Zombies: More Recent Dead (13 page)

Soon there weren’t enough criminals to meet the demand. But people still died. What if you elected to be infected? What if you could pay off your huge hospital bills, end debts, put grandchildren through college? Humans have always made greet sacrifices for their families. The peace of mind that came by selling your body into thralldom was immense. Poor families dreading the cost of Granddad’s funeral now had a marketable resource. It was a great deal: the living would collect a huge fee for their loved one’s attempt to become infected. Ninety percent of the time, the infection didn’t occur. For the ten percent who made the transition, it meant no more pain (at least this was what was believed), and even more money. The sale of one walking zombie paid more than most average humans made in a year. Japan led the world in
kyonshi
manufacture
.
Very few countries opposed the zombies. The Islamic world held out, as did the United States (which had always been based on flesh-worship). From an American point of view, zombies were as bad as abortion, euthanasia, and stem-cell research.

Billy biked to school the next morning. There was a hint of frost in the air, but warmth in his heart. This was the day he would become a man. He would undo the bullying that had haunted his childhood. This was his day to pay Japan back.

When the technician arrived with the
kyonshi
following along, Billy almost ran from his class to meet him. The technician regarded him dully. Billy offered to take him to lunch. With obvious regret the technician accepted.

It was awful. Over the sweet chicken wings Billy ran through every cliché that American public education had given him about diversity, the brotherhood of mankind, the humanness of us all. The technician nodded absently. Billy began to get it. The man did not want Billy’s approval or acceptance. If he had wanted the acceptance of foreigners he could have moved to the United States or Brazil. He wanted to be Japanese. His father’s generation had seen the prejudice against the
Burakumin
almost vanish. But Billy couldn’t reach out to the technician any more than a white child could have to his black friend in the American South in the bad old days. No one is welcomed by someone who stoops to shake his hand. Toward the end of the meal, as each was eating his red bean jelly tofu ice cream, Billy tried talking about the
kyonshi.

“Do you think they remember their former lives?”

“The upper sections of their brains are gone. I doubt they remember anything.”

“But they could remember.”

“Perhaps. That is why my family is hated. Imagine if you were trapping the soul of someone’s relative for generations—
kyonshi
have great vitality. Once the virus is in place, the body has immunity to almost all diseases. Even if the
kyonshi
has a cut, it does not become infected. With care, their useful work-span could be sixty or seventy years.”

“The
kyonshi
at my school. I assume he was American?”

“I would have no idea. Did you guess he was American because all of you people look alike?” The technician smiled at his own joke.

“Who sold his body?” Billy asked.

“He may have been dying without heirs. Sometimes a foreigner passes away, and the state steps in to administer the virus before he or she dies. If heirs show up later the
kyonshi
passes to them.”

Lunch ended. Billy went back to school. For some weeks he would greet the technician or his wife in the hallway. Then he learned to look away. He bought a new zazen program that administered electric shocks when the novice nodded off. He briefly dated a Japanese-American woman. Spring came. Cherry trees blossomed. Billy wandered slowly through his life in love with all he saw, a cousin of Tantalus. He saw the world he wanted but could not touch it. More or less.

Then, without drama, he overslept a few minutes one day. He rushed to get ready, and slipped in the shower. He lay paralyzed with the warm water rushing over him. His overuse of water triggered an alarm system. The building superintendent found him, shut off the shower, and medical
robotos
took his pruney body to the hospital. There were shocks, and heart massage, and stimulants shot into his bloodstream. A Catholic priest read him his last rites. Billy could hear, but not move, not blink. He heard the saws biting into his skull.

Days, weeks, months later—he came to. His eyesight was much better. He saw the toilets he cleaned, the halls he swept, the walls he repainted every seven years. He saw his neighbor, who had strangely grown old. He felt nothing when his neighbor slapped him. Felt nothing when his neighbor spit upon him.

Thoughts slowly came back to him. He would see Nagoya Castle through the windows of the building he worked in. Nothing had changed for Billy Parsons. The world he wanted was still as remote. He still silently watched Japan. After sixty years of janitorial service, his bones wore too thin to be of use. At the behest of his programmers he walked to the crematorium. There was a flash of light and his soul passed beyond the bounds of this story.

Shira Lipkin

I nestle the video camera on its makeshift tripod, carefully centering my daughter’s image. She tucks her hair behind her ear and gives a strained smile. She is sixteen, and that hair is long and golden-kissed light brown and straight; she has the gangly grace only teenagers have, that sleek gazelle form. She is wearing khaki shorts and a striped tank top, and the bite mark on her arm is already putrefying.

She has about an hour, we think. And I have about an hour on this camera, an obsolete Flip mini. I guess all cameras are obsolete now. I don’t know if I’ll ever have a device on which to play this. But she wants to do it. And right now, Becca gets anything she wants. Ice cream or a visit to the zoo, a stolen car or a cliff dive; for the next hour, Becca gets anything and everything she wants.

She crosses her legs and leans forward. Her hair falls over the wound, and she winces. “Does it hurt?” I ask. I’m not in the frame. This video is only her.

“A little. It’s not a sharp pain anymore. It’s a dull ache. Mom, when I’m ready, I’ll tell you, and you have to—”

“I know.” I have the camera in one hand and the gun in the other, and when my daughter turns, I need to put a bullet in her brain.

We are in an abandoned preschool. It was closed when the dead rose, so there’s no gore here; it’s eerie in its silence. There should be children here. There should be cacophony. Becca smiles. “Remember my old preschool?”

“I was just thinking about it. So much screaming all the time!”

“Well. So much screaming all the time everywhere now.”

“Oh, Becca. You know what I—”

“I know.” She looks down; when she looks back up, her eyes are bright. She addresses the camera. “So hi. My name is Becca Martin. I have been bitten by a damn zombie. My mom is going to be taping this because we don’t know if anyone has any data on what happens exactly and, like, mental changes . . . and also I just wanted to talk. I’m sixteen. I’m going to die in probably about an hour. Maybe less. And if anyone survives this, I guess I just want you to know that I existed.” She lifts a stack of wooden beads on the tangled wire maze and lets them clack down,
clackclackclack.
“Do I have to give the history of the outbreak or anything? Anyone who gets this is already going to know all that stuff, right?”

“Right. You don’t have to go into that.”

“Okay. So you already know that we have zombies now. This is day five. And everyone—like, every party I have ever been to, we were joking about zombie apocalypse survival plans, and I think all of those people who had plans? I think they’re all dead now. I think all the plans were good for if we knew it was coming, that we could see the news on Twitter and armor up and head for secure locations, but that’s not the way it happened. We weren’t all together and we didn’t have time to call each other, it was just happening. My parents and I were leaving the movie theater and Mom, that was a dumb last movie of my entire life—”

“It sucked. I’m sorry.” Some romantic comedy I’d already forgotten, with some famous blonde.

“And so my dad made a sound and I turned around and someone was biting him—” her hand flies to her mouth and she looks down again, hair covering her face.

“Sweetie—Becca, don’t. You don’t have to do this.”

She shook her head violently. “And Mom grabbed me and we ran, because Mom could tell right away that everything was really wrong.”

It had been the hardest thing I’d ever done, leaving Dan. But in the instant I’d been turning to see him, I’d seen others, other dead things on the street, other people going down, and something in me had quietly said
this is it,
and I knew I couldn’t save him. I knew he was already gone. And I had to help Becca.

“And we got home and secured the house and—I don’t want to talk about this part.”

“You don’t have to.”

She looks up, eyes huge. “I don’t want to die.”

“Oh. God. Becca.”

I pull her into my arms and she falls apart, huge gasping gulping sobs, and I fall apart along with her—I don’t have to be strong for her this time, not now. This is slow, this is so slow, this is agonizing, but I cannot kill my daughter, not when she is still my daughter. Even though the gray is creeping up to her shoulder, down to her wrist. Even though she has begun to reek.

She pulls back eventually, and in a wavering voice, she just talks. About summer camps and school, best friends and crushes. Becca is my only child. I was young when I had her, and so we have always been friends—parent and child first, but friends second. These are old stories with endings we all know, punch lines that we say in unison. She plays with the wooden beads as she talks, constant punctuation—
clackclackclack.
The room is dusk—dark with primary colors beaming out of the gloom. It’s quiet and wrong. Everything is wrong. Everything now will always be wrong.

Becca’s hand goes
clackclackclack,
and I stroke the gun every time; our new rhythm. A reminder.

She is trying too hard to be brave. She is shaking.
Clackclackclackplink
as one of her fingernails detaches.

She looks at her hand and looks at me. “Mommy,” she whispers.

“I know.” I take a deep, shuddery breath. “Do you want to keep talking?”

“Yeah.”

Her hands are shaking, and the
clackclackclacks
become more irregular. I am watching her and something is rending my heart, my guts. I struggle for breath, watching my beautiful shining daughter go grey, soften.

I was young when I had her. I didn’t know what to do, and I didn’t have many people around to help; I had to figure it all out on my own. I had a hard time getting her to latch on properly to breastfeed, so it was a huge victory when I finally did, when she finally did; I would prop myself against pillows and cradle her, her head in the crook of my elbow and her butt nestled in my hand, legs kicking idly, and she would look up at me with those big blue eyes as I learned how to be a mother to her. There were classes and her first library card and parks and swimming pools and she grew up; toy xylophones gave way to cell phones and we were going to go look at colleges this summer. A little early, but she couldn’t wait. She was so eager to go out into the world. She had so much she was going to do.

She stops talking.
Clackclackclack.

Clackclack . . . clack.

Clack . . . clack.

“Becca?”

She looks up. Her face is sagging oddly. She is not simply gray. There’s a mottling of yellow, green . . .

“Becca.” My hand tightens on the gun.

“Mommy.” Her voice cracks. “You should do it now.”

I carefully turn off the camera and set it aside without releasing the gun or taking my eyes off her. “Not yet, honey.”

“No. Mommy. It’s time.”

“But you’re still
there
!” It’s torn from me, almost, that plea, physically wrenched. It can’t be time yet. It’s only been an hour. It’s only been sixteen years. She is still here. My baby is still here. It can’t be time.

“Mommy,” she pleads, and the anguish in her voice matches mine. I can barely see her through my tears; when did that happen? My throat is sore from holding in the sob that’s rising, I can’t breathe; absurdly, my nose is running. “Mommy,” she says again, her voice softer. “ . . . I’m hungry.”

Her eyes are still her eyes.

I stand.

I set the gun down on a bookshelf, on top of
Pat the Bunny.

“Mommy, no, you have to.”

I walk to my daughter. I kneel before her and I hold my breath, and I hold her hand. “Eat,” I whisper.

She sobs, but the last of Becca slips away with that sob, and I feed my daughter for the last time.

Maureen F. McHugh

Cahill lived in the Flats with about twenty other guys in a place that used to be an Irish bar called Fado. At the back of the bar was the Cuyahoga River, good for protection since zombies didn’t cross the river. They didn’t crumble into dust, they were just stupid as bricks and they never built a boat or a bridge or built anything. Zombies were the ultimate trash. Worse than the guys who cooked meth in trailers. Worse than the fat women on WIC. Zombies were just useless dumbfucks.

“They’re too dumb to find enough food to keep a stray cat going,” Duck said.

Cahill was talking to a guy called Duck. Well, really, Duck was talking and Cahill was mostly listening. Duck had been speculating on the biology of zombies. He thought that the whole zombie thing was a virus, like Mad Cow Disease. A lot of the guys thought that. A lot of them mentioned that movie,
28 Days
where everybody but a few people had been driven crazy by a virus.

“But they gotta find something,” Duck said. Duck had a prison tattoo of a mallard on his arm. Cahill wouldn’t have known it was a mallard if Duck hadn’t told him. He could just about tell it was a bird. Duck was over six feet tall and Cahill would have hated to have been the guy who gave Duck such a shitty tattoo cause Duck probably beat him senseless when he finally got a look at the thing. “Maybe,” Duck mused, “maybe they’re solar powered. And eating us is just a bonus.”