In the last hour of the night I found myself wandering through a wasteland of factories and warehouses, of smokestacks and rusty corrugated tin gates, of broken windows. There seemed to be thousands of broken windows. After a while I realized I was on the Upper Chitpur Road. I walked for a while in the watery light that fills the sky before dawn. Eventually I left the road and staggered through the wasteland. Not until I saw its girders rising around me like the charred bones of a prehistoric animal did I realize I was in the ruins of the hospital where I had been born.
The hole of the basement had filled up with broken glass and crumbling metal, twenty years’ worth of cinders and weeds, all washed innocent in the light of the breaking dawn. Where the building had stood there was only a vast depression in the ground, five or six feet deep. I slid down the shallow embankment, rolled, and came to rest in the ashes. They were infinitely soft; they cradled me. I felt as safe as an embryo. I let the sunrise bathe me. Perhaps I had climbed into the gory chasm between Kali’s legs after all, and found my way out again.
Calcutta is cleansed each morning by the dawn. If only the sun rose a thousand times a day, the city would always be clean.
Ashes drifted over me, smudged my hands gray, flecked my lips. I lay safe in the womb of my city, called by its poets Lord of Nerves, city of joy, the pussy of the world. I felt as if I lay among the dead. I was that safe from them: I knew their goddess, I shared their many homes. As the sun came up over the mud and glory of Calcutta, the sky was so full of smoky clouds and pale pink light that it seemed, to my eyes, to burn.
FOLLOWED
by Will McIntosh
Will McIntosh’s fiction has been published in Strange Horizons, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Postscripts, Interzone, and Futurismic. His story “Perfect Violet” was selected to appear in Science Fiction: Best of the Year, 2008 Edition. McIntosh is currently working on his first novel, Soft Apocalypse, based on the story of the same name published in Interzone.
McIntosh says that zombies are a way to face the existential terror we feel at the awareness of our own mortality. “I think people love zombie fiction because it explores that terror so directly—the dead are right there, in your face, and they’re not ‘undead’ beings with supernatural powers and sexy lives, they’re corpses,” he says. “Corpses scare the shit out of us.”
“Followed” is the result of a discussion McIntosh initiated in a graduate social psychology class he was teaching, in which he posed the question: If you knew you could save lives for $100 each, how many would you save? “I pointed out that we probably can save lives for $100 or less, and we don’t,” McIntosh says, “and each of us has to live with that knowledge, or rationalize it away, or sell our cars.”
She came wandering down the sidewalk like any other corpse, her herky-jerky walk unmistakable among the fluid strides of the living. She was six or seven, Southeast Asian, maybe Indian, her ragged clothes caked in dried mud. Pedestrians cut a wide berth around her without noticing her at all.
I thought nothing of her, figured the person she followed had ditched her in a car, and she was catching up in that relentless way that corpses do. I was downtown, sitting outside Jittery Joe’s Coffee Shop on a summer afternoon. There were still a few weeks before fall semester, so I was relaxed, in no hurry to get anywhere.
I returned to the manuscript I was reading, and didn’t think another thing of the corpse until I noticed her in my peripheral vision, standing right in front of my table. I glanced up at her, turned, looked over my shoulder, then back at her. Then I realized. She was looking at me with that unfocused stare, with those big, lifeless brown eyes. As if she was claiming me. But that couldn’t be. I waited for her to move on, but she just stood. I lifted my coffee halfway to my mouth, set it back down shakily.
The woman at the next table, dressed in a green hemp dress, her foot propped on an empty chair, looked at me over the top of her paperback with thinly veiled disdain. When I caught her eye she looked back down at the paperback.
I lurched to my feet, the metal chair screeching on the brick pavement, my barely touched coffee sloshing onto the table, and retreated down the sidewalk.
I ducked into the anonymity of my parked car and lingered there, tracking the corpse in my rear-view mirror as she lurched toward me. Maybe it was a mistake, a misunderstanding—maybe she’d walk right past me. My Volvo Green was a fuel-cell vehicle, dammit, the most efficient I could afford, not an energy pig like most corpse-magnets drove. How could I have hooked a corpse? I cracked my window, waited to see if she would pass.
I heard her little feet scuffing the pebbly pavement as she drew close. She stopped three feet from my door, turned and faced me. Her face was round and babyish, her chin a tiny knot under her slack, open mouth. She was so tiny.
I started the car and pulled out, almost hitting another car. As I drove off I saw my corpse in the side mirror, lurching down the sidewalk, patiently following whatever homing device the dead used to track those they had claimed.
Every few minutes I pulled back the curtain to see if she was coming. And then there she was, walking along the side of the road with her head down. She turned up my driveway, stubbed her toe on the thin lip of asphalt, stumbled, regained her tenuous balance. She struggled stiffly up the three steps to my front door and stopped. I dropped the curtain, got up and locked the dead bolt.
I phoned Jenna.
“I have a corpse,” I said as soon as she answered.
“Oh my God, Peter,” Jenna said. There was a long pause. “Are you sure?”
“Well Christ,” I wailed, “she’s standing on my fucking doorstep. I’m pretty sure she’s mine.”
“I don’t understand. You don’t deserve a corpse.”
“I know. Jesus, I can’t believe it. I just can’t believe it.”
Jenna consoled me by ticking off the evidence, all the ways I was not like other corpse-owners. Then she changed the subject. I wasn’t in the mood to talk about university politics or how-was-your-day minutiae, so I got off the phone after making plans to have dinner with her.
I tried to distract myself by turning on the TV. I checked the stock market. The Dow was up almost three percent, the NASDAQ two. I switched to the news. The president was conducting a press conference in a field of newly constructed windmills, on her decision to pull out of the Kyoto III accord. “We’re doing everything we can to curb global warming,” she said to the cameras, “but we will not bow to foreign pressure. The American way of life is not negotiable.” Blah, blah, blah. Even with the news cameras picking the best angles a few hundred of her corpses were visible, cordoned from her by a phalanx of blue-suited secret service agents. The corpse of an emaciated four- or five-year-old black boy, his distended belly bulging as if a kickball was hidden under his skin, wandered through a breach and headed toward the president. He was swept up by an agent and returned to the crowd. But gently—the administration didn’t want to give Amnesty International any more ammunition.