The Zombies of Lake Woebegotten

by Harrison Geillor

  That treacherous part deep in his brain said, Getting harder to think, isn’t it? You’re getting tired more easily but you aren’t sleeping much at night, you have to pee all the time, there are aches you never had before, you need reading glasses, you put things down and forget where you put them, that mind like a steel trap you were always so proud of is starting to go rusty, you’re getting old.

  Well, darn it to heck, if he was getting old, he was going to end in a blaze of bloody glory. If he was going to die soon—time moved on, and it wouldn’t wait for him, much as he wanted to believe otherwise—he was going to take as much of the world with him as he could. If Mr. Levitt was going to cease to exist, so was the town of Lake Woebegotten.

  After ten minutes he couldn’t stand it anymore, so he started up the backhoe and began trundling through the site, cursing because he’d forgotten to undo the gate and then just busting through it, because, what the heck, who cared? The bucket on the machine’s front—like the scoop on a bulldozer—hung onto a chunk of the fence so he moved it up and down a couple of times to dislodge the metal. There. Free and clear. He turned left on the road and pushed the machine up to its top speed, which was all of about 25 miles per hour. Ah, well. He’d get there in time. The backhoe snorted and rumbled and vibrated fit to make his butt go numb, belching out diesel exhaust as it went.

  Mr. Levitt couldn’t help it: he whooped. There was something wonderful about piloting a big machine on an errand of devastation.

  “Where the heck’s the backhoe?” Dolph said, scratching his head.

  “Judging by the smashed-open fence, I’d say someone stole it.” Julie walked around the side of the road a bit, peering at the ground. The snow was melting, but there was still enough to show tracks, and she pointed. “There, see? It was driven out of here, and turned left. Away from town. Odd.” She sniffed. “I can still smell the exhaust in the air, can’t you?”

  Dolph sniffed, and she was right. The air had been so pure since the zombie apocalypse started, he should have noticed the sweet chemical tang in the air right away. “Yep,” he said. “Why would someone steal the backhoe? I mean, I know we were going to, ah, borrow it, but, no offense, I doubt there’s another family that needs to do a Jewish funeral real quick.”

  “It does seem improbable,” Julie said. “I’m curious. Aren’t you?”

  “You bet.”

  “Then let’s follow the trail. Even on a snowy road, we can go faster than a backhoe loader, don’t you think? If we can still smell the exhaust, it can’t be far. If it’s someone on a legitimate errand, we’ll wait our turn to borrow the machine. And if it’s something more nefarious…”

  Nefarious, Dolph thought. What a woman. “At least we know zombies can’t drive tractors,” he said.

  Julie nodded. “True. But living humans are much more dangerous than zombies. It’s just, zombies are always dangerous, and the living are only sometimes dangerous. It can be confusing.” She got back into the car, and Dolph followed.

  Mr. Levitt got to the Ebenezer Lutheran Cemetery—the biggest one in town, so the most important one to hit—and got to work right away. He maneuvered the backhoe toward one of the areas that had seemed the most active during his reconnaissance earlier in the winter, worked the levers, and—after a few false starts that knocked over headstones and threatened to tip over the whole loader—he got the backhoe extended out to pretty much its maximum, dipped the bucket into the earth, and started scraping the first few feet of soil off a whole row of graves. He dumped the dirt and moved on to the next section of graveyard, not bothering to see if his work had done any good. He figured the zombies had probably smashed through the tops of their coffins already, and just needed a hand getting through the hard earth above them. If he dug down too deep, or went over the same spot more than a couple of times, he’d risk hitting zombies who’d already dragged themselves partway to the surface, and though dismembered undead were highly amusing, they weren’t much good for his purposes.

  After scraping half a dozen rows of graves, he noticed some movement out of the corner of his eye and turned to look through one of his slit windows.

  There. A dirt-streaked hand reaching up from the ground in the iconic rising-from-the-grave zombie style, beloved of movie posters and cheap paperback book covers. A corpse dragged itself out of the earth, looking shriveled but basically whole, wearing a filthy black suit. Looked like it had been an old man, but zombies didn’t suffer the aches and pangs of the elderly living—one advantage Mr. Levitt had to admit they had over himself. There was other movement in the dirt, so he turned back to his work, running the backhoe a fair distance away. The loader was slow, but he could give a bunch of even slower zombies a pretty good runaround, and do a couple of circuits through the graveyard at the end to attract any stragglers to him. They’d follow him to the next graveyard, and the next, and then to the center of town, and then… buffet time. Even on an ordinary day there were always people in the bar, and the Cafe during the increasingly few hours when it was open, and people lined up taking the last of that idiot Dolph’s giveaway supplies, and getting together at the community center, and who knows, on a day like this, spring beginning to peek out its head, there might even be people in the park in the center of town, or on the Larry “Old Hardhead” Munson Memorial Baseball Field, having a slightly snowy pickup game. And, of course: there was the new elementary school, built some years back to replace the old one. Closed all winter, of course, in light of the emergency, but the town council had pushed to get it going again, drafted some teachers—who seemed to like having something to do—and managed to get the little ones out from underfoot. He wondered if zombies liked children better than adults—if they had more life, if they were tastier. Mr. Levitt didn’t have any particular interest in children—they were too easy to scare, they didn’t pretend to be brave, it was dull—but he knew unleashing zombies on them would thoroughly unhinge any of the townspeople who managed to survive this onslaught.

  Waiting until a night with a town meeting would have been better for maximum carnage, but Mr. Levitt’s boredom had gotten the best of him, and he couldn’t stand waiting any longer. Besides, as the weather got warmer, he would’ve risked the chance of zombies crawling out of graves on their own, and once the town was alerted to the time bomb in their cemeteries, they would have taken steps to deal with the problem.

  Mr. Levitt scraped some more graves, and now there was a goodly horde of fifteen or twenty zombies staggering toward him, men and women, dirty and disheveled, some with just ragged stumps at the ends of their arms, probably having destroyed their hands in the process of smashing out of their coffins. Ah, well. Long as they still had teeth.

  Then the horde of zombies swerved away from him, toward the cemetery’s front gate, and why would they do that, when Mr. Levitt was the only fresh meat for miles?

  The answer was simple. Someone else was here. That wouldn’t do.

  A moment later there was a whine, a crack, and a hole appeared in the sheet metal about a foot to the left of his head. Mr. Levitt stared. Someone was shooting at him.

  That wasn’t very sporting. He’d have to do something about that.

  He reached into his coat and took out a grenade.

  8. What To Do When The World Explodes

  “I can’t hit him at this distance,” Julie said, lowering her weapon. She was standing by the driver’s side, using the car’s roof to steady to her aim, and coincidentally keeping the car between her and the oncoming zombies. “I’m firing blind, since the vehicle is armored, and I didn’t bring extra ammunition with me—I can’t afford to just shoot at him blind.” She shook her head. “I have to loop around, get a clear shot.”

  “Uh,” Dolph said, crouching beside her, wishing he had a gun. “But… zombies.”

  “Yes. Zombies. And in that backhoe loader, a man, trying to free more zombies. If we don’t stop him, the situation gets markedly worse, very quickly. Who can it be? Who would do such a thing?”
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  “Mr. Levitt,” Dolph said promptly.

  “Ah,” Julie said. “I’d heard he was more… sinister… than he seemed. That he was a monster. Monsters do have their place in a conflict. I knew some, in the military, people who channeled their desire to kill into socially acceptable works. But, if this monster was leashed and serving us before, that seems to have changed, doesn’t it?”

  “I’d say so.”

  “Then I’ll shoot him in the head.”

  Dolph, who’d accidentally shot another human being in the head not so very long ago, fought a wave of nausea. “Uh, just, like that, in cold, uh, cold…”

  “It’s self-defense. His weapon is a backhoe. His bullets are zombies. You understand that?”

  “I do. Yeah, I do.”

  “Good. You run that way—some of the zombies will pursue you, but you should be able to outrun them. I have a better chance if I don’t have to avoid all the creatures myself.”

  Dolph closed his eyes for a moment. He’d wanted to help, to serve the town, and had told Julie as much, he’d come to her to get an assignment, to find out how he could do some good. Apparently by being unarmed zombie bait. Well, heck. Being a man was about doing things you didn’t want to do, sometimes. “Yes, ma’am,” he said.

  “Now,” Julie said, and Dolph set off running, wishing there were some big crypts to hide behind, but this was a Lutheran cemetery, so it was mostly modest low headstones. He looked over his shoulder after a few seconds to see how many zombies he was attracting—there had to be thirty of them milling around by now, drifting toward the car—and how far Julie had gotten but instead he saw Mr. Levitt pushing open his improvised sheet-metal door and popping out of the backhoe like an elderly sideways jack-o-lantern. He hurled something overhand toward the car, which was odd, because what was he going to do, throw a rock to try to scare them off, or—

  The first explosion was eardrum-shatteringly loud, and the second explosion, which he realized later was the car’s gas tank catching fire and blowing up, was both loud and hot, and a wave of burning air pressed against his back and tossed him, not too gently, toward a nearby headstone, and it was only by terrific twisting in the air that he managed to smash his shoulder into a chunk of good weathered marble instead of smashing open his head. He couldn’t hear much, his ears were ringing, but underneath the ringing there was something—laughter. That old bastard Mr. Levitt, laughing, big old belly laughs, just like he’d laughed the night Dolph saw him chainsawing zombies to death.

  Dolph got to his feet, swaying and unsteady, and promptly discovered the zombies aren’t distracted at all by exploding cars. They were dedicated. Focused. One-track minds.

  And that track said “lunch,” and the special of the day was lightly-toasted Dolph, and there wasn’t so much as a tree branch he could use for a weapon.

  When the car exploded, Julie thought: He has grenades. That is bad. He has destroyed our transportation. That is also bad. Nor could she call for backup. The town council had to share one radio, and Eileen had theirs today, and cell phones had stopped working ages ago.

  There was only a single sentient hostile, though. Get a clear shot at him, and she’d be fine—the zombies were manageable. Let him be distracted by the merrily burning car while she crept up on him. Levitt’s sightlines—if indeed it was Levitt—had to be hampered by the improvised armor on the backhoe. That would work to her advantage.

  As she crept through the churned-up dirt, keeping an eye on the encroaching zombies at her three-o’-clock and another eye on the backhoe, which didn’t leave an eye for much of anything else, she dearly hoped Dolph had gotten clear of the explosion. He seemed a nice man, and was attractive—by local standards—and she’d thought of taking him as a lover, since Rufus was enthusiastic but ultimately unsatisfactory in bed due to his tendency to treat the female body like a video game controller, where if he executed the same combination of button-presses and joystick-diddles exactly the same way each time, the result would also be identically successful. Julie had tried to teach him that making love was like fighting a battle: plans were well and good, and having tactics in mind was certainly laudable, but you had to pay attention to the situation on the ground and adapt your approach to rapidly-changing conditions… except whenever Julie began talking to Rufus that way, he started talking about some military video game, and their meager common ground was promptly lost.

  Julie liked sex. She’d largely gone without during her time in the Israeli Army, and she’d missed it immensely. Her training had taught her the importance of pragmatism, and she was pragmatic about her love life, too. She didn’t lie, except by omission—men could be silly when they found out about other men—and she made no promises. She got what she wanted, and gave good value in return.

  The sex was different from the domination stuff. That was just a good way for a healthy woman with a lot of self-confidence and no foolish inhibitions to make money, or, in this new world order, obtain antibiotics and generator fuel.

  But this wasn’t sex; this was a literal battle, and she couldn’t let her worry over Dolph’s possibly-exploded condition distract her from the matter at hand.

  She squatted behind a headstone and braced her wrists on top, gun extended. The zombies were a good forty yards away, shuffling toward her slowly, and the backhoe was turning in her direction, soon to point its more-exposed front toward her. As long as he kept the front shovel low instead of raising it like a shield—which is what Julie would have done—she could put a bullet through the chicken wire and into Levitt’s chest. Turn, turn, turn, almost there—

  Something grabbed Julie’s legs and pulled. She took one hand off the pistol and steadied herself, looking down to see a horrible worm-eaten face pressing up out of the soil as the occupant of the grave she was crouching over began pulling himself out of the dirt, using Julie’s legs for a handhold. She pointed the pistol at its face, then paused, because the gunshot would alert Levitt to her existence. He might think she was dead in the car explosion if she kept quiet, but if she made noise… he had grenades. A pistol was very little good against a grenade.

  So Julie rolled away, and kicked at the zombie’s face, hearing bone crunch. It was only partially out of the ground, still buried to halfway up its chest, so she got to her feet, reared back her foot, and kicked as hard as she could, as if trying to drive a soccer ball down the length of the field.

  The zombie’s head, not being attached with a great deal of structural integrity after its time in the grave, separated and went rolling across the grass. Julie crouched back in her position, lifting the pistol… but the backhoe was trundling away, showing her only its backside, and even if she squeezed off a shot at this distance there was no chance she’d actually hit the old man, not with a piece of sheet metal blocking her sight of his precise position. Most of the zombies—more than she could easily count—were following after the backhoe, more attracted to Levitt than herself, presumably because they’d been closer to his position when he left, though three or four zombies were ambling toward her, and there was another knot across the cemetery, possibly in the process of eating Dolph?

  Julie took a deep breath. Mr. Levitt was a problem, but she had more immediate problems. She lifted her gun, took aim, and fired seven times, killing four zombies with headshots. Meaning she’d missed three times, hitting chests or limbs. Usually a shot in the mass of the body was good enough, but with zombies, only headshots were relevant. She needed more practice shooting, she was rusty, but even with Cyrus Bell’s significant and shocking collection of weapons and ammunition, bullets were not infinite, and wasting them on target practice seemed contraindicated.

  After checking hurriedly to confirm the zombies were dead, she ran as best she could over the broken earth, through smoke-filled air, to see if she could save Dolph from relatively certain death.

  Dolph didn’t have a weapon, and he had zombies, and he needed to reverse those situations as soon as possible. Not usually a particularly quick t
hinker—sometimes a rash actor, yes, of course, but not a particularly swift cogitator—he found that shambling corpses with snapping jaws concentrated his mind pretty well. He stripped off his coat and tore off his flannel shirt, popping the buttons, leaving him in just his undershirt, which reminded him that, spring or not, it was still cold. He dodged around the zombies toward a hunk of smoldering wreckage hurled out of the car’s engine. At a glance he wasn’t sure what it was, a fuel pump or distributor cap or who knows what, but it was heavy, and ouch darn it, hot. He spread out his shirt on the ground like a blanket and nudge-kicked the lump of fused smoking metal into the center of the cloth, hoping it wasn’t hot enough to get the shirt burning, because that would sorta defeat the purpose. Dolph grabbed the sleeves and shirt tails and tied a couple of knots and turned to face his enemies, new weapon dangling in his hand.

  He didn’t know if this kind of weapon had a name—oversized sap? homebrew mace?—but it was the same general idea as wielding a tube sock full of quarters, or a pillowcase with a toaster inside it, or a scarf with one end tied around a can of beans. A rope with a weight at the end. Dolph started the weapon swinging, and it felt pretty good. He swung out and caught one of the three zombies on the side of the head hard enough to make its neck snap, and that zombie crashed into the other ones, but not hard enough to send them off balance. Dolph kept his weapon spinning as he backed up, hoping he wouldn’t trip over one of those recessed headstones that sit flat on the ground, just waiting to catch your heel and tip you over backwards.