Dead Men (and Women) Walking Read online

  Dead Men (and Women) Walking

  An Anthology of Things Undead

  Edited by Julie Ann Dawson & Julie Hedge

  ©2009 Bards and Sages Publishing

  Smashwords Edition

  Cover art by Debra Colvin

  Interior art by Ognjen Popovic, Marc Henry Medina, and Benjamin A. Nendza

  License Agreement

  This ebook is licensed for the personal enjoyment of the original purchaser and should not be copied, transferred, distributed, traded, or sold to third parties without the expressed written permission of the authors. Please respect the copyright of the authors by not sharing unauthorized copies.

  Print Book Details: ISBN: 978-1-84728-906-3

  For Monica:

  The only one in the family ready for the zombie apocalypse

  Table of Contents

  Dead Man's Tale

  Guy Belleranti

  Under Cover of Darkness

  Guy Belleranti

  Adam and Eve Versus the Human Race

  Alexander Zelenyj

  Waking Finnegan

  Josh Benton

  Catherine's Well

  Jeff Brown

  The Consequence of Curiosity

  Shawn Westmoreland

  First Born

  Brian Jaime

  Alone in the Dark

  Patricia A. Collins

  The Fountain of Youth

  Lee Pletzers

  Paul

  E.P. Spader

  Old Habits, New Habits

  Arthur Sanchez

  Honor Bound

  Jennifer Schoonover

  The Walking Wounded

  Emily M.Z. Carlyle

  Car Food

  Garth Wright

  A New Year's Tale

  Dave Bartlett

  Birthright

  Aurelio Rico Lopez III

  Searching for Dr. Harlow

  Michael A. Kechula

  Earth A.Z. (After Zombie)

  Brian Rosenberger

  Shop 'Til You Drop

  Brian Rosenberger

  Food Chain

  G. W. Thomas

  The New Creatures

  Tristan T. Tenorio

  Bazaar Shades of Sorrow

  Penelope Allen

  Under a Blanket of Blue

  Donna Taylor Burgess

  Every Time I Close My Eyes

  Tanya Nehmelman

  Billy is Three Weeks Dead

  Dilman Dila

  About the Contributors

  Dead Man's Tale

  By Guy Belleranti

  "A dead man does tell tales,"

  the voice whispers,

  and the mourners scatter like frightened children.

  Their screams filling the room

  as the laughing lips of the dead man

  tell tales that are his own.

  Under Cover of Darkness

  By Guy Belleranti

  Digging through the dampness

  of worm infested earth

  they rise from their graves

  and spread among the alleys

  and weed-choked vacant lots.

  As living children they enjoyed playing dead.

  Now they play alive.

  ADAM AND EVE VERSUS THE HUMAN RACE

  By Alexander Zelenyj

  Our pact had been simple: If one of us goes, the other follows.

  Pacts and treaty promises are easy for the young and love-struck, especially during dire times.

  These are dark times we live in, love in.

  I look to her, huddled down beneath the filthy blanket beside me. Her warmth reassures me. We're alive. Her soft breathing soothes me but I know I won't sleep again tonight. Sleep has become a precious gift, these days.

  Shafts of moonlight slice through the fissures in the derelict barn's roof, illuminating hay bales and discarded saddling gear below us. We'd let the horses go when we found this place. We don't know how to ride and the terror in their black eyes was painful to look at. They smelled the death, or whatever it is. They sensed it shambling in the country all around us, too. We freed them and heard them canter off into the night. I hope they're safe. I hope they stay fleet of foot when they need to be, and run on into tomorrow.

  I can just make out the outline of her profile beside me. We're situated far from the horizon lines of moon glow stretching across the straw floor. We're up high on the creaking loft floor, deep in shadows where no eyes can pierce. I lean in close and kiss her softly on her cheek. I make sure to do this very carefully. I don't want to wake her. Sleep is a gift now, and waking into new days only brings tears and hurt.

  I hope she's dancing in her dreams, the way she once used to, and I hope she feels warm in that picture.

  I'd truly caught her for the first time in the hallway, not the gymnasium itself where we spent all our time practicing.

  There were no teacher's assessing her pirouette and fall and my easy catch and maybe that's why it turned into our first kiss. Her lips were warm and she felt perfect in my arms, just the right size bundle of girl for me to hold.

  Our program specialized in academic snobbery and we followed suit: We were two against the school, and the rest of the world, too. Because it was easy to be strong. Because everything's easy when you have a new love on your arm.

  It would remain this way forever, we told each other every night while cuddling in the library or touching each other in her bed or mine. We relished the act of proclaiming this to each other and did so at any opportunity. We became inseparable, at school and outside of it. This lasted for years.

  We graduated from our program and I cracked my ankle on a warm-up run two hours before show-time. The injury left tiny bone fragments inside my muscle which took surgery to remove. My ankle never fully recovered and I can now predict inclement weather like my arthritic mother used to, in my unhealed bone and tissues.

  And Maria never danced again either. For you, she'd told me, when I'd seen her trunk all packed with old souvenirs, awards and certificates, medals and her first pair of threadbare ballet slippers. For me, she decided to give up a career of theatre and teaching others how to soar on the air. Because how could she dance without me completing the pair that was us, always us?

  Such romantics, we'd always joked, knowing it was true. Knowing we were in it together for the long haul, as they say.

  It might have been the single moment that linked us most inextricably. Standing in the stuffy locker room space with her packed trunk beside us, sobbing into each others' ears while we held one another tightly, looking as bravely as we could into our shared tomorrow.

  And life went on, in its strange and meandering ways. New job paths explored and discarded, others kept and fulfilled dutifully if not happily. At least we're together: It became our mantra, and it really did make it all better. At least each other, and who cared about the rest of the world when ours was this reliable and familiar?

  And life went on, in its strange and unpredictable ways.

  Maria calling to me that first morning, waking me from sleep at some too-early A.M. hour. With gummy eyes, staring at the television with her fingers icy and laced through mine in my lap. We watched the flickering screen silently and we didn't speak for a long time after we'd turned it off and sat numbed in our bedroom darkness.

  The end had arrived.

  It was that simple, according to some. The world we all knew turning into an obscene mirror version of itself. Hell walking inside the vessels of the resurrected, or some such fantastical stuff.

  It was lunacy. It was random lunacy in a suddenly disordered universe. Or it was a hoax. A mass joke which no one understood but when they finally did would all share a relieved laugh and realize
with huge epiphany that their lives weren't so unfortunate after all.

  We heard the screams from the street several minutes later. The truth of the television people's words struck us. We held each other. I think we cried but I can't be certain. We were numb and cold and scared. We tried the telephone but there was no signal, just like in the movies. Everything became dramatic: The power going out, the police sirens wailing like lost children in the street darkness, the terrible moaning which grew louder by the minute as more and more fragments of some hell we couldn't fully fathom found their shambling way into our suddenly changed lives.

  It was only a day or so before we abandoned all hope for our friends and families. The thing had spread everywhere; the television told us before every channel became single-color emergency signal screens and silence.

  We changed, Maria and I, during those early days. We peered from our third floor windows and saw human body hills mounting in the street below where the police piled them. We saw more and more of the other ones, the ones who staggered and plodded towards the living with the uneasily-defined lifeless energy animating their pale faces. We saw humans hunting humans, or the shells which once housed humanity and which now saw the world with empty flat eyes and with that contradictory, eerie and vacuous hunger in their stares. The sight of blood no longer troubled us. The streets ran dark with it. We saw frantic-eyed men and women devouring coils of entrails on the sidewalks where they'd grappled their victims to the ground. We witnessed people being dismembered and eaten alive by these chalk-faced others. We saw unaffected men dragging women screaming into the darkened building across the street while others laughed and jeered and aimed their rifles towards the heads of the nearest shambling form.

  We saw humanity and we remembered that we had each other. Only each other.

  Tenants of our building left daily, never to return. They asked us to accompany them, implored us that logic should dictate our decision because there was strength in numbers and at a time such as this numbers were all any of us could possibly cling to. But we ignored their insistent pleas. We were terrified of what we saw and knew with certainty only that we wanted to remain together. And so when the screaming of dying people spread inside the apartment complex itself several days into the chaos, we packed our meager belongings inside our battered old Pinto. We fled to the country outside of the city, where we figured the thing might not yet have spread. Where maybe two people could remain free, and at least convince themselves that the rest of the world was not falling completely to pieces.

  We're hunters and gatherers now.

  We have been for months, scrounging anything from wild berries in the woods to potatoes from abandoned farmers' gardens. The outlying confectionaries and food marts have all been ransacked by other fleeing survivors and so we no longer visit any of them. We rooted in garbage dumps in the early weeks, before everything had become rotten and spoiled. But now these dumps are only breeding grounds for black flies and writhing maggots.

  We don't eat well at all. Our stomachs are always in knots, hunger pangs and the kneading of fear inside us. I wonder how many times we've each thrown up green- and red-spotted phlegm onto the straw here, those feeble dinners of berries and grass blades disagreeing with our city-bred bellies and away they went.

  But we agree on our situation and the ways to deal with its severity: All human contact is bad contact, whether with the living or the others. We've seen what results from each, and we want now only what we've always wanted: peace and seclusion in our own little bubble-world. To that end, we've tried and succeeded so far.

  Nights we spend trading turns at guard while the other sleeps fitfully in the straw of the loft near the barn's ceiling. We carry either the shovel or the axe or one of the long butcher knives we found inside the farm house. I'll stay awake and alert at the edge of the loft's floor, peering into the darkness below. I'll check my watch by filtered moon glow or star shine and wake Maria only when I know fatigue threatens to overtake me and endanger us both. She wakes fearfully and with a start each time, and so I've taken to cupping my hand gently across her mouth while I whisper softly into her ear each time, as soothingly as I can muster; that it's only me, and that everything's okay. She takes her turn and wakes me long past the time her shift is over, and the cycle begins again. We draw the ladder up with us every night and sleep with it hidden from view.

  Daytime is hunting time for us, and we never let the other venture out alone. The thought of it disgusts, horrifies. Two of us is all we've known for so long and now...

  Now.

  Now it's us versus the human race, or what it's come to. So we creep from our dark barn space with squinting eyes like the Adam and Eve of some new race of moles and face the dawn-light of each new day together as we've always been. We carry our rusty weapons at the ready, knowing we'll use them if we have to, as we have on several occasions in the past already. Every journey outside of our barn carries a risk of a pale cadaver stealing forth from a copse of trees or careening out from behind a shed wall. As hard a blow as can be delivered, straight to the head: This is the way we've learned to deal with them, and our disgust at the grisly work has lessened considerably if not altogether left us.

  Maria carries the large leather satchel we found in the barn, along with my old gym bag. We stuff these as full of berries as we can, and anything else that is at all edible, certain flowers whose names we don't know but which we've learned to differentiate from their non-edible companions; and the occasional mushroom heads, the brown- and grey-topped ones rather than the spotted heads because vomiting and shitting violently throughout the night after a dinner of those vile fungi is a sure way to draw those wandering the country at night. We've neglected to try for live game so far. The rabbits we've seen are too fleet, and although the thought of meat awakens insatiable craving in us both, we shrink away from thoughts of killing the animals. They're so cute, Maria has commented several times already while following their twitching-eared progress hopping gingerly from one patch of grass to another. How could we?

  I smile at the humanity in her. The noble humanity which we both know we should have abandoned long ago but which still lingers on inside us. One day, though, I know we'll find the means, because we've come so far already, cleaving skulls in two with shovel blows and ruining chalky faces with axe swings.

  It's an ordinary afternoon like so many others of the past few months. The skies are silent, devoid of birds or airplanes. No vestiges of human flight have been marked there for weeks in vapor trails ghosting amid the clouds. Only sky...sky everywhere like some past version of the world when the Earth was young. We creep furtively into the thicket, skulking low to the ground, eyes everywhere at once.

  I point them out to Maria before she sees them. We stop a moment, gazing through our cover of thorn-barbed shrubs.

  There are three of them, wandering aimlessly across the expanse of the glade. Their features are ashen and their eyes dead. What keeps you going? I wonder to myself, knowing that Maria wonders it then, too, but keeps it to herself as well. We've discussed this a thousand times, in whispers in our loft haven. It's the question which haunts, and never leaves. One of them is naked from the waist down, a woman wearing a faded red wound in the centre of her forehead. A bullet's entry mark, or the grisly remnants of an axe blow, or some other signature of contact with the other side of humanity. We watch them shuffle along listlessly, bypassing us in our secret vantage. One of them moans before the group is out range of our ears, and the sound quivers us in our skins as it always does. I look to Maria, hating whenever something unpleasant harries her, and can tell by the grimace she wears that her skin is crawling and she wishes only to hurry on our way and return to the safety of our hideaway.

  I nod silently, and we whisper on our way once more. We glide through a patch of twisted briars and get spooked at the sudden appearance of a squirrel which darts out from the base of a nearby tree and watches us a moment before dashing away to another more robust trunk. We tr
avel for several minutes longer than we're used to, our daily explorations elongate in proportion to the food sources we borrow from and deplete so regularly. We're both all nerves and big doe eyes as we make our way further into the woods. The trees become taller the further we go, the enormity of their black bulks towering over us on all sides and making us feel our insect size in the topsy-turvy world.

  At last we discover a small skeleton of a bush with a smattering of blue berries. Many look inedible, small shriveled specimens pockmarked with tiny dark splotches, as if gone bad in the air. Those which look at all healthy we drop into the satchel, and prepare to move on. It's then we hear the scream.

  It comes from nearby, just through the tangle of trees towards the east. We eye each other determinedly, tightening our grips on our weapons. We slip behind the most rotund tree trunk in our vicinity and wait tensely. A moment passes and then the scrambling sounds of harried flight reach our straining ears. We peer around the trunk and see the boy. He's running wildly, his arms all akimbo as his legs pump him desperately on his way. We follow his backwards glance and see it: jawless, its grey shirt blackened with old blood, the thing shambles after the boy. Its hands reach for his fleeing back as its feet shuffle it speedily along over the uneven ground. Some of them are like this, more animated than their companions, relentless in their frenzied hunger.