Creatures (2 page)

He sprang from cover, air singing past his flattened ears, and latched with all fours onto the stainless steel handles of the last passenger car.

He was finally free, moving now with a dizzying speed beneath the trellis bridge timbers, shadows and light flickering in and out of the crossbars. He rocked back and forth in the cradle of the transport he had spent years dreaming about taking him from the poison of the farm life, the hatred of his family, delivering him like a chariot drawn by a thousand steeds to the heart of a new beginning.

He squatted, his back against the wall, relishing the wind nipping at his muzzle and ruffling the fur of his appendages. He had much to contemplate if the hunger spared him the time.

#

The first of his victims opened the sliding train car door not an hour after he had boarded. Joey little understood the compulsion that gripped him as involuntarily his claws extended from their sheaths. He stood, swinging around in a blur, and took the man up and over the safety rail, flipping him headfirst to the metal floor. Reaching back with one paw, Joey clanged the door shut again so the other passengers would not hear the death throes.

"Don't...!" the man cried. "I'm not...!" They were his first, last, and only words before Joey ripped into the tender area just below his chin with jaws so strong they snapped his neck upon closing. Joey fed, the blood as warm and comforting as water from a hose left lying in the sun all day. The flesh was as good as sunshine spilling down his throat.

He threw the carcass overboard and watched while it bounced and tumbled like a huge rag doll down an incline and into a grassy grave.

Squatting again, Joey licked his lips with a rough tongue, felt the howl of triumph sliding up his windpipe and over his great pointed teeth. He opened his mouth, arched his neck, and bayed just as the train blew its whistle at the scudding clouds overhead that limned the edge of the moon.

No one else came to the door at the train's end for hours. Joey sat quietly, fierce joy flooding all through him as the landscape changed from farmland to town. He was beyond Arville and on his way west. In the neon bloom of the passing town he caught the scent of mankind in a flock. He could smell the car exhaust, the disgusting scent of smoked meat from the vent of a barbeque restaurant, and the stench of a chemical plant belching acidic smoke. Why did they live this way?
How
did they live this way? What had happened to take them from the dense jungles and open plains to gather in hovels, to ride in closed coffins, to eat their fresh meat burned to a tasteless crisp? Because he knew them intimately. He had been one himself--a man mired in a prison of walls, feeding on old, dead animal carcasses.

As the moon rode the sky, reached its ultimate zenith, and began to slip toward the horizon, Joey felt his power, jubilation, and certitude of the rightness of his deeds waning. Dawn held the sky hostage, tinting it on the eastern edge a dry and aged parchment yellow.

Falling rapidly into despondency, Joey was not as quick to respond when next the sliding door opened and a human appeared at the safety rail.

When he did manage to move, he was not nearly as swift grabbing the victim as he had been before. He had her, a female, over the rail, reached to close the door, and when he turned again to attack her most vulnerable flesh near the neck, she threw herself from the clutch of his arms, and commanded in a loud voice, "BE STILL, YOU LOATHSOME BEAST!"

Startled into inaction, Joey hesitated, watching her. Her words had reached through his dark mind clouded as it was with animal instinct, and he knew a command when he heard one. He sniffed and found her scent different from the enemies he had killed on the farm. She smelled
nothing
like them.

"So this is what happened to Bernando? He came for a smoke and you did away with him. Haven't you any control? Are you mad with the change? Bernando was my friend."

He turned his head to the side to show his confusion. What did she mean? Why was she not afraid?

She glanced at the sky and saw the moon lying low over the land. "It's almost dawn," she said. "You'll change back soon. Do you understand me?"

He nodded, slowly, and it felt odd, as if he was not supposed to communicate in this manner anymore.

"I am Marta and I know what you are; that's why I'm not frightened. I come from Austria. Before that I was in the cold emptiness of Siberia caring for my sister. She's what
you
are now. That's why I know when the moon dies, so does your craving for the feast. Just wait. Fight it and wait."

He stared at her and his gaze softened. She knew him as real, as wolf-thing, as beast. How many like him were there in the world? There must be many for her to happen upon him this way. Was she, too, a beast, a Thing? She didn't look changed.

"My sister is a wolf," she said. "Bitten when she was a child, bitten and not devoured. I took her with me away to the north country where she wouldn't stalk whole villages while under the curse of the moon. She lived well on wild things and, with my help, her secret was preserved. How long do you think your secret will keep if you murder this way? Poor Bernardo, I told him there were many wolves loose in this land, but he was not careful enough, was he?"

Joey sank to the floor of the platform and turned his head to watch the tracks as they disappeared mile after mile behind them. They crossed an open plain now, dry and dusty and barely covered over with rustling grasses.

She came down to sit beside him. She said in a soft voice, "It's an epidemic."
He did not understand. He didn't know if he wanted to.

"This bite of the wolf, it's spreading across continents, infecting too many for counting. No one believes it, that's why it isn't talked about. It's made into a myth, a boogeyman story to tell children. To keep from coming into the cities, some of your kind have taken cattle and disemboweled them. The silly Americans, they blame it on aliens, on starships! Inside the cities there are cases of violent crime that go unsolved. Again, it's your kind, the wolf rampaging, incapable of mastering their wild animal urges. The authorities think these deaths are caused by other men, but they're wrong."

Cattle.
He had cattle on his farm. It was probably what had drawn the Thing to them. And he--he could have gone after them when he'd been raging with hunger and left his...his family? Had he truly done harm to...his family?

"There's a wise saying..." She placed a hand on his arm to make sure he would listen. "'There are no intruders or strangers in the world. A man at times is a shapeless pygmy that walks asleep in the mist.' That's what your kind does. I had to teach my sister to wake from her sleep, to dispel the mist so she could decide between right and wrong. So must you, my friend."

He saw the moon now kissed the edge of the horizon. It was sinking fast, taking with it the night, taking away his courage and replacing it with regret, taking his strength, and giving him back the weak limbs of a gangly boy. He raised an arm and saw his long delicate fingers emerging from the rounded paw. His fingers were small in comparison to the great claws that had been his only hours earlier. He felt his muscles shrinking in his arms, and the cover of fur vanishing even as he watched. He felt of his face and found it smooth, hairless, flat and small. Human again.

He hung his head in overwhelming grief. Not for the killing he had done. But for the freedom and animal thrill he had felt for so few scant moments of time.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I know the sorrow morning brings. You see, my sister accidentally made me a beast the same as she. Would you come with me to meet my sister and the others? There's a group of us on the train. About every six months we migrate from the lower Americas northward. We're on our way to Alaska where it's sparsely populated. And there are still wild things to eat."

Joey looked at her, at Marta, and saw the faintest layer of dark down on her cheeks. It slowly disappeared as the light of dawn changed from dim yellow to rose in the sky.

"Will you come? Will you join us or go on living this way, taking down the innocent along with the guilty?"

He should go with her. Maybe it would be all right, after all. He had found another family, a better one. As the engine whistled a warning up ahead and the land blew past the train, Joey took Marta's arm and climbed over the safety rail into the cabin of the passenger car. In there he would find others escaping their pygmy selves lost in the mist and learn from them how to do it, how to control the rage, the destruction, the indiscriminate killing.

Also--and this thought buoyed him--he didn't think there would be farms in Alaska. And, moreover,
there was night there that lasted for months on end.

He growled low, ran his tongue over his lips. When Marta patted his arm, he tried to smile in a way that hid the power lurking inside.

The train whistle screamed. The scream hung in the air like a promise.

And Joey shuffled behind Marta into the shadowy passenger car, feeling good again, feeling free, his smile as predatory as an animal's. He would make Marta sorry she had brought him along, he knew that deep down inside where truth lives. He would make her and the others sorry.

He would make them scream.

THE END

THE LONELY WALK

A Zombie's Notebook

Copyright @ 2012 by Billie Sue Mosiman

First published in the anthology, ARMAGEDDON, Baen Books, as "A Watery Silence."

June 4

I have been five days dead.

Nietzsche was right. God is, also, dead. Or God never was. If there were a God, He wouldn't have let humankind suffer in this manner. I would have rather there had been a God in heaven and a Lucifer below, I would have rather burned on red-hot coals for my sins for eternity than to live this everlasting death. I only tell you the truth. If you think I'm going to varnish it or pretty it up, look somewhere else.

I'm leaving these pages for the living so they'll know what they face if they join me. No one before me has chronicled what this life-in-death is like and it's important for the world to know.

The plague that swept across continents and infected millions has also infected me. So far as I know I am the only one who
understands
my predicament. I'm searching for another. I don't want to be alone much longer. I fear my mind is slipping, has slipped, will continue to slip, into madness.

It all began five days ago...

But, wait, just a minute now...

I lifted my arm and brought my flesh close to my face because I thought I might smell something. I pressed my nostrils directly against the skin, felt its tightness against my cheek, slid out my tongue and tasted. It's a little sweet, my flesh, not very salty, and cool. Cold. There is the faint scent of some bits of me rotting down below the layer of muscle. I'm corrupting, but at a slower rate than I would have thought. Especially in this tropical climate. Miami, Florida. A splendid paradise for dying.

So let me continue. After lying dead for five days, an uninfected man would have bloated, stiffened with rigor mortis, and gone soft again, turned to jelly, gaseous and purple as a plum. I'm not that way. Not yet.

It was Saturday when I died. In May. When I had everything to live for. But we all do, always. I tell you this, and you have to remember it every minute you live and draw breath.
There is everything to live for.
Treasure every second. Lift up your face and see the sun and touch your loved ones and capture and hold onto any little joy that burbles in your heart. Life is never so bad that death--any death, but particularly this death--could ever be thought remotely preferable.

Saturday.
"Carrie," I said. "We need milk. We have to get milk for the baby." My daughter had barely survived for eight days on water strained from oatmeal and she needed more nourishment than that. I couldn’t stay barricaded in the house any longer.

Carrie begged, "Please don't go outside, please don't leave us! The provisions will be here on Monday." Teardrops collected on the lower rims of her eyes. She had never cried so easily before, never been so emotional and raw. I wanted to take her into my arms, but I couldn't, not this time.

The army truck would bring our neighborhood milk and cheese and meat and vegetables, enough to last another month--but it never did, it never lasted, not for a growing child. Margaret is just four months old. I delivered her myself, held that tiny wonder in the palms of my hands and saw her take her first breath, held her against my chest and felt her heartbeat flutter wildly, fighting to live. I stood holding her, that naked little life, praying she would make it.

For a week it was all right. Then Carrie had no milk, her malnourishment drying her breasts before the baby could gain a hold on life. I couldn't stand to watch Margaret waste away, grow listless, her blue eyes fading to slate, her lips blindly, softly sucking at the stained water when I could do something, by God, I was her father, wasn't I? I couldn't let her die, could I?

But I have to make you understand this. I didn't want my daughter to die, but there was more than her life in the balance. I wanted her to live for me. I knew if the baby died, Carrie would soon follow. She was already slowly losing her mind, and with the baby's death, I knew she'd give up. In the end I'd be living alone in an echoing house, alienated from any human touch or voice or kindness.

Carrie threatened, "I'll call in and report you! This is abandonment, you can't leave us alone."

She was so afraid of losing me to the zombies. I couldn't let her know my fears of losing first the baby and then her, so I said with a cold edge in my voice, I said go ahead, call, turn me in, have me put into some prison camp for leaving the house, then
you
can watch our baby die alone, if that's what you really want, goddammit.

It took that kind of cold fury to deal with Carrie those days. She didn't listen unless I turned my back on her and spoke with a roughness I didn't really feel toward her.