Eye Witness: Zombie

by Lederman, William

  The only adult who must have stayed with the kids staggered into view. The Volvo owner was rail-thin, dressed all earthy-crunchy, and had badly frizzed hair, but I still couldn’t place her age. She may have been twenty or fifty. It was hard to tell; most of the meat of her face had been eaten away, even the eyelids and nose. It gave her a wide-eyed, startled appearance. Wayne drew and fired without hesitating, knocking her back with a very cleanly placed shot dead between the eyes.

  “No babies, no kids,” he declared, and turned on his heels to meet Big Joe back at the 4-Runner. That left just me and Tony. I could see him working up a little speech about why he too had to pass on cleaning out Hugs Plus, but I put my hand on his shoulder.

  “It’s okay, I’ll do it,” I told him. The relief that washed over his face was such that I almost slapped him out of spite.

  “Are you sure? Because maybe we could just—”

  “No,” I interrupted. “They need to be taken care of, so whatever, I’ll do it. Just go.”

  Tony only needed to hear it once. He wasn’t even out the door before he had taken out a Marlboro and lit up. Cigs were ten bucks a pack now and almost nobody smoked anymore. But your exterminator I.D. got you big discounts on food, gas, and of all things…cigarettes. Not booze, though. You had to stay sharp to do this job right. More than a few idiots had been bitten and fatally infected thanks to senses dulled by pot, pills, or good old liquor. At one point they talked about having us submit to random urine samples, but it never came to that. Seeing or even hearing about a guy getting bit on a routine job was enough to scare anyone into getting drunk or high on their own time. Even sadder were the rare stories I’d heard of exterminators tweaking on coke or meth who had capped their own team members or civilians they should have been rescuing. Freaking out and paranoid with your heart rate hammering out a techno beat was no condition to be holding a loaded weapon.

  The job took me all of two minutes to complete, with a total of nine babies and toddlers and one adult to call in for the clean-up crew to come by and pick up in their covered panel truck, which reminded me a little bit of the covered wagons the old pioneers had pushed westward in back in the nineteenth-century. When the infection started and the sheer volume of corpses had been staggering, we used garbage trucks with powerful trash compactors and hauled everything out to mass graves. Some sites easily have a few hundred thousand bodies. Now that things have started to slow down, protests being made against the ‘inhumanity’ of treating human remains like so much trash. Every town and city had been forced to scrounge up a sort of mass morgue so that relatives at least had a chance to try and claim the bodies of their loved ones and give them a proper burial. Needless to say, the funeral industry was thriving. Unfortunately, most of these morgues were warehouses and not refrigerated. You could literally smell the bigger ones a mile away if you were downwind. Bodies were only kept for thirty-six hours before being transported out to the dumps, where the bulldozers often were digging deep trenches around the clock.

  When I got outside, the guys looked at me with a weird mix of gratitude, respect, and was it really there? Disgust? I hoped not, and I really didn’t think so. Hopefully they saw I took no special joy in dispatching the juvenile zombies. Somebody had to do it, nobody had wanted to, so I had taken one for the team.

  Word moves fast among extermination teams, and it got out that I was willing to take care of the little ones. The damn nickname—which I hate—was hatched almost immediately. My guys never called me ‘Baby Killer’ to my face, but I had no doubt that’s how they identified me to whomever they were talking to. Soon I started getting requests to come take care of babies and kids in the area. It was obvious that many of them had been left behind by other teams who had cleaned out those particular houses. I would get little tidbits of info like ‘locked in upstairs bathroom.’ Others had been shut up in basements, crawl spaces, closets, and in one case, a big plastic Little Tykes toy chest with two mountain bikes arranged across the lid to keep it from escaping. They had assumed that eventually they would starve to death, but that was stupid. We all knew now that these things needed no nourishment, not even water, to survive. Unless we killed the brains, they just kept chugging along on the prowl for warm flesh to munch on until they decomposed to the point where their muscles and tendons could no longer support the skeletons. Depending on factors like the temperature and humidity, that could take as long as three months. In really cold climates, they hardly rotted, but if it was cold enough they would freeze solid. The zombie plague had hit back in April, so, no one knew for sure, but I would wager those fuckers would thaw out like tulip bulbs next spring and pick right up where they left off. And big or small, they were all capable of passing on the infection.

  There were Facebook groups for extermination teams all over the USA as well as out of the country. It turned out I was not as unique as I’d thought. Most regions had someone who specialized in my particular duty. One day I got an invitation from a dude who took care of the younger zombies down in the Orlando, Florida area. I bet a good amount of those ones had been tourists on school vacation when the infection hit. He was in town for his sister’s wedding and wanted to have a drink and swap stories. His name was Josh, but everyone called him Baby Killer, too. The prospect didn’t seem very appealing, but I’ve never been good at either politely declining invitations or making up excuses as to why I can’t do something I’d rather not. Josh had told me to check out his web site and given me a password, but I never got around to it.

  He met me at Finnegan’s, a cozy little bar and grill not four blocks from my house. I don’t know why I pictured him as being about my age (thirty), but he was at least ten or twelve years older than that. Short too, and thin. Couldn’t have gone more than a buck-fifty or -sixty. He had thick glasses, a mustache that reminded me of Burt Reynolds, and a shiny dome with a bad comb-over. He saw me standing in the foyer and motioned me over to his booth with a smile. Something about him gave me the creeps, and it wasn’t just the way he looked; like he should be in a van cruising around playgrounds. I’ve met a few really bad people in my time, and I always got this same sickening sense rolling off them like an odor. I believe in evil. Some people use that word talking about the zombies, which is ludicrous to me. They’re nothing more than animals following a base instinct to feed. They take no more joy in it than an owl does in scooping up a field mouse for his dinner. Zombies have almost zero intelligence, and I am sure they feel no emotion.

  “Primo, right?” he said, offering his hand to shake. It was dainty and hairless, and soft like a baby’s, as if he’d never done a thing with it. He must have been slathering it in high-power moisturizer and then sleeping in rubber gloves. Revolting. I sat down, noting the binder on the table in front of him, which he was careful to keep his glass of beer far away from. It looked like it might be some sort of portfolio.

  “What’s that?” I asked, but just then the waitress came and got my drink order. Long Island. I don’t drink often, but when I do, I don’t fuck around. Josh seemed quite eager as he nudged the binder to me.

  “You saw my site, right?”

  “Oh, no, I didn’t get a chance, sorry,” I mumbled, slowly opening the cover. Josh leaned forward to look along with me. I was surprised he didn’t come around and sidle up next to me like we were on a hot date. I got the feeling he thought we were buddies at some level, though we had never met.

  “That’s okay, it’s better looking at prints than seeing them on your computer screen anyway.” I think he kept talking for a little while after that, but I didn’t hear anything. All I could focus on were the images that were now raping my soul.

  The very first print showed three little zombie kids, all about four or five years old, nailed on three crosses on the top of a hill. They had all been stripped of whatever clothes they’d had and were wearing filthy loin clothes that were probably just his old dishrags. The one in the middle wore a crown of thorns, and he had a crude beard and mustache made with a g
rease pencil or Magic Marker. Josh was decked out in a Roman soldier’s costume, at least the helmet, cape, and breastplate. Instead of a skirt, he wore some red boxers with white polka dots. He was grinning at the camera while poking the little zombie Jesus in the ribs with a spear. Black, syrupy blood oozed out of the wound.

  The next piece in his gallery was a recreation of Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun’s suicide in the bunker in April of 1945. The kid he’d dressed up like Hitler was slumped on one side of a sofa, a Walther pistol in his hand and one side of his head blown out. The Nazi costume was much too big for the zombie and hung on him like drapery. He was probably ten or twelve. Apparently this idiot was too lazy to get some fake mustaches and beards, because Hitler’s mustache looked to have been done with a black Sharpie. Josh had gone to the trouble of finding a pretty little blonde girl—fairly fresh, too—as his Eva Braun-Hitler. She held a revolver stuck into her mouth, and her brains were splattered in a crescent pattern on the huge Nazi flag behind the sofa. That wasn’t even right. I’d watched something on the Discovery Channel a few years ago, and only Hitler had shot himself. Eva had swallowed a cyanide capsule. Clearly Josh had taken some liberties for dramatic effect, which he no doubt felt entitled to as an artist.

  I flipped through a few more pages. There was the Manson family’s murder of Sharon Tate and her friends— which I would have never figured out but for the ‘Helter Skelter’ scrawled on the wall in blood.

  Josh’s creative streak extended into films, too. I glanced very quickly at gruesome set-ups where he had mutilated and dismembered a whole cast of zombie toddlers and children. In these he was dressed variously as Leatherface, with a chainsaw that appeared far too large for such a tiny man to wield, Jason Voorhees with a hockey mask and a machete, Michael Meyers with a butcher knife, and Freddy Krueger with a deadly glove that looked like he’d duct-taped a filet knife to all five fingers. In the movie ‘scenes’, there would be one photo showing the whole of the atrocity in a wide shot, then separate close-up photos of each hacked, stabbed, slashed, and sawed little victim. Josh got a lot of fresh ones. Thing is, there weren’t that many fresh ones. There weren’t even that many young zombies, period. People tended to protect babies and children pretty well. I felt bile rising to my throat as the thought came to me that maybe all of these kids hadn’t already been dead when they met Josh.

  Now I could hear him again. Josh was giggling to himself like he was remembering some hilarious joke. I shut the binder and noticed my drink had arrived at some point. Didn’t matter. I didn’t want it now. All I wanted was to get far away from this filth and never see it again.

  “What do you think?” he asked, beaming. I’m not a violent man. Really I’m not. At that moment though, I had the sudden impulse to reach across the table, take hold of his sweaty little head—yes, he was actually perspiring with excitement to show me these things—and drive it down into the oak tabletop several times with enough force to shatter his nose, break his jaw, and dislodge all of his front teeth. I knew it would be easy, and I knew that no trouble would come to me. I had lived here for most of my life and knew every single cop on the force. Exterminators had a certain leeway these days with law enforcement as long as we did our jobs well and weren’t being too flagrant about our privileged status. I couldn’t have gotten away with killing this piece of garbage, but messing up his face? Absolutely.

  Don’t ask me why I decided to show mercy to this wretch who didn’t deserve it. If you really push me, I would probably answer that I truly believe everyone gets what’s coming to them sooner or later.

  “I think there is something very, very wrong with you,” I said in a measured tone, holding my rage in check with some effort. Josh gaped at me with an open mouth, not getting it. Had he expected a hearty dose of admiration, congratulations on his wonderful work? I do think he did. Maybe he hoped I had my own pictures to share, though he would be smugly sure mine would have none of his creative flair, artistic genius, and showmanship.

  “Never contact me again. Ever.” I allowed a glimmer of what I felt for him to come through in my voice and my eyes. Then I poured my drink on his folder, which I would have torn up except that I knew he would just make up another one, and left without looking back.

  I walked into the house. The TV was on, but Tracy wasn’t watching. That was odd. She had grown up in one of those houses where you never even left a room without switching off the light, where the mom or dad is forever demanding to know if you think they are General Electric.

  “Tracy?” I called. No answer. My door had been locked, our windows were barred, and besides which, we hadn’t spotted a zombie in our area in weeks. The patrols and extermination teams were pretty well caught up. Still, something didn’t feel right and I took the stairs two at a time.

  She was in bed, but not asleep. Her Lady Colt .380, the one I’d had her initials engraved on the barrel, was in her hand. I pulled up the cover and saw what she’d done. Stifling tears, my next instinct was to check on Joey in the next room.

  He was standing up in his crib, staring at me with eyes that were no longer blue. It wasn’t even Joey anymore, not really. I ran back to Tracy and looked at her more closely, trying to keep my gaze away from the exit wound in back of her head. Even in my peripheral vision, it looked like someone had scooped out a fist-sized chunk of skull, hair, and brain. All of that was on the comforter and the headboard. On her left wrist I found what I was looking for—a tiny half-moon of red impressions. She’d been bitten by our eighteen-month-old son.

  The last thing I wanted was to go back and see the thing. Even before I walked in, I heard a low growling in its throat. Hungry. Joey hadn’t been sick. The only thing I could think of was SIDS—Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, or what they called crib death back in my day. I had looked into it a little when Tracy was pregnant, purely out of paranoia. It usually didn’t happen before one month or after six months. I didn’t know what the odds were of a boy Joey’s age dying this way, but they had to be very slim. Crazy thoughts gripped me. Was this God’s punishment for what I had been doing? They had no longer been human—had they? Had I sinned when I thought I had been acting out of mercy and duty to my fellow man? In the end, was I no better than that putrid slime I’d just left back at the bar with his scrap book of atrocities?

  Joey, or what had been Joey, thrust out his arms to me. He had the yellow pajamas with the duck patterns on. The feet of these actually had little webbed toes. How cute was that? Did he still recognize me? Did he want to be picked up, or was he simply trying to communicate his desire to bite me? There was nothing in his eyes, nothing more than what you would see in any hungry animal eyeing its potential prey. His skin was tinted a light blue, but I doubted he could have turned more than a couple hours ago. I knew what I had to do.

  After a quick trip back into my bedroom to kiss Tracy goodbye and cover her, I returned with my Sig-Sauer P220, my sidearm of choice. The .45 has excellent stopping power and makes a nice big hole. I’d had this one for six or seven years, long before I ever thought I would be using it to put down the walking dead. I sure never thought I would use it for this one last job.

  I picked him up. I couldn’t think of him as an it, as one of them. Now I really understood why so many people had been infected by their own children, parents, husbands or wives, brothers or sisters. You looked at them and somehow you still saw them, even though every logical bone in your body told you this was not that person anymore. He still felt like my son.

  My son was hungry. I would feed him, as I had so many times before. Just not like this.

  I sat down with him in the rocking chair and guided him to my throat. When I started to fade, I would do it. Him and then me. I couldn’t leave him like this, and I couldn’t let anyone else be the one to take care of him. As I felt my own warm blood flowing down and soaking me, and listened to Joey gurgling and chewing, I realized that this was the greatest tragedy of it all. No father should outlive his own child, even if it is only for an ins
tant.

  DEAD- the 12 book series

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