Bethany stood up. “I’m sorry I wrecked the car,” she said, although this wasn’t completely true. If she’d still been alive, she would have been sorry. But she was dead. She didn’t know how to be sorry anymore. And the longer she stayed, the more likely it seemed that her hair would do something truly terrible. Her hair was not good Buddhist hair. It did not love the living world or the things in the living world, and it did not love them in an utterly unenlightened way. There was nothing of light or enlightenment about Bethany’s hair. It knew nothing of hope, but it had desires and ambitions. It’s best not to speak of those ambitions. As for the tattoo, it wanted to be left alone. And to be allowed to eat people, just every once in a while.
When Bethany stood up, Mrs. Baldwin said suddenly, “I’ve been thinking I might give up substitute teaching.”
Bethany waited.
“I might go to Japan to teach English,” Mrs. Baldwin said. “Sell the house, just pack up and go. Is that okay with you? Do you mind?”
Bethany didn’t mind. She bent over and kissed her mother on her forehead. She left a smear of cherry ChapStick. When she had gone, Mrs. Baldwin got up and put on her bathrobe, the one with white cranes and frogs. She went downstairs and made coffee and sat at the kitchen table for a long time, staring at nothing. Her coffee got cold and she never even noticed.
The dead girl left town as the sun was coming up. I won’t tell you where she went. Maybe she joined the circus and took part in daring trapeze acts that put her hair to good use, kept it from getting bored and plotting the destruction of all that is good and pure and lovely. Maybe she shaved her head and went on a pilgrimage to some remote lamasery and came back as a superhero with a dark past and some kick-ass martial-arts moves. Maybe she sent her mother postcards from time to time. Maybe she wrote them as part of her circus act, using the tips of her hair, dipping them into an inkwell. These postcards, not to mention her calligraphic scrolls, are highly sought after by collectors nowadays. I have two.
Miles stopped writing poetry for several years. He never went back to get his bike. He stayed away from graveyards and also from girls with long hair. The last I heard, he had a job writing topical haikus for the Weather Channel. One of his best-known haikus is the one about tropical storm Suzy. It goes something like this:
A young girl passes
in a hurry. Hair uncombed.
Full of black devils.
The Human Race
By Scott Edelman
Scott Edelman is a five-time Bram Stoker Award finalist whose fiction has appeared in a variety of anthologies and magazines, such as The Dead That Walk, The Best of All Flesh, Crossroads, and Postscripts. When not writing, Edelman co-edits SCI FI Wire and in the past edited the fiction magazine Science Fiction Age.
In the intro to Edelman’s story in the first The Living Dead anthology, I said that he was something of a zombie genius, but it bears repeating. In the intervening period, the smart folks at PS Publishing reached the same conclusion and gathered together all of his zombie fiction into one volume called What Will Come After.
Though we all live on the same planet, in a sense we each inhabit a separate reality. After all, my reality consists, to a substantial degree, of the specific building I live in, the specific location I work at, the specific stores I shop at, and the places I hang out. Yet out of the six-billion-plus people alive right now, virtually all of them have never (or barely) set foot in any of those places, let alone all of them, and by the same token I will scarcely set foot in any of the places or meet any of the people that make up, as far as they’re concerned, the world. And while other people’s parents are just strangers or possibly acquaintances to us, our own parents occupy a massively defining place in our own personal reality. So when a parent dies, it can seem like the end of the world.
Author Scott Westerfeld recently took his personal experience with the loss of a parent and used it as inspiration to write his novel Leviathan, about a fantastical alternate history of World War I, in which a parent’s death—in this case, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand—actually does cause the world to come apart at the seams. Our next story is another in which the death of a parent coincides with the end of the world itself.
A zombie apocalypse seems to promise, in some sense, the end of death. For some people, that prospect might be very complicated and challenging indeed.
Paula Gaines felt herself quite ready to die.
Or perhaps it was instead that ever since the phone call that brought her to this distant place to look into her father’s dead eyes and have to tell a stranger, “Yes … that’s him,” she was no longer ready to live.