Best New Zombie Tales Trilogy (67 page)
Read Best New Zombie Tales Trilogy Online
Authors: James Roy Daley
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Anthologies & Literary Collections, #General, #Genre Fiction, #Horror, #Anthologies, #Short Stories
I’m out of food now.
November.
I brok the pensil. i bit a hole in my hand and Im writing in blood. The whales are all around. they are losing their skin. i see greasy fat and grey meat in the splits of their flesh. I have never touched a whale, but I look at that bone white fat and all i can think is that running my hands through it would be like squeezing lard through my fingers. I kno its not true. theyr meat. they arent lard covered in skin. Its a stupid thought. one that I can’t seem to shake. I’m a stupid man.
Im coming soon I think maggs. The filter is broken. I taste sea water in my stores now. cant be much longr. i think i taste whalestink in the water too, but maybe its just cuz i smell them and they smell so fuckin bad i cant help but taste them to.
If I do taste them
Can i die?
If they make me sick that would be something huh? if it happens im stepping off the raft and sinking to the bottom of the ocean. its were i belong anyway. maybe ill grab a handful of grease off that whale before i go down. have a snack.
I’ll just lay on the bottom of the ocean, bones crushed, eyes popped like rotting grapes, surrounded by the long cold death of the sea. how long? forever maybe. yes. forever.
Goodbye maggie. I wont write again. I hope I see you soon. If not, please know I love you. I hope I see you.
Good You
Camille Smiled
JOHN EVERSON
Camille smiled. I thought so, anyway.
And then she sighed.
It was faint, light as baby’s breath. But I swear I heard it.
I stroked a wisp of black hair from the marble smooth slope of her forehead.
“Wake up, honey,” I whispered. “Talk to me, baby.”
It had been days since I’d last heard her voice, and the house felt deadly still without the sparkling tinkle of her laughter. As if the whole world was holding its breath, waiting. I didn’t know if I could stand another day of it.
Hour after hour I’d waited by her bedside, pacing, praying, bending to listen for her heart at her breast, holding a mirror to her lips to see if she breathed. I straightened the hand-woven necklace that voodoo queen Madame Trevail had sold me, down in her tiny shop hidden near the French Quarter. I centered its tiny pouch of leaves and clippings and extracts of God only knew what until it rested like a teabag in the small of her neck. Then I reconsidered and moved it out of that pale hollow, thinking that its miniscule weight might choke her tiny throat as it rested in that most delicate of settings.
“Wake up,” I begged again, and stared at her tiny frame, so still and frail there on the bed. She wore her finest dress, a yellow chiffon summery thing that my wife Annabel had picked. “It brings out her eyes,” she’d said.
If only I could see those eyes now. It seemed like forever since they’d gazed up at me, so wide and blue, turning my scolds to dust. She had one of those faces, one of those
looks,
that melted any offense. She was going to bring a lot of men to their knees someday, I knew.
“Jack, come to bed,” a voice spoke behind me.
I turned and Anna was there in the doorframe, her eyes red and swollen, her fist stifling a yawn.
“She sighed,” I explained.
“She didn’t.” Anna’s voice sounded brittle as spun glass.
“She did, I heard her. She’ll wake soon, I know it.”
Anna cried, a low stifled moan, and I went to her. This was a pain we shared, a fear we couldn’t live with. I couldn’t bear to see her suffer, though I felt the same empty pit in my soul. I pulled her close, cushioning her head to my shoulder.
“Believe, Anna,” I whispered through the tangled web of her raven hair, so like her daughter’s.
She pushed away.
“Believe?” she hissed, shoving again at my shoulders. I retreated toward the bed but she kept coming.
Believe in what?” she yelled. “Our daughter is not going to wake up again, why can’t you understand that?”
She stomped to the bed and grabbed Camille’s dress with both hands. The sound of ripping fabric filled the room and Anna turned to me with the shredded lemon chiffon still gripped in her hands.
“Look at her,” she cried, pointing at my eight-year-old daughter’s undeveloped chest. The porcelain white skin was hideously broken by accusing blushes of purple and midnight blue. Black, oozing stitches held my daughter’s chest together from the ruin that the fender of an ’87 Ford had made of it. My daughter would never grow up to wow the boys with her bosom. She would never have one.
“Cammy is dead, Jack,” Anna wailed. “When are you going to accept it? When are you going to take her back to the cemetery, where she belongs?”
Her voice had risen to a dangerous boiling-tea pitch.
“I can’t stand to see her anymore,” she cried, laying her face on the ugly dark crosshatching of Camille’s chest. “I can’t stand to see you like this anymore.”
“Anna,” I began. She shrugged off my hand and rushed from the room.
I turned back to Camille, and tried to draw the shreds of her dress back to a seemly covering.
Wake up, baby,” I said for the thousandth time. I thought I saw her eyelids crease, just slightly, and I leaned forward, anxious.
Her eyes opened.
Maybe it was the press of Anna’s touch, or her tears or the violence of her actions. Maybe the voodoo sachet I’d hocked my second car to obtain had just taken its time. But for the first time in days, my baby’s beautiful crystal blue eyes stared up out of that tiny angel face and into mine. Only they seemed dulled, lacking that ocean-deep warmth I remembered.
“Cammy?” I said, bending to hug her.
She clubbed me in the side of the head with her fist.
“Huh?” I gulped and fell to the floor, more out of surprise than hurt.
Camille sat up in her bed, and looked down at me on the floor. Her expression remained blank.
“Honey?” I said, rubbing my ear. I could feel the heat of swelling as a flood of blood rushed through my earlobe. It felt like a bee sting.
Camille lifted a foot over the edge of the mattress, and then stood, walking slowly and stiffly past me to her dresser. She stood there staring at the mirror and didn’t move. I thought she was looking at her face, but then as I eased off the floor, I saw that her finger was tracing the long jagged paths stitched into her chest. Her skin shone with the glossy smear of something liquid, something leaking, where her finger had passed.
“It will all be okay now,” I said. She leaned towards the mirror, and then turned. A split second later I realized that it might not all be okay.
I barely saw her arm in the air before her pet rock caught me right between the eyes with the force of a major league fastball.
When my vision cleared, she was gone. My head was aching, but my heart felt worse. Something had gone horribly wrong. My beautiful daughter, the little flower who meant more to me than life, would never have hurt a fly, let alone her daddy. But her first two actions upon waking from a sleep deeper than death were to try to hurt me.
Bad.
I gingerly probed the thick bump on my forehead.
Was my daughter dangerous?
Was my daughter alive?
A ragged blade of ice serrated my brain when I turned my head, but gritting my teeth, I grabbed hold of the mattress and pushed myself to my feet. Gingerly, ignoring the pain, I padded out of the room. I had to find Camille. Before she hurt herself.
Or someone else.
I pushed open the door to our bedroom and saw the pale moon of Anna’s cheek setting into the pillow. One hand grasped at my untenanted pillow, and her chest moved slowly, rhythmically. She was already asleep.
I pulled the door shut and took the stairs down to the front room, praying Cammy was still in the house.
And afraid to find her if she was.
The great room was all shadows and floating fear, and I forced myself to put one foot in front of the other to cross it. I had to get to the light switch, but what if my newly-resurrected daughter came at me when I couldn’t see her?
With each step, I paused to listen, but my heart’s insistent pounding drowned out any ambient noise. The house seemed silent. I found the wall near the front door and slid my hand along the frame, looking for the switch plate. I could feel the draught of cold seeping in from outside through the seam in the doorframe, but it wasn’t as cold as the ice in my belly. The hair on the back of my neck stood up, and I pushed my hand fast up the wall, at last connecting with the switch.
The light on the end table near our couch blazed on, blinding me for a moment. I turned and pressed my back to the door, ready for whatever might come at me.
But nothing did.
The room was empty, still. The morning newspaper still lay open on the center cushion of the couch, and the TV remote hung halfway off the coffee table, where I’d left it hours before.
Then I saw her.
Camille stood, unmoving, in the arch leading to the kitchen. Her eyes stared straight at me, yet she seemed unaware of anything. There was no recognition in her gaze. No life in her smile. She seemed a living doll.
There was, however, a long silver carving knife in her hand. It was the knife I used to carve Thanksgiving turkeys, and it looked ludicrously large in her grip, its point just barely above the carpet as she held the shaft in her tiny hand. I knew exactly who and what it was meant for.
“Cammy,” I said, trying without success to level the tremor in my voice. I had to be calm. She was just a child.
My
child. “Baby, what’s the matter? Everything’s okay now, you’re with mommy and daddy again. I brought you back because I love you.”
She began to walk toward me then, placing one delicately sculpted foot in front of the other, her ghastly white toes glowing in contrast to the taupe of the carpet. She said nothing.
“Cammy,” I tried again, trying to think of what would entice her. “Let daddy…get you a nice bowl of ice cream. Does your tummy hurt?”
Her feet sped up and she was across the room, raising her arm with the clear intent to pin me with her blade to the door.
“Baby stop,” I begged, but she didn’t.
As the knife flashed into motion, I acted, sliding down the door and throwing my body to the right. The knife clacked against the wood behind me. When I hit the floor in front of the end table, I rolled away, coming up in a crouch, ready to move again. She was already upon me, raising the knife for the kill.
“Cammy no,” I cried, and instead of rolling away from her, I launched myself
into
her, tackling her at the knees at the same time as I brought my palm up to grasp her thin forearm. She fell backwards with the unexpected slam of my weight, and the floor reverberated with the smack of her skull on the carpet. She didn’t move.
I almost let go of her arm to cradle her head, parental concern overriding self-preservation, but Cammy didn’t miss a trick. Her stillness had been a feint. The knife began to slice towards my throat as I hesitated, and I pushed away from her just in time. Something warm was suddenly dripping down my chest, but I didn’t pause to look. She was already on her feet again, free, and coming towards me.
“Stop,” I cried, putting the coffee table between us while desperately looking for something I could use to hold her back without hurting her.
She held no similar concern. Face blank of any emotion, my little baby walked around the coffee table, knife raised high, ready to slice without remorse into her daddy.
I grabbed one of the couch cushions and thrust it at her just as she struck.
“No,” I yelled, and pushed the cushion––and Cammy––backwards until her feet tangled and she fell again. This time, her back slapped on the decorative oaken strip of the couch front and I heard something crack.
Then she was lying motionless on the floor again, eyes open, and still empty. This time, she stayed down.
The hall light flicked on and Anna appeared on the steps, one fist shoved into her teeth, stifling a yawn.
What’s going on down here?” she demanded, hand and yawn serving to muffle her words.
I looked down at our baby lying on the floor, the knife lying just inches from her hand.
It’s Cammy,” I said, still fighting for breath. “She’s alive again.”
Anna said nothing, but continued down the stairs until she was standing just a couple feet away. Her cheeks glistened in the dull orange light.
“She’s dead, Jack.”
“No honey,” I argued. “After you left, she woke up, and she punched me and then she ran away, so I came down here to find her and…”
“STOP!” Anna screamed. “Our daughter is fucking
dead
, Jack. She’s dead, dead, DEAD. I don’t know what you’re doing down here with her body; I don’t want to know. I can’t stand this anymore. I can’t stand you. Put her back upstairs. And tomorrow, you’re taking her back to the cemetery. And I don’t want to hear anymore about your voodoo black magic bullshit. This is too much.”
My wife ran up the stairs then, leaving me standing there, staring at the unmoving form on the carpet that was once my baby.