Hours pass, the storm dwindles and nothing. Wincing, I close my eyes, cut a sliver of my own skin away. As soon as the scent of my blood hits the air, Jeremy explodes, thrashing harder than he has in days. Startled, the hook slips through my fingers and falls away into the depths.
I sit staring at the bloody flesh in my fingers, red and bright and wet. Inside I’m empty, nothing but water sloshing through my veins, nothing but the taste of salt coating my tongue. Slowly I raise the bit of skin to my lips and close my eyes.
Jeremy moans and writhes as I force myself to swallow.
It’s dark again, so dark that nothing makes sense. There’s a storm whipping around outside, dragging the raft and tossing it around. I brace my hands against the walls and try to hold on tight but still I’m thrown into Jeremy, thrust against him again and again.
Everything’s soaking wet, water seeping through tears in the canopy even though I’ve done my best to lash it shut. It’s slippery and I can’t keep my balance. I reach for Jeremy’s hands.
“I don’t want to be alone,” I scream at him, my throat raw and cracked. “I’m scared.”
It’s too hard to keep doing this, to keep surviving. I’m exhausted and my body’s beyond pain: salt leaches into my cuts, my skin’s tight and shrunken with sunburn and my stomach is so empty I’m frightened it no longer exists.
“I’m afraid to die,” I tell Jeremy. His fingers grab for me, clutch on to me as if he understands what I’m saying. He seems so much stronger than I am.
I kneel in front of him and pull the scrap of shirt from his head, unleashing his jaw. He snaps and moans, louder than the roar of the storm. My breath is shaking as I reach my arm up to him, push it toward his mouth.
A wave crashes down on us, flooding the tiny raft and in the murk of it I feel the sharp sting of his teeth closing around me.
I rest my head in Jeremy’s lap and stare up at the calm blue sky. There’s something comforting about him, about the feel of him underneath me like I’m a kid curled up on my parents’ bed on a Saturday morning.
Already I feel the sear of the infection, my body offering up little resistance. I’ve been shutting down, muscles twitching, throat closing, stomach ceasing to rattle and growl and my heart a bare whisper. I haven’t felt my toes for a day and what bothers me is that I no longer care.
“My dad made the best waffles,” I tell Jeremy, staring at the clouds. “He’d leave the butter out overnight so it was soft and melty. I’d drown them with syrup.” I run the tip of my tongue against the roof of my barren mouth, trying to remember the feel of it.
I’m so wrapped up in the memory that seeing the bird doesn’t make sense, doesn’t penetrate the fantasy I have in my head of a table heaped with food. But then the bird screams and I jolt up, my head colliding with Jeremy’s chin, snapping him back.
“Oh my God!” I shout. “Oh my God!” There’s a tiny spit of land cresting over the horizon. Exerting every force I can muster from my muscles, I hold my hand up, trace the curve of a tree with my finger. We draw closer and closer, the island growing larger and larger, the infection inside me roaring hotter and hotter.
I’m weeping, barely able to move.
Jeremy sags against the wall next to me, red gashes covering his body where the rope’s rubbed him raw. I put my hand on his foot and he twitches, leans toward me. “We made it, Jeremy,” I say with cracked lips.
He leans toward me, his mouth finding my knuckles. He’s so weak now, so torn apart from struggling that he can barely bite, and what hurts more than his teeth grazing my flesh is the sting of salt from his lips penetrating the raw skin.
My eyes blur with tears. “We made it,” I whisper. Overwhelmed with a crush of emotions so intense I can’t even untangle them, I hug him tight, press my face into the curve of his neck and pretend his struggles are joy at being saved.
Thin Them Out by Kim Paffenroth, R. J. Sevin, & Julia Sevin
Kim Paffenroth is the author of the zombie novels Dying to Live and Dying to Live: Life Sentence. A third volume in the series is due out later this year. Paffenroth is also the editor of the anthologies History Is Dead and The World Is Dead. A new novel, Valley of the Dead is due to come out around the same time as this anthology.
Julia and R. J. Sevin are the proprietors of Creeping Hemlock Press, which launched its own line of zombie novels this summer with Kealan Patrick Burke’s The Living. Together, they are the editors of the Stoker-nominated anthology Corpse Blossoms, and individually they have each published fiction in Fishnet, Postcards from Hell, War of the Worlds: Frontlines, Cemetery Dance, and the anthology Bits of the Dead.
All of George Romero’s zombie films-Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead, etc.-feature at least one character who spends the entire movie being shrill and obnoxious and totally impervious to reason. In Night it’s Harry Cooper, who is crassly possessive of the presumed safety of the cellar. In Day it’s Captain Rhodes, the unreasoningly aggressive military commander.
When author Carrie Ryan-whose story you just read if you’re reading the book in order-saw Night of the Living Dead for the first time, she thought it was stupid: The characters are in so much danger, but rather than working together they spend the whole movie bickering with each other in a pointless way. But then someone explained to her that that was the whole point: Romero was saying that this is what humanity is-that we’re doomed by our inability to just get along with each other even in the face of life-or-death challenges. After that, she completely changed her mind about the movie. “This made the film absolutely brilliant to me,” she said.
In the face of current calamities-global warming, economic collapse, AIDS, overpopulation-to which humanity’s response has been mostly just a lot of pointless political sniping, Romero’s warning seems more pressing than ever, and our next story is another that plays with the idea that interpersonal drama can be an even bigger problem than zombies.
He was on his back, looking up at the sky.
He felt a little cold, but overall not too bad. Hearing sounds to his left, he turned his head. Another person stood nearby, eyeing him. Her face, hands, and arms glistened red, and she held something pink in her hands, which she raised to her mouth. Slurping sounds followed, then she wiped her hands on her dress.
He sat up and examined himself. He too was covered with red. He tried to say something, but all that came out was something between a roar and a moan. The red lady returned the greeting, so he thought she might be friendly after all.
He pulled aside the tatters of his shirt, and found a large hole in the middle of him. That must be where the cold was coming from. He reached into the hole and felt around. Mostly it was squishy, but nearer the back, there were hard parts, too. He thought the hole looked nice, all colorful and mysterious, and he thought it might be useful, as a place to put things. But he couldn’t think of anything he had to put there.
He stood up and took a step toward the red lady. The stuff on her neck wasn’t shiny and wet, like the stuff on her mouth and hands, but all caked and dark. Even so, she looked very pretty. The sun made her blond hair shine, where it wasn’t matted with the red stuff. He tried to touch her hair, but she growled and pulled away.
After a while, they both sat down on the pavement. She still wouldn’t let him touch her hair, but she did let him hold her hand. There was a big, shiny metal band around her wrist. That looked nice, too.