The four tourists all met at a spot directly in front of the café. They huddled together like they were going to have a conversation, but their lips didn’t move and they didn’t even seem to be paying attention to each other. Now that they were all closer, it was quite obvious that all of them had wounds much like Megan’s, albeit much worse and more numerous. It was becoming difficult to tell as the flurries grew into an outright storm, but Angie thought that she couldn’t see any of them breathing.
Johnny was the first person to put together the same thing she had. “No way. Please tell me they aren’t zombies.”
“They aren’t zombies,” Angie said.
“Are you lying?”
“Maybe.”
She waited for someone to say that wasn’t possible, yet she wasn’t entirely surprised when no one objected to the idea. In a small town like this, it was easy to believe in seemingly impossible things. Old Bert said he had seen a hollow apparition of a woman walk through a wall at the lighthouse late one night. Jasmine claimed she’d once seen some large, unidentifiable beast swimming in Lake Superior. Mukwunaguk was a town at the edge of the world, and at the edge of the world reason sometimes didn’t seem so reasonable.
“So I’m assuming those have to be the tourists that were out at the cabin,” Boris said. “Anyone know their names?”
Angie shook her head. “They haven’t been in here. I think I saw them go into the supermarket yesterday, though. They might have told Carol.” She thought about the woman in the grocery store right now, probably not thinking to barricade herself in like they had. If she got the chance, Angie might try to run and get her, but with the way these four were hanging around, she didn’t think that would be anytime soon.
“Well, we have to give them names,” Kevin muttered.
“Why would we need to do that?” Beth asked.
“Because we have to be able to identify them, don’t we?” He pointed at the one man. “Archie.” Then at the woman with the purple streaks. “Veronica.” Finally, he pointed at the other woman in the librarian shirt. “And Betty.”
“What about the fourth one?” Johnny asked.
“Weren’t there three of them always fawning over Archie?” Kevin asked. “I could have sworn there were three.”
“There were only two,” Beth said.
“Are you sure?” Kevin asked.
“Jughead,” Kim muttered from her seat on the floor. “The third one was Jughead.”
“Um, I’m not sure that’s how those stories went,” Beth said.
“Is this really what we’re arguing over right now?” Boris asked. “Old comic book characters?”
Angie waited for someone to propose better names, except no one did. It looked like those four poor people would be Archie, Betty, Veronica, and Jughead for the rest of their undead lives, if they all indeed were dead. Angie supposed that was the next task they needed to set for themselves: determining exactly how screwed up all this was.
“Some of them have blood on them,” Rudy noted. “You think all of it’s theirs?”
Angie hadn’t thought about that, but now that she did, she realized it probably wasn’t. While all of them were injured, the wounds looked like they had somehow been cauterized. There wouldn’t have been much blood coming from them. Yet all of them had the signs that they had struggled with someone, and some of the blood looked fairly fresh.
“Do you think they did something to Bob and Louis and the others?” Jasmine asked, but before anyone could answer Johnny made a choked gasped and pointed in the direction Jughead had come from. A fifth person shambled down the sidewalk, but unlike the others they all recognized this one. She had, after all, been in here eating a salad only fifteen minutes earlier.
“Becca?” Johnny said. He went for the door and made to grab the bench, but Angie pulled him away before he could try moving it. “Angie, we’ve got to let her in. Those four might get her.”
Angie looked around at the others, seeing from their expressions that most of them had already come to the same conclusion she had. “Uh, Johnny? I’m sorry, but I think they already did.”
He stepped away from her, as though just being close to Angie was all it took to make the statement true. After a few seconds, his stunned expression became one of real horror. He went back to the window and looked out, finally allowing himself to see what everyone else had already noticed. Becca was in the middle of stripping off her coat. On her cheek was a blackened spot in the shape of a bite mark. She moved with the same slow aimlessness of the others yet still found her way into their little circle. None of them moved. They looked almost like they were waiting for orders from someone or something.
“This can’t be real,” Beth said. “This can’t be happening.”
Again, Angie looked around to see if anyone agreed, but almost all of them seemed to have accepted that something dark and supernatural was going on. They were still at a complete loss as to what.
Or at least most of them were. Old Bert had a crazy look in his eyes that Angie didn’t like, the distinct appearance of someone psyching himself up to do something foolish.
“Bert, whatever you’re thinking, don’t,” Angie said.
Old Bert sniffed. “And why not? You kids said they’re zombies, right? Well, I’ve seen my share of zombie movies right along with everyone else. And we all know how to deal with a zombie.”
He took his pistol out and cocked it.
“Oh shit. Bert, don’t,” Johnny said.
“You’re not really going to let those kind of people invade our town, are you?” Old Bert asked. “This is our place. Just because they come here for a couple days or a week at a time doesn’t mean they have any right to it.”
“Bert, I think you are very much missing the point here,” Angie said. She backed away from him as he swung the gun back and forth at them all. She didn’t think he would actually shoot any of them. It was more of a gesture to keep them away from him. Yet Angie knew that if one of them didn’t get a handle on this quickly, everything was about to go out of control.
“Do you have any idea how long I’ve had to put up with their kind in our town? In my town? They come in here and buy stupid little trinkets and act like they own the place, but I’ve been here since I was born. I’m sick to death of them turning this nice little place into a tourist trap.”
“Okay, seriously Bert,” Kevin said. “That doesn’t have anything anywhere near to do with what going on, I think.”
“It does!” Bert screamed. As if to emphasize his point, he aimed the pistol in the air and fired off a shot into the ceiling. Everyone screamed and ducked at the echoing boom and shower of plaster from the ceiling tiles. Angie made a note to make sure he paid for that, assuming of course they all survived long enough for him to.
“I’m going to put an end to this, and not a single one of you is going to stop me.”
He aimed his pistol at the window and fired.
Five
Angie was afraid the glass would prove sturdier than she had thought and the bullet would simply ricochet about inside the café, but it shattered the glass and left a clear hole through the center of cracked spider webs. They could no longer see clearly through the cracked glass, though, so no one could be sure if Old Bert had actually managed to hit anything.
“Holy shit, Bert, put the gun down now!” Rudy yelled. Old Bert responded by twirling around and pointing the gun at Rudy’s chest. Jasmine had her own revolver up in an instant and pointing at Old Bert.
“Point that somewhere else,” Jasmine said. “I’m willing to bet I’m a better shot than you.”
Bert looked around at them as though they were the ones acting nuts. “Are you people idiots? It’s clear what’s going on. This is the beginning of the end. The zombie apocalypse. And those outsiders out there are the ones who have brought it to Mukwunaguk.”
“Are you including Becca as one of those outsiders?” Johnny asked.
“Yes! I’m sorry, kid, I know you an
d that girl have lived in town for a while, but you’re still not from around here. You’re not one of us.”
“That has nothing to do with…” Angie paused. Was she really going to admit this out loud? Yes, she supposed she was. In all those movies and TV shows, when the zombies started to come, there was always a period of time where everyone denied what they were, as if they themselves had never seen zombies in the media before in their entire lives. Everyone always liked to say that they would be different if that time came. Well now was the time to prove it. “What you’re talking about right now has nothing to do with zombies. You’re just being a xenophobic shitbat.”
Angie wasn’t sure what confused him more, the fact that his waitress had just called him a shitbat or that he probably had no clue what “xenophobic” meant. Either way, he lowered his gun a little, which meant Jasmine also lowered her gun. So of course, that was the moment one of the zombies crashed through the broken window.
Angie had her back to the window and still had her coat on, so she was more protected as the glass exploded inward. She and the others shrieked, but she did it more out of shock than pain like some of the others. Glass showered Johnny’s face, while Beth and Kevin put up their arms enough to block the worst of it. After the initial shock, Angie spun around to see Archie’s fist jammed through the remains of the window, several shards falling and hitting his arm without causing any apparent pain. Through the hole he had made, she could see the other zombies behind him, with Becca the closest, all of them moving in a weird shamble that was somehow both frantic and slow at the same time.
“You idiot, you got their attention!” Boris screamed, presumably at Old Bert, although it was kind of hard to tell since he was running away from everyone toward the kitchen. That seemed like a good idea to Angie, who immediately began ushering everyone else away from the window. Old Bert and Jasmine both stayed put though, the two of them firing at the window with their guns. Archie took a couple bullets in the arm and chest yet didn’t seem fazed. He did, at least, seem to realize that staying where he was would be a bad idea and pulled himself back out the window.
“Come on, everyone away from the window!” Angie said. Jasmine immediately followed her order. Angie expected Old Bert to argue and keep firing, but now that he had seen the zombie up close as it took a couple bullets without feeling anything, much of his bravado had apparently gone away. He stood there for a few more seconds, the pistol still aimed at the now vacant hole in the window, his jaw agape.
“It’s true,” he said. “They really are zombies.”
“No shit,” Angie said. “That’s what we’d already said.”
“I… I guess I didn’t really believe it. I thought I was just shooting…”
Angie suspected his desire to shoot the thing that had come through the window was really nothing than a misplaced desire to shoot a few tourists, although she didn’t want to sit and analyze that idea for long. “Get in back, Bert. We need to regroup.”
It was fancy commander talk that she’d heard in movies. She didn’t really know nor care what they were regrouping about or from or over or whatever. She just needed him to move someplace safer. Her commanding tone was enough to break him out of his stupor, though, and he shoved the pistol into one of his pockets as he followed her back into the kitchen.
Everyone had taken a position huddled close to the floor behind the order window. Angie shoved Old Bert down to join them and peered over the divider to see if there were still any zombies in view. The shattered window now had a hole in it large enough for someone to crawl through, although not without taking a serious amount of damage from jagged shards of glass. Snow fluttered in through the hole, becoming denser in the air with every second, and the wind blew through the hole and rattled the glass like an eerie, peculiar wind instrument. The darkness outside combined with the snow to make it very hard to see much of anything through the hole, but Angie thought she could see movement that wasn’t just caused by the snow and wind. They were still out there, although she had no idea what they might be doing.
“Okay, so what are we going to do?” Boris asked Angie.
“How should I know? This is the first time I’ve ever had to face down a horde of zombies.”
“I’m not sure there’s enough of them to actually call it a horde yet,” Kevin said.
“You don’t think five zombies is a horde?” Beth asked.
“No.”
“Well, then how many is a horde?”
“I don’t know. More than five.”
“You can’t just make that claim. There has to be a specific definition of how many zombies it takes to make a horde. And I don’t see why five wouldn’t be enough.”
“Because a horde is a horde. It’s legion. It can’t be just five.”
“Then give me an exact number.”
“I don’t know. More than five.”
Angie had seen them bicker like this before. There were two possibilities when it came to these two. One, they were about to start outright screaming at each other, which would last for less than a minute before they kissed and promised to make it up to each other later in bed. Two, they would just skip all that and go right to the inappropriate public displays of affection and it would be all she could do to keep them from tearing each other’s clothes off and getting down to it right there on the prep table. Before it could get to either extreme, Angie shut them up.
“This is seriously not the time to argue about this,” she said. She popped her head up over the divide again and instantly pulled it back down as she saw something in front of the hole, blocking the snow from getting it. “We have to figure out what to do.”
“We should call 911 again,” Johnny said. His voice sounded weak, prompting Angie to take a closer look at the damage he had taken from the exploding window. It didn’t look like any glass had gotten in his eyes, so there was that much, but some of the lacerations looked pretty bad. He’d left a trail of blood droplets from the dining room to here, and they were beginning to make a noticeable pool on the floor. He was acting strong, but he needed medical attention. As far as she knew, none of them here had that knowledge.
“That’s not going to do any good,” Rudy said. “You didn’t hear the way Tina was going on. I’d be surprised if she hasn’t already run out of city hall.”
“One of us has to know the cell number for Bob or Louie, though, right?” Boris asked. As he said that Angie looked up again, this time concentrating on the place on the floor where they had left Megan. They probably should have pulled her in back with them, but in their panic they had all forgotten her. She didn’t look like she was in any immediate danger, though. The people who had been standing nearby had taken the worst of the glass, forming a fleshy shield around her. Some of the snow that had wafted in landed on her face, but it melted so fast that Angie couldn’t be sure it hadn’t just been rain. She actually seemed peaceful there, which was more than she could say for the rest of them.
Everyone shook their head at Boris but Jasmine, who seemed to be concentrating. “I think I still have Bob’s number on my cell from that night we hooked up together.”
“Wait, what?” Angie asked, then decided it wasn’t really pertinent. Her aunt could get it on with the sheriff all she wanted in her free time. “Never mind. Is your phone in your office?”
“I don’t know if that’s going to help much,” Rudy said. “From what Tina was saying and the looks of those vacationers out there, I think maybe we’re too late for them. They’re probably wandering around somewhere looking for brains to munch.”
Jasmine paled at that but said nothing, instead quietly going to the office to get her phone. In the meantime, Angie knew they had to come up with some kind of plan. It couldn’t be that long before one of the zombies realized they could come right in through that hole.
“So how do we stop them?” Angie asked.
“All the stories and movies are usually pretty consistent,” Old Bert said. “Shoot them in the head.�
��
Boris gave him an obviously disgusted look. “And exactly how much experience do you have shooting moving targets in the head?”
Old Bert bristled. “Well I’ll have you know that back in ‘Nam I was—”
“Oh, don’t even start that,” Rudy said. “You already told me once when you were drunk that you didn’t join the army until after the US was already out of Vietnam. You served as a cook in Germany.”
“Well, I’ve still shot things in the head,” Bert said, although he himself didn’t sound sure if that was true.
“Okay, does anyone here have any real experience shooting moving targets?” Angie said. “Ones that are actually hostile, not just like deer or anything?”
Kevin raised his hand. “I’ve spent a lot of time playing Call of Duty.”
Angie stared at him, trying to decide whether to shake her head at such a stupid thing or actually consider that as more combat experience than the rest of them. After a few seconds, though, she got the impression that something was missing from this scenario, someone not adding inane comments to the conversation.
“Hey, where’d Kim go?” she asked. Everyone looked around as though they expected to see her crouching right beside them, but she was nowhere they could see in the kitchen.
Infernal Corpse: A Zombie Novel Page 5
