by Brian Keene
“You’ll do no such thing.”
Leila’s smile was tight-lipped, almost a grimace. “I’ve got her email address.”
Gary paused. Felt fear. “You’re lying.”
“Try me.” Now her smile was genuine again, if cruel. “I looked it up on the internet. From her company’s website.”
Gary sighed. “Why? Why do this to me?”
“Because I’m sick of your bullshit. You said you loved me. You said you’d leave her—”
“I’ve told you, it’s not that simple. I’ve got to think about Jack.”
“She can’t take Jack from you. You’re his father. You’ve got rights.”
“I can’t take that chance. Damn it, Leila, we’ve been through this a million times. I love you, but I—”
“You’re a fucking liar, Gary! Just stop it. If you loved me, you’d tell her.”
“I do love you.”
“Then do it. Tell her. If you don’t have the balls to, I will.”
“Are you threatening me? You gonna blackmail me into continuing this? Is that it?”
“If I have to.”
Gary wasn’t sure what happened next. They’d been naked, sitting side by side on the blanket, their fluids drying on each other’s body, the water tower’s shadow protecting them from the warm afternoon sun, hiding their illicit tryst. He wasn’t aware that he was straddling Leila until his hands curled around her throat.
Choking, she lashed out at him. Her long, red fingernails raked across his naked chest. Flailing blindly, his hand closed around the rock. He raised it over his head and Leila’s eyes grew large.
“Gary...”
The rock smashed into her mouth, cutting off the rest.
He lost all control then, hammering her face and head repeatedly. He blocked out everything; her screams, the frightened birds taking flight, his own nonsensical curses. Everything—until he heard the singing.
“La la la la, lemon. La la la la lullaby...”
Jack. Singing his favorite song.
The boy stepped into the clearing. Believing his father was working that Saturday (because that was the lie Gary had told Susan and Jack so that he could meet up with Leila for an afternoon quickie in the first place—he’d even stayed logged into his computer at work so that if anybody checked, it would look like he was there working), Jack froze in mid-melody, a mixture of puzzlement and terror on his face.
“Daddy?”
“Jack!”
His son turned and ran. Jack sprang to his feet, naked and bloody, and chased after him.
“Jack, stop! Daddy can explain.”
“Mommy...”
Unaware that he was still holding the rock, until he struck his son in the back of the head.
“I said stop!”
Jack toppled face first into the grass. He did not move. Did not breathe.
When Gary checked his pulse, he had none.
Something inside Gary shut itself off at that moment.
The rest of the memories became a blur. He dressed. Wrapped the blanket around Leila and loaded her into the trunk of the car, which he’d parked behind the abandoned strip mall, just beyond the cemetery and the water tower. Her blood hadn’t yet seeped out onto the grass, and he made sure none of her teeth or any shreds of tissue were in sight. He’d thrown her clothes and purse inside the car as well.
Then he picked up the bloody rock, the rock that he’d just bludgeoned his son to death with, and threw it down a nearby rabbit hole.
He drove to the edge of LeHorn’s Hollow, where a sinkhole had opened up the summer before, and dumped Leila’s body. Gary knew that the local farmers sometimes dumped their dead livestock in the same hole, as did hunters after field dressing wild game. The chances were good that she’d never be found.
He cleaned his hands off in a nearby stream, then got back in the car and drove to the closest convenience store. He bought some cleaning supplies, paid cash, and then found a secluded spot where he could clean out the trunk. Then he returned to the office, unlocked the door, logged himself off the computer, and went home.
Then he went home.
The police knocked on the door a few hours later. Three teenaged boys found Jack’s body. One of them, Seth Ferguson (who was no stranger to juvenile detention) immediately fell under suspicion. When the police cleared him later that day, they questioned the local registered sex offenders, even though Jack’s body had shown no signs of sexual abuse. In the weeks and months that followed, there were no new leads. The case was never solved.
The murder weapon was never found.
• • •
Daddy...
Gary sat up and wiped his eyes. Steadying himself on his son’s tombstone, he clambered to his feet. His joints popped. He hadn’t aged well in the last two years, and his body was developing the ailments of a man twice his age, arthritis being one of them.
Daddy?
“Oh Jack,” Gary whispered. “Why couldn’t you have stayed home that day?”
Daddy...
His son’s voice grew louder, calling to him, pleading. Sad. Lonely.
Slowly, like a marionette on strings, Gary shuffled towards the water tower.
“Where are you, Jack? Show me. Tell me what I have to do to make it up to you.”
Daddy... Daddy... Daddy...
The voice was right next to him. Gary looked around, fully expecting to see his son’s ghost, but instead, he spied the rabbits. A dozen or so bunnies formed a loose circle around the water tower. They’d been silent, and had appeared as if from nowhere.
Penning him in.
Daddy. Down here.
Gary looked down at the ground.
Jack’s voice echoed from inside a rabbit hole.
The same hole he’d thrown the rock into.
Gary’s skin prickled. Despite his fear, he leaned over and stared into the hole. There was a flurry of movement inside, and then a rabbit darted out and joined the others. Then another. Whimpering, Gary stepped backward. More bunnies poured themselves from the earth, and he felt their eyes on him—accusing.
Condemning.
“What do you want?”
Daddy.
Gary screamed.
• • •
They found him when the sun went down. He’d screamed himself hoarse while pawing at the ground around his son’s grave. His fingers were dirty, and several of his fingernails were bloody and ragged, hanging by thin strands of tissue. He babbled about bunnies, but no one could understand him. The police arrived, as did an ambulance.
From the undergrowth, a brown bunny rabbit watched them load Gary into the ambulance.
When he was gone, it hopped away.
STORY NOTE: This story takes place in the same town as my novels Dark Hollow, Ghost Walk, Take The Long Way Home, and several short stories, and alert readers might recognize a few familiar places and people. The water tower exists much as I described it here, but it is far less sinister in real life. My oldest son and I used to play there when he was little. The mishap with the rabbits and the lawnmower is also based on something that happened in real life. I was mowing my lawn and accidentally hit a hidden nest of baby rabbits. It was horrifying and terrible and I felt guilty about it for months afterward. I channeled some of that into the story.
THE WIND CRIES MARY
Even in death, she returns to visit me every night.
If time mattered anymore, you’d be able to set your watch by her arrival. Mary shows up shortly after the sun goes down. She lumbers up our long, winding driveway, dragging her shattered right leg behind her like it’s a dog. I often wonder how she can still walk.
Of course, all the dead walk these days, but in Mary’s case, a shard of bone protrudes from her leg, just below the knee. The flesh around it is shiny and swollen—the color of lunchmeat. The wound doesn’t even leak anymore. I keep expecting her to fall over, for the bone to burst through the rest of the way, for her leg to come completely off. But it never happens.
/> Her abdomen has swollen, too. We were never able to have children, but death has provided her with a cruel pantomime of what pregnancy must be like. I dread what will happen when those gases trapped inside of her finally reach the breaking point. Her breasts have sunken, as have her cheekbones and eyes. Her summer dress hangs off her frame in tatters. It was one of my favorites—white cotton with a blue floral print. Simple, yet elegant, just like Mary. Now it is anything but. Her long hair is no longer clean or brushed, and instead of smelling like honeysuckle shampoo, it now smells of leaves and dirt, and is rife with insects. Her fingernails are filthy and cracked. She used to take so much pride in them. Her hands and face are caked with a dried brown substance. I tell myself that it is mud, but I know in my heart that it’s blood.
None of this matters to me. Her body may be changing, but Mary is still the woman I fell in love with. She is still the most beautiful woman I have ever known. She is still my wife, and I still love her. Death hasn’t taken that away. It has only made it stronger.
We had fifteen good years together. Death does not overcome those times. Her body may be rotting, but those memories do not decay. I am sure of this. Why else would she return here, night after night, and stare at the house, fumbling at the door and searching for a way in? It can’t be to feed. If it were, she would have given up by now—moved on to the new housing development a few miles up the road, where I am sure there are still plenty of families barricaded inside their homes, too scared or stupid to stay quiet for long. Easy pickings. I don’t know what she does during the day. Certainly it isn’t sleep. The dead never sleep. I assume she eats. Wanders, perhaps. But the question re-mains, why does she return here night after night? Mary doesn’t know I’m in here. Of this, I am certain. Although she paws at the door and the boarded up windows, she can’t see inside of our house. She can’t see me or hear me. So why does she return?
The answer is simple. She remembers. Maybe not in the way the living remember things, but somewhere, rooted deeply in whatever is left of her brain, there is some rudimentary attachment to this place. Perhaps she recognizes it as home. Maybe she just knows that this was a place where she was happy. A place where she once lived.
Mary hated me the first time we met. It was at a college party. She was an art major. I was studying business. I was a drunken frat boy—a young Republican in training, the next-generation spawn of the Reagan revolution. Mary was a liberal Democrat, involved in a number of volunteer social programs. When she walked into the party, a blonde and a brunette were feeding me a forty-ounce of Mickey’s through a makeshift beer bong. She glanced in our direction, then turned away. I was instantly infatuated. Not love at first sight, but certainly lust. Love came later.
I got her number from a mutual acquaintance. It took me two months to get a date with her. I was on my best behavior. The date lasted all night. We saw Pulp Fiction (I loved it, she hated it). We went to Denny’s (I had steak and eggs, she had a salad). We went back to her place. We talked all night. Kissed a little, but mostly, we just talked. And it was wonderful. When the sun came up, I asked for a second date and got it.
We dated for years, and broke up a half-dozen times before we finally got engaged. It wasn’t that we fought. We were just very different people. Sure, we shared some similar interests. We both liked to read. We both enjoyed playing Scrabble. We both liked Springsteen. But these were small, superficial similarities. At our core, we were different from one another. There are two kinds of people in this world—my kind, and Mary’s kind. But we made it work. We had love. And we were happy.
Until Hamelin’s Revenge. That’s the name the media gave it, because the disease started with the rats. Hamelin, the village where the Pied Piper cured the rat problem once and for all. Except that in real life, the rats came back—infected with a disease that turned the dead into rotting, shambling eating machines. Some television pundit called them ‘land sharks’. I thought that was funny at the time. I don’t any longer. The disease jumped from the rats to other species, including humans. It jumped oceans, too. It showed up first in New York, but by the end of the week, it spread to London, Mumbai, Paris, Tel Aviv, Moscow, Hafr Al-Batin, and elsewhere. Armies couldn’t fight it. You could shoot the dead, but you couldn’t shoot the disease. Global chaos ensued. Major metropolitan areas fell first. Then the smaller cities. Then the rural areas.
Mary and I stayed inside. We barricaded the house. We had enough food and water to last us a while. We had weapons to de-fend ourselves. We waited for the crisis to pass. Waited for someone—anyone—to sound the all clear and restore order. But that someone never came.
Mary died a week ago. She’d gone outside, just for a second, to dump the bucket we’ve been using as for a toilet. A dead crow pecked her neck. Panicked, Mary beat it aside and ran back into the house. The wound was just a scratch. It didn’t even bleed.
But it was enough.
She died that night. I knew what had to be done. The only way to keep the dead from coming back is to destroy their brain. I put the gun to her head while she lay still, but didn’t have the courage to pull the trigger. I couldn’t do that to her, not to the woman I loved. Instead, I cracked the door open and placed her body outside.
The next morning, she was gone.
That was when I put the gun to my own head and did to myself what I could not do to my wife. That should have been it.
But I came back anyway—not as a shuffling corpse. No, I am a different kind of dead. My body is decomposing on the kitchen floor, but I am not in it. All I can do is watch as it slowly rots away. I can’t leave this place. There is no light. No voices from beyond. No deceased loved ones to greet me from the other side.
There is only me...and Mary.
I cannot touch her. Cannot follow. I’ve tried to talk to her, tried to let her know that I am still here, but my voice is just the wind, and she does not notice. Each night, I cry for us both, but I have no tears, so my sobs are just the breeze.
There used to be two kinds of people in this world. Now, in the aftermath of Hamelin’s Revenge, there are two kinds of dead—my kind, and Mary’s kind.
We made it work once before.
I wonder if we can make it work once again?
STORY NOTE: Just like a few of the other zombie stories in this collection, this story takes place in the same “universe” as my novels Dead Sea and Entombed. The story itself is a love story. It occurs to me that a LOT of my short stories that deal with zombies are, in fact, love stories. Not sure why that is or what it means about me...
THE RESURRECTION AND THE LIFE
STORY NOTE: The following story is a remake of chapter eleven of the Book of John, which tells the tale of how Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead. My story is a decidedly different version than the one you’ll read in the Bible. The main difference is the addition of Ob.
I’m assuming that you’re already familiar with my novels The Rising and City of the Dead, in which Ob appears. If not, then a brief history lesson is required. Ob is an inter-dimensional being. He commands a race of similar beings known as the Siqqusim. The Siqqusim possess the corpses of the dead, reanimating them, wearing them like you or I wear a suit of clothes. They are zombies, in effect. Since the Siqqusim reside in the corpse’s brain, the only way to defeat them is to destroy their dead host’s brain, thus dispatching the Siqqusim back to the ether.
I got the idea for the story after being forced to go to church one Sunday morning. I was listening to a preacher talk about Lazarus’ resurrection, and I thought, “So Lazarus was the first zombie...”
And so the Jewish priests accused the Rabbi, who was called Jesus, of blasphemy and tried to stone him. Jesus and his disciples fled Jerusalem for their very lives.
Escaping to the borders of Judea, they crossed over the Jordan River to the place where John had been baptized in the early days. There they set up camp, safe from the law, and Jesus began to teach again.
Many curious people came to the site over th
e next four days. Some just wanted to listen to what Jesus had to say. Others had heard rumors of miracles—that he’d made a blind man see, touched a lame little girl and commanded her to throw away her crutches, cast out demons, and walked across water. They flocked to the riverbank hoping for a glimpse, hoping to see something miraculous so that they could tell their children and grandchildren about it in years to come. They longed to say, “I was there the day Jesus of Nazareth made the sky rain blood. He split a rock with his staff and brought forth water. He touched your father’s stump and his arm sprang forth anew. Serpents fled as he trod.”
At first, they were disappointed. That emotion soon waned. Jesus performed no miracles during those four days. He didn’t have to. No matter what their reasons for attending, once the throng heard him speak, they believed. His voice was melodious and assured, and the strength of his convictions shone through in every word. Unlike the prophets who held court in the desert or in the bazaars and alleyways, Jesus appeared sane. Likeable. His charisma was infectious.
When John had taught on this same riverbank in earlier years, he’d prophesied about the Messiah. Many of the older members in the crowd had heard John’s predictions regarding Jesus, and after listening to Jesus speak they said, “Though John never performed a miraculous sign, all that he said about this man, Jesus of Nazareth, was true. He really is the Son of God. The Messiah walks among us.”
On the fifth day, a messenger from the Judean village of Bethany crossed the border and entered the camp. Word spread through the crowd that he was seeking Jesus. Worried that the messenger might actually be an assassin sent by the priests, Peter, one of Jesus’ disciples, met with the man and demanded that the message be given to him instead.
But Jesus overheard this and granted the messenger an audience, telling Peter, “If any come seeking me, you must show them the way.”
