Zombies: The Recent Dead Part 42

I'd told a small lie of my own to Papa just then. There was something more about Maera, something that I'd learned from her and Troilus. Solitude can be all well and good, but sometimes it's nice to have a friend.

"If you have the time, I'm up for a game of rattlebones," I said, then added, "If the offer's still good."

Papa looked at me, and for a moment I thought he might comment on my change of heart, but instead he grinned even wider and clapped me on the back gently, careful not to ruin his latest repair.

"Always, my friend. Always."

About the Author.

Tim Waggoner's most current novels are the Nekropolis series of urban fantasies and the Lady Ruin series for Wizards of the Coast. In total, he's published over twenty novels and two short story collections, and his articles on writing have appeared in Writer's Digest and Writers' Journal, among others. He teaches creative writing at Sinclair Community College and in Seton Hill University's Master of Fine Arts in Writing Popular Fiction program. Visit him at www.timwagonner.com and and www.nekropoliscity.com.

Story Notes.

As Waggoner explains in his story-but is able to expand on more fully in Nekropolis, the novel for which this story serves as a "prequel"-his supernatural creations exist in another dimension that interacts with the mundane world and its humans. His hard-boiled zombie private investigator works in a world of demons, werewolves, magic, and other supernaturals-often technologically enhanced. But, don't worry, purists, the brainless-walking-dead brand of zombies still shamble about in his world, too.

Like more and more speculative fiction authors these days, Waggoner crosses so many genres you can't keep count. Readers seem to love the imaginative results writers are coming up with. Critics who love to devise definitions and marketers who feel books belong in slots, however, aren't always in step with the writers or readers. That-even though it is a topic pertinent to zombies-is, however, another subject.

The Zombie Prince.

Kit Reed.

What do you know, fool, all you know is what you see in the movies: clashing jaws and b.l.o.o.d.y teeth; raw hunger lurching in to eat you, thud thud thud.

We are nothing like you think.

The zombie that comes for you is indifferent to flesh. What it takes from you is tasteless, odorless, colorless and huge. You have a lot to lose.

The incursion is gradual. It does not count the hours or months it may spend circling the bedroom where you sleep. For the zombie, there is no anxiety and no waiting. We walk in a zone that transcends disorders like human emotion. In the cosmos of the undead there is only being and un-being, without reference to time.

Therefore your zombie keeps its distance, fixed on the patch of warmth that represents you, the unseemly racket you make, breathing. Does your heart have to make all that noise, does your chest have to keep going in and out with that irritating rasp? The organs of the undead are sublimely still. Anything else is an abomination.

Then you cough in your sleep. It is like an invitation.

We are at your bedroom window. The thing we need is laid open for us to devour.

For no reason you sit up in bed with your heart jumping and your jaw ajar: What?

Nothing, you tell yourself, because you have to if you're going to make it through the night. Just something I ate.

Hush, if you enjoy living. Be still. Try to be as still as me. Whatever you do, don't go to the window! Your future crouches below, my perfect body cold and dense as marble, the eyes devoid of light. If you expect to go on being yourself tomorrow when the sun comes up, stay awake! Do it! This is the only warning you'll get.

One woman alone, naturally you are uneasy, but you think you're safe. Didn't you lock the windows when you went to bed last night, didn't you lock your doors and slip the dead bolt? Nice house, gated community with Security patrolling, what could go wrong? You don't know that while you sleep the zombie seeks entry. This won't be anything like you think.

Therefore you stumble to the bathroom and pad back to your bedroom in the dark. You drop on the bed like a felled cedar, courting sleep. It's as close as you can get to being one of us. Go ahead, then. Sleep like a stone and if tonight the zombie who ha come for you slips in and takes what it needs from you, tomorrow you will not wake up, exactly.

You will get up. Changed.

When death comes for you, you don't expect it to be tall and gorgeous. You won't even know the name of the disaster that overtakes you until it's too late.

Last night Dana Graver wished she could just bury herself in bed and never have to wake up. She'd rather die than go on feeling the way she does.

She wanted to die the way women do when the man they love ends it with no apologies and no explanation. "I'd understand," she cried, "if this was about another girl." And Bill Wylie, the man she thought she loved-that she thought loved her!-Bill gave her that bland, sad look and said unhelpfully, "I'm sorry, I just can't do this any more."

Her misery is like a bouquet of broken gla.s.s flowers, every petal a jagged edge tearing her up inside. She would do any thing to make it stop. She'd never put herself out-no pills, no razor blades for Dana Graver, no blackened corpse for Bill to find, although he deserves an ugly shock.

She'd never consciously hurt herself but if she lies on her back in the dark and wills herself to die it might just accidentally happen, would that be so bad? Let the heartless b.a.s.t.a.r.d come in and find his sad, rejected love perfectly composed, lovely in black with her white hands folded gracefully and her dark hair flowing, a reproach that would haunt him for the rest of his life. Look what you did to me. Doesn't he deserve to know what it sounds like to hear your own heart break?

Composed for death, Dana dozes instead. She drops into sleep like an ocean, wishing she could submerge and please G.o.d, never have to come back up. She . . .

She jerks awake. Oh G.o.d, I didn't mean it!

There is something in the room.

With her heart hammering she sits up, trembling. Switches on the light.

The silent figure standing by the dresser looks nothing like the deaths a single woman envisions. No ski mask, so this is no home invasion; no burglar's tools. It isn't emblematic, either, there's no grim reaper's robe, no apocalyptic scythe. This isn't SARS coming for her and it isn't the Red Death. The intruder is tall and composed. Extremely handsome. Impeccable in white. The only hint of difference is the crescents of black underneath the pale, finely buffed fingernails.

She shrieks.

In ordinary incursions the victim's scream prompts action: threats or gunshots or knife attack, the marauder's lunge. This person does nothing. If it is a person. The shape of the head is too perfect. There is something sublime in its unwavering scrutiny. Chilled, Dana scrambles backward until she is clinging to the bed stead. She throws the lamp at it, screaming. "Get out!"

It doesn't move. It doesn't speak.

There is only the crash as the gla.s.s lamp-base shatters against the wall behind the huge head. The light itself survives, casting ragged shadows on the ceiling. The silence spins out for as long as Dana can stand it. They are in stasis here.

When she can speak, she says, "What are you doing here?"

Is it possible to talk without moving your lips? The stranger in her room doesn't speak. Instead, Dana knows. Uncanny. she knows.

-Good evening. Isn't that what you people say?

She does what you do. She opens her throat and screams to wake the dead.

-Don't do that.

"I can't help it!"

-I'm sorry. I'm new at this.

"Who are you?"

-You mean the name I used to have? No idea. It left me when I died . . .

"Died!"

The intruder continues -and I would have to die again to get it back, and you know what death brings. Dissolution and decay. Sorrow.

"What are you?"

-For the purposes of this conversation, you can call me X. Every one of us is known as X.

"Oh my G.o.d. Oh, my G.o.d!"

The great head lifts. -Who?

"Get out." Higher. Dana sends her voice high enough to clear the room and raise the neighborhood. "Get out!" When she uncovers her face the intruder hasn't advanced and it hasn't run away.

It hasn't moved. It is watching her, graceful and self-contained. As if her screams are nothing to it. -No.

"Get out or I'll . . . " Groping for the empty pistol she keeps under the pillow she threatens wildly. "I'll shoot!"

-Go ahead. So calm. Too calm! -It won't change anything.

"Oh." Noting the fixed, crystalline eyes she understands that this is true. "Oh my G.o.d."

The bedroom is unnaturally still. So is the intruder. Except for the trembling Dana can't control, except for her light, irregular breathing, she too manages to stay quiet. The figure in white stands without moving, a monument to patience. There is a fixed beauty to the eyes, a terrifying lack of expression. They are empty and too perfect, like doll's eyes: too pale to be real, blue as blown flowers with stars for pupils. -Don't be afraid. That won't change anything either.

Dana isn't afraid, exactly, she is too badly hurt by the breakup with Bill to think much about anything else, and this? What's happening here in her bedroom is too strange to be real. It's as though she is floating far above it. Not an out-of-body experience, exactly, but one in which everything changes.

The intruder is impeccable in a white suit, black shirt, bright circle of silver about one wrist-silver wire braided, she notes in the kind of mad attention to detail that crisis sparks in some people. The rapt gaze. Like an underground prince ravished by its first look at the sun. The attention leaves her more puzzled than frightened. Flattered, really, by that gaze fixed on her as if she really matters. As if this strange figure has come to break her out of the jail that is her life. Bill's betrayal changed her. She was almost destroyed but even that is changing.

She can't forgive Bill but with this magnetic presence in her room, for seconds at a time she almost forgets about Bill.

The dark hair, the eyebrows like single brush strokes, the pallor are eerie and sinister and glamorous. She doesn't know whether to flirt or threaten. Better the former, she thinks. Let Bill come in and finds us, that will show him. Unless she's stalling until her fingers can find bullets and load the gun. As if she could make a dent in that l.u.s.trous skin. "What is this?" she asks, overtaken. "Why are you here?"

The answer takes too long coming. It is not that the stranger has stopped to choose its words. It exists without reference to time. When the answer comes, it isn't exactly an answer. -You are my first.

"First what?" First what, she wonders. First love? First kill? The stranger is so gorgeous standing there. So courteous and so still. Impervious. None of her fears fit the template. If Dana's clock is still running, she can't read the face. Unnerved by the absence of sound-this intruder doesn't shift on its feet, it doesn't cough or clear its throat; she doesn't hear it breathing!-she whispers, "What are you?"

-Does the word undead mean anything to you?

"No!" It doesn't. Nice suit, cultivated manner, he's a bit of a mystery, but the handsome face, the strange, cool eyes lift him so far out of the ordinary that the rules don't pertain here. He's here because he's attracted to her. "You don't look like a . . . "

-Zombie?

Then it does! Images flood the room, blinding her to everything but the terror. Dana flies out of bed, rushing the door, ricocheting off the stranger's alabaster facade with her hands flying here, there. Screaming, she hurls herself at the sealed bedroom window, battering on the gla.s.s.

-Or walking dead.

"No!" A zombie.

-If you prefer.

This is a zombie. "No, no! Oh my G.o.d, don't touch me!"

-Hold still. It has an eerie dignity. -I'm not going to eat you.

Idiot human. If you're afraid of getting your face gnawed off or your arm ripped out of its socket and devoured, you've seen too many movies. Your body is of no interest to us, not me, not any. We don't hunt in packs nor do we come in pairs. The zombie travels alone and the zombie takes what it needs without your knowing it. What I take can be extracted through the slightest opening; a keyhole, the crack under your bedroom door. Like a rich man the morning after a robbery, you may not even know what is missing.

"Don't." Sobbing, Dana retreats to the bed, pulling the covers up in a knot. All her flailing, her failed attempts to escape, all that screaming and the intruder hasn't advanced a fraction of an inch. So calm and so very beautiful. In a way it's everything she wants, she thinks, or everything she wants to be. Unless it's everything she's afraid of. She is a tangled ma.s.s of conflicting emotions-grief and terror and something as powerful as it is elusive. "What do you want?"

-Zombies do not want. They need.

"You're not going to . . . " She locks her arms across her front with an inadvertent shudder.

-Do you really believe I want to chew your arm off?

"I don't know what I believe!" This is not exactly true. In spite of what it says, Dana is afraid it's here to devour her. Doesn't have to be me, she thinks cleverly. Odd what rejection does to you; her heart congeals like a pond in a flash freeze. Why not pull a switch and buy her safety with a subst.i.tute? In a vision of the fitness of things she sees Bill broken in two for his sins; she hears Bill howling in pain as the zombie's pale, strong hands plunge into his open chest, and when this happens? Maybe she and her elegant zombie will make love while Bill dies and that'll show him, that will d.a.m.n well show him. "If you want to eat," she says in a low voice, "I can feed you."

-If that was what I came for you'd be bare bones by now.

She does what you do in ambiguous situations. She asks a polite question. "How . . . How did you get this way?"

-No idea. Zombies do not remember.

This brings Dana's head up fast. "You don't remember anything?"

-No.

Thoughtfully, she says, "So you don't remember how it happened."

-No. Nothing from before. The silence is suddenly empty, as though the thing in her bedroom has just walked out and closed the door on itself.

Nothing, it is the nature of our condition. There was a name on my headstone when I got up and walked, but I had no interest in reading it. There was this silver bracelet on my wrist that must have meant something to me once. Engraving inside, perhaps, but I don't need to read it. Who gave it, and what did I feel for her back when I was human? Human I'm not. There is no grief in the zone where I walk, There is no loss and no pain, and yet . . .

I came out of the grave wiped clean. I came out strong and powerful and insentient. Yet there is this great sucking hole at my center. It burns. I need. I need . . .

What?

"But all this time you've been dead. I mean, undead. You must be starved." Clever Dana's fingers creep toward the phone. She can't imagine what she needs to say to please him. "I can get you somebody. Somebody big. Practically twice my size."

-No thank you.

"Really." All she has to do is tell the b.a.s.t.a.r.d she's OD'd on sleeping pills. Guilt will have him here in a flash. "Tall. Overweight." Fat, she thinks, Bill is fat and now that she thinks about it, probably unfaithful. "Fleshy. Just let me make this call."

-You don't understand. Terrifying but beautiful, in a way, the flat blue gaze. That grave shake of the head. -Flesh is anathema to us.