Zombies - Encounters with the Hungry Dead Part 44

The room now, again. The tea and the woman. Your keys shining like fallen moon shards.

"Those men," Mrs. Gomez says, "they came into my yard."

But those men were not men; they were viruses walking. For them was true gray, of an everlasting shade. Stuffed in their non-minds like aging hot cotton.

She explains, "They bit me here."

And shows you her leg. She could've risked stockings, but that's have been risking pain. Your eyes, they seek the wall, the curtains. But you're a doctor, so you have to look.

"Mrs. Gomez," you say, because you have to say something.

But that wound, it speaks louder, saying nothing at all. It is, one could say, like a chain-hole with meat. The chain: her bone. The meat: her flesh. The color: off-blackness. The spots: conjunctivitis pink.

You stand. Make more eye contact. It's safe up here. You're going to have to inhale before you can speak.

"It's nothing" (it's) "we haven't" (getting worse) "seen before."

She hasn't a sense of your lies.

Two days till the grayness would descend down upon her. Soon an upright corpse where the widow once walked.

Yet you wept on the night of your first a.s.signment. His name won't escape you: it was Mr. Lyons. The name of a restaurant where you order the eggs. A widower, parallel to Gomez.

Would she be your last, just as he was your first?

You seek out such symmetries because you know the world is mad.

You can stick a fork in a bowl of water. You can thrust religion toward the mystery of dying. You can launch hard science at the face of unreason.

But the face will stay there, smiling. And wink.

The moment, now, finally.

Your mind leaves the living room, goes to fields of the night. Fields of flat-b.u.t.ton eyeb.a.l.l.s and reaching, cracked hands.

Mrs. Gomez speaks of flowers. The garden out back, it will summon her soon. When she's back from her treatments- Reach for your gun, one upward slash of your hand. Mrs. Gomez: not scared, nor shocked, nor confused, for there is simply not enough time. That's how good you've gotten.

Clean snap, through the frontal lobe.

Where the bone is less thick.

It's what they taught you.

Doctor...

It's always quiet, the night-time ride. No other cars care to dare the roads. Sometimes you rebel, though the light isn't green. Oftentimes, though, you stop, as expected.

And bear the crickets, the creaking, the wind.

Please now reach for yourself, though-for the strength which you bear. The might which bore the still of the womb.

Cruise now with confidence, beside leafy roads, and past fields upon which lone lights shudder, squat middle schools seated in the empty dark. Ponder the little towns on the way back to your own, and wonder at the lives and near-lives beneath those roofs.

Your wife: think of her, also. She awaits you in bed. Although she is sleeping, in her heart is a wait. Go to her, briskly, for she will save you.

Pray to arrive with the sun.

And to someday stop being the monster you've become.

24/ Max Brooks Great Wall: A.

Story From The Zombie War.

THE FOLLOWING INTERVIEW was conducted by the author as part of his official duties with the United Nations Commission for postwar data collection. Although excerpts have appeared in official UN reports, the interview in its entirety was omitted from Brook's personal publication, now ent.i.tled World War Z due to bureaucratic mismanagement by UN archivists. The following is a first-hand account of a survivor of the great crisis many now refer to simply as "The Zombie War."

THE GREAT WALL SECTION 3947-B SHAANXI CHINA.

Liu Huafeng began her career as a sales girl at the Takashimaya department store in Taiyuan and now owns a small general store near the sight of its former location. This weekend, as with the first weekend of every month, is her reserve duty. Armed with a radio, a flare gun, binoculars, and a DaDao, a modernized version of the ancient Chinese broadsword, she patrols her five-kilometer stretch of the Great Wall with nothing but the "the wind and my memories" for company.

This section of the Wall, the section I worked on, stretches from Yulin to Shemnu. It had originally been built by the Xia Dynasty, constructed of compacted sand and reed-lined earth encased on both sides by a thick outer sh.e.l.l of fired mud brick. It never appeared on any tourist postcards. It could never have hoped to rival sections of the Ming-Era, iconic stone "dragon spine." It was dull and functional, and by the time we began the reconstruction, it had almost completely vanished.

Thousands years of erosion; storms and desertification, had taken a drastic toll. The effects of human "progress" had been equally destructive. Over the centuries, locals had used-looted-its bricks for building materials. Modern road construction had done its part, too, removing entire sections that interfered with "vital" overland traffic. And, of course, what nature and peacetime development had begun, the crisis, the infestation and the subsequent civil war finished within the course of several months. In some places, all that was left were crumbling hummocks of compact filler. In many places, there was nothing at all.

I didn't know about the new government's plan to restore the Great Wall for our national defense. At first, I didn't even know I was part of the effort. In those early days, there were so many different people, languages, local dialects that they could have been birdsong for all the sense it made to me. The night I arrived, all you could see were torches and headlights of a few broken-down cars. I had been walking for nine days by this point. I was tired, frightened. I didn't know what I had found at first, only that the scurrying shapes in front of me were human. I don't know how long I stood there, but someone on a work gang spotted me. He ran over and started to chatter excitedly. I tried to show him that I didn't understand. He became frustrated, pointing at what looked like a construction sight behind him, a ma.s.s of activity that stretched left and right out into the darkness. Again, I shook my head, gesturing to my ears and shrugging like a fool. He sighed angrily, then raised his hand toward me. I saw he was holding a brick. I thought he was going to hit me with it so I started to back away. He then shoved the brick in my hands, motioned to the construction sight, and shoved me toward it.

I got within arm's length of the nearest worker before he s.n.a.t.c.hed the brick away. This man was from Taiyuan. I understood him clearly. "Well, what the f.u.c.k are you waiting for?" He snarled at me, "We need more! Go! Go!" And that is how I was "recruited" to work on the new Great Wall of China.

(She gestures to the uniform concrete edifice.) It didn't look at all like this that first frantic spring. What you are seeing are the subsequent renovations and reinforcements that adhere to late and postwar standards. We didn't have anything close to these materials back then. Most of our surviving infrastructure was trapped on the wrong side of the wall.

On the south side?

Yes, on the side that used to be safe, on the side that the Wall... that every Wall, from the Xia to the Ming was originally built to protect. The walls used to be a border between the haves and have-nots, between southern prosperity and northern barbarism. Even in modern times, certainly in this part of the country, most of our arable land, as well as our factories, our roads, rail lines and airstrips, almost everything we needed to undertake such a monumental task, was on the wrong side.

I've heard that some industrial machinery was transported north during the evacuation.

Only what could be carried on foot, and only what was in immediate proximity to the construction sight. Nothing farther than, say, twenty kilometers, nothing beyond the immediate battle lines or the isolated zones deep in infested territory.

The most valuable resource we could take from the nearby towns were the materials used to construct the towns themselves: wood, metal, cinder blocks, bricks-some of the very same bricks that had originally been pilfered from the wall. All of it went into the mad patchwork, mixed in with what could be manufactured quickly on sight. We used timber from the Great Green Wall* reforestation project, pieces of furniture and abandoned vehicles. Even the desert sand beneath our feet was mixed with rubble to form part of the core or else refined and heated for blocks of gla.s.s.

Gla.s.s?

Large, like so... [she draws an imaginary shape in the air, roughly twenty centimeters in length, width and depth]. An engineer from Shijiazhuang had the idea. Before the war, he had owned a gla.s.s factory, and he realized that since this province's most abundant resources are coal and sand, why not use them both? A ma.s.sive industry sprung up almost overnight, to manufacture thousands of these large, cloudy bricks. They were thick and heavy, impervious to a zombie's soft, naked fist. "Stronger than flesh" we used say, and, unfortunately for us, much sharper-sometimes the glazier's a.s.sistants would forget to sand down the edges before laying them out for transport.

(She pries her hand from the hilt of her sword. The fingers remain curled like a claw. A deep, white scar runs down the width of one palm.) I didn't know to wrap my hands. It cut right through to the bone, severed the nerves. I don't know how I didn't die of infection; so many others did.

It was a brutal, frenzied existence. We knew that every day brought the southern hordes closer, and that any second we delayed might doom the entire effort. We slept, if we did sleep, where we worked. We ate where we worked, p.i.s.sed and s.h.i.t right where we worked. Children-the Night Soil Cubs would hurry by with a bucket, wait while we did our business or else collect our previously discarded filth. We worked like animals, lived like animals. In my dreams I see a thousand faces, the people I worked with but never knew. There wasn't time for social interaction. We spoke mainly in hand gestures and grunts. In my dreams I try to find the time to speak to those alongside me, ask their names, their stories. I have heard that dreams are only in black and white. Perhaps that is true, perhaps I only remember the colors later, the light fringes of a girl whose hair had once been dyed green, or the soiled pink woman's bathrobe wrapped around a frail old man in tattered silken pajamas. I see their faces almost every night, only the faces of the fallen.

So many died. Someone working at your side would sit down for a moment, just a second to catch their breath, and never rise again. We had what could be described as a medical detail, orderlies with stretchers. There was nothing they could really do except try to get them to the aid station. Most of the time they didn't make it. I carry their suffering, and my shame with me each and every day.

Your shame?

As they sat, or lay at your feet... you knew you couldn't stop what you were doing, not even for a little compa.s.sion, a few kind words, at least make them comfortable enough to wait for the medics. You knew the one thing they wanted, what we all wanted, was water. Water was precious in this part of the province, and almost all we had was used for mixing ingredients into mortar. We were given less than half a cup a day. I carried mine around my neck in a recycled plastic soda bottle. We were under strict orders not to share our ration with the sick and injured. We needed it to keep ourselves working. I understand the logic, but to see someone's broken body curled up amongst the tools and rubble, knowing that the only mercy under heaven was just a little sip of water...

I feel guilty every time I think about it, every time I quench my thirst, especially because when it came my time to die, I happened, by sheer chance, to be near the aid station. I was on gla.s.s detail, part of the long, human conveyor to and from the kilns. I had been on the project for just under two months; I was starving, feverish, I weighed less than the bricks hanging from either side of my pole. As I turned to pa.s.s the bricks, I stumbled, landing on my face, I felt my two front teeth crack and tasted the blood. I closed my eyes and thought, This is my time. I was ready. I wanted it to end. If the orderlies hadn't been pa.s.sing by, my wish would have been granted.

For three days, I lived in shame; resting, washing, drinking as much water as I wanted while others were suffering every second on the wall. The doctors told me that I should stay a few extra days, the bare minimum to allow my body to recuperate. I would have listened if I didn't hear the shouts from an orderly at the mouth of the cave, "Red Flare!" he was calling. "Red Flare!"

Green flares meant an active a.s.sault, red meant overwhelming numbers. Reds had been uncommon, up until that point. I had only seen one, and that was far in the distance near the northern edge of Shemnu. Now they were coming at least once a week. I raced out of the cave, ran all the way back to my section, just in time to see rotting hands and heads begin to poke their way above the unfinished ramparts.

[We halt. She looks down at the stones beneath out feet.]

Here, right here. They were forming a ramp, using their trodden comrades for elevation. The workers were fending them off with whatever they could, tools and bricks, even bare fists and feet. I grabbed a rammer, an implement used for compacting earth. The rammer is an immense, unruly device, a meter-long metal shaft with horizontal handlebars on one end and a large, cylindrical, supremely heavy stone on the other. The rammer was reserved only for largest and strongest men in our work gang. I don't know how I managed to lift, aim, and bring it crashing down, over and over, on the heads and faces of the zombies below me...

The military was supposed to be protecting us from overrun attacks like these, but there just weren't enough soldiers left by that time.

[She takes me to the edge of the battlements and points to something roughly a kilometer south of us.]

There.

[In the distance, I can just make out a stone obelisk rising from an earthen mound.]

Underneath that mound is one of our garrison's last main battle tanks. The crew had run out of fuel and was using it as a pillbox. When they ran out of ammunition, they sealed the hatches and prepared to trap themselves as bait. They held on long after their food ran out and their canteens ran dry. "Fight on!" they would cry over their hand-cranked radio, "Finish the wall! Protect our people! Finish the wall!" The last of them, the seventeen-year-old driver held out for thirty-one days. You couldn't even see the tank by then, buried under a small mountain of zombies that suddenly moved away as they sensed that boy's last breath.

By that time, we had almost finished our section of the Great Wall, but the isolated attacks were ending, and the ma.s.sive, ceaseless, million-strong a.s.sault swarms began. If we had had to contend with those numbers in the beginning, if the heroes of the southern cities hadn't shed their blood to buy us time...

The new government knew it had to distance itself from the one it had just overthrown. It had to establish some kind of legitimacy with our people, and the only way to do that was to speak the truth. The isolated zones weren't "tricked" into becoming decoys like in so many other countries. They were asked, openly and honestly, to remain behind while others fled. It would be a personal choice, one that every citizen would have to make for themselves. My mother, she made it for me.

We had been hiding on the second floor of what used to be our five-bedroom house in what used to be one of Taiyuan's most exclusive suburban enclaves. My little brother was dying, bitten when my father had sent him out to look for food. He was lying in my parent's bed, shaking, unconscious. My father was sitting by his side, rocking slowly back and forth. Every few minutes he would call out to us. "He's getting better! See, feel his forehead. He's getting better!'The refugee train was pa.s.sing right by our house. Civil Defense Deputies were checking each door to find out who was going and who was staying. My mother already had a small bag of my things packed; clothes, food, a good pair of walking shoes, my father's pistol with the last three bullets. She was combing my hair in the mirror, the way she used to do when I was a little girl. She told me to stop crying and that someday soon they would rejoin me up north. She had that smile, that frozen, lifeless smile she only showed for father and his friends. She had it for me now, as I lowered myself down our broken staircase.

[Liu pauses, takes a breath, and lets her claw rest on the hard stone.]

Three months, that is how long it took us to complete the entire Great Wall. From Jingtai in the western mountains to the Great Dragon head on the Shanhaiguan Sea. It was never breached, never overrun. It gave us the breathing s.p.a.ce we needed to finally consolidate our population and construct a wartime economy. We were the last country to adopt the Redeker Plan, so long after the rest of the world, and just in time for the Honolulu Conference. So much time; so many lives, all wasted. If the Three Gorges Dam hadn't collapsed, if that other wall hadn't fallen, would we have resurrected this one? Who knows. Both are monuments to our short-sightedness, our arrogance, our disgrace.

They say that so many workers died building the original walls that a human life was lost for every mile. I don't know if that it was true of that time...

(Her claw pats the stone.) But it is now.

25/ Poppy Z. Brite Calcutta,.

Lord Of Nerves.

I WAS BORN IN A NORTH CALCUTTA HOSPITAL in the heart of an Indian midnight just before the beginning of the monsoon season. The air hung heavy as wet velvet over the Hooghly River, offshoot of the holy Ganga, and the stumps of banyan trees on the Upper Chitpur Road were flecked with dots of phosphorus like the ghosts of flames. I was as dark as the new moon in the sky, and I cried very little. I feel as if I remember this, because this is the way it must have been.

My mother died in labor, and later that night the hospital burned to the ground. (I have no reason to connect the two incidents; then again, I have no reason not to. Perhaps a desire to live burned on in my mother's heart. Perhaps the flames were fanned by her hatred for me, the insignificant mewling infant that had killed her.) A nurse carried me out of the roaring husk of the building and laid me in my father's arms. He cradled me, numb with grief.

My father was American. He had come to Calcutta five years earlier, on business. There he had fallen in love with my mother and, like a man who will not pluck a flower from its garden, he could not bear to see her removed from the hot, lush, squalid city that had sp.a.w.ned her. It was part of her exotica. So my father stayed in Calcutta. Now his flower was gone. He pressed his thin chapped lips to the satin of my hair. I remember opening my eyes-they felt tight and shiny, parched by the flames-and looking up at the column of smoke that roiled into the sky, a night sky blasted cloudy pink like a sky full of blood and milk.

There would be no milk for me, only chemical-tasting drops of formula from a plastic nipple. The morgue was in the bas.e.m.e.nt of the hospital and did not burn. My mother lay on a metal table, a hospital gown stiff with her dying sweat pulled up over her red-smeared crotch and thighs. Her eyes stared up through the blackened skeleton of the hospital, up to the milky b.l.o.o.d.y sky, and ash filtered down to mask her pupils.

My father and I left for America before the monsoon came. Without my mother Calcutta was a pestilential h.e.l.lhole, a vast cremation grounds, or so my father thought. In America he could send me to school and movies, ball games and Boy Scouts, secure in the knowledge that someone else would take care of me or I would take care of myself. There were no thuggees to rob me and cut my throat, no goondas who would s.n.a.t.c.h me and sell my bones for fertilizer. There were no cows to infect the streets with their steaming sacred p.i.s.s. My father could give me over to the comparative wholesomeness of American life, leaving himself free to sit in his darkened bedroom and drink whiskey until his long sensitive nose floated hazily in front of his face and the sabre edge of his grief began to dull. He was the sort of man who has only one love in his lifetime, and knows with the sick fervor of a fatalist that this love will be taken from him someday, and is hardly surprised when it happens.

When he was drunk he would talk about Calcutta. My little American mind rejected the place-I was in love with air-conditioning, hamburgers and pizza, the free and undiscriminating love that was lavished upon me every time I twisted the TV dial-but somewhere in my Indian heart I longed for it. When I turned eighteen and my father finally failed to wake up from one of his drunken stupors, I returned to the city of my b.l.o.o.d.y birth as soon as I had the plane fare in my hand.

Calcutta, you will say. What a place to have been when the dead began to walk.

And I reply, what better place to be? What better place than a city where five million people look as if they are already dead-might as well be dead- and another five million wish they were?

I have a friend named Devi, a prost.i.tute who began her work at the age of fifteen from a tarpaper shack on Sudder Street. Sudder is the Bourbon Street of Calcutta, but there is far less of the carnival there, and no one wears a mask on Sudder Street because disguises are useless when shame is irrelevant. Devi works the big hotels now, selling American tourists or British expatriates or German businessmen a taste of exotic Bengal spice. She is gaunt and beautiful and hard as nails. Devi says the world is a wh.o.r.e, too, and Calcutta is the p.u.s.s.y of the world. The world squats and spreads its legs, and Calcutta is the dank s.e.x you see revealed there, wet and fragrant with a thousand odors both delicious and foul. A source of lushest pleasure, a breeding ground for every conceivable disease.

The p.u.s.s.y of the world. It is all right with me. I like p.u.s.s.y, and I love my squalid city.

The dead like p.u.s.s.y, too. If they are able to catch a woman and disable her enough so that she cannot resist, you will see the lucky ones burrowing in between her legs as happily as the most avid lover. They do not have to come up for air. I have seen them eat all the way up into the body cavity. The internal female organs seem to be a great delicacy, and why not? They are the caviar of the human body. It is a sobering thing to come across a woman sprawled in the gutter with her intestines sliding from the shredded ruin of her womb, but you do not react. You do not distract the dead from their repast. They are slow and stupid, but that is all the more reason for you to be smart and quick and quiet. They will do the same thing to a man-chew off the soft p.e.n.i.s and scrotal sac like choice morsels of squid, leaving only a red raw hole. But you can sidle by while they are feeding and they will not notice you. I do not try to hide from them. I walk the streets and look; that is all I do anymore. I am fascinated. This is not horror, this is simply more of Calcutta.

First I would sleep late, through the sultry morning into the heat of the afternoon. I had a room in one of the decrepit marble palaces of the old city. Devi visited me here often, but on a typical morning I woke alone, clad only in twisted bedsheets and a luxurious patina of sweat. Sun came through the window and fell in bright bars across the floor. I felt safe in my second-story room as long as I kept the door locked. The dead were seldom able to navigate stairs, and they could not manage the sustained cooperative effort to break down a locked door. They were no threat to me. They fed upon those who had given up, those too traumatized to keep running: the senile, abandoned old, the catatonic young women who sat in gutters cradling babies that had died during the night. These were easy prey.

The walls of my room were painted a bright coral and the sills and door were aqua. The colors caught the sun and made the day seem cheerful despite the heat that shimmered outside. I went downstairs, crossed the empty courtyard with its dry marble fountain, and went out into the street. This area was barren in the heat, painfully bright, with parched weeds lining the road and an occasional smear of cow dung decorating the gutter. By nightfall both weeds and dung might be gone. Children collected cow s.h.i.t and patted it into cakes held together with straw, which could be sold as fuel for cooking fires.

I headed toward Chowringhee Road, the broad main thoroughfare of the city. Halfway up my street, hunched under the awning of a mattress factory, I saw one of the catatonic young mothers. The dead had found her, too. They had already taken the baby from her arms and eaten through the soft part at the top of the skull. Vacuous b.l.o.o.d.y faces rose and dipped. Curds of tender brain fell from slack mouths. The mother sat on the curb nearby, her arms cradling nothing. She wore a filthy green sari that was ripped across the chest. The woman's b.r.e.a.s.t.s protruded heavily, swollen with milk. When the dead finished with her baby they would start on her, and she would make no resistance. I had seen it before. I knew how the milk would spurt and then gush as they tore into her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. I knew how hungrily they would lap up the twin rivers of blood and milk.

Above their bobbing heads, the tin awning dripped long ropy strands of cotton. Cotton hung from the roof in dirty clumps, caught in the corners of the doorway like spiderweb. Someone's radio blared faintly in another part of the building, tuned to an English-language Christian broadcast. A gospel hymn a.s.sured Calcutta that its dead in Christ would rise. I moved on toward Chowringhee.

Most of the streets in the city are positively cluttered with buildings. Buildings are packed in cheek-by-jowl, helter-skelter, like books of different sizes jammed into a rickety bookcase. Buildings even sag over the street so that all you see overhead is a narrow strip of sky crisscrossed by miles of clotheslines. The flapping silks and cottons are very bright against the sodden, dirty sky. But there are certain vantage points where the city opens up and all at once you have a panoramic view of Calcutta. You see a long muddy hillside that has become home to a bustee, thousands and thousands of slum dwellings where tiny fires are tended through the night. The dead come often to these slums of tin and cardboard, but the people do not leave the bustee-where would they go? Or you see a wasteland of disused factories, empty warehouses, blackened smokestacks jutting into a rust-colored sky. Or a flash of the Hooghly River, steel-gray in its shroud of mist, spanned by the intricate girder-and-wirescape of the Howrah Bridge.

Just now I was walking opposite the river. The waterfront was not considered a safe place because of the danger from drowning victims. Thousands each year took the long plunge off the bridge, and thousands more simply waded into the water. It is easy to commit suicide at a riverfront because despair collects in the water vapor. This is part of the reason for the tangible cloud of despair that hangs over Calcutta along with its veil of humidity.

Now the suicides and the drowned street children were coming out of the river. At any moment the water might regurgitate one, and you would hear him scrabbling up the bank. If he had been in the water long enough he might tear himself to spongy gobbets on the stones and broken bricks that littered the waterfront; all that remained would be a trace of foul brown odor, like the smell of mud from the deep part of the river.

Police-especially the Sikhs, who are said to be more violent than Hindus-had been taking the dead up on the bridge to shoot them. Even from far away I could see spray-patterns of red on the drab girders. Alternately they set the dead alight with gasoline and threw them over the railing into the river. At night it was not uncommon to see several writhing shapes caught in the downstream current, the fiery symmetry of their heads and arms and legs making them into five-pointed human stars.

I stopped at a spice vendor's stand to buy a bunch of red chrysanthemums and a handful of saffron. The saffron I had him wrap in a twist of scarlet silk. "It is a beautiful day," I said to him in Bengali. He stared at me, half amused, half appalled. "A beautiful day for what?"