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

by James Roy Daley

  Harley tagged the body and added the name to his report. When he returned to his truck he called Dispatch, who would notify the Recovery crew. Hopefully they’d get to the boy before animals or the elements—or some other rotter. Normally the crew was timely, but lately business had exploded and they could barely keep up.

  Two left on the list for the day. Twin girls. He studied their pictures.

  As he drove, he wondered about the survival of the human race. Whatever this was, this disease, this infection that had doomed the children was dooming humanity. Newborn rotters, chewing and clawing their way out of their mothers’ wombs, or children changing into these flesh-consuming creatures…going to bed perfectly normal, parents breathing a collective sigh of relief and falling to their knees in thanks suddenly finding themselves in the middle of the night fighting for their lives against their ravenous monstrosities. No one knew what had caused the disease. Or how to cure it, despite children being studied, examined—autopsied. It was no longer safe to try to keep them alive. They had become too much of a threat.

  Harley’s job as a police officer, and his proficiency with his firearm made him the perfect candidate for this detail. A job he despised. Calls from frantic parents had disturbed him at all hours of the day and night at home. Threats. Pleads. He’d heard it all. Warnings that if he killed their baby they would hunt him down and—

  But this was all part of the job. So he’d had his phone number changed and unlisted and the calls stopped.

  The kids (he could never bring himself to think of them as rotters) tended to take to the woods. They avoided the towns. Maybe it was something instinctive, maybe somehow they felt safe. Safe.

  Molly and Melissa, age six. Born three minutes apart. Changed into rotters only that morning, and had last been seen heading into the woods behind their house. Woods that covered hundreds of miles, however. One thing about rotters, though—they didn’t move too quickly. They could attack at rapid-fire speed once the illness had advanced, but they tended to travel slowly, as if lost, as if unable to decide where they wanted to go. And the younger ones, the ones who had not yet developed social or coping skills, the ones who had been clumsy in life and were just getting used to their own bodies were even slower.

  It took Harley about an hour to pick up their trail. The air was thick in that part of the woods, swampy, almost soupy; hordes of mosquitoes and blackflies assaulted him as he made his way through the dense foliage. A short while later he spotted them in a clearing, huddled together as they rested beneath a weeping willow.

  “There you are, girls,” he whispered, catching his breath, closing in on them. He left his pistol holstered as he crept quietly through the bushes and approached them from the side.

  One of the girls lifted her head and looked in his direction but didn’t seem to have spotted him. The girls appeared almost normal; the telltale vacuous expression wasn’t usually evident until several days after the change began. But the other signs were there—the oozing sores, the distorted, runny facial features—as if the kids had been dead for days and were walking the earth again. And the animal-like demeanor—the snarls and grunts, their mindless, predacious instinct—cleared up any doubts whether these kids were still human.

  Their first impulse at this early stage was to run. In a few days they would turn predator, savage. But for now they fled. The first rotter twin finally spotted Harley in the brush and took off into the trees, her startled twin remaining behind to watch the other run.

  Before the girl could react and chase after her sister, Harley pounced, knocking her on her back. She snarled at him—language was the first thing to go, it seemed—and tried to bite, to claw at his face. The abnormal strength that would inevitably come was also not quite there yet, so her struggles were manageable.

  He hog-tied her hands and feet behind her back and muzzled her before chasing after her twin.

  The second girl hadn’t gotten far and was attempting to burrow her way into a rabbit hole. Harley grabbed her ankles and pulled her out of the ground and tied and muzzled her the way he had her sister.

  “I ain’t gonna hurt you, kid,” he said, lifting her up and returning to the spot he’d left the other girl. He then picked up the second girl as well—both children struggling furiously beneath each arm—and carried them back to his truck, carefully laying them in the covered flatbed.

  “Harley, come in.”

  Harley returned to the cab and picked up the radio. “Go ahead.”

  “Where you been, Harley? Been trying to reach you for an hour.”

  “Huntin’,” he said. “What’s up, Homer?”

  “Just wanted your twenty, Harley. Making sure everything’s good.”

  Yeah, he thought. Just swell. “Everything’s fine, Homer. I’m in the woods behind junction three. You sure my location’s all you wanted?”

  Static hovered in the air for several seconds before Homer finally replied. “The captain wants to see you as soon as possible. You need to come in.”

  “Why? What’s wrong?”

  Static again. Harley stared at the radio in his hand.

  “Just come in, Harley.” Something strange about Homer—his usual hard edge had softened.

  Harley nodded at the radio. He’d report in. Right after he took care of the twins in the flatbed.

  His house wasn’t far from junction three. Sarah’s car was gone. Odd. One of them was always home; it was what they’d worked out. What they’d agreed to.

  Harley unlocked the front door and poked his head inside. “Sarah?” No reply. He left the door open and went back to the truck to retrieve the twins, hoisted them beneath each arm and carried them into the house. He slammed the front door shut with his foot.

  When he opened the basement door, the pungent odor of decay burned his nostrils. He’d never get used to that smell, like sulfur and rotting fish, like gangrenous flesh baking in the midday sun.

  He took a deep breath of hallway air before plunging into the fetid stench that waited for him a few steps away. In the basement, he carefully laid Molly and Melissa on the dirt floor and prepared their spots.

  This was getting worse, much worse. There was no denying that this was a progressive disease.

  In the far corner of the room, the little boy once known as Jason Wheeler was developing into something unrecognizable. What had been pockets of pus sores were now runny leaks, consuming his limbs in ebola-like fashion, distorting his face into a mass of spongy tissue. His nose was missing, the cartilage having dissolved into his cheeks. Black holes filled his mouth, nubs that had once been teeth gnashing and snapping at Harley. That little boy, all of eight years old, was now a misshapen mess, a caricature of his former self.

  Around the room, more of the same. The children he had brought home to take care of and feed and love, the ones he could not bring himself to destroy, were evolving around him. Quickly developing into terrifying things without rational thought, becoming creatures intent on killing and eating and nothing else.

  He prayed daily that a cure would be found, that if he held onto these children they might be saved. And Sarah had agreed to this since the beginning, several months earlier, was worried about the poor children that the rest of the world seemed to have given up on.

  Even though what they were doing was against the law.

  Even at risk to their own safety.

  He wondered where Sarah was, why she had left the house unattended when they had agreed they never would, that it was a dangerous risk. And he suddenly wondered why Homer had sounded so uncomfortable on the radio.

  “Oh, shit….” Quickly he chained Molly and Melissa to their new spots in the basement, working carefully, then untied and removed the muzzles from the terrified girls.

  Around the room, the other rotters reached for Harley, and for each other, tried to claw and chew their way out of their restraints. He knew they would settle down after he left. They always did.

  “Sorry, kids,” he said, ascending the steps.
“I’ll feed you when I get back.”

  He returned to his truck. “On my way in,” he said into the radio. “Homer? You there?”

  “Yeah, Harley, ’course I am. See you soon.”

  He wondered why he hadn’t asked Homer about Sarah. He thought maybe he didn’t want to know; that if there was bad news he wouldn’t have wanted to hear it over a dispatch radio. Not that Homer would have told him. Not over a blasted radio. Like last time there’d been bad news, it hadn’t been delivered over a radio, it had been delivered by three officers who were like brothers to Harley and who could catch him if he fell hysterically to the floor. But that hadn’t happened; Harley had retained control. And then he threw himself into his work to keep his mind away from the horrible accident. Keeping himself busy around the clock prevented him from having to think about his own life.

  The warm summer air blasting his face as he drove didn’t help with the queasiness in his stomach. Half an hour later he arrived at the police station. Despite driving with the siren and doing sixty along the back roads, he was too far out of town to make it there any quicker. When he pulled up in front of the station, he spotted Sarah’s car.

  The relief he felt when he raced inside and saw his wife sitting on the bench was enough to make him break down and sob like a baby.

  Sarah stood up and threw herself into his arms.

  “Oh thank god,” he cried, holding her tight. “I thought something happened to you.”

  She shook her head and started to cry.

  “What is it, baby? What’s wrong? What are you doing here?”

  “Patrick,” she said, wiping the tears away with the back of her hand. “It’s Patrick.”

  “Patrick? What?” He blinked rapidly, and his heart pounded in his ears. “What about Patrick?”

  Sobbing now, unable to speak, she just shook her head and clutched his shirt.

  Captain Mellner came up behind Harley and laid his hand on Harley’s shoulder. “We need to talk.”

  “No,” Harley said, emphatically shaking his head. “Patrick’s dead. There’s nothing to talk about.”

  Mellner took Harley’s elbow and led him into his office. He shut the door. “Sit down, please.”

  Harley sat, unsure his rubbery legs would have supported him much longer. Little specks of white light danced before his eyes. He’d never felt faint before, not even when Patrick had died in the car accident, not even when he’d had to identify his little boy’s dead body. Not even at the funeral while viewing his four-year-old boy in his tiny blue suit. Not even then. Control. That was what it had been about. If Harley had lost control—if Harley had been forced to think about these events, which were impossible for a parent to think about—he would have lost his mind.

  But now, somehow he knew what Mellner was about to say, and now the specks bobbed and flashed before his eyes like the Aurora Borealis.

  “It’s not just the living children who are developing this disease. It seems to be reanimating … the … uh, deceased.” Mellner sat on the edge of his desk and leaned forward as if prepared to catch Harley before he tumbled out of his chair and on to the floor.

  “The caretaker at the cemetery called earlier”—(Digger, that’s his name, aren’t all cemetery caretakers named Digger?—“and Patrick’s grave had been dug up. His and several other children’s.”

  “Grave robbers,” Harley muttered. “Some sick fuck—”

  “No. He saw Patrick heading out the gates.”

  “Oh, Christ no,” Harley cried, burying his knuckles in his eyes. “This can’t be. Please tell me this isn’t happening!”

  Mellner wasn’t exactly the comforting sort and gingerly patted Harley’s shoulder. “We called Sarah in. We wanted you both here. In case Patrick …”

  In case Patrick comes home.

  Harley looked up sharply, his hands dropping into his lap. “I gotta get home.”

  “No, Harley. I’ll send a car to your house.”

  Oh, Christ. That was all he needed. He’d just heard the second worse news of his life and didn’t think things could plummet any further. But if those officers went inside his house, and opened the basement door … hell, his entire house stank of rotting children. They wouldn’t have to step much further than the front door to know something was dreadfully wrong inside.

  “No, Captain. I have to go home.”

  “Harley, I’m telling you, you’re not going anywhere. You know as well as I do the SOP for this. You can’t go anywhere near—”

  Harley swallowed. “Christ, Captain! He’s already dead. Just let me go with an officer. I won’t go alone.”

  “Come on, Harley, you—”

  “Captain, please. If it was Aaron, wouldn’t you insist on going?”

  The captain winced at the mention of his son’s name. So far, Aaron hadn’t caught the disease. “All right. Ride with Tompkins.”

  Harley returned to the hall and Sarah looked up at the sound of his footsteps connecting with the tiles. Sarah. He’d forgotten about her.

  “What’s going on?” she asked, clutching Harley’s arm, digging her nails into the flesh.

  “It’s okay, baby. I’m going with Tompkins back to the house.”

  “Oh, Harley,” she said breathlessly. “The house? Oh, no …”

  “It’ll be okay. I’ll think of something.”

  “I’ll go with you.”

  “No, baby, you can’t. This is a police matter now. Why don’t you go on over to your mother’s? Don’t drive, Sarah. One of the guys will take you there.”

  “Call me, Harley,” she cried, eyes wide with terror. “The minute anything happens, you call me.”

  “You know it, babe.” He kissed her softly and caressed her cheek, trying to comfort her but knowing he wasn’t successful.

  Tompkins’ attempts at pleasantries and sympathy were appreciated but ignored. Harley knew the procedure, knew what Tompkins was attempting, and he didn’t want any part of it. The forty-five minute drive back to his house—Tompkins driving the speed limit, the moron—was interminable.

  “This bucket go above forty-five?” Harley snapped, breaking his silence.

  “Sorry, Harley. We’ll be there soon.” And Tompkins broke into another soliloquy about how sorry he was, how he’d want to die if anything like this should ever happen to little Ginny.

  Harley thumped his head against the glass and tried to ignore the man’s voice.

  Finally they reached the house. They sat in the car in the driveway and stared at the front door for almost a minute.

  “Might as well go inside,” Tompkins said.

  “No, let’s wait here. We’ll see him if he comes.”

  “Not if he comes around back, Harley. Besides, it’s too hot to wait in the car.”

  Tompkins got out, his boots crunching on the gravel. Reluctantly Harley followed, and stood beside the car.

  “We can’t go in,” he said. “The place is a mess. Sarah would have a fit.”

  Tompkins looked over at Harley, shielding the sun with his palm. “What’s going on here, Harley?”

  “What?”

  “You’re acting strange.”

  “Think about what’s happened to me today, and then think about what the fuck you just said.”

  “No, man, it’s more than that. I don’t mean to sound like a heartless bastard, ’cause I do know what’s happened to you today. But Harley, man, you’re acting like you’re hiding something. And you know the law, okay? You know you can’t do what I’m pretty sure you did. But there’s still time to fix this. I don’t have to tell anyone I found him inside the house. Okay, Harley?”

  The blazing sun wasn’t helping matters. Harley felt clammy and chilled at the same time, and his bowels clamped up the same instant his testicles crawled inside his body. “Tompkins,” he croaked, “you don’t understand. It’s not like that. Patrick’s not inside. I just found out about it in Mellner’s office.”

  Tompkins started walking toward the house.


  Something was stumbling toward them from the woods beside the house. Something small, very small, something human-shaped but not quite human, something pitching and reeling and trying desperately to climb over deadwood and saplings.

  “Holy sweet mother,” Tompkins said, undoing the snap on his holster and releasing his sidearm.

  Harley came up behind him and pressed his gun into the back of Tompkins’ head. “I swear, you have no idea how sorry I am. But I can’t let you do this. I can’t.”

  “Don’t, Harley,” Tompkins pleaded. “Don’t do this. You know what this means, man.”

  Harley raised his arm and smashed his gun into the back of Tompkins’ head. Tompkins crashed to the ground like a bag of wet cement.

  Patrick had reached the edge of the woods, about five yards away now.

  The child had been in the ground for several weeks and the decay was evident, even from this distance. Harley shook his head, ignoring the stench that assaulted him from ten feet away. Much of the flesh was missing from his son’s face, seemed to have melted away. Part from the car wreck, part from rotting in the ground, part, probably, from being a rotter. A sob tore out of Harley’s throat as the boy approached.

  Tiny fingers clasping and unclasping, vacant eyes staring at Harley although Harley imagined the child didn’t know what he was seeing. The shredded remains of his tiny blue suit, hanging from and falling off the child’s body. Dark hair matted with dirt, alive with whatever maggoty insects had burrowed their way during his climb through the soil from his casket, and nested in with his baby’s body.