Book of the Dead: A Zombie Anthology (52 page)

He was old enough to realize that someone—two people, maybe—had escaped the Dead World last night. Lucky stiffs, he thought.

He reached in for the dangling heart, and it fel to ashes at his touch.

Document Outline

• 1. Blossom By Chan Mcconnell
  
• 2. Mess Hall By Richard Laymon
  
• 3. It Helps If You Sing By Ramsey Campbell
  
• 4. Home Delivery By Stephen King
  
• 5. Wet Work By Philip Nutman
  
• Choices By Glen Vasey
  
  • Provisional Center for Disease Control
    
  • Puerto Nuevo, Florida
    
  • Interoffice Memorandum #57-608
    
  • From: Kenneth J. Howell, Acting Director
    
  • To: Malcolm Foley, Director of Research
    
  • Malcolm,
    
  • This just came into my hands today. Rather than take the time to edit it, and risk omitting something you might find useful, I had Marcie type it just as I received it. I added only one note, near the end where the writing changes hands. I still have ...
    
  • The primary point of interest is the final dozen pages or so.
    
  • I have included a map of the general location where it was picked up. You may want to have your people investigate, if that is possible. Maybe even bring some of these people in for examinations or something. If I can be of any assistance, just holler.
    
  • I don�t know if this will be a help to you, or simply another distraction. I know how understaffed and overworked you are, but I figured that a shot in the dark is better than holding your fire at times like these. My shot in the dark is sending this ...
    
  • I don�t suppose it helps much for me to say that I don�t envy your position, but I�ll say it anyway. This is probably the second time in history that it has been less harrowing to be a bureaucrat than a scientist. The first was during the Spanish Inqu...
    
  • Oh, for the good old days!
    
  • Keep the faith,
    
  • Ken
    
  • I am well concealed. The night is quiet. I am safe for the moment.
    
  • Safe?
    
  • For the moment. They are incapable of stealth. I think.
    
  • The others, the random violent gangs of those yet living, seem to refuse stealth. They are always making noise. Perhaps it is obsessional. An attempt to scare off death. To scare off their awareness of what has happened to this world. A way of convert...
    
  • Am I any different? Trying to write as if the world knew, or cared, that I was still going on? As if it might ever be read by anyone? Am I really trying to confront this, sort it out? Or am I merely trying to avoid the issue in my own way? Making my o...
    
  • Does it really matter?
    
  • I have a goal.
    
  • Time was, when I�and I was not alone in this�took for granted that the cataclysm, the great world crash course in catastrophe and death, would be nuclear annihilation. That it would be unannounced and just sudden enough to eliminate any possible thoug...
    
  • 1) Grab your ass and run, until you can run no further.
    
  • 2) Hunker down on that selfsame ass and pretend at bravery, pretend at some last vestige of defiance by making it clear that they no longer had the power to make you run.
    
  • Of course neither choice would make much difference. At best it is the choice of the Christian facing the lion: flee, only to be chased, caught, and eaten; or refuse to flee, robbing the spectators only of the chase. A question more of stance and pers...
    
  • Not a good situation, surely, but at least that much would have been clear from the start. There would be no room for self-delusion. There is something reassuring about a situation in which all choices are equal, even if they are all equally bad. One ...
    
  • Then God, in his infinite mercy and wisdom, pulls the big switch on us. Throws us a curveball�no, a knuckler�when we were all geared up for the heat, and no doubt busts a gut laughing as we tie ourselves in knots trying to hit it.
    
  • Oh, yes! He left us lucky survivors with a veritable plethora of choices. And, lo! they do not all lead unto death! No, not by a long road. In fact, the great majority of them lead to something considerably worse �though only after a long and painful ...
    
  • So his sacred prerogative of free will remains intact, as ever, propelled by fear and buoyed by false hope.
    
  • For the hope that he has offered us is not �the thing with feathers� that Emily Dickinson once knew.
    
  • No!
    
  • His hope is the thing with teeth. It is the hope of survival. The hope that one might prolong one�s personal experience of horror and deprivation. The foolish but stubborn hope that somehow, after day upon day of terror and pain, he might smile down u...
    
  • We are all drowning. A drowning man cannot easily discern the difference between a timber and a straw. A desperate man cannot distinguish between a hope that is never likely to pan out, and one that cannot under any circumstances.
    
  • Yet these are the choices we must make.
    
  • These are the hopes he has left us.
    
  • I have a goal.
    
  • Straw or timber?
    
  • A desperate man grasps at what he can.
    
  • A godsend.
    
  • I hope.
    
  • Godsend or self-activated trap, it hardly matters. I cannot survive forever without sleep. Real sleep. I will stay the night. I have chosen the likely death of staying in one place and submitting to unconsciousness, over the certain death of attemptin...
    
  • I am hoping that I am not too grossly underestimating their abilities to sense and to seek. Never before have I felt so claustrophobic. Never before have I had so excellent a reason to.
    
  • I know that drinking in this situation is foolish. I must remain alert. But to take advantage of the positive aspects of my circumstance, it is imperative that I sleep. To sleep I must curb my anxieties, my sense of being trapped. No other method seem...
    
  • I cannot stop wondering how long I have. How keen, how far-reaching are their senses? How near are they now? Will I waken in the middle of the night to find them hammering on the door? Worse? Will I waken with their godawful hands and teeth
    
  • STOP!
    
  • I know I may be drinking my death in this godforsaken trap
    
  • ENOUGH!
    
  • Does it matter? Does any of it matter? Why pretend? Ultimately there is no escape, just stays of execution. I die tonight, tomorrow, some other day or night.
    
  • I die.
    
  • That is what it all boils down to. Why pretend otherwise? The world is theirs now. We are all doomed. No escapes remain, only choices.
    
  • I have chosen to die drunk in this bed, trapped inside this house. If I wake tomorrow, I may choose another way to die.
    
  • These are the only choices that remain to me. This is how I am permitted to utilize God�s sacred prerogative.
    
  • They have not found me.
    
  • Yet.
    
  • But I do not feel capable of traveling now. The drink was a stupid mistake. Letting it get so out of hand. Like on a fucking holiday.
    
  • Perhaps that�s what I needed, though. Release. Oblivion. If the delay it has caused doesn�t kill me, I think I will consider the episode less harshly.
    
  • I will try to spend another night here. I prefer to travel by daylight and have already missed much of today�s. I will not drink tonight.
    
  • I am hoping that their absence now indicates that they are all too far away to sense me. Straw or timber?
    
  • I will spend the time I have here writing. It is the only safe peace upon which I can draw.
    
  • Maybe it was simply the fact that someone was knocking on the door. Surely that was a startling enough development itself. Not that the knocking frightened us, we were too far gone for that. Our fear had become abstract, incapable of approaching us in...
    
  • Besides, in the world we were used to�and had refused, to that point, to divorce ourselves of� knocks on the door were, at worst, annoyances, never threats. So even though we had all been informed that the world outside my apartment had changed drasti...
    
  • Perhaps it was the effect of seeing real people, made of actual flesh and actual blood, after so many hours of serious, soulless electronic faces.
    
  • But I think it was something more than either, or both, of these things.
    
  • What I think it was, was the realization that there were still people in the world. People making choices. People choosing to continue to live, not merely to survive, as we were doing almost in absentia. It seems to me now that that is the difference ...
    
  • Scott and Mike and I hadn�t made a conscious decision since the news had first interrupted our routine. Though, by mere luck, we had survived, we had ceased to be alive. We were merely zombies waiting for the ghouls to find us. How many were there lik...
    
  • The only thing that had saved us to that point was the fact that ghoulism�or whatever one might wish to call it�was not yet so widespread as it is now.
    
  • The only thing that saved us from that point on, I am now convinced, is the fact that the Witnesses found us first and woke us up.
    
  • They showed us that there were choices to be made simply by pursuing their own choice, which�pie in the sky or no�they must have known to be tremendously dangerous.
    
  • So perhaps they were out doing God�s good work, if it is neither vain nor ridiculous for me to think that our personal fate could possibly matter to a God who had permitted these horrors.
    
  • Sometimes the choices we make, especially under unbearable stress, don�t make any coherent sense. We will not allow another man to tell us that. It is the case of the drowning man attempting to mount the straw. Certainly it is imbecilic, but in such s...
    
  • How could I have dissuaded either of them? What had I to offer them in place of their thin straws?
    
  • I let them both go.
    
  • Even Mike whose choice was, by far, the most foolish.
    
  • Even Mike whom I have loved like a brother for better than fifteen years.
    
  • The only choices we are ever really left with are these three: be a leader, be a follower, or be an individual.
    
  • Many find security only where the self is given up, subsumed. Where Authority makes the decisions. Where rules are clear and strict. Where orders create Order and are not to be questioned.
    
  • Others find it only where they are themselves the Authority and Order that fashions the rules and makes the decisions.
    
  • Scott may be safe now, following some well-armed, battle-wise sergeant or lieutenant amidst a throng of like-minded companions. But I doubt it.
    
  • Mike may be safe in the darkness of his old school, with his phantom Order protecting him from very real chaos. But that is even easier to doubt.
    
  • The Witnesses may still be knocking on peoples� doors, waking people up, protected by some heavenly umbrella. But that, I find, is hardest to believe.
    
  • More likely by now they have knocked on one too many doors. Have made the big change. Are still out there making converts, but of a different sort. Their teeth revealed no longer by their God�s-gracious-grins, but by the godawful grimace of a hellacio...
    
  • Yes. That I find easier to believe, but not to think about.
    
  • And I�? I have a goal. Straw or timber? How much farther? Can I make it? What will I find? Does it really matter?
    
  • Leader, follower, or individual?
    
  • I like to think I made my choice when I was eighteen, and have simply deferred its actualization all these years.
    
  • Only once in my life did I experience a setting in which a person could be an individual while maintaining the advantages of living in a group. It was a marriage of independence and interaction, of freedom and support.
    
  • It was a brief stay. Afterwards I somehow allowed myself to fall back into the ways for which I had been trained and educated all my life. I permitted myself to accept a position in the lower echelon of the rat race I claimed to despise. I let myself ...
    
  • I tell myself now that those truths, my belief in them, merely slept and did not die. I tell myself that I am now the prodigal son, hoping that some family remains for me to return to.
    
  • I can almost believe that it is all over. That the horror has finally ceased. That I have traveled forward or backward in time, to a period when the threat does not exist.
    
  • Such thinking is dangerous. I cannot permit myself to believe such things. But it is difficult.
    
  • For twenty-four hours I have not been threatened. Looking out this window I am confronted only by grass and trees, shimmering in the complacent afternoon sun. There is a stream too. Not large enough for trout, but certainly supporting a thriving popul...
    
  • Everything within my range of vision is so tranquilly unaffected.
    
  • And then there is me.
    
  • Wondering if I am insane.
    
  • Yet.
    
  • Wondering if the horror is really ended.
    
  • I cannot entertain such thoughts. I might begin to consider staying yet another day. And, if that day was uneventful, yet another.
    
  • Eventually they would find me.
    
  • My time here is limited. If I do not impose that limit, they most certainly shall.
    
  • So I will leave at dawn, grateful for my brief reprieve.
    
  • I have gathered everything that I intend to carry with me, into this one room. I have left the window open for two reasons: to allow in the breeze, which is gentle and kind; and to allow in any sounds from below, which might not be.
    
  • A small bureau is pushed up against the bedroom door. I know that it might slow down my escape, if things should take a certain turn; but it might also buy me some valuable time, if things should twist a slightly different way.
    
  • My pack is stuffed, as full as I can get it, with the food and water that I have found. I am also taking the bottle of rum. Perhaps this is foolish, but I tell myself that I have no other form of anesthetic. Foolish or not, it is the choice that I hav...
    
  • At dawn I will set out, once again, for the Hub. Hoagie told me once that I could find him, if I ever really needed him.
    
  • I need him now.
    
  • If anyone knows how to survive this horror, and still remain alive, it is him.
    
  • I am grateful that the last stages of my journey are lost to me, obscured by a fog of combined remorse and fear. Remorse at and fear of precisely what, I cannot say. I will not subject myself to so thorough an examination. At least not yet.
    
  • In more general terms I know that the remorse is caused by who and what I have proved myself to be. The fear by what I might discover if the fog dispersed and I was forced to confront the actions and scenes that I have so willfully forgotten. I am gla...
    
  • Hoagie tells me that none of it matters anyway. We drank the rum last night, and he said that nothing from the past, whether personal or collective, really matters anymore. Things are different. I am alive. I am here.