Zombies: The Recent Dead (20 page)

As he rounded the bend everything came into view.

The people first of all, a couple of them still dragging themselves from the drainage reens either side of the road, several more converging on his father. He stood several steps from the barricade, glancing frantically around, obviously searching for Jack but seeing only dead people circling him, staring at him.

“Dad!” Jack shouted, at least he tried to. It came out as a gasp, fear and dread and defeat all rolled into one exhalation. Tewton . . . hope . . . .help, all given way to these dead things. For a fleeting instant he thought the barricade was a dividing line behind which hope may still exist, but then he saw that it wasn’t really a barricade at all. It may have been once, maybe only hours ago, but now it was broken down and breached. Little more than another pile of rubbish that would never be cleared.

“Dad!” This time it
was
a shout. His dad spun around, and it almost broke Jack’s heart to see the relief on his face. But then fear regained its hold and his dad began to shout.

“Jack, stay away, they’re here, look! Stay away, Jack!”

“But Dad—”

His father fired the shotgun and one of the dead people hit the road. It—Jack could not even discern its sex—squirmed and slithered, unable to regain its feet.

Mandy
, he thought,
where’s Mandy
,
what of Mandy
?

Mandy dead, Mandy gone, only me and Dad left
—

But the naming of his fears did him no good, because he was right to be afraid. He knew that when he heard the sounds behind him. He knew it when he turned and saw Mandy scrabbling out from the ditch, her long black hair clotted with dried leaves, her grace hobbled by death.

“Mandy,” he whispered, and he thought she paused.

There was another gunshot behind him and the sound of metal hitting something soft. Then running feet coming his way. He hoped they were his father’s. He remembered the dead people in the field yesterday, how fast they had moved, how quickly they had charged.

Mandy was gray and pale and thin. Her eyes showed none of his sister, her expression was not there, he could not
sense
her at all. Her silver rings rattled loose on long stick fingers. She was walking towards him.

“Mandy, Mandy, it’s me, Jack—”

“Jack! Move!” His father’s words were slurred because he was running, it
was
his footsteps Jack could hear. And then he heard a shout, a curse.

He risked a glance over his shoulder. His father had tripped and slid across the lane on his hands and knees, the shotgun clattering into the ditch, three of the dead folk closing on him from behind. “Dad, behind you!” Jack shouted.

His father looked up at Jack, his eyes widened, his mouth hung open, his hands bled. “Behind you!” he shouted back.

A weight struck Jack and he went sprawling. He half turned as he fell so that he landed on his side, and he looked up and back in time to see Mandy toppling over on top of him. The wind was knocked from him and for a few seconds his chest felt tight, useless, dead.

Perhaps this is what it’s like
, he thought.
To be like them
.

At last he drew a shuddering breath, and the stench of Mandy hit him at the same time. The worst thing . . . the worst thing of all . . . was that he could detect a subtle hint of
Obsession
beneath the dead animal smell of her. His mum and dad always bought
Obsession
for Mandy at the airport when they went on holiday, and Jack had had a big box of jelly-fruits.

He felt her hands clawing at him, fingers seeking his throat, bony knees jarring into his stomach, his crotch. He screamed and struggled but could not move, Mandy had always beaten him at wrestling, she was just so strong—

“Get off!” his dad shouted. Jack could not see what was happening—he had landed so that he looked along the lane away from Tewton—but he could hear. “Get the fuck off, get away!” A thump as something soft hit the ground, then other sounds less easily identifiable, like an apple being stepped on or a leg torn from a cooked chicken. Then the unmistakable metallic snap of the shotgun being broken, reloaded, closed.

Two shots in rapid succession.

“Oh God, oh God, oh . . . Jack, it’s not Mandy, Jack, you know that don’t you!”

Jack struggled onto his back and looked up at the thing atop him.

You can name your fears,
Mandy had said, and Jack could not bear to look, this bastard thing resembling his beautiful sister was a travesty, a crime against everything natural and everything right.

Jack closed his eyes. “I still love you, Mandy,” he said, but he was not talking to the thing on top of him now.

There was another blast from the shotgun. A weight landed on his chest, something sprinkled down across his face. He kept his eyes closed. The weight twisted for a while, squirmed and scratched at Jack with nails and something else, exposed bones perhaps—

A hand closed around his upper arm and pulled.

Jack screamed, shouted until his throat hurt. Maybe he could scare it off.

“It’s all right, Jackie,” a voice whispered into his ear. Mandy had never called him Jackie, so why now, why when—

Then he realized it was his father’s voice. Jack opened his eyes as he stood and looked straight into his dad’s face. They stared at each other because they both knew to stare elsewhere—to stare
down
—would invite images they could never, ever live with.

They held hands as they ran along the lane, away from Tewton. For a while there were sounds of possible pursuit behind them, but they came from a distance and Jack simply could not bring himself to look.

They ran for a very long time. For a while Jack felt like he was going mad, or perhaps it was clarity in a world gone mad itself. In his mind’s eye he saw the dead people of Tewton waiting in their little town, waiting for the survivors to flee there from the countryside, slaughtering and eating them, taking feeble strength from cooling blood and giving themselves a few more hours before true death took them at last. The image gave him a strange sense of hope because he saw it could not go on forever. Hope in the death of the dead. A strange place to take comfort.

At last they could run no more. They found a petrol station and collapsed in the little shop, drinking warm cola because the electricity was off, eating chocolate and crisps. They rested until mid-afternoon. Then, because they did not know what else to do, they moved on once more.

Jack held his father’s hand. They walked along a main road, but there was no traffic. At one junction they saw a person nailed high up on an old telegraph pole. Jack began to wonder why but then gave in, because he knew he would never know.

The countryside began to flatten out. A few miles from where they were was the coast, an aim as good as any now, a place where help may have landed.

“You okay to keep going, son?”

Jack nodded. He squeezed his dad’s hand as well. But he could not bring himself to speak. He had said nothing since they’d left the petrol station. He could not. He was too busy trying to remember what Mandy looked like, imprint her features on his mind so that he would never, ever forget.

There were shapes wandering the fields of dead crops. Jack and his dad increased their pace but the dead people were hardly moving, and they seemed to pose no threat. He kept glancing back as they fell behind. It looked like they were harvesting what they had sown.

As the sun hit the hillsides behind them they saw something startling in the distance. It looked like a flash of green, small but so out of place amongst this blandness that it stood out like an emerald in ash. They could not run because they were exhausted, but they increased their pace until they drew level with the field.

In the centre of the field stood a scarecrow, very lifelike, straw hands hidden by gloves and face painted with a soppy sideways grin. Spread out around its stand was an uneven circle of green shoots. The green was surrounded by the rest of the dead crop, but it was alive, it had survived.

“Something in the soil, maybe?” Jack said.

“Farming chemicals?”

Jack shrugged. “Maybe we could go and see.”

“Look,” his dad said, pointing out towards the scarecrow.

Jack frowned, saw what his dad had seen, then saw the trail leading to it. It headed from the road, a path of crushed shoots aiming directly out towards the scarecrow. It did not quite reach it, however, and at the end of the trail something was slumped down in the mud, just at the boundary of living and dead crop. Jack thought he saw hair shifting in the breeze, the hem of a jacket lifting, dropping, lifting again, as if waving.

They decided not to investigate.

They passed several more bodies over the next couple of hours, all of them still, all of them lying in grotesque contortions in the road or the ditches. Their hands were clawed, as if they’d been trying to grasp a hold of something before coming to rest.

Father and son still held hands, and as the sun began to bleed across the hillsides they squeezed every now and then to reassure each other that they were all right. As all right as they could be, anyhow.

Jack closed his eyes every now and then to remember what Mandy and his mum had looked like. Each time he opened them again, a tear or two escaped.

He thought he knew what they would find when they reached the coast. He squeezed his father’s hand once more, but he did not tell him. Best to wait until they arrived.

For now, it would remain his secret.

About the Author

Tim Lebbon
is a
New York Times
-bestselling writer from South Wales. He’s had twenty novels published to date including
The Island, The Map of Moments
(with Christopher Golden),
Bar None, Fallen, Hellboy: The Fire Wolves, Dusk
, and
Berserk
, as well as hundreds of novellas and short stories. He has won four British Fantasy Awards, a Bram Stoker Award, and a Scribe Award, and has been a finalist for International Horror Guild and World Fantasy Awards. Forthcoming books include
The Secret Journeys of Jack London: The Wild
for HarperCollins (co-authored with Christopher Golden),
Echo City
for Bantam in the U.S. and Orbit in the U.K.,
Coldbrook
for Corsair in the U.K., and the massive short story collection
Ghosts and Bleeding Things
from PS Publishing (U.K.). Fox 2000 recently acquired film rights to
The Secret Journeys of Jack London
, and Lebbon is writing the screenplay with Christopher Golden. His story
Pay the Ghost
is in pre-production with Sidney Kimmel Entertainment, and several more of his novels and novellas are currently in development. Find out more at www.timlebbon.net.

Story Notes

Lebbon juxtaposes the hope and optimism of a twelve-year-old boy against complete and utter death. As Jack makes his journey he discovers that not only humans, but animals, insects, plants, even color have died and been monstrously transformed. Jack’s faith in his family and ability to name his fears propels both character and reader through the nightmare of what the world has become. Both hope and fears dwindle, but the reader remains transfixed.

Jack and his father reverse roles as the story develops. By the end, it is the child who is protecting the adult from what he suspects is the truth.

There’s another possible “reversal” in the novella as well—a hint that the zombies, for all their menace and danger, seem to be weakening and dying off. They see bodies after they leave Mandy and continue to the coast, but no more fast-moving zombies attack them. We are left with a faint glimmer of positivity, if we wish to accept it: whatever has happened is over and done, it is no longer spreading, the zombies are dying off. If so, are there others somewhere in the world who have avoided it?