PseudoPod 585: ARTEMIS RISING 4: Cinereous

[Bdoomed]

PseudoPod 585: ARTEMIS RISING 4: Cinereous

by Livia Llewellyn
Narrated by Ibba Armancas
Alternate narration by Lucy A. Snyder
Hosted by Lucy A. Snyder

“Cinereous” was originally published in Zombies: Shambling Through the Ages in 2013.


Paris

October, 1799

The nails on the heels of Olympe Léon’s boots are the only sounds in the silence of night’s chilly end. Click click click through indigo air, like the metallic beat of a metronome’s righteous heart. As always, when she sees her destination at the end of rue St. Martin, rising black and monolithic against the encroaching country and graying sky, her heart and feet skip beats. She thinks of each single drop of blood, spurting and squirting from the bright flat mouths of the necks, and her small calloused hands and wide bowls to catch them all. Olympe, like all the assistants, is very proud of her training, and very afraid of losing her place, very afraid of sinking back into the city’s bowels, never to return. She never misses a drop.



Listen to this week's PseudoPod.


Listen to the alternate narration.

[Katzentatzen]

I love zombies and I’m happy to hear a tale of them in less-modern circumstances, which is the only reason I can think of that the lab let her go after being bitten instead of trying to contain the infection. Delightfully creepy. 

[eytanz]

So, I'm catching up on Pseudopod right now, after letting myself fall behind. I'm not posting on every story but this one... well, it irked me.

Initially, I kept boggling about the logistics of the experiment - where do they get all the kids from? Not in the immediate sense, but originally - do they have human breeding farms somewhere? Because the experiment requires its victims to be raised without human contact, it can't just be that these are orphans or kidnap victims.

That would have been forgivable, though, if the experiment was the topic of the story. But after all the original setup and character work, the story just squanders it all away on a zombie story. I just felt disappointed at the end - there was so much brilliant horror here, and it was eaten up by a cliche.

[Ichneumon]

I  mostly agree with eytanz. There were tons of very horrifying elements of different flavors in this story, but they didn't quite piece together into a polished whole. The biting decapitated head was especially horrific.