The New Dead: A Zombie Anthology

by Christopher Golden

  Corporal Massa was about to fire when Danny pushed the barrel of the gun down. The sergeant and the corporal looked at him as if he had gone out of his mind. Insanity seemed a logical response to what they were dealing with. Danny walked closer to the zombie, watching it gather speed through its motions. He drew closer. And closer. Fascinated. The zombie turned his head and his arms and legs stopped moving. He stared at Danny. Then he tried to look down, and Danny did the same. The zombie began to move animatedly once more, fresh guts vomiting from the hole in his body. When Danny looked into the street below, he saw the zombies had stopped and started moving again. It clicked for him, like rocket science.

  ‘It’s controlling them. He’s the one.’

  ‘We know,’ said the corporal, raising his gun. ‘That’s why we’re here to kill it. He’s a hive-ass motherfucker. Mission: kill him so bad he remembers his death for the rest of his life. With honey and fucking flies on top. Cover your ears.’

  Cover your ears! Familiar words. Jennifer used to say just that before orgasm, warning him how loud she was going to scream. She knew it embarrassed him. What if this zombie were Jennifer, or someone else? It would have family, loved ones . . .

  ‘You can’t.’

  ‘What? What am I supposed to do?’

  ‘I don’t know. I mean, he was probably like you or me at one time, and then . . . this happened . . . He crashes to Earth, and finds himself stuck on this . . . this spire . . . and he can’t get free . . . So he calls in his minions to come together and free him from his suffering, but they’re so stupid they can’t figure out where he is. Plus, he may not be such a bad guy.’

  ‘You make him sound almost human,’ said the sergeant.

  ‘He is kind of human.’

  ‘So. What’s his name?’

  ‘Does he have to have a name?’

  ‘He’s got to have a name.’

  ‘Maybe it’s Dave.’

  ‘Dave? Fuck Dave.’

  ‘Roger?’

  ‘Fuck him too.’

  ‘G?’

  ‘Whaaat?’

  ‘Just the letter, like a rapper.’

  ‘Stupid!’

  Danny sighed. ‘No Dave, no Roger, no G. Fine, you suggest.’

  ‘How about Syphilis? He looks like a disease, and he looks like a cock. It’s perfect!’

  The soldiers high-fived, laughed.

  ‘Well. I still don’t think you should kill it.’

  ‘What should we do with it, poet-boy? Hold its hand and say a prayer? They’re killing the whole town. Everyone.’

  He socked the zombie in the face with the butt of his gun. The dead man stopped moving, blood gushing. Then he started moving again. His nose fell off. The dog set to it and swallowed. Better than the eye he ate earlier, but not as salty. He needed salt. And water. He was dehydrated.

  ‘He just wants to get down. Can you blame him?’

  ‘Yeah? I think you are being a sympathizer. That’s a fucking zombie. You can’t sympathize with something that doesn’t have any brains. Everyone in this country wants to sympathize with something. They protest the environment, animal rights . . . but I’m in the army because I don’t want to protest. I want to kill people, as many as I can. I consider it a privilege. Stand aside and let me do my job.’

  ‘Hold on. If you were impaled and were dead and still alive, you’d probably be angry about it. It’s a Promethean dilemma. That’s sad, don’t you think?’

  Corporal Massa thought on it, nodded.

  ‘Guess . . . you have a point. I was a poor student in school and probably shouldn’t be doing the thinking around here. Just from a human standpoint, I certainly wouldn’t want no thing poking through my abdomen like that.’

  ‘Dude, it’s like he got stabbed with a giant phallus. Not a fun way to go.’ This was Sergeant Resnick.

  ‘What do we do when he gets off the spire?’ asked Corporal Massa.

  ‘Don’t know,’ said Danny. ‘Let’s work on getting it off first. Worry about the rest later.’

  ‘Sounds like a plan, Douche-Nuts.’

  Down in the stairwell, next to the fire extinguisher, there was an axe. The sergeant pulled it out of the glass and came back upstairs. He raised it above his head. Then he began chopping the bottom of the spire, below where the zombie was impaled. He chopped and chopped and chopped. He had to stop to wipe his brow, at which point Danny blurted out, ‘Sympathy!’

  ‘What?’ the two soldiers said together. And then, ‘What’s he babbling about?’

  ‘Beats me, dude.’

  ‘You said I was being sympathetic,’ said Danny, ‘so let’s call him Sympathy.’

  The two soldiers looked at one another. Corporal Massa shrugged, took the axe from Sergeant Resnick, and then hefted it above his head. He muttered under his breath as he chopped. Finally the spire split, and with a size-fourteen boot to the pole, it tilted. The zombie flailed as the spire toppled. After a bit, he began to do his little dead dance, shimmying along the spire to release himself. When he wobbled to his feet, green gunk spewed from the hole in his midsection and his mouthless visage rocked up and down. Danny looked down to the street below. Zombie activity was slowing.

  ‘You see, all he wanted was for someone to set him free.’

  The zombie danced.

  ‘Now what’s he doing, Douche-Nuts? Moonwalking?’ The zombie walked to the edge of the building, moving like he had ungainly hooves instead of feet. He fell off the roof. Whiff. The three of them stood over the edge looking down. The zombie was splayed in the street, arms and legs unmoving, brains seeping into a gutter. Danny wondered if zombies ever ran out of leaking brains. Seemed a reasonable curiosity.

  After a while, an arm began to twitch and then a leg. The zombie began to move again. Shakily getting to his feet. Stumble-walking away.

  The transformation was nearly complete. As his body fell through the sky, plummeting like a fallen angel, fragments of past memories drifted through his head at a rate commensurate with that of the diseased flesh peeling off his body during its rapid descent.6 This memory had to do with General Deaconheinz - that man he had bit the ear and neck flesh off of and gargled down like mouthwash before something had propelled him out of the plane - coming to visit him in his laboratory. They were shoring up details about the project he was going to be working on for the government.

  ‘If you do this, you’ll be handsomely rewarded. The government will see to that. We will provide you with whatever you need.’

  ‘Whatever?’

  ‘Whatever you need. It is yours.’

  Dr Parkingapp looked at his pin-up calendar on the wall. Miss July was a sultry vixen from somewhere in small-town America.

  ‘Well, sometimes, as a scientist, I get kind of lonely. Do you think you can get me Miss July?’

  The general walked over to the calendar and flipped up a few pages and then let them fall. He looked at Dr Parkingapp, sizing him up.

  ‘I’m not dragging the United States military through the muck for something as silly as a pin-up girl. You want to get one, use the money we pay you to make it happen. You can have all the whores you want. But somewhere along the way, we have to draw the line, and I’m drawing the line there. You geeky scientist types just don’t know anything about women. And by the way, I’ve read your file, Dr Parkingapp. I know about the underage girls you smuggled in from Taiwan.’

  ‘Okay, okay. I was just asking.’

  ‘Do you want the job or not?’

  ‘Oh, I want it; I definitely want it.’

  He looked over at the calendar, down at the bottom where it had the facsimile signature: XXO, Jennifer Bugles.

  Danny, the two soldiers, and the dog raced downstairs.

  ‘Tell them not to shoot,’ said Danny to the soldiers.

  They radioed ahead on their walkie-talkies. When the soldiers stopped firing, they noticed that the zombies were all collapsing to the ground. They looked around, confused. It was puzzling.

  Sympathy stumb
led his way through town, the same town, which he would soon leave, taking the population along with him, dragging his dead foot and heaving his aging-beyond-reason body forward. Others followed, but what bothered Danny most, though surely this didn’t bother anyone else, was that he spotted Jennifer in the street going that way too. Zombie or not, she still upset him. He ran to intercept her. He knew that she couldn’t think, that she wasn’t herself. What if he offered himself to her? Just a nibble, that’s all it’d take, and he could be a zombie along with her. But he pulled up, watching her shamble past.

  With a heavy heart, he let her go, like dropping a caught fish back into the water. What choice did he have?

  The zombie fell from the sky,

  Bits and pieces,

  Disintegrating upon descent.

  Limbs shambling and pale,

  Who knew what trouble he would cause?

  Only some - a dog and a Danny.

  And like Jesus upon the cross,

  He found his disciples.

  A town rent asunder,

  A young man’s heart crushed,

  Like dying yellow embers,

  A plague had come . . .

  Fetid and meat-hardy,

  Promethean in disaster,

  An unfeeling man’s fate,

  Government put- on,

  And a poet with trace amounts of . . .

  Sympathy . . .

  For a zombie that fell from the sky.

  MY DOLLY

  BY DEREK NIKITAS

  It was high time for me to fetch frozen Dolly from the butcher shop, but even in an ambulance the drive was rough, it being the Apocalypse out. This girl was too young to be called Dolly, just a teenager, but I named her Dolly because I liked the Golden Oldies, grassroots sheen of it. See, Dolly was dead, and along with the rest of her scrubbed memory, she lost whatever dull moniker her parents had imposed on her. It would be a new dawn for Dolly when I came to her rescue.

  En route I kept the siren wailing. The sound bounced off the coastal pines, stripped bare of branches up to the top ten feet. The only cars left on this woodsy backroad were the few stalled in pine-straw beds, so it wasn’t traffic but crickets and cicadas that impeded my progress.

  Great hordes of them crackled in the air like static, kamikaze-bombing the windshield until it was framed with thick bug juice in the corners where the wipers couldn’t reach. A million wings and limbs twitched in my sight line, and when the road curved, my back tyres jackknifed across fresh slicks of crushed bugs on the pavement. There was no speed limit, since all the road signs were mucked with pestilence. I couldn’t drive through these conditions without a permanent grimace, and my leather-gloved hands cramped from their grip on the steering wheel.

  Milo’s Specialty Meats was a clapboard roadside dive with gravel and dead bugs for a parking lot. This far out, the bug hordes receded a bit. I could even read the street signs, like the hurricane-evac-route marker, blue circle with white swirl icon, the eye of the storm. My coordinates were two miles inland, or thereabouts, as the Atlantic was lately taking bigger breaths, sucking back beaches and piers, blowing down boardwalks.

  I parked and flicked off the siren and threw on my beekeeper’s hat, tucking the netting into the collar of my shirt. I’d dressed for the occasion in a dark blue blazer, light blue shirt, and a nice silk necktie. I’d shaved for the first time in weeks.

  The sign in Milo’s entranceway read closed, but I knew I was welcome anytime. Driver’s door open, a few stray cicadas attached themselves to my lapel and stared at me with their fire eyes. The woods sang the chorus of a thousand one-note lovesongs, so I whistled along as I pulled open the ambulance hatch doors.

  A cold white mist billowed inside. The open boxes stacked along the floor beside the stretcher were filled with hundreds of dry- ice blocks. I inhaled the chilled, thin air. I grabbed the stretcher, slid it out while the rails unfolded and the wheels touched ground. A half dozen cicadas and crickets instantly polluted the sheet’s pristine whiteness with their dull armored bodies. That incessant insect buzz burrowed inside me, deep in my chest, and turned almost pleasant, the hum of anticipation.

  I pulled the stretcher across the lot, and it jostled over the rugged rock. The store’s glass entrance did not give way when I shoved my shoulder against it, so I bellowed, ‘Milo!’ He had to be inside the shop because his pickup was parked in the side yard. I rapped both fists against the glass and called him out again.

  A cartoon pig was sketched in wax pencil on the display window. ‘I’ll huff and I’ll puff,’ I muttered, looking for a softball-size rock to throw. I worried that Milo and his bearded Czech heifer of a wife had abandoned their only livelihood on account of a few rainstorms and some insects, but they had electricity and generators, enough dried meat and imported beers to last months. They had nowhere better to go.

  Over by the gutter spout I found a nice granite chunk and reared back, hoisting it over my shoulder like a quarterback plotting a twenty-yard pass. My best hurl didn’t penetrate the glass, but it burst a spiderweb of cracks across the topmost pane in the entrance door.

  A small helicopter of a bug buzzed past my ear. I heard a lock slide open, and there was Milo’s furious wife filling up the doorway, filling out an unflattering, sheer pink nightgown. She held one arm across her breasts to spare us both the shame.

  ‘You break window, crazy fuckmother! Go away from here,’ she told me.

  ‘I’m here to get Dolly,’ I said.

  She eyeballed the stretcher, the ambulance. ‘Closed!’ she grunted.

  ‘Hold on - is Milo—’

  ‘Closed!’

  ‘My name is Renfroe. Milo told me to—’

  ‘Closed for permanent! No meat!’ She slammed the door shut to prove her point, and the top glass panel rained down in shards onto the cement slab below. After a moment, her face loomed in the horse door she’d created. Her hair was short on the sides, but six inches of tight black coils were piled on top, redolent of some particularly nasty wild mushroom. ‘Shit now!’ she barked.

  I reached into my pocket and pulled out a money clip, wagged it at her. I tore off my beekeeper getup, showed her my sincerest expression, and said, ‘There’s a deceased girl in your meat locker, and I’m here to take her away from you. Milo and I arranged it, and I’ve got five hundred dollars right here for payment.’

  ‘Milos, he is dead from heart attack. One week past.’

  ‘By God, I’m sorry,’ I said. Then, after a solemn few seconds I added, ‘Can I talk to him anyway?’

  ‘He has no remember.’

  The bugs were all over my face, in my hair. I squinted to keep them from landing in my eyes, but I held my ground and made a wide fan of that money so ‘Grunta’ could get a good whiff of it. I forgot her name, but Grunta got the gist.

  ‘You come help me fix hole,’ Grunta demanded.

  ‘Can you tell me, is the girl still here?’

  ‘Fix hole now, headshit!’

  I tossed my beekeeper bonnet onto the cot and scrambled inside, lugging the stretcher behind me. Close up, Grunta smelled like pepperoni. She pointed to a stack of plywood boards atop the empty glass case that once enshrined the choicest meats.

  ‘I get hammer,’ Grunta said. She waddled into the back room while I hoisted up a plywood slab large enough to cover the missing pane. I pressed it against the opening and waited. A calico cat appeared from some hiding spot and leaped up onto the glass case. It was stalking a beetle, bobbing its head to the rhythm of the beetle’s stumbling buzz. I made kissing sounds at it, but the cat ignored me, as cats are wont to do.

  Grunta hurried back into the storefront with the hammer raised in striking position, a dozen nails jutting head-outward from her pursed lips. She fastened the board I held to the doorframe with nails she plucked from her mouth. The loose flesh on her arm seemed to pucker up nicely as she worked. She had to be two feet shorter than me, twice as big around.

  ‘No bugs!’ she coughed, expelling the last coupl
e nails. She hammered a cricket that had landed on the wall beside a tacked-up poster of Prague’s Charles Bridge and its promenade of life-size saint statues. ‘You here for dead girl in freezer?’ Her nostrils flared when she spoke.

  ‘Yes, Milo and I agreed to a five-hundred-dollar fee for—’

  ‘Milos is dead! He remembers nothing. I say seven-fifty. ’