The container rocks, lifting several inches from its mooring, crashes back to the ground. Banging reverberates all around us but Mari and me and our new son ignore it all, spending a few precious moments making a tight little cocoon of wonder. She waits for the pulsing in the umbilical cord to stop completely, then she ties it with some thread and hacks it off.
As she gets to work dealing with the afterbirth—scooping it into the container, mopping the floor with rags—I guide my boy to my nipple. He roots around a bit, and it takes a few tries, but he finally figures it out and latches on like a champ. His crying quiets. I can hardly see anything, but I can brush his soft cheek, his soft hair, trace his tiny ear.
We haven’t discussed a name yet. In the new world, no one names a baby until it has survived a few days.
“Brit,” Mari whispers, against a backdrop of constant banging and hissing. I discern the outline of a knife as she hands it to me, handle first. “Eyes up, knives ready.”
“You think they’ll get in?” I take the knife.
“They are very focused on the door for some reason.”
As if in agreement, the bar rattles viciously.
“Get that afterbirth ready,” I say.
“I’ve got it right here.”
My right hand is my best knifing hand, so I shift the baby into my left arm. He fusses a bit, but latches back on quick. It’ll be a while before I drop any real milk, but he seems content to suckle anyway. A small bit of luck.
The wooden bar cracks, and it’s like a thunderclap in my head. Mari raises her shotgun.
Mari checked the brackets thoroughly when we prepped this place. The undead would have to grasp the handles from the outside and pull in order to get in. They are too clumsy, too mindless to work through the logistics of that.
Then again, what they lack in mindlessness, they make up for in relentlessness.
Carefully, Mari reaches with one hand, runs her fingers along the wooden bar. She gasps.
“What?” I whisper.
“It’s wet. A bit rotted. Rain must’ve gotten in a while back.”
“Shit.” The opening wasn’t as well sealed as we thought.
“Get the rope out of my pack.”
The hissing intensifies. Our container wobbles. I force myself to my knees, babe in one hand, knife in the other. I transfer the knife to my teeth and rummage through Mari’s things until my fingers find the nylon rope.
I’m too late. The door clangs like a cymbal. The bar splinters, and suddenly our door is swinging wide to the icy night.
They rush in, all yellow teeth and gaping eyeholes, spaghetti limbs and melting candlewax skin. Mari fires; the gunshot explodes my eardrums, magnified by container walls. The baby screams.
Mari launches at one with her knife, pushes it back just enough that she can expel the shell and fire again. They tumble backward. Mari grabs the plastic tub filled with afterbirth, tosses it out the door. It plops into the gravel. The flesh-eaters roar, swarm over it like ants on a hill.
Mari jumps out, grabs the door, jumps back in while pulling it behind her.
A flesh-eater’s arm shoves inside, keeping the door from closing, and I attack with my knife, slash, slash, slashing until it finally withdraws. The door bangs shut.
“The rope!” Mari yells, her voice faint and tinny in the wake of the gun blast.
I drop the knife, toss the rope at her, grab the inner bracket and hold the door closed while Mari loops around it. The door rattles, threatens to pull out of my grasp, but most of the undead must be busy with the afterbirth because it’s nothing I can’t handle.
Mari weaves and loops the rope around inner and outer brackets, effectively tying the door closed. Still holding the frayed end, she slides to the floor, letting her head loll against the wall. I know my Mari; she’ll hold that rope tight forever.
The baby screams and screams.
I let Mari catch her breath for a minute, cooing at the baby while offering him my breast again. When he quiets, I say, “They’ll eat the afterbirth, and then they’ll leave.”
She shakes her head. It’s dark inside again, which is why I didn’t notice right away that she’s crying. “I saw more coming. So many. We could be buried under a mountain of them.”
“Oh.” I clutch the baby tight to my chest. “Well. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”
We don’t get lucky.
For the next few days, the door rattles and shakes, but the rope holds. Mari and I don’t dare talk too much, lest we send them into another frenzy. Instead, I spend hours staring at a tiny circle of pure light on the container wall, cast by the rust hole. I nurse my baby, listen to flesh eaters hiss and bump the walls, and watch the light spot creep down with the rising sun until it finally winks out.
On the fourth day, we run out of food. It’s just as well, since our slop buckets are almost full. We put a blanket over them to quell the reek, and it helps a little. But the flesh-eaters refuse to leave.
On the fifth day, the sun breaks unseasonably warm, and our container becomes a sauna, hot and thick with blood and sweat and piss. The flesh-eaters continue to mass. All day long comes a slick, wet, rhythmic sound as one licks the wall.
On the sixth day, clouds must fill the sky because the light spot does not appear. I stand below the rust hole for hours, because it feels good to stand, and because I’m hoping it will rain. It doesn’t. We run out of water, along with clean changing rags for the baby.
On the seventh day, we are out of options.
“Dehydration is not the worst way to go,” Mari says.
“Getting eaten alive is the worst way to go,” I agree.
“So… we just wait to die?” Her gaze drops to the baby in my arms. He is such a good sweet boy, already flexing his fingers and toes and trying to look around, so content to be held by one of us. He has no idea the life that awaits him outside this container, that’s he’s just gone from one womb to another.
I kiss his tiny forehead. He deserves a chance. “Maybe we die trying to live,” I say. We knew it might come to this. “I’m the one still reeking of birth. I’ll make a run for it, draw them away. With luck, they’ll follow. When the way’s clear, you take our son and sneak back to the enclave.”
“Oh, hell no. They’ll be on you in seconds. They’ll swarm you.”
“Then you’d better run fast.”
She stares at me. “Brit.”
I hand her the baby. “You’re faster. You’re his best chance. You know it. This is the only way.”
Her chin quivers, but her voice is steady as a rock when she says, “If they don’t chase you, we all die.”
I grab my knife, and quick before I can think about it, I swick the blade across the back of my hand. A line of heat pours blood, and I smear it everywhere: my face, my hands, my neck, my breasts. “Now they’ll chase me for sure.”
“Oh, god, Brit.”
She moves as if to embrace me, but I put up a hand to stop her. “You’ll get my blood all over yourself.”
She blinks. Tears pour down her cheeks. “I can’t even hug you good-bye,” she says.
“I love you, Marisol. Keep our son alive if you can.”
I grab the shotgun, because I’ll need something to clear a path, make space for Mari and our baby to flee. Mari works the knots of the rope, unwinds it from the brackets.
I push the door open.
The sun is blinding but I don’t have time to adjust, to do anything except get a shot off as I’m leaping from the container. A mass of undead topple backward, but others reach with gaping mouths and bony fingers for my arms, my neck, my hair. I reload, shoot again, reload, shoot, all the while pushing forward.
Flesh-eaters roar with hunger. Something snags my hair, yanks my head sideways. I swing my shotgun around and fire blindly.
Reload, shoot, push forward.
My foot tangles in something—the train tracks—and I go sprawling, the gun flying out of my hand and skidding across the ground. This is it. The moment
I die. I hope I made enough space for Mari.
I crawl forward toward the gun, but my eyes are closed. Any moment now, teeth will rip into my flesh. I force myself to imagine Eileen’s smiling face. My baby’s tiny, perfect nose. Waking up on cool autumn mornings with Marisol at my side.
Death does not come.
Someone screams—not a scream of rot and hunger but rather life and fury. Gunshots thunder around me. Bullets zing past my ears. Footsteps patter by. Someone yanks me up by the armpit.
“Let’s go, Brit.”
It’s Liz, one shotgun in hand, the other stashed under her arm. With her are Rebekah, Min, and half a dozen others. They’ve formed a perimeter around me. I jump to my feet, Liz tosses me the gun she retrieved from the ground. Nearly half the undead trickle away, drawn to something else.
Together we ooze out of the train yard like an amoeba of shotguns, shooting anything that dares approach. By the time we reach the treeline, no flesh-eaters remain in visual distance who are capable of coming after us. Mari is there holding our baby, guarded by Liz’s own teenaged daughter Emma. “We set some menstrual lures, but they won’t last long,” Liz says. “We need to hurry.”
Mari squeezes my hand once, quickly, and we follow after Liz as she rushes us toward the enclave. “Why did you come for us?” I say to her jogging back. This was a costly rescue: the lures, the precious ammunition, the risk to lives.
“You were gone too long,” Liz says gruffly.
“But you said I was selfish.”
She stops in her tracks. Whirls on me. “I stand by that assessment,” she says. “But what kind of world are we making if a woman can’t go after what she wants?”
“We all volunteered,” Min says.
“Our bodies, our choice,” Emma says.
“We really wanted a baby,” Rebekah says. “I mean, I don’t ever want a baby, but I’m glad for you to have yours.”
When we arrive at the enclave, I immediately wash a week’s worth of blood and stench from my skin. Safety first.
The second thing I do is gather Marisol and our baby and take them to the infirmary to see Eileen.
She’s hard to look at. Her skin is so sallow, her eyes so hollow, her teeth gigantic in her face. I half expect her to roar with hunger and charge after me.
But when she sees us, she smiles like a little girl on Christmas morning. “Oh my god, he’s so beautiful.” Marisol places him in Eileen’s arms. He’s swaddled in clean rags now, and his little cheek muscles work as if he might have something to say. “He has your nose, Mari,” Eileen says, and then she laughs at her own joke.
“I would die for him,” Mari says. “Brit almost did.”
“And Liz would die for any woman in this enclave,” Eileen points out.
“Did we make a terrible mistake?” I don’t mean to say it aloud; the words just sneak out of me.
Eileen says: “I have no regrets.”
“Really? Your own baby girl, killed by flesh eaters…”
She closes her eyes. Someone did her hair, making a neat gray braid that drapes over one shoulder. Someone painted her nails, too, in bright pink. Beside her, propped against the chalkboard, is a colored pencil drawing of a tidy little farmhouse with a pretty porch overlooking a gleaming pond. She says, “I miss her every day. But the important thing is not that she died. It’s that she lived.”
An hour later, she’s singing, “Now I know my a-b-c’s” when she slips into a coma. The next morning, she softly dies.
We name our son Eileen.
“That’s a girl’s name,” Rebekah says.
Marisol gets in her face. “Says who?”
I put a gentle hand on Mari’s shoulder. “It’s a new world, Rebekah.” I remind her. “And if Eileen ever asks, tell him he’s named for the toughest bitch who ever lived.”
(Editors’ Note: “Badass Moms in the Zombie Apocalypse” is read by Erika Ensign on the Uncanny Magazine Podcast, Episode 32A.)
© 2020 Rae Carson
Rae Carson is the New York Times best-selling author of numerous novels and short stories published by HarperCollins, Del Rey Star Wars, and Disney-Lucasfilm Press. Literary honors include the Spur Award, Morris Award finalist, Indie Next List, National Book Award longlist, and ALA Best Fiction for Young Adults, among others. Rae lives in Arizona with editor C.C. Finlay and their two rescue cats.
My Country Is A Ghost
by Eugenia Triantafyllou
When Niovi tried to smuggle her mother’s ghost into the new country, she found herself being passed from one security officer to another, detailing her mother’s place and date of death over and over again.
“Are you carrying a ghost with you, ma’am?” asked the woman in the security vest. Her nametag read Stella. Her lips were pressed in a tight line as she pointed at the ghost during the screening, tucked inside a necklace. She took away Niovi’s necklace and left only her phone.
“If she didn’t die here, I am afraid she cannot follow you,” the woman said. Her voice was even, a sign she had done this many times before. Niovi resented the woman at that moment. She still had a ghost waiting for her to come home, comforting her when she felt sad, giving advice when needed. But she was still taking Niovi’s ghost away.
Stella paused. She gave Niovi a moment to think, to decide. She could turn around and go back to her home taking the necklace with her. Back to her unemployment benefits and a future she could no longer bring herself to imagine, or she could move down the long stretch of aisles, past the dimming lights and into the night, alone, her mother’s ghost left behind—where do ghosts return to in times like this? Niovi would be a new person in a new country, wiped clean of her past.
Foreign ghosts were considered unnecessary. The only things they had to offer were stories and memories.
Niovi had prepared herself for this, and yet she had hoped she wouldn’t have to leave her mother behind.
She gave the necklace to the impassive woman and let herself drift down the aisle as if a forceful gust of air ushered her away.
Her mother’s ghost waved goodbye behind the detector and Niovi’s thoughts was of the Saturday of Souls. It was a prayer, an invocation as she put more and more distance between her and the security woman, her and the necklace. Without her mother’s ghost she would start to forget soon. But this she had to remember. She needed to hang on to something now that her mother had been pried from her hands.
The Saturday of Souls.
When the ghost finally disappeared, Niovi’s legs felt like lead. Her arms felt like lead. Everything felt like lead and she could barely move.
“Welcome!” Niovi heard the driver say as she boarded the airport shuttle.
The first thing Niovi faced when she stepped out of the shuttle was the cold. It was only October. Snow would start at the end of November. But even now the cold was so utter, so complete, it seemed like a wall, an extra line of defense between herself and these people who had too many ghosts and her who had none. A final warning that foreign ghosts were a nuisance, a waste of space.
“Don’t worry,” she whispered to the frost. “You are too late.”
She started her new life in a small apartment in a badly-lit part of a street that led to a cul-de-sac.
In the mornings, as she waited for the days to pass so she could start her new job, she would walk around the city, counting ghosts.
Every time she went out the people of the city would notice her, look at her, and scrutinize her. No, not her. The absence of her ghost. She was an oddity among people cloaked in spirits that followed their every step. Some of them looked at her with concern and others with outright curiosity.
There were others without ghosts, of course. They were usually huddled together in small groups, shielding themselves against the unwelcome stares or, perhaps, against their own loss. Niovi couldn’t bring herself to even glance at them. Instead she gravitated towards the other ones. The ones who still had ghosts. Despite their looks of curiosity and sometimes pity. Mos
t of them didn’t even notice their presence, the ghosts’ affections were natural, ordinary. Niovi found this nonchalance fascinating.
Then, there were the untethered ghosts. The ones conjured by the collective memory of the people. They did not belong to anyone in particular. They belonged to everyone. Niovi liked to think they belonged to her too, especially here.
There was the ghost of the old general. He stood right next to his own statue along with the ghost of his horse and offered a spectacle for the little kids. A stubborn man, as Niovi found out; he had been trotting the same square for two hundred years. He had died in a battle that few remembered. He stood there with his medals of honor, speaking in an antiquated manner that nobody understood and riding his ghost horse, saluting the tourists.
Niovi liked the General. He was old, really old and came from a time when ghosts could move around following their loved ones without borders tearing one from the other. Niovi thought of the necklace she tried to bring her mother in. They had sent it to her a few days later, cold, empty. She kept it anyway. It was her mother’s after all.
She sat on a bench, a bag of chips in her lap, and let her mind wander back home. To her empty house. Her mother’s house. Did her mother’s ghost stay there or had she moved on? Maybe she had followed someone else in the family like she did when she was alive and Niovi ignored her calls. Become their ghost.
The edges of her mother’s face were already beginning to blur in her mind. They became fuzzy. She looked at her mother’s pictures on her phone but they were lifeless and flat. They did little to bring her mother’s image back.
So she sat at the square looking at the children scream in a language she was still learning and heard them laugh and laugh.
Niovi’s first job was at a Greek restaurant next to the Southern Harbor. She wanted to cook. In fact, she needed it. Not just so she could justify her staying in the country. Cooking was what her mother had done best when she was alive, and when they were still together in Athens, daughter and ghost, cooking could help her not forget the things she desperately needed to hold on to.
Uncanny Magazine Issue 32 Page 3