Zombies: More Recent Dead (47 page)

She was silent. He tried to be brave about it. “Am I going to die?” he said.

“Ten pieces,” she said without answering, “and a half. That will be enough, I think. Go and get me ten pieces and a half as payment for your staring—and change your pants.”

Ten (and a half) pieces of chewing gum was an unbelievable amount. For one, he had gotten ten-and-a-half pieces only by accident in the first place, but fear made him trek all over Stuttgart in desperation thinking about how he was going to do it. When the next day his American soldier said, “No rations!” he nearly wept like a baby of five. His soldier must have felt bad, because he ruffled Anton’s curls instead. Though he’d had a bath just that week, Anton had to go and wash his hair after.

The next day he got two pieces from the American, and two from a French doctor who knew his father—impertinence his father would have smacked him for, but this was a matter of life and death. Anton snuck down to the morgue and fed them to the dead woman piece by piece.

She spat out the two from the French doctor—“No good,” she said—but ate the two from the soldier. Her eyelids fluttered and her fingers twitched, slowly unbending, stiff toes curling inward underneath her sheet. “You’re slow.”

“He didn’t have much. It’s hard to get.”

“You got it before. You can get it again.”

There was nothing he could say to that.

One piece the next day made three, which meant the vastness of seven and a half pieces to go—now the dead woman could sit up and even hobble a little, and he got her a coat and some skirts to hide all the red splotches from where her body had lain on the table. His dread tripled when she said, “It’s cold here. Take me home with you.”

“You can’t. My father will find out.”

“This place is full of dead people. I don’t like it.”

“But
you’re
dead,” said Anton, nearly crying from frustration.

“Just one night.”

There was nothing for it. He went to her late that night, and she leaned on his shoulder through the streets of Stuttgart where nobody noticed them but a policeman who said, “Go home!” when he saw them both. The woman was heavy and smelled a little sickly, that familiar chilly smell of dead body. When they got to Anton’s house, she clambered through his window then lay on his bed.

Anton made to sleep on the floor, rolling up his unraveling jersey to put underneath his head. They both lay in awkward, uncomfortable silence.

“I just wanted a cigarette,” she said. “I was going to pay him, you know; I don’t beg. I had some apples that weren’t soft.”

He did not know what to say to this, but felt like he had to say something
.
“Were you very old?” asked Anton.

“Nineteen,” said the woman—so, yes, quite old.

The floor was hard, so he was surprised when he did somehow get to sleep. He was woken up by a noise like wet hiccups: the dead woman was crying. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry.” Anton put his clammy hand up into hers. After a little while she stopped crying, but held his hand until he was nearly asleep.

“My name is Elke,” she said, startling him awake.

“What?”

“My name is Elke. When they put me away,” she said, “don’t let them call me anything else.”

In the thin morning sunlight she was gone and he was tucked up in the blankets. Truthfully, he was relieved.

Six pieces. His American had given him another three to make him go away when he found him talking to an American girl, one of the ones with stockings and shiny hair who came with the USO. The day after that, Anton couldn’t find him, and Sunday would come soon, and he didn’t want his dinner because he was too busy thinking about ways to get more chewing gum. That suited Anton, because when his father found out that he had asked the French doctor for candy he got a wallop. Anton didn’t really want to look him in the eye.

He went to the gardens of the houses that had been bombed, picking flowers. It was a sad bunch of woody roses and nosegay, but when he gave it to his soldier, who was still standing in the shadow of the factory wall, he was touched. “Oh, son,” he said. He took one of the roses and put it in his buttonhole, waving it to be admired, and Anton smiled wanly. “I have a brother.” He fumbled with the German as he said it:
Mein Bruder? Mein kleinen Bruder?
Now Anton felt sick. “Little brother. Just like you.”

He pinched Anton’s cheek and laughed at his grimace, then gave him a whole packet of Juicy Fruit. “Brush your tooths,” he said.

Eleven pieces—that was eleven—he stuffed the packet down his shirt and ran all the way to the bakery. His fingers fumbled with the key. As he flung himself down the stairs, his dead woman was already sitting up, gaunt and waiting, and they ripped open the packet together with impatient hands. The last piece he broke in half with his fingernail. She gobbled it up with the rest.

“All right,” she said. “That’s good.” She swung her legs over the side of the pallet and wrapped herself in the skirt and coat, pulling the collar up over her punctured neck. Anton didn’t quite know what he’d been expecting; she was still very dead, though now she walked tall and graceful and smooth. “Let’s go, shall we?”

“Where are we going?” he asked.

But he already knew.

Outside in the bustle of Stuttgart nobody looked at them. He held tightly to her hand, the skin slipping a little underneath his palm, past the anthill piles of rubble from the houses and past the camp where the Russian men fought. He led her to the abandoned factory with its thrusting smokestacks, and there was his American soldier: still with the rose tucked inside his buttonhole, grinding out the butt of his cigarette as he prepared to leave.

At first his mouth rounded in a greeting for Anton, but then he saw the dead woman. The coat had slipped open to show her dead and naked throat, the squeezed bruises of her—her chest, her waxen skin.

His American soldier screamed. She was on him even as his gun clattered bullets into her body and she forced his face into the wall—pushed her fingers into his mouth so that his screams spluttered into a wet muffle. Anton thought that she put her mouth to the place between his soldier’s neck and shoulder to kiss him, but then there were wet gristly sounds that were definitely not kissing.

He pretended himself into one of the rubble piles safely buried in the rocks. He put himself into a monster ant and walked around in the dark, his bristly body scraping up against the bodies of other monster ants. The dead woman chewed wet, noisy mouthfuls, swallowing in grunts, hand rooting around somewhere at the soldier’s belly and into his shirt. Their bodies moved together as one.

When it was over, his dead woman’s belly was grossly distended and there were only scraps of cloth left in her hands, and he couldn’t believe how she’d done it—and she couldn’t either, because she had to be a little sick next to the wall. He did not look. Her mouth was dripping red and she tried in vain to wipe it, but when that didn’t work all she did was cry and cry like a child.

“I was always going to be in the ground with him in me,” she said. “I just wanted to make sure, that’s all. I just wanted to make sure.” And then she was a little sick again.

Anton went to see her Sunday when she was buried. Before she was wrapped up in her sheet she said, “You will come and see me, won’t you? You don’t hate me?” and could only fall asleep when he held her hand. Perhaps it wasn’t sleeping. He sewed her up in a grubby shroud as he had seen his father do, and he was there when they put her at the crossroads grave for suicides. Her and the American. With a stone he expended some effort scratching letters onto a piece of wood, and when he was done had some splinters and E-L-K-E for his pains.

When he made the walk back home into Stuttgart and to the bakery next to the Red Cross hospital, he tried to imagine the monster ants again, but they didn’t come. It was as though he had thought about them too hard and they had burnt up in his brain.

There must have been something in his face when he met his father at the door of the bakery morgue. “I forgive you, darling,” said his father, and put one arm around him. “Just stop acting like one of the beggar-boys from now on. Look! I have something for you.”

From one of his capacious pockets, his father drew something thin and silvery. He presented it to Anton with the air of a magician: two sticks of Juicy Fruit in a bit of their wrapper, smelling as sweet and as sickly as they always did. “There,” he said proudly. “Since you like it so much.”

He did not understand why Anton gagged.

Shaun Jeffrey

“It’s her, Dad, I swear it is. Over there, it’s Mum.”

I exhaled slowly and looked at my fourteen-year-old son, Tim, as he excitedly pointed across the street. Before he could say any more, I took hold of his shoulder and turned him toward me. “You know it isn’t her. She’s dead. We buried her. You know that.”

Tim twisted out of my hands. “I’m not making it up, she’s alive. I just saw her.”

Before I could stop him, Tim bolted across the road, a car horn blaring in response as the driver of a Honda Civic slammed his brakes on to avoid sending my son to see his mother in a more literal sense, which would have been an ironic twist of fate if he’d died in the same way.

“Come back,” I shouted before giving chase.

I couldn’t be too angry with him. His mother’s death had hit him hard. Probably harder than it had me if I’m honest, but saying he’d seen her in the street, well, it was sad and rather unnerving.

Sure I shed bucketsful of tears when Joanna died, spent days questioning why God was so cruel to take her away from us in the prime of her life, but Tim and his mother, they’d shared a special bond, one that only mothers and sons can share.

I dodged shoppers wandering along the high street and gulped deep breaths, my knees cracking. Although only in my mid-thirties, I was out of shape.

Tim was about forty feet ahead and running like a gazelle, his gangly frame almost as thin as the shadow that trailed in his wake. He got his willowy stature from his mum. Not that I was obese, but my trouser size had outgrown my age by a couple of numbers, giving me a paunch—much of which was a direct result of the alcohol I’d drowned myself in after the funeral. Tim had been my lifeline. When I realized how destructive my drinking had become, I stopped. Had to be strong.

I still hadn’t adjusted fully and had taken for granted all that Joanna did around the house. I didn’t have a clue how the washing machine worked, couldn’t iron to save my life, but I’d had to go on a steep learning curve, if not for my sake, then for Tim’s. The house had become a shit hole. I didn’t wash or clean for days at a time. Dishes piled up in the sink and once the cupboards were empty we’d relied on takeaway food. The local Chinese restaurant was on speed dial.

For a while Tim became the adult and me the child. But now I was back in control. I’d gone back to work at the bank and Tim had settled back in at school. He’d fallen behind on his work, but he was catching up and the teachers were understanding and weren’t on his back about it.

I realized that Tim had stopped running and he was standing in front of a disheveled-looking figure that from behind looked like a homeless person, one of the dispossessed as I liked to think of them.

As I caught him up I could feel a pain in my side and I stood wheezing for a couple of seconds. “Come on, Tim. Let’s go home.”

“I told you. I told you it was her,” Tim said, a smile on his face that I never thought I’d see again.

Confused, I shook my head. “Come on, stop being stupid.”

“Look. Look at her.” He pointed at the homeless person.

I glanced towards the figure, not really wanting to make eye contact in case I got drawn into conversation with them, but I felt that I should apologize. Instead I stared open-mouthed. Despite the gray skin with the sores and welts, the lopsided mouth and the dead, glassy eyes, there was no mistaking the face. Impossible as it seemed, it was Joanna.

“Mum, it’s me, Tim.”

I listened to my son as though he was speaking from the end of a tunnel; couldn’t take my eyes off Joanna. Her skin looked papery and dry, tendons protruding from the back of her hands where the skin had sunken in. Her fingernails were torn and there was dirt around them as though she had been clawing through the earth.

Joanna didn’t respond. She started walking, although it was more of a shuffle.

“Mum. Talk to me, mum.” Tim barred her path and Joanna bumped into him, rocking back on her heels.

She was wearing the dress we’d buried her in. Tim had chosen it, saying it was her favorite. I guess he knew her better than me as I didn’t have a clue what her favorite piece of clothing had been.

Sunlight glared from the shop window behind Joanna, making me squint. When I looked back it had given her a halo effect, like an angel.

I gulped, tongue a thick slug stuck to the roof of my mouth.

“Jo, is it really you?” I asked, the words coming out in a rush.

Joanna didn’t reply.

I cleared my throat and said, “How? I don’t understand. You . . . you were dead. They buried you.”

Still no response.

Afraid that I may have been caught up in Tim’s delusion, I reached out and touched Jo’s hand. She was real but her skin was cold and leathery to the touch and I recoiled slightly.

After a moment I realized there was an aroma in the air that originated from Joanna. It was cloying, like spoiled meat that had gone past its sell by date.

“Dad, why isn’t she answering?”

I looked at Tim and shook my head. “I don’t know.” Truth was I didn’t know anything anymore. Joanna was dead, and yet here she was, walking.

It just wasn’t possible.

“We need to get her home,” Tim said.

I watched Joanna keep trying to walk forwards, but Tim kept holding her back. She was like an insistent fly butting into a window and seemed to have no concept of what was happening.

Swallowing to moisten my throat, I tried to think what to do. I noticed a few people staring at us as they walked past and knew that I had to get us off the street to somewhere that we could work this out.