“Yes,” Dustin said. “And the rest of it. Turn right—”
“Walk around the palace… ” The creature took a step toward him, then away. “Walk around the palace… ” it repeated, as it wandered, back and forth.
Obedience
By Brenna Yovanoff
Brenna Yovanoff’s first novel, a contemporary young adult fantasy called The Replacement, should be out from Razorbill around the same time as this anthology. Her short fiction has appeared in Chiaroscuro and Strange Horizons. On her LiveJournal (brennayovanoff.livejournal.com), she claims to be good at soccer, violent video games, and making very flaky pie pastry, but bad at dancing, making decisions, and inspiring confidence as an authority figure.
One of the most wrenching aspects of a zombie plague that makes it completely different from, say, an invasion of alien arachnids is the knowledge that these hordes of enemies were once our friends and neighbors, were once decent, loving people. As we perforate their faces with a .50 caliber machinegun, or hack at their clutching hands with a machete, axe, or chainsaw, it’s impossible not to wonder whether these moaning ghouls retain any trace of their former personality. Are the people they once were still trapped in there somewhere, aware of what’s happening around them? Might they ever be cured, the way a mentally ill patient can be, with the right treatment?
Books and films are filled with incidents in which survivors try to show mercy to zombies—as with the barn full of zombies in Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead—or will even fight to protect them, as with the zombified newborn in the 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead. Michael Crichton’s novel Jurassic Park suggests that it’s impossible to safely keep dinosaurs in captivity, and much the same thing seems to be true of zombies. The temptation is always there, though—what if it were just one zombie? Just one little girl, surely we could handle that?
But if zombie stories have taught us anything, it’s that keeping zombies around, whether out of mercy or as research subjects, seems to have a way of ending up badly for everyone involved—and by “badly” we mean with teeth, blood, and screams.
When the first drinking glass hit the floor and broke, Private Grace pressed her back against the wall and steadied the sidearm with both hands. The window above her was single-paned, the weather-stripping rotten. To her left, a freestanding radiator was rusting gently. The house was a summer cabin, cramped, and redolent with the smell of mice. They’d spent the better part of an hour nailing the windows shut, then gathering glassware—pitchers, vases, dinner plates, a souvenir ashtray with a cartoon walrus painted in the bottom—and arranging the dishes in rows along the sills.
Now, they hunkered down, waiting. There had been food at least, canned, coated in dust. They ate quickly, passing the open cans back and forth as evening fell. The sound the glass made when it landed was explosive, a mortar going off.
“What do we show these giddy bastards?” Whitaker called from the adjoining room, sounding clipped and perfunctory.
The answer came from a dozen positions, followed by the metallic sound of carbines, magazines and bolt assemblies clattering into place. “No mercy, sir.”
They had begun as an infantry platoon of forty-seven, mostly up from New Mexico and Texas. Now, they were thirteen. Ten privates, one combat medic, and Denton the Marine, all serving under Whitaker.
Of the privates, only Grace and a trooper named Knotts were from Whitaker’s original squad. The other eight and Jacobs, the medic, had come off a company that had gotten pinned down at the Air Force base and, for the most part, died there.
The base had been a short-term El Dorado, but when they arrived, their grand welcome was absent, save for a few survivors holed up in the bunkers. Some of the medical technicians had made a last-ditch effort to seal themselves in the sleep chambers. It was difficult to say whether the massacre had happened with the techs scrambling for safety or already in stasis, but one thing was certain. The flyboys had been dead for weeks.
Where Denton originated from remained somewhat of a mystery. It was theorized that he was a deserter, but in truth, Grace did not much care. Denton had the best guns.
“Smirkers,” someone shouted in the front hall, immediately followed by a crash as the door splintered. Fire came in three-round bursts, rattling through the tiny house.