Read The New Dead: A Zombie Anthology Online
Authors: Christopher Golden
The New Dead: A Zombie Anthology (2 page)
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After a time, she leaves, and she never returns.
The priests summon Lazarus. He is brought before their council and made to stand below the dais of the high priest, Caiaphas. Lazarus’s voice has returned, but it is an imperfect thing, as though his throat is coated with grit and dirt.
‘What do you recall of the tomb?’ they ask, and he replies, ‘Nothing but dust and darkness.’
‘In the four days that you lay dead, what did you see?’
And he replies, ‘I do not remember.’
There is a murmur of disappointment, of distrust. They believe him to be lying. Voices are raised, questions falling like dead leaves upon his head. They are the priests, and they must know all that he knows.
Only Caiaphas is silent. He regards the young man before him, taking in the discoloration on his skin, the marks of putrefaction that have not yet disappeared. With a wave of his hand, Caiaphas dismisses the rest, so that only he and Lazarus remain. Caiaphas pours wine, but Lazarus does not drink from his cup.
‘Tell me,’ says Caiaphas. ‘Now that the others have gone, tell me what you saw. Did you see the face of God? Does He exist? Tell me!’
But Lazarus has nothing to offer him, and eventually Caiaphas turns his back on him and tells him to return to his sisters.
It is not the first time that Lazarus has been asked such questions. Even his sisters have tried to find out what lies beyond the grave. But in response, he has been able only to shake his head and tell them what he told the priests:
Nothing. There is nothing, or nothing that I can remember.
But no one believes him. No one wants to believe him.
Caiaphas calls another council, but this time Lazarus is not present.
‘Is there no sign of the one who called him from the tomb?’ he asks, and the Pharisees reply that the Nazarene has hidden himself away.
Caiaphas is displeased. With each day that goes by, he grows more resentful of Lazarus. The people are unhappy. They have heard that Lazarus can remember nothing of what he experienced after his death, and some have begun to whisper that there is nothing to remember, that perhaps the priests have lied to them.
Caiaphas will not have his power challenged. He orders the stoning of three men who were overheard discussing Lazarus in this manner. They will serve as an example to the others.
Lazarus, lost in himself, seeking buried memories, burns his hand on hot stones as he heats water to bathe himself. He does not notice until he tries to remove his hand and instead leaves a patch of skin behind. There is no pain. Lazarus would find this curious, except Lazarus no longer finds anything curious. The world holds no interest for him. He cannot taste or smell. He does not sleep, and instead he experiences every day as a kind of waking dream. He stares at his raw, bleeding palm, then explores it with his fingers, tentatively at first, then finally tearing at the flesh, ripping it apart until the bones are exposed, desperate to feel anything, anything at all.
A woman asks Lazarus if he can contact her son, who died in his sleep two years before and with whom she had argued before he went to bed. A man asks him to tell his dead wife that he is sorry for cheating on her. The brother of a man lost at sea asks Lazarus to find out where his brother buried his gold.
Lazarus cannot help them.
And all the time, he is confronted by those who ask him what lies beyond. He cannot answer, and he sees the disappointment in their eyes and their belief that he is lying.
Caiaphas is troubled. He sits in the darkness of the temple and prays for guidance, but no guidance comes.
In the case of Lazarus and the Nazarene, there are only so many possibilities that he can consider.
i. The Nazarene is, as some whisper, the Son of God. But Caiaphas does not like the Nazarene. On the other hand, Caiaphas loves God. Therefore, if the Nazarene really is the Son of God, then Caiaphas should love him, too. Perhaps the fact that Caiaphas does not love the Nazarene means that the Nazarene is not, in fact, the Son of God, for if he were, then Caiaphas would love him, too. Caiaphas decides that he is comfortable with this reasoning.
ii. If the Nazarene is not the Son of God, then he does not have the power to raise the dead.
iii. If the Nazarene does not have the power to raise the dead, then what of Lazarus? The only conclusion to be drawn is that Lazarus was not dead when he was placed in the tomb; but had he been left there, he most assuredly would be dead by now. Thus, Lazarus
should
be dead, and his continued refusal to accept this fact is an offence against nature and against God.
Caiaphas decides that he is no longer quite as troubled as before, and he goes to his bed.
Rachel is released from her obligations to Lazarus and marries another. Lazarus watches from an olive grove as the bride and groom arrive at the wedding feast. He sees Rachel and remembers the night that she came to him. He tries to understand how he should feel at this time and counterfeits envy, grief, lust, and loss, a pantomime of emotions watched only by birds and insects. After a time, he sits in the dirt and puts his head in his hands.
Slowly, he begins to rock.
The Nazarene returns in triumph to Bethany. The people hope that he will give them answers, that he will tell them how he accomplished the miracle of Lazarus and if he is now prepared to do the same for others, for there have been more deaths since last he came to that place, and who is he to say that the grief of Martha and Mary was greater than that of others? A woman whose child has died holds the infant in her arms, its body wrapped in white, the cloth stained with blood and tears and dirt. She raises the corpse up and begs the Nazarene to bring her child back to her, but there are too many others shouting, and her voice is lost in the babble. She turns away and makes the preparations for her infant’s funeral.
The Nazarene goes to the house of Martha and Mary and eats supper with them. Mary bathes his feet with ointment and dries them with her hair while Lazarus looks on, unspeaking. Before the Nazarene leaves, Lazarus begs for a moment with him.
‘Why did you bring me back?’ he asks.
‘Because you were beloved of your sisters and beloved of me.’
‘I do not want to be here,’ says Lazarus, but the people have gathered at the door, and the Nazarene’s disciples pull him away, concerned that there may be enemies among the crowd.
And then he is gone, and Lazarus is left alone to wonder which is worse - a God who does not care to understand His creation, or a God who thinks that He does.
Lazarus stands at a window listening to the sound of Rachel and her husband making love. A dogs sniffs at him and then licks his damaged palm. It nibbles on his tattered flesh, and he watches it blankly.
Lazarus stares at the night sky. In its blackness, he imagines a door, and behind that door is all that he has lost, all that he left behind. This world is an imperfect facsimile of all that once was and all that should be.
He returns home. His sisters no longer speak to him. Instead, they gaze at him with cold eyes. They wanted their brother back, but all that they loved of him died in the tomb. They wanted fine wine, but all they received was an empty flask.
The priests come for him again, arriving under cover of darkness. They make much noise - enough, he thinks, to wake the dead, were the dead man in question not already awake - but his sisters do not come to investigate. This time, he is not brought before the council but is taken into the desert, his arms tied behind his back, his mouth stuffed with a rag. They walk until they come at last to the tomb in which Lazarus had once been laid. They carry him inside, and they place him on the slab. The rag is removed from his mouth, and he sees Caiaphas approach.
‘Tell me,’ Caiaphas whispers. ‘Tell me, and all will be well.’
But Lazarus says nothing, and Caiaphas steps back in disappointment.
‘He is an abomination,’ Caiaphas tells the others, ‘a thing undead. He does not belong among us.’
They bind him once again in bandages, until only his face remains uncovered. A priest steps forward. In his hand he holds a grey stone. He raises it above his head.
Lazarus closes his eyes as the stone descends.
And Lazarus remembers.
WHAT MAISIE KNEW
BY DAVID LISS
There was never a time when keeping Maisie in the apartment felt right to me. It was always a bad deal, right from the get-go, but there were no good deals, and this was the least-bad deal going. I couldn’t let her stay out in the world, knowing what she knew, blurting out what she did. It probably would have been fine if I’d left it alone, but I could not live with such a flimsy guarantee. It was the chance that things would not be fine that nagged at me, that kept me awake at night, that made me jump every time the phone rang. I had a wife I loved, and we had a child on the way. I had a
life
, and I wanted to keep it. A person can’t live like that, waiting for the other shoe to drop, and so I did the only thing I could do - the only thing I could think of. It was the right call, but it just so happened that it didn’t turn out the way I wanted.
life
, and I wanted to keep it. A person can’t live like that, waiting for the other shoe to drop, and so I did the only thing I could do - the only thing I could think of. It was the right call, but it just so happened that it didn’t turn out the way I wanted.
It should have been fine. Everything I knew about reanimates told me it should be fine. I’d been around them almost all my life. My parents could barely make car payments, but they rushed out to buy a Series One from General Reanimation when they first came on the market. Kids growing up today can’t even imagine what those early models were like - buggy and twitchy, with those ugly uniforms, like weird green tuxedos. I was only five at the time, and the reanimate creeped the hell out of me when it would lumber into my room to check on me at night or when it would babysit while my parents were out. I still remember watching it shamble toward me, a TV dinner clutched hard in its shaky hands. I wasn’t phobic the way some people are. I simply didn’t like them. Dead people should remain dead. That’s one of those things that always made sense, maybe now more than ever.
So I hated going to that apartment where I kept my dead girl, which, on top of everything else, was hard to afford and which I had to hide from my wife, who managed most of the household finances. I’d have rather been anywhere else - at the dentist, the DMV, a tax audit, a prostate exam. But I was there, at the apartment. I opened the front door and walked in, smelled the weird chemical smell that reanimates emitted, and the feeling washed over me that I had no business being there. My name was on the lease, but I felt like an intruder.
It was a crappy apartment on the cusp of the very wrong side of town, cheap, but not too dangerous. The place was a one bedroom - more space than Maisie needed, since she supposedly didn’t need any space at all. She wasn’t supposed to, but I always wondered. Sometimes when I came to check on her, the chairs around the cheap kitchen table would look out of place. I always pushed my chairs in, but these were pulled out at odd angles or even halfway across the floor, as though advertising that they’d been moved. I supposed there was nothing wrong with her taking a seat or moving things around if that was what she wanted to do, but she wasn’t
supposed
to want to do it. That’s what bothered me.
supposed
to want to do it. That’s what bothered me.
When I went in that day, she was standing precisely where I last left her, her back to the far wall of the living area, her face to the door, light from the slightly parted curtains streaming over her. I watched the dust motes dance around her eyes, visible through the mask, wide and doll like and unblinking.
Maisie was a black-market reanimate, but she wore the green-and-white uniform of a licensed General Reanimation unit, and of course she wore that matching green-and-white mask, which made her look, to my eyes, like a Mexican wrestler. Plenty of people, even people who liked having reanimates around, found the mask a bit disconcerting, but they all admitted it was better than the alternative. No one wants to check into a hotel and discover that the reanimate bellboy is one’s own dead relative. No one wants to go to a cocktail party and see a dead spouse offering a tray of shrimp pâté on ciabatta.
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