I know you probably worry about the number of undead out here in the East, but Baltimore County is the safest in all the country. They say so in the newspaper, and you know the paper would never lie.
When I was little, back at Rose Hill, I used to sneak out of the kitchen, away from Auntie Aggie while she and the other aunties worked to feed all of the hungry mouths on the plantation. Once they were distracted I’d tiptoe out past the ovens and slip away to freedom in the fields.
Rose Hill mostly grew tobacco, which Momma and a couple of the bigger field hands would ride into town to trade for cloth and other essentials. Early on, back before I can remember, Momma had tried growing tomatoes and other vegetables; when it became obvious that her small bundle of tobacco was worth more than all the food combined, she switched. Momma is savvy like that. The dead may have risen and we might have been living in the end times of Revelation, but folks still wanted their tobacco.
The tobacco plants grew tall, and the leaves were broad and green. In the summer I could duck down and run through the rows undetected, which is what I did on this particular day. My goal was always the same: find the other kids, the ones that got to run the fields because their mommas weren’t ladies who owned the plantation. The kids I liked best would be near the barrier fence at the far side of the tobacco fields, so I made a beeline for that patch of trouble.
A barrier fence is the line of security between shamblers and the rest of us, and Rose Hill had three such fences: white-painted fence rails that had been our original property line and weren’t more than pretty decoration, a dense forest of wooden poles with sharpened ends implanted in the ground at an angle that worked like stakes to impale any shambler enterprising enough to get to it, and, at the outer edge, a wall of five-strand bobbed wire that was our primary defense against the dead.
Once or twice a day the stronger men would go out to the bobbed wire and end any shamblers tangled up in it. Momma would have them bring the corpses in and burn them for the compost pile. If there were any valuables on the bodies, Momma and a couple of the men would sell them in town, bringing back something fine. One time there was a shambler that musta been a fine lady, since she was decked out in gold and jewels. Momma used the baubles to buy several hogs, and that was how Rose Hill came to have pork chops every Sunday after the Scripture was read.
But I didn’t much care for that business. I was more interested in the children who hung out playing games in between the fences. I scrambled over the white split rail fence and carefully picked my way past the sharpened stakes of the interior fence. And there, between the safety of Rose Hill and the danger of the outside world, were the plantation kids.
Everyone on the plantation but Momma was a Negro, all excepting for Mr. Isaac. There had been other white men, once upon a time, but after the dead rose they’d either ran off or turned shambler. Mr. Isaac was different; he came to Rose Hill after the war. He lived on the plantation because he was married to Auntie Evelyn and relations between Negroes and whites were frowned upon. Momma didn’t much care for, as she called it, “the spiteful leanings of biddies with too much time on their hands,” and welcomed folks into the house staff as long as they didn’t make too much trouble and were happy to work hard. So Mr. Isaac and Auntie Evelyn lived on Rose Hill with a passel of boys, the worst of which were the twins.
Auntie Aggie said twins were an ill omen, and anyone who knew the Isaac twins would agree. The boys were light-skinned, lighter than me, sandy-hued with unnervingly blue eyes. They always had a scam running, like the time they’d stolen a watermelon from the garden and climbed up a tree to share it, or the time they’d let loose all the dogs as a distraction so they could run off to fish in the creek on the north side of Rose Hill.
The Isaac twins were always up to no good.
They were my favorite people in the whole damn world.
“Hey there, Jane!” called Ezekiel, Zeke for short.
“Aww, Jane’s here, now we’re gonna get the strap for sure,” said his brother Joseph, who was saltier than Lot’s wife.
“I snuck off!” I said, as the other kids began to give me dirty looks. “Ain’t no one know I’m gone. What’re you doing?”
Each of the kids held a stick, the end sharpened, and had the look of someone with a secret.
“None of your business. Go back to the kitchens,” Joe said, picking up a rock from the dusty ground and throwing it at me.
The rock missed by a mile, but the one I picked up and flipped back at Joe didn’t. It hit him right in the middle of his forehead, and as he cried out I picked up another rock.
“Next person throws a rock at me is getting what for right in their eye,” I said, shaking with anger.
“No one’s going to throw any rocks, Jane. You should come with us. We’re going to kill the dead.” Zeke smiled wide and handed me a sharpened stick. While Joseph was prickly and hostile, Zeke was all smiles and warmth, the kind of person people liked to be around. And he had the best ideas. It was no wonder Joe was so tetchy. Who would want to share such a wonderful brother with everyone?
I took the stick. “What do you mean, kill the dead?”
“There’s a shambler stuck in the bobbed wire. We’re going to kill it.”
“That ain’t a good idea.” As soon as the words were out of my mouth I knew it was the wrong thing to say. But I couldn’t help it. I liked trouble as much as the next kid, but this seemed different. Dangerous.
“We’re gonna kill it so that we can go on patrols with the rest of the grown-ups,” Zeke said with a grin. “No more chores for us!”
“You can stay here, Jane. No one wants you tagging along, anyway,” Joe said.
I set my jaw. Whatever Joe said, I was going to do the opposite, just to spite him. “I’m coming. You probably ain’t found a shambler, anyhow.”
“Oh, it’s a shambler all right,” Zeke said. “You’ll see.”
We marched in silence, along the line of the fence rails. A few of the kids began to whisper excitedly, but a single glance back from Joe shut them up real quick. My stomach surged and gurgled, roiling with hot dread. I’d heard Momma and the other farm hands talk about how the dead worked, how they came out of the brush, overwhelming the unwary and wary alike. That was what made shamblers so scary: even when they were predictable, they could still surprise you.
As we rounded the corner a loud moan split the air. There, twisted up in the bobbed wire, was a shambler.
We stopped, and all the celebration and shouting died down real quick. I’d always imagined the dead as some kind of monster: mouth gaping as they came to eat you. But the shambler caught in the bobbed wire looked almost normal: a white woman with long brown hair pinned up on her head, wearing a day dress of green linen. The skirt was torn, and her petticoats showed through. Her eyes were the yellow of crookneck squash, and the nails of her grasping hands had been broken down, her fingers covered with dirt. Still, I recognized her.
“That’s Miss Farmer. Her family owns Apple Hill Plantation,” I said. Miss Farmer hadn’t cared for me—she thought Negroes shouldn’t be allowed in the house, since we were dirty—but she loved Momma’s blackberry jam enough that she came to call every so often, when it was safe to travel.
“She ain’t nobody no more,” Joe said, poking her with a stick.
The shambler growled and reached for him. Joe danced out of the way, much to the delight of everyone.
Even me.
I ain’t sure why we thought poking the shambler with our sharpened sticks was a good idea, but everyone started doing it, creeping in close enough to stab the creature and then dancing out of the way before her hands could reach us. The game might have gone on longer if the dead Miss Farmer hadn’t managed to pull herself free.
Bobbed wire ain’t a long-term fix for a shambler wanting in to the plantation. Since they don’t have any kind of survival instinct it’s no big deal for them to eventually pull themselves free of such an entanglement, ripping off great big swatches of themselves to do so. And this is exactly what the undead Miss Farmer did. One moment she was jammed up in the bobbed wire, the next she was stumbling toward us, half her dress and a good bit of arm skin left behind on the fence, which now listed to one side.
Most of the kids, myself included, screamed and ran. I took off for the field of sharpened sticks, knowing that would slow the undead woman down. But when I looked over my shoulder I realized that not everyone was with us.
Joe was standing right where he’d been, not moving, frozen in the path of the dead woman and her gaping maw. The boy had always been a bully, and the thing about bullies is they never learn how to run like the rest of us do. So Joe stood his ground, sharpened stick at the ready, convinced he was going to kill that shambler.
At some point in the woman’s lunge toward Joe he realized that a stick wasn’t much of a weapon against the dead, but it was too late. Joe was about to be shambler chow.
If it hadn’t been for Zeke.
It was Zeke that slammed into Joe, pushing him out of the way of the woman. It was Zeke the woman bit, sinking her teeth deep into his throat. It was Zeke that cried out like a wounded animal, trying for a few precious moments to push the much heavier woman off him as she tore away a great chunk of flesh. And it was Zeke that let out one soft, anguished cry as his life bled out into the dirt of Rose Hill, the sound almost indistinguishable over the noise of the dead Miss Farmer feeding.
“Joe!” I yelled, and the boy looked at me, expression distant and caught somewhere between grief and horror. I ran back to where he’d landed, pulled him to his feet, and dragged him by the hand through the field of sharpened sticks, to the safety of Rose Hill.
As we ran back we passed the patrol coming to put down the dead. I didn’t stay to watch; I’d seen enough carnage for one day. They say when they got there Miss Farmer had started on Zeke’s face, and that two of the men vomited before they even got to putting her down and driving a nail into Zeke’s head so he wouldn’t come back.
Momma gave Zeke a proper burning, and gave Mr. Isaac and Auntie Evelyn his ashes. Joe ran off a few years later, presumably to one of the combat schools, and so their heartbreak was complete, Auntie Aggie clucking her tongue and saying, “Told you them twins was an ill omen.”
It took me a long time before I left the safety of the main house, and I never ventured to the borders of Rose Hill again, not until I came to Miss Preston’s years later. I learned two valuable lessons that day.
One: the dead will take everything you love. You have to end them before they can end you. That’s exactly what I aim to do.
And two: the person poking the dead ain’t always the one paying for it. In fact, most times, it’s the ones minding their own business who suffer.
That’s a problem I still don’t have an answer for yet.