Sometimes I think about leaving. I hear Portsmouth is mostly clean. I could make that on my bicycle. Maybe I could even hotwire a car. I’ve seen them do it on television. The first time I stayed, I stayed for my father. But he doesn’t come home much anymore. There’s little enough left for him to scavenge for the church. He keeps up his kneeling and praying down there, except when the moon is dark, and then they mourn like lost children. Now, I think I stay because I want to see the finished cathedral, I want to understand what they are doing when they eat one of their own. If it’s like communion, the way I understand it, or something else entirely. I want to see the world they’re building out here in the abandoned capital. If maybe they’re not sick, but just new, like babies, incomprehensible and violent and frustrated that nothing is as they expected it to be.
It’s afternoon in the Java Shack. The sun is thin and wintry. I pour myself hot water and it occurs to me that apocalypse originally meant to uncover something. To reveal a hidden thing. I get that now. It was never about fire and lightning shearing off the palaces of the world. And if I wait, here on the black shores of the Kennebec, here in the city that has been ruined for as long as it has lived, maybe, someday soon, the face of their god will come up out of the depths, uncovered, revealed.
So on. So forth.
Zero Tolerance
By Jonathan Maberry
Jonathan Maberry is the bestselling author of several novels, including Ghost Road Blues (winner of the Bram Stoker Award), Dead Man’s Song, Bad Moon Rising, and The Wolfman. Rot & Ruin, the first book in a new young-adult zombie series, was just published; a second volume, Dust & Decay, will appear in 2011. Maberry’s other recent novels Patient Zero and The Dragon Factory, along with the forthcoming The King of Plagues, are set in the same milieu as our next story and are in development for television. Other work includes the non-fiction books THEY BITE!, Stoker Award-finalist Zombie CSU, Wanted Undead or Alive, Vampire Universe, and The Cryptopedia.
September 11, 2001 changed the world, and also changed science fiction, fantasy, and horror. Civilization collapsing had always been a topic of perennial interest in the field, of course, but after 9/11 magazines were positively deluged with this sort of material. And of course zombies, the ultimate symbol of societal breakdown, went from being a niche interest to one of the dominant images in the popular imagination, familiar to everyone. Before 9/11, characters in a zombie story might speculate about the cause of the epidemic without ever mentioning the word “terrorism.” Afterward, of course, that’s tended to be the first word on every character’s lips.
America’s War on Terror has had many casualties, chief among them the nation’s view of itself. Images of U.S. soldiers torturing naked, helpless (and in many cases innocent) prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq haunt the American psyche, and are all the more disturbing given the lingering sense that those truly responsible have never been punished. (In her memoir One Woman’s Army, Janis Karpinski maintains that she was scapegoated due to sexism and that the soldiers sent to prison for the crimes were acting according to policies issued by the White House.)
Nietzsche famously warned: “He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster.” Our next story is a military thriller about zombies, terrorism, war, and some very grim and unsavory interrogation techniques. It’s a powerful story and, much as we might wish otherwise, a tale of our time.
-1-
Battalion Aide Station
Near Helmand River Valley, Afghanistan
One Hour Ago
“I never thought that anyone that beautiful could scare the shit out of me.” The Marine sergeant sounded like he had a throatful of broken glass.
“Tell me about her, Sergeant,” I said.
He looked away so quickly that I knew he’d been waiting for that question. He tried to keep a poker face, but he was a couple tics off his game. Sleep deprivation, pain and the certain knowledge that his ass was in a sling can do that to you. Even to a tough son of a bitch like Sergeant Harper. As he turned I saw the way guilt and shame twisted his mouth; but his eyes had a different expression. One I couldn’t quite nail down.
“Tell you what? That I can’t bear to close my eyes ’cause when I do I see her? That I’ve had the shivering shits ever since we found her out there in the sand? I don’t mind admitting it,” said the sergeant. He started to say more, then closed his mouth and shook his head.
Harper’s uninjured hand was freckled with powder burns and skin was missing from two knuckles. He ran his trembling fingers through his sandy hair as he spoke. He did it two or three times each minute. His other hand lay in his lap, the hand cocooned inside gauze wrappings.
I waited. I had more time than he did.
After a full minute, though, I said, “Where did she come from?”
Harper sighed. “She was a refugee. We found her staggering in the foothills.”
“A refugee from what?”
“From the big meltdown out in the desert.”
“In the Helmand River Valley?”