Best New Zombie Tales Trilogy (Volume 1, 2 & 3)

by James Roy Daley

  “Hell, I was tired of arguing with the guy, so I took it.”

  “And why’d we just dump the damn thing in the middle of your pond?” Tuck said, cocking a thumb over his shoulder.

  “Turned out some pieces were missing, along with the shelves. Wasn’t good for anything besides snaring a child. So that’s what I used it for. You only heard it fall over from inside the house, but I saw it. And I saw what made it fall.”

  Tuck gave Duffer a blank look. “You’re shittin’ me.”

  Lyndon couldn’t see Duffer’s face, but there was a long pause, followed by hoarse laughter as Duffer Kendrick slapped his knee and said, “Boy, you’re dumber than you look, and I wouldn’t have thought that was possible. Course there wasn’t no one in that gun safe. What do you think I am, the nut who’s been snatching up kids? The guy never sent the shelves, or the key. I have no way of opening the damn thing.”

  But Lyndon didn’t buy it. He had a feeling the first thing out of Duffer’s mouth had been the truth, and he suspected there were other children lying at the bottom of the pond, less fortunate than he was…feeding the fish. His stomach churned at the thought that the water currently chilling him to the core might have microscopic bits of human flesh in it.

  A jagged shard of scoria caught his eye. He stooped down to snatch it up and stepped out of hiding. Finally Tuck took notice of Lyndon’s presence, but it was too late to do him—or Duffer—any good. Lyndon ran for Duffer and delivered a heavy blow to the back of the man’s head with the ruddy rock. It knocked him clean off the log, but Lyndon didn’t stop there. He straddled Duffer’s chest and drove the scoria chunk into the man’s forehead, cheeks, and eyes.

  Duffer tried to resist at first, but he’d been taken by surprise, and before long he was too weak to fight back. And finally he was dead. Only then did Lyndon rise up from his grisly work to see what Tuck thought of it all.

  The man stood several feet behind Lyndon, his face a stretched piece of leather.

  “Not much of a friend, huh?” Lyndon asked, short of breath.

  “Why’s that, son?”

  “Well, you didn’t exactly come to the creep’s aid.”

  “No. No, I suppose I didn’t. And I’ll have to live with that. Just like you’ll have to live with what you done. Better hand over the rock, son.”

  Lyndon tossed him the scoria.

  “Can I give you a lift somewhere, boy? That’s my pickup right over there.”

  “Guess not,” Lyndon said, and he turned to walk away.

  But he only made it three or four paces before he felt the sudden impact of something striking the base of his skull. He fell onto his back and saw Tuck pitch the rock toward the pond before scooping Lyndon up in his arms and walking him to the passenger side of his pickup.

  “Like I said, boy, you’ll have to live with what you done. But not for long. We’re going to take us a little ride over to my place, you and me. Why, I have a cellar that just goes on and on. You’ll love it. Might even have a few of your old chums buried down there.”

  The sound of the passenger door closing against Lyndon’s shoulder, and Tuck’s footsteps as he stomped around to the other side of the vehicle, were almost as bad as the door of the safe sealing him in. Maybe every bit as bad and he was just too damn tired and hurt for it to register completely.

  Tuck Wagner slid behind the steering wheel and turned over the engine. “You and I’ll get on just fine if you keep your mouth shut while I drive. I’m none too happy about having to come back here later to clean up your little mess. But first things first.”

  A wave of nausea rippled through Lyndon’s guts, but he passed out before he could tell if he puked or not.

  When he woke up, the pickup was climbing over the top of the last hill before Tuck’s turnoff. He touched his shirt, which was bumpy with dried vomit. The sun was low, almost gone, and it cast an eerie glow on the scene below. Tuck slammed the brake pedal to the floor and brought the pickup to a jerky, angled stop on the shoulder. He stepped out to survey the crowd gathered at the base of the hill, blocking the highway with its lumbering presence.

  “Wagner!” one of them hollered in a hoarse, garbled voice. And then they began to point.

  He took a few steps in their direction and was about to speak, but then he must have realized what he was seeing. The mass of pointing, shambling figures was made up of his victims. Somehow they’d come back from the grave to claim revenge. Lyndon recognized some of them as boys who’d gone missing in recent months. But Tuck Wagner must have been at his work for longer than anyone realized, because there were at least two dozen figures down there.

  Tuck stood dead still for a while, like he was considering killing them all again, tearing them limb from limb with his bare hands. But terror and revulsion appeared to win out, for those still wearing skin wore only mangled strips of the stuff, and their deathly stink came ahead of them. Tuck jumped back into the pickup, but by now Lyndon had gotten out. And as Lyndon watched Tuck peel away, back in the direction of Kendrick’s farm, he felt safe at last. The dead boys were no longer pointing, but beckoning with slowly curling fingers. He couldn’t imagine what they wanted with him, but it wasn’t bound to be any worse than what Tuck had had in mind. In fact, he felt sure it was something altogether different. Something new.

  And so he walked down the hill to meet them, and together they followed the setting sun into night—bloodthirsty without exception.

  La Sequia

  T. F. DAVENPORT

  Contrary to promises made in church, death does not give her the use of her legs back. Nor does it give her a respite from pain, although this too was promised. What it gives her is a keening thirst deeper than anything she felt while living, deeper even than what she felt while dying: sprawled next to her wheelchair, croaking her breath out in a prayer for water. What death gives her––no small thing––is enough pain to overcome the shame of her infirmity. She picks herself up, crawls arm over elbow into the desert.

  She leaves the ranch house behind. She leaves the cistern with its cover screwed shut against los secos––the dry ones––who shambled out of the desert to pry at it with feeble hands. Now that she’s one herself, the sweetness of the water tugs at her. She could stay forever, caressing the iron lid, never dying. Instead she crawls west, across the desert and into Los Angeles.

  She finds a dead city of concrete and brown lawns, where secos lurch from one car to the next, twist without hope at the air conditioning knobs, and move on. She finds a city where if you fall into a dry swimming pool you’ll never find the strength to climb out. The paint bubbles on road signs. Withered faces lift to the sun in anger. Everyone who could has long since traveled north.

  Just like her death, the city has something to give her. One rippling afternoon, as she huddles in the shade of a jeans boutique, she encounters a male seco. He wears a farmer’s shirt so faded and soiled its original color is anyone’s guess. His eyeballs are raisins, shriveled back in their sockets. But beggars can’t be choosers, and aren’t they here because at the onset of the drought they were beggars?

  She feels his arm. It’s dry and wrinkled like jerky. Back in her water-fat days, she saw the secos as less than animals. Like the dying they had no strength, no words; they pawed at her latches with the husks of their hands. She shivered and hid, not comprehending that they meant her no harm. Now it’s obvious. They came for the air conditioning in her house. They came for the steam in her shower, for the water beads evaporating in the tub of her sink. The man takes her hand in his. Neither of them speak.

  This drought is never going to end. It will sweep over the earth, sucking the rivers dry, and what it takes it will make into more of itself. Wherever the secos go, they’ll carry the drought with them.

  She helps her companion to his feet. He touches her back as she crawls.

  There’s nowhere to go but north.

  Viva Las Vegas

  THOMAS S. ROCHE

  I cruise the blackened cit
y in the primer-gray Caddy, all-steel construction carving a path of blood and bone as I search the faces of the living dead. I stalk the streets like nightmares on a pale horse with a 390 pre-smog, radials and a big ugly hood ornament of a woodpecker or something, the air conditioning on high and the Beretta across my lap. I drive the Strip with its shattered neon lights and fragments of plate glass windows, silver dollars and poker chips and hundred-dollar bills forming drifts like the desert sands across Las Vegas Boulevard. I look into the desperate eyes of the rotting, watching them claw at the windows of the Caddy, and I put my shades on.

  Emily is nowhere in sight.

  But I hold on to the faith that’s kept me on the highway since I started. It’s a small burning coal at the pit of my stomach that tells me one day very, very soon I’m going to have my Emily back and then not even Manny Pearlman can take her away again. Off in the distance, I hear the howl of a dog.

  I park the Caddy in the parking lot of a Mister Doggy and light an unfiltered Black Lung. I sit there, smoking, and thinking about the way Emily’s eyes are going to light up when she sees me. It’s been a long time coming––pedal-to-the-metal in the Caddy, burning up the road to this place, and every time I look into the face of Death he is a brainless zomboid drooling green muck on his shirt. Every time I get cornered and try to speak words of wisdom to the great unwashed (which has gotten particularly unwashed of late), I find myself face to face with a greater kind of pinhead––the occupant of a brave new and even stupider TV nation looking for a rather unwilling TV dinner, namely, me. Every time I point nine millimeters of death at the brain of the New Regular Joe, his jaws just clack and his hands claw to get a grip on my arm and peel off a succulent morsel.

  But none of that matters worth rat-shit. I know, know in my heart, in my soul, that when I finally find Emily I’m gonna take her in my arms and she’s gonna see me, recognize me, remember everything we had together. That’s when her eyes’ll brighten and I’ll see those beautiful shining tears of hers. At long last I’ll have my Emily back from the hands of Death.

  All at once I see them, two dead hippies, one short and one tall, wearing tie-dye shirts with skull logos. They have just walked up to the Caddy’s side windows like they’re trying to sell me some weed with a couple of Louisville Sluggers. No time to get the car in gear. I open the door fast so the short guy takes the bottom edge in the knee; the bat goes flying. I lean out of the car just enough to point the Beretta at his head; the gun barks and brains spray over the second hippy as he comes at me.

  I see tie-dye and Jerry Bear on the guy’s shirt: Forever Dead. Christ, could I make this shit up?

  I fire again but miss the second hippy’s head and the bat comes down on me once, twice. I see stars and tumble back into the Caddy. He starts climbing in, his jaws already working, his hands grabbing for me. I’ve still got the Black Lung in my mouth and I quickly put it out in the hippie’s eye. Not that it hurts the bastard, but it seems to slow him down just a hair. That gives me the chance I need to get the Beretta in his mouth and spray his brains all over the inside of the Caddy’s door. The first bullet takes the guy out something fierce, but you know how it is with those goddamn Berettas, once you get started it’s hard to stop, so next thing I know the clip is empty and hot cartridges are rattling around the inside of the Caddy like pinballs in the Hot Rod Derby machine down at the Boardwalk in Santa Monica. The guy’s head isn’t just blown open but gone, which is maybe how I like it. The Beretta makes a hollow click over and over again as I pull the trigger. Then with a “Yech” I kick the headless body out into the Mister Doggy parking lot, slam the door, and get the car in gear.

  Wetwork never used to be this wet.

  Both hippies crunch under my radials as I swing a tight turn out of the parking lot. I barely miss the giant dog with the obscene wiener, which used to flash neon-red like a goddamn blood sausage. The back end of the Caddy scrapes loud as I crank another turn and get going onto Tropicana, flooring it. Cruising in the fast lane, I shake out another cigarette and get it into my mouth with trembling hands. It doesn’t do much to kill the smell of the guy’s rotting insides drizzling down the inside of the Caddy’s door.

  I curse, telling myself not to daydream like that.

  “Easy,” I whisper around the butt of the Black Lung. “It’s a war for the future, don’t ever forget that. She’s out there and it’s your job to take her away from them.” Nowadays, sometimes talking to yourself is the only way to stay sane. If you can even use that word any longer.

  I stop in the middle of the street to reload the Beretta and move the pump-action Remington .410 to the front seat. I check the weight of the two .32s in my jacket pocket. Can’t be too careful.

  * * *

  There. Under the burned-out neon palm tree…

  I spot her in the shadows of a shambling horde on the corner of Paradise. There’s got to be thirty, maybe forty of them, wandering with arms outstretched, uttering the faintly whining battle-cry of the eternally hungry. I take it slow, creeping forward until the horde, as one, sees me, and––as one––turns toward me.

  It’s her.

  I put the Caddy in ‘Low’ and click the safety off the Beretta.

  She’s there, in the middle.

  The 390 roars like a demon. I’m halfway to sixty when I get there. I see her face and I know I’m cutting it close, maybe too close, but it’s the only way to be sure. I hit the brakes at the last possible second, yank the wheel to the left, slam into the mass of rotting flesh and splatter bodies over the front end of the Caddy. She’s there––arms out, clawing at the Caddy, only a foot away. I could have nailed her but I missed her, just. The bodies under the wheels are pulped, but heads and arms are still writhing, groping for me. Jaws clack and goo-choked pieholes make wet sounds. I open the driver’s side door and slam it into the press of bodies; then I’ve got the Remington out and I’m standing there, surrounded by them, pulling the trigger as fast as I can, pumping the action until there’s gore everyfuckingwhere and the spent shells rain down on me like a plague of locusts. Then it’s out with the Beretta. I’ve got a path cleared in five shots; heads crack open all around me. I jump on the hood of the Caddy and take out the two on either side of her; then she’s clawing at me and trying to get her teeth latched onto my arm. But it’s her; it’s my Emily. I almost lose it, almost can’t hit her as hard as I need to. I get her in a headlock and all she tries to do is snap her teeth down on my flesh, but she misses and I get her onto the pavement with my knee in her back. I have to blow away three more of them with the Beretta while I’m holding Emily down––not the easiest task in the world––and then I see a group of them crawling over the Caddy. The Beretta makes hollow clicks in my hand. I barely manage to drop it and get the first .32 out before this rotting guy missing one arm comes down on me––lucky shot, one bullet right into the mouth, upward angle. Under me Emily is writhing and shrieking, clawing for me, trying to close her mouth on my thigh. I empty the .32 and pick Emily up in a bastardized Full Nelson, swinging her like a pair of num-chucks, knocking a couple of the rotting bastards down.

  “I’m sorry, baby, I’m sorry––” I mutter as I get the trunk open.

  Emily claws at my face, her jaw working, her throat uttering an inhuman shriek. Then I slam her into the trunk just as a priest gets his arms around my throat and tries to drag my face into his wide-open mouth. Crap…there’s a church just across the street; I’m a Catholic, I hate this shit. Screaming, I try to swing him around and get him down on the pavement so I can slam the trunk closed, but Father Zombie’s teeth are shutting hard an inch from my nose and I know he’ll fucking bite it off if he gets half a goddamn chance. His mouth is oozing green puss from sores and infections and I’m about to puke from the smell. Ten or twelve more of them are closing in, they’ll be here in a few seconds. Holding the priest against the tail fin of the Caddy I hammer down with my knee as he gropes for me, I feel the tail fin piercing his back, maybe severing his spine, but
they don’t feel pain like the living, which maybe is something to look forward to since my throat is hurting something awful just now. I push the friendly Monsignor harder down on the tail fin but he won’t let go of me. I manage to get the second .32 out as I pull him up off the Caddy’s tail fin, but I can’t bring the gun into line with his face. The Caddy’s trunk goes slick with blood and oozing grey-green rot. I put two bullets in his stomach but all it does is send little sprays of blood out his mouth and over my face. And he’s still groping and biting at me. Now the other group of them are all around me and I know they’re gonna drag me into their midst any second. I come down hard on top of the priest, wedging my knee into his groin, then his chest; then I stand up with my foot on his throat. I point the .32 at his quickly-working mouth and sneer down at him.

  “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned,” I say, and put two in his head.

  By then they’re all around me: a postal clerk, two cops, a showgirl, a bus driver, two strippers, four or five card dealers, a lounge singer, half-a-dozen cocktail waitresses, ten or twelve guys in Hawaiian shirts…Jesus, here come the nuns. A longhair Jimmy Buffet type swings his Strat like a club; I should have brought the chainsaw. The .32’s almost empty. As I turn I see that Emily has gotten out of the trunk and is crawling over the bumper holding my tire iron.

  “Sorry, baby, I’m sorry,” I tell her as I take the tire iron away. Then I hit her hard in the chest, pushing her back into the trunk as three more of the fuckers come up behind me. Emily totters and falls. I slam the lid down. A butcher has his arms around my leg and is going for it like it’s a turkey leg. I bring the tire iron down three times as a rotting traffic cop goes for my waist. I put the last .32 slug in the oinker’s head and hammer the butcher till he lets go.