Jews vs Zombies (12 page)

‘Other people, apart from the Jews, must have resisted the temptation of the serum,’ mused Jonie.

‘You think we Jews resisted the temptation? We’re such expert temptation-resisters? Don’t be pumpkinny. If they’d’ve offered us immortality, wouldn’t we have taken it? Only they didn’t offer it. That was the deal. Because the Wolf hated us.’

For a while they sat in silence, looking at the lake. The little slurpy waves kept kissing away at the reed-bank, over and over. The sun was lower. Daniel pinched out the last quarter-centimetre of his cigarette, and brought up his tin. Then he placed the demi-stub on the metal, and lit it again with his lighter, bringing his face close to it to suck up the very last wisps of smoke. His cigarette tin was brushed with a score of black marks where he had done this before. But what can you do? Tobacco is precious.

‘When did all this happen?’ Jonie asked. ‘I mean – I know it was a long time ago. I know it wasn’t living memory.’

‘My grandfather remembered those times,’ Daniel said, musingly. ‘He used to tell me about it.’

‘He died. So that,’ said Jonie, with the pedantry of youth, ‘is not living memory.’

‘He died, thank God!’ agreed Daniel. ‘There were a lot more of us, back then. Whole villages-full. Not like now. Ah well. Onward I suppose. Until we find the island and build the New City.’ And he heaved himself off his stick-seat and folded it away.

2

That night Jonie had another go at reading the book; but it was indigestible stuff, and Daniel’s handwriting didn’t make it any easier – assuming it had been copied out by Daniel, and not some other scribe. His spelling was idiosyncratic even by Jonie’s teenage standards, and sometimes his vocabulary was simply baffling.

Physiologists should think twice before positioning the drive for self-preservation as the cardinal drive of an organic being. Above all, a living thing wants to discharge its strength, to roll it forcefully from birth to death: life itself being fundamentally a Wheel to Power. Self-preservation is the oblique perversion of this wheel, the most frequent consequences of zombie life.

Physical-what-nows? And then there was a series of weird proverbs, almost none of which made sense.

Anyone who despises himself will still respect himself as a despiser.

It is the desire, not the desired, that we fall in love with.

The consequences of our actions take us by the scruff of the neck, altogether indifferent to the fact that we have ‘improved’ in the meantime.

We are punished most for our virtues.

Vices, she presumed he meant to write there. And –

He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby becomes a monster. And when you gaze long into zombies the zombies also gaze into you.

Cold blue eyes. But, though young, Jonie had enough experience of the Zayinim to know that when they looked at you, there was nothing behind the look. They could not gaze. Most were repulsive-looking, but even the good-looking ones were no better than beasts: naked, filthy, dangerous. At breakfast the next day, she challenged Daniel: ‘Do you write it out, Uncy? Is this book I borrow-éd in your handwriting?’

Daniel glowered at her. They were expecting Jacob back soon: later that day maybe, or maybe tomorrow, or the day after; and until he came back Daniel had to conserve his tobacco. Accordingly he was grumpy. ‘You’ve a problem with my handy writing, maybe? Stealers can’t be choosers, my girl.’

‘It’s hard going, and your spelling is a shocker, and I don’t know,’ Jonie said, haughtily enough. ‘Tell you what the problem is? The problem is the book has no story.’

‘No story,’ snorted Daniel, rubbing the palm of his hand over his tall, lined brow. ‘Stories you want, eh? But we’re beyond stories now. The world has ended, and we’re living in the afterwards, and there are no stories any more.’

Her mother nodded sagely at this, sipping her tea.

This was hardly a very satisfying answer, and Jonie vowed to give Daniel the book straight back – or burn it, or throw it in the lake, just to annoy him. But she didn’t. She kept reading. There was something weirdly compelling in the mumbo-jumbo of it. And that night, as she drifted off to sleep, it occurred to her with a force like revelation – maybe this was a holy book. Maybe it contained the answer to the problems of the Jews and the Zombies.

She was jolted awake by raised voices. She knew immediately what the shouting meant. Sat straight up in bed. Slapped herself on the face. But she knocked her lighter on the floor when she reached for it, and wasting time scrabbling around before she could get a candle lit. Then she put shoes on, and put on her leather coat and gloves, the material stiff as thick cardboard in the cold. Cradling the candle she came out and along the corridor, and clanging up the metal steps to the top of the tower. Even before she reached the top she heard the snap, snap of rifle fire.

Everybody was there: her mother, Daniel, Elisheva, Esther, K. and Ash. K. swivelled the spotlight, and the others took turns at shooting at the indistinctness below. Ash handed Jonie a pistol (all the other rifles were away with father), but the moon was no bigger than a toenail clipping and some mocking clouds were playing peekaboo with even this small light. The Zayinim could be heard rather than seen, rattling the wire fence, making their distinctive ‘ch’ hissing noise, occasionally letting out dog-like high-pitched whimpers.

‘It’s not good, them being out at night,’ Jonie gasped, excited despite herself. K. moved the spotlight, and three of them were visible in the circle. They turned their eyes up at the sudden Illumination, and mother shot the one on the left – drove a groove right down the crown of its head, like parting its hair. It danced backwards as a spray of black fluid appeared above its head like a rooster’s comb. Then it fell out of the light.

Abruptly, the Zayinim started shambling away. They were dumb, ‘severely mentally impaired’ as mother put it, but they were not wholly brainless. The fence was not giving way, and they weren’t getting through. ‘It’s not good, that they’re out at night,’ Jonie repeated.

‘Indeed not,’ said Elisheva. Zombies usually got active in the warmth of the day. Unless they got food, that was the only way they could get active. Shambling around in the small hours must have meant they’d been feeding. And feeding carried with it the inevitable correlative: feeding on whom?

‘I’m going to start one of the trucks,’ said Daniel, heading down the stairs. ‘We need more light.’

‘Don’t waste the petrol,’ said mother. ‘They’re going anyway.’

‘You sure?’

As if in answer to his question, clouds parted and enough pearl-coloured moonlight fell on the field in front of the camp to show it deserted.

‘They’re gone,’ mother pronounced.

Jonie was sent back to bed, but of course she was too wired-up to sleep now. She read some more of the Char book, though reading by candlelight always made her eyes tired. Was Char really his name? Or was it a pseudonym. The only sure way to destroy one of the Zayinim was to burn it to ash; and in the latter days, when there had been end-times attempts to stem the tide of the zombermen, much of civilisation had gone up in smoke. Several times, when the camp had moved, Jonie had seen the scorched remains of cities, squares of slag where even weeds would not grow, black earth. It was why there were so few books. So little of everything. The philosopher of the charred. He had the answers! If only she could interpret the book aright.

The Jews – a people ‘born for zlavery’ as Tictacus and the whole ancient world says, ‘the chosen people’ as they themselves say and believe – the Jews achieved that miracle of revaluation of values thanks to which life on earth has for a couple of millennia acquired a new and dangerous fascination – their prophets fused ‘rich’, ‘godless’, ‘evil’, ‘violent’, ‘sensual’ into one and were the first to coin the word ‘world’ as a term of infamy. It is in this inversion of values ... that the significance of the Jewish people resides: with them there begins the slave revolt in morals.

‘Zlavery’? Was the word an artefact of Daniel’s orthography? It wasn’t in her Websters – she got out of bed and checked. So was it a slip of the pen? Or actually intended as a portmanteau of zayin and slavery? How were the Jews born for that?

She snuffed her candle and lay down again, until she felt sleep creep over her, like sinking into a hot bath. Then it suddenly shot through her mind, a fiery spear in her thoughts. They were slaves – slaves to the persistency and hostility of the Zayinim! A hundred disparate things fell into a gorgeous and meaningful pattern for the first time – with what splendour it all made sense. The Egyptian pharaoh undead mumzombie people keeping the Jews in bondage until the red sea of blood opened its doors across charred black sands and they fled along the Mobius-strip pathway of DNA. The struggle between Jews and zombies would drag on, itself zombie-like, unless they found a way to pass beyond Jews and Zombies. The future. She was the future. New blood, and a new beginning. Breaking the old wheel of tradition. Helix and double-helix, and the doubling was a necessary part of the helix.

She debated with herself whether to get up, relight her candle, seek out her mother and explain things – but she could anticipate the cross temper of waking her at this hour. She’d explain it all in the morning. And, giving herself permission, she fell into sleep.

3

In the morning she woke with a fizzing in her stomach. But when she got up, and as she was rinsing her face in the basin outside, it dawned on her that she had forgotten the whole glorious unified vision she had had in the night. She sat on the end of her bed and waited for the inspiration to return to her, but it didn’t. Then she grew angry with herself for slothfully falling asleep instead of getting up and doing something. Anything! Writing it down, shouting it in Daniel’s ear. She propped her pillow against the end of the bed and punched it for a while. But that didn’t do any good. Oh, she was in a foul temper went she went through to see what there was for breakfast.

Everybody was there, and they were right in the middle of a discussion about moving the camp. ‘Include me out of this discussion, why don’t you,’ she wailed.

‘We didn’t want to wake you, princess,’ said Ash, separating his beard into two forks that he plaited round one another, undoing the plait and smoothing the beard into one again – a nervous tick of his.

‘We can’t move until Jacob gets back,’ said Daniel.

Jonie scowled at him. ‘Of course we can’t,’ she said, sarcastically. ‘We need the extra hands to help us load the trucks.’

‘I didn’t mean that,’ said Daniel.

‘He didn’t mean that,’ mother echoed.

‘Then what did he mean?’ snapped Jonie. And as she asked the question she saw, with a horrible internal clatter, what he meant. He meant: what if the others don’t come back? What if they can’t? She saw it. Those Zayinim from the night before had been eating something.

Her thought processes must have been obvious, because A. said, ‘I’m sure they chanced upon a deer, or a sheep, or something.’

Jonie announced: ‘Father is fine. And I’ve been reading Daniel’s book, and I have had a vision. A vision! I suddenly saw how we could escape the predation of the Zayinim!’

Everybody was looking at her now. ‘All right,’ prompted her mother. ‘How?’

‘Actually I can’t remember now,’ she said, trying to look dignified. ‘But I’m sure it’ll come back to me.’ She took a mug of porridge from the breakfast pan and retreated to her room to read more of the Char. But her attention jittered over the words, and she kept trying to cast herself back into the middle of the previous night.

…be assigned to pretence, to the will to delusion, to selfishness, and cupidity. It might even be possible that WHAT constitutes the value of those good and respected things, consists precisely in their being insidiously related, knotted, and crocheted to these evil and apparently opposed things – perhaps even in being essentially identical with them. Perhaps! But who wishes to concern himself with such dangerous ‘Perhapses’! For that investigation one must await the advent of a new order of philosophers, such as will have other tastes and inclinations, the reverse of those hitherto prevalent – philosophers of the dangerous…

It was no good. She couldn’t concentrate. There was some commotion outside, so she gave up on her reading. She put on her jacket and gloves and hat and went to the main gate.

‘There’s one left over from last night,’ said Esther, excitedly. ‘They’re all out there now sorting it out.’

‘Let me through,’ Jonie demanded.

‘Your father wouldn’t want me to.’

Esther was, like, a hundred years old. ‘Don’t be a shrivelled old stupid person, Esther, and let me out.’

‘I’ll tell him it wasn’t my idea,’ Esther grumbled. ‘Take a gun, at least.’

‘Yes yes yes,’ said Jonie, snatching the weapon and squeezing through the door before it was even a quarter open.

It always felt good to be outside. Spring was everywhere now, which was good in one sense – no more sleeping in all her clothes wrapped in two blankets and still shivering with the cold – and very bad in another. The Zayinim became much more active in the warm months of the year. Not just in terms of moving more rapidly and with more purpose – although until you’d seen a zombie immediately after a feed you had no idea just how quickly they could go – but in terms of aggregating into larger and therefore more dangerous packs. Nonetheless, it was good to breathe the fragrant air.

Someday, she mused, she would escape it all. Start her own life. Have kids, maybe. Except that having kids would not be to escape.

They were all standing, a circle of folk in the long grass. It was indeed one of the Zayinim from the previous night – the one mother had shot across the top of its skull. It was lying on its back in the grass. Jonie came up behind Daniel, and then peered past him.

It was naked, as all the Zayinim were. Their bodies long outlasted whatever clothes they had once worn. This one was nude, but not all of them were – some were covered in hair, like beasts of the field. The thing was the serum, or whatever it was, that made them immortal. It prompted regeneration of the flesh, with almost miraculous speed and accuracy. But the accuracy was not perfect, and over long enough stretches of time weird glitches worked their way into the operation. This could take any number of forms, but a common one was that hair follicles grew thicker and thicker hair. Not this guy, though: he was bald, eyebrowless, pubic-nude and stark as a skeleton. But there were other oddities. At some point in its long life the zombie had been split open across the side. This wound had, of course, healed; but teeth had grown in an irregular pattern along the scar. It had only a finger and a thumb on its right hand, but its left hand was a root-tangle of extra fingers all clutched together. She couldn’t help looking at its genitals: a smaller penis grew from the end of its actual penis, the way potato-buds sometimes sprouted from whole potatoes. The gouge carved by mother’s bullet, an inch deep at its deepest point, divided its cranium along a black crease. But it still had both its eyes, and its mouth was working. ‘Ch-ch-ch.’