Jews vs Zombies Read Online Free Page B

around hopefully and heard Yehoshua’s laughter.
    ‘Just kidding,’ he said.
    ‘You stupid arsehole!’ Solvi roared at the laughing man. He grabbed the matchbox from his hand, struck a match and threw it at him.
    The burning man screamed like there was no tomorrow, and Solvi retorted, ‘Just kidding,’ before leaving the forest.
    It was only a week later, during one of his gloomy constitutionals, that he happened upon the human lump of coal that used to be Yehoshua. He bent over the burnt corpse and called, ‘Yehoshua! Yehoshua! Stop playing this silly game!’ but it was evident no life remained in the formerly dead man, who’d resumed his old status courtesy of Solvi’s momentary fit of rage.
    Solvi was thinking about the second dead person who managed to prove the theory of eternal temporariness and tried to banish from his mind the other thought, about himself being the culprit, since he’d killed another man, albeit a once dead one. And then it hit him, like nothing before – not even the tree that had changed the course of his lives. Perhaps the only way to help a formerly dead person fulfill their death wish was to have another formerly dead person do the deed.
    The excited pounding of his heart reminded him of his not-so-long-ago metal days, and by the time he got back home, he knew he was right. That was the secret. Marketa died because she was run over by a formerly dead driver. Different rules applied to the dead, and one just had to follow them.
    Another month went by. Solvi was waiting beside the familiar prison gates for another member of the scapegoat factory to emerge. After talking to Felix and finding out about the next formerly dead person to be released, he contacted the woman in question and told her about his secret plan, assuming she was seeking death as well.
    When she stepped out of the gates, he smiled at her. Her name was Diana Bloomberg, and she’d served four years for fraud on a national scale.
    At first she said she wouldn’t want to waste another minute, but then she changed her mind and said she wouldn’t mind having one last cup of coffee before they annihilated each other. They had that coffee and forgot themselves a little, talking about this and that, when they noticed the sky was darkening. Then they had a quick bite and headed for the forest.
    Solvi, who’d got hold of two pistols, gave her one and asked her to pull the trigger at the exact moment he would.
    Diana smiled bashfully. ‘How about one last kiss.’
    Solvi sighed and humoured her. Then they made love. Twice – once for each life. Eventually, when all was said and done, they stood facing each other and, on a count of three, fired the pistols.
    And this is the end of Solvi’s story.
    For now.

LIKE A COIN ENTRUSTED IN FAITH
    SHIMON ADAF
    1
    They wake up Sultana the midwife at the dead of night. Poundings on the door, which she disguises in her sleep. Hides them within the symbolism of the dreams. But her consciousness arises at last. She identifies the knocking, the intervals between knockings. And she is alarmed. The alarm is not shaped yet. She covers herself quickly. Out of habit. Ties her headdress and goes out. In spite of the urgency of the knocks, the man is standing with his back to her hut. Almost indifferent, his small cart, tied to a grey ass, in the starlight of the beginning of autumn in Morocco, is also cut from the landscape.
    Afterwards she remembers the light gallop of the ass and the cart on the slope, the rustle of the world she senses whenever she leaves the hamlet, out of the protective imagination of its inhabitants. The wind is warm still, unexpected warmness, and the lucidity of the air. She smells the sea in it, Essaouira’s daily commotion caught in it even at midnight. But they circumvent the city. She already recognised the driver, Shlomo Benbenishti. It’s been years since she’s last seen him. He hurries the ass. He tells it, run like the storm, my beauty, and laughs. She does