The Living Dead 2

The Other Side by Jamie Lackey

Jamie Lackey’s short fiction has appeared in Atomjack Magazine, Bards and Sages Quarterly, Drabblecast, and in the anthology It Was a Dark and Stormy Halloween. She is also a slush reader for Clarkesworld Magazine and an assistant editor for the Triangulation annual anthology series. She hails from Pittsburgh, where George Romero filmed Night of the Living Dead.

For most of history, human beings have been throwing up walls. Walls seem to offer protection from a hostile world, and give us a sense of control, of keeping people where we think they ought to be. But walls definitely have a spotty history when it comes to their actual usefulness. The magnificent Great Wall of China never really did keep the barbarians out, nor did the walls of the Roman Emperor Hadrian. The Berlin Wall ultimately failed to keep Germany divided, and the strenuous efforts by the Israelis to put up walls between them and the Palestinians haven’t really proven effective.

Can we have much confidence that walls would do any better against zombies? And of course with any wall there’s the question not just of what are you keeping out, but also what are you holding in. Our next story is about fences, about boundaries, and being on the wrong side of them, and, of course, about zombies. The author says, “This story is about high school students almost twenty years after a zombie apocalypse. And unrequited love. I started thinking how the world would be different if there were zombies, but they’d been driven back decades ago. The zombies might still be a threat, biding their time, waiting to strike again, or they could have all rotted away without anyone noticing. The emotions in the story are what make it personal to me-the need to fit in, the fear, and in the end, the sorrow and regret.”

No one has seen a zombie in my lifetime. The twelve-foot-high electrified chain-link fence that protects us from the dead land passes behind my house, and I used to stare into the woods for hours on end, looking for zombies. I saw a raccoon once, peeking out through a broken window in a half-burned townhouse. It might have been undead. But it might not have been.

There used to be regular armed patrols on the dirt road inside the fence, back when I was little, but eventually the manpower was diverted to other projects. Federal troops still come around once a year in a tanker truck and burn back the vegetation in the buffer zone with napalm.

We have about fifty feet of scorched earth so that if they do come out of the woods, we can see them before they get to the fence. It keeps them from using trees to climb out, too. But like I said, no one has seen a zombie for well over a decade. Some of the kids in my school want to take the fence down and see what’s beyond it, see if there are any people up in Canada anymore. But anybody who was alive during the apocalypse is set against ever taking the fence down. Just in case, they always say. Just in case. Let them keep the dead land.

There was a group of guys in my high school who wanted the fence down. They were idiots, but they were cool, and I wanted desperately for them to like me. They threw Katie over the fence because they could, and because they wanted to prove that the zombies were gone.

Katie and I were best friends. Best friends outside of school, anyway. She’d always been kind of a dork, and she didn’t even drink or party anymore, not since the previous Fourth of July. Something had happened while I was away at a family picnic, and no one would tell me about it. Anyway, Katie wasn’t someone to hang out with in public, since I wanted to be cool.

I was an asshole to her. But she put up with it. I didn’t figure out why till too late. She had thick glasses and curly hair and average everything else. But none of this would have happened if she hadn’t been so smart.

But she was brilliant and didn’t bother to hide it from anyone, so they picked her to hurl over the fence. They were jerks, but they weren’t murderers, so I didn’t think they’d do it till her body actually hit the ground on the other side.

They used the volunteer fire truck. They put up that ladder meant to save people and stranded kittens and tossed my best friend into the dead land. She landed in the fresh ashes, and for a second everyone was silent.

Then I started screaming at them, which pretty much killed my hopes of high school popularity. They laughed and opened some beers and settled in to see if the zombies would show up. I cried and screamed for them to get her out until they punched me, then I got my cell phone and called the police.

They left in a hurry after that.

All through it, Katie sat on the ground and stared at the fence. She didn’t look toward the woods once. She didn’t look at me either.

The police were no help. They wouldn’t get her out. She was outside the fence. She counted as infected. It didn’t matter that I’d been watching the whole time and that she didn’t have a mark on her. They couldn’t let her in. She might be a zombie.

They dragged me home and took my statement and I didn’t see the guys again who tossed Katie over. I heard that they were taken away in the night and executed.

She was still there the next day, sitting and staring.

“Katie?” I called through the fence. “Are you okay?”

She looked at me, and her eyes filled with tears. “I’m not going to get out of here, am I?”

“I’ll figure something out.”

Katie just shook her head and went back to staring. Her tears made trails through the ash that had settled on her skin. I’d never touched the fence before. I knew some people who had, but I never did, till that day. I was watching Katie’s tears, and I reached out and grabbed onto the fence.

When I woke up, my head felt like it had exploded and I couldn’t move my arms.

Katie was standing on the other side of the fence, one finger reaching through the chain links. “Are you okay?”

When I woke up again, she was still there. “Thing really packs a punch,” I said.

“It was made to put a zombie down long enough for a clean headshot.”

At least she wasn’t crying anymore. But it was getting dark. I got up slowly, flexing my fingers to make sure they still worked. “I have to go home.”

“I know,” she whispered.

I touched her fingertip, staying carefully away from the fence. Her skin was cold and dry. I wanted to hug her. “I’ll get you out.”

I tossed her a bottle of water and my peanut butter and jelly sandwich. That night, I called every government agency I could find a number for, but they all repeated the same thing. She’s outside the fence, she could be infected. No one wanted to risk another outbreak. I called the volunteer fire chief, and he said the same thing.

So did Katie’s parents.

I heard it enough times I started to half believe it. After all, I hadn’t been watching her the whole time. She could have been bitten. I wouldn’t know.

I skipped school and went straight out to see her. “Are you infected?” I asked. She looked the same as always. But sometimes, they looked the same. Sometimes, they could even still talk.

“Of course I’m not,” she said.

I wanted to believe them so I could give up on her and mourn. “You’d say that if you were.”

That pissed her off. “You think I’m bitten? You think I’d be horrible enough to want out of here if I was? Do you think I want to be the cause of another outbreak?” She pulled off her shirt, then her pants, and unhooked her bra, all faster than I could think of a response. “See? No bites.”

She kept her underwear on. She’d whipped off her bra, but left those on. “What about on your hips?” I said.

Her face turned red, as if she suddenly realized that she was standing in front of me almost naked. “How could a zombie bite me through my underwear and not leave any marks on them?”

“Maybe it happened when you were going to the bathroom or something,” I said. I stared at her, searching for signs of the change.

“I didn’t get bit there.” She sounded close to tears.

“Prove it!”

She didn’t move.

I took a step back. She was lost. Dead. No, worse than dead-a monster. I started to walk away.

“Wait!” she shouted. “I swear, I didn’t get bitten.”

“Then prove it.”

“I was drunk.” Her voice shook. “I didn’t know what I was doing, and I’ve been saving up to get it removed.”

“What are you talking about?”

She took off her panties very slowly, then turned for my inspection.

There was no bite, but she had a tattoo that I hadn’t known about, just below the crest of her pelvis.

My name.

She was crying. Sobs this time, with painful gasping breaths between them. “I’m not infected.” Her voice was different when she was crying. I’d never heard it like that before. “I’m not!”

I didn’t know what to say to her. How could I? She was in love with me, and some tattoo artist somewhere knew it-half the school probably knew it-and I hadn’t? She was my best friend.

“Is this what happened on the Fourth of July?”

She nodded and wiped her eyes, but she refused to look at me.

“You should have told me,” I finally managed.

“What good would it have done?”

I couldn’t answer her. I just didn’t feel the same way about her and we both knew it. “I’m still looking for a way to get you out of there.”

“I love you,” she said. Her voice still sounded different.

I wanted to cry. I ran home.

The next day, she wasn’t there.

There was a dark spot in the shadows of the woods. It might have been blood. But it might not have been.