Category Archives: Issue 5: The Historical Undead
Issue 5: The Historical Undead: Alternate History Zombies
Parallel Zombie History, by Maria Kelly (Editorial Page)
The First Book of the Dead, by Kevin Hoffman (Short Story)
A Better World, by T. Fox Dunham (Short Story)
Zombie Gonzo, by Reed Beebe (Flash)
Lt. General John Bell Hood’s Last Day, by Michele Cacano (Drabble)
Revenants in Warfare, by Matt Mitrovich (Flash)
Let Them Eat…BRAINS! by Kenneth Shand (Flash)
ZombieMania, by Tom Ward (Drabble)
Yes, Wonderful Things, by Daniel Ritter (Short Story)
It Begins, by Larry Kollar (Microfic)
Shambler, by Jay Wilburn (Flash)
The Grassy Knoll, by William Wood (Drabble)
The Clothed Heart, by Chris Castle (Short Story)
The Grave, by Audiowriter (Drabble)
Ruthless Mercy, by Kara Kreswell (Short Story)
Expedition Through The Great Sandy Desert, by Bayard Tarpley (Microfic)
Forty, by Maria Kelly (Short Story)
Zombie Mnemonic, by Reed Beebe (Poem)
The Deadlist, by Melanie Browne (Flash)
Nazi Doomsday, by Tim Tobin (Short Story)
Pilgrim’s Plague, by Michele Cacano (Microfic)
Parallel Zombie History (Editorial)
Happy Halloween.
Beware of zombies. At all times.
The undead are with us.
They have clawed their way across the face of human history since the ancient times, and have left their mark upon the eons.
We have here for your perusal, twenty-two accounts of how the undead have gnawed across the pages of history from Ancient Egypt to Marquis DeSade. From the the Book of the Undead to the Necronomicon. Famous events, like the Beatles on tour, the Lizzie Borden case, and JFK in Dallas; to more recent events have been visited by our alternate zombie history authors.
There’s something here for all fans of zombie fiction. Past, present, and even some future history collide with the flesh and brain consuming undead hordes.
Enjoy!
And Happy Halloween from The Were-Traveler.
“Lizzie Borden took an axe
And gave her father forty whacks…”
The First Book of the Dead, by Kevin Hoffman
Alexandria, Egypt
48 B.C.
“Magister Titus, we may have a small problem,” said the little man in the simple gray robe and sandals. He carried a pile of books under one arm. Titus appreciated books as much as the next soldier, but to the people in this library, knowledge and science were more religion than anything else.
“Caesar is on his ship in the harbor and intends to tour the Mouseion this day. The Philologoi assured me there would be no problems,” Titus said, struggling to maintain his patience. He had dropped less sweat in preparation for month-long campaigns than he had getting this library prepared for Caesar’s visit.
He clenched the hilt of his Gladius, a Pompeii-style one made by a friend back home, a home he might not see again for years. He had learned to squeeze his sword hilt to suppress the urge to punch irritating little busybodies and administrators.
The little man looked scared, opening his mouth to speak twice and both times deciding against it.
“Out with it, I don’t have all day. If this is a security matter you will tell me now,” Titus demanded, longing for the days when he didn’t have to deal with people like this and instead spent his time on the battlefield.
“Well, some of the Philologoi found a previously untranslated copy of the Book of the Dead in the archives,” the little man’s fear disappeared and a light filled his eyes and face as he talked about his deity, knowledge. “This was an original and we think the spells were actually written in blood of some kind. The binding was magnificent.”
“Skip to the part where this is relevant to me,” Titus said through gritted teeth, his knuckles white as he squeezed his hilt.
“Oh, yes, of course, sorry,” he stammered, “they started translating it. One of them read it aloud while the others transcribed it in different languages. That’s when it started.”
“What? Out with it you annoying little bookworm. I have things of real import to deal with,” Titus snarled.
“Bodies from the nearby mausoleum, they,” the little man paused again and Titus lost his patience.
He grabbed him by the shoulders and lifted him so he could look him in the eye, “They what?”
“They came alive and broke through crypt walls and made their way here, into the library,” the man sputtered. Titus heard water dripping, looked down and saw that the little bookworm had pissed himself.
“Dead bodies came alive and broke through the clay walls?” Titus said, dropping the man, who crumpled into a heap on the floor, sobbing and clutching his books like a child’s safety blanket.
Titus turned down the corridor toward the common room, the area with all of the viewing tables with massive shelf-lined hallways spreading out from the center like spokes on a wheel.
“Don’t go down there, they’re in that room,” sobbed the librarian.
Titus ignored the whimpering man, drew his Gladius and continued down the hallway until he stepped out of the dim torchlight and into the brightly lit common room. What he saw there was worse than the carnage of any battlefield he had ever survived, and he had been through some terrible ones.
Hunched on all fours like rabid animals on the tabletops, terrible semi-human creatures with decaying flesh, exposed bone and torn burial robes feasted on the fresh corpses of librarians and scholars alike, thick pools of blood gathering beneath the tables and all over the ornate marble floor.
“By the gods,” Titus gasped in shock, almost losing the grip on his sword.
“The gods had nothing to do with this abomination, unless this was Pluto’s doing,” came a voice from the hallway behind him. Titus turned to see his second in command, Agrippo, and five of his best legionnaires, each sharing the same shocked look.
“Those things, they’re eating the Philologoi,” Titus said.
“Over there, look,” Agrippo said, pointing. One of the formerly dead library members was struggling to stand up amid a slippery pool of his own blood. His neck and arms had been chewed to the bone and there was a fist-sized hole in his gut.
“They are rising from the dead,” Titus whispered as a few of the creatures looked up from their fresh kills, inspecting the new arrivals as though they were nothing more than prey.
“Can they be killed…again?” asked one of the legionnaires.
“Only one way to find out,” Titus said and charged into the common room.
He only partially heard the other men charge into the room behind him. Titus reached the first table, a long finely carved piece that, underneath all the blood and torn flesh, contained a dozen rare maps.
The creature looked up from his kill and snarled, a blackish ooze dripping from between gaps in his bottom teeth, only some of the undead thing’s original flesh remaining.
It was no wonder the little bookworm had lost control of his bladder.
Titus bit back his first instinct, to run as fast as he could and get out of this terrible place, and swung his sword. It cut clean through the thing’s neck, sending the head bouncing across the marble floor, its body flopping around like a headless chicken until finally dropping.
Encouraged by how easy the first creature went down, Titus leapt the table and ran for the next one. Two rotting corpse-things feasting on scholarly flesh looked up just in time to see Titus ram his blade through both of their chests, skewering them like a kebab.
When he pulled the blade free and started for the next table, he stopped. The creatures behind him hadn’t dropped to the floor. He turned just as they reached out for him, grabbing his neck.
Titus grabbed one arm, ripping it clean out of its owner’s shoulder. Using that same arm, he slammed it over and over into the creatures’ heads until they relented and let go of his throat.
Once free, he chopped their heads off.
“Sever their heads,” he shouted, “anything less isn’t good enough.”
“Don’t let them bite you,” shouted Agrippo from across the room, fending off a pair of creatures with his sword and a massive kite shield.
Titus, Agrippo, and the other soldiers waded into the carnage from one end of the common room to the other, slashing their way through the undead, cutting off the heads of their victims to make sure they would stay dead.
Resting his hands on his knees, Titus took a deep breath and surveyed the carnage, making sure that nothing moved.
“Bring me the bookworm,” Titus said, leaning against a bloodstained shelf.
A moment later, the little librarian was escorted into the room in the arms of two soldiers. They dropped him on his knees, still weeping, in the center of the room on one of the few remaining spots of clean floor.
“What sort of black magic calls the dead back and turns them into… into, whatever these things were?” Titus asked, still not sure he could believe what he had just survived. Up until that moment, he had little use for superstition, tales of dark magic, or religion at all for that matter.
Now he wasn’t sure what to believe about any of it.
“It must have been one of the spells from the Book of the Dead.”
“Is there a spell to undo this? Are there more of these things coming?”
The librarian shrugged. He had no idea, and the people who read the original spell were likely among the headless victims nearby.
“Can you read the book?”
He nodded.
“All right then, you will come with us to the book and you will fix this.”
Titus signaled for his men to follow, two of them taking up the rear with the librarian. They had only gotten to the far end of the room when they heard it.
At first it sounded like a stampede of horses, echoing in the small space of the hallways connected to the common room, but the noise grew louder and higher pitched until the beating hooves sounded like feet stomping.
A high-pitched wail sounded their arrival.
Like ants streaming from their hills, the undead poured out of the hallways and into the room.
Titus and the others backed up toward the way they came as the undead slowed, again eyeing them more like a meal than a foe.
“Agrippo, run to Caesar’s ship and have him set the docks ablaze. No matter what else you do, this place must be razed. Destroy the library entrance.”
“What about you, sir?”
“If we get out in time, we get out. If not, these dark things must not be allowed to leave the library.”
“Sir, I won’t leave you here.”
“Agrippo if you don’t get out of here now and we lose this fight, nothing will be able to stop them once they get outside. They will wash over Cleopatra’s empire like a plague. Now run!”
Titus took Agrippo’s shield and watched him run down the hallway. He had to buy him enough time to get to Caesar’s ship to start the attack on the library.
Gods willing, he would live long enough.
Backing into the hallway with the little librarian in tow, Titus took up the first position, his shield nearly covering the entire opening.
The creatures had waited long enough. Like a pack of hungry wolves, they howled then charged Titus’ group, their bent and broken limbs barely slowing them down, some even dropping to all fours and loping forward on stumps.
“Stand fast!” Titus shouted, dropping to one knee to give his men room to attack over him in the narrow hallway.
The surge of dead hit them full force, the creatures mindlessly bouncing off of Titus’ shield, hurling their bodies at the soldiers. As each got close enough to a blade, their head came off clean.
But there were just too many of them.
Slowly, they retreated further and further back into the hallway as the horde pressed in on them. The pile of corpses was so high it was hard to tell the difference between the bodies they had killed and the ones they hadn’t.
The deafening echoes of the creatures’ shrieks and gurgling roars filled the hallway and the men with terror. Titus had spent his entire life fighting his nation’s enemies, but nothing had prepared him for this.
Before he could react, the creatures swarmed over his shield and swallowed it up within the floor-to-ceiling pile of squirming rot advancing toward them. Just as he managed to stand up to retreat, the pile overwhelmed him.
Dead flesh and bone surrounded him and pressed in on him from all directions. He gasped for air, sucking in only the smell of decay. The enemies’ teeth were just inches from his face, the only thing saving him that they were pressed so tightly into the tunnel they couldn’t move to strike.
Neither could he.
Claustrophobia took hold and Titus could feel his sanity slipping away. He couldn’t see any of his men. Standing there, smothered in crawling death, his sword pressed against his leg with no room to maneuver, Titus prepared himself for death.
Just before he closed his eyes to succumb to his fate, he pictured the beautiful city outside, pictured it being overrun by living corpses eating women and children alike and turning them into even more foul creatures.
He couldn’t let that happen.
Titus let out a primal roar, his muscles pushing as hard as they had ever pushed. Finally, just before he thought his arms might break, he heard bones crack and the sea of bodies gave way, freeing his arm.
Swinging in short, narrow arcs, Titus sliced through the pile and stepped back, letting the bodies spill further into the hallway.
“I can’t get a clean strike,” shouted one of the soldiers pressed up next to him.
“Thankfully neither can they,” Titus replied. “We need to open this up. Fall back!”
Titus and the others backpedalled down the hallway, making short slashes and stabs at the undead as they went. It felt more like swatting at gnats than a battle.
Once at the end of the hallway at an intersection, they spread out and waited for the enemy to stream out of the opening where Titus’ group could take full, measured swings at their necks.
Just as Titus thought they were regaining the advantage and pushing back the horde, a loud whistle accompanied by the deep sound of rushing wind came from beyond the hallway and the common room.
“What was that?” asked one of the soldiers.
Titus said nothing, still hacking and slashing at the attackers. A moment later a wave of heat blasted through the corridor and hit them head-on.
“Caesar started the attack, the library is burning!”
“Run for the exit!” Titus shouted, ushering his men out first and then charging after.
They ran as fast as they could, staying just ahead of the horde, dodging wall sconces and skidding around corners, charging through the insufferable maze of books and scrolls and experiment labs.
Titus risked a glance over his shoulder only to see a raging fireball consuming the horde from behind. In just moments it would be upon them too and they would all die a fiery death.
Finally, after a seemingly endless set of turns and corners, the library entrance appeared before them, the blue-gray afternoon light spilling onto the stone floor.
Titus pumped his legs and arms as fast as he could, dropping his sword to sprint even faster. Somehow the bookworm overtook him, the awkward little man able to run without the burden of boots or armor.
Fear could make people do amazing things.
As they grew closer to the entrance, Titus could see a group of soldiers at the ready, each leaning back, holding taught a rope tethered overhead.
Titus could feel the searing heat of the flames behind him, the roar of the fire swallowing the air as loud as the call of a dragon, stifling the piercing screams of the burning undead.
Just as he crossed the threshold, he leapt between two of the rope-bearing soldiers, crashing into a stack of barrels on the dock. The flames erupted out of the library’s mouth and the soldiers let go of the ropes, dropping an avalanche of boulders over the entrance.
Titus struggled to his feet and watched as the soldiers beheaded the few undead still moving among the rubble.
“Make sure you burn them all to ash,” he said.
As thankful as he was to still be alive and not some half-dead rotting corpse, Titus couldn’t help but feel a pang of sadness at the loss of his favorite sword.
Agrippo stepped out of the group of soldiers and saluted his commander, “And you thought Museion security would be boring.”
~~
Kevin Hoffman is a Fantasy and SF author who has been writing for as long as he can remember. He pays the bills while writing by creating software, and has managed to work writing into that career as well, writing and contributing to over 16 computer programming books. While a fantasy author, he loves a good zombie story and has one published in an anthology, Dead Worlds 5. He is currently working on an epic YA fantasy novel and can be found blogging at http://www.kshmusings.com, Tweeting at @kshmusings, and Reading on Goodreads at http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/96017.Kevin_Hoffman.
Lt. General John Bell Hood’s Last Day, by Michele Cacano
Lt. General Hood surveyed the battlefield, swallowing a lump.
“So many men…”
Try as he might, he’d been unable to overcome Sherman’s army.
While tallying the dead, Hood saw movement twenty yards away: a soldier, trying to sit up.
“Good God!” Hood yelled. “Medic! Soldier–”
Hood felt the blood rush from his head. He tried to make sense of the gaping hole in the man’s chest.
“Cannon fire,” Hood thought. “How in God’s name?”
Hood tripped, scrambling away from grasping hands.
“God in Heaven, deliver me!”
This prayer, too, went unanswered, as fallen soldiers closed in, devouring their defeated commander.
~~
Revenants in Warfare, by Matt Mitrovich
An excerpt from the Introduction of Revenants in Warfare by Jorge Roman, Professor of History at Bradford College, Haverhill, Massachusetts, Commonwealth of New England
They work in our factories. They repair our roads. They mow our lawns. They do the work we avoid. They were friends, neighbors, grandparents, parents, siblings and spouses.
They are the dead.
Our society depends on their ceaseless toil and they are a common part of life, but we have forgotten their violent birth. We ignore what is underneath our feet. Deep underground an army of cryogenically preserved nightmares silently awaits the last argument of kings.
I have always been fascinated by the revenants among us. Knowing there is an afterlife, even if it is not what the mythologists predicted, is something we accept, but fail to understand. While there are volumes of material behind the science of death, little has been written on its history. The darker aspects are rarely covered and realizing this I took it upon myself to shed some light on a past most would like to forget.
This book begins at the dawn of human civilization. The original spell of reanimation, anachronistically referred to as the “Ishtar Incantation”, was first written down in ancient Mesopotamia. The myth of the original copies being made with human skin has been dispelled by modern historians by pointing out more readily available, and cheaper, materials.
For millennia the secrets of reanimation remained isolated in the dark corners of humanity. Occasionally some inept conjuror would perform the incantation without the proper precautions and unleash a minor outbreak. Some Norse gothi experimented with the incantation creating a draugr, a creature with increased strength, intelligence and could turn humans into them through bites.
Humanity realized the true nature of death when Toussaint Louverture, the first Lich King of Haiti, performed a revised version of the incantation. In 1802, with an army from Napoleon Bonaparte coming to restore French authority in Haiti, the then governor-for-life allied himself with a rogue houngan who experimented with the incantation in an unprecedented manner. With his help Louverture created an army of the dead which drove the French into the sea.
Europe reeled from this onslaught of “black magic”. Copies of the Ishtar Incantation found their way into the hands of those resisting European domination. Emperor Simon I of Gran Colombia used his hordes of undead to drive the Spanish out of the Americas. Lakota medicine men prevented further American expansion into the west with their “ghost dance”. The slave revolts which destroyed southern American society would not have been successful without the angry dead who carried out their master’s revenge for centuries of bondage.
Thanatology spread across the world. Governments fell, scapegoats were persecuted (Jews and witches mostly) and the mythologists preached a coming apocalypse. Nevertheless, even at the height of the Age of Terror, the brightest minds of 19th century Europe labored to discover the secret of the Ishtar Incantation.
These early thanatologist believed “magic” did not exist and a rational explanation could be found for “revenants”, the animated corpse from British folklore. They refused to use the popular name for the creatures, zonbi, since those who had torn their great empires asunder used the name. Not held to the rules and traditions of the mystics and mages, they pushed human understanding of death to its limits. Byproducts of their research helped advance our understanding of medicine and create life-extending procedures, but their true goal was to discover a scientific substitute to replace the incantation. Research into the draugr myth birthed a new type of revenant.
These “artificial” revenants were more violent than their more docile cousins. Once they solved the issues of control, a new generation of solider entered the battlefield, modified to make them better suited for battle against the shambling, decayed zonbis. Bayonet fingers ripped through flesh, hammer arms pulverized bones and walking cannons tore down walls of the rebels and usurpers. The short-lived golden age of magic came crashing down as the native empires crumbled underneath the boot heels of steel plated revenants. With the coronation of King Victor I of Britain in 1839, the Gothic Age had begun.
Nations continued to push revenant warfare to new heights in the late 19th century. Steel struts replaced fragile human bones to create frames to support larger guns. Sensor packages featuring wireless communications and miniature cameras replaced eyes. A thanatologist’s imagination was limited only by the raw material available.
Even with strict criminal codes, the supply of condemned criminals could not adequately feed demand. Previously dead were too decayed to be useful, except for suicidal drones packed with explosives. At the height of the Gothic Age, nations passed the “Final Breath” laws, giving the government ownership of the recently deceased. Although unpopular when introduced, even with exceptions for mythologists or those wealthy enough to afford the tax, any riot could easily be quelled with a battalion of war revenants.
As a new century dawned, a radical movement challenged the ruling aristocrats. Known as “cosmicism” and founded by Howard Lovecraft, it holds that humans are insignificant creatures in the greater scheme of the universe. Though denying the existence of a divine being, cosmicists believed unimaginably powerful forces existed, neither benign nor malevolent, and could wipe humanity out without remorse. Cosmicists felt the old morality of good vs. evil prevented individuals back from their full potential. Cosmicism found favor among the poor who lost work to surplus revenants who could work longer hours without pay, food and rest.
The Gothic Age ended in 1936 with the Great War. Popular unrest led to cosmicist governments coming to power in the United States and Prussia. The old order, fearful the blight of cosmicism would spread to their people, went to war to stop the spread of cosmicism. The Philadelphia-Berlin Axis, however, had prepared for the coming conflict with new, unforeseen weapons.
Rejecting the earlier divorce from magic, thanatologists in both nations combined the old mysticism with modern science. In the dark New England woods, scientists developed a new breed of revenant known as “corpse gods”. Newly dead bodies became as malleable as clay and shaped into giant forms and armed with claws, tentacles, wings and talons. In the ancient abodes belonging to the junker ruling elite, the Prussians developed an even more hideous weapon. They discovered how to take the energy needed to raise a revenant and store it for later use. Manufactured deities trampled armies of war revenants, while the most ancient cities of Europe disappeared in a blinding flash of light.
Though the Grand Alliance emerged victorious, the devastation wrought by these new weapons of mass destruction scarred the globe and humanity’s conscience. Meanwhile, some cosmisicists survived and remained a threat to civilization. The Sibiu Accords of 1946 halted thanatological research and weapons and required nations across the world to liquidate their armies. Empires crumbled without the war revenants necessary to keep the native population in check. The global community created sovereign havens for the decimated cultures harvested by the cosmicists to feed their creations.
The Technocratic Revolution of the 1960s ensured a well-ordered society led by those with the knowledge, expertise and skills to govern humanity. They rose to their rank based on merit and not by birth or ideology. Thanatologists diverted their attention to civilian uses of revenants, ranging from household servant and industrial workers, to deep sea miners and outer space probes. The United Technates, however, remained on the lookout for the hidden cosmicists.
To aid them in this quest, a new strain of revenant came into being known as “hounds”. The most intelligent and life-like revenant ever created, they would relentlessly hunt their target across the world and would not stop until it neutralized their target. Sadly these fearsome predators could not stop one cosmicist from uttering the Ishtar Incantation in 1968 near Pittsburg. Failure to contain the outbreak led to the collapse of the United States in 1978 and forced the United Technates to order the use of war revenants to contain the threat.
Even with the threat of zonbi outbreaks, most humans live in a near state of utopia. A peaceful army of revenants is tasked with making our lives as easy as possible, giving us the chance to pursue more noble quests. Yet we all must surrender to the inevitable. Rich or poor, strong or weak, genius or dunce, we all will serve in the pale legions. Meanwhile, snug securely in their vaults, the ultimate back-up plan waits if things fall apart. These beings are the parents of modern society and their contributions should not be forgotten.
~~
Let Them Eat…BRAINS! by Kenneth Shand
Bernard Réné de Launay peered out of the comté tower of Bastille prison at the hordes below, writhing and seeming to multiply like maggots. They formed a ghastly syrup of limbs and flesh, viscous and vicious, pouring towards the prison as though it were some fancy sponge pudding soaking up custard. Occasionally a lone creature would break away from the crowd, arms flailing as his stumble became a lopsided run. Inevitably he would either fall or be pushed into the moat, only to reappear soaked but alive, staggering as shots from the invalides blew off his arms and legs or tore chunks from his body. Only when the head was blown off, de Launay noted, did the creature finally give in to death.
The pervert, de Sade, had warned him this would happen.
“I must thank you, Bernard,” he’d said to him, “for releasing me into madness. Charenton will keep me safe, a high priest among holy fools. A dark tide is coming, you see, to sweep your little sand-castle away. Before the fortnight’s over the dead shall walk the earth, eager to piss all over your self-righteous ambitions. They’ll come for you and they won’t leave a stone of this cess-pit standing.”
“And what makes you think we’re a likely target for your walking dead, noble marquis?”
“A kindly fortune teller – a sweet young girl with an innocent, golden smile – actual gold teeth I tell you – told me so not three nights ago. Between gulps and yelps of course. So much wisdom from one so very very young.”
“I see. So she came to see you, did she? Walked right into our most fortified prison?”
“All my daughters have been coming. Your men can be so kind when it comes to family visits. And my girls can be so persuasive. So generous. I’ve been attending to them quite meticulously you know, night after night after night.”
De Launay had dismissed de Sade’s words in the same way that he’d dismissed the rest of the man’s nonsense. Now, even as he stood there in his tower, watching re-animated corpses scratching at the wooden gates to his fort, he could scarcely believe it was happening. It seemed as though the whole huddled mass of the Parisian poor had determined to throw itself at his little prison, like ants upon a bowl of sugar, but to what end.
Not for the first time, it occurred to de Launay that he had a big part to play on the stage of history. Like Caesar or Charlemagne, he knew it would be his to tame the barbarian hordes. France needed a man like him. For although he’d never left the Bastille for longer than a day, and didn’t much like what he saw out there, he had the ambitions and pretensions of an emperor.
His reveries were broken by a knocking at the door.
“How goes the fight?” De Launay asked the captain of the Swiss mercenaries.
“Not good… It’s horrible… Those eyes!”
“What?
“One of my men sir… He got bit guarding the wall. They’d stuck a ladder up and he tried to unhook it. And he did unhook it. But he got bit first.”
“So he’s injured?”
“He’s not injured sir. It’s worse. His eyes gone all milky, and his mouth gone all dry and he was like trying to bite us all when we tied him up. He became one of them.”
“And where is he now?”
“The men are restraining him, he should be…”
But a hideous sound of groaning was coming from the courtyard. The two men looked down to see their own defenders, all decked out and decaying in their Swiss uniforms. They were drinking deeply from barrels of rainwater, punching bricks loose from the wall, gnawing at each other’s heads then spitting in disgust. Some of them seemed to be trying to work out the route to the tower.
“We don’t have much time. I want you to follow my orders exactly.”
“Yes sir.”
“I want you to go down and open the gate. Let every monster in Paris into the Bastille. Give it enough time so that the whole flotilla of scum can drift here. Stay alive as long as you can; run if you have to.”
“Ok sir, but what will you do? If I can ask that sir?”
“This fort contains thirty thousand pounds of gunpowder and I’m going to set it off when the time is right. We’ll go down in history, you and I, as the men who saved Paris. The men who saved France. We’ll be remembered forever for our noble sacrifice,” de Launay assured the captain, whose name has long since been forgotten.
The captain scurried off down the stairs and de Launay followed more cautiously. He drank half a bottle of brandy, smoked a pipe then took his time in lighting a torch. Amber light danced around the stairwell as he descended, taking slow steady steps. He carried a loaded pistol in his right hand and the torch in his left. When he reached the bottom of the stair, the courtyard was empty. He wondered for a moment whether the dead had walked away from his prison in search of some other, more twisted amusement. Encouraged by this fancy, de Launay was shocked when he found that the door to the cellar where the gunpowder was kept was hanging open.
He had no idea what the monsters would want with gunpowder, but it wouldn’t be good. He imagined them trying to eat it, or pissing on it, or pouring it on each other’s heads, like children bathing. He really hoped they hadn’t compromised his noble plan of destroying all of them and himself. Another staircase and he was down near the cases of powder. He kicked hard and heavy at the side of one of the cases until powder poured out. It was at that moment that a sound caught his ear, a brutal unholy sound like the sound of deaf children crying. A doorway was visible where he’d never seen one before – boxes had been smashed up, beams torn down to reveal it. Curious, de Launay stepped through.
He came upon a dreadful scene, quite the most grotesque he’d ever witnessed. He saw the bodies of women, girls and boys; on racks, hanging from chains, pilloried or staked. They’d been mutilated beyond recognition; the devices through which this was achieved lay all around: hammers, knives, paddles, thumb-screws, choke pears and breast rippers. He knew straight away that this must be de Sade’s work, the work he’d alluded to so gleefully, so convincingly, that de Launay had declared him insane.
Moving round the room with their clumsy jerky motions, a small group of the Parisian undead had found their way in. Dressed in grocer’ aprons and butcher’s outfits, soldier’s uniforms and tailor’s garb, they were opening cages, lowering chains and cutting bodies loose. De Launay expected them to fall upon the dead and devour them, but instead they laid them carefully, ceremoniously, onto the dungeon floor. The wails of despair were louder in here and whenever one gargling, rasping voice stopped, another began. De Launay knew he had a duty: to ignite the powder with his torch and eradicate these monsters. He stepped back through the secret doorway and into the cellar, torch in hand. He lowered the torch towards the pile of powder, ready for his blaze of glory. But then he hesitated. It was the last decision he’d ever have to make. He would have to try to get it right.
~~
Kenneth Shand is a writer from Glasgow, Scotland. He writes short stories and occasional poems. He has an MSc in Creative Writing. He owns a tea shop. He likes puffins. His favourite colour is teal. He has difficulty with words that don’t sound like the thing they describe, like “emancipation” or “pulchritudinous”.
ZombieMania, by Tom Ward
‘Please Please Me’ had ridden the top of the charts for its thirtieth week and once again there were several hundred bodies outside the hotel; moans of “Beeeaaaattttlllleeeesssssssss” and “Braaaaiiiiiiiinnnnnssssss” reached the window of the boy’s suite. It was hard work being the biggest band in England, having to sneak out back doors of venues and being chased through the streets by the shambling corpses of rabid fans.
But there was a show tonight…
“Once more into the breach…” said John as the fab four forced their way out through the hotel door, swinging guitar cases and dodging biting cadavers.
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Tom Ward is an aspiring writer from Liverpool where he enjoys comic books, reviews unsigned punk bands on his blog http://freepunkrock.tumblr.com/ and complains to anyone who will listen how all the best tv shows get cancelled.
The Were-Traveler 