The New Dead: A Zombie Anthology

by Christopher Golden

  ‘Tell Jenkins he’s getting sloppy,’ he said. ‘I can’t imagine you giving him a night off in the old days without finishing the cleaning. Looks like he hasn’t dusted in weeks.’

  ‘I’ll tell him,’ said his godfather. ‘Go on, go on. I’ll see you very soon.’

  But Nightingale did not go through the doorway. Instead, he turned and slowly walked back into the room. ‘Uncle Edward,’ he said. ‘Are you certain you’re going to be all right? I mean, the power’s still off. You can’t breathe without your ventilator.’

  ‘The generator can run for hours and hours. It’ll shut itself off when the regular power comes back.’ He waved his hand testily. ‘Go on, Nate. I’m fine.’

  ‘But the strange thing,’ said Nightingale, ‘is that when the generator came on half an hour ago, the ventilator didn’t. There must be something wrong with it.’

  Arvedson went very still. ‘What . . . what are you talking about?’

  ‘Here. Look, the little lights on it never came back on, either. Your ventilator’s off.’

  The room suddenly seemed very quiet, nothing but the distant sound of cars splashing along out on Jones Street, distant as the moon.

  ‘What happened to Edward?’

  The old man looked surprised. ‘I don’t . . . Nate, what are you saying . . .?’

  The gun was out of Nightingale’s coat and into his hand so quickly it might have simply appeared there. He leveled it at a spot between the old man’s two bushy white eyebrows. ‘I asked you what happened to Edward - the real Edward Arvedson. I’m only going to ask this once more. I swear I’ll kill him before I let you have his body, and I’m betting you can’t pull your little possession trick again on a full-grown, healthy man like me - especially not before I can pull the trigger.’

  Even in the half- light of the desk lamp, the change was a fearful one: Edward Arvedson’s wrinkled features did not alter in any great way, but something moved beneath the muscles and skin like a light-shunning creature burrowing through the dark earth. The eyes fixed on his. Although the face was still Edward’s, somehow it no longer looked much like him. ‘You’re a clever boy, Nightingale,’ said the stranger in his godfather’s body. ‘I should have noticed the ventilator never came back on, but as you’ve guessed, this sack of meat no longer has a breathing problem. In fact, it no longer needs to breathe at all.’

  ‘What’s happened to him?’ The gun stayed trained on the spot between the old man’s eyes. ‘Talk fast.’

  A slow, cold smile stretched the lips. ‘That is not for me to say, but rather it is between him and his god. Perhaps he is strumming a harp with the other angels now . . . or writhing and shrieking in the deepest pits . . .’

  ‘Bastard!’ Nightingale pulled back the trigger with his thumb. ‘You lie! He’s in there with you. And I know a dozen people who can make you jump right the hell back out.’

  The thing shook its head. ‘Oh, Mr Nightingale, you’ve been playing the occult detective so long, you’ve come to believe you’re really in a story - and that it will have a happy ending. We didn’t learn new ways to possess the living.’ The smile returned, mocking and triumphant. ‘We have learned how to move into the bodies of the recently dead. Quite a breakthrough. It’s much, much easier than possession, and we cannot be evicted, because the prior tenant . . . is gone. Your Uncle Edward had a stroke, you see. We waited all around him as he died. Oh, and believe me, we told him over and over what we would do, including this moment. Like you, he caused us a great deal of trouble over the years - and as you know, we dead have long memories. And when he was beyond our torments at last, well, this body was ours. Already my essence has strengthened it. It does not need to breathe, and as you can see . . .’ The thing rose from the wheelchair with imperial calm and stood without wavering. Nightingale backed off a few steps, keeping the gun high. ‘. . . it no longer needs assistance to get around, either,’ the thing finished. ‘I feel certain I’ll get years of use out of it before I have to seek another - time enough to contact and betray all of the rest of Edward Arvedson’s old friends.’

  ‘Who are you?’ Nightingale fought against a despair that buffeted him like a cold wind. ‘Oh, for the love of God, what do you monsters want?’

  ‘Who am I? Just one of the hungry ones. One of the unforgiving.’ It sat down again, making the wheelchair creak. ‘What do we want? Not to go quietly, as you would have us go - to disappear into the shadows of nonexistence and leave the rest of you to enjoy the light and warmth.’ The thing lifted its knotted hands - Edward’s hands, as they had seemed such a short time ago - in a greedy gesture of seizure. ‘As you said, this is a war. We want what you have.’ It laughed, and for the first time the voice sounded nothing at all like his godfather’s familiar tones. ‘And we are going take it from you. All of you.’

  ‘I don’t think so. Because if you need bodies to survive here, then those bodies can be taken back from you.’ And even as Nightingale spoke, his gun flashed and roared, and the thing in his godfather’s shape staggered and fell back against the wheelchair cushions, chin on chest. A moment later the so- familiar face came up again. Smiling.

  ‘Jenkins,’ it said. ‘If you would be so kind . . .’ Something knocked the gun from Nightingale’s hand, and then an arm like an iron bar slammed against his neck. He fought, but it was like being held by a full-grown gorilla. His struggles only allowed him to slide around enough in his captor’s grip to see Jenkins’s blank eyes and the huge hole in the side of the caretaker’s head crusted with bits of bone and dried tissue.

  ‘I lied about giving him the night off,’ said the pseudo-Edward. ‘The living get impatient, but my colleague who inhabits him now was perfectly willing to stand in the dark until I needed him.’ Now Arvedson’s body stood again, brushing at its clothes; the hole Nightingale’s gunshot had made in its shirt was bloodless. ‘Bullets are a poor weapon against the risen dead, Nightingale,’ it pointed out with no little satisfaction. ‘You could burn the body, I suppose, or literally pulverize it, and there would be nothing left for us to inhabit. But of course, you will not get the chance to tell anyone about that.’

  ‘Bastards!’ He struggled helplessly against the Jenkins-thing’s grip. ‘Even if you kill me, there are hundreds more like me out there. They’ll stop you!’

  ‘We will meet them all, I’m sure,’ said his godfather’s body. ‘You will introduce us - or at least the new resident of your corpse will. And one by one, we will remove them. The dead will live, with all the power of age and riches and secrecy, and the rest of your kind will be our uncomprehending cattle, left alive only to breed more bodies for us. Your driver was right, Mr Nightingale: the storm door really is open now. And no power on this Earth can shut it.’

  Nightingale tried to say something else then, shout some last words of defiance, but the pressure on his neck was crushingly strong, and the lights of the world - the lamp, the headlights passing in the street below, even the storm-shrouded stars beyond the window - had begun leaching away into utter darkness.

  His last sight was of the cold, hungry things that had been hiding behind that darkness, hiding and waiting and hating the living for so long, as they hurried toward him to feed.

  KIDS AND THEIR TOYS

  BY JAMES A. MOORE

  Of course they poked it with a stick. What else would twelve-year-olds do with a freshly discovered corpse? Later, when the fascination was fading, they would do what they were supposed to do and tell the police about the body, but then, at that first moment of discovery, they had a new toy and it had to be carefully examined before it could be given away.

  They probably would have called the police, too. Certainly that was part of the unspoken agreement between them, but then their new toy moved and all of the rules changed.

  ‘Fuck me, Freddie, are you serious?’ Tom’s voice broke as the dead man moaned and turned its head in the summer heat. They were all so shocked that no one called him on dropping the f-bomb.

  Every last o
ne of them saw the motion and heard the noise. They were all watching when the neck muscles shifted and the head rolled unevenly. The face of the dead man was revealed. He was no one they had ever seen before, and maybe that fact helped add to the madness of the moment, or maybe it was simply that at twelve years of age they had so little in the world that could truly be called theirs.

  Jack glanced about, checking to see if there were any grown-ups around. He couldn’t decide if the lack of them made him happy or worried him sick. They were near the old quarry at the edge of his granddad’s property. None of them were supposed to go swimming at the quarry, but that had never stopped anyone before. You leave a perfectly good lake’s worth of water in a convenient spot and add in the summer heat, and the next thing you know, there’s a new swimming hole. The big bonus was that Grandpa Murphy was too old to come check on them much.

  None of them knew why a man was lying dead on the ground, but it didn’t look like he’d been murdered or anything. He was just lying there, grey and a little bloated, and there they were and there he was, and of course there were sticks nearby. Charlie had learned for them that you should always use a stick to poke dead things. A couple of years earlier, when he’d found a dead pigeon on the ground, he’d scooped it up and run all the way to the fort before anyone else got there. Charlie had allergies something fierce, and he hadn’t even smelled the bird’s rot. The others sure did though, which was why he still had to deal with the nickname Skunk. No amount of washing would get rid of the stink on him until he went home and took a real bath, and none of them saw any reason not to pick on him about it. You do stupid things and you have to pay the price. That was one of the simple rules that dictated their lives.

  The thing tried to sit up, and Tom jabbed the stick into its shoulder and pushed as hard as he could. It let out another bleating noise and fell back, struggling feebly as its milky eyes rolled in its leaking head. The halo of flies around it buzzed harder for a moment and then settled down onto their latest meal again.

  Tom laughed. ‘That’s sick, dude.’

  Charlie nodded his head and licked his thick lips. Charlie had a sister two years older than any of them, and it was agreed that the features that made him look like a fish made her look like a pin-up girl. It was weird how that sort of thing worked. Jack cleared his throat and looked around again. ‘Should we call someone?’ He hated to ask, of course, because he knew everyone would look at him funny.

  Tom sneered. Tom liked to sneer. He was a dick sometimes. ‘You crazy? We have to see what this is all about.’

  ‘Well, I mean, is he really dead? Or is he just sick?’ He pointed at the dead thing, which seemed to be getting stronger. ‘Cuz if he’s just sick, we could get in some deep shit.’ He knew about that sort of thing, of course. His brother Steve was over in Iraq, and there were all sorts of stories about what happened to prisoners over there. Sometimes when they weren’t treated right, the soldiers who were watching them got in deep trouble. Sometimes they wound up in jail. It hadn’t happened to Steve, of course, because Steve was one of the good guys, but a few of the guys he knew over in Iraq had gotten into some serious shit.

  ‘Dude, he’s a zombie.’ Tom scowled and poked hard enough with the stick to tear the fabric of the shirt over the dead man’s chest. The skin under that was soft, and something wet and black leaked out and stained the shirt’s light-blue threads a dark grey. Tom shook his head. ‘If he’s alive, I’ll kiss Skunk on the mouth.’

  ‘Zombies are real?’ That was José, who was only eleven, but cool enough that he got to hang out with them anyway.

  Jack looked from the dead man to José. ‘Guess they have to be. I mean, we got one right here, right?’

  They all looked again, trying to make sure it really was a zombie. There were stories, of course. They had as much use for the nightly news as they did for instruction manuals, but you sort of had to hear things, even if you weren’t trying. There were places in California and in Mexico that had supposedly been overrun by the dead. Most everyone thought the whole thing was some kind of joke, or maybe a publicity stunt for a new Hollywood monster movie. You had enough money, you could probably convince the news stations to play along. At least that was what his daddy said.

  The dead man swung a wild arm at the stick Tom had pushed into its chest and knocked the thick branch back, taking a chunk of wet rot along for the ride.

  Skunk gagged a little. Seemed his allergies didn’t suck so bad that day.

  ‘What are we gonna do with it, guys?’ Jack again. He had to ask. He had to know. They couldn’t just leave a thing like that lying on the ground. Some of the stories said the dead people ate other people, and that would be sort of like leaving a rabid dog on the side of the road, wouldn’t it?

  Tom had a solution. Tom always had a solution. That was why he was the boss so much of the time. ‘Let’s tie it up and hide it somewhere.’ Tom’s blue eyes looked from under his thick, dark bangs, and he flipped the too-long hair from his broad, tanned face. ‘Let’s play with it.’

  Jack wasn’t sure if that was the best idea ever, but there was that thrill, that secret shiver that danced across his skin as he thought of all the things they could learn about zombies if they experimented a bit.

  ‘Where are we gonna hide a zombie?’ José’s voice rose half an octave as he spoke. ‘How are we gonna get it where no one’s gonna take it from us?’ His Mexican accent was faint: he’d lived in the area as long as any of them could remember, but that accent never quite left him.

  ‘I know where.’ Jack licked his lips and tasted sweat on his tongue. The heat was hammering down on them as the summer day grew older. They needed someplace where the roasting weather wouldn’t ruin their new plaything. ‘I got the perfect place.’

  Some secrets are too big not to share, and in this case the secret also needed to be moved as quickly as possible, because the dead man was definitely getting more active. Billy Chambers and Ben Deveraux were recruited to join them on their quest. Billy worked on his dad’s farm, and that meant he worked with horses. He was perfect, really, because he knew how to throw a lasso. Maybe he’d come in fourth in the junior rodeo the year before, but he was fast enough for their needs, and he was one of them. Ben too, even if he didn’t get to come out and play as often.

  Billy threw the lasso around the dead man’s shoulders - extra wide so they wouldn’t accidentally pull his head off or something - and they passed the rope around in a circle until they’d looped the heavy cable around the monster’s chest and arms half a dozen times.

  It fought back, thrashing and croaking incoherently. Its teeth - big and white in the grey receding gums - clashed together loudly again and again as it tried to bite at them, but they were smarter; they never got that close. After the arms were bound to the waist, Billy pulled it backward and Tom and Jack caught and held the legs, while Skunk and José tied them together with more rope. Most of their parents would have been shocked to see how well they could work together when they had to. Their folks would have been surprised by a lot of things that their little ones were capable of, but isn’t that always the case?

  Once they had their new toy properly bound and gagged - not for silence, but to keep those teeth of his from getting ahold of them - the group half carried and half dragged him across the field to the storm shelter Jack’s grandfather had built into the property. A wallet, thin and black, fell from the thing’s pants, and Tom snapped it up so fast that almost no one noticed as they struggled with their burden. Almost no one. Jack saw, but he kept it to himself. Tom’s family was poor - Jack’s dad called them ‘dirt farmers’ when he thought Jack wasn’t around to hear - and if anyone needed the cash, it was Tom. Besides, Tom always thought of cool things to do whenever they came across a few dollars.

  The part of Texas where the boys lived was known for many things, including tornadoes. The storm season wasn’t quite ready to come around, and that meant that there was no reason for anyone to disturb them or their experime
nts. The area was far enough away from the house and deep enough under the ground that there was no reason to worry about anyone hearing them, especially since Grandpa Murphy was at least half deaf.

  The air in the storm shelter was nearly cold after they’d been in the blasting heat of the day. It brought sweet relief and a rush of gooseflesh across Jack’s skin. Still, he wouldn’t even consider bitching about the weather. From what he understood, they had it a lot worse where Steve was. All desert heat and crazy people with bombs who wanted to kill Americans whenever they saw them. He’d never met anyone from the Middle East, and he planned to keep it that way if all they wanted to do was bomb people. What sort of animals killed and killed without any good reason? Besides, they didn’t even believe in Jesus.

  ‘So what are we gonna do with him, guys?’ Ben held his hand in front of his face and tried to wave away the smell of dead man. Like that was even possible.