Z- Zombie Stories

by J M Lassen

  Tom stopped outside of the paint-peeling white picket fence. He looked from the erosion portrait to the man in the window and back again.

  “Benny?” he said under his breath. “You think that’s him?”

  “Mm-hm,” Benny said with a low squeak.

  The zombie in the window seemed to be looking at them. Benny was sure of it. The withered face and the dead pale eyes were pointed directly at the fence, as if he had been waiting there all these years for a visitor to come to his garden gate.

  Tom nudged the gate with his toe. It was locked.

  Moving very slowly, Tom leaned over and undid the latch. The process took over two minutes. Nervous sweat ran down Benny’s face, and he couldn’t take his eyes off of the zombie.

  Tom pushed on the gate with his knee, and it opened now.

  “Very, very slowly,” he said. “Red light, green light, all the way to the door.”

  Benny knew the game, though in truth he had never seen a working stoplight. They entered the yard. The old woman in the first garden suddenly turned toward them. So did the zombie in the bathrobe. “Stop,” hissed Tom. He held the pistol close to his chest, his finger lying straight along the trigger guard. “If we have to make a run for it, head into the house. We can lock ourselves in and wait until they calm down.”

  The old lady and the man in the bathrobe faced them but did not advance.

  The tableau held for a minute that seemed an hour long. “I’m scared,” said Benny.

  “It’s okay to be scared,” said Tom. “Scared means you’re smart. Just don’t panic. That’ll get you killed.”

  Benny almost nodded, but he caught himself.

  Tom took a slow step. Then a second. It was uneven, his body swaying as if his knees were stiff. The bathrobe zombie turned away and looked at the shadow of a cloud moving up the valley; but the old lady still watched. Her mouth opened and closed as if she was slowly chewing on something.

  But then she, too, turned away to watch the moving shadow.

  Tom took another step and another, and eventually Benny followed. The process was excruciatingly slow, but to Benny it felt as if they were moving too fast. No matter how slowly they went, he thought that it was all wrong, that the zombies—all of them up and down the street—would suddenly turn toward them and moan with their dry and dusty voices, and then a great mass of the hungry dead would surround them.

  Tom reached the door and turned the handle.

  The knob turned in his hand, and the lock clicked open. Tom gently pushed it open and stepped into the gloom of the house. Benny cast a quick look at the window to make sure the zombie was still there.

  Only he wasn’t.

  “Tom!” Benny cried. “Look out!”

  A dark shape lunged at Tom out of the shadows of the entrance hallway. It clawed for him with wax-white fingers and moaned with an unspeakable hunger. Benny screamed.

  Then something happened that Benny could not understand. Tom was there and then he wasn’t. His brother’s body became a blur of movement, as he pivoted to the outside of the zombie’s right arm, ducked low, grabbed the zombie’s shins from behind, and drove his shoulder into the former Harold Simmons’s back. The zombie instantly fell forward onto his face, knocking clouds of dust from the carpet. Tom leaped onto the zombie’s back and used his knees to pin both shoulders to the floor.

  “Close the door!” Tom barked, as he pulled a spool of thin silk cord from his jacket pocket. He whipped the cord around the zombie’s wrists and shimmied down to be able to bring both of the zombie’s hands together and tie them behind the creature’s back. He looked up. “The door, Benny—now!”

  Benny came out of his daze and realized that there was movement in his peripheral vision. He turned to see the old lady, the two little girls and the zombie in his bathrobe lumbering up the garden path. Benny slammed the door and shot the bolt, then leaned against it, panting as if he had been the one to wrestle a zombie to the ground and hog-tie it. With a sinking feeling, he realized that it had probably been his own shouted warning that had attracted the other zombies.

  Tom flicked out a spring-blade knife and cut the silk cord. He kept his weight on the struggling zombie while he fashioned a large loop like a noose. The zombie kept trying to turn its head to bite him, but Tom didn’t seem to care. The biting teeth were nowhere near him—though Benny was still terrified of those gray, rotted teeth.

  With a deft twist of the wrist, Tom looped the noose over the zombie’s head, catching it below the chin, and then he jerked the slack so that the closing loop forced the creature’s jaws shut with a clack. Tom wound silk cord around the zombie’s head so that the line passed under the jaw and over the crown. When he had three full turns in place, he tied it tight. He shimmied farther down the zombie’s body and pinned its legs and then tied its ankles together.

  Then Tom stood up, stuffed the cord into his pocket, and closed his knife. He slapped dust from his clothes as he turned back to Benny.

  “Thanks for the warning, kiddo, but I had it.”

  “Um… holy sh—!”

  “Language,” Tom interrupted quietly.

  Tom went to the window and looked out. “Eight of ’em out there.”

  “Do-do we… I mean, shouldn’t we board up the windows?”

  Tom laughed. “You’ve listened to too many campfire tales. If we started hammering nails into boards, the sound would call every living dead person in the whole town. We’d be under siege.”

  “But we’re trapped.”

  Tom looked at him. “Trapped is a relative term,” he said. “We can’t go out the front. I expect there’s a back door. We’ll finish our business here and then we’ll sneak out nice and quiet and head on our way.”

  Benny stared at him and then at the struggling zombie, who was on the carpet.

  “You—you just…”

  “Practice, Benny. I’ve done this before. C’mon, help me get him up.”

  They knelt on opposite sides of the zombie, but Benny didn’t want to touch it. He’d never touched a corpse of any kind before, and he didn’t want to start with one that had tried to bite his brother.

  “Benny,” Tom said, “he can’t hurt you now. He’s helpless.”

  The word helpless hit Benny hard. It brought back the image of Old Roger—with no eyes, no teeth, and no fingers—and the two young women who tended to him. And the limbless torsos in the wagon.

  “Helpless,” he murmured. “God…”

  “Come on,” Tom said gently.

  Together they lifted the zombie. He was light—far lighter than Benny expected—and they half carried, half dragged him into the dining room. Away from the living-room window. Sunlight fell in dusty slants through the moth-eaten curtains. The ruins of a meal had long since decayed to dust on the table. They put him in a chair, and Tom produced the spool of cord and bound him in place. The zombie continued to struggle, but Benny understood. The zombie was actually helpless.

  Helpless.

  The word hung in the air. Ugly and full of dreadful new meaning. Tom removed the envelope from his pocket. Apart from the folded erosion portrait, there was also a piece of cream-colored stationery on which were several handwritten lines. Tom read through them silently, sighed, and then turned to his brother.

  “Restraining the dead is difficult, Benny, but it isn’t the hardest part.” He held out the letter. “This is.”

  Benny took the letter.

  “My clients—the people who hire me to come out here—they usually want something said. Things they would like to say themselves, but can’t. Things they need said so that they can have closure. Do you understand?”

  Benny read the letter. His breath caught in his throat and he nodded as the first tears fell down his cheeks.

  His brother took the letter back. “I need to read it aloud, Benny. You understand?”

  Benny nodded again.

  Tom angled the letter into the dusty light and read:

  My dear Harold. I love
you and miss you. I’ve missed you so desperately for all these years. I still dream about you every night, and each morning I pray that you’ve found peace. I forgive you for what you tried to do to me. I forgive you for what you did to the children. I hated you for a long time, but I understand now that it wasn’t you. It was this thing that happened. I want you to know that I took care of our children when they turned. They are at peace, and I put flowers on their graves every Sunday. I know you would like that. I have asked Tom Imura to find you. He’s a good man, and I know that he will be gentle with you. I love you, Harold. May God grant you His peace. I know that when my time comes, you will be waiting for me, waiting with Bethy and little Stephen, and that we will all be together again in a better world. Please forgive me for not having the courage to help you sooner. I will always love you. Yours forever, Claire.

  Benny was weeping when Tom finished. He turned away and covered his face with his hands and sobbed. Tom came and hugged him and kissed his head.

  Then Tom stepped away, took a breath, and opened his knife again. Benny didn’t think he would be able to watch, but he raised his head and saw Tom as he placed the letter on the table in front of Harold Simmons and smoothed it out. Then he moved behind the zombie and gently pushed its head forward so that he could place the tip of his knife against the hollow at the base of the skull.

  “You can look away if you want to, Benny,” he said.

  Benny did not want to look, but he didn’t turn away.

  Tom nodded. He took another breath and then thrust the blade into the back of the zombie’s neck.The blade slid in with almost no effort in the gap between spine and skull, and the razor-sharp edge sliced completely through the brain stem.

  Harold Simmons stopped struggling. His body didn’t twitch; there was no death spasm. He just sagged forward against the silken cords and was still. Whatever force had been active in him, whatever pathogen or radiation or whatever had taken the man away and left behind a zombie, was gone.

  Tom cut the cords that held Simmons’s arms and raised each hand and placed it on the table so that the dead man’s palms held the letter in place.

  “Be at peace, brother,” said Tom Imura.

  He wiped and folded his knife and stepped back. He looked at Benny, who was openly sobbing. “This is what I do, Benny.”

  XII

  They left by the back door, and there were no problems. Benny’s tears slowed and stopped, but it took a while. They walked in silence, side by side, heading southeast. Miles fell away behind them. They passed another gas station, where Tom greeted another monk. They didn’t linger, though. The day was burning away.

  “We’ll be back in an hour,” Tom said to the monk after gifting him with vials of cadaverine and a wrapped package of jerky. “We’ll need to stay the night.”

  “You’re always welcome, brother,” said the monk.

  They walked on for another fifteen minutes, through a grove of trees that were heavy with late season oranges. Tom picked a few, and they peeled and ate them and said almost nothing until they reached the wrought-iron gate of a community that was embowered by a high red-brick wall. A sign over the gate read SUNSET HOLLOW.

  Outside of the gate there were trash and old bones and a few burned shells of cars. The outer walls were pocked with bullet scars. To the right of the gate someone had used white paint to write THIS AREA CLEARED. KEEP GATES CLOSED. KEEP OUT. Below that were the initials T. I.

  Benny pointed. “You wrote that?” It was the first time he’d spoken a full sentence since leaving the house of Harold Simmons.

  “Years ago,” Tom said.

  The gates were closed, and a thick chain had been threaded through the bars and locked with a heavy padlock. The chain and the lock looked new and gleamed with oil.

  “What is this place?” Benny asked.

  Tom tucked his hands into his back pockets and looked up at the sign. “This is what they used to call a gated community. The gates were supposed to keep unwanted people out and keep the people inside safe.”

  “Did it work? I mean… during First Night?”

  “No.”

  “Did all the people die?”

  “Most of them. A few got away.”

  “Why is it locked?”

  “For the same reason as always,” Tom said. He blew out his cheeks and dug into his right front jeans pocket for a key. He showed it to Benny and then opened the lock, pushed the gates open, restrung the chain, and clicked the lock closed with the keyhole on the inside now.

  They walked along the road. The houses were all weather damaged, and the streets were pasted with the dusty remnants of fifteen years of falling leaves. Every garden was overgrown, but there were no zombies in them. Some of the doors had crosses nailed to them, around which hung withered garlands of flowers.

  “Your other job’s here?” Benny asked.

  “Yes,” said Tom. His voice was soft and distant.

  “Is it like the other one?”

  “Sort of.”

  “That was… hard,” said Benny.

  “Yes it was.”

  “Doing this over and over again would drive me crazy. How do you do it?”

  Tom turned to him as if that was the question he’d been waiting for all day. “It keeps me sane,” he said. “Do you understand?”

  Benny thought about it for a long moment. Birds sang in the trees and the cicadas buzzed continually. “Is it because you knew what the world was before?”

  Tom nodded.

  “Is it because if you didn’t do it… then maybe no one would?”

  Tom nodded again.

  “It must be lonely.”

  “It is.” Tom glanced at him. “But I always hoped you’d want to join me. To help me do what I do.”

  “I… don’t know if I can.”

  “That’s always going to be your choice. If you can, you can. If you can’t, then believe me, I’ll understand. It takes a lot out of you to do this. And it takes a lot out of you to know that the bounty hunters are out there doing what they do.”

  “How come none of them ever came here?”

  “They did. Once.”

  “What happened.”

  Tom shrugged.

  “What happened?” Benny asked again.

  “I was here when they came. Pure chance.”

  “What happened?”

  “Maybe it’s better that I don’t tell you.”

  Benny looked at him. “You killed them,” he said. “Didn’t you?”

  Tom walked a dozen steps before he said, “Not all of them.” A half dozen steps later he added, “I let two of them go.”

  “Why?”

  “To spread the word,” Tom said. “To let the other bounty hunters know that this place was off-limits.”

  “And they listened? The bounty hunters?”

  Tom smiled. It wasn’t boastful or malicious. It was a thin, cold knife-blade of a smile that was there and gone. “Sometimes you have to go to some pretty extreme lengths to make a point and to make it stick. Otherwise you find yourself having to make the same point over and over again.”

  Benny stared at him. “How many were there?”

  “Ten.”

  “And you let two go.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you killed eight of them?”

  “Yes.” The late-afternoon sunlight slanting through the trees threw dappled light on the road and painted the sides of all of the houses to their left with purple shadows. A red fox and three kits scampered across the street ahead of them.

  Benny opened his mouth to say something to Tom but didn’t. Tom stopped in the middle of the street.

  “Benny, I don’t really want to talk about that day. Not now, not here, and maybe not ever. I did what I thought I had to do, but I’m not proud of it. Telling you the details would feel like bragging, and I think that would make me sick. It’s already been a long day.”

  “I won’t ask, Tom,” said Benny.

  They stood there, taking e
ach other’s measure perhaps for the very first time. Taking each other’s measure and getting the right values.

  Tom pointed, and Benny turned toward the front door of a house with peach trees growing wild in the yard. “This is it.”

  “There’s a zombie in there?”

  “Yes,” Tom said. “There are two.”

  “We have to tie them up?”

  “No. That’s already been done. Years ago. Nearly every house here has a dead person in it. Some have already been released, the rest wait for family members to reach out and want it done.”

  “I know this sounds gross, but why don’t you just go house to house and do it to every one of them? You know… release them.”

  “Because most of the people here have family living in our town. It takes a while, but people usually get to the point where they want someone to go and do this the way I do it. With respect, with words read to their dead family. Closure isn’t closure until someone’s ready to close the door. Do you understand what I mean?”

  Benny nodded.

  “Do you have a picture of the… um… people in there? So we know who they are? So we can make sure.”

  “There are pictures inside. Besides, I know the names of everyone in Sunset Hollow. I come here a lot. I was the one who went house to house and tied the dead up. Some monks helped, but I knew everyone here.” Tom walked to the front door. “Are you ready?”

  Benny looked at Tom and then at the door.

  “You want me to do this, don’t you?”

  Tom looked sad. “Yes. I guess I do.”

  “If I do, then I’ll be like you. I’ll be doing this kind of thing.”

  “Yes.”

  “Forever?”

  “I don’t know, Benny. I hope not. But for a while? Yeah.”

  “What if I can’t?”

  “I told you. If you can’t, then you can’t, and we go to the way station for tonight and head home in the morning.”