Zombies: The Recent Dead (60 page)

“What do you think it is?” George asked.

Louis turned back to the counter.

“My brother Jean’s necklace,” Louis said. “On the back of this, it should have engrave . . . ” Louis waved his hand about, “J.P. It is there, no?”

George still didn’t look down.

“I imagine so.”

Louis leaned back and laughed.

“
Merde
. So far away, so damn far away, and that bitch Jacqueline still has talons. Unlucky? Ha,” he spat. “Do you know my story?”

“No,” George said. “I do not.”

The barkeep finally delivered a mug of beer, the dirty amber fluid spilling over the sides and onto the bar top where it would soak into the wood and add to the dank and musky air. Louis took it with a firm grasp and tipped it back. It took only seconds before the mug contained nothing but slick wetness at the bottom.

Louis smacked the mug down. “Buy me another, damn you,” he ordered. George tapped the counter, looked at the barkeep, and nodded.

Stories, George thought, could sometimes be as interesting as something shiny and new. He would indulge Louis, yes, and himself. He handed Louis the necklace.

“Jean was much the better brother,” Louis said. “I think it broke my father’s heart to hear he died in Haiti. My father locked himself in his study for three days. Did not eat, did not drink. And when he came back out, he put his hand on my shoulder, like this—” Louis draped a heavy arm over George and leaned closer. His breath reeked of beer. “—and he tells me, he tells me, ‘Louis, you must go and take over where you brother has left off.’ That is all he tells me. I never see him again.”

Louis pulled back away. “And Katrina, my wife, she is very,
very
sad to see me go away to this island. But I tell her it is good that I take over the business Jean created. I will make for her a better husband. My brother has left me a good legacy. Hmmm. I did good business. I made them all proud. Proud! And you know what,” Louis said, looking down at the necklace, “it was all great until Jean walked into my office three month later. It was unnatural . . .  I’d seen his grave! There were witnesses . . . ”

“Business was good?” George interrupted Louis. “What did you do?”

Louis ran a thumb around the rim of his glass.

“It didn’t cost much. A boat. Provisions. We bought our cargo for guns . . . and necklaces, or whatever: beads and scrap.” He opened a weathered palm. There was nothing in it.

“What cargo?” George interrupted. This was the point. It was why Mama Jaqi had sent him.

“Slaves,” Louis said. “Lots of slaves.”

“Ah, yes,” George said. Mama Jaqi had been a slave.

“I made money,” Louis said. “For the first time I wasn’t some peasant in Provencal. I had a house with gardens.” Louis looked at George. “I did good! I gave money to charity. I was a good citizen. I was a good
businessman
.”

“I am sure you were,” George said. He felt nothing against Louis. In another life, he would maybe have sympathized with Louis’ arguments. He remembered using some of them once, a long time ago. A brief flash of a memory occurred to him. George had desperately blabbered some of the same things, trying to defend himself to the incensed Mama Jaqi.

George shook away the ghostlike feel of passion to prod Louis’ story along. “But what a shock seeing your brother must have been.” George was here for the story. He wanted it over quickly. Time was getting on, and George had to open the shop tomorrow. He would have to finish Mama Jaqi’s deed soon.

“I thought some horrible trick had been played on me,” Louis said. “I had so many questions about what had happened. And all Jean would do was tell me I had to leave. Leave the business. Leave the island. I refused.” Louis made a motion at the bartender for more beer. “I was still in Haiti when it all began. Toussaint . . . the independence. I lost it all when the blacks ran us all off the island. I slipped away on a small boat to America with nothing. Nothing.” Louis looked at George, and George saw a world of misery swimming in the man’s eyes. “In France, they hear I am dead. I can only think of Katrina remarrying.” He stopped and looked down at George’s arm.

“What is it?” George asked.

Louis reached a finger out and pulled back the cuff of George’s sleeve. Underneath, a faint series of scars marked George’s wrist.

“Jean had those,” Louis said. The barkeep set another mug in front of Louis, and left after George paid for it. “Do me a favor,” Louis said, letting go of George’s sleeve. “One last favor.”

“If I can,” George said.

“Let me do this properly, like a real man. Eh? Would you do that?”

“Yes,” George said.

Louis took his last long gulp from the mug, then stood up.

“I will be out in the alley.”

George watched him stagger out the tavern.

After several minutes George got up and walked out. The distant cold hit him square in the face when he opened the door, and several men around the tables yelled at him to hurry and get out and shut the door.

In the alley by the tavern, George paused. Louis stepped out of the darkness holding a knife in his left hand, swaying slightly in the wind.

Neither of them said anything. They circled each other for a few seconds, then Louis stumbled forward and tried to slash at George’s stomach. George stepped away from the crude attempt and grabbed the Frenchman’s wrist. It was his intent to take the knife away, but Louis slipped and fell onto the stones. He fell on his arm, knocking his own knife away, then cracked his head against the corner of a stone.

Louis didn’t move anymore. He still breathed, though: a slight heaving and the air steaming out from his mouth.

George crouched and put a knee to Louis’ throat. The steaming breath stopped, leaving the air still and quiet. A long minute passed, then Louis opened an eye. He struggled, kicking a small pool of half-melted snow with his tattered boots. George kept his knee in place.

When Louis stopped moving George relaxed, but kept the knee in place for another minute.

The door to the tavern opened, voices carried into the alley. Someone hailed for a cab and the clip-clop of hooves quickened by the tavern. George kept still in the alley’s shadows. When the voices trailed off into the distance George moved again. He checked Louis’ pockets until he found what he wanted: the necklace. He put it back into his own pocket. Then he stood up and walked out of the alley to hail his own cab.

The snow got worse towards the harbor and his shop. The horses pulling the cab snorted and slowed down, and the whole vehicle would shift and slide with wind gusts. George sat looking out at the barren, wintry landscape. It was cold and distant, like his own mechanical feelings. He could hear occasional snatches of the driver whistling
Amazing Grace
to himself and the horses.

Mama Jaqi had done well. George felt nothing but a compulsion for her bidding.
Obey
 . . . no horror about what he had just done. Just a dry, crusty satisfaction.

When he got out George paid the driver. He took the creaky back steps up. He lit several candles and sat in his study for a while, still fully dressed. Eventually he put his fingers to the candle in front of him and watched the edges turn from white, to red, to brown, and then to a blistered black. The burnt flesh smelled more like incense than cooked flesh.

He pulled them away.

Tomorrow they would be whole again.

George pulled the silver necklace out with his good hand. He set it on the shelf, next to all the other pieces of flashy trinkets. Another story ended, another decoration on his shelf.

How many more would it take, George wondered, before Mama Jaqi freed him? How many lives did she deem a worthy trade for the long suffering she knew as her life? Or for the horrors of George’s own terrible past? George didn’t know. She’d taken that ability away from him. In this distant reincarnation of himself, George knew that any human, passionate response he could muster would be wrong.

Even his old feelings would have been wrong.

Long after the candles burned out George sat, waiting.

About the Author

Tobias S. Buckell
is a Caribbean-born writer who grew up in Grenada, the British Virgin Islands, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. He has published stories in various magazines and anthologies. His three Caribbean SF novels,
Crystal Rain, Ragamuffin,
, and
Sly Mongoose
were published by Tor Books, as well as the
New York Times
bestselling novel
Halo: The Cole Protocol.
He is currently working on his next book.

Story Notes

Buckell’s subtle story is yet another interpretation of what a zombie could be. Here, George Petros, an early nineteenth-century New England jeweler, is obviously Mama Jaqi’s zombie—but he is an emotionless “distant reincarnation of himself” with the appearance and demeanor of a normal man and superhuman powers of regeneration. But, as with many zombie stories, the author uses fiction to make a social comment: Mama Jaqi, a slave recently freed in the Haitian Revolution, is taking revenge on slavetraders. George’s last name is of interest, too. In Haitian Voudou, there are two primary types of spirits (loa):
Rada
and
Petwo
(or
Petro, Pethro
, etc.). The Petwo are “hotter” loas than the Rada, and less compromising. They are also associated with the brutal experience of slavery and consequent uprisings against it. In Greek
petros
means “a piece of rock; a stone.”

David Wellington

The dead man couldn’t get away, no matter how hard he struggled. Barbed wire wreathed the outer perimeter of the WalMart parking lot, long droopy coils of it that bounced every time he tried to convulse his way to freedom. The blotchy skin of his neck tore open and a little dried blood sifted out. He pulled again, his arm held motionless by the wire and then stopped again, confused, lacking the brainpower to unsnag himself, lacking the energy to panic.

The girl—Winona—threw a rock that bounced off his skull but didn’t crack the bone. She had blond hair pulled back in a braid curled and oiled until it looked like metal and eyes the color of old glass bottles. We stood on the loading dock of the superstore a hundred yards from the dead man. My hair and clothes still smelled like the cookfires burning inside. I couldn’t wait to get out there, onto the road again. My cargo had already thrown one tantrum that morning, demanding she be allowed to stay. Too bad for her.

“Is this enough?” her father asked. He wore a bright orange vest and a baseball hat crowned with a ring of bird skulls. He was an Assistant Manager for WalMart and a man of some importance. He held out to me an orange plastic pill bottle. The label had been worn off long ago and the contents were a mixed assortment of colorful capsules and tablets, some of them crumbled near to dust, all of them decades past their expiration date. I nodded to the manager and grabbed the girl’s hand. “Now you’re mine,” I told her, “and you’ll behave, or else.” Her father pursed his lips but I don’t make my living coddling the civilized folk of the stores. I pointed at the dead man in the wire. “That’s just what we call a slack. Too dumb and too far gone to hunt us, sure. You make too much racket throwing stones, though, and you’ll attract his friends, and they
bite.”

She merely stared at me, those green eyes wide and vacant. A look she’d practiced, sure. She didn’t care, wasn’t going to care unless I gave her a reason. I pulled her along behind me as I stormed down the ramp to the parking lot. In my other arm I cradled my spring-lance, the one thing in the world I couldn’t afford to lose.

“If any harm comes to her—” the manager shouted at my back.

I finished the thought for him. “Then you won’t see me again.” It wasn’t what he wanted to hear. Screw him.