Strangers in the Land (The Zombie Bible) Read Free Page B

soft cartilage, perhaps only a moment before the child’s mother had been able to rescue it.
    Its eyes gazed on the
navi
, but those eyes were dull and dry like small stones.
    The infant was not alive.
    It would never again draw milk from the young Canaanite’s breasts. It would never crawl or learn to walk. Its hair would never grow even a fingernail’s width, nor would it ever void its bowels.
    But it
would
hunger.
    Devora listened to that high, unwavering moan for one long moment, feeling not only chilled but old: the ache in her wrists and fingers, the sharp needles that lived in her back. Swallowing against the dryness in her throat, she motioned to the man who stood behind her. After an instant’s hesitation, Zadok set aside his spear and plucked from the girdle about his waist two gloves of dried goatskin. He drew them on, then moved forward quickly to seize the child.
    The girl shrieked, tried to leap away with her infant, but the man caught her arm, pulled her savagely back, even as she kicked at him and screamed, her eyes dark with horror. He took up the baby by its remaining leg, wrenching it from her. He held the girl away from his body, and she clawed wildly at his arm, thrashing. Her salmah fell open, revealing a body thin and wasted, withgreat folds of skin slack from a childbirth that could not have happened more than a couple of weeks before.
    “
Navi!
” the girl screamed. “
Navi!
”
    The man hesitated, looked to Devora, even as the girl fought his grip. The infant wriggled in the air, hissing like an asp, its small arms moving. The people below on the slope could see it now, and several of them cried out.
    Devora tensed. That corpse writhing in the nazarite’s grip was her most terrible fear made flesh. “Zadok,” she said—
    Then, between one beat of Devora’s heart and the next, it happened.
    The air around her
heated
, as though the
navi
were standing in a desert. A dry and violent heat that overcame her and swept into her. Devora knew what it meant; it was the
shekinah
, the holy presence of God, the same heat that dwelled over the Ark in the Tent of Meeting at Shiloh. Devora braced herself, and then the vision came. The seeing of what might happen.
    She saw shambling figures lurching through the valley below. Some of them were on the slope below her, others were by the river. Still more were among the tents, small at this distance. Herds of them, all swaying as they walked. Arms lifted as though yearning for an embrace. The scent of decay stank sweetly in Devora’s nostrils. She coughed painfully and passed her hand over her eyes, which burned now with strain.
    Her vision cleared, mercifully. There was only the girl screaming and Zadok the nazarite with the child clutched in his hand. And the supplicants below with ashen faces, the hill on which they stood, and around them the wide fields of heather and barley under a pale sky. No other dead, only that small, moaning infant.
    Her lips tasted of salt; in the heat of God’s presence all the moisture had been baked from them, leaving only that taste behind.
    She forced herself to breathe. Deeply, fully.
    It was the future she had seen, but it was not the truth. Not yet. It couldn’t be. It mustn’t be. In her mind, she heard the screams outside her mother’s tent, screams that went on and on until they died in a gasp of breath. That was a memory, that was the past. She tried to shove it back as she turned cold eyes on the Canaanite girl. Thirty years ago, her people had brought the unclean death into the land. Now it was happening again.
    “Please,
navi
,” the girl cried, her face twisted in pain and fear. “Please, pray to the Hebrew God. There must be something the gods can do. He didn’t die of illness or hunger or any wild animal. It’s
unjust
. The gods have to give him back! Please,
navi
, please,
navi
!”
    The girl’s cries pulled at her, but Devora could not afford to pity her. The miracle the girl hoped for was not