What Is a Zombie?
by Caitlin Zielinski
Grade...well, if the college were still going I guess I"d be Grade 14.
A zombie is not a reanimated corpse. This was never a Night of the Living Dead scenario. The word zombie isn"t even right-a zombie is something a voudoun priest makes, to obey his will. That has nothing to do with the price of coffee in Augusta. My dad didn"t die. His skin ruptured and he got boils and he started snorting instead of talking and bleeding out of his eyes and lunging at Mr. Almeida next door with his fingernails out, but he didn"t die. If he didn"t die, he"s not a corpse. QED, Channel 3.
A zombie is not a cannibal. This is kind of complicated: Channel 3 says they"re not human, which is why you can"t get arrested for killing one. So if they eat us, it wouldn"t be cannibalism anyway, just, you know, lunch. Like if I ate a dog. Not what you expect from a nice American girl, but not cannibalism. But also, zombies don"t just eat humans. If that were true, I"d have been dinner and they"d have been dead long before now, because, as I said, Augusta is pretty empty of anything resembling bright eyed and bushy tailed. They eat animals, they eat old meat in any freezer they can get open, they eat energy bars if that"s what they find. Anything. Once I saw a woman-I didn"t know her-on her hands and knees down by the river bank, clawing up the mud and eating it, smearing it on her bleeding b.r.e.a.s.t.s, staring up at the sky, her jaw wagging uselessly.
A zombie is not mindless. Channel 3 would have a fit if they heard me say that. It"s dogma-zombies are slow and stupid. Well, I saw plenty of people slower and stupider than a zombie in the old days. I worked next to the state capitol, after all. Sometimes I think the only difference is that they"re ugly. The world was always full of drooling morons who only wanted me for my body. Anyway, some are fast and some are slow. If the girl was a jogger before, she"s probably pretty spry now. If the guy never moved but to change the channel, he"s not gonna catch you any time soon. And my father still knows my name. I can"t be sure but I think it"s only that they can"t talk. Their tongues swell up and their throats expand-all of them. One of the early warning signs is slurred speech. They might be as smart as they ever were-see jogging-but they can"t communicate except by screaming. I"d scream, too, if I were bleeding from my ears and my skin were melting off.
Zombies will not kill anything that moves. My dad hasn"t bitten me. He could have, plenty of times. They"re not harmless. I"ve had to get good at running and I have six locks on every door of the house. Even my bedroom, because my father can"t be trusted. He hits me, still. His fist leaves a smear of blood and pus and something darker, purpler, on my face. But he doesn"t bite me. At first, he barked and went for my neck at least once a day. But I"m faster. I"m always faster. He doesn"t even try anymore. Sometimes he just stands in the living room, drool pooling in the side of his mouth till it falls out, and he looks at me like he remembers that strange night when he bit me before, and he"s still ashamed. I laugh, and he almost smiles. He shambles back down the hall and starts peeling off the wallpaper, shoving it into his mouth in long pink strips like skin.
There"s something else I know. It"s hard to talk about, because I don"t understand it. I don"t understand it because I"m not a zombie. It"s like a secret society, and I"m on the outside. I can watch what they do, but I don"t know the code. I couldn"t tell Channel 3 about this, even if they came to town with all their cameras and sat me in a plush chair like one of their endless Rockette-line of doctors. What makes you think they have intelligence, Miss Zielinski? And I would tell them about my father saying my name, but not about the river. No one would believe me. After all, it"s never happened anywhere else. And I have an idea about that, too. Because people in Manhattan are pretty up on their zombie-killing tactics, and G.o.d help a zombie in Texas if he should ever be so unfortunate as to encounter a human. But here there"s nothing left. No one to kill them. They own this town, and they"re learning how to live in it, just like anyone does. Maybe Augusta always belonged to them and James Purington and the Dead River Company. All hail the oozing, pestilent kings and queens of the apocalypse.
This is what I know: One night, my father picked up our toaster and left the house. I"m not overly attached to the toaster, but he didn"t often leave. I feed him good hamburger, nice and raw, and I don"t knock him in his brainpan with a bat. Zombies know a good thing.
The next night he took the hallway mirror. Then the microwave, then the coffeepot, then a sack full of pots and pans. All the zombie movies in the world do not prepare you to see your father, his hair matted with blood, his bathrobe torn and seeping, packing your cooking materiel into a flowered king-size pillowcase. And then one night he took a picture off of the bookshelf. My mother, himself, and me, smiling in one of those terrible posed portraits. I was eight or nine in the picture, wearing a green corduroy jumper and big, long brown pigtails. I was smiling so wide, and so were they. You have to, in those kinds of portraits. The photographer makes you, and if you don"t, he practically starts turning cartwheels to get you to smile like an angel just appeared over his left shoulder clutching a handful of pins. My mother, her gla.s.ses way too big for her face. My father, in plaid flannel, his big hand holding me protectively.
I followed him. It wasn"t difficult; his hearing went about the same time as his tongue. In a way, I guess it"s a lot like getting old. Your body starts failing in all sorts of weird ways, and you can"t talk right or hear well or see clearly, and you just rage at things because everything is slipping away and you"re never going to get any better. If one person goes that way, it"s tragic. If everyone does, it"s the end of the world.
It gets really dark in Augusta, and the streetlights have all been shot out or burned out. There is no darker night than a Maine night before the first snow, all starless and cold. No friendly pools of orange chemical light to break the long, black street. Just my father, shuffling along with his portrait clutched to his suppurating chest. He turned toward downtown, crossing Front Street after looking both ways out of sheer muscle memory. I crept behind him, down past the riverside shops, past the Java Shack, down to the riverbank and the empty parking lots along the waterfront.
Hundreds of zombies gathered down there by the slowly lapping water. Maybe the whole of dead Augusta, everyone left. My father joined the crowd. I tried not to breathe; I"d never seen so many in one place. They weren"t fighting or hunting, either. They moaned, a little. Most of them had brought something-more toasters, dresser drawers, light bulbs, broken kitchen chairs, coat racks, televisions, car doors. All junk, gouged out of houses, out of their old lives. They arranged it, almost lovingly, around a ma.s.sive tower of garbage, teetering, swaying in the wet night wind. A light bulb fell from the top, shattering with a bright pop. They didn"t notice. The tower was sloppy, but even I could see that it was meant to be a tower, more than a tower-bed-slats formed flying b.u.t.tresses between the main column and a smaller one, still being built. Ma.s.ses of electric devices, dead and inert, piled up between them, showing their screens and gray, lifeless displays to the water. And below the screens rested dozens of family portraits just like ours, leaning against the dark plasma screens and speakers. A few zombies added to the pile-and some of them lay photos down that clearly belonged to some other family. I thought I saw Mrs. Halloway, my first grade teacher, among them, and she treated her portrait of a Chinese family as tenderly as a child. I don"t think they knew who exactly the pictures showed. They just understood the general sense they conveyed, of happiness and family. My father added his picture to the crowd and rocked back and forth, howling, crying, holding his head in his hands.
I wriggled down between a dark streetlamp and a park bench, trying to turn invisible as quickly as possible. But they paid no attention to me. And then the moon crowned the spikes of junk, cresting between the two towers.
The zombies all fell to their knees, their arms outstretched to the white, full moon, horrible black tears streaming down their ruined faces, keening and ululating, throwing their faces down into the river-mud, bits of them falling off in their rapture, their eagerness to abase themselves before their cathedral. I think it was a cathedral, when I think about it now. I think it had to be. They sent up their awful crooning moan, and I clapped my hands over my ears to escape it. Finally, Mrs. Halloway stood up and turned to the rest of them. She dragged her nails across her cheeks and shrieked wordlessly into the night. My father went to her and I thought he was going to bite her, the way he bit me, the way zombies bite anyone when they want to.
Instead, he kissed her.
He kissed her on the cheek, heavily, smackingly, and his face came away with her blood on it. One by one the others kissed her too, surrounding her with groping hands and hungry mouths, and the moon shone down on her face, blanching her so she was nothing but black and white, blood and skin, an old movie monster, only she wept. She wept from a place so deep I can"t imagine it; she wept, and she smiled, even as they finished kissing her and began pulling her apart, each keeping a piece of her for themselves, just a sc.r.a.p of flesh, which they ate solemnly, reverently. They didn"t squabble over it, her leg or her arm or her eyes, and Mrs. Halloway didn"t try to fight them. She had offered herself, I think, and they took her. I know what worship looks like.
I was crying by that time. You would, too, if you saw that. I had to cry or I had to throw up, and crying was quieter. Your body can make calculations like that, if it has to. But crying isn"t that quiet, really. One of them sniffed the air and turned toward me-the rest turned as one. They"re a herd, if they are anything. They know much more together than they know separately. I wonder if, in a few decades, they will have figured out how to run Channel 3, and will broadcast How to Recognize a Human in Three Easy Steps, or What We Know.
They fell on me, which is pretty much how zombies do anything. They groped and pulled, but there were too many of them for any one to get a good grip, and I may not have killed one before but I wasn"t opposed to the idea. I swung my fists and oh, they were so soft, like jam. I clamped my mouth shut-I knew my infection vectors as well as any kid in my generation. But they didn"t bite me, and finally my father threw back his head and bellowed. I know that bellow. I"ve always known it, and it hasn"t changed. They pulled away, panting, exhausted. That was the first time I realized how fragile they are. They"re like lions. In short bursts, they"ll eviscerate you and your zebra without a second thought. But they have to save up the strength for it, day in and day out. I stood there, back against the streetlamp, fingernails out, asthma kicking in because of course, it would. And my father limped over to me, dragging his broken left foot-they don"t die but they don"t heal. I tried to set it once and that was the closest I ever came to getting bitten before that night on the river.
He stood over me, his eyebrows crusted with old fluid, his eyes streaming tears like ink, his jaw dislocated and hanging, his cheeks puffed out with infection. He reached out and hooted gently like an ape. To anyone else it would have been just another animal noise from a rotting zombie, but I heard it as clear as anything: Caitlin, Caitlin, Caitlin. I had nowhere to go, and he reached for me, brushing my hair out of my face. With one b.l.o.o.d.y thumb he traced a circle onto my forehead, like a priest on Ash Wednesday. Caitlin, Caitlin, Caitlin.
His blood was cold.
After that, none of them ever came after me again. That"s why I can have my nice little habit of opening the Java Shack and writing in my notebooks. These are the days of Punky Princesses, and I am safe. The mark on my forehead never went away. It"s faint, like a birthmark, but it"s there. Sometimes I meet one of them on the road, wandering dazed and unhappy in the daylight, squinting as if it doesn"t understand where the light is coming from. When they see me, their eyes go dark with hunger-but then, their gaze flicks up to my forehead, and they fall down on their knees, keening and sobbing. It"s not me, I know that. It"s the cathedral, still growing, on the banks of the Kennebec. The mark means I"m of the faith, somehow. Saint Caitlin of the Java Shack, Patroness of the Living.
Sometimes I think about leaving. I hear Portsmouth is mostly clean. I could make that on my bicycle. Maybe I could even hotwire a car. I"ve seen them do it on television. The first time I stayed, I stayed for my father. But he doesn"t come home much anymore. There"s little enough left for him to scavenge for the church. He keeps up his kneeling and praying down there, except when the moon is dark, and then they mourn like lost children. Now, I think I stay because I want to see the finished cathedral, I want to understand what they are doing when they eat one of their own. If it"s like communion, the way I understand it, or something else entirely. I want to see the world they"re building out here in the abandoned capital. If maybe they"re not sick, but just new, like babies, incomprehensible and violent and frustrated that nothing is as they expected it to be.
It"s afternoon in the Java Shack. The sun is thin and wintry. I pour myself hot water and it occurs to me that apocalypse originally meant to uncover something. To reveal a hidden thing. I get that now. It was never about fire and lightning shearing off the palaces of the world. And if I wait, here on the black sh.o.r.es of the Kennebec, here in the city that has been ruined for as long as it has lived, maybe, someday soon, the face of their G.o.d will come up out of the depths, uncovered, revealed.
So on. So forth.
Zero Tolerance By Jonathan Maberry
Jonathan Maberry is the bestselling author of several novels, including Ghost Road Blues Ghost Road Blues (winner of the Bram Stoker Award), (winner of the Bram Stoker Award), Dead Man"s Song Dead Man"s Song, Bad Moon Rising Bad Moon Rising, and The Wolfman The Wolfman. Rot & Ruin Rot & Ruin, the first book in a new young-adult zombie series, was just published; a second volume, Dust & Decay Dust & Decay, will appear in 2011. Maberry"s other recent novels Patient Zero Patient Zero and and The Dragon Factory The Dragon Factory, along with the forthcoming The King of Plagues The King of Plagues, are set in the same milieu as our next story and are in development for television. Other work includes the non-fiction books THEY BITE! THEY BITE!, Stoker Award-finalist Zombie CSU Zombie CSU, Wanted Undead or Alive Wanted Undead or Alive, Vampire Universe Vampire Universe, and The Cryptopedia The Cryptopedia.
September 11, 2001 changed the world, and also changed science fiction, fantasy, and horror. Civilization collapsing had always been a topic of perennial interest in the field, of course, but after 9/11 magazines were positively deluged with this sort of material. And of course zombies, the ultimate symbol of societal breakdown, went from being a niche interest to one of the dominant images in the popular imagination, familiar to everyone. Before 9/11, characters in a zombie story might speculate about the cause of the epidemic without ever mentioning the word "terrorism." Afterward, of course, that"s tended to be the first word on every character"s lips.
America"s War on Terror has had many casualties, chief among them the nation"s view of itself. Images of U.S. soldiers torturing naked, helpless (and in many cases innocent) prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq haunt the American psyche, and are all the more disturbing given the lingering sense that those truly responsible have never been punished. (In her memoir One Woman"s Army One Woman"s Army, Janis Karpinski maintains that she was scapegoated due to s.e.xism and that the soldiers sent to prison for the crimes were acting according to policies issued by the White House.) Nietzsche famously warned: "He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster." Our next story is a military thriller about zombies, terrorism, war, and some very grim and unsavory interrogation techniques. It"s a powerful story and, much as we might wish otherwise, a tale of our time.
-1-.
Battalion Aide Station Near Helmand River Valley, Afghanistan One Hour Ago
"I never thought that anyone that beautiful could scare the s.h.i.t out of me." The Marine sergeant sounded like he had a throatful of broken gla.s.s. never thought that anyone that beautiful could scare the s.h.i.t out of me." The Marine sergeant sounded like he had a throatful of broken gla.s.s.
"Tell me about her, Sergeant," I said.
He looked away so quickly that I knew he"d been waiting for that question. He tried to keep a poker face, but he was a couple tics off his game. Sleep deprivation, pain and the certain knowledge that his a.s.s was in a sling can do that to you. Even to a tough son of a b.i.t.c.h like Sergeant Harper. As he turned I saw the way guilt and shame twisted his mouth; but his eyes had a different expression. One I couldn"t quite nail down.
"Tell you what? That I can"t bear to close my eyes "cause when I do I see her? That I"ve had the shivering s.h.i.ts ever since we found her out there in the sand? I don"t mind admitting it," said the sergeant. He started to say more, then closed his mouth and shook his head.
Harper"s uninjured hand was freckled with powder burns and skin was missing from two knuckles. He ran his trembling fingers through his sandy hair as he spoke. He did it two or three times each minute. His other hand lay in his lap, the hand coc.o.o.ned inside gauze wrappings.
I waited. I had more time than he did.
After a full minute, though, I said, "Where did she come from?"
Harper sighed. "She was a refugee. We found her staggering in the foothills."
"A refugee from what?"
"From the big meltdown out in the desert."
"In the Helmand River Valley?"
"Yes."
He didn"t tack on "sir." He was f.u.c.king with me, and I was okay with that for now. He didn"t know me, didn"t really know how much s.h.i.t he was in, or how deep a hole he"d dug for himself. All he knew was that his career in the Marines had hit a guard rail at seventy miles an hour, and now he was sitting across a small table from a guy wearing captain"s bars and no other military insignia. No medals or unit patch. No name tag. Harper had to be measuring that against the deferential way the colonel treated me. Like I outranked him, which I don"t. I"m not even in the military anymore. But in this particular matter I was able to throw more weight than the base commander. More weight than anyone else in or out of uniform on the continent. As far as Harper was concerned, when it came to throwing him a lifeline it was me and then G.o.d, and G.o.d was off the clock.
Harper couldn"t really know any of that, but he was smart enough and sly enough to know that I had some juice. On one hand, he rightly figured that I could drop him into a hole deeper than the one he"d dug for himself. On the other hand, he had information that I wanted, and he was stalling to see how best to play his only good card.
"How long are they going to keep me here?"
"To be determined, Sergeant. Do you feel you"re being inconvenienced?"
He didn"t rise to the bait.
"It"s been three days."
"Not quite. Forty-seven hours and change."
"Seems longer." He didn"t even know that we"d already met. Not sure when I was going to spring that on him. It wouldn"t do anything to calm him down.
I opened my briefcase and took out a file folder.
"I"d like you to look at some photos," I said and took two color eight-by-tens from my briefcase and laid them on the table. If I"d tossed a scorpion on the table he couldn"t have jerked back faster.
"Jesus Christ!"
I nodded at the print. "That"s her?"
"f.u.c.k me," muttered the sergeant. "Oh f.u.c.k me f.u.c.k me f.u.c.k me."
Take that as a yes.
I sat back and waited him out. Sweat popped all along his forehead and leaked out from his hairline. He smelled like urine, cigarette smoke and testosterone, but I could smell fear, too. A whole lot of it. I used to think that was a myth, or something only dogs and horses could smell, but lately I"ve learned different. The kind of s.h.i.t I deal with? I smell it a lot, and on myself, too. Like now, but I wasn"t going to let this a.s.shole know it.
"Could...could you turn the pictures over? I don"t mean to be a p.u.s.s.y, but I don"t want her staring at me the whole time, y"know?"
"Sure," I said, and did so. But I left them on the table. "Try to relax. Smoke one if you got any."
He shook his head. "Never took it up. Jesus H. Christ. Wish I did."
I opened my briefcase and took out two bottles of spring water, unscrewed one and handed it to him. He drank half of it down. Then I took some airline bottles of Jack Daniel"s and lined them up in front of him. One, two, three.
"If it helps," I said.
He s.n.a.t.c.hed one off the edge of the table, twisted off the cap and chugged it, then coughed. More bravado than brains.
"Tell me about the woman," I said. "And what happened in the cave."
He gave that some thought, drank half of the second bottle of Jack.
"Do you know my outfit? Second Marine Expeditionary Brigade, Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion. We were part of Operation Khanjar, working that corner of Helmand Province, doing some recon stuff up in the hills," he began. "Counterinsurgency work, and some fox hunts to flush the Taliban teams running opium through the area. That whole part of the province is nothing but dead rock riddled with a million caves. You could hide a hundred thousand people in there, camels and all, and it would take us fifty years to find half of them. That"s why this war was f.u.c.ked from the snap. The Russians couldn"t do it twenty years ago, and we can"t do it now. Besides, nine out of ten people you meet are friendlies who look and dress just like the hostiles, so how you going to know?"
"Skip the politics, Sergeant. Talk about the woman."
He shrugged. "It was weird out there because last week the whole place was lit up by some kind of underground explosion. We got word that some Taliban lab blew up, but the blast wasn"t nuclear. Something to do with geo-thermal chambers or shifting plates or some bulls.h.i.t like that. A whole section of desert just fell into itself and there was this spike of fire that shot a couple hundred feet in the air."
"No radiation?"
"No. Most of us still had TLD badges and the badges stayed neutral. The area was hot, though...not with radiation, but actually hot. Like a furnace. When we reached the outer perimeter of the event zone we could see a weird shimmer and I realized that big sections of the desert had been melted to gla.s.s. It looked like a lava flow, rippled and dark."
"And is that where you found the woman?" I asked.
He drank the rest of the second bottle of Jack Daniel"s, and chased it with a long pull on the water bottle. He was pale, his eyes sunken and dark, his lips dry. He looked like s.h.i.t and probably felt worse. Just mentioning the "woman" made his eyes jump.
"Yeah," he said. "Locals started calling in sightings of burned people, and then word came down to scramble a couple of recon teams. We went in...and after that everything went to s.h.i.t." He turned away to hide wet eyes.
-2-.
The Warehouse DMS Tactical Field Office / Baltimore Ninety-two Hours Ago
I was on the mats with Echo Team"s newest members-replacements for the guys we lost in Philadelphia. There were four of them, two Rangers, a jarhead and a former SWAT guy from L.A. For the last couple of hours Bunny and I had taken turns beating on them, chasing them with paintball guns, trying to carve our initials in them with live blades, swinging at them with baseball bats. Everything we could think of. Actually, let me rephrase that. There were ten of them this morning. The four who were left were the ones who hadn"t been taken to the infirmary or told to go the f.u.c.k back to where they came from.
We were just about to enter a practical discussion on pain tolerance when my boss, Mr. Church, came into the gym at a fast walk. He only ever hurries when the real s.h.i.t is coming down the pike. I crossed to meet him.
Church nodded toward the recruits. "Are these four in or out?"
"Is something up?"
"Yes, and it"s on a high boil."
"They"re in."
Church turned to Bunny. "Sergeant Rabbit, get these men kitted out. Afghanistan. No ID, no patches. You"re wheels up in fifteen." Bunny flicked a glance at me, but he didn"t question the order. Instead he turned and hustled them all toward the locker room. Bunny was a nice kid most of the time, but he was still a sergeant. And we"d been through some s.h.i.t together, so he knew my views on hesitation: Don"t.