Jamie Lackey’s short fiction has appeared in Atomjack Magazine, Bards and Sages Quarterly, Drabblecast, and in the anthology It Was a Dark and Stormy Halloween. She is also a slush reader for Clarkesworld Magazine and an assistant editor for the Triangulation annual anthology series. She hails from Pittsburgh, where George Romero filmed Night of the Living Dead.
For most of history, human beings have been throwing up walls. Walls seem to offer protection from a hostile world, and give us a sense of control, of keeping people where we think they ought to be. But walls definitely have a spotty history when it comes to their actual usefulness. The magnificent Great Wall of China never really did keep the barbarians out, nor did the walls of the Roman Emperor Hadrian. The Berlin Wall ultimately failed to keep Germany divided, and the strenuous efforts by the Israelis to put up walls between them and the Palestinians haven’t really proven effective.
Can we have much confidence that walls would do any better against zombies? And of course with any wall there’s the question not just of what are you keeping out, but also what are you holding in. Our next story is about fences, about boundaries, and being on the wrong side of them, and, of course, about zombies. The author says, “This story is about high school students almost twenty years after a zombie apocalypse. And unrequited love. I started thinking how the world would be different if there were zombies, but they’d been driven back decades ago. The zombies might still be a threat, biding their time, waiting to strike again, or they could have all rotted away without anyone noticing. The emotions in the story are what make it personal to me—the need to fit in, the fear, and in the end, the sorrow and regret.”
No one has seen a zombie in my lifetime. The twelve-foot-high electrified chain-link fence that protects us from the dead land passes behind my house, and I used to stare into the woods for hours on end, looking for zombies. I saw a raccoon once, peeking out through a broken window in a half-burned townhouse. It might have been undead. But it might not have been.
There used to be regular armed patrols on the dirt road inside the fence, back when I was little, but eventually the manpower was diverted to other projects. Federal troops still come around once a year in a tanker truck and burn back the vegetation in the buffer zone with napalm.
We have about fifty feet of scorched earth so that if they do come out of the woods, we can see them before they get to the fence. It keeps them from using trees to climb out, too. But like I said, no one has seen a zombie for well over a decade. Some of the kids in my school want to take the fence down and see what’s beyond it, see if there are any people up in Canada anymore. But anybody who was alive during the apocalypse is set against ever taking the fence down. Just in case, they always say. Just in case. Let them keep the dead land.
There was a group of guys in my high school who wanted the fence down. They were idiots, but they were cool, and I wanted desperately for them to like me. They threw Katie over the fence because they could, and because they wanted to prove that the zombies were gone.
Katie and I were best friends. Best friends outside of school, anyway. She’d always been kind of a dork, and she didn’t even drink or party anymore, not since the previous Fourth of July. Something had happened while I was away at a family picnic, and no one would tell me about it. Anyway, Katie wasn’t someone to hang out with in public, since I wanted to be cool.
I was an asshole to her. But she put up with it. I didn’t figure out why till too late. She had thick glasses and curly hair and average everything else. But none of this would have happened if she hadn’t been so smart.
But she was brilliant and didn’t bother to hide it from anyone, so they picked her to hurl over the fence. They were jerks, but they weren’t murderers, so I didn’t think they’d do it till her body actually hit the ground on the other side.
They used the volunteer fire truck. They put up that ladder meant to save people and stranded kittens and tossed my best friend into the dead land. She landed in the fresh ashes, and for a second everyone was silent.
Then I started screaming at them, which pretty much killed my hopes of high school popularity. They laughed and opened some beers and settled in to see if the zombies would show up. I cried and screamed for them to get her out until they punched me, then I got my cell phone and called the police.
They left in a hurry after that.