Magnified and Sanctified

By J. David Core

Humanity has a hidden name, a “secret cord” known and feared in our unconscious minds for millennia. Uttered for the first time in human history, it has the power to control our very essence, altering us at the cellular level and changing us into mindless reapers intent on sharing the irresistible name; transforming all who hear and calling them to join the danse.
In the first year since the start of the zombie apocalypse, Andrew Moore and his young daughter have struggled to survive. As monsters patrol the streets in search of unwitting recruits for their army of shambling sirens, the Moores are making their way toward the Atlantic coast in hope of refuge on one of the government’s offshore sanctuaries. Meanwhile, Mark Bell has been stranded alone in the relative safety of a defensible state park. He has learned to survive and thrive despite the constant threat from the menacing masses of wandering undead.
As winter looms, the two men meet, and they decide to band together in a compromise plan to sail into Lake Erie; but can they survive long enough to reach their goal, or will the peculiar stranger they meet along the way put their chances of survival at risk?

• Language: English
• Publisher: J. David Core
• Release date: Apr 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005396558

J. David Core

With a profound interest in religion, liberal politics and humor, Dave began writing in High School and has not given up on it since. His first professional writing jobs came while attending the Art Institute of Pittsburgh when he was hired to create political cartoons for The Pitt News and to write humor pieces for Smile Magazine. Dave has worked in the newspaper industry as a photographer, in the online publishing industry as a weekly contributor to Streetmail.com, and was a contributing writer to the Buzz On series of informational books and his story, The Bet in Red Dust, was published at the Western online anthology, Elbow Creek.Dave’s science fiction novel, Synthetic Blood and Mixed Emotions, is available from its publisher, writewordsinc.com.Dave currently resides in his childhood home in Toronto, OH with his beautiful girlfriend and his teenage daughter. He enjoys participating in local community events and visiting with his two adult children and his grandson.

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J. David Core

Published by J. David Core at KDP

Copyright 2021 by J. David Core

ASIN: B09JSW9LBX

Cover illustration by the author

Photo by Bess Hamiti from Pexels

Big eyed child

Hand photo by Elina Krima from Pexels

Also by the Author:

The Lupa Schwartz Mystery Series

On the Side of the Angel

8 Tales of Noir

The Return of the Dragon

Info on all of these titles available at my website!

This novel is dedicated to my wonderful family and friends for all of their patience and help. I particularly want to thank my beautiful girlfriend, Cheryl, and all of the people who read my manuscript and gave input; my Alpha Readers: John Priscilla and Karen Kuhn; and my Beta Readers: David Straka and Linda Longo. Also, very special thanks to J. Tanner (a fellow author and horror writer) for his early notes on the outline and beats. His help really was crucial to this becoming the story it is now.

Contents

Copyright info

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Notice

Author Bio

Chapter 1: What’s in a Name?

Yitgadal Ve-Yitkadash Shemei Rabbah.

Magnified and sanctified be His great name.

― Jewish prayer, The Mourner's Kaddish

Names and attributes must be accommodated to the essence of things, and not the essence to the names, since things come first and names afterwards.

― Galileo Galilei

Some people started singing it not knowing what it was, and they’ll continue singing it forever just because …

― The Song Which Doesn’t End

December 11, 15 Years Before Zero

I’m sorry, Babka, the boy said in Russian when he saw the frustration in the old woman’s face. I’m trying.

Arons Wahl sat at the kitchen table as his grandmother, Ilsa, chopped carrots and corrected his pronunciation of the Hebrew words he was learning to recite. Arons would be 13 in the new year (the goyim New Year, not the real one,) and while it was not traditional for a boy’s Savta to be his primary instructor for his bar mitzvah, nor for a woman to read Aliyah at all in fact; it was necessary in this circumstance as there were no other Litvak Jews currently living in Tula to her knowledge, and Ilsa had little trust for what she still referred to as Soviet Jews to do the job correctly. Yes, the Jewish community of Tula in Russia had come out from the shadows and thrived both during Glasnost and even more-so since the fall of the Soviet Union, and yes, they still followed the traditions; but they had been corrupted from decades of living under atheistic communism; or so she believed. This—she thought to herself—would not be her responsibility if they were in Israel.

Ilsa had long since forgiven her now-deceased husband for bringing her and her then small son to Russia during the Belarus diaspora rather than to Israel where all her friends and relatives had gone, but she had never forgotten. And (truth be told) she hadn’t really forgiven him either. She would defend him when the topic came up; explain that he had not wished to inflict such culture shock on his boy; and besides, he had business contacts here in Tula, but he had none in Jerusalem; however, defending his memory was more for the sake of her child than for her husband.

She had thought that when her son matured, she would convince her husband to retire to Israel, but that was not to be her fate. Six years ago, her husband had died of a massive coronary, and her son and his wife had been killed in a car accident a week later as they hurried home from sitting shiva, probably she thought, because they were in a hurry to have sex. As a result, she was trapped forever in Tula as the sole living relative and now-guardian of her two grandsons.

As Arons began his recitation again, the door opened from the outside, and his older brother, Yuri, came into the house. "Still having trouble pronouncing habocher?" Yuri asked as he saw the frustration in his little brother’s tensed jaw.

Arons admired his brother’s freedom. He was three and a half years older, and he had stopped attending synagogue when he had turned sixteen. Yeah, Arons said, grateful for the distraction.

I don’t know why you won’t just let him use a phonetic transliteration, Yuri said to his grandmother. The words aren’t magic. They’re just sounds.

The words are the words, Ilsa said testily. They do have meaning. They have actual meanings—definitions—and they have added meaning as the tongue of our people.

Still doesn’t make them magic, Yuri said. If there’s a God, He won’t be able to hear the difference between a mnemonic reading and a phonetic reading.

Stop it! Ilsa said, becoming angry. And do not use His name in vain.

Whose name? Yuri asked. God’s? That’s not a magic word either, Babka.

Are you trying to bring bad fortune to our family? Ilsa demanded. It’s not for us to question. The words are the words. The covenant is the covenant. The commandments are the commandments.

It’s superstition, Yuri said. Watch. Yahweh! he shouted. Hey, Elohim! See? Nothing happens.

Something happens, Ilsa muttered. "Something always happens when you mock haShem. Now get out of here and let us return to our studies."

Arons watched the exchange in rapt fascination. His grandmother was so certain that mocking G-d’s name was dangerous, but Yuri was equally certain that it was nonsensical superstition. As they fought about it, he jotted the four letters that represented the mysterious name on a scrap of paper. YHWH he wrote, and he stared at the letters as his Savta chased his brother from the room. As she returned, he quickly pulled the paper to his lap, and as he again recited the Hebrew passage for his guardian, he secretly crushed the scrap of paper and dropped it to the floor.

Late December, The Year Zero

The trees were barren. The country and side roads of Eastern Ohio were covered in a patchwork blanket of partly melted and refrozen snow. A hybrid car cruised on gas power along a generally northward path up the winding trail through the Appalachian foothills. The car was driven by a careful black man who turned 27 at some uncelebrated time in the past month. Next to him sat a white man roughly twice his age who was trying, with little success, to connect a cellular phone to the aux port of the car. Behind them sat a little girl, the black man’s daughter. To a casual observer, she would appear to be playing with a tablet computer. Just three people out for a drive in the country on a pleasant winter day.

A triumphant look of satisfaction came over the white man as music, Charlie Daniels, began to play through the car speakers. He smiled, his gnarled and unkempt facial hair parting to show surprisingly well-maintained teeth. If nothing interrupts our trip, he declared, We’ll reach the Lake Erie shore in a matter of hours—maybe slightly after noon. The driver held up his hand to display crossed fingers.

The little girl interrupted. Bogey up ahead, she declared, shaking her head to indicate that the ETA the white man had just so hopefully announced was overly optimistic. Headed our direction. Two klicks.

The driver switched over to electric power as the white man turned off the music. Should we pull over here? the white man asked.

The little girl’s father looked over his shoulder to gage the opinion of his daughter, their spotter. She looked up from the tablet to give a barely discernible shrug, her face twisted slightly, and her eyes half-closed noncommittally. The driver glanced to his left at the tree line. No, he said. They’re still far enough ahead that we can afford to close the gap some and find a safer spot to enter the woods. We can drive another mile or so before taking action.

Almost two minutes of tense travel later, the little girl said, We’re close now. If we get much closer, we’ll hear them before we can get far enough away. They found a safe place to pull to the side of the road, a truck pull-over on the shear side of the hill to their right, a copse of trees on mostly level ground to their left. The driver powered the car down, exited the vehicle, and opened the rear driver’s side door allowing his daughter to exit without having to take her eyes from the tablet. A moment later she used the device to land the small drone she’d been using to monitor their path, which they retrieved before all three entered the woods on the westside of the road. The white man had gone in ahead of them, clearing the way with a machete.

Had the drone remained airborne, it would now show them the motley group of people shambling southward on the blacktop toward their location. Had the drone been miked, it would have picked up the strange atonal hum of their voices, which was really the most dangerous thing about them. Their choreographed movement was off-putting and out-of-place; their lifeless stare and slack but twitching jaws were frightening and surreal; their apparent purposeful progress and mindless intent—well—creepy is really the best word to describe that; but our trio knew that none of that could harm them. It was the sound they made that did the damage. The sound would lure you, then kill you, then transform you.

A few hundred feet into the woods the trees broke into a clearing. They crossed the grassy and snowy field giving them significant berth from their car, as well as from the mindless flock. The little girl again raised the drone and watched the progress of the milling crowd on her tablet. When the mob had cleared the car and gone an extra quarter mile, they returned to their ride and resumed their journey. It had taken the better part of four hours. They would not be reaching the lake by noon.

The sun is getting low in the sky, the white man said as they reached the Painesville city limits. They had chanced the main roads in the rural areas but had opted for the more pastoral roads when they approached the previously more densely populated hubs. It’ll be getting dark in about an hour or so. I don’t think we can make it safely to the harbor before dark. A lot of people lived here, so a lot of people died here, so a lot of those things patrol here.

We can’t stay exposed like this, the driver said. We’ll have to find a safe tall building to camp in ‘til morning. The higher up we go, the further we’ll be from their sounds. Chloe, get a fresh drone up, and do your thing. Find us a high-rise or something, he said to his daughter in the back seat.

The little girl got a fresh drone from the trunk and after a few minutes she had it airborne. Soon she had an image from a good height, showing that the landscape was dotted with distant threats. There were two primary hubs of congregated dead, moving in and out in two pulsating mobs: one in a hospital complex’s parking area, and another in the lot of a shopping mall.

This was a phenomenon they had witnessed several times over the past months, but the drone gave a new perspective. The dead, they had observed, somehow always seemed to gather in large open spaces, where they would slowly stroll about in a trancelike choreography; as though they had a purpose and intention to their movements, despite their minds being obviously absent. The hivelike aspect of this behavior was undeniable as individuals that hit obstacles would cause a ripple in that segment of the overall unit which would then gradually translate into the entire mob having a new synchronized composition of movement.

There was another characteristic of the things’ choreography they had frequently observed. At the extremities of the amassed crowds, the outermost members would sometimes find themselves thrust outward by the structure of the danse, where a half dozen or so would be pinched off here and there from their respective segments of the mob, forming a sub-group which would then head out on—what they had come to call—a patrol. Consequently, several small groups of wandering weirdos were making their way down various streets, which Chloe’s team would easily avoid in their now silently running vehicle.

The drone’s camera showed a handful of patrols on a variety of side and connecting streets, as well as three on nearby main thoroughfares, but they were distant enough for now. Each group moving generally forward, weaving in and out of each other’s path as they tended to do as they migrated, occasionally bumping into a fire plug, or a utility pole, or the corner of a building, which would cause them to hesitate and blindly restructure their course. Eventually this group would find and join up with another patrol, and this now-larger patrol would create a new danse and chart a new course, which would ultimately take them to one of the large gatherings where they would join that choreography, until happenstance again pinched them off in a new patrol.

Experience also told them that these patrols were not just following their own choreography, but they were—for want of a better term—singing. None of the passengers who had just arrived on the scene had ever actually heard the song. They had spent the last year actively avoiding it, so they couldn’t describe it even if they wanted to. They had seen the song’s purpose though. They had witnessed its terrible effect. Then, as she watched the milling and meandering tours, the little girl spotted something weird even for this reality.

A few blocks from their current location, deeper into the city, relatively close to the hospital complex, there was a man like themselves. A human man. A living man. He wasn’t part of a patrol. He wasn’t wandering, dancing, or singing. He was alive, and he was right in the path of a distant but oncoming patrol. He looked to be homeless, pushing a shopping cart toward a dumpster behind a gas station. She showed her father, a pleading look in her eye. He doesn’t know they’re coming.

The two men exchanged a long glance. He’s not our problem, said the white man. But I don’t want to watch him die if we can help. Is there time?

That depends on him, said the little girl’s father. Who knows what his reaction would be to us driving up on him.

Look at it this way, the little girl said, maybe he can help us. He’s survived somehow. Maybe he has some trick for avoiding the zombies he could teach us.

Again, the two men shared a prolonged glance. Finally, the white man shrugged. She’s got a point.

Maneuvering the streets to reach the man took only a few minutes. They were safe to drive quickly as the hybrid car ran almost silently. They had all witnessed the reaction of the creatures when assaulted by the sound of machinery or gunfire. Most sounds of nature failed to elicit a reaction, with a few exceptions such as the screeching of eagles or the call of cicadas, but there was something about the sound of machinery, music, and other sounds not found in nature, sounds which carried and overpowered the sound of their song, that agitated the dead. So, it was essential that they not startle the man, that they not slam doors or squeal tires, and that—after they warned him—they drive as far from the dead as possible before the patrol got to within earshot.

Pulling to a stop on the street across from the mini-mart where the stranger was tossing bags from the dumpster to near a shopping cart he’d found somewhere, they settled on a strategy. It would be too weird, they thought, to have the little girl called Chloe walk up on the man. Imagine you’ve seen nobody alive for who-knows-how-long; and suddenly, out-of-the-blue, a child appears to say hi. No, that’s a horror movie trope you don’t want to experience in real life. Yet, no matter what tactic they chose to introduce themselves to the man, it was going to be a shock. So why not go with the horror movie trope? At least she didn’t represent the same threat as two adult males suddenly showing up.

The drone transmission showed