Strangers in the Land (The Zombie Bible) (33 page)

She made a high-pitched, furious sound like a beast discovering a trap about its paw, then rode back. None of the children lifted themselves from the begrimed earth to challenge her. Beside her, Zadok dismounted and left the cache and walked slowly among the bodies, making sure each of them had been speared or cut through the head, making sure all were still.

Hurriya made a choked sound from where she watched from the corner of the charred house. Her eyes were round and dark in the dim light. Omri walked his horse away from the cache. For once he did not even look at the women. He had eyes only for the bodies in the street.

Barak still sat his horse in the middle of the street, in shock, the shofar now held in one limp hand. Devora cantered toward him until she was near enough to address him without lifting her voice.

“Do not hesitate again, chieftain of Israel.” Devora’s voice was a shard of winter. “These were not children. These are the dead. Look at their eyes, not their bodies. Whether they wear a levite’s white or a young girl’s sash, whether their face is that of a spearman or an infant, the eyes of the dead hold nothing. They are only bodies to bury.” She kept Mishpat carefully extended, though it tired her arm—for the blade was spattered with unclean gore. “Did any of them touch your naked skin?”

The look Barak gave her was distant, distracted, and her heart skipped a beat. “Barak?” she asked harshly.

“No,” he said after a brief hesitation. “None.”

“Are you sure?”

“They touched only my greave,” he said hoarsely.

She held his eyes a moment, then accepted this as the truth and looked back at the stillness in the street, the unholy stillness. She could not think about what she had seen and done; there were judgments to make. “Before you enter the camp, you must cut a strip from your cloak, Barak ben Abinoam, and wrap that wool about your fingers. Then pluck away the greave and cast both bronze and wool to the earth. Do not touch the bronze with your hand. In this way, you can enter the camp clean and under no judgment.”

“It will be as you say,
navi
.” He seemed hardly to hear her; his voice was a croak.

She turned from him, holding back her own dread. What had happened this night would rattle any man. Barak seemed frozen with horror now, almost like Zadok had often been, though his eyes flicked from the left to the right; he did not seem unaware of the bodies at his feet or the charred house before him. Dismissing him from her mind, Devora began walking Shomar away.

Omri rode up alongside her, still clutching his guttering torch, his eyes round with fear and wonder. “That blade,” he said.

“Yes, I can wield it,” Devora said sharply. She had no patience right now for the man.

“It—it really
is
iron,” Omri breathed. His gaze was fixed on the
navi
, as though wondering if she too were made of some strange, foreign substance of which other women were not. Devora ignored him and walked her horse back down the street. Shomar stepped nervously over the corpses, and the
navi
caressed his neck softly, whispering in his ear. She met Zadok’s eyes as she passed him; the nazarite straightened and gave a weary nod. It was done, then. The nazarite drew his knife and cut his hand grimly, then sheathed the knife.

She led Shomar to the corner of the burned house and glanced down at Hurriya, who was shaking. After a moment Devora dismounted to stand before the shuddering girl. The girl’s horror pulled at her heart.

“Close your eyes,” Devora said softly.

Hurriya gave a small shake of her head. She stared at the children in the street.

Devora took a saddlecloth and pressed the cloth to the young woman’s eyes. “No, girl,” she said. “There is no ruined house, no town. You are in the olive grove, and there are no dead. You are watching your sister play in the branches.”

“The town,” Hurriya whispered, without trying to remove the cloth. “The whole settlement. Like my child.”

“No.” Devora glanced at the dark hole of the cache. Her body felt cold, everything inside her was cold. “Not the
whole
town. They probably locked the children in to keep them safe, then lured the dead away, all that they could. They must have meant to circle back.”

“Only they haven’t,” Hurriya whispered. “They haven’t circled back.”

Devora was distracted from answering by the sound of hoofbeats. She glanced over her shoulder. The other men were riding down the street toward them, summoned by the sound of the shofar. Laban rode at their head with that massive axe of his ready in his hand, held as lightly as though it were only a hatchet. They stopped near Barak, looking down at the shattered corpses, their faces stricken.

“It is all right,” the
navi
called, raising her voice in a shout. “There were dead in the cache, but—”

The door of the nearest house across the street jolted hard in its hinges, then shuddered again, a sound as of bodies thrusting against it from within. Devora swung to face the door, her face white with shock.

The dead. Roused perhaps by Devora’s battle song or by the shofar to stumble about within the house, looking for the living. Perhaps they had been on the second floor and had finally tumbled below. Now, alerted by Devora’s shout to the direction in which they could find her, they had thrown themselves against the door.

“Spears!” Barak rasped. He dismounted and tugged his own spear free, and several of his men left their horses and ran up, one with a spear like Barak’s, the others with poles or rakes or whatever they’d improvised along the journey.

“Break the door,” Barak gasped, unable to find enough breath to make the order any louder. “Let it out where we can slay it.”

The men were as pale as he. Devora heard the breaking of cedar, the sharp crack of the door coming apart; the door splintered and wrenched aside, and dead lurched out into the street, their teeth bared. Their arms reaching for warm flesh. Barak’s men were between her and the corpses, and they shoved their spears hard into the corpses’ bellies and thighs, pushing them back by brute force. But the dead still groped for them and moaned, not heeding the wounds.

“Their heads!” she cried. “Strike them between the eyes! Between the eyes, men of Israel!”

As if wakened by her cry, Barak surged into action, leaping forward and driving the bronze point of his spear into one skull, driving it in by the ear, the flesh parting at the metal’s touch like a rotting apricot.

Devora moved toward the house, but Zadok stepped near and took her arm in a firm grip, peering into her face. “
Navi
?”

“There are dead in the houses,” she said numbly.

Her hand tightened about Mishpat’s hilt, and she tried again to step toward the door, but Zadok thrust her behind him with one powerful arm. One of the dead had pushed a pole aside and now grasped one of Barak’s men by the shoulder, pulling him
toward its jaws. Zadok’s spear drove into its open mouth, and he lifted the corpse free of the door; it jerked helplessly in the air, impaled and writhing with the cold metal driven into its throat.

Devora gasped as Zadok spun, his spear sweeping through the air. The incredible strength of the man! The corpse came loose and was flung through the air, slamming into the ground. A snap of bone. The corpse got to its feet, one arm limp at its side, and lurched toward them again. Others were still pushing out at the door, being barred only by the long-shafted weapons and the desperate strength of the men. Those men were ashen-faced, panicked, screaming as they held the dead back, the long fingers of the dead catching at their hair, their cheeks, their arms. One man was pulled in close, and a hissing corpse bit down on his ear and tore it away with a long strip of tissue and flesh.

She saw Barak leap away from the door, screaming orders. While Zadok and Laban and a few men held the dead back at the door, four others ran with Barak to the cache and wrenched its massive lid up from the ground. They brought it swiftly to the house and pressed the wooden lid against the door, pushing the dead back into the house by sheer might and barricading the door with it, holding it in place with their own living bodies. The massive lid shook as the dead pounded against it from within.

The house had two stories, one window for each; the lower window was barred with wood, but now Devora could see gray, half-eaten hands reaching through cracks in the wood, some of them missing fingers, tearing chunks of wood free, ripping away the covering over the window. Devora lifted Mishpat and stepped near even as the wood slats came away and a corpse’s face appeared at the window, pale against the darkness behind it. The left side of its face that of a young woman, the right side eaten away almost to the bone. It hissed at her, and Devora thrust Mishpat at it, cutting across its cheek. The corpse fell back from the window into the darkness of the house; she could hear it hissing and spitting.

The men at the door were screaming, Barak roaring louder than any. The door was rattling.

There was a cracking of wood above her; she glanced up, caught the glimpse of another torn and half-chewed face gazing down at her out of the dark frame of the second-story window; then the thing was coming through, climbing out. It toppled and fell toward her with a slow and terrible grace, as though falling through dark milk instead of air. Devora screamed, then something else slammed into her side, knocking the breath from her. She sprawled in the dirt, glanced up, wheezing. Saw Zadok ben Zefanyah standing over her, his eyes cold as though there had never been warmth in the world. The corpse had fallen almost at his feet and was staggering upright when the nazarite drove his spear into its face. The point passed through the thing’s skull and out above the base of its neck. Zadok pressed his boot to the body’s shoulder and shoved it free of his spear; it fell back and crumpled to the earth as lightly as though it were only a heap of clothes.

“Get back,
navi
,” Zadok growled. “Away from the houses. Into the market. These are for me to fight.”

But now, as Devora looked about her, she saw the doors of the nearest houses bucking and shaking as well; there must be dead in most of the houses on this street, corpses locked inside. She could hear moans muffled behind the wood, and she shivered. She heard the clear, deep voice of the shofar lifted, louder than the wailing of the dead, louder than the slamming of their bodies against the doors. Barak had his shoulder pressed to the great lid, his other hand held the ram’s horn to his lips. Living men came running through the market shops toward them, perhaps twenty, thirty men. As though the shofar had called them. But they were on foot and must have left the encampment moments after Omri and Laban did, and then taken this long to reach their chieftains who’d ridden in on horseback.

Devora backed up and stood in the midst of the street with Mishpat gleaming in her hand. She saw the cracks appearing in wooden doors up and down the street. Whatever dead had waited concealed within, the battle and the voices outside their doors had stirred them. The lid that Barak and the men held to the first door leapt like a living thing, and one of the dead within forced its arm out. Then the corpses were pushing the men back, with a strength born of unstoppable hunger, a strength that would not give out, for the dead felt no fatigue, no hopelessness.

With a roar, Zadok threw himself hard against the door, lending his weight to that of the shorter men, and the lid slammed back into place so sharply that its edge severed the decayed arm. It fell to the ground and lay there like a piece God had discarded when shaping men at the beginning of time.

Another corpse began climbing out through the lower window, and Devora impaled its head on Mishpat. Breathing raggedly, she realized that the men could not contain the dead in these houses. More corpses would spill into the street at any moment. And though other men were now running to join them with staves and knives and makeshift spears, they would not be enough.

Omri had let his torch fall in the midst of the street when he had taken up the lid with Barak and the other men; the torch still lay there, blazing in the dirt. Now Hurriya ran from the corner of the burned house and took up the torch, panting as she staggered toward the house, toward where Devora stood at the window the dead had torn open. Realizing her intent with a shock, Devora leapt in her way, seized her arm, wrested the torch from her. “No!” the
navi
cried. “Not with fire! These were the
People
! Not with fire!”

The Canaanite tugged wildly to get her arm free, her eyes intense. “Let me go!” she cried. “We
have
to! This was my vision. What the gods meant me to see!”

Devora looked at her in horror, holding the torch away from her, out of her reach. The Canaanite woman’s face was translated in revelation, in sudden, awestruck belief that the gods hadn’t abandoned her, that the blessing or the burden they’d given her was more than just a caprice.

“We have to burn the houses,” Hurriya shouted. “We have to burn them! As the people here did.”

“No,” Devora breathed. She glanced suddenly at the torch she held in her hand, at the flames. Words of the Covenant rang in her ears in the deep, calm voice of Eleazar ben Phinehas ben Eleazar ben Aharon:

The people must not be burned with fire

not consumed with flame

but buried beneath clean stone.

And, faintly, the rasp of Eleazar’s dying words:
Don’t let the People be—eaten—or—or burned...

“We have to!”

“We are
not
heathen,” Devora cried.

Hurriya took her arm wildly, clutching her through the thick wool of her dress. Her eyes alight. “So you Hebrews have ways to keep the dead from rising. Your cairns, your graves, your Covenant. But the dead
have
risen,
navi
. And the people here have found ways to deal with them
then
!”

“It is a heathen way!”

“Yes!” Hurriya screamed. “Or we die!”

Suddenly Devora’s own words from earlier that night were recalled to her mind as clearly as though spoken to her this very moment by God: