It was while walking my bike through that town whose name I loved so well, Lonelyville, that I stumbled upon—literally—the undead object of my desire, but now she was just plain old dead dead, her stiff, supine body glistening with ice crystals. I knelt down beside her and stared, my grief indescribable. Her tank top had disappeared, and her bra was torn, one cup shredded revealing a pale, translucent yellow breast. Her face was angelic, at least it was to me at that moment, and I felt shame for having fostered lust for this creature. Not because it was unnatural—you can debate that all you want—but because she looked above such secular desires. Tears began streaming down my cheeks but I didn’t wipe them away. I felt more loss here for this stranger than I had for my own wife, maybe because my wife’s demise was in the abstract. I hadn’t been there for it. I’d also been in a blind panic like everyone else.
Now, in this tranquil wintry setting, I had the luxury of time to grieve. I let it all out for this strangely captivating zombie girl, for my wife, for all of humanity. I bawled and right there in the road, lay on my side and spooned her, my body shaking not from the cold but from previously unimaginable loss.
And as we lay there a grizzled stag stepped onto the road, staring at us, its eyes black and unknowable. Steam pumped from its craterous nostrils and it grunted with bestial authority, like we were trespassing.
We. I so badly needed to be a part of “we” again. Does that make me codependent? My vision blurred by anguish, my mood black as pitch, I glared at this four-legged interloper. It grunted again and scraped a hoof against the pavement. The effrontery was too much. It was this goddamned filthy animal that was trespassing on this scene of human loss.
I disengaged from the girl’s cadaver—and that’s all it was now, just a plain old regular garden-variety corpse—and stood up, my fists vibrating with barely contained mayhem. I wanted to hurt this threadbare excuse for a deer, its antlers cracked and collapsing, its fur a mat of mud and grime and abrasions. I stepped toward it and it shook its head back and forth, its right antler threatening to drop off with each motion.
“I hate you miserable bastards,” I hissed. “I’ve always hated the deer on this godforsaken island, but now you, you really put it in italics. Can’t you see this is a private moment? I know it’s beyond your feeble peanut brain to show any goddamn respect, but so help me if you don’t get the hell away from here I’ll bash your skull in!”
It stood there, steaming away in the sleet.
So I took a swing at it. Not the brightest thing I’ve ever done, but I was a tad overwrought, shall we say? Open handed I made to slap it right across the muzzle and it bit me. And then it hit me why these deer looked so spectacularly putrid: they were dead. Undead. Whatever. They were animated corpses. Humans aren’t the only ones circling the drain. It’s all life. All of it.
So now I’m looking at the fresh white gauze wrapped around my right hand, a ring of small red dots seeping through. Not a lot of blood; in fact quite little. But enough to have me concerned.
And back on that road lies the undead girl of my dreams. I didn’t bury her.
I guess I’m infected.
The Wrong Grave
By Kelly Link
Kelly Link is a short fiction specialist whose stories have been collected in three volumes: Stranger Things Happen, Magic for Beginners, and Pretty Monsters. Her stories have appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Realms of Fantasy, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Conjunctions, and in anthologies such as The Dark, The Faery Reel, and Best American Short Stories. With her husband, Gavin J. Grant, Link runs Small Beer Press and edits the ’zine Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. Her fiction has earned her an NEA Literature Fellowship and won a variety of awards, including the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, Stoker, Tiptree, and Locus awards.