Three Witches and a Zombie

by Maggie Shayne

  He sighed. “I knew you’d be like this.”

  “And didn’t care about anything except getting me in the sack before I found out.” I closed my eyes, shook my head, picked up my bag and turned to stomp away.

  “Suzy, come on.”

  “No amount of money is worth making a deal with the devil.” I sighed heavily. “I was going to break it off tonight anyway. I guess this just validates my decision.”

  “That’s a lie. You weren’t–”

  “Ask your sister. She knew.” I sighed, but still couldn’t turn to look at him. I’d lose my will if I did. “Good bye, Chuck,” I said, and resumed walking away, moving fast before the tears could take me over.

  “Suz. Suzy, don’t go.”

  But I kept on walking.

  Chapter Two

  I couldn’t sleep for the longest time. And not just because it was kind of creepy, how my mother hadn’t changed my bedroom at all since I’d left. I hadn’t been back in six months, and only a couple of times a year for the two years before this one. And every time, my room was exactly the same. My senior class photo, framed on the wall, my soccer cleats on the closet floor, my music box on the dresser.

  Mom, though...she had changed. At first she’d been kind of lost and pathetic without me. But then, the last couple of visits home, she’d seemed, I don’t know. Younger. Stronger. She didn’t hang around waiting for me, with a sad attempt at a vegan meal on the table. In fact, half the time when I was home, she was off on some outing or other. Something was definitely up with her.

  I kept thinking about Chuck, and the terrible decision he’d made, maybe for all the right reasons. Seven figures must have been hard as hell to turn down. I knew he’d be rich someday, but I’d expected it to take longer. I didn’t really think he cared all that much about money, though. In hindsight, I realized, he probably thought he had taken the job for me, in some twisted way. And I’d shot him down.

  He must feel like hell.

  It didn’t matter. It was up to him now. He’d have to make his decision based on something besides me. It was over. We were over.

  I lay there, drowning in useless tears and trying to envision the future without him. But I couldn’t see anything. It just looked... bleak.

  Eventually, I must have fallen asleep, because I woke up at three a.m. to something scratching on my window. It was probably Chuck. I half hoped it was. (Okay, I totally hoped it was, and that he’d say he wasn’t taking the damn job and that he’d figure out another solution and that we would make things work somehow.) Even half asleep I knew it was impossible. Rubbing my tear-tender eyes, I rolled toward the window, then I jumped a foot off the mattress and let out a truncated scream before clapping a hand over my mouth.

  Someone was standing on the other side, face and hands flattened to the glass, mouth working weirdly.

  Wait, I knew her.

  “Amy?” I asked, leaning closer, squinting. Amy Johnson, who’d been in my class all through high school, looked pretty rough. Her blond hair was all tangled with bits of weed and brush and she had what looked like mud smeared all over her face. She kept gnawing at the glass, like she was trying to chew her way through it or something.

  “Damn, girl. How much did you drink, anyway?” I took my hand off my chest, grinning at my girl-in-horror-flick reaction, and went to the window again. “What did you do, walk through a briar patch to get here?” I reached for my window, to open it, when a second face mashed up against the glass, right beside Amy’s. I jerked backward, jumping and shrieking. Amy’s boyfriend, Mark. He was as messed up as she was. The same mud on his face and smeared through his hair, eyes not meeting mine, mouth wide and gnawing at the glass.

  “Suzy, get away from the window!”

  That was my mom. She was standing in my bedroom doorway with a baseball bat in one hand and the phone in the other. “I mean it, get back!” she shouted in a very un-Mom-like manner. “And get some clothes on. Quick.”

  I frowned and backed up a little, standing now, between my bed and my mother, my eyes glued to my friends outside, my ears attuned to Mom’s conversation with, I presumed, a 911 operator.

  “They’re all around the house,” she said. “I’m telling you, there’s something wrong with them.”

  I pulled on a pair of jeans, a tank top, socks. “Bath salts,” I said. “Some idiot must have brought bath salts to the party.”

  Mom met my eyes, and I could see she disagreed. “I tried calling Chief Mallory at home, ma’am,” she said to the dispatcher on the phone. “There was no answer. This is a one-cop town. You need to send in the State Police.”

  I was getting scared, dropped my running shoes and quickly shoved on my black pleather hiking boots.

  Mark lifted a hand and slammed my window with something. As he pulled back and hit again, I saw what he was using as a weapon and backed into my mom so hard I almost knocked her over, shouting, “It’s an arm it’s an arm it’s an arm!”

  Glass shattered. Mark and Amy started clambering through, dragging themselves over dagger-like shards that should’ve killed them. Their flesh tore away, but they kept on coming, and the gurgling groaning sounds they made were more animal than human.

  “They’re inside! We’re getting out of here!” Mom threw the phone at Amy, clocking her in the forehead. It didn’t even faze her. We lunged into the hallway and I slammed my bedroom door closed behind us, wishing it would lock from the outside. I was gripping Mom’s arm for dear life as we ran down the hall. Her bedroom door was closed, and I could hear pawing and groaning from the other side of it as we ran past, into the living room.

  “Mom, what the hell is going on?”

  “I don’t know, I don’t know!”

  We headed for the front door, but before she could open it, I planted my heels, skidding us both to a stop. “Wait!” I crept nearer and looked through the window pane. “There are more of them out there. Just dragging themselves up and down the street.” My breath steamed the glass, and I wiped it with my hand. They all looked familiar to me. They were all my age. They’d all been at the party, at least a lot of them had.

  God, where was Chuck? And Sally, what about Sally?

  “How many are there?” Mom asked.

  I shook my head. “A dozen. Then the two in my room–”

  “Three in mine, that I know of,” she said.

  “That’s seventeen.” But I hadn’t seen Chuck among them. The banging from the bedroom doors got louder. “They’re going to come through those doors, Mom. We have to get out of here.” And I had to find Chuck. I had to make sure he was all right.

  “We’ll go out through the garage, take the car.” Mom handed me her baseball bat and stopped at the living room closet, reaching for something on its upper shelf.

  “Mom, we don’t have time to pack.” I heard wood splintering. “They’re breaking through the bedroom doors. Mom!”

  She pulled down a shoebox, and fumbled with shaking hands until the lid fell off and she held a hefty silver handgun.

  “Holy crap, Mother, where the hell did you get that?”

  She shrugged and to my utter shock, my little four-foot-eleven, formerly scared of her own shadow mom jammed a clip into the gun’s hollow handle and worked the action. “I’ve been alone out here while you’ve been going to school. I took precautions.” She stuffed the gun into the waistband of her mom-jeans, gathered three more clips and a huge box of bullets, then took her purse from the hook on the inside of the closet door and shoved the ammunition inside.

  She yanked my denim jacket from the closet and threw it to me, then pulled on her own leather one and gave me a nod.

  I put my jacket on, checking for my cell phone in its pocket, clutched the baseball bat tight, and took Mom’s hand. We crept through the house toward the back door, and I took the car keys, both hers and mine, just in case, from the key rack in the kitchen, then peered out the back windows.

  “More of them,” I whispered. “They’re all over the back yard
. Weird, Mom, they look blue, don’t they?”

  She was digging her glasses out of her purse. “Sad blue or Smurf blue?”

  “Death blue.”

  She put her glasses on and looked up at me slowly. I’d never seen her as afraid as I did just then. But even with that, she wasn’t falling apart. The Mom I’d left behind two years ago would’ve been sobbing in the corner by now. After Dad had walked out on us when I was fifteen, she’d been kind of...broken. She’d never really put herself back together again. At least, she hadn’t, last I knew.

  We both looked at the door that led from our kitchen to the attached garage where Mom’s behemoth was parked. I preferred my own car, but my tiny hybrid was outside, parked at the curb. Her 1985 Ford station wagon with wood grain panels and all of 23,000 miles on it, was in the garage. It was a relic and a gas hog.

  “What if they got into the garage?” I whispered.

  And then my bedroom door crashed open, and we were out of time. “Then I start shooting,” she said. She opened the garage door, and we ducked through and pulled it closed quickly behind us.

  Then we stood there in the dark, with the shape of the car in front of us, shivering and listening, not moving, not making a sound.

  “Should I turn on the light?” Mom whispered.

  “I don’t think so.” I thought I heard something moving near the front of the little garage. Just outside the door? Or just inside? “Is the car unlocked, Mom?”

  “Yes.”

  There were five feet of empty space between us and the car. Its driver’s side faced us, its nose pointed toward the overhead door. Mom always backed in. There were two car doors on our side, front and back. “You take the back seat, I’ll take the front,” I said, soft as I could.

  “I’m driving. You take the back. Ready?”

  I nodded, wondering what this confident, gun-toting fifty-five year old had done with my real mother.

  “I love you and I’m proud of you, Suz.”

  “Love you back, Mom. On three, okay?”

  “Three,” she said. We lunged, took two leaping strides in perfect synch, yanked our respective doors open simultaneously, dove into the car and slammed the doors closed. The things, whatever they were, plastered themselves against the car almost instantly. God, they must’ve been closer than I’d known. I heard the locks snap closed as Mom hit the button. Then she started the engine and flipped on the headlights. And we saw them. The garage was teeming with them. Groaning, they clawed at the car, the whites of their eyes hiding behind bloody spiderwebs. They reacted not at all to the headlights blazing into their faces. Didn’t squint or shield their eyes like you’d expect.

  Mom screamed, and pointed her gun at the thing that was pawing at her window.

  “Don’t shoot don’t shoot!” I cried. “Just drive.” I reached over her shoulder, and slammed the column shift into gear.

  Mom dropped the gun onto the seat beside her, gripped the wheel and hit the gas. Her trusty old woody smashed straight through the bodies of the things, and then through the garage door behind them. She floored it and cranked the wheel to the right, and we fishtailed, then rocketed down our quiet, country road.

  In a few hundred yards, they were behind us, the road was clear. I climbed up into the front seat and picked up my mother’s gun, studying it. I’d never held a gun in my life. I didn’t believe in them.

  “Where are we going?” I asked her.

  “Into the village,” she said. “The police department. It’s the safest place I can think of.” She looked at me briefly. “Unless you have a better idea?”

  “Maybe not better, but definitely more essential. I want to go after Chuck. But...but it might not be safe.”

  “Why not?”

  “Cause most of those...things were at the party. Before whatever happened to them happened to them. And that’s where I last saw him and Sally.”

  She nodded just once. “Then that’s where we have to go.”

  “Mom, I can’t take you there. It might be dangerous.”

  “So then we leave them to the mercy of...whatever this is? No. No, we have to go after them.”

  I stared at my mom for about four seconds. It seemed longer. “You’ve changed since I’ve been away.”

  She ran a hand over her hair. “Covered the gray. Red was my natural color you know. This is a little brighter, but–”

  “You’re stronger than I ever knew, Mom.”

  She smiled. “Given the choice between evolution and extinction, I chose to evolve. Thanks for noticing. Now give me back my gun.” She flipped open the glove compartment, reached inside, and pulled out another one, smaller, but just as shiny. “You can use this one. It’s got a full clip. Just turn off the safety, point, and shoot.”

  I frowned at her. “Why the weaponry, Mom? Why are you suddenly packing more iron than Annie Oakley?” And that’s when I realized that there had to be a reason. “Did something happen since the last time I came home?”

  “Nothing worth mentioning,” she said, and just kept on driving.

  Chapter Three

  My hybrid would never have made it. Mom drove off the road and into the desert toward the cluster of red rocks that had been party central for generations of Bloody Gulch youth for as long as kids had been sneaking booze and cigarettes.

  We came to a stop just outside the circle of boulders and she shut off the headlights. I could see the dying glow of the campfire beyond the rocks, and it gave me hope. Looking around carefully, I whispered, “Stay here, Mom.”

  “We stick together,” she said.

  I nodded. “Tough as you are, I can still move faster on foot. And you might have to come and rescue me. Keep it running, okay? Watch for me. If I need you, I’ll wave my phone in the air with the flashlight app on. Drive to where you see it, and pick me up. Okay?”

  “Be careful.” She picked the gun up off her lap, held it out to me.

  I shook my head. “I’m not sure I can handle one of these things much less two.”

  “I wasn’t suggesting two. Trade with me. This one packs more of a wallop.” She shrugged, leaned in and kissed my face, shoving the gun into my hands as she did. “Safety’s off so keep your finger off the trigger unless you mean it. Just point and squeeze. Now go, hurry up.”

  “All right.” I got out of the car. “Remember to lock the doors until I come running.”

  She nodded. “Go on, already.”

  So I did. I closed the door as silently as possible, heard the locks engage, and then I crept over the desert to the red rocks I so loved. I moved low and fast, looking around me all the time, holding the detested handgun nose up like I’d seen people do on TV. When I reached the first boulder I pressed my back to it, listening, watching behind me. Nothing. And the only thing I heard from the other side of the stones was the soft snapping of the fire.

  I eased around the giant boulder and the circular clearing came into view. Several people lay on the ground around the low burning fire, sleeping soundly. A handful of tents stood on the outer edge of the circle, between the sleepers and the rocks on the far side of the fire from me. I crept around toward them, staying close to the stone sentries, my focus entirely on Chuck’s tent. About five steps in, I heard something coming from inside it. Snuffling sounds.

  Jeeze, was it one of them? In there with my Chuck?

  Jerking the gun’s nose level, I let the silver barrel lead the way nearer, no longer hating the weapon. I was completely ready to use it to blow away anything or anyone who might be hurting him.

  The closer I got, the louder those soft sounds were, and my horror movie-fed mind envisioned a handful of zombies munching on my boyfriend’s brain.

  Stupid. No such things as zombies.

  I held the gun in one hand, glancing behind me. No movement. Everyone asleep. Surely if those things had been here, no one would be lying around sleeping, would they? Maybe the campers who’d changed into monsters had left here first, and encountered whatever disaster had done
this to them, somewhere else.

  The tent flap was unzipped. Good. I could be quieter that way. I curled my hand around it, and lifted it slightly, pointing my gun inside, standing to one side enough so the firelight would illuminate the tent’s interior.

  Chuck sat on the floor, holding Sally in his arms. She was all covered in blood and so was he. God, was he one of those...things? I kept the gun barrel pointed right at him, even knowing I couldn’t shoot him, no matter what.

  “Talk to me, Chuck. Say something.”

  He snapped his head up fast, his eyes flashing...with tears. “Th-they killed her. They killed my sister.”

  I lowered the gun and went to him, fell to my knees and took him by the shoulders. “Are you okay? Are you hurt?”

  “No.” He looked down at his own arms, which were covered in blood. But Sally was worse. Her throat had been torn open. She’d bled out. The evidence was all over the tent, and she was clearly dead. I touched her and her skin was already cooling.

  “Lay her down, Chuck. Lay Sally down for me.”

  Nodding, he lowered his sister onto her blood-drenched sleeping bag and stared at her, unblinking.

  “What happened here?” I asked. I felt like crying too. Sally was my best friend, but I had to get Chuck out of here. And the others, the ones out there sleeping. How the hell was I going to fit them all in Mom’s car? But first things first. “Chuck?” I prompted. “Come on, tell me what happened.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know, some of the people went...they went crazy. Started attacking us. They were biting, clawing...” He met my eyes, his round and horrified. “They were trying to eat us.”

  “I saw them too. They’re overrunning the town. We have to get out of here, Chuck. You understand? We have to get you and everyone else who’s still alive, out of here. Now. Okay?”

  He looked at Sally, wiped his tears with a bloody hand. “It’s just me. No one else.”

  I blinked. “What about everyone outside? Everyone who’s still sleeping...?” I think I knew the truth even as I said the words.