The Living Dead

'I called you a true name, and I'm telling you that if you don't leave Lucille's Etienne alone, so the two of them can go to hell in their own way, then I . . . well, then I will forget all about you, and you will never be in my book.'

Freida pealed with laughter. The old man slumped in his chair. The laughter cut off like a radio, and Freida, suddenly grave, looked down. 'They do not last any time, do they?' she murmured. With a forefinger, she poked the back of his head. 'Poor pretty things.' With a sigh, she faced Zora, gave her a look of frank appraisal, up and down. Then she shrugged. 'You are mad,' she said, 'but you are fair.' She backed into the door, shoved it open with her behind, and hauled the dead man in after her.

The tap-tap was running late as usual, so Zora, restless, started out on foot. As long as the road kept going downhill and the sun stayed over yonder, she reasoned, she was unlikely to get lost. As she walked through the countryside she sang and picked flowers and worked on her book in the best way she knew to work on a book, in her own head, with no paper and indeed no words, not yet. She enjoyed the caution signs on each curve—'La Route Tue et Blesse,' or, literally, 'The Road Kills And Injures.'

She wondered how it felt, to walk naked along a roadside like Felicia Felix-Mentor. She considered trying the experiment when she realized that night had fallen. (And where was the tap-tap, and all the other traffic, and why was the road so narrow?) But once shed, her dress, her shift, her shoes would be a terrible armful. The only efficient way to carry clothes, really, was to wear them. So thinking, she plodded, footsore, around a sharp curve and nearly ran into several dozen hooded figures in red, proceeding in the opposite direction. Several carried torches, all carried drums, and one had a large, mean-looking dog on a rope.

'Who comes?' asked a deep male voice. Zora couldn't tell which of the hooded figures had spoken, if any.

'Who wants to know?' she asked.

The hoods looked at one another. Without speaking, several reached into their robes. One drew a sword. One drew a machete. The one with the dog drew a pistol, then knelt to murmur into the dog's ear. With one hand he scratched the dog between the shoulder blades, and with the other he gently stroked its head with the moon- gleaming barrel of the pistol. Zora could hear the thump and rustle of the dog's tail wagging in the leaves.

'Give us the words of passage,' said the voice, presumably the sword-wielder's, as he was the one who pointed at Zora for emphasis. 'Give them to us, woman, or you will die, and we will feast upon you.'

'She cannot know the words,' said a woman's voice, 'unless she too has spoken with the dead. Let us eat her.'

Suddenly, as well as she knew anything on the round old world, Zora knew exactly what the words of passage were. Felicia Felix-Mentor had given them to her. Mi haut, mi bas. Half high, half low. She could say them now. But she would not say them. She would believe in Zombies, a little, and in Erzulie, perhaps, a little more. But she would not believe in the Sect Rouge, in blood-oathed societies of men. She walked forward again, of her own free will, and the red-robed figures stood motionless as she passed among them. The dog whimpered. She walked down the hill, hearing nothing behind but a growing chorus of frogs. Around the next bend she saw the distant lights of Port-au-Prince and, much nearer, a tap-tap idling in front of a store. Zora laughed and hung her hat on a caution sign. Between her and the bus, the moonlit road was flecked with tiny frogs, distinguished from bits of gravel and bark only by their leaping, their errands of life. Ah bo bo! She called in her soul to come and see.

Calcutta, Lord Of Nerves

by Poppy Z. Brite

Poppy Z. Brite is the author of many novels, including Lost Souls, Exquisite Corpse, Liquor, and Soul Kitchen, among others. Her short fiction has appeared in a number of anthologies, such as Borderlands, Dark Terrors 3, Shadows Over Baker Street, McSweeney's Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories, and Outsiders. A new short fiction collection, Antediluvian Tales, was released in 2007. She is also co-editor (with Martin H. Greenberg) of the vampire erotica anthologies Love in Vein and Love in Vein 2.

This story was nominated for the World Fantasy Award, losing out to 'This Year's Class Picture' by Dan Simmons. Which is ironic, because 'Calcutta, Lord of Nerves' was inspired by Simmons's novel Song of Kali. 'I approached Calcutta and the goddess Kali from a very different point of view,' Brite says, 'but my story would never have been written without Dan's novel.' (Incidentally, in his acceptance speech, Simmons said the award should have gone to 'Calcutta.')

This story is a sort of travelogue through the zombie-ravaged city of Calcutta, more picaresque than plot- driven. 'It basically consists of a guy walking around and looking at things,' Brite says. 'What makes the story interesting (I hope) is that the sights he sees are extremely unusual and vivid.'

I was born in a North Calcutta hospital in the heart of an Indian midnight just before the beginning of the monsoon season. The air hung heavy as wet velvet over the Hooghly River, offshoot of the holy Ganga, and the stumps of banyan trees on the Upper Chitpur Road were flecked with dots of phosphorus like the ghosts of flames. I was as dark as the new moon in the sky, and I cried very little. I feel as if I remember this, because this is the way it must have been.

My mother died in labor, and later that night the hospital burned to the ground. (I have no reason to connect the two incidents; then again, I have no reason not to. Perhaps a desire to live burned on in my mother's heart. Perhaps the flames were fanned by her hatred for me, the insignificant mewling infant that had killed her.) A nurse carried me out of the roaring husk of the building and laid me in my father's arms. He cradled me, numb with grief.

My father was American. He had come to Calcutta five years earlier, on business. There he had fallen in love with my mother and, like a man who will not pluck a flower from its garden, he could not bear to see her removed from the hot, lush, squalid city that had spawned her. It was part of her exotica. So my father stayed in Calcutta. Now his flower was gone. He pressed his thin chapped lips to the satin of my hair. I remember opening my eyes— they felt tight and shiny, parched by the flames—and looking up at the column of smoke that roiled into the sky, a night sky blasted cloudy pink like a sky full of blood and milk.

There would be no milk for me, only chemical-tasting drops of formula from a plastic nipple. The morgue was in the basement of the hospital and did not burn. My mother lay on a metal table, a hospital gown stiff with her dying sweat pulled up over her red-smeared crotch and thighs. Her eyes stared up through the blackened skeleton of the hospital, up to the milky bloody sky, and ash filtered down to mask her pupils.

My father and I left for America before the monsoon came. Without my mother Calcutta was a pestilential hellhole, a vast cremation grounds, or so my father thought. In America he could send me to school and movies, ball games and Boy Scouts, secure in the knowledge that someone else would take care of me or I would take care of myself. There were no thuggees to rob me and cut my throat, no goondas who would snatch me and sell my bones for fertilizer. There were no cows to infect the streets with their steaming sacred piss. My father could give me over to the comparative wholesomeness of American life, leaving himself free to sit in his darkened bedroom and drink whiskey until his long sensitive nose floated hazily in front of his face and the sabre edge of his grief began to dull. He was the sort of man who has only one love in his lifetime, and knows with the sick fervor of a fatalist that this love will be taken from him someday, and is hardly surprised when it happens.

When he was drunk he would talk about Calcutta. My little American mind rejected the place—I was in love