Jews vs Zombies (14 page)

The clocklike tick and tock of the windscreen wipers.

Jonie watched. This one tall, hirsute, with too many ears and the arms hanging at his sides so long they reached almost to his ankles. This one had been a woman once, naked, with her skin covered either in scales or perhaps boils, Jonie couldn’t see very clearly. This one stocky, muscles, with fangs like a tiger poking through the skin of his lips. This one black, this one white, this one with a third arm sprouting from a cankerous looking mass on its shoulder, this other long and smooth and genital-less as a doll. All standing, and just watching them as they rolled by.

‘Spooky,’ opined Esther.

The rain stopped. Soon enough the clouds moved away, and the sun came out.

‘I’m always struck,’ said mother, as the steering wheel, ‘that the earth must be heavier after a rainfall than it was before. Isn’t that a striking thought?’

Finally they reached the end of the Zayinim row and passed it, and left the whole grisly crew of them far behind. But the very last individual was the most unsettling of all, for he was dressed in clothes. They cannot have been the clothes in which he had dressed before; for those threads must have long since crumbled to powder. He must have dressed himself – or been dressed. Of all the zombies she had seen, he was the least deformed (unless the deformities were hidden beneath the clothes) – a stack of white hair on his head, and an ageless face. In the sunlight his eyes glinted a clear blue, and he looked straight through the window at Jonie with what seemed like intention. But it can’t have been – of course. He almost looked handsome. If he hadn’t been a zayin, he would have been handsome: with his strong nose, and white-blond hair, and primrose eyes. His head turning slowly, so that his gaze could follow her. A dressed zombie? Wearing his smart suit, and gazing forlornly as the squire’s own daughter passed by. I mean, obviously not that. Obviously not. But it was weird.

‘Have you ever seen them act like that before?’ Jonie asked Daniel.

‘They act weirdly,’ was Daniel’s opinion. ‘Weird is the height and breadth and depth of them.’ To celebrate the fact that they’d gotten away without further mishap he took out a cigarette and lit it. His sigh of contentment was not the sort of noise a human usually made.

It was hard for her to put the intensity of the creature’s blue gaze out of her head. So she took out the book, the Beyond book, from the inside of her leather jacket, and tried to settle to reading it again. There was an answer in there somewhere, she knew.

CONTRIBUTORS

RENA ROSSNER
is a graduate of the Writing Seminars program at The Johns Hopkins University, Trinity College Dublin and McGill University. She works as a foreign rights and literary agent at the Deborah Harris Agency in Jerusalem. Her poetry and short fiction has been published in a variety of online and print magazines and journals. Her cookbook,
Eating the Bible
, was recently published by Skyhorse Publishing.

OFIR TOUCHE GAFLA
was born in 1968 in Israel. He has written five novels (T
he World of the End, The Cataract in the Mind’s Eye, Behind the Fog, The Day the Music Died
and
The Book of Disorder
) that garnered great acclaim. He won the Geffen and Kugel awards for his first novel and in 2014 won the Creation award for Writers. He has also written numerous short stories which featured in different anthologies and magazines. He teaches creative writing at Sam Spiegel School of Film in Jerusalem, and is currently a visiting professor at the University of Texas in Austin.

SHIMON ADAF
was born in Sderot, Israel, in 1972 to parents of Moroccan origin. He began publishing poetry during his military service. Later, he moved to Tel Aviv and joined a rock band as songwriter and acoustic guitar player. He published three poetry collections and six novels so far. His third collection of poetry
Aviva-No
won the Yehuda Amichai Poetry Award in 2010. between 2010-2012 he published the Rose of Judea trilogy, which deals with the issue of Jewish identity in different realities and with the role of poetry in initiation to adult life. The second volume of the thematic trilogy,
Mox Nox
, won the Sapir Prize (the Israeli equivalent of the Booker Prize) in 2011. The novel
Sunburnt Faces
came out in English in 2013 (PS Publishing). He resides in Tel Aviv and teaches Creative Writing and Literature in Ben Gurion University.

DANIEL POLANSKY
is the author of the Low Town fantasy noir trilogy. His latest book,
Those Above
, was released by Hodder and Stoughton in 2015. He is sometimes in Brooklyn.

SARAH LOTZ
is a screenwriter and novelist with a fondness for the macabre and fake names. Among other things, she writes horror/thriller novels under the name S.L. Grey with author Louis Greenberg, a YA pulp-fiction zombie series with her daughter, Savannah, under the pseudonym Lily Herne, and quirky erotica novels with authors Helen Moffett and Paige Nick under the name Helena S. Paige. Her latest solo novel,
The Three
, was published in May, 2014, and
Day Four
is out later this year. She lives in Cape Town with her family and other animals.

BENJAMIN ROSENBAUM
’s stories have appeared in F&SF, Strange Horizons, Harper’s, and Nature, nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, Sturgeon, BSFA and Locus Awards, and been translated into more than 20 languages. He has been a party clown, rugby flanker, synagogue president, and programmer for the Swiss banks. He currently works in Washington, DC with his wife Esther and his kids, Aviva (author of the blues song “Homework”) and Noah (author of the RPG “Galaxy World”). He is writing a roleplaying game about the fantastic shtetl, called Dream Apart.

ANNA TAMBOUR
’s fiction is always 110+% true tales, minus the names. She says, 'The pseudonymous "Irving Wiseman" is actually my father - and the time of his life covered here predates his time machine, on which he later installed a seatbelt for my safety." Tambour’s last novel,
Crandolin
, was shortlisted for the World Fantasy Award. Look out for her next collection,
The Finest Ass in the Universe
, coming soon from Ticonderoga Publications.

ADAM ROBERTS
has published fifteen science fiction novels and many short stories, some of them collected in Adam Robots (Gollancz 2013). He is a university academic as well as a writer, and lives a little outside London.

LAVIE TIDHAR
is the author of
A Man Lies Dreaming, The Violent Century
and the World Fantasy Award winning
Osama
. His other works include the Bookman Histories trilogy, several novellas, two collections and a forthcoming comics mini-series,
Adler
. He currently lives in London.

REBECCA LEVENE
has been a writer and editor for twenty years, working in the games, publishing, TV and magazine industries. Her new four-part epic fantasy series, The Hollow Gods, launched in July 2014 with
Smiler’s Fair
.

ABOUT THE CHARITY

Mosac (Charity No: 1139077) provides practical and emotional support to non-abusing parents, carers and families of children who have been sexually abused.

The charity was formed in 1992 when four mothers whose children were abused came together and drew strength from each other’s shared experience and realised the need for a similar service for others.

Based in Greenwich in south London, Mosac offers a national helpline, as well as counselling, advocacy, support groups and play therapy, and aims to break the silence surrounding child sexual abuse by raising awareness through training and consultancy.

All proceeds from the sale of this book will be donated to Mosac.