“Christ, Bertha, you smell worse than a dead dog! What you been rolling around in, woman? I don’t think the tub’s gonna do you any good. I think we might need to hose you off outside first.”
By now, Bertha had gotten to her knees of her own accord, and was working her way to her feet. She never was quick on the draw when it came to standing from even a kitchen chair, so I was used to waiting on her to gather herself. I averted my eyes in a gentlemanly fashion, even though it was my own wife’s rump I was avoiding looking at. In truth, I didn’t think I would be able to stand the sight of it. As horrible as her dead face was, I shuddered to think what terrors her dead nether regions had gone through.
Once on her feet, she just stood and stared at me with her one good eye. I motioned to the back door, but she remained silent, as if unsure what I wanted of her. With a heavy sigh, I made a move to help her. Then, remembering her snapping teeth, decided against it.
“Come on, Bertha. I ain’t got all night. The Price is Right comes on at ten, and I ain’t missing it for your dead behind.”
Bertha let out another groan at my words, then began to shuffle toward me. I supposed that maybe her one good eye wasn’t all that good and she was attracted to the sound of my voice. It wouldn’t be the first time. She used to tell me how much she loved to hear the sound of my voice the whole time we were courting. I smiled at the memory as I proceeded to shout directions at the shambling corpse of my wife.
“This way, darlin’. Straight a bit. Now left. No! Your other left, woman! Now watch the root.”
Even though she had lived in that house for near on twenty years, she didn’t watch the root in the middle of the yard, and was down on her backside in an instant. I couldn’t help but let out a little laugh, at which Bertha didn’t seem to mind. She just kept up with the moaning and snapping her teeth at me like I was just the ham sandwich she had waited the last five days to eat. While she rolled about on the ground trying to find purchase to stand again, it dawned on me that although I had water, via the garden hose, I might just need a little soap.
“You stay here, Bertha. I’m gonna go fetch the dish soap.”
I left her moaning and struggling to stand as I darted back into the kitchen. The sink soap dispenser was empty, so I had to run to the bathroom instead. Along the way back to her, the television caught my attention. I stopped as I stared at a breaking news report. The sound was down, but I ain’t so stupid that I couldn’t read the headlines below the reporter’s startled face.
The Dead Have Risen!
I snatched the remote, turning the television volume up just enough so I could hear it. I didn’t want to attract Bertha’s attention, lest I had to lead her all the way back out of the house again to wash her down. But with the way the news report sounded, I might not even want to do that for her.
Chad Walters from the Channel Seven News Team was as flustered as I had ever seen the man. Now I don’t remember it word for word, but I do remember him saying that what was happening to me was happening all over the world. The dead were crawling from their graves, out of morgues, even breaking out of crypts to rejoin the living.
I dropped to my chair in disbelief, devastated by the news. Here I was beginning to think that my Bertha had come back just because she might have missed my company. But no. She was part of some greater going on. The dead coming back was a sign of the End Days. Isn’t it? Now I find myself wishing I had gone to church more often with Bertha.
As I pondered the state of my soul, Chad Walters from the Channel Seven News Team had more to say on the matter of the dead. Again, I don’t recall it word for word, but the important gist was that the dead folks were a might bit dan-gerous. There were even reports of them attacking and eating live folks. I was informed by the news that the only way to stop one of these things was to shoot them in the head.
I swallowed hard. I didn’t want my Bertha to attack and eat me, but did I really have the wherewithal to shoot her? I wasn’t sure, but I thought perhaps it would be a very good idea to go and get my gun just in case. Only, I couldn’t remember where I had left the darned thing. Last I’d seen it I was poking around in the shed. I figured I must have left it lying on the bench when I filled my jug. Without Bertha there to remind me of these little things, I was just no good.
Heading for the back door again, I found Bertha just where I had left her. Once again she was motionless, seated in the dirt with her head hung low as if waiting for some kind of instructions on what to do next. I pushed the back door open then slipped through. I forgot to catch it, and it slammed closed.
Bertha snapped her head up at the sound, and started once again with that awful moaning. In light of the news report, I now saw her as less of a woman who had just let herself go a bit, and more of, well, more of a monster. I found myself very afraid of my very dead wife.
“Now, honey,” I said. “You don’t wanna go and eat me. I ain’t nothin’ but a gristly old man. Skin and bones, that’s what you always said. Right, darlin’?”
Dead Big Bertha obeyed me no more than the live Big Bertha would have. She scrambled to her feet while I crossed the yard toward the shed and was soon shambling for me, arms outstretched, teeth gnashing, throat moaning. I was going to have to deal with her, one way or another. And, according to Chad Walters from the Channel Seven News Team, there was only one way to deal with the newly risen dead.
I trotted into my shed, dreading the task before me with all my soul.
Forty years of marriage might have left Bertha and me at odds a few times, but overall it had been a good life. She had been a good wife, not the prettiest or the most obedient, but for what it was worth she never cheated on me. She was always faithful to me, and for the record I was true to her, even if we fought like cats and dogs most of the time. And, save that one time she almost died from double pneumonia, she always had my dinner on the table at seven o’clock every night for forty years. What more could I have asked for in a wife? Sure, she wasn’t able to give me children because she was all wrong on the insides, but I knew I wouldn’t have made much of a father anyways. I know for a fact that I didn’t make much of a husband either, and now that my Bertha was gone I regretted that most of all.
I should have been better to her. Kinder. Sweeter.
Well, I reckoned I would have to make up for all of that. Bertha deserved to lay at rest after such a rotten life, not scrambling around trying to eat people like some wild animal. It hurt my heart to know what was coming, but I knew it had to be done. I slipped past my still and found my shotgun exactly where I had left it. Once it was in my hands, my resolve faltered again, even with her dead behind making her way into the shed, ready to eat me alive, I just couldn’t do it.
I readied the gun and took aim for her. I was a pretty decent shot, and with her so close to me, putting a bullet in her soft brain would be a simple thing to do. But she turned that one good eye to me, and the pale blue of it tore at my heart. I couldn’t shoot her. Not my wife. There had to be another way.
“Bertha. Please, darlin’. I don’t want to do this. Can’t you just get back in your grave and go to sleep? I promise I’ll come visit you everyday. I really did love you. I know I never said it enough. Or at all. Damn it, woman! Ain’t you listenin’ to me?”
No, she wasn’t listening to me. She was shuffling toward the sound of my trembling voice, ready to tear out my supple throat with her hungry mouth. When she was near enough, I pushed at her, to steer her away from me. Bertha reeled, her center of gravity lost in her enormous bulk, until she once again landed flat on her rump. Only this time it wasn’t just on the dirt floor of the shed.
Bertha landed square in the center of my still.
“My still!” I shouted to the tune of shattering glass and breaking wood.
My dead wife thrashed about in the debris, ruining a lifetime’s labor in an effort to right herself again. If I hadn’t known better, if I wasn’t sure the woman was dead beyond reason, then I would have thought she was doing
it on purpose. And maybe she was. It seemed like a right awful lot of rolling and moaning and flailing about just to get her feet under her. In fact, the more I watched her roll around in the ruins of my wonderful still, the more I became convinced that she was doing it on purpose.
Look at her, I thought, look at the way she’s rolling around making sure she’d crushed every last glass tube, bent every copper coil and broke every breakable part. She was always jealous of that still, and now, from beyond the grave, she was finally having her revenge.
The idea of it was enough to make a man proper mad. And so, seething with hate, I came over with a righteous anger, raised my gun, and fired at my dead wife as she rolled about in the debris of my prized still. She took the shot right between the eyes, mid-roll, with the back of her head blowing out like a bad tire on a rocky road. Blood and brains and bits of skull went everywhere, coating the pitiful remains of my once glorious creation.
With the calm reassurance of having done the right thing, I returned to the living room with my shotgun still clutched between my trembling hands. As I sat down in front of the television again and stared at the last jug of white lightning I would ever own, I began to wonder what to do now. My wife was gone. My wonderful still was gone. The world was going to heck without the handbasket, and I had nothing but a single jug of moonshine to face its decline.
And that’s where the rescue folks found me, sitting in the living room of my empty house, fingering the contours of my shotgun and waiting for Chad Walters of the Channel Seven News Team to tell me what in the hell I was supposed to do now that I had lost everything.
Patrick D’Orazio resides in southwestern Ohio with his wife, Michele, two children, Alexandra and Zachary, and three spastic dogs. He has been writing since he was a teenager but only recently clued into the fact that unless he attempted to get published, no one else would really care.
Several of his short stories appear in various anthologies from Library of the Living Dead, including “The Moron’s Guide to the Inevitable Zombocalypse,” “The Zombist,” “Night of the Giving Dead,” “Zombidays,” and “Letters from the Dead.” He will also be appearing Pill Hill Press’ “Daily Bites of Flesh 2011.”
Comes The Dark, the first book of a trilogy, is Patrick’s first novel, and is being released in late summer, 2010 by the Library of the Living Dead.
You can find out more about what Patrick is up to on his blog at www.patrickdorazio.com.
sighted in all 50 states *GP wire release* Military buckling under
A Soldier’s LamentReported By Patrick D’Orazio
This shit is getting old.
No one in Delta Company has heard a peep out of Echo or Foxtrot for over two days now, so I’m guessing downtown has become a wasteland. But here I am, off on another mission bringing me too damn close to the city, trying to save some dumbasses because they were too stupid to pay attention to what they were told to do.
The name is Private Sam Bartowski, and I’m in the National Guard. Currently, I’m sitting in a Black Hawk and letting the vibrations from the rotors roll over me. It sorta soothes my nerves, which are getting a hell of a lot more twitchy these days. As I look out the window toward Cincinnati, I can see smoke, but no more fires. I’m not sure what that means. Probably nothing good.
There are ten of us in the gunship. Our five-man team is led by Sergeant Vickers. He’s become a hardass over the last month, but it’s not like he was all that pleasant in Afghanistan. The dude looks the part: his face is craggy and he’s got this wicked scar running along his jawline that freaks the civ-ilians out.
My teammates are good guys. Pat Welch is a big Mick with a loud mouth that gets him into trouble. He also strokes his shotgun like it’s his dick. If you ask him about it, he’ll just wink and say, “At least she’ll never cheat on me.” Elgin Montclair tries to act like he was another brutha from da ‘hood before joining the Guard, but everyone knows he majored in business at Ohio State and grew up in Indian Hills, not Over-The-Rhine. Eric Keogh is the youngest member of the team. I think he turned twenty a month ago, but no one’s celebrating birthdays these days. He’s a good kid, but he’s worn down. His face has this sunken look to it, and the circles under his eyes get larger every day. It seems this shit has taken a greater toll on him than the rest of us, although none of us is doing great.
This is supposed to be a milk run, but I can’t shake the nervous buzz in my gut. I’m guessing this will be one of the last Search-and-Rescue missions we do before bugging out. Things are dicey out there even when we know exactly where we’re going and who we’re supposed to pick up.
We’re supposed to grab the LT’s daughter on this one. Since everyone likes the lieutenant, plenty of us volunteered to retrieve her. We’ve done the same for other officers, and even a few of the grunts with family in the area. The captain lets it slide because it keeps desertions to a bare minimum and morale high enough that we aren’t trying to slit each other’s throats all the time. Besides, this beats schlepping Jersey barriers, stringing razor wire, and picking off the occasional DIC that wanders into the Safety Zone. So here I am, going back into the shit.
I can feel the Black Hawk tilting, and I look down. There’s the apartment where Miss Snotnose is hiding out with her pedophile boyfriend. The rooftop looks clear, so I scan the streets below. I don’t see any stiffs stumbling around, which eases my mind a bit.
This is one of those gentrified areas yuppies cream their jeans over. You know what I mean: where the rusted-out factories and warehouses get overhauled and made into boutiques, upscale condos, and overpriced restaurants. I suppose I can’t blame Sydney for wanting to hang out here instead of some high school gym crammed with a thousand other panic-drenched refugees. Even if her boyfriend is like thirty-five and she’s only seventeen.
“I want a nice, clean extraction, boys.” Sergeant Vickers’ voice is as gruff and nasty as you’d expect from looking at him. He has to yell to be heard over the chop of the rotors, but we already know the drill.
“Let’s snatch the snatch quick so we can get back home in time for dinner!” Welch blurts out with a snort. He has a sparkle in his eyes and a devious smile twitching at his lips.
“Unfortunately,” Sergeant Vickers glares at Welch, “the lieutenant doesn’t know which apartment she’s in, so we’re gonna do this one by the numbers.”
Sarge reaches into his pocket and pulls out a wallet-sized picture of Sydney. I notice Sergeant Stein doing the same thing with his team, but I can’t hear anything he says to them. Welch gives an appreciative wolf whistle before handing the picture to me. Sydney is your typical blonde, blue-eyed cheerleader type. Not someone you’d expect to end up with some middle-aged sleazeball. But what the hell do I know? Maybe she has daddy issues.
I pass the picture to Montclair, who briefly glances at it before handing it to Keogh.
“What about the boyfriend, sir?” the junior member of our team asks.
Montclair smiles wickedly as he nudges the kid. “I bet the LT wouldn’t mind if we accidentally dropped him out a window.”
Welch hoots with laughter and high-fives Montclair. Keogh’s expression remains impassive as he waits for the Sarge’s response.
“The lieutenant doesn’t give half a shit about him, but if it’ll keep Sydney calm, we take him in, too,” Vickers answers Keogh’s question, ignoring the antics of his other two men.
A few seconds later, Sarge raises his hand to his headset and listened as the pilot gave him instructions. Nodding, he speaks into the mouthpiece before taking off the headset and putting on his combat helmet.
Standing, he slides past us and reaches for the door handle. “We’re up! Get ready!”
I stand ready behind Welch and Montclair. Welch hoots in excitement as he grips the twelve-gauge, and Montclair keeps his M16 pointed at the deck. Sergeant Vickers turns to face us. “Again, I want a clean extraction, boys. Let’s get home before dusk.”
He flips the release-lever on the door and p
ulls it back, slipping out of the way to let Welch jump down. Montclair follows, and when my turn comes, I take a deep breath just as I feel a hard slap on my back. I land clean on the hardtop and run toward the door leading to the stairs.
I keep my head on a pivot as I scan the rooftop. Several terra cotta planters with towering green foliage block my view across the deck. There are too many damn places for someone to hide. I relax a little when Welch and Montclair make it to the door unmolested.
I can’t hear Keogh, Sarge, or the second team running behind me. The twin turbos on the Black Hawk drown everything else out, even as the bird fades into the distance.
I fall into position behind Montclair as Keogh and Vickers move into place on the other side of the door, forming our four-man stack. Yes, there are five of us… don’t ask. The other team takes up positions around the roof to cover us.
Montclair shakes his head, signaling us that the door is locked. He bangs his fist against it. “This is the National Guard! If anyone is behind this door, announce your presence. We will be opening the door by force in five seconds.”
This is the only warning given. Back in Kandahar, house-to-house searches were nerve-wracking, but most of what we did in Cincinnati had gone more smoothly, even with people screaming about constitutional rights. After a few close encounters with some rabid DICs, all thoughts of civility went right out the window.
DICs are what we in the Guard called the walking dead. Whether it stood for Disease-Infested Civilian, Deteriorating Infected Corpse, or some other clever slur, no one ever told me. All I know is that DIC is a perfect description for those undead bastards. Besides, they don’t seem to mind. They’re too busy trying to chew everyone’s face off to give a crap what we’re calling them.
Eye Witness: Zombie Page 2
