Zombies - Encounters with the Hungry Dead Part 45

True Hindu faith calls upon the believer to view all things as equally sacred. There is nothing profane-no dirty dog picking through the ash bin at a cremation ground, no stinking gangrenous stump thrust into your face by a beggar who seems to hold you personally responsible for all his woes. These things are as sacred as feasting day at the holiest temple. But even for the most devout Hindus it has been difficult to see these walking dead as sacred. They are empty humans. That is the truly horrifying thing about them, more than their vacuous hunger for living flesh, more than the blood caked under their nails or the shreds of flesh caught between their teeth. They are soulless; there is nothing in their eyes; the sounds they make-their farts, their grunts and mewls of hunger-are purely reflexive. The Hindu, who has been taught to believe in the soul of everything, has a particular horror of these drained human vessels. But in Calcutta life goes on. The shops are still open. The confusion of traffic still inches its way up Chowringhee. No one sees any alternatives.

Soon I arrived at what was almost invariably my day's first stop. I would often walk twenty or thirty miles in a day-I had strong shoes and nothing to occupy my time except walking and looking. But I always began at the Kaa-lighat, temple of the G.o.ddess.

There are a million names for her, a million vivid descriptions: Kali the Terrible, Kali the Ferocious, skull-necklace, destroyer of men, eater of souls. But to me she was Mother Kali, the only one of the vast and colorful pantheon of Hindu G.o.ds that stirred my imagination and lifted my heart. She was the Destroyer, but all final refuge was found in her. She was the G.o.ddess of the age. She could bleed and burn and still rise again, very awake, beautifully terrible.

I ducked under the garlands of marigolds and strands of temple bells strung across the door, and I entered the temple of Kali. After the constant clamor of the street, the silence inside the temple was deafening. I fancied I could hear the small noises of my body echoing back to me from the ceiling far above. The sweet opium glaze of incense curled around my head. I approached the idol of Kali, the jagrata. Her gimlet eyes watched me as I came closer.

She was tall, gaunter and more brazenly naked than my friend Devi even at her best moments. Her b.r.e.a.s.t.s were tipped with blood-at least I always imagined them so-and her two sharp fangs and the long streamer of a tongue that uncurled from her open mouth were the color of blood, too. Her hair whipped about her head and her eyes were wild, but the third crescent eye in the center of her forehead was merciful; it saw and accepted all. The necklace of skulls circled the graceful stem of her neck, adorned the sculpted hollow of her throat. Her four arms were so sinuous that if you looked away even for an instant, they seemed to sway. In her four hands she held a noose of rope, a skull-staff, a shining sword, and a gaping, very dead-looking severed head. A silver bowl sat at the foot of the statue just beneath the head, where the blood from the neck would drip. Sometimes this was filled with goat's or sheep's blood as an offering. The bowl was full today. In these times the blood might well be human, though there was no putrid smell to indicate it had come from one of the dead.

I laid my chrysanthemums and saffron at Kali' s feet. Among the other offerings, mostly sweets and bundles of spice, I saw a few strange objects. A fingerbone. A shrivelled mushroom of flesh that turned out upon closer inspection to be an ear. These were offerings for special protection, mostly wrested from the dead. But who was to say that a few devotees had not lopped off their own ears or finger joints to coax a boon from Kali? Sometimes when I had forgotten to bring an offering, I cut my wrist with a razor blade and let a few drops of my blood fall at the idol's feet.

I heard a shout from outside and turned my head for a moment. When I looked back, the four arms seemed to have woven themselves into a new pattern, the long tongue seemed to loll farther from the scarlet mouth. And-this was a frequent fantasy of mine-the wide hips now seemed to tilt forward, affording me a glimpse of the sweet and terrible petalled cleft between the thighs of the G.o.ddess.

I smiled up at the lovely sly face. "If only I had a tongue as long as yours, Mother," I murmured, "I would kneel before you and lick the folds of your holy p.u.s.s.y until you screamed with joy." The toothy grin seemed to grow wider, more lascivious. I imagined much in the presence of Kali.

Outside in the temple yard I saw the source of the shout I had heard. There is a stone block upon which the animals brought to Kali, mostly baby goats, are beheaded by the priests. A gang of roughly dressed men had captured a dead girl and were bashing her head in on the sacrificial block. Their arms rose and fell, ropy muscles flexing. They clutched sharp stones and bits of brick in their scrawny hands. The girl's half-pulped head still lashed back and forth. The lower jaw still snapped, though the teeth and bone were splintered. Foul thin blood coursed down and mingled with the rich animal blood in the earth beneath the block. The girl was nude, filthy with her own gore and waste. The flaccid b.r.e.a.s.t.s hung as if sucked dry of meat. The belly was burst open with gases. One of the men thrust a stick into the ruined gouge between the girl's legs and leaned on it with all his weight.

Only in extensive stages of decay can the dead be told from the lepers.

The dead are greater in number now, and even the lepers look human when compared to the dead. But that is only if you get close enough to look into the eyes. The faces in various stages of wet and dry rot, the raw ends of bones rubbing through skin like moldy cheesecloth, the cancerous domes of the skulls are the same. After a certain point lepers could no longer stay alive begging in the streets, for most people would now flee in terror at the sight of a rotting face. As a result the lepers were dying, then coming back, and the two races mingled like some obscene parody of incest. Perhaps they actually could breed. The dead could obviously eat and digest, and seemed to excrete at random like everyone else in Calcutta, but I supposed no one knew whether they could e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.e or conceive.

A stupid idea, really. A dead womb would rot to pieces around a fetus before it could come halfway to term; a dead scrotal sac would be far too cold a cradle for living seed. But no one seemed to know anything about the biology of the dead. The newspapers were hysterical, printing picture upon picture of random slaughter by dead and living alike. Radio stations had either gone off the air or were broadcasting endless religious exhortations that ran together in one long keening whine, the edges of Muslim, Hindu, Christian doctrine beginning to fray and blur.

No one in India could say for sure what made the dead walk. The latest theory I had heard was something about a genetically engineered microbe that had been designed to feed on plastic: a microbe that would save the world from its own waste. But the microbe had mutated and was now eating and "replicating" human cells, causing basic bodily functions to reactivate. It did not much matter whether this was true. Calcutta was a city relatively unsurprised to see its dead rise and walk and feed upon it. It had seen them doing so for a hundred years.

All the rest of the lengthening day I walked through the city. I saw no more dead except a cl.u.s.ter far away at the end of a blocked street, in the last rags of b.l.o.o.d.y light, fighting each other over the bloated carca.s.s of a sacred cow.

My favorite place at sunset is by the river where I can see the Howrah Bridge. The Hooghly is painfully beautiful in the light of the setting sun. The last rays melt onto the water like hot ghee, turning the river from steel to khaki to nearly golden, a blazing ribbon of light. The bridge rises black and skeletal into the fading orange sky. Tonight an occasional skid of bright flowers and still-glowing greasy embers floated by, the last earthly traces of bodies cremated farther up the river. Above the bridge were the burning ghats where families lined up to incinerate their dead and cast the ashes into the holy river. Cremation is done more efficiently these days, or at least more hurriedly. People can reconcile in their hearts their fear of strangers' dead, but they do not want to see their own dead rise.

I walked along the river for a while. The wind off the water carried the scent of burning meat. When I was well away from the bridge, I wandered back into the maze of narrow streets and alleyways that lead toward the docks in the far southern end of the city. People were already beginning to settle in for the night, though here a bedroom might mean your own packing crate or your own square of sidewalk. Fires glowed in nooks and corners. A warm breeze still blew off the river and sighed its way through the winding streets. It seemed very late now. As I made my way from corner to corner, through intermittent pools of light and much longer patches of darkness, I heard small bells jingling to the rhythm of my footsteps. The bra.s.s bells of rickshaw men, ringing to tell me they were there in case I wished for a ride. But I could see none of the men. The effect was eerie, as if I were walking alone down an empty night-time street being serenaded by ghostly bells. The feeling soon pa.s.sed. You are never truly alone in Calcutta.

A thin hand slid out of the darkness as I pa.s.sed. Looking into the doorway it came from, I could barely make out five gaunt faces, five forms huddled against the night. I dropped several coins into the hand and it slid out of sight again. I am seldom begged from. I look neither rich nor poor, but I have a talent for making myself all but invisible. People look past me, sometimes right through me. I don't mind; I see more things that way. But when I am begged from I always give. With my handful of coins, all five of them might have a bowl of rice and lentils tomorrow.

A bowl of rice and lentils in the morning, a drink of water from a broken standpipe at night.

It seemed to me that the dead were among the best-fed citizens of Calcutta.

Now I crossed a series of narrow streets and was surprised to find myself coming up behind the Kalighat. The side streets are so haphazardly arranged that you are constantly finding yourself in places you had no idea you were even near. I had been to the Kalighat hundreds of times, but I had never approached it from this direction. The temple was dark and still. I had not been here at this hour before, did not even know whether the priests were still here or if one could enter so late. But as I walked closer I saw a little door standing open at the back. The entrance used by the priests, perhaps. Something flickered from within: a candle, a tiny mirror sewn on a robe, the smoldering end of a stick of incense.

I slipped around the side of the temple and stood at the door for a moment. A flight of stone steps led up into the darkness of the temple. The Kalighat at night, deserted, might have been an unpleasant prospect to some. The thought of facing the fierce idol alone in the gloom might have made some turn away from those steps. I began to climb them.

The smell reached me before I ascended halfway. To spend a day walking through Calcutta is to be a.s.sailed by thousands of odors both pleasant and foul: the savor of spices frying in ghee, the stink of s.h.i.t and urine and garbage, the sick-sweet scent of the little white flowers called mogra that are sold in garlands and that make me think of the gardenia perfume American undertakers use to mask the smell of their corpses.

Almost everyone in Calcutta is scrupulously clean in person, even the very poor. They will leave their trash and their spit everywhere, but many of them wash their bodies twice a day. Still, everyone sweats under the sodden veil of heat, and at midday any public place will be redolent with the smell of human perspiration, a delicate tang like the mingled juices of lemons and onions. But lingering in the stairwell was an odor stronger and more foul than any I had encountered today. It was deep and brown and moist; it curled at the edges like a mushroom beginning to dry. It was the perfume of mortal corruption. It was the smell of rotting flesh.

Then I came up into the temple, and I saw them.

The large central room was lit only with candles that flickered in a restless draft, first this way, then that. In the dimness the worshippers looked no different from any other supplicants at the feet of Kali. But as my eyes grew accustomed to the candlelight, details resolved themselves. The withered hands, the ruined faces. The burst body cavities where ropy organs could be seen trailing down behind the cagework of ribs.

The offerings they had brought.

By day Kali grinned down upon an array of blossoms and sweetmeats lovingly arranged at the foot of her pedestal. The array spread there now seemed more suited to the G.o.ddess. I saw human heads balanced on raw stumps of necks, eyes turned up to crescents of silver-white. I saw gobbets of meat that might have been torn from a belly or a thigh. I saw severed hands like pale lotus flowers, the fingers like petals opening silently in the night.

Most of all, piled on every side of the altar, I saw bones. Bones picked so clean that they gleamed in the candlelight. Bones with smears of meat and long snotty runners of fat still attached. Skinny arm-bones, clubby leg-bones, the pretzel of a pelvis, the beadwork of a spine. The delicate bones of children. The crumbling ivory bones of the old. The bones of those who could not run.

These things the dead brought to their G.o.ddess. She had been their G.o.ddess all along, and they her acolytes.

Kali's smile was hungrier than ever. The tongue lolled like a wet red streamer from the open mouth. The eyes were blazing black holes in the gaunt and terrible face. If she had stepped down from her pedestal and approached me now, if she had reached for me with those sinuous arms, I might not have been able to fall to my knees before her. I might have run. There are beauties too terrible to be borne.

Slowly the dead began to turn toward me. Their faces lifted and the rotting cavities of their nostrils caught my scent. Their eyes shone iridescent. Faint starry light shimmered in the empty s.p.a.ces of their bodies. They were like cutouts in the fabric of reality, like conduits to a blank universe. The void where Kali ruled and the only comfort was in death.

They did not approach me. They stood holding their precious offerings and they looked at me-those of them that still had eyes-or they looked through me. At that moment I felt more than invisible. I felt empty enough to belong among these human sh.e.l.ls.

A ripple seemed to pa.s.s through them. Then-in the uncertain candlelight, in the light that shimmered from the bodies of the dead-Kali did move.

The twitch of a finger, the deft turn of a wrist-at first it was so slight as to be nearly imperceptible. But then her lips split into an impossibly wide, toothy grin and the tip of her long tongue curled. She rotated her hips and swung her left leg high into the air. The foot that had trod on millions of corpses made a pointe as delicate as a prima ballerina's. The movement spread her s.e.x wide open.

But it was not the petalled mandala-like cleft I had imagined kissing earlier. The p.u.s.s.y of the G.o.ddess was an enormous deep red hole that seemed to lead down to the center of the world. It was a gash in the universe, it was rimmed in blood and ash. Two of her four hands beckoned toward it, inviting me in. I could have thrust my head into it, then my shoulders. I could have crawled all the way into that wet crimson eternity, and kept crawling forever.

Then I did run. Before I had even decided to flee I found myself falling down the stone staircase, cracking my head and my knee on the risers. At the bottom I was up and running before I could register the pain. I told myself that I thought the dead would come after me. I do not know what I truly feared was at my back. At times I thought I was running not away from something, but toward it.

I ran all night. When my legs grew too tired to carry me I would board a bus. Once I crossed the bridge and found myself in Howrah, the even poorer suburb on the other side of the Hooghly. I stumbled through desolate streets for an hour or more before doubling back and crossing over into Calcutta again. Once I stopped to ask for a drink of water from a man who carried two cans of it slung on a long stick across his shoulders. He would not let me drink from his tin cup, but poured a little water into my cupped hands. In his face I saw the mingled pity and disgust with which one might look upon a drunk or a beggar. I was a well-dressed beggar, to be sure, but he saw the fear in my eyes.

In the last hour of the night I found myself wandering through a wasteland of factories and warehouses, of smokestacks and rusty corrugated tin gates, of broken windows. There seemed to be thousands of broken windows.

After a while I realized I was on the Upper Chitpur Road. I walked for a while in the watery light that fills the sky before dawn. Eventually I left the road and staggered through the wasteland. Not until I saw its girders rising around me like the charred bones of a prehistoric animal did I realize I was in the ruins of the hospital where I had been born.

The hole of the bas.e.m.e.nt had filled up with broken gla.s.s and crumbling metal, twenty years' worth of cinders and weeds, all washed innocent in the light of the breaking dawn. Where the building had stood there was only a vast depression in the ground, five or six feet deep. I slid down the shallow embankment, rolled, and came to rest in the ashes. They were infinitely soft; they cradled me. I felt as safe as an embryo. I let the sunrise bathe me. Perhaps I had climbed into the gory chasm between Kali's legs after all, and found my way out again.

Calcutta is cleansed each morning by the dawn. If only the sun rose a thousand times a day, the city would always be clean.

Ashes drifted over me, smudged my hands gray, flecked my lips. I lay safe in the womb of my city, called by its poets Lord of Nerves, city of joy, the p.u.s.s.y of the world. I felt as if I lay among the dead. I was that safe from them: I knew their G.o.ddess, I shared their many homes. As the sun came up over the mud and glory of Calcutta, the sky was so full of smoky clouds and pale pink light that it seemed, to my eyes, to burn.

26/ John Skipp And Marc Levinthal.

G.o.d Save The Queen.

Part One The Boy.

I.

He drifted through black waters of sleep, across an oceanic silence; and when the dark waters parted, the nameless boy found himself once again walking. Walking through the haunted slumber land remains of London, in what seemed to be the East End, alone.

The air was freezing-cold damp off the river. Funny that, now wasn't it, how he could feel the cold in a dream?

He was looking for his house, but he just couldn't find it. No roof, no door, no window registered. There were rows upon rows of lifeless homes, stretching out endlessly before him; and though with his gaze he groped hard for his bearings, not one single recognizable detail appeared.

And yes, he felt lost. And yes, he felt frightened And no; as in his waking life, there was no one left to ask.

The dead were all around him, of course: lumbering, stupid, eternally hungry. Reeking of old meat: their victims', their own. Husks of selfhood, on unstinting auto drive. They were looking for something, too. But evidently, it was no longer him. He could at least thank G.o.d for that.

It wasn't, it seemed, that the dead couldn't see him. They could. They just didn't seem to care. They were all honed in on some inscrutable postmortem live-meat vibe, and evidently he no longer aired on that station.

Like an apparition so dense as to simulate ma.s.s, he watched them walk around him, then pa.s.s right by.

The boy touched himself: gaunt girlish features, sparrow chest to genitals, across the a.s.s and back. He ran long bony fingers through dark matted hair still streaked with red, blue, violet, green. He felt himself alive. Felt righteously so. Felt more alive than anyone he knew.

And yet, at times-when he looked in their eyes-he could almost hear and smell and feel the necro-frequency's whispered breath: a subcutaneous static tickling, at the furthest marrow-depths.

Whatever its message, it would not come clear.

As if, for him, it were not yet time.

And he couldn't find the house. Couldn't remember what it looked like. Couldn't remember much at all. He felt empty, hopeless desperation, as though he'd been searching forever; and so far as he knew, he quite possibly had. For all he knew, he'd already pa.s.sed the place a million f.u.c.king times.

It made him so lonely, this disconnection: this pointed loss of time, place, self. Most of the time, in waking life, he didn't let it bother him. But in the dream, it was soul-crushing lonely.

Strange indeed, how emotional sensation was so much more vivid in the context of the dream.

And then, all at once, Vince blundered up, out of the crowd of milling dead. The shock of recognition-of any at all-blew the boy back in his tracks, put a shudder through the membrane of sleep.

He looked at Vince-yes, he of the pocked chin and Husky-blue eyes; ol' ten-inch Vince-and found himself yelling, "Hey!' Actually shouting and waving for the attention of the living dead.

Vince was snuffling at a garbage container. Like the others, he looked up, then away. The boy stepped forward, felt a clean surge of rage, slammed into the bin and sent his dead ex-lover sprawling.

Vince hit the moist dream-cobblestones hard, staring up in blank zomboid confusion. No stir through the shuffling community "It's me!" the boy screamed. "It's me!"

Vince stared up as the others shambled past, and his look would have said what do you want from me? if his look had said anything at all. But it didn't. It was vacant as an enema's r.e.c.t.u.m. It was barren as a fresh-aborted womb.

And it was there, in that blank-met stare, that the boy abruptly snapped out of the dream.

II.

He woke up, shivering in the record shop on King's Road sleeping behind a barricade of alb.u.m crates in the stockroom. The sun had freshly fallen, but he could see his breath in the dim candlelight, and wrapped his overcoat more tightly around his delicate frame.

It was a chill evening, which was a good thing. The cold slowed the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds down. Not enough to stop them, but any edge is a good edge, especially when the odds are a million to one against you.

The stockroom was a favorite hiding place, one of more than twenty at the top of his rotation. The boy found it wise to break things up: never stay in one place too long, or return too often. The dead had no strategic mental capabilities, but their short-term memory could surprise you.

In the well over a year he'd been surviving all alone-the rest of the last of his fellow street rats having been duly shredded, or converted by default to the opposite camp-this was perhaps the thirtieth time he'd stayed here overnight. And it was a testament to just how alone he truly was that, in all that time, n.o.body had raided his stash. The last tins of meat, the last packs of smokes were right where he'd left them. And thank G.o.d for that. Pickings had gotten mighty slim in the days turned to months turned to years since the End.

The boy stretched, took a stale John Player from his pocket, lit it off the candle's stub. The nicotine went straight to his head, amping the peculiar Buzz that always seemed to be with him these days. It was good to get that initial disorienting blast out of the way, first thing, in a place that was relatively safe from harm; and once he'd realized that the dead couldn't really smell past their own rotting brains, it had become his waking ritual.

It gave him roughly ten minutes, at the start of each night, to put his daily ducks into a row. Figure out where he was off to next. Muse a little.

Maybe even remember who he was.

When that didn't happen, he snubbed out the b.u.t.t, loaded his pockets and put out the candle. Then he carefully took a small section of the crates down, slid out of his hidey-hole, put his ear against the stockroom door and listened. He couldn't hear anything knocking around out in the store, but there was no way to be sure. Sometimes they just stood still, for hours on end: not sleeping, but not exactly conscious either. Just waiting for some little sound or motion to activate them.

Slowly, he cracked open the door and peered out. In the dim evening light, the aisles between the rows of ransacked alb.u.m bins appeared to be empty. He thought, and not for the first time, what an astonishing waste it all was: all that excellent music, and no way to play it. Figures that when vinyl died, it had to take all of western civilization with it. The boy had always felt that digital was a bad idea.

It took a minute for the sound from the street to register.

It began, for starters, from so far away that it bled rather than erupted into his consciousness. And said consciousness, still rocking from the confluence of nicotine and his new perma-Buzz had gone off on a little idle speculation of its own, (something about how, if the sounds of real life were best reflected by the wholeness of full-bodied a.n.a.log waves, then maybe living death was like a bad digital simulation: trillions of little squared-off wave-bits, attempting to replicate the sweep of true sound. Fake life, not real life. Catching bits, but missing out on the whole.) (Which led him to think about migrating factors like distortion and static: vibrational corrosives that snuck in sideways to coa.r.s.en or devour the original signal. Whatever that might be. And whatever it might mean.) (Which begged the question: how and why had G.o.d or whatever changed the format of human experience?) This type of thought was relatively new to him. In the past, insofar as he could recall, he'd been a fairly shallow young man: a survivor, to be sure, but one far more concerned with what, who, and when than the esoterics of how or why.

But as time had gone on, and the Buzz had slowly grown, he'd found himself increasingly p.r.o.ne to Deep Thoughts. They came to him frequently, surprisingly, cogently.

And as he was thinking these things, the sounds were getting closer.

It wasn't till the first distant gunshots cut through that he noticed the rowling under growl. A truck or something. No more than six blocks away.

"f.u.c.k," he said, hands clenching, trying to get a bead on the situation. Unless the dead had finally learned how to drive, and fire off guns, these were people that he might want to meet.

Over the years, he'd heard such sounds before. But always too distant. Or the timing was wrong. There had been times, along the way, when the last thing he wanted was to run into still-extant human beings. Especially ones with guns.

He did not miss the threat of rape, much less the actuality. He did not miss having his shirt stolen. And he did not, as a rule, miss people much at all.

But it had been a long time since bands of predators roamed. Most of them were dead, and there was not much left to steal. He figured that anyone left with bullets was doing way better than he was.

More shots went off, and tires squealed. He looked out the shattered front windows, and thought he saw headlights glimmer, dim, off the bricks of the chemist shop on the corner.

"f.u.c.k," he said again, and then went quickly back into the hidey-hole for his axe. If they were shooting, that meant that there were dead out on the street. And the more they shot, the more dead would come. Which would doubtless be bad news for him.

Because he was going out.

Did this make sense? He wasn't sure. If he went out there, he was exposing himself. If they didn't pick him up, he would probably get eaten. If they did, then... what? G.o.d only knew. Slavery. Friendship. A few extra meals. Hopefully s.e.x, and lots of it.

Or maybe just a bullet in the head.

He thought all this as the truck and the gunshots drew nearer, as he grabbed the fire axe and made his way to the front door, on impulse pulling another cigarette out and lighting it, as if to say the dead don't smoke! Already committed, without quite knowing why, to what he was about to do.

Then he was out the door. Out on the street.

Surrounded by the dead.

And it was not like the dream. They saw him right off, and they were moved. Their body language, as they tilted toward him, more than said it all.

Terror flared, and the boy began to run: fire axe in one hand, cigarette in the other. He ran in the direction of the sound, the light that was even now blasting toward him. When he looked down the King's Road, he was half-blinded by the high beams that nailed him, could almost see the shape of the vehicle that bore them.