Chivalry Is Dead

by Bennie Newsome

  Creaking sounds erupted from the bottom of the stairs and they snapped Elias’ attention back to the present. He rushed down the flight and surveyed the foyer. The creature could be anywhere in those shadows, he knew. But without light, he had little choice but to stumble through the dark, providing it opportunity, and wait for it to strike.

  He searched the living room but found nothing more than dust and weary furniture. He wandered down the blackness of the hallway leading into the kitchen. He shuffled his feet as he walked, expecting he might find the creature lurking along the ground below.

  As he entered the kitchen, he caught sight of a tiny hint of movement at the far end. His tired eyes squinted, allowing his vision to focus upon the spot. There, huddled in the corner, he saw a shroud of tissue wrapped around a narrow framework of bones. A thin ray of dying light beamed from the window, pointing like an endless finger to illuminate the gloomy face. Like a morbid porcelain doll, the girl looked just like her mother. And despite all the grotesqueness of the features, Elias could still recognize himself in that face as well. Since the day of her birth, and every day throughout the course of her six years among the living, she had always represented a perfect blend of both mother and father.

  Elias hesitated. Yet again, he wondered how he could even consider putting a bullet in the head of his own flesh and blood, his dearest little daughter. But nor could he leave her in a state such as this; condemned to exist in a hellish nightmare as a flesh-eating fiend. Indeed, it was an atrocity that had continued for far too long.

  He raised his gun, but his delayed action had allowed time for the creature to react. It sprang from shadow, launching toward him as a spider lunges to catch a fly. It latched on to his torso as bony limbs wrapped around his waist and shoulders. The face then buried itself into his neck and jagged little teeth went to work, tearing and chomping.

  Elias stumbled, his back pushing against the wall. This time, he could not choke it back; he burst into a dry sob. The cries did not stem from the pains of relentless biting, but wholly from the fact that it had been more than twenty years since he’d last held his little girl within his arms.

  He gently stroked black strands of brittle hair, moaning a tearless wail. He placed the muzzle to temple. His finger trembled at the trigger, and then squeezed.

  He held tightly to the tiny body as it fell loose like a rag doll. He carried her up the stairs, the echo of the shot still burning in his brain, and placed her next to her mother. He curled up beside the twisted pair, listening to the sounds of the undead mob filling the streets, and drifted into dreamless slumber.

  ***

  Elias woke with the dawn. With his fever broke, he felt refreshed. He kissed his wife and daughter goodbye before leaving his home for the final time.

  A few of the mindless ghouls still loitered about. They paid him no attention, no longer recognizing him as food. He passed them in a casual stroll, out of town, and headed back into the desert.

  He walked for hours before growing weak, tired. At last, he lay down and put his face to the sun. He didn’t notice the absence of the vultures in the sky. They were already on the ground, amassed in a circle and ready to feast, closing in on the undying flesh.

  Stephen Hill is writer working out of Toronto, Ontario. The short fiction anthologies his work has been featured in include Night Terrors, Madness of the Mind and Don’t Tread on Me - Tales of Revenge and Retribution. His fiction can also be found online on such sites as Thrillers, Killers & Chillers, The Oddville Press, The Broken Pencil, and Microhorror, among others.

  Have you ever sat and watched somebody watching the television? Their eyes glaze over. They become rapt, entranced by the moving pictures. They sit, barely moving, unless eating and then they chew and chew… Sometimes, if the show breaks through to them, they’ll laugh, or yell, or throw something at the screen but mostly, mostly they stare.

  This story will suck you in and make your eyes dance across the page in delight. Your heart will pound and your face will become animated as you experience pity, disgust and amusement.

  So sit back and relax, put down the TV remote, step away from the snacks, and read this treat from Stephen Hill.

  After all, TV will rot your brain…

  Changing Channels

  By: Stephen Hill

  Alive, my big brother Ed could drive me crazy by inventing new and elaborate ways to annoy me. Dead, he drove me nuts by doing almost nothing.

  As a zombie, ninety percent of every day and night for Ed was the same: staring at the TV for hours using eyes that floated in their sockets like poached eggs. First was the traffic report he watched with Dad, who caught a quick glimpse before fleeing for work. Later was the morning news with Mom while I stuffed my knapsack with books and lunch.

  When I got home from class, he’d still be there. Oprah, The Young and the Restless, Judge Judy—it didn’t matter what it was—he watched with the same glassy, nobody-home look that washed his face clean of emotion. Sometimes he was alone, and sometimes with Mom. Recently retired to look after her son, she would flit around him busily—swatting at the hungry flies dive-bombing his decaying flesh.

  After Dad got home, we’d roll Ed to the kitchen for dinner, the wheels on his chair squealing like tortured animals. He couldn’t eat a bite, but Mom’s need for routine was vital. Come hell or high water, Ed joined us at the table. After all, dead he no longer had a choice, and Mom was calling the shots more than she had when he was in diapers.

  At seventeen, the little control she had over him had been destined to spiral into the stratosphere when he left for college. Then he was bitten. Perhaps it was too much to say that she was glad Ed was a zombie.

  But probably not.

  When he was alive, Ed was a picky eater, fork-lifting half his food my way when Mom and Dad weren’t looking. Dead, Mom filled his plate with whatever she’d baked, boiled or fried, and it stayed exactly where she’d put it. He never swallowed a thing, but he never complained either. Meanwhile, as the steam disintegrated across his face, Dad and I would fork food into our mouths as if dinner was a contest, desperate to ignore the monster with the napkin jutting like a plank over the lip of his shirt.

  Sometimes his rotting fingers would lumber from his plate to mine. Dissatisfied, they would cut shaky furrows back through his own food—meandering tunnels through mashed potatoes, a collapsing path across a scoop of peas. Once, his fist squeezed a breast of chicken until its greasy flesh squelched between his fingers. As gristle twisted and bones snapped, I heard my voice get louder, and suppressed the urge to scream. We knew what Ed really wanted. No salt needed, and no fork either. He would enjoy our flesh uncooked, unseasoned and clinging stubbornly to the bone.

  Mom knew it, too, but the threat never scared her a bit. Perhaps it was because she was the one who stabbed his heart with a nightly shot of Re-ax that squashed his impulses and gave him the reflexes of a footstool.

  Most nights when dinner was over, the wheelchair would chase me out the front door as Dad hustled Ed back in front of the TV. If I couldn’t find a friend in the neighborhood, it was good enough to secure some space alone and away from the madness. A park bench. The woods. The corner store. Anywhere.

  Eventually though, I’d always have to come back to the glowing eye of the Samsung and the shape of my brother slumped in front of it. Usually Ed was there with at least one of my parents, but tonight he was alone—the couch deserted of my mother’s sprawl, the Lazy Boy emptied of Dad’s twitchy bulk.

  Cocked to one side, Ed’s head was as still as the living room furniture, the late hour smothering much of room black. Careful to be quiet, I unlaced my shoes as carefully as a surgeon, watching him closely. The LED screen beamed images across his face like the lights of an oncoming plane. Pockets in his flesh were washed away, the green pallor obscured. Even his pupils looked shocked into life.

  Strange that Mom hadn’t come down yet. It was almost eleven-twenty, and most nights she had checked on her firstborn and w
heeled him to bed by eleven.

  I lowered myself carefully into the Lazy Boy. The remote control lay against one of Ed’s hands—a useless black appendage sprouting buttons like warts. A year ago Ed had worked it like a musical instrument—surfing channels, leapfrogging between components, fine-tuning settings. A new media scientist. Now the remote held more life than he did within the shine of its skin.

  I looked at what he was watching, recognizing Sarah Jessica Parker and Mathew McConaughey mugging at one another in a soulless cookie-cutter rom-com. Alive, this was a movie Ed would have destroyed. Now he sat watching motion-less, supportive in his impassivity. It killed me.

  A year before he was bitten, Ed’s blog of movie write-up’s had snowballed into being scooped up as a paid reviewer for the Bloomville Herald. Twenty-five thousand copies a week wasn’t New York Times circulation, but it was potentially twenty-five thousand more people than had read Ed the day before the paper was published. Besides, new people were reading his reviews online every week—copy slapped up under a JPEG that made Ed look thirty, throwing twin suns across his glasses and turning him from geek to super-geek.

  Ed didn’t mind. Still two years from graduating high school, and he was already a published critic. Within weeks he was asking I proofread his stuff, his trust in me motivating me to write my own fiction. Eventually Ed was plowing through my work with a grin, encouraging me even when he slammed my fondness for vampires. I loved the spark lighting his eyes when he stumbled on a fresh turn of phrase, piece of dialogue, or a twist he didn’t see coming. Eventually he told me he couldn’t wait to read what I was going to write. I told him the same, and meant it. Soon we were pounding out a screenplay sharing Ed’s used MacBook. Devouring a few books on the craft, we ham-mered through a first draft with, to us, what was the most obvious premise: a comedy adventure featuring the exploits of a dysfunctional family on vacation—basically, ours. Scenarios were usually exaggerated or were pure bullshit. Others—the funniest—were almost exact recollections. Dad’s underwear, for example, had burst from an overstuffed suitcase onto a luggage belt in a Hawaiian airport in front of hundreds. Also true: drawing stares with our cat Dexter, on a leash and stoned on prescription drugs so incapacitating we assumed the veterinarian had confused the cat’s dosage with an elephant’s. Not true: confronting a midget-fighting league on a Caribbean cruise ship…but that was a hell of a lot of fun to write.

  Now, everything had dried within the husk of Ed’s brain—every story, every review. Apparently, every thought in his head. The only thing a pen was being used for was as a chew toy as he watched terrible TV until Mom rolled him to the bathroom for bedtime cleanup. It didn’t matter that the soft bristles of the children’s toothbrush was like a belt sander on Ed’s soft gums, knocking out three teeth in as many weeks. These habits were routine, and as such were just as important as dinner time. For years, Mom hadn’t known whether Ed was brushing his teeth or washing behind his ears. Now, she knew exactly what he was doing, because she was doing it for him. And it didn’t matter how hard it got. Even when one of Ed’s cheeks had slopped off when Mom got a little too vigorous with a facecloth, she just fished it from the sink and patched it up. She would even remind Ed to use the toilet. Never mind you had to drink liquid to produce it—and Ed hadn’t had a drop since turning zombie.

  In fact, the last time I’d seen my brother drink anything was less than an hour before he was bitten. It was a Dr. Pepper in a cup; scoops of crushed iced turning it into a brown slush that made it look like it had dredged the sewer.

  No one was prepared when the feeders stumbled into Six Flags. Later on, the news reported it as the first assembled group of zombies anyone had seen in the city, and one of the first five in the country. Ed and I ran headlong into more than a dozen of the meat-eaters clogging up the artery between Skull Mountain and The Twister.

  Ed was seventeen years old, and he’d never thrown a punch that I knew about. That night, though, the first punch he threw was also his last. One swing, and Ed’s haymaker became a real knuckle sandwich for a ghoul with a faux-hawk and a nose ring. We somehow stumbled out with no further injury, but less than twenty-four hours later, his skin had turned the color of asparagus, and regurgitated meatloaf was pooling around his feet on the kitchen tile.

  Of course not eating anything for months on end begged the question of how Ed or any of the other surviving zombies were still able to function in the first place. While the great minds of the world continued to puzzle over the question, most accepted it as simply another unexplained miracle of the zombie not-life. Screw science, and screw logic. Just accept it: when your breath reeked of your own spoiling tongue, you could keep going on nothing for a long, long time.

  As zombies went, Ed’s rate of decay seemed typical enough, though it helped that my mom was handy with the needle and thread thanks to a crash course from my grandma. “Slow and steady wins the race,” Gran would say in her position as tutor, although it turned out “slow and steady” should have been a little more “fast as fuck” on account of Grandpa ripping her throat between his dentures one night. The good news for Grandma was that the same militia bullets that torpedoed through Grandpa’s zombie brain took Grandma out. too. Neither of them had to see what an eternity was like without their four-o’clock dinners at Denny’s.

  Or watch terrible TV like Ed.

  As the movie lurched towards its foregone conclusion, Ed’s face remained a twisted cushion with eyes sunk deep in their sockets.

  “So how’s it going, Ed?”

  He stared at the TV.

  “Awesome.” I nodded.

  The commercials began, first Colgate sold by a redhead’s teeth polished to a blinding white. I leaned forward, really scrut-inizing him for the first time in ages. The reports all said the same thing about the zombies. The essential nature of the person you knew was pulverized. I noticed his mouth opening and closing as I got closer—just slightly, but it was doing it. Up and down, up and down, as if he was chewing gum.

  “Look at zombies like a car,” one doctor had said on 60 Minutes. “Take out the engine, and everything else under the hood. Now take the radio, the speedometer, in fact blow up the whole dashboard. After all that, what are you left with?”

  Morey Safer shrugged. “Not much.”

  The doctor’s face had stretched back over a smile. “Exactly.”

  Still, this chewing motion was behavior I hadn’t seen before. It wasn’t a sign of hunger though—at least I was pretty sure it wasn’t. There were none of the other signs that went with it. No moaning, no shifting, no awkward swipe my way or twisting of the neck. This was something else.

  I snatched the remote control propped up against his thigh, trying to ignore what felt like his femur poking on up through the old muscle. I jacked up the volume, and suddenly the dialogue was booming through the 7.1 surround sound of the living room.

  Ed’s mouth began to work faster, back and forth, up and down, as if he were trying to spit something out. His hand twitched at his side, and the couch leather squeaked indignantly.

  I leaned towards Ed, my eyes searching his. “You don’t like it, do you, Ed? You don’t like it at all?”

  Ed moaned. It was low, but it was there—the first textbook danger sign of a zombie coming out of a drug-induced stupor. I didn’t think I’d have to worry though. This wasn’t about eating me. No, this was a reaction to something else.

  Ed’s hand twitched as if afflicted with the jumps of a nightmare. The flickering lights of the TV threw a greasy shine across the remote, making it look like an oil spill.

  “You want to turn it off,” I said. “You want to turn the TV off, don’t you?”

  Ed moaned again, a little louder. Behind his eyes, something flickered. It was like shine of a flashlight tethered to the floor of a lake, bobbing below several feet of murky water.

  I restrained the urge to reach over and help. It would have been so easy. Just grab the remote, punch a button; done deal. But no, someth
ing was happening. Something was seep-ing through in a way that had never been documented with the dead, and I had to let it take its course.

  He was going to do this himself.

  “Do it, Ed,” I whispered. “The remote’s right there.”

  On TV, Mathew McConaughey was taking his shirt off at a funeral.

  Ed was still looking at the TV, but his hand twitched again. More than that, it was moving.

  I knew it.

  Synapses were snapping in the wet pudding of his brain —weak sparks in a vast chasm perhaps, but they may as well have been nuclear explosions.

  “What’s going on down there!”

  Mom. Always concerned. Keeping him dressed in clothes he didn’t care about, filling his plate with food he didn’t want, and torturing his brain with TV he never watched before. While living, my brother was not someone who sat passively as the world washed over him. And he didn’t have to be in death either.

  “Nothing!” I yelled. A door slammed upstairs, and old floorboards whined beneath her march for the stairs. An ache was building in my temples, knots flexing against my skull. Something in my voice had given me away—something that made her think Ed was in trouble.

  Ed had to act now. Before she got there, before her iron fist choked off progress and yanked him back several months. Before I could make a breakthrough that no one thought was possible.

  He just had to do it for himself.

  “Come on, Ed!” I whispered.

  Ed’s eyes stared at me, really looking, the irises no longer shifting, but steady and strong—inky black and laser-focused. His jaw had stopped working, but his hand was now on the remote.

  “Yes,” I said, my heart pounding, my voice quivering as if ready to split. “Do want you want to do.”