Thirteen Hours Read online

  Hans shrugged. He knew the answer deep inside: he'd be relegated to the library, to the classroom, meant to teach the first years about their grammar and their paradoxes for enough money to live on day in, day out.

  "I don't even care about the fame," Hans said. "I just wanted the space to work. A room to do my experiments."

  "I know. I understand the feeling." Therese worried her lip. She glanced upstairs, at her own room to herself, a room they would certainly not be able to afford on his new teaching salary.

  "I will do whatever is in my ability so we don't have to move."

  "Oh," Therese said. "I'm not worried about that."

  "What are you worried about?" Hans took her hand. They exchanged an awkward look as he did. In all this time she'd been living with him, primed for marriage, they had barely held hands. A few brushes over the dog when their fingers had touched, and a couple kisses on the cheek in greeting, but they had never done much. Hans used his research as an excuse; she used her letter writing. They both had busy lives that intersected, and it became very clear now as he held her hand, they would not consummate what was never really there, even if Therese was beautiful.

  "Are you worried about the marriage?" he asked. "We can call it off."

  "We can't call it off," Therese told him firmly. "People would talk."

  "People already talk about me."

  "I know. They call you dirty hands. Dirty Hans. Ask me what you do at night."

  "And what do you tell them?"

  "I tell them nothing. It's not their business to know about us and what we do at night."

  Hans smiled. "Thank you. I could not have asked for a better wife."

  "I know that. Which is why we will be married eventually. The sooner the better, especially with this news."

  "Oh?"

  "Yes. We can go visit the courthouse, get the paperwork done, and that's it. Ceremony does not have to be fancy."

  "Then we have our happily ever after?" Hans asked.

  Therese laughed. She took her hand away from his, but still maintained a friendly smile. "When we're married, we get benefits. I've been reading about them. It's in our best interest to be married on paper. But it also won't be odd for us to be seen out together at night if we're married."

  Hans furrowed his brow. "Where do you want to go?"

  "With you. To do your experiments."

  "I can't. I have no funding." Hans huffed. He was about to reiterate the letter when Therese waved her hands.

  "I know. You cannot afford a lab assistant. So I will be him. Or her. Rather."

  "You can't. You're much too..."

  "If you say delicate, I will not marry you, Hans Metzger."

  Hans chuckled but soon quieted. He had no idea how to solve the predicament in which they now were, but Therese seemed to have everything worked out. When she led him to the couch and placed Izzy in his lap, he let her keep talking.

  "While you teach, I can make a lab for you. Here, in this house. The room that we share can be a lab room and nothing more. Our experiments can be the way we consummate."

  "And children? People will wonder about children."

  Therese rolled her eyes. She touched Izzy's head. "This is all I want for kids. And children are a luxury in zombie times."

  "But the bodies. How will I be able to get them? Animal experiments have worked so far, but I will need to test on human tissue soon. Research cannot get far without it."

  "Another issue to figure out at a later date. We need to make sure you remain who you are, through and through, until then."

  Hans drew silent. Ideas swirled in his mind. He had performed experiments at night once before, he could do it again. And he'd have help. The more he thought and the more he petted Izzy, the more everything fell into place.

  "I don't know what I can do to say thank you," Hans said. "I don't know what I did to deserve you."

  "I have a favour to ask," Therese said. "A friend that I think could help out. With this whole endeavour."

  From the way Therese smiled, Hans understood she meant a friend with more than simple kindness in her eyes. There was desire there, too, a desire he'd never seen in her before.

  "When were you going to tell me about this friend?"

  "Sometime. The right moment. I do admit, this is not the ideal circumstance. But she could help us out with your experiments, too."

  "And I'm sure we wouldn't have to worry about any extra rooms."

  Therese blushed. After a moment of thought, she reached in past her bodice and pulled out several letters. All of them were worn. She extended them to Hans. "Before I met you, Joan taught me how to read. Only a little, since she knew not much herself. We were both orphaned and sent to the same convent. She is beautiful," Therese added rather breathlessly, "and very good with her hands."

  The letters were full of small notes, small pleas of love, and even some drawings. If this was what made Therese happy, he could only say yes; she was already risking her life and freedom to help him with his experiments.

  "This is fine. This woman will come to stay with us. Help us out."

  "That's wonderful," Therese said. She hugged Hans close to her, so much he could feel her heart pound through his own thin shirt. "I will tell her to board the next ship here. Yes?"

  "Yes," Hans said. Her ticket would be the last bit of his stipend. But Hans was no longer as worried about his future, not with Therese on his side. "Send for her right away."

  Chapter Three

  Three weeks later, Joan arrived on a ship at the London Harbour. While Therese shuffled eagerly from side to side, Hans inspected the security all around them. Travel was always difficult before the zombie epidemic. Now, it was nearly impossible. A few years earlier, Hans had heard of a ship being taken over by the infection. The captain had attempted to throw the zombies overboard, only to realize that they didn't need to breathe. The bulk of the crew's zombie shipmates turned up on a shoreline a couple miles away and ate through the local village. Since then, each ship had a doctor that saw to the typical safety precautions.

  When the doctor walked off the ship first, Hans knew that Joan's voyage had been a safe one. Many men and families with babes in arms came off the boat and greeted those who waited. Therese squinted through her large green eyes and searched the crowd's dirty faces for Joan.

  "Where is she, where is she..." Therese murmured under her breath. When she gasped Hans's arm, he knew Joan was incoming.

  Hans was not expecting the squat, short woman with boyish hair and an ivy cap that walked down from the ship. Her dark hair framed her frame, bangs cut just before her brows, obscuring almost silver eyes. She wore pants and a tight vest that seemed to do nothing for the early autumn chill in the air. She held her carpet bag in her large hands, her knuckles speckled with dirt; these were hard-working hands that didn't shy away from a thing.

  When Joan spotted Therese, she matched her loud gasp. They ran towards one another on the docks, throwing arms around the other's waists.

  "Sister! Sister!" Therese shouted with some foresight. When the others around them heard the declaration, they looked away, no longer concerned. Only Hans saw the quiet, small peck against Joan's mouth Therese gave her and the tight clasping of their hands together.

  "And this is Doctor Metzger," Therese said, directing Joan to his side. She extended her hand right away, then noticing the state of her knuckles, brought it back and shined it against her vest before extending it again.

  "Nice to meet you, doc," Joan said. Her grip was firm. "Sorry I look a bit a fright right now. The trip was long and hard."

  "Was there any sign of infection?" Therese asked, a worried trill to her voice.

  "Not even a little bit. I'm fine. You see? Strong as a boy."

  "That's good to hear. Tell me," Hans asked. "What did you do back at the convent?"

  "A whole lot of nothing! They try to make you study, teach us how to read, but it's more like memorizing bland facts."

  Therese chuckle
d. "Remember when we put frogs inside of Sister Agatha's bed?"

  "A good slimin' deserved the witch right," Joan said with a laugh. "Though the plague was about her. But truthfully, doc, I was a gardener. That's how I got the froggers."

  "Really? Gardening? That's quite extraordinary."

  "I did enjoy it, but you know, they didn't like me digging up the rose bushes so I could plant daisies, so I did it at night. Really hard to grow flowers in the night, though."

  "I know. Therese and I both know."

  Therese smiled and hooked her arm with Joan's. The two walked side by side off the docks and towards the street, Hans a footstep ahead of them both.

  "But I can do anything, doc. Therese told me in the last letter that I'd be helpin' with your experiments. I am good with helping, just tell me the right way to do something, an' I got it. Maybe I'll find a bit o'earth to dig around in later, but you are my first need."

  "Perhaps we can collaborate. With your botanical knowledge, maybe we can even get into the science hall of the university again."

  "Botanical knowledge?" Joan repeated. She shook her head and laughed. "I just like flowers. Even have some bulbs."

  Joan glanced around the shipping yard. Therese, smile still in full bloom on her face, took Joan to the sidelines and into the shadows. The smell of fish on the waves, mixed with a lingering hint of decay, hit Hans's nostrils and made him quiver. London was so different now. The air was thick and full of smoke, making hands forever inky black with coal, and the city stank in the afternoon sun. The thought of flowers made Hans long for better smells in the air and a new kind of London littered with plumage. Joan's quick, excited talk pulled him back to the present moment.

  "They checked on the ship for any living thing, especially if it had green spots from the infection. The yellow bits inside the flower can sometimes hold it, so I had to leave my daisies behind. But I smuggled these bulbs, yeah? We gotta be careful. Anyone looking?"

  "We can never be too careful," Therese said as she surveyed the area again. "But I think we're okay now. Show us what you have."

  Joan glanced at Hans before she pulled the bulbs out. They were still covered with dirt, even after the long voyage, as if Joan had hurriedly grab them last minute. The bulbs themselves looked like dried up garlic cubes, but when Hans leaned in for a smell, their scent was... fresh. Clean. Not like a flower, but like a new beginning.

  "May I?" Hans asked and gestured towards the bulbs.

  "You're the boss, doc. Hold 'em if you want 'em."

  Hans grasped one of the three remaining and held it his hand, heavy like his future. Perhaps he really could collaborate with Joan and work his way back into the science department. It had been a plot he considered when he couldn't sleep some mornings and he'd stare out at the English hillside speckled with zombies. Perhaps he could win his funding back through botany, by cloning seeds. Make a pretty penny in flowers for people's graves, especially if he could synthesize a flower that kept the undead away. There was something in the green English hills that the zombies did not like. They always wormed their way back into the cities, and Hans knew it was more than just a feeding ground. If he found what exactly the zombies didn't like and planted it everywhere, then maybe the city could be safe again.

  "Thank you, Miss Landry. This is wonderful. Perhaps the most hope I've had in a while."

  "Please, doc. Call me Joan."

  So Hans did. On the way home, Therese and Joan traded more stories about their life back in the convent, and Therese shared the details of her life here that she couldn't put in letters.

  "Like Izzy," Therese said. "You'll really get to see my dog now, and understand why she's so marvelous."

  Over dinner, Joan and Therese grew tired of talking, and Hans expounded on his studies. He gave Joan the exact same lecture he'd given the university, only with a much different reaction. She ate up every last word, along with her food, and asked him a million questions with excitement in her eyes. When Joan and Therese went to bed together for the night, Izzy was the only one left in the room with Hans.

  "Well, come here, girl." Hans patted the spot next to him on the couch. She moved over next to him, humming in her mechanical way. "I suppose it's just me and the machines now, right?"

  The dog hummed again, almost musical. He petted her ears, relishing her sounds, before she fell asleep. Hans rose from the couch, found his best piece of music, and put on his gramophone player.

  Then he set to work.

  Chapter Four

  "The paradox of right and wrong is a matter of life and death," Hans spoke, lecturing to his moral philosophy classroom. "We divide them into two separate, opposing categories. But we cannot separate the states as easily as this. In a way, then, our current problem represents a moral quandary we haven't been able to grapple with yet. If something is dead, how can it move? If something is alive, then how does it decay and want something so counter to what we want? The zombie is a mixture of life and death, but also of right and wrong. So when dealing with them, we cannot ask ourselves limited moral questions. We must think big."

  Hans bit his tongue. He wanted to draw his experiment results—where the zombie could live again, half human and half machine and therefore break down this insipient polarity—but he couldn't. He'd be fired for even thinking such thoughts, let alone teaching them in the first year classroom only a month into his new teaching post.

  Instead, he drew a diagram from the textbook on a long chalkboard. When he turned back to his class, his eyes flitted over each tired expression. He cleared his throat but didn't finish his lecture. This class was the last of the day and the last of the week; at a little past three PM, no one wanted to pay attention anymore. With light growing less and less abundant in autumn, Hans supposed there was only so much people could pay attention to before their stomachs growled and their heads slumped in their hands. Hans closed the giant volume of philosophy on his desk.

  "I'd say we've done enough work for the late hour. How many of you would like to leave class early?"

  The class's attention stirred again. Hans could barely get out the instructions for the next assignment, due in a fortnight, before all the desks were cleared.

  He sighed. As much as he wanted his class to pay attention and respect him as an instructor, he also was desperate to leave.

  A month had passed since Joan had arrived as their guest. Within the first week, he had married Therese, Joan posing as her lady's maid. The two of them had the honeymoon designed for Hans's marriage, spending endless nights together and moaning until morning, while Hans worked on setting up his new lab. He'd gathered as much scrap metal as he could to furnish a good store and bought some proper black smithing equipment. When Joan had come out of her love-haze, she used her connections with the men on the ship to get him some more supplies from discards on people's voyages. Hans had stumbled into several books on alchemy and botany that way, along with even more scrap material from abandoned houses. Joan had also started to show him what she knew of plant life while tending a garden around his house in window boxes. Therese, of course, remained the busy-body she was and attended to all of Hans's correspondence, often times acting as himself when she wrote, so he didn't fall behind in his scholarly duties. She was also grading the papers from each class. All three of them were a team (four if they counted Izzy's company), and everything was right on track.

  Except, of course, that Hans had no bodies on which to experiment.

  Without access to the school's morgue or experiment area, it was nearly impossible to find suitable cadavers. Hans was still working on brokering deals with the morgue and hospitals, but revealing who he was meant revealing the university. The school had cut his funding once—the next step was to fire him completely and make him a true social outcast. Joan and Therese were both taking on extra washing jobs on the side to pay their way, so Hans needed to keep this teaching position. No one at the morgue or hospital would listen to Therese because she was a beautiful woman—and n
ow a beautiful woman married to "dirty hands." Joan tried to pass as a boy several times to speak with the morgue, but they caught glimpses of her heart-shaped face, her sizeable bust, or her soft voice and threw her out. She insisted she was still working at finding connections in London in between her washing duties and scavenging trips, but Hans was giving up hope.

  At one point, Joan suggested capturing one of the undead from the outer lands for experiments, but that mission was far, far too dangerous. To go to the outer lands meant risking themselves. And Hans, in spite of his "dirty hands" reputation, had grown quite used to the creature comforts of married life, even if it wasn't quite his marriage.

  After dismissing his class, Hans wandered the campus. His mind was alight, rehashing all the ways to get cadavers short of grave robbing, and he didn't hear or see the person calling his name until they were nearly shouting.

  "Hans. Doctor Metzger. Doctor Hans Metzger."

  Hans finally stopped walking. By the time he turned towards the voice, he was sure he heard them mumble "dirty hands" under their breath. When he located the voice near the biology building, and a familiar figure of Doctor Stevenson standing between two pillars, his blood drew cold.

  "Aren't you a little far from home?" Matthew Stevenson asked.

  Hans tried to smile. He had walked from the philosophy ward through the campus towards the science side. He'd been walking without thinking, his feet guiding him towards an area that would always feel more like home.

  "I'm simply heading towards my house, Doctor Stevenson. Class ended. Long weekend coming up, I do think. I'm sure my wife misses me."

  "That's good. As long as you know where you belong," Doctor Stevenson said. "Have a good night."

  Hans waved and waited until Doctor Stevenson stepped inside the biology wing again. When Stevenson did not move, Hans realized they were at a standstill. And because the sun was going down, and Hans really did want to go home and be with his wife and her lover, he decided to let Doctor Stevenson win.