Infernal Corpse: A Zombie Novel

by D. J. Goodman

  They didn’t. Rudy had even already taken the road off the highway that would lead to the lighthouse. It was the only building on this side of the harbor, so they could see it for some distance even through the snow. It was all one building, although parts had been added onto it over the years. That made it an odd conglomeration of white tower, red brick, and yellow siding. There was a chain-link fence around the whole area, another point in its favor in terms of defensibility, and Rudy had to stop the bus long enough for him to get out and unlock the rolling gate. Angie had an idea that they should all get out now and walk the rest of the distance to the lighthouse while Rudy drove the bus somewhere out of sight. It wasn’t like they’d be able to use it to make a quick getaway anyway. Rudy grunted his approval, took the key off the ring for the back lighthouse door to give to Angie, then took the rest. He drove the bus away, leaving the rest of them alone here in the middle of nowhere.

  Kim’s earlier assertion that the lighthouse was haunted was a popular opinion among the townsfolk, and standing out here in the freezing cold staring up at the forlorn tower, Angie could understand the sentiment. Even in the best of times, during the height of tourist season, the lighthouse had the uncanny ability to seem like it was the last building at the edge of the world. It had probably seemed even more so back in the days where it had actually been on the water’s edge, before poor civil planning had rendered it useless for its original purpose. It was easy to look out over Lake Superior and feel like there was nothing beyond. The current crash of the waves and howl of the wind didn’t help.

  “Angie, could we please get the hell inside?” Boris asked. “Not all of us have our coats with us, remember?”

  She led them to the back door, which despite its position, was typically the entrance Old Bert had used when starting the tour. Nearby there was a small brick building that housed the lighthouse’s circuit breaker and maintenance equipment, but although Angie made note to ask Rudy if one of the keys on the ring would work for it, she still walked past the building for now. They wouldn’t want to turn on the power in the lighthouse. It was designed to be a beacon, after all, and they didn’t want to alert anyone to their presence here.

  Angie unlocked the door and let them all in, counting her charges as they filed past her to a room that wasn’t really that much warmer than outside. Kim and Megan, Beth and Kevin, Boris and Jasmine. Including herself and Rudy when he got back, that was eight people. Eight people left from a town of a couple hundred or so. Of course, she had no way of being certain that they were the only survivors, but the odds for everyone else didn’t look good.

  However, she was also aware that this number was higher than it was supposed to be. Once they were all in and settled, this needed to be the first thing they discussed.

  This first room had originally been intended as a kitchen and pantry, the last room that had been added to the house back when people were actually supposed to live in it. It was pitch black in there as the room didn’t have any windows, but that was just fine for now. Once they spread out, they would need to find ways to cover up the windows anyway. After some cursing and fumbling, Beth managed to get the batteries back in their two flashlights (since one had been lost in their hustle to get out of the museum) and they were able to walk around a little without banging their shins into more artifacts of a bygone time. While technically as much a museum as the place they had just left, the lighthouse had been laid out to look as much as possible like it once had when it was inhabited. The shelves in here had old cans and jars on the shelves, a small table, an old fashioned cast iron stove, and a primitive laundry wringer. None of this stuff was actually useful anymore, unfortunately. Several of them eyed the stove with heavy sighs as they shivered.

  “Okay, so now what, fearless leader?” Boris asked her. Despite the sarcasm of the question, he sounded sincere enough, and judging from the looks on everyone else’s faces, they felt the same way. She was indeed their leader, and their survival or death relied entirely on her.

  Angie thought about it and then handed out some tasks. They were going to have to stay here until the storm was over and they could try walking out of town, preferably in the day when it wasn’t as cold. So, although they hopefully wouldn’t be here too long, they still needed to make this place livable. There were a few small windows on this floor, all of them high up on the walls because the base of the lighthouse was partially built into a small hill. She assigned Boris and Jasmine to find anything they could use to cover the windows up so they could use the flashlights with risk of being seen. Kevin searched in a closet and found a small gas-powered space heater used for the rare occasions when someone needed to be in the lighthouse during the off season. Angie, Beth, and Kevin went up to the second and third floors looking for any extra pillows, blankets, or anything else they could use to rest and warm up. These were the floors that had actual beds and amenities, many of them almost as old as the lighthouse itself, and they were kept looking ready to use in order to give tourists the proper idea of old-style lighthouse life.

  The bottom floor of the lighthouse, the one they had come in on, was technically more of a basement. After the kitchen was a dining room that had been converted into a more museum-like space, with various utensils, china, and other ephemera of daily life from the early 1900s kept in glass cases. Beyond there was a small room with rickety stairs that led up to the real first floor. Here there was a study, a living room and one of the bedrooms. Again, this floor was dressed to look like someone still lived in it with a few out of place items for the tourists to view, most noticeably the old foghorn in the living room. Old Bert had always taken what Angie thought was a perverse pleasure in telling the tourists to cover their ears and then crank its handle, shaking the entire lighthouse with its piercing bass rumble. In front was the main door, although it was never used, and a narrow metal stairwell that spiraled upward. The second floor was all bedrooms, all of them small with low ceilings thanks to the sloping roof. Taking the stairs past this floor brought tourists to the top of the lighthouse tower where they would have to go outside onto a rickety platform that surrounded the light itself. The light room could only be accessed through a small hatch that tourist had to get down and crawl through, and only four or five of them could fit in it at a time provided they scrunched together. Angie suspected they were going to have to send someone up there later to act as a lookout, but for now they left the tower alone.

  By the time they had all assembled back in the dining room, Rudy had returned. He’d remembered what happened back at the museum and stopped in the maintenance shed before coming in, so they now had more weapons- shovels, hoes, a very large pair of hedge trimmers, and various other gardening implements. There was enough that everyone had a weapon now, even if most of them were of dubious use in a fight. Rudy also told Angie to hold out her hand and gave her a full magazine for Old Bert’s gun.

  “He had it stashed under the seat in the bus,” Rudy explained. “I found it when I was searching for a first aid kit.” He indicated her bitten hand, which had stopped bleeding for now but throbbed horribly. Angie kept expecting it to finally grow dark with charred skin, the sign that she was finally turning. All it did instead was make her desperately wish for some pain killers.

  “Did you find one?” Angie asked.

  “Not in the bus, but I’m sure there’s got to be one in here somewhere. This decrepit old place is full of ways for fool tourists to injure themselves.”

  Angie nodded. They hadn’t found one so far but that didn’t mean it wasn’t here. At the moment, though, she was more interested in the magazine.

  “Why the hell did he have this in the bus?” Angie asked.

  “Knowing Old Bert, he probably expected one of the tourists to rob him or something. That, or he really didn’t want anyone taking a selfie with him.”

  Angie decided not to question it and instead silently thanked the crotchety old man, wherever he might be now.

  “We should all get some rest,
” Angie said, turning to the others. Every single one of them was staring at her, hanging on her every word. Kevin, however, seemed decidedly unnerved.

  “Can’t we talk about something first?” he asked.

  “What?” Angie asked.

  “The fact that several of us are supposed to be dead. And aren’t.”

  Angie thought at first of her own bite wound, then remembered with a start that, according to the voice on the message, Kevin wasn’t supposed to be here. He was supposed to be shambling around in the zombie horde right next to Johnny.

  “Well, I’m not sure yet about me,” Angie said, raising her wounded hand for all to see, “but I’ve got a general idea why you didn’t die.”

  “Please enlighten us,” Jasmine said. “Because I’m sure we can use any news at all that might make us less freaked out.”

  “It’s exactly what I was saying earlier,” Angie said. “Something went wrong early in the voice’s plan.”

  “We’ve got to stop just calling it ‘the voice’ or ‘the message.’ We need to give her some kind of name to identify her.”

  “Sabrina,” Kevin said.

  “Huh? Why Sabrina?” Boris asked.

  “Well duh. We’ve already had Archie, Betty, Veronica, and Jughead. What else are you going to call the apparently magical female that hangs around them?”

  “We’re not calling her Sabrina,” Boris said.

  “I think that name’s pretty,” Kim said.

  Angie waved her uninjured hand to stop the argument before it could really start. “Fine. Whatever. She’s Sabrina until we have something else to call her. Her name’s not what’s important. What’s important is the butterfly effect we’re causing. Going into the museum there were two people there that weren’t supposed to be. Megan and Beth.”

  “Uh, I’m still not one hundred percent sure what’s going on here,” Megan said. Her voice still had a slight slur to it but she was standing steady without any help now, and she had managed to be some help while searching for supplies.

  “We’ll get to all that in a second, I think,” Angie said. “So we had those two with us when we weren’t supposed to. And that changed things.” She thought about it for a second. “Two things, as far as I can see so far.

  “One, Kevin,” she said, holding up a finger. “Somehow the fact that Beth was still alive saved him. Although I’m not entirely sure how.”

  “I think maybe I was supposed to get dragged out the back door with Johnny,” Kevin said. “That seems like the most likely place and time.”

  “Then why didn’t you?” Boris asked. “What little thing out of place kept you from being at that door?”

  Even in the dim light, Angie thought she could see him blush. “Uh, I guess I was, uh, a bit tired.”

  “Tired?” Boris asked.

  Angie figured it out immediately and had to fight not to smile. “You don’t need to say, Kevin.”

  “No, I want to know,” Boris said.

  “Uh, I was slower because, uh…”

  “It was me,” Beth said. “I’m the one who tired him out.”

  Boris still didn’t seem to get it for a few seconds. “What are you even…?”

  Beth twitched her eyebrows in a suggestive manner and rubbed a finger over her bottom lip as though she were wiping something away.

  “Oh,” Boris said. “Uh, I see.”

  “Wait, I don’t watch too many horror movies,” Jasmine said, “but isn’t that kind of thing against the rules? You know, sex is supposed to kill you, not save you?”

  “Good thing this is real life, then,” Beth said.

  “Yeah, sure, if an invasion of dancing zombies who don’t always conform to zombie rules could ever be real,” Boris said.

  “The point being that Beth’s presence changed the way things were supposed to be.” Angie paused, not sure whether she wanted to bring this up, but it was something they would have to discuss eventually. “And Megan’s presence was the reason I got bit.”

  “Yeah, it’s time to talk about that,” Rudy said, a hint of distrust creeping into his voice.

  “Wait, back up first,” Megan said cautiously. “My memory of the last couple of hours is pretty fuzzy. Could someone fill me in on what the hell has been going on?”

  “Actually, we were hoping you could tell us,” Angie said. Nonetheless, she gave an abbreviated version of everything that had happened from the moment Megan’s car had crashed in front of the Gitchigumi Café. Despite her better condition now, Megan paled as she seemed to realize how much of a role she’d played in it all.

  “So what did you mean about me being the reason you were bit?” Megan asked. The guilt in her voice was tangible and made Angie feel bad for her.

  “Well, I didn’t say it was your fault. But I stayed back to help you get out and that’s when I got bit. Judging from Sabrina’s prediction, that wasn’t supposed to happen. I was supposed to survive.”

  “But you did survive,” Boris pointed out.

  “And do we have any idea how?” Jasmine asked.

  “I don’t have a clue,” Angie said. “Which brings us back to you, Megan. You were the first one who was supposed to succumb to the zombie virus, or whatever it is. And you didn’t. So the question is why?”

  Megan stared at the wall for several seconds. Judging by the look on her face, whatever she was thinking or remembering wasn’t pleasant. “I don’t know.”

  “Were you out by that cabin?” Angie asked. “Is that where you were bitten?”

  Again, Megan hesitated for a long time before she answered. “I wasn’t bitten by a zombie. Or I don’t think it was a zombie. It was…something else.”

  It was obvious that thinking about what had happened to her was traumatic, but Angie couldn’t help but feel a faint glimmer of happiness that they might finally be about to get answers. “What was it, Megan?”

  “I think it was, uh, based on what you guys said was on my phone, I guess it was Sabrina.”

  “So you saw her?” Boris asked.

  Before Megan could answer, Kim grabbed her by the shoulders and pulled her away from the rest of the group. “You all stop this right now. You’re upsetting her.”

  Megan tried to shrug Kim’s hands off her, but the woman’s fingernails were hooked into her daughter’s clothes like talons. “Mom, stop. Please. I can take care of myself.”

  “No, you can’t. You need me, you always have.”

  “We need to know what happened or what you saw,” Angie said gently. “It’s important. It could tell us what’s really happening. It might even give us some idea of how to stop it.”

  Kim tried to pull Megan farther away from the group. Megan finally managed to twist out of her grip, then walked right up to Angie. The way she got so close yet looked away from Angie’s eyes at the last second made Angie’s breath catch in her throat. She knew that look. She’d seen it in others, although some had hid it better than others. Boris looked at her in a similar way, although without the demure bashfulness. Although she supposed she could be wrong, Angie thought Megan might have a crush on her. How long had that been there, she wondered? And more importantly, what did she feel about it?

  “I was on the shore,” Megan said, still not meeting anyone’s eyes. “Yeah, it was near the cabin those tourists were renting.”

  “What were you doing out there?” Kim asked, her voice sounding bizarrely harsh for such a simple question. Megan tensed, the movement of a child afraid someone was about to beat them. Angie thought to the bottle of pills in Megan’s pocket, wondering if the two things were somehow related. After all, Megan didn’t strike her as the kind that had that many secrets.

  Or maybe not. She thought again to the way Megan had looked away. Perhaps she was the kind to keep herself hidden.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Angie said. “Go on.”

  “There was…uh, an explosion.”

  The words came tumbling out of Megan’s mouth so fast Angie thought she might be afraid of them, l
ike if they were with her for too long they might do something terrible. Her narrative wasn’t always the clearest, but no one dared interrupt her. On any other day, the story Megan told would have been completely unbelievable, yet they had already seen so much tonight that they story of a burned woman who wouldn’t die didn’t seem so far-fetched.

  “I don’t really remember much after she bit me,” Megan said. “Just bits and pieces. I think I remember her talking into my phone. She said a few other things too. Then she pushed me off, and then it’s just fragments of the things you guys already told me.”

  “What else did she say?” Boris asked.

  “I don’t know,” Megan responded.

  “Think, Megan. Please,” Angie said. She resisted the urge to reach out and grab her shoulders. “Anything at all that you remember might be the key to getting us all out of this.”

  “I said I don’t know!” Megan yelled, backing away from everyone. Yet she looked Angie in the eye finally, and the blind, uncomprehending fear Angie saw there told her that Megan did, in fact, remember something. Something she didn’t want to say.

  Angie looked around at everyone else. “Megan, would you maybe want to talk about this with me alone?”

  “No, you can’t do that,” Kim said. “She’s fragile. She needs to rest.”

  “Please stop,” Megan said, although her voice was low, cowed, like she’d been in this situation with her mother before and knew exactly how it would end. The look in her eyes didn’t match her tone, however. There was fire there, anger.

  “Kim, it’s okay,” Angie said, making it very clear with her tone that she was going to take Megan aside whether Kim liked it or not. Kim might not have the best grasp of subtleties, but she could tell when Angie wasn’t going to put up with any of her shit. Kim silently backed away, and while everyone else stared Angie led Megan up the stairs to the first floor where they would have a small measure of privacy.

  Angie would have preferred they sit on a couch or something, but the only couch in the living room was an antique that probably wouldn’t have supported even the two of them at once. Instead, Angie led her to the bedroom where they sat on the bed. There were still some windows on this floor that they hadn’t covered, so neither of them dared use a flashlight, instead having to rely on the tiny amount of ambient light filtering in through the snow-covered windows. Angie had been in here before, though, and she knew the basic layout. The bedroom was fairly plain, much as it had been when it was actually in use, with the only noticeable decoration being a framed black and white photograph of Samuel Haecker, one of the several men who had once been the lighthouse keeper. He was the most notorious and legendary because he only had one hand, the result of a drunken attempt to stop a firing cannonball that was being shot off at a Fourth of July celebration. Local legend persisted that he had wandered back to the lighthouse and fallen asleep in this very bed for a short time before going to a doctor, and that his blood could still be found on this bed if one only knew where to look. Angie had never wanted to look.