Zombies: Shambling Through the Ages

by Неизвестный

  He carried the banner that night, walking the streets of the East End without stopping for rest or sleep—indeed, without even feeling the need for rest or sleep—ferreting out the hiding places of the homeless, but with his mind on only one man.

  He caught up with Barlow in a doorway, the man sitting on the top step, his knees bunched up to his chest and his head bent down between them, trying to sleep.

  Nettle kicked his foot. “Wake up,” he said. “I want a word with you.”

  Barlow thought him a policeman at first, and had already half pulled himself to his feet when the haze of sleep left him entirely, and he realized who was standing in front of him.

  “You owe me an answer, Mr. Barlow.”

  But Barlow didn’t stand still to give it. He turned and ran with all the energy a scared, weatherbeaten, and prematurely old man could muster.

  Nettle followed him at a jog, yelling “I want an answer!” over and over again at Barlow’s back, and as they slipped deeper and deeper into the warren of slimy streets that made up the bowels of the East End, a cold, light rain began to fall.

  Nettle finally closed on him in a back alley off the Brown Hay Road, the streets deserted now and splashy beneath their feet. Barlow had curled up under a flight of stairs and was trying to hide his face with his arms.

  “You have some explaining to do,” Nettle said. The rain rolled off his face unnoticed.

  Barlow stared up at him with abject fear.

  “What did you do? Answer me!”

  “For the love of all that’s ’oly, sir, please don’t yell. You’ll—”

  “I’ll what? Wake the dead? Go on, you villain, say it! Say it! Are you afraid they’ll hear us?”

  Barlow looked seasick. His eyes pleaded for silence, but got none.

  “Spill it!” Nettle roared. “Tell me what you did.”

  Nettle waited, and for a moment there was no sound but the pattering of a gentle rain on cobblestones, but then it came, as both Nettle and Barlow knew that it most assuredly would, the sound of slow, plodding feet dragging on the cobblestones behind them.

  Nettle looked over his shoulder, and saw a small crowd of shamblers had appeared out of the mist. There were men, women, and even children in that crowd. Their faces were dark with disease and their cheeks empty from extreme hunger. Their eyes were carrion eyes, and a smell that could only be death’s smell preceded them, filling the street with its sad, inexorable power.

  A man in the front of the crowd raised his arms, and it looked like one of his hands had been partially eaten. He groaned, “Fooooood,” and Barlow jumped to his feet and tried to run.

  “Where are you going?” Nettle yelled after him. “Don’t you know you can’t run from this?”

  Barlow didn’t make it very far, only to the middle of the Brown Hay Road. There, he stopped, wheeling around in a panic, surrounded by the dead on every side. They stepped out of every doorway, out of every alley, from behind every staircase, taking shape out of the shadows. He fell to his knees in front of Nettle and started to cry.

  “Please,” he begged.

  “Tell what you’ve done,” Nettle said.

  Barlow looked at the groaning, starving dead, and he shook his head no. No, no, no, no, no!

  “Say it,” Nettle said. “While there’s still time.”

  But there wasn’t any more time. Barlow could no more belly up to the magnitude of what he’d done than he could force himself to stop breathing, and as the rotting dead shouldered their way past Nettle and closed on Barlow, all that he could do was close his eyes.

  The dead tore at Barlow with their hands and their teeth, ripping his flesh like fabric. Nettle stumbled away, into the dark, and as he walked he heard Barlow’s screams carry on and on and on. They seemed to go on far longer than it seemed possible for any one man to suffer, but go on they did, and they echoed in Nettle’s mind even after the shrillness of them disappeared from his ears.

  After that, Nettle wandered, his mind unhinged, until he began to see people. These he tried to tell what he had seen, but they flinched away from him, alarmed at the intensity in his eyes and the urgency in his voice and the complete lack of sense in his speech.

  As day broke, a russet stain behind plum-colored smoke clouds, Nettle collapsed less than fifty feet from the doors of Stepney Green Hospital. He lay there, lips moving soundlessly, eyes still as glass beads, until an orderly from the hospital knelt beside him and said, “Hey, mate, are you hurt? What is it? Are you ’ungry?”

  If the horror wasn’t on Nettle’s face, it was nonetheless there, in his mind. Eat, he thought, and sensed his body in complete revolt at the idea. God no, I’ll never eat again.

  Lonegan’s Luck

  Stephen Graham Jones

  Like every month, the horse was new. A mare, pushing fifteen years old. Given his druthers, Lonegan would have picked a mule, of course, one that had had its balls cut late, so there was still some fight in it, but, when it came down to it, it had either been the mare or yoking himself up to the buckboard, leaning forward until his fingertips touched the ground.

  Twenty years ago, he would have tried it, just to make a girl laugh.

  Now, he took what was available, made do.

  And anyway, from the way the mare kept trying to swing wide, head back into the shade of town, this wasn’t going to be her first trip across the Arizona Territories. Maybe she’d even know where the water was, if it came down to that. Where the Apache weren’t.

  Lonegan brushed the traces across her flank and she pulled ahead, the wagon creaking, all his crates shifting around behind him, the jars and bottles inside touching shoulders. The straw they were packed in was going to be the mare’s forage, if all the red baked earth ahead of them was as empty as it looked.

  As they picked their way through it, Lonegan explained to the mare that he never meant for it to be this way. That this was the last time. But then he trailed off. Up ahead a black column was coming into view.

  Buzzards.

  Lonegan nodded, smiled.

  What was dead there was pungent enough to be drawing them in for miles.

  “What do you think, old girl?” he said to the mare. She didn’t answer. Lonegan nodded to himself again, checked the scattergun under his seat, and pulled the mare’s head towards the swirling buzzards. “Professional curiosity,” he told her, then laughed because it was a joke.

  The town he’d left that morning wasn’t going on any map.

  The one ahead of him, as far as he knew, probably wasn’t on any map either. But it would be there. They always were.

  When the mare tried shying away from the smell of death, Lonegan got down, talked into her ear, and tied his handkerchief across her eyes. The last little bit, he led her by the bridle, then hobbled her upwind.

  The buzzards were a greasy black coat, moved like old men walking barefoot on the hot ground.

  Instead of watching them, Lonegan traced the ridges of rock all around.

  “Well,” he finally said, and leaned into the washed-out little hollow.

  The buzzards lifted their wings in something like menace, but Lonegan knew better. He slung rocks at the few that wouldn’t take to the sky. They just backed off, their dirty mouths open in challenge.

  Lonegan held his palm out to them, explained that this wasn’t going to take long.

  He was right: the dead guy was the one Lonegan had figured it would be. The thin deputy with the three-pocketed vest. He still had the vest on, had been able to crawl maybe twenty paces from where his horse had died. The horse was a gelding, a long-legged bay with a white diamond on its forehead, three white socks. Lonegan distinctly remembered having appreciated that horse. But now it had been run to death, had died with white foam on its flanks, blood blowing from its nostrils, eyes wheeling around, the deputy spurring him on, deeper into the heat, to warn the next town over. Lonegan looked from the horse to the deputy. The buzzards were going after the gelding, of course.

  It made Lon
egan sick.

  He walked up to the deputy, face down in the dirt, already rotting, and rolled him over.

  “Not quite as fast as you thought you were, eh deputy?” he said, then shot him in the mouth. Twice.

  It was a courtesy.

  Nine days later, all the straw in his crates hand fed to the mare, his jars and bottles tied to each other with twine to keep them from shattering, Lonegan looked into the distance and nodded: a town was rising up from the dirt. A perfect little town.

  He snubbed the mare to a shuffling stop, turned his head to the side to make sure they weren’t pulling any dust in. That would give them away.

  Then he just stared at the town.

  Finally the mare snorted a breath of hot air in, blew it back out.

  “I know,” Lonegan said. “I know.”

  According to the scrap of paper he’d been marking, it was only Friday.

  “One more night,” he told the mare, and angled her over to some scrub, a ring of blackened stones in the packed ground.

  He had to get there on a Saturday.

  It wasn’t like one more night was going to kill him, anyway. Or the mare.

  He parked the buckboard on the town side of the ring of stones, so they wouldn’t see his light, find him before he was ready.

  Before unhooking the mare, he hobbled her. Four nights ago, she wouldn’t have tried running. But now there was the smell of other horses in the air. Hay, maybe. Water.

  And then there was the missing slice of meat Lonegan had cut from her haunch three nights ago.

  It had been shallow, and he’d packed it with a medley of poultices from his crates, folded the skin back over, but still, he was pretty sure she’d been more than slightly offended.

  Lonegan smiled at her, shook his head no, that she didn’t need to worry. He could wait one more day for solid food, for water that wasn’t briny and didn’t taste like rust.

  Or—no: he was going to get a cake, this time. All for himself. A big white one, slathered in whatever kind of frosting they had.

  And all the water he could drink.

  Lonegan nodded to himself about this, leaned back into his bedroll, and watched the sparks from the fire swirl up past his battered coffee pot.

  When it was hot enough, he offered a cup to the mare.

  She flared her nostrils, stared at him.

  Before turning in, Lonegan emptied the grains from his cup into her open wound and patted it down, told her it was an old medicine man trick. That he knew them all.

  He fell asleep thinking of the cake.

  The mare slept standing up.

  By noon the next day, he was set up on the only street in town. Not in front of the saloon but the mercantile. Because the men bellied up to the bar would walk any distance for the show. The people just in town for flour or salt though, you had to step into their path some. Make them aware of you.

  Lonegan had polished his boots, shaved his jaw, pulled the hair on his chin down into a waxy point.

  He waited until twenty or so people had gathered before reaching up under the side of the buckboard, for the secret handle.

  He pulled it, stepped away with a flourish, and the panel on the buckboard opened up like a staircase, all the bottles and jars and felt bags of medicine already tied into place.

  One person in the crowd clapped twice.

  Lonegan didn’t look around, just started talking about how the blue oil in the clear jar—he’d pilfered it from a barber shop in Missouri—how, if rubbed into the scalp twice daily and let cook in the sun, it would make a head of hair grow back, if you happened to be missing one. Full, black, Indian hair. But you had to be careful not to use too much, especially in these parts.

  Now somebody in the crowd laughed.

  Inside, Lonegan smiled, then went on.

  The other stuff, fox urine he called it, though assured them it wasn’t, it was for the women specifically. He couldn’t go into the particulars in mixed company though, of course. This was a Christian settlement, right?

  He looked around when no one answered.

  “Amen,” a man near the front finally said.

  Lonegan nodded.

  “Thought so,” he said. “Some towns I come across . . . well. Mining towns, y’know?”

  Five, maybe six people nodded, kept their lips pursed.

  The fox urine was going to be sold out by supper, Lonegan knew. Not to any of the women, either.

  Facing the crowd now, the buckboard framed by the mercantile, like it was just an extension of the mercantile, Lonegan cycled through his other bottles, the rest of his jars, the creams and powders and rare leaves. Twice a man in the crowd raised his hand to stop the show, make a purchase, but Lonegan held his palm up. Not yet, not yet.

  But then, towards mid-afternoon, the white-haired preacher finally showed up, the good book held in both hands before him like a shield.

  Lonegan resisted acknowledging him. But just barely.

  They were in the same profession, after all.

  And the preacher was the key to all this, too.

  So Lonegan went on hawking, selling, testifying, the sweat running down the back of his neck to wet his shirt. He took his hat off, wiped his forehead with the back of his sleeve, and eyed the crowd now, shrugged.

  “If you’ll excuse me a brief moment,” he said, and stepped halfway behind the ass-end of the buckboard, swigged from a tall, clear bottle of nearly-amber liquid.

  He swallowed, lifted the bottle again, and drew deep on it, nodded as he screwed the cap back on.

  “What is that?” a woman asked.

  Lonegan looked up as if caught, said, “Nothing, ma’am. Something of my own making.”

  “We—” another man started, stepping forward.

  Lonegan shook his head no, cut him off: “It’s not that kind of my own making, sir. Any man drinks whiskey in the heat like this is asking for trouble, am I right?”

  The man stepped back without ever breaking eye contact.

  “Then what is it?” a boy asked.

  Lonegan looked down to him, smiled.

  “Just something an old—a man from the Old Country taught this to me on his deathbed. It’s kind of like . . . you know how a strip of dried meat, it’s like the whole steak twisted into a couple of bites?”

  The boy nodded.

  Lonegan lifted the bottle up, let it catch the sunlight. Said, “This is like that. Except it’s the good part of water. The cold part.”

  A man in the crowd muttered a curse. The dismissal cycled through, all around Lonegan. He waited for it to abate, then shrugged, tucked the bottle back into the buckboard. “It’s not for sale anyway,” he said, stepping back around to the bottles and jars.

  “Why not?” a man in a thick leather vest asked.

  By the man’s bearing, Lonegan assumed he was law of some kind.

  “Personal stock,” Lonegan explained. “And—anyway. There’s not enough. It takes about fourteen months to get even a few bottles distilled the right way.”

  “Then I take that to mean you’d be averse to sampling it out?” the man said.

  Lonegan nodded, tried to look apologetic.

  The man shook his head, scratched deep in his matted beard, and stepped forward, shouldered Lonegan out of the way.

  A moment later, he’d grubbed the bottle up from the bedclothes Lonegan had stuffed it in.

  With everybody watching, he unscrewed the cap, wiped his lips clean, and took a long pull off the bottle.

  What it was was water with a green juniper leaf at the bottom. The inside of the bottle cap dabbed with honey. A couple drops of laudanum, for the soft head rush, and a peppermint candy ground up, to hide the laudanum.

  The man lowered the bottle, swallowed what was left in his mouth, and smiled.

  Grudgingly, Lonegan agreed to take two dollars for what was left in the bottle. And then everybody was calling for it.

  “I don’t—” he started, stepping up onto the hub of his wheel to try
to reach everybody, “I don’t have—” but they were surging forward.

  “Okay,” he said, for the benefit of the people up front, and stepped down, hauled a half-case of the water up over the side of the buckboard.

  Which was when the preacher spoke up.

  The crowd fell silent like church.

  “I can’t let you do this to these good people,” the preacher said.

  “I think—” Lonegan said, his stutter a practiced thing, “I think you have me confused with the k-kind of gentlemen who—”

  “I’m not confused at all, sir,” the preacher said, both his hands still clasping the bible.

  Lonegan stared at him, stared at him, then took a respectful step forward. “What could convince you then, Brother?” he said. “Take my mare there. See that wound on her haunch? Would you believe that four days ago that was done by an old blunderbuss, fired on accident?”

  “By you?”

  “I was cleaning it.”

  The preacher nodded, waiting.

  Lonegan went on. “You could reach your hand into the hole, I’m saying.”

  “And your medicine fixed it?” the preacher anticipated, his voice rising.

  Lonegan palmed a smoky jar from the shelves, said, “This poultice, yes sir. A man named Running Bear showed me how to take the caul around the heart of a dog and grind—”

  The preacher blew air out his nose.

  “He was Oglala Sioux,” Lonegan added, and let that settle.

  The preacher just stared.

  Lonegan looked around at the faces in the crowd, starting to side with the preacher. More out of habit than argument. But still.

  Lonegan nodded, backed off, hands raised. Was quiet long enough to let them know he was just thinking of this: “These—these snake oil men you’ve taken me for, Brother. People. A despicable breed. What would you say characterizes them?”