The Mammoth Book of Zombies

by Stephen Jones

  He wanted to stand behind her then, massage her shoulders and bring back the days when they could laugh without strain. And the worst of it was, he understood all too well why their relationship had ended. Three times married, four years each time, and she had every right to be sceptical whenever he protested but this time it's different, it isn't like the others. She'd reasoned rightly he had said it (and had meant it) twice before, and at thirty-two (to his forty) a four-year contract was hardly a promise of security and heaven.

  He shoved his hands into his pockets and leaned against the blackboard. "She sure looks old enough to have been here forever. As a matter of fact, your nephew thinks she's a vampire."

  "That would be Philip. Peter's the one with the better command of street language." She shuffled paper for a moment, and stood. "How are you?"

  "Hanging in," he said quietly.

  She picked up a pencil and tapped it hard against her blotter. "Carl thinks we should get together, a double date or something."

  He nodded. Death knell. Finishing touch. "Sure, why not?"

  She reached for her purse in the desk's bottom drawer. "I'm supposed to feed you lunch."

  "Fine," he said. "I never carp a free meal."

  The cafeteria was midway along the central corridor - white wooden walls and green slippery tiles - and they tagged the end of a softly babbling line. Students giggled and gossiped, faculty feigning extreme patience. Keith played the stoic, smiling automatically while he wondered why he didn't feel more devastated than disappointed. But before he could consider further, a grizzled winter-bent man in greyed coveralls and carrying a stiff broom sidled up to him and tugged on his jacket.

  "Mac, you gotta light?"

  "You been drinking?" he said from the corner of his mouth.

  Jane turned around briefly, pursed her lips and turned back.

  "Not a drop, mac. Not since German found my whisky and curdled it with a look."

  Keith barked a laugh and jabbed Stan Linkholm's scrawny arm with a loose fist. The man was three weeks away from retirement as the school's custodian, and was looking forward to spending the rest of his life watching dirt join him in his house. They had met at the Deer Head, the only bar on the highway within walking distance that didn't feature country music six nights out of seven. And it had been there Keith had heard the stories of the darkmoon, of the dogs tourists left behind in summer to run wild in the hills.

  "Well, you gonna help my cancer or what?"

  He pulled matches from his pocket and Linkholm nodded thanks, peered into the cafeteria with a sneer and grunted as he left - back bent, head down, a deceptively frail man tracking wisps of dust.

  "You like him?" Jane asked innocently as the line finally drifted forward.

  He shrugged. "He tells great jokes, he buys me a drink now and then, and he speaks his mind."

  "Ah," she said, grinning, "he's mentioned his skirmishes with sweet Mrs German."

  Skirmishes, Keith thought, was hardly the word for what sounded like all-out warfare. It was Stan's contention that he should be permitted into the basement once in a while, just to see if the foundations were still holding the place up; the math teacher, however, informed him that his utensils and the boiler were in a different section of the building, and nothing in the records kept below the steepled core should have the slightest interest for a man who shaved only once or twice a month.

  It was an impasse Stan was determined to break before he retired.

  Jane then spent the next twenty minutes avoiding Keith's questions about her life with Carl Andrews. And finally, when he felt self-pity beginning to well, he excused himself with a blown kiss to her cheek and walked outside to let the fresh air calm him. He stood in front, just below the once-belled steeple, and directly ahead the ground sloped gently toward the highway; beyond, a steeper incline, and behind a row of thick-boled elms the apartments began, rising and falling on the gentle swells of the old farm until the woodland reasserted itself, dark with noon shadows.

  He lit a cigarette and turned around to look at the school. It was an oddity, he thought - originally one room, it had been added to here and there, modernized, bloated and extended around the central building, which seemed now beneath flanking willows like a dwarfed New England church. He didn't like it. Innocent and white and crawling with children, and he didn't like it. It was, he thought, as if contemporary builders had known something everyone else hadn't, and had tried to hide it by disguising it, badly.

  He tossed the cigarette away without finishing it, angry with the way his mood had soured, blame in equal parts on himself and Jane. He walked slowly, a conscious effort to clear his mind, and by the time he reached home he was at least ready to smile.

  And he did when he saw Peter waiting there for him.

  The entrance to his apartment was recessed beneath a slate roof, the door on the right his downstairs neighbours’, the one on the left belonging to him. Peter was standing on the concrete stoop, his red hair awry, faint shadows over his eyes.

  "Hi, Uncle Keith." Desultory, uncomfortable.

  Keith leaned against the door frame. "You cut out of school early, m'boy. Does your mother know you're home yet?"

  Peter shook his head, staring with a scowl at the building across the way. "Mrs German wants to suspend me."

  "What? For God's sake, you're only in fifth grade!"

  There was almost a grin. "Well… I put a tack on her chair."

  He couldn't help it - he laughed. Unoriginal and stupid and demeaning to the teacher, but he laughed and slipped an arm around the boy's shoulders, cool here in the shade, almost cold. "I don't believe it. Of all the people in the world… my God, don't tell your mother I think I approve."

  "She's gonna kill me."

  "You want me to talk to her?"

  Peter pulled away instantly, brightening and smiling. "No kidding, you will?"

  "Sure, why not. But you have to tell her first. Then I'll come over later to talk."

  "But we're going to grandma's for dinner."

  "You're always going to grandma's for dinner. She must be a hell of a cook. Nope. You first, then me, or no deal." He waited. "How high did she jump?"

  "That's the dumb part. She didn't feel a thing. Elsie Franks snitched."

  He was gone before Keith could make further comment. Great, he thought; I think I've just been conned. He shrugged and reached for the doorknob, stopped when he saw deep scratch marks around the lock. The door wasn't closed.

  He glanced around, looked for Peter, then gently nudged the door with his shoe. It swung open slowly. Immediately to the right were the stairs, carpeted in dim gold and badly needing a vacuum. He listened and heard nothing, but took the steps cautiously, his gaze on the dim light that blocked the room above. His arms were stiff, the breath caught in his lungs spilling over to cold. He blinked rapidly, swallowed, told himself to go back down and call the cops from Moira's. For all he knew the robbers, the vandals, the murderers were still up there, hiding behind the recliner, in the bedroom, in the kitchen, behind the plastic shower curtain in the bath. For all he knew the whole place had been stripped and he was left with nothing but the clothes on his back.

  He reached the top and paused.

  The room was twenty-five feet from front to balcony, twelve feet wide in the living room area. It was dark, the drapes drawn and all the other doors closed. Darker than it should have been on a May afternoon. And colder. Much colder. He felt his breath pluming between lips growing chapped. He shivered, and clenched his left hand before reaching for the light switch. Clicked it and waited, but the lights wouldn't flare on.

  Fuse, he thought; the circuit breakers busted.

  His vision adjusted, and he could see nothing wrong. All the books were on their shelves, his desk undisturbed, the manuscript by the typewriter still stacked in disarray.

  But the cold persisted, and he hugged himself tightly.

  Go away, he thought then; go away and leave me alone. But he wasn't at all sur
e whether he was talking to himself or the intruder.

  He backed down one step, and the cold began to leave.

  The lights winked on.

  And when he looked across the room he saw the drapes hadn't been drawn at all, that there was sun out there spilling onto the carpet.

  He sat suddenly and hard, his hands gripping his knees and his gaze fixed on the open door below. He knew there was an explanation for everything that had happened. He was tired. He was self-admittedly overworked. He was reacting to losing another woman from his life. It would be natural for his mind to overload, to punish him for the abuse and teach him a lesson. That was the logical path to pursue, and pursue it he did - sitting in the stairwell until just before sunset, then rising and going down, pulling the door closed, glancing at the lock and not seeing any scratches.

  He walked away quickly. Away from the apartment, up the hill to the highway. His fingers were trembling and he hid them in his pockets, jumping to one side when the white globed streetlamps reacted to their times and filled the complex with soft light. There were low hills below the sky, their ragged western edges shading from grey to brilliant rose. And as he walked along the verge gusts from passing buses and trucks kept his eyes in a squint. A few headlights were on, and dusk gave the air a black-spotted complexion.

  At Frazier's - a mom-and-pop luncheonette and grocery - he ate a tasteless sandwich, drank four cups of coffee, and bought a carton of cigarettes he tucked swagger-stick under his arm. He felt better for the food and the quiet company the Fraziers gave him, and he'd just stepped outside when he remembered his promise to Peter.

  "Great," he muttered, and stepped out in a hurry.

  The scent of rain, a rising wind, tires on the blacktop already hissing wetly. He'd almost broken into a guilt-prodded run when an aborted siren's wail stopped and turned him. With his free hand screening the side of his face against the wind he looked toward the school. On the curved drive in front was a patrol car with blue lights swirling, and a rescue squad van whose rear doors were open, whose attendants were lifting a white-covered stretcher into the back. He checked the traffic quickly, then sprinted across and stood at the base of the grassy slope while Carl Andrews walked toward him.

  "Carl," he said, as neutrally as he could while he eyed the van.

  "How's it going, Keith?" He was tall, brawny and dark-haired. His left palm rested on his revolver's wooden stock, in his right hand a clipboard.

  "Could be better, I suppose. You got trouble it seems."

  "We can handle it."

  "Yeah. Anybody I know? Jesus, not another kid, is it?"

  Andrews didn't move.

  "Dead?"

  "Yeah. Dead." Andrews licked at his lips. "Very. It's Stan Linkholm."

  "Ah… Christ." Keith looked back to the highway and shook his head slowly. "Heart attack, something like that?"

  "Something like that."

  Keith frowned slight irritation. "Carl, look, if you're going to tell me, then tell me. I mean, I knew him and I'd like to know. But if you're not going to tell me, then don't. I've got work to do."

  Carl Andrews turned away.

  He spent the next two days finishing the article, keeping his door locked and the phone off the hook. No one bothered him. No mail was delivered. He worked until his fingers cramped, ate and worked again. He slept badly. There were dreams, and there was a lingering memory of the cold he'd discovered after talking to Peter. The cold that had him lying under two layers of blankets.

  On Thursday morning the weekly paper was shoved through the door's mail slot and he hurried down to grab it, sitting on the bottom step and snapping it open to the front page. A short piece about Stan, about a cardiac arrest, about his years with the school and a long quote from Bonachek. A grainy photograph. A story on page three about a New York couple who'd been missing since Monday from their campsite in the hills. An editorial demanding action, citing the tourism the county needed to survive.

  It was spring, and it was business as usual, and he threw the paper into the corner and didn't believe it.

  Stan's heart was as sound as his broomstick, and if Danny Ramera died of exposure he'd turn in his typewriter and dig ditches instead.

  But it wasn't the stories that had finally convinced him, it was the memory of the cold, of the vanished scratches on the lock, of the way the children cowered when Mrs German walked by.

  He knew it was stupid. He knew he was driving himself out of the Jane-induced depression by grasping at whatever straws the wind carried his way. Mrs German was odd, but no odder than the teachers he'd had himself as a child; and people who weren't used to the hills were always disappearing, always turning up, always changing their minds and heading for home without notification.

  But the cold… it was the cold.

  As soon as he dressed he drove to the hospital eight miles away, and was refused permission to check the medical records. The police stalled him, Andrews wouldn't meet with him, and when he talked to Philip after school he was given nothing more than bits of gossip about Jack the Ripper and Godzilla the Monster and everybody knew it was Mrs German anyway so why don't we just get some stakes and catch her in the basement.

  He punched at his typewriter, so hard his knuckles burned. There was a murderer out there, dammit, and no one was helping!

  Another hour to stoke courage, and he grabbed his windbreaker and hurried to stand beside one of the highway's guardian elms. He was a hundred yards from the school, watching as the lights in each room died, as the faculty left in pairs and alone to vanish into an evening beginning too soon.

  Five cigarettes. A handful of patrol cars that passed him, slowed, recognized him and moved on. The wind again, and the clouds, and the stars died before rising.

  He tried to grin. Silliness is what it was. He understood that, and he approved. His early panic, his dreams, a combination of nonsense that produced further nonsense. But it was working, at least - he realized with a start not at all guilty that he hadn't thought of Jane in more than three days. Nevertheless, he was here, playing a country-boy Humphrey Bogart against a prickling at his nape that would not scratch away.

  And just before seven he straightened and inched behind the tree. Mrs German, tall even at this distance, stepped around the corner of the school, walking slowly and holding a deep-blue shawl closed at her throat. She seemed to be checking the windows, the front door, searching the grass for items dropped by the students. She disappeared. Reappeared with purse in hand and made her way briskly through the playground and into the trees.

  Stupid, Keith thought as he raced across the road; stupid, he repeated as he cut between the swings and found the narrow path between two cages of birch.

  Light faded, slipping swiftly through twilight to full dark as the foliage closed like lacing clouds overhead. His footfalls were muffled, but the slap and scrape of twigs against his trousers had him holding his breath, brought a hand to his forehead to wipe away the perspiration. Road sounds died. The day's warmth hung in patches of humid mist to the branches, to the hollowed ground, to the linings of his lungs. He gulped to breathe. He pulled at his shirt, his belt. His socks felt wet. He scolded himself impatiently when he glanced up through a leafy gap and saw the darkmoon hanging.

  Ten minutes, and he wondered if he'd already passed the spot where Danny had been found. Where Stan had been found.

  Another ten minutes and he stopped. Listened. Shadowswift whispers of wind through an elm, the scurrying of something small to his right, the lumbering of something large to his left.

  He moved on, his sense of direction skewed, the silliness buried beneath a blanket of sour regret.

  And when time finally blurred and his watch was unreadable, the trees thinned, the underbrush cleared, and he was staring at the backs of several clapboard houses. A street beyond. Fences around the yards. He felt his jaw lowering, and he snapped it shut with a curse. Mopped his face with a sleeve, and saw the kitchen light in the house directly ahead switch on
to reveal Mrs German at the window. She was holding a tea kettle close to her eyes, shaking it slowly.

  A tea kettle. A goddamned copper tea kettle.

  "Jesus," he whispered. "God… damn!" And he walked away with a gesture condemning the tract to hell, berating himself for almost believing she might be living in a coffin. "Idiot!" It sounded right. "Idiot!"

  And all because he'd listened to the children.

  He shivered, then, and slowed. It was cold. December had become dislodged and slipped down around him, tightening his cheeks and knifing through his chest. His nose began to run, his ears began to ache, and it took him several moments to hear the walking in the woods.

  It was off to his left, deep in the black, at one point sounding furtive, at another perfectly calm. And as far as he knew he was on the only trail. He smothered a cough - God, it was cold! -and hurried on, left hand out in a wavering semaphore to keep the branches from his face, right hand clasping the wind-breaker's collar tight to his neck.

  It kept pace, then fell slowly behind.

  He tried to stare through the dark, and succeeded only in making the boles twist, the brush climb, the leaves reach out to ensnare him. He faced forward, searching for the highway's lights. Nearer, then; he was positive the sounds were nearer. He tried to whistle; his mouth was too dry. He tried reciting all the lines of memorized verse, but the first line that came was from Bryant's "Thanatopsis."

  The cold deepened. Dry, ancient, crackling as he passed through it, snapping as his shoes slapped against the ground.

  Death cold, and black, and digging through his scalp like the claws of an angry cat.

  The shrubbery gave way behind him; whatever it was had broken from the trees.

  And despite the fact he knew he wouldn't die, that he was like all men immortal, that he was only a writer who lived just over the low rise ahead and beyond the old school… he ran. He jumped as if working from a starting gun and he ran, heedless now of the twigs and the branches, leaping whenever he thought he saw a root, swerving whenever he thought he saw a boulder.