Zombies: The Recent Dead Part 39

"Business was good?" George interrupted Louis. "What did you do?"

Louis ran a thumb around the rim of his gla.s.s.

"It didn't cost much. A boat. Provisions. We bought our cargo for guns . . . and necklaces, or whatever: beads and sc.r.a.p." He opened a weathered palm. There was nothing in it.

"What cargo?" George interrupted. This was the point. It was why Mama Jaqi had sent him.

"Slaves," Louis said. "Lots of slaves."

"Ah, yes," George said. Mama Jaqi had been a slave.

"I made money," Louis said. "For the first time I wasn't some peasant in Provencal. I had a house with gardens." Louis looked at George. "I did good! I gave money to charity. I was a good citizen. I was a good businessman."

"I am sure you were," George said. He felt nothing against Louis. In another life, he would maybe have sympathized with Louis' arguments. He remembered using some of them once, a long time ago. A brief flash of a memory occurred to him. George had desperately blabbered some of the same things, trying to defend himself to the incensed Mama Jaqi.

George shook away the ghostlike feel of pa.s.sion to prod Louis' story along. "But what a shock seeing your brother must have been." George was here for the story. He wanted it over quickly. Time was getting on, and George had to open the shop tomorrow. He would have to finish Mama Jaqi's deed soon.

"I thought some horrible trick had been played on me," Louis said. "I had so many questions about what had happened. And all Jean would do was tell me I had to leave. Leave the business. Leave the island. I refused." Louis made a motion at the bartender for more beer. "I was still in Haiti when it all began. Toussaint . . . the independence. I lost it all when the blacks ran us all off the island. I slipped away on a small boat to America with nothing. Nothing." Louis looked at George, and George saw a world of misery swimming in the man's eyes. "In France, they hear I am dead. I can only think of Katrina remarrying." He stopped and looked down at George's arm.

"What is it?" George asked.

Louis reached a finger out and pulled back the cuff of George's sleeve. Underneath, a faint series of scars marked George's wrist.

"Jean had those," Louis said. The barkeep set another mug in front of Louis, and left after George paid for it. "Do me a favor," Louis said, letting go of George's sleeve. "One last favor."

"If I can," George said.

"Let me do this properly, like a real man. Eh? Would you do that?"

"Yes," George said.

Louis took his last long gulp from the mug, then stood up.

"I will be out in the alley."

George watched him stagger out the tavern.

After several minutes George got up and walked out. The distant cold hit him square in the face when he opened the door, and several men around the tables yelled at him to hurry and get out and shut the door.

In the alley by the tavern, George paused. Louis stepped out of the darkness holding a knife in his left hand, swaying slightly in the wind.

Neither of them said anything. They circled each other for a few seconds, then Louis stumbled forward and tried to slash at George's stomach. George stepped away from the crude attempt and grabbed the Frenchman's wrist. It was his intent to take the knife away, but Louis slipped and fell onto the stones. He fell on his arm, knocking his own knife away, then cracked his head against the corner of a stone.

Louis didn't move anymore. He still breathed, though: a slight heaving and the air steaming out from his mouth.

George crouched and put a knee to Louis' throat. The steaming breath stopped, leaving the air still and quiet. A long minute pa.s.sed, then Louis opened an eye. He struggled, kicking a small pool of half-melted snow with his tattered boots. George kept his knee in place.

When Louis stopped moving George relaxed, but kept the knee in place for another minute.

The door to the tavern opened, voices carried into the alley. Someone hailed for a cab and the clip-clop of hooves quickened by the tavern. George kept still in the alley's shadows. When the voices trailed off into the distance George moved again. He checked Louis' pockets until he found what he wanted: the necklace. He put it back into his own pocket. Then he stood up and walked out of the alley to hail his own cab.

The snow got worse towards the harbor and his shop. The horses pulling the cab snorted and slowed down, and the whole vehicle would shift and slide with wind gusts. George sat looking out at the barren, wintry landscape. It was cold and distant, like his own mechanical feelings. He could hear occasional s.n.a.t.c.hes of the driver whistling Amazing Grace to himself and the horses.

Mama Jaqi had done well. George felt nothing but a compulsion for her bidding. Obey . . . no horror about what he had just done. Just a dry, crusty satisfaction.

When he got out George paid the driver. He took the creaky back steps up. He lit several candles and sat in his study for a while, still fully dressed. Eventually he put his fingers to the candle in front of him and watched the edges turn from white, to red, to brown, and then to a blistered black. The burnt flesh smelled more like incense than cooked flesh.

He pulled them away.

Tomorrow they would be whole again.

George pulled the silver necklace out with his good hand. He set it on the shelf, next to all the other pieces of flashy trinkets. Another story ended, another decoration on his shelf.

How many more would it take, George wondered, before Mama Jaqi freed him? How many lives did she deem a worthy trade for the long suffering she knew as her life? Or for the horrors of George's own terrible past? George didn't know. She'd taken that ability away from him. In this distant reincarnation of himself, George knew that any human, pa.s.sionate response he could muster would be wrong.

Even his old feelings would have been wrong.

Long after the candles burned out George sat, waiting.

About the Author.

Tobias S. Buckell is a Caribbean-born writer who grew up in Grenada, the British Virgin Islands, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. He has published stories in various magazines and anthologies. His three Caribbean SF novels, Crystal Rain, Ragam.u.f.fin,, and Sly Mongoose were published by Tor Books, as well as the New York Times bestselling novel Halo: The Cole Protocol. He is currently working on his next book.

Story Notes.

Buckell's subtle story is yet another interpretation of what a zombie could be. Here, George Petros, an early nineteenth-century New England jeweler, is obviously Mama Jaqi's zombie-but he is an emotionless "distant reincarnation of himself" with the appearance and demeanor of a normal man and superhuman powers of regeneration. But, as with many zombie stories, the author uses fiction to make a social comment: Mama Jaqi, a slave recently freed in the Haitian Revolution, is taking revenge on slavetraders. George's last name is of interest, too. In Haitian Voudou, there are two primary types of spirits (loa): Rada and Petwo (or Petro, Pethro, etc.). The Petwo are "hotter" loas than the Rada, and less compromising. They are also a.s.sociated with the brutal experience of slavery and consequent uprisings against it. In Greek petros means "a piece of rock; a stone."

Dead Man's Land.

David Wellington.

The dead man couldn't get away, no matter how hard he struggled. Barbed wire wreathed the outer perimeter of the WalMart parking lot, long droopy coils of it that bounced every time he tried to convulse his way to freedom. The blotchy skin of his neck tore open and a little dried blood sifted out. He pulled again, his arm held motionless by the wire and then stopped again, confused, lacking the brainpower to unsnag himself, lacking the energy to panic.

The girl-Winona-threw a rock that bounced off his skull but didn't crack the bone. She had blond hair pulled back in a braid curled and oiled until it looked like metal and eyes the color of old gla.s.s bottles. We stood on the loading dock of the superstore a hundred yards from the dead man. My hair and clothes still smelled like the cookfires burning inside. I couldn't wait to get out there, onto the road again. My cargo had already thrown one tantrum that morning, demanding she be allowed to stay. Too bad for her.

"Is this enough?" her father asked. He wore a bright orange vest and a baseball hat crowned with a ring of bird skulls. He was an a.s.sistant Manager for WalMart and a man of some importance. He held out to me an orange plastic pill bottle. The label had been worn off long ago and the contents were a mixed a.s.sortment of colorful capsules and tablets, some of them crumbled near to dust, all of them decades past their expiration date. I nodded to the manager and grabbed the girl's hand. "Now you're mine," I told her, "and you'll behave, or else." Her father pursed his lips but I don't make my living coddling the civilized folk of the stores. I pointed at the dead man in the wire. "That's just what we call a slack. Too dumb and too far gone to hunt us, sure. You make too much racket throwing stones, though, and you'll attract his friends, and they bite."

She merely stared at me, those green eyes wide and vacant. A look she'd practiced, sure. She didn't care, wasn't going to care unless I gave her a reason. I pulled her along behind me as I stormed down the ramp to the parking lot. In my other arm I cradled my spring-lance, the one thing in the world I couldn't afford to lose.

"If any harm comes to her-" the manager shouted at my back.

I finished the thought for him. "Then you won't see me again." It wasn't what he wanted to hear. Screw him.

There was no gate or door in the barbed wire for us to pa.s.s through. Instead a couple of boys who were watching the captive slack dragged out a sheet of plywood and leaned it up against the barrier, making a ramp for us. The girl refused to climb the ramp. Maybe she thought she'd get splinters. "My name is Cher," I told her. "I'm what your dad calls a Roadie. You know what that means?"

"Half human being, half wild folk," Winona said, watching the boys instead of me. "You travel between the Stores. You cross Dead Man's Land, to conduct our trade. That makes you our servant. Do you know what I am? I'm the daughter of a Manager and you've been hired to protect me."

"I suppose that's so, on this side," I said. I picked her up by the back of her pants and threw her over the wire. Behind me on the loading dock I heard someone gasp and someone else yell. I ran over the ramp and kicked it back, cutting off the only way in, getting shut of the place. I grabbed her yellow hair and stared into those green, green eyes. I showed her my spring-lance, a coffee can on the end of a wooden pole. The can concealed a spring-loaded steel spike long enough to skewer most heads. "Now we're in my world, little girl. Now you're nothing but ghoulbait. Understand?"

Why was I so hard on her? She needed to behave, of course, or she could get us killed. But there was more, a special reason to hate her, and it could be summed up in two words: Full up.

That was what they told my grandfather when he went to the great stores along the New Jersey Turnpike with me in his arms, back when the highways were still crowded with the fleeing going north and going south. "Full up," they said at Barnes and n.o.ble. Full up at CostCo and TJ Maxx. No room for us who waited too long.

So he took me into the wilds, which at that time were lush and green but no higher than your ankle. The mowed lawns, the abandoned houses of suburbia. We hid where we could and moved on every morning. We lived on canned food and we listened to the radio in the dark, listened to static when that was all there was, hoping to hear of shelter somewhere, real shelter.

Full up. They were all full up before we arrived. Not enough food to go around, not any more room, they told him. He died in the wild and I could have joined a tribe in Montclair, they would have taken me in but instead I crushed his head with a rock before I'd even begun to weep. I would not be a wild woman, a friend to the dead. I would not be a savage.

I didn't go hungry for long. The Stores needed me and my kind. We meant communication and trade and that meant survival. They let me sleep on their floors. They paid what I asked. And every time I looked one in the eyes I saw those words again, and I hated them all over again. There was no room in my heart for this girl. I was full up, too.

We couldn't make the thirty miles to Home Depot in one day but I wanted us as far from the WalMart as possible before nightfall. The commotion our leaving made would draw too much attention-probably for days to come Winona's father would be watching ghouls circle his perimeter, looking for the source of all that noise. He would lock his big loading gates and pray for them to leave him in peace, for his fence to hold them back.

We didn't have that option. I pushed us hard. I led Winona through a drainage ditch behind the store, through reeds taller than me and water sc.u.mmed with mosquito larvae. On the far side we had to cross an old asphalt access road, a broken field of smooth black fragments with bright green weeds sticking up in unnatural rectilinear patterns. It took us most of an hour to get to the far side and over the sway-backed fencing there. It would have taken me a quarter of that time, alone. They don't need proper shoes in the Stores and what she had were old pa.s.sed-down sneakers so well-used the laces were crusted in place.

Beyond the road the woods began, the real dead man's land. I saw the signs of ghouls everywhere, on every sc.r.a.ped tree trunk, on every broken branch. I was looking for one thing, to convince myself I wasn't just being paranoid. When I finally found it I felt almost relieved.

In a clearing in the shadow of a creaking utility pylon where the high gra.s.s grew yellow and thin I saw a splash of red. I pushed through the sighing vegetation to get closer and bent to touch the ground. A broad swath of gra.s.s had been bent back, crushed by the weight of a human being. Blood soaked the ground and turned the long stalks red. I dug around amidst the roots for a moment and came up with a broken leg bone-too long and thin to be human. Probably white-tailed deer. The femur had been cracked open so the marrow could be sucked out.

I squatted and ran a few blades of the gra.s.s through my fingers, letting the dried blood powder away like rust. Winona stared at the discarded bone as if it might come back to life at any moment. She'd probably never seen a meat bone before that wasn't in the bottom of a stew pot.

"There's one nearby," I told her, whispering. The dead don't linger when they've eaten and there was nearly no chance of the ghoul still being within earshot. Still I don't make a habit of raising my voice out in the woods. "He ate recently so he'll be strong and fast."

"But so he's full, then, and he won't attack us," she said, her fingers brushing the fibrous surface of the femur. She wasn't scared. The little idiot.

"A living thing, an animal might not but this is a dead man. If he can't find human he'll eat deer or rabbits or mice. If he can't find meat he'll chew the bark off of trees and stuff himself full of gra.s.s. He doesn't care if he eats so much he pops, he'll still want more, even if it just slides down his gullet and out the hole in his belly. The more he eats the hungrier he gets."

She shrugged and laid back in the gra.s.s, probably exhausted after her long hike. I could see it in her eyes. She didn't need to worry, she thought. I would protect her.

So I did just that: I yanked her up to her feet and got us moving again, despite her exhaustion.

You smell them first, long before you see them. It's a mixed blessing-scent is a fickle sense to have to rely on. The stink of decaying meat keeps you on your toes but you can't tell what direction it's coming from. You could walk right into the ghoul and not know it. They don't make much noise. They never talk or cough or sneeze.

I had him in my nose for most of the afternoon, on and off. Once I thought I saw him but it was only slacks, a whole line of them on the crest of a hill. They walked in single file, the one in front missing most of the flesh from his skull. Just red-shot eyes rolling in a blank skull. Their clothes, filthy and torn, still kept the colors of the old time. Some of those colors never fade. In red and blue and purple T-shirts and dresses they looked almost merry up there, silhouetted against the setting sun. They walked without looking to the side, without knowing where they headed. This is their world now and they're safe within it as long as the don't get too close to the Stores. I kept the girl down, hidden under a berry bush until they were gone just to take care.

In the middle of an overgrown housing development I hauled Winona over the splintered remains of a picket fence and into a house that had only been partly burned down, most of its roof missing but the walls solid as when they were put up. The stink of the ghoul was everywhere-he couldn't be more than a quarter mile away, even if he was upwind. Inside I held the door closed by shoving furniture up against it. It was the best I could do short of boarding us in and that's never a good idea. I let the girl collapse on an old water-stained sofa and searched the place. Green saplings grew through the floorboards of the living room while old pictures, still bright and fresh, lined the stairway to the upstairs. Smiling people out in the sunshine, boats on clean water. The frames of the pictures were riddled with wormcast and some had rotted away altogether.

Night came down, early as it does in October. The girl refused to sleep on any of the house's beds they were so infested with bugs. Instead she wanted to stay up and talk. I sat in one corner of an upstairs room under a hole in the roof, the spring-lance across my knees and listened, too tired to shut her up properly.

"My children will be managers," she told me, at some length. "Great men, great warriors and they will finally rid the land of the monsters. That is the destiny of my line. The story was told often around our fires."

I shifted slightly-the carpet under me was damp. "Is that why you're going so far away? To have babies?"

She nodded readily and gave me a smile that could have sold toothpaste in the old time. "To be wed to the General Manager of Home Depot and to bear his heirs."

"The big man's tired of f.u.c.king his first cousins," I guessed. "Makes sense. They've got bad skin out that way 'cause it's too close to the old chemical plants. Me, I never gave much thought to a baby. Just one more corpse to walk the earth in the end."

"That's doom talk, and it's not allowed at WalMart," she scolded me. She played with a DVD case she'd found in the entertainment center, the card insert showing a man dressed like a bat. She opened and closed the plastic with a snap, over and over again, snap snap, snap snap. A good sound of well-made pieces fitting together perfectly. Everything sounded like that in the old time. "It's not just about babies, anyway. This will be a strategic alliance, uniting two Exits and drawing borders for future conquests to come. I imagine you have no use for politics-"

"Shush," I told her. I'd heard something downstairs. She kept prattling on for a minute till she saw that I meant it. The sound came again. Wood screeching on wood. Furniture sc.r.a.ping on a hardwood floor. The ghoul was testing my barricade.

They can smell you, just like you can smell them, and they don't need to rest. You can't hide for long.

A chest of drawers squealed and crashed as it fell over. A chair tumbled away from the door. I lifted the windowsill as quietly as I could and gestured for Winona to go on, out onto the roof. The second-floor window let out onto a slope of rotten shingles that skidded out from under her and she wouldn't let go of the sill.

I crawled over her and carefully slipped my way down to the gutter so I could look over the edge. The ghoul looked up at the same time and we made eye contact. He had on the loose gray pants of a wild man, stained now with deer blood. Most of his hair had fallen out and something had eaten his lips, leaving ragged skin that failed to cover his crooked teeth. His eyelids were gone too, giving him the look of a b.l.o.o.d.y death's head.

I skittered back onto the roof. Below I heard him redouble his efforts, slamming a bookshelf to the side. He would be through the door soon. Winona started screaming. "Kill it! It's right there! Just kill it!"

It was an eight foot drop to the ground. There were some scraggly bushes down there to break my fall but I landed badly and lost a fraction of a second jumping back up to my feet. By that time the ghoul had turned to face me, slaver running out of the hole in his face. I could see the blotchy sores on his gray skin, I could hear his teeth grinding together in antic.i.p.ation.

"Do your job!" Winona howled. Her fingers couldn't hold her on the slope of the roof and suddenly she was sliding, falling on the loose shingles. I had been one step ahead of her-bringing the spring-lance around to line up my shot I was a breath's span away from firing when she called me. I managed to ignore the distraction of her falling off the roof. The dead man didn't-he swung his head up and to the side, looking for the source of the noise.

The spring-lance connected with his head, but not in the right place. The coffee can slid back, triggering a latch, and the lethal spike clanged out of the sheath and into his flesh. His jawbone exploded inside his fragile skin, yellow teeth flying from his mouth to clatter on the ground. The blow knocked him backward and off his feet but it had failed to penetrate his brain.

I jumped back and looked up at the roof. Winona had fallen into the gutter, which had bent but not broken. I only caught half a glimpse of her-a pale shape hanging in the darkness. Meanwhile the ghoul was recovering from my attack. The spring-lance was useless until I could crank back the spring.

He stood up, clutching at the place where his jawbone had been. His eyes focused on me with horrible slowness.

"Winona!" I shouted. "You stay there and be quiet!"

The ghoul started in to charge me, his head down, his broken fingernails stretched out to grab and tear my clothes and my skin. I turned around and headed into the woods, running as fast as my legs could carry me.

The dead are slow. You can outrun them, for a while.

"Come on, girl! Winona! Show yourself!"

She wasn't there when I got back. Which was the bad news. I couldn't find any blood or torn clothes, either, meaning the ghoul didn't get her. That could be very bad news. It could mean she'd run off on her own. I doubted it.

It took me most of the night to outrun the ghoul. He was a tough character, real strong, but none of them are ever as fast as a living person. If you don't exhaust yourself with sprinting, if you don't trip on an old curb and break your leg, you can escape them. It's how I've stayed alive so long.

I lead him in a wide loop through the subdivision, up cracked streets and through backyards full of play sets rusted down to twisted sc.r.a.p. I could hear him behind me, smell him too, but I kept my eyes on my feet. I could step on an abandoned toy or even an old lawnmower lost in the high gra.s.s and it would be over. I could trip over an exposed cable or pipe. I could run right into a tree and give myself a concussion.

You have to not panic, is all. I kept my heading and I kept moving. Well before dawn his stench was just a memory in my nose, a last whiff of corruption that lingered on me well past the time I'd lost him. I circled back, made a wide circuit around the row houses in case he caught smell of me again. Eventually I wound up right where I started, ready to resume my travels.

Except Winona was gone. I tore the house apart looking for her, turned over every decaying mattress, broke open every closet and scared a few mice for my trouble. I looked all around the yard, constantly aware that the ghoul was still nearby. I searched the nearby houses.

Three doors down I found the remains of a campfire on what had been somebody's front lawn, a time ago. I found some old cans, emptied and licked clean. I found flat places in the gra.s.s where wild folk had laid out in the night.