The New Dead: A Zombie Anthology

by Christopher Golden

‘Well, I know a better pool player when I see one.’

  ‘How about one more?’ Ray Martin said. ‘Just one more game and we’ll throw in the towel.’

  Ross pursed his lips and looked like he wished he were back on the farm, maybe fucking a calf.

  ‘Hell, you can spare another two or three dollars, can’t you?’ Ray Martin said.

  ‘I guess,’ Ross said, and did that lip-pursing thing again. ‘But I tell you what: you want to go another game, let’s go ahead and play it bigger. I ain’t been winnin’, but I’m gonna bet you can’t do three in a row. My pappy always said bet on the third in a row ’cause that’s your winner.’

  ‘He rich?’ Ray Martin asked.

  ‘Well, no,’ Ross said.

  Ray Martin laughed a little, a sharp little laugh like a dog barking. ‘That’s all right; even someone mostly wrong has got to be right now and again.’

  ‘Very well, then,’ Ross said, ‘I’m gonna trust my old pappy. I’ll bet you . . . say, ten dollars.’

  ‘That’s bold.’

  ‘Yeah, and I’m about to change my mind, now that I think about it.’

  ‘Oh, no,’ Ray Martin said. ‘You made the offer.’

  ‘Now that I think about it, it was stupid of me,’ Ross said. ‘I guess I was feelin’ kind of full of piss and vinegar. How about we drop it? My old pappy ain’t even right when he says it’s gonna rain.’

  ‘No. You’re on. Retard’s got ’em racked. Come on, country boy, let’s shoot.’

  Of course, when it got right down to it, we were all country boys, just some of us lived in town, as if in disguise, but this Ross, he was a regular turd knocker. He tried to get out of it, said, ‘Heck, I’ll pay you a dollar to forget it. I shouldn’t have bet anything. I ain’t really no bettin’ kind of man. I’m actin’ bigger than my goldarn britches.’

  ‘You welchin’ on a bet, mister?’ Ray Martin said, and when he said it, he laid the pool cue on the table and stepped close to Ross. ‘You welchin’?’

  ‘No. I’m not welchin’. I’m just tryin’ to pay my way out so as I can get out cheaper.’

  Ray Martin shook his head. ‘Pick up your cue, farmer. You’re in.’

  Ross lost the coin toss on the break, and Ray Martin started out good, went for several shots before he missed. Ray Martin leaned on his pool cue then and looked smug. Ross picked up his cue, studied the table, shook his head, said, ‘I’ll give it a try.’

  His first shot was a doozy. He busted two balls, and both of them went into pockets. He said, ‘Now that’s somethin’. Even a blind hog finds an acorn now and then.’ And then he started to shoot again. He didn’t miss. Not one shot. When he finished, he looked up, surprised. ‘Maybe my old pappy was right.’

  Ray Martin paid Ross the money as if the bills he was peeling out of his wallet were strips of his own skin, and then he insisted on another game. Ross said he’d had enough, that he’d had a lucky run, but Ray Martin jumped the price up to fifty dollars, and after a bit of haggling, they went at it. Ross got the flip, and he started shooting. He didn’t miss a shot, and once he even jumped the cue ball over another ball to make a shot. I’d never seen anything like it. The way he moved then was different. There was a fluid sort of way he had of going around the table, nothing like the gangly moves he’d shown before, and his face had changed as well: it was dark with concentration, and there was a sparkle in his eye, as if he were actually powered by electricity.

  When he was finished, he said, ‘I’m gettin’ better.’

  ‘You sure are,’ Ray Martin said.

  ‘I guess I could play another game, you want,’ Ross said.

  Ray Martin shook his head and said, ‘You don’t get that much better that quick, and seems to me you ain’t talkin’ slow as you were before. You sound a little uptown to me.’

  ‘Well, a Co-Cola and a good game perks me,’ Ross said. ‘I guess it’s the sugar.’

  Ray Martin’s eyes narrowed and his forehead wrinkled. ‘You’re a hustler. You hustled me.’

  Ross looked as if he had just received a blow. ‘I can’t believe you’re talkin’ like that. You wanted to play. I tried to quit. I tried to pay out on you.’

  ‘You were playin’ me,’ Ray Martin said. ‘You and that car. That ain’t no car like a cracker would have. I should have known. You ain’t from around here. You’re a pool-hall hustler. You’re makin’ the towns, ain’t you?’

  ‘I’m just a man likes a good contest now and again,’ Ross said, ‘and I’ve had a lucky day.’

  ‘Tell you somethin’,’ Ray Martin said, ‘your goddamned luck just run out.’ And then Ray Martin’s hand dipped into his pocket. We saw a flash of silver, and Ross made a face, and Ray Martin’s little cheap Saturday-night special coughed, and we all jumped, and then Ross, who was still holding the pool cue, dropped it, fanned his right knee out to the side, then collapsed as if someone had opened a trapdoor beneath him. The way he fell, the way he crumpled, there wasn’t any doubt he was dead. A little hole in his forehead began to ooze blood. The air filled with the stench of what Ross had left in his pants.

  Rugger said, ‘Oh, hell.’

  The retard said, ‘You hit him right ’tween the eyes, and he done shit on himself.’

  Ray Martin turned and looked at me and my friends. We were as quiet as the walls around us. He pointed the gun in my direction. ‘You,’ he said, ‘you look in his pockets, see you can find his keys.’

  I hesitated only a moment, and Rugger said, ‘I got it.’ Rugger went over and pushed the guy around on the floor so that he could get to his pockets easy, found the keys, held them up, shook them.

  ‘Now my money, and his too,’ Ray Martin said. ‘I’m claimin’ some interest.’

  Rugger got the man’s money and gave it to Ray Martin, who folded it up and shoved it in the front pocket of his jeans. He tossed the keys on the pool table.

  ‘All right,’ Ray Martin said, turning back to me. ‘I want you, tough guy, you and no one else to take those keys and go outside and unlock the trunk of his car, and then I want you back in here faster than a bunny fucks, you understand? Otherwise, you go in the trunk with him after I shoot your balls off. You got me, dry fuck?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, and when I spoke, my mouth was dust-dry. The word came out more like a cough. This wasn’t some scuffle in the halls at school, some after-school fist-fight at the Dairy Queen. This was the real thing. This was the world where real tough guys lived, and I wasn’t one of them.

  I took the keys and went outside and unlocked the trunk of the Impala and lifted it up and went back inside. ‘Give me them keys,’ Ray Martin said. I gave them to him. He said, ‘I don’t like nobody likes to cheat me. I got rules. Don’t cheat me, don’t hang with niggers, and don’t let women tell you what to do. Keep your hands away from my wallet. And don’t never back down. Them’s my rules. He broke one of them.’

  ‘You didn’t have to shoot him,’ Rugger said. ‘We could have just beat his ass and got your money back.’

  ‘You got him right ’tween the eyes,’ the retard said, suddenly overcome again with Ray Martin’s marksmanship.

  ‘Shut up, Retard,’ Rugger said. ‘Now we got a mess.’

  ‘Mess can get cleaned up,’ Ray Martin said. He looked at Donny. ‘You, nickel dick, go over there and lock the door and pull the blind down. Now.’

  Donald pulled the blind down over the glass and locked the door. Ray Martin waved the gun at Donald and said, ‘When I tell you, you look out there see ain’t no one comin’. Someone’s comin’, you close the door and lock it. Ain’t no one comin’, you say so, and don’t be wrong. Got me?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Donald said, as if he were speaking to a teacher.

  ‘You, tough guy,’ he said to me, ‘you acted like you wanted some of my action. You still wantin’ it?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘No, huh. That the way you talk to me? You heard how your friend spoke to me. Let me hear some of that.’

  ‘No, s
ir,’ I said.

  ‘Now you’re talkin’. Stay sharp, I might need you to wipe my butt with your tongue. But right now, you get hold of this fucker’s legs, and you,’ he said to Lee, ‘you get his head, and you boys take him out and put him in the trunk of his car and close the lid and come back in, and don’t screw around.’

  We picked up the body, and a hair-covered fragment from the back of his skull fell against the tile with a sound like pottery being dropped. As we lifted him, I found myself drawn to his face. Ross’s eyes were wide open, and I saw then that everything he had been or might have been, all of his plans and memories, dreams and schemes, they had fled out through the hole in the back of his skull, across the floor in a puddle of blood and brain fragments, a piece of his skull. The body was empty. It was in that moment I knew something I had never really known before. Oh, I knew it on an intellectual basis. I knew we all died. But this wasn’t like on TV. This guy didn’t just look like a guy lying down. He was truly dead. Looking at him, in that moment, I knew there was nothing beyond the moment, nothing beyond our time on Earth, that dead was dead, and I had never wanted to live more than I did in that moment with my eyes locked on Ross’s face. Hell, he wasn’t Ross any more. He was just meat. Dead meat.

  I got ahold of Ross’s feet. The mess in his pants smelled strong. Lee got his shoulders, and we lifted him and carried him toward the door. When we were about there, Donald unlocked and opened the door and looked out, then pushed the door wide open. Me and Lee put Ross in the trunk of the Impala, curled him around his spare tyre, and closed the lid. We went back inside. It was all like a dream.

  ‘All right, now,’ Ray Martin said, ‘lock the door.’

  ‘What now?’ Rugger said, lighting a cigar. The smell of it wafted over the stink Ross had left.

  ‘Get the retard to wipe the floor up . . . but not yet. The backseat of that Impala, it’s still got room.’ Ray Martin looked at us.

  I said, ‘Wait a minute.’

  ‘We ain’t gonna tell nobody,’ Donald said.

  ‘Nobody,’ Lee said, just in case Donald hadn’t stated our case firmly enough.

  ‘Hell,’ Ray Martin said, ‘I know that. Dead men, they don’t talk.’

  I didn’t realize it, but I had backed up against the pool table. I remember it crossing my mind to grab a pool cue, a pool ball, anything. But I knew I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t do anything. I couldn’t move. It was like I was glued to the floor. I thought maybe I was about to do in my pants what Ross had done in his.

  ‘I know these boys,’ Rugger said softly. ‘They’d be missed. Their folks know they’re here.’

  That was a lie, but it was a beautiful lie, and I clung to it, hoping.

  ‘You can tell them they was here but they left,’ Ray Martin said. ‘I don’t want to take chances. And this one,’ he said, pointing the Saturday-night special at me. ‘I don’t like him. I didn’t like him soon as I saw him.’

  ‘I know that,’ Rugger said, and I saw that when he pulled his cigar out of his mouth his hand was shaking. Even he, a man who had fought a mess of oil-field guys with my daddy, he knew Ray Martin was beyond just trouble. Guys like him had invented trouble; they had given it its name. ‘This boy here,’ Rugger said, ‘his daddy and me once fought a bunch of oil-field workers together.’

  ‘What’s that mean to me?’ Ray Martin said.

  ‘It means you and me is kin,’ Rugger said, ‘and I’m asking a favor. It’s not like you didn’t get your money back.’

  Ray Martin went quiet. You could almost see his brain working behind his skull. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t gonna do nothin’. Not really. Well, maybe with the tough guy here.’ He waved the gun at me. ‘But here’s the thing, and you little turds listen tight as a nun’s ass, ’cause you don’t, you’ll be seein’ me and this here gun, maybe a knife or a tyre tool . . . : You didn’t see a fuckin’ thing.’

  ‘No. Nothin’,’ I said.

  ‘What you gonna do with the hayseed?’ Rugger asked.

  ‘He wasn’t no hayseed. He was a goddamned pool shark. I’m gonna drive him out to the river bottoms. I know a place you can drive that car off, and it’ll go deep. And you, Rugger, you’re gonna follow me. Maybe we ought to pop the retard too, put him in the backseat.’

  Rugger shook his head. ‘He’s all right. He won’t remember nothin’ come tomorrow mornin’. Hell, I got to tell him when to shit.’

  ‘You got him right ’tween the eyes,’ the retard said.

  ‘Shut up,’ Rugger said. ‘You go on and sit down on that stool and shut up.’

  The retard hung his head and went and sat on the stool.

  ‘You can get you a Co-Cola,’ Rugger said, and the retard got a soda and popped it and went and sat back on the stool and sipped it.

  Ray Martin said, ‘I don’t know, man. I’m thinking on it some more, and I don’t know I should let these asswipes go.’

  ‘They ain’t gonna say nothin’,’ Rugger said. ‘You boys . . . you ain’t gonna say nothin’, are you?’ ‘About what?’ Donny said.

  ‘There you go,’ Rugger said.

  Ray Martin put the gun in his pocket and said, ‘Maybe.’

  ‘The retard finishes his Coke,’ Rugger said, ‘we’ll have him wipe up that blood, spray some air freshener around. You drive the fella’s car to the bottoms, Ray Martin, and I’ll follow. We’ll get rid of him. You boys, you go on out the back way. And don’t you never say nothin’. Nothin’. Not a fuckin’ word.’

  ‘No, sir,’ I said, ‘we won’t,’ and then I looked at Ray Martin and said, ‘We won’t say anything, sir. I promise.’

  Ray Martin grinned at me. His teeth reminded me of an animal trap. ‘Go on then, punks, before I bend you over this pool table and fuck you in the ass, one at a time.’

  We went quickly out the back door and didn’t say a word, just split and went three different ways.

  Of course, I saw Donny and Lee after that, in school, in the halls. We waved or smiled, but we didn’t hang. I don’t think they thought I was so tough any more. We went our own ways after that. I never went back to the pool hall. I doubt they did. I thought about telling someone about what happened, but didn’t, and to the best of my knowledge, neither did Donny or Lee. I had nightmares. I still have nightmares.

  I saw Rugger around town a few times and nodded at him. He always looked at me like he’d never seen me before, and he never came back to the garage. Ray Martin I never saw again, and I’m not bothered by that. I never even asked anyone about him, and I think I heard he was in prison somewhere for something or another. I think about Ross a lot, that face, that empty face, all the life there was and ever would be gone from it, leaving the rest of us aware and alone, waiting.

  WEAPONIZED

  BY DAVID WELLINGTON

  For a while it looked like the robots were going to win our wars for us.

  I believed it. After what I saw in Syria, back in 2012, sure. I was embedded with a Stryker group tasked with locking down the Blue Zone there. We were rolling in a lead vehicle that was six kilometers outside Damascus when its brakes locked up. The driver looked as surprised as I was. A canned voice from the dashboard told us the vehicle had been halted automatically because an IED had been detected. I’ve been doing this long enough that those three little letters made my flesh crawl. Up ahead in the road an old man with a long white beard and a skullcap was driving a flock of overheated sheep across the dusty road, urging them on, out of the way of the hundred tons of olive-drab depleted-uranium armor bearing down on them. He had been carrying a plastic carrier bag, and he’d dropped it in the middle of the road, as if he was too distracted by the sheep to worry about his lunch.

  They still get you like that, sometimes. If you’re not paying attention.

  ‘Don’t worry, Ms Flores. We’re all good.’ The driver gave me the grin that soldiers always give to journalists, that practised, cockeyed smile they think is going to get them five seconds on the evening news.

  ‘What
do you do now?’ I asked the driver. ‘Call in a sweeper team?’ I sighed, having been through this routine before. It could be an hour before the IED was disabled and the road cleared for travel again, and I had a deadline to meet.

  ‘Naw,’ he said, lacing his fingers behind his head. He was a kid, like all the soldiers I met that summer, barely out of high school. He had bad acne on his cheeks, and his first tattoo, on the back of his hand, was still bright enough to look like a cartoon. ‘The Silverhawk’ll get it.’

  The Silverhawk Unmanned Aerial-Weapon Platform was a sort of mini- zeppelin with solar-panel wings and an MTHEL slung under its gondola. It was designed to operate above the cloud layer, loitering for months at a time, soaking up sunlight and not doing much of anything. When an alarm went off in some distant monitoring station, the Silverhawk slowly came to life, picking out its target some three hundred meters below using satellite imagery to find traces of plastic explosive in the plastic bag we were all watching so intently. I never saw the Silverhawk, nor the officer who confirmed the strike, nor even the pencil-thin beam of the MTHEL, a deuterium fluoride laser weapon that heated up the plastic bag to a couple of thousand degrees for a split second - long enough to make the IED inside go pop. There was a fizzing noise I could hear through the Stryker’s up-armored windows, and then a bright plume of smoke jumped into the air.