What Will Come After Read online

  During the three decades Scott Edelman has dedicated himself to the short story, his fiction has been called “darkly hopeful,” “deep, disturbing, and emotionally draining,” and “unnerving work that peers into the darkest corner of the human soul and makes one fear what lurks at the bottom of that abyss—but also makes it impossible to look away.”

  In these nine tales, you’ll also discover that long before the current craze of mashing up mindless shamblers with the literary classics, Edelman was remixing zombies with “Romeo and Juliet,” “Our Town,” and other famous fictional worlds.

  In the Stoker Award finalist “A Plague on Both Your Houses,” you’ll visit a post-apocalyptic Manhattan that reads like a fever dream created by George Romero collaborating with William Shakespeare, in which the living son of the mayor of New York City falls in love with the daughter of the zombie king.

  In “Almost the Last Story by Almost the Last Man,” another Stoker nominee, you’ll lock yourself in a library as a writer struggles to keep his sanity by making sense of the zombie uprising the only way he knows how.

  And in “What Will Come After,” original to this volume, you’ll learn what happens to Scott Edelman himself when he faces his own inevitable end.

  Gathering his complete zombie fiction to date, What Will Come After proves that the undead can be more than just rampaging braineaters—though you’ll find plenty of gory gorging in these pages as well—but also a lens through which we can see that the living and the living dead are not so very different after all.

  Scott Edelman

  WHAT WILL COME AFTER

  Copyright © Scott Edelman 2010 & 2011

  The right of Scott Edelman to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted by his in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Originally published in printed book form by PS Publishing Ltd. in May 2010. This electronic version published in March 2011 by PS by arrangement with the author. All rights reserved by the author.

  FIRST EBOOK EDITION

  ISBN

  978-1-848631-44-1

  This book is a work of fiction. names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  PS Publishing Ltd

  Grosvenor House / 1 New Road / Hornsea / HU18 1PG

  East Yorkshire / England

  [email protected]

  www.pspublishing.co.uk

  What Will Come After

  Live People Don’t Understand

  The Man He Had Been Before

  Almost the Last Story by Almost the Last Man

  Goobers

  Tell Me Like You Done Before

  A Plague on Both Your Houses

  The Human Race

  The Last Supper

  No More Mr. Nice Guy

  For Irene

  Wife. Partner. Friend.

  I shall but love thee better after death.

  I am already aware of certain events surrounding my coming death—which, if I’m reading the signs correctly, is not that far off—as surely as if they’d already occurred and I am merely remembering them.

  I will not really begin to live until after I die. I will not be alone in that. It will be that way for many, as if what had up until then been the entirety of human existence had suddenly instead become its prologue. Death—though not dying, which will remain as painful, frightening, and mysterious as ever—will have lost its fi nality. We won’t understand why. There’ll be no explanation, at least none which will be found acceptable to us. That’s just the way it will be one sudden morning, when we will all wake to a world in which death has become only temporary. Some of us will take it to be the vengeance of God, while others will place the blame on the hubris of science. But the finger-pointing of billions will not alter our new situation. Life, for lack of a better word, will go on, and what will come after will more often than not be far more interesting than what had come before. Because how many of us, if tasked to speak the truth, could ever say that we fully used what we had been given in the first place?

  …

  Long before everything changes, I will have already seen the script for my desired death acted out by others. It won’t, however, have been an end capable of rehearsal. It’s a scenario I will have hoped for, but which I, which we, will be denied. I will not be as lucky as the ninety-year-old woman, married for sixty-seven years, who had a stroke, or her husband, also ninety, who then phoned 911. I have already read about their ends, now, even as I write these words, long before the world’s rebirth, long before I’ll need to fear the transformation. As the emergency crew bundled up that elderly woman to rush her to the hospital, the stress from the flurry of activity, from seeing his wife limp and unmoving, caused her husband to have a stroke as well. Neither of the pair ever regained consciousness. They died within days of each other. If I could choose a manner in which to leave this world, it would be that one, my wife and I taken at once, neither of us suffering extended solitude, never alone for long. Those few minutes apart would be an eternity enough. My wife and I have talked about that, hoped for that, and will continue to hope, even after everything changes. But who among us gets to choose the time and place of his or her death? Especially when the world becomes the way the world will henceforth be forever.

  I will die in my own home. Even though I will have sickened, I will not have sought help as once I might have. The world will no longer contain enough help to go around, not for all the frail and faltering, not once people have changed into predators. Besides, places which used to be symbols of safety will have become too suspect to act as havens. Hospitals, for example, will have become far too dangerous by then for any sane person to visit, what with the undead coming back to life, and though those institutions will uneasily live on, struggling to be more than just a feeding ground as patients become hunters, they will never be safe again, no matter what precautions are taken. Neither will malls, movie theaters, sports arenas, convention centers, schools, or any other businesses at which the public had previously gathered in so carefree a manner. For humans, stepping out of one’s sphere of solitude will become a rarity. We will adapt to telecommuting not only in our jobs, but in our personal lives as well. In love, in family, and in marriage, too, the long distance will become commonplace. Our race’s slow march to solitude will increase to a breakneck speed.

  I will die alone. My wife and I will have separated, not the way married couples do when disaffected, but for our own safety, since we will both know what would inevitably happen to her if I were to die by her side, or to me, should she predecease me while I remained within her reach. Neither of us will want to chance that risk of being the first to go, and since the only other way to eliminate that possibility would be a suicide pact, one which we will not trust ourselves to properly effectuate in order to avoid the anticipated horrors, we will, as we sense our individual ends approaching, know that we have to part. I will remain in our home in West Virginia, while she will move to her mother’s home in Maryland, which will, at that time, have been empty. Her mother will have been the lucky one, avoiding with impeccable timing what will someday occur. Our parting will be emotional, as we have been together since we were children. At least, that’s the way it’s always seemed. I will not share the details of that separation here; some things should remain private. The exodus from our home will not be easy for her, as any journey in that future time will have its dangers, but still, it will be safer for her to be a state away rather than here, remaining beside me while we counted down the days, wondering which of us would be the first to fall only to then rise up into a frenzy. Neither one of us will want to shuffle off to what should have been a long sleep with the other still alive beside us, only to have that sleep interrupted, to wake and then begin to feast on the one we love. A solitary death, as painful as that would be, would be preferable.

  I will die in my own bed. It will bear no relation to the end I had expected. I will have always assumed that I would be attacked and eaten by a bear that wandered over from Sleepy Creek, or else find myself flying through the windshield of my Jeep at dusk after hitting a deer. Or, if I was to be lucky enough to have a death less violent than that, I expected it to be out in the garden. I would clutch my chest—perhaps among the bamboo, the spot which brings me the most happiness—and fall to my knees, tottering a moment before my face hits the earth. But it will prove to be none of those. I know this. I will have tucked into my own bed, which will have suddenly grown to the size of a continent. I will have patted the place where my wife’s shape could still be felt, and then fallen into a deep sleep. I will be dreaming of her, missing her, acting out within my mind a scenario in which she is still beside me, in which we are forever young, and in which the nightmare we faced had been replaced by a desired dream, when something will burst in my brain. All bodily functions will stop, but only for a little while … then some of them will start up again. Some, but not all, and I, like so many others, will be reborn.

  I will not suffer from Alzheimer’s, but I will look at my world as if I did. When I rise again, in that most miraculous way, I will stare blankly at my surroundings. I will look at the bookshelves filled with people and worlds I had loved, populated by universes created by others and then carefully collected by me, and I will not remember any of them. On other shelves, I will see the books and magazines filled with words I had written and not know
that they had ever been mine. I do not even think that books and magazines will any longer register as meaningful objects. They will just be the random static of a world I will no longer be capable of hearing. I will look at the paintings on the walls, many of them created by my own father, and not recognize them, or remember him. I will look at the photographs also hanging there, and see only strangers. Perhaps I will not even be capable of that, of categorizing human beings. Perhaps I will only see those photographs as advertisements for feasts which will be beyond my reach. My conscious mind will be gone, and I will be nothing but a moving tropism, a thing of urges alone. Eventually, once my desire manifests, it will only have one true destination.

  I will not immediately be hungry. This will not surprise me, however, as I will be beyond surprise. I will have assumed, based on many news reports I watched to fulfill my final days—which will prove to be as inaccurate on this matter as they proved to be during my lifetime on so much else—that I would leap up instantly ravenous, and feel caged by the four walls surrounding me. I will have imagined that I would instantly stumble wildly about, lusting for a living target on which to feed. But instead, my waking will be slow, with the birthing of my body first long before my desire, and so, at the start of my second chapter, I will move calmly through the house. That will perhaps be a side effect of the fact that my wife and I had arranged events so that I would be reborn alone. If she would still have been at my side, perhaps her scent would have roused my hunger immediately. But I will never have a chance to learn if that is so, to contrast those two possibilities. One rebirth is the most any of us can expect in our lifetimes.

  I will not be as favorably situated as I would have been had I never left New York. In the rural location I have chosen, the pickings will be slim, while back in the city of my birth, the possibilities would have been infinite. Candidates to feed upon would have been easily found. But because I have remained here, I will stumble about the house, bouncing off the walls—literally, for once, rather than metaphorically—unable to sense a scent, not understanding how to turn a doorknob in order to get outside and begin whatever journey it is I will be destined to make. As I do those things, I will spot the skittish movement of a deer in the yard, and will mistake its blur for the motion of an escaping human. I will crash through one of the glass doors at the back of our house, an action which, though freeing me from the confines of this home I love, will serve only to frighten the animal away. That loss will not make me sad, or angry, or give rise to any other disappointed feelings, for, separate from the fact that I will be beyond those emotions, I will understand, in a place beyond consciousness, as the creature speeds off, that it had not been human, and I will know, with an awareness beyond intelligence, that only human flesh will henceforth be able to feed my hunger.

  I will not be killed so quickly as I would have thought. What neighbors I should have had will be gone. Their houses will be abandoned, the doors left ajar. Inside the nearest homes, the ones I will mindlessly enter, will be such total emptiness as to signal that the previous occupants assumed they would never be reclaimed. But I will not be able to interpret that, nor will I any longer have the slightest idea where those neighbors could have gone. If I could have breached the barrier between my far future self and the most recent future former self, that living self of mere days before, I would have asked and learned this—that some of Earth’s survivors will have banded together and fled, seeking safety at the government compounds, while others will have gone even more deeply into the woods, seeking to hide high on mountains which they will feel the undead will not be able to climb. Still others, even more fearful of what they are sure is to come, will kill themselves in such ways they feel will prevent return. (At least, that is what they will hope. And in some cases, they will be correct. But not in all.) I will not know any of this, nor will I be able to realize how I am benefiting from those actions, for these disparate decisions of others will keep me alive my first few days of life after death. I am unmolested in my aimless wandering, instead of becoming the immediate object of target practice as I would have been had my neighbors not scattered, or if I had remained in that distant city of my birth.

  I will not be helped by any of the research I will have done. I will not even remember having done it. But even if I had somehow managed to retain all of the supposed facts of the undead, that knowledge would not have helped. Yes, I will need no sleep, but what good will knowing that do me? And I had once known, but was no longer aware, that the only way for this new self to die would be by a shot through the head, one which would sever the brainstem, but once reborn, this would not help me either, not to live and not to die. And I will not need to be told to seek the living, for finding flesh will be paramount. The knowledge of that will be embedded within me, and I will have no need of instruction from my late, living self to tell me so. I will have no need of knowing because I will be busy being. But there is one fact which my former study had not revealed that I would have found fascinating, if only I could reach back to pass it on. One thing I will not have known, and therefore I could not have told myself, is that having been reborn, I will head directly for her. For my wife. For my love. She whom I sent away. So I will have forgotten what will have come before, and all I will know is—I must head for her.

  I will not think of my parents. I will have been thinking about them often during those final days leading up to my death, which will mean that they will be paramount among the many things of which I will not be thinking then, of which I will no longer be able to think. I will have been glad that they had left this world before the uprising will have begun, because the worrying I will have done about them before they died in their normal, though still sad and tragic ways, will be as nothing when compared to the fears added to the menu of our anxiety once death was no longer an option. The world, once everything changed, will have become a place in which we no longer wrestled with letting go as our loved ones were taken, but instead were horrified at the thought that to be merciful, we might have to take part in their final erasure from the Earth. We will have become more than mere bystanders to the deaths of our parents, children, and friends. We will have been forced to become reluctant participants. Some will try to reject that by instead choosing to engineer their own deaths, but it will not always work. Those five stages of grief which had been hammered into us—denial, anger, bargaining, and so on—had a new more horrible stage grafted on to the end, one which I will have been spared having to endure, at least as far as my parents were concerned. As I will be pulled in the direction of Maryland, shambling closer toward the scent of my wife, I will not be conscious of any of this. The world will be made up of only two families then, the living and the living dead, and as I will be part of the latter group, I will not be concerned with the intricate social constructs of the former. When those I’ve left behind come to mind at all, it will only serve to enflame me toward one ravenous purpose.

  The ability to swim will have been stripped from me. By the time I reach the spot at which a bridge once crossed over to Maryland, that span will no longer exist. My former living self would have recognized the signs that the bridge’s destruction had been deliberate, but the me which will eventually be all that remains will not, will not remember the explosions that had occurred and which I had heard and noted the month before I died, nor will recall my inability then to interpret them. Gunfire in my neck of the woods is common, but I’d never before heard explosions of that magnitude, and had no idea what they could have meant. Whether this action will have been taken to keep the undead from crossing to Maryland from West Virginia or to West Virginia from Maryland, I will not know, or even be able to contemplate, or care. I will arrive at what remains of the bridge and continue walking, out onto bent struts and then beyond, until there is nothing but open air beneath me, and I will fall forward, tumbling into the icy Potomac River below. I will not bother to flail my arms as I drop, and I will emit no sound. Once I hit the water, I will sink, for the dead do not float, but it will not matter. I will keep putting one foot in front of the other, the river bottom no less foreign than the roadway. I will occasionally clamber over rocks, making a slow and clumsy progress, until I reach the other shore. My head will rise slowly out of the water. I will pause there for a moment, still submerged from the neck down, waiting for a sign, waiting until I sense my wife again. Only once she registers will I continue on.