The New Dead: A Zombie Anthology (24 page)

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Authors: Christopher Golden

BOOK: The New Dead: A Zombie Anthology
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I got her number from a mutual acquaintance. It took me two months to get a date with her. I was on my best behavior. The date lasted all night. We saw
Pulp Fiction
(I loved it; she hated it). We went to Denny’s (I had steak and eggs; she had a salad). We went back to her place. We talked all night. Kissed a little, but mostly we just talked. And it was wonderful. When the sun came up, I asked for a second date and got it.
 
We dated for years and broke up a half-dozen times before we finally got engaged. It wasn’t that we fought. We were just very different people. Sure, we shared some similar interests. We both liked to read. We both enjoyed playing Scrabble. We both liked Springsteen. But these were small, superficial similarities. At our core, we were different from one another. There are two kinds of people in this world - my kind and Mary’s kind. But we made it work. We had love. And we were happy.
 
Until Hamelin’s Revenge. That’s the name the media gave it, because the disease started with the rats. Hamelin was the village where the Pied Piper cured the rat problem once and for all. Except that in real life, the rats came back, infected with a disease that turned the dead into rotting, shambling eating machines. Some television pundit called them ‘land sharks’. I thought that was funny at the time. I don’t any longer. The disease jumped from the rats to other species, including humans. It jumped oceans too. It showed up first in New York, but by the end of the week, it spread to London, Mumbai, Paris, Tel Aviv, Moscow, Hafr Al-Batin, and elsewhere. Armies couldn’t fight it. You could shoot the dead, but you couldn’t shoot the disease. Global chaos ensued. Major metropolitan areas fell first. Then the smaller cities. Then the rural areas.
 
Mary and I stayed inside. We barricaded the house. We had enough food and water to last us a while. We had weapons to defend ourselves. We waited for the crisis to pass. Waited for someone - anyone - to sound the all clear and restore order. But that someone never came.
 
Mary died a week ago. She’d gone outside just for a second to dump the bucket we’d been using as a toilet. A dead crow pecked her neck. Panicked, Mary beat it aside and ran back into the house. The wound was just a scratch. It didn’t even bleed.
 
But it was enough.
 
She died that night. I knew what had to be done. The only way to keep the dead from coming back is to destroy their brains. I put the gun to her head while she lay still, but I didn’t have the courage to pull the trigger. I couldn’t do that to her, not to the woman I loved. Instead, I cracked the door open and placed her body outside.
 
The next morning, she was gone.
 
That was when I put the gun to my own head and did to myself what I could not do to my wife. That should have been it.
 
But I came back anyway - not as a shuffling corpse. No, I am a different kind of dead. My body is decomposing on the kitchen floor, but I am not in it. All I can do is watch as it slowly rots away. I can’t leave this place. There is no light. No voices from beyond. No deceased loved ones to greet me from the other side.
 
There is only me . . . and Mary.
 
I cannot touch her. Cannot follow. I’ve tried to talk to her, tried to let her know that I am still here, but my voice is just the wind, and she does not notice. Each night, I cry for us both, but I have no tears, so my sobs are just the breeze.
 
There used to be two kinds of people in this world. Now, in the aftermath of Hamelin’s Revenge, there are two kinds of dead - my kind and Mary’s kind.
 
We made it work once before.
 
I wonder if we can make it work once again?
 
FAMILY BUSINESS
 
BY JONATHAN MABERRY
I
 
Benny Imura couldn’t hold a job, so he took to killing.
 
It was the family business. He barely liked his family - and by family, that meant his older brother Tom - and he definitely didn’t like the idea of ‘business’. Or work. The only part of the deal that sounded like it might be fun was the actual killing.
 
He’d never done it before. Sure, he’d gone through a hundred simulations in gym class and in the Scouts, but they never let kids do any real killing. Not before they hit fifteen.
 
‘Why not?’ he once asked his Scoutmaster, a fat guy named Feeney, who used to be a TV weatherman back in the day.
 
‘Because killing’s the sort of thing you should learn from your folks,’ said Feeney.
 
‘I don’t have any folks,’ Benny countered. ‘My mom and dad died on First Night.’
 
‘Oh, hell,’ said Feeney, then quickly amended that. ‘Oh, heck. Sorry, Benny - I didn’t know that. Point is, you
got
family of some kind, right?’
 
‘I guess. I got “I’m Mr Freaking Perfect Tom Imura” for a brother, and I don’t want to learn
anything
from him.’
 
Feeney had stared at him. ‘Wow. I didn’t know you were related to him. Your brother, huh? Well, there’s your answer, kid. Nobody better to teach you the art of killing than a professional killer like Tom Imura.’ Feeney paused and licked his lips nervously. ‘I guess, being his brother and all, you’ve seen a lot of killing.’
 
‘No,’ Benny said, with huge annoyance. ‘He never lets me watch!’
 
‘Ask him when you turn thirteen. A lot of kids get to watch when they hit their teens.’
 
Benny had asked, and Tom had said no. Again. It wasn’t a discussion. Just, ‘No.’
 
That was two years ago, and now Benny was six weeks past his fifteenth birthday. He had four more weeks’ grace to find a paying job before county ordinance cut his rations by half. Benny hated being in that position, and if one more person gave him the ‘Fifteen and Free’ speech, he was going to scream. He hated that as much as when people saw someone doing hard work and they said crap like, ‘Damn, he’s going at that like he’s fifteen and out of food.’
 
Like it was something to be happy about. Something to be proud of. Working your butt off for the rest of your life. Benny didn’t see where the fun was in that.
 
His buddy, Chong, said it was a sign of the growing cultural oppression that was driving humanity toward acceptance of a slave state. Benny had no freaking idea what Chong meant, or if there was even meaning in anything he said. But he nodded in agreement because the look on Chong’s face always made it seem like he knew exactly what was what.
 
At home, before he even finished eating his birthday cake, Tom had said, ‘If I want to talk about you joining the family business, are you going to chew my head off?’
 
Benny stared venomous death at Tom and said, very clearly and distinctly, ‘I. Don’t. Want. To. Work. In. The. Family. Business.’
 
‘I’ll take that as a no, then.’
 
‘Don’t you think it’s a little late now to try and get me all excited about it? I asked you a zillion times to—’
 
‘You asked me to take you out on kills.’
 
‘Right! And every time I did you—’
 
‘There’s a lot more to what I do, Benny.’
 
‘Yeah, there probably is, and maybe I would have thought the rest was something I could deal with, but you never let me see the cool stuff.’
 
‘There’s nothing “cool” about killing,’ Tom said sharply.
 
‘There is when you’re talking about killing zoms!’ Benny fired back.
 
That stalled the conversation. Tom stalked out of the room and banged around in the kitchen for a while, and Benny threw himself down on the couch.
 
Tom and Benny never talked about zombies. They had every reason to, but they never did. Benny couldn’t understand it. He hated zoms. Everyone hated them, though with Benny it was a white hot, consuming hatred that went back to his very first memory - a nightmare image that was there every night when he closed his eyes. It was an image that was seared into him, even though it was something he had seen as a tiny child.
 
Dad and Mom.
 
Mom screaming, running toward Tom, shoving a squirming Benny - all of eighteen months - into Tom’s arms. Screaming and screaming. Telling him to run.
 
While the
thing
that had been Dad pushed its way through the bedroom door, which Mom had tried to block with a chair and lamps and anything else she could find.
 
Benny remembered his mom screaming words, but the memory was so old and he had been so young that he didn’t remember what any of them were. Maybe there were no words. Maybe it was just her screaming.
 
Benny remembered the wet heat on his face as Tom’s tears fell on him when he climbed out of the bedroom window. They had lived in a ranch-style house. One storey. The window emptied out into a yard that was pulsing with red and blue police lights. There were more shouts and screams. The neighbors. The cops. Maybe the army. Benny thought it was the army. And the constant popping sounds of gunfire, near and far away.
 
But of all of it, Benny remembered a single, last image. As Tom clutched him to his chest, Benny looked over his brother’s shoulder at the bedroom window. Mom leaned out of the window screaming at them as Dad’s pale hands reached out of the shadows of the room and dragged her back out of sight.
 
That was Benny’s oldest memory. If there had been older memories, then that image had burned them away. Benny remembered the hammering sound that was Tom’s panicked heartbeat vibrating against his own chest, and the long wail that was his own inarticulate cry for his mom and his dad.
 
He hated Tom for running away. He hated that Tom hadn’t stayed and helped Mom. He hated what their Dad had become on that First Night all those years ago. And he hated what Dad had turned Mom into.
 
In his mind they were no longer Mom and Dad. They were the
things
that had killed them. Zoms. And he hated them with an intensity that made the sun feel cold and small.
 
A few years ago, when he found out that Tom was a zombie hunter, Benny hadn’t been proud of his brother. As far as he was concerned, if Tom really had what it took to be a zombie hunter, he’d have had the guts to help Mom. Instead, Tom had run away and left Mom to die. To become one of
them.
 
Tom came back into the living room, looked at the remains of Benny’s birthday cake on the table, then looked at Benny on the couch.
 
‘The offer still stands,’ he said. ‘If you want to do what I do, then I’ll take you on as an apprentice. I’ll sign the papers so you can still get full rations.’
 
Benny gave him a long, withering stare.
 
‘I’d rather be eaten by zoms than have you as my boss,’ Benny said.
 
Tom sighed, turned, and trudged upstairs. After that they didn’t talk to each other for days.
 
II
 
The following weekend Benny and Lou Chong had picked up the Saturday edition of the
Town Pump
because it had the biggest help-wanted section, and over the next several weeks, they applied for anything that sounded easy.
 
Benny and Chong clipped out a bunch of want ads and tackled them one at a time, having first categorized them by ‘most possible money’, ‘coolness’, and ‘I don’t know what it is but it sounds okay’. They passed on anything that sounded bad right from the get-go.
 
The first on their list was ‘Locksmith Apprentice’.
 
That sounded okay, but it turned out to be humping a couple of heavy toolboxes from house to house at the crack of frigging dawn while an old German guy who could barely speak English repaired fence locks and installed dial combinations on both sides of bedroom doors and put in bars and wire grilles.
 
It was kind of funny watching the old guy explain to his customers how to use the combination locks. Benny and Chong began making bets on how many times per conversation a customer would say ‘What? Could you repeat that?’ or ‘Beg pardon?’
 
The work was important, though. Everyone had to lock themselves in their rooms at night and then use a combination to get out. Or a key; some people still locked with keys. That way, if they died in their sleep, they wouldn’t be able to get out of the room and attack the rest of the family. There had been whole settlements wiped out because someone’s grandfather popped off in the middle of the night and then started chowing down on the kids and grandkids.

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