Auntie Aggie said twins were an ill omen, and anyone who knew the Isaac twins would agree. The boys were light-skinned, lighter than me, sandy-hued with unnervingly blue eyes. They always had a scam running, like the time they’d stolen a watermelon from the garden and climbed up a tree to share it, or the time they’d let loose all the dogs as a distraction so they could run off to fish in the creek on the north side of Rose Hill.
The Isaac twins were always up to no good.
They were my favorite people in the whole damn world.
“Hey there, Jane!” called Ezekiel, Zeke for short.
“Aww, Jane’s here, now we’re gonna get the strap for sure,” said his brother Joseph, who was saltier than Lot’s wife.
“I snuck off!” I said, as the other kids began to give me dirty looks. “Ain’t no one know I’m gone. What’re you doing?”
Each of the kids held a stick, the end sharpened, and had the look of someone with a secret.
“None of your business. Go back to the kitchens,” Joe said, picking up a rock from the dusty ground and throwing it at me.
The rock missed by a mile, but the one I picked up and flipped back at Joe didn’t. It hit him right in the middle of his forehead, and as he cried out I picked up another rock.
“Next person throws a rock at me is getting what for right in their eye,” I said, shaking with anger.
“No one’s going to throw any rocks, Jane. You should come with us. We’re going to kill the dead.” Zeke smiled wide and handed me a sharpened stick. While Joseph was prickly and hostile, Zeke was all smiles and warmth, the kind of person people liked to be around. And he had the best ideas. It was no wonder Joe was so tetchy. Who would want to share such a wonderful brother with everyone?
I took the stick. “What do you mean, kill the dead?”
“There’s a shambler stuck in the bobbed wire. We’re going to kill it.”
“That ain’t a good idea.” As soon as the words were out of my mouth I knew it was the wrong thing to say. But I couldn’t help it. I liked trouble as much as the next kid, but this seemed different. Dangerous.
“We’re gonna kill it so that we can go on patrols with the rest of the grown-ups,” Zeke said with a grin. “No more chores for us!”
“You can stay here, Jane. No one wants you tagging along, anyway,” Joe said.
I set my jaw. Whatever Joe said, I was going to do the opposite, just to spite him. “I’m coming. You probably ain’t found a shambler, anyhow.”
“Oh, it’s a shambler all right,” Zeke said. “You’ll see.”
We marched in silence, along the line of the fence rails. A few of the kids began to whisper excitedly, but a single glance back from Joe shut them up real quick. My stomach surged and gurgled, roiling with hot dread. I’d heard Momma and the other farm hands talk about how the dead worked, how they came out of the brush, overwhelming the unwary and wary alike. That was what made shamblers so scary: even when they were predictable, they could still surprise you.
As we rounded the corner a loud moan split the air. There, twisted up in the bobbed wire, was a shambler.
We stopped, and all the celebration and shouting died down real quick. I’d always imagined the dead as some kind of monster: mouth gaping as they came to eat you. But the shambler caught in the bobbed wire looked almost normal: a white woman with long brown hair pinned up on her head, wearing a day dress of green linen. The skirt was torn, and her petticoats showed through. Her eyes were the yellow of crookneck squash, and the nails of her grasping hands had been broken down, her fingers covered with dirt. Still, I recognized her.
“That’s Miss Farmer. Her family owns Apple Hill Plantation,” I said. Miss Farmer hadn’t cared for me—she thought Negroes shouldn’t be allowed in the house, since we were dirty—but she loved Momma’s blackberry jam enough that she came to call every so often, when it was safe to travel.
“She ain’t nobody no more,” Joe said, poking her with a stick.
The shambler growled and reached for him. Joe danced out of the way, much to the delight of everyone.
Even me.
I ain’t sure why we thought poking the shambler with our sharpened sticks was a good idea, but everyone started doing it, creeping in close enough to stab the creature and then dancing out of the way before her hands could reach us. The game might have gone on longer if the dead Miss Farmer hadn’t managed to pull herself free.
Bobbed wire ain’t a long-term fix for a shambler wanting in to the plantation. Since they don’t have any kind of survival instinct it’s no big deal for them to eventually pull themselves free of such an entanglement, ripping off great big swatches of themselves to do so. And this is exactly what the undead Miss Farmer did. One moment she was jammed up in the bobbed wire, the next she was stumbling toward us, half her dress and a good bit of arm skin left behind on the fence, which now listed to
