Zombies: The Recent Dead (40 page)

About the Author

Andy Duncan
’s stories have won two World Fantasy Awards and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award and been nominated multiple times for the Hugo, Nebula, Stoker and Shirley Jackson awards. His latest novelettes are a supernatural romance set in Western Maryland,
The Night Cache
(PS Publishing, 2009); and “The Dragaman’s Bride,” a revisionist Appalachian folktale that concludes
The Dragon Book
, edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois (Ace, 2009). His first collection is the award-winning
Beluthahatchie and Other Stories
(Golden Gryphon Press, 2000); a second,
The Pottawatomie Giant and Other Stories
, is forthcoming from PS Publishing. Recently published is a revised and expanded second edition of his non-fiction guidebook
Alabama Curiosities
(Globe Pequot, 2009). A graduate of the Clarion West writing workshop in Seattle, Duncan has taught at both the Clarion and Clarion West workshops; he also teaches interdisciplinary literary seminars on twenty-first-century science fiction and fantasy in the Honors College of the University of Alabama. He is a juror for the 2010 Philip K. Dick Award. Having taught undergraduates for seventeen years, Duncan lives in Frostburg, Maryland, where he is an assistant professor of English at Frostburg State University.

Story Notes

Andy Duncan was fascinated with Zora Neale Hurston’s description and photo of the “zombie” Felicia Felix-Mentor in her 1937 book,
Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica.
He based his fictional Zora on the real author but has noted the story is more about the U.S. pop cultural idea of the zombie from the 1930s and 40s than about Haitian zombies.

[You’ll find another story in this volume, Neil Gaiman’s
Bitter Grounds
, that references Hurston, too.]

As for the zombie herself, Louis P. Mars, M.D., a professor of psychiatry at the School of Medicine and of Social Psychology at the Institute of Ethnology, Port-au-Prince, in the Republic of Haiti, a Member of the Societe Medico-Psychologique of Paris, and a Haitian Public Health Officer wrote in
Man: A Record of Anthropological Science
(Vol. XLV, no. 22. pp. 38-40. March-April, 1945):

At first [the Mentors, who believed the woman to be a long-dead family member] had based their belief on the fact that the woman was lame. Before the real Felicia Felix Mentor died, she was lame as a result of a fracture of her left leg.

Her physical appearance and lameness in addition to the deep belief in the country that sometimes the dead come back to life, induced the Mentors to believe that the strange woman was indeed their late sister Felicia.

I made an X-ray examination of both legs at the Central Hospital in Port-au-Prince. There was no evidence of a fracture and the lameness could therefore be attributed to muscular weakness due to undernourishment. This may be said to be the cause since, after she had a normal diet for two months, the lameness disappeared. She also gained weight.

This is evidently a case of schizophrenia and gives us an idea of how cases of similar nature are likely to arouse mass hysteria . . . The case under discussion was reported by Miss Zora Neale Hurston in her book
Tell My Horse
, in which she stated emphatically ‘I know that there are Zombis in Haiti. People have been called back from the dead.’ This American writer stated specifically that she came back from Haiti with no doubt in regard to popular belief of the Zombi pseudo-science.

Miss Hurston herself, unfortunately, did not go beyond the mass hysteria to verify her information, nor in any way attempt to make a scientific explanation of the case . . .

Dr. Mars doesn’t mention it, but Hurston also offered a “scientific explanation” herself: “If science ever gets to the bottom of voodoo in Haiti and Africa, it will be found that some important medical secrets, still unknown to medical science, give it its power, rather than gestures of ceremony.” [Hurston, Zora Neale.
Dust Tracks on a Road
. 2nd Ed. (1942: Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984, p. 205)]

David J. Schow

Doug Walcott’s need for a change of perspective seemed simple:
Haul ass out of Triple Pines, pronto. Start the next chapter of my life. Before somebody else makes the decision for you, in spades.

He grimly considered the shovel in his grasp, clotted with mulchy grave dirt. Spades, right. It was the moment Doug knew he could not go on digging up dead people, and it was only his first day on the job. Once he had been a teacher, with a teacher’s penchant for seeing structure and symbols in everything. Fuck all that, he thought. Time to get out. Time to bail, now.

“I’ve got to go,” he said, almost mumbling, his conviction still tentative.

Jacky Tynan had stepped down from his scoop-loader and ambled over, doffing his helmet and giving his brow a mop. Jacky was a simple, basically honest guy; a spear carrier in the lives of others with more personal color. Content with burgers and beer, satellite TV and dreams of a someday-girlfriend, Jacky was happy in Triple Pines.

“Yo, it’s Douglas, right?” Jacky said. Everybody had been introduced shortly after sunrise. “What up?” He peeled his work gloves and rubbed his hands compulsively until tiny black sweatballs of grime dropped away like scattered grains of pepper.

“I’ve got to go,” Doug repeated. “I think I just quit. I’ve got to tell Coggins I’m done. I’ve got to get out of here.”

“Graves and stuff getting to ya, huh?” said Jacky. “You should give it another day, at least. It ain’t so bad.”

Doug did not meet Jacky’s gaze. His evaluation of the younger man harshened, more in reaction against the locals, the natives, the people who fit into a white trash haven such as Triple Pines. They would hear the word “cemetery” and conclude “huge downer.” They would wax prosaic about this job being perverse, therefore unhealthy. To them, digging up long-deceased residents would be that sick stuff. They all acted and reacted strictly according to the playbook of cliché. Their retinue of perception was so predictable that it was almost comically dull. Jacky’s tone suggested that he was one of those people with an almost canine empathy to discord; he could smell when something had gone south.

Doug fought to frame some sort of answer. It was not the funereal atmosphere. The stone monuments, the graves, the loam were all exceptionally peaceful. Doug felt no connection to the dearly departed here . . . with one exception, and one was sufficient.

“It’s not the work,” Doug said. “It’s me. I’m overdue to leave this place. The town, not the cemetery. And the money doesn’t matter to me any more.”

Jacky made a face as though he had whiffed a fart. “You don’t want the money, man? Hell, this shit is easier than workin’ the paper mill or doin’ stamper time at the plant, dude.” The Triple Pines aluminum plant had vanished into Chapter Eleven a decade ago, yet locals still talked about it as if it were still a functioning concern.

The people in Triple Pines never saw what was right in front of them. Or they refused to acknowledge anything strange. That was the reason Doug had to eject. He had to jump before he became one of them.

One of them . . .

A week ago, Doug had not been nearly so philosophical. Less than a week from now, and he would question his own sanity.

Craignotti, the job foreman, had seen Jacky and Doug not working-that is to say, not excavating-and already he was humping his trucker bulk over the hilltop to yell at them. Doug felt the urge to just pitch his tools and helmet and run, but his rational side admitted that there were protocols to be followed and channels to be taken. He would finish out his single day, then do some drinking with his workmates, then try to decide whether he could handle one more day. He was supposed to be a responsible adult, and responsible adults adhered to protocol and channels as a way of reinforcing the gentle myth of civilization.

Whoa, dude, piss on all that
, Jacky might say.
Just run
. But Jacky rarely wrestled with such complexities. Doug turned to meet Craignotti with the fatalism of a man who has to process a large pile of tax paperwork.

A week ago, things had been different. Less than a week from now, these exhumations would collide with every one of them, in ways they could not possibly predict.

Frank Craignotti was one of those guys who loved their beer, Doug had observed. The man had a
relationship
with his Pilsner glass, and rituals to limn his interaction with it. Since Doug had started haunting Callahan’s, he had seen Craignotti in there every night—same stool at the end of the bar, same three pitchers of tap beer, which he emptied down his neck in about an hour-and-a-half. Word was that Craignotti had been a long-haul big-rig driver for a major nationwide chain of discount stores, until the company pushed him to the sidelines on account of his disability. He had stepped down from the cab of his sixteen-wheeler on a winding mountain road outside of Triple Pines (for reasons never explained; probably to relieve himself among Nature’s bounty) and had been sideswiped by a car that never saw him standing there in the rain. Presently he walked with a metal cane because after his surgery one leg had come up shorter than the other. There were vague noises of lawsuits and settlements. That had all happened before Doug wound up inside Callahan’s as a regular, and so it maintained the tenuous validity of small-town gossip. It was as good a story as any.

Callahan’s presented a nondescript face to the main street of Triple Pines, its stature noted solely by a blue neon sign that said BAR filling up most of a window whose sill probably had not been dusted since 1972. There was a roadhouse fifteen miles to the north, technically “out of town,” but its weak diversions were not worth the effort. Callahan’s flavor was mostly clover-colored Irish horse apples designed to appeal to all the usual expectations. Sutter, the current owner and the barman on most weeknights, had bought the place when the original founders had wised up and gotten the hell out of Triple Pines. Sutter was easy to make up a story about. To Doug he looked like a career criminal on the run who had found his perfect hide in Triple Pines. The scar bisecting his lower lip had probably come from a knife fight. His skin was like mushrooms in the fridge the day before you decide to throw them out. His eyes were set back in his skull, socketed deep in bruise-colored shadow.

Nobody in Triple Pines really knew anything bona fide about anybody else, Doug reflected.

Doug’s first time into the bar as a drinker was his first willful act after quitting his teaching job at the junior high school that Triple Pines shared with three other communities. All pupils were bussed in from rural route pickups. A year previously, he had effortlessly scored an emergency credential and touched down as a replacement instructor for History and Geography, though he took no interest in politics unless they were safely in the past. It was a rote gig that mostly required him to ramrod disinterested kids through memorizing data that they forgot as soon as they puked it up on the next test. He had witnessed firsthand how the area, the towns, and the school system worked to crush initiative, abort insight, and nip talent. The model for the Triple Pines secondary educational system seemed to come from some early 1940s playbook, with no imperative to change anything. The kids here were all white and mostly poor to poverty level, disinterested and leavened to dullness. Helmets for the football team always superseded funds for updated texts. It was the usual, spirit-deflating story. Doug spent the term trying to kick against this corpse, hoping to provoke life signs. Past the semester break, he was just hanging on for the wage. Then, right as summer vacation loomed, Shiela Morgan had deposited herself in the teacher’s lounge for a conference.