Infernal Corpse: A Zombie Novel

by D. J. Goodman

  Rudy swung a little too close.

  It happened so fast that Angie didn’t have time to put all the pieces together in her mind until a few minutes later. That was when she realized Rudy, with his hedge clippers wide open, got a little too zealous in going after one of the zombies that had staked a place just inside the door next the growing mound of incapacitated living dead. The zombie in question had been Lucas “Sugar” Shack. Angie hadn’t known much about him other than his ridiculous nickname and the fact that Rudy was often complaining about him owing Rudy a significant amount of money for some long ago offense. One blade of the clippers took Sugar in the stomach, but they stuck there and in the few seconds where Rudy tried to yank them out two more zombies clawed at him, one getting a firm hold on his shirt while the other, unlikely as it might have seemed, grabbed him by the ear. The one with the ear pulled his head towards her before Rudy could react and, with the other hindering his movements, the zombie’s mouth came down on the top of Rudy’s head. Angie was fully aware that human teeth should have in no way been able to rip open a skull, but that was exactly what they did, making a very audible crunching noise before Rudy was pulled into the main mass of the horde at the door.

  Then he was gone. The whole moment had lasted no more than a second. Angie didn’t even have time to scream out his name.

  She also didn’t have time to mourn her cook. The noises up the stairs were getting louder, and the three defenders set to guard the front door were sounding increasingly worried. Now was the moment for a full retreat, and they needed to act panicked like it wasn’t part of her plan at all. The panic, at least, wasn’t hard to fake.

  “Run!” Angie said. She wasn’t sure if Boris could hear her over the moans of the horde, but he understood her body movements well enough when she turned and dropped the hoe to run. Abandoning her weapon felt wrong, but she couldn’t run effectively with the unwieldy thing at her side. Besides, she still had the gun, even if its time in the plan hadn’t arrived yet.

  She didn’t bother to look back as she crossed the dining room and got the wooden stairs at the far end. She did look back as she started to go up though, and saw that Boris was straggling behind, a strange look in his eye that she didn’t like. She’d seen that look in his eye before, had in fact seen it in a lot of men. It was the smug satisfaction they got when they suddenly believed they were the smartest person in the room and they had suddenly been blessed with an idea so brilliant that everyone else would bemoan that they hadn’t thought of something so obviously wonderful first.

  In Angie’s experience, it was a look men typically had right before they made jackasses of themselves.

  “Boris, whatever you’re thinking of, don’t do it!” she said over her shoulder as she ran up the stairs, stopping at the top to look down through the floor back at him. She wanted to tell him to stick to the plan, but it suddenly occurred to her that Pestilence, despite being heard at the back door right before the zombies had broken it open, couldn’t be seen anywhere in the horde so far. There was no telling where she was or if she might be listening in, and Angie wanted to make it look like they were running around without any idea what they were doing for as long as possible.

  Angie blinked in confusion as Boris slowly sauntered up to the bottom of the stairs and then proceeded to, well, do nothing but stand there.

  “Boris, what the hell are you doing?” she hissed.

  “I’ve got a theory, and it’s kind of based on what you were saying earlier,” he said. Although there was some stress in his voice, it didn’t seem like nearly enough given the massive number of undead following right behind him. He turned around to face the horde, not doing anything at all. To Angie’s shock, zombies surrounded Boris at the bottom of the stairs and just stopped.

  “What the hell?” Angie asked.

  “It’s what you were talking about. All of this? It’s just to entertain this so-called Legion.” A single zombie came forward from the others, moving slowly as though he thought Boris was a dog that would bite any second. Angie tensed, waiting for something to happen, but Boris didn’t move except to talk. He looked maddeningly confident in himself. “So the only thing we need to do is nothing.”

  “Wait, what?”

  The single zombie slowly poked Boris with his finger. Boris still didn’t move. “We do nothing. As long as we don’t do anything interesting, we’re not entertaining to those sick bastards. You know, the only winning move is not to play.”

  Angie watched as the zombie shambled back to the others and they moaned gently amongst each other as if conferring. She had to admit there was a certain crazy sense to what Boris said, but as soon as she thought about it for a few seconds she saw a glaring, horrible flaw in his logic.

  “But Boris, isn’t irony interesting?”

  His head shot up to look at her, obviously startled that there might be something he hadn’t thought of. “Huh?”

  “If you just stopped right there thinking you’d found a way to be immune and you were wrong, then wouldn’t the irony of you getting ripped to shreds be interesting?”

  “Oh,” Boris said. He took a slow step to the stairs, looking back at the zombies as they all raised their heads, their intimate conference over, and looked at him. “Maybe I should just…”

  The zombies spilled over him at once. He was ripped apart with such force that his blood went all the way up the stairs and sprayed the front of Angie’s coat.

  She didn’t stop for any length of time to mourn him. Maybe he hadn’t been such a terrible guy after all. Of course, he hadn’t been an especially good one either.

  Angie threw some decorative lamps from the top of the stairs back down them. She knew they wouldn’t stop the zombies for more than a few seconds, but seconds could honestly be all the difference between life and death at this point. As she ran through the living room, she heard Beth, Kevin, and Jasmine screaming to know what was going on. Angie was about to yell back that she was coming and they needed to get ready when she stopped short, staring at the foghorn.

  Zombies can hear, right? she thought. She tried to think back to the rest of the night, searching for any memory that would suggest hearing was just as important a sense to the undead as any other. She couldn’t remember anything specific, but what the hell. It was worth a shot.

  “Cover your ears!” she yelled as she ran to the foghorn and grabbed the crank. It was unfortunate she didn’t have any earplugs of her own, although she had to admit her death would be just as interestingly ironic as Boris’s if she tried this and all it did was deafen her long enough for a zombie to sneak up on her.

  “What was that?” Jasmine yelled back. The slamming on the front door told her that the zombies hadn’t broken through yet. There probably weren’t as many in front as there had been in back.

  “I said, cover your…” Angie didn’t finish. The first zombies had made it up from downstairs and were now surging into the living room with her, not so fast that she couldn’t outrun them if she had the space and energy but quick enough that they could overwhelm her in just a few seconds.

  Angie turned the crank. The old foghorn bellowed, a deep, vibrating thrum that shook the whole lighthouses, rattling the windows and instantly giving her a headache from its proximity. She only turned the crank four or five times, enough to ensure everyone in the vicinity with working eardrums would be stopped in their tracks. As she stopped turning, her hearing had gone fuzzy, but it had worked. Zombies might not feel pain when someone shot them, but they felt the piercing noise rattle in their brains. Several still had enough human reflexes to cover their ears, but most others staggered, a large number of them falling to the floor and twitching. Angie wondered only too late if that would be enough head trauma to set them aflame. Thankfully, though a few looked like there might be smoke coming out of their ears, none of them started on fire.

  Angie ran from the foghorn to the front entryway, jumping over a couple fallen zombies just as they showed signs of getting back up.
She could still hear commotion from downstairs as more zombies streamed in, probably ignoring their shocked brethren as they trampled them underfoot. That move had bought her some time, as well as allowing for more zombies to fit in the lighthouse. She just hoped none of them would crush the other zombies’ heads before she and the rest of the survivors were in place.

  Angie skidded to a stop in the front hall. The three defenders were still in front of the door while Kim, looking hurried and determined for the first time all night, worked off the bolts that connected the bottom of the metal stairs to floor. They’d loosened most of the bolts earlier to make her job easier now, but Angie saw even at her quickest speed this might not be enough.

  “You’ve got to hurry!” Megan yelled from above. Angie looked up to see her head framed by the hatch, snow blowing in from above her. Only now, when Angie realized her life and the lives of everyone else down here would require them to run up all those stairs – yet carefully – did she get a sense of vertigo from the height. It was about three or four stories up, and an equally long way to fall down.

  Angie looked at the defenders, making a quick judgment of each by speed and weight. “Jasmine and Kevin, get the hell upstairs. Beth, stay here and help me and Kim with the bolts.”

  Kevin looked like he was about to protest leaving his wife behind, but Beth gave him a quick peck on the cheek, a squeeze of his groin, and a short whisper in his ear. Judging by the way he blushed, it was a promise of something truly kinky should they both make it out of this alive. With no more hesitation, he ran up the stairs, holding Jasmine’s hand as he did so neither of them would fall back down the steep spiral steps. The staircase rattled beneath them. It probably would have done that under normal circumstances anyway, since it wasn’t designed to be used with that kind of speed, but it shook even more so now. That’s what would happen when every single bolt trying to keep the thing steady had been loosened.

  Beth grabbed another wrench like the one Kim had while Angie had to make do with a claw hammer. She looked back down the hall to the living room and saw that most of the zombies had gotten back up and where jockeying for room to come through the narrow hall and take the three people there that they thought were easy prey. Then she glanced at the front door. Despite the fine craftsmanship of the door, decidedly more so than the back door, the door jamb looked like it was cracking. Angie had been a little worried at that. The plan required the zombies to be able to easily get in through there, but if the door held up too well, that meant someone would have to open it for them. As it was, that didn’t look like it would be a problem.

  All the bolts that held the stairs directly to the floor had either been completely undone or else were loose enough that it didn’t matter. Not every bolt needed to be completely undone. In fact, they couldn’t be. The plan had been risky from the beginning, and had she had more time to come up with something, she didn’t think she would have gone with something so desperate. The bolts needed to hold just long enough for everyone to get to the top of the tower. They then needed to give out immediately after. It was the kind of precision that didn’t lend itself well to the situation. In fact, Angie realized that she’d missed something important: she’d thought to loosen the bolts on the first floor and all the ones that bolted the staircase to the wall, but they had completely neglected to do anything to the bolts that connected the stairs to the second floor landing. The landing was only a thin strip of wood with four places where the metal was bolted in, but it would be enough to keep the stairs stable when they weren’t supposed to be.

  “Kim!” Angie screamed. “The second floor!”

  Kim looked up and, for a horrible moment, Angie thought she didn’t understand and Angie would have to take precious moments they didn’t have to explain. But Kim surprised her, running up the stairs to the second floor and kneeling on the landing, studiously working at the bolts with her wrench.

  The front door broke open. The zombies who had come from downstairs had made it to the end of the hall. There was no more time to make sure the staircase was loose enough. Time for their final retreat.

  A zombie came through the broken door taking a swipe at Beth with his fingernails before turning on Angie. Lenny, a local mechanic that Angie had slept with twice. He’d been a great date and gentle in bed but had a horrible tendency to drone on about hockey stats. Angie brought the claw of her hammer down onto his gaping lower jaw, smashing his teeth and forcing his mouth permanently open wide like a snake that had unhinged its jaw to eat. He staggered back, giving Angie the moment to turn and go up the stairs. Beth was ahead of her a few steps, and the combined weight of their harried footsteps made the stairwell shake and groan beneath them.

  Angie was almost at head height with the second floor landing when one of the zombies reached up and gripped her ankle. Its grip wasn’t strong enough to hold onto her for more than a second, but it still tripped Angie up. She slammed into the steep metal steps hard, almost slipping back down into the zombies that had started to try their way up the perilous stairs. Pain blasted through her, although she barely noticed in her panicked adrenaline rush. The force of her hitting the stairs caused the entire thing to shake far more than it had before. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw one of the nearby braces come away from the wall. The stairs were no longer supported by anything below the second floor, and most of the bolts above the second floor wouldn’t hold its weight by themselves anymore. That meant Kim’s work on the second floor landing was probably all that was keeping the giant metal contraption upright.

  Angie had the sudden realization that this wasn’t going to work. She hadn’t had the time to plan out the loosening of the bolts. The stairwell needed to collapse, or at the very least break away enough that no one would be able to get up to the tower anymore. But someone had to stay behind and finish those last bolts on the second floor. Best case scenario, that person would get left on the second floor. Under any other circumstances, that might be considered safe, but not according to Angie’s plan. They hadn’t had time come up with an escape plan from the second floor. Anyone stuck there might be able to get out, but it was more likely that they would die.

  “Kim, go up,” Angie said. She was surprised how calmly she said it. She’d expected Kim to follow her orders without question. The expression Kim gave her, though, let Angie know that she understood perfectly what Angie was suggesting.

  “No, you have to be the one up there. You have the gun.”

  “I can use it from here if I need to,” Angie said. “And if I can’t, Jasmine still has one.”

  “I’m lighter than you. I still might be able to get up.”

  Angie looked down at the zombies. The steep incline combined with the curved shape of the stairs had been hindering the zombies before, but just as they had been all night, the zombies stubbornly refused to conform to one set of rules. Pestilence must have known that it would provide a more intense situation if her pet zombies just for right now had enough coordination to climb the stairs. The first couple had rounded the spiral staircase about halfway up to the second floor. A few more had difficulties with the incline, tripping and falling back into the mass below. The zombies were now shoulder to shoulder in the lighthouse, jostling for room as they reached up at the two women still in their view. That was actually perfect, exactly what Angie had hoped. But it wouldn’t do either of them any good if they were stuck here.

  “Okay, fine, but hurry!” Angie raced up the remaining steps, gritting her teeth and muttering a prayer under her breath every time the giant tube of metal that was the spiral staircase shifted underneath her. She could see up here that most of the braces had come away from the wall. At the top the stairs, the metal buckled under her weight, dropping her several inches and causing her to screech. The metal held long enough for her to grab the ladder, though, and that at least was still bolted firmly to the wall.

  Angie’s initial impulse was to climb straight up and take a breather out on the frozen deck outside the light r
oom. However, she didn’t feel like she had the right yet. She had to stay here and watch, to make sure that this was going to work. She wrapped her legs and ankles around the rungs of the ladder, an uncomfortable position but nonetheless one that would keep her from falling. Keeping one hand on the ladder for balance, she let the other swing free so she could turn slightly in her position and look down.

  From up here, the bottom of the tower looked like Hell, a pit of dead but moving and moaning bodies reaching up for her, waiting for her to fall. About twenty feet below her on the second floor landing, Kim was just standing up. All the bolts holding the staircase to the landing were gone, dropped to clink on the heads of the undead below. Kim hesitated, obviously not sure what to do. Angie was about to scream at her to stay on the second floor, that there were windows there she could jump out of with only a couple broken bones to show for it if that was her only means of escape. But before Angie could say anything, Kim saw the two zombies still making their way up the stairs. Panicking, Kim dropped her wrench and went back onto the stairs, moving as quick as she could to get up.

  “Angie, what are you…” Angie looked up to see Megan’s face through the hatch again. “Mom?”

  Kim’s unrestrained movement on the staircase was the last straw for it. Over the moans below, Angie could hear the distinct creak of metal shifting more than it should. The braces, though not attached to anything anymore, did well in keeping the metal cylinder in place in the center of the tower for a moment, then several of those braces bent. The entire staircase tilted to one side, dangerously catching Kim at the wrong moment and almost throwing her over the low railing. One of the zombies below her wasn’t as lucky, tumbling head over heels off the side and hitting the zombies below with a meaty liquid thwack. The other zombie held on, although it didn’t seem to know how to move on a visibly askew staircase.