Timmy climbed in and his sister Ginny climbed in beside him. Ginny was worried it might be too much with all the food, so Timmy ferried their bags over first and then came back for his sister. Before long, they were both safely over with their goods.
The area, even terribly overgrown, was familiar. Of course there was zombie traffic to worry about now, but after all they’d been through, killing a few zombies meant nothing. When they finally saw their father’s home, they broke into a sprint. Only one zombie stood between them and safety. As they passed it, Ginny beheaded the foul thing and Timmy drove his blade through its face to finish it off.
They reached the house and went around to the back where they scurried up a tree that grew outside Ginny’s bedroom window. Timmy flung open the window and they both dived in. The pair ran down the staris to discover their dear father nearly starved.
They threw themselves into his arms. The poor man hadn’t had a happy moment since he had left them in that forest and was overcome. Once the tearful reunion was over, he explained how their stepmother was bitten on the return trip. He’d kept her in back in a shed, unable to kill her himself. Ginny excused herself for a few moments, then returned, wiping off her machete.
Timmy let his sister reveal all the food. All their worries were over. As soon as their father was strong enough, they would travel back to that hillbilly shack and live in peace with plenty of food. My story is done, see the mouse run; if you catch it, you may make yourself a great big fur cap out of it.
16
The Night Begins
Based on:
Die drei Schlangenblätter
There once was a poor man who couldn’t support his only son any longer. One day the son said, “Dear father, you’re having such a bad time of it and I’m only a burden to you. I’d better leave home and see if I can make it on my own.”
The father tried to argue, but the son made a logical case. Eventually, the elder man conceded and they parted in great sorrow. The son decided to really take advantage of his possibilities and made his way south, all the way to South America and the unexplored lushness of the Amazon Rain Forest. He was pleasant and hard-working, and eventually found himself taken in by a tribal chieftan.
There came a time when this chief’s tribe found itself in a war with a neighboring tribe. The young man entered into service and joined in the campaign. Javelins and arrows flew in one very nasty battle and the war chief was slain. At the sight of the man’s death, the rest of the men were ready to take flight.
The young man stepped forward and spoke, “We shall not let this tribe suffer defeat!” Then he did his best to recite some of his favorite lines from the movie Braveheart when William Wallace was rallying all the Scotsmen.
The rest of the war party followed the young man into battle. They fought like demons and drove the other tribe back to the brush. When the tribal chief heard that he had the pale-skinned stranger alone to thank for the victory, he raised him to a place of honor in the tribe. He even named him as tribal warlord, the highest position besides tribal chief.
The chief had a daughter, who was very beautiful, but also very strange. She had sworn an oath not to take any man for her mate unless he promised that if she died first he would let himself be entombed with her in the tribal ziggurat.
“If he really loves me,” the girl was known to have said, “why would he want to go on living?” She also claimed that she would do likewise and let herself be buried with him if he should die first.
Up to this point, her strange oath had frightened away all her potential suitors. However, the young man was so taken by her beauty that nothing could discourage him and he asked her father for her hand.
“Do you know what you must promise?” the chief asked.
“Oh yes,” he said. “I shall have to let myself be entombed with her if I outlive her. But my love is so great that I care nothing for the risk.”
The chief gave his consent and the marraige ceremony was a grand spectacle. Several of the neigh-boring tribes were invited, and the event lasted a full seven days.
For a while, the couple lived happily together, but then it so happened that the chief’s daughter fell gravely ill. None of the shaman or medicine women could do anything to help. At last, the girl died and the young man was reminded of his promise—not that he’d forgotten. He didn’t really like the thought of being sealed in a tomb with a corpse, but he was nothing if not a man of his word. He went without a fuss and entered the tomb when his bride was laid to rest. There were several of the tribes warriors placed outside as the stone block was pushed back into place to seal the tomb.
Beside the pallet that the body was laid out on, there was a cask of oil for the lantern, a table, four loaves of bread, and four gourds of fermented berry juice. Once these provisions were gone, he would starve. There he sat in grief and anguish. Each day he ate only one bit of bread and drank only one mouthful of the fermented berry juice; yet he knew that death was coming closer and closer.
As he sat staring, he saw a snake crawl from one corner of the vault and approach the corpse. At first he thought he might be hallucinating. Once he was certain it was real, he drew the ceremonial sword he’d been entombed with.
“While I live, you will not touch that body!” he proclaimed, and cut the snake into three pieces.
In a little while a second snake came crawling out of the corner. It seemed to pause as if it were considering the other snake that had been chopped up. This made the young man further question his sanity. Then, in a speedy slither, the snake was gone. However, it soon returned, and with three leaves in its mouth.
The young man pushed the gourd of fermented berry juice away and rubbed his eyes as he watched the peculiar scene play out before him. The second snake took the pieces of the first snake and put them back together how they belonged. Next it laid a leaf on each of the sections. Instantly, what had been parted became one and the two snakes quickly slithered out of the tomb.
The young man was now almost certain he was seeing things, but boredom and curiousity eventually got the better of him. The leaves were still lying on the floor, and it occurred to the unhappy young man who had witnessed the whole scene that the miraculous power of the leaves, which had brought a snake back to life, might help a human as well.
He picked up the leaves and laid one on the dead woman’s mouth and the other two on each of her eyes. He remembered hearing all sorts of rumors about how the Amazon likely held the secret cure to every single disease known to man, but it would probably be destroyed by industrial clear-cutting before anybody made such a discovery.
No sooner had he finished this thought than his former bride’s hands began to twitch. The color came back to her face and she drew a breath. Her eyes fluttered open and her gaze fell on the surprised gaze of her husband.
“Heavens!” she exclaimed. “Where am I?”
“You are with me, my dear wife,” he replied, and told her exactly what had happened and how he had brought her back to life.
Then he gave her some of the bread and fermented berry juice, and when her strength returned she stood up. They went to the door and knocked and shouted so loud that the sentries heard them and told the chief. The chief came to the tomb himself and ordered the block removed from the tomb’s entrance.
He was amazed to discover the couple both seemingly alive and well. There was rejoicing and an invitation was sent out to surrounding tribes to celebrate the miracle. The young man pocketed the three leaves so he could try and find a plant with their match later.
During the next few days, he hunted down the plant, carefully dug it up, and brought it back to his hut. He wrote his father back in Pennsylvania and folded a trio of the leaves in his letter along with an explanation of how they’d worked. Then, he gave the original three he’d been carrying to his most trusted soldier.
“Take good care of these,” he cautioned. “Carry them with you wherever you go. Who knows what use we may have for them in a time
of trouble or war.”
But a change began to take place in the wife after she was brought back to life. All her love for her husband seemed to have gone out of her heart. Then, sometime later he came home to discover her sitting on the floor of their hut with the bloody remains of a monkey scattered about.
The young man kept it quiet and cleaned her up. A few times, she snapped at him, but he was able to keep his fingers safe. It was while he was burning the remains of the monkey that he made a gruesome discovery. Only, he wasn’t certain his eyes hadn’t played tricks. As the head of the monkey was burning in the fire, the young man was almost certain that he saw its eyes open…and even worse…move about.
The young man worried that his lovely wife might be succumbing once more to a sickness. After one stint in that tomb, he didn’t really relish the thought of doing it again. Therefore, he approached the chief and explained that he greatly missed his home. What’s more, he hadn’t ever been able to introduce his wife to his father. He asked permission for him and his wife to travel to Pennsylvannia in the United States for a visit. The father thought it would be a fine idea.
Two days later, even though she was showing signs of worsening, they boarded a train after taking a canoe to a small town. During the journey, the young man’s wife only seemed to get worse. The day they changed trains for the last time and began the five-day leg of the journey that would end on the outskirts of Pittsburgh, she climbed into bed and did not get up for over forty-eight hours.
Late on the third night, she sat up, climbed from her bed, and wandered out into the narrow corridor where the engineer just happened to be returning to the lead car after a quick meal. The woman tore into the man’s throat, sending a geyser of blood spraying the walls and nearby window.
The young man’s faithful servant was in the sleeper cabin next door and heard the disturbance out in the hallway. He rushed out to discover his boss’s wife crouched over the body of a man, tearing out chunks of his flesh and eating greedily. She glanced up, a peculiar growl in her throat.
Rushing in, he woke the young man. They made it out to the hall as the torn up body of the train’s engineer was rising to its feet and following the woman down the narrow corridor towards the well-lit and noisy dining car. The two ran the opposite direction and found themselves in the space between two cars. The train was begining a climb up a long hill, and its speed was gradually decreasing. The sounds of screaming made their minds up for them. Something very bad was about to happen and the men jumped.
They plummeted down a hill and into a stream. The servant pulled the young man out, just saving him from drowning. In fact, when the young man opened his eyes, the servant was just about to fish out the three leaves and place them over the young man‘s eyes and mouth.
The two walked through the night until they arrived at the nearest town. When they arrived, it was obvious that the citizens were in an uproar. It seems that the train had blown through town without even slowing down. In a nearby café, the television was showing the Emergency Broadcast Network screen.
“We interrupt this program to bring you this Special Report. Bands of crazed citizens are committing acts of extreme violence in the suburbs of Pittsburgh. Reports say that these bands are…am I reading this correctly?...biting?...”
17
The Zombie Whisperer
Based on:
Die weiße Schlang
Some time after the dead got up and began taking chompy-chomps on warm-bodied folk, there lived an elderly black man named Willie who was once a groundskeeper for an exclusive golf club. He had been a big fan of George Romero when he was younger because of one movie: Night of the Living Dead. When the whole zombie thing happened for real, he secured the walled golf course and became the leader of his little empire. Rich folk now waited on him, and everybody was ever so grateful for his kindness and wisdom.
Somewhere along the way, it seemed as if he gained psychic powers. He always knew where to send rescue parties and scavenging teams. It was strange, but people didn’t question their fortunes. There was one little oddity…when lunch was cleared away, Willie’s most trusted butler, Jake, would bring him one more dish. This dish was covered; not even Jake knew what was in it. In fact, nobody did, and Willie never removed the cover until the room was empty.
One day, after this had been going on for quite a while, Jake’s curiousity got the best of him. He raised the lid and saw what could only be a zombie’s tongue. It was all greyish-black and vile looking. Still, he couldn’t help himself and had to try it. After all, maybe Willie was on to something. No sooner had he taken a teensy taste, than he heard strange grumbles from just over the wall. When he went over and listened, it turned out that the voices belonged to the zombies that had gathered outside the barrier during the night:
“…wish they weren’t so noisy when we ate them…”
“Did eating that Italian make my butt look big?”
“…love the wiggly part just above the stomach…”
“I feel so dirty after eating those intestines.”
Tasting the tongue had givem him the ability to understand the language of the zombies!
Now it just so happened that on this very same day, Willie’s best lady, Queenie, had her favorite ring come up missing. It didn’t matter that such things had no value anymore. According to Willie, it was the principle of the thing. And the only person besides Willie and Queenie allowed in the bedroom where the ring was last known to have been was, of course, Jake.
Willie called Jake to the room and bitched him up one side and down the other. He told the poor butler that if the ring didn’t turn up, a certain person would be considered guilty and tossed over the wall. It did no good for Jake to protest his innocence; Willie sent him on his way without a single kind word.
Totally stressing, Jake went out to the old seventeenth hole where a beautiful lake had once swallowed many a golf ball. Just on the other side of the wall, a few zombies were arguing. Jake couldn’t help but listen to their peculiar and strangely convenient conversation.
“Why don’t we eat those funny little creatures in the water?” one zombie groaned. Jake had to assume it was referring to the flock of ducks paddling around and preening at the water’s edge.
“The feathers stick in our throat,” said another zombie.
“Did you see that shiny thing that big duck swallowed?”
“Yeah, those little buggers gobble anything they get their mouths on.”
“That’s pretty disgusting.”
“Dude! You eat people’s intestines!”
Jake had heard enough. He quickly fashioned a snare and yanked the largest duck in the bunch hoping he had the right one. He ran all the way back to the kitchen and slapped the dead fowl on the table. He made certain that Willie and his woman were called as he beheaded, then gutted the bird. Sure enough, Queenie’s ring was found in the entrails.
Jake didn’t have any problem clearing his name after he reminded Willie of the fact that he and his lady had gotten freaky down by the lake just the day before. Wanting to make it up to Jake for talking bad to him and accusing him of thievery, Willie told his loyal butler that he could have his pick of anything he wanted and he didn’t have to be a butler anymore. Jake could kick it and just hang out.
Jake said he wanted a little adventure. He would like to pick a few things from the armory along with one of the fortified RVs. Willie said it was cool and Jake loaded up. The next day, he headed through the gates and out into the post-apocalyptic world of the undead.
One day, he woke up from where he’d parked beside a crystal clear pond and noticed a trio of child-zombies all tangled up in some old fishing nets. Even though they were zombies, Jake had a soft spot in his heart for the children they’d once been.
“…oh yeah,” one of them hissed, “this was a great idea.”
“I can’t help it” said the second, “I used to come here a lot, and for some reason—”
“You have this unexpla
inable need to come here,” interrupted the third. “Yeah, we get it. We’re all creatures of habit.”
Jake walked up cautiously with his machete and untangled the net, setting the child-zombies free. They of course, couldn’t help themselves and began to stumble towards him, gnashing their teeth and moaning.
“I hope this one gets away,” said the first.
“Yep, so do I,” agreed the second.
“But I’d still like to grub on his liver,” added the third.
Jake jogged back to his RV, leaving the trio of zombies in a cloud of dust. Driving along for a while, he found a neighborhood of upscale houses and pulled over. It looked like the military had tried to set up a base in a park that sat in the hub. There was a huge pen full of a mob of zombies, and they were very unhappy.
“…years we’ve been in here…”
“…get off my toes…”
“…can’t feel my arm…”
“…don’t have an arm, you idiot…”
Jake stood outside the pen, listening to the chorus of complaints. He never knew that zombies were so miserable and grouchy. An idea came and he went through several of the empty homes, finding a few useful items to load into his RV. When he was finished, he walked up to the gate.
“…bet he tastes delicious…”
“…just one teensy nibble…”
“…still on my foot...”
Gruesomely Grimm Zombie Tales Page 11
