Normal (Short Story)
My mother called me Martin Shillings because of my eyes, which are a flat gray, and because she had a deep love of British authors. I’ve used that name several times since, and as much as I think of myself in terms of a name, that is the name I use.
They killed my family when I was eight-they missed me because I had been hiding from my sister in a clothes basket and had dozed off. The screams paralyzed me, not that I would have done anything useful had I emerged. I saw them, though, as they prowled around.
The couple they put me with adopted me-they had wanted kids but couldn’t manage it. I wasn’t any trouble, but I wasn’t what they hoped for, either, so they picked up another kid a couple years later who was more the cuddly sort they wanted. They didn’t ignore me, but they gave me the room I needed to function, and that’s about as good as it gets. They are great people, and I’ve been extremely careful never to go within two hundred miles of them since I left home.
I needed room to function because I had seen the people who had done for my family-just walking corpses, dead people up and moving around. The police agreed solemnly with my descriptions and nice people asked a lot of questions while hunkering down to my level. It was all very kind, and even in my stunned state a tiny bit of me eventually realized it would do well to shut the hell up about the deaders.
One reason was because while I was seeing the walking dead, other people did not-lucky for me kids are expected to say stupid things. It was hard to understand back then, but I came to realize that other people could not see the deaders. Oh, they saw them, but where I saw a slack-jawed corpse with rotting patches where the skin was thin and eyes that were flat and dull like a shark’s, and yet knowing at the same time, they saw a homeless person, or a man with a limp.
As I grew older I started keeping notes on what I saw, partially because I thought I might be crazy, and partly because the walking dead seemed to have a purpose or pattern-some even seemed to hold menial jobs. They didn’t rot fast, and their smell wasn’t nearly as bad as it should be. I collected a goodly number of facts but nothing that tied them all together. I did notice that I never saw a person that I knew become one of the walking dead, and I never saw the walking dead interact with the living, not in any meaningful sense. They shambled about as if extras in a major production, providing numbers and movement without really taking part in the core story.
I filled a dozen notebooks between the ages of thirteen and sixteen, took tons of photos, and none of it really pulled together. After three years I had a bunch of details but no big picture, other than there were dead walking around that only I could see as being dead.
In the end, I decided I had an issue, a complex from what happened to my family, some sort of delayed stress thing. It was harmless. I could live with it. So I quit with the notebooks and concentrated on being normal.
That lasted six months. I still saw the deaders, but I just ducked and adverted like people did with the homeless, and kept on keeping on. I started to talk to a girl, Norma, in school. I think I liked her name the best: it sounded like normal.
I think on that sometimes, especially when its late or I’m feeling echoes of old injuries: about the two-hundred-odd days when I sort of had a girlfriend and was starting to ‘hang out’, learning about bands and songs and style. Shifting from being the weird quiet kid the security guy always watched as I came through the metal detectors into one of the normal ones.
***
My brief foray into normalcy ended abruptly one damp May afternoon, a cool day under low-hanging gray clouds that sucked all the life out of the world. I was cutting across a big empty lot where some buildings had been torn down when I almost walked into a deader, as in I almost bumped into it. It had been coming around a bit of old wall and I had been walking with my head down, walking fast.
Peripheral vision prevented an actual collision, but I looked up as I hopped to the side and we both looked at each other. I had never attracted a deader’s attention before, I never had been this close to one, and I was badly startled.
We looked at each other, and it knew. I saw that, its eyes sharpened and focused. It knew that I saw it, it knew that I saw what it was.
And it went for me. Damn near got me, too, but I was scared and quick and once I had a dozen foot lead there was no way it was going to catch me, but it tried to follow me for a long way. Trying to find out where I was going, I realized. Trying to find where I lived.
I never wore that jacket or those clothes again. I got a haircut, a close burr, before going home. The next day I bought the weakest pair of over-the-counter reading glasses they had at the Casco, and wore them occasionally.
And I quit trying to be normal. Being in a group might be safer because I would be harder to spot, but I also couldn’t watch, and something in the look of realization I had seen in that thing’s eyes made me believe that it wasn’t going to stop looking.
New notebooks with mottled black and white covers and the pages with cross-hatching lines on them, only this time I started listing where and when I saw deaders, and their descriptions, and more importantly, I started to follow them. I bought a pocket recorder so I could mutter details on the move and not be too obvious-I taped ear buds to it so onlookers would think it was an mp3 player and I was just singing along under my breath.
My first studies had just been notes based on observations of the deaders I saw day to day, quick glimpses into the problem that had created a disjointed mosaic of unrelated facts. My second study changed everything.
The most important thing was that I stopped wondering if I was crazy.
At first I chose one at random, one that was moving, and trailed it a few blocks. It was important to build up the skills needed to tail someone before I got serious, but even after the first couple tries it was clear to me that I had missed a huge amount of data in my first study.
The deaders seemed to wander around aimlessly, or to do jobs such as pushing a broom or gathering trash, but it quickly became apparent that their aimless-ness was pure sham. Their movements might be slow and rambling but they moved to definite destinations. They did not hold jobs, its just that no one questions someone picking up trash or carrying a package.
They were looking and watching, for what I wasn’t sure, but it didn’t take a great deal to realize they were moving like cattlemen tending a herd of cattle.
And they communicated, leaving scratched marks at certain places, symbols I copied, and later, staking out those places, I saw others examining or running their fingers over the marks, usually on easy-access places like mail drop boxes, light poles, and bus stop shelters.
The biggest thing I learned, the one that bought me my sanity at the price of greater horror, was that I wasn’t the only one who saw them.
***
Things had been hinting that way for a while-I was three months into the tailing business, doing it pretty much full-time since school ended with a lot of unpaid overtime tacked onto the week for good measure, and I was noticing things. Little things, but there were a couple people who seemed to be a shade too deliberate in not looking at the walking dead, while being a lot more alert to their surroundings than most.
Ditching the deader I had trailed halfway across town, I doubled back and examined the mark it had casually chalked in passing onto the concrete frame of a bus stop bench.
Swiping the lines onto the ball of my thumb with a Sharpie, I started to walk away when a dry voice spoke behind me. “The symbol means it’s being followed.”
The voice belonged to a heavyset man who kind of looked like Hemmingway in his later years, square-faced, bearded, and solemn, sitting on a low stone fence. He was short but solid, wearing an olive-drab panama style hat, one of those loose Mexican shirts, jeans, and heavy-duty sandals. He grinned a little, a hard smile without mirth. “It couldn’t make you, but it knew it was being tailed. You’re good, but a little shy of being great.”
My skin felt hot and tight-I just stood and stared, a whirlwind in my mind stripping me of my ability to speak.
His grin got a little bigger. “Cop a squat,” he jerked a thumb towards the fence. “You don’t want to draw any attention.”
Numbly I sat a couple feet from him, a thousand questions boiling in my mind.
“You think you were the only one?”
I shrugged. “Kinda. Lately, not so much-I think I see others not looking.”
“Yeah, that’s how it usually goes.” His eyes watched the street from beneath his hat while he talked, always moving. “A lot who start to see for whatever reason get shuffled off to a loony bin-it makes a lot of people crazy. And the carrion grab most of those who manage to avoid getting a funny jacket but don’t think to shut up quick. Me, I was lucky, I guess: my father could see ‘em, and when he realized I could, he schooled me.”
“They killed my family,” I blurted out, and started weeping, much to my chagrin.
“That’s what they do,” He nodded quietly. “In the end, that’s their purpose. You can call me Mike-its not my real name, but I like it.”
I managed to get a hold of myself fairly quickly, surprised to feel a knot inside me ease-I had been carrying it so long I had forgotten it was there. “Sam.” That was my brother’s name, but I took Mike’s caution seriously.
“There’s three sorts who can see them,” Mike produced a pen knife and cleaned his fingernails, eyes moving while he attended the simple task. I saw that the wide brim of his hat made it harder to see where he was looking, provided the wearer had the discipline to keep his head still. “There’s those who go crazy or talk too much and get snatched, there’s those who duck their heads and pretend, and then there’s the third sort. The third sort takes an interest, which if you’re not careful can lead to you getting killed.”
“You’re taking an interest.”
“Not so much any more. Was a time I studied them, but I lost interest. Now I hunt them.”
The words were spoken normally-in the movies there would be a significant close-up, or dramatic background music, but here it was just an old guy cleaning his nails with a little penknife whose handle was worn smooth and dark, talking in a low, even voice.
“You hunt them.” It wasn’t a question.
“Yeah.” He had a bit of an accent, one he had worked to lose-it made me think of the southeast, maybe. “That’s what they do, after all. See, they’re like wolves-they circle the herd just out of sight, pick off loners, raid a family, do what they do. How many go missing every year? A lot, especially amongst the homeless, hookers, addicts. No body, no interest. And over half the regular murders never get solved.”
“How do you stay out of trouble?”
He grinned, almost a snarl. “You mean the police? Easy-I never break the law. Not ever. See, you pop one of them, and you gotta get it in the head to kill it, then in a second or two all you’ve got is the clothes it was standing in. Littering is the only law you break, so long as no one sees you.”
“What are they? What do they want?”
“I dunno for sure-what I think is that they’re what’s left on Earth after the fight between Satan and the hosts of Heaven, when the fallen were cast out. Some sort of lost foot soldiers like the Japanese troops they used to find on the Pacific islands long after World War Two. They’re still killing, still fighting for darkness, inhabiting corpses for a lack of anything better. Waiting for the end of times I guess, for the recall to the flag that will get them a rematch.”
I sat in silence for a while. “Why my family?”
He sighed. “They have some sort of pattern to their actions-they don’t just run amok. They’ll click along killing people no one misses and hiding the bodies, and then they’ll wipe out a group or family in some awful fashion. Then go back to doing the addicts and hookers. The only time they change from that is when they spot someone who can see them. Then they act, fast and mean. The ones here, they know a Seer is trailing them-I know their signs a bit. They’re looking for you, boy, and it ain’t to give you a present. They’ll kill you and anyone close to you.”
That sent chills down my spine-I didn’t want my adoptive parents to be endangered. “How close are they?”
“Not very-they can’t track too well by sight, a fella once told me they can tell gender and extreme variances in age, but they are color-blind, or at least see colors differently than we do. You can’t get careless around them, but they aren’t going to circulate sketches of you, either. They understand names, but not well enough to track you by the phone book. Me, I never use a moniker too long, just to be safe. Keep on the move, too. They can’t talk, but they do communicate somehow.”
“Are there many like you?”
“A few. Its an occupation with a high mortality rate-I’ve lasted a lot longer than most. But I’ve met a lot of Seers, and more than a few Hunters in my time.”
“How do you survive? With money, I mean.”
He grinned, and this one had steel in it. “They pay my way. They horde money and valuables-I don’t know why, and I suspect they don’t either. Check their clothes after you drop one. They’ve been funding me since,” pain flashed across his face. “Since one figured out my kid sister could See. Trick is, don’t look poor. A guy in dirty clothes with a backpack interests the police. A guy in a decent car staying at a hotel, now, that’s not someone who interests the police unless you’re close to the border.”
“How many have you hunted?”
“Ah, there’s the rub. Thing about them, you put down the shell. They find another corpse, and they’re back in business. I suspect that the others will kill just to free up a body for their comrades to grab. That’s why a Hunter has to keep moving-the more he kills, the more they have to work with when looking for him. It’s a losing game-sooner or later they find every Hunter.”
I thought about that. “So how do you hurt them? Really hurt them?”
“Kill them a lot-as in often. I met a Hunter from England who had worn out his welcome there, He was third generation in a manner of speaking-trained by a guy who had been trained, sort of an apprentice approach. He said the carrion get weaker every time they get put down and get a new body, not a lot, but permanently. Erosion type of thing. He had the journals from the first guy in his line, and the first guy described the carrion as being a lot faster and brighter. Other Hunters have said the same thing. I’ve been hunting twenty years, and I can say that you can see the difference in areas that had been hunted hard, and ones that hadn’t; the carrion are a bit more shop-worn where they’ve been hunted. You know how every culture has legends of vampires? There’s Hunters who think that they stem from the days when the carrion were a lot tougher and technology was lower. I think it feels right.”
I thought about this, questions sloshing around inside my skull. “I thought I was going crazy.”
“I know. But you’re not-just remember that sometimes the world is.” He passed me a small pocket notebook. “These’re the symbols that I’ve puzzled out or other Hunters have shown me. Keep it, I’ve got another copy.”
“Thanks. How come the government doesn’t know about this?”
“I think it does, to some degree. But can you imagine trying to explain it?”
“Yeah. If you can’t see it, it sounds… crazy.” That was a word I had never been comfortable with.
“Look, I know you’ve got a million questions, but I dropped two of your local carrion yesterday, and it will be bad for you to be seen with me. If you’re smart, you’ll find a town that doesn’t have many, and practice not looking at them. I can’t recommend my choice in life, Sam: its going to be the death of me, and a very ugly death at that.”
“I understand. Thanks, Mike.” He was right-I had a million questions burning inside me, and for the first time since my family I was with someone who understood what I felt. But the look in his eyes was real-this was a man one step ahead of the Angel of Death.
“Good luck, Sam.” He shook my hand, one firm dry clasp, and then he was up and sauntering away.
I headed off in the other direction.
***
I left town three days later. Using Mike’s list I quickly saw that they weren’t just aware of me, they were actively looking for a Seer who was trailing them. They knew Mike was around-he had his own symbol.
Leaving safeguarded my adoptive parents, and gave me time to think.
A week and three hundred miles later I killed my first deader. It had fifteen hundred dollars and a collection of jewelry on it, cheap stuff I left where it would be found.
***
I never saw Mike again, although I saw his symbol in a few towns over the next couple years. I’ve used that name on occasion out of respect. I have met Seers and a few Hunters, shared facts and guesses, explained a few things, and learned more. I have my own symbol now, the deaders know me by reputation, and they’ve gotten close several times.
They’ll get me sooner or later, just like they’ve gotten every Hunter. But in the meantime they’ll pay, and keep on paying. I think the erosion theory is real-although I’m older and lamed up a bit from many injuries, the walking dead seem to be less effective on the average than they were when I was young. I’ve eroded many dozens myself over the years-I’ve purged whole areas.
But it wouldn’t matter if they came back refreshed and stronger-I will keep killing them until the day they drag me down and rip me to pieces.
They should have just left us alone.
All I wanted was to be normal.
