“Still, it’s funny, don’t you think…that in the midst of all this rot and death there’s still a kind-of life. You see it taking root all around us. I suppose that’s why so many of us have found ceiling beams that will take our weight, or loaded up the pump-action shotguns and killed our families before turning the gun on ourselves…or jumped from tall buildings, or driven our cars head-on into walls at ninety miles an hour…or-or-Or-OR!
“There’s a window behind me that has this great view of the hillside. In the middle of the field behind the station there’s this huge old oak tree that’s probably been there for a couple of thousand years. Yesterday, a dead guy walked into the field and up to that tree and just stood there looking at it, admiring. I wondered if maybe he’d proposed to his wife under this tree, or had something else really meaningful-pardon my language-happen beneath that oak. Whatever it was, this was the place he’d come back to. He sat down under the oak and leaned back against its trunk. He’s still there, as far as I can make out.
“Because we found out, didn’t we, that as soon as the dead come home, as soon as they reach their destination, as soon as they stop moving…they take root. And they sprout. Like fucking kudzu, they sprout. The stuff grows out of them like slimy vines, whatever it is, and starts spreading. I can’t see the tree any longer for all the…the vines that are covering it. Oh, there are a couple of places near the top where they haven’t quite reached yet, but those branches are bleach-white now, the life sucked out of them. The vines, when they spread, they grow thicker and wider…in places they blossom patches of stuff that looks like luminescent pond-scum. But the vines, they’re pink and moist, and they have these things that look like thorns, only these thorns, they wriggle. And once all of it has taken root-once the vines have engulfed everything around them and the patches of pond-scum have spread as far as they can without tearing-once all that happens, if you watch for a while, you can see that all of it is…is breathing. It expands and contracts like lungs pulling in, and then releasing air…and in between the breaths…if that’s what they are…everything pulses steadily, as if it’s all hooked into some giant, invisible heart…and the dead, they just sit there, or stand there, or lie there, and bit by bit they dissolve into the mass…becoming something even more organic than they were before…something new…something…hell, I don’t know. I just calls ’ em as I sees ’em, folks.
“Laura’s sprouted, you see. The breathing kudzu has curled out of her and crawled up the walls, across the ceiling, over the floor…about half the broadcast booth’s window is covered with it, and I can see that those wriggling thorns have mouths, because they keep sucking at the glass. I went up to the glass for a closer look right after I got back from the bathroom, and I wish I hadn’t…because you know what I saw, folks? Those little mouths on the thorns…they have teeth…so maybe…I don’t know…maybe in a way we are going to be eaten…or at least ingested…but whatever it is that’s controlling all of this, I get the feeling that it’s some kind of massive organism that’s in the process of pulling all of its parts back together, and it won’t stop until it’s whole again…because maybe once it’s whole…that’s its way of coming home. Maybe it knows the secret of what lies beyond death…or maybe it is what lies beyond death, what’s always been there waiting for us, without form…and maybe it finally decided that it was lonely for itself, and so jump-started our loved ones so it could hitch a ride to the best place to get started.
“I’m so tired. There’s no unspoiled food left from the vending machines-did I mention that I took a baseball bat to those things five-almost six days ago now? I guess the delivery guy never got here to restock them. Candy bars, potato chips, and shrink-wrapped tuna salad sandwiches will only get you so far. I’m so…so tired. The kudzu is scrabbling at the base of the door…I don’t think it can actually break through or it would have by now…but I’m thinking, what’s the point, y’know? Outside, the field and hillside are shimmering with the stuff-from here it almost looks as if the vines are dancing-and in a little while it will have reached the top of the broadcast tower…and then I really will be talking to myself.
“If anyone out there has any requests…now’s the time to phone them in. I’ll even play the seventeen-minute version of ‘In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida’ if you ask me. I always dug that drum solo. I lost my virginity to that song…the long version, not the three-minute single, thanks for that vote of confidence in my virility. I wish I could tell you that I remembered her name…her first name was Debbie, but her last name…pffft! It’s gone, lost to me forever. So…so many things are lost to me forever now…lost to all of us forever…still waiting on those requests…please, please, PLEASE will somebody out there call me? Because in a few minutes, the vines and thorns will have covered the window and those little mouths with their little teeth are all I’ll be able to see and I’m…I’m hanging on by a fucking thread here, folks…so…
“…three minutes and forty seconds. I am going to play ‘The Long and Winding Road,’ which is three minutes and forty seconds long, and if by the end of the song you have not called me, I am going to walk over to the door of the broadcast booth, say a quick and meaningless prayer to a God that was never there to hear it in the first place, and I am going to open that door and step into those waiting, breathing, pulsing vines.
“So I’m gonna play the song here in a moment. But first, let’s do our sworn FCC duty like good little drones who are stupid enough to think anyone cares anymore, and we’ll just let these six pathetic words serve as my possible epitaph:
“We now pause for station identification…”
Reluctance by Cherie Priest
Cherie Priest is the author of the bestselling novel Boneshaker, which, as of this writing, is a finalist for the prestigious Hugo and Nebula awards. She has three other works set in the same milieu as Boneshaker: a novella from Subterranean Press called Clementine, another novel from Tor called Dreadnought, and the story that follows. Priest’s other novels include Four and Twenty Blackbirds, Wings to the Kingdom, Not Flesh Nor Feathers, and Fathom. Forthcoming books include urban fantasies Bloodshot and Hellbent. Her short fiction has appeared in Subterranean Magazine and Apex Digest and is forthcoming in Steampunk Reloaded.
Priest is one of the leading writers of “steampunk,” a literary subgenre of fantasy typically characterized by a Victorian aesthetic and the use of Industrial Age technology like gears and steam pipes to power wondrous contraptions such as giant robots.
Our next story, which is set in the same milieu as Boneshaker, is an alternate reality in which the American Civil War has stretched on for nearly two decades and which has seen the development of all manner of incredible steampunk machinery. In the novel, an inventor’s ill-conceived scheme to tunnel for gold beneath Seattle ends up releasing a toxic gas that turns much of the city’s population into shambling corpses called “rotters.”
If just the thought of “steampunk plus zombies” has you quivering with joy, this next story should be right up your alley. The author says, “I’d been reading a lot about the Civil War, and something that nabbed my attention was how boys were occasionally sent off to fight while still horribly young. Thirteen was fairly common, and boys as young as eleven are rumored to have fought. I wanted to tell a story about one of these kids ‘all grown up’ and trying to move on-moving west, to make a life for himself away from the front lines. I thought such a boy might make an excellent character to dump into the creeping danger of a zombie story because he wouldn’t necessarily face the steep learning curve that ordinarily whittles down a survival party; his instincts and battle experience would give him an edge.”