The Zombies of Lake Woebegotten
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Mr. Levitt took off his earflap hat, and his earlobes instantly went numb. Winter was easing up—it was no longer so cold your extremities would turn blue, then black, and then fall off shortly after being exposed unprotected to air—but it was still a long way from the warmth of spring. If you were quiet and you listened—two things Mr. Levitt was pretty good at—you could hear the creak and squeak of trees swaying as the ice on their branches melted, easing their burden of cold.
This was the oldest cemetery in the area, so it wasn’t as active as the newer one closer to town, but some of the older families buried their kin here with their illustrious descendants who’d founded the town. The earliest dead white people in the area were the denizens of a fur trading post populated mostly by drunken Frenchmen who’d died in a fire—though some had frozen to death afterward because it was winter and their shelter had burned down—but as far as Mr. Levitt knew none of them were buried here. Then there’d been the Utopian community where it turned out the leader told all the young girls that his flesh physically transformed into the flesh of Christ every night in a sort of full-body transubstantiation, and that by sleeping with him while he was suffused with the holy spirit, they might have the chance to bear the new Messiah. Winter killed most of them before sexually-transmitted diseases could. There were a few of those Utopians buried in a corner of the cemetery, but they were far too old for Mr. Levitt’s purposes. This ground held the earliest Lutheran settlers, too, though, and many of the names on the memorials here would be familiar to anyone driving through the area, as those surnames adorned various roads, nature trails, baseball fields, and primary schools. Plenty of them adorned the idiot living descendants of those proud and brave—or, more likely, stubborn and self-effacing—settlers, too. The dead around Lake Woebegotten easily outnumbered the living. As would become apparent in a few more weeks, Mr. Levitt suspected.
The old man scouted out the newest-looking headstone and crouched down on the frozen earth, ignoring the twinge in his back—flesh as a general rule was weak, he’d proven that again and again, but he didn’t like to think about the weakness in his flesh—and pressed his ear to the soil. The numbness in his ear was replaced by an icy fiery pain that soon vanished into a dull throb. He might lose an ear to frostbite yet if he wasn’t careful, but he couldn’t help it; the sound was so wonderful.
Scratch. Scratch. Scrabble scrabble thump scratch. Scratch. Scratch.
Mr. Levitt grinned, sat up, glanced at the name on the headstone, and said, “Hell-o Erlene Mildred Borgerson, devoted wife and mother. You must be getting pretty hungry down there. I imagine you’ve smashed through the lid of your casket by now, and you’re just clawing at the dirt, aren’t you? I bet you even made a little progress, but it’s hard as a rock now, isn’t it? Those last few feet of soil are a bitch. But don’t worry—spring is coming. The ground will thaw. You’ve probably scraped your fingers to the bone by now, but I have faith in you. You can use your wristbones for spades. And then you can go looking for some food. And I’ll make sure you find it.”
He put his earflap hat back on, pausing at a few other tombstones, listening for scratching. He didn’t hear much, but that was okay. The newer cemeteries were more recently occupied, and sounded a lot livelier.
He kept trying to estimate how many dead might rise from the town’s Lutheran and Catholic graveyards, but the math defeated him—there were too many unknown variables. He mulled it over again. He knew the annual death rate in America—pre zombie-apocalypse—was about 0.8%. There were around 2,000 people in Lake Woebegotten and environs, so say 16 people died a year. If they were all embalmed and buried locally—some were cremated and some wound up elsewhere but this was a back-of-the-envelope thing—and if he assumed that any bodies buried within the last ten years could rise from the dead, there were about 160 zombies underground desperately trying to go out for breakfast.
Who knew how accurate that estimate was, though? The number could be half that, or double. Though Mr. Levitt had created a lot of dead bodies in his time, he didn’t know very much about the mortuary sciences, as his interest in the bodies ended more or less when they became corpses. Still, he knew embalming techniques had come a long way in the past decades, and had heard stories of embalmed and be-coffined corpses dug up many years after death that looked remarkably lifelike, apart from being yellowish and saggy. On one of his cemetery visits yesterday he’d heard scratching from one grave with a headstone that bore an end date over fifteen years in the past. As long as the bodies had brains in their heads and ligaments and tendons bound to their bones, he suspected, they’d come climbing out of the ground once spring was sprung. There was a pet cemetery, too, but pets weren’t embalmed, so they were surely all bones, which was too bad, because the sight of Rover and Snowball and Spot attacking their former owners would have cheered him up, especially after what he’d been forced to do to Alta, but you couldn’t have everything.
Levitt had figured out the danger posed by the town’s graveyards months ago, but no one else seemed to have even considered the threat from below. Morons. He’d planned to tell the townspeople about the cemeteries, detail men to surround the areas with guns or some of Cyrus Bell’s more exotic weaponry—he had at least two flamethrowers—and become even more of a hero when Rising Day came and the dead were easily defeated thanks to his leadership. Of course, he’d expected to be mayor in that scenario, riding an easy tide of victory after pretty much single-handedly killing all the bus crash zombies who’d attacked Ingvar’s house. Sure, a few others had died in the process, but it was a chaotic situation, and as far as anyone knew for sure those deaths were accidental. Damn Dolph and his hearsay evidence and heartstring-tugging little girl testimony anyway. He should have checked under the table for witnesses. Still, some little girl’s word shouldn’t have been enough to turn the people against him. They should have voted him mayor anyway, instead of a woman.
But the people of Lake Woebegotten had foolishly decided to go another way. And as far as he was concerned, they could go on all the way to Hell. He wasn’t planning to tell anybody about the scrabbling dead below their feet. Quite the opposite. He was going to arrange a feast for them. He just needed to figure out how best to maximize the carnage. If he couldn’t get into politics, he had to amuse himself some other way, and the total destruction of the town would definitely be amusing. Afterward, he could light out, find another town, and offer his services. He thought he could play the role of brave, tragic sole survivor beautifully. He patted Erlene Mildred Borgerson’s headstone and said, “See you soon, darling. Save the last dance for me.”
He walked off, whistling, wondering where he might find a backhoe and the diesel fuel to run it.
The First Day
of Spring, More or Less:
Nice Weather, Shame About
the Zombies Though
1. Eileen vs.
the Great Beast
Eileen woke, as she did every morning since becoming mayor and having no choice but to prove herself a woman of the people, to the sound of screaming children. She sat up on the air mattress in her laundry room—which was really just a room now that she mostly washed her clothes in the bathtub instead of the washing machine in order to conserve generator power, and she didn’t like to think about what she’d do when the propane was entirely gone and she couldn’t even run the power long enough to operate the pump to pull up water from the well. The room was tiny, with just enough space on the floor for her air mattress (leaky, of course) to fit between the wall and the useless white appliances, and it smelled of ancient fabric softener and drifting molecules of lint and distant mildew. She’d hated this room when she was married, seeing it as a sort of concretized symbol of her domestic servitude and the endless drudgery of being a wife, and she hated it now, though it served at least as a sort of inner sanctum, a space she could claim completely as her own, though largely just because it was too small to squeeze another cot or pallet in here.
She spat into the sink, steeled herself, dressed in the least-smelly clothes from the pile she kept inside the dryer, and went out to greet her constituents.
The kitchen was crammed, but at least it was warm from the woodstove. There were five children on and around the big butcher block table eating instant oatmeal noisily and messily, and seven adults lounging at various points staring dolefully into their strictly rationed half-cups of instant coffee. Eileen knew all their names, had known most of them since she was a girl, but she thought of them all simply as the great beast. When she’d decided to run for mayor she’d picked up a few books from the library about politics and read about Alexander Hamilton, who’d responded to his rival Thomas Jefferson’s comments about the greatness of the people by saying, “Your people, sir, is nothing but a great beast.” Hamilton had never become President but he’d gotten his face on the ten dollar bill, and that was pretty good, though on the other hand he’d been shot and killed in a duel so he was probably a poor figure to model yourself after. He definitely had a point about people being beastly, though. Especially when they were crammed in your house and you had to let them in because they were too dumb to lay in enough fuel in their own houses and you were the mayor now and such largesse was expected and oh, of course the old married couple should get to sleep in the master bedroom while you went to sleep in the laundry room because the kids’ old rooms were filled with bunk beds and rollaways and cots to accommodate the who-can-even-remember-how-many-children are living here now in a house that had felt too crowded for her taste with just two inhabitants.
“Morning mayor!” they chorused, and that was some small thrill, though it was smaller every day. Being mayor had never meant a whole heck of a lot in Lake Woebegotten—her husband had managed the job, after all, and he could make a mess out of falling out of bed in the morning—but she’d foolishly expected the public perception of the office to change now that the town was an outpost alone on the frontier of a hostile world, in dire need of leadership. Leading Minnesotans was tricky business. They mostly just wanted to do things on their own, and they’d nod at you and listen and be polite and shrug and then go on doing whatever they thought was best.
Eileen elbowed her way to the stove and poured the last of the hot water into a cup with a pitiful half-spoonful of coffee crystals. There was no peaceful place to sit and sip, no unoccupied chair, so she smiled and nodded and refrained from screaming and throwing elbows and made her way toward the living room and the door that led out to the porch. If she wanted privacy at all in her waking hours she had to go outside into the cold. It would be so easy to poison them all, she mused. Slip some rat poison in with the instant coffee, that would do it in no time. Though then she’d have a house full of zombies, which would be even worse, marginally.
She’d finally gotten the house to herself by killing her husband, and it had been a blissful little while of sleeping diagonal in her bed and not having to pick up anyone’s dirty underwear and doing dishes for one, basically a kind of solitary paradise—leaving aside the whole zombie situation and dwindling fuel and lack of electricity and Dolph’s cowardice and imprisonment and subsequent release and decision to just plain flat out ignore her from now on—until Ingvar’s house burned down and all his dozens of refugees started looking for new homes and, as the leader of the town, Eileen had really had no choice but to open her doors to them. They’d been living with her for nearly six weeks now.
She’d wanted power, and instead, she’d somehow ended up with responsibility.
Eileen stepped out onto the porch, expecting the bracing blast of cold to do the job of waking her up that a half-cup of elderly instant coffee couldn’t do… but it wasn’t that cold. Brisk, sure, but only brisk. The snow had been gradually disappearing in the past couple of weeks, the town filled with the dripping of melting icicles, patches of white mostly clinging to shadows, the deep frost that turned the soil to stone finally loosening and the first green shoots poking up and reaching for the sun. By the calendar, spring had already come—the vernal equinox had, anyway—but this was the first day it had really felt like spring, and Eileen took a deep breath of air that didn’t burn her nostrils. Despite the hordes of people in her house and the responsibilities she’d only vaguely understood when she began campaigning for this job, she felt kind of hopeful. On a morning like this, with winter finally giving up its grip, the future seemed possible again.
The odd fellow folks called the Narrator wandered into the yard, squinting up at the sky, a low murmur coming from his mouth, sounding sort of like distant traffic or the sea or a toilet that wouldn’t stop running. He was dressed in suspenders and a bow tie twisted from horizontal to mostly vertical and he only had one shoe on, and the way he sort of slowly wove across the lawn made her wonder if he’d gotten himself zombified. What if he was saying “Brains, brains, brains” over and over?
But as he came closer she could make out his actual words, which were:
“Spring had come at last to Lake Woebegotten, with the snow keeping itself mostly to the shadows, and birds chirping as they flew hither and yonder looking for fat earthworms to have for breakfast, and all the animals of the forests and fields starting to get frisky, and the flowers, of course, just beginning to poke their heads up out of the ground like sleepy teenagers emerging from under their covers at noon. Of course, that spring, flowers weren’t the only thing you could expect to see coming up out of the ground, because that was the spring—”
He came a little too close to the front door then, and because Eileen was afraid he’d invite himself in for a half-cup of instant coffee, she interrupted him with a loud “Shoo!” and flapped her hands at him like you would at a stray cat, and the Narrator obligingly wandered off toward the edge of her property. She watched him weave on out of sight, then went inside to take her turn in the bathroom—there was a chart, with a rotation, and if you overslept or missed your slot then woe betide you because you’d have to make do with sponge baths until tomorrow, even if you were the mayor and this was your house—and get her cold shower and get dressed and ride over to the town hall where she had her “office” in a converted supply closet so she could keep this community from starving to death, drowning in sewage, being overrun by zombies, and generally collapsing. It was a lot of work but she guessed it beat housewifing.
One of the very few perqs of being mayor: she got a second half-cup of instant coffee because Stevie Ray was courteous that way, though he was the one who’d imposed—he’d say “suggested”—the rationing of supplies anyway
“Thanks all of you for coming out this morning,” she said, addressing the newly formed town council, which had not been elected so much as simply coalesced, drawing in the people who were interested and dedicated and willing to get some work done. They sat around a long wooden table in the town hall’s one conference room, with sunlight streaming in the windows, and it could almost have been a normal day in an undestroyed world, except then, she wouldn’t be mayor, would she?
She sipped her coffee, savoring the heat and warmth and the smell, though the flavor had never done much for her, and that powdered creamer substitute was no match for real milk.
Once upon a time she could have prevailed upon her lover Dolph to dip into his store’s supplies and give her anything she asked for, as such transactions had been central to their relationship, but things between them had dissolved, and after his accident, and imprisonment, and b
reakdown, and subsequent total personality shift, their relationship had cooled. It wouldn’t do for her to be caught angling for special favors anyway. Minnesotans weren’t too willing to tolerate corruption in their elected officials. Power wasn’t everything it was cracked up to be, that was for sure.
She looked around the table, smiling and nodding as everyone got settled and took out their notebooks or fussed their coffee into some semblance of acceptability with little packets of artificial sweetener and powdered milk. Being mayor wasn’t exactly like being an empress, but Stevie Ray listened to her, and he was the man with the guns, so that was something.
And Pastor Inkfist treated her with a lot more respect than he had when she was head of the Women’s Circle—not that he’d disrespected her then, exactly, he’d just treated her like a mop or a microwave or an old reliable car, something that would do its job without complaint, something you didn’t have to worry about. Brent had treated her the same way, and look where that had gotten him. Father Edsel didn’t treat her with much respect, but he didn’t treat anybody with respect, so she didn’t let it bother her; he was just a Catholic anyway.
Julie Olafson—who was only on the council as far as Eileen was concerned because of some hereditary sentimentalism over her grandfather, who’d served as a councilman for many years, though officially she was here in her capacity as a diner owner, serving as a representative of the town’s business interests, which should have been Dolph’s job except he’d become a Communist or whatever and decided to give his store’s entire inventory over to the town to be distributed to those in need, which was both disappointing for her as a onetime lover disgusted at his weakness and gratifying for her as a mayor who appreciated the supplies—was staring into her coffee with her eyebrows drawn down, scowling, and while Eileen thought it should be nice having another woman on the council, she actually just found it annoying. Julie hadn’t come close to Eileen’s numbers in the mayoral race, but she’d gotten some votes, and that was irksome. Plus she had all sorts of ideas. Maybe even a vision, always talking about making the town into a green zone. Eileen, whose vision didn’t extend much beyond the next few days unless she strained herself tremendously, found that quality sort of offensive. Above her station. Uppity. Things like that.