Death, Be Not Proud

by Jonathan Maberry

  My inner 15-year-old giggled: Spontaneous combustion? Fire is cool! Fire fire fire!

  I told my teen to buzz off and set to kicking some zombie hiney in Kombat mode.

  All I could see was a mass of legs, so I hopped the badger onto a nearby chair for a better view. Bob was leaping from table to table, trying to dodge the five zombies as he reloaded his shotgun. He’d blasted away parts of their limbs, heads, and bodies, but he’d only just slowed them down. Even the one who’d lost both its lower legs and all of one arm was hopping around on stumped thighs, gamely trying to grab Bob’s ankles.

  Bob turned his head toward the badger. “A little help here?” he called. His voice came through the iBook’s speaker a half-second after I heard it through the door.

  I leaped the badger onto Runs On Stumps. As the badger bit into the back of its neck, the zombie went rigid, and its skin went white and ashy. The zombie’s NecroNulled flesh crumbled like clay beneath the badger’s teeth and raking claws.

  “Good one!” Bob said. “The others won’t go so quick ‘cause they ain’t hurt so bad.”

  I attacked the next zombie, which had only a superficial shotgun wound to its shoulder. As the badger’s teeth sank into its neck, the zombie roared and punched the badger into a pile of empty computer cases. I heard a dull snap from the speaker, and the badger shuddered.

  The screen flashed:

  WARNING! SPINAL TAP IN PROGRESS!

  Kombat mode not possible. Continue via IKnowKungFu? (Y/N)

  Fire! Fire! Fire! My inner teen chanted.

  I hit the “Y” key, and the screen went red. The badger rose up, up in the air and floated against the ceiling, scanning for targets. The zombie who’d fractured the badger’s spine was flaking apart like asbestos, and the remaining three had cornered Bob, whose shotgun had apparently jammed.

  Then Bob looked up, saw the badger, mouthed Oh crap and dropped to the floor, covering his head.

  The badger screamed down on the zombies, jaws snapping and paws clawing faster than the computer could track. It went clear through one zombie’s head like a fuzzy buzzsaw and ripped through the others. I caught a glimpse of Bob crawling desperately for cover at the back of the store. The badger dove in and out, faster and faster, like a small furry dead Superman.

  WARNING! OVERLOAD IMMINENT!

  I gave the iBook the four-finger salute, but the program was locked. I was just about to hit the power button when the badger exploded.

  You know how matter can turn into energy? I found out later that the reason NecroNull is buried in FleshGolem’s options is that when IKnowKungFu sparks a spiritual overload, it causes all of the still-living matter in the golem to become energy. A few bacterial cells, usually, or maybe a dying roundworm. Not enough to match the power of a nuclear weapon, but plenty to create one hell of a bang.

  Is it a bug, or a feature? I guess it depends on how many zombies you have to kill, and how badly you want them gone.

  The boom rocked the entire building, and I was knocked flat. The iBook clattered onto the dirty floor, its keyboard popping free and its screen blacking out.

  I got to my feet and cautiously opened the door. Bob lay in an unconscious heap against the back door. The computer shop was a complete wreck. Smoke and zombie blood hung in a thick, rust-red mist. The remaining windows were shattered, and the front door had been blown off its hinges. There was not a single zombie in sight.

  Two middle-aged women in pink beautician’s smocks stood on the sidewalk outside, squinting into the dark shop. One clutched a Mossberg shotgun. Though their faces and smocks were smudged with soot and blood, their bouffants were immaculate.

  “Are you okay in there?” the older of the two women called.

  “I’m fine, but Bob needs an ambulance,” I replied. “Does the phone in your shop still work?”

  “Shore does. I’ll go give the boys at ’t VFD a holler,” she said.

  It took me three days to get back to civilization. I didn’t end up killing my editor; when I got back, we had what diplomats call “a frank and cordial exchange” and, well, we parted ways. After that, I did what any good American would do: I sued.

  But all’s well that ends well. I used my settlement proceeds to start up the Kritter Karaoke Klub, and the college kids can’t get enough.

  * * *

  Lucy A. Snyder is the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of the novels Spellbent and Shotgun Sorceress and the collections Sparks and Shadows, Chimeric Machines, and Installing Linux on a Dead Badger. Her writing has appeared in Strange Horizons, Weird Tales, Hellbound Hearts, Masques V, Doctor Who Short Trips: Destination Prague, Chiaroscuro, GUD, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet.

  SURPRISE

  Rick Hautala

  Your wife Ann found you sometime after mid- night, out behind the tool shed. You were sitting with your legs pulled up tightly against your chest. There was an empty whiskey bottle beside you, but you hadn’t drunk it all. You must have knocked it over with your knee or something.

  Make no mistake; you had been drinking earlier that evening.

  Plenty.

  It was all part of your Double-A program to help you deal with what was happening in your life.

  Avoidance and alcohol.

  A good “solution,” if you’ll pardon the pun.

  But you’d been dealing with a lot of shit that—well, you used to joke with your wife that it would have broken a lesser man by now, and honest to Christ—sometimes you wonder how you hung in there for so long.

  In the span of six months—no, actually it was less than six months—you lost your job, your mother died, and the bank, which had been sending some not so nice notices to the house—some even came registered mail—had begun foreclosure.

  You had plenty of life insurance, back from when the money in real estate was good; and quite honestly, you had considered suicide a few times . . . usually at night when you‘d lie there in bed, staring up at the ceiling and wondering where the money was gonna come from for all those bills.

  Hell, yes—it would have broken a lesser man, but you religiously practiced your Double-A method, and by Christ, it worked!

  Up to a point.

  Lately, you’d been getting calls from the bank pretty near every day, asking when you were going to pay up the last six months mortgage—with interest and late charges—and what you intended to do about your current financial situation. You told that asshole in collections, Karen what’s-her-face, that you were doing every goddamned thing you could think of, but she should try supporting a family of four on next to nothing.

  You had cashed in everything—your retirement account, what was left of your inheritance, and the few valuable antiques you and your wife had acquired over the years. You even sold the collection of Indian head pennies your mother gave you when you were a kid. Day after day, you went through the classifieds until your hands were black with smudged ink, but—well, shit, you don’t care what’s happening with the economy in the rest of the country, here in Maine there aren’t a whole lot of jobs that pay what you need.

  And quite a bit of what little money you did have went into your Double-A program.

  Why the fuck not?

  In your private moments—and you tried like hell not to grind Ann too hard on this—you often wondered why she didn’t get the fuck out there and find a job herself. She’d remind you of how she hadn’t had a job in better than five years, and the job she used to have at the electronics factory had become computerized, so she would have had to go back to school before she’d be able to jump back into the work force.

  What did you expect, anyway, that she’d go out and get a job slinging groceries at the local Shop ‘n Save?

  Between the two of you, you might have been able to make enough to scrape by a little while longer, but you needed considerably more than a minimum wage paycheck to meet your bills. Besides, who was going to stay home with the kids?

  Or were you supposed to put one whole grocery-slinging paych
eck toward day care?

  But tonight—Christ! You finally reached your limit.

  You couldn’t help it.

  What started out as a casual conversation with your wife about your finances set you off, but good. Was it too much of one A and not enough of the other? Or maybe there was a third A you needed—a little more ass! What with all the stress you’d been under, you were staying awake so late at night that you never felt like having sex any more.

  But maybe that’s exactly what you needed.

  Beats the shit out of you!

  Anyway, you lost it real bad and started yelling at your wife, berating her for all of your problems. Then, when Sally, your six year old, wandered into the living room, you started screaming at her to get her butt upstairs to bed.

  Damn, you were so mad, you threw the book you were reading against the wall, and it knocked the photograph of your wife’s parents’ wedding day off the mantel. It hit floor, smashing the frame and glass to pieces.

  That’s when Ann lost control.

  You had told her that you hadn’t even wanted to talk, so it wasn’t your fault; but now you’d done something to set her off. Rather than keep the shouting match going, you stormed out into the kitchen, grabbed the nearly full bottle of whiskey from the counter, and walked out the door, making sure to slam it shut hard behind you.

  Fuming and sputtering with curses, you went out across the back yard to the tool shed, where you sat down, leaned back against the building, and just stared off at the dark line of trees bordering your property.

  Goddamn, you were pissed!

  Rage filled you as you spun off the bottle cap and took several long slugs of whiskey. Your heart was punching like a piston against your ribs, and you hoped the booze would help calm you down.

  After a while, your breathing slowed, and you felt at least a little bit at peace. Bats or some kind of night birds were darting back and forth across the powdery gray of the star-filled sky. All around you, the night seemed to throb with a weird purplish glow. You focused hard on the solid black line of trees until your vision began to blur. In the tangled lines of branches and leaves, you imagined silhouettes of faces and the cold fire of eyes, staring back at you.

  You knew you were losing your mind, but you didn’t care.

  You were pissed!

  Fed up!

  So what if you lost your fucking mind. You’d lost everything else, so who gave a shit?

  Once or twice you checked your watch, but after a while you lost track of time. You were still fuming with rage. At some point you became aware of a deep, hard throbbing in your neck. At first, you were only mildly worried, but then, as the pain grew steadily stronger and sharper, you started to panic. A cold, deep ache shot down your left arm and up underneath your chin like you’d been cold-cocked a good one.

  It didn’t take long to figure out what was happening.

  You were having a heart attack.

  No fucking wonder!

  Your breathing came hard and fast, and the icy pain spread like an evil touch throughout your chest and shoulders. You wanted to stand up but were suddenly afraid.

  Shit! You didn’t want to die, but you didn’t even have the strength to call out to Ann for help, either.

  You were fucked and you knew it, but suddenly, like a bubble bursting, you no longer cared.

  You realized that this was probably what you had been looking for all along—an escape from all your problems; and this way, you didn’t even have to commit suicide, so in the end, your wife would be able to collect the life insurance money.

  So why not just go with it?

  Why not ride it to the end?

  You didn‘t even blink your eyes as you cocked your head back and stared up at the night sky. It was pulsating with dull energy, and seemed at times to shift into two gigantic, dark hands that reached out to grab you. They wrapped around you, and then began to squeeze tighter and tighter.

  Go with it!—you kept telling yourself—Just go with it!

  You thought of a few things you would miss—especially watching the kids grow up—but you knew that the heart attack was too strong and had gone on for far too long. Numbing pain gripped you tighter, like cold, pressing waves.

  Go with it! … Just go with it!

  And then from somewhere deep inside your head, you heard—honest to God, you heard what sounded like a thick piece of wood, snapping in half. Sound, pain, and light exploded inside you. You vaguely sensed your legs kicking out in front of you as you stiffened and desperately clutched at your chest. Then, in one final, hard convulsion, you pulled your legs back up to your chest and sat there like an fetus, willing the night to take you all the way down.

  Only it didn’t happen that way.

  You were frozen, lost in an impenetrable darkness, but you were still horribly alert and aware of the world around you. The intense pain was still there, too, as strong as ever; but you were somehow distanced from it, as though it was just the memory of pain. All around you, you could hear the soft sighing of the breeze in the trees, the rasping flutter of unseen wings, the gentle hissing of the lawn, and something else that sounded like someone crying . . . or laughing.

  You were convinced that you were dead, and you just sat there, waiting for the darkness to pull you all the way down.

  But that didn’t happen.

  Just at the edge of awareness, you heard something else—the soft thud of approaching footsteps.

  Someone was coming!

  Was it your wife . . . or someone else?

  You struggled to open your eyes.

  Or maybe your eyes were already open, and you had blown out something inside your brain and had gone blind.

  It didn’t matter.

  It wasn’t simply that you were frozen and couldn’t move; you couldn’t even feel your body. You were nothing more than a tiny spark of awareness, suspended in an endless, black void.

  But soon, that void was filled with a shouting voice. Through the confusion, you finally recognized your wife’s voice, frantically shouting to someone that she had found you, and to call the rescue unit.

  You wanted desperately to move, to say something to her, to indicate that it was all right—that you were content to be dead and drifting far, far away. Everything was all right, and maybe everything would be all right for her, now, too. You struggled to open your eyes or your mouth to give her a sign, but you simply couldn‘t.

  Her footsteps thundered like drums in your ears as she came up close to you. Her presence was a pulsating, burning heat that touched your mind as much as your body and you were instantly aware that she was what you needed.

  She was warm, human flesh.

  A misery and longing as deep and painful as anything you’d ever experienced before filled you, and the darkness embracing you throbbed with a groundswell rush of deep, blood red. You knew—absolutely—that you were dead, but you also realized that you’d been like this for a long time . . . for a very long time.

  And you knew what you had to do next to dull that over- powering surge of loneliness welling up inside you.

  You couldn’t believe how loud your wife screamed when you opened your eyes!

  * * *

  Under his own name, Rick Hautala has written close to thirty novels, including the million-copy best seller Nightstone, as well as Winter Wake, The Mountain King, Little Brothers and Cold Whisper. He has had over sixty short stories published in a variety of national and international anthologies and magazines. He has published two short story collections: Bedbugs and Occasional Demons, and a new collection, The Back of Beyond, is due soon. Writing as A. J. Matthews, his novels include the bestsellers The White Room, Looking Glass, Follow, and Unbroken. His forthcoming books include the “Little Brothers” novella Indian Summer and the novel Chills.

  Born and raised in Rockport, Massachusetts, Rick is a graduate of the University of Maine in Orono with a Master of Arts in English Literature. His three children are all grown up. He lives in southern Ma
inewith author Holly Newstein.

  For more information, check out his website www.rickhautala.com.

  DEEP THROAT ... WITH ZOMBIES

  Steven L. Shrewsbury

  “A human being has a natural desire to have more of a good thing than he needs.”

  Mark Twain

  The sight played out like a typical porno bondage scene, splayed across the wide screen in Randy Johnson’s living room. A woman lay naked, tied down to a pool table with heavy burlap straps and dog chains. A series of men, all playing with themselves before their turn arrived, forced fellatio on her. However, this wasn’t typical porn and adult films hadn’t been the same since the zombie apocalypse years before wiped out California’s exclusivity for American sex flick production. The woman’s skin, colored a pale blue all over, denoted that she had joined ranks of the undead. Her toothless condition, well, who can say how she’d arrived as such? However, her ability at consuming an entire penis at will brought truth to the title of the video, DEEP THROAT… WITH ZOMBIES.

  A dark haired man sat, watching with hands folded, emotionless, and flanked by two tall men. The one on his right, red haired and wearing a shoulder holster over his cuffed white shirt, asked, “What do you have to say for yourself, Randy?”

  “Officer Kent, all right,” Randy replied. “Okay, okay, there’s a lab once used for meth out in Naperville, that’s where we manufacture the BOLT hard-on tablets.”

  Kent frowned and looked to his fellow officer. “I don’t think he gets it, Scott.”

  A tad smaller of a man than Kent, Scott frowned, ran a hand through his receding hair, and said to Randy, “Do you think we don’t know about that or you guys making these flicks in Chicago?”

  Randy shrugged. “I pay my dues to the outfit; I didn’t think it was a big deal anymore.”