Zombies: The Recent Dead (74 page)

“Questions about our mission,” Eric said. “About the All-Night and what we’re doing here next to the Ausible Chasm. I need to understand what just happened with the zombies and the pajamas, and whether or not what happened is part of the plan, and whether or not the plan belongs to us, or whether the plan was planned by someone else, and we’re just somebody else’s big experiment in retail. Are we brand-new, or are we just the same old thing?”

“This isn’t a good time for questions,” Batu said. “In all the time that we’ve worked here, have I lied to you? Have I led you astray?”

“Well,” Eric said. “That’s what I need to know.”

“Perhaps I haven’t told you everything,” Batu said. “But that’s part of the plan. When I said that we were going to make everything new again, that we were going to reinvent retail, I was telling the truth. The plan is still the plan, and you are still part of that plan, and so is Charley.”

“What about the pajamas?” Eric said. “What about the Canadians and the maple syrup and the people who come in to buy Mountain Dew?”

“You need to know this?” Batu said.

“Yes,” Eric said. “Absolutely.”

“Okay, then. My pajamas are
experimental CIA pajamas,
” Batu said. “Like batteries. You’ve been charging them for me when you sleep. That’s all I can say right now. Forget about the Canadians. These pajamas the zombies just gave me—do you have any idea what this means?”

Eric shook his head no.

Batu said, “Never mind. Do you know what we need now?”

“What do we need?” Eric said.

“We need you to go outside and wait for Charley,” Batu said. “We don’t have time for this. It’s getting early. Charley gets off work any time now.”

“Explain all of that again,” Eric said. “What you just said. Explain the plan to me one more time.”

“Look,” Batu said. “Listen. Everybody is alive at first, right?”

“Right,” Eric said.

“And everybody dies,” Batu said. “Right?”

“Right,” Eric said. A car drove by, but it still wasn’t Charley.

“So everybody starts here,” Batu said. “Not here, in the All-Night, but somewhere
here,
where we are. Where we live now. Where we live is here. The world. Right?”

“Right,” Eric said. “Okay.”

“And where we go is there,” Batu said, flicking a finger towards the road. “Out there, down into the Ausible Chasm. Everybody goes there. And here we are,
here,
the All-Night, which is on the way to
there.
”

“Right,” Eric said.

“So it’s like the Canadians,” Batu said. “People are going someplace, and if they need something, they can stop here, to get it. But we need to know what they need. This is a whole new unexplored demographic. So they stuck the All-Night right here, lit it up like a Christmas tree, and waited to see who stopped in and what they bought. I shouldn’t be telling you this. This is all need-to-know information only.”

“You mean the All-Night or the CIA or whoever needs us to figure out how to sell things to zombies,” Eric said.

“Forget about the CIA,” Batu said. “Now will you go outside?”

“But is it our plan? Or are we just following someone else’s plan?”

“Why does that matter to you?” Batu said. He put his hands on his head and tugged at his hair until it stood straight up, but Eric refused to be intimidated.

“I thought we were on a mission,” Eric said, “to help mankind. Womankind too. Like the
Starship Enterprise.
But how are we helping anybody? What’s new-style retail about this?”

“
Eric,
” Batu said. “Did you see those pajamas? Look. On second thought, forget about the pajamas. You never saw them. Like I said, this is bigger than the All-Night. There are bigger fish that are fishing, if you know what I mean.”

“No,” Eric said. “I don’t.”

“Excellent,” Batu said. His experimental CIA pajama top writhed and boiled. “Your job is to be helpful and polite. Be patient. Be
careful.
Wait for the zombies to make the next move. I send off some faxes. Meanwhile, we still need Charley. Charley is a natural-born saleswoman. She’s been selling death for years. And she’s got a real gift for languages—she’ll be speaking zombie in no time. Think what kind of work she could do here! Go outside. When she drives by, you flag her down. Talk to her. Explain why she needs to come live here. But whatever you do, don’t get in the car with her. That car is full of ghosts. The wrong kind of ghosts. The kind who are never going to understand the least little thing about meaningful transactions.”

“I know,” Eric said. “I could smell them.”

“So are we clear on all this?” Batu said. “Or maybe you think I’m still lying to you?”

“I don’t think you’d lie to me, exactly,” Eric said. He put on his jacket.

“You better put on a hat too,” Batu said. “It’s cold out there. You know you’re like a son to me, which is why I tell you to put on your hat. And if I lied to you, it would be for your own good, because I love you like a son. One day, Eric, all of this will be yours. Just trust me and do what I tell you. Trust the plan.”

Eric said nothing. Batu patted him on the shoulder, pulled an All-Night shirt over his pajama top, and grabbed a banana and a Snapple. He settled in behind the counter. His hair was still standing straight up, but at 4
am
, who was going to complain? Not Eric, not the zombies. Eric put on his hat, gave a little wave to Batu, which was either, Glad we cleared all
that
up at last, or else, So long!, he wasn’t sure which, and walked out of the All-Night. This is the last time, he thought, I will ever walk through this door. He didn’t know how he felt about that.

Eric stood outside in the parking lot for a long time. Out in the bushes, on the other side of the road, he could hear the zombies hunting for the things that were valuable to other zombies.

Some woman, a real person, but not Charley, drove into the parking lot. She went inside, and Eric thought he knew what Batu would say to her when she went to the counter. Batu would explain when she tried to make her purchase that he didn’t want money. That wasn’t what retail was really about. What Batu would want to know was what this woman really wanted. It was that simple, that complicated. Batu might try to recruit this woman, if she didn’t seem litigious, and maybe that was a good thing. Maybe the All-Night really did need women.

Eric walked backwards, away and then even farther away from the All-Night. The farther he got, the more beautiful he saw it all was—it was all lit up like the moon. Was this what the zombies saw? What Charley saw, when she drove by? He couldn’t imagine how anyone could leave it behind and never come back.

Maybe Batu had a pair of pajamas in his collection with All-Night Convenience Stores and light spilling out; the Ausible Chasm; a road with zombies, and Charleys in Chevys, a different dog hanging out of every passenger window, driving down that road. Down on one leg of those pajamas, down the road a long ways, there would be bears dressed up in ice; Canadians; CIA operatives and tabloid reporters and All-Night executives. Las Vegas showgirls. G-men and bee men in trench coats. His mother’s car, always getting farther and farther away. He wondered if zombies wore zombie pajamas, or if they’d just invented them for Batu. He tried to picture Charley wearing silk pajamas and a flannel bathrobe, but she didn’t look comfortable in them. She still looked miserable and angry and hopeless, much older than Eric had ever realized.

He jumped up and down in the parking lot, trying to keep warm. The woman, when she came out of the store, gave him a funny look. He couldn’t see Batu behind the counter. Maybe he’d fallen asleep again, or maybe he was sending off more faxes. But Eric didn’t go back inside the store. He was afraid of Batu’s pajamas.

He was afraid of Batu.

He stayed outside, waiting for Charley.

But a few hours later, when Charley drove by—he was standing on the curb, keeping an eye out for her, she wasn’t going to just slip away, he was determined to see her, not to miss her, to make sure that she saw him, to make her take him with her, wherever she was going—there was a Labrador in the passenger seat. The backseat of her car was full of dogs, real dogs and ghost dogs, and all of the dogs poking their doggy noses out of the windows at him. There wouldn’t have been room for him, even if he’d been able to make her stop. But he ran out in the road anyway, like a damn dog, chasing after her car for as long as he could.

About the Author

Kelly Link
(kellylink.net) is the author of three collections of short stories,
Stranger Things Happen, Magic for Beginners,
and
Pretty Monsters.
Her short stories have won three Nebulas, a Hugo, and a World Fantasy Award. Link and her family live in Northampton, Massachusetts, where she and her husband, Gavin J. Grant, run Small Beer Press (smallbeerpress.com), and play ping-pong. In 1996 they started the occasional zine
Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet
(smallbeerpress.com/lcrw).

Story Notes

“The Hortlak,” according to critic Laura Miller, is like “a Raymond Carver story on mescaline.” Can’t say I disagree, but Link’s story also reminds me of a surrealistic take on Dennis Etchison’s classic story “The Late Shift.”

As for the zombies, they are somewhat mysterious, but seem benign—but they
do
force unwanted pajamas on Batu.

The Turkish word “hortlak” is usually translated as “ghost,” “spook” (I don’t think they mean the CIA type, but Link might), “ghoul” (which I mentioned in connection with David Wellington’s story), or “revenant.”

Although it has been used in various ways in literature (and elsewhere) a revenant (
revenant
means “returning” in French) was originally a corporeal ghost or someone returned from the dead to terrorize the living, usually for a specific reason or to seek revenge. Eric Draven in James O’Barr’s
The Crow
, for instance, might be considered a revenant.

Gary McMahon

I stand at the topmost window of our fortified house, looking out at the dead. They are clearly defined in the moonlight; clumsy figures draped in rags and peeling tatters of skin. They are the first ones I have seen in quite some time, but their appearance was always inevitable.

They will never leave us alone.

We have been in the old farmhouse for two weeks, now—enough time for Coral to have recovered from the badly twisted ankle she sustained when we were running from an infested warehouse district, and to finish what little food we found in the place when we arrived.

Coral is downstairs now, packing. We travel light; everything we once owned has now been abandoned, other than crucial items like water bottles, a tin opener, knives and the gun.

I watch the dead as they stumble around amongst the trees, sniffing us out. It was quiet here when we first arrived, with no traces of anyone in the immediate vicinity, but now they have discovered us. I wonder if they can smell our living flesh, or perhaps the blood in our veins? They must have developed some kind of hunting instinct over the past ten years since the term “dead” began to mean something different from simply an end to walking about. They always find us, no matter how far and how fast we run.

We were both active political campaigners back then, before things changed. We attended rallies and marches for world peace and hunger; worked with charities to help Third World countries with massive debts, unstable regimes, and little hope of helping themselves. In short, and to borrow a phrase from an old song, we cared a lot.

That term, the Third World, has been outdated since the Cold War ended in the early 1990s. During that unique state of drama and conflict after World War II, when it seemed that the opposing blocs of the Soviets and the Western World were destined to blow us all to hell, the Third World countries watched and starved and wondered just who might help them.