God willing, he’d have the strength to hoist Marta through the hole and onto the roof, and then he’d do his best to cover her with his poncho to keep her dry and hide her from the dead things that surrounded them. But they’d still be stranded. And Marta would still be without her morphine.
Below, Marta cried out in agony. Desperation shot through him. What else could he do?
He scrambled around the roof, looking for a safe way off, but the water was everywhere, rushing past in black, white-capped fury. He scanned the surface for debris, for a bobbing chunk big enough to use as a raft, but again there was only black water. Black water and the thrashing, floating bodies of the animated dead.
Marta cried out again, voice tinged with such pain, such agony, that Remy moaned in frustration and blind emptiness as rage blossomed along with his fear. He beat the chimney until his knuckles were bloody, crying out himself, his own anguish mingling with Marta’s cries and the moans rising up from the dark water around him.
And then he felt a sudden calm come over him. There was another way out of this. Another way. For a moment he felt a flicker of doubt, but another cry from Marta decided the issue.
The animated dead moved with ease and felt no pain. That much had been clear from the thing in his living room. As unbelievable as it seemed, he could not doubt what he had witnessed or question the opportunity that had been placed before him.
He wondered about Marta’s voice as he lowered himself back through the hole in the roof and onto the dresser. Would it return when her pain disappeared? He listened to the moans coming through the wall as clear as a back-up chorus. Maybe the dead could do more than moan. Was that so hard to believe in the face of all this? Maybe the dead outside chose to moan their woe, chose to moan in eulogy for the living who no longer grieved for them.
But such would not be the case with Marta and him. They would choose to do otherwise. They had each other. They’d always have each other.
Remy clambered down from the dresser, rushed to Marta’s side, and leaned over to kiss her forehead. She opened her pain-stricken eyes.
“Do you trust me?” he whispered.
She blinked her eyes once slowly in reply. Always.
Nodding, he turned and opened the bedroom door.
The floodwater rushed in to soak the tops of his galoshes, then chilled his calves, then his knees. The cold water kept rising as he sloshed back to the bed, sat by Marta’s side, and stroked her forehead.
It had to be something in the water that brought the dead back. It had to be.
“Close your eyes, hon,” he said.
But she didn’t close her eyes. He knew she could sense his doubt. His fear. In fifty years, he could never keep a secret from her.
She might have known what was about to happen, too, because she reached out, gently pulled his face to hers, pressed her lips to his ear. And began to sing. For the first time in so, so long.
Her raspy, pain-etched voice scraped only the bottom of the notes she used to reach, but it soothed his spirit just the same, long enough and completely enough until the floodwater delivered them into their new beginning.
Living With The Dead
By Molly Brown
British Science Fiction Award-winner Molly Brown is the author of the novels Invitation to a Funeral and Virus. Her short fiction has appeared many times in Interzone, and in the Mammoth Book anthologies: Jules Verne Adventures, New Comic Fantasy, and Future Cops. Other anthology appearances include Steampunk, Time Machines, Celebration, Villains! and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. Many of these stories have been gathered in her collection Bad Timing and Other Stories. In addition to writing prose fiction, Brown has written and appeared in a several short zombie films, and some of her stories have been optioned for film and/or television.
One of the challenges of assembling an anthology of zombie fiction is deciding exactly what constitutes a “zombie” story. The term originated in the Caribbean and originally referred to recently deceased individuals who had been brought back to life through magic to serve as slave workers. After the word zombie was used in connection with the marketing of George Romero’s 1978 film Dawn of the Dead, the term has mostly been associated with masses of mindless, hungry undead who kill and convert the living. In recent years, the film 28 Days Later and the video game Left 4 Dead have depicted zombies as belligerent infected who aren’t actually undead. However, they are otherwise so similar to Romero zombies that everyone calls them that, and they can really be classified no other way.