After a while Stevie Ray reached the Borg Co-Op Grain Elevator, rising in splendid isolation here near a great confluence of fields. The elevator was the highest point in town, higher even than the water tower, and the daredevil Stevie Ray had sent a message to—asking a town teenager to run it over in person since there weren’t enough radios and weren’t any phones—was here waiting for him.
Malcolm Madland was a dark-haired moody teenager and something of a troublemaker, but in a fairly harmless way. Mostly he enjoyed climbing things, and was the town’s only tagger. He’d put his graffiti on the side of the water tower, on the roofs of most of the businesses, and on pretty much any other place that was inaccessible for the average person. Harry had found him more exasperating than anything else, and mostly made him paint over his own graffiti, which was fine with Malcolm; he just liked climbing high and splashing paint, and painting over his old tags just gave him a blank canvas for the next batch. Eventually Harry told him that he’d be a more successful criminal if he stopped signing his work, and from that point on Malcolm stopped using the big loopy overlapping “MM” symbol he favored and started spray painting other incomprehensible designs. Like Harry said, “I still know it’s him, but at least now he’s making an honest effort at covering his tracks.”
Malcolm was the obvious culprit for tagging the Brotherhood’s sign, but the wit seemed maybe a little beyond him. If it had been a picture of a penis, then Stevie Ray would have been comfortable accusing him, but given the nature of the crime, he had his doubts.
“You call me here to hassle me, copper?” Malcolm said, smoking a cigarette. “You gonna rub me out?”
Copper? Rub me out? Malcolm must have gotten his hands on some gangster movies from the forties. Better than “pig” at least. “Pig” as an insult had never made sense to Stevie Ray, really, though. Pigs were smart, smarter than dogs. And they were delicious. They provided livelihood for a lot of the farmers around here too. They could get smelly. There was that.
“I need your help, actually. You ever climb to the top of the grain elevator?”
Malcolm cut his eyes left. “No. Course not.”
Of course, yes. “Now’s your chance, then,” Stevie Ray said. “I need a lookout. Someone to climb up there, and stay up there a while, scanning the horizon in all directions. You can’t do it all yourself, but you’re the first one I thought of.”
Malcolm frowned. “What’d I be looking for?”
“Oh, you know. Military convoys. Cars with survivors. Now that it’s spring, people might use the roads again, we might have some visitors.” Stevie Ray cleared his throat. “People. On foot. Especially… large groups of them. You can see for miles on a clear day, all the way across the prairie.”
“Like a pirate in a crow’s nest,” Malcolm said thoughtfully. Then he remembered to sneer. “Why should I help you?”
Stevie Ray shrugged. “There’s only so much spray paint left in town. I confiscated Dolph’s whole supply. Help me out, and I’ll make sure a few cans make it your way, and if some tags pop up here and there, well, we’re in a zombie situation here. I can’t go cracking down on minor crimes like that.”
Malcolm began to smile. “It’s a deal.”
“Take this radio and these binoculars.” The binoculars hurt. They were Swarovski 42MM ELs, and had belonged to his mother, an avid birdwatcher. They were the single most expensive thing she’d owned, and she’d passed them on to her son, though Stevie Ray had only ever used them for the times he went bow-hunting for deer. They were beautiful optics, but they were the only binoculars he had, and if this kid dropped them… “Call in if you see anything. And don’t fall down from up there, your mother would kill me.” He paused. “And don’t hurt those binoculars, or I’ll kill you. They mean more to me than you do.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Malcolm said, and vanished around the side of the elevator.
Stevie Ray watched him scale up the ladder on the side, then returned to his truck. As he was driving away, he thought he heard something—a distant boom, with another boom immediately afterward—and stopped the truck, listening for a repeat of the sound, but there was nothing. He glanced at the elevator, and Malcolm was coming back down at speed. He ran over to the truck, waving his arms. “Chief!” he called. “Chief, something just exploded, out by the new Lutheran cemetery!”
“See, you’re earning your spray paint already,” Stevie Ray said, and put the truck in gear, and headed to the source of the explosion. What kind of job did he have where he had to race toward explosions? What had he been thinking signing up for this?
Stevie Ray was about halfway to the cemetery when he saw Julie and Dolph on the side of the road, walking—Dolph was almost limping—and they waved their arms at him furiously. “What are you doing out here?” he said, and they climbed into the car, Julie in front, Dolph in back, and Dolph started babbling until Julie said, “Stop, I’ll tell him,” and she did, in clipped, clear, precise language, everything—her dead grandfather, the trip to get the backhoe, the discovery of the theft, and Levitt’s shenanigans at the graveyard, grenade and all.
“Well don’t that beat all,” Stevie Ray said wonderingly. “That man was a junkyard dog, but I thought he was a dog on a chain. I was wrong. I knew he was up to something—” he filled them in about Levitt’s attack on Rufus—“but I didn’t expect anything like this.”
“The dead have been down in those graves like time bombs waiting to go off, but it just never occurred to me,” Julie said, shaking her head in frustration. “Not until today at the meeting. If only we’d realized the danger posed by the graveyards, we could have taken steps, but…”
Stevie Ray shrugged. “If ifs and buts were candy and nuts… Sure, I wish we’d thought to post guards at the graveyards too, but if we’d covered that line of attack, Levitt would’ve done something else instead. Set the town on fire. Climbed the church steeple with a sniper rifle. His crazy just started boiling over, and it was gonna splash out somehow. What do you think his plans are now?”
“Get together as many zombies as possible and head toward town,” Dolph said.
“I didn’t pass him on the road, and he would’ve come this way if he was going to town,” Stevie Ray said.
“Not if he planned to hit the other cemetaries first,” Julie said, and Stevie Ray groaned. He reached for his car radio. “Rufus, pick up.”
“Here boss,” Rufus crackled.
“Levitt’s on a backhoe, probably out on Cheetham Road, probably being trailed by forty or fifty zombies. Check the old Lutheran cemetery, and if he’s not there, head on over to the Catholic cemetery.”
“Uh… okay, boss,” Rufus said. “But you know Mr. Levitt probably heard what you just said, right? I mean, he’s got my radio.”
“I do,” Stevie Ray said. “And if you’re listening, Mr. Levitt, you old son of a gun, you should know: we’re coming for you.”
After a moment of hissing silence, Mr. Levitt’s voice spoke, first with that dry heh-heh-heh laugh of his: “Come along. I’m having a dinner party. You’re the dinner.” That was all.
Stevie Ray turned off the radio and turned to Julie. “So now that Mr. Levitt thinks we’re going to the cemeteries to head him off, where do you think he’s actually going to go instead?”
“The new elementary school,” Dolph said. “He was school superintendent, once, so maybe… I don’t know. But I think he might try to lead the zombies he already has to the school.”
“Then let’s make sure that doesn’t work.” Stevie Ray rubbed his eyes. “We’ll have to do it ourselves. Because of the radio, we can’t risk coordinating with Edsel or the Anti-Zombie guys, or Levitt will change his plans. So we’ll go, evacuate the school, and set up an ambush.”
“I believe I can help with the tactical planning,” Julie said, and there was a light in her eyes that would have been kind of sexy if it wasn’t also kind of scary.
11. The Omega
Scenario
Because Mr. Levit
t had a police radio, Father Edsel didn’t bother telling Stevie Ray or the Anti-Zombie fighters what he had in mind. Let them chase Levitt around cemeteries—where, if the old man had any sense, he wouldn’t bother going at all—while Father Edsel, as usual, took care of things himself.
He was on his way to visit Cyrus Bell anyway, having heard the man was ill and wanting to check on him—mostly to make sure he didn’t die and turn into a zombie, at least, not without a friend there to kill him—so he didn’t even have to turn his car around when he heard the chatter on his radio. The Rustic Comfort Cabins were neat and trim as always, though the bait shop, usually an eternally-open institution, was closed. Nobody wanted to do any ice fishing when the dead fish would promptly come back to life and try to eat you, which was the same reason deer hunting and hog butchering had gone out of fashion, and why Mr. Torkelson’s farm was rather more filled with hogs than it usually was after the winter slaughter season. Once the last of the frozen meat from Dolph’s store was gone, this was going to be a town full of vegetarians, except for chickens, because birds didn’t appear to get zombified, just mammals and fish and reptiles, for whatever reason, who knew why, God surely had his plans.
Edsel went to Cy’s preferred cabin and pounded on the door. After a moment, Cy came to the door, bags under his eyes, sweat soaking his undershirt, and a putrid smell emerging from behind him. “Father,” he said. “I’m sick. I think the CIA has poisoned me.” He paused. “Or else that walleye jerky wasn’t cured as good as I thought. Been dumping my insides out into the toilet and the garbage can all night.”
“I heard about your illness,” Edsel said. Normally he’d barge right in, assuming an invitation was implicit, but the cabin wasn’t that inviting. “I came planning to see if you needed anything, I did, but circumstances have changed. Now I need something from you.” He put a hand on Cy’s shoulder—even though said shoulder was frankly kind of damp and sweaty—and said, “I need the remote, Cy.”
Cy’s eyes shone. “Is it… is it the Omega Scenario?”
Father Edsel, who had no idea what the Omega Scenario was, simply nodded gravely. “I’m afraid so.”
“I can’t believe it’s come to this,” Cy said. “I’ll come with—” He paused, looked alarmed, and ran to the bathroom, where unspeakable sounds soon emerged. Edsel stood in the doorway, waiting as patiently as he could, though he knew the seventh seal was cracked, the end was near, and so on. There were things on this Earth you could hurry along, and things you couldn’t, and a man in the throes of vomiting was one of the things you couldn’t. Cy returned, shaking his head. “All right. I can’t go. But let this be your fallback location if you can’t stop the invasion. How are you going to lure the moon people to ground zero?”
“I have some ideas in mind,” Edsel said. “Best I don’t elaborate. Someone might be listening.” He looked upward, and Cy nodded and held a finger to his lips.
“Let’s go get the remote,” he whispered, though his whisper was basically the volume of his ordinary speaking voice, only harsher-sounding. “You remember where the packages are placed? You don’t want to be in the vicinity when they go, but you need to be within a few hundred yards for the signal to work.
“Of course,” Edsel said, calmly enough, all things considered. He’d been quite alarmed when Cyrus had confided the secret of his explosives. The notion of large quantities of C-4 hidden in places often frequented by the people and children of the town was naturally pretty disturbing, and Cy’s rambling rationale—if the Chinese invaded, or the townsfolk were transformed into pod people, or whatever, there would be a sort of self-destruct option of last resort—was hardly reassuring, since Cy was apt to assume anybody was Chinese, and as for pod people, well, the whole point with them was you couldn’t tell them from everybody else. Cy had explained that plastic explosive was very stable, that you could shoot it with a gun or hit it with a hammer and it would remain utterly inert—you could even set it on fire, and it would just burn slow, like a piece of damp wood, and not explode. Cy was generally pretty reliable when it came to ordnance, at least, so Edsel took his word for it, and accepted that unless the detonators were triggered—remotely, using a device Cy had rigged himself—the explosives wouldn’t go off.
Edsel had convinced Cy to put the remote in a lockbox that required two keys, one in Cy’s possession, one in Edsel’s, so that—Edsel explained—if one of them was Manchurian Candidated or taken over by pod people, they couldn’t blow up half the town of their own accord. Cy had seen the sense in that. He led Edsel down to his bunker/armory, where they made a great ritual out of taking out their keys, slotting them into the twin keyholes together, turning them in tandem, and opening the box.
The remote didn’t look like much, just a garage door opener that had undergone some impromptu open-compartment surgery, and it was held together mostly with lots of electrical tape. “Just turn it on and you’ll see a red light, get within range, press the button, the light turns green, that means it’s active, press it again, and kaboom,” Cy said.
“You’re a warrior for God,” Edsel said, and clapped Cy on the back.
“After we stop the invasion, maybe we can smash the moon right out of the sky,” Cy said.
“It’s good to dream big,” Edsel agreed.
Next, Father Edsel raced to Mr. Torkelson’s farm and hammered on his screen door. Torkelson ambled out, wearing overalls, with manure on his boots. “See you, Father,” he said. “Springtime, huh? Uff da. Gonna have a lot of piglets here soon. Some guys might say you can’t have too many pigs, but me, I’d have to think about it.”
“I’d like to take some of those pigs off your hands, Mr. Torkelson,” Edsel said.
“Oh yeah? Planning a barbecue then?”
“Something like that,” the priest replied.
“They’ll trample up the field,” Torkelson said, backing the big truck up to the Larry “Old Hardhead” Munson Memorial Baseball Field, which was fenced off pretty good. “It’s all muddy and snow melted in there anyway. Some folks might not like so many pigs as this running around on the baseball field.”
“They’ll like it fine,” Edsel said, looking into the field. Four bases, and a pitcher’s mound. And under all four bases and the mound were who knew how many pounds of explosives. Molded into blocks and buried. “We’ll put some pigs in the bandshell, too,” Edsel said. “And over by the statue of the Hypothetical Viking.” There was a lot of explosives under those, too, Cy had assured him.
“Good way to get pig shit all over the bandshell, that,” Torkelson said.
“That’s just an unimportant side effect.”
“It’s your money,” Torkelson said, and Edsel almost laughed. He was giving the man all the money in the church coffers for his pigs. As if money still mattered. Well, whatever made the farmer happy. Edsel suspected he was mostly happy to get rid of some of the pigs.
Stevie Ray came trotting over to the truck from the direction of the police station, with Julie and Dolph in tow. At least Eileen wasn’t with them. “My fellow councilpersons!” Edsel boomed. “Mr. Torkelson is here to help us with our little zombie problem.”
Stevie Ray just gaped at the horde of pigs streaming onto the community baseball field, and Dolph looked utterly confused, but Julie began to laugh, and slowly clapped her hands.
Mr. Levitt didn’t have quite the merry band of zombies he’d hoped for since he had to abandon his plan to dig up the other cemeteries, but that was okay. The great thing about zombies was, they were self-replicating. Out here on the outskirts of town, there were a few farmhouses, and because people were banding together to share resources and heating oil and just generally crowd together in sheeplike masses, those houses were packed with people, and every one was a beacon to his zombies. All Levitt had to do was lead his merry band of zombies within sight of a farmhouse, and the horde would peel off, bash in windows, and make short work of the occupants. It was a beautiful thing, even from the vantage point of a backhoe loader�
�the screaming, the breaking glass, the people trying to run away. There were escapees here and there, but who cared? Let word of Levitt’s coming spread out before him. Once the zombies finished off a house and the new dead rose, they inevitably came back toward Levitt, following his lead, hoping to eat him, unable to understand that he was their benefactor. Ah, well. Why should zombies be any more grateful than the living?
After hitting three houses, the ranks of Levitt’s zombie army had tripled, to well over a hundred shambling, bent-necked, bloody, undead Minnesotans. Enough to do serious damage at the elementary school and the bar and the diner, and once they got a decent foothold in town, they’d multiply exponentially, and that would be that. Maybe Levitt’s brood would spread across the whole Earth and devour all the living.
The backhoe rumbled just fine across the frozen fields. Levitt was avoiding the roads, since the radio was full of squawkings from Rufus and the morons in his old coterie, the Anti-Zombie Etc. There was a silence on the part of Stevie Ray and Father Edsel, the only remotely formidable people with power, and he might have construed that as ominous, but he was leading a horde of zombies to the center of town; the only ominous thing around here was him.
If they’d made him mayor, he would have gotten to ride in the fourth of July parade. They’d turned on him, though, the ingrates, so he’d been forced to organize his own parade.
“Grand Marshal of the Zombies!” he shouted, and then downtown was in view. The baseball field, the park, and then—the school. The bar. The diner.
The buffet.
Daniel parked his car near the elementary school and put his head down on the steering wheel and just let himself shake. Lord, he prayed, your poor servant can bear no more. So much death. So much destruction. So many invitations to sin. Just, please, can’t you grant me a little peace?
The Zombies of Lake Woebegotten Page 27
