Troubadour Horror Zone: a twice a month terror/horror new series, with stories submitted by many of our T21 authors.

This is the first story in a new T21 series of horror/thriller stories. First there will be a research essay on the horror character, followed by a story written just for T21. Chris Deal will be writing the research essays, and the stories will be written by a different T21 author each week. Our first set is about zombies. Below we have Chris Deal’s essay on zombies, followed by his story on zombies.

Essay on zombies: The Current Zombie Apocalypse by Chris Deal

The unholy mass, the unnaturally animate, each lumbering forward with exposed wounds, blood and viscera pouring out from ripped burial clothes or whatever the poor soul happen to die in. Limbs excised and broken teeth gnashing, as they slowly flank you, blocking your escape. When there is no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth. The dead have come.

We all know the imagery of the living dead. Like anything in the field of horror, it’s up to the audience to decide what can actually scare them. An ingrained cultural fear perhaps, but zombies, the living dead, they’ve been in the human mind since before recorded time. I’ve been scared of them since I was six and my uncle showed me “Night of the Living Dead.” My house was just up from a Civil War era cemetery, and I remember staying up late at night, not wanting to look out the window by my bed on the off chance there was a rotting corpse out there, looking in at me.

The word “zombie” came into the English language around 1871, being derived from both the Haitian and subsequently the Louisiana Creole word “zonbi”, which itself has roots reaching back to the Bantu language. The Kilgongo word “nzambi”, which means god or spirit of a dead person, is also considered a predecessor. The concept of the zonbi, which was brought to the US from the idea of voodoo concerns the dead who were brought back to life to serve as slaves for bokors, or sorcerers. There also exists the idea of the zombi astral, the soul, or part of it, that is captured by bokors to use a sort of grim good luck charm.

The voodoo zombie wasn’t quite the cannibalistic living dead we think of today. The idea, backed up by the controversial Wade Davis of “The Serpent and the Rainbow” fame, was that by using various chemicals, tetrodotoxin, for example, which would cause a strong paralysis that can simulate death, or at least the initial symptoms, the victim would be thought dead and buried. The bokor would dig up the grave and claim their free labor. This explanation was supposedly been backed up by the story of Clairvius Narcisse, who was kept in his stupor by a paste made from datura. Narcisse was buried on May 2, 1962, and his master, who kept him and other zombies at work on his sugarcane plantation, died two years later. It wasn’t until eighteen years later, that Narcisse was returned to his family, having spent the intervening years wandering the countryside.

Of course, there is no consensus Narcisse’s story is true, and if so, how he managed to escape his zombified bondage.

For the first half of the twentieth century, the voodoo zombie was all we had. “White Zombie”, starring Béla Lugosi, is considered the first zombie movie. Completely entrenched in the voodoo tradition, the film took place in Haiti and concerned Lugosi’s character, Murder Legendre, who uses his abilities as a bokor to turn people into slaves to change Madge Bellamy’s Madeline Short into a love zombie for a rich plantation owner, perhaps an inspiration of “Return of the Living Dead 3″, and one of the few examples of a love affair with the undead.

The voodoo, workhorse zed was preeminent in pop culture until 1968, when George A. Romero directed “Night of the Living Dead.” Admittedly taking more influence from the 1962 film “Carnival of Souls” and Matheson’s “I am Legend” than “White Zombie”, Night single-handedly changed the way zombies were thought. Instead of cheap labor, zombies were now cannibalistic creatures, Romero feeling that the eating of human flesh was the most shocking thing the beasts could do, or at least that he could get away with at the time. This has a precursor in the 1922 H. P. Lovecraft serial, Herbert West—”Reanimator”, a parody of Frankenstein concerning the eponymous scientist’s efforts to bypass death, which results in the murderous undead. Still, in West, instead of killing the Reanimates with a bullet to the brain, the spine has to be destroyed to bring them down.

The word zombie was never actually said in “Night of the Living Dead”. In fact, Romero himself never thought of his creations as zombies, still entrenched in the voodoo tradition. If he described his creations as anything, it was as ghouls. Initially, what would evolve into “Night of the Living Dead” began as a horror-comedy concerning a teenage alien, then the second draft concerned aliens who used the bodies of humans as a food source. Another version, closer to the ultimate form, centered on humans possessed by an alien pathogen or radiation from a returning NASA satellite, a possible cause of the chaos presented in the final film. Another trope, one that zombie media has for the most part maintained, that had its roots in Romero’s work was leaving the cause of the mayhem unexplained.

Following the film’s release, zombies were the new “it” monster. Though there were many movies in the early days of Hollywood concerning the voodoo tradition, the Romero version became the main fiend. In the 1970’s alone, over thirty movies were made concerning cannibal fiends, including the first sequel in Romero’s series, and what many argue the best, “Dawn of the Dead”, and the Italian pseudo-sequel, Fulci’s “Zombi 2″, perhaps the only time the world would see a shark and a zombie go at it. Romero would continue the series with 1985’s “Day of the Dead”, and twenty years later with “Land of the Dead.” He would then reboot the franchise, that most hated of current trends with the 2007 release of “Diary of the Dead” and the upcoming “Survival of the Dead.” The undisputed master of the zombie genre, Romero will publish his first novel in 2010. Titled simply, “The Living Dead”, the book will do what his films have not: reveal exactly what is the cause of the zombies, and he will explain what they do. A sequel is already expected.

Night cowriter John A. Russo would have his own say with the film “Return of the Living” and its sequels, all of them breaking completely from Romero’s rules by for also revealing the cause of the zombies, a chemical used by the US government, Trioxin, and having the zombies have the same intelligence they possessed as living humans. This gave the world the cry of “Braaaaains,” what virtually anyone calls out when they imitate a zombie.

Romero’s literary endeavor is not a first. That dubious honor goes to the anthology “Book of the Dead”, published in 1989. With a foreword by Romero, the collection featured the work of Stephen King and Ramsey Campbell, among others. Considered the first real example of zombie literature, besides Lovecraft’s “Reanimator”, the genre would find new life.
“The Rising”, and its sequel, “City of the Dead”, by Brian Keene, didn’t follow all of Romero’s conventions, like “Return”, explicitly naming the cause of the outbreak as demonic possession and having the zombies retain the intelligence they had in life.

While the shambling, dead cannibal has maintained a firm grip on the nightmares of children everywhere, a rising tide in the portrayal of zombies is moving away from this. The infected, hordes of still living people driven mad by some chemical or viral influence, is becoming the more prevalent. Stephen King’s novel, “Cell”, considered a zombie novel, states that the “phoners” are still living people driven insane by “The Pulse”, a signal transmitted to anyone who was on a cell phone at the time. A similar idea was mined in the film “The Signal”, which told three different stories about the effects of a transmission across all telecommunication devices, cell phones included, that induced a murderous insanity. “28 Days Later”, the video game “Left 4 Dead” and its recently released sequel, and “Zombieland” (the infection in Zombieland starts with a bad gas station burger), they all are evidence away from the living dead to the infected trope, all featuring fast hordes running to their victims, slow zombies not considered as scary these days perhaps.

The first decade of the new century has so far been great for the Living Dead. 2004’s homage and loving parody to Romero’s Dawn, “Shaun of the Dead” was both a critical and commercial success, launching Simon Pegg to deserved fame here in America. 2003 saw the launch of a new zombie icon with the publication of Max Brooks, son of director Mel Brooks, first book, “The Zombie Survival Guide” and his subsequent, critically successful “War World Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War.” The fuel behind the undead’s rise is the virus Solanum. Brooks’ work mostly follows the Romero conventions, though he uses the word zombie throughout, the characters do note how many feel foolish and self-conscious over using the term. The British film “28 Days Later”, and its sequel, “28 Weeks Later”, both did very well commercially, and a third film, “28 Months Later” is on its way. Another inversion, featuring a possibly Hell-born strain of Rabies, the Spanish film REC received a sequel and an American remake, “Quarantine”, as well as much praise. A second sequel has begun production, but the remake didn’t do so well.

With over 50 films being released on the subject and countless books, video games, comics and with the Living Dead popping up in practically every conceivable medium, you might as well call 2009 the year of the zombies.

The film “Zombieland”, starring Woody Harrelson, managed to more than double its budget in two weeks, all but assuring a sequel and possible franchise. With strong distribution and all the hype imaginable and great critical response, “Zombieland” assures that the dead have a position on the cultural zeitgeist for the foreseeable future, but is that a good thing?

The most curious part, and perhaps even the root of the current upswing of zombies was published on April Fool’s Day of this year. “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies” is an adaptation of the iconic Jane Austen novel, only slightly subverted. Using the original text, Seth Grahame-Smith added references to zombies, and to seal the deal with today’s youth, ninjas, maintaining the general outline of the novel. Set in an alternative history, London is a walled in city, and a woman is now judged by her ability to put down the undead as well as her breeding and composure. The image of Elizabeth and the other Bennet girls wielding katanas and decapitating zombies is probably not what Austen had in mind 200 years back.

A huge hit, “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies”, following on the heels of “Shaun of the Dead”, has done much to shift the view and tone of zombies in the media. By adding a comedic slant, they make the Living Dead safer, less scary. The fear of the lumbering horde is gone, replaced by laughter. The shock of killing your friends and neighbors is not nearly as damning as it was. When Shaun finally had to put a bullet in his newly turned mother, we cried for him, despite the fact that the jokes were front and center. “Zombieland” was a comedic western with zombies as window dressing, “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies” was the result of someone combing two diametrically opposed concepts together for a buck.

While the current zombie upswing is a boon for the horror aficionado, could this be the end of them as something to be feared? This isn’t the first time a horror icon has been subverted. The recent trend in vampires has all but completely watered-down the once feared image of the bloodsucker. There are two television series currently on the American airwaves that center on vampires, “True Blood” and “Vampire Diaries”, both of which concern the vampire as a love interest to a human protagonist. Even Disney’s “Wizards of Waverly Place” uses this predatory creature as a romantic goal. The root of the current vampire trend is the Stephanie Meyer series of books and films, “Twilight”, which completely undermines the horrific nature of both vampires and werewolves by use of a chaste love triangle. Still, vampires have been used since Bram Stroker’s “Dracula” as a representation of forbidden lust, and it can be argued that even though it turned vampires from a curious folklore ghoul into something almost sexy.

Is this really the end of the zombie as something to be feared? That’s to be debated, as the bokor himself, George Romero has a new film and a book on the way. Though the recent release of the young adult book, “The Forest of Hands and Teeth”, the start of a series, itself with a film version of the way, could further weaken the undead, but in a world where the dead rise, anything is possible.

Zombie story: Cosplay by Chris Deal

On the two blocks from our hotel to the convention center, we saw seventeen Jasons, fifteen Freddies, ten Michael Myers, four Draculas, eight werewolves, an alien, two Lestats arguing with a Cullen, one Pinhead, two Leatherfaces, and, a block away from our destination, a whole crowd of zeds.

“Dude, look,” Donnie said, raising a hand dyed a stark red with food color and pointing to his costumed kin, “it’s a flash mob.” His thrift-store suit was torn about the back, the sleeves, and along the legs. His face and white shirt was a Pollock painting of different shades of red, more food color, some chocolate syrup, and some dried oatmeal that was meant to represent undeclared viscera along his mouth, that only managed to make him look like a messy eater.

“Shut up, Donnie,” Jed said, lifting his goalie mask and eyeing the crowded undead, blood pouring from their mouths and wounds on their heads and torsos, clothes ripped, each slowly shuffling along down the middle of the street. “Posers,” he said. His blue pair of coveralls was decorated with fake bloodstains like his brother’s.

“Pretty good costumes,” I said.

“Yeah, all right. They ain’t bad,” Jed said, as pulled the mask back down over his face and poked Donnie in the back with his plastic machete. “Thinking you won’t be winning the costume contest, man.”

“It is what it is, I guess,” Donnie said.

“Ain’t like Jason’s a very original idea,” I said.

“I don’t give a good God damn about originality, I just want to get a picture with Hodder.” With his machete, Jed pointed at my costume, the white short-sleeved button up with the red ink placed so carefully. “You’ve got red on you,” he said.

“Why, thank you,” I said in my horrible British accent. I nudged his ribs with the cricket bat, pushing him into the way of another zed, a woman with ratty blonde hair and smudges of fake blood along her mouth. She took a couple slow shuffles back.

“Wow, I’m really sorry,” Jed said, “this asshole pushed me.” The woman zed said nothing. She opened her jaw wide and hissed a low, guttural growl. Jed laughed and kept walking past her to the convention center. “Talk about not breaking character. You should take her example, Donnie.”

“I should walk around all day like a zombie-” Donnie said.

“Don’t say that,” I interrupted. A scream came from behind us, but those cosplayers, the ones who get really into it like that zed, they’re all about getting the most attention they can.

“What?” Donnie asked.

“That, the zed word,” I replied. The screams kept getting louder behind us. The girl must have surprised some people not going to the convention.

“We’re not saying the zed word,” Jed said.

“It’s ridiculous.”

Donnie let out a loud guffaw. “Yeah, yeah, but still, man, I need to do that. Just walk around the convention like a zom-”

“Donnie,” I said.

“Sorry. I need to walk around all day like a zed.”

“Donnie, what did I just say?” Jed asked.

“What? I didn’t say the zed word.”

“No, about following her example and shutting the hell up.”

“You’re a dick,” Donnie said, turning his eyes down to the sidewalk, slowing his gait.

“You know I love you, you sad little zed,” Jed said as he through an around Donnie’s shoulders.

A loud scream was cut through by a gunshot, the sound echoing through the city streets almost defining. The three of us turned and saw a guy dressed as a cop shooting at the female zed, the woman’s back exploding with fake viscera, and a new batch of cosplayers who had come together in a piece of street theater, the new zeds slowly making their way towards the big crowds making their way towards their day jobs, who were all playing along with the convention goers.

“Pretty damn realistic,” I said.

“Yeah. You see those squibs they had? Looked like the bullets went right through those zeds,” Jed said.

“Man, we should have thought up an act like that,” Donnie said.

“Shut up, Donnie,” Jed said.

We walked up the steps to the convention center, a great building that wouldn’t look out of place as a courthouse, with great marble columns at the top of the stairs covered with bloody handprints all and a great banner with the words “First Annual Charlotte Horror Con” written in gothic type. Inside was a long corridor that led to the main convention floor, the floor strewn with bodies and blood.

“Man, they went all out,” I said.

“Damn things look real,” Jed said. “Smells real, too.” There was a noxious odor along the corridor, to go along with the corpse motif they had set up.

“Damn realistic,” Donnie said.

“Donnie-” Jed started.

“I know, I know,” he interrupted, “shut up.”

“That’s my boy,” Jed said.

As we walked further down the corridor, the cacophony of the convention was getting louder and heavier, a growing drone of noise and movement that did nothing, but get my blood pumping. I pushed open the door to the convention and we three laid eyes on the chaos that was inside.

The entire convention floor was littered with bodies, people running and screaming away from the hordes of cosplayers.
“Man, they really are taking this seriously,” Jed said. “Let’s go find Hodder’s booth.”

Donnie picked up a pamphlet from a display by the entrance that contained a map of the convention floor and the schedule of events. “Doesn’t look like Hodder’ll be here until after noon.”

“Well, damn,” Jed said. “Want to check out the zombie apocalypse?”

“Hey,” Donnie said.

“What?” Jed asked.

“We’re not using the zed word.”

“Jason can used the zed word,” Jed said, tapping the hockey mask.

“Jason can’t talk.”

“He just doesn’t talk; there’s nothing in the films that says he can’t. Besides, zeds can’t either.”

“They did in ‘Return of the Living Dead.’”

“Who the hell cares about ‘Return’?”

“I do, you ass.”

“Dorks,” I said.

“Shut up, Shaun,” Jed said, “and shut up, Donnie. Come on, let’s get to it.”

We walked into the chaos, around people on the ground cosplayers on top of them, seemingly chewing on their necks or faces. A few steps in, one notices us and gets off the person on the ground. His white tee shirt is torn, with streaks of blood leaking down his mouth, from the socket where his eye should have been. When Donnie sees the man, he goes into character, walking slowly with his knees locked, arms forward, groaning like Frankenstein’s monster. The cosplayer keeps coming towards him, his hands out, reaching for Donnie, and when he locks his hands on Donnie’s shoulders, Donnie starts laughing, saying, “I’m one of you, man. I’m one of you.” The man keeps coming, and Donnie keeps repeating, “I’m one of you,” his voice getting louder, shriller. The man knocks Donnie to the ground. Jed is too busy laughing to notice Donnie’s screams, as the man bites hard onto Donnie’s cheek, ripping the flesh there. Jed stops laughing, and I run forward and hit the man in the head with my cricket bat. Donnie’s screams had caught the attention of the others.

“Man,” Jed said, his voice quiet behind his mask, “I don’t think those are cosplayers.”

The man who bit Donnie got up, a slow trickle of red where I hit him on the head. I reached under Donnie’s arms and tried to pick him up, but his legs didn’t seem to want to work. Jed just stood there. I called to him, “Help me with Donnie,” which was enough to get him to move. He struck at the man who bit Donnie with his machete, forgetting for a moment it was made of plastic. It broke off on the man’s neck. Jed looked at the handle for a moment before throwing it at the man, hitting him square between the eyes, but not even knocking him back. Jed made a whimpering sound at the same moment Donnie did, and then came back and grabbed Donnie’s other arm, the two of us able to lift him up. We made a move to the corridor we came from, but a gathering crowd of those slow moving things blocked it from us.

“You’ve got to be shitting me. You’ve got to be shitting me. I told him I was one of them,” Donnie said in a whisper, his face missing a hunk of skin and muscle, the blood pouring out of him fast.

“Just shut up, Donnie,” Jed said. “We’ll get you out of here, get you help.” Jed and I carried Donnie down an aisle of booths that was covered with the bodies of convention goers like us. A group of those damned things were chewing on the innards of another Jason, his hockey mask still down, blood leaking from the eyeholes. One of those things had a real machete straight through its torso.

“Hold him,” I said to Jed. I let go of Donnie and walked to the masticating monstrosities, slowly so as not to attract their attention. Once I was sure they were content with their meal, I hit the one with the machete across his face, sending him awkwardly to the ground. With my foot on his chest, I pulled hard on the machete’s handle, pulling it loose with a grotesque sucking sound and a spray of blackened blood. The thing tried to grab my foot, but I hit it again and again with the cricket bat, its bones breaking and more blood pouring out of it until it stopped moving.

I ran back to where Jed stood holding Donnie, handing him the machete. “Thanks, man,” he said.

I went to put Donnie’s arm around my neck again, but it was limp. His head was hanging down, his forehead almost touching his chest. “Fuck,” I said.

“What?” Jed asked. He looked down at Donnie and saw the truth of the situation. “No,” he said as he slowly began shaking, “no, no, no, no, no.”

“Jed, man,” I said.

“They fucking killed my brother. Those motherfuckers killed my brother.”

“Jed.”

Gently, Jed lowered Donnie to the ground, as a tear fell from his mask.

“I’m sorry, man.”

His chest was wracked, heaving with sobs, and then he was still. Standing over the body of his brother, Jed looked like a giant. He raised the machete, so he could get a look at the bloodstained metal, observing it for several long moments, before he turned to the group that was eating the other Jason. In two strides, he was there above them, raising the machete to the sky and then bringing it down in quick strikes, burying the blade in the backs and arms and skulls of those things, until not a one of them was moving. He turned and looked at me.

“You’ve got red on you,” he said, pointing at the stains on my shirt, Donnie’s blood mixing with the red ink.

Jed turned and started walking slowly, with determination towards the growing horde that was coming down the aisle to us. Silently, he dove into the rotting mass, raising the machete and swinging it down again and again, but it wasn’t enough. The crowd closed in on him, the dozen things biting through his coveralls, trying to block his swings, but he kept hacking away, until they got him to the ground, and mercifully, I couldn’t see what they were doing to him.

I turned away from the mass that had occupied themselves with Jed, and tried to scan the convention floor for an exit. Down at the other end of the aisle I was in, another batch of about six of those fucking things making their way for me, and past them was a door, the only option I could see.

Lacking any other options, I started running towards them, letting forth what I hoped would be a great battle cry. The plan was simple: hit as many of them with the cricket bat as possible, knocking them down or at least giving me enough time to try the door.

Before I could put the plan in motion, I slipped on a puddle of blood, falling on my back, knocking the wind from my lungs, and hitting my head on the ground, the cricket bat sliding across the floor away from me. By the time I remembered why I was running, I was surrounded, the hordes closing in, those rotting things reaching for me as they got slowly closer.

“For fuck’s sake,” I said as I felt the first zed’s cold hand close on my arm. “For fuck’s sake.”