I like zombie stories. I like subversive zombie stories. Zombie stories are already subversive—they deal with what happens when social mores get broken. But they’re also about dehumanizing the people who disagree with you. I like zombie stories that tell you about what happens when social mores get broken, and when the zombies are disturbingly human. You should side with the humans, right? Right?
As I hid under the bridge, I noticed there was a sliver under my skin that had come from the coffin of the last grave I dug up for Dr. Skalos. Dr. Skalos is the kind of doctor that you hope you never have to consult, but somehow you always do. And then you have placed yourself in his power.
I had had to consult him on the matter of my brother, who had not yet died, even though he was dead. I had tried everything from bathing him in milk and attar of roses to hitting him on the head with a shovel, and still he moved and hungered, even after the sickness stopped his breathing.
I had finally tied him up and stuffed his mouth with rags to keep him from moaning, and brought him in a cart to Dr. Skalos’s back door.
Dr. Skalos took him inside, chanted and waved burning feathers over him, and laid in him stone-dead in a coffin within the hour. I assumed guardianship of the two brats that my brother had not yet consumed and the debt of having him put, finally, to rest.
And so I dug up corpses when Dr. Skalos requested it. Oh, he paid me, just as I had had to pay him to lay my brother down, but there were debts other than money that neither of us had yet deemed paid.
I pulled the sliver out of my thumb with the tip of my knife, and a yellow ball of pus welled up. The last thing I wanted was for it to get infected and have to be cured; for then I would be even deeper in Dr. Skalos’s debt. Finally, the guards passed over the bridge under which I waited, and I was able to drag the cart with the body and the sacks of potatoes up from the cobbled sewer ditch, across the street, and into Dr. Skalos’s shed.
The sound of the ocean echoed up the cliffs, and I wondered what it would be like to be able to leave this island, to leave my brother’s brats and my other obligations behind. However, it is impossible to live without incurring obligations; this is one of the necessities of life. Unless we owe other people something, we will never be bound to them, that is, we will be alone. Alone, we are monsters.
I left the cart in the shed and locked it, then went around the side of the house to the kitchen door, the back door, the door of secrets, to collect my pay for the night. Two growing boys ate more than I could provide but for the work I did for the doctor. Another debt.
I saw a movement through a window and stopped to look. Dr. Skalos was holding a ledger while a dark shape walked back and forth, carrying boxes. Glass rattled.
“Gently!” Dr. Skalos said, and the other man moaned. It was a hoarse, wet sound, the sound of pneumonia or some other infection of the lungs.
Through a trick of the light and a breeze against the lace curtain, I saw a glimpse of the man inside Dr. Skalos’s house. It was my brother.
He had died and died and died again, and yet he lived. Nailing him in the pine box was a part of a magician’s show in order for Dr. Skalos to have another assistant, that was all.
As I saw my brother, he saw me. His jaw opened. His tongue had been cut; because he was dead, the end of it was a flat piece of muscle, almost like the end of a piece of tongue that one might boil up for supper. Some of his teeth were missing, the others clearly loosening in their sockets, tilting askew.
I held my finger to my lips. My brother moaned and pointed toward me, and Dr. Skalos looked up.
“You,” he said.
“Our debt is over,” I said.
“You brought the corpse I requested?” he said.
“In the shed.”
He nodded and went back to his ledger.
“I mean it,” I said. “I have finished with you.”
Dr. Skalos sneered without bothering to look up. “How will you feed those boys, one wonders?”
Meanwhile, my brother had begun moving boxes again, moving them away from the window and back toward the door. For one moment, he looked at me, and the moonlight glinted off the flatness of his eye, like a fish eye, pearlescent.
I said, “I want to be paid before I go.”
“You’ll be paid when I feel like paying you.”
“And if I take the debt to the judge? What then?”
“You’ll be arrested.”
“Perhaps the judge will take the boys in,” I said. “They are good boys. But I will be bound to you no longer, slaver of dead men.”
Dr. Skalos gritted his teeth, then reached into his pocket and threw a flashing coin at me. It missed the window and bounced to the floor, singing. Dr. Skalos cursed, walked over to the coin, and bent over to pick it up. He pushed his hand out of the window to give the coin—it was gold, all he must have had on him at the moment; anything to get rid of me—and I grabbed him by the wrist and pulled him closer to me.
“Let go!” he said.
“You have turned your back on a dead man for the last time.” I tightened my grip on his arm, leaning backward from the wall of the house.
There was a moan, and my brother pulled Dr. Skalos from the other side. Dr. Skalos dropped the coin and screamed, then disappeared backward. I stumbled and fell, the arm falling out of my grasp and landing on the cobbles beside me. The lace curtain fell softly, as if it had all the time in the world.
The scream had stopped.
The lace curtain jerked and turned black, half-sliding off its rod. My brother reached out his hand, and I gave him Dr. Skalos’s arm. He opened his mouth, moaned, and returned to the room. I heard the rattle of glass and the ripping of cloth. I picked up the gold coin.
Except for my brother’s sons, I was free.
In the morning I will sell everything I own, and I will take the boys to the mainland. Or perhaps we will stay on the sea, and fish. I shall take his sons with me almost without resentment…but not without regret.
***