Zombies: More Recent Dead (46 page)

“No need for all this, John,” Folkvarder Gray said. “It’ll be weeks yet before the thaw opens the roads, and no knowing when the next one will come.”

Folkvarder Gray looked carefully into the thick dark of the grave. “A little steep, my boy,” he said after a moment. The warm damp rose up from the ground, sharp-smelling, and he stepped back. That was no smell for the living.

“It’s just for practice,” said John, turned the shovel on its edge, slid a slender finger along it until he began to bleed.

After the service on Sunday, Anni and Finn went out walking.

Inside the lodge, Samuel Ness started a new wager that they’d come back that same day and ask the priest to marry them. Mrs. Domar, who didn’t approve of such suggestions, went to the window and pretended to be deaf.

From the window Mrs. Domar could see Anni and Finn walking on the lawn behind the lodge, hand in hand toward the chemist’s, and John’s silhouette in the upper window, looking out toward the graveyard to admire his work.

“Finn will come sniffing around after a job,” said Philip Prain. “I could make use of him in the store maybe a month out of the year, but he’ll have to make his money some other way, and I don’t see much need for a clerk in Konstan Spring.”

“We have need for him if he does good work,” said Folkvarder Gray. “And who will be the chemist if he takes Anni out to some farm instead of staying in town? We can’t do without a chemist. It’s not civilized.”

“They’ll find some way to scrape by,” said Kit. “Young fools like that always do.”

“It’s no good,” said Mrs. Domar, watching John look over at the cemetery.

No one answered her; Mrs. Domar never saw good in anything.

The wager, sadly for Samuel, came to nothing.

That evening, Finn and Anni disappeared from Konstan Spring, and if Folkvarder Gray noticed that the chemist’s house was quiet, that the boulder in the yard was gone and the wide deep grave was smoothed over, he said nothing to John about it.

No town was run well without some sacrifices. Artists had their ways, and another chemist would be easier to come by than a gravedigger of so much patience and skill.

The question of Anni and Finn trapped in the grave made the folkvarder sorry for Anni’s sake, but it was what came sometimes of breaking a good man’s heart.

(Not everyone can be missed.)

It was for the best. Anni had never been a good chemist; Konstan Spring deserved better, he knew.

Samuel Ness paid Kit from the whorehouse two dollars, having been wrong about both Anni and John, and Anni and Finn.

Mrs. Domar didn’t approve of Kit, but she had never forgiven Samuel for taking back his orchard, and was happy to see him lose a little money.

Kit kept the money in an envelope, for a wedding present in case Anni should ever come home. (She knew Anni must; she wasn’t the type to disappear on her own.)

After a month of no word, Kit sent redheaded Mary from Odal over to the shop at the edge of the graveyard.

Mary knew a little about the chemist’s, and a little about coaxing the hearts of quiet men, and it would be best, Kit figured, to have the gravedigger of Konstan Spring soon settled with a pretty young wife.

Others did not quite agree; against Kit’s complaints, Folkvarder Gray put a CHEMIST WANTED sign in the window of his office, and sent young Gerder to town on horseback with another advertisement for the train station wall.

Folkvarder Gray was confident that sooner or later a wonderful chemist would come across the advertisement, when the time was right. The country was still rough and unknown, and brave artists were hard to come by, but he was prepared—he would take nothing but the best.

Konstan Spring could afford to wait, and Folkvarder Gray knew the importance of a job done right.

Tamsyn Muir

HITLER DEAD! FÜHRER FELL AT REICH CHANCELLERY!

Anton’s American soldier had whipped out the torn front page of the newspaper for him to translate the headline. His German was very bad and Anton’s English worse, but they worked it out anyhow, repeating it back and forth to each other until they were satisfied with the results. He admired the headline mainly because the American was his friend, then asked for chewing gum.

His American was inclined to be generous with his largesse, so he gave to Anton four pieces of Juicy Fruit wrapped up in a twist of the old wrapper. He also got a pat on the head, which at ten years old was something to resent but he put up with it anyway. He wrapped up the gum in his handkerchief. Anton took only half a piece for himself, chewing it and chewing it on the road home until it lost all of its flavor and was tack in his mouth. He weighed up his options: it was a well-known fact that swallowing it would coat his lungs and almost certainly kill him, but it seemed like such a waste not to.

His father was sitting next to the smuggled radio when he came through the door, crying and laughing and crying again as Radio Hamburg repeated the news
: Attention! Attention! Our Führer is dead.
Bread was burning on the stove, but the pale sour bread he made wasn’t much to cry over if it was burnt up. Anton left him with three and a half pieces and his handkerchief and went back out into Stuttgart, rich with time to waste before work.

In the evenings, the house rubble looked like the hills of giant ants. He liked to pretend that they were what had laid waste to so many of them: huge six-legged insects with clacking, dripping mandibles, knocking down chimneys and blackening the walls with their giant ant excretions. It might look like the scorch-mark from a shell, but Anton knew it was the monster ants, fooling everyone else by acting like it was the war. He spent a little time nudging his toe into sooty puddles and watching smoke rise from the American barracks over to the south, and went to loiter by the fences there when the thrill of giant ants palled.

There was a camp there, for Russian prisoners. In the evenings you could hear them arguing in loud Slavic voices, their figures in the prison yard wreathed in darkness as they shouted and sometimes fought. Hitler was dead, but it seemed like they yelled as they always yelled before and wheeled blows at each other with the exact same blind, unhappy aim. Anton decided to go back home by weaving a path behind the empty cloth factory where the tall, frondy weeds grew in the cracks in the path.

In the shadow of the smokestack stood his American soldier and a strange woman, with a headscarf over her head. The soldier had his gloved fingers crammed in her mouth so that the only noises she could make were wet pants, and her skirts were ripped across the breadth at the back. Her legs were naked and white, flashing in the shadows as she struggled, and Anton stared dumbly as the man scraped the woman’s forehead up against the factory wall over and over and over again.

He noticed Anton, but didn’t even seem to care for either staring boys or blood. Anton could not move. “It’s all right,” his American assured him in his broken German.
Alles gut.
The woman seemed to be nearly knocked senseless, half-fainted against the cold concrete. “It’s all right, son.” He dropped his handful of headscarf and rooted around in a pocket instead. “You go home! You have good night!”

Though the flesh was white, the blood on it was purple. Anton had something thrown at him. It slid off his jersey and onto the ground. “You go home,” said his American. “You go.”

The woman did not make a sound, but every so often she jerked around like a fish on a hook. An unopened packet of chewing gum lay near the frondy weeds. Juicy Fruit. The woman in her headscarf gurgled into those prying fingers, more blood mixing with saliva, and Anton took the gum and ran away; he could think of nothing else to do.

Somebody would know. Somebody would find out. The Juicy Fruit paper crackled in his fingers. When he thought he had run away enough and could not see the cloth factory any more, he sat on a pile of rubble and crammed all of the gum into his mouth. It made a wet and noisy ball as he chewed it. He swallowed, hard, and it made a lump in his throat all the way down.

His father worked in the Red Cross hospital that the French doctors had set up. Well—that wasn’t quite true. He did not work in the hospital, but in the basement of the empty bakery next door where they had the morgue. When the doctors and nurses were tired of them and had done all that they could, Anton’s father washed the bodies of the dead. So did Anton, as the hospital was small.

It was an odd occupation and he liked it. He wasn’t one of those boys who ran around and shouted; he was a boy who liked looking at things. Looking at the dead people was easy now. His father told him they were all going to Heaven, except maybe the Nazis, so you didn’t have to feel bad about them. When he passed by the hospital to go to the bakery morgue, he saw rows of whey-faced women there.

“I don’t want you going out at night,” said his father, washing toes. “All these Moroccan soldiers, those Tunisians, attacking our girls. It’s disgusting. You come here before six o’clock, Anton.”

Anton thought about it.

“Why is it only women?”

His father made that
tch!
noise which meant he didn’t really want to answer the question. “Your hair’s getting too long,” he said. “I will cut it.”

“They do things to them, don’t they?”

Wrong question. Anton was set to wring out sponges.

He kept thinking about the gum in his stomach rather than anything else. Swallowing all those pieces really would kill him. He would drop down dead, which was a relief, because then he wouldn’t ever have to meet his American soldier again or think about the woman. He thought about the woman’s white, bloodied legs and split lips. He thought about the unbuttoned front of the American’s trousers. Sweat prickled on his palms.

“You smell like sweets,” said his father, when he was done with the sponges. “No more! Stop annoying the soldiers for them. The Americans, they’ve liberated us. Stuttgart was proudly outside the Reich for years. Now we have our dignity back—if the Tunisians would just go and stop their disgusting business.”

“What if it wasn’t Tunisians?” asked Anton, but his father didn’t understand.

The next day he found himself by the factory again. His legs took him there, unwilling, and he watched the American soldier fold a woman over some abandoned crates. Anton thought it might have been the same woman. He did not talk to Anton this time, just rummaged in his pocket and tossed chewing gum to him like you would for a clamorous seagull. Then he went back to his work. Anton’s mouth tired of chewing by the time he got back home. He had started burying the wrappers in the rubble piles, like they were for the monster ants.

One night, his father washed the body of a woman and he realized with a start it was
his
woman—the American soldier’s woman, that was: it had taken him a bit to notice because her throat was torn in a long raggedy line terminating halfway across the neck. His father fancied himself a bit of a coroner. “Suicide,” he said, shaking his head. “See how the first hole here is deep, and the rest of the gash is much shallower? See how it is a hole, not a cut? Ah, Anton, what a waste. Commend her to God. “

Her hips and her thighs were all one bruise. Her wrists had bracelets of fat red marks with flecks of dried blood beneath her fingernails. Anton did not breathe.

“Poor lady,” his father said. “She is somewhere happy now.”

She did not look happy. Her jaw was clenched shut. There was a silvery fleck at the corner of her mouth, and his father reached out to try to wipe it away. It didn’t wipe. His fingers were very gentle as he pressed on her lips and opened them up, and took a thin wafer out from underneath the swollen tongue. “Those nurses are being lazy,” said Anton’s father, and held up the wafer to the light. A striped Juicy Fruit wrapper, oily with blood.

Anton had to close his eyes and count to ten, which he had not needed to do in the morgue since he was eight. His father must have seen, because he said quietly: “Go out and get some air, darling. Not too far. Stay by the door.”

The night was dark and cold. From down the street he heard raucous voices, infantrymen. Anton hugged his knees to his chest until his father came outside to take him home.

On the third day his American soldier was smoking indolently by the chimney wall. “What,” he said laughingly, “now ‘
haben Sie cigarette’
?” Anton shook his head. “Good boy,” said the American. “Good. No smoke! Makes you sick.”

There was only one piece of gum for him now. He clutched it in his fist and saw every policeman on the corner now as he walked, every woman, imagined their staring through his fingers to see what was inside. The giant ants settled in their holes underneath the untidy piles of brick, muttering about chewing gum and Anton, and he took the key from beneath the bakery flowerpot to open up the morgue.

Nobody had come for the woman because nobody knew who she was. There were many people in Stuttgart like that now. She would be written down as
Lieschen
and put at the crossroads grave come Sunday when the priest came. Anton touched her chilly fingers gently, as his father had touched them gently, and then he prized open the mouth to put the piece of chewing gum within. He could hide it there, inside her.

He wet himself when the dead woman began chewing. The soft rectangular strip mulched between her pink-stained teeth as she rolled it around in her mouth, gray eyes flicking open as she spread it on her palate and sucked out the flavour as Anton always did. He was aware of hot trickles down his legs.

When she swallowed, there was a brief flash of pink in that ugly hole at her throat. The dead woman was staring at the ceiling, and he was sure that once she turned that gaze on him he would be killed immediately.

“Tell me how much you got,” she said.

Her voice was a little bubbly, whistling through that awful hole, but otherwise sounded perfectly normal. Anton could not speak. She said, “You ate his food. How much did you eat?”

Because his brain would not work, he had to count on his trembling fingers. He had liked math when he had been at school. Five pieces to a packet, which meant—“Ten pieces,” he said, and recalled further. “And one half. Ten and a half. Since Tuesday.”