Zombies: Shambling Through the Ages

by Неизвестный

  A half hour later he finds signs of—O wonderful paradox!—life.

  The rumors are true. Bosie’s father has been buried vertically upside down. There is no coffin at all, just a body jammed into the earth. Wilde’s spade finds the feet and the feet are—moving. A thin layer of dirt pulses like a beating heart and Wilde clears it to reveal two worn and filthy soles. He gasps, falls back and hastens to the satchel.

  He pulls Bosie’s head from within and sets it atop the tombstone. “Now at last I understand Salome,” Wilde says, considering the head. The desiccated blue cataracts leer straight ahead at Wilde as he resumes digging. Queensberry’s legs kick in greater strides as Wilde disencumbers them. It takes almost three hours before he can drag the body out of its hole.

  The Marquess is clearly ravenous and Wilde recognizes a hunger that is unchanged by death. Had he been buried like a normal person, he would have clawed his way to the surface weeks ago. Wilde swallows, angered by his fear of the familiar, rotting face. He did not come all this way to indulge fear. Queensberry suddenly lunges stiffly at him and Wilde shrieks and bashes his head with a powerful backhand. The fear goes, replaced with a long nourished rage that seizes all of his being. He will use the sword.

  There is no God, Wilde thinks. And if there is a God, what he does next is perhaps not technically a sacrilege, an immorality so vile that even the most decadent of men would turn from the very idea in horror. It is not necrophilia if the body is resurrected, after all, and he pins Queensberry into the dirt before the grave and shames the father in front of the son.

  When it is finished, he takes Ayat’s sword and beheads the Marquess and puts it on the tombstone next to Bosie’s. The air around Kinmount House fills with laughter and the echo of heavy footfalls. It is Wilde, his long arms swaying in the air as his body writhes, a man veiled with life, and he is dancing, dancing, dancing.

  Early 20th Century

  The Gringo

  Silvia Moreno-Garcia

  “I know him. That gringo was a famous writer.”

  Light trailed through the leaves, tracing funny shadow patterns on the ground. The resurrected man dangled from a thick rope, twitching every few minutes and moaning.

  The resurrected were sturdy and the soldiers who’d hanged this one had done a poor job, merely hoisting him from the branches like a broken piñata. When you’re going to have a hanging, you’d better have it right but Catalina had seen many idiots tie a rope and get it all wrong. Even with regular prisoners, never mind the resurrected, they’d muddle it. There was nothing worse than watching a poor sod slowly suffocate because someone had not figured how to break his neck properly.

  Catalina smirked, taking a puff on the cigarette and handing it to her fellow soldadera. Catalina smoked a cigarette each afternoon and another one at night. Religiously, Lola said, possibly because everything had to do with religion for Lola.

  Small things. It’s the small things that count, Catalina’s dad used to say, and she found herself in agreement more and more these days.

  “You read any of his stuff?” Catalina asked.

  Before the Revolution Lola had been studying at an exclusive girl’s school in Cuernavaca. She spoke French and English, and knew how to dance the waltz. Not that it mattered now. What mattered was carrying weapons and cleaning them, shooting the Federales with a steady hand, and Catalina could do that even if she couldn’t read none too well.

  “He had a story about a hanged man who thinks he’s not really dead,” Lola said.

  “It sounds like he saw it coming.”

  Lola handed Catalina the cigarette back. Catalina crossed her arms and stared at the twitching gringo. An old guy, gray-haired. What did he think he’d be doing down in Mexico, following the troops at his age? And then a Cemetery Man had the gall to bring him back, to have his withered hands drag supplies across the arid fields.

  Catalina understood the logic of the Federales: they needed cannon fodder. Hell, everyone needed cannon fodder. It didn’t matter if you were fighting for Zapata or Villa, everyone wanted more soldiers. Kids of twelve or thirteen were being “recruited” at gunpoint. Before the Revolution, the henequen fields were harvested by groups of resurrected. Now the Federales had the dead fighting for ’em.

  “What do you want to do about him?” Lola asked. “Are we cutting him down?”

  “Cutting him down,” Catalina said, chuckling. “He’d kill us.”

  The man moaned. A low, guttural sound. The resurrected were pretty stupid but also pretty strong. Without a Cemetery Man to control him, he’d be extra stupid and violent. Catalina didn’t want to take any chances.

  “It doesn’t seem right to let him stay like this. The crows are going to peck him.”

  “The crows are going to peck all of us.”

  Catalina looked at the man and wondered if it had been villagers who’d hanged him or Revolutionaries like her. She wondered if they’d done it for sport, ’cause the more she looked at the rope, the more it looked like they’d just left him there for fun.

  She thought about six months back, when they’d passed through a scorched village reeking of death. The streets were littered with corpses. The Federales had taken everything. The horses, the cows, the chickens. But they’d somehow left behind the pigs. Big, fat pigs which were happily munching on the corpses.

  When her company had gone through, a few soldiers, for kicks, decided to tie a couple of pigs up and burn them. They weren’t hungry. They wanted to hear them squeal.

  Pigs eating men and then the men eating the pigs. And a guy hanging from a tree, probably because it was a merry sight. Just like the pigs squealing had been funny.

  She grabbed the Mauser and aimed, slowly squeezing the trigger. The shot sent the birds in the tree flying; created echoes which splashed across the fields.

  The man who had been a famous writer twitched one last time and his moaning ceased.

  “We should say a prayer,” Lola said.

  “Next you’ll want to bury him. You’d have made a good nun.”

  Lola did not reply. She knelt, closed her eyes and pressed her hands together, head politely bowed.

  “Our Lord in Heaven, we ask that you receive the spirit of our brother Ambrose. Amen.”

  “Amen,” Catalina repeated.

  Lola rose, wiping the dirt from her skirts. She glanced at Catalina.

  “If I die, will you make sure I have a cross with my name on it?”

  “Like a cross with your name is gonna do you any good.”

  “Just promise.”

  “Don’t think about that,” Catalina said.

  Lola stared at her. Catalina smoked her cigarette, finally shaking her head.

  “Well, that’s enough scouting for a day. I say we head back and meet with them others,” Catalina muttered.

  They turned around, back towards Rio Frio. Catalina gave the dead gringo one last look. At least he’d be eaten by the birds. That was better than being pig food. That was better than being resurrected. Small things. It’s the small things that count.

  She flicked her cigarette away.

  The End of the Carroll A. Deering

  Bob Hole

  “Oh, I saws them, I did.” Jacobson muttered. Once he demanded men at the tap call him Captain, but lately even he had forgotten the title except on the rainiest, the bleakest of nights. “I saw them poor blighters up on that ship.”

  The fellow seated beside him snorted at the edge of his stein.

  “Crew all was stumblin’ ’round the foredeck. They was groanin’ and callin’, I tells ya.” Jacobson had not been near the water in years. His skin no longer a tan from sun and salt but the pasty gleam of too much time indoors. “It was the Deering, comin’ back from Rio. Last stop was Barbados they said. No mistakin’ the five masts of that schooner. Maine wastes trees.”

  “True enough, but many a man has been known to mistake things at sea.” His listener sipped his beer. “At night.” He was amused and baited the old seaman.
He had traveled all the way from New York because Jacobson’s tale deserved to be preserved in the ragged, untrimmed edges of the pulps.

  “Not as close as I got! Them things weren’t human . . . least not anymore.” Jacobson finished his mug, then clanked it on the wooden table with a sharp thunk. Perhaps a sign to both visitor and pub that he wanted his third of the evening. “They’d stopped in Barbados.”

  Putting his own mug down in front of him, his companion said, “What of it? What were they hollering, then?”

  “So much wind. First I swore I heard them callin’ out ‘sleet.’ A hard-bitten January, cold in ’21 as to set all the grinders in Diamond Shoals chatterin’ in men’s mouths.

  “Then they came closer. Then I knew what they was callin’. Didn’t think I could feel the chill more that night. But near as soiled myself. Can tell you that. Tell you that now.” Jacobson stared out the grungy window of the pub. The shoreline was miles away but not to his eyes. “Barbados.” He repeated the word as if some catechism. “Just like the others.”

  “What others?”

  The captain turned back to his visitor. “Cyclops. She left Barbados just like the Deering, but in ’18, three years ago. Three hundred eight souls ’board. All lost. There were stories then.”

  The man from New York was losing patience. “Out with it.”

  “Cursed waters, ships abandoned. Lost if lucky. Crews gone missin’ ’twixt here and Bermuda.”

  “But the Deering wasn’t lost. She came aground at Hatteras.”

  “An’ her crew all gone.” The captain turned back to the window and chewed a bit more at the lower lip hidden beneath his beard. “Taken by the sea, I hope . . . Salt water heals all things, I hear . . . ” His voice trailed off.

  The visitor groaned and paid the tab. He rose and shook out what water remained on his overcoat. “Tell me at least what you heard them hollering?”

  The captain, his eyes locked somewhere past the window, shuddered. “Meat, Mr. Munsey. They was callin’ fer meat.”

  Promised Land (Wineville, 1928)

  Richard E. Gropp

  Promised land. Promised land. Promised. Land. The fever burned through his flesh—words without thought, echoing through the empty cavern of his skull.

  Promised land.

  West by night. The mid-day sun was too scalding now, doing awful things to his skin. And he remembered, at times, where he was going—but never where he was. Or exactly who he was.

  California. He was going to California. The beach. The stars. Home to all of those magical picture shows, flickering black and white across his barely-remembered hometown screen—so alien to his family, a source of ridicule, scorn, and Father’s angry fists whenever he showed up too late to work the fields. Too busy daydreaming. Too busy imagining himself up there on the screen, in tux and tails and rakish grin.

  And the daylight didn’t just hurt his skin now. His eyes, too—the sun burning bright in one, the other turned blind, then gone. Plucked out. Soft and wet on his tongue. He’d dug into the eye cavity for more, but there was nothing there, just crumbling flesh sloughing off against bone. And his flesh, too, was bad: tasted tough and bitter, when he wanted warm and sweet and alive.

  It had started with a single bite. He had stowed away on the back of a farmer’s truck, heading to California (the promised land, the promised land, the promised land!) only to find that he wasn’t alone. A shadow in the corner, a salivating beast in overalls, waiting for a fresh hot meal. He’d managed to tumble out of the back of the truck before that thing could rip more than a single bite from his forearm.

  And then the fever had struck, and he lost days and days and days. And his skin . . .

  So he hid during the day and moved at night, following the setting sun. His feet didn’t hurt, despite all the walking, but his joints made horrible sounds, popping and crackling under his disintegrating flesh. Must be in California by now. He’d started out in Arizona, surrounded by dead crops and crumbling farmhouses. And he wished he could see his father now. That old man, beaten down and angry at the world, angry at his family, angry at his dying fields.

  The thought of Father’s fleshy, callused right fist made his stomach scream with hunger.

  He caught a cat in the dark, in the woods. Domestic. It must have been domestic; it didn’t even run. And then he saw farmhouse lights beyond a wall of trees. And heard the screams of disturbed birds. A chicken ranch.

  There were people in the yard, and as soon as he saw them, his arid mouth filled with saliva, and he bit off a chunk of his own tongue—dead, pale imitation of human flesh.

  “I said, do it!” A yelling voice, a looming Father-shadow next to the nearest chicken coop. “Or you’re next, you little whoreson. A shallow grave and quicklime . . . to make sure we never get caught. And that’s more than these Satan-lure catamites deserve!” Then he stalked off, and the front door slammed shut, leaving one quaking shadow to drag a child-size lump across the field, to a spot near his hiding place.

  The urge was great—and growing greater—to hunt and eat, to bite down on something that breathed and bled. Something human. But he couldn’t do it. He remembered Hollywood. He remembered glamour on a screen, elegance and beauty, and he couldn’t kill. That wasn’t him. That wasn’t his destiny.

  So, despite his hunger, despite his overwhelming desire for the flesh of this trembling teenager, he stood in the trees and watched. He watched as a scared boy dug a little hole for a little body. And when the teenager was finally done, and disappeared back into that run-down shack, he darted out and dug up the freshly turned earth.

  The dead-boy flesh wasn’t particularly good—not warm, not filled with beating blood. But it was flesh, and it sated some of his hunger. Not as much as the shaking teenager would have done, or the horrible Father-man—or any of the others he could smell cowering inside that horrible, horrible shack.

  But he wasn’t a monster. That wasn’t a role he wanted to play.

  There were multiple graves in the Father-man’s field, out behind the chicken coops. All children. A terrible crop planted over days, or weeks, that would never grow. And when he was done, when the graves were empty and his stomach full, he closed his eyes and tried to feel the pull of the promised land in the distance. It wasn’t far now. He could sense it.

  And, once again, he started shambling west, toward Hollywood.

  He was going to be a star.

  Tell Me Like You Done Before

  Scott Edelman

  As the star-speckled black of the sky gave way to an unbroken dark blue canvas that promised a dawn, a thin man, his shoulders slumped as if he had been carrying the world upon them, rose from where he had been hiding amidst the brush.

  He slapped at the dry earth which clung to the folds of his well-worn clothing. The grim expression on his sharp features softened slightly as he was swallowed by the resulting cloud of dust.

  He stared down into the valley to where he knew a ranch was nestled several miles away, miles he’d had no remaining juice to cover the night before. Even though a new day was on the verge of being born, he still could make it out by but a few pinpoints of campfire.

  He smiled then, a change in expression so slight that it would have been perceptible only to someone who had known him for many years.

  But there was only one friend like that who still walked God’s green Earth. And he was many miles away, the miles growing greater each day. Or so this weary man hoped.

  Besides, that friend was supposed to be dead.

  The man had made it to the start of another day, something which he’d been wise enough not to count on. He wished he could have made it to the ranch the night before, where surrounded by others he might have been lulled into a false sense of security which would have let him get some rest, instead of a broken sleep which left him as exhausted now as before he lay down, but fatigue had overtaken him there among the sycamores, and that was that.

  He heard a scraping at his feet, and looked down to s
ee a small rabbit, its bones bent, its eyes glowing, dragging itself toward him through the brown grass. Before he could react, it leapt at him, though because its frame was crippled, it could only propel itself to the top of his left boot, and no further. The wretched thing drove its incisors into the thick leather at the man’s calf.

  He shrieked, and struggled to kick at it with the heel of his other boot, but his angle was all wrong, and so he struck it with only glancing blows. He fell, even as he was doing so telling himself how stupid he’d been to let his throat get within the creature’s reach. The rabbit dropped its jaws, a noxious liquid spilling forth, and as it readied itself for another leap, one which would end this terrifying dance, the man’s scrabbling fingers chanced on a medium-sized rock. He scooped it up and slammed it hard against the thing’s skull.

  The coney dropped to the man’s side, still wriggling, preparing for another attack, and so he quickly rolled to his knees, bashing at it again with the rock. But it kept coming, not giving up until he caught its skull directly. He brought the rock down once, twice, again, so many times he lost count.

  Only then did it lie still.

  The man fell back, gasping for breath, shuddering not only from the close call, but also from the memories which had haunted him ever since the night he’d pulled the trigger, embers which the violent encounter had stirred into a raging fire. He’d been haunted even before that dreadful dusk, but he’d thought that with his ultimate action, once the bullet flew, it would surely be over.

  Turned out all he’d done was trade one kind of haunting for another.

  He lay on his back until the sky had turned a bright cloudless blue, a color that told him he was free of any further such encounters, at least until night began to fall once more. He stood then, looked down at the ranch the morning had revealed. He’d hoped that might be the place to rest for a spell, but he now saw that he still needed to put a few more miles on his boots.