“It’s no reason for you to leave, not now, not when we need you. Burton would have you back in a minute. He owes this election to you, he knows that. Come back.”
“Not yet,” I said, “I’m not ready.”
But now, staring out across the upturned faces of the dead as a cold January wind whipped across the Mall, I felt the lure and pull of the old life, sure as gravity. The game, Burton had called it, and it was a game, politics, the biggest Monopoly set in the world and I loved it and for the first time I understood why I loved it. For the first time I understood something else, too: why I had waited years to ring Gwen’s doorbell, why even then it had taken an active effort of will not to turn away. It was the same reason: Because it was a game, a game with clear winners and losers, with rules as complex and arcane as a cotillion, and most of all because it partook so little of the messy turmoil of real life. The stakes seemed high, but they weren’t. It was ritual, that’s all—movement without action, a dance of spin and strategy designed to preserve the status quo. I fell in love with politics because it was safe. You get so involved in pushing your token around the board that you forget the ideals that brought you to the table in the first place. You forget to speak from the heart. Someday maybe, for the right reasons, I’d come back. But not yet.
I must have said it aloud for Lewis suddenly looked over at me. “What?” he asked.
I just shook my head and gazed out over the handful of living people, stirring as the ceremony got underway. The dead waited beyond them, rank upon rank of them with the earth of the grave under their nails and that cold shining in their eyes.
And then I did turn to Lewis. “What do you think they want?” I asked.
Lewis sighed. “Justice, I suppose,” he said.
“And when they have it?”
“Maybe they’ll rest.”
A year has passed, and those words—justice, I suppose—still haunt me. I returned to D.C. in the fall, just as the leaves began turning along the Potomac. Gwen came with me, and sometimes, as I lie wakeful in the shelter of her warmth, my mind turns to the past.
It was Gran that brought me back. The cast had come off in February, and one afternoon in March, Gwen and I stopped by, surprised to see her on her feet. She looked frail, but her eyes glinted with determination as she toiled along the corridors behind her walker.
“Let’s sit down and rest,” I said when she got winded, but she merely shook her head and kept moving.
“Bones knit, Rob,” she told me. “Wounds heal, if you let them.”
Those words haunt me, too.
By the time she died in August, she’d moved from the walker to a cane. Another month, her case manager told me with admiration, and she might have relinquished even that. We buried her in the plot where we laid my grandfather to rest, but I never went back after the interment. I know what I would find.
The dead do not sleep.
They shamble in silence through the cities of our world, their bodies slack and stinking of the grave, their eyes coldly ablaze. Baghdad fell in September, vanquished by battalions of revolutionaries, rallying behind a vanguard of the dead. State teems with similar rumors, and CNN is on the story. Unrest in Pyongyang, turmoil in Belgrade.
In some views, Burton’s has been the most successful administration in history. All around the world, our enemies are falling. Yet more and more these days, I catch the president staring uneasily into the streets of Washington, aswarm with zombies. “Our conscience,” he’s taken to calling them, but I’m not sure I agree. They demand nothing of us, after all. They seek no end we can perceive or understand. Perhaps they are nothing more than what we make of them, or what they enable us to make of ourselves. And so we go on, mere lodgers in a world of unpeopled graves, subject ever to the remorseless scrutiny of the dead.
BLOSSOM
by David J. Schow
David J. Schow is a bit of a legend in zombie circles. He’s the author of the notorious story “Jerry’s Kids Meet Wormboy,” as well as several others, which have been collected in Zombie Jam. He’s also the author of the novels The Kill Riff, The Shaft, Bullets of Rain, and Rock Breaks Scissors Cut. His most recent novel is Gun Work, a hard-boiled crime novel due out in November. Schow co-wrote (with John Shirley) the screenplay for The Crow, and has written teleplays for TV shows such as Showtime’s Masters of Horror. As for non-fiction, Schow has authored The Outer Limits: The Official Companion, and a collection of essays called Wild Hairs. He’s also generally considered to be the originator of the term “splatterpunk.”
In Zombie Jam, Schow says: “‘Blossom’ is a simple story, written in a single day, the process beginning with the image of a beautiful nude woman eating flowers, working backward from that image. Along the way it was decided that the incidental background of the story would address the notion of what it was like in the big cities two nights before the spread of the zombie virus made survival the overriding issue.”
“Each of us has a moment,” Quinn told her. “The moment when we shine; that instant when we are at our absolute best. Just as each of us has an aberration, a hidden secret. Some might call it a perversion, though that’s rather a rough word. Crude. Nonspecific. Is it a perversion to do that thing you’re best at, to enjoy your individual moment?”
Amelia nodded vaguely, watching the older man through her glass of Sauvignon Blanc. He was going to answer his own obtuse question, and the answer he had already decided upon was no. It was the puffery that preceded the crunch—was she going to fuck him tonight, or not? She was positive he had already answered that one in his head as well. Dinner had run to ninety-five bucks, not counting the wine or the tip. Dessert had been high-priced, higher-caloried, chocolate, elegant. Cabs had been taken and token gifts dispensed.
She had worked in loan approvals at Columbia Savings for nine months, riding the receptionist’s desk. Older men frequently asked her out. When Quinn invited her to dinner, a weekend date, she had pulled his file, consulted his figures, and said yes. All the girls in the office did it. He drove a Jaguar XJS and was into condo development.
The dinner part had been completed two hours ago. Now it was his place. When your income hit the high six figures there was no such animal as date rape. Amelia had herpes. It was inactive tonight. Best to stay mum; it was like compensation. To her certain knowledge she had never bedded bisexuals or intravenous-drug users, and in truth she feared contracting AIDS in the same unfocused way she feared getting flattened in a crosswalk by a bus. It could happen. But probably not. There was no way in the world either of them could fit a condom over their mouths, so it was academic. Right?
Quinn’s watery gray eyes glinted as he rattled on about aberrations and special moments. Probably the wine. It had gotten to Amelia half an hour ago, a fuzzy vino cloud that put her afloat and permitted her to tune out Quinn’s voice while staring past him, to nod and generate tiny noises of acknowledgment on a schedule that allowed him to believe she was actually listening. She had disconnected and felt just fine. She took a deep, languorous breath keeping him on the far side of her wine glass, and stifled the giggle that welled within her. Oh my yes, she felt nice, adrift on a cumulus pillow of gasified brain cells. She would look past him, through him, in just this way when he was on top of her, grunting and sweating and believing he had seduced her… just as he now believed she was paying attention.