John Lindqvist - Handling The Undead

I'm… locked out.

They did not want him. What had he done? It was as if Anna had been biding her time before she let the bomb drop, allowed him to understand that he was not wanted. Took her chance as soon as they got here, when there was no possibility of flight.

He picked up a stone, tossed it at a gull and missed by several metres. A white sail sliced the horizon like a shark fin in the distance. He slapped his hand against the rock face.

Let them try to manage on their own. Let them just try.

He blocked the thought, tried to erase it. Could they hear him? The insight that, on top of everything else, he had to be careful what he was thinking was even more enraging. He was alone, and could not even be alone in peace.

This was not how he had imagined it. Not at all.

The Heath 12.50

With each step Flora took toward the buildings, she could feel the field grow stronger. If the sensation outside the gates had been of streams running through her head, this was more like wandering into a gradually thickening fog. And just as fog magnifies sound, she could hear single individuals' thoughts faintly but clearly, distant cries. When she reached the area between the buildings she stopped, and took it in.

She had never before experienced anything like this field. It consisted of consciousness, many consciousnesses, but they were simply there: a strong presence, thinking no thoughts. There were thoughts, though. Mental exclamations of horror could be heard within the field, causing it to grow in intensity, just as an electric conductor grows warm when power flows through it.

The more you fear us, the bigger we get.

She leaned against a wall and it was as if there was not enough space for her. There was a micro version of everything happening in the area right now inside her head, and mainly it was terror, despair-the base human emotions, the reflexes of the reptilian mind, and she could feel them everywhere so strongly that she thought the field ought to be visible, billowing in the air like waves of heat rising from the asphalt.

This is not good, this is… dangerous.

She took a couple of steps with her hands around her head and looked in through a balcony window on the ground level. She saw a living room without furniture. Sitting in the middle of the floor there was a figure in a blue hospital gown and pants. A figure, because it was almost impossible to tell if it was a man or a woman. Almost all the hair had fallen from the head, the features had withered away and the yellowing skin was smeared onto the skeleton as though a temporary cover had been applied for the sake of decency. No meat, no muscles. The person on the floor had about as much identity as a head that has spent a couple of weeks on a spike.

Even so the body had not collapsed. It sat rigid, tense, legs jutting out; staring at a point straight ahead. The eyes were too deeply sunk into the skull for it to be clear where the gaze was directed, but the head was turned to the front.

A frog was hopping between its legs. For a moment Flora thought it was a real frog but when she'd watched the mechanical hopping for a couple of seconds she realised it was a toy. Up and down, up and down the frog jumped and the dead person sat with gaping mouth, following its movements. A soft clicketyclack, clicketyclack could be heard through the windows.

The movements became slower, the frog's hopping more feeble.

Finally there were only small death twitches in its legs, then it stopped completely.

The dead person leaned over and put a hand on the frog, hitting it a couple of times. When nothing happened the frog was lifted to eye level and the dead person studied it, bony fingers working across the frog's smooth metallic surface. Found the key and turned it over and over and over. Put the frog back down on the ground, where it resumed its hopping, observed with exactly the same interest.

Flora turned away from the window and shook her head, which still rang with the anguished cries of a suffering that was in her, but was not hers. She walked into the nearest courtyard, saw the grey facades, the rows of repaired windows, the emptiness between the front doors now that people had gone in to see their own.

Hell. This is Hell.

She had thought this place was creepy before: all the garbage, people quarrelling in bombed-out apartments, but that was nothing compared to what she felt now. Every speck of dirt had been removed from the walkways and a smell of disinfectant hovered in the air. The apartments had been set up nicely, cleaned; the dead had been given somewhere to live and it was simply new graves. Sit still in the grave, staring at an endlessly repeated motion. Hell.

Flora walked out into the middle of the yard where once a playground might have been planned, but they had got no further than the swing supports and a couple of benches. She sat down heavily, pressing the heels of her hands into her eyes until she saw exploding suns.

But the field… the presence…

A couple with hunched shoulders walked out of a building. A man and a woman. The man was thinking something about regard her as dead and the woman was a little girl, clambering up into her mother's lap.

Flora put her backpack down next to the bench and curled herself up. Peter's building was a couple of hundred metres away and she didn't have the energy to get there. She wished the field would fade back just a little, but there was intense motion everywhere, a cacophony of revulsion and denial that just fed it.

Somewhere behind her glass broke. She looked, but was only in time to see the flash of shards falling to the ground, shattering. There was a scream from somewhere. Oddly enough, she found it calming. The pressure was starting to find release. She smiled.

It is starting.

Yes. It was starting like a distant hum, a swarm of mosquitoes on a summer evening that you can hear but not see. It came closer, slicing through all the other sounds.

Something was coming.

The sharp sound, piercing now, assumed physical form, became a force that was directed at her, pushing her head down and to the right.

Was it her gift? She found she could pinpoint the exact location of the sound; it came from a spot ten metres to the left of her and she understood its significance: she was not allowed to look at that place.

The source changed position, moving away from her.

I am not afraid!

With the muscles of her neck straining, as if she were straightening up under a heavy load, she turned her head up to the left. And saw.

She saw herself moving away from herself.

The girl walking across the yard had a too-large outfit exactly the same as hers. The same backpack, the same straggly red hair. The only thing different was the shoes. The girl was wearing her favourite shoes, the sneakers that had broken; but on her they were intact.

The girl stopped, as if she had felt Flora's eyes in her back. The screech of grinding metal in her head did not let up, and there was no possibility that she could get up and follow the girl when she started moving again, going on down the path to the next courtyard. All the strength in her legs was gone. Flora collapsed on the bench, sobbing and averting her gaze. The screeching stopped.

She closed her eyes, lying down on the bench with her backpack as a pillow, turning her back in the direction she had seen the girl, hugging herself.

I saw it, she thought. It was here and I saw it.

The Heath 12.55

It was not easy to find 17C. New hospital-style signs had been put up but no one had removed the old ones. The result was a contradictory mixture of directions to different street names between identical blocks of houses. It was like a maze, with people wandering around like lab rats and no one to stop and ask the way.