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He stopped moving and stared down at me. It was working, against all the rules, it was working.

It was Carla who spoiled it. Her voice saying, “Arthur, Arthur, forgive me.”

He was distracted and tried to move toward her voice. I stopped him with a hand on his chest. “Arthur, I command you, do not move. I who raised you command you.”

She called one more time. That was all he needed. He flung me away absentmindedly. My head hit the tombstone. It wasn’t much of a blow, no blood like on television, but it took everything out of me for a minute. I lay in the flowers, and it seemed very important to hear myself breathe.

Arthur reached down for her, slowly. His face twitched, and his tongue made small sounds that might have been “Carla.”

The clumsy hands stroked her hair. He half-fell, half-knelt by her. She drew back at that, afraid.

I started crawling over the flowers toward them. She was not going to commit suicide with my help.

The hands stroked her face, and she backed away, just a few inches. The thing crawled after her. She backpedaled faster, but he came on surprisingly quick. He pinned her under his body, and she started screaming.

I half-crawled, half-fell across the zombie’s back.

The hands crept up her body, touching her shoulders.

Her eyes rolled back to me. “Help me!”

I tried. I tugged at him, trying to pull him off her. Zombies do not have supernatural strength, no matter what the media would like you to think, but Arthur had been a large, muscular man. If he could have felt pain, I might have pulled him off, but there was no real way to distract him.

“Anita, please!”

The hands settled on her neck and squeezed.

I found the machete where it had dropped to the ground. It was sharp, and did damage, but he couldn’t feel it. I chopped at his head and back. He ignored me. Even decapitated, he would keep coming. His hands were the problem. I knelt and sighted at his lower arm. I didn’t dare try it any closer to her face. The blade flashed silver. I brought it down with all the strength in my back and arms, but it took five blows to break the bone.

The separated hand kept squeezing as if it were still attached. I threw the machete down and began prying one finger at a time from her neck. It was time consuming. Carla stopped struggling. I screamed my rage and helplessness at him and kept prying up the fingers. The strong hands squeezed until there was a cracking sound. Not a sharp pencil-break like a leg or an arm, but a crackling as the bones crushed together. Arthur seemed satisfied. He stood up from the body. All expression left him. He was empty, waiting for a command.

I fell back into the flowers, not sure whether to cry, or scream, or just run. I just sat there and shook. But I had to do something about the zombie. I couldn’t just leave him to wander around.

I tried to tell him to stay, but my voice wouldn’t come. His eye followed me as I stumbled to the car. I came back with a handful of salt. In the other hand I scooped the fresh grave dirt. Arthur watched me without expression. I stood at the outer edge of the circle. “I give you back to the earth from which you came.”

I threw the dirt upon him. He turned to face me.

“With salt I bind you to your grave.” The salt sounded like sleet on his suit. I made the sign of a cross with the machete. “With steel I give you back.”

I realized that I had begun the ceremony without getting another chicken. I bent and retrieved the dead one and slit it open. I drew still-warm and bloody entrails free. They glistened in the moonlight. “With flesh and blood I command you, Arthur, return to your grave and walk no more.”

He lay down upon the grave. It was as if he had lain in quicksand. It just swallowed him up. With a last shifting of flowers, the grave was as before, almost.

I threw the gutted chicken to the ground and knelt beside the woman’s body. Her neck flopped at an angle just slightly wrong.

I got up and shut the trunk of my car. The sound seemed to echo, too loud. Wind seemed to roar in the tall trees. The leaves rustled and whispered. The trees all looked like flat black shadows, nothing had any depth to it. All noises were too loud. The world had become a one-dimensional cardboard thing. I was in shock. It would keep me numb and safe for a little while. Would I dream about Carla tonight? Would I try to save her again and again? I hoped not.

Somewhere up above, nighthawks flitted. Their cries came thin and eerie, echoing loud. I looked at the body by the grave. The whiteness of it stained now with dirt. So much for the other half of my fee.

I got in the car, smearing blood over the steering wheel and key. There were phone calls to make: to my boss, to the police, and to cancel the rest of my appointments. I would be raising no more dead tonight. There was a taxi to send away. I wondered how much the meter had run up.

My thoughts ran in dull, frightened circles. I began to shake, hands trembling. Tears came hot and violent. I sobbed and screamed in the privacy of my car. When I could breathe without choking, and my hand was steady, I put the car in gear. I would definitely be seeing Carla tonight and Arthur. What’s one more nightmare?

I left Carla there alone, with Arthur’s forgiveness, one leg lost in the flowers of his grave.

IN BEAUTY, LIKE THE NIGHT

by Norman Partridge

Norman Partridge is the author of the novels Saguaro Riptide, The Ten Ounce Siesta, Slippin’ into Darkness, Wildest Dreams, and Dark Harvest, which was named one of the 100 Best Books of 2006 by Publishers Weekly. He also wrote a media-tie in novel The Crow: Wicked Prayer, which was later adapted into the fourth Crow film.

Partridge’s short fiction—which has appeared in Amazing Stories and Cemetery Dance and in a number of anthologies, such as Dark Voices 6, Love in Vein, and Retro Pulp Tales—has been collected in three volumes: Mr. Fox and Other Feral Tales, Bad Intentions, and The Man with the Barbed-Wire Fists.

In the introduction to the latter collection, Partridge describes in detail his first experience seeing Night of the Living Dead at the local drive-in. “The drive-in in my hometown had not one… not two… but three cemeteries as neighbors,” Partridge says. “Realizing that, a nasty little idea began to nibble at the corners of my imagination. I couldn’t help but wonder what would happen if the dead folks in those cemeteries clawed their way out of their graves and came shuffling across the road to pay us a little visit.”

Which sounds to me like the origin of many zombie tales if not this one in particular.

The beach was deserted.

Somehow, they knew enough to stay out of the sun.

Nathan Grimes rested his elbows on the balcony and peered through his binoculars. As he adjusted the focus knob, the smooth, feminine mounds that bordered the crescent-shaped beach became nets of purslane and morning glory, and the green blur that lay beyond sharpened to a crazy quilt of distinct colors—emerald, charcoal, glimpses of scarlet—a dark panorama of manchineel trees, sea grapes, and coconut palms.

Nathan scanned the shadows until he found the golden-bronze color of her skin. Naked, just out of reach of the sun’s rays, she leaned against the gentle curve of a coconut palm, curling a strand of singed blonde hair around the single finger that remained on her left hand. Her fingertip was red—with nail polish, not blood—and she thrust it into her mouth and licked both finger and hair, finally releasing a spit curl that fought the humid Caribbean breeze for a moment and then drooped in defeat.