‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s head back.’
Benny Imura looked back at the wrought-iron gates and at the words painted outside. He nodded to himself.
Together they walked through the gathering twilight back to the way station.
THE ZOMBIE WHO FELL FROM THE SKY
BY M. B. HOMLER
In Jesus-like effigy, the body hung impaled upon the spire atop the tallest building in town - city hall. It rested with arms sagging back, legs dangling down, torso firmly rooted in place. When the body landed, there had been a loud shuck and townsfolk in the street felt a fan of light rain - a rain not in the forecast - sprinkle down on top of them. Bespattered with red, they had to admit it was a gruesome landing, maybe a perfect ten in gruesomeness. Slivers of dried flesh floated like confetti in the streets. On a random street corner, an eyeball stared upward. No one got to see it except for a passing Chihuahua, who gobbled it down - with minimal choking and hacking - before his owner could surmise what happened. Most in this small town, unknown for providing entertainment beyond small-time gossip and the occasional affair, were transfixed by the sudden and illogical impaling.
Response on the scene was quick. Cop cars and fire-trucks roared to siren-wailing stops in front of city hall. Due to the graphic nature of the incident, they closed every nearby street to keep bystanders back. Firemen raised the fire ladder out as far as it would go and swung it over to the body, smacking the corpse and sending guts flying. Several firemen went up the ladder and stepped off onto the roof. They looked up at the spire. Walkie-talkies to their mouths, they reported what they saw in detached journalistic fashion. Desiccated body . . . mouth stripped of flesh . . . gums fully exposed . . . lips missing . . . yellow-green teeth filed down . . . a mass of bloody innards, guts and pus oozing . . . freely . . .
When the corpse on the pole twitched, everybody jumped.
They never did get it down. Oh they tried: they pulled and pushed and moved the body up and down the spire - an image reminiscent of firefighters running back and forth with a safety net trying to catch a threatening jumper - but they could not get it off. After putting in a great many hours, they gave up, let the corpse slide back down, and left it there. Thump. Their attitude was fuck it. The mayor’s attitude was fuck it. Let rigor mortis and the flesh-eating maggots and buzzards of the world take care of it!
So that’s what they did, and though many townsfolk claimed to have seen the body twitching, as if the crows were taking to it - their wish fulfilled - this unfortunately was not the case. The crows would go nowhere near it. They remained far away and aloof on a telephone wire.
Scared? They might have been.
Danny McDanielson worked as a short-order cook in the diner down the street from city hall. Being a short-order cook meant that no one took him seriously, and while he tried to pretend it didn’t bother him, it did. A young poet, not bad looking, with Johnny Depp hair that he was always peeking out from under, he struggled to keep his burgeoning feelings of inadequacy to himself. When the corpse had fallen from the sky, Danny was one of the few people unable to rush out and gawk. His girlfriend of the last three years, Jennifer Bugles, the same one that fawned over his morbid poetry and tousled his scarecrow mane of hair to no end, had been in the process of breaking up with him. She didn’t know why; it seemed like the right thing to do.
‘Hey, Danny. You know that screen that appears at the end of Ms Pac Man when you die?’
‘Yeah.’
‘It’s Game Over for us.’
‘Why?’
‘If you have to ask, I can’t tell you.’
‘What?’
‘Are you trying to make this difficult?’
‘Huh?’
‘Oh gee, right, Danny. You know what? Screw you. I’m out of here.’
Hurt, stunned, Danny didn’t know what to say. But there was not much he could say when Jennifer came back into the diner minutes later with her new beau, Trevor Moses, a dude who had patches of facial hair, piercings, and tattoos. Danny could hardly stomach the image of Jennifer standing there slightly bent at the hips while this man thumbed the G-string poking out of her jeans shorts. He would never forget the smug grin on Trevor’s face either. It was as if a gold tooth were glinting at him. ‘What are you looking at, geekazoid?’ Danny withdrew to the kitchen and tried to let it all fade to black.
The diner was empty this early evening. Danny was feeling tired. It was hot in the kitchen and hot outside. Perspiration dripped from his face, horseshoed the pits under his T-shirt and at the small of his back. With Charlene Guttersnipe, his demanding boss, out on an errand, he decided to take a break. Normally he would go out the back door and sit on the stoop wishing that he were a smoker, but he wasn’t. Instead he took his note - pad and pencil outside. He often used this notepad to draw pictures and work on turns of phrases, however unlikely they might be.
He sat on the stoop trying to think, but nothing came to him. He had heard some of the talk about the body that landed on the spire, and now that hours had passed and everyone had forgotten about it - that was how this town was - this was his opportunity to go see it. He was curious. With his apron still on, he walked the several blocks to city hall. There, he squinted up at the spire. The glare of the sun sawed his eyes. He couldn’t see. He needed to get closer.
Using the emergency stairs inside city hall, he walked to the roof. When he first came through the door, his hand went to his mouth and he muttered, ‘For shit sakes!’ Once the initial shock passed, he took it in, drank it down like cold water. It was an amazing sight. On his notepad, he began to sketch the head, with words percolating in his own: The creature, not a person, limbs shambling and pale. The more he stared at it, the more entranced he grew. And for some ugly reason he kept seeing Jennifer’s face appear in front of him. Could he not escape this girl? Even in the presence of this hideous sight, he still found himself thinking of her.
When he realized how late it was, the trance wore off. He had taken too long of a break and strayed far from the diner. He hurried, thoughts racing with his legs, and as he was departing, taking that first couple of steps, he swore he saw the body twitch. Unsure, he looked back, stared, and nothing. The wind picked up. He shook his head. It couldn’t have been. Just a creepy thought.
On his hurried return, he wondered why the town seemed okay with this body up there. It didn’t strike him as normal, as practical, as something everyone should be okay with. Even for them.
Charlene, a tomato-bottomed woman who often walked around with her hands on her hips, was waiting for him when he got back. Her lacquered nails tip-tapped on her hip as her tongue clucked at the top of her mouth. The frown she wore on her face was orgasm by expression but lacking all pleasure.
‘Where have you been? I’ve got customers here trying to eat and no cook to make the food!’
‘Sorry . . . I went for a walk.’
‘Would that be a walk of leisure or away from your job? Next time you decide to pitter-patter off, do so on your own time. This is a business I run, not a support center for retards that can cook.’
She turned to the customers, the two people that were seated there, apologized to them for the lateness of the food, and declared that the food would be free, meaning that it would be paid for out of Danny’s salary.
Danny went back into the kitchen and picked up the orders. Though he was supposed to be cooking, he couldn’t get his mind off the body sitting atop city hall. Something was nagging at him, and it wasn’t Charlene . . .
When he returned home that evening, all he wanted to do was relax, sit on the couch, veg out, consider the frat house-party-mess his life had become. Sitting there, eating sardines out of a can, staring at his barely reception-worthy TV, he could think of nothing more than how angry Jennifer had made him. He thought if he could get even with her, it would make him feel better, but really, he just wanted her back.
The local news was advertising top stories to come. The redheaded newscaster Terra
Gerstner gave the highlights: ‘Bear Mauls Teens Having Sex’ and ‘Toupee Injures Construction Worker in Rare Scalping’ and ‘Man Cooking Weiner-Dogs at County Fair Burns His Britches’ and ‘Airplanes Disappear in New Bermuda Triangle’.
Danny’s notepad lay on the coffee table. And while watching TV like this was supposed to be the life, he spent the time pissed off. Fortuitously, his brooding abruptly ended when the doorbell rang. He didn’t get visitors, didn’t have friends, and there wasn’t a chance that Jennifer could have dropped by - or was there? He went to the door and looked out the peephole. No one was there. Was it someone playing a game? The doorbell rang again. He looked again. No one.
‘Who is it?’
He heard something in response but wasn’t sure what it was. Some kind of moan or grunt. Frustrated, annoyed, he grabbed the knob and flung the door open. To his shock and surprise, Jennifer stood before him.
‘Jennifer?’ he said, with a sneer of disgust but also maybe a hint of hurt. ‘Why are you here?’
She didn’t say anything. He turned his back and went inside and left the door open. Hadn’t everything been bad enough? Now he had to deal with this. Her here. Here to talk. Talk about what?
When he realized that she hadn’t said anything, he turned back around. She still stood in the doorway.
‘Well. Aren’t you going to come in?’
For the first time, under the porch light, he noticed something was off.
‘Are you okay—?’
‘The plague . . . has come.’ She said this almost as if she were a lizard, hissing it out.
‘What the—?’
She was stooped and haggard-looking in a way he had never seen her. Sure, sometimes he thought she wasn’t as pretty without the make-up, but good God, was that her upper lip curled into a rictus snarl? And her hair was standing on end as if electrified. Her face bore a grey hue to it that seemed to be darkening the closer she got. He looked at her breasts. What the hell had happened to her breasts? They had shrunk and were poking through her T-shirt like tree branches and not mounds of flesh.
‘It has . . .’
She didn’t finish the thought, and Danny could see why when part of her brain slid out of her nose.
She came at him moaning. He tried to reason with her, but she rammed him against the arm of the couch. He noticed the eyes - yellow, evil-looking, disturbed. And teeth - crooked, filed down to slivers. She scratched at his face. She tried to bite him. He grabbed a glass off the kitchen table and smashed it against her head. He winced, fearing that he had hurt her. She gave no reaction, came after him again. He grabbed a pen - the only thing near at hand - and made for the door, but she grabbed his foot, pulled him toward her. She lifted him into the air and held him up by his ankle. Where did she get the strength? He couldn’t believe this was happening. When he glanced up her nose, he saw what looked to be vermicules crawling around inside and lost his shit. He brandished the pen, swung his body up, and drove the pen into the side of her eye with such force that it popped out through the socket of the other eye, sending the two eyeballs toppling to the floor.1
She dropped him on his head.
Then she staggered back, screeched like a Poe raven, and blood jetted, spraying indecipherable graffiti around his apartment. He started to see words in the splatterings . . . until he came to his senses and realized that he was lucky to escape with his life. Then reality hit him. He had killed his ex-girlfriend.
He threw up on the carpet.
Before the menace fell from the sky and landed in the center of town, far away in an undisclosed location worked a scientist named Dr Parkingapp. He was part of an elite team of scientists perfecting the supersoldier serum for the United States government, codenamed Project Captain America. He believed, after years of research and thousands of hours of tests - measured out in the lives of a billion mice, along with perpetual graphing and calculating at the expense of tax-payer dollars - that he had finally discovered what would make it work. This so-called working serum he had poured into a single test tube, and now he looked upon it with glee. The government, however, didn’t share in his glee and was talking about cutting his funding so that they could build a rumored weapon, the Earth bomb, which no one would talk about at length except to say that it was a destroyer of worlds and could one day be used against the threat of alien invasion, in case aliens were real.
Not wanting to lose his funding, Dr Parkingapp was eager to test the formula. But since he had no more mice to destroy - he had tested the mice that had been injected with his formulas by seeing if they could withstand conditions of extreme heat, and if they could, that meant that the formula worked2 - it was time for him to use it on himself.
With his stereo cranked to full, he stood with his legs spread and pointed to an imaginary crowd while holding a liquid-filled test tube in hand. Springsteen’s ‘Born in the USA’ rocked his loudspeakers. He sang along in a punched-testicle falsetto, using the test tube as a microphone. When he broke into a dance step, he accidentally tripped and spilled a drop of serum on the tip of his shoe. It was more acidic than he thought. It ate through his shoe and into his foot.
‘Ah, shit. I fucked up. Oh, my god, I fucked up. Holy crap it burns!’
His screams of agony were drowned out by the music.
Danny grabbed his notepad and ran from the house, leaving the door wide open. He ran down the street in a state of panic. He had killed the only woman he had ever loved. It was awful, horrendous. He felt hideous.
After a while he stopped running to catch his breath and try to get hold of his emotions, which seemed to be overpowering him with grief. Despite the obvious signs that Jennifer had contracted some terrible sickness, he was convinced it was his fault. He looked around town and saw the street where they had walked hand in hand for the first time. There was part of a fuselage on the sidewalk. He didn’t notice that. It was unfortunate that he focused only on his own grief, because if he had stopped to turn around before running off, he would have seen Jennifer sit back up on the floor of his home and say, ‘Rreor.’
Exhausted, Danny found a light pole on a street corner to rest against. From this vantage point, he surveyed the downtown area. It seemed normal, at first glance. Then he spotted the plane wing sitting in the road. There was an alarm going off at the local bank. Screams of terror. People running. The cops were on the scene, only they didn’t seem to be doing anything. They were standing around. Danny didn’t know what to do. Cops? What if they were looking for him? He was a murderer now. He was trying to save his life, but was it worth it? Maybe he should have let her kill him; maybe he deserved that, but . . . what was going on? This scene didn’t seem right. He moved in closer, finding some of his energy coming back to him. He looked at the back of a plane engine lying in the street. There were feet sticking out from under it.
Oh, my God!
One of the officers was swaying back and forth as if he were a leaf being pushed by the wind. When Danny got two steps closer, all of that changed. The officer turned around. He looked as if he had been buried underground for the past nine weeks and had somehow come unearthed. He let out a sound somewhere between a murmur and a roar. Danny looked past the man-thing and saw that the screaming inside the bank was no longer going on and that there were more of these moaning and groaning man-things coming out of the bank. He backed up, shaking his head in disbelief.
A bony hand fell on his shoulder, and an inhuman voice hissed in his ear: ‘I likey . . . fresh . . . meeeeat.’
Danny jumped, pulled at the arm, and felt it give. Next thing he knew he was running down the street with someone’s arm in his hand, the body that it belonged to far behind him. He ducked around a corner and winged the arm on the ground in disgust. When he saw it move, he stomped on it and booted it away. He was breathing hard. It wasn’t just Jennifer any more. It was the entire town.
‘Jesus Christ.’
He looked toward city hall, where the impaled body hung, roasting in the sinking sun. H
e thought he saw it twitch.
Did he? Yup. He did.
‘Jesus Christ!’
Dr Parkingapp was no longer coherent. Placed in a straitjacket, he was bounding up and down and cackling like a madman, swinging his shoulders into the soldiers that had been brought in to restrain him. General Deaconheinz, a tall swarthy man with a handlebar mustache, stood there grinning wildly. His unit commander was at his side, fussing with his nose, attempting not to appear as if he was picking it, although that was exactly what he was doing.
‘This is the greatest day in our nation’s history.’
‘Sir, I don’t understand, the supersoldier serum was a failure.’
‘No, it wasn’t a failure. It just wasn’t a supersoldier serum.’
‘Sir?’
‘It’s classified. But let me put it to you this way: he wasn’t working on a supersoldier serum. That’s a load of hokum from the comic books. You’d have to be pretty stupid to believe he was working on that. That’s the brilliant thing about these genius scientist types. They’re smart enough to make discoveries but dumb enough to misunderstand what they’re discovering. Soldier, he was developing a very dangerous biological weapon.’
The New Dead: A Zombie Anthology Page 24
