The Hanging Wives of New England

by Ellis Brightwell

  “No,” I said. “I read novels, mostly.”

  “That’s a shame. They had this guy, an alien from another planet who sat upside down in chairs just like our friend Andy. It was hilarious.”

  “Your deputy is dead. How can you laugh about that?”

  “Yeah, everyone’s dead or halfway there. What am I supposed to do, cry? I’d never stop crying. Might as well laugh my ass off about it, just not too loud or too long. I’d tell you to try it, but you look like you just saw a ghost. And you really need to get that brushfire on your head under control so you don’t get grabbed. I’ll ask Linda if she has any barrettes when she wakes up. You drive like shit, by the way.”

  “The roads are covered in black ice.”

  “Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to do much to those shambling monstrosities out there. Only thing that works on them is bullets. I figure you take out one of my deputies and trash his car, you owe me a helping hand. Ever fire a gun?”

  “My husband goes hunting sometimes. I stay at home with the kids. And I can’t see anything without my contacts.”

  “Where’s your husband at? We could use him.”

  “I think… I don’t know. Deputy Andrews came to the house looking for him.”

  I hung my head as I fiddled with the bottom button on my bloodied, pink sweater. Sheriff Graham set her hand on my shoulder like my grandmother used to do when I stood no higher than the belt on her church dress.

  “You’ll find your husband,” she said. “And I know where you can find contacts. We actually have some of those in the supply locker. Energy bars? Nope. Band-aids? Yeah, right. God forbid we keep anything useful in there, but if you can requisition yourself a pair of contacts to keep your eyeballs from drowning, well, you knock yourself out.”

  Sheriff Graham walked back to her desk and spread her fingertips against its surface while she looked over her little kingdom of documents.

  “Did you take Andy’s radio off him?” she said.

  “I didn’t touch him.”

  “Apart from caving his skull in. I’ll go grab his things and move that cruiser. Once you get your contacts in, you head up to the roof and see one of my deputies about getting a pistol. I don’t care whether you know how to shoot it. When those things come at us—and they will—you aim in their direction and pull the trigger until you’re out of bullets.”

  The thin floorboards muffled her footsteps in a way that made the hair on my neck stand on end. Down the hall from where Deputy Williams slept on her stack of phone books, I found a tall, gray locker stocked with an odd assortment of remedies for pink eye and ear wax. I had just put in a pair of contact lenses over the washroom sink when firecrackers went off somewhere outside the building.

  “I should have known,” growled a woman.

  I stepped out into the office area. Deputy Williams hauled herself to her feet with bloodshot eyes. Wisps of baby hair shrouded a face of stone.

  “Stay inside, Shannon,” she said. “I’ll be up on the roof. Let us handle this.”

  “But Helen said—”

  “But nothing.”

  Linda dragged herself through the station’s door and slammed it shut. The metal stairway outside rattled the walls. Piercing explosions and heavy footsteps from above shook the roof. I crouched low to the ground and covered my ears.

  The window above the sheriff’s desk exploded. A misshapen, leather volleyball with hairy fringes thrust itself through the metal bars—it was the sheriff’s disfigured head. Withered hands wielding claw-like fingers stabbed into her eyes and peeled back her scalp, leaving a crownless skull whose brain invited its captors to feast. When I stood up, the head retreated at once in favor of a spindly mass of arms that shook the window’s restraining bars hard enough to draw sawdust powder from the wooden walls. One red-stained, fleshless hand held a two-way radio whose static vomit muffled a woman’s frantic voice.

  “Sheriff Graham. Sheriff Graham, this is Deputy Williams. I’m up on the roof with the county response team. The dead are concentrating their attack on the eastern perimeter, but I thought I just heard activity on the western walls. I can’t expose my position to check on it. Please advise.”

  Against my better judgment, I dashed to the writhing wall of hands and wrested the walkie-talkie from their grip, only to have them grab my hair and pull on it so hard I thought my skin would come off. I gripped the antenna and struck at the arms with the radio’s heavy body. A ripping sound sent blood trickling down my face and dropped me to the ground. One skeletal hand held a lock of curly, red hair. I scurried across the carpet and flattened myself against the wall by the station’s door. Its little window provided a glassy view of the stacked-up car frames that bolstered a mess of barbed wire woven through diamond-shaped gaps in the chain-link fence surrounding the station.

  “Deputy Williams?” I said to the radio. “This is Shannon. I think Sheriff Graham is dead. What should I do?”

  An explosion just beyond the eastern fence sent reddish-orange flames billowing high into the sky. Whooping cheers and profanity welcomed flying limbs that splattered blood where they landed on the pavement inside the fence.

  “Shannon?” came Linda’s voice over the radio. “Shannon, you get your ass up to the roof and help us. There’s a bunch of them coming in hot.”

  Deafening gunfire east of the building drowned out everything else. Behind me, above the desk, the half-clothed, half-fleshed arms reaching through the iron bars sent the surrounding wall crashing to the carpet in a shower of splintered wood. Desiccated bodies fell in a heap on the floor and pulled themselves to their feet using the sheriff’s desk. I clasped the radio to a belt loop on my pants and shoved the station’s front door open.

  A bullet ricocheted off the metal handrail three steps from me. Deputy Williams stood poised over the lip of the roof above me, her dark brown cheeks and forehead glistening with sweat even in the frosty cold.

  “Get up here, Shannon! Now!”

  Men and women fired out at the mass of shambling corpses funneling themselves through the narrow gap in the eastern fence. They climbed over car frames and tipped over burning barrels to seize preoccupied defenders with their unrelenting claw-hands. Razor blade teeth gnashed gaping holes into necks and faces and shoulders, taking long, snake-like trails of bloody viscera from their bodies. One woman with a bulging stomach fell onto her back and succumbed to two foam-mouthed assailants who ripped her belly open like paper. They reached down with fingernail knives and gnashing teeth for the lifeless, cord-bound form inside her—

  I sprinted up the nearest mountain of loose tires and threw myself over the top of the chain-link fence. The hard earth knocked the wind out of me and made me cough up bile. I staggered up onto my feet and ran through frosty grass, slipping and tripping with every third step. The shambling dead, entranced by the hellish sound of their own impending demise, ignored me as I wove my way through their thinning numbers. The last of them were behind me when I reached the church overlooking Queensport’s main intersection. From there, it would be a mile and a half to Rick’s office building. My husband worked in a cubicle farm guarded by several locked doors, a maze of concrete halls, and windows—so he told me—that would break for nothing less than a tactical air strike. Whining static at my hip snapped me out of my thoughts.

  “Shannon,” said Deputy Williams. Her voice cracked and broke. “Shannon, you come back to the station, I’m going to assume you’re bitten. Good luck out there and may God have mercy on your soul.”

  I turned off the radio.

  3

  Lily

  I clenched my aching left side as I skirted the meandering things shuffling through the eastern plaza’s snow-frosted playground. I had made it a habit to wait two hours after my morning oatmeal before getting on the elliptical—and there I was, stilt-walking down the highway access road with my rear end pressed together to avoid emptying my bowels into my pants. Unless I wanted to squat behind a tree, I’d need to stop at the bed and br
eakfast down by the pier and use their restroom. Preferably without a gun pointed at me.

  The little building’s entrance stood hidden behind a wide, cylindrical hay bale that weighed next to nothing. I swung open the flimsy, metal screen door and held it in place with my foot. The heavy inner door drifted open with a creaking sound that drowned in a steady stream of white noise. Resting behind the antiquated, half-circle desk were the proprietors, Doug and Winnie, both in their familiar red flannel. They sat with their backs to me as they watched a wall-mounted television’s static flicker in rhythm with the swinging pendulum of a grandfather clock.

  “Hi, Doug. Winnie. It’s Shannon. Do you mind if I use your restroom?”

  Only Winnie turned to answer me. Her stained, leathery face did not possess a jaw to give shape to the words that flicked her hanging tongue to life.

  I dashed out the door and down the snowy hill to where the long, concrete pier cut through ice floes and turned them into misshapen puzzle pieces. I climbed the shaky ladder to the second level and immediately wished I hadn’t: at the end of the pier, beneath the tall lookout tower used to signal ships, hung a woman in a pink cardigan and pitch black slacks who looked too much like me. A violent frothing out on the water sent whip-like tentacles lashing out at the causeway, taking chunks of heavy concrete as if they were styrofoam. I slid down the ladder and fled north, straight past the highway access road to a side street whose timber-truss bridge would hide me from whatever octopus or kraken might follow me from the bay into the river.

  Halfway to Rick’s office building, I could take it no longer. I did my business behind a thick oak trunk and cleaned my legs with chilly snow. Yamata Corporation’s reception area would have a restroom where I could finish washing up. I hoped. I had been there once before to drop off a box of doughnuts for Rick and his co-workers. Unlike the mess at the police station, I simply drove into a guest parking space and greeted the friendly security officer, who tasted the best-looking doughnut to make sure the rest of them were “fit for consumption.” Today, I did much the same, minus a car, and received less than a warm welcome: an empty, unplowed parking lot recorded my footsteps all the way to a pair of massive, glass-paned doors whose tall handles were bound shut with a thick, padlocked chain. Rick enjoyed telling me unsolicited tales about the military contractors his company worked with and how they often left things “secured on sight” rather than secured on site, so it was not entirely unsurprising when I jiggled the padlock in just the right way and the several yards of heavy chain came sliding off the door handles.

  My reward was entry into a well-lit, immaculate reception area as big as a department store. In its center sat a modest desk that watched over a row of black leather armchairs against the left wall. On the far right, an unmanned security checkpoint guarded a double flight of stairs that led up to the second floor high above my head. Nobody was around to challenge me, so I took the liberty of using the upstairs washroom to finish cleaning my legs. It wasn’t until I was drying my hands that I spied the message written in bloody brush strokes on the wall: FLOORS FOUR AND FIVE COMPROMISED.

  Rick worked on the fourth floor. Damn it. Had those undead things broken into his office and ripped out his co-workers’ innards? I had to kill those images from the police station. It was like Helen said: if you cried for everyone who died, you’d never stop crying. But Helen was dead. And I found it difficult to imagine that Rick might be dead, too, even if he did work in a department he called “Murders and Executions”—Mergers and Acquisitions. He liked the way his favorite movie protagonist said it. I asked him why he looked up to someone who thought he was a psychopathic murderer but was really just delusional and in need of a therapist. When Rick told me it was because it reminded him of being married, he got to sleep on the couch. And of course I joined him in the middle of the night because I didn’t have the heart to let him lie there alone.

  The elevator’s fourth floor doors opened to an eviscerated body hanging by the neck from its own intestines. I emptied my stomach all over the shoes of my unwanted companion. My heart beat against my ribs like a kettle drum. The life had dropped out of my legs, but I willed them into faltering motion long enough to send me down the hall and around the corner to the third door on the right marked “M&A”. My useless fingers fumbled the handle open. I slammed the door shut behind me and slumped down onto the ground. If there was anyone else out there who wasn’t hanging from the ceiling, they probably had a pair of ears that heard what I just did.

  The solitary worker in Rick’s office, however, took no notice of me. He sat at his cubicle in front of a neon green terminal, hammering away at an old keyboard whose keys housed obnoxiously loud springs. I felt sorry for him, holed up here at work all by himself with frozen sleet all over the roads. Poor guy forgot to shave the little hairs off the nape of his neck. He hadn’t even untucked the collar of his dress shirt from his sweater vest. I slid the back of my own sweater upward against the door’s polished glass and steadied my buckling legs with one hand against the wall.

  “Rick? Honey? Where’s your car? I didn’t see anyone in the parking lot. Do you know what’s going on?”

  Rick glided backwards in his chair, swiveled around, and stood up. His eyes were as big and black as a bug’s. Dark ink trickled from the left corner of his lips, down his chin, and onto the buttoned-up collar of his nice dress shirt.

  “What happened, sweetie?” I said. “Are you all right?”

  He walked toward me with uncertain steps, as if he were about to stumble and fall.

  “Do you need aspirin? I can find some for you.”

  His forehead exploded between his eyes. A spray of black mist flew over my shoulder. Rick’s knees buckled and his body went slack, almost like liquid. I wanted to catch him in my arms, but how do you catch a husband who turns to oily sludge as he falls?

  “Don’t touch him! He’s corrupted. Get away from him!”

  A young woman in a white dress shirt and a black skirt pointed a handgun at the muddy pile of clothing on the floor. I did what she said so I wouldn’t have to stare down the barrel of a gun for the third time today. She approached in black, velvet pumps that made little sound against the thick carpet. The ceiling lights’ reflection on her glasses hid her eyes from me.

  “How did you get in here?” she said.

  “That’s what you’re concerned about?” I said. “You just turned my husband into something that doesn’t even look human.”

  “I had to do it. He would have killed you.”

  “You should have let him. I lost my children earlier this morning.”

  “Were they corrupted?”

  “Does it matter? You should shoot me, too, so I can join them.”

  “That’s not how I operate.”

  “His fingers are still twitching. Is making people suffer how you operate?”

  She lowered her gun to her waist and held it there in both hands as she stared at the filthy clothing that had, moments ago, resembled my husband.

  “I’m just riding this out until they send a helicopter for me,” she said. “Only problem is the top two floors are fubar and those assholes locked me in here.”

  I squinted at the plastic identification badge clipped to her shirt pocket.

  “Don’t you work here, ‘Lily Ming’?”

  “I sure do. You see how they treat their own when the shit hits the fan? I’m normally down at the reception desk in the lobby when people aren’t shape-shifting into mud.”

  “And why would they be doing that?”

  “I have no clue. I thought I got all of them. When the fourth floor elevator alert activated, I figured it was that guy hanging from the ceiling kicking around. Guess it was you. What’s your name?”

  “Shannon. That was my husband, Rick.”

  “I’m sorry for your loss, Shannon. I didn’t know your husband, but we’ve lost a lot of people to this… stuff. It’s the same filth that’s seeping in everywhere else in this place. Fourth floor. Fift
h floor. And they expect me to fly up the stairwell to the roof as soon as I hear helicopter blades. Would help if they’d give me a radio, seeing as how cell phone service is dead. Where’d you get that antenna on your hip?”

  “It’s a police radio. The sheriff doesn’t need it anymore because she’s dead.”

  “Ouch. Well, maybe we can make better use of it. So, that question I asked you earlier: how did you get in here?”

  “Through the front doors.”

  “You? With those arms? I like you, Shannon. You seem like a nice person. I’m sorry about your husband. I had to shoot my boyfriend, Derek, at the water cooler. You’re not the only one who’s lost someone.”

  “Is that supposed to make me feel better?”

  “I can give you a hug if you’d like.”

  “Don’t touch me.”

  “That’s become standard operating procedure around here. I suggest we get the hell out of here before anything else surprises us. My flying taxi is probably halfway across the bay by now. I don’t blame them.”

  Lily climbed over the desk to avoid stepping on the black oil seeping into the carpet. She opened the glass door and stood there like a sentry with her gun in her hand. I wanted to stay there a while with Rick, maybe even lie down with him and let that black stuff take me away, but that’s not what he would have wanted.

  Was that really him lying there on the floor?

  “You want me to just leave my husband here like this?” I said.

  “That’s not your husband,” Lily said. “Not anymore.”