Stained Glass

Posted on June 19, 2019 by Kate

Kage Baker loved coloured glass.

I think she saw it as a combination of fire and candy – safe to pick up and handle, inedible so you never used it up, beautiful and rare. She was especially fond of marbles in what she called sea-colours: blue, green, lavender, silver. She kept jars of them where the sun could shine through them, and I think the sensory effect was a tactile one; the light through the coloured glass was a clear touch on her skin.

Kage always appreciated an apt use of synesthesia.

In her mother’s house, Kage and Anne both lobbied for (and installed) stained glass here and there, to wonderful effect. There was a weird little dove grey and mauve window set in the wall above where Kage’s bed had been before she moved up into the Tower. Kage designed it, though she said the glassmaker got the design wrong; she loved it, though. The door at the end of the upstairs hall was made of Mondrian-style panels of red, blue and amber glass, and the afternoon light through it painted the floor with lozenges of colour.

I don’t know what happened to either of those pieces. They were wonderful, and I have no idea what was done with them. The house has been torn down for years now, and fancy townhouses stand on the site. I don’t think they have any stained glass, except the sunlight shining red through the remaining eucalyptus trees.

In our many little houses, Kage hung stained glass panels in the plain clear windows: a road winding dark through sea hills, flowering branches, prisms and globes and medallions. Rainbows bloomed all over the house, at all hours, as the sun found the various ornaments. When she didn’t hang special panels, Kage lined up coloured vases and glasses, and marmalade jars filled with bits of sea-glass harvested off the beach. She segregated them by hue – blues and greens were pretty common, red and purple much rarer. But there was a lot of all of it, because Kage never stopped hunting for the glass.

That’s been on my mind all day – the play of light through the coloured glass, the swathes of ruby and amethyst and emerald, the rainbows that filled our rooms. Kage sat there, all the colours of heaven playing over her, and wrote all of them into whatever story was also pouring through her. If she could have written in colours, she would have – and then no one would have understood her stories except for chromatophore-using cephalopods from Space …

Luckily, she wrote in words. We can all be grateful for that, Dear Readers.

And in the merry meantime, for your amusement, here is what I have been writing.

When last seen, our heroine was discovering that Fox 11 in Los Angeles is playing a marathon of zombie movies: topical, if in bad taste. So here’s the next 1900 words/3 pages or so of the Zombie Story:

 

Reports of lights in the sky and weird rains were still being pulled out of the archives on CNN, apparently to give the live anchors time to wash, eat, shave and hit the bathroom. No one seemed inspired to run for home. There were no live reports from the Man In The Street, not from Atlanta or New York.

Strangely, coloured rain really was falling all over the place, around then. It had been all Spring. Red, green, blue; featuring snakes, frogs, starlings, giant hailstones and mysterious bits of plastic confetti. It eventually turned out that the rains of ‘blood’ in India (as well as Los Angeles and Miami and St Louis, to mention a few) were not responsible for the zombies rising; despite what Dr. Chandra Wickramasinghe kept speculating.

But they were a subtle clue. Our problems were in the clouds, and blowing in the wind.

***

I hadn’t been awfully worried about all that freaky rain; not when it originally happened. It was all East of the Rockies. I live in Los Angeles – what worried me were brush fires, gas prices and decreasing tourism. I was amazed, though, that were so many reports over the last few months – CNN just kept finding them. I mean, I was aghast and amazed at the videos, but it had just not registered that it was so widespread.

But going through their archives – probably a make-work assignment to keep someone from hysteria – yielded some strange correlations. CNN began building a sort of time line of weirdness as that second morning wore on. Murphy and I watched it all.

The first reports of whole neighborhoods going nuts and eating people had been pretty much lost in the shuffle. After all, this was America! Reports of door-to-door salesmen and pollsters getting attacked and gnawed on by housewives were initially treated as jokes – they sort of expected African insurgents to go old-school and use cannibalism as a form of terrorism, but not in the US suburbs.

The first really seriously reported incident, in the CNN retrospective, was about a month old; from a nice neighborhood near Eden Isle in St. Tammany Parish, in Louisiana. Some poor guy went to his Home Owners Association meeting to complain about a notice criticizing his shrub selections, and they attacked and ate him. It was discovered when the dazed, blood-stained HOA members started wandering around the neighborhood, knocking on doors to admonish residents for unmowed lawns, and then devouring them. The residents, not the lawns.

It was blamed, just like the Florida incidents, on drugs. But with the entire HOA board in jail and under observation, there were other changes noticeable. These people seemed actually sick. They had low fevers; and the ones who still talked said their joints hurt. They were dazed and generally unresponsive. They were seldom wildly violent, and even sometimes lucid: they just had an uncontrollable appetite for living flesh. It didn’t have to be human – a few dogs and cats were consumed in the HOA’s ramble – but humans mostly meet other humans during the course of their day, so it was mostly humans who got eaten.

It took barely half that second day before anyone left broadcasting was calling them the “HOA zombies”.

The late night hosts were mostly still around the first night – I think the Apocalypse may have begun on the East Coast in the wee hours, and none of them had left their studios. I don’t know how Stephen Colbert managed, in the Ed Sullivan Theater; or what any of them did about audiences. But nobody got eaten live on television.

I do remember Jimmy Fallon that first evening – when it was still kind of horribly funny if you hadn’t been out on the streets – saying he was surprised they’d turned out to be zombies, as he would have expected HOA people to be vampires. But he got jumped and eaten outside the NBC studios the second week, so … anyway, within a week of the HOA attack, there were reports coming in from all the Gulf states, most of the East Coast cities, and they were beginning to surface in every big river or lakeside city in the Midwest.

Nobody connected them all until that morning when LA went critical. So what I – and whoever else was hiding at home with their telly saw – was a hastily assembled montage of recent reports, and the real violence that had commenced that morning in August.

***

Noon of the second day, and the streets up above Highland Avenue were quiet and empty. I hadn’t noticed anyone on the street since the anonymous walker had fallen down last night. As far as I could tell, all of the cars that had parked last night, when their owners had scurried indoors, were still there. None of my neighbors had evidently left for work – I didn’t blame them; I’d be unwilling to chance being jumped, or not being able to make it home again if I left. I guess people just called in undead …

Armed with coffee and Fig Newtons, with mackerel for Murphy, I sat by the front window and watched the street for a couple of hours. The sun came out and the day got warm. I kept the drapes drawn, just watching through the slit where they met and gave me an archer’s view of the intersection below my house. Now and again I’d sneak a wider peek up the street or down: nothing moved but the wind in the branches of the trees.

The television continued to mutter alarmingly beside me. I kept the sound down to prevent – well, zombies, I guess – from hearing sounds of life in my house, Which was a good thing, when the civil defense alarm began a subdued shrieking from the telly. If I’d had the sound up, I would have died of fright, whether or not a passing zombie heard it. As it was, Murphy yowled, leaped straight up into the air, and then ran back under his chair.

On the screen, the CNN newsroom gave way to a black screen with a continuous crawl. It was obviously being broadcast from somewhere in Los Angeles – the old missile site up on Mount Hollywood? The Army Base in Burbank? Universal Studios? I couldn’t tell and there was no live announcer. Instead, the crawl just advised that there was a dusk to dawn curfew throughout the L.A. Basin, and martial law had been declared. All law enforcement personnel should report to their places of employment. All civilians were advised to stay indoors and do what the authorities told them to do. Stay safe, and please do not loot.

“I assume this is if we can even find any authorities,” I said to Murphy. He meowed faintly and came crawling out from under the chair again. I think he was considering giving up life as a quadruped as a bad deal.

I sympathized, but … I really wanted to know a little of what was happening in my own neighborhood. I didn’t want to go knocking on doors – it felt like a great way to get shot by a terrified homeowner – but I was sure some of the houses around me were empty. And I wanted to assess what was in them, and see if it would be happier in my house instead. The Civil Defense had reminded me that this was probably the best possible time for a little discreet looting.

“We’re gonna go looting, Murphy. Well – I am. I somehow don’t think you’d be a lot of help in hauling things home, little guy like you … “ I chattered to him as I got dressed in something suitable for looting; he followed me anxiously into my bedroom, stropping my ankles and looking up at me. “You’re good company, Murph, but why aren’t you a nice ferocious Rottweiler? That could pull a cart? If I had a cart …”

Long sleeved t-shirt, and a photographer’s vest with a million handy pockets, yeah. Jeans I could run in; hiking boots ditto. I remembered the cat lady jumping the mailman and shuddered – I wound a muffler around my throat and tied in it place. A watch cap and a kerchief over my lower face and fingerless driving gloves, so as little bare skin was exposed as possible to zombie bites.

I went out through my kitchen into my garage, collecting my garage door opener and half a dozen cloth shopping bags along the way. When I began to open the door, Murphy promptly vanished back into the living room. I guess he was going to hole up until and if I returned. I’m not sure that cat ever intended to go outside again.

I dithered about locking the door behind me. What if I came back at a run, pursued by zombies? Well, this door did go right into the garage: I could lock it behind me, then close the garage door when I ran in and have enough time to get the door open and locked again behind me. Or so I figured.

I took my machete from my gardening bench. It was the closest thing I had to a weapon. With the bags over my shoulder and the machete in one hand, I carefully hit the garage door button until the door slid up a bare yard or so. Thank God it didn’t squeal! The creak it did make sounded like the Trump of Doom to me.

So I lay on the garage floor for awhile, just staring out at the hot white street. Bougainvillea petals were drifted up against the line where the door had met the ground, paper thin and bleached hot pink, smelling of dust and incense. It was so quiet out there that I could hear a mockingbird and jay screaming at one another up the hill.

The guys next door were my chosen victims – I was pretty sure they had not come home last night, and I made it out of my garage, around the corner of my back wall and into their tiny back yard in maybe 15 seconds. I shut my garage door from behind their wall, and crept up on the French doors into their dining room.

There was no security keypad by the door, or stickers in the windows, which was good – there was still power, after all, though I was willing to bet that no no one going to answer a silent alarm even if I tripped it. Anyway, I was prepared to break the glass if I had to, or to lift the latch with the edge of my machete: but to my appalled amazement, the door handle turned and the doors opened at once.

Oh, jeeze, the doors were open! This did not thrill me. Who knew what was in there? On the other hand, I had not heard anything from over here in more than 24 hours, and the house stretched dark and silent in front of me now. So I tiptoed in. I was so frightened, my ears were ringing and there was a good chance that if a zombie had jumped out at me, I would have just puked on it and fainted.

But no one was home, nothing at all lived in the dark rooms except me. Not that I explored – I made sure the blinds were down in the living room, and made for the kitchen. In the hallway leading to it, I found their answering machine – blinking red in the gloom, with the message number reading 8. Obviously, no one had been home for some time.

I searched their fridge and shelves as quickly as I could. It took very little time to fill my bags with can and boxes of easy-to-store goods; I reserved one bag for things from their freezer, and what produce they had. There was more than I could get in one trip, even filling my bags full. But I had a good idea I could come back and find it just the same as now – empty, silent, the phone blinking scarlet.

When I had as much as I figured I could carry next door (Some practical looter I was. Not.), I went to check out the front window. They had fancy blinds, so I peeked round the edges rather than raise them and signal the houses across the street.

Their steps up from the street were open and exposed, but there was a little enclosed patio below their porch as well. The gate was open to the street. I could see down into it. It was painted thickly with drying blood. And there was – an arm. And a leg. Most of a leg.

My head was spinning, with a loud high hum which was all I could hear. I was frozen, which was very lucky indeed: if I’d fallen down right then, I would have pulled the blinds down with me and made it obvious to anyone with half a brain that someone was in here.

Do zombies still half a brain? Of their own, I mean? I was never sure how intelligent the infected were, but it never seemed as though they had many smarts once they turned. And they certainly only got worse as time went on. But if I’d fallen down instead of going tharn like a rabbit from Watership Down, I’d have been sighted for sure. Because, brains or not, there were two zombies in a yard across the street, and they sure as hell had eyes.

Also hands, and teeth. They were eating what was probably the rest of whomever’s limbs were on the patio below me. The pretty little Spanish style house they were crouched in front of had its door standing open, and a dark stain that was probably not mud puddled over the low steps.

I really have no idea how long they enjoyed their lunch down there in the shade of a loquat tree. The shadows had time to change, as the sun began to pour down the street from the west. Their shadows stretched out black behind them as they finally left the garden and walked unsteadily – and thank you, all you gods and goddesses of the silver screen! – west, up the rising street and out of sight.

As soon as I could no longer see them, I fled. I was hung all about with tote bags, but I think I was counting on the purloined rice, coffee and frozen peas to act as armour if I was attacked. Machete in hand, I scurried back out and around the corner of my wall, and under my rising garage door: I had it creaking down again as soon as I was under it, nearly braining myself in the process.

I slammed through the door into the kitchen, dropping all my bags and myself in a heap on the floor. I scrabbled up far enough to lock the door, and then sat on the floor sobbing – as silently as I could – until Murphy soft-footed in to climb on me, purring in relief at my return.

“Beginner’s luck, Murphy,” I whispered, crying into his soft little head. “Beginner’s luck is all that saved me. I suck at looting. Good thing you stayed home.”

***

We stayed in the house for 5 days after that. Things got weirder, and wilder, and noisier. We watched it all, Murphy and me, through the darkened front windows and the magic screen of the television. I finally recovered enough of my wits to try my laptop, and lo! The power stayed on and whatever had knocked out the cell phones didn’t effect my modem or the servers. I got an even better, closer view of what I didn’t want to see but did not dare not watch,

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Fruit Season

Posted on June 18, 2019 by Kate

Kage Baker loved summer fruit. Plums were her favourite, Santa Rosa plums, but she also loved the huge big golden peaches that come into season in June. She claimed to be indifferent to grapes, but she would sit beside a bowl of Red Flame or Concord and eat them with the reflexive enjoyment of a cinephile with a box of popcorn.

Various East Coast friends have informed me that Concord grapes are junk, fit only for Welch’s juice boxes. But they were the grapes that grew in Kage’s mother’s enormous garden, and she loved them. She would go into an absolute frenzy over some grape she could never find or identify, that she had eaten once in childhood. A bunch had been sent from her mother’s family in North Carolina, I think – the Jeffreys still run a seed company out of Goldsboro there.

Kage described the grapes as translucent amber, long, somewhat rectangular, tasting strongly of honey: with her eyes unfocused in ecstasy, usually, as she recalled the wonder of them. She thought at one point they might be Catawba, but looking up pictures on the Internet makes it obvious they weren’t. Catawbas are conspicuously spherical, a lovely bright burgundy in colour, with an opaque bloom on them. Kage sought those damned grapes from childhood on, and never found out what they were; I searched frantically in her last year, but could never locate them for her either. They had some typically peculiar Eastern Seaboard name – Nangpoolie? Finsprocket? Cawlahippick? If anyone can figure it out, do let me know – I still grieve over not finding them for Kage.

Anyway, cogitating on summer fruit and comfortably disheveled gardens led me into working on The Misses Take and Trick. I finally figured out what the title meant.  Therefore, before any of you, Dear Readers, join my historically futile quest for the Great Unknown Amber Grape, here is another few page of the ghoul story.

It picks up just as our PI  heroine sights the walls of her goal. Oh, and I corrected the name of the convent slightly: I’m not good at plurals in Turkish …

***

The path I was following left the trees and sort of dribbled out in a fan of loose gravel on the edges of a broad, wild lawn. It was a lawn only in that it had been mowed short and was presently green. In another month it would be arid gold. Right now it was a bowl of mixed greens – wild radish, miners lettuce, mustard; fescue, rye and California bunch grass growing in rough lumpy circles like squashed cupcake wrappers.

On the other side of the meadow, walls rose at least 8 feet tall and swept across about 40 feet before curving back into the trees. They looked to be rough stone, plastered heavily and painted white. I could see red tile and grey shake roofs rising beyond the walls – no other features here where it fronted the access road, except for a small wooden door set into a recess. Bougainvillea dripped thinly over the uneven top of the wall, scarlet and orange and wine-coloured, glowing in the thin grey light.

It was typical ghoul architecture, really. It was also pretty typical California architecture, of the sort built on the edges of things by amateurs before the housing code really caught on. The gardens would be further back, further in. Tops of fruit trees were just barely visible off where the walls curved out of sight. The combination of the two styles always made me giggle a little inside, and spoke clearly to me of childhood – both before and after Mom had kidnapped us back to human society. I lived in a lot of places that looked like this.

There was another sign for the Rahibeler Organization beside the wooden door, a nice little plaque of silvered wood, carved with elegant floral motifs. verdigrised bronze bell hung beside the door, with molded oak leaves and morning glory blossoms – it was a nice one;I had one like it at my house in Hollywood. I got it from the Signals catalog. Recalling the mail box out on Highway 1, I guessed the ghouls had, too.

I grabbed the rope hanging from the bell, and rang it repeatedly. Yep, same sound.

I could hear soft footsteps approach, then the door swung inward. A female ghoul stood in the short tunnel that ran through the wall to hold the gate, looking at me in mild inquiry.

“I’m sorry, are you lost? We don’t usually have – ” she started to say. Then she stopped abruptly, and we stared at one another for a moment.

She was tall, and slender in the way that Western writers like to call “raw boned”. Her skin was pale and smooth, though; ghouls were always nearly hairless. She had a permanent flush of sunburn on her sharp cheekbones, and her long hands were big-knuckled and rough. Her hair was a pretty silver-gilt mix, though, bound back in a complicated wreath of braids that was incongruous above the jeans and plaid shirt she was wearing.

Her eyes, now, her eyes I knew. Crystal pale and warm, like stream water over golden granite. I had taken out my coloured contact lenses before I started hiking up from Highway I, and I knew she was seeing the same eyes in my round human face.

“I am named Petek,” she said. “What is your name? And what did your mother call you?”

“My name is Neith. But my mother called me Treat,” I answered her.

Call and response, as formal and as cryptic as a secret handshake. If I wasn’t a homecoming orphan, I’d just have thought it was a weird way of asking me my business. But those names are traditional among the children born of the

kidnapped human girls the ghouls steal away; the girls born of human women in the convents of ghouls.

The girls who never, ever leave; or if they do, they never, ever come back. My mother left – but I came back. That was my secret weapon.

***

Memories just about drowned me as we walked through the convent gardens, where the air filled with the perfumes of grass, flowers and fruit blossoms. I couldn’t help drawing in deep breaths of the scents in the morning mist, and I could see Petek smiling as she caught me at it. Her teeth were jagged, especially the canines.

“Sweet air, isn’t it?” she said.

“It smells like home,” I said truthfully.

She nodded, but didn’t ask me anything else about my origins. As far as she was concerned, she already knew everything about me that mattered.

***

A brief digression is needed here, about the culture and physiology of ghouls. As I said, they live in gendered isolation. The females, who are many, live in groups. The males, who are few, live alone in wilderness areas. They are usually loosely attached to certain convents, which they supply with meat – when requested. And with sperm – also when requested.

The females are mostly vegetarian, growing what they need and patronizing farmers’ markets. They earn money with a variety of hand-crafted objects: jams, yarns, herbs, jewelry. They can usually pass for human, but these days they conduct a lot of their commerce online – Amazon sells everything to anyone, and the USPS isn’t kidding when they claim they will deliver no matter what.

The males are largely carnivorous. The females supply them with preserved fruit and vegetables, and with bread: bread is worth it’s weight in the precious metal of your choice, to a ghoul. I don’t know why, although it is really good bread … The males can most definitely not pass for human – too tall, too craggy, too stooped. They have the long arms and corpse-pale skin of the stories, and their canine teeth project beyond their lips. But their eyes are the same as the females, crystalline and bright.

They only bring meat to the convents at ritual times, for mating; human meat, maybe once or twice a year. There are females who have never even tasted human flesh.

And here’s the pivotal matter of ghoul reproduction; when the males breed with their own females, the babies are overwhelmingly male. This must have been fine, once upon a time: but now, too many males can no longer hide from the humans, who are everywhere – so they have to practice birth control. This is easy for them, because female ghouls who have never copulated with a male can conceive parthenogenetically.

That’s right, virgin birth; but the result, as with most animals who can pull off this difficult trick, is always female. Babies on demand, only when wanted, who can be slotted right into the convent culture. The males born of sexual reproduction are rare, because the act is seldom practiced; they are raised and educated to about 6 years old, and then handed over to their fathers. They may never see their mothers again. But the convents go on, full of healthy, happy mothers and babies.

The big problem, of course, is biodiversity. Those little girls born to virgin females are essentially fertile clones of their mothers. Fresh blood is needed, new lines of descent, once every thirty years or so. The ghoul who figured out the answer is revered by all ghouls, male and female, as Malike Valide – the Queen Mother.

And here is the answer. If a human female breeds with a male ghoul, she too may have either a girl or a boy; but usually a girl. That girl, who is a hybrid, will be able to reproduce parthenogenetically, just like a full-bred ghoul. But she will pass on entirely new genes to her children, which will be expressed no matter how they in turn reproduce. She will found a new blood line. And the gene pool is periodically refreshed.

So ghouls steal little girls, whom they raise lovingly in their own culture. Ultimately they breed them to male ghouls, until at least one baby girl results. And everyone lives happily ever after. Unless, and sometimes it is a huge “unless”, the stolen girl remembers or discovers her human origins and doesn’t want to breed with a male ghoul.

I don’t how my mother discovered her own roots. But I know she found the process by which I was produced … unpleasant. I was her third pregnancy, and the previous two had been boys. She always said she had loved them. They were both given away when they were 6 years old. So, when I reached that magic age, she took me and ran.

So, yeah, I’m half ghoul. The convent where I was born named me “Neith”, which is the name for an Egyptian mother goddess. But my mother never called me “Treat”, though it’s the traditional baby nickname for girls like me. She called me “Trick”, for her bitterness at the circumstances of my birth.

I have my father’s eyes. I know the answers to the secret questions. I have no really bad memories of my life before I was 6, and no really happy ones afterward. But I was going to save Bree Millard from from my unhappy mother’s fate.

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Who Really Likes Mondays? I Mean, Really?

Posted on June 17, 2019 by Kate

Kage Baker loathed Mondays. Of course she did.

Most people do, at least some of the time. A lot of it, once we began to expand our vices beyond the candy store and the cookie jar, is suffering the after-effects of weekends spent in careless debauchery. Monday is when all the birds come home to roost, and promptly shit down your neck.

Kage adored weekends and days off and long, summer vacations – all those sacred times when she could completely forget what day it even was, and scull her way down the sunlight stream of narrative eternally. Mondays were a definite spanner in the works, and she detested them. She had the usual run-ins with alcohol poisoning that everyone does in their 20’s and 30’s; but Kage’s determination was such that she could drive her self on even through the green heaves to write.

Kimberly and I have pretty much passed our days of whine and roses, and Michael is a teetotaler (I sometimes wonder how he is related to me, I really do.) However, we are now deep in the new routines of home hospice care, and so Mondays have developed fresh ghastly miens and habits to terrify us. The worst of these are the home hospice care visitors.

The point of hospice care is that the terminal patient can go home and be comfy in familiar surroundings. This is especially important for Ray, who has a deep and abiding hatred of hospitals. And we want some help, we really do – mostly so a real nurse or doctor can make sure we aren’t missing something vital. What we do NOT want is for each and every Monday to be a day we have to clean up the house to an absurd degree – Kimberly is the sort of person who would consider it perfectly logical to vacuum before the maid comes in – and have guests.

So far, our tally is two different nurses (one for intake, one for regular checkups), and a very annoying social worker. Why we need a social worker, we cannot tell; although the excessively religious specimen we got has informed us that HE is the most important member of the team … he is wrong, the little plague marmot, he is wrong!

The most important member of this “team” is its Captain. And that is Ray. All others’ needs must come second to his. Anyone who pushes us on this is going to find that the KB sisters are descended from the Furies.

Well. Enough of that. Despite it’s being Monday, and me being critically short on sleep, and forced to be altogether too tidy and polite today – I also managed to write. Here, Dear Readers, are the next 4 pages of the Zombie Story. As you may recall, our heroine is cowering in her kitchen while a clumsy neighbor is falling down in the street.

 

“Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” he yelled up at the sky, waving his arms.

I was sure that meant he wasn’t a zombie. Almost sure. But I just couldn’t bring myself to stand up, or call to him. The cat lady had talked, too. The UPS guy had been driving around and leaving packages! And what if he was just not yet – turned, or whatever it took before you starting biting people?

On the other hand, what if he was all right and I let him walk off and get eaten?

It was more than I could process, I was too terrified to make a decision. I knelt there frozen while he got up, still cursing, and loped off down the street. Then I sat and cried for a half hour, as silently as I could, while the cat stropped himself against my legs and purred. Even the purring sounded unhappy.

Finally we went back in the living room, Murphy and I, and sat down to watch more of whatever news we could find.

Thank God for cable, man. Up in the Hollywood Hills, you just hadn’t gotten television much at all before the cables went in anyway; now I could get news from the whole damn world – except from LA. There’s an irony for you – I was watching CNN and BBC in my darkened living room, there in the heart of the film industry; but nothing local was even being relayed out. It gave the East Coast a great scary topic for a while, on top of all the others: what was happening to Los Angeles?

Bad things. Bad, bad noises, worse than any real riot I had ever heard, and I’ve lived here all my life. The sounds of the city never stopped, though they were … weird. A lot more sirens, and lot more gunshots, and, in the early hours of the evening, a lot of distant screaming. At first there were a lot of helicopters, too, but those stopped pretty early on. I never found out why, if the ground crews were eaten or it was just considered pointless or what; but not hearing choppers overhead was scarier than the ruckus they usually made.

The news from anywhere but where I was continued patchy and weird. It was obvious that something was going on in several large American cities, and as the evening wore on, reports began surfacing from small towns all over the Midwest and the South. At CNN, they still clung pretty hard to the terrorism idea for some hours; but the idea of a plague of some sort was slowly growing. They were clearly bringing anyone who was expert in anything and was still hanging around the studios – and it also seem pretty clear that no one was willing to leave those sanctuaries in Atlanta and New York.

So it was one their own resident meteorologists who was shoved out in front of the green screen around 1 AM, to point out that the afflicted areas had all been victims of really wet weather that year. No one knew whether or not it meant anything, but it was a fact, you know? A more normal fact than all that footage of stock brokers eating tourists in Chattanooga. Being CNN, they spent the next few hours assembling more and more fun weather facts and interviewing one another about them. A lot of the fun facts lent weight to the disease idea.

Weird weather stories were always popular in the news; and in the 2000’s, most of the US had begun to drown in the rains. Climate change, ocean and atmospheric currents altering, government weather machines, the wrath of God – a popular theory until fundy ministers’ houses started getting blown away, too – all sorts of suggestions had been made, but “why?” was not the question. The question was “What’s going to happen next, with the Midwest and the Gulf coast under water half the year?”

Zombies hadn’t been mentioned. But there were acres-wide spiderwebs in Texas, blamed on the spiders escaping flooding. There were new and exciting molds and fungus outbreaks all over the Heartland, and the usual half-informed history students eating ergot in search of free LSD. Florida, of course, was just a mess. It was a strange, humid summer even in Los Angeles, and weird stories are the backbone of human interest segments. The stories had gotten stranger and funnier all summer – but now, tonight, suddenly, they were coming in from all over the Gulf and Midwest, and they weren’t nearly as funny. People were getting hurt. And dead.

And the Los Angeles stations were down. Even the most extremely local station, Channel 5 down on Sunset, was showing an Indian head penny test pattern they must have had to pull out of the archives.

Nobody said anything about zombie plague, at first, although there were a few thin, pallid jokes in the beginning. The terrorist idea lasted well past midnight. By the time CNN was interviewing their own weathermen, though, a few of the wilder-eyed staff were beginning to say, “Yeah, but what if?”

About the closest they got to saying anything out loud was the growing theory of a plague making people crazy. By that time, I had fetched pillows and blankets into the living room, and made a nest for Murphy and me between the shelter of the couch and the coffee table – it wasn’t as soft as the couch itself, but we felt safer down there on the floor.

It was dark, the blankets and the cat were warm, the city was silent and the voices on the television were almost whispers. And I fell asleep.

I think I woke up because it was so silent. Los Angeles is not a quiet city; the sound of traffic penetrates everywhere, like the sound of the ocean in a more normal city. What woke me, I’m sure, was the quiet – so deep and thick I was dreaming the house had been tented, like for termites, and I was terrified the poison gas would start pumping in. All that happened was I sat up fast enough to hit my head on the table, and launch a startled Murphy into the air.

The CD player claimed it was 5:37 AM, and there was a hint of grey light down the hall from the kitchen. The television was still on. Wolf Blitzer had lost his tie and looked unshaven even through a full beard: things were not going well at CNN.

CNN was now running banners headed “Zombie Apocalypse?”. It was almost business as usual. It just showed names of cities and numbers. Estimates of people – killed? Eaten? Out of communication? I couldn’t tell. But it looked like CNN had given up on trying to identify why the attacks were happening, and was just telling people where they were. I watched it round until I saw LA; oh, goodie, someone had noticed something was wrong out here. Our listed number of whatever was 13,000 … who the hell, I wondered, had compiled the figures. And how had they gotten them to CNN? The phones still didn’t work.

Murphy glared at me and went pointedly back to sleep. When I got up and tottered off to the bathroom, though, he was right there behind me, not even pretending a normal feline indifference. That was one traumatized kitty.

I was another one. I went as silently as I could from window to window, checking all the sides of the house – no movement anywhere, no bodies in the streets, no slumped shadows in the parked cars. No helicopters, or traffic; just the muffling fog pressing down on the tops of the hills, and the reflected light going greyer as the sky lightened above it.

I collected my phone, more tuna and water and retreated to the blankets by the couch. Murphy, at least, was interested in the chow; I just sat there, pointlessly trying emergency numbers on my phone again.

“We need a routine, Murphy,” I told him. “Something so we can keep it together, make plans. We can ride this out. Whatever it is.”

Murphy looked up briefly, expressing quite clearly that continued tuna, water and blankets – and no more crazy cat ladies – were all the routine he wanted. As far as that went, I was in complete agreement. But I was the one with thumbs, so it was up to me to plan for the eventual future.

Calling 911 got me a recording now, advising me that all circuits were busy and repeated the order for civilians in certain areas to shelter in place. The areas listed were basically the entire Basin, and most of the Foothill communities; in fact, the recording specifically warned folks away from the Downtown area due to the possibility of “uncontrolled mobs”. In case of utter life-threatening emergency, I was advised to seek shelter at a police station or medical facility. And they invited me to leave my phone number; which I did, just to leave a clue that I was not a zombie.

I wondered what happened to the folks who went running up to police stations in the throes of an emergency? That sounded like a life-threatening situation in itself to me.

No answer at the nearest hospital or police station, though, not by phone. Personal calls couldn’t go through. Out of state calls got me the “All circuits are busy” recording. Rarely, a call would produce an endless ringing – but as no one ever answered, I was confident the system was down. There had always been rumours that, in the event of a city-wide disaster, City Hall could shut down all the personal phones; lock down the towers for emergency communication only. If they were doing that, they were not yet bothering to talk to the public.

Okay. Next thing to try, see if anything local was broadcasting yet.

And a couple stations were! That was heartening, even if one of them (Channel 11, the Fox affiliate. Which seemed apt, somehow.) was running a marathon of – yes, zombie movies. It was the closest the local news got to being current and topical; everything else was either still static and flags in slow motion, or feeds from the East Coast.

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Father’s Day

Posted on June 16, 2019 by Kate

Kage Baker adored her father. He deserved it, too – George Baker was an extraordinary man. I was privileged to know him for most of my life, even though he did tell me once that eating black licorice would surely kill me … but Dads are prone to saying things like that, about their kids’ (or foster kids’) compulsive behaviours. They think it’s funny.

My own father, whom I nonetheless loved dearly, told me much worse things. I’m still sorting out which ones were true and which ones were productions of his vast, eclectic knowledge, and his very loose connection to reality. Daddy believed everything he said, when he said it. Once he said it, he seemed to have felt that the truth of any matter was on its own and could thereafter fend for itself. Small wonder I ended up living with, and then becoming, a writer. It’s only a wonder that I ended up able to tell fact from fiction at all.

Though, actually, I can’t really be certain just how tight my own connection to reality is. I’ve been an historical re-enactor since age 20; not only spending days on end in other times and countries, but imbibing an awful lot of alcohol while I did it. And I’ve been reading science fiction since I was 6 years old.

At age 7, I  woke my Da up in the middle of the night to tell him I could see the moon rotating – which I feared must foretell the end of the world, since the Moon is in a tidal orbit, always showing the same face to the Earth. It is typical of Daddy that he did not tell me I was nuts and to go back to sleep – he entertained the idea long enough to get out the binoculars and carry me out into the yard, where he showed me that what I had taken for a changing moonscape was actually thin clouds obscuring the Moon as they passed in front of it.

As a teenager, I convinced Kage that possums were New World animals and opossums were Old World animals. When ATM cards were brand spanking new (I am old, Dear Readers) I convinced a bank clerk that an ATM card was a check cashing card: their branch had no ATMs yet, but I was 300 miles from home and needed money … and it was my money, after all. I am notorious for telling friends demented “facts” with such an honest demeanor that some habitually look up anything I tell them, just to be sure; others will no longer believe any even slightly peculiar statement … which is a shame, because usually I am telling the truth. And, in my defense, at least I know when I’m lying. I don’t think Daddy did.

This is, after all, the same man who regularly during my childhood won extensions from bill collectors by reporting that I, or Kimberly, had tragically died. You get used to it after awhile, accepting condolences while not blowing the gaff for your father … and for all I know, this contributed directly to my skill at theatrical improvisation. Does that count as epigenetics? Might, I guess.

So, I rather suspect that my father passed down to me the genes of a fabulist. Luckily, I can tell reality from dream – most of the time – and so have managed to rein in this tendency to run off at the mouth and over the borders of Elfland … except in occasional emergencies, or for grins and giggles in a friendly atmosphere (sorry, Stacey!) I do assure you, Dear Readers, that I have always told you the truth. Except for when I haven’t. But I clearly label those times and wait anxiously to see if you like them, so you’re safe.

Daddy, I love you. I miss you. I miss your free-wheeling passage through my life. Happy Father’s Day.

This is my Da at age 20 or so. He’s the slick-looking young man on the left, with a resemblance to Dean Winchester. The curly-haired one on the right is my favourite uncle, Da’s brother Bob. And the woodchuck in front is their youngest brother, my uncle Charles, who most unexpectedly grew up to be a master archer …

No, really.

 

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Summer of The Spiders: The Return

Posted on June 15, 2019 by Kate

Kage Baker tried hard to write through any problem she ever had. She succeeded an amazing amount of the time. Her focus was inhuman, essentially becoming tunnel vision and elective deafness. Stephen King, in one of his excellent essays on writing, called it “falling into the computer screen”. And any half-way serious writer knows that they will need to invoke this kind of fugue from time to time. Because shit happens, you know?

The heat wave in Los Angeles has moderated pretty well and the lovely June gloom is back.  But the wet spring and the unseasonable heat have encouraged a particularly heinous spider to hatch out in droves, and it’s decided my house was a BNB. I don’t even know what it is, though the view glimpses I got 2 years ago were of a small grey spider – Ms. Generic Arachnid.

Whatever the hell is it, I react extremely badly to its bite. It itches for days, forms enormous bumps that usually open up and scab over, and the venom of enough bites makes me ill. And there are always multiple bites. It’s some kind of damned foodie spider, grazing widely on the buffet of me. Or maybe there are several of them tag-teaming me. Nothing would surprise me.

However! Despite itches and a bellyache, I did write! I reached that enviable trance state. I hope Kage approves. My general wooziness made it hard for me to pick a story I had neglected lately: I wanted to give every one of my 4 or 5 projects equal time, but the only one that inspired me was the Zombie Story. So here are the next 2,000-odd words of it.

Thank you for your indulgence, Dear Readers. Having an audience is proving absolutely inspirational. But please – don’t read it if it isn’t amusing. Zombie Story, in particular, is being assembled oddly, as I patchwork previously notes and scenes together …

Anyway: here we go. This picks up after the heroine’s first sighting. Any errors are the spider’s fault.

The next one was about 2 hours later.

By that time, there had been some really weird !!! Breaking News!!! out of Tennessee; and between that and what was clearly not a good day in my neighborhood, things were not looking up.

I’d called 911 as soon as my one-shoed neighbor had left – I got that weird cycling wail that means the lines are overwhelmed. I tried 911 again and again, and worked my way through most of the personal numbers on my phone. But I couldn’t get a call out to anywhere, or anyone. After about 20 redials, as I was pausing for breath, I got a call coming in. But it was just a robocall from the LAPD, advising me to shelter in place, as there were reports of “unknown rioters” in the vicinity of the Hollywood Hills.

I wondered who had gotten to select the explanation for that call? Pretty sure zombies were not on the LAPD emergency menu.

CNN had stopped giggling at the reports by then, and was no longer inserting them at the ends of its scheduled shows as filler. In fact, a banner titled “CRISIS?” was running full time at the bottom of the screen, and the reportage had moved up to DefCon 2 – Wolf Blitzer and a full-scale green screen, pulling up every “silly season” report for the last 6 weeks and connecting some pretty strange dots, re-defining them all as a possible terrorism outbreak.

There were a lot of reports. The latest – a report fresh that morning, actually – was from Chattanooga, where tourists down on the Chattanooga Riverwalk were being attacked and chased by “alleged terrorists” costumed as zombies. Chaos reigned supreme. There were reports of tourists trapped in the Tennessee Aquarium and the Hunter Museum of Art; many had had to be rescued from the river itself. Some of those had attacked the rescue crews.

More disturbingly, there were reports of people being devoured right there in the Visitor’s Center and the Riverpark. Mostly it was tourists getting chewed up, but sometimes it was the “terrorists” turning on one another. There was plenty of shaky phone footage, mostly shot by screaming people running backwards … Some of the attackers seemed to come from the sewers that stretched back from the Chattanooga River, but most were well dressed office workers from the nearby Downtown. It didn’t seem likely that it was any known form of terrorism, Wolf reported solemnly.

Still, no reporters were using the z-word. That didn’t matter. Lots of people making amateur videos were, as they ran for their lives and shrieked for help. It’s pretty obvious when you’re being chased by a zombie, even if they’re wearing a 3-piece suit.

I had my drapes drawn by then, all my doors and windows locked and blocked, all the lights out, and the TV turned way down. That necessitated my sitting by it on the floor, but it let me shelter beside the couch. Which was fine with me – also fine with the cat, which had finally crawled out from under the furniture and into my lap. We sat there together for some hours, both of us shivering; I was grateful for the cat’s company, and he was obviously happier inside with me. He had fur like grey velvet, beautiful green eyes, and supermodel cheekbones; also, an elastic red collar with a tag that read “Murphy”.

About 5 PM, I heard a large vehicle draw up outside. I detached a reluctant Murphy and crept to the front window to peek through the drapes – it was the UPS truck. Why the hell was he out here delivering when the LAPD was warning about rioters?

There was no one out on the street at that point. I watched as he got out and trotted over to a house, left a package, knocked and waited a few moments, then trotted back. I was dithering on whether or not I should step out and yell at him to get away as quick as he could, when the ex-cat lady came wandering down the street again.

She hailed the UPS guy – they waved at one another, and then I saw her break into a run toward him. She lost her one red shoe doing that, but she was sure as hell fast: she leaped at him from 5 feet away, landed wrapped around his chest, and was tearing at his throat as they rolled together into the gutter.

I was horrified. I shrieked when he bit off her nose, then grabbed a double handful of her hair and took a bite out of her neck. Then I clapped both hands over my mouth, trying to stifle my horrified yells for fear that they would hear me.

Cat lady squalled and fountained blood. The UPS guy chewed a little more, and her squeals got fainter. When she stopped flailing at him, he got up , dragged her into his big brown truck, and then drove away. Oh, thank you, God!

So. I guessed I knew why he’d been knocking on doors …

I made sure the curtains were back in place and crawled back over to Murphy. He climbed back up me and clung to my neck, trembling.

“They eat their own, Murphy,” I told him. “This is really, really bad.”

We sat and watched television all that day, me and Murphy. I tried local news broadcasts from time to time, but they were even scarier than the Situation Room with Wolf. Some reported wide-spread terrorist attacks – obviously, the official story. Others were showing the same ambiguous footage over and over – what looked like violent protests, crowds being repelled (or protected) by fire personnel with high pressure hoses, or police with clouds of tear gas. The water worked, the tear gas didn’t; but they weren’t showing any more of the ghastly zombie-cam footage I’d seen on CNN.

Murphy and I lunched on tuna and water. I put down papers in the bathroom, because he didn’t seem to want to be left alone. I sure didn’t. So we took bathroom breaks together.

By mid-afternoon, the Apocalypse had unofficially conquered LA: every live television feed went off the air. Nothing but endless loops and emergency warnings. That hadn’t happened in my entire freaking lifetime. Something weird was sure as shit happening, and it was happening fast.

CNN continued to show footage from anywhere they could upload a camera feed. They must have had well-fortified studios. Although, between the cannibal attacks and the fleeing screamers, you could tell that most of this was coming from the same 4 or 5 places. If you paid attention, it was obvious that most of the US was not running around eating itself. Not that that was a lot of relief to Chattanooga or LA or Orlando or New York or Savannah.

A few foreign feeds were coming in; not many. But there were enough to show that 1) Asia and South America were in a mess similar to North America; and 2) Europe was sitting tight and hoping no one noticed it. The world’s press was apparently spending its day like I was: sitting on the floor, peeking through the curtains.

There were never many cars on my street, except when residents went to work and then came home. So the day wore on silently outside my windows, and I only checked when I thought I heard footsteps or voices on the street. There was never anyone I could see, not though the tiny gaps that were all I dared open for a view. But by 6 PM, people began to come home.

Some of them, anyway. The guys next door were usually in by 7 PM; my house would shake when they slammed the door on their garage, which was conjoined to mine. They didn’t come home that night; in fact, I never saw them again. The young mother across the street came home, crow bar in one hand, baby carrier in the other, and scurried indoors so fast I figured she already knew what sort of problems we had. I was glad she hadn’t come home early – her porch was where the UPS man had left his package.

People who could still drive seemed to be unaffected – the few who made it home that night vanished inside as fast as they could, and they all looked normal; also, scared as hell. But all the houses stayed dark. No one wanted to show any lights.

There were a few dazed figures wandering around the neighborhood, but none of them arrived by car. They were either venturing out from their own houses, or coming up from Highland and the streets down below. I saw another confrontation between 2 zombies, but they fled one another after a brief, bloody scrap. They didn’t seem any surer of who was a zombie than I was.

I could hear helicopters off in the distance for awhile, but they were all heading downtown. There was a brief car chase, a police car shrieking after a small truck with two blood-stained people trying to break through the back window of the cab to get to the frantic driver, but that horror show screamed up over the hill and the top of the street into oblivion.

And the fog came down, the way it does in LA in the summer: a ceiling reflecting cold yellow light down over the hills. It didn’t help visibility at all, the few times I peeked out the windows. I kept telling myself that I wouldn’t look, wouldn’t take the chance. But when there loud noises out there – or worse, faint ones that might be creepy scrabbling fingers or worse – I just had to look. I never saw much, and never anything I wanted to see.

At one point, after the helicopters had been quiet for awhile, I though it might be a safe time to do some inventory in the kitchen. There hadn’t been a car stopping or the sound of a footstep for some time. I wasn’t about to turn on a light, but when you live in the Hills, you keep candles everywhere – the power goes out a lot. I went to explore my supplies with a candle, and with Murphy doing his best to walk directly under my feet.

The curtains in my kitchen only covered the bottom halves of the windows; the view from the street was obscured by my back wall, that ran along the narrow street behind me. I usually never thought about it, but panic grabbed me as soon as I saw the darkness outside the upper panes of the windows. No candle for me! So I did a cursory inventory in the dark, by the light from the foggy overcast outside.

I knew the power was still on, of course, so I didn’t need to check the fridge. I was afraid of the damned light, anyway, and didn’t know where the button was you could press to turn it off. But I knew I had fresh perishables, meat and milk and veggies, in there, enough for days. Even stuff for Murphy, and he was going to be eating well – I had no cat food, but I had lots of fish fillets and canned tuna. Lucky Murphy.

The freezer was full. The pantry was pretty thin on canned stuff, but far from empty. The water was running – wasn’t that one of the bad problems you had to expect when a city went tits up? – and I had several gallons of bottled water set aside, left over from a vague attempt at earthquake preparedness.

But most importantly, the windows were all locked tight. Since my house sits on a lot that is essentially a 30 degree slope, surrounded by walls, there was no sight-line from the street into any of them, either. The back door was triple locked, and so was the door into my garage; and nothing showed any sign that anything had been scratching at them.

But as I paused by the sink, reaching for the tap handle, I heard footsteps outside. They were uneven, slithery steps – well, the sidewalk outside was at the same steep slope as my lot, and it wasn’t always easy walking down the street. Not that many people did that in the middle of the night.

I snatched my hand back before I could turn on the water, the loud, betraying water! … back down on my hands and knees, I crawled to the window and peered under the curtain-edge.

A man was proceeding unsteadily down the middle of the street. He kept running into cars parked on one side, caroming off them. He was barefoot; as I watched, his foot turned in a pothole – our roads are awful, in the Hills – and he went flat on his ass in the street.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Found My Writing Hat

Posted on June 14, 2019 by Kate

Kage Baker was a firm proponent of setting her writing area up properly. That included drinks she liked (Coca Cola)  in a ritually correct vessel (red glass), with assorted writing fetishes (Mr. Crabs, beach glass, several small lighthouses …) scattered around. And background music, which in Kage’s habit was whatever albums she had picked as the sound track for her latest novel, with the REPEAT set to INFINITE.

My props are different, but I do ascribe to the same philosophy. My big oaken desk is lousy with spiritually endowed mini figs and bottles of sacred earth and water. However, at the moment I am set up in my sister’s living room, in the recliner where I also sleep, with my traveling icons instead. That includes my writing hat, which was only located for me today by my ever-obliging nephew Michael. My teddy bear had annexed it …

Anyway, Michael returned it to me, and it has facilitated my writing frenzy no end today. I am flitting – with deliberation and purpose, I assure you, Dear Readers – between 5 different stories at the moment, and this really seems to be adding momentum to my current mood. Maybe I’ve slipped into a manic state? I do not care at all.

Tonight, I offer the first thousand words or so of “The Misses Take and Treat”. It’s like nothing I have ever done before. Feels weird – but right.

The Misses Take and Treat

This is the way I always see them, whenever I remember my childhood: two little, little girls playing in a walled garden, derelict but green and madly alive with Spring, under a low grey sky.

One is white-blonde and one is dark. Both are so pale they almost glow. They are wearing cut-down women’s blouses as dress-up gowns: a sequined T-shirt that sheds sparkles in the dim air, belted with a scarlet silk scarf; a white lace peignoir over a black velvet tunic that falls to skinny ankles. The girl in rhinestones is draped with strands and strands of donkey beads and translucent Bakelite. The one in black velvet is wound around and around her arms and legs with brightly coloured telephone wires, and there are bells and spoons and anything that will rattle or ring wired to them.

They are playing with ribbon wands. They dance wildly, the sort of frenetic hopping and skipping that only kittens and small girls dance, leaping among one anothers’ arching ribbons like fish in nets.

To be honest, I don’t know any more if they ever really danced like that, dressed like that, in a green feral garden. But it’s what I always see, when I remember them.

One of them had pointed teeth. And one of them was human.

***

The mist was hanging low as I came up the road. It ran narrowly through the trees here, and among the trees there was nothing to see but curtains of fog. The tree tops were invisible. It was like walking through an enormous soap bubble, a ballroom made of tissue-thin nacre. No matter where I looked, the walls were never more than 50 feet away; and as I walked, it looked like the trees were moving through them while I stood still.

My name is Natalie Osborne, and I’m a private detective. I track, and hopefully find, missing people. I’m a particular kind of specialist. There’s more money in specialization in any field – there’s pet detectives, credit detectives, wandering spouse detectives; even a few of those black leather and tattoo weirdos you see on reality shows, who claim they track down parole violators. Personally, I think they’re fake. But my standards of reality are a little more eccentric than most people. What I hunt are cryptids.

I guess that’s a little melodramatic. Actually, I hunt their victims. Not all cryptids prey on humans, but enough do that it pays well to be one of the few people who will believe an hysterical wife claiming that her husband was dragged off by a monster. Look at Lindy Chamberlain-Creighton – she said a dingo, a real actual feral dog that everyone knew existed, took her infant daughter, and she ended up charged with murder. Took years for that poor woman to be vindicated and declared innocent, and she still had to deal with the loss of her child.

I was hunting another missing little girl. I meant to see her mother didn’t end up in jail, with a dead daughter. Which is why I was hiking into the Los Padres National Forest (“Land of Many Uses” had warned the sign down on Highway 1, in search of a convent of ghouls.

Ghouls do exist, of course. Humans even know it, although they think that ghouls are just evil people with skeezy eating habits. That makes human “ghouls” cannibals; and frankly, I don’t care about them. They tend to kill their victims far too quickly for a hunter like me to affect a rescue. Also, they are crazy in a specifically horrible way, and I don’t like to deal with crazy.

Real ghouls aren’t cannibals – they eat other species, which happen to include humans. They have always been a suburban species, living as quietly as possible in the edges of human cities. That’s one of the reasons they were associated with graveyards. And one of the ways they stay under the radar now, when human cities damn near cover the Earth, is that they live in wilderness areas: which is perfectly legal, in America, as long as you pay your taxes and got in before the Forestry Service and BLM took over.

In these modern days, most ghouls don’t subsist solely on humans anyway. But they do steal them, and they keep some of them long enough to rescue. In fact, if all goes well, a stolen baby girl will live out her whole life in a ghoul convent, probably fairly content. They are loved, they are cherished, and many of them never figure out that they are not, in fact, ghouls themselves. In many ways, that is a Fate worse than death – if they ever figure it out.

That was one of the reasons I was going to save little Bree Millard before that happened, if I could.

It was complicated, though. It would bother me if I had to kill the ghouls in the convent. I should explain that female ghouls can pass easily for human, though they tend to be lean and usually have teeth that look … peculiar. They live in segregated communities. Ghouls call them convents. Humans tend to call them “that weird commune over by the campground; you know, they sell macrame and fruitcakes.” Humans are suckers for religious camouflage.

The males are few and solitary, and only visit the convents to deliver meat – most of it poached – and, very rarely, to breed.

I should further explain that I was born and grew up in such a convent. I know why they steal girl children, like my mother; and raise them as one their own. And when my mother figured it out, when I was 6, she stole both of us and ran as far and as fast as she could.

But I remember.

A couple of miles hiking, and I found where a graveled road branched off of the decaying asphalt of the Park road. The entry was closed off with a chain between two tidy bollards, from which hung a sign:

                                                      PRIVATE ROAD

                                 PROPERTY OF RAHIBE ORGANIZATION

“Rahibe” is Turkish for “nun”. Or “Priestess”. Like I said, religious camouflage.

Under that was a number to call for entrance, or information, or something. There were no directions and the sign didn’t say NO TRESPASSING, so I ducked under the chain and continued up the road.

The fog got thicker as I walked on, but the forest on either side began to look better groomed. Female ghouls are wonderful gardeners; they don’t care much for symmetry and tidy beds, but plants grow enthusiastically in their gardens. Clearly, they had been training this forest to a better sensibility. Even the gooseberry and blackberry bushes between the oak trees, although definitely thorny and a barrier to careless exploration, were lush and heavy with fruit.

The fog ahead of me began to coalesce into low white walls. I had come to the convent.

 

 

 

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I’ve Caught A Fever

Posted on June 13, 2019 by Kate

Kage Baker burned with a constant high fever. She was like the Ghost of Christmas Past: capped with a flickering flame, like a torch. You couldn’t literally see it – but if you spent some time with her, that flame could burn you.

It was contagious, too. A writer’s flame is contagious by its nature – readers catch it eagerly when they read the writer’s work, though the infection is low-level and (sadly) often temporary. Luckily, you don’t develop resistance, so the fever can be caught again and again.

Sometimes the fever is of a more durable nature … it burns deep and makes itself a nest of embers, from which it can leap to life again and again, like a phoenix. That was Kage’s flame, her especial fever; and I lived within singe range for most of my life. I never doubted that Kage’s fever had made itself a niche somewhere in me – but lately it has woken up to extraordinary ferocity, and I have spent the last two days and most of the night writing.

My back aches. My butt is numb. My hands are stiff. When I get up, I hobble until my knees remember how to move. My hips don’t like to re-engage: I swear I can feel my trochanters grinding futilely against my acetabulae, trying to find the next gear.

I haven’t had this much fun in a long, long time, Dear Readers.

What will come of this slow-motion frenzy, I do not know; though I’m hoping to actually finish one of the 4 stories I am working on simultaneously … they task me, they heap me*, and it’s all I’ve been able to do to pick one one which to work. So I’m taking them in turns. Sharing bits of them with you all helps me, gives immediate value to my work. Also, it’s fun for me. I hope it’s fun for you.

I can’t find that I have shared this next bit before, and dear Tom Barclay tells me I haven’t done so either. (Moombies may show up later, though.) So – here are the first 3 pages of The Zombie Story.

A ZOMBIE STORY

It started with a rain from space, of course.

That’s stereotypical, but there’s a reason for stereotypes. It’s because they are all too often true. If some enormous change is about to alter Life As We Know It for the worse, people look retroactively for signs that it was coming. It doesn’t help much, but it gives most folks a feeling of being more grounded if they can say to themselves: I knew something bad was coming. That rain of frogs/blood/crowbars was a sure sign.

When the spring plantings fail, people remember that the winter storms were especially fierce. Or especially mild. If a cattle murrain happens, people remember those weird mushrooms that came up in the woods last October and embarrassed all the milkmaids by looking like glowing, well, you-know-whats.

If, in more modern and urban settings, the entire roster of Presidential candidates turns out to be drooling morons, people nod wisely and blame it on the meteorites over Washington DC. Or maybe the fluoridated drinking water. Cartoonists and late night television hosts just send up thanks to God.

The point is, a rain from space is a good way to begin what turned out to be the zombie apocalypse. It’s traditional. It’s familiar. And if there’s ever a time when you need to feel that things are still a little traditional and familiar, it’s during the zombie apocalypse.

***

The signs began in the early 2000’s, when there began to be reports of cannibalism in odd places – Canada, for instance. Canada had its share of cannibals during the settlement days, of course, but these new cases were not due to being lost in the wilderness. One of the first attacks happened on a Greyhound bus, for God’s sake. When there were several reports of people eating other people – especially their heads – a lot of horror and giggles began making the rounds after each story. But it happened rarely, and people forgot.

There were recurrent reports of face eating from Florida, too. But, it was Florida! Lots of new recreational drugs were always cropping up there, and unlikely invasive animals – though no one really thought bath salts or capybaras could make you eat someone’s face; but, you know, Florida … and then storms began to get bad and the seas began to definitely rise, and sinkholes developed all over the place like the Mole People were attacking; and it just seemed like more of the normal apocalypse you expect in the Gulf states. And people forgot.

The bottom line: probably zombies had been cropping here and there, now and then, for years. But urban violence, and drugs, and weird weather – especially storms and floods – kept obscuring the signal. The conditions that produced zombie-ism just sort of smoldered, in back alleys and small towns, until they built up enough to erupt in several places at once. That’s my theory, anyway.

Which brings me to – well, me. My name is Rosemary Leighton, and I witnessed the Great Zombie Apocalypse. Mostly on the news at first, it’s true. This is the 21st Century, and – all respect to Mr. Heron – everything gets televised. But eventually it spread. I got a close-up personal view of the parts in Los Angeles.

I work for a plant company, the people who provide greens for films; they also send those weekly ladies in pastel overalls who ghost through offices watering plants and clipping ficus runners. But it was August, and I was on vacation, which probably saved my life. I was just lazing at home in the Hollywood Hills, which undoubtedly prevented me from being eaten by someone in Accounts Payable somewhere. Or a gaffer with nothing to do on a shoot.

Anyway. I was watching the news in my living room that August morning, when I looked out my window and saw one of my neighbors walking down the street carrying a cat. I recognized the cat; it was gray and lived down the street. I recognized the neighbor, too, a woman who also lived down the street (though not with that cat) and who usually wore more clothes and both shoes when she went out.

Not today. Today, she was wearing one shoe, a nice classic Salvatore Ferragamo Vara flat, in red patent leather. And what appeared to be seersucker pajamas from Vermont Country Store. And she was carrying the very limp cat with one hand around its middle, like a clutch purse.

Which was quite a shock, since Stephanie Ruhle was chattering away on my television right then, giving a half-snarky, half-solemn report about reports of zombies in St. Louis:

“ … said that her next-door neighbor came to her front door in a confused state, asked to come in for coffee, and offered her a dead dog,” said Stephanie. You could hear her eyes rolling in her tone of voice.

The woman on my street had serious bed hair, suggesting she had, in fact, slept in a sock; maybe with that cat on her head. Her eyes were so wide it looked like she had stapled them open. She stood a moment on the corner, turning to look at all the nearest houses – then she turned into my front yard and began to climb the front stairs.

That looked like absolutely nothing I wanted to encounter. My house is on a raised lot, above street level; you have to climb a dozen steps to reach my porch. Before she emerged between the retaining walls of my front garden, I was crouching on the floor behind my couch in a state of pure instinctive funk.

I saw her shadow on the wall as she crossed in front of the windows. I heard her knock – heard her call out “Are you home? I brought over a present!” and then knock again. She knocked twice more, kicked the door once – I locked my hands over my mouth to keep from screaming when she did that – and then left. “Catch you later!” she called cheerily as she went. I saw her shadow again, crossing the porch, and then heard the flip-flop of her one Ferragamo on my stairs.

On the television, Stephanie Ruhl was now talking about yet another face-eating incident in Florida.

It was probably 10 minutes before I stopped shaking enough to go check the front door, and that was only because I heard a faint miaow. When I cracked the door, the cat was sitting up, looking absolutely terrified – as soon as the door was a few inches open, the poor thing ran in and straight under a chair. I thought seriously about joining it.

That was my first zombie sighting. Of that first morning, anyway.

 

 

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Bookmark!

Posted on June 12, 2019 by Kate

Kage Baker used to go on mad, deep, writing jags. Those were the times she seldom spoke, unless to request a Coke or ask me what I though about a new passage. She was in the zone, her zone anyway, and the world outside it had effectively ceased to exist.

I know the world is there – and you, Dear Readers! – but I am in the desperate throes of writing. All I can manage tonight is this placeholder blog. More tomorrow, including some new bits\, I hope.

Des anyone remember if I ever posted any of my Zombie Story? My mind is so full of new ideas, I can’t remember f I did or not. Anyone who knows, please let me know.

Until tomorrow, Dear Readers.

 

 

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What I Did Today, Instead

Posted on June 11, 2019 by Kate

Kage Baker was clearly looking over my shoulder today. She was at least standing behind me, poking me in said shoulder – she always poked hard, too – and telling me to get to work.

It wasn’t my intention to do anything much at all, Dear Readers. I got my first full night’s sleep in weeks, slept late, woke up to find that the outdoors was already burning to a crisp in the heat, and decided to just be boneless all day. Eat lime ices and drink iced coffee. But I didn’t. For your amusement, Dear Readers, here is what I did –

Instead …

Last August, I handed a nice publisher (who was always good to Kage and me) a novel via e-transom. That is, I ambushed him and handed him a thumb drive at World Con. Today I worked up the courage to anxiously inquire as to it’s fate? Turns out the poor man had misplaced my manuscript, with many others, in the wake of installing a new submission system. But that does not mean NO! So I sent it again, and am now in hope once more.

And here are the first two pages of Knight and Dei:

“Any sound in my ears but Your silence, O Lord God.”

Distantly a horn blared. The praying woman opened her eyes and leaned forward, frowning.

After a moment she shrugged and got to her feet. She bound back her hair in the red scarf of her Order, making stray locks stand up round her forehead like flames, and went down the hill to camp.

Down in the shadows where the sunrise had not yet arrived, the other woman looked up. She scowled.

“One of us should charge the battery on the car, Sister Pilot,” she said pointedly. “And I’m busy breaking camp.”

“I’m sorry, Sister Driver,” said the woman with the red scarf. “I was praying.”

“Works would be more appropriate at the moment, Sister.” The Driver pushed the ends of her own scarf – which was blue – over her shoulder, and bent back down over the tent she was rolling up.

The Pilot sighed, and went to the aircar settled deep in the dry grass. She opened the cover to the starter motor, seized the battery crank in both hands, and began to recite the Dedication to Labor. When the Driver turned to glare at her, she hunched her shoulders and set to hurriedly on the crank, continuing the Dedication under her breath.

“Boy, this is awkward,” she remarked in a few moments. “I wonder why they put the crank up here, instead of down on the side?”

“It’s a cheap little starter. And it’s cheaper to make the gears horizontal to start with, instead of adding another gear to translate the cranking motion from the vertical,” Driver said. She buckled the tent bag closed and started rolling a bedroll. “Does that tell you anything you need to know?”

“No. Sorry,” said Pilot in automatic guilt.

She cranked unsteadily but silently until Driver had stood and was loading the gear into the cargo bay and the back seat, checking the straps that kept the roof folded back and open. Then she asked politely:

“Don’t you find it distracting to tell your Deds while you’re actually doing the labor?”

“No.” Driver went round to the front of the car, pulled off the air filter and began shaking a storm of dried bugs out of it. “I love the monotony, the soul-numbing boredom. It’s such a soothing contrast.”

Instead …

I got hit with a sudden idea about little girls. And childhood memories. And ghouls. Here is the first page of “The Misses Take and Treat”.

This is the way I always see them, whenever I remember my childhood:

two little, little girls playing in a walled garden, derelict but green and madly alive with Spring, under a low grey sky.

One is white-blonde and one is dark. Both are so pale they almost glow. They are wearing cut-down women’s blouses as dress-up gowns: a sequined T-shirt that sheds sparkles in the dim air, belted with a scarlet silk scarf; a white lace peignoir over a black velvet tunic that falls to skinny ankles. The girl in rhinestones is draped with strands and strands of donkey beads and translucent Bakelite. The one in black velvet is wound around and around her arms and legs and torso with brightly coloured telephone wires, and there are bells and spoons and anything that will rattle or ring wired to them.

They are playing with ribbon wands. They dance wildly, the sort of frenetic hopping and skipping that only kittens and small girls dance, leaping among one another’s arching ribbons like fish in nets.

To be honest, I don’t know any more if they ever really danced like that, dressed like that, in a green feral garden. But it’s what I always see, when I remember them.

One of them had pointed teeth. And one of them was human.

***

The mist was hanging low as I came up the road. It ran narrowly through the trees here, and among the trees there was nothing to see but curtains of fog. The tree tops were invisible. It was like walking through an enormous soap bubble, a ballroom made of tissue-thin nacre. No matter where I looked, the walls were never more than 50 feet away; and as I walked, it looked like the trees were moving through them while I stood still.

My name is Natalie Osborne, and I’m a private detective. I track, and hopefully find, missing people. I’m a particular kind of specialist. There’s more money in specialization in any field – there’s pet detectives, credit detectives, wandering spouse detectives; even a few of those black leather and tattoo weirdos you see on reality shows, who claim they track down parole violators. Personally, I think they’re fake. But my standards of reality are a little more eccentric than most people. What I hunt are cryptids.

I guess that’s a little melodramatic. Actually, I hunt their victims. Not all cryptids prey on humans, but enough do that it pays well to be one of the few people who will believe an hysterical wife claiming that her husband was dragged off by a monster. Look at Lindy Chamberlain-Creighton – she said a dingo, a real actual feral dog that everyone knew existed, took her infant daughter, and she ended up charged with murder. Took years for that poor woman to be vindicated and declared innocent, and she still had to deal with the loss of her child.

I was hunting another missing little girl. I meant to see her mother didn’t end up in jail, with a dead

daughter. Which is why I was hiking into the Los Padres National Forest (“Land of Many Uses” had warned the sign down on Highway 1) in search of a convent of ghouls.

Instead …

I found my zombie story, which had gone MIA. I didn’t work on it tonight, but I at least found the damn thing, and hope to breathe some life into it tomorrow.

Instead …

Did you know there are arboreal chinchillas? Have you ever heard of chinchilla rats? They are related to expensive chinchillas, they have fur just as soft and velvety, and most were considered extinct until recently, when several species were found alive. One lives at Machu Picchu. One lives in a cloud forest in Argentina and is called Mendoza’s Chinchilla Rat. I kid you not, Dear Readers. Just consider it. I have begun notes on a story called “Malocclusion In The Arboreal Chinchilla”.

Instead …

I found a large unopened bag of malted milk balls, and have been steadily consuming them for the last  half-hour. Man, am I buzzed!

Which is why I have written this huge, ungainly blog entry. But it is actually about writing, and about Kage, and about about being responsible and creative and even sort of organized in a weird, giggly way.

Enjoy, Dear Readers. Consider it as little tidbit for your late night delectation. And if it’s not to your taste, (and it may not be; I have no illusions) have some chocolate – that never disappoints.

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Happy Birthday

Posted on June 10, 2019 by Kate

Kage Baker’s birthday is today. She would have been 67 years old – eye to eye with 70, and probably complaining about it.

I can’t quite imagine what she would look like at this age. The ways I have changed in the last 9 years are simply appalling, Dear Readers – Time has played so many tricks on me that it’s hard for me to imagine what I used to look like. I always figured that by this time we’d both look rather like apple dolls; however, I seem to have metamorphosed into a turnip doll.

Today, the heat that has been plaguing the Northern end of California has spread down the coast like marmalade, melting under its own weight. Los Angeles is besieged. We shut up the house in early morning, and turned on the AC as soon as the last float in the Galileo thermometer had plummeted to the bottom of the glass. Then we watched in fascinated horror until the temperature outside – as cleverly displayed on my computer – climbed inexorably up to 97 degrees. After about 80 degrees, the Galileo thermometer just registers freaking hot.

Kage would have loved it. She adored heat, as long as she had enough cold Coke to drink, and had located both her white silk pajamas and the standing fan with vanes like palm leaves. It was all accessory and settings with Kage; that was her author-by-the-seaside-in- intolerable-heat costuming, and once she was comfortable she could write no matter how hot it got.

The morning Kage was born, though – that was relatively cool and clear. Mild weather in the 70’s, and just a few clouds coming in briefly in the mid-afternoon. Suitable weather, I guess, for a baby girl to be born. It was the sort of opalescent weather than would make her birthday more years than not, as time went on; classical, for the L.A. Basin. Kage grew up under the pearl grey skies, raiding plum trees in her mother’s terraced garden; picking huge bouquets of the roses that grew on the edge of every narrow lawn; making bows from eucalyptus saplings and shooting at her brothers with arrows scavenged from a crazy neighbor up the hill who shot them down into the lower yards … eventually, she took over the cupola on the roof of her mother’s house, and started to write the stories that would make her name later on.

On grey days, the Cahuenga Pass below her windows would be brim-full of mist and roaring cars; anything could have been down there. On hot days, she opened all the windows and the room was full of panting wind, perfumed by the garden; the eucalyptus trees scattered leaf-shadows like fish across the walls. At night – to the East, the Valley was a sea of jewels; to the West, the few houses made the Hollywood Hills look like faerie garths, infrequent lamplight shining through the sides of the hollow hills.

I spent a lot of summer nights up there. Sometimes we slept on the roof, trusting to whatever looks after teen aged girls that neither rapists nor pumas would find us. None ever did, though the owls scared the hell out of a few times; in return, I think we ruined a few raccoons’ nights. We’d wake up in the eredawn, our sleeping bags and our hair gemmed with dew, and take off into the hills before the heat got too bad. We’d eat pizza slices and cold soda and imported chocolates in the Hollywood Bowl, where it was cool and green, until we called Mrs. Baker to come pick us up, oh please please please …

Weird to remember maidenhood so very clearly, now that I am so thoroughly a crone. We always sort of thought we’d sort of circle back to those days eventually – probably in golf carts or motorized wheelchairs, if we got too old to hike down the Pass. It seemed as likely as any other fate, when we were still scampering around the Hollywood Hills like a pair of cut-rate maenads.

If she had lived, we’d have given it a go, I fear. We had no sense at any age. Kage would have regrown her hair, I am sure; but I suspect it would have continued to come in white and silver-gilt, only retaining a garnet wash down at the tips of her braid. She’d be a little wrinkled. but I think not too much – she lost a lot of weight before she died, and her face was taut and clean-edged, almost adolescent. She swore that she would never lose her cheekbones again … she’d have aged into Granny Weatherwax, is what she would have done.

I’d have been Nanny Ogg. All I need to do right now is to bleach my hair white and get a bad perm. I’ve even got the red boots.

It would be so worth it, to risk broken hips and crashed golf carts in the golden summer hills: the way it was in the morning of the world, when all the floats were at the top of the glass and we knew we would live forever.

Happy birthday, kiddo.

 

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