After the Rain | Page 8

still do for some soldiers.
Mata came through the door like an old woman, and Valentine looked
up from the table where she'd been patiently feeding silent Trover
before collapsing to sleep again. Valentine stood and looked at her and
her Mata looked at Valentine, and then her mother hobbled across the

room like an old woman and gave Valentine a fierce, hard, long hug.
Valentine found she was crying and also found that silent little Trover
had gotten up from the table and was hugging them both. He was tall,
she realized dimly, tall enough to reach up and hug her at the waist
instead of the knees, and when had that happened?
Her mother ate some of the dinner they'd had, and took a painkiller, the
old kind that came in pill form that were now everywhere. Take a few
of them and you would forget your problems, or so hissed the boys she
passed in the street, though she passed them without a glance or a sniff.
Soon Mata was asleep, back in her bed, and Valentine was back in her
bed, too, but she couldn't sleep.
Under her bed she had the remains of her grip sheet parcel, one of the
precise robot-knots remaining. In that parcel was her winter galosh, just
one, the other had been stolen the winter before, while she'd had them
both off to rub some warmth back into her toes before going back to the
digging.
In the toe of the galosh, there was a pea-sized glowing light. She'd
never considered selling it for bread, though it was very fine. Its light
seemed too bright in the dark flat, so she took it outside into the hot
night, and used it to light her way on a secret walk through the old
streets of her dirty city.
#
Nine months after her father died, winter had sent autumn as a
threatening envoy. The bread ration was cut to 120 grams, and there
were sometimes pebbles in the bread that everyone knew were there to
increase the weight.
She was proud that when the bread was bad, she and the other diggers
cursed the enemy and not the city. Everyone knew that no one had it
any better. They fought and suffered together.

But she was so hungry all the time, and you couldn't eat pride. One day,
she was in the queue for bread and reached out with her trembling
hands to take her ration, and then she turned with it, and in a flash, a
man old enough to be her father had snatched it out of her hands and
run away with it!
She chased after him, and the shrill cries of the women followed them,
but he knew the rubble-piles well, and he dodged and weaved, and she
was so tired. Eventually she sat down and wept.
That was when she saw her first zombie. Zombiism had been
eliminated when she was practically a baby, just after the revolution,
years and years ago.
But now it was back. The zombie had been a soldier, so maybe
zombiism was coming back in the gas attacks that wafted over the
trenches. His uniform hung in rags from his loose limbs as he walked in
that funky, disco-dancer shuffle that meant zombie as clearly as the
open drooling mouth and the staring, not-seeing eyes. They were fast,
zombies, though you could hardly believe it when they were doing that
funky walk. Once they saw prey, they turned into race horses that tore
over anything and everything in their quest to rip and bite and rend and
tear, screaming incoherencies with just enough words in them to make
it clear that they were angry -- so so angry.
She scrambled up from the curb she'd been weeping on and began to
back away slowly, keeping perfectly silent. You needed to get away
from zombies and then tell someone from the city so they could
administer the cure. That's how you did it, back in the old days.
The zombie was shambling away from her anyway. It would pass by
harmlessly, but she had to get away in any event, because it was a
zombie and it was wrong in just the same way that a giant hairy spider
was wrong (though if she found something giant and hairy today, she'd
take it home for the soup-pot).
She didn't kick a tin or knock over a pile of rubble. She was perfectly
stealthy. She hardly breathed.

And that zombie saw her anyway. It roared and charged. Its mouth was
almost toothless, but what teeth remained there gleamed. It had been a
soldier, and it had good boots, and they crunched the broken glass and
the rubble as it pelted for her. She shrieked and ran, but