Zombies: The Recent Dead Part 43

Idiot woman, do you imagine I came here to feed? Flesh-eating monsters may exist, botched lab experiments or mindless aberrations raised from the grave by toxic spills, but they are only things with no awareness of outcomes and this is the difference between them and us.

When you have been dead and buried, outcomes are everything to you.

Eat and the outcome is inevitable. Gorge on flesh-take even one bite!-and it all comes back: life, memory and regret, rapid, inexorable decay and with it, an insatiable desire for the fires of home.

Gnawing anxiously at her lower lip, Dana is too distracted to feel her teeth break the skin. She sees the intruder's eyes s.h.i.+ft slightly. They are fixed not on her throat, but on her mouth. She shakes her head, puzzled. "You're really not hungry?"

-When you have been dead and buried, mortal concerns are nothing to you.

"So you really don't have to eat."

-If we do we lose everything.

"But when you die you lose everything," she says, s.h.i.+vering.

-If you mean little things like pain and memory, yes.

This brings Dana's head up. "Nothing hurts?"

-Nothing like that. No.

"Wait," she says carefully. "You don't feel anything?"

-We are above human flaws like feeling . . .

"And you don't remember anything. Oh. Oh!" The truth comes in like a highway robber approaching in stages. She says in a low voice, I can't imagine what that's like."

- . . . and mortality.

Her breath catches and her heart shudders at the discovery. Her hand flies to cover it. "Oh," she cries. "Oh!"

Easy. This is easy. Greedy, vulnerable girl. I knew you before you saw this coming. Who wouldn't want to forget and who doesn't love oblivion? Who would risk all that for a sc.r.a.p of meat, the taste of blood? Knowing flesh can destroy us.

Topple and your former self comes back to you. All the love and pain and terror and excitement and grief and intolerable suspense that come with mortality. All you want to do is go home. You want to go home!

Aroused and terrified, you set out. With your restarted heart thudding, you approach the house. You are burning to rejoin the family. Walk into the circle: am I late? as though nothing's happened. Do not expect to find them as you left them. You have changed too. Are changing as your body begins to decay-too fast, all that lost time to make up for.

It will be harsh.

Do not imagine that-wherever you come from, no matter how sorely you are missed-they will be glad to see you. Didn't they drop dirt and roses on your coffin a dozen years ago when they put you away? They sobbed when you slipped into a coma and fell dead, no cause the doctors could find, so sad. They loved you and begged G.o.d to bring you back to them, but they didn't mean it.

Not like this.

Your body is no longer in stasis. You are in a footrace with decay. The changes begin the minute your heart resumes beating so hurry, you are on fire. If only you can see them again! Hurry. Try to make it home while they can still recognize you! You will decompose fast because, face it, you died a long time ago. You've been around too long. In the end, you'll die again, and the family? Look at them sitting around the supper table in the yellow light, photo of you on the mantel, pot roast again. G.o.d in His Heaven and everything in its place. Do you really want to blunder in and interrupt that?

You should hang back, but now that you remember, now that you feel, you are excited to see them, you can't wait! Be warned, nothing is as you remember. Not any more. With your arms spread wide in hopes you will come surging out of the darkness, incandescing with love, but do not be surprised when they run screaming. Your loving face is a terror, your gestures are nightmarish, they are horrified by the sounds you make, your heartfelt cries that they can't quite decipher bubbling out of your rotting face.

Pray to G.o.d that your home is so far away that you won't make it even though you are doomed to keep going. Sobbing, you will forge ahead on b.l.o.o.d.y stumps, heading home until the bones that hold you up splinter and you drop. Now hope to G.o.d that what's left of you decomposes in a woods somewhere, unseen by the loved ones you're trying so desperately to reach. You need to see them just once more and you need it terribly, but be grateful that they are spared this final horror. You will die in the agony of complete memory, and you will die weeping for everything you've lost.

Time pa.s.ses. The silence is profound. It is as though they are sharing the same long dream. Certain things are understood without having to be spoken. At last Dana snaps to attention. Like a refrigerator light set to go on when the door opens, the handsome figure in her bedroom remains motionless, with its great hands relaxed at its sides and crystal eyes looking into something she can only guess at. Alert now, excited by the possibilities, Dana tilts her head, regarding him. Carefully, she resumes the catechism. "You really don't feel anything?"

-No.

Dana studies the beautiful face, the graceful stance. Absolute composure, like a gift. She says dreamily, "That must be wonderful." Some time during the long silence that has linked them, she stopped thinking of the zombie who has come for her as an it. This is a man, living or dead or undead, a beautiful man in her room and he is here for her. Without speaking he tells her, -When you have been dead and buried there is no wonderful . . .

"I see." Not sure where this is going, Dana touches her Speed Dial. On her cell phone, Bill has always been number One. Her zombie notes this but nothing in his face changes. If he hears the little concatenation of beeps and the phone's ringing and ringing cut short by Bill's tiny, angry "What!" it makes no difference to him. When she's sure Bill is wide awake and listening Dana opens her arms to the intruder, saying in a new voice, "But we can still . . . "

- . . . and no desire . . .

"But you're so beautiful." She expects him to say, So are you.

- . . . looks are nothing to you . . .

"That's so sad!" The phone is alive with Bill's angry squawking.

-because you never change.

"Oh!" This makes her stop and think. "You mean you never get old?"

-No.

For Bill's benefit she continues on that same s.e.xy note. Oddly, it seems to fit the story that's unfolding. "And nothing hurts . . . "

-No, nothing hurts.

Far out of reach, Bill shouts into the phone. "Dana . . . "

As Dana purrs like a tiger licking velvet. "But everybody wants."

-Zombies don't want. They need.

She is drawn into the rhythm of the exchange, the metronomic back and forth. G.o.d he is handsome, she would like to run her hands along that perfect jaw, down the neck and inside the s.h.i.+rt collar to that perfect throat. "And you need . . . "

Without moving he is suddenly too close. She sees green veins lacing the pale skin.

-Something elusive. Infinitesimal. You won't even miss it. And when it's gone . . .

"Dammit, Dana!"

"But when it's gone . . . "

-You will be changed.

"Changed," she says dreamily, "and nothing will hurt any more."

-When you have been dead and buried pain is nothing to you.

"Will I be like you?"

-In a way.

She says into the growing hush, "So I'll be immortal."

-In a way.

There is an intolerable pause. Why doesn't he touch her? She doesn't know. He is close enough for her to see the detail on the silver bracelet; he's next to the bed, he is right here and yet he hasn't reached out. Unaccountably chilled as she is right now-something in the air, she supposes-Dana is drawn. Whatever he is, she wants. She has to have it! Her voice comes from somewhere deep inside. "What do you want me to do?"

His cold, cold hand rises to her cheek but does not touch it. -Nothing.

"Are we going to, ah . . . " Dana's tone says, make love. She is distantly aware of Bill Wylie still on the phone, trying to get her attention.

"Dana, do you hear me?"

"Shut up, Bill. Don't bother me." She wants to taunt him with the mystery. She doesn't understand it herself. She wants to make love with this magnetic, una.s.sailable stranger; she wants to be him. She wants him to love her as Bill never did, really, and she wants Bill to hear everything that happens between them. She wants Bill Wylie to lie there in his outsized bachelor's bed listening as his seduction unfolds, far out of sight and beyond his control-Bill, who until last night she expected to marry and live with forever. Let this night sit in Bill's imagination and fester there and torture him for the rest of his life. Whatever she does with this breathtaking stranger will free her forever, and Bill? It will serve him right. "Come take what you want."

"d.a.m.n it to h.e.l.l, Dana, I'm coming over!"

-When you have been dead and buried you do not know desire.

Yet there is a charge in the air between them.

The mind forgets but the body remembers. Bracelet glinting on my arm. What's the matter with me? Zombies know, insofar as they know anything, that you extract the soul from a distance. Through a keyhole, through a crack in a bedroom window. Always from a distance. This is essential. This knowledge is embedded: get too close and you get sucked in. And yet, and yet! It is as though the bracelet links X to the past it has no memory of. Interesting failure here, perhaps because this is its first a.s.sault on the precincts of the living. Zombies come out of the grave knowing certain things, but this one is distracted by unbidden reminders of the flesh, the circle of bright silver around the bone like a link to the forgotten.

"Then what," Dana cries as destiny closes in on her; she is laughing, crying, singing in a long, ecstatic giggle that stops suddenly as all the breath in her lungs-her soul-rushes out of her body and into his, along with the salty blood from her cut lip, the hanging shred of skin. "What will you take?"

-Everything.

Dana . . . can't breathe . . . she doesn't have to breathe, she . . . Lifeless, she slips from his arms as her inadvertent lover- if he is a lover-staggers and cries out, jittering with fear and excitement as emotion and memory rush into him. Shuddering back to life, he will not know which of them performed the seduction.

"Oh my G.o.d," he shouts, horrified by the sound of his own voice. "Oh my G.o.d."

That which used to be Dana Graver does not speak. It doesn't have to. The word is just out there, shared, like the air Dana is no longer breathing. -Who?

My G.o.d, my G.o.d I am Remy L'Hereux and I miss my wife so much! For my sins, I was separated from my soul and with it, everything I care about. For my sins I was put in the grave and for my sins, my empty body was raised up, and what I did that was so terrible? I ran away with the houngan's daughter. We met at Tulane, we fell in love and believe me, I was warned! My Sallie's father was Hector Bonfort, they said, a doctor they said, very powerful. A doctor, yes, I said, but a doctor of what? And without being told I knew, because this was the one question none of them would answer. I should have been afraid, but I loved Sallie too much. I went to her house. I told him Sallie and I were in love. Hector said we were too young, fathers always do. I said we were in love and he said I would never be good enough for her, so we ran away. I laughed in his face and took her out of his house one night while he was away at a conference.

MY Sallie left him a note: Don't look for us, she wrote. We'll be back when you accept Remy as your own son. The priest we asked to marry us begged us to reconsider; he warned us. "You have made a very grave enemy, and I . . . " He was afraid. We went to City Hall and the registrar of voters married us instead. Silver bracelet for my darling instead of a ring. Hector did not swear vengeance that I heard, but I knew he was powerful. n.o.body ever spelled out what he was. I knew, but I pretended not to know. Sallie and I were so much in love that I took her knowing he would come for me. G.o.d, we were happy. G.o.d, we were in love.

Sallie, so bright and so pretty with her whole heart and soul showing in her face, we were so happy! But we should have known it was not for long. When Jamie came he was the image of both of us. Our little boy! The three of us were never happier than we were in New York, as far away from New Orleans as we could go. I couldn't stay at Tulane, not with Hector's heart turned against me. In New York, we thought we could be safe. There are always flaws in plans cobbled out of love. Hector found out. Then he, it. Something came for me. I got sick. I fell into a coma, unless it was a trance. I didn't know what was happening, but Sallie did. She prayed by my bedside. She cried.

We were torn apart by my death, I could hear her sobbing over my bed in the days, the weeks after I fell unconscious but I couldn't reach out and I couldn't talk to her. I heard her sobbing in the room, I heard her sobbing on the telephone, I heard her begging her father the houngan to come and release me from the trance. I tried to warn her but I couldn't speak. Whatever you do, don't tell him where we are. Then I felt Hector in the city. On our street. In my house. Deep inside my body where what was left of me was hiding. I felt the intrusion, and that before he ever came into my room. It was only a matter of time before his hand parted me down to the center, and I was lost. I was buried too deep to talk but I begged Sallie: Don't leave me alone! Then Hector was in the room and in the seconds when Sallie had to leave us alone-our son was crying, Jamie needed her, she'd never have left me like that if it hadn't been for him-when Sally left I felt Hector approaching-not physically, but from somewhere much closer, searching, probing deep. Reaching into the arena of the uncreated.

Sallie came in and caught him. "Father. Don't!"

"I wasn't doing anything."

"I know what you were doing. Bring him back!"

"I'm trying," he said. It was a lie.

Then he put his ear to my mouth, his ear and my G.o.d with the sound of velvet tearing, my soul rushed out of me. "Father," Sallie cried and he thumped my chest with his big fist: CPR. Then he turned to her.

"Too late," he said. "When I came into the house Remy was already dying."

She rushed at him and shoved him aside. Before he could stop her she slipped her silver bracelet on my wrist. I was almost gone but I heard her sobbing, "Promise to come back."

The grief was crus.h.i.+ng. It was almost a relief to descend into the grave with my sweetheart's tears still drying on my face and the bracelet that bound us rattling on my wrist, forgotten. Until now. My G.o.d, until now!

What have I done?

I was better off when I was no more than a thing, like that beautiful, cold woman rising from the bed but it's too late to go back. Where I felt no pain and no desire, desire is reawakened.

I want to go home!

I have go. Go home to Sallie, the love of my soul, and I want to see Jamie, our son. I miss them so much, but I can't! I have been dead and buried and I don't know how long it's been. I would give anything to see them but for their protection, I have to stay back. Sallie wants to see me again, but not like this. The hand I bring up to my face is redolent of the grave and when I open my mouth I taste the sweet rot rising inside of me.

I can't go back to them, not the way I am, I won't.

I have to. I can't not go because with the return of life comes the awful, inexorable compulsion. Better I throw myself in front of a train or into a furnace than do this to the woman I love. I know what's happening, the rus.h.i.+ng decay because to live again means you're going to die, and when you have been dead and buried, death comes fast. I have to stop. I have to stop myself. I . . .

The creature on the bed does not speak. It doesn't have to. -Have to go home.

I have to go home. In a return of everything that made him human-love, regret and a terrible foreboding and before any of these, compulsion-in full knowledge of what he has been and what he is becoming, Remy L'Hereux turns his back on the undead thing on the bed, barely noting the fraught, anxious arrival of Billy Wylie, who has no idea what he's walking into.

That which had been Dana Graver sits up, its eyes burning with a new green light and its pale skin s.h.i.+mmering against the black nightgown.-Then go.

I'm going now.

About the Author.

Kit Reed has stories appearing in Postscripts, Asimov's, Kenyon Review, and several invited anthologies this year. A collection from PS Publis.h.i.+ng is scheduled for 2011. Publishers Weekly praised Enclave (2009) as "a gripping dystopian thriller." Other novels include The Baby Merchant, J. Eden, and Thinner Than Thou, which won an ALA Alex award. Often anthologized, her stories appear in venues ranging from The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Asimov's SF, and Omni to The Yale Review, The Kenyon Review and The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Her collections include Thief of Lives, Dogs of Truth, and Weird Women, Wired Women, which, along with the short novel Little Sisters of the Apocalypse, was a finalist for the Tiptree Prize. A Guggenheim fellow and the first American recipient of a five-year literary grant from the Abraham Woursell Foundation, she is Resident Writer at Wesleyan University.

Story Notes.

Booklist's review of Reed's collection Dogs of Truth had this to say about "The Zombie Prince": "There's even a story, the almost-sweet creepy . . . in which zombies get to be something other than moaning hulks out to eat brains . . . " True enough.

There's also, to me, something particularly disturbing about the human in this tale, Dana.

Selected Scenes from the End of the World:.