six, but he went up. The grunting didn’t get any more intense as the flames took him. If anything, it died down. He moved aimlessly around while he burned. Finally, something popped or broiled or I-don’t-know-what inside what was left of his brain and he settled down on the floor to smolder, mostly in silence, aside from the odd pop and crackle. And that was the end of Roger. The second end. The final one, I hoped. I backed away with a shudder and went out onto the porch, leaving the doors open to get better circulation for the fire. That sure as hell wasn’t how I wanted to close out my Peace Corps service.
We took Cyndi back to the taxi park after an alcohol bath, got our money from the sousprefet and caught a car taxi back with no other passengers. It cost a little extra to get the whole car, but it was worth it. We were covered with dried sweat already, the heat of late morning wringing out more, and Cyndi was acting pretty claustrophobic. About halfway home, Cyndi started to get semi-coherent and more than thankful. That was actually worse because then she had to tell us all about how Roger had been bitten by a zombie rat out of nowhere and turned a few days later. How she’d survived the past two weeks being chased around the house by her zombie boyfriend, afraid to go out in case she was attacked by more zombies. Damn. That was almost as bad as ending up like Roger.
On the way back, the driver took a detour to pick something up from his house, so we ended up coming in on the same road we’d taken the day before from the train station in Ngaounderé. The remains of the dead gendarme our taxi had hit lay all over the road. The limbs still moved feebly.
Suddenly, I needed a really stiff drink, but we’d used up all my gin for disinfectant purposes. I’d have to go dry until we got back to the house.
“ Arrêtez !” I shouted to the driver. “Stop! Stop the car!”
The driver thought I was nuts, but he pulled over. We hadn’t paid him the full fare yet. He wouldn’t leave.
“What’re you doing?” Josie said, getting out with me. Cyndi just huddled in the back seat of taxi.
“I’m not leaving that poor bastard in the road.” I started getting the kerosene and matches out.
“Ahhh,” she said, following my line of sight to the twitching arms and legs.
We didn’t even bother to gather the body parts together, too much risk of infection. We just went up and down the road in the noon heat, pouring kerosene on the pieces and setting them on fire. I hoped that somehow it gave that gendarme some peace. I hoped I’d never have to do the same thing to Josie. And I hoped that if I got unlucky, too, someone would give me the same mercy.
The Anteroom
By Adam-Troy Castro
Adam-Troy Castro’s work has been nominated for several awards, including the Hugo, Nebula, and Stoker. His novels include Emissaries from the Dead and The Third Claw of God , and two collaborations with artist Johnny Atomic: Z Is for Zombie, and V Is for Vampire , which comes out in October. Castro’s short fiction has appeared in such magazines as The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction , Science Fiction Age , Analog , Cemetery Dance , and in a number of anthologies. I previously included his work in The Living Dead and in Lightspeed Magazine . His story collections include A Desperate, Decaying Darkness and Tangled Strings .
People throughout history have had many different conceptions of what an afterlife might look like. The Greeks imagined the sunny fields of Elysium and the unending drudgery of Hades. The Vikings imagined that great warriors would go to an endless kegger in Valhalla. Dante imagined Hell as a massive multi-tiered pit. (The image of the underworld as a place of fire may have been inspired by the volcanic island of Crete, and the word Gehenna, associated with Hell, is named after a fiery garbage pit outside Jerusalem.) But what sort of an afterlife might await those who have been transformed into
We took Cyndi back to the taxi park after an alcohol bath, got our money from the sousprefet and caught a car taxi back with no other passengers. It cost a little extra to get the whole car, but it was worth it. We were covered with dried sweat already, the heat of late morning wringing out more, and Cyndi was acting pretty claustrophobic. About halfway home, Cyndi started to get semi-coherent and more than thankful. That was actually worse because then she had to tell us all about how Roger had been bitten by a zombie rat out of nowhere and turned a few days later. How she’d survived the past two weeks being chased around the house by her zombie boyfriend, afraid to go out in case she was attacked by more zombies. Damn. That was almost as bad as ending up like Roger.
On the way back, the driver took a detour to pick something up from his house, so we ended up coming in on the same road we’d taken the day before from the train station in Ngaounderé. The remains of the dead gendarme our taxi had hit lay all over the road. The limbs still moved feebly.
Suddenly, I needed a really stiff drink, but we’d used up all my gin for disinfectant purposes. I’d have to go dry until we got back to the house.
“ Arrêtez !” I shouted to the driver. “Stop! Stop the car!”
The driver thought I was nuts, but he pulled over. We hadn’t paid him the full fare yet. He wouldn’t leave.
“What’re you doing?” Josie said, getting out with me. Cyndi just huddled in the back seat of taxi.
“I’m not leaving that poor bastard in the road.” I started getting the kerosene and matches out.
“Ahhh,” she said, following my line of sight to the twitching arms and legs.
We didn’t even bother to gather the body parts together, too much risk of infection. We just went up and down the road in the noon heat, pouring kerosene on the pieces and setting them on fire. I hoped that somehow it gave that gendarme some peace. I hoped I’d never have to do the same thing to Josie. And I hoped that if I got unlucky, too, someone would give me the same mercy.
The Anteroom
By Adam-Troy Castro
Adam-Troy Castro’s work has been nominated for several awards, including the Hugo, Nebula, and Stoker. His novels include Emissaries from the Dead and The Third Claw of God , and two collaborations with artist Johnny Atomic: Z Is for Zombie, and V Is for Vampire , which comes out in October. Castro’s short fiction has appeared in such magazines as The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction , Science Fiction Age , Analog , Cemetery Dance , and in a number of anthologies. I previously included his work in The Living Dead and in Lightspeed Magazine . His story collections include A Desperate, Decaying Darkness and Tangled Strings .
People throughout history have had many different conceptions of what an afterlife might look like. The Greeks imagined the sunny fields of Elysium and the unending drudgery of Hades. The Vikings imagined that great warriors would go to an endless kegger in Valhalla. Dante imagined Hell as a massive multi-tiered pit. (The image of the underworld as a place of fire may have been inspired by the volcanic island of Crete, and the word Gehenna, associated with Hell, is named after a fiery garbage pit outside Jerusalem.) But what sort of an afterlife might await those who have been transformed into
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