John Lindqvist - Handling The Undead

… nice… think nice…

Anna sobbed and took a few steps. Something rattled near her feet, but she paid it no attention, continuing instead toward the boat, toward the creature whose head tugged and jerked above her father's lifeless body.

Disgusting bloody. …… nice… .

She knew. Deep down she knew. As long as she'd sat on the bed doing nothing, thinking nothing, the creature had simply stood outside and looked at them. It was when she had gone up to the window and screamed at it to go away, sent hatred and disgust to it, that it had broken the window. It was her terror that had driven its attempts to get in in the first place.

When her father had started to send hate to the creature, toward the image of the eel in the chest cavity, she had tried to send the same thing as Elias was now doing: Think nice, but she had not reached him, and now it was too late.

It's a challenge to reason clearly when someone has just killed your father. Quite a challenge.

Disgusting bloody white disgusting. …

She continued into the grass, unable to find any nice words.

Everything was being taken from her, bit by bit, person by person. She saw the creature stand up, go down into the reeds and cross the sand toward the boat, toward her.

Her gaze flitted over the ground, looking for a strong tree branch, something to use as a weapon. The branches lying on the ground were all clearly rotten, otherwise they would not have fallen. The creature's feet sloshed through wet seaweed and Anna suddenly spotted the drying rack where Elias' socks still hung. She could break it off, she could use it as…

The creature was level with the boat now and Anna was moving parallel to the shore higher up. If she managed to break off the rack, if she could-Elias squirmed restlessly in her arms, the blanket dragging by her feet-if she could…

What? What? You can't kill someone who's already dead.

But nonetheless she persevered along the hill, laid Elias down on the rocky ground and pulled on the pole, forcing it back and forth. The elements had weathered the wood, but her terror made her strong and the rack broke off at its foot with a creak. Elias' socks were still dangling on their hooks and even as the creature was coming up through the grass, only five metres away, she dashed the rack against the rockface to break off the cross board, make a clean weapon.

Mother's little Olle, walking in the woods…

Elias' little voice penetrated the shell of her terror and she understood. As the creature reached the foot of the boulder right under her and the cadaver stench reached her nostrils she disconnected every other thought and filled her head with:

Roses on his cheek and sunshine in his eyes lips so small, of blueberries so blue

She could not think nice, but she could sing in her mind. The creature stopped. Its legs froze, its arms went limp. A machine suddenly run out of fuel.

If only I did not have to walk here quite so alone.

The tears ran silently down Anna's cheeks as she saw a black substance smeared around the creature's mouth, but she would not think about Daddy's blood, nor anything that could lead her thoughts to anger and hatred. Instead she went on reciting:.

' Brummelibrum, Hark! Who goes there?,

The bushes are shaking, it must be a dog.!

The irony of the lyrics made her body tremble, but she was no longer in her body. She was standing beside it. Noting its changes, seeing what it saw, but directing: directing the body's brain to keep singing.

The creature turned and walked back the way it had come:

toward the inlet, toward the jutting rocks, toward her father's body. She did not reflect on this, simply noted that it was happening.

She waited half a minute until she reached the end of the song, then wrapped Elias in the blanket and walked down to the boat. The yellow moon was reflected in a little pool on the rock face and as the grass whispered over her legs she saw-

Yellow?

– that yellow glow was all wrong. She looked again. The light was coming from the cell phone. She had dropped it. Still singing the same song-she dared not change in case she broke her concentration-she fished up the phone and laid it on Elias' stomach, walked down to the boat.

Teddy he eats almost all that there is. …

She settled Elias on the bottom and avoided looking toward the inlet as she pushed the boat out from the edge of the shore, took a couple of steps into the water and crawled in. The boat floated well and they glided out onto the faintly ruffled water. Anna sat in the middle seat, and saw the bags of food, the water. In the silence she heard the moist crunching sounds

from the inlet, the sound of a fish being gutted. Her lower jaw started to quiver, she hugged herself.

He tried to… he meant well… he just wanted to… filthy disgusting… . Holds out his basket with chubby little hands…

She had to keep singing. The creature could swim.

She unshipped the oars with shaking hands and rowed out into the inlet on the other side. She knew it was in the wrong direction, but she could not stand to get closer, perhaps see…

When she had rowed about fifty strokes and there was only the blue expanse of the Sea of Aland behind her back she let the oars go, let them hang freely from the rowlocks and crept down next to Elias, curled up on the bottom next to him and let everything come. Stopped fleeing, stopped singing, simply stopped.

The southerly breeze was slowly moving them farther and farther out. Gaskobb Island floated past and soon Soderarrn's lone blinking eye was the only thing that could be seen between space and the sea.

The Heath 22.00

Flora stood there gazing at the mass of tangled bodies.

That evening in Elvy's garden she had wished-she had known that something was going to happen. Something that would change Sweden forever. Now it had happened, and what was the change?

Nothing.

Terror gave birth to terror, hatred begat hate and all that was left in the end was a pile of burnt bodies. As everywhere; as always.

Something was moving among the bodies.

At first she thought it was fingers that had managed to survive the blaze somehow and were now struggling to make their way out. Then she saw it was caterpillars. White caterpillars burrowing their way out of some of the bodies. The stench from the bonfire was unbearable despite her face mask and she shuffled back a couple of metres.

Only seven caterpillars had emerged, even though there had been around fifteen people to start.

She took the others.

She knew the caterpillars were people… no, the caterpillars were the human element in the people, given a visible form it was possible to comprehend in this world. Not even her twin was really her twin-she wasn't anything that could be understood in human terms. Flora had known that in the second they had stared into each other's eyes.

The other Flora, the one wearing her best sneakers, was only a force: one that manifested itself in a way that made sense to each individual. The only constant was the hooks, since the task of the power was to catch, to collect. And not even the hooks were anything real, simply an image people could understand.

The caterpillars that had emerged from the black mass wriggled, nowhere to go now that their host had been destroyed.

Lost, Flora thought. Lost.

There was nothing she could do. They had turned away in fear and were now lost. As she watched they swelled up, becoming first pink, then red.

Faintly, faintly, Flora could hear screams of anguish as the caterpillar-people realised what she already knew: they were now being pulled inexorably to the other place. The place of which nothing can be said. Nothing.