Zombies vs. Unicorns (38 page)

“James,” I whispered.

He opened his eyes. His skin was as pale as ashes, his blue eyes now the black color that the eyes of the newly dead often turn. He wore a white shirt and black pants and the big heavy emblem of the ducal house around his neck on a chain. He could have died an hour ago. His gaze fastened on me where I knelt over him with the drill in my hands.

He smiled.

“I knew you’d come for me, Adele,” he said.

We sat on the steps of the mausoleum and looked out over the town. There were lights down in the streets, and bright illumination in the center of town where they were setting up the stage for tomorrow’s Hanging Day.

“I woke up in the coffin,” he said. “It must have been days ago. I yanked and pulled at the manacles, but all that happened was this.” He showed me his ragged wrists. There were wounds braceleting them, torn but not bloody. The wounds of the dead never heal, but they never bleed, either. I had seared the metal of the manacles with the drill until they’d come apart and fallen
away. I was wincing as I did it, terrified I would hurt him even as I knew I couldn’t.

“Your uncle did this,” I said. “He didn’t want you coming back to accuse him.”

“He must have planned this for a long time. Had the coffin made. The manacles put in. Paid the maker to be silent. Hired a man to run me down.” James was looking toward the town. Toward the brightly illuminated gallows. “They’re hanging him tomorrow, aren’t they?”

I nodded. “They’re calling him a drunk driver. Your death was an accident, but he still has to die for it.”

“It wasn’t his fault,” said James distantly. “No one says no to the Duke.” He turned to look at me. “If it weren’t for you, I’d still be in that coffin.”

I looked at him. He was still the same James, his beautiful face hardly changed at all. But something behind his eyes had gone away, something indefinable and strange. I said, “What’s it like?”

“What’s what like?”

“Being dead.”

He reached up and put his palm against my cheek. His hand was cold, so cold, but I leaned into it anyway, fitting the curve of my cheekbone to his palm as I had so many times before. “When I woke up, I could hear everything.” His black eyes reflected the lights of the town like mirrors. “I could hear you. I could hear your heart beating. But I couldn’t sleep in my grave without you.”

“James …” I swallowed. “In the morning they’ll know what
happened. That I dug you up. We have to get out of town—run away. Maybe we can go to the city—”

“No one runs away from Lychgate.” He tilted his head to the side, slowly. “Where can we go? In any other town, when they look at me, they’ll see a walking corpse. They’ll chase us away with pitchforks and torches.”

“Then what can we do?” I looked at him. I wondered when the black had eaten the blue in his eyes. Had it been gradual, or had it happened all at once?

“I want you to come with me,” he said. “To Hanging Day, tomorrow.”

“James—” I was horrified. “Your uncle will be there. If he sees you, he’ll know what I did. That I got you out. I’ll go to jail.”

“No, you won’t.” He sounded completely confident.

“You can’t be sure of that.”

“Adele.” He turned to me. “Do you trust me?”

I hesitated. He was James, still. I had always trusted him. Even if his skin was the papery color of an old book now, and his eyes were black instead of blue, and he smelled of cold stone and fresh dirt. “Yes.”

“I won’t let anything happen to you. Not while I—”

He hesitated. I knew he had been going to say
while I’m alive.
It was something he’d always said.

“Not while I’m here,” he finished. He reached to take my hands. He wrapped his fingers around mine. His were like twigs carved out of ice.

“After that we can run away?” I said. “Hide somewhere, where they’ll never find us?”

He leaned forward and touched his lips to mine. His were cold and tasted of salt.

“Whatever you want,” he said.

Hanging Day began early, with crowds gathering in the square by nine in the morning. I had brought James some of his old clothes that he’d left at my house—a battered shirt and jeans would be much less likely to stir up notice than his somber funeral gear.

We stood at the outskirts of the crowd, in the shadow of one of the taller buildings. James kept his head down, his hair hiding his face. The return of the Duke’s nephew from the dead would have been an event newsworthy enough to take the attention off Hanging Day, or even bring it to an end completely. He was totally silent, watching the stage, the scaffold, and the lectern where his uncle would stand. When he was alive, I could always read his face, but now I couldn’t imagine what he was thinking.

Slowly the town square filled up with people. Teenagers in laughing groups, parents with their children on their shoulders, young couples carrying picnic baskets. And as I stood there with James, I saw something I had never really noticed before. I had always been close in to the festivities in the center of the square. But now that I stood outside everything, I saw that there were zombies here, clinging to the shadows, folding themselves into the darkness at the edges of the crowd. They stood with their black eyes fixed on the scaffold, their hands hanging empty at their sides.

It would never have crossed my mind that zombies would
enjoy a Hanging Day just like everyone else. But of course, we had been trained to ignore the undead. Not to see them when they were there. They were like trash lying in the gutter; you looked up and away, trying to concentrate on more pleasant things.

A shout went up from the crowd, and I looked to see what they were shouting about. The Duke’s stretch limousine was sliding through the crowd like a shark through shallow water. The people in the crowd began shouting and waving. Behind the limo drove a police wagon with barred windows. I felt James, beside me, grow as stiff as a plank of wood.

The Duke’s car drew up to the stage, and he was helped from the black limousine by his attendants. The crowd was surging; I could see only bits and pieces of what was going on—the policemen opening the back of the wagon, yanking out a terrified-looking man who was handcuffed and gagged. He struggled and kicked as they dragged him up the steps to the scaffold, where the executioner stood, all in black.

The Duke took his place at the lectern. He looked out over the crowd, smiling, as a few feet away the murderer was forced to stand over the square trapdoor cut in the stage’s floor.

“Greetings, good folk of Lychgate,” the Duke said, and a roar went up from the crowd.

James’s hand tightened on mine. Suddenly he was moving, pulling me after him forward through the crowd. I tried to dig my heels in, but his grip was as hard as iron.

“Today we stand as one, united in our desire for justice,” the Duke went on. “A terrible crime has taken place. The murder of my beloved nephew—”

His voice was drowned out by the crowd yelling. They were shouting James’s name. None of them noticed that James was there among them, stepping on their toes and jostling their elbows as he dragged me closer to the stage. He was just some scruffy zombie pushing through the crowd.

“—The punishment for which, as I am sure you know, is death by hanging—”

We were nearly at the stage now. The Duke’s amplified voice was deafening in my ears.

“—and burning, the ashes to be scattered on Corpse Hill—”

There was a police line around the stage, blocking the crowd from getting too close to the steps. As we neared it, an officer threw out his arm as if to stop us. James came to a halt, still holding my hand, and looked full in the officer’s face.

The policeman lowered his arm slowly, looking astonished. “Your Grace?”

“—And if any among the crowd has an objection, or evidence of this man’s innocence, bring them forth now!”

The Duke’s voice rang out like a bell. He was required to say these words; the crowd could always come forth and speak up for the prisoner; no one ever did.

Except now. James raised his head and in his slow, dead voice, said loudly:

“I speak for the prisoner.”

The Duke looked stunned. “Who was that? Who spoke?”

“It was me, Uncle.” James took a step forward, but the
police officer blocked him. James gave him a stern look. “Don’t you know who I am?”

“Y-yes,” the man stuttered. “But—”
You’re dead.
I could see he wanted to say it, but he didn’t. Instead he stood aside and let James ascend the lectern. The crowd was screaming, watching James as he made his slow and steady way to the stage.

His uncle was staring at him. Duke Grayson was putty-colored, like a zombie himself. He looked as if he couldn’t believe his eyes. “But—but—we bound you,” he said, finally. “With salt, and bronze—”

“Bronze can be shattered,” said James, “and locks broken. I stand before you today and demand to see my murderer punished.”

Duke Grayson pointed toward the trembling man with the rope around his neck. “He’s there, James.”

James smiled a cold, unpleasant smile. “I meant you.”

Now there was chaos. The crowd was screaming and milling. The police officer who had let James go by took me and set me on the steps to the stage, as if worried I would be crushed in the melee.

The Duke was blustering. “I don’t know what you imagine happened, James, but I never harmed you—”

“Never harmed me?” James snarled. It was frightening to see the way he looked, his teeth bared and his black eyes glowing with the low light of the rageful undead. “You wanted to be the Duke. You never wanted me to live to eighteen. You hired someone to run me down, then found some poor vagrant you
could pin the crime on and bribed the judge to make it stick. I
heard you
, Uncle. I heard you, paying off the murderer you hired. I heard you after I died.”

The Duke spun toward the crowd. “He’s gone mad,” he said. “You know that death can shatter men’s minds.”

My heart was pounding. I had not known what James wanted to do here in the square, but I had not imagined a direct confrontation.
Trust me,
he had said. And I did. Even knowing there was no way out of this for him now. For us, now. Not unless James knew something I didn’t.

“I am quite sane, nonetheless,” said James, and I saw, from the way that the crowd was looking at him, that they believed him.

“The testimony of a dead man means nothing!” the Duke shouted. “Officers, take him away!”

But the police didn’t move. James was the son of the old Duke, and both had been beloved in Lychgate. They would not move to hurt him, even in death.

“What can you possibly hope to gain by accusing me, boy?” the Duke demanded of James in a low voice that was half snarl and half wail. “You have lost the Dukedom. Accept it. If I die, there will be no one left with Grayson blood to hold the title of Duke of Lychgate. Do you want that?”

“No,” said James.

“Then—”

“I will be the Duke of Lychgate,” said James.

“But you’re
dead.
A dead man can’t hold a title—”

“Can’t he?” The rage had faded from James’s expression; there
was a cool, calm smile on his pale lips instead. He turned to the crowd. “Who here would prefer a dead man to a murderer for their Duke? Who here wants the son of the
true
Duke Grayson as their ruler?”

The crowd stirred; I could sense their ambivalence. They had adored James when he was alive. I knew how much he had been loved; I had been there with him in the streets when they had stopped us both to wish him good health, or take photographs of him with their phones and cameras. But now he was dead, and the dead were not like us.

Duke Grayson smiled a thin smile. “Don’t you see?” he said. “They don’t
want
you. Officers, take my nephew—”

There was a rustle then, a sort of wave of sound that went through the crowd. I saw the Duke’s expression change as he looked out over the people of Lychgate, and I stood up myself, to get a better view.

It was the zombies. They were coming forth from the shadows, moving in their slow deliberate way. Without making a sound they pushed through the crowd toward the stage and stood—at least a hundred of them—in a circle around it. The implication was clear. James was not to be touched.

Now it was James who was smiling. “You see,” he said. “They do want me.”

“They’re dead,” said the Duke. “They don’t matter.”

“Don’t they?” said James. “I think it is time that we stopped pretending. Who among us cannot count a family member—a child, a parent, a wife or husband—or a friend who has returned from the dead? We know what they call this
place—Zombietown. We know that the Curse follows us. If it is even a curse. Maybe we should stop and ask ourselves if there is any real reason for us to be ashamed. In other towns death is the end. Here we see our dead. We speak to them. And they love us.”

At that, he looked at me.

“Perhaps,” he said, “it is time for Lychgate to have a Duke who represents what the town really is. A union of living and dead.”

He held his hand out then. I stood. It was not as I had always imagined it would be. I had thought I would marry James before the entire town, with a carpet of white flowers spread out at my feet and James, handsome in a tuxedo, waiting for me in the gardens of the Duke’s palace. Now he was asking me to stand up with him in front of everyone while there was grave dirt under my nails and clinging to the soles of my shoes. It flaked off in clumps as I made my way across the platform and took his hand.

It was as cold as ice.

We turned to face the crowd, together. I saw them. The faces of the town. They had never smiled when they’d looked at me, but now they smiled at
us.
We were young and in love. We were living and dead. The faces of the zombies shone as they gazed at us.

The crowd began to clap. Slowly at first, then fast, a sound like thunder. I heard the Duke cry out. He turned to run, but the zombies were there, blocking his way, encircling the stage. They looked to James for instruction.

He gave it.

“The Duke is yours,” he said.

The dead swarmed up the steps like driver ants. They took hold of Duke Grayson and dragged him, struggling and screaming, to the trapdoor. The executioner released the innocent prisoner, who fled. The Duke was gagged and the rope placed about his neck. It was one of the zombies who pulled the lever that opened the trapdoor and dropped the Duke, twisting and kicking, into neck-snapping space.