Best New Zombie Tales, Vol. 3

by Anthology

  He must’ve come in through the torn screen door on the back porch, although he would’ve had to be smart enough to figure out how to lift the loose piece of screen up before slipping in. I couldn’t help but think he wanted something from me, and was waiting for me to understand.

  “What do you want?” I asked, for the first time talking to an animal, as I’d seen so many people do before.

  We locked eyes.

  Black slices of darkness in the middles of his eyes like propeller blades on a plane resting between flights…

  I wasn’t sure what to do. Though I’d been around cats plenty, I’d never picked one up. They even made me a little uncomfortable. Winston slept near me, but only when Joy was there to stroke her and make her happy. My presence in the bed was incidental.

  As if sensing my discomfort, Peg Leg jumped off. I heard claws jutting from three feet patter on the wood floor, and the hinges on the back-porch screen door move as he slid out.

  I didn’t see him again for a long time.

  The first week of December the snow started, slow and light. The house gets frigid at this time, as it’s in a real shambles. One afternoon a thud drew me to the attic. Part of the roof had fallen in. Squirrels nested in a corner next to a steamer trunk filled with old curtains and doilies. I thought the house might not last the winter once it gets going.

  Through a hole in the attic roof I noticed a knot of activity down in the town center where the Queen of the Egg Festival would’ve been crowned atop a massive hen-shaped float, all yolk-blonde tresses and shell-white skin. On Festival day the sky went purple at two o’clock––an hour before the ceremony––so this would be the first year with no Queen. Now the bodies gathered there, moving more rapidly than I’d seen before, walking in duck-duck-goose circles.

  Remember what Gentry said?

  Needed cold.

  They wanted it to snow.

  I moved the cans of cat food to the back-porch, where they would be shielded from the wind and snow. I would then sit behind the screen door in the rocker with my coffee and watch from that warmer vantage point. None of these cats figured out how to get through the screen door like Peg Leg, so I didn’t worry about them getting in. Peg Leg seemed smarter than the rest. But I didn’t know cats enough to be sure.

  To my surprise the number of visitors to my porch increased as snow fell in earnest. I worried there wouldn’t be enough cases to last the winter. The cat food was looking pretty good to me now as my own supplies dwindled.

  I always liked Crumble-Down Farm in December; the gray wood outhouse, the tool-shed, the caved-in barn, the wet, black trees covered in the same blanket of snow, the yard a picture of quiet stillness. But now intermittent cat-movements invaded the calm. Paw prints Rorschached the snow, and I heard their steps up the porch stairs, and aluminum cans clanging into each other as they ate in a hurry.

  It was a strange sight from the third story window. I saw the dark shapes of the cats set in the whiteness below, some still and washing up or scratching, others jumping after squirrels or birds, and most going somewhere unknown to me.

  Usually I didn’t look toward town, but I’d hear them, like demented backup singers in some dead pop star’s insipid love song.

  Ooh ooh ooh ooh ooh ooh ooooh…

  Near month’s end I saw fewer cats as heavy snowstorms swept over this part of Connecticut. The town was nothing but a blank valley and the moans stopped—or else I mistook them for the wind living in the skeleton trees. I imagined the yard was drowned in all the envelopes lying around the post office, great piles of white that hid messages forever undelivered. Congratulations, greetings, apologies, love… The snow drifted five feet high in some places there, which I guessed made cat-travel difficult, if not impossible. And the other night I spied a fox eating cat frozen food that had sat untouched for days. I let him finish it; then I threw out the cans and stopped the attempts at feeding.

  Until this morning.

  My isolation must’ve got to me because I spoke out loud to myself for the first time ever (So many firsts lately: First cat fed! First thing named! First lesbian sighting! First cat seen eye-to-eye! First zombie knocked over! First day of the end of my life!). My exact words were:

  “Thank God, they need me. God bless those cats. Thank God. Thank God…”

  See, now I had cats like everyone I ever loved… and I knew a little of how they must have felt having their cats, and it meant that in some way I still shared my life with those people, like they weren’t really gone.

  There was a herd… I counted at least twenty––some reddish, some black, some brown, some white and barely distinguishable from the landscape. They crept up the hill, no doubt risking sinking with each step. I thought I recognized some, but not all. I figured they were starving smaller cats––they had to be light as balsa to tread on such fragile ground. I got the food out in expectation of their arrival.

  Not long after I saw Peg Leg.

  I’d gone to the cellar for some dwindling firewood. I was about to hit the attic, to use fallen roof for tinder, when the cat stepped out from behind a rusty old wheelbarrow. He didn’t say anything, just looked at me with those violet eyes, now dyed a deeper purple.

  He had a muzzle of blood.

  I put down the logs.

  “I bet you’ve been living down here all this time, haven’t you?” I asked.

  If he’d stuck around the house it would’ve been easy for him to get down to the cellar. After all, he knew how to get through the hole in the screen door, and there were mice to eat living in the walls.

  Peg Leg hobbled closer and sat down, looking up at my face.

  “What do you want?” I asked him, stooping down to his eye level.

  He kept staring at me. Then he got up and went over to the trapdoor that led outside.

  I followed him and opened it outward. Snowy air blew in and stung my face. The cat climbed up the ladder leading to the eastern side of the house with difficulty, pulling himself up by front paws and swinging one back leg after him. I followed when he’d reached the top.

  We stood in a few inches of snow. That side of the house is protected by an awning where there was a porch ages ago. All round the sheltered area were five and six foot high walls of glimmering snow.

  And the cats.

  Fifteen lay at our feet glazed with frost. Friend Lee was missing, and the cat with no eyes, too. They were huddled together, as if still trying to keep warm in death.

  The snow came down––they’d be buried in a few hours.

  “Is this what you wanted me to see?” I asked Peg Leg.

  He looked at me with a quiet I could feel. It choked my heart.

  Raised his little face to the endless dark air.

  I saw the herd of unknown cats I’d expected. They crawled to the awning as though drawn to Peg Leg. But something wasn’t right.

  Cats have heads and eyes and tails and legs. These were just oval mounds of fur moving over the snow.

  The wall before me burst open in a cocaine sneeze explosion as a co-worker of mine staggered out. I’d thought the auburn hair atop his head was a rusty tabby I used to see sometimes. But it was Vitolo the guitar-playing mailman walking through the snow.

  Under it.

  They got stronger with the cold, and now they had enough energy to make it up the hill…

  I lifted my shotgun and fired. The shot went through a gaping hole in his chest and into the snowbank behind him. He stopped as though startled. Purplish-black blood sprayed from the snow as another zombie appeared behind the first. It was a little girl with no head. She kept treading forward, her pale flesh flapping like she was made of tattered surrender flags.

  I raised the gun and pumped it. The girl pushed Vitolo forward. He slid onto the gun so the barrel stuck out his back, and threw blue arms around me. If shit could take a shit, he smelled like that. I thought he winked at me but it was a black beetle crawling around in his eye. He tried to speak but had no lower jaw and wretched
a spluttering sob, repeated over and over like one stuttered word. I kicked his feet out from under him and he fell spread-eagled, taking the shotgun down with him.

  Its barrel pointed up at my mouth.

  The headless girl tumbled onto Vitolo’s body and the one finger left on her tiny dead hand curled around the trigger and tightened.

  I stepped back and threw a hand out to knock the barrel away.

  Wave good-bye, hand.

  The shot clanged in my head. My face stung as though a thousand angry bees had been loosed from the barrel. I started down the ladder and tried to use both hands. One was a phantom and the floor came up hard against my cheek.

  Above, the zombies broke through the pristine snow. Their putrid shadows fell in first and then their bodies. I heard a broken melon noise as one crashed headfirst.

  I ran for the door and up to the attic. Crumble-Down Farm’s spongy gray steps shook and groaned. I’d never treated the stairs that way. I felt I was stomping on my mother’s face. Noise in Crumble-Down farm! Another first. My, how things had changed…

  I shut the attic door as well as I could. Through the holes in the roof the freezing storm blew against me. Snow lay in heaps round the room. I grabbed an old shovel, and piled it against the door. Packing it with one hand was slow painful work.

  I couldn’t tell how smart they were. Maybe if I’d made it up fast enough, they wouldn’t find me.

  What about the blood trail from the stump at my wrist?

  I sat down, leaned against the snow, and stuck my arm deep into the pile. As a red circle grew round it I felt weary. I put my good hand to my face. It was there, but singed by the blast that maimed me.

  The snowflakes in the air faded and bits of cold night blew into my eyes until I couldn’t see. I grew numb.

  Fell asleep.

  I don’t know how much time passed. Something soft hit me on the nose and I jerked awake, throwing my left hand out for the gun.

  But I had no left hand.

  It was Peg Leg. Relief woke me from my daze.

  There must be a cat-sized hole somewhere in the shadows.

  “What do you want?” I asked him.

  He climbed on my chest and put his paws on either side of my face and his nose to my nose. His eyes were so icy, so purple.

  Impostor eyes.

  I wept. The tears stung my blasted cheeks.

  He opened his jaws to speak for the first time and a strange meow came out. It sounded as though he was trying to articulate a human word but had the wrong mouth for it:

  Woo woo woo oooh…

  He was such an unusual cat. The purple sky must’ve gotten him the way it got the others. Perhaps it took longer for him to change… I stroked his head and he lay down on my lap. I felt I was being lowered into icy water.

  I tried to think, to focus: furry head lapping at toilet water… Mother… purring under a plaid cotton sheet… Father… tiny cries at birds outside a window… Joy… broken wings versus fangs… nobody had a dog… all the dogs got away…

  I heard sodden footsteps on the stairs, and bodies tumbling down steps…

  ~

  Now the zombies have reached my door. Their nails and bones scrape the wood. Their fists pound. They want in. They want me to share myself with them. So far the door has opened a half-inch or so as they push it against my body’s weight and the packed snow.

  And I know what Peg Leg wanted all this time. To draw them to me. And I can hear them answering his call. I was never close enough to hear what they were saying so clearly.

  The word is you.

  That’s me.

  And here I am.

  Sabbatical in the Ohio Methlands

  JOE MCKINNEY

  Not really zombies.

  Not like in the movies, anyway. To begin with, they’re alive. And they don’t eat their victims. They’ll rape you, rob you, murder you, sure, but not eat you.

  The rest of it’s the same, though.

  They lurch around looking dead. They smell dead. Boils, abscesses, old infected injuries––they all do their part in approximating putrefaction. Sometimes a murmuring haze of flies will surround their eyes and mouths. They look like skeletons in leather sheets. Their knee joints have a bigger circumference than their thighs. Starvation and malnutrition are the norm. But their crippled movements and disoriented moaning can be deceptive. Step into the street with your head elsewhere and they’ll swarm you.

  Afterwards, your corpse will look like it’s been eaten.

  But they don’t eat you. Just… tear you up.

  I’ve seen it happen too many times. Some family in a station wagon, just passing through, gets lost, doesn’t see the roadblocks. College kids looking for a gag. Survivalists, testing their mettle, and failing. I even watched them get an Ohio state trooper once. But usually those guys know better.

  This is the sixth year I’ve been coming to what used to be Gatling, Ohio. Like most of the small towns in America’s midsection, Gatling was abandoned after the Meth Rebellion of 2017, given over to the meth zombies who now wander its streets and sleep in the doorways of its uninspired, post-WWII architecture. The buildings are falling apart. Few windows remain unbroken. Insulation hangs from the ceilings. Scrolls of wallpaper curl off the walls. The only life here is that which feeds off meth and wanders the streets, moaning like something out of a Romero film, looking for the high that will take them through the coming night.

  Luckily, the little second floor dentist office I’ve taken over as my observation point has escaped the depravations. During the day, when the meth zombies are most active, I can sit at the window and get film footage or dictate notes, whatever I feel like doing. At night, I sit in the old patient’s chair and read Jack Finney novels and drink gin. It’s diligent fieldwork––don’t get me wrong––but I enjoy my summers here in Gatling just the same.

  Gene Northrop, a chemistry professor from Texas A&M, has a similar setup across town in the old New Life Baptist church. I’ve seen him around some. He’s working on a paper on aboriginal techniques for methamphetamine production in the post-industrial ruins of abandoned America. Sometimes, late at night, I’ll hear a building explode at the edge of town, and I think to myself, Ah, one of Gene’s grad students just scored himself a paper. Some night soon I’m going to visit him. Maybe we can compare notes.

  In the meantime, I’ve been working on a paper on the mating habits of the female meth––

  Okay, I need to change gears for a second.

  There was a noise outside the door just a bit ago and I had to make sure it wasn’t a wrecking party. The males can be dangerous when they’re scavenging for a high. I had to shoot a few of them earlier this month. I hated doing it, but I have to preserve this observation post.

  Luckily, it was only Susan.

  She started coming here, to my office, two years ago. She’s a white female, early 30s, which means she was in her teens when the Rebellion happened. The meth has charred most of her mind to cinders, but her survival instincts are still strong.

  She caught me off guard the first time she came here. It was late at night. I had gone through a lot of gin. I got up from my dentist’s chair to jot down some notes on something I’d seen that day, forgetting the front door was still unlocked. I heard a floorboard creak and turned around. She was squatting in the middle of the floor, dressed in rags, her long brown hair a frizzled, shaggy mass around her dirty face, nicks and cuts all over her hands and arms.

  Have you ever been watched by a squirrel? Same nervous, unblinking look I got from her.

  I tried to speak, but she scrambled toward the door. She didn’t make it far, though. She was hungry, dehydrated, her body weak.

  I gave her some clean water and let her sleep on my couch. When she woke the next morning she was going through withdrawal. She looked at the clean clothes I’d dressed her in, touched her face that I’d scrubbed clean, and panicked. Residual feelings of violation? I wondered. I watched her from my desk. I put a militar
y MRE on the floor. She snatched it up and backed toward the open door. I didn’t make a move to stop her, just went on smiling.

  I was delighted when she came back the next night.

  We developed a routine. I’d leave the door cracked at night, a little food and water on the chair next to my bed. Though she never talked, she could still communicate, with her eyes and her body language.

  She seemed grateful. I know I was.

  I started calling her Susan, after this girl I used to dream of dating back in my grad school days. I don’t think my meth girl minded. It seemed to comfort her, just as she became a comfort to me, a bulwark against the loneliness that used to overwhelm me here at night in the Methlands.

  I’ve been back in Gatling for three days now. That first night, when I was still getting settled, she came to me. She had something to show me, a memento of our night together last August.

  Now I’m sitting here at my desk, watching her rub her belly. I wonder if her baby will be born without a soul, or if it will lose it along the way.

  Like its father.

  A Sense of Duty

  GREGORY MILLER

  The four men worked hard with handkerchiefs tied around their faces. The September floods had been very bad, the worst in a hundred years, and the graveyard by the woods outside town had paid the price. Now someone needed to clean up the mess.

  “Ain’t no work for a man,” said one, shoveling clear a load of muck from the top of a disintegrating pine box.