Jews vs Zombies by Daniel Polansky, Adam Roberts, Sarah Lotz, Ofir Touché Gafla, Rena Rossner, Shimon Adaf, Benjamin Rosenbaum, Anna Tambour Page A

Shambling around in the small hours must have meant they’d been feeding. And feeding carried with it the inevitable correlative: feeding on whom?
    ‘I’m going to start one of the trucks,’ said Daniel, heading down the stairs. ‘We need more light.’
    ‘Don’t waste the petrol,’ said mother. ‘They’re going anyway.’
    ‘You sure?’
    As if in answer to his question, clouds parted and enough pearl-coloured moonlight fell on the field in front of the camp to show it deserted.
    ‘They’re gone,’ mother pronounced.
    Jonie was sent back to bed, but of course she was too wired-up to sleep now. She read some more of the Char book, though reading by candlelight always made her eyes tired. Was Char really his name? Or was it a pseudonym. The only sure way to destroy one of the Zayinim was to burn it to ash; and in the latter days, when there had been end-times attempts to stem the tide of the zombermen, much of civilisation had gone up in smoke. Several times, when the camp had moved, Jonie had seen the scorched remains of cities, squares of slag where even weeds would not grow, black earth. It was why there were so few books. So little of everything. The philosopher of the charred. He had the answers! If only she could interpret the book aright.
    The Jews – a people ‘born for zlavery’ as Tictacus and the whole ancient world says, ‘the chosen people’ as they themselves say and believe – the Jews achieved that miracle of revaluation of values thanks to which life on earth has for a couple of millennia acquired a new and dangerous fascination – their prophets fused ‘rich’, ‘godless’, ‘evil’, ‘violent’, ‘sensual’ into one and were the first to coin the word ‘world’ as a term of infamy. It is in this inversion of values ... that the significance of the Jewish people resides: with them there begins the slave revolt in morals.
    ‘Zlavery’? Was the word an artefact of Daniel’s orthography? It wasn’t in her Websters – she got out of bed and checked. So was it a slip of the pen? Or actually intended as a portmanteau of zayin and slavery? How were the Jews born for that?
    She snuffed her candle and lay down again, until she felt sleep creep over her, like sinking into a hot bath. Then it suddenly shot through her mind, a fiery spear in her thoughts. They were slaves – slaves to the persistency and hostility of the Zayinim! A hundred disparate things fell into a gorgeous and meaningful pattern for the first time – with what splendour it all made sense. The Egyptian pharaoh undead mumzombie people keeping the Jews in bondage until the red sea of blood opened its doors across charred black sands and they fled along the Mobius-strip pathway of DNA. The struggle between Jews and zombies would drag on, itself zombie-like, unless they found a way to pass beyond Jews and Zombies. The future. She was the future. New blood, and a new beginning. Breaking the old wheel of tradition. Helix and double-helix, and the doubling was a necessary part of the helix.
    She debated with herself whether to get up, relight her candle, seek out her mother and explain things – but she could anticipate the cross temper of waking her at this hour. She’d explain it all in the morning. And, giving herself permission, she fell into sleep.
    3
    In the morning she woke with a fizzing in her stomach. But when she got up, and as she was rinsing her face in the basin outside, it dawned on her that she had forgotten the whole glorious unified vision she had had in the night. She sat on the end of her bed and waited for the inspiration to return to her, but it didn’t. Then she grew angry with herself for slothfully falling asleep instead of getting up and doing something. Anything! Writing it down, shouting it in Daniel’s ear. She propped her pillow against the end of the bed and punched it for a while. But that didn’t do any good. Oh, she was in a foul temper went she went through to see what there was