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

for breakfast.
    Everybody was there, and they were right in the middle of a discussion about moving the camp. ‘Include me out of this discussion, why don’t you,’ she wailed.
    ‘We didn’t want to wake you, princess,’ said Ash, separating his beard into two forks that he plaited round one another, undoing the plait and smoothing the beard into one again – a nervous tick of his.
    ‘We can’t move until Jacob gets back,’ said Daniel.
    Jonie scowled at him. ‘Of course we can’t,’ she said, sarcastically. ‘We need the extra hands to help us load the trucks.’
    ‘I didn’t mean that,’ said Daniel.
    ‘He didn’t mean that,’ mother echoed.
    ‘Then what did he mean?’ snapped Jonie. And as she asked the question she saw, with a horrible internal clatter, what he meant. He meant: what if the others don’t come back? What if they can’t? She saw it. Those Zayinim from the night before had been eating something.
    Her thought processes must have been obvious, because A. said, ‘I’m sure they chanced upon a deer, or a sheep, or something.’
    Jonie announced: ‘Father is fine. And I’ve been reading Daniel’s book, and I have had a vision. A vision! I suddenly saw how we could escape the predation of the Zayinim!’
    Everybody was looking at her now. ‘All right,’ prompted her mother. ‘How?’
    ‘Actually I can’t remember now,’ she said, trying to look dignified. ‘But I’m sure it’ll come back to me.’ She took a mug of porridge from the breakfast pan and retreated to her room to read more of the Char. But her attention jittered over the words, and she kept trying to cast herself back into the middle of the previous night.
    …be assigned to pretence, to the will to delusion, to selfishness, and cupidity. It might even be possible that WHAT constitutes the value of those good and respected things, consists precisely in their being insidiously related, knotted, and crocheted to these evil and apparently opposed things – perhaps even in being essentially identical with them. Perhaps! But who wishes to concern himself with such dangerous ‘Perhapses’! For that investigation one must await the advent of a new order of philosophers, such as will have other tastes and inclinations, the reverse of those hitherto prevalent – philosophers of the dangerous…
    It was no good. She couldn’t concentrate. There was some commotion outside, so she gave up on her reading. She put on her jacket and gloves and hat and went to the main gate.
    ‘There’s one left over from last night,’ said Esther, excitedly. ‘They’re all out there now sorting it out.’
    ‘Let me through,’ Jonie demanded.
    ‘Your father wouldn’t want me to.’
    Esther was, like, a hundred years old. ‘Don’t be a shrivelled old stupid person, Esther, and let me out.’
    ‘I’ll tell him it wasn’t my idea,’ Esther grumbled. ‘Take a gun, at least.’
    ‘Yes yes yes,’ said Jonie, snatching the weapon and squeezing through the door before it was even a quarter open.
    It always felt good to be outside. Spring was everywhere now, which was good in one sense – no more sleeping in all her clothes wrapped in two blankets and still shivering with the cold – and very bad in another. The Zayinim became much more active in the warm months of the year. Not just in terms of moving more rapidly and with more purpose – although until you’d seen a zombie immediately after a feed you had no idea just how quickly they could go – but in terms of aggregating into larger and therefore more dangerous packs. Nonetheless, it was good to breathe the fragrant air.
    Someday, she mused, she would escape it all. Start her own life. Have kids, maybe. Except that having kids would not be to escape.
    They were all standing, a circle of folk in the long grass. It was indeed one of the Zayinim from the previous night – the one mother had shot across the top of its skull. It was lying on its back in the grass. Jonie came up