Is that what happened? You shrug, deliberately. “I’ve killed dozens of others.”
“Maybe you’ve changed.”
“Maybe I’m not that hungry. Maybe she smelled like brussels sprouts.”
“I don’t believe that.”
You’re very close to him now. Close to his long-sleeved T-shirt, his flushed cheek, his gun. “Why, Jack?”
“I don’t know. ‘Behind Blue Eyes’ and Harajuku pop and Ian Curtis—”
Hands and lips and teeth, and you’d forgotten—no, you’d never known—this way of knowing someone, this dissolution of self, this autophagy.
His shirt rips, but you’re careful with his skin.
8. Sounds of Silence
Ian Curtis killed himself on the eighteenth of May, 1980. You might think this ironic of the lead singer of a band called Joy Division, but actually their name is a reference to prostitution in Nazi concentration camps. (Which might explain why their iconic song is called “Love Will Tear Us Apart.”) He hung himself, a death of slow asphyxiation, of utter helplessness for long minutes until he finally, mercifully, lost consciousness. There are certain theories of suicide that propose that the more self-loathing one feels, the more violent the method one chooses.
Elliott Smith (folksinger) stabbed himself in the heart with a kitchen knife. Nick Drake (folksinger) OD’d on antidepressants.
A qualitative difference in self-loathing? Please. When you decide to check yourself out, the difference between a gun and a rope is how long it takes to tie the knot.
9. Eat the Music
You stay in motels. And not the kind with friendly signs in primary colors and “Kids Stay Free!” deals on weekends. These motels have sputtering neon spelling “vacancy” and long rows of rooms, identical as LEGOs. The bathroom floors are coated with grime spread thin by lazy efforts to wipe it away. Sheets are haphazardly laundered. The second night, you see a bloodstain that covers half the floor. It blends well enough with the carpet and you don’t tell Jack. You’re hungry and you don’t like to remind him of what you are.
Jack pays for the rooms, and no one asks questions. For a last-minute escape, he’s managed well: a few thousand in cash, a box of emergency food supplies in the trunk, two swords, and three more of those big, black guns. You nearly vomited when he offered to let you use one. Now you just try not to look at them.
You haven’t eaten human flesh in ten days. You might have snapped before now, but Jack bought a haunch of pork from a local butcher. He couldn’t look you in the eye when he handed it to you. “Second thoughts about your charity case?” you asked, and felt the hollow reward of his silence.
Pork works. Not as well as warm human flesh, not even close, but at least you can keep away the worst of it, the insanity you remember from those first moments with the prion. Whatever madness you feel, whatever longings you have, are bound up in what you and Jack do late at night on scratchy sheets, and the only music you share is the hum of the hallway ice machine, the occasional rumble of pickup trucks speeding by on the country roads. During the day there are no lingering glances, tentative hand-holding, butterfly kisses. During the day you’re the zombie and he’s your keeper. At night he’s still afraid of his father, but at least he lets you see the fear. It descends like an army. It makes him pace up and down the room, makes him cry, sometimes vomit. You hate what he won’t tell you, and you hate knowing anyway.
The third night, his father calls. This is not the first time Jack’s cell phone has buzzed, not the first time he’s gone too still and too pale and you’ve wondered how much his ice man father did to him. But this time Jack picks up.
“I’m not coming back,” Jack says. He’s trying to sound tough, but you can see his fears as clearly as you can see his scars in the moonlight.
“I trained you for better than this.” Jack likes his speaker volume the way he likes his music: too loud. I can hear every word his father says.
“You trained me to be a monster.”
His father is silent for a few seconds. “You’re in room 303 of Jimmy’s Truck Lodge in Osler. I’m about ten minutes away. Let me finish this, Jackson. The boys at the agency have orders to kill that creature and anyone with him.”
“Dad, you’re not—”
“You should let me finish this.”
The line goes dead. You wonder for a moment what he’ll do, but Jack doesn’t even hesitate. He rushes you out the door. It’s not hard to leave quickly— everything important is in the car. Jack is steady, so iced and cool that you wonder how much longer before he’s just like his father. Maybe that’s what this is really about—not loving you, not a sense of fair play, but one last, desperate ploy to not become a monster.
He gestures angrily at you. “Get in!”
“If I stay behind—”
“And anyone with him, remember?”
“Your dad wouldn’t …”
“Will you bet my life on it?”
“I could bite you. Make it look authentic.”
“Fuck you, Grayson.”
“Why does it matter? I’m a fucking zombie! You think even this cure they gave me will last forever? What the hell is wrong with you? Let your ice man dad kill me, and you can run away somewhere and have a decent life with some decent people.”
Jack isn’t steady now. He punches the door—solidly, enough to hurt. “You’re the only person—Fuck. You know, don’t you? Get in the car. Please.”
You knock him out.
It’s brief and efficient, to the jaw. You know how to incapacitate people. He only has time for one wide-eyed stare before he slumps into your arms, unconscious.
You carry him back into the motel room and rip his shirt. You figure the shoulder’s as good a place as any. But when you look down, the light illuminates another scar, still-pink marks from stitches running across his collarbone. You swallow back bile and rip his shirt some more. Hopefully that will be enough.
Ice man is standing in the doorway when you turn around.
“So that’s what this is about?” he says. Of course you couldn’t fool him.
“You wondered?”
“No. Not really. I guess I never … I don’t know what they’ll do to him. Not if they think you two …”
“You stopped me from feeding,” you say.
“That didn’t look like feeding.”
“What would you know about it?”
He cocks his head. Then nods. “Okay. I stopped you from feeding.”
You don’t think you’re imagining the hint of relief in his voice, the subtle loosening of tension in his arms.
Then he shoots you in the shoulder. You just want this over with, but Jack is moaning on the bed, and you went through way too much trouble for him to ruin this now. You rush the ice man, which surprises him enough that he falls onto the concrete outside. You run past him, feeling the blood dripping down your arm, but not much else. The prions are good about pain. A few other guests have opened their doors at the noise. The ice man lets off another shot. It misses you.
You rush to a large, empty space at the edge of the lot. You don’t want to make this too obvious. It shouldn’t be much work for him to hit your head from this distance. But the next shots are so wide that you can’t even smell the lead.
“Come on,” you mutter when the ice man just stands there.
Then he falls down.
Jack stands behind him, jaw bruised, gun smoking. There’s a hole in the back of his dad’s head, and you can smell it from here.
“You okay?” Jack asks, after you jog up to him. But he’s the one who’s shaking.
Someone shrieks. The night clerk talks rapidly into his cell phone. “I think the cops are coming,” you say.
“Yeah. It’ll probably take them a while.”
You both look down at the corpse. Jack hauls him inside the room. “Hurry up,” he says.
You only have time for the brains, but that’s okay. They’re the best part.
10. Shoot Out the Lights
We live in a little cottage in Mexico now, in a village so tiny that only the residents have heard of it. There’s a beach with good fishing, and a market once a month an hour away. Jack spoke some Spanish before, and we’re picking it up well enough.
We go into town for the Internet, where Jack sells Mexican handicrafts on eBay.
I bought him a guitar for his birthday, but I ended up playing it. When I practice, he jokes about how good he’s getting. I wrote him one song, and sometimes I like it.
I haven’t played it for him yet. Even now, it’s hard for me to guess what will make him go still and icy. Sometimes I think a part of him hates me.
I know Jack will kill me if I eat again. I imagine it sometimes, when I stare too long at some plump girl in a bikini and her smell reaches back into that prion part of my brain and I can feel the old hunger tearing at my skin. I imagine him playing Joy Division, Ian Curtis’s mournful voice almost scraping against the speakers, “Do you cry out in your sleep / all my failings exposed,” and Jack’s tears smear my lips, and I get just that last, ecstatic taste of him before the blade goes snicker-snack.
“Purity Test”
Holly: The association of the unicorn with virtue is of long origin. According to legend, a young girl would be sent ahead of unicorn-hunting parties—as shown in the famous unicorn tapestries—to lure the creature with her innocence and purity.
Once the unicorn rested its head in the girl’s lap, hunters would surprise the unicorn and, well, that would be that.
Some scholars have creepily suggested that unicorns are able to detect chastity, although, according to the literature, unicorns have been lured not only by women who weren’t maidens, but in at least one case, by a perfumed boy dressed in women’s clothes. Now, I don’t think, as my coeditor will no doubt suggest, that this means unicorns are dumb, but rather they are lured by essential inner goodness.
One of the things I love most about Naomi Novik’s “Purity Test” is how it takes our expectations of unicorns and maidens and turns them on their head. Plus, it’s very funny.
Justine: “Purity Test” is funny because Naomi Novik is making fun of unicorns.
That’s right, Naomi Novik is secretly on Team Zombie. Poor Team Unicorn, in such shambles from the outset. I almost pity them. (Get it? Shambles? You know, like, zombies shambling? Never mind …) Holly: “Purity Test” is funny because it makes fun of foolish zombie-loving people’s perceptions of unicorns. She’s our double agent.
Purity Test
By Naomi Novik
“Oh, stop whining,” the unicorn said. “I didn’t poke you that hard.”
“I think I’m bleeding, my back hurts, and I’m seeing unicorns,” Alison said. “I so have grounds.”
She pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes and sat up slowly on the park bench. Spending her emergency train-fare-home money on margaritas in the first midtown bar that hadn’t carded her had seemed like a good idea at the time. She wasn’t even completely ready to give up on it yet, although the crazy hangover had been tipping the scales even before the unicorn had showed up and jabbed her.
The unicorn was extremely pretty, all long flowy silver hair and shiny hooves, indescribable grace, and a massive spiraling horn about four feet long that seemed like it should have dragged the unicorn’s head down to the ground, just on basic physics. Also, it looked kind of annoyed.
“Why a unicorn?” Alison wondered at her subconscious out loud. She wasn’t thirteen years old or anything. “I mean, dragons are so much cooler.”
“Excuse me?” the unicorn said indignantly. “Unicorns kill dragons all the time.”
“Really?” she said skeptically.
The unicorn pawed the ground a little with a forehoof. “Okay, usually only when they’re still small. But Zanzibar the Magnificent did kill Galphagor the Black in 1014.”
“O-kay,” Alison said. “Did you just make those names up?”
“You know what, shut up,” said the unicorn. “Entertaining as it would be to spend three weeks correcting your misguided preconceptions, there’s no time; the herd only gave me three days, and then that idiot Talmazan gets his turn. And if you knew him, you would understand what an unmitigated disaster that would be.”
“His turn at what?”
“Finding a virgin,” the unicorn said.
“Um,” she said. “Maybe he’d have more luck than you. I’m not—”
“La, la, la!” the unicorn sang loudly, drowning her out. It even sang beautifully, perfectly on-key. “Have you never heard of plausible deniability?” it hissed at her, when she’d stopped trying to finish the sentence.
“Excuse me, either you don’t know what ‘plausible’ means or I’m insulted,” she said.
“Look,” the unicorn said, “just be quiet a second and let me explain the situation to you.”
The hangover was moving to the front and center of Alison’s skull, and she was starting to get a little worried: The unicorn hallucination wasn’t going away. She shut her eyes and lay back down on the bench.
The unicorn apparently took it as a sign to keep going. “Okay,” it said. “So there’s this wizard—”
“Wow, of course there is,” Alison said.
“—and he’s been grabbing baby unicorns,” the unicorn said, through gritted teeth.
“You know,” Alison told her subconscious, “I’ve got to draw the line somewhere.