9 Tales Told in the Dark 21

by 9 Tales Told in the Dark

  I asked him if by end times he meant Armageddon.

  Ruben shook his head. “You obviously don’t know your scripture. Armageddon’s a place. It’s where the armies of the Messiah, the Antichrist, and Satan gather for the final battle. ‘And behold, the Devil shall resurrect a great host of the dead and their multitudes shall cover the land.’”

  With a wry smile, Willow whispered to me, “Old man Canfield may not have had the land covered, but he was all over his wife.”

  I asked Ruben if he really believed J. J. was one of the Devil’s soldiers.

  “How’s the Devil supposed to raise an army, open a recruiting center at the mall?”

  I told him I hadn’t thought about it. He told me I should. I lied, told him I would.

  Then a little lump of an old woman with a wrinkly round face and tufts of wispy-thin, white hair spotting her head stepped out of the crowd.

  Like a mother scolding a naughty kid she grabbed Ruben’s ear and told him, “You put that gun away this minute.”

  Ruben begged the old woman to let go of his ear.

  When she did, Willow asked him, “You really think God and the Devil chose to have it out right here in beautiful Cornhusk New York?”

  When Ruben said, “And the non-believers shall perish,” the old woman reached for his ear again.

  Ruben got away from her by ducking into the crowd. Willow told me he was a casualty of his beliefs. I told her he was certifiable.

  “Hey,” she said, as though I had insulted her, “I’ve dated worse guys than that.”

  I immediately began daydreaming about dating Willow, but my fantasy was cut short by a very upset young girl with sun-bleached hair and a freckle-covered face.

  She had stepped forward holding a cell phone to ask the crowd, “Has anyone got decent reception?”

  After a few mumbled answers, a tall, thin, nerdy-looking kid stepped forward. “There’s only one cell tower on this side of town and it’s probably down or overloaded. You might have to go all the way to Pulaski to get another tower.”

  “So what the hell are we supposed to do?” the girl demanded, glaring at him as though it was his fault.

  “There’s nothing you can do but wait a while and try it again.”

  She tried it again without waiting, and it obviously didn’t work because she told the kid she hated him, which he seemed to take personally. After that, an eerie, tense silence settled in the church.

  Willow caught me staring at her and I blushed like a little boy, which made her smile. I wondered if she was amused by my discomfort or happy knowing I enjoyed looking at her. Fortunately, a commotion in the back of the church saved me from having to explain myself.

  Someone had finally gotten one of the doors open and a badly decomposed former human had burst into the church and grabbed a young boy. Then all at the same time: the guy who had opened the door tried to close it; the kid tried to break free; a woman began screaming, and one of the other kids nearby said to the corpse, “Uncle Ted, is that you?”

  Several people near the door forced it shut. Two men went to the kid’s aid but couldn’t break the murderous thing’s grip. While they struggled with it, it tried to bite the closest piece of exposed flesh. The action was fast and confusing and looked as though it would end badly for the kid, until a very small and very wrinkled old woman came up behind the thing and grabbed its head with both hands. Where her fingers touched its parchment-like skin, it sizzled and burned like raw meat on a hot barbeque grill.

  As the heinous thing thrashed and flailed, it let out a scream that sounded as though it had come right out of hell. And although it was so strong two men had had trouble restraining it, it couldn’t break away from the old lady’s grasp. Being a well-educated, firm believer in the sanctity of science, if someone had told me when I left for the funeral this morning that I’d see a witch this afternoon, I’d have laughed at the idea, but I couldn’t think of any other way to explain it.

  When the old woman let go of the creature it slumped to the floor in a pile, like a marionette with its strings cut. A woman came and led the kid away while the two stunned men stared slack-jawed at the old lady.

  So stooped over she was no taller than the boy, and so skinny she barely had a third dimension, the little old woman told the two men gawking at her, “Well you two pussies weren’t getting it done.”

  Then she looked around at the group. They all looked stunned. I know I was.

  “Name’s Althea,” she said, “and I’m the sweet little lady who lives next door to you.”

  When I told her I doubted it, she lunged at me, her hands reaching for my face. I ducked. She managed to touch my face anyway. I cringed. She let out a big, unladylike laugh and Willow laughed with her.

  When I’d recovered my breath well enough to talk, I pointed at the creature on the floor and asked the old lady how she had burned it with her bare hands.

  “I dipped them in the holy water.”

  Someone asked her how she knew the holy water would work.

  Considering the risk she’d taken, her answer was surprisingly matter-of-fact and her attitude remarkably blasé. “Because Ruben said they were the devil’s disciples.”

  I told her she was crazy for grabbing something so deadly just on Ruben’s say so. She called me a sissy. It’s harsh when an old lady calls you a sissy, but having to admit that Ruben, one of the nut-job survivalists I’d been laughing at for years, might have been right all along somehow felt worse. I started to worry about my odds of surviving in a world being fought over by God and the devil.

  Now that the thing was dead, or whatever it is you call it when one of those things stops moving. We all crowded around to inspect it. Unlike old man Canfield, the clothes on this corpse were no more than shreds of cloth with clumps of soil, a variety of live bugs, and a few worms clinging to them. Where its skin showed, it was leathery and brown and stretched tightly over its bones. Where its bones showed, they were chalky-white and shiny.

  A woman standing nearby asked, “Where the hell did that come from?”

  Ruben had rejoined us. Raising his arms like a tent preacher, he proclaimed, “And the dead shall walk among you.”

  I guessed people were becoming inured to his insanity because I didn’t hear any derisive remarks this time.

  During the tense silence that followed his comment, Willow fired a broadside at director Levesque who was standing on the other side of the prostrate carcass. “Either this one’s been in the ground a while, or you did a lousy job prepping him.”

  Arnie scowled. Willow smiled.

  Joe Finch, a clean-shaven, young ex-marine, who worked as a janitor at the Sandy Creek Federal Credit Union, stepped forward and announced that he would, “see if the coast is clear.”

  A stocky, dark-complexioned man with a dimpled chin and eyebrows that reminded me of a bird’s wings, Joe dragged a table holding a stack of funeral programs over under one of the two-story stained glass windows. The place became deathly silent as we all watched him climb up on the table to peer outside.

  While we waited anxiously for his report, I heard a commotion behind me. The girl with the cell phone and the boy who’d been attacked were fighting over the bowl of holy water on the altar. The boy pulled steadily on the bowl and would have won if the girl hadn’t yanked on it. I watched it fall and its contents splash on the floor, the antique wooden floorboards greedily soaking up the precious fluid.

  The kids looked startled then guilty then scared, no doubt afraid that they were in a lot of trouble. I too was scared, because ever since Althea had showed us the effect of God’s water on those monsters, I’d been counting on using it if any more of them showed up. I just couldn’t visualize any of the people there for J.J. Canfield’s funeral service as corpse fighters.

  At that moment Willow, who’d stuck to me like a bad debt, said, “Ah, shit,” so convincingly I thought some of those things had broken in. I looked around anxiously. Satisfied we didn’t have any more of
the former cemetery tenants among us, I asked her what was wrong.

  She seemed surprised by my question, asked me, “Didn’t you see the dirt on that thing?”

  I nodded my head. I’d seen the dirt, but didn’t see her point.

  She announced that, “It must have come from the bone zone,” as though it explained everything.

  “The what?”

  You know, bone zone, graveyard. What planet have you been living on?”

  Then she asked the group, “Does anybody know how many bodies are buried out there?”

  They all shook their heads or shrugged their shoulders or just stood there looking dazed, except for Joe, who was still up on the table. He said, “Judging from the gravestones, there must be a hundred, give or take.”

  A very excited teenage boy with a bad case of acne told us to look at the stained glass window above Joe. The top of the glass panel depicted light and dark angels in a cosmic struggle. The middle portion was a sadistic, allegorical depiction of a battle between humans and skeletons that looked ominously like the thing lying at our feet. The losers, some of them humans, some of them skeletons, were falling into a flaming pit at the base of the panel.

  With great solemnity Willow announced, “Those things may not be as bad for you as you think.”

  I told her she was crazy.

  When she grinned I knew she’d set me up. “How bad can they be? They’re free-range organic zombies.”

  The nerd chose that moment to share a little more knowledge with us. “That faint boom we heard when Canfield’s wife was giving the eulogy may have been an atmospheric detonation of a thermonuclear device.”

  A man in the back of the crowd yelled, “How about saying that again in English.”

  The kid frowned in the guy’s general direction, but to his credit, he did try to explain. “When a nuke is exploded above ground it sends out a ginormous magnetic pulse that induces power surges in electronic devices. One energy surge from one bomb can burn out all of the electronics for hundreds, maybe thousands, of miles. Some nukes are designed and targeted specifically to knock out the enemy’s electronic infrastructure.”

  The guy in the back yelled, “That’s not English, you twit.”

  The kid rolled his eyes. “None of your radios, televisions, cars, trains, airplanes, phones, or anything else with electronics in it will ever work again.”

  The freckled, cell-phone-addicted, teenaged girl pushed through the crowd and demanded, “How are my friends gonna know what I’m doing if I can’t post anything?”

  When the kid told her, “Your friends have bigger problems,” she threw her phone at him and stormed off.

  A true nerd, he failed to catch it. It glanced off his chest then clattered across the floor, stopping when it hit Ruben’s left foot. He looked at it curiously then announced, “If someone did use a nuke on us, it was the false prophet, the antichrist. And it’s either that Russian nut-job, Putin, or some Islamic extremist in the Middle East.”

  Ignoring Ruben’s outburst, Willow asked the nerd, “If the electricity’s out, there won’t be any water either, will there?”

  He shook his head.

  “Oh, well that’s just great,” she said, pointing at the creature on the floor. “So pretty soon we’re all gonna smell like that thing.”

  When a woman in the crowd said, “I’m more afraid of being eaten,” Willow leaned in close to me and asked if I was getting hungry.

  In spite of not having had any food for the better part of the day I shook my head, because after watching old man Canfield gnaw on his wife the thought of eating made me nauseous.

  Willow said, “I sure could use a bite” then smiled impishly.

  I thought she looked positively erotic. I told her she was heartless.

  “No,” she said, “Mrs. Canfield’s heartless.”

  I asked her if it would it kill her to show a little respect for the dead.

  “Oh sure,” she said, “you get all indignant when I crack a joke, but you’re just as bad.”

  I asked her what she meant.

  “Kill me,” she said, “you asked if it would kill me.”

  I was about to tell her that she was giving me credit for things I’d said accidentally, when we were interrupted by a woman with two noisy kids in tow who walked up to Miss Enright, the organist for the funeral. The woman asked Enright to play something gentle to soothe her children.

  Miss Enright, who seemed less than enthusiastic, told her, “All I know are hymns.”

  “Then play something upbeat, something that will get their minds off what’s happening.”

  Miss Enright, dressed all in black, old-lady funeral attire, wiggled her plentiful butt as she planted it on the organ bench. Then, pounding on the keys with all the stops out, she broke into a booming, off-key rendition of Onward Christian Soldiers.

  Part way through the first verse I heard banging on the church doors and a chorus of growling that seemed to respond to Miss Enright’s own howling. She stopped and the noise soon abated. Everyone there was looking at the doors. I wondered if they’d all had the same terrifying thoughts I’d had - that more of those things had showed up for the party, that they had us trapped in the church, that they could break through the doors at any moment, and that they wanted to eat us.

  Willow chose that moment to be wildly inappropriate. “Gee, it sounds like a real Zombie-Fest out there, a good old-fashioned Graveyard-Gala, a real Bone-Bash, a Gore-Fest…”

  I pleaded with her to stop. She laughed. I noticed people were looking at her as though she was insane, which I suspected was at least partially true, and which for some strange reason made her seem even more attractive.

  Someone asked Joe what was going on outside. When he turned around to give us an update, the color had drained from his face. “We’ve got company.”

  Althea asked him how many.

  “I can’t see how many are at the doors, but there’s a dozen or more headed this way from the cemetery, and there’s more coming out of the ground.”

  Willow asked the group, “Did anyone else notice that those things stopped making a racket when Miss Enright stopped singing, or whatever that was she was doing.

  When a very indignant Miss Enright assured us that it had been a coincidence Willow suggested, “Then sing a little more of that song for us, and really belt it out this time. We’ll see if that’s what got them upset.”

  No sooner had Miss Enright begun to screech out another verse than I heard renewed pounding and growling over her jarring vocals. An indignant-looking Miss Enright pushed away from the organ and scowled at us.

  Althea, bless her empathetic little heart, suggested, “Maybe they like Miss Enright’s singing.”

  Willow said, “Gee, I don’t know. Althea, I think they probably wanted to kill her. It sounded that good.”

  As a kindness to Miss Enright, I suggested, “Maybe they’re staunch atheists and the Christian lyrics upset them,” but I suspected Willow was right - that Miss Enright’s singing was killing them.

  Then we heard from Ruben. Having been dismissed as a crackpot earlier, I think he wanted to rub our noses in it. “And behold a mighty host shall rise up out of the earth and smite the nonbelievers.”

  His mother slapped the back of his head. “How many times do I have to tell you? If you talk like that people are gonna lock you up.”

  The nerd suggested, “Maybe we should be quiet and see if the creatures go away,” but Joe said, “I’m worried about the doors holding,” and that got everyone stirred up again.

  Well, everyone except for Willow who leaned over and asked me, “You thinking what I’m thinking?”

  When I told her I seriously doubted it, she pouted. She actually looked hurt. So I apologized. She grinned. Then I felt like a fool, but relieved that I hadn’t hurt her feelings.

  Dependably capricious, Willow said she had a question for me.

  Wary of another wisecrack, I cautiously asked her, “What?”

&nbs
p; “If one of them gets a hard-on, do you call it a boner, or would that be politically incorrect?”

  She giggled, then leaned close to my ear and whispered, “I wish someone would jump my bones.”

  There was nothing I wanted more than to jump her bones, and hoping her comment had been a thinly disguised invitation, I played along. “You know, it’s not just the dead that want to jump your bones.”

  “Well I should hope not,” she said, affectedly, “’cause those things are gutless.”

  She elbowed me and asked if I got it.

  I closed my eyes and hung my head.

  “Besides,” she said, “they’re not what you’d call deep thinkers, are they?”

  “You prefer the cerebral type?” I asked, feigning astonishment.

  “I want a guy I can have an intelligent conversation with when we’re not engaged in wild salacious sex.”

  The thought of having wild salacious sex with her excited me a lot more than I dared to let on, so I tried to make a joke of it. “You actually come up for air?”

  “Girl’s gotta breathe,” she said.

  Then she stared off into space, as though she was contemplating one of the questions that had stumped the great philosophers. “But I also like a guy with a sense of humor.”

  I told her a guy would have to have a sense of humor just to date her. She called me a hypocrite. I asked her why. She asked me if I’d ever eaten raw fish at a Sushi bar. I was wondering what that had to do with a sense of humor when she asked me if I’d ever had Steak Tartar.

  I asked her if we could change the subject because my stomach wasn’t ready for food jokes. She promised me she would if I answered her about the Steak Tartar. I told her I’d tried it once but didn’t like it.

  “Well, there you go,” she said, decisively.

  “Really,” I said, “that makes me a hypocrite? Hell, I barely choked down the first forkful, and unlike old man Canfield who ate his own wife while she was still alive, I didn’t bite the cow before they killed it.”