Table Of ContentDead Men
(and Women)
Walking
An Anthology of Things Undead
Edited by Julie Ann Dawson & Julie Hedge
Cover art by Debra Colvin
Interior art by Ognjen Popovic, Marc Henry Medina,
and Benjamin A. Nendza
©2006 Bards and Sages
ISBN: 978-1-84728-906-3
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For Monica:
The only one in the family ready for the zombie apocalypse
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Table of Contents
Dead Man’s Tale pg 6
Guy Belleranti
Under Cover of Darkness pg 6
Guy Belleranti
Adam and Eve Versus the Human Race pg 7
Alexander Zelenyj
Waking Finnegan pg 18
Josh Benton
Catherine’s Well pg 27
Jeff Brown
The Consequence of Curiousity pg 43
Shawn Westmoreland
First Born pg 57
Brian Jaime
Alone in the Dark pg 62
Patricia A. Collins
The Fountain of Youth pg 67
Lee Pletzers
Paul pg 79
E.P. Spader
Old Habits, New Habits pg 81
Arthur Sanchez
Honor Bound pg 87
Jennifer Schoonover
The Walking Wounded pg 89
Emily M.Z. Carlyle
Car Food pg 91
Garth Wright
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A New Year’s Tale pg 96
Dave Bartlett
Birthright pg 113
Aurelio Rico Lopez III
Searching for Dr. Harlow pg 119
Michael A. Kechula
Earth A.Z. (After Zombie) pg 123
Brian Rosenberger
Shop ‘Til You Drop pg 125
Brian Rosenberger
Food Chain pg 131
G. W. Thomas
The New Creatures pg 133
Tristan T. Tenorio
Bazaar Shades of Sorrow pg 136
Penelope Allen
Under a Blanket of Blue pg 139
Donna Taylor Burgess
Every Time I Close My Eyes pg 155
Tanya Nehmelman
Billy is Three Weeks Dead pg 162
Dilman Dila
About the Contributors pg 169
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Dead Man's Tale
By Guy Belleranti
"A dead man does tell tales,"
the voice whispers,
and the mourners scatter like frightened children.
Their screams filling the room
as the laughing lips of the dead man
tell tales that are his own.
Under Cover of Darkness
By Guy Belleranti
Digging through the dampness
of worm infested earth
they rise from their graves
and spread among the alleys
and weed-choked vacant lots.
As living children they enjoyed playing dead.
Now they play alive.
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ADAM AND EVE VERSUS THE HUMAN RACE
By Alexander Zelenyj
Our pact had been simple: If one of us goes, the other follows.
Pacts and treaty promises are easy for the young and love-
struck, especially during dire times.
These are dark times we live in, love in.
I look to her, huddled down beneath the filthy blanket beside
me. Her warmth reassures me. We’re alive. Her soft breathing soothes
me but I know I won’t sleep again tonight. Sleep has become a precious
gift, these days.
Shafts of moonlight slice through the fissures in the derelict
barn’s roof, illuminating hay bales and discarded saddling gear below
us. We’d let the horses go when we found this place. We don’t know
how to ride and the terror in their black eyes was painful to look at.
They smelled the death, or whatever it is. They sensed it shambling in
the country all around us, too. We freed them and heard them canter off
into the night. I hope they’re safe. I hope they stay fleet of foot when
they need to be, and run on into tomorrow.
I can just make out the outline of her profile beside me. We’re
situated far from the horizon lines of moon glow stretching across the
straw floor. We’re up high on the creaking loft floor, deep in shadows
where no eyes can pierce. I lean in close and kiss her softly on her
cheek. I make sure to do this very carefully. I don’t want to wake her.
Sleep is a gift now, and waking into new days only brings tears and
hurt.
I hope she’s dancing in her dreams, the way she once used to,
and I hope she feels warm in that picture.
I’d truly caught her for the first time in the hallway, not the
gymnasium itself where we spent all our time practicing.
There were no teacher’s assessing her pirouette and fall and my
easy catch and maybe that’s why it turned into our first kiss. Her lips
were warm and she felt perfect in my arms, just the right size bundle of
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girl for me to hold.
Our program specialized in academic snobbery and we
followed suit: We were two against the school, and the rest of the
world, too. Because it was easy to be strong. Because everything’s easy
when you have a new love on your arm.
It would remain this way forever, we told each other every
night while cuddling in the library or touching each other in her bed or
mine. We relished the act of proclaiming this to each other and did so at
any opportunity. We became inseparable, at school and outside of it.
This lasted for years.
We graduated from our program and I cracked my ankle on a
warm-up run two hours before show-time. The injury left tiny bone
fragments inside my muscle which took surgery to remove. My ankle
never fully recovered and I can now predict inclement weather like my
arthritic mother used to, in my unhealed bone and tissues.
And Maria never danced again either. For you, she’d told me,
when I’d seen her trunk all packed with old souvenirs, awards and
certificates, medals and her first pair of threadbare ballet slippers. For
me, she decided to give up a career of theatre and teaching others how
to soar on the air. Because how could she dance without me completing
the pair that was us, always us?
Such romantics, we’d always joked, knowing it was true.
Knowing we were in it together for the long haul, as they say.
It might have been the single moment that linked us most
inextricably. Standing in the stuffy locker room space with her packed
trunk beside us, sobbing into each others’ ears while we held one
another tightly, looking as bravely as we could into our shared
tomorrow.
And life went on, in its strange and meandering ways. New job
paths explored and discarded, others kept and fulfilled dutifully if not
happily. At least we’re together: It became our mantra, and it really did
make it all better. At least each other, and who cared about the rest of
the world when ours was this reliable and familiar?
And life went on, in its strange and unpredictable ways.
Maria calling to me that first morning, waking me from sleep
at some too-early A.M. hour. With gummy eyes, staring at the
television with her fingers icy and laced through mine in my lap. We
watched the flickering screen silently and we didn’t speak for a long
time after we’d turned it off and sat numbed in our bedroom darkness.
The end had arrived.
It was that simple, according to some. The world we all knew
turning into an obscene mirror version of itself. Hell walking inside the
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vessels of the resurrected, or some such fantastical stuff.
It was lunacy. It was random lunacy in a suddenly disordered
universe. Or it was a hoax. A mass joke which no one understood but
when they finally did would all share a relieved laugh and realize with
huge epiphany that their lives weren’t so unfortunate after all.
We heard the screams from the street several minutes later. The
truth of the television people’s words struck us. We held each other. I
think we cried but I can’t be certain. We were numb and cold and
scared. We tried the telephone but there was no signal, just like in the
movies. Everything became dramatic: The power going out, the police
sirens wailing like lost children in the street darkness, the terrible
moaning which grew louder by the minute as more and more fragments
of some hell we couldn’t fully fathom found their shambling way into
our suddenly changed lives.
It was only a day or so before we abandoned all hope for our
friends and families. The thing had spread everywhere; the television
told us before every channel became single-color emergency signal
screens and silence.
We changed, Maria and I, during those early days. We peered
from our third floor windows and saw human body hills mounting in
the street below where the police piled them. We saw more and more of
the other ones, the ones who staggered and plodded towards the living
with the uneasily-defined lifeless energy animating their pale faces. We
saw humans hunting humans, or the shells which once housed
humanity and which now saw the world with empty flat eyes and with
that contradictory, eerie and vacuous hunger in their stares. The sight of
blood no longer troubled us. The streets ran dark with it. We saw
frantic-eyed men and women devouring coils of entrails on the
sidewalks where they’d grappled their victims to the ground. We
witnessed people being dismembered and eaten alive by these chalk-
faced others. We saw unaffected men dragging women screaming into
the darkened building across the street while others laughed and jeered
and aimed their rifles towards the heads of the nearest shambling form.
We saw humanity and we remembered that we had each other.
Only each other.
Tenants of our building left daily, never to return. They asked
us to accompany them, implored us that logic should dictate our
decision because there was strength in numbers and at a time such as
this numbers were all any of us could possibly cling to. But we ignored
their insistent pleas. We were terrified of what we saw and knew with
certainty only that we wanted to remain together. And so when the
screaming of dying people spread inside the apartment complex itself
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