne jumpy; sometimes, he makes her lead on the trail just to watch her twist and squirm whenever she walks into a spider web. Steven hunches over, so that shadows fill the hollow spaces beneath his eyebrows. He does his best Boris Karloff impression.

  “They say there is a giant bear in these woods. They say it craves human flesh.”

  Anne hits him on the arm, and laughs. The raindrops on her eyelashes look heavy, and blink on and off like traffic lights.

  “Come on,” she says, “Let’s get out of here.”

  The rain stops that evening, and the skies fill with the stra
nge, bright light of the western stars. Steven builds a decent fire, and they eat baked beans out of aluminum water cans. They make love to warm their joint sleeping bag, and Steven falls asleep immediately after, snoring in even cycles like a washing machine.

  Anne stays awake late into the night, unable to sleep with the constant sighs and exhalations of the animals in the woods around them. She tries her best not to listen to the movement of soft, padded feet around their campsite, or what might be fingers shifting through their food packs.

  And when the long, low frequency growl of something hungry approaches their tent, she closes her eyes and pretends to be home, far from the fearsome things living in the forest.

  As the Crow Flies

  Rita Oakes

  “The revenant knows nothing of strategy or tactics. He wakes from death without fear. He marches to no drummer but his own insatiable hunger.”

  Etienne Jean René Feraud

  Russia, November 28–29, 1812

  There are forces a man should not have to fight. Not this side of the gates of Hell. Captain Etienne Feraud, of Emperor Napoleon’s 5th Hussars, called his ragged troops to a halt within a small evergreen wood. Cavalry unhorsed are worse than useless. God has a terrible sense of humor, certainly.

  Lice-ridden, starving, frost-bitten, his men turned faces to him that even now held an unshakable faith—faith in him and faith in their Emperor. So few and still so trusting.

  They had done all he’d asked. Endured march and fusillade, bayonet and world-shaking artillery, and when in triumph they entered the wondrous capital of the tsars, instead of relaxation and plunder, their reward proved an inferno and the snapping jaws of the hungry dead.

  The emperor had passed that very afternoon, leaving the remnants of the finest army on the continent to its wretched fate. With any luck, the dead city of Moscow and its unholy inhabitants had burned entirely to ash in the weeks since the retreat began.

  Etienne reached inside his greatcoat and pulled forth a brass spyglass, a gift from his lover before departing for the Russian campaign. Martin. The tales I might tell you. But he wouldn’t. Even if fortune permitted him to live to see France again he would keep talk of revenants from tainting Martin’s sunny nature. Etienne blinked back a wash of sentiment, put the glass to his eye, and peered through the fringe of trees.

  The land sloped down to a snaking river. Two makeshift bridges had been thrown across it by General Eblé’s pontonniers. The broader of the two, for artillery, had collapsed, and Etienne could make out small figures in the icy water working to repair it. Crowds of soldiers and civilians, mostly on foot but some miraculously retaining their mounts, swelled and surged at the remaining bridge, eager to cross before Cossacks or revenants fell upon them.

  “Orders?” Gerard asked, the habitual challenge in his tone.

  His elder brother was unquestionably brave, but frequently quarrelsome. Oftentimes cruel, Gerard Feraud had been reduced in rank more than once for insubordination, and Etienne cursed the fate that had forced Gerard into the tatters of his own regiment.

  Etienne took the spyglass from his eye, studied Gerard’s frost-rimed beard, the wind-burned patches of skin beneath his eyes, the never-quite-absent air of a rabid wolf in his manner.

  “Set the watch,” Etienne said.

  His preference would have been to cross the bridge and camp on the other side of the ice-filled torrent, but it would take all night from the look of things. And footing would be treacherous. He’d lost too many men to relish pitching the rest of them into the water. Better to cross in the morning.

  Provided Cossacks and the revenants do not attack in the night.

  Bent with a bag over one shoulder that bulged with plunder, Gerard nodded curtly and set off to post sentries. As Etienne watched his brother crunch across the ice-crusted snow, he noticed the bag seemed to writhe.

  Etienne rubbed gritty eyes with his thumb and forefinger. What I would not give for a soft bed, a blazing fire, and a full bottle of cognac. And for Martin in sweet dalliance beside me.

  But Martin was thousands of leagues away on a small horse farm in Picardy. Etienne was glad of it—glad that Martin’s gentle nature need never witness the brutal waste of thousands of good horses, nor the horror of those who refused to stay dead.

  Fires dotted the grounds where men kindled flames with pine boughs for their meager camp. Discipline was holding and the men had not yet resorted to plundering each other—unlike some of the other regiments. The road from Moscow was littered with riches looted from a city now abandoned—gold and jewels gave no warmth, filled no bellies—only served to weigh a man down, step after exhausting step.

  They were a far cry from the five hundred thousand enthusiastic men who had crossed the Nieman in the summer.

  Etienne moved among the men, asking after this one’s frostbitten toes—that one’s rasping cough—a pause to remind another of their valorous charge just three months before at the redoubt at Borodino—remarking on the courage of still another in the less glorious but more dangerous recent affair of the revenants in Moscow—a clap upon the shoulder, a word, a memory—reading moods as his thermometer read the falling temperatures—steadying those most likely to break.

  And steadying himself in turn. For the sake of his men Etienne kept madness from gnawing its way through the stubborn bone of his skull—kept the nightmares tamped down as thoroughly as tobacco in his broken pipe. On the march he managed better—one foot planted mindlessly before the other. The nights—the nights were different. Too much time to think in darkness.

  Etienne circled back to the edge of the wood. Gerard crouched over a merry blaze, roasting a black bird spitted upon his saber. The stench of burnt feathers and roasting meat filled Etienne with nausea.

  “What is that?”

  “Crow. Froze in mid-flight and fell to earth like a stone at my feet. Lucky.” Gerard tore off a chunk of the half raw, half-charred flesh.

  Gerard had never been a generous man, especially toward the brother he held in near-contempt, but he offered his bounty with grease-slick fingers. Bound by shared misery, had warmth kindled in his heart after all these years?

  “Eat,” Gerard said.

  Etienne shook his head. Though his last meal—an unsatisfying handful of frozen cabbage stalks, had been hours—perhaps even days ago—the smell and sight—even the thought—of eating meat revolted him. The bitter smell of seared feathers conjured the burning city—the ripping of bone and muscle reminded him of the first victims he’d seen fall to the revenants.

  “Eat.” Gerard shook the rent fowl at him. The faded sleeve of his uniform was discolored where the chevrons of a sergeant’s rank had been removed. Gerard had not volunteered the tale of his most recent disgrace and Etienne had not asked.

  “It fell at your feet, not mine,” Etienne said. “I’m not hungry.”

  Gerard’s eyes went flat, as if dead. A dangerous look Etienne remembered from childhood. Gerard never liked being spurned. And whatever truce there might have been between them swirled away into spark and ash.

  Huddled inside his coat, Etienne turned from the fire, made another circuit of the camp. I should have accepted the execrable bird. I am supposed to be the polite one.

  When they were boys, Gerard had always been the favored son—in spite of his tempers. High spirited, their maman said, though she would beat either of them with a stout wooden spoon for the slightest transgression. She was too busy running a bustling inn to brook youthful nonsense. Though Etienne tried to be a dutiful son, especially since their soldier father’s visits home were all too rare, he could not help but note that the shine of pride in her eyes when her boys were clever or obedient never shone as brightly for her youngest.

  Gerard loved little so well as tormenting his younger brother—a pinch, a punch, a horse turd dropped down the collar of his clean shirt. Etienne bore it with puzzled stoicism or the unequal scuffles common between brothers and rivals.

  Now is not the time for
nostalgia.

  Etienne returned to Gerard’s side. Gerard barely acknowledged him, tossed the stripped clean bones of the crow onto the fire. Etienne settled himself for sleep—close enough to the flames he would not freeze to death in the night—yet not so close the warmth would rouse the lice in his uniform to their maddening quick-march.

  He closed his eyes, not truly expecting sleep—he’d managed only light dozes since marching from Moscow—but a little reprieve from the weariness of body and soul he carried as surely as Gerard carried his bag.

  A summer day in boyhood. The brothers were mucking out the inn stable, the air sweet with the smell of horse and hay, straw and dung. Dust motes danced sleepily in a shaft of sunlight at the open door. A fine day, except for Gerard’s constant teasing. Etienne had had enough and Fanchon, the stray dog Etienne had patiently tamed with kind words and pilfered table scraps, had had enough, too.

  She growled, which Gerard found funny, and snarled, which he did not. He launched a kick at her. She dodged, barked a warning Gerard did not heed. Fanchon darted back and nipped him on the calf, which surprised Gerard so much he fell into a pile of fresh horse manure.

  Etienne laughed.

  Gerard sprang to his feet, face purple.

  Etienne braced himself for the inevitable drubbing, but Gerard seized Fanchon instead, throwing her against the stone stable wall with so much force Etienne heard bones snap.

  Fanchon gave one high-pitched yelp and tried to flee, but her hind legs refused to work.

  Gerard advanced. He kicked her, time and again, while Etienne pummeled and pulled and shouted for him to stop, but Gerard was older, stronger, and filled with rage.

  The ostler, a grizzled campaigner who had served with their father, barked an order which pierced Gerard’s madness. “Off with you, boy,” he said. “You’re scaring the horses.”