Zombies - Encounters with the Hungry Dead Part 42

They clung to each other, shuddering, their teeth working on arms and legs, throat, chest, face. Faster and faster still, as the wind crashed and Beethoven thundered; gobbets of flesh fell to the carpet, and those gobbets were quickly s.n.a.t.c.hed up and consumed. Jim felt himself shrinking, being transformed from one into two; the incandescent moment had enfolded him, and if there had been tears to cry, he might have wept with joy. Here was love, and here was a lover who both claimed him and gave her all.

Brenda's teeth closed on the back of Jim's neck, crunching through the dry flesh. Her eyes closed in rapture as Jim ate the rest of the fingers on her left hand-and suddenly there was a new sensation, a scurrying around her lips. The love wound on Jim's neck was erupting small yellow roaches, like gold coins spilling from a bag, and Jim's itching subsided. He cried out, his face burrowing into Brenda's abdominal cavity.

Their bodies entwined, the flesh being gnawed away, their shrunken stomachs bulging. Brenda bit off his ear, chewed, and swallowed it; fresh pa.s.sion coursed through Jim, and he nibbled away her lips-they did taste like slightly overripe peaches-and ran his tongue across, her teeth. They kissed deeply, biting pieces of their tongues off. Jim drew back and lowered his face to her thighs. He began to eat her, while she gripped his shoulders and screamed.

Brenda arched her body. Jim's s.e.xual organs were there, the t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es like dark, dried fruit. She opened her mouth wide, extended her chewed tongue and bared her teeth; her cheekless, chinless face strained upward-and Jim cried out over even the wail of the wind, his body convulsing.

They continued to feast on each other, like knowing lovers. Jim's body was hollowed out, most of the flesh gone from his face and chest. Brenda's lungs and heart were gone, consumed, and the bones of her arms and legs were fully revealed. Their stomachs swelled. And when they were near explosion, Jim and Brenda lay on the carpet, cradling each other with skeletal arms, lying on bits of flesh like the petals of strange flowers. They were one now, each into the other-and what more could love be than this?

"I love you," Jim said, with his mangled tongue. Brenda made a noise of a.s.sent, unable to speak, and took a last love bite from beneath his arm before she snuggled close.

The Beethoven record ended; the next one dropped onto the turntable, and a lilting Strauss waltz began.

Jim felt the building shake. He lifted his head, one eye remaining and that one sated with pleasure, and saw the fire escape trembling. One of the potted plants was suddenly picked up by the wind. "Brenda," he said-and then the plant crashed through the gla.s.s and the stormwind came in, whipping around the walls. Another window blew in, and as the next hot wave of wind came, it got into the hollows of the two dried bodies and raised them off the floor like reed-ribbed kites. Brenda made a gasping noise, her arms locked around Jim's spinal cord and his handless arms thrust into her ribcage. The wind hurled them against the wall, snapping bones like matchsticks as the waltz continued to play on for a few seconds before the stereo and table went over. There was no pain, though, and no reason to fear. They were together, in this Dead World where love was a curseword, and together they would face the storm.

The wind churned, threw them one way and then the other-and as it withdrew from Brenda's apartment it took the two bodies with it, into the charged air over the city's roofs.

They flew, buffeted higher and higher, bone locked to bone. The city disappeared beneath them, and they went up into the clouds where the blue lightning danced.

They knew great joy, and at the upper limits of the clouds where the lightning was hottest, they thought they could see the stars.

When the storm pa.s.sed, a boy on the north side of the city found a strange object on the roof of his apartment building, near the pigeon roost. It looked like a charred-black construction of bones, melded together so you couldn't tell where one bone ended and the other began. And in that ma.s.s of bones was a silver chain, with a small ornament. A heart, he saw it was. A white heart, hanging there in the tangle of someone's bones.

He was old enough to realize that someone-two people, maybe-had escaped the Dead World last night. Lucky stiffs, he thought.

He reached in for the dangling heart, and it fell to ashes at his touch.

21/ Jack Ketchum The Visitor.

THE OLD WOMAN IN BED NUMBER 418B of Dexter Memorial was not his wife. There was a strong resemblance though.

Bea had died early on.

He had not been breathing well that night, the night the dead started walking, so they had gone to bed early without watching the news though they hated the news and probably would have chosen to miss it anyway. Nor had they awakened to anything alarming during the night. He still wasn't breathing well or feeling much better the following morning when John Blount climbed the stairs to the front door of the mobile home unit to visit over a cup of coffee as was his custom three or four days a week and bit Beatrice on the collarbone, which was not his custom at all.

Breathing well or not, Will pried him off of her and pushed him back down the stairs through the open door. John was no spring chicken either and the fall spread his brains out all across their driveway.

Will bundled Beatrice into the car and headed for the hospital half a mile away. And that was where he learned that all across Florida-all over the country and perhaps the world-the dead were rising. He learned by asking questions of the harried hospital personnel, the doctors and nurses who admitted her. Bea was hysterical having been bitten by a friend and fellow golfer so they sedated her and consequently it was doubtful that she ever learned the dead were doing anything at all. Which was probably just as well. Her brother and sister were buried over at Stoneyview Cemetery just six blocks away and the thought of them walking the streets of Punta Gorda again biting people would have upset her.

He saw some terrible things that first day.

He saw a man with his nose bitten off-the nosebleed to end all nosebleeds-and a woman wheeled in on a gurney whose b.r.e.a.s.t.s had been gnawed away. He saw a black girl not more than six who had lost an arm. Saw the dead and mutilated body of an infant child sit up and scream.

The sedation wore off. But Bea continued sleeping.

It was a troubled, painful sleep. They gave her painkillers through the IV and tied her arms and legs to the bed. The doctors said there was a kind of poison in her. They did not know how long it would take to kill her. It varied.

Each day he would arrive at the hospital to the sounds of sirens and gunfire outside and each night he would leave to the same. Inside it was relatively quiet unless one of them awoke and that only lasted a little while until they administered the lethal injection. Then it was quiet again and he could talk to her.

He would tell her stories she had heard many times but which he knew she would not mind his telling again. About his mother sending him out with a nickel to buy blocks of ice from the iceman on Stuyvesant Avenue. About playing pool with Jackie Gleason in a down-neck Newark pool hall just before the war and almost beating him. About the time he was out with his first-wife-to-be and his father-in-law-to-be sitting in a bar together and somebody insulted her and he took a swing at the guy but the guy had ducked and he pasted his future father-in-law instead.

He would urge her not to die. To try to come back to him.

He would ask her to remember their wedding day and how their friends were there and how the sun was shining.

He brought flowers until he could no longer stand the scent of them. He bought mylar balloons from the gift shop that said get well get well soon and tied them to the same bed she was tied to.

Days pa.s.sed with a numbing regularity. He saw many more horrible things. He knew that she was lingering far longer than most did. The hospital guards all knew him at the door by now and did not even bother to ask him for a pa.s.s anymore.

"Four eighteen B," he would say but probably even that wasn't necessary.

Nights he'd go home to a boarded-up mobile home in an increasingly deserted village, put a frozen dinner into the microwave and watch the evening news-it was all news now, ever since the dead started rising-and when it was over he'd go to bed. No friend came by. Many of his friends were themselves dead. He didn't encourage the living.

Then one morning she was gone.

Every trace of her.

The flowers were gone, the balloons, her clothing-everything. The doctors told him that she had died during the night but that as of course he must have noticed by now, they had this down pretty much to a science and a humane one at that, that once she'd come back again it had been very quick and she hadn't suffered.

If he wanted he could sit there for a while, the doctor said. Or there was a grief counselor who could certainly be made available to him.

He sat.

In an hour they wheeled in a pasty-faced redhead perhaps ten years younger than Will with what was obviously a nasty bite out of her left cheek just above the lip. A kiss, perhaps, gone awry. The nurses did not seem to notice him there. Or if they did they ignored him. He sat and watched the redhead sleep in his dead wife's bed.

In the morning he came by to visit.

He told the guard four eighteen B.

He sat in the chair and told her the story about playing pool with Gleason, how he'd sunk his G.o.dd.a.m.n cue ball going after the eight, and about buying rotten hamburger during the Great Depression and his first wife crying well into the night over a pound of spoiled meat. He told her the old joke about the rooster in the henyard. He spoke softly about friends and relations, long dead. He went down to the gift shop and bought her a card and a small potted plant for the window next to the bed.

Two days later she was gone. The card and potted plant were gone too and her drawer and closet were empty.

The man who lay there in her bed was about Will's age and roughly the same height and build and he had lost an eye and an ear along with his thumb, index and middle fingers of his hand, all on the right side of this body. He had a habit of lying slightly to his leftas though to turn away from what the dead had done to him.

Something about the man made Will think he was a sailor, some rough weathered texture to this face or perhaps the fierce bushy eyebrows and the grizzled white stubble of beard. Will had never sailed himself but he had always wanted to. He told the man about his summers as a boy at Asbury Park and Point Pleasant down at the Jersey sh.o.r.e, nights on the boardwalk and days with his family by the sea. It was the closest thing he could think of that the man might possibly relate to.

The man lasted just a single night.

Two more came and went-a middle-aged woman and a pretty teenage girl.

He did not know what to say to the girl. It had been years since he'd even spoken to a person who was still in her teens-unless you could count the cashiers at the market. So he sat and hummed to himself and read to her out of a four-month-old copy of People magazine.

He bought her daisies and a small stuffed teddy bear and placed the bear next to her on the bed.

The girl was the first to die and then come back in his presence.

He was surprised that it startled him so little. One moment the girl was sleeping and the next she was struggling against the straps which bound her to the bed, the thick grey-yellow mucus flowing from her mouth and nose spraying the sheets they had wrapped around her tight. There was a sound in her throat like the burning of dry leaves.

Will pushed his chair back toward the wall and watched her. He had the feeling there was nothing he could say to her.

On the wall above a small red monitor light was blinking on and off. Presumably a similar light was blinking at the nurse's station because within seconds a nurse, a doctor and a male attendant were all in the room and the attenddant was holding her head while the doctor administered the injection through her nostril far up into the brain. The girl shuddered once and then seemed to wilt and slide deep down into the bed. The stuffed bear tumbled to the floor.

The doctor turned to Will.

"I'm sorry," he said. "That you had to see this."

Will nodded. The doctor took him for a relative.

Will didn't mind.

They pulled the sheet up over her and glanced at him a moment longer and then walked out through the doorway.

He got up and followed. He took the elevator down to the ground floor and walked past the guard to the parking lot. He could hear automatic weapons-fire from the Wal-Mart down the block. He got into his car and drove home.

After dinner he had trouble breathing so he took a little oxygen and went to bed early. He felt a lot better in the morning.

Two more died. Both of them at night. Pa.s.sed like ghosts from his life.

The second to die in front of him was a hospital attendant. Will had seen him many times. A young fellow, slightly balding. Evidently he'd been bitten while a doctor administered the usual injection because the webbing of his hand was bandaged and suppurating slightly.

The attendant did not go easily. He was a young man with a thick muscular neck and he thrashed and shook the bed.

The third to die in front of him was the woman who looked so much like Bea. Who had her hair and eyes and general build and coloring.

He watched them put her down and thought, this was what it was like. Her face would have looked this way. Her body would have done that.

On the morning after she died and rose and died again he was walking past the first-floor guard, a soft little heavyset man who had known him by sight for what must have been a while now. "Four eighteen B," he said.

The guard looked at him oddly.

Perhaps it was because he was crying. The crying had gone on all night or most of it and here it was morning and he was crying once again. He felt tired and a little foolish. His breathing was bad.

He pretended that all was well as usual and. smiled at the guard and sniffed the bouquet of flowers he'd picked from his garden.

The guard did not return the smile. He noticed that the man's eyes were red-rimmed too and felt a moment of alarm because he seemed to sense that the eyes were not red as his were simply from too much crying. But you had to walk past the man to get inside so that was what he did.

The guard clutched his arm with his little white sausage fingers and bit at the stringy bicep just below the sleeve of Will's short-sleeved shirt. There was no one in the hall ahead of him by the elevators, no one to help him.

He kicked the man in the shin and felt dead skin rip beneath his shoe and wrenched his arm away. Inside his chest he felt a kind of snapping as though someone had snapped a twig inside him.

Heartbreak?

He pushed the guard straight-arm just as he had pushed John Blount so long and far ago and although there were no stairs this time there was a fire extinguisher on the wall and the guard's head hit it with a large clanging sound and he slid stunned down the face of the wall.

Will walked to the elevator and punched four. He concentrated on his breathing and wondered if they would be willing to give him oxygen if he asked them for it.

He walked into the room and stared. The bed was empty.

It had never been empty. Not once in all the times he'd visited.

It was a busy hospital.

That the bed was empty this morning was almost confusing to him. As though he had fallen down a rabbit-hole.

Still he knew it wasn't wise to argue when after all this time he finally had a stroke of luck.

He put the slightly battered flowers from his garden in a water gla.s.s. He drew water in the bathroom sink. He undressed quickly and found an open-backed hospital gown hanging in the closet, slipped it on over his mottled shoulders and climbed into bed between clean fresh-smelling sheets. The bite did not hurt now and there was just a little blood.

He waited for the nurse to arrive on her morning rounds.

He thought how everything was the same, really. How nothing much had changed whether the dead were walking or not. There were those who lived inside of life and those who for whatever reason did not or could not. Dead or not dead.

He waited for them to come and sedate him and strap him down and wished only that he had somebody to talk to-to tell the Gleason story, maybe, one last time. Gleason was a funny man in person just as he was on TV but with a foul nasty mouth on him, always cussing, and he had almost beat him.

22/ Kathe Koja The Prince Of.

Nox.

THE PRINCE OF NOX UPON A TABLE, pinned by plastic, praying for death.

The lights were recessed blue above him; his sky. Punishing medicinal smell, reek of plasma and clean gore. Directly beneath him, the smooth gurney landscape; they would not waste a real bed on him. His restraints, ignored because ubiquitous, specially made to bind the strong and mobile dead: hurried fruit of a terrible specialization but not a growth industry, no, or at least not anymore; what had the drivers of the plague wagons done with their vehicles when the crisis was over? Slimly constructed gauntlets of some heavy material, not precisely cloth nor precisely plastic, the dull metal fasteners like nickel scabs on the pale false flesh pinning forehead, chest, arms, legs, abdomen. They were smart enough, here, to be very careful.

He stretched, a little, the hemisphere of his restraints. To his left was the unwindowed wall, to his right the door bristling its redundancy of locks. He had a call b.u.t.ton-perhaps the ultimate grotesquerie-and a long-empty saline drip. From a small metal tree hung his chart, a monstrous thing with a definite life of its own. His name was written in fading blue capitals, alongside it and underlined (twice), his date of death.

He remembered everything.

His name was Death; the yang to birth's yin and he had gone through it heedless as a tramp, stunned by plain sensation when he should have been most aware. Still, how was he to guess that that first metamorphosis was itself the gate to a grander change, how could he have foretold? The nervous parking lot of a Piggly Wiggly, one of the few stores still open at night, the a.s.sault a surprise more dreadful than death would be: grabbed from behind by hands missing fingers, teeth on his body like porcelain chips and his own blood spraying stupid across the windshield of his Chevette, brown-bagged milk, cigarettes, lunchmeat smashing to a pulpy goulash on the blacktop. Lunch-meat. That's what it all came down to, the gift of life. Kiss of life. l.u.s.t for life. Crouched and dying against the hood of his car, his a.s.sailant's brute heedless attention now bestowed on the man trying for the car next to his, a big gray late model Ford like an elaborate moving sarcophagus, the man struggling with those stubborn jaws on his throat as if they were the hinges on the gates of h.e.l.l. Good luck.

The hood of his own car still warm, his temples and bowels one swimming migraine; disorientation; the plunging loss of control, horrible, horrible. And then: resuscitating agony, tissues lurching not back to life but back to service. All the smells. His own s.h.i.t. His own blood. Meat, somewhere, very ripe. Hiding behind the store, its back door open-the clerks were all dead, all two of them, he had watched them die-he hunched sideways in the pour of fluorescence, staring at his hands, unable to believe they could now reduce a human body to chunks and shreds.

Until he did it. Murder; but he was starving, the meat smell was everywhere: so absolute it reduced to the status of whim the greedy threshold quest for o.r.g.a.s.m, until then the strongest physical emotion he could imagine. To this hospital moment he still did not consciously remember whom he had killed, how, recalled only the sense of vomitfullness before he lay where he was to sleep, less than half a mile from the parking lot where he had achieved zombie-hood, Piggly Wiggly everlasting, His sleep was not as it had been, less dreams than random firings of misdirected neurons, cessation but no rest. He woke like an appliance turning on, itchy with dried blood, the yellowish gravel of broken patio blocks stubbling his cheek, the backs of his hands. He lay in the driveway of a house, fake brick, fake farmhouse mailbox and lurching gutters, the whole carelessly abandoned like a bad idea: there were still toys in the overgrown yard, a garden hose half-coiled, gritty chunks of charcoal in a rusting grill. When he stood up he was very dizzy; it was almost impossible to keep an even gait. So, he thought, remembered thinking (remembering now in the slow radiation of blue above him, the heinous scent of meat he could smell but not touch), that's why they walk so funny.

Inside the house through the open back door, cereal box still on the kitchen counter, more toys underfoot. Newspapers in the living room, he could not read them, he could not properly focus his eyes, In the bathroom, a small dog recently dead behind the toilet. More toys' in the tub, a duckie, a pair of red flat-bottomed boats that fit, moored, in the palms of his cold hands. He did not realize he was crying until he smelled his own tears.

He put everything back the way it had been and left the house, doors locked this time; it seemed important that the house stay undefiled. It was easier to keep to the sidewalk, less chance of stumbling. He walked back to the main road, careful to keep away from the infrequent cars until he realized there was no longer a reason to care.