Strangers in the Land (The Zombie Bible) (24 page)

Yet even as the scream left her lips, the heat was gone.

It had passed through her.

The cool air again touched her skin. Thirst parched her; she tasted salt on her lips.

Then she was running.

Below, the fire was spreading through the camp, and still there were moans and screams, a few male voices raised in a psalm of battle and defense. Panting, Devora rushed down the long slope, rushing through the thigh-high heather, feeling it slap against her
ragged dress. Rushing as though if she could only get there in time, the camp might live. She knew that she needed to be there, with those she had begun to love. She began calling their names, calling their names in the dark as she ran, the glow of the fire on her face. Her sides burning.

Devora reached Shiloh and the tents of the
kohannim
just as dawn reclaimed the sky from the dark, her legs streaked with dirt and sweat from her run. The early light showed her smoke rising from many tents that had been set afire; men were moving about. With heavy gloves on their hands, they pulled charred bodies from the ashes and dragged them out, setting them in long lines. A small girl huddled with her arms about her knees by the lines, rocking back and forth. No one knelt to speak with her or shoo her away.

There were so many bodies. Forty, maybe fifty. Some were missing limbs or had great gashes in their sides. Many had been blackened in the night’s fire, skin and flesh baked away to leave only stretched, sinewy things behind, like heathen doll-people made out of sticks.

A small boy of perhaps seven winters stood by the line of bodies. Behind him stood a lone woman, standing straight and silent as though unwilling to let pain bow her shoulders. She was veiled like a heathen girl, her eyes lowered to conceal her private grief from the view of others.

There was something familiar about the boy’s face, and Devora watched him, troubled, as she approached the line of bodies. She saw that his eyes were hard; they were not the eyes of a child. In the moans of the dead and the roar of fire, that small boy had learned, in one wrenching of the heart, that the same God gives and takes away.

She also saw something more. Something in the shape of his face.

Feeling as though she had stepped off a cliff of stone and was falling through a great expanse of air, Devora made her way to the boy, until she stood before him and his mother.

“You are Zefanyah’s son,” she said softly.

The boy didn’t answer her. His eyes remained hard, and he kept his gaze on the bodies.

“Your father—he is here among the dead?” She could not keep the pain and shock from her voice.

The boy nodded and looked down at one of the bodies.

Devora shivered and followed his gaze. The corpse the boy was staring at was charred almost to soot, the face unrecognizable, white teeth and eyeless sockets facing the sky.

“Zefanyah,” she whispered.

The boy nodded again. The woman standing behind him made no sign that she’d heard, or indeed that she was capable of seeing or hearing.

Devora gazed down at that scorched body. How many nights she had dreamed of being held in his arms, being kissed, being his. How in her dreams he and the man she’d seen defending his cattle by the river—how they had become one, youthful, strong, vital. A rock a young woman might lean on. Now all that strength, all that life, all that fierce will and heat, how it had all been doused in the brief dark between the moon’s setting and the sun’s rising. She could not understand. She could not. It had been one thing to carry the body of a tiny boy through the reeds, to feel that boy reduced to mere bones and sinew, but that a man she had seen sweating on the training ground, whose muscles rippled in the sun’s heat, a man who might wrestle a lion to the earth and whose grin lit such fires in her body—that
he
might now be nothing more than brittle bones within a shroud of ravaged and burned tissue. How could it be possible?

She drew a breath, and she turned to the boy. The boy and the silent woman Zefanyah had left behind, with none to pitch a tent for them. “What is your name?” she asked the boy.

“Zadok.” His tone was flat. He didn’t look at her.

Zadok, the righteous one.

She took his face in her hands, made the boy look at her. Found his eyes. “Zadok.” She spoke intently, desperately, and after a moment she could see through her tears that the boy saw her, was returning her gaze. “You must find stones. Heavy stones. Ones that hurt to lift. Help the men bury your father. Whenever one of the People dies, you bury them so they cannot rise. You raise a cairn high, high enough that God will see and remember them.” Her voice broke. “Do you understand me?”

The boy nodded. He looked as though he might cry too.

Devora straightened, glanced at the woman grieving. “God will remember your husband.” Her voice broke. “God will remember all of them!”

Then Devora turned and walked along the line of bodies, shaking. Forcing herself to look at the faces. Those whose faces were still recognizable—she knew them all. All of the freshly dead.

At the end of the line of bodies, a girl sat on the ground with brown fluid and bits of flesh spattered across her nightdress and a knife held loosely in her hand. Devora knew her.

“Sarai?” she called softly, kneeling by the girl.

Sarai looked up. Her face was smudged with dirt. “They’re all dead,” she said, without emotion. Her eyes were dazed, in shock.

“What happened?” Devora whispered.

Sarai just looked past her, at the lines of bodies. Devora followed her gaze. A young man was moving down the lines with a heavy stave in his hands, and as he passed each corpse, he struck its skull hard.

Devora flinched and looked back to Sarai’s face. Her friend’s eyes were distant. Devora took Sarai’s face in her hands and pressed her forehead to hers. “Don’t look,” she whispered.

Sarai brought her hands up, placed them on Devora’s, but made no effort to draw back from her touch.

“Sarai, it’s all right. It’s all right.” She spoke as softly as she could, though fighting her own horror. “Shh, it’s all right,” she whispered.

Sarai moaned.

A hand gripped Devora’s shoulder from behind, startling her, and then a voice she knew, a man’s voice: “Devora, the
navi
is calling for you.”

She glanced up. “Eleazar!”

He looked at her numbly. “Will you come?”

Devora nodded numbly, rose, and walked beside him, letting him lead the way through the white tents. Zefanyah,
Zefanyah
dead. So many dead. Where was the
navi
?

“Where did they come from?” she whispered.

Eleazar answered her but didn’t seem to have heard her question. His voice sounded dull, hollow, as though he were speaking from the bottom of a well. “I was sleeping. We were all sleeping. Those things were
feeding
in the tents by the river—who knows how long before someone blew the shofar.”

“How many?” Devora felt a sense of unreality closing on her, like a fog descending over the camp and shrouding the carnage. Her head felt curiously light.

“Fifteen, maybe twenty.” Eleazar’s eyes were bloodshot. “Herdsmen, still wrapped in their wool. Heathen. Canaanites. They stumbled in from the slopes.”

“Canaanites,” Devora repeated. Anger bit at her.

“Yes. They bit—so many.” He stumbled, caught himself. Devora looked at him, appalled at his fatigue. He seemed to be on his feet only by sheer effort of will. “The nazarites—they saved me. Some of the others. And I got several priests to the Tent of Meeting and we brought out the Ark. We brought out—and the camp—the camp burst into flame. The dead lit as though they’d
been doused in oil, yet they walked about still moaning even as they burned—” His voice dropped and he whispered words of the Law under his breath:

The people must not be burned with fire

not consumed with flame

but buried beneath clean stone.

“God’s judgment on them was so entire, so complete,” he said. “Some burned away until not even bones were left behind.”

Devora shivered. She recalled the leaping of flames into the dark as she had seen it from the hill, and the sense she’d had of heat passing across her skin, though the fire was so far away. And how it had felt like the heat that came when she saw things that hadn’t yet happened. Behind the leaping of visions into her waking day there rested a Power and a Presence that might burn the world at a touch. The appearance of the visions was the gentlest of its visitations, as though a great mother bear with teeth the length and lethality of knives had chosen to nudge her hip gently with its nose.

“Not even bones,” Eleazar whispered. He looked around them at the camp. Men and women were moving past them now, some with bandaged arms or with bloodstains on their robes.

“We will have to watch for signs of fever,” Eleazar said, in that hushed voice that was so unlike the exuberance of the priest who taught in the evenings. “Some in the camp may be hiding their wounds. Many people touched the dead last night. We have to find out who is clean and who is not.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

Surely Naomi the Old had given orders for everything that needed doing?

But before the levite could answer, they reached the
navi
’s tent. Eleazar drew aside the flap and inclined his head respectfully. With a tremor of unease, Devora stepped through.

Inside, the
navi
was propped up on cushions, her face pale and damp with sweat. No one else was there with her. Her eyes shone, and her hands trembled where they clutched at the cushions. Her garment had been cut away from her right shoulder, where a livid bite could be seen in the skin above her breast, a fierce half circle of red marks, the marks of human teeth. Devora sucked in her breath as she saw it.

Naomi looked up, gestured her close. Devora hurried to her side and knelt there. She reached for Naomi’s hand, but the old woman cried out, “
Stop!
”

Devora stood still. She could feel the heat from her flesh through the air between them, as though the woman lying on those cushions carried hot coals inside her body.

“I am unclean, girl,” the
navi
rasped. “Do not touch me.”

“No,” Devora whispered.

The
navi
had to swallow twice before she could speak further. “They brought you to me, the priests. I hoped they would,” she managed.

“I’m here,” Devora said.

“The Canaanites brought this on us,” Naomi said quietly. “There will always be strangers in the land, and they will be neglectful of the Law. Until it is too late. You must help the People remember the Law.” She tapped a small clay jar at her side. “Open this,” she whispered.

Devora did so, careful not to touch Naomi’s hand with hers. Careful to touch only the top part of the jar. In a moment it was open, and the
navi
lifted it in one shaking hand. “Bow your head,
girl,” Naomi said, and then upended the jar over Devora’s head. A little olive oil trickled out over her hair and her forehead. Devora closed her eyes as it ran down her face, slick and sweet-scented.

“You have been like a daughter to me,” Naomi murmured. “As they all have. But you are the one who sees. I always thought it might be you. The way you remember the
mitzvot
as easily as other women remember the names of their kin. I wish I’d had the time to prepare you. To tell you things first...I anoint you, Devora. I anoint you the
navi
and judge of Israel.”

Naomi lowered the jar, lost her grip on it. It rolled aside until it stopped against the side of a cushion.

“Don’t die,” Devora whispered. She opened her eyes, and took in the sight of the old woman burning up on her cushions. The reddened bite wound. The fever sheen in the
navi
’s eyes.

“Girl,” Naomi murmured. “You’ll have time to mourn me later. Only be strong, for they will look to you. The
kohannim
know already what you are. I made sure of that. Now we must act, girl. Before this fever takes what’s left of me.” She lifted a hand weakly, pointing at a pile of furs in the corner. “Bring what you find. Be quick.”