Nights of the Living Dead

by Jonathan Maberry

  Then something had me. I was pulled up and out of the water, gasping for breath, sputtering and spitting. Tommy was holding on to me. We were moving our feet to stay afloat.

  “You all right, Sis?”

  “You saved me,” I said.

  “Yep. Started to leave you, but then I remembered you win all the races. That’s too good a money to throw away.”

  I thought about that fine Dodge Charger, down below in the deep dark wet. What a waste.

  Those things, maybe half a dozen were in the water, having grabbed at the car, or having run off the cliff after us. They weren’t close and they weren’t swimming. They bobbed a little and sank like anvils.

  I was coming back to myself by then.

  “What now?” Tommy said. “So far, I’m not crazy about your plan.”

  “We swim together,” I said, “then we take turns with one swimming, the other hanging on. Then we go back to swimming separate. We take our time, do that until we get to the other side.”

  “It’s a long ways,” Tommy said. “I already feel like I was eaten by a wolf and shit off a cliff.”

  I looked at the far quarry wall. It was a lot more distant than it had seemed from above.

  “And the walls are high and slick as glass,” he said. “What do we do if we get there? Levitate?”

  “If we have to.”

  We started seriously swimming, first side by side, and then I put an arm around Tommy’s neck and he swam. Then we switched and he held my neck. I was the stronger swimmer by far. When I looked around after what had seemed like forever, I couldn’t tell that we had covered much distance at all. But I thought I saw a trail going up the far wall, and then the moon was shadowed by clouds and the shadows lay on the quarry wall like a curtain. I couldn’t be sure if I had seen a trail or not.

  Maybe the moon would break the clouds apart and I would see the trail again. If it was there, and I hoped like hell it was, I thought we might just make it.

  A DEAD GIRL NAMED SUE

  by Craig E. Engler

  “You’re fucking arresting me for killing a dead person?”

  Cliven Ridgeway sat in the back of the sheriff’s cruiser, unsuccessfully trying to wrestle free from his handcuffs.

  “It’s open season on them. Says it on the news even.”

  Sheriff Evan Foster didn’t turn around to address Cliven. Didn’t even look at him in the rearview.

  “Last time I saw Etta, she was as alive as you and me,” the sheriff said. “Until I know different, that means it’s a homicide, and that puts you back behind bars.”

  Cliven spat on the floor of the car. “So that’s what this is, huh? Railroad job. And you taking me to jail in the back of the car my family bought for the department. It’s a disgrace.”

  The sheriff turned down Harrison Lane. The streetlights were out, the houses dark. The power had gone off eight hours ago and he didn’t figure it to come back on anytime soon. The word the electric company had used was “indefinitely.” That was when the phones worked and you could still get through to someone.

  “It’s not the first time you been in the back of my car,” the sheriff said. “And I thanked your folks at the ribbon cutting ceremony. That don’t excuse you of murder.”

  “Only it’s not Etta Winnerson’s murder you’re arresting me for, is it?”

  The sheriff didn’t say anything. He came up to Schaefer Road and hooked around the turnabout where the Ladies Petunia Club had planted an array of their namesake flowers, dominated by an impressive spread of “wild white,” if he remembered last Thursday’s lecture at the library correctly. He frowned at the body lying in a patch of multifloras. Made a mental note to come back and check whose it was after he was done at the jail. Clearly not one of the reanimated dead. And probably someone the sheriff knew.

  Just a few hours back he’d had to put down three of his friends, including Deputy Sheriff Jackson Hayes. He couldn’t say for sure how they’d died, but he suspected two of them had been in a car accident and Hayes had tried to perform CPR on one of them. That seemed to be how a lot of the early victims of the outbreak died, trying to help what they thought were living people.

  Cliven was still messing around in the back with his cuffs. A satisfying click followed by a curse told the sheriff that Cliven’s efforts were only succeeding in making them tighter.

  “Only two ways this goes, sheriff,” Cliven said. “Either tomorrow the courthouse is open and the judge hands me a get out of jail free card, or the courts never open again and you got to let me out on account of there ain’t no courts anymore. Anyways I can help clean up this mess. I’m a better shot than most of your deputies.”

  “Maybe so. We’ll see how it goes either way. But I wouldn’t count on Judge Henderson letting you out again.”

  “He’ll let me out or my sister will kill him.” Cliven smiled. “Or worse, divorce him. But you and me both know I’ll walk. How many times you have to try and frame me for this or that crime before you realize, they ain’t never going to put me in jail? Hell, you’re only sheriff because my daddy said a good word for you at election time. Maybe next time I’ll run for sheriff so’s I can arrest you for made-up shit you never done.”

  Cliven gave up on the handcuffs and switched to kicking the reinforced panel that sat between the rear and front seats. Every kick coinciding with a word: “They.” Kick. “Ain’t.” Kick. “Never.” Kick. “Going.” Kick. “To.” Kick. “Put.” Kick. “Me.” Kick. “In.” Kick. “Jail.” Kick.

  “I’ve never arrested you for something you didn’t do, Cliven. Not being convicted of a crime isn’t the same as never having committed it. That’s a lesson I don’t think you’ve learned.”

  Two more kicks: “Fuck. You.”

  “Take old Etta,” the sheriff went on. He’d still not so much as glanced back at Cliven. “She might have died of natural causes, or maybe unnatural ones. And yeah, you might have come across her and been attacked.”

  “I told you she come after me! Thought she was drunk, her housecoat open and her not even wearing granny panties or nothing. Disgusting is what it was. She come at me and tried to bite my face off!”

  “That could be true, Cliven. But it could also be true that you figured you could pretty much kill anyone during a thing like this and no one would question it. Especially an old lady who can’t remember her own name most days.”

  “Fuck.” Kick. “You.” Kick. “Twice.” He ended the sentence with two kicks, maybe trying to be clever.

  “Is that what you did? Murder an old lady in the street because you thought it’d be fun? They call that a ‘thrill kill,’ Cliven, did you know that?”

  Cliven looked out the window at nothing in particular. “I ain’t no thriller killer. It was self-defense. And even if it wasn’t, no way for you to know different.”

  The sheriff saw the lights of an oncoming car. He slowed down as it got closer, recognized Chris Miller driving the Municipal Road Works van. He pulled to a stop and the van pulled up opposite him.

  “You boys okay?” the sheriff called out his window. He could see young Billy O’Connell in the van alongside Chris.

  “We got delayed some but we’re all right,” Chris said. He looked in the back of the cruiser, spotted Cliven.

  “Guess things are still on track then?”

  “Still on track,” the sheriff said. “I’m just taking this suspect to the jail.”

  “All right,” Chris said. “It shouldn’t take us too long, though it’s not the kind of thing I’ve ever done before.”

  “You don’t have to do it if you don’t want to. I can find some other volunteers.”

  Chris let out a short laugh. “It might be wrong to say it, sheriff, but I never wanted to do something more in my life. Me and him”—he nodded at Cliven—“go back a long way. Most people in town could say the same.”

  “Most could.”

  “We’ll see you at the jail then.”

  “See you there. And you two tak
e care you don’t get yourselves hurt.”

  Chris waved as he pulled off down the road.

  Cliven had followed the exchange closely.

  “What the fuck is going on, sheriff? Why’d he look at me like that?”

  “I suppose he don’t like you much.”

  “Why’s he even allowed to drive around? Thought we was all under martial law?”

  The sheriff watched until the taillights of the van disappeared down the road, then he continued on.

  “I deputized those boys to help me out during the crisis. I got them running some errands.”

  “Them, deputies?” Cliven scoffed. “You’d have done better to make me a deputy than them two. They couldn’t find their asses in a dark room even if you was to give ’em flashlights.”

  “Oh, I think they’re the right boys for the job I need doing.”

  Cliven looked like he wasn’t sure what to make of that comment.

  The sheriff continued on to the municipal building, which is where the three-(now two-) person sheriff’s department was housed. It also contained the holding cells, the courthouse, the mayor’s office, and the town clerk’s office. The double-wide front doors had both been left open by someone, and the glow of the interior emergency lights spilled into the night.

  He pulled up right in front by the stairs to minimize the distance he and Cliven would have to walk in the open, then got out and surveyed the quiet street. All dark as midnight except for a few stores that had their own emergency lights. The pharmacy. Hardware store. June’s Café.

  Someone had tried to pry open the security gate of the pharmacy to little success other than busting the window. The sheriff added a note to his mental to-do list to try to figure out who’d attempted to break in, though he was pretty sure no one was going to file a complaint about it.

  As he turned to retrieve Cliven from the car he glimpsed, or thought he glimpsed, a figure in the distance. He put his hand to his gun but took it away a moment later. If it was one of the walking corpses he thought he would have seen its herky-jerky movements again. So it was either a real person or nothing at all, and neither was enough to distract him away from his current business.

  He pulled Cliven out of the back of the car and marched him up the stairs into the mostly dark building, Cliven protesting the whole way.

  “You can’t put me in here if the power’s out. I got my rights. I won’t be able to see nothing.”

  “Emergency lights are on. Good for forty-eight hours.”

  “Yeah, and what then?”

  “According to you, the judge will have you out come morning. So nothing to worry yourself about.”

  “And what if it’s like you said?”

  The sheriff didn’t answer for a moment. “I’m just taking things one step at a time, Cliven. It’s fair enough to say the night has been full of surprises and I expect things to continue that way.”

  As they walked down a hallway and past the sheriff’s personal office, a figure suddenly loomed out of the dark at them.

  Cliven stiffened and tried to pull away, but the sheriff had him by the cuffs and held him steady. The figure stepped into the halo of an emergency light and revealed itself to be Joe Donovan, owner of Donovan’s Tree & Lawn Service and father to Sue Donovan, who’d recently been found murdered.

  Cliven recoiled from Joe more fiercely than if it’d been one of the walking corpses.

  “What’s he doing here?” he demanded from the sheriff.

  Joe’s eyes were rimmed with red and his face was pale as death. His skin had a clammy look to it and you could just about feel a wave of heat coming from him. Joe stared at Cliven like the prisoner was some kind of demon who’d just erupted from hell. Then he turned to the sheriff.

  “I can’t do it, Evan.”

  “Do what?” Cliven asked.

  The other men ignored him.

  “That’s okay,” the sheriff said. “We’ll handle it from here. In fact, I think it’d be better if you left before the boys get back. No need for you to see that.”

  “I thought I could, but I can’t,” Joe said.

  “Do what?” Cliven demanded again.

  The sheriff put a hand on Donovan’s shoulder. “Go home. Be safe. See your wife.”

  “I don’t know if I can look her in the eye after…”

  “You can look her in the eye. You haven’t done anything. Something’s been done to you. Now you got to try to heal from it.”

  “What in the fuck are you two talking about?”

  “The others are downstairs,” Donovan told the sheriff. Then he turned to face Cliven. Without warning he struck the captive man across the face, an open-handed slap that rocked Cliven’s head to the side.

  Joe raised his finger to Cliven’s face like he was going to say something, but then lowered it and shoved past him.

  “I’m going to go see my wife like you said,” he told the sheriff, and hurried out of the building.

  “Jesus Christ!” Cliven said. “He can’t just hit me like that! Ain’t you going to arrest him?”

  “I must have been looking away, Cliven. I didn’t see anyone hit you.”

  Cliven kicked at the floor in frustration.

  “Goddamn it, sheriff, this ain’t right. You arresting me for no reason, then letting crazy Donovan use me like a punching bag. This ain’t right at all.”

  “If he did hit you, you might consider how lucky you are that’s all he did. Another father in his situation, you in front of him cuffed and all, things might have turned out worse for you.”

  “I fucking told you I ain’t had nothing to do with his daughter! Nothing. I got eyewitnesses back up my alibi. You all don’t even have a single piece of evidence.”

  The sheriff stood in silence, as if pondering some weighty question.

  “Funny how things work out, isn’t it?” he finally said. “The only forensic tech we got access to decides to go on a European vacation, of all things. First class tickets. Staying at the Four Seasons no less. Would’ve been a hell of a trip I imagine if it wasn’t ruined by the ongoing situation.”

  “I ain’t had nothing to do with that,” Cliven said. “I can’t control when someone decides to take a vacation for fuck’s sake.”

  “Never said you did,” the sheriff said. “I expect that was your daddy.” He guided Cliven toward the stairs in the back that led to the cells.

  * * *

  Downstairs there were two small jail cells off an equally small kitchen where the deputies liked to make coffee and bullshit. Fiona Hapsburg, the town clerk, would come down for a cup anytime she smelled a fresh pot, but never made it herself because she’s “not drinking coffee no more ’cause of her blood pressure.” No one minded too much.

  Today Fiona wasn’t there but Jeremy Potter and Cindy Kerr were at the table, sitting around an electric Coleman lantern and eating granola bars. Both armed. Him with a Colt .45 that was his daddy’s during the war, and her with a hunting rifle she’d gotten on her fifteenth birthday.

  “Hey, sheriff,” she said.

  The sheriff nodded at them.

  “What the hell are they doing here?” Cliven asked. “More of your new deputies?”

  Jeremy gave Cliven an icy look. Cindy smirked at him, like she knew a secret he didn’t.

  “More like interested parties,” the sheriff said.

  He tried to guide Cliven toward the cell but now the prisoner started resisting in earnest.

  “I see what you got here,” Cliven said. “You’re rounding up everyone ever held a grudge to me, is that it?”

  The sheriff said nothing, tried again to urge Cliven toward the cell, but Cliven was having none of it.

  “Is this some kind of execution, sheriff? You gonna take me in there and put a bullet in my head while these watch?”

  “Why would I do that for?” the sheriff asked.

  “’Cause you believe all the shit they talk about me. What Jeremy said I done to his brother, what she says happened on prom n
ight, what Donovan thinks happened to his daughter. And you got a bee up your ass about old Etta who attacked me tonight.”

  “Them other things you got off for. And like I said, your story checks out about Etta, we’ll let you go.”

  “We ain’t talking about Etta and you know it.”

  “If you got things weighing on your conscience, Cliven, that’s not my fault.”

  The sheriff stopped him and looked straight into his prisoner’s eyes for the first time all night. Cliven was taken aback by what he saw in the sheriff’s gaze. The rest of his face was unreadable as stone, but the sheriff’s eyes practically burned with hatred.

  “You got something you want to confess to me, boy?”

  Cliven looked around for help, but only met Jeremy’s cold stare. When he looked to Cindy she let out a small giggle but said nothing.

  “You got maybe one chance to say something decent here,” the sheriff said. “I’m asking you again, you got something you want to confess to me?”

  Cliven turned away from the sheriff. “No,” he said weakly. He didn’t protest any more when the sheriff led him to the cell.

  * * *

  The cell was ten feet long and five feet wide, with the obligatory bare metal toilet and sink, and a bench inset along one wall that could double as a cot. It wasn’t meant to house prisoners for more than a night or two before they were moved up to county jail.

  There was a small, rectangular opening about waist height in the cell door where prisoners put their hands to be cuffed or uncuffed as needed. As soon as the sheriff put him in the cell, Cliven backed up to the opening and held out his hands to be released, like it was something he’d done before. The sheriff ignored him.

  “Ain’t you going to uncuff me?” Cliven asked.

  “No, I don’t believe I will tonight,” the sheriff said.