He opened the next drawer, saw more bluish feet, this one an old man’s he didn’t know, and once again the zombie started to get up, and once again, Stevie Ray made it lie down again.
“This isn’t so bad,” Harry said, opening the next drawer and grinning at Stevie Ray. “I’ve had more trouble killing rats—”
“HARRY!” Stevie Ray shouted, and Harry felt a searing pain on his arm, and looked over to see that, in defiance of all consistency, this corpse had been slid into the drawer feet first, so its head was right there, and in fact its teeth were sunk in Harry’s arm, and now it was reaching for him, and Harry tried to get his pistol but his right arm was in agony and his left was his stupid hand and the zombie had his throat, and Lord, it was strong, an old lady with wispy grey hairs and a face wrinkly like a desert canyon seen from an airplane but a grip like a circus strongman.
The zombie pulled him down, and its jaws unclamped from his arm, and Harry said “Oh thank you sweet Jesus” in the sudden lessening of pain, but then the zombie’s teeth found his neck, and he felt his hot warm life pumping out of him, and he thought, No save point, I lose.
“It jumped up out of the drawer like a flea off a dead dog,” Stevie Ray said, swaying. “We put down the first one, and the second one, too, without much trouble, but the third one reached out and grabbed Harry and pulled him off balance, and Harry started screaming, but he was between me and the body in the drawer so I couldn’t get off a shot, and then Harry fell on the ground and his throat was all red and torn-up and when I tried to help him the zombie in the cooler came at me, knocked my gun away, and I wound up fighting it hand-to-hand, managed to twist it off my hip and smash its head into the big industrial sink, just kept smashing it and smashing it until it was just in pieces, and then this terrible hammering started up, it was a four-drawer cooler and all four drawers must have been full and the last dead body was excited, I guess it heard the commotion, I couldn’t stand the noise, and I—I just ran.” He lifted his gaze to Gunther, and his eyes were as bleak as the sky at the end of the shortest day of winter. “I’ve been a soldier. I’ve killed men in combat. But these things, and seeing what they did to Harry, I just couldn’t, I had to get away…”
“No shame in it,” Gunther said. “We all get to a breaking point if we live long enough. What matters is what you do next.” What Gunther had done next was get stinking drunk and arrange to stay that way for the foreseeable, but no use mentioning that. “But what about—”
Harry, he was going to say, but then Harry came out of the office, dragging one leg, big bite taken out of his throat, face all gray, eyes blank, and he was a zombo, sure enough, killed and come back. Poor guy. He’d always done right by Gunther, just stuck him in a cell if he needed drying out, never gave him an ass-kicking, just a talking-to.
Stevie Ray was in no shape to cope, and he didn’t have his weapon anyway, so Gunther reached into his big old overcoat and took out his pistol, thumbed back the hammer, looked past Stevie Ray’s astonished face, took a two-handed target shooter’s stance, and put one right in the middle of old Harry’s face.
The revolver didn’t make heads disappear like those spaceman guns did, but it appeared to get the job done, because Harry died for the second time.
Stevie Ray looked at his dead boss, then back at Gunther, and said, “You told us you didn’t have a gun!”
“Said I didn’t have a fancy spaceman gun like yours.” Gunther put his pistol away. “Just my lousy old sidearm from when I was in the service. Hadn’t fired it in years.”
“You always carry that thing around?”
“I’m an old man. I live alone. I sometimes black out. Gotta protect myself.”
Stevie Ray stood up from the table and looked down at his dead boss. “Oh, shit, Harry, what am I supposed to do now?”
“Guess this makes you the chief,” Gunther said. He paused. “Want to buy me and you a drink to celebrate your promotion?”
14. Snow Creamed
As Eileen trooped through the snow on the trail of her insufficiently dead husband, she thought about when the twins were little and how they used to make snow cream right after the second snowfall. Never the first snowfall, because she’d always felt the first snow was dirty, no matter how clean and white and fresh it looked—snowflakes were like little lint brushes falling through the air, attracting all the particulates and pollutants and nasty things that normally floated around over your head, so by the time the flakes started piling up on the ground they were steeped in invisible grime, and who would want to eat that?
But after the second snowfall, Brent would go out with a big metal mixing bowl and come back with it full of fresh fluffy snow, and Eileen would mix in the milk and sugar and vanilla until they had a big old batch, and the twins would sit on the barstools at the counter bouncing up and down they were so excited, and they’d all eat the snow cream pretty fast, before it could melt, but not so fast they got ice cream headaches, so it was a delicate balancing act that required a fair bit of attention. One time Todd, the younger of the twins by a whole two minutes, had looked at them in big-eyed alarm, holding his spoon, and said, “Little kids in Africa don’t ever get to eat snow cream, do they?” and Brent had said, “Never mind the African kids, think about the little kids in Florida! It doesn’t snow there either. They have to make do with alligator cream!” And the twins had laughed, the way little kids do at absurd things, and Brent had laughed, as he always amused himself, and Eileen had laughed, too, and that memory was like a warm coal she carried around with her in the snow, a moment of loveliness in the past rescued and revived here in the icy present. They hadn’t made snow cream this year, or the year before, or the year before that, not since the kids were much younger, and they hadn’t even missed it, none of them; just a little tradition that withered away from lack of attention.
Pretty much like the rest of her marriage.
Walking along with the gun in her coat pocket, a weight that bumped against her side with every step through the ankle- and sometimes knee-deep snow, unseen underbrush branches scraping at her legs, she thought maybe she’d done the wrong thing, deciding to kill Brent. It wasn’t remorse, exactly, unless it was like buyer’s remorse; she wasn’t appalled by the fact of the choice she’d made, she just thought maybe she could have made a better choice. She could have walked out on him. Or even divorced him. Surely his intimate relations with a car were sufficient cause. But killing him had seemed so much better. Planning the murder had given her something to do. It was her hobby. The fantasy she retreated to when things were bad. Of course it hadn’t worked out, but that was life, wasn’t it? Her father used to say “plan” was a four-letter word, which she hadn’t understood for the longest time, it was like saying “dog is a four-legged animal,” just a factual statement, but eventually someone had explained it to her, how four-letter words were swear words, and she felt dumb, but started using the expression herself a lot in dark secret hopes that she might make someone else feel dumb and get to explain it. Hadn’t happened yet, but time went on.
Sleeping with Dolph and buying fancy underwear was a fantasy too, but it wasn’t as satisfying as planning Brent’s murder. Probably she shouldn’t have gone through with it, but all that planning without follow-through had seemed like a waste of time, and she hated wasting time. And now here she was tromping through the woods looking for her husband so she could finish him off and bury him in the snow where nobody would notice him until spring, probably. In the old days before dumps and garbage pickups, people used to just throw their trash and chicken bones and broken plates and such in their front yards in the winter, and forget about it until springtime came. The snow hid everything. Snow was good that way. If she could have kept a nice snowfall over the top of her marriage, hiding the nasty parts, things might have continued indefinitely, but spring always came eventually, and screwed everything up. But that would end soon. Eileen was no wild woman of the wood, but she could follow a trail as obvious as the one her dying
husband had left her.
She paused underneath a tall tree, not unlike all the other tall trees surrounding her, and emerged on the shore of Lake Woebegotten. The ice was thick and solid, that bluish-white of good hard ice, and out of the trees the wind was whipping, blowing snow in little spirals and spins across the surface of the lake, and there were no footprints to be found, and no sign of her husband anywhere. A brain-damaged half-run-over man who’d never been too cunning to begin with had escaped and outsmarted her.
“Shitbiscuits!” she shouted, and took out her gun and fired off three shots right into the lake, punching holes in the ice, and, she hoped, killing some passing sleepy fish. Eileen wanted to kill something, by God.
She tromped back home, which took just about forever, and the snow was seeping into her boots, and her foul temper got fouler and fouler, and then, sitting on her back steps, was Dolph, looking much worse than he had this morning. Eileen stopped a few feet away and stared at him. “What are you doing here? What if someone sees you?”
“I was just so worried about you.” He rose and came toward her, arms outstretched, which reminded her uncomfortably of the way Brent had looked when he came out of the garage. “I thought Brent was here, I saw his truck, so I went and knocked on the door, I was going to tell him some story, I just had to know you were okay, but Brent’s not here and neither are you and so I figured I’d just hang around and see if you came back and—”
“Why are you worried about me? What are you talking about?” Eileen didn’t like Dolph in this context, in her yard. When she’d decided to get rid of her husband, it wasn’t with any intention of having Dolph hanging around her house instead. It was to have her house to herself.
“I know it’s going to sound hard to believe, but… There are zombies, Eileen. The dead have risen. There’s a town meeting about it tonight, but—”
“Zombies?” Thinking of Brent stumbling out of the garage, looking dead but walking around, and if there were zombies, that made a lot more sense, didn’t it? Though it was disappointing that killing him didn’t mean getting rid of him after all, it was also heartening to know that she hadn’t flubbed the job. She’d murdered Brent just fine. His continued mobility was due to circumstances beyond her control.
Suddenly the sight of Dolph’s concerned face made her think of the fact that she’d broken two commandments already today, the fifth and the sixth. Would she break any more before the day was out? Could be. It was barely past four-thirty, though it was already getting dark. The day was young.
“I know it sounds crazy,” Dolph said, “but I’ve seen it with my own eyes.”
She started to say of course, she’d seen it with her own eyes, too, in the form of her lurching husband, but admitting she’d seen zombies would mean admitting she’d seen a dead person and she wasn’t about to do that. So she just said, “Well, if you say so, I guess I have to believe you,” but in a doubtful tone.
Dolph’s mouth tightened and his eyes got steely and she felt the barest little flutter of desire. In truth she’d been sleeping with him mostly for the free groceries and the illicit thrill than for the actual fact of him, lately, but seeing him get all serious and tough reminded her why she’d been initially attracted to him. He was a smart, hardworking entrepreneur who didn’t have shit on his boots or engine oil on his overalls at the end of the workday, and that was a rare thing in these parts.
“There’ll be proof at the meeting tonight.” He took a deep breath and let it out. “Proof that’s waiting in my freezer. And Eileen… Clem got turned.”
She frowned. “What do you mean?”
“The dog that bit him—the zombie dog—the bite got infected, I guess maybe the mouths of the dead are nastier than the mouths of the living, who knows, but Clem had a fever, and he fainted, and, ah, when he fell, he hit his head… He died. And then he came back.”
Eileen stepped toward him, even though they were right in the yard where anyone sufficiently nosy could conceivably see. “Dolph, did you… did you have to…”
Dolph looked away. “I couldn’t bring myself to do it, Eileen. He still looks like Clem. I just shut him up in the freezer.”
Weak, then. Well, no man was perfect. “I understand. Have you told Harry?”
“No. I guess I should.”
She looped her arm through his. “Let’s do it together.”
He frowned, looking down at her hand. “But what about Brent?”
“He wouldn’t want me walking around in a zombie apocalypse without a man to keep me safe, Dolph. Don’t worry. Now let’s go.”
“What do you mean Harry’s dead?” Dolph sat down in one of the hard visitor’s chairs in the tiny police station, unsure his legs would hold him up.
“Like I said.” Stevie Ray’s voice was grim. “We went to clear out the funeral home, and one of the deaders got his hands on Harry. Nothing I could do. He had to be put down.”
“You shot Harry?” Eileen asked, and Dolph couldn’t decide if she sounded appalled or… excited? It couldn’t be excited, could it?
“Probably killed him so he could become chief of police.” Mr. Levitt’s voice was calm and reasonable and made Dolph’s skin crawl.
“Like I’d want the job,” Stevie Ray snapped. “No. Gunther Montcrief was the one who shot Harry, actually.”
“Gunther?” Dolph couldn’t believe it. “That old drunk who lives in a shack out by the lake? He comes into the store and doesn’t buy anything but beef jerky, and I think the only thing he drinks is whiskey.” Dolph wasn’t one to speculate over another man’s probable bowel movements, but he imagined Gunther Montcrief hadn’t taken a dump in years, making him quite literally full of shit. “He put down Harry?”
“Zombie Harry,” Stevie Ray reminded. “Gunther used to be a good target shooter, and I guess he’d drunk just enough today to make his hands steady, not enough to make them shaky again. Hell, I might have to make him a special deputy, like these two.” He nodded his head toward Rufus and Otto, both sitting miserable and dejected on a bench.
“Why do they get to be special deputies? I’ve done as much as they did!” Dolph regretted it as soon as he opened his mouth. Like he needed more responsibilities?
“Fine, you’re a special deputy, too, then.” Stevie Ray laid his head down on the desk. “Everybody’s a special deputy. Welcome to law enforcement. Who wants to be chief?”
“Who’s going to speak at the meeting Harry called?” Eileen asked.
Stevie Ray lifted his head. “Oh, for damn. It’s only, what, an hour from now?”
“It has to be you, Stevie Ray,” Dolph said. “You’re the face of law enforcement in this town now.”
“And what am I supposed to say? ‘Harry can’t be here tonight, he was eaten by a zombie, but I know he was planning to tell you everything’s going to be fine, because there aren’t so many dead people in town, and they can’t eat all of us.’ That’s going to go over real well. What about the mayor?”
“I haven’t seen Brent all day,” Eileen said, shrugging. “Don’t know what’s become of him. I hope he’s okay.”
Stevie Ray put his head in his hands, and Dolph figured he’d be pulling his hair out in clumps, if he had any hair. “The town council?”
“Will Mathison’s dead,” Otto said. “Petey Storm’s visiting his daughter in Florida. That leaves Mr. Olafson, and he had that stroke a while back, he’s just at home in heaven’s waiting room, his granddaughter’s taken over the Cafe even. I think you’re the only kind of authority we’ve got, Stevie Ray, apart from the pastor and,” he grimaced, “Father Edsel.”
“I guess—” Dolph began, but then the power went out, plunging them all into the dark.
“Boo,” Mr. Levitt said, and cackled. “I hope you all like the dark. I love the dark myself. Do most of my best work there.”
The backup generator kicked in—most of the businesses and all the town buildings and as many of the residences that could afford them had generators, because the power
usually went out two or three days at least every winter, and other times too if a big wind came blowing across the prairie—restoring the veneer of normalcy, an illusion that would last, Dolph knew, just as long as the propane did. He did a little mental inventory of the propane in his store, and decided he might do well to move it to a more secure location. Not that the people of Lake Woebegotten were apt to riot or steal, but why give them the temptation?
“Guess I’d better try to call the power company,” Stevie Ray said.
“Make calls while you can.” Mr. Levitt scratched at his wattly neck. “Pretty soon you’ll realize we’re all alone here. In the cold. With the dead.” He grinned. “It’s how I lived for years. It’s not so bad. You get used to it.”
15. A Meeting
of the Minds
Pastor Inkfist rubbed at the back of his neck with a handkerchief. Speaking at church didn’t bother him a bit, but he was assured a fairly friendly audience there, all things considered. Here in the community center, faced with what looked like the entire population of the town, though, he found himself nervous, and nerves made him sweat, and sweating made him self-conscious, and self-consciousness made him more nervous, and thus a vicious cycle was born.
Eileen Munson had done a great job, as always, though he didn’t see her anywhere—instead Glenda Dreier was scooting around the room adjusting chairs and rearranging the muffins and brownies and bars and coffee urn on the refreshment table. Glenda was pious, and (Daniel thought guiltily) brainless, and (Daniel thought even more guiltily) completely oblivious to her own sexiness, which was considerable for a woman with a son old enough to go to college. She had shiny hair and shiny eyes and Daniel always got the impression that she had probably the best over-age-40 breasts in Lake Woebegotten, though he did his best to never let his eyes stray below her neckline. It was inappropriate to think of a parishioner in a sexual way, even though unlike Father Edsel he wasn’t bound by a vow of chastity, and indeed he had a wife, Trudy, who’d gone off to visit her recently-divorced sister in Amsterdam of all places about six weeks ago and kept calling with good reasons why she needed to stay a little longer, ranging from ill nieces to moral support, and who gave equally good reasons why Daniel didn’t need to join her. He had the sneaking suspicion she didn’t even miss him, and he’d grown awfully tired of frozen dinners, but what could he do? Family was family. He’d tried calling her a couple of times in between Edsel’s harangues and the zombie attack and the gun acquisition, to no avail. He wanted to check the internet to get an idea if this dead-rising thing was a local problem or if it was happening all over, but hadn’t had the chance yet, and anyway he was a little afraid of what he might find out.
The Zombies of Lake Woebegotten Page 10
