Book of the Dead: A Zombie Anthology (37 page)

“Three hundred lek,” the old Albanian told him.

“Three hundred! You’re joking!” He looked aghast at the clapped-out old three-wheeler. “That wouldn’t get me to Durres, never mind Shkodra.”

“It’s a good vehicle. Three hundred lek. Very good price. Look elsewhere if you wish.”

Hašek knew Kadare had him; there was nowhere else to go. The old man had a virtual monopoly in the city and therefore in the country, for the city had expanded to such an extent that the two were now the same.

“Two hundred,” Hašek tried.

“Three hundred,” was the reply, no hesitation. “The tank is ful . The battery charged.”

He drove most of the way one-handed. His left hand mimed the lower notes of “These Foolish Things” while the fingers of his right hand tapped out the high notes on the steering wheel. The sky appeared briefly between concrete wal s and rusting iron roofs. Literal y thousands of people were wandering about; war casualties, their Albanian hosts, and some of the American and European refugees who had fled the war and got in before visa controls were introduced.

The farther north he went, the more iron and steel dominated the ramshackle architecture at the expense of concrete and rough stone. The dead were everywhere, walking from one construction to another, visible also through gaps in the wal s, sitting watching television and playing games.

Shkodra was close, just beyond lay Yugoslavia and his only chance of obtaining visas for Barton.

She was waiting in West Berlin, checking every day at the replication unit where the documents would come through if Hašek was successful.

“Why do you want to join a squad?” they asked him, with some suspicion.

He’d decided against honesty. It would only create extra difficulties.

“I want something to do. I’m bored of the games.”

“So it would be just a game for you?”

“No. Far from it. It’s how we make our country rich. It’s serious business.” They just stared at him. “I want to be useful.”

They knew he was lying. The dead never did anything for the good of anyone else—unless by accident. They acted purely out of self-interest. Slaves to instinct. But it seemed he’d said the right words.

“There’s a squad leaving tonight, one man short. The fourth member final y lost al power of movement today. Sulphur mustard gas. Kil ed him some weeks ago, but left him able to move.

Until today.”

The man took out a smal map of the vicinity and began drawing on it. “Look. This is where you should meet them.”

It was like a gulch between two massive skeletal blocks of rough concrete apartments, built in the early days of the war when the first casualties were arriving by boat and pushing inland. The lights were purplish and glimmering. An ex-Yugoslav army jeep lurched up the rough road, throwing its two occupants about inside.

“Why did you want to join us?” asked the driver, a Russian cal ed Varnov, who had been so badly burned he had no skin left apparent on his body. He wore a loose-fitting, torn-and-patched military uniform actual y from the old Albanian armed services. He and Jensen, a tal , strong Danish woman with strange, mauve eyes and close-cropped, dyed-black hair, had picked up Hašek and another group member, Vol mer, a dark-skinned German, and were now jostling northwards minutes from the border.

“Something to do,” Hašek replied without turning his gaze from the mountains. Even here the city climbed the slopes in iron and steel and prefabricated units, on which the endless lights shone thickly. The sky was spiderweb-bed with reception aerials and radar warning systems. The defenses had so far proved impenetrable to military forces, though in fact little was known about the country outside of its own and Yugoslavia’s borders.

They had no trouble at the frontier, thanks to the agreement between the two states. Yugoslavia conducted corrupt arms deals for money and was living with both East and West, while Albania persisted in isolationism. But since many native Albanians had joined their leadership in accepting the Greek Orthodox Church’s offer to possess and settle on Corfu, the people of Albania—the dispossessed, the exiled, and in the greatest numbers, the dead— often crossed to Yugoslavia to enjoy a share of that country’s opportunities for exploitation.

Which was what Hašek was doing now. Varnov’s squad would cruise until they found living people who would be especial y vulnerable to their particular form of attack. They were entering the outskirts of Titograd, where there was no shortage of black-market traders—the people with whom the squad would eventual y do business—but their numbers were constantly multiplying as more flowed into the country, so that even with the death squads targeting them, they were not significantly depleted.

Smoke issued from a side street and a vehicle exited under its cover so suddenly that the squad’s jeep had to veer sharply to the right to avoid a col ision.

The first they knew was a guttural scream from the German, Vol mer, sitting in the back on Hašek’s left. Two spikes of a grappling hook pinned him to the jeep’s bodywork, one through the shoulder, the other through his forehead and skul . A chain taut from the stem of the hook disappeared into the smoke, stretching to the other vehicle, stil hidden but tracking the jeep. A second hook thudded into the hood and dragged the jeep off course. Varnov attempted to regain control, but the aggressor appeared to their left and smashed heavily into the side of the jeep. This set the jeep back on its original course, and as Hašek cut through the chain of the rear hook, and Jensen, in the passenger seat, worked at the front hook, Varnov regained power in his steering. Having done so, using the element of surprise, he jerked the wheel to the left and the nose of the jeep careened into the front right side of the other vehicle, a Hungarian armored car.

Hašek and Vol mer, who had freed himself from the hook, opened fire on the Hungarian unit. A grenade bounced off their own bonnet and exploded away to the right. Jensen engaged her weapon and delivered a sustained vol ey of automatic fire across the gap between the two vehicles. Although the side of the car was visible, its occupants were not. They were stil active, however, shooting sporadical y and with no great accuracy, though one bul et did tear through Hašek’s upper arm, missing the muscle by mil imeters.

Varnov passed something back to Vol mer, saying: “Use it. I can’t aim while driving.” Vol mer had a look; it was a thermite grenade. But before he had a chance to lob it over, his whole body jerked backwards, pivoting at the neck. Hašek twisted his head around. A man had jumped from the other car and was riding on the back bumper, holding onto a garrote around Vol mer’s neck.

The man’s face trailed off halfway down: nose, mouth, and chin were gone, wiped out in some former conflict. Just tatters of flesh were left in front of his top vertebrae, which Hašek saw through the space where his throat should have been. Clearly the man was one of their own people, not a Hungarian soldier; but once engaged in hostilities, it was hard to let go. He freed one of his hands, took a pistol from his belt, and fired at Hašek. The Czech was thrown to the floor of the jeep with the force of the shot, which had lodged under his shoulder blade. He grunted, not with pain but with displeasure at being so unceremoniously floored by a man from the same side. He took aim with his own gun, but his stream of bul ets hit air. The wire had sliced right through Vol mer’s neck and spine, and the faceless attacker fel away, clutching the German’s head. Meanwhile, Jensen had retrieved the grenade and skil ful y threw it high so that it dropped in the armored car and exploded on impact. The thermite flashed bril iantly, silhouetting the remaining three dead men as they carbonated and were swiftly destroyed.

The men in the armored car had certainly been pirates, just like Varnov, Vol mer, Jensen, and Hašek, looking for the same thing but ending up mistaking the jeep’s crew for some of their living, breathing targets. Now the three had to press on, without Vol mer; the remainder of his body stil sat uselessly alongside Hašek.

Jensen and Varnov wouldn’t think Hašek’s reasons for being there were any different from theirs: to plunder the living for their special booty, which in Yugoslavia was easily exchanged either for straight cash or for the technological hardware and luxury goods the new Albanians depended on.

They weren’t in it for the general good, but because personal instinct drove them on. And if a man had twelve televisions, he probably wouldn’t be able to watch them al at the same time, so his neighbor could take one almost without him noticing. In a land where the people had so few desires, they were wel served by what was basical y an anarchic system. Al aspirations concurred.

Apart from a few exceptions. Hašek being one. He’d been creative in his life, a man of music. The memories of it haunted him. Even now his fingers were playing “Anthropology” on the butt and barrel of his submachine gun as the jeep rattled on.

They drove through another area of fires, keeping especial y vigilant regarding the thick clouds of low smoke.

Hel a Elizabeth Barton scanned the street behind her before turning into Gothaerstrasse. Her suspicion was not unfounded; she’d been under surveil ance for some weeks now, ever since meeting and forming an attachment to Trefzger. A vociferous opponent of chemical and bacteriological weapons since before the war started, he had been a marked man, official y, for years; branded a communist, a pacifist, an anarchist, and general y a headcase, but a dangerous one, he lived under the constant watchful eye of military and civil authorities in West Berlin.

In the last few days, though, he had gone into hiding, and Barton had been doing her best to conceal her movements. Making love by candlelight was preferable to sex by torchlight, which they had endured in Trefzger’s old apartment, as the duty officers in the street and the building opposite played their torches constantly over his curtained windows.

Barton ducked through the basement window and felt her way around the decaying wal s of the room to the door at the far side. She worked the locks and shut the door behind her. Down the steps, dripping moss and fungus, and through another locked door at the bottom. She was in the derelict U-bahn tunnel—commissioned, built, and never used—and had to feel her way again.

She always expected a train to come scraping along the rusted rails, but one never did, nor ever would.

Six knocks brought Trefzger to the door. He hustled her in before saying hel o.

“You’re getting very jumpy these days, Detlef,” she reproached him.

“I should go and live in Albania,” he replied, “where your Hašek is.”

“He’s not my Hašek. And anyway, Berlin is the perfect place. Your work would never reach anyone from down there.”

“Of course it would,” he said. “They have excel ent communications. Probably the best in the world.” He looked at her. “Let’s go in.”

Later, when they were lying on a deep rug and she was running a hand through his long blond hair, he asked: “How was your day at the replication unit?”

“You talk as if I work there,” she said. “I only waited an hour. Nothing came through. No documents, no messages. Any day now though, I should think.”

“He must real y want you, Hel a.”

“No, I don’t think so. I think he just wants something from me. Wants to use me. Same old story.”

“You know,” Trefzger said, sitting up, “you shouldn’t pretend to be so cynical. I can see you stil feel for him underneath.”

“You’re jealous,” she said, gently scratching his back.

He laid a hand on her thigh. “No, I’m not jealous. You’l grow tired of me one day like you did of him.”

“He died in a chemical attack a year ago.”

“You left him long before that, Hel a. Seven or eight years before. He no longer excited you, just as one day I wil no longer excite you.”

“That’s not true.” She sat up ful y and threaded her hand around his waist, al owing it to drop to his crotch. “You excite me. He never did.”

Trefzger knew it wasn’t true, but rather than being a lie, it was a sort of code. He turned and kneeled between her legs. She drew his head closer and they kissed. He kissed her chin, her neck, her shoulders, and her breasts, gently biting. She threw her head back and tried to control her breathing. She opened her eyes to see if that would help. There was Detlef’s desk, his computer, the monitor screen a pattern of green symbols. Papers, books, pens, pencils… It was no good, the catalog of mundanity could not distract her body. She trembled as he sucked at her breast and as she distinctly felt the pulsing of his blood between her thighs. Wheezing now, she ignored the pain and hitched her legs up a little.

“Al right?” he asked her.

“Yes,” between gasps for air.

“Your asthma?”

“Yes. Come on.”

He didn’t move, so she moved up farther, opened wider, and eased down onto his penis. He responded, thrusting up, and she yelped, then wheezed. Her breathing was a harsh rasp, but she urged him on, quicker stil and harder. He came suddenly and she rode higher, then fel back, away, breathing quickly and noisily.

“Here.” Trefzger had reached for her insufflator. She pressed and inhaled, twice.

“It’s ridiculous,” she said, between gulping for air. “You’re meant… to grow out of it… I’m getting… worse every day. A doctor… the other day… told me if I didn’t have this stuff…”

indicating the drug, “and I had a severe attack… it could be serious.”

“I was wondering,” Trefzger said, slowly, “why it should be getting worse. Then it came to me today. It’s the germs. Al the bacteriological stuff. Most of them are composed of tiny spores.

Tularemia, anthrax, plague, al these things. They are acting as irritants. There’s not enough in the air to kil , but plenty to exacerbate an asthmatic reaction. That’s the case away from the most active war zones, anyway. That’s why I don’t think you should go down to Belgrade or Tirana.”

“I have to,” she said, breathing a little more easily. “He needs me. He wants to live again, and I’m the only person he’s got to help him.”

“You do care more about him than me.” Trefzger sounded hurt.

“I don’t,” she shouted. “Don’t you understand? He needs me for five minutes. It’s not much to ask.”