Three Zombie Novels

by David Wellington

  His left arm was missing entirely. It had been replaced with a tree branch covered in rough gray bark. It ended in three thick twigs less like fingers than the tines of a pitchfork. Dark energy surged through the wooden arm and it twisted like a snake. The tines reached up and scratched the magician’s chin. He studied Erasmus, moving around the werewolf, tapping his sternum and the back of his skull. With his human hand he plucked a hair from the paralyzed lich’s cheek.

  Erasmus didn’t even twitch.

  The wooden arm slapped at Erasmus’ chest and tore a strip of skin away from the rigid muscles beneath. They were pink and grey and they didn’t glisten at all. No blood emerged but she could clearly see the edges of his skin where it had been torn open. In the midst of all that fur the wound looked like a sickly orifice, a new and monstrous genital.

  Ayaan pushed the telescope away and stood up. It was a long way down the ridge and for all she knew there were mines planted all around the little barnyard but she couldn’t wait any longer. She stumbled out of the lookout station and practically threw herself down the side of the ridge, grabbing at tree branches to slow her descent, her feet barely touching the ground. A torrent of pine needles and rustling leaves swept around her while bits and pieces of rock and soil pattered and bounced down before her like a miniature landslide. She skidded to a stop in a copse of trees near the floor of the valley and pushed the branches away from her to take a look. Nothing had changed in the barnyard. Ayaan moved forward until she was standing before a seven foot high fence of thin wooden palings, the only barrier between herself and the barnyard.

  Maybe, she thought, just maybe she still had the element of surprise. She would need it—this wizard had more power than any living man was supposed to. Careful to be as silent as possible she climbed up one side of the fence and jumped down on the other.

  Her foot barely nudged something round and hard as she landed. She looked down and saw a human skull there, bleached white with all its delicate nasal bones still intact. Other skulls littered the ground just inside the fence. Dark energy flickered inside every cranium.

  The skull she touched gave off a blood-curdling shriek. Whether it actually made a sound or it was just inside her mind she couldn’t say, but the scream made her clutch her ears and duck her head.

  At the center of the barnyard the wizard looked up. His wooden hand dropped a ball of fur and skin on the ground and Ayaan felt his attention hit her like a spotlight.

  “This a friend a yins, monkey-boy?” the wizard asked, looking over at Erasmus. The furry lich didn’t move an inch. “You shoulda said somethin’. I coulda redded up the place.” The wizard’s face cracked in a wide, toothy smile.

  Ayaan wasted no time. She dropped into a shooter’s crouch and flung her hands in wide arcs. Energy spilled from her core and sizzled as it cut through the air. The wizard turned, far too fast, and put his wooden arm up. The bark there cracked and snapped and the wood underneath creaked and groaned. He reached inside the back pocket of his trousers and whipped out a pocket knife. Ayaan saw that the palm of his remaining hand was one smooth callus from fingers to wrist. He slashed the callus with his knife and then squeezed his fist until blood dropped onto the dry grass of the barnyard.

  The door of the barn rattled on its hinges. Ayaan shot another bolt of death energy at the wizard but he caught it easily in his wooden hand. He absorbed the darkness into his own body with a visible shudder of delight. Ayaan raised her hands to attack a third time but then the door of the barn slammed open.

  Dead people came slouching out. They were skinny, skeletally thin. They were missing pieces. Very few among them still had four limbs. A few were missing all the flesh from their heads and all but the sinews of their necks. All of them had chunks of their torsos and abdomens carved away. Their ribs stuck out from denuded sides or were cut away entirely leaving them horribly lopsided. None of them had body hair of any kind. None of them had eyes, nor much skin.

  Ayaan had seen plenty of decomposing bodies in her time. She’d seen human flesh gnawed on, torn apart, burned, hacked, eaten away by disease. She’d never seen human bodies systematically butchered, though. Not butchered for their meat.

  “Just like prime aged beef,” the wizard chuckled. “If you sauce it just right, it gets so you hardly can tell.” He squinted at Ayaan. “Now, I figger I could do with a nice skirt steak for breakfast.”

  The carved dead shuffled toward her, their faces unmoving, their hands up to grab and claw and tear.

  17

  Sarah ran a finger across the top of a water heater and stared at the dust that came up, a thick felt-like layer of forgotten time.

  She started to reach for the soapstone in her pocket and stopped herself. Whatever Ptolemy might have to say to her she knew she didn’t want to hear. She had essentially used him as a diversion to save her own skin. He was smart enough not to appreciate that.

  Ayaan was dead. Nothing mattered.

  She knew what she was doing, and how wrong it was. She couldn’t stop, though. Or rather she couldn’t start. Leaving the basement would mean engaging the horrors outside. It would mean the possibility of dying. She’d been taught how to survive, had been taught so well, in fact, that her body would go on doing what it needed to do to keep living even if she stopped thinking altogether. It would take real willpower to go against that training, to throw herself into the fray.

  In the back of the basement the building’s long-dead superintendent had set up a little personal lounge: a broken-springed recliner, a coffee table holding an ashtray full of old butts, a record player and a pair of speakers. All of it dead, rotting with age, covered in dust. She found a stack of plastic crates full of old records. She took out a few and studied the album cover art. She tried not to listen for air horns or screams or sounds of violence outside. If there had been power in the basement she could have played music to block out the sounds. That might be nice. To go back in time for a little while. To pretend like her whole life had never happened yet, that it was thirty years prior. It would be nice to...

  She dropped the record she was holding and it slapped on the naked concrete floor, not breaking. White fur had sprouted inside the gate-fold cover. It grew longer as she watched, soft-looking tendrils that reached for the moist air.

  She had to turn around and look at the door, make sure it was locked. She needed to make sure it was locked because if it wasn’t, she still had time to go and lock it. Fear took her over, though. It was like a spotlight blazing into life in a still, dark night. She couldn’t move, she was dazzled by the fear. Then adrenaline poured into her circulatory system and flipped every switch to ON.

  In one corner of the basement a tiny patch of mushrooms nursed on a wet patch of floor. They were getting bigger. She ran. No, more like she jumped, like an antelope running from a cheetah.

  She found a stairway in the corner of the basement farthest from the mushrooms. She stomped up the stairs, flew up them two at a time. At the first landing she finally managed to turn and look back. A broad brown stain was creeping across the concrete floor. The wood banister of the stairwell was cracked. Trumpet-shaped fungi peeked out of that crevice. Sarah ran again, upward, away from the basement. She could hear rustling down there. The sound of rot and blight and smut growing at a horribly accelerated pace.

  If it touched her, if she got any of it on her, it would eat her skin. It would get in her mouth, her nose, her lungs. It would fill up her insides and burst her open like a wet, stringy pumpkin. She ran.

  Ground floor. The stairwell door opened into another, broader stairwell that lead up into darkness. Office space surrounded her on every side, some of it empty, some full of abandoned furniture. All of those offices were dead ends. She pushed through a glass door and into the building’s foyer. A thick bluish slime covered the front door, colored the light coming in through the frosted glass.

  Back to the stairwell. She had only one direction to go. Up. Up and away, away from
the monster. She climbed, her breath already coming in ragged gasps.

  A bloom of mold ran along one wall, chased her up the steps. Sarah pushed herself, pushed harder. Every step made her knees creek, her shins burn.

  Come on. Come on. Come on.

  The refrain sounded stupid even inside her own head but she kept it up. Second floor—more offices, a little light from a window at the far end. Nothing she could use. Third floor identical to the second except that little stars were flashing before her eyes. Just how badly out of shape was she? She had gotten plenty of exercise while living with Ayaan. Could four flights of stairs really make her this desperate for a lungful of air?

  No.

  No, they couldn’t. The mold was already in her. The dust she’d breathed in, down in the basement. It must have already been full of spores. And now the Fungal Freak was causing them to bloom inside her body.

  A door slammed down in the basement. She had forgotten to lock it and now the monster was inside. C’mon c’mon c’mon. Sarah gasped for breath and pounded up the stairs, almost ran into a door with a metal release bar at hip-height. She pushed the bar and the door opened up on blue sky. Sarah’s arms shot out to help her keep balance but the door wasn’t just opening on empty space. She had come to the roof. She looked out across tarpaper and gravel, stared at the clogged-up ventilation hoods like tiny minarets. The roof. Last stop.

  There was nowhere to go. The buildings on either side were too low to leap to. If she tried she would break her legs. The fire escape didn’t reach the roof.

  Last stop. Sarah looked back and saw something drippy and wet on the stairs below her. She stepped out into the sunlight and tripped over a hidden step.

  She fell forward, her hands outstretched to catch her but they just slid across loose gravel. Her chin smacked the tarpaper and she lost blood. Dark spots blobbed across her vision. She couldn’t seem to get her breath, couldn’t seem to move her arms, her legs, she felt like a dead spider with her limbs up in the air.

  Slowly, very slowly she relaxed her body, her stiff limbs. Slowly, very slowly she sucked in breath through one nostril. She closed her eyes and saw green flashes. She opened them again and saw her fingernails had turned yellow. Faint black spots swam down there in the quick. As she watched her thumbnail creased down the middle—fungus underneath was pushing up against it. The nail turned white and started to split. It hurt like a motherfucker.

  She heard a heavy tread on the stairs. Someone was coming up, coming after her.

  She focused on the pain in her thumb. Used it. She saw it as a white sparkle, a sunburst in her hand. This wasn’t her special sight, it was just pure visualization, but it worked. She used that energy to propel her back up to her feet. She drew her Makarov, flicked off the safety, assumed a firing stance with her arm outstretched and pointed at the doorway she’d just come through. She yanked breath into her filling lungs, fought her own body to stay upright long enough to put one bullet through whoever came through that door.

  The tarpaper beneath her started to vibrate. It had to be a hallucination, she decided. Not enough oxygen was getting to her brain and it was starting to break down but she couldn’t let that stay her hand, she couldn’t—

  It wasn’t a hallucination. If it was it was the most convincing one she’d ever had. The whole roof was shaking, the whole building. She focused on the black rectangle of the doorway, she focused on the green splotches that were blossoming on her sweatshirt, anything to keep her mind steady.

  The stairwell door split into pieces and then disappeared into a yawning gulf of empty space. Down, it went down. Half the building collapsed with a sudden roar like the world’s back breaking, a prolonged snapping and squealing and rumbling as stone and brick and steel twisted in on itself and cascaded down the stairs. The wooden beams supporting the upper floors had given way to fungal rot and half the roof just fell in and Sarah was in the air, her feet weren’t touching anything, and something pinched her arm, she looked, and half the roof was on top of her arm and then it was gone, half of the building and half of the roof was gone.

  Sarah was a little surprised that she didn’t go with it. She was on a part of the roof that remained, tilting down at a slight angle but stable for the moment. She was lying on her side under a heap of rubble and her right elbow was shattered. There was blood leaking from her crushed skin and pieces of bone stuck out of her arm. Oh no, she thought, but there wasn’t a lot of emotion there. She was too stunned. She would get infected, she knew, wounds like that always got infected. She would get a secondary infection and there were no more antibiotics in the whole world. She was going to die.

  The demon—the lich—the monster put one hand up on the remaining part of the roof and hauled herself up to stand over Sarah. She had no mouth. The monster had no mouth. Was it going to eat her? Or maybe they would just make her one of those handless ghouls she’d seen.

  The monster leaned forward. Pieces of mold and fungus fell from it, vegetative debris that pelted Sarah’s chest and face. Sarah couldn’t breathe. This close... this close the monster could kill you just by default. Sarah’s lungs were full, her chest kept heaving like it was trying to vomit something out but she was stuffed full of something soft and damp and smothering. She felt like someone had fuzzy cotton down her throat until she couldn’t hold anymore.

  The monster reached down and touched her face with one enormous hand. The fingers stuck to Sarah’s cheek where they touched and made a wet suction-cup sound.

  You can hear me, can’t you? the monster said, inside of Sarah’s head. You have the gift.

  Sarah tried to nod. She couldn’t move the muscles of her neck, they were too clenched with the effort of trying to get some oxygen in her lungs.

  You can hear me… I can’t tell you how much I need someone like you. Someone to talk to. I can’t save your life, now. It’s already too late. But I can bring you back to be with me. I won’t let them change you, not so much. Would you… would you like that, to be my... friend?

  Sarah lifted her left arm. It was hard. The arm fell back to flop on the tarpaper. Try harder, she told herself.

  She lifted her left arm, with the Makarov’s incredible weight in her unwieldy hand, and shoved the barrel into the thick layer of mold and fungus over the monster’s forehead. She squeezed the trigger, waited for the weapon to cycle, and squeezed again. Cycle. Again. Cycle. Again.

  18

  Ayaan fired a bolt of dark energy into the legs of an oncoming ghoul and the meat slid right off its bones. The sinew and cartilage beneath darkened and cracked and it fell face forward across the packed dirt of the barnyard. The wizard just laughed.

  “There’s more where she came from, gal. And even that one ain’t finished.” It was true. The now legless ghoul kept coming for Ayaan, skinned hands digging into the soil with slow but total determination.

  Ayaan spun around and blew the head off a tall ghoul that had been creeping up behind her. Flesh peeled off its skull in dry strips and fell away, it black tongue flopping to the ground in one piece. That one went down for good—but while she had watched it die others had flanked her as she had known they would.

  Skinless hands closed around Ayaan’s flesh, pinching her mercilessly. The eyeless dead wrapped their arms around her and lifted her off her feet. She kicked and struggled and threw her center of gravity around but every time she slipped out of their dry grey arms another would come up to grasp at her hair or her wrists. She managed to get one quick shot off that seared a ghoul to death where it stood—the naked muscles of its chest and neck withering visibly, the individual strands of fibrous tissue splitting and peeling and blowing away like dandelion fluff. But it wasn’t enough.

  Without a word, without a command they carried her inside the farmhouse. The front door lead through a simply decorated parlor and into the back of the house, to an enormous kitchen. A wood-burning stove blazed merrily in one corner while a barn door up on trestles filled the center
of the room. Dark blood stained the wood in several places.

  A painted wooden door in one corner stood ajar. Something bright glinted behind it. As the corpses carried Ayaan inside she caught a glimpse of blonde hair, no higher than the doorknob, and then the door closed silently. Ayaan had no time to wonder about that—she was too busy fighting her captors.

  The skinless corpses threw her down onto the table hard enough to make her head reel. While she tried to pull her brains back together the wizard came in and secured her spread-eagled with stout iron chains. He’d clearly done this before. His wooden arm was no use for the job but he worked the manacles quite adeptly with his callused hand.

  “My name,” he told her, as if it were a courtesy, “is Urie Polder and I eat the dead for the magic they got. Don’t you get me wrong, gal. I didn’t come to this lookin’ for a taste of gray meat.” The ghouls moved to the corners of the room while he busied himself with pots and pans and especially knives. “It was a kinda court of last resorts arrangement, you unnerstand. The larder,” he said, stabbing a butcher’s knife into the wood of the table until it vibrated in place, “was bare. Now that’s an old, old story and I don’t need to be re-tellin’ it. I ain’t the first, I figger, but God help me, I hope to be the last.” He brought a cleaver down to stick in the wood as well. “It was only when I et her heart that I felt it. That was when I feel the holy power for the first time, and I knew what God had given to me.”

  “Whose heart?” Ayaan demanded.

  “I’m a rebuilder,” Polder told her, ignoring her question. “Some folks come on through here and see all the skulls and like and say I’m some nature of demon, but it ain’t true.” He gestured with a knife steel. “This is where it begins once and over again, it’s the Garden, right? Only this time, the Fall came first, and now we’re goin’ back to the good place. It’s Eden in reverse.”