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

by James Roy Daley

  no bloody chance because now the world is hell and if you doubt it, then you don’t know the facts, Gentlemen. No bloody chance.

  We ended the war by dropping hell on Nagasaki and on Hiroshima, and we opened up Germany and discovered all those hells, and during the siege of Stalingrad, the living ate the dead, and tata, Gentlemen, turnabout is fair play, and we’re just starting to know the hells that good old Papa Joe put together no bloody chance and we’re not blameless, oh, no, ask that poor nigger hanging burning from the tree, ask the Rosenbergs who got cooked up nice and brown, ask––Welcome to hell, and how do you like it now, Gentlemen?

  When the world is hell, the dead walk.

  XI

  When they returned to Ketchum, Idaho on June 30, the old man was happy. Anyone who saw him will tell you. He was not supposed to drink because of his antidepressant medication, but he did drink. It did not affect him badly. He sang several songs. One was “La Quince Brigada,” from the Spanish Civil War. He sang loudly and offkey; he made a joyful racket. He said one of the great regrets of his life was that he had never learned to play the banjo.

  Later, he had his wife, Mary, put on a Burl Ives record on the Webcor phonograph. It was a 78, “The Riddle Song.” He listened to it several times.

  How can there be a cherry

  that has no stone?

  How can there be a chicken

  that has no bone?

  How can there be a baby

  with no crying?

  Mary asked if the record made him sad.

  No, he said, he was not sad at all. The record was beautiful. If there are riddles, there are also answers to riddles.

  So, so then, I have not done badly. Some good stories, some good books. I have written well and truly. I have sometimes failed, but I have tried. I have sometimes been a foolish man, and even a smallminded or meanspirited one, but I have always been a man, and I will end as a man.

  * * *

  It was early and he was the only one up. The morning of Sunday, July 2, was beautiful. There were no clouds. There was sunshine.

  He went to the front foyer. He liked the way the light struck the oakpaneled walls and the floor. It was like being in a museum or in a church. It was a well-lighted place and it felt clean and airy.

  Carefully, he lowered the butt of the Boss shotgun to the floor. He leaned forward. The twin barrels were cold circles in the scarred tissue just above his eyebrows.

  He tripped both triggers.

  The Finger

  MATT HULTS

  1.

  Through some ironic twist of fate, the phone call from the morgue came while Jim Cooley sat watching Frankenstein on one of the cable channels.

  “It’s me,” Stuart said when Jimmy picked up the receiver. “I got one. How fast can you get down here?”

  Jimmy straightened up in his seat, letting the half-eaten bag of Crispy Pork Bits fall to the trailer’s floor. “Hot damn, Stu, are you serious?” he asked. “When’d he come in? Where’d they find him—”

  “I’ll fill you in on the goddamn details when you get here,” Stuart interrupted. “Harrington just went out to lunch, so we have less than an hour to do this.”

  Jimmy grinned. “We’re really going through with it?”

  “I guess so. Meet me at the back loading dock by twelve-thirty or the deal is off!”

  He hung up.

  Outside thunder rumbled across the sky like the footsteps of an angry god.

  Jimmy continued to smile as he replaced the handset, then slapped his hands together with a jovial whoop of delight. “Hot shit!” he cheered. “The little bastard did it!” He jumped up from the couch and grabbed his jean jacket off the wall hook as he hurried out the door.

  2.

  Three inches of rainwater sloshed along the gutters and burbled around the storm drains as Jimmy guided his rusty Mustang down the alley that serviced the back side of the Hewitt County Municipal Building. The parking area at this end of the lot boasted twenty spaces, but only two other vehicles currently occupied the asphalt; Stuart Wyllie’s dented red Honda and a 1988 Ford that made up the third unit in the HCPD’s trio of squad cars.

  Jimmy parked next to the sunken driveway that gave access to the lower loading bay of the building and got out. The rain continued to come down like a busted water main, soaking his shoulders and hair as he ran to the back door.

  He rapped on the steel. “Yo, Stu? Open up, man!”

  He knocked again when no one answered, letting his gaze flick to the old squad car as he waited. A smile crept onto his face when he thought of when he’d etched his initials in the vinyl on the rear of the driver’s seat back when the car had been new.

  The door clicked and flew open.

  “What the hell?” Stuart asked. “I never told you to knock!”

  The kid glanced around like a mouse in a cat kennel as Jimmy stepped past him, into a green-tiled hallway outside the morgue office.

  “I’m due back at the hospital as soon as Doctor Harrington returns,” Stuart reminded him. “We don’t have much time!”

  “Don’t shit yourself,” Jimmy told him. “Now, what do you got for me?”

  Stuart eased the door into its frame before speaking, and when he did, he kept his voice low. “Mexican male, no ID. Sheriff Picket said a trucker found the body under the I-30 overpass around four o’clock yesterday morning. He’s guessing the guy’s an illegal thumbing his way north.”

  “Kick ass!” Jimmy cheered.

  “Keep your voice down!” Stuart whispered, glancing up and down the corridor.

  “Yeah, yeah—what else?”

  Stuart ushered him inside the empty office, toward a door across the room. “We got him fresh,” he said, snatching a manila folder off the desk as they passed it. “Harrington pronounced the cause of death as heart failure two hours after they brought him in, and we just got the toxicology and blood work reports back from HCMC: negative across the board; aside from being dead, he’s as healthy as a horse.”

  “Ah, man, this is friggin’ perfect!” Jimmy agreed.

  Stuart pushed through the door of the autopsy room and led the way past the central operating table and body hoist. Jimmy shivered as the first drops of adrenaline hit his veins. His neck hairs prickled on end the way they did in his childhood, when his mother would drag him to the doctor’s office with an ear infection or pneumonia. Cold sweat sheathed his palms as his eyes drifted over the various items in the room: the table, the scales, the shiny stainless steel containers. The drive over had been easy enough—even a bit exciting—but now his emotions sobered as the reality of what awaited him began to sink in.

  Stuart unlocked another door, and they stepped into the cooler. Six stainless steel storage lockers took up the far wall, but only one displayed an information card in the holder on the exterior of the door.

  “This him?” Jimmy asked.

  Stuart gestured to the locker’s handle. “Be my guest.”

  Jimmy reached for the handle but stopped short before his fingers touched the metal. He glanced to Stuart, to the purple latex gloves he wore, and with a smirk of self-admiration, he slipped the cuff of his jacket over his hand. “Can’t be too careful.”

  He opened the door and rolled out the retractable table.

  The corpse had already been packaged in a black body bag for its trip to the Hewitt County Medical Center, where it would await cremation if nothing came up on a fingerprint check, or if nobody claimed the body.

  Still using his jacket cuff, Jimmy took hold of the zipper and opened the top third. With a final glance at Stuart, he reached up with both hands and parted the two halves of the bag to reveal a bloodless stump where the man’s head should’ve been.

  “Holy Christ!” he yelled.

  He snapped his hands back and leapt away.

  “Son of a bitch!”

  When Jimmy looked up, he saw that Stuart had cracked a grin for the first time since their meeting.

  “Real hilarious, ass
hole! I thought you said his ticker crapped out?”

  “It did,” Stuart laughed. “After he got hit by a truck.”

  “Damn!”

  “Hey, at least we don’t need to wait for the dental x-rays.”

  Jimmy shook his head, still squirming from the surprise like a snake trying to work itself out of an old skin.

  Stuart’s smile faded as he glanced at his watch, then to the door. “Okay, let’s get this over with. We’re pushing the limit here.”

  He placed the manila folder he’d grabbed on the dead man’s chest, flipping it open. A second later, he produced an ink tray from the pocket of his lab coat.

  Jimmy lingered at a distance for another moment, then moved forward again. He gave a fleeting glance to the shredded mess of torn muscle and broken bones in the bag—all that remained of the cadaver’s neck—then refocused his attention on Stuart as he held up the man’s right arm and dabbed his blue-gray fingers on the ink-soaked felt of the tray. The top form in the stack of papers Stuart had opened contained two rows of sequential square boxes, each labeled for the digits of the human hand. Starting with the row marked “Right,” he pressed the man’s fingers into the appropriate spaces one at a time, rolling them from side to side to transfer their impressions. He then repeated the procedure for the left hand, all except for the smallest finger.

  For that box, he dabbed his own left pinky in the ink and rolled it on the paper.

  He took the original fingerprinting sheet out of the file—the one Doc. Harrington had done when the Sheriff first brought the corpse in, Jimmy guessed—and crumpled it into a wad, using it to wipe away the excess ink from his hand. Once finished, he stuffed the soiled paper in his pocket, slipped the new form into the file, and gathered up the folder.

  “I still say it should be your print on that paper,” he commented. “This was your plan, after all.”

  “I got a record,” Jimmy said. “You don’t.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Anyway, that’s my end of it… Your turn.”

  Jimmy reached into his back pocket, extracting a sandwich-size Zip-Loc baggy and a dirt-flecked pair of pruning sheers.

  He met Stuart’s eyes… then looked to the cadaver’s left hand.

  To the smallest finger.

  His heart hesitated in his chest as his hands moved forward, positioning the tool’s cutting edge between the first and middle knuckle. Then, after one last glance at Stuart, he squeezed down on the sheer’s handle with both hands as hard and as fast as he could.

  Shick!

  Stuart grimaced as Jimmy lifted the severed digit from the table, holding it between thumb and forefinger.

  “You really gonna eat that thing?” Stuart asked.

  “I ain’t gonna eat it,” Jimmy corrected as he slipped the finger into the Zip-Loc bag. “I’m going to do like we talked about and just ... chew it a little.”

  “This is nuts,” Stuart said.

  Jimmy eyed him. “Hey, we’re in this together, man. Don’t start getting fidgety on me! Just keep thinking about that old lady who burned herself with the coffee from McDonalds. What’d she get for her lawsuit ... a million? Two million?”

  “Actually, I think it came closer to three.”

  “Exactly! Now imagine what a big-ass chain like Smokey’s will have to shell out when I find a human finger in my food!” He clapped his hands together. “Hot damn, boy! Even split fifty-fifty we’ll both be rolling in it! I’ll make sure a couple of guys from the worksite are with to see me spit it out. Then those patty-flipping pricks will have to pay through the roof for emotional stress.”

  Stuart’s expression remained as serious as ever, but Jimmy noticed a renewed gleam of determination in his eyes at the mention of the money. “Just remember to cook it,” the kid said. “You gotta simmer it in the chili for at least three hours at 180 degrees so the spices will permeate the flesh. That’ll give any prosecutor in the country an uphill battle to prove it wasn’t in the mix from the start. Especially since Smokey’s meat supplier just got busted for hiring illegals. I Googled the case settlement last week and ...”

  Jimmy shook his head and laughed.

  “What?” Stuart asked.

  “Nothing,” Jimmy answered, heading for the door. “I just knew hanging out with a nerd like you would pay off eventually.”

  3.

  Jimmy waited three days, just like they’d planned, allowing the police time to do a fingerprint check on the Mexican, and when no word came from Stuart to abort the mission, he drove to work on the forth morning with the finger in a Styrofoam cooler full of ice on the passenger seat.

  With the lid on, the white rectangular box hardly looked worth the three dollar price tag. Because he knew what lay inside it, however, Jimmy couldn’t help seeing the container as something secret, something important, and for part of the drive from the Shell station, he imagined himself as a character on one of those TV medical dramas transporting an urgently needed donor organ.

  He arrived at the job site just after nine, coming to a stop amid the larger pick-ups and SUVs of the regular work crew. Construction had been suspended for the last few days due to the rain, but today the steel skeleton of the new Park Street mini-mall bustled with activity.

  Before getting out, he peeked in on the finger. It lay in the Zip-Loc bag like a half-curled worm. Smiling, he closed the cooler’s lid and got out of the car.

  The ground remained soft and moist from the recent rainfall, and Jimmy’s feet made loud smacking sounds in the mud as he walked to the construction company’s mobile office. He noticed Tom Ryder, the foreman, talking with two of the subcontractors working the same site, animatedly clapping them on the back as he always did during conversations, acting like a father congratulating his sons on a well-played little league game. Jimmy ducked into the trailer to clock in before the man spotted him.

  He found Jeff Densi, the lead mason, out by what would become the entrance to the mall’s parking lot. Jeff crouched beside his brother, Roy, near the first of two walls that divided the lot from the sidewalk, and when seen side by side, the two looked like the working-Joe equivalent of Laurel and Hardy.

  Jimmy waved hello as the men looked up.

  Jeff had been kneeling alongside the guide wires that outlined the wall’s base, and he stood up as Jimmy approached, maneuvering his bulk with ease. He returned the greeting eagerly enough, but his features appeared grim. “You’re a half hour late, Cooley. What gives?”

  Jimmy put on his apology face. “I’m sorry—”

  “I gave you a break with this job,” Jeff went on without pause. “You wouldn’t have it if my regular bricklayer hadn’t wrecked his back.”

  “I know, Sir—”

  “With your work history you’d be lucky to get hired at a firecracker stand, let alone anywhere else. I took you on ’cause I didn’t have another choice.”

  Jimmy nodded, trying to look humble. “It won’t happen again, man. I just couldn’t find my lunch box this morning… I think Meg must’ve taken it with her when she split.”

  Jeff had been glaring at him with what Jimmy had come to know as his “business look,” but at the mention of Megan, his true amiability reappeared and his face softened. “Your woman left you?”

  Jimmy nodded.

  “Shit, pal, I’m sorry to hear that.”

  Roy had stopped his work to listen and now leaned on his shovel like a farmer watching his crops grow. “Women,” he said.

  Jimmy shrugged. “Like you said, I’d be damned if I could hold a decent job for long, and that doesn’t look too good on a home loan application… She must’ve just got fed-up with living with a loser.”

  Jeff waved his comment away. “Hell, kid, I didn’t mean it like that. Don’t be so hard on yourself.”

  “I guess.”

  The big man hooked his thumbs in his suspenders and simply nodded, looking uncertain of what else to say.

  “Here comes Slappy,” Roy commented, breaking the silence. He tipped his head in t
he direction of the company trailer, and Jimmy spotted the foreman making his rounds.

  Jeff clapped his hands together and gestured at the wall base. “Okay, let’s get back to it,” he said, sounding relieved to have gotten off the subject of Jimmy’s muddled love-life. “I hope everything works out for you, Jim—I really do—but we got a schedule to keep.”

  Jimmy nodded. “Don’t worry about me. Besides, I got a plan to get her back.”

  “Yeah?” Jeff asked.

  Jimmy looked at the Smokey’s restaurant across the street and thought about the finger in his car.

  “Why don’t you boys join me for lunch, and I’ll tell you about it.”

  4.

  Just before lunch, Jimmy went to his car under the pretext of retrieving his wallet. Using his body as a shield, he reached into the cooler and snatched up the Zip-Loc bag, slipping it into the pocket of his jean jacket.

  Jeff and Roy had already started across the road to Smokey’s, and Jimmy caught up with them as they fell into one of the lines behind the bank of registers along the counter. The lunch rush had the small building packed to capacity. He wiped his brow in an unconscious reaction to the crowd, and his hand came away covered in sweat.