Stevie Ray considered. Levitt was rational. Crazy, yes, certainly, crazy as the winter nights were long, but not a raving madman. And he certainly wouldn’t balk at putting any zombies down, human or otherwise. Most importantly, the only way this situation could end was either in a hail of bullets, or in granting Mr. Levitt’s request to serve the town. “You’ll need to put down the gun. First step.”
“I can do that. But you have to let me out of here, Chief. It’s not optional. Maybe you see an old man when you look at me, but push me, and you might be surprised.”
“Understood. The gun?”
Levitt looked at him—or at the coat rack, though he sure seemed to be looking through the coat rack—and laid his pistol on the desk.
“Rufus,” Stevie Ray barked. “Get the gun.”
Rufus looked up blankly, then nodded, walked over about as slow as a fella with gout and bunions and plantar fascitis, and picked up the gun. He plodded back to the spot by his dead uncle and sat back down.
“All right,” Stevie Ray said. “I have conditions. One: you will wear a tracking bracelet. Harry got a couple of them with the Homeland Security money, those house arrest things, go around your ankle, tamperproof, we always know exactly where you are.”
“Fine with me,” Levitt said. “Still a lot more privacy than I had in that box.”
“Two: you will be brought to justice. Either some higher authority will set things right and the world will go back to normal, or this town will elect a new mayor and get its organizational eggs in a row, and when that happens, I’ll tell whoever takes charge what you are, who you are, and how ironclad the proof is. I’m also going to leave some of that evidence in a location known only to me, to be opened if I die, or Rufus dies, or Dolph dies—you won’t be picking off the witnesses.”
“You’re living in the past, Chief—the days of swift and fair trials are over, so what do I care if there are witnesses? But, of course, if those measures console you, I have no objection.” Levitt was grinning, hands laced behind his head, stocking feet up on the desk, happy as a pig in poop.
“The last condition,” Stevie Ray said, “is your first target: that zombie dog that killed Clem and Otto.”
The smile froze on Levitt’s face, then melted and drained away. “My Alta? No, don’t be ridiculous, I’m not going to—”
Stevie Ray came around the coat tree, gun extended. “It’s the price you pay for your freedom, Mr. Levitt. Come on. You’re supposed to be a hard man. Can’t kill one little dog?”
Levitt smiled again, but there was no joy in it now, more one primate showing his teeth to another in aggression. “I can kill anything, Chief. Be good for you to remember that.”
“I’m the one with the gun now.”
“Never liked guns anyway. Give me a boning knife anytime.”
Stevie Ray pushed the safety off.
Levitt sighed. “Fine, fine, I’ll kill Alta, I suppose he’s not my little precious anymore anyway.”
“Okay,” Stevie Ray said. “Let’s get you hooked up with that bracelet. Rufus, you want to keep that gun on our guest until he’s got his nice new jewelry on?”
Rufus nodded, though he still didn’t speak, and rose to his feet.
“This will be fun,” Mr. Levitt said. “Do you think I can get a badge? I’d love to have my own badge.”
12
The Catholic Christmas Pageant went beautifully at first, with kids dressed in choir robes as angels, holy singing—the Catholics do beautiful hymns, you can say what you like but you can’t deny that, something about hearing words sung in Latin speaks to the heart, maybe because you can imagine they’re saying anything at all, anything that speaks to your own heart and sense of the sacred—and, of course, the Nativity story, because no small-town pageant is complete without a ten-year-old playing the Virgin Mary and two young wise men who are slowly coming to realize they never even asked what frankincense and myrrh are, and why does that other kid get to be the one who hands out the gold, never mind asking what a baby would do with gold, anyway.
The pageant took place in the hall attached to the Catholic church, where a stage had been set up and a bunch of folding chairs brought in. The children blundered through their lines with customary aplomb, and turnout hadn’t been affected too adversely by the appearance last week of zombies. None of the kids had really seen any zombies, and though the power had stopped working most everybody had fuel for their generators and oil for their furnaces and their pantries were stocked, so the ongoing disaster was largely abstract for the children—and only slightly less so for their parents. It was in almost all ways a typical Christmas pageant.
Until the boy playing Joseph pulled the blanket away from the wooden cradle as prelude to lifting up the traditional baby Jesus, veteran of countless pageants—the baby was a doll, and in fact a girl doll judging by the eyelashes, but that doll had served as the infant Jesus for a long time and issues of potentially transgender religious icons were generally ignored.
Except that doll was gone, and in its place barely fitting into a cradle that had in fact always rather dwarfed the doll, there was a zombie: one with no arms or legs, true, but that was even more grotesque if somewhat less dangerous than a whole zombie, and young Joseph screamed and jumped back (fortunately retaining his full complement of fingers), and all the other children screamed too, and then a general exodus began from the stage—Exodus not usually being a component of a Catholic Christmas pageant, or really Christmas stories in general, but the ad-lib seemed justified by the circumstances—with children in angel robes and shepherd robes (basically the same robes, if you wanted to get picky) leaping into the laps of their parents, screaming “Zombie zombie zombie Jesus!” and similar cries, except for those who took the more elemental route of just sobbing. General bedlam threatened to take hold, until Father Edsel strode onto the stage from the wings, holding a big long knife.
Without hesitation he stepped to the cradle, looked down at the zombie—which no one in the audience had really seen, except maybe the ones on their feet in the front row, owing to its literally low profile—and then drove the knife into the zombie’s eye. The force of his blow was too much for the cradle—which was wooden, and not too well-made to begin with, and also a veteran of countless pageants—and it simply splintered into a few big pieces right there on the stage, with the dead torso of a murder victim, transformed by energies or causes unknown (if much speculated-upon) into a ravenous monster, and then transformed again by causes generally mysterious (though a few people in town knew about Levitt’s chainsaw) into the limbless parody of a monster it was now.
Then Edsel pressed a button on the hilt of the knife and the zombie’s head exploded like a grapefruit stuffed with firecrackers. The patter of exploded headmeat did nothing to calm the crowd.
Edsel kicked the body once or twice, a ferociously concentrated look on his face (though whether it was concentrated rage, hate, disgust, or some other emotion no one could quite agree), then, satisfied it was dead, turned to face the now largely silent but still highly keyed-up crowd. “People of Lake Woebegotten!” he boomed. “This creature is an agent of the devil, but it did not slip into this cradle to torment us on its own. It was placed here by hands—human hands! We face not only unholy creatures risen from Hell, but human collaborators as well, perhaps Satanists, perhaps mere agents of chaos, perhaps pranksters unaware of how their latest prank endangers their very immortal souls! Be vigilant!”
He paused, then stooped, picked up the cradle blanket, and draped it over the limbless corpse. “The pageant is over. Give the children a round of applause.”
The crowd complied with subdued clapping, though it wasn’t entirely clear what, or who, they were clapping for.
13
Ingvar Knudsen had a big house full of not much but emptiness, ancient wooden furniture, his dead wife’s vast collection of antique teapots, including teapots shaped like chickens, pumpkins (and other melons, including a few summer squash), th
e heads of Indian chiefs, basketballs, boots, penguins, pilgrims, sailing ships, bears, gazelles, gargoyles, pandas, and the Roman Coliseum. She’d never intended to be a teapot collector—she’d had a couple of nice antique Fiesta teapots she liked, and a silver tea service she’d inherited and kept out for display—but some relative noticed her three teapots in the kitchen and decided she must be a collector, and so it began. Anyone unfortunate to be deemed a collector by their relatives can share this tale of woe, because every Christmas and birthday sees the same thing: a procession of variations on whatever it is you’re supposed to be collecting, whether it’s teapots, snow globes, unicorn statuettes, novelty socks, candlestick holders, or salt shakers, with relatives smiling widely at their finds and the collector outwardly grateful but increasingly thinking where am I going to put all these and who’s going to dust them? But the teapots reminded Ingvar of his late wife, so he kept them all, arrayed on the shelves he’d built for her in their big old farmhouse kitchen, and he kept them dusted, too, though otherwise he was an indifferent housekeeper and considered it a job well done if he didn’t track pig manure in on the rug. Since he’d sold all his land to the quarrymen, rock dust was more likely than pig manure, and that made him sad, but he’d wanted to be sure to provide a nice inheritance for his grandchildren, all of whom lived away, and none of whom had been much interested in continuing the family farm; no wonder, since their parents, Ingvar’s own children, hadn’t wanted to, either.
Now of course he hadn’t heard from his children or grandchildren in some time, most of them having chosen new homes in typical former-Minnesotan fashion: by going someplace where it didn’t snow. He hoped they were all right. He hoped they were surviving the very new year, the Year of the Zombie maybe it should be called, someplace safe and warm, but who knew? He didn’t much expect to survive long enough to hear from any of them. He was now the second-oldest-man in town, outranked only by Emperor Torvald, who was much younger in spirit and mind, having reverted in his nineties back to somewhere around his early teens, complete with undisguised lusting over women a considerably large fraction of his age. Even without the town’s only doctor dying he wasn’t a prospect for longer life, speaking strictly by statistics, though he still got around all right so long as he didn’t hurry, and had never smoked a day in his life, and didn’t drink much, and didn’t even eat much meat, having grown up in times when meat was a luxury. Still, even without extraordinary abuse, normal wear and tear would get him soon enough. He was just sad he was going to die alone. His wife had passed the year before, and this had been his first Christmas a widower, and his children had actually pulled together and planned to return to the frozen north of their youths—their own kids, not knowing any better, were excited by the prospect of a white Christmas—so Ingvar wouldn’t have to spend it alone. He’d laid in an epic quantity of supplies, from food to extra fuel for the generators to lots of extra heating oil because his children, after so long in warmer climes, were apt to be overly sensitive to the sort of cold which would merely make Ingvar himself shrug and put on another sweater. He’d always been a thrifty man, but he’d intended to throw caution and parsimony to the wind in order to host a great family fete… And now he was alone in his big farmhouse with an undecorated Christmas tree waiting for the worst to happen.
Then one day not long after the New Year pastor Daniel Inkfist knocked on his door. “Hello, Ingvar, how are you holding up?” he asked. The college boy, what was his name, Randy? Something silly and modern like Rumpus? was there too, holding a rifle and looking around, which was probably prudent but still made Ingvar uncomfortable. He’d been in a war—two of them, actually—and didn’t like the sight of an armed vigilant man—or boy—in his front yard. It brought back unpleasant associations.
“Oh, not too bad, can’t complain,” Ingvar said, which was exactly the same response he would have given if he’d been in the jaws of a mountain lion or actually on fire or being tortured in an Iron Maiden at the time, though it was also the answer he would have given while bathing in the fountain of youth just prior to reclining on a pile of fluffy thousand-dollar bills while being waited on hand-and-foot by doe-eyed maidens in gold bikinis.
“You mind if we come in?”
Ingvar ushered them in, got them seated on the couch—still covered in plastic, as his wife would’ve wanted—and offered them coffee, which they accepted, because as cold as it was, who wouldn’t want something hot to sip?
After fifteen or twenty minutes of conversation about the weather, the state of the town, the upcoming mayoral election, and confirmation that no one had heard anything from the outside world at all, Daniel said, “Let me get right to the point, Ingvar. Since we lost contact with the outside world, some of our townspeople have been struggling. They don’t have enough oil for heat or enough wood laid by, and we’ve had one house fire—”
“I heard about that,” Ingvar said. There was no 911 to call now. No fire engines came screaming in. Lucky it was winter or the woods around the house might have caught too.
“Well. Things are rough for some of our people. And then there are all the ones who live alone, we’re trying to get people to move in together, share resources, but—”
“I’ve got plenty of room here,” Ingvar said, shrugging. “Enough fuel to get me through the winter even if I make it 68 degrees night and day.” Next winter was a different story, but he could gather wood next fall, assuming he lived that long. “Enough food to feed a battalion, assuming you’ve got somebody who can cook—I’m not much good if it gets beyond making a hamburger or some eggs. Enough gas to keep the gennie running for a good long while if I’m careful.”
Pastor Inkfist’s eyes went wide. “Oh, Ingvar, we were just coming by to see if you maybe had some canned food or fuel or old blankets you could donate, we’ve been going door-to-door and—”
“No need. Got a lot of room here. Could use the company. Send anyone who needs a place over. We’ll work it out.”
Rufus spoke up: “You sure you can handle it? I mean, we could send ten, fifteen people today, are you really up to dealing with them, getting them settled, working out the, uh, bathroom situation? I mean, that’s a lot to do for… for anyone.”
For someone so old, Ingvar thought, with more amusement than anger. To be so young that you thought being young and inexperienced somehow made you more qualified to deal with life’s problems; it was a kind of stupid that pretty much everyone suffered from at one point or another. “I raised eight children in this house, son. And ran the biggest family farm in Drizzle County while I did it. I imagine I can handle having a few of my neighbors visit.”
And that’s how what came to be known as Ingvar’s House of a Thousand Orphans got started. In truth there were only two orphans, the six- and eight-year-old kids who lost their parents in the fire, but the name seemed to fit anyway, since Ingvar opened his door to pretty much anybody in need, putting rollaway beds in hallways and cots in the basement, with whole families sleeping in double beds in his guestrooms. The bathroom was a bit of an issue, but with severely limited hot water nobody much wanted to shower, and when everybody kind of smelled equally bad you got used to it.
The townsfolk of Lake Woebegotten didn’t like to impose or take charity, so pretty soon every little minor repair he hadn’t gotten around to yet was done, and far from making more work for him, Ingvar’s open-door policy meant he pretty much didn’t have to lift a finger—coffee was made in the morning, supper was set before him at the long (and very crowded) big table every night, and the only chore he held onto (and even that took some effort to retain) was dusting his wife’s teapots. The bustle had a restorative effect on Ingvar, too. A house full of jostling people made the long winter seem a lot shorter, and it was always easy to get a game of euchre going, and having kids around gave him hope for the future. He felt like he might not die so soon after all, that he could live a good long while, that in a way letting all these people into his house and—though he’d never s
ay so out loud—his heart had given him new life, and better yet, a reason for life. The kids all started calling him Grandpa Ingvar. Life was good.
Of course, all that was before the bus crash, and what came after.
14
BigHorn Jim found the squirming limbless zombie in the woods north of the lake, humping along at great speed—considering its relative lack of arms and legs—in pursuit of a ground squirrel that really should have been snug in a hollow tree for winter by now. The snow had iced over, creating a sort of armored snow that didn’t want to break unless you really hammered your boot down, and the limbless zombie was sort of sledding on its belly, head lifted, jaws snapping, propelling itself by undulations of its abdominal muscles and flailings of its leg stumps.
BigHorn Jim was pretty sure the little beast was taunting the zombie, or else the cold had made it stupid, because the squirrel could have easily shot up any of the nearby trees and been completely free. Jim’s religion included tales of Ratatoskr, the squirrel that ran up and down the trunk of the world tree Yggdrasil, carrying messages from the nameless eagle at the top of the great ash to the dragon who dwells beneath the roots, telling lies and spreading gossip and gnawing at the tree’s bark as he goes. The squirrel was not quite a trickster figure, more of a low troublemaker, but in a battle between old rat-tooth and a draugr, BigHorn Jim knew which side he’d take. He took the throwing axe from his belt, hefted it in his hand, and judged the angle. Throwing the axe and hitting a rapidly-moving prone object would be difficult, and only severing the head or damaging the brain would stop a draugr, so he reluctantly put the axe away. He was a fearsome enough warrior, he knew, but some feats were beyond him.
The Zombies of Lake Woebegotten Page 17
