The Living Dead 2

Zombie Season by Catherine MacLeod

Catherine MacLeod has tried to watch Night of the Living Dead, but every time she does, she spends so much time with her hands over her face she can’t actually claim to have seen it. When not cowering behind her hands, she writes fiction, which has appeared dozens of times in the Canadian science fiction magazine On Spec, and in other magazines such as Talebones, TransVersions, and the French-language magazine Solaris. Her work has also appeared in anthologies Tesseracts 6, Bits of the Dead, and Open Space. Forthcoming work includes her story “Stone,” which will appear in Horror Library #4.

Death is a horrible and terrifying thing, but it’s a reality that has to be faced. When a loved one dies, most people don’t feel like doing anything but grieve. Sadly, there are a whole host of practical issues that have to be attended to-phone calls to make, financial affairs to be put in order, and funeral arrangements to be made. A coffin must be picked out, the body must be prepared, and a service pla

We all know this is a vital occupation, but perhaps because of our discomfort with the idea of death, we tend to form some pretty strange ideas about those who dig graves. Ask your average person to picture a gravedigger and what do they imagine? Some weirdo, right? Some lurking creep with frenzied hair and haunted eyes, a guy with a strange voice who spends too much time by himself. It’s an ugly stereotype, and it’s high time that something was done to set the record straight. Gravedigging is an honorable profession, and our gravediggers deserve better treatment at the hands of authors and moviemakers.

We hope that our next story, which portrays a gravedigger as a brave, zombie-battling hero, will eliminate those negative preconceptions and give everyone a more positive, wholesome image of gravediggers everywhere.

The secret’s all in the salt. People just expect the town zombie hunter to carry it, along with a shotgun and squirt-bottle of gasoline. I don’t believe it’ll protect me, but if carrying it makes folks feel safer, that’s fine.

Of course, I’ve always carried salt, but not for reasons that would make anyone feel safe, and that’s fine, too.

The first shriek shreds the air at 7 a.m., and I’m ready. I was a gravedigger, back before Judgment Day put me out of a job-no use digging holes if the deceased aren’t going to stay in them-and these days people say I just have a natural way with the dead. Privately, I don’t think much of their appetite for living flesh, but I don’t judge.

Some people fear the dead, no matter what, and back then I didn’t understand. Now I do. The dead know too many secrets, and some folks have reason to worry.

Like Adam Wade saying his crazy wife ran off to New York, only to have her shamble on home with her head stove in. Or the preacher’s pure-as-new-snow daughter dying of pneumonia, then wandering into church yesterday with the remains of a dead baby caged in her ribs.

But everyone has secrets. I suppose how bad they are is just a matter of opinion.

Then again, concern for opinion has always kept me closemouthed about my own.

My seven o’clock job is a zombie on Main Street, who probably wouldn’t even have noticed Miretta Jackson if she hadn’t started screaming at it. Then again, it’s Henry Jackson, Miretta’s late husband. She screamed at him non-stop when he was alive, and old habits die hard.

I shoot him down, spare the gasoline, and drop a match on the chance that-yup, you can always tell who’s been embalmed; they go up like marshmallows.

I watch the fire from the coffeehouse as I eat pancakes and ketchup. The waitress, Gina, says, “Billy Martin, I swear you have no taste,” just like always. Then, like always, she glances at my shotgun and moves off.

It’s coming on fall now, and the dead slow down in cool weather. They’re no good at all in winter. I’ll have to start curing meat to put by while the hunting’s still good. Gina has no idea, saying I have no taste. After all, isn’t my salt mixed with parsley and thyme?

Life is easier these days. I don’t have to dig the dead up anymore, or worry about getting caught; and no one wants to watch me roast zombies, especially when one might be their own dearly departed. Still, I’m discreet. Only the dead know my secret, and I doubt they’ll judge.

People say I just have a natural way with the dead, and I think that might be true.

That, and the secret really is all in the salt.

Tameshigiri by Steven Gould

A Hugo and Nebula Award finalist, Steven Gould is the author of the novel Jumper, the basis for the recent film of the same name. Other novels include Reflex, Blind Waves, Helm, Greenwar, and Wildside. A new novel, 7th Sigma, is scheduled for May 2011. Gould is currently working on another entry in the Jumper series. His short fiction has appeared in Analog, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Amazing Stories, The Year’s Best Science Fiction, and Tor.com. When not writing, Gould spends entirely too much time killing zombies on his Xbox 360.

Ninjas were spies, saboteurs, and assassins in ancient Japan. In Japan the equivalent term “shinobi” is more common, but Westerners prefer the sound of “ninja.” Ninja was an officially recognized job, and only those of a certain income were allowed to keep ninjas on the payroll. Ninjas commonly wielded swords (katanas), throwing stars (shuriken), and chain and sickle weapons called a kusarigama. While popular imagination pictures ninjas clad in black, in real life ninjas probably tried to blend into the local population by dressing as priests, entertainers, and merchants. Much of Japanese architecture was originally developed as a defense against ninjas, including the use of gravel courtyards and nightingale floors that made it difficult for intruders to move about silently.

Gould says that this story is all my fault: “I made the mistake of saying on Twitter something like ‘Ninjas awesome. Zombies awesome. Ninjas and Zombies? Double awesome!’ John Joseph Adams saw it and asked if I was writing such a thing. I wasn’t, but I said that I could.”

A student of Iaido-the Japanese sword as a martial art-for over twelve years, Gould didn’t need to do much research for the story, but he says he did stand out in the middle of his backyard with a bokken (wooden sword) for a while, working on some of the moves depicted in the story.

Why zombies? “The scary thing about zombies, slow or fast, is that there will always be more,” Gould says. “It doesn’t matter how many you kill, eventually more will arrive. Zombies are a palpable, biting representation of our own mortality. And mortality stinks. And it has rotting flesh.”

In medieval Japan there was a swordsmith who volunteered to execute a felon so he could perform tameshigiri-test cutting-on his latest blade. When the convicted man saw the sword maker he said, “If I had known it would be you, I would have swallowed stones to ruin your blade!”

Some days you’re the sword maker, slicing cleanly through flesh and bone, and some days you’re the poor bastard forcing rocks down your throat right before they put the steel to you. Sure you’re going to die, but you don’t have to go easy.