by Jozelle Dyer



With no one else left to eat, and the long days passing slowly, the zombies in town were getting playful.  They would ring the doorbell and run quickly to hide in the bushes.  If we dared to peek through the boards covering the windows, we would see an eye or a tooth, maybe even a finger, left like an offering on the doorstep.  It was a race, of sorts, to see who would succumb first, David and I to the zombies, or the zombies to the carrion birds who flew overhead.  There were flocks of them circling the town, filling the sky until they blocked out the sun.  It was always night these days.

David and I also played.  For weeks we had been at each other’s throats, but on the day we found the body wedged halfway through the doggie door, we decided to call a truce.  We pulled out the family board games I’d collected over the years and waged war with each other over Monopoly, Scrabble, and Clue.  So things went for a while until the morning that David kissed me in the bathroom just after I had cleaned my teeth.  It was the day after we saw my now dead dog chasing a dead cat down the street and into a tree.  David had stopped shaving when his wife had died and taken the children, and his beard rubbed pleasantly.

After that we played a different kind of game.

“Grrr,” he growled.  “Argh.”  I don’t know how it started, but we began to make love—for it was a strange kind of love binding us together—as we believed zombies would.  As we believed our spouses would if we could chance letting them in the door.  I ran for the kitchen doorway, giggling.  He caught me at the steps.  Outside it sounded as though a storm was gathering: the zombies were pelting the windows with dirt from the garden.  They had churned up so much dust in the air that the birds swooped and squawked angrily, blinded.  David growled again, low in his throat then clamped his teeth on mine.

“Ava.”  He whispered his dead wife’s name even as he tugged hard on my nipples.  He bit them until I thought he’d draw blood, while I clawed at his back and called for Daniel.

I heard my name called in a hiss, and wondered at it.  David always called for Ava.  Then I realized that David—whose head was buried between my thighs—hadn’t spoken, and the hissing came from the direction of the dining room window.  I craned my neck awkwardly and could just make out the aquiline nose that belonged to my dead husband.

“Jenny,” he called as though his heart was breaking.  “Jenny.”

I pushed David away, but even as I did, Daniel began to laugh.

“Jen-ny,” he sing-songed.  “Jen-ny.”

Even as I began to realize—perhaps for the first time—that my husband was truly gone, there came a whisper from the direction of the doggy door, calling, “David, David.”  I could hear a wild weeping, and recognized Ava’s voice.  She had been my dearest friend, the best of neighbors, but now she was dead and had no right to be calling for her man at my back door.

My thoughts formed rapidly for I was unreasonably panicked.  We were inside, we were safe.  Then I realized that David was no longer beside me, but was moving like the undead himself to open the back door.  Before I could call out he was gone, into the arms of his lost love who was already devouring him greedily.  I could only slam the door shut, locking and barring it quickly even as Ava feasted on David’s tongue.

From the dining room I could hear Daniel’s call turn mournful, and I let my body slide down to the black and white tile floor.  I was alone.






JOZELLE DYER used to work at Tor Books, but has decided that she would rather write than edit. She is currently working on her MA in writing from Johns Hopkins University. Jozelle is afraid of vampires, werewolves, and zombies, but can never resist writing about them. It is Jozelle’s way of facing her fears. This is her first submission.

by Jack Frey



Two minutes is a long time underwater.  It was a dupe, right from the start, Konrad now realized.  A plot to uncover the research program and maybe even to start a war.  The fake scuba tank, with a gauge that always read full, even if there were just three breaths left.  The phony GIs, with their perfect Midwestern, Corn Belt accents.  And now, beneath him, in the black depths of the Arctic Ocean, the divers were circling.

The program, codenamed Gooseflesh and overseen by the Pentagon, had been in existence for three years.  Here’s what they knew for sure:

1.  The Soviets had developed (accidentally discovered?) a way to revive the dead.

2.  Although the corpses regained some function, and were apparently capable of following orders, the necrotized flesh decayed rapidly.

3.  The Soviets had begun using the undead as divers beneath the polar ice cap, where the freezing temperatures maintained the bodies in a state of near refrigeration.

With the permission of the Canadian government, a monitoring station had been built on the northern tip of Ellesmere Island, where the Navy could track the progress of the Soviets.  Of course, this was particularly difficult, given the enormity of the polar region, the adverse weather conditions, the thickness of the ice, and the simple fact that when using sonar a single human body beneath the water, truly living or otherwise, is very difficult to distinguish from a beluga or a narwhal.

From time to time, the scientists and Navy personnel got lucky.  They found one, trapped in the ice about sixteen miles off the coast.  Probably a woman, or had been once.  Its head was caught, locked in the ice, or else it might have just chewed through its ankles or wrists to get free, like a fox in a trap.  But the thing must have had some sort of temperature sensor, or else it was just that sensitive to heat, because as soon as they had chopped it free and dragged it into the station, it turned black and began to rot.  Within five minutes, the corpse stopped twitching, and after that the meat turned to stinking paste.

While the scientists could be sure of nothing, there was a lot of speculation back in Washington.  The Pentagon believed that Uncle Joe was at the top of it all, that Stalin himself had authorized the program.  He was reputedly obsessed with the paranormal, and had built a psionic resonance parabola on Severnaya Zemiya.  But President MacArthur swore it was Rasputin himself who oversaw the operation.  He claimed that Rasputin had never been killed, or maybe had, but then turned himself into a zombie, possibly as early as 1922.  MacArthur had been elected on a solid majority after he turned the strip along the Yalu River between North Korea and China into a radioactive wasteland, and anything he said carried a lot of weight, especially for a project like Gooseflesh.

But none of that mattered especially.  Not now.  At least Konrad’s gauss rifle was real, he knew that much.  It was his own, a bearing model with a harpoon slide, not some fake handed to him by the people who had infiltrated the program.  But it couldn’t blow through three feet of ice.

How had it happened? he wondered.  How had the Russians got in?  Or had they always been in, skunking the project right from the start?

Seventy-three seconds had passed since the hole in the ice was sealed up behind him.  Those three breaths had long since bubbled out of his lungs, floated up to the flat sheet above him that blotted out the sunlight.  Konrad had imagined all this before, in the warmth of his bunk at the station.  He’d imagined it and dreamed about dying beneath the ice.

Konrad had a light, fixed to the end of his gauss rifle.  He shone it down into the depths, swung it in slow circles.  His diving goggles were fogging over.  He thought he spotted a dull white object, far below him, moving fast.  And even though Konrad knew he ought to fear the undead creatures that he would soon encounter, his mind was elsewhere.  He was thinking about the Inuit woman that he’d met on the ice few days earlier, and the way that her long black hair fell across her round face.  He wanted to kiss her, even now.

Suddenly, a noise that was impossible to ignore, impossible, impossible to think at all.  At first Konrad thought it might be an earpiece, a bug in his ear, but the noise was inside his head, and only there.

single-recipient-message—omnilang—prepare-to-encounter

Telepathy.  The Pentagon didn’t know about this.  The undead creature swam near enough to give Konrad a clear view, a milky-soft white texture to its naked body.  The flesh along its back was almost all gone, scraped away, or eaten by fish, perhaps.  Ribs and vertebrae, yellow like ivory.  The thing turned its face towards him, and Konrad saw that its lips and eyelids were in tatters, fluttering in the icy current.

single-recipient-message—omnilang—disable-weapon

Konrad struggled to stay focused, to keep his head.  He had to stay near the hole in the ice, even if the Russians had closed it over with a steel lid.  There was no other way out.  He gripped the rifle, gave the trigger a quick squeeze.  In the moment before the steel bearing connected with the thing’s head, the noise came again.

multi-recipient-message—omnilang—target-aggressive-full-assault

After that, the creature’s head burst, dissipated in a fine cloud of bone and colourless tissue, no blood.  The diver’s body went completely limp and began drifting slowly downwards, into the deep.

But now Konrad heard them, their telepathic voices muted across the distance.  They were coming from all directions.  Faster now, swimming like snakes beneath the ice.  He spun, waved the light in a broad arc.  A white shape.  He fired.

This time he only caught the thing in the chest, and while its ribcage was now splayed open, it swam on.  Another round, another ball bearing, and this time the creature’s head shattered, the body motionless.

Beneath him now, another one, shredded fingers grasping at his boots.  But he brought the rifle down quickly, fired point-blank into the thing’s skull, kicked away the pulpy mess.  The noise, from all sides.

multi-recipient-message—omnilang—consume

Everywhere, and no air.  Lungs burning, blood pounding in his throat, eyes going dark.  They were everywhere.  Ninety-seven seconds and no air.  Two more rounds, two imploded heads, the water thick with floating particulate.  Konrad felt himself beginning to black out.

He was fumbling with the harpoon now, trying to slide the bolt back, to set it in position.  But his fingers were numb.  The things were all around him now, circling, coming up under him, snatching and clawing.  Their limbs, their faces, lurching beyond the shaft of light, spongy and dead.

Konrad’s eyes were closing, the hands at his ankles, his wrists, no air.  One hundred and fifteen seconds.  The rifle was moving down now, the light falling away from him as it slipped from his hands into the unseen depths.  But on his face, on his mask, fingers.

One hundred and eighteen seconds.  A shaft of white that swallowed up the sea.  The steel lid was pulled away and sunlight poured into the hole.  Two, then three splashes, lifeless bodies falling into the water, but this time, blood.  The phony GIs, with their perfect Midwestern, Corn Belt accents.  Konrad felt the lip of the icy hole, and strong arms grabbing him.  He felt the slick touch of the things below, shredding the newly deceased.  One hundred and twenty seconds.

On the ice now, steam rose from his body.  Konrad drew the Arctic air into his lungs, burning him, making him bleed.  There were boots on the snow, people around him now, living people, and he lifted his face towards the sky.  The Inuit, the ones he’d met on the ice, and they carried ancient Lee-Enfields.  And then Konrad saw that she was there, too.  The one with crow-coloured hair and beautiful face that was round like the moon.

“Gooseflesh” originally appeared on the website staticmovement.com. And by “appeared,” Jack means in the Douglas Adams sense of the word: “It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.’”

JACK FREY lives in Winnipeg, Canada with his wife and two young boys. He plans to walk across Asia on foot, but is still searching for the perfect pair of hiking boots. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Shelf Life Magazine, Rose & Thorn Journal, Fractured West, and the Last Man Anthology, among others. Like many of us, he is currently working on his first novel. jackfrey.wordpress.com

by Ash Krafton



We don’t talk much.  I suppose not having functioning vocal cords is a big part of that but, honey, I don’t blame you for our lack of communication.  I just wish our relationship was a little different.

Even if you blinked once in a while to make me feel like we were connecting.  Some tiny affirmation that you know I’m here.  I love you to the point of incineration, to the point where I can’t breathe because the conflagration steals the oxygen from my lungs.  It’s why I did this all for you.

Stealing your body was no easy feat.  You know I’m a good person, wouldn’t hurt a fly (never mind commit a felony) but I did it.  I had to.  You lived a stony life, chasing death and begging for release but I know you didn’t want to die.  Not permanently–

So hiring a zombie priest wasn’t as big a deal as I might have once thought.  It was no different than finding a lawyer or a mechanic or some other necessary evil.

Maybe if I knew you were going to die, I could have interviewed a couple zombie raisers.  You know, look into their portfolio, ask about their zombie philosophy, their success rate and refund policies.  Stuff like that.  Maybe I could have found someone capable of actually putting some animation in the animating.  But I was in a bit of a rush and had a limited window of opportunity.  It had to be done while you were still fresh.  Not that I’m complaining–

Because you’re here.  I really do like that suit on you and you look so handsome with your hair combed like that.  Today we’ll do all your favorite things — we’ll go for a drive and we’ll sit on the front porch and we’ll go for a slow walk in the moonlight.  I’ll even put in that Three Stooges DVD I found in your coffin.

That way you won’t mind so much when I change your embalming fluid and scrape the mold from the back of your neck.  Curly makes you laugh.  I think it’s laughing, anyway, that long hollow rasp like a splintering tree.  You make that sound whenever the Stooges slap each other.  I don’t know why that sound upsets the dog so much because laughter is such a beautiful thing in and of itself–

We don’t talk much.  But I suppose that’s still better than not being able to talk at all.






Pushcart Prize nominee ASH KRAFTON is a speculative fiction writer whose work has appeared in several journals, including Niteblade, Ghostlight, and Silver Blade. Ms. Krafton resides in the heart of the Pennsylvania coal region and is an active member of Pennwriters, a national writers group. She’s co-editor of the Pennwriters Area 6 blog at pennwritersarea6.wordpress.com and maintains her own at ash-krafton.livejournal.com.