Zombies: More Recent Dead

The Hunt: Before, and the Aftermath Joe R. Lansdale

We rode the famous Fast Train out west, all the way from New York City.

Went out there with men and women packed in all the cars along with all our baggage and the guns, and they were good guns, too. All of us had good guns. That was a perquisite. We had paid for the hunt and our guides made sure we had the best of everything, and that included the guns. They wanted us to have good weapons, not only because we were about to hunt and were paying heavily for the privilege, but because they thought if we had excellent weapons and ammunition, it less likely that something might blow up in someone’s face, killing them. There were insurance policies, of course. But there’s always trouble and always challenges from the insurance, especially on these types of hunting expeditions. Part of the reason the hunting was so expensive, was because the insurance the hunting company paid was very high.

I brought along my wife, Livia, and we left the kids with their grandparents—my parents. It was a nice trip out, and there were excursions along the way, and we even did a bit of bird hunting in Arkansas. Stopped there for a couple of days and stayed in some cabins up in the mountains where the woods were thick.

It was September, and there were some brisk mornings, some warm middays, and then at night there was the cool again. But it was never miserable. We spent the nights in the cabins, but before bedtime we all sat around a campfire that was prepared by our guides, and there was entertainment. Singers and even some skits that weren’t really all that good but seemed a lot better under the circumstances.

As I said, it was a nice trip, in that everything went smooth, but it wasn’t good when it came to Livia and I, and considering all that had gone before, I didn’t expect it to be, but it was good that the trip itself wasn’t bad to make matters worse. At least we had that going for us, the smoothness of the trip.

During the day while we were in Arkansas we hunted. Mostly we were done by noon, and when we came in the guides would have the birds cleaned right away and put in the refrigeration car, and that night they would be our meal, that and some good beans and fresh baked cornbread.

Frankly, though I like shooting birds, I don’t much care for the meat. But I ate it well enough, and by the end of the day, tromping around with the hunting dogs that had been provided by the Arkansas cabin owner where we stayed, I most likely could have eaten anything and thought that it was fine. I think I would have thought that cornbread was fine anytime; I’m a big fan of cornbread.

The first night in the Arkansas accommodations, Livia and I went to our cabin and decided to take showers since we smelled of smoke from the campfire. Livia wanted to go first. She began to undress. I watched her. Even though she was nearing the age of forty, she had a youthful body, and I enjoyed watching her take off her clothes and pause before a mirror in the bedroom to shake out her hair, which had been tied back in a pony tail.

When she walked to the bathroom, I enjoyed the view, and was sorry that even though we were sharing a bed, we wouldn’t be sharing one another. I wished then that I had things to do over, but I didn’t, and it was my hope in time that we could reconcile things, and not just so we could have sex, but so we could have peace and things would be like they used to be; that was the purpose of the hunt: time together and reconciliation.

Anyway, she showered, and came into the room, and pulled a huge red nightshirt over her head, and without putting on panties got into bed. A year ago, that would have been a kind of silent invitation, but tonight I knew it was just a tease, something to make me feel bad about what I had done, and about what I wasn’t going to get tonight because of it. It had been that way every night since she found out about the infidelity. That was eight months ago, but things hadn’t changed much in that time, except we could talk a little more civilly most of the time.

I showered, and while in the shower I masturbated, thinking it would be a lot better to do that than to lie in the bed and think about what was under her nightshirt all night. There was also in me a bit of defiance. I was truly sorry for what I had done, and I had tried in every possible way to make it up.

I didn’t think just because I was sorry that it should be the end of the matter, as that kind of betrayal is serious and nothing anyone can get over easily. I know I would have had problems, but damn it, I was trying, and I didn’t seem to get points for trying. I felt she was enjoying punishing me a little too much.

By the time I had satisfied myself and washed the results down the drain, I was feeling less bold, and understood exactly why she felt the way she did. I took a long time drying off and brushing my teeth, and by the time I got in bed, Livia was sound asleep.

We stopped in Palo Duro Canyon in northern Texas, and that night there was a play about statehood. It was performed in a beautiful part of the mountains, and there were lots of lights, and there were horses and cowboys and they rode the horses along the rim to the sound of brassy, but inspiring music that seemed to be as loud as the canyon was normally silent.

It was a good show, and it even included the changes that had occurred, and there were people dressed up like the dead people, shuffling along, and there were a few comic bits associated with it, and then it was over.

As we were bused back to where the tracks were, and where our hotel was, Livia said, “You know, that was hokey, but I really enjoyed it.”

“So did I,” I said, though that wasn’t entirely true. I had begun to see that Livia was looking at other men in a way she hadn’t before. I don’t know if it was because she was thinking about cheating to even up the score, or if what I had done had just opened her mind to someone other than me. Anyway, I had watched her and I thought I had seen something in her eye when she was watching some of the male actors in the plays. They were all young, and most likely gay, I told myself, but still, Livia was watching. I felt certain of it. Nonetheless, I liked that she had spoken to me in that way, as it seemed natural and for a few seconds it seemed as if she had forgotten all about being mad at me.

But back at the room we went straight to bed, and I lay there and looked at the ceiling for a long time. Eventually I heard Livia breathing evenly as she slept, and I turned and looked at her.

There was enough moonlight through a part in the curtains to fall on her face and make her look angelic. I thought she was the kind of woman who could easily attract a much younger man, and I was the kind of man who, if I managed to keep my business and money, could most likely attract a younger woman, but only if they didn’t know I was in debt. She had options, and I didn’t have any real ones. Just ones I might be able to lie about.

I think that’s what it had been about, the infidelity, a feeling that I was getting past it all and needed some assurance of my manhood. It hadn’t been a classic sort of infidelity, and I told myself that because of the uniqueness of it, it didn’t count. But if it had been the other way, Livia instead of me that had done it, I know I would have been insane with jealousy.

I might have been better off had I had an affair, and not just an encounter—an encounter I paid steeply for, both financially and emotionally.

I hoped when we got to the hunt, everything would be better. That I could make it better and she would accept that. I lay there and tried to think of all the clever things I could do to make her happy, but all of them were fantasy and I knew none of them would work.

We had a private car on the train with food and alcohol and most anything that we seriously needed. There would be the hunting car later, but on the way out and back, when we weren’t stopped along the way at some site or entertainment that was planned, we had the room and a fold-down berth, and it was all nice and clean and private.

The humming of the train over the tracks had become soothing, and maybe that was why Livia was able to talk about it. She came at me with it out of nowhere, and it was the first time she hadn’t yelled at me when she brought it up.

“Was it because I didn’t satisfy you?”

I was sitting at the fold-down table with a drink of well-watered whisky. I said, “Of course not.”

“Then why?”

“I’ve told you, Livia.”

“Tell me again.”

“I’ve told you again and again.”

“Make me believe it.”

I sat for a moment, gathering my energy for it. “I suppose it has to do with getting older. I don’t feel all that attractive anymore. I’m a little heavy, going bald. I wanted to feel that I could be with another woman.”

“But that woman . . . That doesn’t work, Frank. She didn’t want you back. She was paid for. And she was . . . ”

“I know,” I said. “But it was the fantasy that she was someone who cared for me and that it was a secret rendezvous. It was the idea of it more than the actuality of it. It was stupid, but I did it and I’m sorry, and I am so sad it ever happened.”

“Childish.”

“Yes,” I said. “Very much so. I know that now. But I just felt it might give me a boost, so to speak.”

“I don’t give you a boost?”

“You do.”

“I know I’m older—”

“You look fantastic,” I said. “It wasn’t that. It was me.”

“And that’s supposed to make me feel better?”

“I don’t think that—no. It won’t make you feel better. But it’s an answer, not an excuse, and it’s the only one I have. There is no good answer. I was foolish. It’s just that . . . I love you, Livia. But I just wasn’t satisfied.”

“It wasn’t like I didn’t make love to you.”

“No,” I said. “You did. But . . . it wasn’t all that passionate.”

“We’re not eighteen anymore.”

“I guess that’s what I wanted, something more passionate. Something that would make me feel eighteen again.”

“The only thing that could make you feel eighteen again is being eighteen,” she said.

“I know. I just wanted something besides the usual, you know. I don’t mean that offensively, but I wanted to feel something akin to the old passion.”

Livia turned her head away from me when she spoke. “Why didn’t you ask? We could have experimented.”

“I hinted.”

“Hinted?” she said. “Isn’t it men who always say that women don’t say what they want? That they beat around the bush? Don’t you always say: ‘How am I supposed to know what you want if you don’t ask’?”

“I suppose it is.”

“No supposing to it.”

We sat silent for a long time. I didn’t even pick up my drink.

“Do you think you can ever feel good about me again?” I asked. “That you can ever trust me and feel that things are right again? Can we ever be okay?”

“I don’t know,” Livia said.

She went to the cabinet and pulled the latch and took out a glass and a bottle of some kind of green liquor. She poured herself a drink and put everything back, and went to sit on the fold-down bed.

“You’ll try?” I said.

“I try every day,” she said. “You don’t know how hard I try.”

“This trip . . . was it a mistake?”

“I don’t know. I’ll see how it makes me feel when it’s all over.”

I nodded and drank the rest of my drink. I couldn’t think of anything else to say or do, except get another drink, and I didn’t even do that. I just sat there, and in time Livia took a magazine from her suitcase and lay on the bed and read.

I finally got up and got another drink and sat down at the table with it. I sipped it and thought about how I had ruined everything that had ever meant anything to me for a piece of overpriced heavily lubricated ass.

I began to hang all my hopes on the hunt, and that the enthusiasm of it would excite her as it did when we used to deer hunt together. That had been years ago, and this was different, but I think, except for those times when we had been young and in bed together, it was the time when I felt the most bonded to her.

I suppose it was the thrill of the hunt, and mostly the thrill of the kill. I never deluded myself into thinking hunting was a sport. Killing was what it was all about, and to kill something was to satisfy something deep in the soul, something primal. And it was a strange thing to see that primitive nature in a woman, and to observe her face when she stood over the body of a dead deer; her eyes bright, the deer’s eyes dull, and on Livia’s face an expression akin to the one she had when she had an orgasm and lay in my arms, happy, satisfied, having experienced something that was beyond intellect and rationalization.

It was a cool, crisp morning when we reached Montana. The air felt rich with oxygen and the sky was so blue it was hard to believe it was real. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky. By midday it would be relatively warm, if still jacket weather, but we would be in the hunting car, perched at the windows with our rifles, so it would be comfortable enough, stuffed as the car would be with other hunters, adrenaline and passion and the desire to kill. Though, perhaps, kill was the wrong word here, and that’s what made the whole thing somehow acceptable. You can’t kill what’s already dead, but you can enjoy the shooting, and maybe it wasn’t as good as a live deer brought down and made dead, but to shoot the living dead, a human, and not have any remorse because it was all sanctioned, there was something about that, something about the fantasy of killing a human being instead of just bringing down a walking thing that was the shell for someone who had once lived.

The train parked on the tracks and some of the guides went to the storage car where the dead people were kept. They would let them out and drive them to the center of the plain, and they would throw sides of beef in the dirt to keep them in that area, bloody beef that the dead could smell and want.

When they went for the beef, when the guides said it was time, we could point our guns out the window and take them as fast as we could shoot. Sometimes, the guides said, the dead would come to the window, and that you had to be careful, because you could get so caught up in the shooting, you could forget that they wanted you as much as you wanted them. If you’re arm was out the window, well, you could get bit, and the waiver we had signed said that if that was the case, we went out there with them. We wouldn’t necessarily be dead, but we soon would be, so there was a chance to shoot someone who was actually alive; someone already doomed. It was considered practical and even humane, and it was covered by insurance money that your family would receive.

Livia and I settled into our shooting positions. We had benches by a long window, and the window was still closed. We were given our rifles. They were already loaded, and we were told to keep them pointing up, which, of course, we knew without being told. Everyone here had gone through the program on how to handle the weapons and how to deal with the dead, and Livia and I were already hunters and we could shoot.

I had paid dearly for this event, and I hoped it would make a difference. When it was all over, I would be deep in debt, but I would have saved my marriage if it worked. Money was easier to regain than it was to regain the loss of a good marriage.

The guides came through and told us the basic rules again, gave us reminders, the same stuff I told you about not getting so caught up in the kill that we forgot to watch for the dead slipping through, getting hold of us through the windows. They said everything was very safe, but that it had happened, and they would be outside, on the fringes, with weapons to take down any of the dead that seemed to be getting through the line of fire and presenting a problem.

My hands were sweating. Not from fear of the dead, or even anticipation of the shoot itself, but thinking how it would be between Livia and me when it was over.

“What’s she wearing?” Livia asked.

I was startled out of my thoughts.

“What?”

“I said, what is she wearing?”

“I bought an orange jump suit for her.”

“How does she look?”

“Dark hair, tall . . . well built.”

“That could be me.”

“I suppose that had something to do with it,” I said. “Her reminding me of you.”

“A dead woman?”

I knew then my tact had backfired, and I could have kicked myself.

“Just the appearance,” I said. “But it’s been awhile. And even with refrigeration, she’s gone downhill. She still looks close to being alive. Not as much as before.”

“You mean when you fucked her?”

We were seated pretty close to other hunters, and I glanced to see if any of them had heard her, heard anything we might have said.

They all seemed preoccupied with their weapons and their thoughts and their eagerness, and I realized that Livia wasn’t as loud as I thought she was.

“I don’t know how to describe her so that you will know right off,” I said. “I’ll try and point her out.”

“You do that,” Livia said. “I want to be the one.”

“I know.”

“I thought maybe I’d want you to shoot her, just to show me it didn’t matter, but then I thought that wouldn’t do. I want to shoot her.”

“Of course it doesn’t matter,” I said. “It wasn’t like she was alive.”

“I want to shoot her,” she said.

“It could be anyone that shoots her,” I said. “There’s no guarantees it’ll be you that gets her.”

“It better be me,” Livia said. “You paid to fuck her, now you’ve paid for me to shoot her. It better be me.”

“You don’t just want to shoot her,” I said. “You want to finish her. A shot through the head to destroy the brain.”

“Think I don’t know that? Everyone knows that. And I can shoot. You know I can shoot.”

I couldn’t say anything right. Everything I said was like stepping in shit and being forced to smell my shoe.

“Yes,” I said. “Of course you can shoot.”

The guides were moving back along the aisle of the rail car.

“All right,” one of them said. “We are going to open the cars, and when the dead come out—and listen to me. Do not shoot! Not at first. The beef is in place. You see the yellow chalk line we’ve laid in the grass? You cannot, and will not, shoot until the dead are beyond that, on the beef. If some do not go past the line, the outside guides will work them that way with the push poles, and if they can’t get them to go, they may have to put a few down themselves. After the dead are over the line, you can fire at will. And if they start to come back over the line, you can still fire. But you have to wait until they are first over the line. Does everyone understand?”

We all called out that we understood.

“Any questions?” asked the guide. There were none.

“Then,” the guide said, “ladies and gentlemen, the windows will be lowered. Do not put your rifles out the windows until the dead are all past the yellow line, and when they are, then it is open season.”

The automatic windows rolled down. The windows gave plenty of room for propping the rifles and for laying your elbows on the sill.

We heard the train cars opening on either side of us, and we could hear the dead, moaning. Then we saw them coming out of the cars. The guides had big heavy poles and they pushed the dead with them to make sure they went toward the yellow line. But they didn’t need much pushing. The bloody meat smelled even better than we did to them, and the dead went for it right away.

Livia said, “Point her out. I want to shoot her a few times in the body before I take the head.”

“Someone might beat you to it,” I said.

“Just point her out.”

In that moment I thought about the night I had had with the woman who had no name and was for a while part of the dead brothel down on 41st Street. She was only part of it while she was fresh, and then they had to let her go to the sale market for the hunts, and I was lucky to buy her. I almost didn’t win the bid, and I had to keep raising it, and pretty soon I had my bid way up there and it was really far more than I could afford. But I bought her for the hunt. But even then, she was just mine to place in the hunt, not mine or Livia’s to shoot. That was up to circumstance.

It was said many a husband or wife had bought their dead spouses to shoot at because of past grievances, and it even occurred to me Livia might turn the rifle on me. It wasn’t a serious thought, but it passed through my head nonetheless.

I thought about the dead woman now, of how she had been fastened to the bed and her mouth was covered over with a leather strap; how she had writhed beneath me; not because she enjoyed or felt anything, but because she was trying to break loose and she wanted to bite me. I could hear her grunting with savage hunger under the mask, and it was exciting to know what I was doing. I had paid for her with a charge card, and though the card didn’t say brothel on it, Livia was able to figure it all out. It took her awhile, but she got it doped out and then she confronted me, and I didn’t even try to lie. I think on some level I had wanted her to find out, had wanted her to know.

But the young woman beneath me that night at the brothel was still firm and she wasn’t falling apart. She hadn’t been dead long, and what had killed her was heart failure, some inherited condition that took her out young. When she died the dead disease took her over, and her mother sold her to the brothel then; had them come out and capture her and take her there.

A few years back such a thing would have been thought horrible, but now it happened all the time. It was part of the government plan to dehumanize them after they were dead, to make people think of them as nothing more than empty shells that walked and were a threat and were sometimes entertainment. It was an indoctrination that was starting to take hold.

Yet, when I saw the dead out there, wandering over the line, in all manner of conditions, some fresh, some with their skin falling off, some little more than skeletons with just enough viscera and flesh to hold them together, I felt sick. My parents had died but a few years before the flu came that caused so many to become what these poor people were, and I thought if they had lived just another year, they might have been victims, they might be out there. Someone’s parents, brothers, sisters, husbands, you name it, were out there. It was only luck that had caused us and so many others to take flu shots that year, and the flu shots saved us, even though there had never been a flu like this one. Just that simple thing, a flu shot, had saved many from dying and coming back. Those who hadn’t taken the shot, and got the flu, they got worse, died, and came back.

All of this was running through my head, and then I saw the woman. She had on the orange jump suit I had bought for her, and she was staggering toward the meat on the other side of the line.

“There she is,” I said. “The orange jump suit.”

“There are a lot of orange jump suits,” Livia said.

“Not like this one,” I said. “It’s bright orange. She’s off to the side there. She has long black hair. Very long, like yours. Like all the others, her back is to us.”

“I see her,” Livia said.

She lifted her rifle and fired right away. It was a miss. But she fired again and she hit the woman in the back. The shot knocked the woman down. She got up rather quickly, and started walking again, toward the beef.

“I want to see her face,” Livia said.

“That might not happen,” I said.

Livia fired again, hit the woman in the back of the right knee. It was a shot that not only knocked her down, but as she fell, her face turned toward us. It was still a good face, somewhat drawn, but still the face of someone pretty who had once been very pretty in life. And then she caught another shot from Livia’s rifle, this one in the face, just over the upper lip. The woman spun a little, and I think the blow from the heavy load made her neck turn in such a way that it snapped her spine.

When she was on the ground, she began to crawl toward the smell of the meat again. Her head was turned oddly on her neck, and the side of her face dragged the ground as she went.

“I want you to shoot her once,” Livia said. “Then I’ll make the kill. You shoot her in the body.”

Now there were explosions everywhere as the dead targets took hits, and even Livia’s target, the woman I had fucked, was being shot at. Bullets were smashing into the earth all around her and one took off part of her right foot.

“You shoot her,” Livia said. “You shoot her now.”

I fired and missed.

“You better hit her,” Livia said.

I fired again, hit the woman in the body. She kept crawling. Livia just sat there, watching her crawl.

“You want to finish her, better hurry before someone else gets her,” I said.

Livia looked at me. Her eyes were cold. “You better hope no one else does,” she said.

She lifted her rifle and fired. The woman’s head exploded.

After that, we began to fire at will, and I think I blew the heads off four, though someone else’s shot might have taken one of them. I couldn’t be sure. Livia hit at least seven in the head and dropped them. She hit several more in the body, and dropped them. Eventually, someone firing at the same targets got the head.

When it was all done, the guides gathered up the bodies with hooks and carried them to a large and long pile of lumber that had already been laid out and had weathered some. They put the dead on the pile and poured gasoline over all of it and set it on fire.

When the fire was going, the rifles were gathered and stored and we broke for clean up and then dinner, just as the train was starting to move.

Back in our little room we could really smell the gun oil and the stink from the firing. We decided to shower and dress for dinner. There was to be a big formal dinner in the dining car tonight, a celebration of the completion of the hunt. On the way back the train wouldn’t stop, but would run full speed night and day until we arrived back east.

Before I got in the shower, I looked at Livia, and she was obviously different, relieved, as if a poison had been drained from her. I went to the bathroom and undressed. It was tight in there and the shower was close. I turned on the water and began to soap up and shampoo my hair.

I heard the curtain slide back, and there was Livia, naked. She didn’t smile at me. She didn’t say a word. She got in and pulled back the curtain and took hold of me and got me ready and then before I knew it was happening, I was inside of her, pushing her up against the shower wall, going at her for all I was worth.

She was amazing, animal-like even. It was over quickly for both of us. We leaned together, panting. Then Livia was out of the shower, and was gone, and I was left dazed and amazed, satisfied and confused.

When I came out of the bathroom, drying myself with a towel, the lights were on, but Livia had already gone to bed. She was lying in our little bunk beneath the sheets with her back to me, her face turned to the wall. The blanket was folded back to her feet.

I was about to put on my pajamas, when she said without turning toward me, “Don’t bother with your pajamas. Put out the light and come to bed.”

I did. And we did.

It was a great, long night of love, and even as I mounted her, and enjoyed her, and she squirmed beneath me and moaned, I couldn’t help but somehow being reminded of that night with the woman we shot. Like that night, what Livia and I did was not so much making love as it was a pounding of each other’s genitals. It was a savage pelvis fight that left bruises and redness and utter exhaustion.

Later, lying beside Livia, holding her, listening to her breathe, I wondered how long it would be before things went back to the way they used to be. Not just how we could be together without the thing I had done not hanging before us in the air, but the sex, as well; how long before it became mild again, as common as a subway ride, and as boring.

I thought of that and I thought of the strange time I had had with the dead woman in a room on 41st Street, and I told myself that such a thing couldn’t happen again, but I knew too, that while Livia and I had been at it this night, when I closed my eyes, it was not Livia I saw. It was the dead woman I imagined beneath me.

What in hell were the desires of man?

No profound revelation presented itself in answer to my question.

I closed my eyes and thought about many things, but mostly I thought about that dead woman, and how she had been, and how it had been to shoot her today, and how it had made Livia and me fill up with the lava of passion. I tried to think of Livia, and our life, and how much I loved her, but in my mind all I could see was that dead girl being screwed by me or shot by us, and the Fast Train fled eastward.