The house is oddly familiar, in the way all rundown houses are. But in the end, the sun forces my decision. Out here, it always does. The dead things behind me stink. My water is almost gone, so too the packets of junk food I stole from a screaming petrol-station worker while zombies tried to clamber over her counter. At least the farmhouse offers shade. So I hurry.
The screen door opens with a groan that echoes down the dark hallway. Like the house is a zombie itself. It bangs when I shut it, resists when I try to do a rusted latch. In the end I resort to a piece of stiff wire to keep it closed. There are still gaps at the floor and again near the ceiling; the door doesn’t line up properly. But they’re too small for the roo, the crumbling stairs hopefully too difficult for the lizards and the bony, disconnected arms.
I wonder if there’s any water left in an old, dry place like this. Sunlight splinters in through the door, but the details of the house remain in shadow. I can’t see the color of the threadbare carpet, I can’t make out the photos in frames that hang on the wall. All I can see is an opening at the end, shifting with a curtain of beads that rattle in a warm breeze.
I brush the beads aside, ignoring cobwebs that stick to my hand and shoulder, and step into a kitchen. Dried eucalypt leaves darken the floor, piling up in corners and beneath cabinets. The windows are open, glass smashed and tattered curtains of yellowing lace fluttering.
A long, dark timber table dominates the room; it pushes out over cracked linoleum from a faded green wall. An old woman sits at one end, thin white hair pinned to her head, floral-patterned dress too wide for her skeletal frame. She looks up at me, and she smiles. Unfocused, watery eyes dance, her hands play with sticks and little white stones on the tabletop.
That’s when I realize I should never have stepped inside. It is her house, changed, yes, but hers all the same. Older, wider, spread somehow from a city two-bedroom to a farmhouse. But I know that table; I recognize those lacy drapes.
I try to take a step back. Something presses against my back. Large and solid, but damp. Cold fluids soak through my shirt.
I gag as rot washes over me, ripe, strangely sweet and thick. It runs down the back of my throat.
Hands grip my shoulders. They hold me upright and
ooze
against my skin.
“So, dearie.” The old woman’s voice still sounds like the rattling of bones. Only now, it’s a sound I know well. “Have you found what you were looking for?”
“Your Necromancer’s a woman. Did you know that?”
The Hunter tipped his hat back and scowled. The only admission of surprise he was likely to give. “Why do you say that?”
The young policeman shifted on his feet, uncomfortable beneath the Hunter’s scrutiny. “We have reports . . . ah, sir. From civilians fleeing the area, from the emergency service workers sent in to get them out. A woman, probably early thirties. Medium build, blond—”
“Yes, thank you.” The Hunter rolled a cigarette in his hand but didn’t take his eyes from the policeman. He lit it, lazily, and let it dangle from the corner of his mouth as he spoke. “It does not matter
what
she looks like. I need to know if she
is
the Necromancer or just some poor girl in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
The policeman took off his deep blue cap and ran fingers through sweat-dampened hair. He used the hat to beat at perpetually buzzing flies and leaned back into the shade of the post office’s tin roof. The Hunter did not move, and beside him, Chase tried to follow his example. But whatever it was the Hunter possessed that made even the insects respect him, Chase didn’t have it. He resorted to waving them away.
Replacing his cap, the policeman nodded. “
They
were following. All of the witnesses were very clear. She had . . . zombies, ah, following her. People from the cemetery.” He gestured back along the dirt road and Chase glanced over his shoulder. There wasn’t much to this town and it had been almost empty when he and the Hunter drove in. Only a few bony cats and half a dozen lizards. The Hunter had dispatched them with ease. “Not only that. Roos and cattle too. Couple of sheep—”
“Yes, thank you.” The Hunter stepped back, into the dirt street and the full blow of the mid-morning sun. Chase followed with reluctance. “I understand.”
“Sir?” The policeman reached out, but didn’t leave the building’s shadow. “We can help—”
“Which way did you say she went?” The Hunter dropped his cigarette and snuffed it into the dust with the heel of his boot.
The young man pointed.
“There, you’ve helped.” With that, the Hunter spun and marched to his car, muttering about who was going to poke their nose into his business next. The car was an old, clunky thing that drunk down petrol and didn’t even have air-conditioning. But it got them out of the small town soon enough.
The Hunter drove in silence, following the road, eyes intent. Chase waited until the older man gave a deep sigh. “A woman.”
Chase looked at him but did not ask. Whatever the Hunter wanted him to know, the Hunter would say.
Chase had learned the Hunter’s quirks quickly, after the weathered, scowling man had taken him away from family and friends. Even got him out of school. All his talk about destiny and the struggle for the future of mankind had impressed his parents well enough. Must have worked on his teachers too.
After two months following the guy around, it would be nice if it had rubbed off on Chase. Would have made things a whole lot easier. But as it was, he couldn’t shake the feeling that this apprenticeship was all one big mistake.
“Not many women Necromancers, not many at all.” With one hand the Hunter riffled through the glove box and found a glass bottle of lukewarm water. He tossed it into the boy’s lap without looking. “Drink, it’s hot out here. Easy to get too dry.”
Chase obeyed, wrinkling his nose at the stifled taste.
“They just don’t have it in them, the
need
for control that drives a man to raise the dead.” He shook his head as the boy offered the bottle of water. “No, you don’t see many women Necromancers at all, let alone one who would raise so many, so indiscriminately. It doesn’t make sense.”
Dry, orange earth sped along beneath them. Thin trees, bent and drooping, spotted the side of the road. At one point a small flock of emus ran in the distance. Chase watched the sheer monotony of it all and tried not to breathe too loudly. Not while the Hunter was thinking.
“Why would she have them follow her? She’s raised cities and left them there, so why are they following her now? It makes no sense.”
The Hunter braked suddenly and turned off the road. The movement threw Chase against the window, and as he rubbed the bump forming on his forehead, he strained to look out the back. Half a kangaroo hopped beside the trunk of a termite-hollowed tree. Wire wrapped around its tail and snagged on the bark.
It was not struggling to hop along the road, instead it headed into the bush. The way the Hunter was driving. Not on any path, over fallen logs, and hard, cracking dirt.
“No sense at all.”
He hasn’t been dead that long, but it’s hard to recognize him. Guess that’s what the car did. Took off most of his face, and his body doesn’t look the same either. It’s missing something in his back that made him stand straight, so he slouches to the side. His remaining green eye has gone cloudy.
He doesn’t know me.
The old woman sits me in a chair and pushes a plate of rock cakes at me. I just stare at him. He stands at the doorway, hands still raised where he had been holding my shoulders, eye looking straight ahead.
“Eat something, dearie. You’re looking a little thin.”
Finally, I turn to glare at her. Rock cakes and their china plate shatter as I knock them from the table. “Bitch.”
“Now, now.” The old woman smiles, one hand fiddles with a large silver ring on a knobbly finger. “You shouldn’t be speaking to me like that, should you? Or haven’t you learned yet?”
I pull back, fold in on myself like she’s slapped me.
“
Have
you found what you were looking for?” She collects a small, round stone and strokes it. I feel my back straighten, my knees draw together like a good, polite girl. A great shudder runs through me.
“No. But you know that.” I want to turn around, to point. So I do, but only once she’s put down the stone. “You had him all along.”
The old woman nods. “Convenient, wouldn’t you say?”
“Why would you do that?”
She shakes her head. “Maybe you haven’t learnt anything after all. You came into my house,
dearie.
You made demands like you owned the place, didn’t you?”
When I don’t respond she glances at the white stone. I nod, but don’t trust myself to speak. I just don’t seem to say the right things. “A dead husband’s quite an ask, even for an old witch like me.”
She cackles her laugh. “You can’t have expected it for free.”
I look down at my knees. The memory is hazy, mixed with alcohol and grief, and dwarfed by weeks of shuffling undead. I remember stumbling up front stairs, somewhat less rundown than the entrance to
this
house. Slamming an almost empty bottle of vodka—God, I can’t even remember if it had a flavor—on the table. Shouting at her, crying at her. Her little, twisted smile. Yes, I remember that.
She gave me a stone, pretty, shaped like a rose but black. And then she asked her price.
“You knew I couldn’t give it to you.” A life for a life, I guess. But a baby? And someone else’s baby at that, because I had none of my own, and she wasn’t willing to take the risk.
Her eyes sharpen and pin me down like a butterfly on a board. “It was too late by then.” She is disgusted by me; I can see it in the wrinkling of her nose. “And you still used my stone.”
I swallow, and for a second consider standing up. How far would I get if I tipped up the chair and ran for the kitchen door? Before she had time to pick up one of her damned stones?
She collects a stick from the table and runs it over her weathered palm.
I don’t bother, what’s left to fight for anyway? “Yes.” My shoulders sag forward, a little more with each word. “I took it to his grave. I placed it there, like you said. Planted it into the earth, as deep as I could dig. But he didn’t come out. I waited, I waited until
they
surrounded me and I couldn’t breathe for the smell.” I had pushed my way through a cemetery’s worth of dead to get out of that place, and not even the cold sea spray coming up from the cliffs could clean away the stench. They had watched me, empty eye sockets, sagging skin and gaping, grinning mouths. They followed until I came to the road, until I passed shops and
people.
Then . . . then they had started to feed.
But never on me.
“There is always a price.”
“My husband had just died, I was drunk—”
She snorts, very unladylike. “Doesn’t give you the right to steal from me.” She looks me up and down, out of the corner of her eye. “So you’ve been walking since then? Coming all the way out here, trying to get away from everyone?”
“Trying to save them.” My mouth tastes like orange dust.
“How very noble.” Sounding bored, she pushes away from the table. Perfume drapes over me as she rests her cold hand on my head. “I wonder how many people died, before you thought to do that.”
She steps back. I raise my head, slowly. Open my eyes and turn to her. Have I been crying? The world between us, between me and
him,
is wavering.
“Now I just have to decide.” She folds the last flap of a velvet cloth over her stones and places them gently in a white handbag with a faux-gold clip. “If I want to keep him.”
She lifts a hand and my husband, my
dead
husband, leans his cheek against her skin.
I stand, quickly, chair toppling to the floor. Outside, tires skid to a stop over dust and gravel.
The Hunter knew the zombie was there before Chase saw it in the hallway gloom. He grabbed Chase with one hand, pulled him back, forced him behind, and drew his blade with the other. Didn’t even give him the chance to find his gun, but then, what was the point?
But the creature didn’t rush at them. Stooping in the doorway, it turned and grinned with half a face.
The Hunter breathed in sharply.
“Let him through.” A crackly voice commanded, and the zombie stepped aside to reveal a small, ancient-looking woman.
“Who are you?” The Hunter edged forward, sword extended, voice tense and clipped. Chase held back. He fumbled his gun out of its holster and held it high.
The crone laughed. “Come looking for your Necromancer, have you?”
The Hunter stepped onto faded plastic tiles; Chase hung in the darkness of the hallway. One hand clung to the doorframe. The derringer’s barrel was cold as he leaned it against his cheek, the only way to ensure he held it steady.
The Hunter’s blade twitched between zombie and old woman. “How do you—?”
“She’s right here.” The old lady gestured. A younger woman stood by a wooden table. Her face was ruddy with sunburn; she was dressed in tattered jeans and a filthy shirt. Her hands shook, and she clasped the edge of the table as though that was all that kept her upright. “That’s your Necromancer, Hunter. Aren’t you going to do justice for all those her undead killed?”
The young woman shook her head. Straggly blond hair caught in sweat on her forehead and chin. “No.”
The Hunter hesitated. His sword pointed at her, and the young woman closed her eyes. Slowly, the Hunter turned back to the little old lady. “I know Necromancers. I can feel them. She is no Necromancer, although she stinks of the dead.”
The blond woman’s eyes snapped open. They were sharply blue. “Now
you.
” The Hunter straightened his arm, leveling his sword with the old woman’s smiling face. “
You
I can feel. But . . . you’re not quite right.” Chase could hear a scowl in the Hunter’s voice.
The old woman cackled. “Pity.” She clutched at a pale handbag, fiddling with the clasp. “If you don’t want to play, Hunter, you should leave. You’re out of your depth here. Can you feel that?”