Zombies: More Recent Dead (43 page)

“Wake up,” she says—
you
say—but the shock of the mercury and iodine you administered to the vivarium have rapidly faded, and once more there is but the absolute and inviolable present moment, so impervious and sacrosanct that I can not even imagine conscious action, which would require the concept of an apprehension of some future, that time is somehow more than this static aqueous matrix surrounding and defining me.

“Do you hear me? Can you not even
hear
me?”

All at once, and with a certitude almost agonizing in its omneity, I am aware that I am being watched. No, that is not right. That is not precisely the way of it. All at once, I know that I am being watched by eyes which have not heretofore beheld me; all along there have been
her
eyes, as well as the stalked eyes of the scuttling crabs I mentioned and other such creeping, slithering inhabitants of my mind’s ocean as have glommed the dim pageant of my voyage. But
these
eyes, and this spectator—my love, nothing has ever seen me with such complete and merciless understanding. And now the act of
seeing
has ceased to be a passive action, as the act of being
seen
has stopped being an activity that neither diminishes nor alters the observed. I would scream, but dead women do not seem to be permitted that luxury, and the scream of my soul is as silent as the moon. And in another place and in another time where
past
and
future
still hold meaning, you plunge your arms into the tank, hauling me up from the shallow deep and moving me not one whit. I am fixed by these eyes, like a butterfly pinned after the killing jar.

It does not speak to me, for there can be no need of speech when vision is so thorough and so incapable of misreckoning. Plagues need not speak, nor floods, nor the voracious winds of tropical hurricanes. A thing with eyes for teeth, eyes for its tongue and gullet. A thing which has been waiting for me in this moment that has no antecedents and which can spawn no successors. Maybe it waits here for every dying man and woman, for every insect and beast and falling leaf, or maybe some specific quality of my obliteration has brought me to its attention. Possibly, it only catches sight of suicides, and surely I have become that, though
your
Circean hands poured the poison draught and then held the spoon. There is such terrible force in this gaze that it seems not implausible that I am the first it has ever beheld, and now it will know all, and it shall have more than knowledge for this opportunity might never come again.

“Only tell me what happened,” you will say, in some time that cannot ever be, not from
when
I lie here in the vivarium you have built for me, not from this occasion when I lie exposed to a Cosmos hardly half considered by the mortal minds contained therein. “Only put down what seems most significant, in retrospect. Do not dwell upon everything you might recall, every perception. You may make a full accounting later.”

“Later, I might forget something,” I will reply. “It’s not so unlike a dream.” And you will frown and slide the ink well a little ways across the writing desk towards me. On your face I will see the stain of an anxiety that has been mounting down all the days since my return.

That will be a lie, of course, for nothing of this will I ever forget. Never shall it fade. I will be taunting you, or through me
it
will be taunting your heedless curiosity, which even then will remain undaunted. This hour, though, is far, far away. From when I lie, it is a fancy that can never come to pass—a unicorn, the roaring cataract at the edge of a flat world, a Hell which punishes only those who deserve eternal torment. Around me flows the sea of all beginnings and of all conclusion, and through the weeds and murk, from the peaks of submarine mountains to the lowest vales of Neptune’s sovereignty, benighted in perpetuum—horizon to horizon—does its vision stretch unbroken. And as I have written already, observing me it takes away, and observing me it adds to my acumen and marrow. I am increased as much or more than I am consumed, so it must be a
fair
encounter, when all is said and done.

Somewhen immeasurably inconceivable to my present-bound mind, a hollow needle pierces my flesh, there in some unforeseeable aftertime, and the hypodermic’s plunger forces into me your concoction of caffeine citrate, cocaine, belladonna, epinephrine, foxglove, etcetera & etcetera. And I think you will be screaming for me to come back, then, to open my eyes, to
wake up
as if you had only given me over to an afternoon catnap. I would not answer, even now, even with its smothering eyes upon me,
in
me, performing their metamorphosis. But you are calling (
wake up, wake up, wake up
), and your chemicals are working upon my traitorous physiology, and, worst of all,
it
wishes me to return from whence and when I have come. It has infected me, or placed within me some fraction of itself, or made from my sentience something suited to its own explorations. Did this never occur to you, my dear? That in those liminal spaces, across the thresholds that separate life from death, might lurk an inhabitant supremely adapted to those climes, and yet also possessed of its own questions, driven by its own peculiar acquisitiveness, seeking always some means to penetrate the veil. I cross one way for you, and I return as another’s experiment, the vessel of another’s inquisition.

“Breathe, goddamn you!” you will scream, screaming that seems no more or less disingenuous or melodramatic than any actor upon any stage. With your fingers you will clear, have cleared, are evermore clearing my mouth and nostrils of the thickening elixir filling the vivarium tank. “You won’t leave me. I will not let you go. There are no ox carts here, no wagon wheels.”

But, also, you have, or you will, or at this very second you are placing that fatal spoon upon my tongue.

And when it is done—if I may arbitrarily use that word here,
when
—and its modifications are complete, it shuts its eyes, like the sun tumbling down from the sky, and I am tossed helpless back into the rushing flow of time’s river. In the vivarium, I try to draw a breath and vomit milky gouts. At the writing desk, I take the quill you have provided me, and I write—“
Wake up,
”
she whispers.
There are long days when I do not have the strength to speak or even sit. The fears of pneumonia and fever, of dementia and some heretofore unseen necrosis triggered by my time
away.
The relief that begins to show itself as weeks pass and your fears fade slowly, replaced again by that old and indomitable inquisitiveness. The evening that you drained the tank and found something lying at the bottom which you have refused to ever let me see, but keep under lock and key. And this night, which might be
now,
in our bed in the dingy room above your laboratory, and you hold me in your arms, and I lie with my ear against your breast, listening to the tireless rhythm of your heart winding down, and
it
listens through me. You think me still your love, and I let my hand wander across your belly and on, lower, to the damp cleft of your sex. And there also is the day I hold my dying brother. And there are my long walks beside the sea, too, with the winter waves hammering against the Cobb. That brine is only the faintest echo of the tenebrous kingdom I might have named
Womb.
Overhead, the wheeling gulls mock me, and the freezing wind drives me home again. But always it watches, and it waits, and it studies the intricacies of the winding avenue I have become.

She rolls through an ether of sighs—

She revels in a region of sighs . . .

—Edgar Allan Poe

(December 1847)

Michael A. Arnzen

Don’t be afraid, boy—

this here corpse is twice dead.

Come on over to the gurney

and take a gander at that there

shiny yellow knob snuggled in

his Corpus Collosum like

a gawdamn popcorn kernel.

Here, let me use this here probe

to give y’all a better look. See that

ugly thing? That there cluster of

gunk? No, that ain’t human at all.

You’ll only find ’em in zombies.

I dub it the “Resurrectal Cortex”—

a fancy name for this whole new lobe

that emerges inside what’s left of the brains

of the dead like a fetus in a fetid womb.

I reckon that’s what they’re feeding

when they eat folks dry. And that’s

what we’re popping when we shoot ’em

in the melon. Here, let me remove it

so we can get a better look. There it is.

Okay, here, hold that. Heavier than you

’spected, ain’t it? Feels like a rotten

grapefruit, right? Tastes like one, too.

Sure, I ate one. Go on ahead and try

it yerself. Come on, take a big bite.

And you better get used to it, boy.

Cause the only thing that’ll

ever really rid the world

of these undead bastards for good

is a zombie zombie. Dammit,

I said eat it. Sure, I know

it tastes like death warmed over,

but it ain’t gonna kill you.

It’ll make you one of us—

one of the unundead.

And there’s plenty more

where that came from. Plenty.

Eat up. Just close your eyes

and try to think of it as

Communion without all that

high-falutin’ ceremony

and fancy rigormarole.

Carrie Vaughn

I’d refused to stay home alone on New Year’s Eve. I wasn’t going to be one of those angst-ridden losers stuck at home watching the ball drop in Times Square while sobbing into a pint of gourmet ice cream.

No, I was going to do it over at a friend’s, in the middle of a party.

Matt, a guy from the radio station where I was a DJ, was having a wild party in his cramped apartment. Lots of booze, lots of music, and the TV blaring the Times Square special from New York—being in Denver, we’d get to celebrate New Year’s a couple of times over. I wasn’t going to come to the party, but he’d talked me into it. I didn’t like crowds, which was why the late shift at the station suited me. But here I was, and it was just like I knew it would be: 10:00 p.m., the ball dropped, and everyone except me had somebody to kiss. I gripped a tumbler filled with untasted rum and Coke and glowered at the television, wondering which well-preserved celebrity guest hosts were vampires and which ones just had portraits in their attics that were looking particularly hideous.

It would happen all over again at midnight.

Sure enough, shortly after the festivities in New York City ended, the TV station announced it would rebroadcast everything at midnight.

An hour later, I’d decided to find Matt and tell him I was going home to wallow in ice cream after all, when a woman screamed. The room fell instantly quiet, and everyone looked toward the front door, from where the sound had blasted.

The door stood open, and one of the crowd stared over the threshold, to another woman who stood motionless. A new guest had arrived and knocked, I assumed. But she just stood there, not coming inside, and the screamer stared at her, one hand on the doorknob and the other hand covering her mouth. The scene turned rather eerie and surreal. The seconds ticked by, no one said or did anything.

Matt, his black hair in a pony tail, pushed through the crowd to the door. The motion seemed out of place, chaotic. Still, the woman on the other side stood frozen, unmoving. I felt a sinking feeling in my gut.

Matt turned around and called, “Kitty!”

Sinking feeling confirmed.

I made my own way to the door, shouldering around people. By the time I reached Matt, the woman who’d answered the door had edged away to take shelter in her boyfriend’s arms. Matt turned to me, dumbstruck.

The woman outside was of average height, though she slumped, her shoulders rolled forward as if she was too tired to hold herself up. Her head tilted to one side. She might have been a normal twenty-something, recent college grad, in worn jeans, an oversized blue T-shirt, and canvas sneakers. Her light hair was loose and stringy, like it hadn’t been washed in a couple of weeks.

I glanced at Matt.

“What’s wrong with her?” he said.

“What makes you think I know?”

“Because you know all about freaky shit.” Ah, yes. He was referring to my call-in radio show about the supernatural. That made me an expert, even when I didn’t know a thing.

“Do you know her?”

“No, I don’t.” He turned back to the room, to the dozens of faces staring back at him, round-eyed. “Hey, does anybody know who this is?”

The crowd collectively pressed back from the door, away from the strangeness.

“Maybe it’s drugs.” I called to her, “Hey.”

She didn’t move, didn’t blink, didn’t flinch. Her expression was slack, completely blank. She might have been asleep, except her eyes were open, staring straight ahead. They were dull, almost like a film covered them. Her mouth was open a little.

I waved my hand in front of her face, which seemed like a really clichéd thing to do. She didn’t respond. Her skin was terribly pale, clammy looking, and I couldn’t bring myself to touch her. I didn’t know what I would do if she felt cold and dead.

Matt said, “Geez, she’s like some kind of zombie.”

Oh, no. No way. But the word clicked. It was a place to start, at least.

Someone behind us said, “I thought zombies, like, attacked people and ate brains and stuff.”

I shook my head. “That’s horror movie zombies. Not voodoo slave zombies.”

“So you do know what’s going on?” Matt said hopefully.

“Not yet. I think you should call nine-one-one.”

He winced and scrubbed his hand through his hair. “But if it’s a zombie, if she’s dead an ambulance isn’t—”

“Call an ambulance.” He nodded and grabbed his cell phone off the coffee table. “And I’m going to use your computer.”

I did what any self-respecting American in this day and age would do in such a situation: I searched the Internet for zombies.