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

by Anthology

  A Barney shambled along the street, an old man, eighty-five or ninety, sloped shoulders and sunken chest curled with wisps of white hair. His flaccid belly jiggled with his stiff-legged walk, toothless mouth gaping and his pee-soaked pajamas falling off his scrawny backside.

  A second sheriff pulled up in front of the Barney. The competing headlights threw perpendicular shadows on the ground. The first SUV's door opened and an officer stepped out, shotgun at port arms. He circled around the Barney, who had stopped as the second set of lights washed over him, circled until the other officer was free from his line of fire. In what could have been a replay of Harold's movement earlier in the day the Sheriff took two quick steps, nestled the shotgun in the back of the old man's head, and pulled the trigger.

  Before the echoes rolled off down the street and the Barney's frail body hit the pavement, Harold snapped the shutters down, not sure if he should get back in bed, knowing there'd be no more sleep tonight.

  ~

  The next morning Harold slipped into his usual parking space at the plant. Val hadn't woken when he'd told her goodbye. Or if so, she'd done a good job of hiding it, keeping her breathing slow and regular. He'd snipped a rose from one of the bushes out front and left it in a tumbler of water on the kitchen table with a scrawled "I love you," on the back of an envelope.

  Harold tucked his thermos under one arm, lunch box swinging from the same hand, when he saw Bert, one of the QC's, striding across the parking lot. Bert's fingers beat a rapid tattoo against his pant leg and the muscles in his jaw bunched like he was swallowing a pair of marbles.

  "Knocking off already?" Harold smiled and squinted into the rising sun.

  Bert unlocked the door to his Chrysler, his eyes feverish, burning in their sockets. "Knocking off for the rest of the week, Harold---shit I guess knocking off for good."

  "You're quitting?" Bert's time was as short as Harold's.

  "Not quitting," Bert's gaze skittered around the parking lot filling up for the morning shift. He nodded his head at the pebbled cement walls of the processing plant. "Listen, I got to get out of here before I do something stupid. Go talk to that sonofabitch yourself if you want the story. Tell Levi he better hope I don't see him on the street. Kick his fucking teeth down his throat if I do," his hands shook as he opened his car door. "Tell him that if you see him."

  ~

  "It can do the job, Harold. Don't see why you're so worked up." Harold had button-holed Levi near the end of the wrapping line, packages of 8-piece fryers slipping along. A Barney stood at the line's end, head jerking left to right as the packs rolled before him. "It's not like I didn't offer Bert another job---he's just too proud to take it"

  "Back on the gut crew---swilling out eviscerators at the end of the night, half as much money---what'd you think he would do?"

  "It can do the job, watch," Levi grabbed one of the shrink-wrapped packages off the rollers. He tore loose an edge of the cellophane, pulled a drumstick half out, and set it back on the conveyor. As the fryer crossed in front of the Barney his head jerked down and he snatched the damaged pack off the rollers, dropping it in a bin at his feet, his sunken, milky eyes unblinking as more clicked by. "Now why would we pay someone eighteen bucks an hour when we've got him?" He slapped the creature's shoulder. "They're just tools, Harold. If a business is going to make money you can't be afraid of tools."

  "Christ, Levi, don't you remember? It hasn't been so long. Don't you remember being boarded up in your own house, watching your friends, your family torn apart? Don't you think about what they are---what they were?"

  "It's progress Harold. It's the new order of business. People like you had their way we'd still be living in caves, shitting ourselves during a thunderstorm."

  He made a point of glancing at his wristwatch. "You been on the clock now for about half an hour? Maybe you ought to be worrying we aren't training one of these guys to watch for green lights to go blinking off."

  Through the rest of his shift Harold fought to stay focused, watching the Z -crew as they gutted the chickens, but his mind hiked out on its own tangents. Had they really forgotten what brought these things forth? He raised the Mossberg and sighted along the backs of their heads. The regulators winked green at him over and over. What if they hadn't found a way to control them in the first place? Would it have been better if they all burned?

  Levi's words echoed in his head. Maybe he ought to be worrying about his own job, never mind Bert's. He was a secondary warning system, nothing but another set of eyes, where the technician in the control room leaning over the transponder board had the ability to turn the regulators on and off at will.

  Harold straightened his leg from the stool, wincing at his knee. The Mossberg held five shells and he carried another twenty in his utility belt. He could shoot them all right now, walking along, firing and reloading. They wouldn't blink. Each would keep pulling at its chicken guts until he put the barrel against their skull, squeezed the trigger. What would they do? Fire him, maybe charge him with destruction of property?

  They've forgotten what they are, he thought.

  The clean-ups come so easy in the middle of the night now, sanitary. Two cops in front of his house. The old Barney falling limp like a string-cut puppet. It's like the entire world had forgotten.

  He avoided Levi the rest of the day.

  ~

  Val's Honda was still in the driveway when Harold came home.

  He threw back the deadbolts and stopped, one foot on the rug. The swamp cooler wasn't running. The television wasn't on. His breathing echoed through the still rooms, the heavy air.

  "Val?" In the kitchen the water glass stood empty, a flower stem on the table and a small pile of petals on the floor. Beneath his scribbled note Val's spiky, handwriting filled the bottom of the envelope.

  ----I'm so tired, Harold. Tired and sorry. I know I haven't shown it but I never blamed you for Stephen. I just couldn't say it to you. You did the right thing and you've carried that awful burden alone. I pray you'll do the right thing again if you have to. With all my heart----

  Harold read the note a second time, tracing fingertips across the words. "No, Val, you couldn't have," he whispered. "You wouldn't do that to me."

  He couldn't leave the kitchen. The rose petals were soft, wilted, curling in on themselves in the heat. The only dishes in the sink were his from this morning, a coffee cup---brown stained porcelain as he'd forgotten to rinse it---and a bowl and spoon with flecks of shredded wheat gluing them together. He filled a glass with lukewarm tap water and drank it down. Rinsing the coffee cup and bowl, he gazed out the window at the vegetable garden.

  Stephen was down there, bones wrapped in down-filled nylon.

  The second tumbler of water was cooler and he passed its cold curve across his forehead, hearing the faint pops and creaks of the old house as it expanded and eased in the evening warmth.

  After what seemed hours, as cool blue shadows crept across the back yard, Harold opened the hall closet and grabbed the Remington pump, the one they'd left loaded by the front door through all these years after the Epidemic.

  He walked heavily to the bedroom door, twisted the knob and cracked it open. With shades drawn tight the room was cave-dark, cooler than the rest of the house.

  "You didn't do this to me," he whispered again, but the air in the room carried a sour undercurrent, vomit and urine. He took in Val's still form, the comforter pulled to her armpits, the empty brown Valium bottle on the nightstand. She lay turned on her side, back to the door and one hand splayed on her thigh.

  Harold eased himself onto the bed, shifting quietly as if he might wake her. He held the Remington awkwardly in his left hand and thumbed the safety off. With his right hand he grasped Val's cold, slack fingers, interlaced them with his own.

  He knew the accepted thing was to block the door and call the CDC, the police. They'd be out in minutes, zipping her up and whisking her away to the crematorium, but he also knew the virus had waned over the years
. There was a better-than-even chance Val was dead, dead and gone. At some kind of peace now. He couldn't bear the thought of some group of haz-matted strangers clomping through their house, tumbling her body into a rubber-lined bag.

  "In the morning, Val. I'll call them in the morning." He closed his eyes and tried to conjure memories of their first days together, her quick step and the bright sparkle in her eyes.

  The bedside clock read 11:45 when her fingers clenched hard on his. Her back arched and her heels drummed into his thigh.

  "It's alright," he whispered, and canted the Remington across his chest, barrel pressing into her skull. He pulled the trigger before a sound could escape from her writhing lips.

  Harold spent the night lying in the dark, ears ringing.

  ~

  "Harold, didn't you call in sick?" Sally at the front desk smiled at him as he stumbled by. "Jonas's been on your shift three hours."

  "A bug, but I'm better now," Harold mumbled. He stepped quick down the corridor to the locker rooms. How long before Sally phoned Levi and the little prick came snooping around for him?

  In the echoing tile-floored locker room he tugged on his vest and pulled the Mossberg from its brackets, thumbing the red cartridges into the magazine. In his locker door's seam he had tucked a photo of Val and Stephen, taken some twenty years before at Lake Powell. They both wore goofy, sunburned grins, squinting into the camera lens, framed by placid blue water and smooth sandstone cliffs.

  "It'll be okay," he slipped the photo into his shirt pocket.

  Would this make any real difference? Deep down he had the answer. One man can't shift the world's balance. But people needed to know---to remember what happened. He couldn't be the only one who thought like that.

  He pressed the Mossberg along his leg as he left the locker room, turning right toward the control center rather then left to the hydraulic push doors into the plant itself.

  Harold didn't know the technician inside the control room, which was just as well. The man slouched in a rolling desk chair, a slight cowlick sticking up as he sipped from an insulated coffee mug. Video monitors stretched across the wall far wall, tiny black and white images of the plant jerking back and forth. To the left a flat screen monitor displayed a rapid cycling of numbers and digits, each culminating with tiny green dot, F237, M24, M458, F17.

  The technician turned his head, catching Harold's reflection in the screens as he stood with door propped open by one foot. "Hey you know the rules, buddy. Nobody but management or control crews in here."

  "Yeah, I know the protocol," Harold stepped into the room, keeping the door open with the barrel of the Mossberg. "This door's supposed to be locked down too, isn't it?"

  "Hey," the technician's eyes darted to the shotgun, and he leaned to put his coffee cup on the desk. Harold stretched his free hand forward, clamping down on the bird-thin bones of the technician's shoulder, his thumb pressed against the seat back. He jerked and the man rolled backward, past Harold and through the open doorway. The chair bounced hard over the threshold and the technician spilled into the corridor. Harold kicked the chair out after him and slammed the door. On the inside was a thick bolt. The control room was designed as a refuge of last resort. He threw the bolt and turned his back on the technician's pounding and indignant squawking, narrowing the sounds from his consciousness.

  The control board was clearly labeled and no great shakes to cipher out. Harold thumbed off the override controlling the plant's electronic doors. Every door would swing free and easy until he turned it back on. A flurry of activity in one of the monitors caught his eye, Levi barking into his radio, rustlers running haphazardly before the camera. Maybe they'd all leave the work rooms, come thundering into the corridor.

  Harold removed the photo of Val and Stephen and propped it beside the screens. All he had held dear in one faded scrap of paper.

  "I guess this'll about do it," his voice was a cracked whisper. This might shock them back into reality, make them remember what everyone had so easily forgotten.

  Something heavy hit the control room door and it shook in its frame but he paid it little mind. The technician's radio squalled over and over. Harold cycled up the regulator controls and began shutting them down, one hundred to a screen. Five screens filled with urgently winking amber pinpoints when he was done.

  On the video monitors the Z-crews stopped their methodical movements, heads twisted back and forth, hands jerked, clawing at the air as they looked for something, anything to quell their hunger.

  Harold shut the monitors off one after another. This wasn't something he wanted to see. Thin screams seeped through the walls, between static bursts of the radio. On the last monitor Levi and half dozen rustlers were in the corridor outside. They stopped pounding at the control room as, from the far end of the hall, a pack of Barneys and Betties surged through the swinging doors, coveralls stained dark, gloved hands and mouths smeared and clotted.

  They'd soon be out of the plant, lumbering into the city.

  Harold laid the shotgun up across his knees. When the noise died down he'd throw the bolt open and go out.

  He'd go out and see if he couldn't get his family together again.

  The Last Supper (The Anatomy Of Addiction)

  JOHN CLAUDE SMITH

  "...yes, my friends, there is nothing new to report on this, the 300th day of... of infestation. As if there will ever be anything new to report. No, the turmoil that prevails is quite obviously terminal: the attrition of humanity... Just take a look out your windows... that's if you haven't already boarded them up. Otherwise, take my word, oh yes, yes. The horrors are real... and relentless..."

  ~

  The drug haze swells in his head as Razor tries to wake (WAKE UP!), but the effort is more akin to wading through mud. It feels like a turgid, convoluted descent into someone else's 'no longer private' hell; someone's corrupt imagination. Surely these images of decay and extinction cannot be nourished into fruition by the unconscious reels that project from the back of his brain and onto the white cranial screen he now views. It is a wasteland, a grainy, gray and rust-hued visual documentary cataloging the demise of civilization as we know it. Holocaust to the nth! Only it is much worse than an exclamation point, for there is no finality.

  The landscape is littered with dead people; walking dead people; feasting dead people. The morbid, leering eye----the prime reaction culled by the masses since the onset of the disease being cathode ray addiction, voyeurs of the visceral----gleans every bit of perversion, presenting in excruciating detail, the aimless gaze. The savage quest for anything meat: rats, cats, dogs... people; the horrendous corrosion and disorder. In one fell swoop the world changes; this is the way it is destined to be, there is nothing to be done about it. It is the blatant intrusion of grade Z cannibal films as Headline News (5, 6 and 11). The eye constantly scours the desolation, peering with clinical (carnivorous) curiosity as the final days unravel. It is a painstakingly slow process. Like picking a scab off a dying race, repeatedly prying it off to search underneath for the reasons why, prolonging the moments (seconds into minutes into hours into days...) before The End (my friend). Leaving the grave unoccupied...

  Razor twitches, realizing the scenes he witnessed are external, not internal. Cathode ray addiction indeed, amongst many other addictions ingested, snorted or shot into eager veins. He slams his eyelids shut, incinerating the light with the precious cool darkness, canceling the TV's brutal exhibition. He immediately nods off. There are no dreams. There is no reason for them anymore.

  ~

  When he wakes his eyes feel like they are throbbing, not enough room in the sockets. As he shoved the throb to the back of his head, to the abandoned place where dreams once roamed free, he hones in on Sara. She's still, lying still. Ribbons of blood trickles from her mouth into a pool of saliva, creating patterns that seem vaguely familiar. He remembers nothing (hitting, pummeling---this is my ride, senorita---Go away!), remembers something (sorry, I'm sorry, babe), and, as
usual, denies everything, even his existence; this existence. She is face down on the hardwood floor: flat and smooth, the floor. The baby----what was her name?----is her miniature twin. Razor notices a slight rise in Sara's torso, a slight ripple in the ever-expanding pool. He is uncertain if he can notice any discernable indication that the baby is breathing. Then again, his vision is tweaked, seeing doublouble and even tripripiple.

  He sits up, gaining focus while viewing the TV screen. The volume is forever mute. The color is faded like the bleached terrain outside, basking in hues of gray and rust. The radio is a whisper screeching in the far corner, settled into a nook next to a pile of filthy clothes. It emits an array of clicks, blips and static, epitomizing the final wheezing breath of this dying planet.

  Razor, stricken with pangs of compassion (more likely, flushed with guilt), unsteadily props himself up on his hands and knees. He belches and bile fills his mouth. He coughs, spitting the putrid yellow and red fluid on the hardwood floor; it splats, quickly assuming a Rorschach quality. Mesmerized, he searches for faces, secrets, unlocked doors...

  Suddenly Razor peripherally glimpses the hypodermic syringe. The needle----

  (Something sharp.)

  He reaches out and his balance sways, stumbling into the warm fluid, soaking his shirt. But he doesn't realize this. Everything is sucked into oblivion, the comforting vacuum of nothingness...

  ~

  "...why do I persist to report the carnage? Perhaps it is journalistic instinct. Perhaps it abates some of the internal suffering, hoping that I've made a connection with somebody out there, my friends. At least one of you who understands, who is not already grist for the bone mill. [cynical snicker] Perhaps... perhaps it is the knowledge that if I sign-off, well..."