The New Dead: A Zombie Anthology (45 page)
Read The New Dead: A Zombie Anthology Online
Authors: Christopher Golden
One zombie met another zombie on the road.
One zombie said to the other zombie: How do you do? Shall we go eat some people?
The second zombie did not answer. They stood for a second, swaying. Then the second zombie leaned forward and took a big bite out of the first zombie’s head.
He ate the first zombie over the course of a sunny July afternoon. In a minipark, by a wooden bench. Only one zombie, this second zombie, was at all interested in eating his fellow zombies. Most found that bad-tasting. The idea was to go after live blood, live humans, the zombies like vampires, preying on that which they did not have - the life force of a living being. Dead people eating live, as opposed to live people eating dead. Even plants, one might think, would have greater culinary appeal to a zombie than another rotting zombie corpse. But this was the latest zombie, the newest re-reincarnation of zombie, an evolutionary glitch in the reanimation process, and the eating of his fellow zombies just made him crazier and hungrier. He grew. He roared in the dappled light of the minipark. He doubled into himself.
After all, he had been dead, and then wasn’t dead, so he was already being overused as a commodity. Let the poor guy decompose in peace.
The salmon farm in Ketchikan, Alaska, ran out of funds. They could not keep feeding their salmon brand-new fish food just made for salmons. So they stirred leftover salmon bits into the salmon food. It seemed like a good idea at the time: the salmon bits were free, because they were taken from the leftover dead salmon guts that had not been good enough to package in tins and send to the humans. But the salmon, when fed salmon, became poisonous to eat. Toxic. People got sick. When investigated, the farm was slapped with a giant lawsuit and has since gone under.
In England, the cows, when fed cow bits, became mad: cows like to eat grass, not the bonemeal of their cousins. The people who ate the mad cows got sick and died. A sickness in the brain.
My friend’s mother came over for dinner. She lived across town. She didn’t get out much.
My friend’s mother usually cooked for herself, but he was worried about her, so all three of us were going out to a restaurant together. She sat on the couch. She was one of those people who did not lean back on couch cushions but sat up perched on the very edge. In another life, she was surely a small bird. She watched out the window at an old man walking down the sidewalk using a silver walker. Then she turned to us, bright-eyed, in her scarf with what looked like hard-boiled eggs on it.
So, she said. What do we want for dinner?
My friend thought about it, tapping his fingers on the table. But I couldn’t help cringing, over by the bookshelves. A kind of thick, sludgy rage gargled through me.
My friend was listing restaurants. After ten, he trailed off.
I don’t know, I said slowly, when they turned their heads to me. Where do
you
want to go?
you
want to go?
We might like Italian, she said cheerfully.
But do
you
? I said. Do
you
want Italian?
you
? I said. Do
you
want Italian?
She looked at me, quizzical.
Or are you, perhaps, a queen? I asked. My friend shot me a look.
She extended her neck, higher.
A queen? she said. I don’t understand. If we don’t want Italian, what might we like instead? Are we hungry? Do we prefer French?
I ran out of the apartment. I ran screaming down the street. I called her later to apologize. I never asked what they ate.
There is a movie written by an unusual screenwriter from the final year of the previous millennium in which a portal opens in the city and people can slide down it and enter the brain of a famous actor. It is a world unto itself. Later in the movie, the famous actor himself finds the portal and slides down it and enters his own brain. This causes such disruption in the system that while he’s in there, everyone forgets how to talk and they can only say his name, over and over again. It is all they know how to say.
Usury, says the man on the radio, is money that makes money.
It is money that climbs on top of other money to make more money, but there is no service rendered. The interest rate is exorbitant. Most world religions outlaw it; it is a bad sign of greed, of the avaricious nature of a financial situation gone awry. What people need are services or products: now those are a worthy exchange. It is, they say, one of the foundations of the current economic crisis, because we are living off debt, off credit-card offers from banks so eager they mail applications addressed to pets, off mortgage-loan mismatching, off corporate loan errors and sketchy pricing for risk, off all these questions about regulation, off mountains of promises made based on air.
The big zombie who ate zombies?
He ate and ate and ate.
But more decay cannot reverse decay, and eventually he grew sick. He was large and used to be strong, and he lay in a park, breathing hard. The other zombies feared him, but when they saw he was ill, they surrounded him in a circle.
They grunted. They shambled. They swayed. After a while, they grew bored and lumbered off. Alone, Big Zombie died, again. He was reanimated shortly after. This time, worse. He was too hungry to look for another zombie, so this time he ate his own arm. His own leg. His own head, all eating, until he started to digest himself, until all that was left was a mouth and a GI tract. A mouth, an esophagus, a stomach, intestines.
And, finally - a true story.
I was at the house of a man who had recently gotten divorced. He was sixty years old, and his wife had kept the household together for forty years, and then all of a sudden decided she was done with him. She left him, all at once. He did not know how to boil an egg. He did not know where to buy toothpaste.
A friend recommended he have people over, since he was dying of loneliness, of the sounds in the new house that felt like the clanging of death bells. At sixty, the rest of his life was a vacancy. He’d met one woman online who seemed like she might be willing to take over his life for him, but the woman moved in after two days and he found her rifling through his wallet and looking too closely at his stock statements, and about money he was clear, so he threw her out. He put her piles of shoes in rows in the hallway. She yelled at him from outside. She forgot his correct name and called him the name of her ex-lover, by accident.
He had five of us over to watch TV together, a show. I knew him from work; others knew him from church. We ate pizza and drank beer and watched TV and talked.
At the end of the show, he looked around the room.
Thank everyone for coming, he said.
We all nodded and smiled.
You’re welcome, we said, filing out. Thank you for having us.
But it stuck in my head, a little, walking down the stairs to my car. What had he said?
The show was a series, so we were back again the next week. Each of us needing somewhere to go on Wednesday nights.
Thank everyone for coming, he said again, at the end.
I waited a week, to be sure. The following week, the same.
I drove home. The traffic lights were green. The city, black silhouettes. Golden lights in front windows.
Thanks
, I thought. It should have been
thanks
.
, I thought. It should have been
thanks
.
Thanks, everyone, for coming.
But he had said: Thank everyone for coming.
Why?
The bugs, inside. The jittery bugs. The lurch, the shamble, the arms, the groan.
Two miles from my apartment, stalled at a red light, I had an idea.
He was a smart man, and English was his first language. He surely knew the correct verb and grammar. He spoke fluidly at all other times. The only explanation I could find was that this is what he had been told to say to guests. Most likely, they had had people over for years. She had invited the people. She had made the food. She had picked out his clothes. At the end, she told him, John, go thank everyone for coming.
And he had so fully stepped out of his own point of view that he simply echoed her words, exactly. He was so far gone from himself that he did not do the natural act of conjugation that would make the words fit his point of view.
They say it’s all fantasy - zombies? It’s all made-up goofiness? It’s all silliness we create for our own delightful fear?
GHOST TRAP
BY RICK HAUTALA
Although it was often part of his job, Jeff Stewart hadn’t been expecting to find a body today. It was Saturday morning, and he was doing some diving for his friend and drinking buddy, Mel ‘Biz’ Potter. A storm had passed through the night before, and they were looking for some of Biz’s lobster pots that had broken off their buoy ropes in the rough seas. Locals called such lost traps ‘ghost traps’ when they lay on the bottom of the ocean, where a lobster could still scuttle inside. If more than one lobster ended up in a trap, the bigger, stronger one would kill and eat the others, but that only prolonged its captivity until, eventually, it died of starvation.
Even on the sunniest day, there was no light down as deep as Jeff was. Today, following the storm, the sky was as grey as soot, the seas choppy. Even at six or seven fathoms, Jeff could feel the powerful tug of the tide. He’d agreed to help Biz out - like he did once or twice a summer - for the comradeship and the simple pleasure that diving gave him. No matter how much Marcie, his girlfriend, bitched about him screwing around on the one day of the week they had to spend together, Jeff took advantage of any and all excuses to dive. He relished the freedom, the sense of weightlessness and total isolation.
His day job was working search, rescue, and recovery for the U.S. Coast Guard, so Jeff had seen more than his fair share of drowned bodies - ‘sinkers’, as he and his coworkers called them. When this one came into view, illuminated by the diffused beam of Jeff’s underwater light, he couldn’t help but be startled.
Most drowning victims, if you found them soon enough - say, within twenty-four to forty-eight hours, before the lobsters, crabs, and other scavengers scurrying around on the bottom of the ocean started to consume the dead meat - ended up the same way. Once they were dead, the blood pooled in their rumps and lower legs, weighing them down so they were sitting on the ocean floor with their legs splayed out in front of them. Their arms invariably would be raised and extended, like they were reaching for something to cling to, something solid so they could hoist themselves back up to the surface.
In all his years of diving, the one thing Jeff had never been able to get over - the single most fascinating thing - was the dead person’s face . . . especially the eyes. Once the blood drained out of the head and upper body and settled into the lower trunk, the puckered skin turned as white and translucent as marble. Winding traces of veins stood out like faded tattoos just beneath the skin. Of course, someone with darker skin wouldn’t be as white as alabaster, but the effect - at least on every body Jeff had ever recovered - was as fascinating as it was gruesome. The eyes - if some sea creatures hadn’t gotten at them yet - would be wide open and staring with an expression of stunned surprise. It was as if the victim still couldn’t believe he or she had actually drowned.
But it was one thing when Jeff was fifty or more feet below the surface of the ocean looking for a drowning victim. Finding one when he wasn’t ready for it sent a startled rush through him, like an electric jolt to the groin. He drew back involuntarily, waving his arms and kicking his legs to keep his orientation. His heart was pounding like a drop-forge hammer, and a thick, salty pressure throbbed behind his eyes. The flashlight almost slipped from his hand, but he clutched it tightly. After the initial shock began to subside, he trained the beam back onto the drowned man. Kicking easily and still trying to force himself to calm down, he approached slowly.
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