The Zombie Stone

by K. G. Campbell

  “So you’ve said,” said August.

  “What you are seeking,” Professor Leech assured him, “lies there.”

  “It’s much farther than I thought,” admitted August, consulting a scrap of notepaper with some handwritten directions. “Professor Leech didn’t include any distances.”

  August and the zombies were making slow progress along a bleak and lonely road, flanked by rusting train tracks, vast warehouses, and silently towering cranes. Beyond a persistent weed or two, there was little in the way of greenery.

  There were no other pedestrians, nor human activity of any kind other than a few occasional cars, some of which slowed down as they passed. August glimpsed one driver—a woman in a hat so flowery that it resembled an azalea bush—peering at the group in openmouthed amazement before abruptly speeding off.

  The area seemed devoted to large industrial activities of a daytime nature and, in the gathering shadows of dusk, had taken on the deserted air of a ghost town.

  “I didn’t imagine,” said August apologetically, “it would take this long to walk here. Not that we have enough money for a taxi anyway.”

  The nearby rails began to rattle and whine, the volume increasing rapidly.

  “Here comes another one,” warned August, covering his ears.

  The zombies huddled behind him, clearly agitated by the clattering din of the passing freight train. Only Claudette appeared unworried, eagerly waving her detached arm at the graffiti-covered boxcars.

  The last car, the caboose, trundled past, and beyond it was revealed a boxy, windowless building.

  “Over there,” commanded August.

  He pointed to the faded lettering above the corrugated doors that read “Pirate’s Sea Cargo” and bustled the zombies across the tracks into a sprawling parking lot.

  The concrete expanse was empty but for one battered truck at the far side. The vehicle was growing hazy as it was engulfed by mist creeping from the nearby banks of the Continental River. As they passed it, heading into the wall of damp and chilly fog, August wondered why the tailgate of the unattended truck sat open, and what the boxes stacked nearby might contain.

  He could now hear the lap of river waves, and the parking lot ended abruptly in an impassable thatch of reeds and shrubbery. The only route forward was a narrow metal walkway that disappeared into the swirling mist.

  “This is it,” August announced, peering up through the milky haze at a sign mounted on a post. The worn wooden plaque had been created in the shape of a pelican and bore signage indicating one’s arrival at Pelican Wharf.

  The rusty ramp groaned and creaked metallically as the party moved awkwardly along it.

  “Shhh!” hissed August, turning to the zombies with a finger pressed to his lips. He was not sure why exactly, but the muffled silence of the fog made him self-conscious of the noise they were generating.

  Through the painted metal grille beneath August’s feet, dark ripples hinted at the presence of muddy water below. From the shallows on either side protruded strange, enormous nests of tangled, rotting timbers—the foundations, August guessed, of riverside structures long gone.

  The gangway deposited August upon a metal platform, its surface patchy with rust and puddles. From the bobbing sensation beneath his feet, August could tell that they had arrived upon a floating pontoon.

  The zombies, not the most stable at the best of times, were wobblier than ever and clung to the boy and to one another for support. As Jacques LeSalt grabbed August’s shoulders from behind, the boy was thrust forward slightly and, in a puddle before him, saw something that jolted his senses.

  A reflection stared back at him of a young girl near his elbow. The child had clear eyes, shiny brown ringlets, and a crisp, clean bow tied at the back of her head. The girl was healthy, flushed, and very much alive.

  “Claudette?”

  August turned sharply to his right, and there in the dimensional world stood his own pallid, drooling zombie, her loose eyes struggling to meet his own. She bent down, and as she did so, the other, pretty, puddle Claudette simultaneously bent up.

  August was stunned. Somehow, in her reflected self, Claudette appeared as she had in life, before she was undead; before she was even regularly dead. Had he never, the boy wondered, seen her reflection before? He could not think of a moment when he had.

  The physical Claudette was groaning softly. The puddle Claudette’s mouth was moving.

  “Are you saying something?” August asked in wonder, leaning in close. He heard a whisper, but this one was soft and musical, like that of a child, free from the wet gurgling of a zombie. “Louder,” he urged. “It sounds like…‘pearls.’ Are you saying pearls? You want your pearls back?”

  But the conversation was abruptly interrupted when the platform suddenly rose then fell on some watery surge and the half-faced lady stumbled, obliterating the puddle Claudette beneath her high-heeled boot.

  Before the water could settle, before even August could give the strange incident further thought, the boy was presented with a more immediate situation.

  “Who’s there?” cried an unfamiliar and forceful voice from somewhere in the fog. “Show yourselves!”

  The man’s blurred silhouette emerged farther along the pontoon. August moved toward him, but his heart skipped a beat when, as the figure took form, he could see that its face and head were not those of a man.

  Two pointed ears protruded from the creature’s skull, a long snout extended toward August, and all were covered with an armor of thick scales. Worse, August could now make out similar figures lurking in the fog and, beyond them, the mass of a vessel tethered to the wharf, looming outriggers suggesting its function as a shrimping boat.

  “Who is it?” inquired a harsh female voice emitting from a snouted figure on the vessel’s stern who was accepting a box from another blurry figure on the wharf. “Is it the cops?”

  “Nah,” responded the closest creature. “Looks like some tourists from the Carnival. Cool costumes actually. Staggering drunk, I reckon. Some of ’em anyway.”

  Below the unsettling snout moved a very human mouth and a very human chin, and August’s alarm dissipated as he realized that the man and his companions were wearing masks molded in the form of armadillo faces.

  “You folks best be getting along now,” said the armadillo man flatly. “It can be dangerous round these parts.”

  “We’re looking,” August explained politely, “for a large amber marble, sir. It’s formed from a mineral called Cadaverite.”

  “Cadava-what?”

  August peered past the man and into the fog, where other shadowy armadillo people continued to toil, passing box after box into the shrimping boat.

  “The last time I saw it,” he continued, “it was mounted on a model, like a balloon, with a skeleton boy.”

  The man scoffed.

  “Skeleton boy?” He turned his head slightly to yell over his shoulder. “Virgil, you seen any skeleton boys round here?”

  The stouter shadow, who was passing another box to the woman in the boat, guffawed loudly, and then, as a result, lost his grip.

  “Dagnabbit!” snapped the man, presumably Virgil.

  The box thumped onto the shrimping boat’s washboard, where it burst open, a shimmering cascade of gold coins slithering forth.

  Suddenly, with a spine-chilling, unearthly howl, the zombie pirate Jacques LeSalt lunged forth, knocking aside August, the armadillo man, Virgil, and the woman on the boat.

  The grunting, loose-jawed pirate roughly righted the box and with his large-yet-withered hands began to scoop great piles of the coins into the air. He went in for more, letting the booty fall around him, and then again and again in a wild-eyed frenzy.

  “Thief!” screamed the woman.

  “Stop him!” yelled another voice.

  I
n moments, many powerful armadillo-people hands had seized the undead pirate, yanked him from the vessel, and roughly tossed him onto the wharf, where he sprawled in an angular pile near August’s feet.

  “Hey!” protested August. “He’s just a zombie, you know. He probably thinks that’s his long-lost treasure. You don’t need to be so—”

  August stopped short. The first armadillo man had stepped forward threateningly. And, for the first time, August noticed a baseball bat in the man’s fist. The man was close now—close enough that when it swung gently upward, his bat’s tip was pressed against August’s chest.

  “Why you really here, huh?” The man’s tone was low, dark, and threatening. “You come looking to steal from us? From the Armadillo Gang?”

  “You show ’em, Homer,” Virgil advised.

  The baseball bat shoved August backward into the gaggle of fidgeting, trembling zombies at his rear.

  Suddenly a blurred shadow darted in from the right.

  There was a “HEY!” from Homer, followed by a powerful whoosh and a sickening crash.

  Claudette stood holding the baseball bat’s handle in the fist of her severed arm. The rest of the weapon lay in splinters, scattered across the undulating pontoon. But Homer did not flinch. He merely smiled coldly, growling softly, like a feral cat.

  “So that’s how you want this to go.”

  Slowly, from the inside of his long coat, the man drew a very large wrench. Behind him, armadillo people loomed from the fog. August counted at least five and, behind them, several more advancing smudges. All of their silhouettes had ominous extensions whose fuzzy forms suggested boat hooks, crowbars, and something that was possibly a toilet plunger.

  “I told you these here was dangerous parts,” said Homer. “They say this is Armadillo Gang territory. They say messing with the Armadillo Gang can get you hurt.”

  Homer smacked the wrench into his other palm with a vicious sneer.

  “It’s true, bro, I know it,” said another voice—a high-pitched wheeze—from behind August. “It can get you hurt real bad.”

  August twisted swiftly around and was surprised and alarmed, based on the smallness of the voice, to discover the largeness of the advancing shadow.

  The figure was taller even than Jacques LeSalt, and four times as wide, with shoulders and arms thick as those of a gorilla, arms that might toss any person present into the river like an old sweater.

  “But no one,” announced the newcomer, “is getting hurt tonight.”

  And, as he emerged into view, August beamed with delighted recognition and called out the ginormous man’s name with unconcealed relief.

  “Buford Juneau!”

  August knew that they were headed back toward the Pelican Wharf ramp, but the fog had thickened and was now so dense, he could see only a few feet in front of him.

  Buford, however, strode forth, his boots carelessly splashing through puddles with the confidence of a person who knew where they were going. So August hurried the zombies along in the wake of the Pepperville tattooist’s immense, comforting shape.

  “What brings you to Croissant City, Buford Juneau?” asked August breathlessly as he scurried to keep pace.

  “Carnival, bro,” responded Buford without looking down. “Those tourists sure do love them some temporary tattoos. Make a killing every year, I reckon, with my booth in LeSalt Square. Lawyers, bookkeepers, geography teachers: they all pay me to ink ’em up with their favorite bands or cartoon characters. Makes ’em feel like somebody else.” He chuckled. “Somebody dangerous. At least for a day or two. Till the tattoo wears off in the shower ’course.”

  He pointed to a spot underneath the metal ramp, where welcoming golden lights peeked through the fog.

  “Looks like we’re home.”

  As they passed beneath it, August heard a faint creaking on the steel walkway, and he glanced up to see some movement near the riverbank above: a blur of pink that resembled, oddly, a moving azalea bush.

  “Baby,” Buford was calling out, “we got visitors.”

  “Visitors?” a girlish voice responded from the fog. “Not, I hope, the Armadillo Gang.”

  Under the ramp, August discerned a modestly sized sailboat wedged in the tight channel between the floating wharf and the tangle of rotting wooden foundations behind it. The vessel was far from new: the fiberglass cabin and deck were dented and scraped, the rivets around the window frames were rusted, the weathered timbers of the wooden hull were flaking like bark. The hand-painted script fading on the stern proclaimed the boat’s name to be Sea Hag.

  August’s nostrils detected an acrid, vinegary odor that reminded him of Belladonna’s pasta lacquer. On the roof of the low-slung cabin, wrapped in a thick woolly scarf, and with her naked heels resting on the forward hatch, perched a young woman August had met before: Buford’s girlfriend, Destiny. Pink dreadlocks fell across her face as she painted her toenails with an eggplant-colored polish.

  “Oh, my Lord!” she said, looking up. “If it isn’t the little goth and her helmet fella. Look, girl, check it out!”

  She rose and pulled aside the scarf to reveal her left shoulder blade, from where an impressive likeness of Claudette extended ghoulish fingers.

  “I knew you’d make a great tattoo, girl. Since Buford did it,” Destiny said, grinning, “it’s been the most requested design in the studio. You’re a big hit!”

  Claudette, with a coy leer, hugged her dismembered arm with the other and wiggled her hips excitedly.

  “Now, get yourself aboard, girl. Bring your friends.”

  Destiny reached out a limp hand to the ragged troupe.

  “Welcome aboard. Like that turban! How you doing that trick with your arm, girl? Jeez, sir, your hand is freezing. That’s right; down there. Careful on the steps. Through the galley and into the saloon. Not quite so many butterflies if you don’t mind. It’s pretty small.”

  The cabin interior was indeed compact, and dated, but clean and cozy. August and the zombies stumbled through a tiny built-in kitchen into the space beyond, squeezing themselves behind a laminated table into a U-shaped vinyl banquette.

  Destiny found herself tightly wedged between Jacques LeSalt and Sad Celeste. She regarded one and then the other with undisguised wonder.

  “I have never seen,” she marveled, “such impressive makeup. The dead eyes. The loose teeth.” She gently touched the exposed radius bone of Celeste’s forearm, frowning.

  “Now, what in the world,” wondered Buford, who leaned on the kitchen counter, his enormous frame blocking the doorway behind him, “brings you to this seedy part of town?”

  August explained that they were still in search of the gemstone that had led him to Buford’s tattoo parlor the previous summer.

  “You know, the Cadaverite, commonly known as alligator’s eye? A ball gazer told us we might find it on Pelican Wharf.”

  “Some ball gazer,” Buford said with a scoff. “Any local knows that this is Armadillo turf. Don’t they, baby?”

  Destiny nodded.

  “We pay the gang a little something to moor here,” she explained absently, “so they let us be. But I don’t know who in their right mind would send kids here after dark. Is that eyeliner waterproof?” she asked of the small, sad-eyed prince.

  “Well, they’re safe now with us,” Buford said reassuringly to his girlfriend. “Hey, who of y’all is partial to hot cocoa?”

  August alone raised his hand as Buford lit a stove burner.

  “No one else? Y’all look like you could use a little warming up.”

  “I don’t think,” said August with a tight smile, “there’s any warming up my…companions.”

  Destiny’s palms smacked the table with uncharacteristic vigor.

  “Wait a minute! Wait one hot minute!” she said with a look of revelation. “The bleached bon
es. This half-a-face thing. The faint odor of decomposition.” Her mouth opened, half smiling. “It’s not makeup, is it? Y’all are real live…I mean real dead zombies.”

  She looked sharply at August for confirmation. He paused, then nodded reluctantly.

  Destiny clasped her hands together in thrilled disbelief.

  “You hear that, baby?” she said. “Zombies! Right here on our little Sea Hag.” She excitedly grabbed the closest zombie wrists available, one on either side of her. “I am such a fan,” she gushed. “Every zombie book. Every zombie movie. You name it, I have most decidedly seen it. Twice. Or more times. I can’t believe it. Zombies! Yay!”

  Overcome, the young woman grinned at Sad Celeste, then Jacques LeSalt. As she excitedly shook their scrawny wrists in her gripping fists, the two zombies jiggled helplessly back and forth like marionettes, and something dropped from the brim of the pirate’s hat. It rolled across the table and toppled on its side. It was a large gold coin.

  “Oh, no! Oh my!” cried August, standing swiftly. “We stole from the Armadillo Gang. We need to give that back. They’ll come after us!”

  “Relax, bro,” said Buford, warming milk in a pan. “They are a greedy bunch, to be sure, but they won’t miss one doubloon. If you’re that concerned, just eat it.”

  “Eat it?”

  “Why not? They’re delicious.”

  August lifted the coin to discover that it was formed from foil-wrapped chocolate. He took a bite.

  “Hmm. No Mudd Pie, but it’s not bad.” He stuffed the rest of the not-so-bad chocolate coin in his mouth. “So, let me get this straight,” he said, chewing. “This dangerous Armadillo Gang steals money…made from chocolate?”

  “Never,” said Buford sternly, “underestimate the things some folks will do for chocolate.” He moved toward the table with two steaming mugs. “The Armadillo Gang is notorious for its ruthless obsession. It’s said they’ll stop at nothing to stockpile the stuff, and Carnival is prime time for their thievery. Speaking of chocolate…”