Of course, I’ve always carried salt, but not for reasons that would make anyone feel safe, and that’s fine, too.
The first shriek shreds the air at 7 a.m., and I’m ready. I was a gravedigger, back before Judgment Day put me out of a job—no use digging holes if the deceased aren’t going to stay in them—and these days people say I just have a natural way with the dead. Privately, I don’t think much of their appetite for living flesh, but I don’t judge.
Some people fear the dead, no matter what, and back then I didn’t understand. Now I do. The dead know too many secrets, and some folks have reason to worry.
Like Adam Wade saying his crazy wife ran off to New York, only to have her shamble on home with her head stove in. Or the preacher’s pure-as-new-snow daughter dying of pneumonia, then wandering into church yesterday with the remains of a dead baby caged in her ribs.
But everyone has secrets. I suppose how bad they are is just a matter of opinion.
Then again, concern for opinion has always kept me closemouthed about my own.
My seven o’clock job is a zombie on Main Street, who probably wouldn’t even have noticed Miretta Jackson if she hadn’t started screaming at it. Then again, it’s Henry Jackson, Miretta’s late husband. She screamed at him non-stop when he was alive, and old habits die hard.
I shoot him down, spare the gasoline, and drop a match on the chance that—yup, you can always tell who’s been embalmed; they go up like marshmallows.
I watch the fire from the coffeehouse as I eat pancakes and ketchup. The waitress, Gina, says, “Billy Martin, I swear you have no taste,” just like always. Then, like always, she glances at my shotgun and moves off.
It’s coming on fall now, and the dead slow down in cool weather. They’re no good at all in winter. I’ll have to start curing meat to put by while the hunting’s still good. Gina has no idea, saying I have no taste. After all, isn’t my salt mixed with parsley and thyme?
Life is easier these days. I don’t have to dig the dead up anymore, or worry about getting caught; and no one wants to watch me roast zombies, especially when one might be their own dearly departed. Still, I’m discreet. Only the dead know my secret, and I doubt they’ll judge.
People say I just have a natural way with the dead, and I think that might be true.
That, and the secret really is all in the salt.
Tameshigiri
By Steven Gould
A Hugo and Nebula Award finalist, Steven Gould is the author of the novel Jumper, the basis for the recent film of the same name. Other novels include Reflex, Blind Waves, Helm, Greenwar, and Wildside. A new novel, 7th Sigma, is scheduled for May 2011. Gould is currently working on another entry in the Jumper series. His short fiction has appeared in Analog, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Amazing Stories, The Year’s Best Science Fiction, and Tor.com. When not writing, Gould spends entirely too much time killing zombies on his Xbox 360.
Ninjas were spies, saboteurs, and assassins in ancient Japan. In Japan the equivalent term “shinobi” is more common, but Westerners prefer the sound of “ninja.” Ninja was an officially recognized job, and only those of a certain income were allowed to keep ninjas on the payroll. Ninjas commonly wielded swords (katanas), throwing stars (shuriken), and chain and sickle weapons called a kusarigama. While popular imagination pictures ninjas clad in black, in real life ninjas probably tried to blend into the local population by dressing as priests, entertainers, and merchants. Much of Japanese architecture was originally developed as a defense against ninjas, including the use of gravel courtyards and nightingale floors that made it difficult for intruders to move about silently.
Gould says that this story is all my fault: “I made the mistake of saying on Twitter something like ‘Ninjas awesome. Zombies awesome. Ninjas and Zombies? Double awesome!’ John Joseph Adams saw it and asked if I was writing such a thing. I wasn’t, but I said that I could.”
A student of Iaido—the Japanese sword as a martial art—for over twelve years, Gould didn’t need to do much research for the story, but he says he did stand out in the middle of his backyard with a bokken (wooden sword) for a while, working on some of the moves depicted in the story.
Why zombies? “The scary thing about zombies, slow or fast, is that there will always be more,” Gould says. “It doesn’t matter how many you kill, eventually more will arrive. Zombies are a palpable, biting representation of our own mortality. And mortality stinks. And it has rotting flesh.”