Zombies: The Recent Dead (66 page)

“Maybe the loan sharks didn’t want to conduct their business in the public eye.” He gave me an embarrassed smile. “If they’d been real, I mean.”

“I’ll admit Maera’s story wasn’t completely out of the realm of possibility. The loan sharks
might’ve
wanted to make their demands on her in private, and they
might’ve
wanted her to see Finn in manacles, just to drive home the point that they were deadly serious. And despite their warning not to seek help from the Sentinels, Maera
might’ve
decided to take a chance on the zombie detective that had helped out her friend Kyra. But that was one too many
might’ves
for me. I decided her story was bogus, and after that, it was just a matter of playing along until I could figure out what her game was.”

“And you nearly ended up as a talking head in a birdcage for your troubles,” Papa said. He touched the hot metal tip of the soldering gun to my shoulder one last time, and then leaned back. “Finished. Try to take it easy on the arm for the next few days so the spells have a chance to take hold fully, all right? Same with the ear.”

“Sure thing.” I reached up with left hand and touched the ear Papa had also reattached. The arm worked and the ear didn’t fall off, so all was right with the underworld—at least for the time being. I got up from the stool and slipped on the pullover shirt that Papa had loaned me. My suit jacket and shirt were riddled with holes from where the leech-vine had grabbed me, and while Papa had used his soldering gun to seal the punctures on my dead flesh, he drew the line at tailoring. Considering how bad his sewing was, I didn’t mind.

Papa rose from his stool, turned off the soldering gun, and placed it on his workbench to cool.

“There’s one last thing,” I said. “Since Maera’s story was a lie—”

“She didn’t pay you,” Papa finished. “Which means that not only don’t you have the darkgems to cover the balance on your last repair, you can’t pay for this one either.”

“Afraid not.”

Papa grinned. “No worries. You’ll pay when you can. You always do.” He stuck out his hand and we shook.

I’d told a small lie of my own to Papa just then. There was something more about Maera, something that I’d learned from her and Troilus. Solitude can be all well and good, but sometimes it’s nice to have a friend.

“If you have the time, I’m up for a game of rattlebones,” I said, then added, “If the offer’s still good.”

Papa looked at me, and for a moment I thought he might comment on my change of heart, but instead he grinned even wider and clapped me on the back gently, careful not to ruin his latest repair.

“Always, my friend. Always.”

About the Author

Tim Waggoner
’s most current novels are the
Nekropolis
series of urban fantasies and the
Lady Ruin
series for Wizards of the Coast. In total, he’s published over twenty novels and two short story collections, and his articles on writing have appeared in
Writer’s Digest
and
Writers’ Journal,
among others. He teaches creative writing at Sinclair Community College and in Seton Hill University’s Master of Fine Arts in Writing Popular Fiction program. Visit him at www.timwagonner.com and and www.nekropoliscity.com.

Story Notes

As Waggoner explains in his story—but is able to expand on more fully in
Nekropolis
, the novel for which this story serves as a “prequel”—his supernatural creations exist in another dimension that interacts with the mundane world and its humans. His hard-boiled zombie private investigator works in a world of demons, werewolves, magic, and other supernaturals—often technologically enhanced. But, don’t worry, purists, the brainless-walking-dead brand of zombies still shamble about in his world, too.

Like more and more speculative fiction authors these days, Waggoner crosses so many genres you can’t keep count. Readers seem to love the imaginative results writers are coming up with. Critics who love to devise definitions and marketers who feel books belong in slots, however, aren’t always in step with the writers or readers. That—even though it is a topic pertinent to zombies—is, however, another subject.

Kit Reed

What do you know, fool, all you know is what you see in the movies: clashing jaws and bloody teeth; raw hunger lurching in to eat you, thud thud thud.

We are nothing like you think.

The zombie that comes for you is indifferent to flesh. What it takes from you is tasteless, odorless, colorless and huge. You have a lot to lose.

The incursion is gradual. It does not count the hours or months it may spend circling the bedroom where you sleep. For the zombie, there is no anxiety and no waiting. We walk in a zone that transcends disorders like human emotion. In the cosmos of the undead there is only being and un-being, without reference to time.

Therefore your zombie keeps its distance, fixed on the patch of warmth that represents you, the unseemly racket you make, breathing. Does your heart have to make all that noise, does your chest have to keep going in and out with that irritating rasp? The organs of the undead are sublimely still. Anything else is an abomination.

Then you cough in your sleep. It is like an invitation.

We are at your bedroom window. The thing we need is laid open for us to devour.

For no reason you sit up in bed with your heart jumping and your jaw ajar:
What?

Nothing
, you tell yourself, because you have to if you’re going to make it through the night.
Just something I ate
.

Hush, if you enjoy living. Be still. Try to be as still as me. Whatever you do, don’t go to the window! Your future crouches below, my perfect body cold and dense as marble, the eyes devoid of light. If you expect to go on being yourself tomorrow when the sun comes up, stay awake! Do it! This is the only warning you’ll get.

One woman alone, naturally you are uneasy, but you think you’re safe. Didn’t you lock the windows when you went to bed last night, didn’t you lock your doors and slip the dead bolt? Nice house, gated community with Security patrolling, what could go wrong? You don’t know that while you sleep the zombie seeks entry. This won’t be anything like you think.

Therefore you stumble to the bathroom and pad back to your bedroom in the dark. You drop on the bed like a felled cedar, courting sleep. It’s as close as you can get to being one of us. Go ahead, then. Sleep like a stone and if tonight the zombie who ha come for you slips in and takes what it needs from you, tomorrow you will not wake up, exactly.

You will get up. Changed
.

When death comes for you, you don’t expect it to be tall and gorgeous. You won’t even know the name of the disaster that overtakes you until it’s too late.

Last night Dana Graver wished she could just bury herself in bed and never have to wake up. She’d rather die than go on feeling the way she does.

She wanted to die the way women do when the man they love ends it with no apologies and no explanation. “I’d understand,” she cried, “if this was about another girl.” And Bill Wylie, the man she thought she loved—that she thought loved her!—Bill gave her that bland, sad look and said unhelpfully, “I’m sorry, I just can’t do this any more.”

Her misery is like a bouquet of broken glass flowers, every petal a jagged edge tearing her up inside. She would do any thing to make it stop. She’d never put herself out—no pills, no razor blades for Dana Graver, no blackened corpse for Bill to find, although he deserves an ugly shock.

She’d never consciously hurt herself but if she lies on her back in the dark and
wills
herself to die it might just accidentally happen, would that be so bad? Let the heartless bastard come in and find his sad, rejected love perfectly composed, lovely in black with her white hands folded gracefully and her dark hair flowing, a reproach that would haunt him for the rest of his life.
Look what you did to me.
Doesn’t he deserve to know what it sounds like to hear your own heart break?

Composed for death, Dana dozes instead. She drops into sleep like an ocean, wishing she could submerge and please God, never have to come back up. She . . .

She jerks awake.
Oh God, I didn’t mean it!

There is something in the room.

With her heart hammering she sits up, trembling. Switches on the light.

The silent figure standing by the dresser looks nothing like the deaths a single woman envisions. No ski mask, so this is no home invasion; no burglar’s tools. It isn’t emblematic, either, there’s no grim reaper’s robe, no apocalyptic scythe. This isn’t SARS coming for her and it isn’t the Red Death. The intruder is tall and composed. Extremely handsome. Impeccable in white. The only hint of difference is the crescents of black underneath the pale, finely buffed fingernails.

She shrieks.

In ordinary incursions the victim’s scream prompts action: threats or gunshots or knife attack, the marauder’s lunge. This person does nothing. If it is a person. The shape of the head is too perfect. There is something sublime in its unwavering scrutiny. Chilled, Dana scrambles backward until she is clinging to the bed stead. She throws the lamp at it, screaming. “Get out!”

It doesn’t move. It doesn’t speak.

There is only the crash as the glass lamp-base shatters against the wall behind the huge head. The light itself survives, casting ragged shadows on the ceiling. The silence spins out for as long as Dana can stand it. They are in stasis here.

When she can speak, she says, “What are you doing here?”

Is it possible to talk without moving your lips? The stranger in her room doesn’t speak. Instead, Dana knows. Uncanny. she
knows.

—Good evening. Isn’t that what you people say?

She does what you do. She opens her throat and screams to wake the dead.

—
Don’t do that
.

“I can’t help it!”

—
I’m sorry. I’m new at this
.

“Who are you?”

—
You mean the name I used to have? No idea. It left me when I died
 . . .

“Died!”

The intruder continues —
and I would have to die again to get it back, and you know what death brings. Dissolution and decay
.
Sorrow.

“
What
are you?”

—
For the purposes of this conversation, you can call me X. Every one of us is known as X
.

“Oh my God. Oh, my God!”

The great head lifts. —
Who?

“Get out.” Higher. Dana sends her voice high enough to clear the room and raise the neighborhood. “Get out!” When she uncovers her face the intruder hasn’t advanced and it hasn’t run away.

It hasn’t moved. It is watching her, graceful and self-contained. As if her screams are nothing to it.
—No.

“Get out or I’ll . . . ” Groping for the empty pistol she keeps under the pillow she threatens wildly. “I’ll shoot!”

—
Go ahead.
So calm. Too calm! —
It won’t change anything.

“Oh.” Noting the fixed, crystalline eyes she understands that this is true. “Oh my
God
.”

The bedroom is unnaturally still. So is the intruder. Except for the trembling Dana can’t control, except for her light, irregular breathing, she too manages to stay quiet. The figure in white stands without moving, a monument to patience. There is a fixed beauty to the eyes, a terrifying lack of expression. They are empty and too perfect, like doll’s eyes: too pale to be real, blue as blown flowers with stars for pupils. —
Don’t be afraid. That won’t change anything either
.