The Zombies of Lake Woebegotten

by Harrison Geillor

  He took the grenade from his pocket, pulled the pin, and tried to think of something nasty to say, but, heck, they were zombies, it wasn’t like they’d appreciate his wit. So he just chucked the grenade at them and waited.

  What a beautiful throw. Levitt had played a lot of baseball in his youth, and he still had the arm. The grenade actually bounced off the bear’s back, Levitt saw it, and then—boom. A flash of white, a lot of smoke, and pieces of bear scattering far and wide. Pieces of Eileen, too, for that matter. “Yes!” Levitt shouted, actually jumping in the air in his excitement, though that wasn’t such a good idea, because when he landed his knee twisted, and he went down pretty hard. The ground was uncommonly hard and cold here, and—

  Oh, heck.

  You’re on the lake, idiot, that small treacherous part of his mind whispered. You thought you were in a clearing, you were just running blind, you ran out on the ice, and it’s thin ice, and you just threw a grenade onto that thin ice—

  The noise of ice on a lake breaking is unlike any other noise. It doesn’t just crack, it squeaks, and sighs, and moans, and it was doing all of that now, a chorus of icy disinterested death. The remains of Eileen and the bear vanished as the ice gave way beneath them, black water splashing, and as black cracks raced through the ice toward him, Mr. Levitt tried to get to his feet and run, to make it to shore, but his knee was too bad off, and the ground gave way beneath him, and there was the water, as cold as his heart, as merciless as himself, as welcoming as only death can be.

  Mr. Levitt sank into the freezing water, and he couldn’t think of any good last words, not that there was anyone around to hear them anyway.

  The voice in his head had a last word, though. That word was Moron.

  Dolph watched Mr. Levitt fall into the ice, and radioed Stevie Ray to tell him what had happened—including the sudden appearance of Eileen and a bear—and what he planned to do. Stevie Ray told him to be careful, but that it sounded like a good plan. So Dolph picked through the ruins of the fish shack and found, miraculously unshattered, most of a bottle of bourbon, hidden so deep under the little pallet there that even the owner had probably not known of its continued existence. Dolph took a few bits of blanket, chose a spot on the shore of the lake where the ice was all broken up, and sat on the blankets, and sipped the bourbon, just a bit. He didn’t want to get drunk. He just wanted to savor being alive.

  After about an hour, the water rippled. A head emerged. Then a torso. It was a zombie, walking up out of the water, face nibbled by fish—maybe even zombie fish—skin blue from the cold. A familiar face, though, even blue and fish-gnawed. A hateful face. Mr. Levitt’s face.

  Dolph stood up, lifted his gun, took careful aim, and put a bullet right into the center of that face.

  The twice-dead body fell back into the water and floated there.

  Dolph took another sip of his bourbon, smiled at the world in general, and started the walk back to town.

  Epilogue:

  A Pretty Nice Night

  After the town meeting that evening, Stevie Ray, Father Edsel, Julie, and Dolph sat in a booth in Cafe Lo sipping instant coffee by the light of a couple of camping lanterns.

  “There’s still a lot of work to do,” Stevie Ray said. “We need to get lookouts up on the grain elevator night and day. We should probably build some barricades, maybe even a wall around downtown, if we can manage it. Maybe dig some trenches. It shouldn’t be hard to keep zombies out, but now that the weather’s changed, we might have to worry about other things—gangs of survivors, Road Warrior type stuff, you know?”

  “They won’t find us easy pickings,” Edsel said. “We have Cyrus Bell’s stash. Which, ah, you might want to seize. A man who plants explosives on the baseball field shouldn’t have ready access to that kind of weaponry.”

  “You explain it to him, then,” Stevie Ray said. “Convince him it’s a good idea to keep the weapons at the police station. I’m sure not storming up there threatening to trample on his right to bear arms, even if they are illegal arms.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” Edsel said.

  “You going to stand for mayor, Julie?” Dolph asked.

  “If the town will have me. But even if they don’t, I’ll help whoever they do elect. This is my home now. I went away, for a while, but this is the place I came back to, and I want to protect it. I don’t feel like we’ve done too good a job so far. I want to do better.”

  “We’re all just learning as we go,” Stevie Ray said. “And today could have been a whole lot worse. We’ve got guards posted at the cemeteries, so there won’t be any more surprises from that direction at least. Maybe we’re past the worst of it. But even if we’re not, at least we’re preparing for the worst.”

  “I propose a toast,” Father Edsel said. “Though toasting with coffee instead of wine is an abomination, it will have to do. To Lake Woebegotten.”

  “To Lake Woebegotten, the Green Zone of central Minnesota,” Dolph said. “Where all the women are brave.”

  “Where all the men are pure of heart,” Julie said.

  “And where each child is more unique than the last,” Stevie Ray said, clinking his coffee mug against the others.

  Outside the diner, the Narrator stood on the sidewalk gazing up at the big moon overhead. He’d lost his other shoe somewhere, and his glasses sat askew on the bridge of his nose, giving him even more of an absent-minded-professor air than usual. A nasty bite mark on his left calf—from a raccoon, maybe, or even a pocket gopher—oozed fluids of various hues and consistencies. He said:

  “Night fell on the first day of spring in Lake Woebegotten—not the first day by calendar time, but the first day that felt like spring, like a day for new beginnings and bold new enterprises and rebirth and renewal and no more long underwear for a while—and the people were peaceful and full of hope, at least, the ones that were still alive. Over on the outskirts of town—”

  The Narrator coughed, a messy, wet cough that spilled down the front of his shirt. “Ah, must be allergies, those come right along with the flowers, it’s the dark side of spring, everything’s got a dark side—”

  Another cough, and now the Narrator stumbled and went down on one knee, and his skin was looking a bit grayish, his eyes behind his off-kilter glasses getting a little glassy themselves. “The good people of Lake Woebegotten, they—ah—that is, they all knew—”

  The Narrator turned his head, and looked through the windows of the diner, and saw the lantern light there, dimly. And glowing far more brightly than the lanterns, he saw the life of the people inside there, talking and laughing and clinking their mugs together like they were at a fancy cocktail party or some such, and he said, like he’d just discovered the word:

  “Brains?”

  And got to his feet and headed on inside Cafe Lo to get a bite to eat.