Zombies vs. Unicorns Read online

  “You stopped me from feeding,” you say.

  “That didn’t look like feeding.”

  “What would you know about it?”

  He cocks his head. Then nods. “Okay. I stopped you from feeding.”

  You don’t think you’re imagining the hint of relief in his voice, the subtle loosening of tension in his arms.

  Then he shoots you in the shoulder. You just want this over with, but Jack is moaning on the bed, and you went through way too much trouble for him to ruin this now. You rush the ice man, which surprises him enough that he falls onto the concrete outside. You run past him, feeling the blood dripping down your arm, but not much else. The prions are good about pain. A few other guests have opened their doors at the noise. The ice man lets off another shot. It misses you.

  You rush to a large, empty space at the edge of the lot. You don’t want to make this too obvious. It shouldn’t be much work for him to hit your head from this distance. But the next shots are so wide that you can’t even smell the lead.

  “Come on,” you mutter when the ice man just stands there.

  Then he falls down.

  Jack stands behind him, jaw bruised, gun smoking. There’s a hole in the back of his dad’s head, and you can smell it from here.

  “You okay?” Jack asks, after you jog up to him. But he’s the one who’s shaking.

  Someone shrieks. The night clerk talks rapidly into his cell phone. “I think the cops are coming,” you say.

  “Yeah. It’ll probably take them a while.”

  You both look down at the corpse. Jack hauls him inside the room. “Hurry up,” he says.

  You only have time for the brains, but that’s okay. They’re the best part.

  10. Shoot Out the Lights

  We live in a little cottage in Mexico now, in a village so tiny that only the residents have heard of it. There’s a beach with good fishing, and a market once a month an hour away. Jack spoke some Spanish before, and we’re picking it up well enough. We go into town for the Internet, where Jack sells Mexican handicrafts on eBay.

  I bought him a guitar for his birthday, but I ended up playing it. When I practice, he jokes about how good he’s getting. I wrote him one song, and sometimes I like it. I haven’t played it for him yet. Even now, it’s hard for me to guess what will make him go still and icy. Sometimes I think a part of him hates me.

  I know Jack will kill me if I eat again. I imagine it sometimes, when I stare too long at some plump girl in a bikini and her smell reaches back into that prion part of my brain and I can feel the old hunger tearing at my skin. I imagine him playing Joy Division, Ian Curtis’s mournful voice almost scraping against the speakers, “Do you cry out in your sleep / all my failings exposed,” and Jack’s tears smear my lips, and I get just that last, ecstatic taste of him before the blade goes snicker-snack.

  “Purity Test”

  Holly: The association of the unicorn with virtue is of long origin. According to legend, a young girl would be sent ahead of unicorn-hunting parties—as shown in the famous unicorn tapestries—to lure the creature with her innocence and purity. Once the unicorn rested its head in the girl’s lap, hunters would surprise the unicorn and, well, that would be that.

  Some scholars have creepily suggested that unicorns are able to detect chastity, although, according to the literature, unicorns have been lured not only by women who weren’t maidens, but in at least one case, by a perfumed boy dressed in women’s clothes. Now, I don’t think, as my coeditor will no doubt suggest, that this means unicorns are dumb, but rather they are lured by essential inner goodness.

  One of the things I love most about Naomi Novik’s “Purity Test” is how it takes our expectations of unicorns and maidens and turns them on their head. Plus, it’s very funny.

  Justine: “Purity Test” is funny because Naomi Novik is making fun of unicorns. That’s right, Naomi Novik is secretly on Team Zombie. Poor Team Unicorn, in such shambles from the outset. I almost pity them. (Get it? Shambles? You know, like, zombies shambling? Never mind …)

  Holly: “Purity Test” is funny because it makes fun of foolish zombie-loving people’s perceptions of unicorns. She’s our double agent.

  Purity Test

  By Naomi Novik

  “Oh, stop whining,” the unicorn said. “I didn’t poke you that hard.”

  “I think I’m bleeding, my back hurts, and I’m seeing unicorns,” Alison said. “I so have grounds.”

  She pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes and sat up slowly on the park bench. Spending her emergency train-fare-home money on margaritas in the first midtown bar that hadn’t carded her had seemed like a good idea at the time. She wasn’t even completely ready to give up on it yet, although the crazy hangover had been tipping the scales even before the unicorn had showed up and jabbed her.

  The unicorn was extremely pretty, all long flowy silver hair and shiny hooves, indescribable grace, and a massive spiraling horn about four feet long that seemed like it should have dragged the unicorn’s head down to the ground, just on basic physics. Also, it looked kind of annoyed.

  “Why a unicorn?” Alison wondered at her subconscious out loud. She wasn’t thirteen years old or anything. “I mean, dragons are so much cooler.”

  “Excuse me?” the unicorn said indignantly. “Unicorns kill dragons all the time.”

  “Really?” she said skeptically.

  The unicorn pawed the ground a little with a forehoof. “Okay, usually only when they’re still small. But Zanzibar the Magnificent did kill Galphagor the Black in 1014.”

  “O-kay,” Alison said. “Did you just make those names up?”

  “You know what, shut up,” said the unicorn. “Entertaining as it would be to spend three weeks correcting your misguided preconceptions, there’s no time; the herd only gave me three days, and then that idiot Talmazan gets his turn. And if you knew him, you would understand what an unmitigated disaster that would be.”

  “His turn at what?”

  “Finding a virgin,” the unicorn said.

  “Um,” she said. “Maybe he’d have more luck than you. I’m not—”

  “La, la, la!” the unicorn sang loudly, drowning her out. It even sang beautifully, perfectly on-key. “Have you never heard of plausible deniability?” it hissed at her, when she’d stopped trying to finish the sentence.

  “Excuse me, either you don’t know what ‘plausible’ means or I’m insulted,” she said.

  “Look,” the unicorn said, “just be quiet a second and let me explain the situation to you.”

  The hangover was moving to the front and center of Alison’s skull, and she was starting to get a little worried: The unicorn hallucination wasn’t going away. She shut her eyes and lay back down on the bench.

  The unicorn apparently took it as a sign to keep going. “Okay,” it said. “So there’s this wizard—”

  “Wow, of course there is,” Alison said.

  “—and he’s been grabbing baby unicorns,” the unicorn said, through gritted teeth.

  “You know,” Alison told her subconscious, “I’ve got to draw the line somewhere. Baby unicorns is going too far.”

  “No kidding,” the unicorn said. “You don’t think I’d be wasting my time talking to a human otherwise? Anyway, wizard, baby unicorns, where was I—Oh, right. Probably he’s trying to make himself immortal, which never works, except wizards never listen when you tell them that, and we would really prefer if he got stopped before he cuts off the babies’ horns trying.”

  “Let me guess,” Alison said. “Is his name Voldemort?”

  “No, what freakish kind of name is Voldemort?” the unicorn said. “His name is Otto, Otto Penzler. He lives downtown.”

  “So what do you need a virgin for?”

  “Do you see hands at the ends of these?” the unicorn said. Alison cracked an eye open enough to see that yes, the unicorn was still there, and it was waving a silver hoof in her face. There wasn’t any dirt on the hoof, even t
hough the unicorn was standing in the middle of a torn-up meadow.

  “What does being a virgin have to do with opposable thumbs?” she said.

  “Nothing!” the unicorn said. “But will anyone else in the herd listen to me? Of course not! They go off and grab the first thirteen-year-old who coos at them, and then it’s all, ‘Their purity will lead the way,’ blah, blah, blah. Lead the way to a whole bunch of dead baby unicorns, maybe. I want a little more competence in my heroine.”

  “I’m drunk and sleeping on a bench in Central Park,” Alison said. “That meets your criteria?”

  “Hello?” The unicorn dipped its horn and lifted the dangling sleeve from her wadded-up jacket, the one she’d been using as a pillow. “U.S. Marines?”

  The jacket had come out of a two-dollar bin in the army-navy store. She actually had tried to enlist, two days ago, after the last-ditch attempt to get hired at McDonald’s had failed. She’d thought that the recruiters in Times Square would be hard up enough for volunteers that they wouldn’t be picky about her age, but that apparently awesome idea had nearly ended with her handed over to the cops for truancy, so even if the unicorn was a hallucination, she wasn’t going to let on that it was wrong.

  “How do you know I wasn’t dishonorably discharged?” she said.

  The unicorn brightened, which Alison had to admit was something to see. “Are you a lesbian? I’m pretty sure that doesn’t count toward virginity.”

  “I am pretty sure it does,” Alison said, “and sorry, but no.”

  “Well, it was just a thought,” the unicorn said. “Let’s go.”

  “I’m not going anywhere without coffee,” Alison said. She wanted a shower, too, but she had a total of nineteen dollars left, so coffee was more in reach.

  The unicorn tossed its head and snorted and then whacked her on the head with its horn. “Ow! What was that for?” Alison said, and then she was wide-awake, not hungry, and felt cleaner than she had in two weeks of showering in hostels. “Oh. Okay, that’s a trick.”

  Then she stared, because she was stone-cold sober, sitting on a bench in Central Park in the middle of the night, and there was a unicorn standing in front of her.

  “Just let me do the talking if we run into any other unicorns,” the unicorn said, pacing her. At four in the morning by the clock on the CNN billboard, even the streets of Manhattan were pretty quiet, but Alison would still have expected the unicorn to get at least a few double takes from the taxi drivers and the drunks going home. Nobody did more than nod to her, or at least to the uniform jacket.

  “Uh-huh.” She was halfheartedly trying to convince herself she really was hallucinating or still drunk, but it was a losing fight. She’d had freakish dreams before, but nothing like this, and there was something uncomfortably real about the unicorn. It was actually kind of creepy. The more she looked at it, the more it seemed like it was the only real thing, and the rest of the world was one of those really expensive computer games, flattened out, with too much color.

  “Where did you come from, anyway? Like, Fairyland or something?”

  The unicorn turned its head and gave her a blue-eyed glare. “Yes. Fairyland,” it said, dripping sarcasm. “Fairyland, where the fairies and the unicorns play, and never is heard a discouraging—”

  “Okay, okay, jeez,” she said. “Do you want me to buy you an apple or something? Would that make you less cranky?”

  The unicorn snorted and minced disdainfully over some flattened droppings left by one of the carriage horses. “Anyway, we’re always here, you idiots just don’t notice anything that doesn’t shove itself in your faces. You’ve never spotted the elves, either, and they’re taking up half the tables at Per Se every night.”

  “Hey, Belcazar,” a cat said, walking by.

  The unicorn very slightly flicked his tail. “Social climbers, cats,” the unicorn said with a sniff after they had passed farther on.

  “Belcazar?” Alison said, eyeing his tail, long and white-furred with a tuft at the end, like a lion’s. “So, if I help you get the baby unicorns back, this is all going to stop, right? I don’t need to be hearing cats talking.”

  “Who does?” the unicorn said evasively. “This way,” he added, and trotted across Columbus Circle to take Broadway downtown.

  Otto Penzler lived on Gramercy Park in a neat three-story brownstone with an honest-to-God front yard and fresh flowers in the window boxes.

  “I guess he can just magic up money or whatever,” Alison said, staring in through the fence bars. She’d been spending a lot of time in libraries reading the New York Times to find classified ads for jobs she wouldn’t get, so she had picked up what this place had to cost.

  “Not unless he wants the Treasury Department to decide he’s a counterfeiter,” Belcazar said. “He probably has a day job. Come on.”

  He jumped the ironwork fence in a single spectacularly graceful leap and trotted to a side window. Alison rolled her eyes and just went through the unlocked front gate. “What’s the plan, here, exactly?”

  Belcazar touched the window with his horn. The latches on the inside slid by themselves, and the window rose smoothly open. “You climb through, let me in the front door, and then we find the baby unicorns and get out, hopefully before the wizard even wakes up,” he said.

  “Uh,” Alison said. “I hate to break it to you, but he’s not keeping them in there.”

  “How would you know?” Belcazar demanded.

  Alison pointed inside the window. “If he blew that much money on hardwood floors, I do not think he is letting a bunch of horses walk on them. He’s got to have them somewhere else.”

  Around back there was a padlocked cellar door. Belcazar backed away from the lock with a snort. “Cold iron,” he said unhappily.

  “Would it help if it was warm iron?” Alison said. “I have a lighter.”

  “Very funny, not,” Belcazar said. “That must be where he’s got them.” He looked at Alison expectantly.

  It was New York, so there was a twenty-four-hour hardware store a couple of blocks away. The guy at the cash register had a vague expression on his face as he handed Alison the crowbar and put one of Alison’s last five-dollar bills into the register. Belcazar was standing just inside the door; he had somehow managed to cram himself in between the folding ladders and the mops.

  “If I get locked up for this, you are so busting me out,” Alison said shortly after working the crowbar into the lock and leaning on it. The padlock popped open like a gunshot, and she looked up and around to make sure no one had gotten curious and stuck their head out a window to see her breaking into some nice upstanding wizard’s cellar in the dead of night.

  “I’ll hire you a goblin lawyer,” Belcazar said. “Hurry up before it gets light.”

  She was still careful opening the doors, keeping them as quiet as she could, lifting them slowly. She wasn’t sure what she was expecting; this all still seemed unreal, the streetlamp casting Belcazar’s shadow with the tapering horn on the ground next to her. But you could get used to pretty much anything, if you gave it enough time—eating in soup kitchens, sleeping on the street. Unicorns were not that hard, and breaking into an evil wizard’s basement was turning out to be easier than getting into the high school weight room after hours.

  The doors opened on a broad staircase going down into black, with the annoying kind of fancy steps that were so long you had to take an extra step before you got to the edge, but not long enough to take two extra steps, so you were always going down on the same foot. She couldn’t see the bottom, even after they had ducked all the way in.

  Belcazar’s horn glowed white as they descended, a sort of cool, unforgiving pearly light. The walls were weird and smooth and curved, like they were auditioning for an Escher painting. It seemed like they were trying to bend away from the light.

  “Ew,” Alison said, twenty steps down, with the dark cornflower blue rectangle of open sky above getting farther away than she wanted it, and a rotten stink getting c
loser. “Is this going to end up in the sewers or something?”

  “Ugh, no; it’s a troll,” Belcazar said, stopping.

  They hadn’t quite stepped off the stairs, but they’d bottomed out in a small antechamber, pretty much just a landing with a door at the other end. Alison didn’t see what Belcazar meant until the big lumpy pile of rock by the door sat up and unfolded concrete gray arms and legs and blinked little black pebble eyes at them. “Yum,” the troll said, and came lumbering toward them.

  “Uh,” Alison said, backing away rapidly. Belcazar just stood there, though, and the troll got yanked up a foot short of the stairs by a chain around its neck.

  “Yum,” it said unhappily, stretching its thick stumpy arms out at them futilely.

  “They won’t stay put unless you chain them,” the unicorn said to Alison a little loftily.

  “Thanks for letting me know!” she said. “So now what? Can you kill this thing?”

  “No,” the unicorn said.

  “I thought you guys could take out dragons?”

  Belcazar pawed the ground. “Okay, theoretically I could kill it, but if it grabbed on to me, it’s stronger, and it’s not like there’s a lot of room to maneuver in here.”

  “Well, I don’t think it’s going to let us by if we just ask nicely,” Alison said.

  “Yep,” the troll said immediately. “Let you by. Go ’head.” It backed up against the wall and waved a hand at the passageway. It even tried a hopeful smile, full of teeth like broken rocks.

  “Nice try,” Alison said.

  “Aw,” the troll said.

  “You’re a soldier!” Belcazar said. “Haven’t you got any better ideas?”

  “Oh, yeah, absolutely. I’ll go upstairs, call around, and find someone in Manhattan with a grenade launcher, and we’ll come right back,” Alison said sarcastically. She wondered what a real marine would do. Probably shoot it with the gun a real marine would be carrying and know how to use, which wasn’t a lot of help.