The Zombies of Lake Woebegotten

by Harrison Geillor

  “Little ten-year-old Gina Kvalheim was playing the Virgin Mary, and she was pretty cute, everybody said so, with the pillow stuffed up under her dress to make her look pregnant. Marty Throp, also ten but looking about two feet shorter than his holy wife, played the part of Joseph, with the hem of his robe dragging on the floor, and the Innkeeper was Lemmy Holst, who had a big booming voice just like his daddy, who’d been a cattle auctioneer, and while Lemmy projected his lines to the back of the house, the other two pretty much mumbled by comparison, making it sound like a one-sided conversation, but it wasn’t like nobody knew the story: no room at the inn, what do you expect when there’s a census going on, but hey, there’s a barn, help yourself.

  “The pageant didn’t usually draw that many folks, just the parents of the kids, and pretty much every child who wanted one and a few who didn’t want one got a part, even if it meant some years there were seven or eight wise men and a whole host of angels and various children playing the parts of sheep and cows and donkeys with much enthusiastic mooing and bleating and whinnying. But what with all the dark and disturbing events in town lately, and the zombies and whatnot, people felt more of a need than usual to gather together in the winter and push back the dark a little, plus people who hadn’t gone to the Catholic Pageant had missed all the shenanigans with the unusually carnivorous baby Jesus so they were here hoping for a repeat performance, if not of the same specific thing than of something equally scandalous and worthy of tut-tutting and discussing over a piece of rhubarb pie, assuming there was any of that good pie left, at the Cafe Lo later on.

  “It didn’t look like they were going to have much luck, but then right when Gina was lifting up the bundled baby Jesus—gingerly, just in case, but nope, it was still just a little baby doll, that’s all—BigHorn Jim stood up from a seat near the back, that big helmet of his askew, his big red beard all braided like cornrows for your chin, and started shouting for everyone’s attention. Now the truth was he’d had everyone’s attention beforehand, because the town’s only neo-pagan didn’t spend a lot of time coming into churches, not because people tried to convert him—Lutherans aren’t a pushy bunch as a rule—but just because there was a distinct shortage of mead and cursing and loud singing in the holy houses of Lake Woebegotten. BigHorn Jim wasn’t too social at all, though he got together with the old fellas from the Pretty Good Brotherhood of Cnut every once in a while to carouse, since they liked all that old Viking stuff, and could sing a song and toast each other and swing around big swords, though theirs were strictly ceremonial and only came out during parades, while it was rumored BigHorn Jim used his sword to cut down timber at the very least.

  “Well he got everyone’s attention all right, and he started hollering about how all us Christians were in league with the zombies, except he called them draugr, because BigHorn Jim is never one to use an English word where a Norse one will do, something we can all respect even as we simultaneously find it… kind of annoying. He said Jesus Christ Our Lord and Savior was the original zombie, rising from the dead and encouraging his followers to eat flesh and drink blood, which shows a certain kind of muddled thinking, because zombies mostly don’t go around offering their body and blood to people as sacraments, though I guess if pressed some of us might admit the whole consuming-the-blood-and-body thing sounds a little funny when you put it the way he did. Pastor Inkfist asked the resident Viking warrior—who by all evidence had dipped fairly deeply into his mead supply before coming to the pageant—pretty politely to keep it down and let the kids finish, and a couple of the actors on stage started crying though some of the others took the opportunity to play football with the swaddled body of the baby Jesus for a ball. Father Edsel took a harder line, though, standing up and beckoning to the new police chief Stevie Ray and a couple of other fellas known more for their burliness than their kindness, and they hustled BigHorn Jim out, with him hollering the whole time that Ragnarok was upon us. Myrtle Friberg turned to Sigmund Sigmond and asked what Ragnarok was, and Sigmund said he thought it was one of those wild music festivals, and that something like that wasn’t really his idea of a good time, but you know, it takes all kinds, and, of course, he’s right.

  “After that the pageant settled down to its typical routine, though nobody could find the doll standing in for the baby Jesus and Pastor Inkfist had to wrap one of his shoes in a couple of handkerchiefs as a stand-in. Which is all right, really, because the Christmas story is all about humble origins, and it doesn’t get more humble than being born a shoe wrapped in a couple of snotrags.”

  The people sitting next to the Narrator in the audience were pretty annoyed at his constant stream of talk, especially since he got louder and louder as he tried to talk over BigHorn Jim’s speech, but that’s what you got for coming in late: you had to sit in the back with the weirdoes.

  10

  Pastor Daniel Inkfist had to admit the Catholic church had a certain grandeur that his own sacred space lacked, but he wasn’t entirely sure that was a good thing; too much grandeur had to be bad for the soul, just like eating too much marshmallow fluff or divinity fudge. It could overwhelm a person. But Edsel had insisted on the home altar advantage, and he had the guns, so here they were.

  “Gentlemen,” Edsel began, standing at his pulpit, and then Eileen Munson cleared her throat loudly and pointedly and Daniel covered his mouth so none of the dozen people watching raptly from the front pew would see his smile. “And lady, of course,” Edsel said, uncharacteristically magnanimous, possibly because he was standing exactly where he wanted to stand. Daniel had never actually heard the man preach, and this probably wasn’t the full experience, as Edsel was wearing a red-and-black plaid shirt and jeans instead of his vestments, but there was definitely something of the orator about him, and a touch of the kind of wild-eyed-prophet that was a lot better temperamentally suited to the blazing desert than to the icy winter prairie. Edsel said,

  “We live in a fallen world, my children. The end times are upon us, and none can doubt it—the dead that walk among us prove that fact. They are soulless bodies fuelled not by the divine spark of life but by the unholy fire of Hell itself. A little piece of the Devil resides in every one of these ravening bodies, and what is the Devil? What is Evil? Evil is hunger without hesitation. Evil is action without thought of consequences. Evil the gratification of immediate needs at the expense of future happiness. Evil is an unthinking slavering mouth, snapping teeth, hands twisted into claws and eager to rip out guts and tear out throats and—this is the important part—drag you down to their level. These creatures that we, for convenience, call zombies, have only one goal: to make everyone they see as dead as they are themselves. To strike fear into our hearts, to drive our thoughts from God, to make us desperate creatures scrabbling to hold onto… this.” He slapped himself in the chest, not unlike a gorilla giving a display of aggression. “This shell. This weak vessel. But the body is only a body. These monsters are only bodies without the benefit of a soul. Don’t let them frighten you. Don’t let them drag you down, to forget your inner divinity and become obsessed with fear over the integrity of your body.”

  Daniel had some more complex ideas about mind-body duality than that, but now didn’t seem like the time to interrupt. He should have known when Edsel said he wanted to make an opening statement that it was going to be a barn burner.

  “But!” Edsel held up a warning forefinger. “God gave us these bodies, and so we should protect them. God wouldn’t want us to contribute our flesh to the army of Hell, would he? So to honor God, we must defend ourselves. We will kill the zombies, gentlemen—and lady. You are the brave ones, the ones who’ve heard the call—” The ones who aren’t known drunks or lunatics, who have some idea how to use a gun, anyway, Daniel thought. “—and you will be the town’s staunch defenders in this time of tribulation. Seven Catholic men. Six Lutheran men and one good Lutheran lady. You, my sons—and daughter—are the Interfaith Anti-Zombie Defense Initiative.”

  Daniel sigh
ed. Initiative. Sometimes it was League, or Patrol, or Task Force, Edsel couldn’t seem to decide, and Daniel’s suggestion that they come up with a name that had a snappy memorable acronym—the sort of thing you could paint easily on the side of a pickup truck or snowmobile, say, so people would know not to panic when a passel of armed men appeared in their driveways shouting quasi-military jargon—had been met with outright scorn. “This is the Time of Tribulation, Daniel,” Edsel had said. “Not the Tee-oh-Tee. Acronyms belong to another age.”

  Now Daniel stood up. He didn’t get a pulpit, he just got to stand up there next to Edsel as if he were the world’s oldest altar boy, and he didn’t have the same booming oratorical style, but he’d been in front of a lot of rooms full of sleepy Sunday morning churchgoers, so at least he wasn’t noticeably nervous. “You’ll work in teams, always two at a time, so you can watch one another’s backs. You’ll be provided weapons—Cyrus Bell has graciously offered to loan us a few items from his, ah, extensive gun collection—and we’ll make sure you have gas for your trucks and snowmobiles for as long as we’re able. We’ll divide the day into shifts, and, unless the weather’s especially bad, you’ll all take a turn patrolling a particular part of the town. We’ve marked your routes on these maps. Now, of course, you should be on the lookout for human zombies—we don’t know how many you’re likely to encounter, we’re trying to make sure nobody in town is left alone so that nobody dies alone—but you also have to watch out for dead animals. We’ve seen a dog zombie, and we’ve heard of zombie fish—” Daniel didn’t know how reliable Gunther Montcrief was, but he was one of the few men who’d actually killed a zombie in this town, so he was inclined to take his word about the fish, even if he was too much of a drinker to serve on this Task Force, or Initiative, or whatever—“and there may be other kinds of zombie animals.”

  “Zombie pocket gophers,” someone said, maybe one of the Brock brothers, and a few others sniggered.

  “Their bites are nasty,” Daniel said, tone sharp. “You all heard what happened to poor Clem over at the grocery.” Clem’s zombie was still in the freezer, and he’d been dead for days. Nobody could quite bring themselves to kill him. Even Stevie Ray said he was too busy to go do it himself, but everyone knew it was really because he didn’t have the heart. “Bitten on the ankle by a zombie dog and dead just a little bit later. I can only imagine their mouths get nastier the longer they’re dead, too. Even a pocket gopher could be lethal.” He paused. “Assuming it could bite through your clothes, which is pretty unlikely, I guess.”

  “How about zombie bugs?” Eileen said, and Daniel was pretty well derailed then.

  “Uh,” Daniel said. “That is…” Lord, if bugs didn’t die… it wasn’t so bad in winter, but come summer, when the mosquitoes started to breed, there’d be clouds of the things, and they normally died off, but if their little zombie blood-sucking corpses kept flying around…

  “Probably not,” Otto’s nephew Rufus said. “Probably only animals with bigger brains. Bugs barely have any brains at all, at least, not the way bigger animals do. They just have, like… ganglia.”

  “There you go,” Daniel said. “Ganglia, nothing to worry about. So we can—”

  “I don’t know,” Otto said. “Cockroaches can run around without their heads for a while, can’t they? That’s practically a zombie anyway.”

  “You make a good point,” Daniel said, “but—”

  “If the Lord of Flies sees fit to unleash a plague of undead locusts upon us, we’ll face that problem when it comes,” Edsel rumbled. “In the meantime, watch out for things we’re sure might come back from the dead and try to kill us: zombie badgers, bats, beavers, birds, bobcats, chipmunks, cows, coyotes, deer, dogs, foxes, mice, mink, moose, muskrats, otters, porcupines, possums, rabbits, raccoons, shrews, snakes, squirrels, wolverines, wolves, and woodchucks. And, yes, pocket gophers.”

  Was that list alphabetical? Had Edsel practiced that?

  “How about bears?” Eileen Munson said.

  “Haven’t seen a bear in these parts for a few years,” Stevie Ray said. He was in the back of the church—technically he wasn’t part of the task force, since he felt it was incompatible with his position as a law enforcement officer to take part in a group of unregulated armed vigilantes, but at the same time he wasn’t going to let such a group have its first meeting without his observation, and he’d insisted his special deputies Otto and Rufus be on board, even though Otto was a bit weaselly and Rufus was, to all appearances, the very definition of a surly snotnosed teen punk. “Then again, it’d be just our luck to get a bear this year, so, yeah, keep your eyes open. If you see one, just shoot it in the head. Lots of times—Cyrus Bell has plenty of ammunition, so don’t be afraid to use it up. I hate to kill a bear that’s minding its own business, but I don’t want a zombie bear walking down Main Street.”

  “Gentlemen,” Edsel said. “There’s punch and cake over in the reception hall. We’ll hand out your patrol assignments there. God bless you all for your service and your courage.” He clapped his hands, an applause of one, and the men—and Eileen—made their way out, until it was just Edsel, Daniel, and Stevie Ray.

  “Quite a posse you’ve got there,” Stevie Ray said.

  “Brave men and true!” Edsel shouted. He pointed at the figure of Christ on the cross, and as always, Daniel winced when he saw it—the blood, the crown of thorns, the droopy hangdog eyes, the jutting ribs, the loincloth, give him a nice clean cross anytime, who wanted to be reminded of all that suffering every time you wanted to think about God? “Satan torments us with a mockery of our Lord and Savior, the one man who’s ever truly risen from the dead.”

  “Well,” Daniel said. “There was Lazarus. And of course the boy the prophet Elijah brought back to life. Plus the dead son of the Shunammite woman resurrected by the prophet Elisha, and the dead body that came back to life when it touched Elisha’s bones in the tomb, and the various dead saints who arose and entered Jerusalem after Jesus’ own resurrection, and Dorcas who was returned to life by Peter, and Eutychus who fell from the window… lots of others.”

  “None of them were immortal,” Edsel said. “Only Christ was granted physical immortality.”

  “The zombies aren’t too immortal, either,” Stevie Ray said. “They die just fine when you take off the head.”

  “Daniel—ha, not me, the biblical Daniel, of course, said, ‘Many of those who sleep in the dust of the ground will awake, these to everlasting life, but the others to disgrace and everlasting contempt.’” Daniel had brooded over that passage lately. It seemed to him that it meant something very different from what he’d always assumed it meant. “Perhaps the zombies are those who are disgraced?”

  “They are dead bodies inhabited by demons sent by Satan,” Edsel said flatly. “It’s as obvious as knowing water is wet, snow is cold, and monkeys—and their antics—are hilarious. We will kill these creatures, all of them we can, and prove ourselves worthy for the eventual return of our Lord.”

  There was silence for a moment. Then Stevie Ray said, “At least we don’t have to worry about zombie monkeys. I’d sure hate to be in the rainforest right about now.”

  11

  “Come on, Chief. You know I’m the man this town needs now. I’m finally in my element.” Mr. Levitt sat comfortably in the chair behind Stevie Ray’s desk. He still had his gun, and Stevie Ray was still holding his service pistol, but neither of them were pointing their weapons at the other anymore. Rufus was sitting in the corner by his dead uncle, holding his head in his hands. At some point this had stopped being a hostage situation, exactly, and had become a negotiation instead.

  “You’re a confessed murderer,” Stevie Ray said, still half-hidden from Levitt’s line of sight by the coat tree near the front door. The coat tree wasn’t cover, but it was concealment, which was something. If Levitt shot him maybe he wouldn’t get the headshot, and Stevie Ray could at least take comfort that he’d return as a zombie and eat the son of a gun. “You
think I’m going to let you walk around loose in this town?”

  “Who knows about my… colorful history? You, the boy, Dolph. Harry did, but he’s dead, and the same with Otto. Why, if I wanted to, I could reduce the number of witnesses to one, right now, and do you think I’d have a hard time hunting a grocer? I could slip back into my role as a respected pillar of society like that.” He snapped his fingers. “So how about we do it without the bloodshed? Don’t get me wrong, I like bloodshed, live for it, but I’m taking the long view. I think I’d have more fun as the town’s heroic zombie-hunter, adored by all. And if your little fairy tale comes true and civilization is restored, and the judges start coming back to town, why, you can take me back into custody and see justice served.”

  The fact was, having Levitt in jail was a pain in the ass. Someone always needed to be here with him, to make sure he didn’t escape or kill himself, though the former was looking increasingly moot and the latter was never likely, since rattlesnakes, proverbially, didn’t commit suicide. “How do I know you won’t go on a killing spree?”

  “They didn’t require an abnormal psychology class or criminology studies for your job as a bartender, Chief? I’m not a disorganized spree killer. I’m organized. Methodical. I’m a planner. It’s not my inclination to run through town pumping bullets into people. I find the whole idea… distasteful. Worse, boring. And if I wanted to kill people, I would have killed Rufus there. And you, when you walked in the door—an ambush would not have been difficult to set up. I didn’t—there’s all the proof of my sincerity you need. Hear me well: I’m not going back into that cell. I’m bored in there. Pushing your psychological buttons is about as challenging as playing tic-tac-toe with a chicken. I need something to engage my mind. So let me be a zombie killer, join the little task force the preachers have set up—I hear they’re down a man.” He nodded toward the body of Otto.