The driver thought I was nuts, but he pulled over. We hadn’t paid him the full fare yet. He wouldn’t leave.
“What’re you doing?” Josie said, getting out with me. Cyndi just huddled in the back seat of taxi.
“I’m not leaving that poor bastard in the road.” I started getting the kerosene and matches out.
“Ahhh,” she said, following my line of sight to the twitching arms and legs.
We didn’t even bother to gather the body parts together, too much risk of infection. We just went up and down the road in the noon heat, pouring kerosene on the pieces and setting them on fire. I hoped that somehow it gave that gendarme some peace. I hoped I’d never have to do the same thing to Josie. And I hoped that if I got unlucky, too, someone would give me the same mercy.
The Anteroom by Adam-Troy Castro
Adam-Troy Castro’s work has been nominated for several awards, including the Hugo, Nebula, and Stoker. His novels include Emissaries from the Dead and The Third Claw of God, and two collaborations with artist Johnny Atomic: Z Is for Zombie, and V Is for Vampire, which comes out in October. Castro’s short fiction has appeared in such magazines as The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Science Fiction Age, Analog, Cemetery Dance, and in a number of anthologies. I previously included his work in The Living Dead and in Lightspeed Magazine. His story collections include A Desperate, Decaying Darkness and Tangled Strings.
People throughout history have had many different conceptions of what an afterlife might look like. The Greeks imagined the sunny fields of Elysium and the unending drudgery of Hades. The Vikings imagined that great warriors would go to an endless kegger in Valhalla. Dante imagined Hell as a massive multi-tiered pit. (The image of the underworld as a place of fire may have been inspired by the volcanic island of Crete, and the word Gehenna, associated with Hell, is named after a fiery garbage pit outside Jerusalem.) But what sort of an afterlife might await those who have been transformed into zombies?
“The most bone-chilling horror of the zombie sub-genre has always been that the plague turns us into things we don’t want to be, things capable of committing depraved acts that would have appalled the people we used to be,” Castro says. “We laugh when the hero of a zombie story blows away the shambling rotter in his path…but we tend to forget that the rotter used to be a person, and might have even been a human paragon. Stephen King wrote about his rabid St. Bernard Cujo, from the novel of the same name. You can’t hate the dog. The dog always tried to be a good dog. But something got into him, something that eliminated free will from the equation. How would Cujo feel if somebody returned to him the capacity to understand what he’d done? How would a human being?”
Your mercy killer, who knew you well in life and weeps for you even as he does what he must, presses the rifle barrel against your forehead with a gentleness that renders the gesture more a goodbye kiss than a murder. He even apologizes to you, calling you by name and telling you how sorry he is. You do not understand the apology or recognize your name or even appreciate that you are being put out of your misery. You only know that you have been prevented from shuffling forward, the atavistic impulses that drive your rotting limbs still urging you toward the very man who is about to end you. You don’t attempt to evade the bullet, because that kind of problem-solving is beyond you. You simply moan in protest. And then he pulls the trigger and the world fills with fire and your head comes apart in an explosion of bone and blood and brains. The wall behind you drips with everything good you were in life and everything obscene you became in death.
Your best friend will tell himself that you’re in a better place now. And here we leave him, wishing him well, whether he manages to survive or at least dies without becoming infected. Because his story is unremarkable. There have been many thousands just like it, in the world plagued by the living dead.
But your own story is not yet done.
In fact, your story might never be done. And this is why.
You wake an infinite distance away, blinking on your back beneath a sky that is neither dark nor light, but rather a shade of gray that reminds you of sheets that have gone unwashed. You are naked, to the kind of air that raises goose bumps on your skin and assures you that you’re once again alive. You are hungry, but it is not the hunger that you have been feeling in the days since the contagion turned you into a thing neither alive nor dead; it is the hunger a human being feels, the hunger of skipped meals, the hunger of a body beginning to tremble from need but not yet forced to desperation. It is not pleasant, but it is better than what you felt as a corpse: a gnawing, painful emptiness powerful enough to drive ambulatory meat.
It’s cold. The air has the kind of chill only possible in caves. The dirt against your back feels dry, and so solid that it might as well be concrete, but there is no warmth in it, no sense that it has ever known sun or sprouted so much as a weed.
But that’s not the force that makes your face contort in pain. A flood of unwanted memories has reminded you of the man you were, in the world before everything turned to shit, and taken you through every shambling step of the journey you began when you rose as one of the living dead. You recall facing people you’d once known, and seeing only meat; hearing the screams of somebody who had been wounded and left behind, and feeling only hunger; digging with your bare hands through the steaming belly wound of a victim who begged you to finish her off, and knowing only the compulsion to shovel more of her sweetmeats into your idiot maw. You remember exactly the long minutes she lasted, and you remember failing to see her as a living thing, even when she called you Daddy. You remember losing interest in her after her heart stopped, staying near her only out of indecision, walking away after she sat up a thing hollowed out both body and soul, noticing but not caring that she tried to follow you but fell behind with every step.
As a mindless walking corpse, preying on the warm, you were spared these memories. As whatever you are now, something capable of knowing what they mean, you will never be able to escape them. You will never be able to forget what it had been like, before, to watch that bulge in your wife’s belly grow until it became a great big promise of imminent life; to hold the squirming little miracle in your hands, unprepared for the sheer intensity of the love that seized you as you looked into the baby’s indignant face; to feel that wonderment again the first time she smiled at you; to live for the moments when she laughed; to watch her run around you in circles, her laughter like music; to hold her in your arms as the world turned to shit and the skies filled with soot and everything you saw became an atrocity, clutching for you both. You will never be able to forget the way she’d fallen into a lasting silence well into the plague after your wife died from a simple fever, one that killed without forcing her to rise. You will never be able to forget watching your daughter’s exhausted sleep while foul things moaned on the other side of a flimsy wall. You will never be able to forget telling her, without waking her, that you would never let the bad things get her, that you would never become one of them, that you would never let her become one of them either. You will never be able to forget the long weeks of bitter struggle that followed. You will never be able to forget the moment when your own chances ran out, or the way she regained her powers of speech and called you Daddy just before you put an end to her.
You weep until you have to stop from sheer emotional exhaustion.
Only when you fall silent, for a moment, do you register the many other wails in the wind.
Standing hurts. The ground is covered with a thin layer of concentrated grit that irritates your skin where it adheres to the soles of your feet. You wipe the particles away with a brush of your hand, but more accrues with your next step, which makes a nasty crunch as you sink a millimeter or so into the surface. Your body’s going to have a hard time generating enough warmth to replace what the dirt leeches from your flesh; and while you should be better off standing than you were lying flat on your back, the air is no real improvement. It’s thin, frigid, and tasteless. Your lungs derive no nourishment from it.