Stalking The Zombie: Fables of Tonight Read online

  STALKING THE ZOMBIE

  MIKE RESNICK

  A John J. Mallory Collection

  AMERICAN FANTASY

  American fantasy Press Woodstock. Illinois 2012

  STALKING THE ZOMBIE Copyright © 2012 Mike Resnick.

  Preface Copyright © 2012 Connie Willis.

  Cover and interior Artwork Copyright © 2012 Douglas Klauba.

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from both the author and copyright holder, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in review.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  “Introduction”: Copyright © 2012. It appears here for the first time.

  “Post Time in Pink”: Copyright © 1991. First appeared in Newer York.

  “The Blue-Nosed Reindeer”: Copyright © 1992. First appeared in A Christmas Bestiary.

  “Card Shark”: Copyright © 1998. First appeared in the May, 1998 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

  “The Chinese Sandman”: Copyright © 2002. First appeared in Black Gate #3. “The Amorous Broom”: Copyright © 2004. First appeared in Masters of Fantasy.

  “The Long and Short of It”: Copyright © 2008. First appeared in The Dragon Done It.

  “Shell Game”: Copyright © 2007. First appeared in The Solaris Book of New Fantasy.

  “Stalking the Zombie”: Copyright © 2012. It appears here for the first time.

  Published by American Fantasy

  919 Tappan St., Woodstock, Illinois, 60098 www.americanfantasypress.com

  Trade Hardcover ISBNs: 0-9610352-5-0 / 978-09610352-5-9 Signed, Limited Edition ISBNs: 0-9610352-8-5 / 978-0-9610352-8-0

  FIRST EDITION 10 987654321

  To Carol, as always.

  And to those earnest, hard-working, and extremely talented men and women that Maureen McHugh has dubbed “Mike’s Writer Children.”

  PREFACE

  by Connie Willis

  When you talk to Mike Resnick, the first thing you find out is how much he loves to tell stories, whether in print or to an eager bunch of fans gathered around him at a science-fiction convention. And he’s been doing just that for nigh onto five decades, spinning tales of everything from elephant tusks to hootch dancers, set everywhere from carnival midways to outer space to brothels to L5s.

  He’s written space operas and future histories, Battle-star Galactica tie-ins and award-winning short stories. And when he isn’t writing fiction, he’s editing SF anthologies, penning the history of science fiction, writing screenplays and writing advice columns and articles on dogbreeding and anything else he can think of.

  The second thing you find out about Mike is that he’s a walking encyclopedia on any topic you’d care to name. On one of our very first encounters, he told me all about Craig Rice (I thought I was the only person who’d ever heard of her) and baseball and Teddy Roosevelt’s trip to Yellowstone.

  Roosevelt’s a particular passion of his, and so is Africa —hence the wonderful Kirinyaga stories, my favorites among all his work. They’re understated, ironic, and endlessly thought-provoking, and his hero, the wise man Koriba, is one of my favorite characters of all time: a sincere, kind, wise man charged with a hopeless task: trying to prevent progress and to make time—and history—stand still. Those elegant stories—“The Mana-mouki” and “Seven Views of Olduvai Gorge” and “For I Have Touched the Sky”—and others show Mike at his serious best.

  But there’s another side of Mike’s writing that I like nearly as well, and that’s when Mike’s just having fun, like he’s done in “The Best Rootin’ Tootin’ Shootin’ Gunslinger in the Whole Damn Galaxy” and his Lucifer Jones adventures and “Will the Last Person to Leave the Planet Please Shut Off the Sun.” And like he’s doing here in Stalking the Zombie.

  The minute you land in Mike’s “other” Manhattan, you sense there’s something a little bit . . . um . . . different about it. For one thing, it’s a Manhattan full of trolls and vampires, nattily-dressed card sharks (literally) and cowardly elves and magic mirrors which make unflattering remarks and then go back to broadcasting “the third inning of a scoreless 1963 American Association baseball game between El Paso and Tucson.” It’s a New York City of roller derbies and diners and Racing Forms and a nag named Flyaway who’s never won a race and never will, even though Mallory keeps betting on him.

  That’s John J. Mallory, a small-time detective with, of course, a faithful partner, a fifth of Scotch in the desk drawer, and an office cat—though in this particular Manhattan none of them are quite what they seem. Especially the cat, whose name is Felina and who can talk. When she does, she says exactly what cats would say if they could talk. She’s amoral, selfish and faithless. And absolutely charming.

  Felina doesn’t faze Mallory, and neither do his clients or the New York City he suddenly finds himself stuck in, though it’s very different from the one he’s used to. It’s got a Vampire State building and a Pinochle Tower, and eateries like Cannibal Joe’s and Morgan the Gorgon’s 2-Star Diner and Hardware Store. And its inhabitants include unicorns, Chinese sandmen, and Tassel-Twirling Tessie Twinkle, the Lizard Girl.

  But there’s just as much crime as in the Manhattan he came from, and his clients are just as dishonest, sleazy, and dangerous as the ones he left behind. And there are just as many scams and double-crosses.

  If all this reminds you of Raymond Chandler or The Maltese Falcon (or Craig Rice, whom Mike says was his main influence for Stalking the Zombie), it’s not accidental. Mike’s having a great time sending up all his favorite hard-boiled detective novels.

  I see a strong resemblance to Damon Runyon, too, with his Broadway small-time gamblers and lowlifes, and not just because of Mike’s colorful characters and Mallory’s penchant for betting on horses that CANNOT POSSIBLY win. I’m also reminded of Runyon because it’s so much fun listening to his characters, and the same is true of Resnick. I could listen to the seemingly friendly conversations between Mallory and the Grundy, with their undertones of danger and violence, all day. And I love the office squabbles of Winnifred, Felina, and Mallory. Stalking the Zombie's full of snappy banter and wry observations on everything from racing forms to romance novels, from politics to Casablanca sequels to rap.

  Stalking the Zombie is the fun, funny, tall-tale-telling Mike at his cutting-loose best. It’s inventive, satiric, fastpaced, a rollercoaster ride of a book. And you’re going to have a whale—oops, pink elephant—of a time reading it!

  INTRODUCTION

  It was back in the mid-1980s that I decided, after all my science fiction novels, it was time to write a fantasy novel. Now, I happen to loathe magical quest stories with Lords, Ladies, archaic English, and enchanted swords, and they were so popular at the time that one of my colleagues (I think it was Bob Silverberg) invented the term “elf-and-unicorn trilogy” as a pejorative.

  I got to thinking about it, and decided that my novel should have an elf and a unicorn and be the farthest thing anyone could imagine when they heard that term, so I set it in present-day Manhattan—not the Manhattan you and I visit, but the one you can only see out of the corner of your eye, and which vanishes away when you turn to face it head on. It’s a Manhattan populated by lecherous elves, incompetent magicians, entrepreneurial goblins, and the like, and boasts structures such as the Vampire State Building and Madison Round Garden.

  My hero was a hard-boiled detective, down on his luck and short of funds like all hard-boiled detectives, who finds himself in this mystical Man
hattan while on a case, and seems destined to spend the rest of his life—at least his literary life—there.

  Almost every critic and reviewer claimed, with absolute certainly, that my hero was a tribute to Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe. That’s flattering, to be sure, since I consider Chandler the finest writer to come out of the pulps in any category.

  However, the very first female category writer to make the cover of Time was Craig Rice, whose hero, John J. Malone, made his way through some delightful madcap mysteries such as The Big Midget Murders and Having Wonderful Crime, and of course my John Justin Mallory, whose adventures range from amusing to hilarious, is a tribute to Malone (note the names) and his creator, a fact which has managed to escape every critic for the quarter-century of Mallory’s existence.

  When I had finished Mallory’s first novel, I sold it to Tor under the title (which I still love) of Yes, We Have No Nirvanas. My editor, Beth Meacham, explained that while she appreciated the title, it would be lost on any reader under the age of 30 (and this was back in 1987), and I changed it to Stalking the Unicorn. Just as well I did, since it gave readers a way to identify future Mallory books, including this one.

  When the novel came out I thought Mallory was permanently retired. I had no intention of writing about him again. But then Lawrence Watt-Evans put out a call for stories for his anthology, Newer York, and someone asked him on the late, lamented GEnie network if he would accept fantasy. He replied that he would if it was as well-conceived and well-written as Stalking the Unicorn. Flattery gets you everywhere with me, so I pulled Mallory out of mothballs and set him to work again in “Post Time in Pink,” which Lawrence bought.

  Marty Greenberg read it, and asked me to bring Mallory back again for A Christmas Bestiary, hence, “The Blue-Nosed Reindeer.” Then Kris Rusch asked for a Mallory story for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and I wrote “Card Shark” for her.

  Black Gate was the next to ask for one, and I wrote “The Chinese Sandman” for it. Bill Fawcett asked me to write one of my continuing fantasy characters for Masters of Fantasy, and since Mallory was my only continuing character I wrote “The Amorous Broom.” (By that time, I think Felina, the office kind-of cat, had passed Mallory in popularity, at least according to my fan mail.)

  I gave him a few years off, then put him back in harness in “Shell Game” when The Solaris Book of New Fantasy put in a request for him. And when Eric Flint and I co-edited The Dragon Done It, part of our sales pitch to Jim Baen was that we’d each write a brand-new novelette for this anthology of fantasy shamuses, and I confronted Mallory with “The Long and Short of It.”

  Lou Anders, my editor over at Pyr, decided that Mallory worked just as well at novel length. He reprinted Stalking the Unicorn and commissioned two new novels, Stalking the Vampire and Stalking the Dragon.

  And, when it came time to put together a collection of all these Mallory stories, I knew I needed a title story with “Stalking” in it, so Mallory came back one last time for “Stalking the Zombie.”

  These things have been a delight to write over the past 25 years, and if truth be told, I don’t know that I prefer my Manhattan to Mallory’s.

  POST TIME IN PINK

  WHO DO YOU LIKE in the sixth?” asked Mallory as he stuck his feet up on the desk and began browsing through the Racing Form.

  “I haven’t the slightest idea,” said Winnifred Carruthers, pushing a wisp of gray hair back from her pudgy face and taking a sip of her tea. She was sitting at a table in the kitchen, browsing through the memoirs of a unicorn hunter and trying not to think about what the two donuts she had just eaten would do to her already-ample midriff.

  “It’s a tough one to call,” mused Mallory, staring aimlessly around the magician’s apartment that he and Winnifred had converted into their office. Most of the mystic paraphernalia—the magic mirror, the crystal ball, the wands and pentagrams—had been removed. In their place were photos of Joe DiMaggio, Seattle Slew, a pair of Playboy centerspreads (on which Winnifred had meticulously drawn undergarments with a magic marker), and a team picture of the 1966 Green Bay Packers, which Mallory felt gave the place much more the feel of an office and which Winnifred thought was merely in bad taste. “Jumbo hasn’t run since he sat on his trainer last fall, and Tantor ran off the course in his last two races to wallow in the infield pond.”

  “Don’t you have anything better to do?” said Winnifred, trying to hide her irritation. “After all, we formed the Mallory & Carruthers Agency two weeks ago, and we’re still waiting for our first client.”

  “It takes time for word to get out,” replied Mallory. “Then shouldn’t we be out spreading the word—after you shave and press your suit, of course?”

  Mallory smiled at her. “Detective agencies aren’t like cars. You can’t advertise a sale and wait for customers to come running. Someone has to need us first.”

  “Then won’t you at least stop betting next week’s food money on the races?”

  “In the absence of a desperate client, this is the only way I know of to raise money.”

  “But you’ve had six losing days in a row.”

  “I’m used to betting on horses in my New York,” replied Mallory defensively. “Elephants take awhile to dope out. Besides, they’re running at Jamaica, and they haven’t done that in my New York in 35 years; I’m still working out the track bias. But,” he added, “I’m starting to get the hang of it. Take Twinkle Toes, for instance. Everything I read in the Foi'm led me to believe he could outrun Heavyweight at six furlongs.”

  “But he didn’t,” noted Winnifred.

  “Outrun Heavyweight? He certainly did.”

  “I thought he lost.”

  “By a nose.” Mallory grimaced. “Now, how the hell was I supposed to know that his nose was two feet shorter than Heavyweight’s?” He paused. “It’s just a matter of stockpiling information. Next time I’ll take that into consideration.”

  “What I am trying to say is that we can’t afford too many more next times,” said Winnifred. “And since you’re stranded here, in this Manhattan, it would behoove you to start trimming your—our—expenses.”

  “It’s my only indulgence.”

  “No it’s not,” said Winnifred.

  “It’s not?” repeated Mallory, puzzled.

  “What do you call that, if not an indulgence?” said Winnifred, pointing to the very humanlike but definitely feline creature perched atop the refrigerator.

  Mallory shrugged. “The office cat.”

  “This office can’t afford a cat—at least, not this one. She’s been drinking almost a gallon of milk a day, and the last time I went out shopping she phoned the local fishmonger and ordered a whale.”

  “Felina,” said Mallory, “is that true?”

  The catlike creature shook her head.

  “Are you saying you didn’t order it?” demanded Winnifred.

  “They couldn’t fit it through the doorway,” answered Felina, leaping lightly to the floor, walking over to Mallory, and rubbing her hip against his shoulder. “So it doesn’t count.”

  “You see?” said Winnifred, shrugging hopelessly. “She’s quite beyond redemption.”

  “This city’s got nine million people in it,” replied Mallory. “Only two of them didn’t desert me when I went up against the Grundy two weeks ago. You’re one of them; she’s the other. She stays.”

  Winnifred sighed and went back to sipping her tea, while Felina hopped onto the desk and curled her remarkably humanlike body around Mallory’s feet, purring contentedly.

  “Do you like the Grundy?” asked Felina after a moment’s silence.

  “How can one like the most evil demon on the East Coast?” replied Mallory. “Of course,” he added thoughtfully, “he makes a lot more sense than most of the people I’ve met here, but that’s a different matter.”

  “Too bad,” purred Felina.

  “What’s too bad?”

  “It’s too bad you don’t like the Grundy.�
��

  “Why?” asked Mallory suspiciously.

  “Because he’s on his way here.”

  “How do you know?”

  Felina smiled a very catlike smile. “Cat people know things that humans can only guess at.”

  “I don’t suppose you know what he wants?” continued Mallory.

  Felina nodded her head. “You.”

  Mallory was about to reply when a strange being suddenly materialized in the middle of the room. He was tall, a few inches over six feet, with two prominent horns protruding from his hairless head. His eyes were a burning yellow, his nose sharp and aquiline, his teeth white and gleaming, his skin a bright red. His shirt and pants were of crushed velvet, his cloak satin, his collar and cuffs made of the fur of some white polar animal. He wore gleaming black gloves and boots, and he had two mystic rubies suspended from his neck on a golden chain. When he exhaled, small clouds of vapor emanated from his mouth and nostrils.

  “We need to talk, John Justin Mallory,” said the Grundy, fixing the detective with a baleful glare as Felina arched her back and hissed at him and Winnifred backed away.

  “Whatever you’re selling, I’m not buying,” answered Mallory, not bothering to take his feet off the desk.

  “I am selling nothing,” said the Grundy. “In fact, I have come as a supplicant.”

  Mallory frowned. “A supplicant?”

  “A client, if you will.”

  “Why should I accept you as a client?” asked Mallory. “I don’t even like you.”

  “I need a detective,” said the Grundy calmly. “It is your function in life to detect.”

  “I thought it was my function to save people from mad dog killers like you.”

  “I kill no dogs,” said the Grundy, taking him literally. “Only people.”

  “Well, that makes everything all right then,” said Mallory sardonically.

  “Good. Shall we get down to business?”