Best New Zombie Tales Trilogy (33 page)

“Something like that. Listen, Mr. Foreman, before you open that envelope, ask yourself how badly you need to know the name, and how willing you are to forgive the person who killed you.” I stood up, offered my hand. “Good luck to you,” I said, meaning every word.

The big question in this case hadn’t been who killed Terry Foreman. It wasn’t whether or not Debbie was paying for Thanos to keep his dead mouth shut. And it wasn’t why she hadn’t told the police about Morrison cheating her husband. No, it was more basic than that. This is a world where the sky is falling, where the truly good have been taken away and the dead walk among us. So why in this world did Terry Foreman, a man everyone agrees was a good man, return after death? Was it because he had some secret sin, some vice no one knew about? Or was it because in a moment of weakness and despair, having lost his wife, job and future, he got a gun, put it to his head and pulled the trigger?

Debbie told me she had heard the shot and ran out to find Foreman slumped over in the front seat, gun near his hand. Even in her shock and grief, she realized that suicide cancelled Foreman’s insurance. So she took the gun, hid it well and waited for the police to ring her doorbell. Later she dropped it in the lake. When the police decided it was probably a robbery gone bad, she let them think it, rather than tell the truth or trying to place the blame on Morrison.

I closed the case out as a suicide. One day someone might read the file and contact the insurance company. If so, Debbie might be in some trouble, but it’s not likely.

I never saw Terry Foreman again so I don’t know if he ever opened the envelope. If he did, I hope he found the strength to forgive himself, to take the second chance we’ve all been given to make up for the weakness that had denied us Paradise.

On the Usefulness of old Books

KIM PAFFENROTH

He scanned the binoculars along and counted them again. On the length of fence they were responsible for watching this morning, there were only twenty-seven. Four years after the initial outbreak, their clothes were faded and shredded, and the owners weren’t in much better shape––digits and ears and eyes missing, toothless mouths hanging open, barely able to moan anymore. In the summers there would be hundreds outside, and they’d have to go up to the fence and shove spears through, stabbing the dead in the foreheads and eyes in order to thin them out, lest they break through the fence with their sheer weight. But now it was autumn, and the nighttime cold was slowing the dead down, so that fewer and fewer new ones showed up at the fence each day. Soon it would be cold during the day as well, and the dead would stop arriving at the fence entirely, so the living could venture outside their compound again to gather supplies. They would also take the killing past the fence and catch the dead out anywhere they could find them. He couldn’t say he exactly enjoyed it, for it was hard and dirty work, but he did smile at the prospect of going outside the fence. His smile had the slight downturn of a sneer at the irony that the living were now most active during the night and the winter, times when people used to huddle inside and hear tales of the undead and other monsters.

“What are they, dad?” The man looked over at his son, eleven years old, who had again asked this rather obvious and wholly unnecessary question. The man’s smile softened to the quizzical and bemused one he usually turned on his son at times of such pointless questioning. The boy looked exactly like him––same hair and eye color, same nose and chin, same gaunt build. But the boy would always have his mother’s mind, a mind insatiable for questions, especially ones that seemed to have an obvious answer, but which both of them would always push further and further, never ceasing to look for what they were so certain was there––the hidden, truer meaning under the obvious, surface answer. As much as he had loved both of them, it was maddening at times, for he had long since learned that some questions were better left unasked, and many more were better left unanswered. He’d learned that long before the dead rose, and that particular phenomenon had only driven the point home in the most vivid way imaginable to him.

His remembrance of the boy’s mother wiped the smile from his face, but he kept his reaction just to that, as he almost always kept his emotions under control in front of the child. At the beginning of the outbreak they had fled north, as far as they could go. Given what they heard on the radio, it hadn’t been the worst choice of action. It had prolonged their lives past the initial, universal, and unimaginable carnage of cities being overrun by the living dead. But “not worst” and “good” were two totally different things, and that first winter had nearly killed all three of them anyway. The boy’s mother had died in March, even as things were beginning to thaw and melt; she had been so painfully, so maddeningly close to surviving. He’d tried to cut their rations to the point where they’d last until the spring, but it had left them all too weak and susceptible to disease and she had died. He had been pretty sure at that point––and was now completely convinced––that there was no hell worse than the one they were in now. Nonetheless, he was equally sure that there were still some things that one simply never did, no matter what––if not for fear of hellfire, then just out of some sense of primal, ineradicable pollution. He therefore had decided that he would feed the boy only the remaining, regular rations, while he would take upon himself the internal torment and sickness of eating the other sustenance that had become available with her death. The two of them had survived that way, but he had known there was no way they’d make it through another winter like that on their own, so in the spring they had started moving southwards until they arrived at this community of survivors.

That other unpleasant remembrance he wiped from his mind as quickly and cleanly as he had the smile from his face, and he finally replied, “Son, I keep telling you: they’re just dead people.”

The boy’s eyes were defiant, and he knew that, although exactly like his own, they would always sparkle with a fierce intellect that he had never had. Like any parent would, he often wondered what the boy would’ve become, if things hadn’t changed, and he had tried out all the usual answers that proud parents would’ve given in that other world––doctor, scientist, president, Academy Award-winning director. But today a different answer came to him, and with an unnerving, breathless clarity that few other than religious mystics ever experience: the man knew––not wondered or hoped, but knew––that the boy would’ve been a prophet, though the man barely knew what that meant in any world other than a made up one of gods and priests. But he knew, somehow that the boy would’ve railed against injustice, and ignorance, and hate: the fire in the boy’s eyes and the vehemence with which he now spat out his words left no doubt.

“I know that, Dad, but why do they walk around? Why do they try to kill us? Why do we have to go out and kill them? The books we have, that we read in class, they don’t talk about that. I remember when Grandpa died, when I was really little, and he didn’t become one of… them. When someone dies, they lie down and they stop moving. It isn’t right.”

The man drew his breath in slowly and deeply through his nose and felt the cold tingle, while the boy was practically panting in frustration and rage. He thought to himself how the boy would, in just a few more years, have spent more time in the world of the undead than he had in the previous one. It would be his “normal,” his “regular,” in a way that it could never be for his father or any of the older people. As sad as it seemed––to grow up and live in such a world––the man was almost happy for that, because he thought it might make it easier for the boy.

“I don’t know, son. It just started happening one day. No one knows why. But they’re still just dead people.”

The boy drew himself up and back, and calmed a little. His eyes narrowed. “Mr. Grosvenor says it’s because God is angry with us. He says the people out there are damned, and we will be too if we don’t believe in God and do what He says.”

Now it was the man’s turn to spit out words. “What God says, or what Grosvenor says?” Yes, the boy was just like his mother, all right. He knew just how to push his buttons. Get your Dad to admit he doesn’t know the answer to something, then tell him that someone else does. Oh, and the someone else who does know the answer––he’s someone you know your Dad doesn’t like. Hates, is more like it. The kid was a real button pusher. “Grosvenor is a sanctimonious asshole,” the man growled as he shook his head.

Now it was the boy’s turn to sneer. “A sanctified… a what kind of asshole?”

There was a certain amount of reconciliation and satisfaction that could now be gained by father and son laughing together, and the man was glad for that. “It means he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, and he judges other people too much.”

“So, does that mean that God isn’t angry?”

The man kept looking at him. “No, I guess I’d say that He is. What do you think?”

They started walking back towards the edge of the roof, away from the enclosure they had been in––a kind of blind made out of cubicle partitions that had been built on the roof of one of the perimeter buildings of their compound. The area had been an industrial park, so the buildings were sturdy and defensible––many without windows––and surrounded by a cyclone fence. The man had been told how, before they had gotten there, the battles with the dead had been fierce. But now they lived a fairly stable existence, with the outer fence secure and covered over with paper or fabric, so that the dead couldn’t see them moving around within the compound. The roofs of some of the buildings had these little blinds, so they could observe the dead outside the fence and monitor their numbers and activity.

“Yeah,” his son agreed, “I think He probably is.” He looked sideways at his father and smiled a little more. “But I still think you’re right about Mr. Grosvenor.”

The man grinned and playfully punched the boy’s shoulder. They climbed down the aluminum ladder to the ground. “You looking forward to going outside?” When things froze hard in a few weeks, the boy would go outside the compound with him for the first time.

“Not really. I don’t know. I guess. I want some more books.”

More questions needed more books, that raised more questions, that needed more books; it seemed as though it would never end. On the whole, however, he deemed it a worthier goal than booze, candles, and matches, which were what he’d be looking for.

* * *

Spiking Day arrived early that year. It was the only holiday on their rather circumscribed and grim yearly cycle, and it had no set date. It was simply declared after a week had passed in which no new zombies showed up at the fence that surrounded their little compound. Then the people of this little outpost could go outside and kill all the dead who were pressed up against the fence. The celebration of the holiday was exactly as its name implied: they would walk up to the more or less helpless dead, who could still flail about clumsily but defenselessly, and drive a spike through each of their heads. They couldn’t afford to waste bullets. Any dead who were still slightly more active could be spiked at a safer distance using spears, as were any who blocked the gates. They would then drag the bodies some distance away, dump them in a pit––which was now the same one, used over and over at the beginning of each winter––and set them ablaze. Any who looked like they might have more fat would go on top, so the grease would drip down and help the fire: again, no waste was possible, and fuel was as important as ammunition. Not since the days of human sacrifice on Incan step-pyramids and Celtic moors, thousands of years past, had there been among humans a more horrible and dichotomous celebration, as the people celebrated the beginning of the season in which they would be relatively safe from attack and would be able to gather food and eat with much greater abundance than they could during the lean months of summer and autumn. It was the equivalent, in their world, of what Easter or Passover or any springtime celebration had once been in saner times. But their celebratory acts were not hiding eggs or dancing around a maypole. Instead, they built the unholy, obscene edifice of an enormous pile of burning human bodies, a hideous inferno that went on for hours, accompanied by the sickening sizzle of fat, the pop of eyeballs and various vesicles, and the oppressive stench of the smoke that roiled over them, hanging low like a shroud to hide their shame and joy from a God who could neither understand or lessen their pain.

Even in their world, however, there was some sense of decency, and the smallest children were shielded from the details or the full and personal experience of Spiking Day. This winter, that would change for his son. The man didn’t really think that it’d be that big of a deal: the boy had seen the fire from a distance and had smelled the awful smoke. There were certain details, however, that he still dreaded explaining to the boy, all because he knew his rapacious intellect and the unanswerable and never-ending barrage of questions that would ensue. But as they prepared to go outside, he looked at his son in profile, and the boy’s resolute features––looking today in the bright autumn sun much more like his dead mother’s than they usually did––together with his calm, piercing, hazel eyes, somewhat reassured the man that it would be all right.

Some of the men speared enough of the dead to allow the gates to be opened and everyone tumbled out to begin the horrible work of their joyous celebration. The first round of spiking was done with care and speed, without a sound on either side––neither a shout of triumph from the living, nor the usual moan from the dead, as though the dead were as willing and content to die as the living were eager and resigned to kill. As the bodies piled up and the writhing and tottering dead were driven further back, some people began dragging the bodies to the pit. The man and his son began this work, and he watched the boy carefully, as he knew this was actually the more horrible and unnerving part, because this was usually when one made the more graphic and nauseating observations of ravaged human anatomy. It was bad enough to drive a rusty spike into the head of what looked like a little girl. It was far worse to go to pick her up, as gently and respectfully as one could now, and have her arm tear off in your hands and her head roll away on the ground. That was guaranteed to have a two-fold effect, one bodily, one spiritual. First one would usually vomit uncontrollably––for this reason, Spiking Day was also the only fast day on their calendar, in a year with little enough eating. And then one slowly, fully, and forever after realized the full weight of how much one had violated and victimized a monster that somehow remained partially and painfully human.