The Living Dead 2

Last, we torched Roger. Or I did, that is. On the front porch, Josie sat on top of Cyndi to squash her ongoing hysterics and to keep her from watching while I went back into the living room to take care of the thing that used to be her boyfriend.

“Sorry about this, Roger,” I said. Just because he’d been an asshole when he was alive didn’t mean he deserved this. Nobody did. I doused him with kerosene, coughing at the smoke oozing through the house while he grunted and snapped at my hands. Then I lit a match. It took five or six, but he went up. The grunting didn’t get any more intense as the flames took him. If anything, it died down. He moved aimlessly around while he burned. Finally, something popped or broiled or I-don’t-know-what inside what was left of his brain and he settled down on the floor to smolder, mostly in silence, aside from the odd pop and crackle. And that was the end of Roger. The second end. The final one, I hoped. I backed away with a shudder and went out onto the porch, leaving the doors open to get better circulation for the fire. That sure as hell wasn’t how I wanted to close out my Peace Corps service.

We took Cyndi back to the taxi park after an alcohol bath, got our money from the sousprefet and caught a car taxi back with no other passengers. It cost a little extra to get the whole car, but it was worth it. We were covered with dried sweat already, the heat of late morning wringing out more, and Cyndi was acting pretty claustrophobic. About halfway home, Cyndi started to get semi-coherent and more than thankful. That was actually worse because then she had to tell us all about how Roger had been bitten by a zombie rat out of nowhere and turned a few days later. How she’d survived the past two weeks being chased around the house by her zombie boyfriend, afraid to go out in case she was attacked by more zombies. Damn. That was almost as bad as ending up like Roger.

On the way back, the driver took a detour to pick something up from his house, so we ended up coming in on the same road we’d taken the day before from the train station in Ngaounderé. The remains of the dead gendarme our taxi had hit lay all over the road. The limbs still moved feebly.

Suddenly, I needed a really stiff drink, but we’d used up all my gin for disinfectant purposes. I’d have to go dry until we got back to the house.

“Arrêtez!” I shouted to the driver. “Stop! Stop the car!”

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 Joh

People throughout history have had many different conceptions of what an afterlife might look like. The Greeks imagined the su

“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 begi

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.