The Living Dead 2 Part 47

She waved the medic over, but one look at his face told her all she needed to know. They could recover from most injuries, but if the damage was too great, too extensive ...

Oh G.o.d. Not Gareth. Please not Gareth.

She stayed beside him as the medic took a closer look. The soldiers ringed around them, solemn-faced, a few shaking, arms around each other.

When the medic looked up to give his report, Gareth waved the soldiers back out of earshot. They hesitated, but obeyed at a growl from him.

"I can make him comfortable," the medic murmured. "Get him back to the fort ..."

"Waste of time," Gareth said. "Someone's bound to have heard that blast. Get them moving before-"

"No," Monica said. "You're coming if I need to carry you myself."

She expected him to argue, but he gave a slow nod. "You're right. They don't need this. Not now. Take me back, tell them I'll pull through."

That wasn't what she meant at all, but he had a point. Their best warrior-a man who'd single-handedly annihilated mobs of Others-killed by a simple tripwire bomb? That was a blow to morale they could ill afford.

The medic bound Gareth's chest while the soldiers fashioned a makeshift stretcher from branches and clothes, and they took Gareth back to the fort.

Monica stood on the guard's balcony overlooking the stockade crammed with Others. Prisoners of war. That had been her policy from the start. Leave as many of the enemy alive as possible. Bring them here. Keep them alive and comfortable. Use them as bargaining chips and as proof to the Others that they weren't monsters.

It hadn't mattered. Her missives to the government had gone unanswered, as they always had.

For years, she'd tried to reason with the Others. First to negotiate, then, as their numbers dwindled, to beg for mercy. She understood that they posed a threat. So they'd go away, far from the living.

The Others might as well have been getting letters from a colony of diseased rats. Eventually, she'd realized that was exactly how they saw the Infected-diseased rats that somehow had the power of communication, but rats nonetheless. Subhuman. Dangerous. A threat requiring swift and thorough extermination.

She looked out at the Others and thought of what Gareth had said. The final option. Back when she'd first started arguing for the taking of prisoners, the other commanders had seen the possibilities. Horrified, she'd fought until the option was off the table. Only it wasn't really. It never had been.

She left the guardroom and walked through the fort. She pa.s.sed the rooms of soldiers playing card games, of civilians mending clothing and preparing meals, of children listening to stories at the feet of the old ones. Everywhere she looked, people were carrying on, hiding their fear, laughing and talking, just trying to live.

Just trying to live. That's all they'd ever asked for, and that was all she ever wanted for them. So how far was she willing to go? Not to save them-she wasn't sure that was even possible anymore-but to give them every possible chance for survival.

How far would she go? As far as she could.

Three days later, she was back on the balcony overlooking the stockade. Gareth was beside her.

"I need to be there," he'd said. "They need to see me standing there."

So the doctors had done what they could, binding him up, and she'd done what she could, washing away the worst of the stink of rot that had set in. They'd cleared the hall and carried him on a stretcher to the stockade door. He'd taken it from there, finding the strength to walk up to the guard post. He stood in front of a pillar and she knew he leaned against it, but to those below, their champion was back on his feet. And, now, with this new hope she'd given them, so were they.

Once again, she looked out over the men and women packed into the room below. Only this time, they looked back at her. More than one hundred and fifty trained soldiers on their feet, watching her.

In those faces, she saw fear and uncertainty. She saw hate, too, but less of that, surprisingly less.

Guards ringed the room. Civilians walked up and down the aisles with trays of meat. Cooked meat because, for now, that would make them comfortable. They gave the hostages as much as they wanted. That would help. So, too, would the doctors slipping along, silent as wraiths, watching for signs of trouble, others in the back room, dosing the meat with mild sedatives.

The transition had gone smoother than she'd expected. The doctors a.s.sured her it would, but she'd seen one too many h.e.l.lish deaths and rebirths to truly believe them. They were right, though. After all these years, the virus had mutated, ensuring its own survival by making the process faster, less traumatic. One shot of the virus. Then a death-inducing dose of sedative. Within a day ... rebirth. And now, two days later, an army to command.

She started her speech with a history lesson. How the Others had driven them to this place. How they'd fought the sporadic incursions, killing only those they could not capture. How they'd treated the prisoners of war humanely. Every man and woman there could attest to that. But now, with the wolves at their door, refusing to negotiate, they'd been forced to do the unthinkable.

"We need soldiers to fight," she said, her voice ringing through the stockade. "Right now, I'm sure you don't feel much like helping us. But you won't be fighting for us, you'll be fighting for yourselves. You are us now. You are Infected. Every one of you is now free to walk out our front gates. But you won't. Because you know they won't let you. Your brothers-in-arms, your friends, your families-every one of them would lop off your head if you walked into that camp because you are no longer human. You are Infected."

She paused to let her words sink in. Behind her, Gareth shifted, struggling to stay on his feet. She glanced at him. He smiled and whispered that she was doing fine.

She turned back to the troops. "To everyone you left behind, you are now dead. Do you feel dead?"

They shuffled, the sound crossing the stockade in a wave.

"To everyone you left behind, you are now a monster. Do you feel like a monster?"

More shuffling, sporadic grunts.

"To everyone you left behind, you have no right to live."

Another glance at Gareth. He stood straighter, chin lifting. He was dying. They all were and this was how they had to face it: stand tall and refuse to let Death win so easily. They'd cheated it before. Now they had to cheat it again.

She turned back to the crowd below. "Do you want to live?" She paused. "Are you willing to fight fight to live?" to live?"

The answer came softly at first, her own troops calling back. Gradually, more voices joined them, the new soldiers joining in, their shouts boosting the confidence of the others until the cry ran through the fort.

Gareth moved up behind her, his fingers sliding around her waist, his touch ice-cold now.

"You gave them hope," he said. "You gave them a chance."

She nodded. It wasn't much, but it was the best she could do. Maybe, just maybe, it would be enough.

The Thought War By Paul McAuley

Paul McAuley is a winner of the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Philip K. d.i.c.k Award, the British Fantasy Award, and the Sidewise Award. His most recent novels are Gardens of the Sun Gardens of the Sun and and The Quiet War The Quiet War. Earlier work includes the award-winning novel Fairyland Fairyland, White Devils White Devils, Four Hundred Billion Stars Four Hundred Billion Stars, Mind's Eye Mind's Eye, and The Secret of Life The Secret of Life, to name a few. His short fiction has appeared in a wide variety of magazines and anthologies, including Asimov's Science Fiction Asimov's Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Interzone Interzone, Postscripts Postscripts, and has been reprinted on numerous occasions in best-of-the-year annuals.

In Alan Moore's legendary graphic novel Watchmen Watchmen, scientists watch in horror as one of their colleagues is accidentally obliterated by a piece of high-powered lab equipment. But as a result, the victim transcends material existence and obtains G.o.dlike powers. Later he reconst.i.tutes his physical body, first as a walking circulatory system, then later adding bone, muscle, and finally flesh. Zombies are typically missing a lot of their skin and we can see right through to their innards. But what if, as with Watchmen Watchmen's Dr. Manhattan, they are in the process not of decomposing but coalescing coalescing? And what if, as the process continues, it becomes harder and harder to tell who's human and who isn't?

This sort of paranoia has inspired a lot of great science fiction, from Invasion of the Body s.n.a.t.c.hers Invasion of the Body s.n.a.t.c.hers to the Philip K. d.i.c.k-inspired film to the Philip K. d.i.c.k-inspired film Blade Runner Blade Runner, in which human-seeming replicants can only be identified by subtle variations in their emotional responses. In John Carpenter's The Thing The Thing (based on a short story by John W. Campbell), a research team at a remote arctic compound realizes that some of them have been replaced by shapeshifting aliens, and the only way to know for sure who's human is to jam a hot wire into samples of their blood and see if the blood tries to crawl away. (based on a short story by John W. Campbell), a research team at a remote arctic compound realizes that some of them have been replaced by shapeshifting aliens, and the only way to know for sure who's human is to jam a hot wire into samples of their blood and see if the blood tries to crawl away.

Our next story takes some of these notions and runs with them. But these zombies aren't just out to eat your brains. They've got something bigger in mind. Much bigger.

Listen: Don't try to speak. Don't try to move. Listen to me. Listen to my story.

Everyone remembers their first time. The first time they saw a zombie and knew it for what it was. But my first time was one of the first times ever. It was so early in the invasion that I wasn't sure what was happening. So early we didn't yet call them zombies.

It was in the churchyard of St Pancras Old Church, in the fabulous, long lost city of London. Oh, it's still there, more or less; it's one of the few big cities that didn't get hit in the last, crazy days of global spasm. But it's lost to us now because it belongs to them.

Anyway, St Pancras Old Church was one of the oldest sites of Christian worship in Europe. There'd been a church there, in one form or another, for one and a half thousand years; and although the railway lines to St Pancras station ran hard by its north side it was an isolated and slightly spooky place, full of history and romance. Mary Wollstonecraft G.o.dwin was buried there, and it was at her graveside that her daughter, who later wrote Frankenstein Frankenstein, first confessed her love to the poet Sh.e.l.ley, and he to her. In his first career as an architect's a.s.sistant, the novelist Thomas Hardy supervised the removal of bodies when the railway was run through part of the churchyard, and set some of the displaced gravestones around an ash tree that was later named after him.

I lived nearby. I was a freelance science journalist then, and when I was working at home and the weather was good I often ate my lunch in the churchyard. That's where I was when I saw my first zombie.

I can see that you don't understand much of this. It's all right. You are young. Things had already changed when you were born and much that was known then is unknowable now. But I'm trying to set a mood. An emotional tone. Because it's how you respond to the mood and emotions of my story that's important. That's why you have to listen carefully. That's why you are gagged and bound, and wired to my machines.

Listen: It was a hot day in June in that ancient and hallowed ground. I was sitting on a bench in the sun-dappled shade of Hardy's ash tree and eating an egg-and-cress sandwich and thinking about the article I was writing on cosmic rays when I saw him. It looked like a man, anyway. A ragged man in a long black raincoat, ropy hair down around his face as he limped towards me with a slow and stiff gait. Halting and raising his head and looking all around, and then shambling on, the tail of his black coat dragging behind.

I didn't pay much attention to him at first. I thought he was a vagrant. We are all of us vagrants now, but in the long ago most of us had homes and families and only the most unfortunate, slaves to drink or drugs, lost souls brought down by misfortune or madness, lived on the streets. Vagrants were drawn to churchyards by the quietness and sense of ancient sanctuary, and there was a hospital at the west end of the churchyard of Old St Pancras where they went to fill their prescriptions and get treatment for illness or injury. So he wasn't an unusual sight, shambling beneath the trees in a slow and wavering march past Mary G.o.dwin's grave towards Hardy's ash and the little church.

Then a dog began to bark. A woman with several dogs on leads and several more trotting freely called to the little wire-haired terrier that was dancing around the vagrant in a fury of excitement. Two more dogs ran up to him and began to bark too, their coats bristling and ears laid flat. I saw the vagrant stop and shake back the ropes from his face and look all around, and for the first time I saw his face.

It was dead white and broken. Like a vase shattered and badly mended. My first thought was that he'd been in a bad accident, something involving gla.s.s or industrial acids. Then I saw that what I had thought were ropes of matted hair were writhing with slow and awful independence like the tentacles of a sea creature; saw that the tattered raincoat wasn't a garment. It was his skin, falling stiff and black around him like the wings of a bat.

The dog woman started screaming. She'd had a clear look at the vagrant too. Her dogs pranced and howled and whined and barked. I was on my feet. So were the handful of other people who'd been spending a lazy lunch hour in the warm and shady churchyard. One of them must have had the presence of mind to call the police, because almost at once, or so it seemed, there was the wail of a siren and a p.r.i.c.kle of blue lights beyond the churchyard fence and two policemen in yellow stab vests came running.

They stopped as soon as they saw the vagrant. One talked into the radio clipped to his vest; the other began to round everyone up and lead us to the edge of the churchyard. And all the while the vagrant stood at the centre of a seething circle of maddened dogs, looking about, clubbed hands held out in a gesture of supplication. A hole yawned redly in his broken white face and shaped hoa.r.s.e and wordless sounds of distress.

More police came. The road outside the churchyard was blocked off. A helicopter clattered above the tops of the trees. The men in hazmat suits entered the park. One of them carried a rifle. By this time everyone who had been in the park was penned against a police van. The police wouldn't answer our questions and we were speculating in a fairly calm and English way about terrorism. That was the great fear, in the long ago. Ordinary men moving amongst us, armed with explosives and hateful certainty.

We all started when we heard the first shot. The chorus of barks doubled, redoubled. A dog ran pell-mell out of the churchyard gate and a marksman shot it there in the road and the woman who still held the leashes of several dogs cried out. Men in hazmat suits separated us and made us walk one by one through a shower frame they'd a.s.sembled on the pavement and made us climb one by one in our wet and stinking clothes into cages in the backs of police vans.

I was in quarantine for a hundred days. When I was released, the world had changed forever. I had watched it change on TV and now I was out in it. Soldiers everywhere on the streets. Security checks and sirens and a constant low-level dread. Lynch mobs. Public hangings and burnings. Ten or twenty on-the-spot executions in London alone, each and every day. Quarantined areas cleared and barricaded. Invaders everywhere.

By now, everyone was calling them zombies. We knew that they weren't our own dead come back to walk the Earth, of course, but that's what they most looked like. More and more of them were appearing at random everywhere in the world, and they were growing more and more like us. The first zombies had been only approximations. Barely human in appearance, with a brain and lungs and a heart but little else by way of internal organs, only slabs of muscle that stored enough electrical energy to keep them alive for a day or so. But they were changing. Evolving. Adapting. After only a hundred days, they were almost human. The first had seemed monstrous and pitiful. Now, they looked like dead men walking. Animated showroom dummies. Almost human, but not quite.

After I was released from quarantine, I went back to my trade. Interviewing scientists about the invasion, writing articles. There were dozens of theories, but no real evidence to support any of them. The most popular was that we had been targeted for invasion by aliens from some far star. That the zombies were like the robot probes we had dispatched to other planets and moons in the Solar System, growing ever more sophisticated as they sent back information to their controllers. It made a kind of sense, although it didn't explain why, although they had plainly identified us as the dominant species, their controllers didn't try to contact us. Experiments of varying degrees of cruelty showed that the zombies were intelligent and self-aware, yet they ignored us unless we tried to harm or kill them. Otherwise they simply walked amongst us, and no matter how many were detected and destroyed, there were always more of them.

The most unsettling news came from an old and distinguished physicist, a n.o.bel laureate, who told me that certain of the fundamental physical constants seemed to be slowly and continuously changing. He had been trying to convey the urgent importance of this to the government but as I discovered when I tried to use my contacts to bring his findings to the attention of ministers and members of parliament and civil servants, the government was too busy dealing with the invasion and the consequences of the invasion.

There was an old and hopeful lie that an alien invasion would cause the nations of Earth to set aside their differences and unite against the common enemy. It didn't happen. Instead, global paranoia and suspicion ratcheted up daily. The zombies were archetypal invaders from within. Hatreds and prejudices that once had been cloaked in diplomatic evasions were now nakedly expressed. Several countries used the invasion as an excuse to attack troublesome minorities or to accuse old enemies of complicity with the zombies. There were genocidal ma.s.sacres and brush fire wars across the globe. Iran attacked Iraq and Israel with nuclear weapons and what was left of Israel wiped out the capital cities of its neighbours. India attacked Pakistan. China and Russia fought along their long border. The United States invaded Cuba and Venezuela, tried to close its borders with Canada and Mexico, and took sides with China against Russia. And so on, and so on. The zombies didn't have to do anything to destroy us. We were tearing ourselves apart. We grew weaker as we fought each other and the zombies grew stronger by default.

In Britain, everyone under thirty was called up for service in the armed forces. And then everyone under forty was called up too. Three years after my first encounter, I found myself in a troop ship at the tail end of a convoy wallowing through the Bay of Biscay towards the Mediterranean. Huge columns of zombies were straggling out of the Sahara Desert. We were supposed to stop them. Slaughter them. But as we approached the Straits of Gibraltar, someone, it was never clear who, dropped a string of nuclear bombs on zombies ma.s.sing in Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt. On our ships, we saw the flashes of the bombs light the horizon. An hour later we were attacked by the remnants of the Libyan and Egyptian air forces. Half our fleet were sunk; the rest limped home. Britain's government was still intact, more or less, but everyone was in the armed forces now. Defending ourselves from the zombies and from waves of increasingly desperate refugees from the continent. There was a year without summer. Snow in July. Crops failed and despite rationing millions died of starvation and cold. There were biblical plagues of insects and all the old sicknesses came back.

And still the zombies kept appearing.

They looked entirely human now, but it was easy to tell what they were because they weren't starving, or haunted, or mad.

We kept killing them and they kept coming.

They took our cities from us and we fled into the countryside and regrouped and they came after us and we broke into smaller groups and still they came after us.

We tore ourselves apart trying to destroy them. Yet we still didn't understand them. We didn't know where they were coming from, what they were, what they wanted. We grew weaker as they grew stronger.

Do you understand me? I think that you do. Your pulse rate and pupil dilation and skin conductivity all show peaks at the key points of my story. That's good. That means you might be human.

Listen: Let me tell you what the distinguished old physicist told me. Let me tell you about the observer effect and Boltzmann brains.

In the nineteenth century, the Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann developed the idea that the universe could have arisen from a random thermal fluctuation. Like a flame popping into existence. An explosion from nowhere. Much later, other physicists suggested that similar random fluctuations could give rise to anything imaginable, including conscious ent.i.ties in any shape or form: Boltzmann brains. It was one of those contra-intuitive and mostly theoretical ideas that helped cosmologists shape their models of the universe, and how we fit into it. It helped to explain why the universe was hospitable to the inhabitants of an undistinguished planet of an average star in a not very special galaxy in a group of a million such, and that group of galaxies one of millions more. We are typical. Ordinary. And because we are ordinary, our universe is ordinary too, because there is no objective reality beyond that which we observe. Because, according to quantum entanglement, pairs of particles share information about each other's quantum states even when distance and timing means that no signal can pa.s.s between them. Because observation is not pa.s.sive. Because our measurements influence the fundamental laws of the universe. They create reality.

But suppose other observers outnumbered us? What would happen then?

The probability of even one Boltzmann brain appearing in the fourteen billion years of the universe's history is vanishingly small. But perhaps something changed the local quantum field and made it more hospitable to them. Perhaps the density of our own consciousness attracted them, as the ma.s.s of a star changes the gravitational field and attracts pa.s.sing comets. Or perhaps the inhabitants of another universe are interfering with our universe. Perhaps the zombies are their avatars: Boltzmann brains that pop out of the energy field and change our universe to suit their masters simply because they think differently and see things differently.

This was what the old physicist told me, in the long ago. He had evidence, too. Simple experiments that measured slow and continuous changes in the position of the absorption lines of calcium and helium and hydrogen in the sun's spectrum, in standards of ma.s.s and distance, and in the speed of light. He believed that the fundamental fabric of the universe was being altered by the presence of the zombies, and that those changes were reaching back into the past and forward into the future, just as a pebble dropped into a pond will send ripples spreading out to either side. Every time he checked the historical records of the positions of those absorption lines, they agreed with his contemporaneous measurements, even though those measurements were continuously changing. We are no longer what we once were, but we are not aware of having changed because our memories have been changed too.

Do you see why this story is important? It is not just a matter of my survival, or even the survival of the human species. It is a matter of the survival of the entire known universe. The zombies have already taken so much from us. The few spies and scouts who have successfully mingled with them and escaped to tell the tale say that they are demolishing and rebuilding our cities. Day and night they ebb and flow through the streets in tidal ma.s.ses, like army ants or swarming bees, under the flickering auroras of strange energies. They are as unknowable to us as we are to them.

Listen: This is still our world. That it is still comprehensible to us, that we can still survive in it, suggests that the zombies have not yet won an outright victory. It suggests that the tide can be turned. We have become vagrants scattered across the face of the Earth, and now we must come together and go forward together. But the zombies have become so like us that we can't trust any stranger. We can't trust someone like you, who stumbled out of the wilderness into our sanctuary. That's why you must endure this test. Like mantids or spiders, we must stage fearful courtship rituals before we can accept strangers as our own.

I want you to survive this. I really do. There are not many of us left and you are young. You can have many children. Many little observers.

Listen: This world can be ours again. It has been many years since the war, and its old beauty is returning. Now that civilisation has been shattered, it has become like Eden again. Tell me: Is a world as wild and clean and beautiful as this not worth saving? Was the sky never so green, or gra.s.s never so blue?

Dating in Dead World By Joe McKinney

Joe McKinney's latest novel, Quarantined Quarantined, was a finalist for the 2009 Bram Stoker Award. His first book, a zombie novel called Dead City Dead City, was recently reissued, and a sequel, Apocalypse of the Dead Apocalypse of the Dead, will be published in October. A third entry in the series, The Zombie King The Zombie King, will appear in 2011. McKinney's short fiction has appeared in the zombie anthology History Is Dead History Is Dead, and a zombie anthology he co-edited, Dead Set Dead Set, was published earlier this year. When not writing fiction, McKinney works as a Homicide Detective for the San Antonio Police Department.

Dating is hard, and that's under the best of circ.u.mstances. Throw in a few unusual complications, and going out on a date can quickly turn into the stuff of nightmares. In the movie 50 First Dates 50 First Dates, Adam Sandler attempts to woo Drew Barrymore, only to discover that she's afflicted by a rare condition that causes her to forget they've ever met every time she falls asleep. In There's Something About Mary There's Something About Mary, Ben Stiller goes to pick up Cameron Diaz for the prom, only to suffer a horrifying mishap involving a zipper. But at least those guys never had to deal with the situation presented in our next story.

The author says, "After I finish a novel, I'm usually struck by a sort of separation anxiety. So much mental effort is put into worldbuilding and getting to know the characters. So what I usually do is write a few short stories set in the world of the novel I've just finished. 'Dating in Dead World' was a part of that process." He adds, "Right before I left for my first date, my dad gave me the only bit of parental s.e.x education I ever received. He said, 'Remember this, you will be held personally accountable for everything that happens to that girl from the moment she leaves her front door to the moment she walks back in it. Conduct yourself accordingly.' It wasn't until after I'd written this story that I realized I was channeling that advice. I guess it took."

Heather Ashcroft told me to come to the main entrance of her father's compound. She said the guards there would know my name; they'd be expecting me.

They were expecting me all right.

Four of them had their machine guns trained on me while a voice on a PA speaker barked orders.

"Turn off your motorcycle and dismount." The voice was clear, sharp, professional.

I did what I was told.