Zombies: The Recent Dead (68 page)

—
No, nothing hurts.

Far out of reach, Bill shouts into the phone. “Dana . . . ”

As Dana purrs like a tiger licking velvet. “But everybody wants.”

—
Zombies don’t want. They need.

She is drawn into the rhythm of the exchange, the metronomic back and forth. God he is handsome, she would like to run her hands along that perfect jaw, down the neck and inside the shirt collar to that perfect throat. “And you need . . . ”

Without moving he is suddenly too close. She sees green veins lacing the pale skin.

—
Something elusive. Infinitesimal. You won’t even miss it. And when it’s gone . . .

“Dammit, Dana!”

“But when it’s gone . . . ”

—
You will be changed.

“Changed,” she says dreamily, “and nothing will hurt any more.”

—
When you have been dead and buried pain is nothing to you.

“Will I be like you?”

—
In a way.

She says into the growing hush, “So I’ll be immortal.”

—
In a way
.

There is an intolerable pause. Why doesn’t he touch her? She doesn’t know. He is close enough for her to see the detail on the silver bracelet; he’s next to the bed, he is right
here
and yet he hasn’t reached out. Unaccountably chilled as she is right now—something in the air, she supposes—Dana is drawn. Whatever he is, she wants. She has to have it! Her voice comes from somewhere deep inside. “What do you want me to do?”

His cold, cold hand rises to her cheek but does not touch it. —
Nothing.

“Are we going to, ah . . . ” Dana’s tone says,
make love
. She is distantly aware of Bill Wylie still on the phone, trying to get her attention.

“Dana, do you hear me?”

“Shut up, Bill. Don’t bother me.” She wants to taunt him with the mystery. She doesn’t understand it herself. She wants to make love with this magnetic, unassailable stranger; she wants to
be
him. She wants him to love her as Bill never did, really, and she wants Bill to hear everything that happens between them. She wants Bill Wylie to lie there in his outsized bachelor’s bed listening as his seduction unfolds, far out of sight and beyond his control—Bill, who until last night she expected to marry and live with forever. Let this night sit in Bill’s imagination and fester there and torture him for the rest of his life. Whatever she does with this breathtaking stranger will free her forever, and Bill? It will serve him right. “Come take what you want.”

“Damn it to hell, Dana, I’m coming over!”

—
When you have been dead and buried you do not know desire.

Yet there is a charge in the air between them.

The mind forgets but the body remembers. Bracelet glinting on my arm.
What’s the matter with me?
Zombies know, insofar as they know anything, that you extract the soul from a distance. Through a keyhole, through a crack in a bedroom window. Always from a distance. This is essential. This knowledge is embedded: get too close and you get sucked in. And yet, and yet! It is as though the bracelet links X to the past it has no memory of. Interesting failure here, perhaps because this is its first assault on the precincts of the living. Zombies come out of the grave knowing certain things, but this one is distracted by unbidden reminders of the flesh, the circle of bright silver around the bone like a link to the forgotten.

“Then what,” Dana cries as destiny closes in on her; she is laughing, crying, singing in a long, ecstatic giggle that stops suddenly as all the breath in her lungs—her
soul
—rushes out of her body and into his, along with the salty blood from her cut lip, the hanging shred of skin. “What will you take?”

—Everything.

Dana . . . can’t breathe . . . she doesn’t have to breathe, she . . . Lifeless, she slips from his arms as her inadvertent lover— if he is a lover—staggers and cries out, jittering with fear and excitement as emotion and memory rush into him. Shuddering back to life, he will not know which of them performed the seduction.

“Oh my God,” he shouts, horrified by the sound of his own voice. “Oh my
God
.”

That which used to be Dana Graver does not speak. It doesn’t have to. The word is just out there, shared, like the air Dana is no longer breathing. —
Who?

My God, my
God
I am Remy L’Hereux and I miss my wife so much! For my sins, I was separated from my soul and with it, everything I care about. For my sins I was put in the grave and for my sins, my empty body was raised up, and what I did that was so terrible? I ran away with the
houngan’s
daughter. We met at Tulane, we fell in love and believe me, I was warned! My Sallie’s father was Hector Bonfort, they said, a doctor they said, very powerful. A doctor, yes, I said, but a doctor of what? And without being told I knew, because this was the one question none of them would answer. I should have been afraid, but I loved Sallie too much. I went to her house. I told him Sallie and I were in love. Hector said we were too young, fathers always do. I said we were in love and he said I would never be good enough for her, so we ran away. I laughed in his face and took her out of his house one night while he was away at a conference.

MY Sallie left him a note:
Don’t look for us,
she wrote
. We’ll be back when you accept Remy as your own son
. The priest we asked to marry us begged us to reconsider; he warned us. “You have made a very grave enemy, and I . . . ” He was afraid. We went to City Hall and the registrar of voters married us instead. Silver bracelet for my darling instead of a ring. Hector did not swear vengeance that I heard, but I knew he was powerful. Nobody ever spelled out what he was. I knew, but I pretended not to know. Sallie and I were so much in love that I took her knowing he would come for me. God, we were happy. God, we were in love.

Sallie, so bright and so pretty with her whole heart and soul showing in her face, we were so happy! But we should have known it was not for long. When Jamie came he was the image of both of us. Our little boy! The three of us were never happier than we were in New York, as far away from New Orleans as we could go. I couldn’t stay at Tulane, not with Hector’s heart turned against me. In New York, we thought we could be safe. There are always flaws in plans cobbled out of love. Hector found out. Then he, it. Something came for me. I got sick. I fell into a coma, unless it was a trance. I didn’t know what was happening, but Sallie did. She prayed by my bedside. She cried.

We were torn apart by my death, I could hear her sobbing over my bed in the days, the weeks after I fell unconscious but I couldn’t reach out and I couldn’t talk to her. I heard her sobbing in the room, I heard her sobbing on the telephone, I heard her begging her father the
houngan
to come and release me from the trance. I tried to warn her but I couldn’t speak.
Whatever you do, don’t tell him where we are.
Then I felt Hector in the city. On our street. In my house. Deep inside my body where what was left of me was hiding. I felt the intrusion, and that before he ever came into my room. It was only a matter of time before his hand parted me down to the center, and I was lost. I was buried too deep to talk but I begged Sallie:
Don’t leave me alone!
Then Hector was in the room and in the seconds when Sallie had to leave us alone—our son was crying, Jamie needed her, she’d never have left me like that if it hadn’t been for him—when Sally left I felt Hector approaching—not physically, but from somewhere much closer, searching, probing deep. Reaching into the arena of the uncreated.

Sallie came in and caught him. “Father. Don’t!”

“I wasn’t doing anything.”

“I know what you were doing. Bring him back!”

“I’m trying,” he said. It was a lie.

Then he put his ear to my mouth, his
ear
and my God with the sound of velvet tearing, my soul rushed out of me. “Father,” Sallie cried and he thumped my chest with his big fist: CPR. Then he turned to her.

“Too late,” he said. “When I came into the house Remy was already dying.”

She rushed at him and shoved him aside. Before he could stop her she slipped her silver bracelet on my wrist. I was almost gone but I heard her sobbing, “Promise to come back.”

The grief was crushing. It was almost a relief to descend into the grave with my sweetheart’s tears still drying on my face and the bracelet that bound us rattling on my wrist, forgotten. Until now. My God, until now!

What have I done?

I was better off when I was no more than a
thing
, like that beautiful, cold woman rising from the bed but it’s too late to go back. Where I felt no pain and no desire, desire is reawakened.

I want to go home!

I have go. Go home to Sallie, the love of my soul, and I want to see Jamie, our son. I miss them so much, but I can’t! I have been dead and buried and I don’t know how long it’s been. I would give anything to see them but for their protection, I have to stay back. Sallie wants to see me again, but not like this. The hand I bring up to my face is redolent of the grave and when I open my mouth I taste the sweet rot rising inside of me.

I can’t go back to them, not the way I am,

I won’t.

I have to. I can’t
not
go because with the return of life comes the awful, inexorable compulsion. Better I throw myself in front of a train or into a furnace than do this to the woman I love. I know what’s happening, the rushing decay because to live again means you’re going to die, and when you have been dead and buried, death comes fast. I have to stop. I have to stop myself. I . . .

The creature on the bed does not speak. It doesn’t have to. —
Have to go home.

I have to go home
. In a return of everything that made him human—love, regret and a terrible foreboding and before any of these, compulsion—in full knowledge of what he has been and what he is becoming, Remy L’Hereux turns his back on the undead thing on the bed, barely noting the fraught, anxious arrival of Billy Wylie, who has no idea what he’s walking into.

That which had been Dana Graver sits up, its eyes burning with a new green light and its pale skin shimmering against the black nightgown.—
Then go.

I’m going now.

About the Author

Kit Reed
has stories appearing in
Postscripts, Asimov’s, Kenyon Review,
and several invited anthologies this year. A collection from PS Publishing is scheduled for 2011.
Publishers Weekly
praised
Enclave
(2009) as “a gripping dystopian thriller.” Other novels include
The Baby Merchant, J. Eden,
and
Thinner Than Thou,
which won an ALA Alex award. Often anthologized, her stories appear in venues ranging from
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Asimov’s SF,
and
Omni
to
The Yale Review, The Kenyon Review
and
The Norton Anthology of American Literature.
Her collections include
Thief of Lives, Dogs of Truth,
and
Weird Women, Wired Women,
which, along with the short novel
Little Sisters of the Apocalypse,
was a finalist for the Tiptree Prize. A Guggenheim fellow and the first American recipient of a five-year literary grant from the Abraham Woursell Foundation, she is Resident Writer at Wesleyan University.

Story Notes

Booklist
’s review of Reed’s collection
Dogs of Truth
had this to say about “The Zombie Prince”: “There’s even a story, the almost-sweet creepy . . . in which zombies get to be something other than moaning hulks out to eat brains . . . ” True enough.

There’s also, to me, something particularly disturbing about the human in this tale, Dana.