CREATURES Page 4

  Oh, it was an awful time. One of the Valesquez boys, a blond child just six years old, died on the trip from a high fever. There was such uproar and breast-beating. They held a religious service and performed a hasty burial at sea. They were afraid I would turn the child into a zombie. They circled around me, holding up crosses as if I were a vampire to be held at bay by the Christian symbol, and I laughed, I made a laughing face, because although the heat of the hunger now so often tortures me, I fight valiantly against the desire to harm anyone, especially the quiet dead, especially them, the lucky ones.

  In Mexico I had to stay hidden and only come out at night. My feet, you see, are falling apart. Both my small toes are gone, and the others are following suit each time I dare remove my shoes. And my hands, they're a mess. My gloves make squishy sounds while I try to write this. My face, oh Jesus, if you could see my face. Great chunks are missing. I've tried everything. Bandages. Tape. Staples. The skin is too thin and tender. Nothing holds. My testicles were lost on the boat over. I dropped the shriveled sacks gently into the sea when no one was paying attention to me. Also my nose is gone, thrown to the sea, bait for fish. Although I can't smell anything anymore, I know I must be a pit of vile odors. I can't even get close to the towns anymore. Their dogs come out, lunging and snapping, hoping to tear me to pieces.

  A few days ago I met one person who made me feel that all of this bother and searching and hoping was worthwhile. I lay resting out on the plains outside a small village. I heard a rustle and thought it was a rattlesnake slithering across the sand, but when I sat up there crouched not three feet from me was a young girl who might have been twenty. She was dressed in rags and dishwater blond hair hung in front of dark haunted eyes.

  "You're a zombie, aren't you?" she asked. She was not Spanish, but American.

  The question was so startling that I could just dip my head a little in answer.

  "I've seen you out here walking in circles, pacing at night. Do you understand what I'm saying to you?"

  Again I nodded, but more vigorously. I grabbed for my pad and pencil. I threw a couple of sticks on the fire and motioned her forward. On the pad I wrote, Why aren't you afraid that I'd attack and kill you?

  She said, "I don't know. I just watched you for a while and it seemed to me that you aren't like the others."

  I'm not! I wrote quickly. I was killed and infected, but I'm just the same as I was when I was alive. I don't understand it and I've come all this way from Florida trying to find another one like me. Have you met any?

  She shook her head slowly. "You can't talk?" she asked.

  I wrote, No. My vocal cords are no good and my lungs...well, I have no air in them.

  She did something incredible then. She crept even closer to me and she reached out and she placed her warm hand on my cold shoulder. She said, "I don't think I could have ever thought of something so terrible as what you must be going through. I've traveled three thousand miles, and I've seen dead children in piles waiting for burial, I've seen bombed out cities, and whole towns on the move with just what the people could carry on their backs, but to be...dead...and to know it...My god, I'm sorry, I'm really so sorry. The others, the ones who don't know, they must be better off."

  I lowered my head and stared at the pad and pencil in my hands. My fingers trembled when I tried to write another note. I had to get a firm grip on the pencil.

  Will you stay with me the night and just talk to me? I won't hurt you. If you'll just talk to me, I'd be so grateful.

  And she did. She had me lie on my back. She took one of my gloved hands and despite how my scent must have made her want to gag, she sat beside me all through the darkest hours and she talked to me about her family, her travels, her hopes for the future. She had a bright optimism that made me glow, that made me forget, just for a while, that I had nothing whatsoever to look forward to. She even made me forget that I was ravenous and that without the greatest exertion of will, I would turn on my side, grab her in an unyielding vise, and bite a chunk from her smooth, white, fragrant abdomen.

  When I thought of chewing, of swallowing, of satisfying that burning need that glowed like a large red ember in my belly, I wrenched my thoughts back to the girl's soothing singsong voice, remembering, with her tales, what it was like to be a man. To hear a woman talk to me in that tone of voice reminded me when I would reach out and take the globe of Carrie's breast into my palm, suck her lips separately between my lips, feel her strength beneath me in her heat, rising to meet me, clutching me as she peaked, riding down the escalator into the abyss of surrender... This girl reminded me of life and love and the fickle fate that had severed me from both.

  After the girl left, no one came to the plains again. I have spent days and nights rolling across the sand, holding myself, the hunger so deep it's a scream locked inside me, a claw scraping through my innards. I am afraid now. I know it's gone too far. I would eat now, if given opportunity. If the girl comes back, I will tear her limb from limb and feast. There's no help for it. I'm driven by such tremendous need that when I think of Carrie now, I think of consuming her. When I think of Margaret, I think of what a small, pure, tasty feeding she would be. I would murder and eat that which I had left to protect, that which brought me to this place and in this condition.

  I am now truly as obscene and inhuman as any other of the dead.

  It has come down to this.

  As I hunger, so am I hungered for. Now it's the coyotes who want me at night. Wolves. They come down from the hills and howl at me where I've climbed a tree. Flies have laid eggs in my crevices and I crawl with little white blind...I can't say it, I can't write it, I can't think it... I've always hated even the thought of wiggling, squirming, segmented things.

  There are zombies here as there were in Cuba. I saw them, but the girl told me so, too. There are millions of them. More than live humans. The towns are dead. Stinking. People are on the move everywhere. People kill to get what boats are left. Rafts set sail with dozens on them. All the planes have disappeared from the country. Children are orphaned and have joined into gangs. They are worse than the military in the States, worse than the wolves even. They don't care if you're alive or dead, they shoot to kill, and then they dismantle you as if you were a Tinker toy.

  I've made up my mind. I'm going to let them.

  Shoot me. Why not?

  I don't commit suicide because that's for the living. I commit deathicide. I'll simply walk out into the open and let them explode, with impunity, this long dead body.

  There aren't any zombies like me. But I am becoming one of them. I either die to this world or I turn on men and I eat. I'm the only one who ever knew what this is like and I'm coming to pieces before my own eyes.

  I have no ears. My hair fell out. My eyes are going. I can hardly see to write this. My dwindling muscles have contracted and my bones been broken a thousand times over. I stumble when I try to walk. It's only my brain that knows anything and what it knows it's tired of knowing. There's no pleasure, no curiosity, no hope, no reason to keep going.

  The best I can do is go into that forever darkness where I won't worry about being alone again. I'm placing this notebook in an envelope and I'll hold it to my chest as the gangs shoot my head into tiny bits with their telescopic rifles.

  What becomes of my testament is not of my concern after tonight. I could have sent it to the president in Washington, D.C.--if he's even still there. He's a good man trying to keep a nation together, though I could tell him it's no use. He would never reveal it to people, he couldn't, I understand that, and it doesn't matter that much to me anymore. I thought I could find a way to go on, find a reason why this happened to me. I thought my survival might help in stopping the plague, or that at the very least I could provide an enlightenment about life after death, but I don't think so now. It appears it was futile to ever begin this long trek across miles and oceans.

  I don't mean to sound like suffering Jesus or the tortured Job. I thought I could still find a s
hred of happiness or some meaning, even a tiny pleasure left to me, but I should have known better. I can do one thing. I can tell you to stand and fight. The armies will fall eventually. You'll be on your own. Order will give way even more and there will be nothing but chaos, enemies, and insanity. If you don't fight to the end, are you worthy to be called human? Look in the mirror. Could you call yourself human?

  There has never been a plague like this one and there never will be one again because this is the last. You know they don't understand how the virus mutates and defies all efforts to contain it. As soon as something is tried, the virus changes, finds a way to survive, grows ever stronger and impenetrable. The promised vaccine might work and it might not. None of the "cures" worked, did they? Those early promises of a cure were ridiculous and we know it now. As expensive as they were to make and no matter how much pollyanna-hopeful-bullshit scientific hype you heard about them, they did not work, did they?

  You should be ready if the vaccine doesn't work either.

  The world we have known might really return to the pristine beginning of time when it was nothing more than a revolving ball of watery silence spinning in space.

  If you fight and if you survive it unscathed then there might be a slim possibility there really is a God. I hope there is. I pray there is. For all our sakes.

  Unfortunately, my earnest opinion--and please feel free to disregard it because I don't want to leave you without all hope, that was never my intention--but it just seems to me, in this hour before my real true death, that Nietzsche was probably right.

  The son of a bitch.

  THE END

  ANGELIQUE

  A Prequel Story to the novel BANISHED

  By Billie Sue Mosiman

  Copyright 2011 by Billie-Sue Mosiman

  ANGELIQUE

  Angelique watched the dead man’s eyes open. Success!

  Nisroc was back.

  The body was exquisite—muscled with long legs and wide shoulders. The face was Scandinavian, square with a strong jaw and a high, intelligent brow. The eyes were a blue that would rival the deepest, stormiest seas.

  Now those eyes, no longer dead and empty, but reflecting intelligence and understanding stared back at her. He looked incredulous.

  “Angelique,” he whispered, recognition finally dawning.

  “Can you move?”

  His face drew in with effort. A crease furrowed between his fine, blue eyes.

  “I can’t…”

  She put a hand on his shoulder and pressed him back. He lay on the wood plank floor of her wagon, a small embroidered pillow beneath his head. She had the thick curtains drawn at the back of the wagon, but she still glanced there every little bit to make sure no one had come to fetch her. It was yet two hours before show time, but sometimes they checked her wagon to remind her the panther was calm or the elephant was tearing up his pen again or the lions were so lethargic they’d fed them raw meat coated with pepper to try to rouse them.

  The body she had taken for Nisroc had belonged to the circus high wire walker and special gymnast, a man named Gustav Freedrickson. He had come down with consumption that took but months to wear down his defenses and leave him weakened. Consumption was a scourge racing across most of Europe and Gustav sickened rapidly with a particularly virulent form. He literally coughed himself to death, hemorrhaging his life’s blood in one horrendous, extended spell of spastic lung contractions. Angelique knew he would die and she lusted to own the shell left behind once the spirit absconded. It did not matter the lungs were filled with blood and disease ridden. Once the new spirit took over the entire make-up of the human form would be changed, even down to the molecular level.

  She needed Gustav’s body for Nisroc, her most high fallen angel in the ranks she’d left behind when she herself descended to Earth.

  Until now she hadn’t needed any of the other angels’ help, but finally it had become imperative. She was, after all, a child. She was tired of training humans to do her bidding, to stand in as her parent or guardian. She wanted a partner, not a puppet. She wanted Nisroc.

  “I have to go prepare the animals for the show, but I’ll be back as soon as I can. Just rest here.”

  Nisroc nodded, blinking with some confusion. Angelique patted his shoulder, smiled, and throwing back the curtains, leapt down from the wagon.

  Dying sunlight pierced through the slight opening between the curtains, but most of the interior lay in shadow.

  The beautiful male form that remained prone on the boards of the wagon did not move an inch only because right now he could not move. The supernatural elements of his being busily suffused the human body, permeating the cells, flowing through the bloodstream, animating the heart, the damaged lungs, and filling the brain with new light…

  ***

  Within an hour Nisroc felt a human strength he had not felt in nearly two thousand years. As disembodied angel there were no sensations of body, only of mind. Now that Angelique had brought him to Earth again, he reveled in the sensations he had only dreamed about for all those long moments lost in the dark alone-and-lonely void. It was almost painful to see the dim light streaming through the parted curtains beyond his feet. The boards under his back felt like rock, hard and pressing against his flesh and bone. His nostrils flared with the mingled scents that assaulted his senses—Angelique’s clothes that stank of her human sweat, dust that was settled over the canvas roof of the wagon, and beyond the wagon, the scent of food cooking, animal dung, wood fire smoke, latrines full of human waste. He swallowed and marveled at the sensation of saliva sliding down his throat. He moved his tongue over his teeth, front, back, and sides, finding them firm and whole and clean. He drew in air and sighed at the beauty of oxygen filling what had been ravaged lungs that even now was in the process of rejuvenation.

  He loved this world. He loved life, real life lived in human form. A beating heart, rhythmically drumming to circulate his warm blood, seemed to speak like a lost lover as it reverberated in his ears. It whispered I AM, I EXIST, I LIVE…I AM IN THE HERE AND NOW, REAL. There was nothing compared to this existence. No angel in heaven or cast into the nether regions experienced such fantastic sensations. The mind lived forever, the soul never died, but the body was a magical mechanism that took in all of life and translated it into sensation and that was God’s most gracious gift in all of creation.

  Nisroc had hungered for it always, true life. In God’s court there was but mind and spirit. But what He created on this planet was the true bounty--the experience of living man.

  Now thanks to Angelique, She Who Ruled the Fallen, he was back. Back in the world!

  The very thought propelled him. He came up as if loosened from chains, sitting straight, shoulders back, hips tensed. From this perspective the world seemed to tilt and skew for a moment. He closed his eyes, but the darkness behind his lids scared him, reminded him of the dark from which he’d come, so he quickly opened his eyes, his mouth falling open. He took a deep breath. He looked around.

  Angelique was living such a meager existence. Her clothes, lying crumpled on the floor and hung from pegs, were ragged and faded. Her bed was made of rope, woven and tied, swinging from the ribs of the canopy that covered the wagon. She had a small chest, but without looking in it he knew there was little of value there.

  Reduced to these circumstances he could understand why she needed his assistance. She had tried for three lifetimes to make it on her own, training humans to care for her. Losing her last human to death threw her again on her own where she’d discovered this job with the traveling circus. Naturally they had not wanted her, hadn’t believed she’d be of use—a ten-year-old waif with worn shoes and holes in her clothes. But she had convinced the Master of the circus that she had supernatural abilities dealing with his few wild caged animals. She could make them bend to her will. The elephant lifted front legs into the air on her command and danced when she made her biding. The lions sat on small stools and roared on cue. The panther, the best perfo
rmer of all, slithered in a circle, its sinuous muscles moving like snakes beneath its skin. It could leap through a burning ring of hay bales and leap out again unscathed. It would go to its belly and let Angelique climb onto its back for a ride around the circus arena. It could even stand up on its back legs, taller than a man, and scream with a piercing cry, showing teeth that were a child’s nightmare. This panther, under Angelique’s tutelage, had become the star of the show.

  In his dark place in the far regions of creation Nisroc had now and again widened his vision in order to see what Angelique was doing. He tried to imagine the scent of the animals, tried to hear the sound of the wind and rain, tried to feel the rest of true sleep, but all he could do was watch and hunger and hope.

  Now she had deigned to bring him to her and he was so full of joy and appreciation that he thought he might burst.

  He felt an itching on his back and sensed his great wings buried beneath his skin, but only as nubs, tiny buds of flesh that through the strength of his will he could cause to grow. Not now, of course. He had no use for them in this fine body of a man. But he knew they were there if ever he did need them.

  He lifted his arms above his head and laughed. LIFE!

  **

  Angelique returned to her wagon after the show. The crowds were thinning, families trudging home to London and outlying farms. She carried a bowl of stew made from goat, potatoes, rutabagas, and carrots. Nisroc would need to eat. By now she expected he was able to move, but even though his angel being was renewing the diseased human flesh, he still needed to take sustenance just as any man would. He was now part angel, part human, the greater being angel. She was so excited he was with her. Human guardians were fine for a while, but tended in the end to be such a burden. Nisroc, on the other hand, was like her—nearly indestructible. Some accident might fatally injure the body, even kill it, but being angel made them both so quick, so sensitive to danger, that neither of them needed to worry overmuch about human death. Given the properties they had brought to the body from the angelic realm, it was as if they were a completely different, rare, and superior species.