Nights of the Living Dead

by Jonathan Maberry

  Lainey smiles, clearly triumphant at cutting the grin from my face. And I realize that this is how things are going to go from here on out. That we’ve found a way to stay safe, but in doing so we’ve trapped ourselves in this roaring inferno indefinitely, our only company the moaning dead and the sickly sweet scent of their burning bodies.

  THE DAY AFTER

  by John A. Russo

  Sheriff McClelland lit his gasoline-soaked torch and touched it to the pyre, which had already been soaked in gasoline. The pile of zombie corpses went up with a whoosh, the flames licking high into the morning sky. The sheriff and his posse had gunned down more than two dozen of the flesh-eating ghouls that had been lurking around the Miller farmhouse.

  He said to Deputy Vince Daniels, “You think we got ’em all, Vince?”

  Vince said, “We rooted ’em out best we could and shot ’em in the head. But I couldn’t swear none of ’em managed to sneak into the woods. Gunshots scare ’em just like fire does. They coulda hid from us when they heard us shootin’.”

  “Chopper’s still circlin’,” said McClelland. “If they spot any they’ll let us know. Let’s head back toward Willard the other way round the valley in case folks’re holed up in some other farmhouse.”

  * * *

  Rasping, drooling zombies moved through a patch of woods, some of them carrying partially devoured body parts from the people who were overrun at the Miller place. One zombie was sitting under a tree gnawing on a hand and forearm. On the wrist dangled a charm bracelet, burnt and discolored, a trinket once worn by a girl who had been blown up in a truck, along with her boyfriend.

  The zombie drooled, then used his big yellowish teeth to pull off one more string of flesh. Then he dropped the picked-clean bones onto the ground and slowly trailed after some other zombies who were already shambling out of the woods.

  An undead woman’s mangled hand reached down and picked up the remains of the hand and wrist that were dropped. She growled, lusting after the slim pickings. In life she went by the name Barbara, and she had a brother, Johnny. He had helped others like him to drag her out of the Miller farmhouse. But then, after they killed her, he stopped them from completely devouring her. Pieces of her were now gone. She bore big bloody bite marks and gaping wounds on her body. Parts of her lips, nose, and ears were missing.

  A beastly little girl, known as Karen while she was living, sneaked up on Barbara and made a grab for the stringy remnant of wrist bone and hand. Barbara tried to keep it, but it fell onto the ground. Both of the female zombies gave up on the morsel and hastened to keep up with the rest of their kind.

  * * *

  Just off a two-lane blacktop, a gas company right-of-way curved through some woods. Telephone poles laden with cables stretched one after another through the wide, grassy lane.

  Lineman Jed Harris, a tall, lanky thirty-year-old, dark-haired with a full beard and mustache, shinnied up a pole wearing hobnailed boots, a safety harness, and a wide leather belt with a pouch full of tools. He wore a plaid shirt, blue jeans, and a cap bearing the logo of the Willard Power Company. A company van bearing the same logo was parked near the foot of the pole. Finding a frayed break in one of the power lines, he muttered, “No wonder,” then set to work with wire cutters, pliers, and electrician’s tape.

  Meanwhile, three zombies came out of the woods and approached his van. For a long moment they stared up at him, drooling, but he was preoccupied. Jed’s dog, Barney, was sleeping in the passenger seat. His ears pricked up and he awakened when he smelled the ghouls. He started barking and jumping all around on the front seat. And the zombies picked up rocks and started smashing the van’s windows.

  Barney howled, and Jed started rappelling down the pole. He saw that the side windows of the van were pulverized and zombie hands were reaching in for the dog. Barney bit one of the grasping hands and hung on, snarling viciously. Refusing to let go, when the ghoul pulled away he was yanked out of the van through a shattered window. Both Barney and the ghoul tumbled to the ground.

  Jed yelled, “Barney!”

  One of the ghouls smashed a rock at the dog’s head. Barney howled. The ghoul smashed at him again and again, till he lay still.

  Jed was down off the pole now, his harness strap dangling from his waist. He pulled a big screwdriver and a claw hammer from his tool pouch. Consumed with rage over the death of his dog, he advanced toward the three flesh-hungry zombies. He tried to bash one of them in the head with his hammer, but he missed, dealing only a glancing blow to the dead creature’s shoulder. The other two were closing in, and Jed was in big trouble, kind of like a gazelle being circled by hungry coyotes.

  He jabbed his screwdriver at one of the zombies’ eyes, and it backed away. But the other two, drooling and slavering, were unfazed. They were in front of the driver’s side of the van, blocking the door. Jed came at them, swinging his hammer and jabbing with his screwdriver.

  The nearest zombie dove and tackled him. He fell, dropping his screwdriver but managing to hang on to his claw hammer. He thrashed and struggled, trying to get back up, but the zombie that tackled him was lying heavily across his legs. He tried to crawl away, dragging the zombie clutching at his ankles. He managed to get partway up and smashed his hammer down upon the zombie’s head. He smashed again and again till the zombie was done for, its yellowish dead eyes staring straight up into the sky, its cracked skull oozing dark blood.

  When Jed looked up he saw five more zombies coming out of the woods. He scrambled to his feet and ran, with the zombies in pursuit. Then three more zombies emerged, blocking his escape. He stopped in his tracks, brandishing his hammer but not knowing if it would do him much good.

  Suddenly he heard a loud roaring engine. A Jeep appeared, humping off the edge of the two-lane blacktop and onto the right-of-way, heading straight for three of the menacing ghouls. To his amazement, the glimpse he got of the driver showed her to be a blonde young woman. She plowed her Jeep right into the three ghouls, sending two of them flying through the air and crushing the third one against the telephone pole. Then she backed the Jeep up, careening it in a sharp turn, and screeched it to a halt, just a few feet from Jed.

  She yelled, “Quick! Get in!”

  Jed didn’t hesitate. He ripped open the passenger door, dived onto the seat, and the Jeep peeled out, getting away from the advancing ghouls. As they made it out onto the blacktop, Jed eyed his rescuer. She was not only good-looking, but obviously brave. Her low-cut blouse and hiked-up skirt revealed a terrific figure. “Thanks, you saved my life!” he yelled above the roar of the engine.

  “What in the world are you doing out here by yourself?” she yelled back. “Don’t you know what’s been happening?”

  He shot her a bewildered look. “I got attacked. Who are they? They killed my dog. They look crazy or wasted or something.”

  “They’re not crazy—they’re dead!”

  “That’s impossible!”

  “That’s what everyone thought—but now the whole world’s been turned upside down. The dead are coming back to life. Don’t you watch TV or listen to the radio?”

  “I’ve been out here in the boondocks on my own, checking and repairing telephone lines. The job got harder and stranger, ’cause all of a sudden there was no communication from my home office. I kept on trying to do my job, trying to figure out the problems. Power lines seem to be out of whack everywhere—malfunctioning at best.”

  The woman said, “Our whole society is malfunctioning, coming apart at the seams! And nobody knows why. It’s a strange new epidemic, an insane outbreak that no one understands.”

  Jed told her, “I tuned everything out, just me and my dog, Barney. We sleep in my tent, or just under the stars. But now … now Barney is dead.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Jed Harris. What’s yours?”

  “Danielle Greer. I sell cosmetics and stuff door-to-door. I have lots of rural customers. I live in Willard, but when I work my route out here I stay in
my cabin by myself. I didn’t know this plague, or whatever you want to call it, was happening till I found a woman chewed up and dead in her living room. All the power was out, her phone wouldn’t work. I decided to head for Willard to make a police report. Meantime, my radio in the Jeep came back on. They’re running emergency broadcasts now and then. That’s the only reason I have any kind of clue as to what’s going on.”

  Jed said, “I work for Willard Power. They sent me out because the pastor of St. Willard’s church called the main office and said they had no electricity for the church or school. Before I even got on the road, more calls came in, all from this same part of the county.”

  “I hate to tell you,” Danielle said, “but we had better check out the school. By now they could be surrounded.”

  “Surrounded by what? What would you call them? Nutcases? Mentally diseased?”

  “I don’t know what to call them, except ghouls. They have to be killed, that’s what the authorities say. It’s us or them.”

  * * *

  At St. Willard’s Catholic Church and School, the church itself, a hulking stone structure with stained glass windows, remained intact, but the one-room school had been under assault for several hours, and its tall windows of ordinary glass were boarded up. But some of the glass behind the boards had already been smashed. Almost two dozen ghouls were surrounding the place, hungry to get inside and devour the living.

  Father Ed, the bespectacled middle-aged pastor in a clerical suit and Roman collar, was trying to make the place more secure. The church was on the other side of the parish cemetery, too far away for the kids to make a run for it, especially the littlest kids, who were only five or six years old. So Father Ed had made a decision to wait for rescuers, after he heard that kind of advice on the intermittent radio broadcasts. He had a hammer and some large nails, and he was trying to hold a heavy piece of a desk in place and pound a nail in at the same time. He called out, “Annie, will you give me a hand, please?”

  Annie Kimble, a bright, winsome twelve-year-old, jumped up and helped hold the board up while Father Ed drove his nails.

  A radio on the teacher’s desk emitted a burst of static, and Sister Hillary said, “It’s picking up a signal again! Listen! There’s going to be another broadcast.”

  She and Father Ed and Annie gathered close to the radio, and most of the other children did likewise. The broadcast told them that armed policemen and volunteers were combing rural areas, but help might be slow getting to everyone in need. It advised them that if they were in temporarily safe surroundings, they should stay put, unless they were in imminent danger of being overrun.

  Sister Hillary said, “You see, children, we’re doing the right thing. We’ll be safe here, and our prayers will be answered. The rescue teams will come. We must trust in Almighty God.”

  But a sandy-haired little boy named Bertie Samuels, precociously bright, but terribly spoiled, whined, “That’s not what the radio said! We’re doomed! They don’t have enough rescue workers! I want my daddy!”

  Sister Hillary tried to calm him, saying, “You’ll be seeing your father soon enough, Bertie. He can’t come to you right now. It’s too dangerous out there.”

  Bertie wailed louder. “I want my daddy!”

  Father Ed said, “Shush! They can hear you! You might make them move in closer.”

  Annie and her mother, Janice, moved to a window on the far side of the building and saw zombies doing just what Father Ed feared, milling around, looking more alert than before, sniffing for the scent of fresh young human flesh. Annie gasped, “Oh my God, Mom, there are more than before!”

  Her mother said, “She’s right! We’ll never get out of here alive.”

  She made the Sign of the Cross over herself, and some of the kids started to cry again. Little Bertie cried the hardest.

  “Calm down, Janice,” Father Ed pleaded. “You’re scaring the kids worse.”

  Janice joined her daughter at the window again and now even more zombies were arriving. And, though she did not know it, three of the new arrivals were Barbara, Johnny, and Karen, who had become undead during the previous twenty-four hours.

  Sister Hillary said, “Come, children, let me lead you in prayer. Pray along with me, Janice. You, too, Annie.”

  Annie said, “What happened to the broadcast? It cut out.”

  “No, it ended,” said her mother.

  Annie picked up the radio and shook it, hard. “I think it must’ve died.”

  Bertie wailed louder than ever. “Just like us! We’re all gonna be dead! I want my daddy … I want my daddy … I want my daddy…”

  Pete Gilley, the janitor, came into the room with a toolbox in his hand and eyed Bertie with a sour grimace. He put the toolbox down with a heavy thud on top of one of the intact school desks and said, “I can’t take that brat anymore. I gotta get outta here.”

  “He can’t help it,” Janice told him. “He’s just a little boy, and he’s scared.”

  “Jesus said, ‘Suffer the little children to come unto me,’” Sister Hillary reminded them.

  “Yeah, well, he’s sure makin’ me suffer!” Pete snapped. He sneaked over to a cabinet that held cleaning supplies, rummaged behind paper towels and rolls of toilet paper, pulled out a half-pint of whiskey and furtively uncapped it with his back to the wall. He chugged a gulp or two, then wiped his mouth and hid the flask by tucking it into a side pocket of his coveralls. Then he went over to his toolbox, took out a sharp chisel, and tucked it into one of his back pockets. “Wish I had a shotgun,” he said, “but all I got is a box of tools. I guess one of them critters might back off if I stab his eye out with my chisel. I got my motor scooter out back in the shed. If I could get to it I could make a break. And I think I can do it. Them dead critters is slow moving.”

  Father Ed warned, “There are too many of them. You couldn’t crash through them on a motor scooter. The machine’s too light to run one of them down.”

  “Mebbe I could zigzag right through ’em like I used to when I played halfback for Willard High. One of your puny barricades give way, we’re all gonna be zombie feed.”

  Defiantly he took out his flask with no pretenses and gulped down some whiskey right in front of the kids. Then he lit up a cigarette and blew out smoke rings. Father Ed eyed him with disapproval but said nothing. Sister Hillary, however, said, “Pete! Shame on you!”

  Pete said, “I’m sick and tired of all your rules, Sister! If I have to die, I’m goin’ out drunk and full of nicotine!”

  Two six-year-olds giggled. They were both in short pants and short-sleeved shirts with neat little neckties.

  Eyeing Pete angrily, Father Ed said, “Put that cigarette out or I’ll fire you.”

  Pete snapped, “You don’t have to, I quit! I’m gettin’ the hell outta here. Don’t try to stop me.”

  “I’ll follow you to the back door and make sure it’s locked after you go out. And may the Lord have mercy on your soul.”

  They both went to the gray steel door, and Father Ed opened it a crack. Garbage cans were stacked near it on a slab of concrete. They both peered out, casing the back lawn and the aluminum garden shed, and it appeared that no zombies were close by. Pete took a swig of whiskey, then tucked the flask back in his coveralls.

  Father Ed said, “Good luck, Pete. I wish you’d change your mind.”

  But he went out, and the priest closed and bolted the door.

  Wielding his chisel, Pete crept stealthily across the backyard toward the shed. From one of his pockets he pulled out a ring of keys attached to a belt loop by a long chain. With shaking hands he managed to insert a key into a Master lock and undo the hasp. He glanced all around, and now he spied the Johnny, Barbara, and Karen zombies coming toward him, starting to rasp and drool. In a panic, he pulled open the door to the shed, got in there, and wheeled out his motor scooter as fast as he could. He jumped on and tried to kick-start it. But the engine didn’t catch. He tried again. And again.

  The three g
houls were getting closer.

  Johnny stooped and picked up a thick piece of kindling from the log pile.

  Finally the motor scooter came to life with a loud sputter and a cloud of dark smoke. In drunken triumph, Pete tossed his chisel away and yelled, “Now try to stop me, motherfuckers!”

  He gunned the scooter right for an opening between Barbara and Johnny. If he could get through the gap he could speed to relative safety. But his front tire kicked up a partially devoured arm bone, and it flipped into the spokes of Pete’s wheels, and with a loud clatter the scooter went flying and tumbling—and so did Pete! He hit headfirst against the trunk of a tree and fell, arms and legs akimbo, his neck twisted and broken, a horrid death grimace distorting his face.

  Father Ed saw all this from a shattered boarded-up window. He pulled away, a sick look on his face, and told the others, “They got him. It’s awful. Don’t none of you look.”

  They all knew without looking that Pete was being devoured.

  * * *

  Punching button after button on her Jeep’s radio, Danielle Greer said, “I wish another news bulletin would come on. Even if we get to the school, I don’t think we can rescue them all by ourselves. We don’t even have any guns.”

  “I had one in my van, but couldn’t get to it,” Jed told her.

  She said, “There’s a general store at a crossroads we’re coming to. They sell shotguns and rifles, maybe a few handguns. We might have to bust our way in if the store’s locked up.”

  “That’s if the zombies didn’t bust in ahead of us,” Jed said.

  * * *

  Under a short, narrow bridge, seven zombies waded into a creek polluted with greenish foam, black crud, old tires, and debris. Spotting them wading into the poisonous-looking water, Sheriff McClelland and a squad of his vigilantes opened fire on them from up on the bridge. When the fusillade ended, the zombie corpses were left floating in the creek.

  * * *

  The front door of the general store was hanging half off its hinges, wide open. The remains of three chewed-up bodies lay strewn on the gravel.