Best New Zombie Tales, Vol. 3

by Anthology

  “Two years,” Sprague answered, realizing instinctively what his uncle wanted to know. “It’s been two years.”

  “Why… am… I… here?” Each word, each movement, had to be meticulously calculated and judiciously executed. Even with the treatment, the body processes lacked the fluid animation of life. They had degraded into clumsy mechanics, driven by an awkward automation mimicking vitality. “Why… was… I… brought… back?”

  “I’m sorry, Uncle Howard,” Sprague said, trying to repress both his grief and anger. “I don’t know why.” Sprague swallowed the heartache he had relinquished years earlier, reminding himself that the thing in the hospital bed could only be a shadow of the man he had known. “Those men can tell you why,” he said, turning toward Ames and Chesterton. “Those men did this to you––to all of you.”

  Around the room, Ames’ subjects exhibited a collective flash of recognition. Their medically-sustained solemnity deteriorated rapidly as the revelation gripped them. At once, all their misery and anguish and restiveness resurfaced. Something else emerged, too––an emotion thankfully absent until that critical epiphany washed over them. With newfound hatred, the corporeal undead struggled with the restraints confining them to their beds. They fought so violently that the adjacent skin tattered and turned a macabre shade of purple. Their glassy eyes bulged from their sockets.

  Sprague recognized in their hostility a thirst for retribution, for justice and, maybe, for blood.

  “Damn it, Sprague,” Ames said, beckoning his private staff of assistants. Aides swarmed into the room, prepared to sedate the rebellious dead. Chesterton, savvy enough to appreciate a bad situation that might get even worse, quietly slipped out the door. “Get out of my ward, Sprague. Get out of my hospital.”

  Downstairs, lines of dead had formed in the corridors. They stretched through the emergency room, across the parking lot and down the sidewalk bordering Avery Boulevard. Troops crammed them into the backs of the black panel trucks, which ferried them to the airport. There, more troops loaded them onto Chinooks. When filled to capacity, the helicopters lifted from the tarmac, heading east to some unknown destination.

  Sprague, now unemployed, joined in the crowd of spectators watching the dead depart.

  ~

  Later that evening, Sprague rested on his sofa nursing a bottle of imported Irish stout. Cable service had not yet been re-established, but local television stations had begun broadcasting live reports from Arnesville that afternoon.

  Officially, an unnamed pharmaceutical company had been to blame for the epidemic. An allegedly unsanctioned five-year study of a drug said to promote longevity had gone horribly wrong. Ten towns across North America had been affected, including Arnesville. Exposure rates, which should have been limited to 10 percent of the population, had exceeded 80 percent. Though the root cause had been determined, the catalyst that actually triggered the reanimation of the dead had yet to be discovered.

  Government troops had begun overseeing an evacuation of all corporeal dead entities from the stricken municipalities. Remote camps had been established to help treat and reintegrate the victims back into society.

  At 8 p.m. the president addressed both houses of Congress. Sprague, on the verge of sleep, roused himself to watch the historic broadcast.

  “Everything,” the president said, “will be… all right.” Sprague sat up and perched on the edge of the cushion. He upset the bottle as he hunted for the remote control. “My friends at FEMA… are working with… the military,” he continued. His speeches had always suffered from his sluggish tone and staggered delivery. Tonight, though, Sprague paid closer attention to his cadence and inflection. “We welcome… these people… with open arms,” he said, his eyes oddly unblinking. His rosy cheeks seemed too red, like someone might have applied blush just before he went on the air. “And I… am willing… to ask my colleagues… in Congress,” he stammered. His hands rested on the sides of the podium, completely motionless. “To grant full citizenship… to the victims… in return for… five years of… service to our country… in the United States Armed Forces.”

  The camera panned across the floor of Congress. Representatives and Senators applauded with mechanical synchronicity, their expressions lacking any emotional subtext. Sprague spilled onto the floor, crawled over to the screen as he scanned the audience. Though some of the older members seemed a bit disheveled, most projected at least the semblance of life. A few, though, had only just begun the treatment. Their ashen faces, their sunken eyes, their leathery flesh betrayed their lingering putrescence. Tonight, the dead governed the living. Tomorrow, the world would know no better.

  Regardless of the morning’s setback, unflustered by potential impediments, Bernard Chesterton, CEO of Therst Weber Pharmaceuticals, stood among the powerbrokers, contented with his coup.

  The Purple Word

  ERIK T. JOHNSON

  Everyone I ever loved owned a cat.

  I’d never thought about it until recently, now that I’m the only human left at the “Crumble-Down Farm,” as the local children once called it.

  My mother, difficult but always there for me, had an orange tabby named Charlie who seemed to be living his first life in a feline incarnation. She had to lift him up onto windowsills because he wasn’t sure how to jump, and I once saw him fall off a table and land on his side. How he loved her, too. He was a marmalade shadow always at her side, even, she told me, keeping her lap warm while she sat on the toilet.

  And Benjamin was my father’s obese, white, deaf cat who shed rugs weekly and kept his tongue sticking out stiff as a little pink depressor. Benny was an affectionate, stupid animal who never used his claws on anything, not even furniture. He liked to play with grapes.

  There are so many more I could name, each different than the next, cats belonging to my best childhood friend, my aunt Willa, both my grandmothers. And Joy’s cat Winston.

  She was a little Tonka truck of a cat with a thick African wildcat tail, and skin missing on her flank where some cruel boy had thrown hot tar. Everything about Winnie was round––marble green eyes, neckless head, paws. When Joy and I would leave her alone too long she’d grow angry and swipe at our feet and shins upon our return. But then she’d curl up with us later in Joy’s bed, making our warmth sweeter with purring…

  These trivial details are so important to me here in the attic. I roll them round me like a kitten with balls of yarn, trying to lose myself in the unwound threads of lost lives. If I stare at the snow that’s fallen through the roof I see the cats so clearly, like pictures projected on a white screen.

  Everyone I ever loved is gone.

  They were in town at The Egg Festival when the blue sky was overwhelmed by an infinity of stunning purple. An impostor sky.

  A stomach virus saved me from this plague. I was home sick at the farm and saw it through my window. It moved like a time-elapsed movie of an approaching storm, abnormally quick and arching itself over the horizon until there was just a glowing purple above the world. It shone bright as sunlight, but the sun was nowhere in sight. It only lasted a few days but was so immense it seemed years from end to end. It brought cold with it too, and that first day was like January in Maine. When it left I heard dogs howling all over the countryside, then the howls got dimmer and dimmer. They left for some other dog place.

  But the cats stuck around.

  The farm is so quiet. I like that. The old gray wood doesn’t creak; it’s pliant and spongy beneath my heavy steps. It makes me feel I could lay my head anywhere and sleep, as if the whole place is one great bed. I’m on the highest hill in the county with a view of the land all around. There are plenty of trees around the house, with overgrown grass in the summer to make me feel far from civilization. The nearest town is five miles away. I don’t know if anyone lives there any longer. There’s a highway close, but it never bothered me. It sounded like the ocean.

  Last month was November. After the impostor sky left and the blue returned, the lea
ves died. I let them fall and pile up all over the yard. Flakes of red, orange, green, and yellow, like the down of an enormous tropical bird. One day at sunset I sat on the back porch in great-grandmother’s rocker listening to the zombies complain down in the valley. I watched the leaves shiver, the trees scrape back and forth. And then I saw a small white and black cat I’d spotted around a lot, walking funny along the tree line fifty feet away. As my eyes followed him I realized he hobbled because he was missing one back leg.

  It must’ve come off in a fox trap.

  He disappeared behind a log pile without looking over his shoulder.

  The next day I did something I’d never done before: I went into town to get cat food. I knew it would be difficult because by then I was sure everyone I knew was walking around dead. When the wind blew strong from the south I could smell them rotting and hear their moans. They seemed to be trying to articulate a particular word their ruined mouths couldn’t make clear. It sounded something like:

  Ooh ooh ooh ooh ooh…

  Somewhere in that hellish sound was Joy’s voice. She was at The Egg Festival with the others. Once she got her finger caught in our Chevy’s door. The howl she made, I never wanted to hear it again. I strained my ears to find it among the wailing as they shambled below Crumble-Down farm.

  Like trying to pick out one raindrop’s splash in a thunderstorm.

  How did I deal with this? What was I thinking?

  A white paw batting black grapes across a pink rug… a marmalade tail… two lidless marble eyes rolling across my mind, the slices of darkness in the middles spinning like the propellers of a plane that can’t take off…

  The road to the store was deserted as the sun slid down. The Egg Festival signs hung with bright pictures of Chickens from poles along the way. There was a poster for an omelet-eating contest in Gentry’s Mercantile’s window. I parked and saw the store’s front door swing back and forth.

  No breeze.

  Something had just walked through.

  Out or in?

  I entered slowly. Vegetables were stacked in display cases, some covered with colorful mold resembling coral reef formations. Cans lined the shelves orderly as barcodes. Rotten eggs were on prominent display in a small refrigerator. A thin layer of sawdust like wooden snow had been recently disturbed by shoe tracks. Each step I took announced itself with a thud. I walked back to the front and looked out at an empty street.

  I’d never looked for pet food at Gentry’s before, but I figured it must be in the back.

  I passed the frozen meats when I heard ice falling.

  Mr. Gentry wriggled from a refrigerated display case the size of a child’s coffin. His skin peeled off in lasagna strips, tiger-striping his face deep purplish red. One eye was missing. The other gaped unblinking as a cave mouth. I ran to the back and grabbed a case of cat food. When I turned round he was halfway out, massive torso hanging down towards the floor and head just an inch above it. He’d forced his three hundred pound, six-foot-five body into the five-foot long frozen meat case. His legs were smashed and twisted completely around and he’d got his toes caught under something.

  “Needed cold,” Gentry coughed wetly. He lashed out at the ground and thick bloodstreams dripped from his open mouth.

  I stepped back in shock, more at hearing him speak in that state than seeing him that way. The shelf came down. Steel bars cut hot into my back as I hunched over and shielded my head with my hands.

  Through the ringing in my ears I could hear footsteps.

  I shifted into a push-up position beneath my burden. Sticky blood ran into my eyes and I could feel the lumps growing on my head.

  One Mississippi…

  Something scratched at the floor before me.

  Two Mississippi…

  Moaning from above.

  Three Mississippi…

  I pushed myself up and scrambled out from under the shelf, tripping over scattered cans and standing up right before stumbling over the mess of Gentry’s head.

  A case or two had landed on it and one eye lolled like a panting tongue. Another loose can had hurled smack into the middle of his over-ripe face and the bottom stuck out of there, where mouth and nostrils had been. Even then a noise percolated in his throat and his bloody scabby hands were like two red crabs having epileptic fits, clawing at the floor with overlong nails.

  Don’t panic. Think: white whiskers tipped black at the ends… gray ears erect like teepees… soft body warm as cup of tea curled on lap…

  Twin headaches burst out from the epicenters of my temples. I picked up another case and walked toward the streetlight shining through the front door.

  One foot away from the exit I remembered the footsteps…

  I spun around to an empty room.

  Something tapped me on the scalp. A blood-drop. A widening dark stain spread across the ceiling. I heard footsteps again. They came from above.

  Floorboards hit me seconds before the bodies. Two women with dead meat faces knocked me on my back. They didn’t seem to notice me as they faced each other over my legs. They lay on their bellies, each on a pillow of red guts spilling from their open stomachs. Without lifting their skeletal arms they bit at each other’s mouths. No tongues. No lips. I’d never seen lesbians before. The stench of their hisses and grunts was unbearable.

  I shifted my hands behind me and pulled myself to the door. The movement caught their attention and they tried to bite my legs, but when I saw I couldn’t sneak away I jumped up, knocked them down, and ran to the truck. Night had fallen, blue and cool as a freshly washed sheet.

  About to turn the key in the ignition, I asked myself what I was doing in this nightmare.

  I wanted to feed those cats. Small mouths lined with sharp teeth. Rough tongues coated in medicinal saliva.

  Looking up I saw lights in the houses, and figures shuffled back and forth past the windows. I heard things crashing to the ground in the apartments. Still bodies must’ve started stirring at once. I took a crowbar from the truck, determined to get that food.

  It seemed hundreds of lost shadows crossed the street, thrown by zombies in the windows. I walked through them to the store and kicked open the door, crowbar in hand.

  As other doors creaked open and doorknobs rattled in the street behind me I breathed deep and plunged in.

  The two fallen women feasted on Gentry’s entrails by the frozen meat display case. They ignored me, and I managed to get a lot of cases to the truck before I could see the rest, coming for me like sleepwalkers from all directions. They were a block away.

  Everyone I’d ever known.

  I sped off as their strangled calls rose in the cold night where chimney smoke once coiled and broke apart.

  Ooh ooh ooh ooh ooh… Were they crying “blue,” asking the sky why it had turned on them?

  The next day I stored the food in the attic and put a can out near the porch. I found myself in the rocker waiting for Peg Leg to come again. I laughed with a strange sense of amusement, as I realized I’d given him a name. I’d never named anything before, and I used to wonder how the pet owners I knew chose from so many options. Now I saw: names just appeared from nowhere, like purple zombie-making skies.

  The pain in my head and my sides shut me up fast.

  He did not come that day. November bugs laid their eggs in the food and I had to throw it out.

  The next morning I sat with my coffee on the porch. There was a trace of coming rain in the air, so the screen doors gave off a pleasant metallic odor. I watched an old clothesline suspended from the third story to a tall oak tree guarding the border between the yard proper and the woods. A faded red scarf hung by the side of the forest, clothes-pined to the line. It was put there to dry by my mother. It might’ve been the last thing I’d seen her do.

  A rustling drew me from the cloth. I raised the shotgun I now kept near by at all times. A cat approached the fresh food I’d put out when I woke. The cat sniffed the ground, head moving side to side and rubbing his chin
on the earth as he crawled, like a solider advancing under enemy fire.

  His coat was confederate gray but it might’ve once been white. Under his nose was a black mustache smudge. I wondered if he was blind, as he didn’t look up at me, but seemed to have found the food by scent alone. He ate rapidly. Then thunder pealed, and he raised his head with taut masticated ears. He had no eyes. A shiny BB gun pellet was lodged in one socket.

  The rain fell hard and he zigzagged in a crazy pattern toward the trees, more like a fly without wings than a cat. The sky turned the color of his coat.

  But my thoughts ran to friends and family. Perhaps the rain would melt them away like a herd of wicked witches of the west. Or perhaps having forgotten what rain is they would seek its source and come up the hill to look for it, finding me instead of clouds.

  Why not? Weirder things have happened.

  The days grew colder. It became my daily ritual to sit on the back porch, waiting for cats to get the food I’d put ten feet from my seat. I’d wait with anticipation to see who would arrive, cleaning my shotgun to kill time. I found if I left five or six cans I could get as many as ten cats to come up to the house. Sometimes it was Bandito (as I started to call the mustached cat). Other times he’d not appear for days. I also named Pickle, Jester, Streak, and Crush, orange tabbies like my mother’s Charlie; three Calicos called Mike, Jesse, and Bombay; gray tigers (Lee and Max were my favorites), and a striking dark chocolate brown cat I think belonged to a friend of my cousin. I called him Friend Lee. They tended to remain quiet. I didn’t see Peg Leg for weeks.

  Then one frosty December morning I woke with him sitting on my chest.

  His eyes were a pale violet I’d never seen on any feline. Of course, I never looked face to face with a cat before. I pet them now and again. But the cats weren’t mine, and you don’t look eye-to-eye with what isn’t yours. But still, they seemed unusual.