Best New Zombie [3] - Best New Zombie Tales, Vol. 3

by Anthology

  What about the blood trail from the stump at my wrist?

  I sat down, leaned against the snow, and stuck my arm deep into the pile. As a red circle grew round it I felt weary. I put my good hand to my face. It was there, but singed by the blast that maimed me.

  The snowflakes in the air faded and bits of cold night blew into my eyes until I couldn't see. I grew numb.

  Fell asleep.

  I don't know how much time passed. Something soft hit me on the nose and I jerked awake, throwing my left hand out for the gun.

  But I had no left hand.

  It was Peg Leg. Relief woke me from my daze.

  There must be a cat-sized hole somewhere in the shadows.

  "What do you want?" I asked him.

  He climbed on my chest and put his paws on either side of my face and his nose to my nose. His eyes were so icy, so purple.

  Impostor eyes.

  I wept. The tears stung my blasted cheeks.

  He opened his jaws to speak for the first time and a strange meow came out. It sounded as though he was trying to articulate a human word but had the wrong mouth for it:

  Woo woo woo oooh...

  He was such an unusual cat. The purple sky must've gotten him the way it got the others. Perhaps it took longer for him to change... I stroked his head and he lay down on my lap. I felt I was being lowered into icy water.

  I tried to think, to focus: furry head lapping at toilet water... Mother... purring under a plaid cotton sheet... Father... tiny cries at birds outside a window... Joy... broken wings versus fangs... nobody had a dog... all the dogs got away...

  I heard sodden footsteps on the stairs, and bodies tumbling down steps...

  ~

  Now the zombies have reached my door. Their nails and bones scrape the wood. Their fists pound. They want in. They want me to share myself with them. So far the door has opened a half-inch or so as they push it against my body's weight and the packed snow.

  And I know what Peg Leg wanted all this time. To draw them to me. And I can hear them answering his call. I was never close enough to hear what they were saying so clearly.

  The word is you.

  That's me.

  And here I am.

  Sabbatical in the Ohio Methlands

  JOE MCKINNEY

  Not really zombies.

  Not like in the movies, anyway. To begin with, they're alive. And they don't eat their victims. They'll rape you, rob you, murder you, sure, but not eat you.

  The rest of it's the same, though.

  They lurch around looking dead. They smell dead. Boils, abscesses, old infected injuries----they all do their part in approximating putrefaction. Sometimes a murmuring haze of flies will surround their eyes and mouths. They look like skeletons in leather sheets. Their knee joints have a bigger circumference than their thighs. Starvation and malnutrition are the norm. But their crippled movements and disoriented moaning can be deceptive. Step into the street with your head elsewhere and they'll swarm you.

  Afterwards, your corpse will look like it's been eaten.

  But they don't eat you. Just... tear you up.

  I've seen it happen too many times. Some family in a station wagon, just passing through, gets lost, doesn't see the roadblocks. College kids looking for a gag. Survivalists, testing their mettle, and failing. I even watched them get an Ohio state trooper once. But usually those guys know better.

  This is the sixth year I've been coming to what used to be Gatling, Ohio. Like most of the small towns in America's midsection, Gatling was abandoned after the Meth Rebellion of 2017, given over to the meth zombies who now wander its streets and sleep in the doorways of its uninspired, post-WWII architecture. The buildings are falling apart. Few windows remain unbroken. Insulation hangs from the ceilings. Scrolls of wallpaper curl off the walls. The only life here is that which feeds off meth and wanders the streets, moaning like something out of a Romero film, looking for the high that will take them through the coming night.

  Luckily, the little second floor dentist office I've taken over as my observation point has escaped the depravations. During the day, when the meth zombies are most active, I can sit at the window and get film footage or dictate notes, whatever I feel like doing. At night, I sit in the old patient's chair and read Jack Finney novels and drink gin. It's diligent fieldwork----don't get me wrong----but I enjoy my summers here in Gatling just the same.

  Gene Northrop, a chemistry professor from Texas A&M, has a similar setup across town in the old New Life Baptist church. I've seen him around some. He's working on a paper on aboriginal techniques for methamphetamine production in the post-industrial ruins of abandoned America. Sometimes, late at night, I'll hear a building explode at the edge of town, and I think to myself, Ah, one of Gene's grad students just scored himself a paper. Some night soon I'm going to visit him. Maybe we can compare notes.

  In the meantime, I've been working on a paper on the mating habits of the female meth----

  Okay, I need to change gears for a second.

  There was a noise outside the door just a bit ago and I had to make sure it wasn't a wrecking party. The males can be dangerous when they're scavenging for a high. I had to shoot a few of them earlier this month. I hated doing it, but I have to preserve this observation post.

  Luckily, it was only Susan.

  She started coming here, to my office, two years ago. She's a white female, early 30s, which means she was in her teens when the Rebellion happened. The meth has charred most of her mind to cinders, but her survival instincts are still strong.

  She caught me off guard the first time she came here. It was late at night. I had gone through a lot of gin. I got up from my dentist's chair to jot down some notes on something I'd seen that day, forgetting the front door was still unlocked. I heard a floorboard creak and turned around. She was squatting in the middle of the floor, dressed in rags, her long brown hair a frizzled, shaggy mass around her dirty face, nicks and cuts all over her hands and arms.

  Have you ever been watched by a squirrel? Same nervous, unblinking look I got from her.

  I tried to speak, but she scrambled toward the door. She didn't make it far, though. She was hungry, dehydrated, her body weak.

  I gave her some clean water and let her sleep on my couch. When she woke the next morning she was going through withdrawal. She looked at the clean clothes I'd dressed her in, touched her face that I'd scrubbed clean, and panicked. Residual feelings of violation? I wondered. I watched her from my desk. I put a military MRE on the floor. She snatched it up and backed toward the open door. I didn't make a move to stop her, just went on smiling.

  I was delighted when she came back the next night.

  We developed a routine. I'd leave the door cracked at night, a little food and water on the chair next to my bed. Though she never talked, she could still communicate, with her eyes and her body language.

  She seemed grateful. I know I was.

  I started calling her Susan, after this girl I used to dream of dating back in my grad school days. I don't think my meth girl minded. It seemed to comfort her, just as she became a comfort to me, a bulwark against the loneliness that used to overwhelm me here at night in the Methlands.

  I've been back in Gatling for three days now. That first night, when I was still getting settled, she came to me. She had something to show me, a memento of our night together last August.

  Now I'm sitting here at my desk, watching her rub her belly. I wonder if her baby will be born without a soul, or if it will lose it along the way.

  Like its father.

  A Sense of Duty

  GREGORY MILLER

  The four men worked hard with handkerchiefs tied around their faces. The September floods had been very bad, the worst in a hundred years, and the graveyard by the woods outside town had paid the price. Now someone needed to clean up the mess.

  "Ain't no work for a man," said one, shoveling clear a load of muck from the top of a disintegrating pine box.

>   "We volunteered, Hugh," said another. "It don't do no good to complain."

  "We didn't volunteer for this, Carl," Hugh insisted.

  "Stop your whining and shovel," Carl said, lifting the handles of a broke-down wheelbarrow full of bad earth and turning away with it. "Whining ain't fitting a man, neither."

  "Carl's right," said the third. "Volunteer firemen are in for it, no matter the calamity. You signed up as a volunteer fireman, you volunteered for this. So here you are. It's for the good of the town... 'Course, it sure is nasty," he added, peering into the dank hole before him... mostly empty, but not quite.

  "I guess, but it strikes me this here's a bit above and beyond the call of duty, or what have you," said Hugh. "You'll change your tune if you fall in there, Ted," he said.

  The fourth man, the groundskeeper, returned from his trip to the storage shed, pulling an empty cart behind him. "That was Mr. Wilbur Collins I just stored. Wiped off the name plate," he said. "The newer boxes all have 'em."

  "Never did like Old Man Collins," said Hugh. "Shot me with rock salt once for cutting across his north pasture."

  "How many we got in there now, Mike?" Carl asked.

  Mike let go of the cart and wiped his brow with a gloved hand. "So far there's eleven... and some spare... odds and ends. Phew! For late September it sure is hot." He looked sick and pale.

  "Eleven," said Ted, turning away from the open grave only to face another. Carefully, he picked his way back to clear ground. "That means," he continued once safe, "there's a good... well..."

  "The chart says ninety-two," Mike said, rummaging in his overalls for a battered sheaf of papers. "Yep, ninety-two. But to be honest, this one hain't been updated in some time. The new chart, I'm afraid it was warshed away. Can't say as I can recollect all the names, seeing as I just took the post six months ago, but there's probably a few dozen more than what we see here."

  "Jesus wept," groaned Ted.

  "With all the stones strewn about, we got our work cut out for us," Mike agreed.

  Hugh thumped Mike on the back, grinning. "Ain't you glad you got the job when you did?"

  "Pineville's a small town, thank God for that," said Carl. "It could've been worse."

  ~

  Around three they rested on a log at the far end of the cemetery, carefully checking before they sat to make sure there weren't any surprises lying nearby.

  "Looking at it from this vantage point, I think I'm gonna cry," said Ted. "I don't wanna go back there."

  From where they sat it became apparent just how little their day's work had achieved. One corner of the yard was mostly clear, tombstones neatly stacked against the low stone wall, nothing else in sight but a long hole every now and again or a bulge in the matted grass signifying a risen coffin the waters hadn't entirely freed.

  The rest of the yard, sixteen square acres, was a charnel garden. Tombstones lay strewn about, some face down, some face up, some cracked, some broken, some sticking in the earth by a corner after being tossed end over end by the current. Only a few of the heavier, expensive granite stones remained mounted and upright. In almost all cases the remains they memorialized were no longer where they belonged.

  It was an old cemetery, some coffins planted so long ago there was nothing left to float, but Pineville had also been gifted with several generations of skilled casket makers who knew how to prolong disintegration and fit boards tight together; thus, many had risen when the waters called, only breaking open when those same waters currented them into trees, tombstones, rocks and each other. Scores of broken wood caskets littered the yard, along with their long-hidden contents that turned the stomach and watered the eyes... some still under lids, others strewn across the muck. Friends, family, and ancestors society had long ago accepted as lost had now returned, but they were not wanted.

  "If only everything wasn't so damp," said Ted. "A little sun, a little heat----"

  "Heat would only make it worse." Carl sniffed.

  "But at least it would make everything less... less dead. I hate autumn. Cold mists, colder rains, and never enough sun. It's the sun I need more than anything. Besides, we won't be able to rebury any of these folk until the ground dries. We should pray for sun."

  "Prayer is good, I won't argue none with that, but we should pray for strength more than sun," Mike said, "and hurry up and get on with our job before what strength we got left gives out." He stood, stretched, and trudged slowly back to his cart.

  The others, equally slowly, followed.

  "What we should pray for is a miracle," muttered Hugh, bringing up the rear. "Something involving me never having to see anything like this ever again."

  ~

  By sundown the shed----formerly used for storing shovels, spades, hoes, rakes, bags of peat and wheelbarrows----stored three-dozen occupied coffins, and the remains of a dozen and a half Pineville citizens without; the latter were securely tied up in burlap sacks. Outside, four stacks of tombstones lay in front of the shed, which were to be sorted through and restored to their proper places later.

  "Another two days should do it for the gathering," Carl said. "Then we can help Mike here with the sorting and put everybody back proper who can be put back."

  The night was clear but moonless, the wind gentle but cool. They slept in Mike's cottage on the hill next to the shed, setting up two-hour shifts to guard the cemetery from animals that might worry the exposed remains. Mike lent out his rifle for the purpose, along with an oil lamp so no one would take any bad steps in the dark.

  Carl picked the short straw and kept watch first. He walked the grounds carefully, handkerchief tied tight around his face, trying not to think. For two hours his only excitement was chasing a red fox away from what was left of Abigail Wilson. At two he gave Ted a kick in the leg and turned in.

  Ted didn't go through the graveyard, just circled around it. He didn't want to stumble over any gaping holes in the dark, didn't even want to risk it, so he kept to the perimeter, scaring off rats and raccoons then stumbling over, not a hole, but a wooden coffin that gave way as his boot pressed down.

  Forty-five minutes later, still wiping his heel on the grass, he shambled, muttering, back to the house and woke Hugh.

  Hugh chose sitting rather than walking, and parked himself on Mike's porch swing for guard duty. It was in pretty poor shape, the weatherworn wooden seat hanging from rusted chains that looked ready to break, but it felt good to sit, and everything held. In fact, it felt so good that after a while, probably not more than a couple of minutes, he drifted off into uneasy sleep.

  He dreamt fitfully of mildewed linen, dank holes, and the sighing of fretting winds through dark tree boughs. The sound conjured images of waving doors that shouldn't be open; clattering attic shutters in abandoned mansions; cold, wet-ashed chimney flues... and after a time it grew louder, more distinct and insistent, until with a start and a cry he awoke.

  But the sound did not cease.

  "What's that?" he hissed, then clapped a hand over his mouth. "What is that?" he hissed again through white fingers. He looked back toward the front door and the black inside space beyond. Silence there, save for snores.

  "Christ Almighty, that ain't them, he said, and fumbled for the dark lantern. "Gonna see," he said. "Gonna see what that goddamned sound is."

  But he couldn't bring himself to strike a match.

  The sound was like a tide, cries washing over voices, voices demanding answers. The sound was faint but resonated with the power of a multitude. Over the voices came the tread of feet on grass and leaves, the knocking of knuckles against wood, the ripping of fabric with fingernails.

  "Lord a' mercy." The words could have been Hugh's but were not. They came from behind him. He spun like a top, arms raised to fend off or strike.

  Carl grabbed him. "Now, now, it's just us." Mike and Ted stood beside him in the dark, holding their breath.

  Together they stood on the porch and listened.

  "It's coming from the bone yard," Mike whi
spered.

  "Some of the kids from town come back to cause trouble?" Ted whispered.

  "Hell no," Carl said. "No one would cause trouble with that." His shadow nodded toward the cratered lawn.

  Mike took a deep breath and said, "Come on now, let's not get panicked. It's my job to see this property's residents are kept safe. I'm turning on a lamp." He fumbled with a match. Yellow flame sprang up, touched an oiled rope. The lantern glowed.

  Hugh gasped. Ted shut his eyes tight. Carl grabbed the rifle from Hugh's hand.

  Mike raised the lantern.

  The noise rose for a moment, then, protesting, faded quickly and completely away.

  Nothing moved in the cemetery but rats and leaves.

  Even so, no one caught a wink the rest of that long night.

  ~

  "Well, I'd say something looks different."

  Everyone looked at Mike, who was surveying the cemetery, hands on hips and nodding slowly. "It don't look as messy today."

  "That's cause we worked our behinds off yesterday," said Hugh. "Now my first order of business is to get that damned pine tree to give up her goods. It just don't look right, that thing all the way up in a tree." Shouldering a coil of rope, he walked over to the spruce planted in the middle of the lot and looked up into its cover, where the glint of a brass handle betrayed the presence of a coffin lodged between two branches some eight feet off the ground.

  "I'd better help him," said Carl, following. "If the damn thing drops sudden it'll probably land on his head."