Nights of the Living Dead

by Jonathan Maberry

  Dolores Anne-Marie Whitaker (nee Collins), thirty-two, maternal death due to obstructed labor, whose much-sought and rigorously planned pregnancy ultimately killed both her and her daughter, who was to have been named Cherie Camela. Dolores had insisted on a home birth, and by the time the ambulance reached the farmhouse occupied by her and her husband, Brian, trauma and hemorrhage had taken charge.

  Cherie Camela Whitaker, intrapartum death (stillborn).

  The three recently deceased people in Williamson yet unknown to either Chief Delaney or the Star-Ledger, in order of their demise, were:

  Allyson Roberta “Minx” Manx, twenty-two, former Williamson High cheerleading captain, who had been strangled last Wednesday by the love of her life (this week), Cameron “Chip” Jackson, former Williamson High Corsairs fullback. The issues of contention had been threefold: their immediate need for a revenue stream, vague and unfounded issues of sexual fidelity, and the equitable distribution of a dwindling ration of assorted chemical stimulants. Chip boldly protested that his mild interface with the world of crime, so far, was not his fault. It was the sort of argument that could only escalate. Now, he had introduced himself to the “crimes of passion” bracket, and was already upset enough that he’d had to choke Ally with a length of barbed wire to shut her up, and less perturbed that he had manifested a raging erection while killing her. Once he had metabolized his initial panic, he stashed Ally’s corpse deep in the Pickton wheat fields. He didn’t want to think any more about somehow getting the body closer to the tempting facilities of Kendrick Meats for disposal purposes, but it was Monday already, and he was going to have to do something.

  Richard “Ramses” Coverdale, fifteen, had decided he had taken the last beating he was ever going to take from his father, over school grades. His first impulse had been to work such overdue patricide using Dad’s very own antique Savage/Fox 20-gauge side-by-side, which Rick knew to be loaded at all times, like all the firearms in the house—that way, so lectured his father, “you’ll never shoot yourself with an ‘unloaded’ gun.” Thanks to a worn trigger sear, the damned thing went off as soon as Ricky pulled it (bore-first) from the gun case, atomizing the left side of his head so quickly that he wasn’t alive long enough to see the muzzle flash of his own erasure.

  Lorena Darling, forty-four, had died at home of a brain aneurysm, completely unexpectedly. One moment she was laughing and joking, smoking some after-dinner weed and forking up great gobs of apple pie with too much cornstarch in it, partaking of giggles with her de facto life partner, Buddy Rawls, with whom she shared a small clapboard house on a five-acre plot that was mostly potato field interrupted by two modest greenhouses. Past inadequate camouflage, the greenhouses were mostly full of marijuana plants. Buddy, his brother Bernardo, Bernardo’s girlfriend, Tammy, and a fifth-wheel guru ostensibly named Kersawani had wound up here two years ago after Buddy and Bernardo successfully altered their identities, thereby ducking the military draft. They played guitar, shared campfires, sold kush to most of the delinquents in Williamson, and fancied themselves true Age of Aquarius psychedelic savants … which was the problem. Kersawani had insisted that involvement by the Man not despoil the beauty of Lorena’s unanticipated death, that she be cleansed and worshipped and honored and duly given back to Mother Earth right here, in private, on the property, according to customs and rituals they could invent themselves, not shoplift out of someone else’s life-handbook. So, on that same Monday, Lorena was laid out on a repurposed door in the living room, barefoot, doused in patchouli and surrounded by wildflowers. She was beginning to stink and Tammy had already mentioned the possibility of calling in an actual adult, for which Bernardo almost slapped her, but he knew better. He also knew that harboring a corpse after twenty-four hours hung between major misdemeanor and minor felony; failure to report the death, failure to report the disposition of a body, and possible desecration at least.

  “That’s if we’re caught,” Buddy argued him down. “It probably ain’t legal, but who cares? Is it legal to drive over the speed limit? No, but people do it all the time and what usually happens? Nada.”

  * * *

  “It’s one of ours,” Dr. Steckler said unnecessarily.

  Sheriff Delaney’s boys had strung hazard tape and established a perimeter while Brice Handelmeyer rolled his eyes and moaned about the damage to his store to Olnee Strats, whose wife, Emmalene (a former Husker Queen and still a head-turner on a good day), had also come down to demonstrate something or other; maybe the full power of the local fourth estate. More likely to get a jump on the out-of-town reporters who would soon swarm to Williamson in droves if this was some kind of lost government bird or top-secret space project. She quickly scampered back to the Star-Ledger office bearing fresh intel and Olnee’s latest rolls of undeveloped negative.

  With the help of Delaney’s men, the Credit Union had posted a door notice advising temporary closure due to unforeseen circumstances. General Manager Tommy Tighe had given his employees the remaining half-day off rather than waste that time explaining the hole in the wall to irate customers. In half an hour, Dill Barrett’s pickup would arrive, and by sundown Dill would have fixed up the wall just fine, because he was a good craftsman who knew what he was doing, one of those guys who had an almost Zen relationship with bricks and mortar, with lathe and plaster and raw lumber.

  Dr. Steckler had brought a Geiger counter from the hospital, a clunky, halogen-tube warhorse model at least fifteen years old, plus latex gloves and assorted kit. Delaney thought Steckler looked like one of those, what did you call them, character actors, like the guy who always plays the hero’s best friend, or the good-hearted buddy who always gets killed ten minutes before the end of the movie. He had dramatic hair and very pale blue eyes. Big, competent, veiny hands. Harsh spectacles.

  Steckler thought Joseph Delaney fit right into the mold of the community father figure, twenty pounds over fighting trim but the kind of guy who still starched his uniform blouses. Receding hair but advancing intellect. A “bold baldie.” A man quick to counsel and slow to violence.

  “This isn’t radioactive, is it?” said Delaney.

  “No,” said Steckler. “Not in the sense you mean. Don’t let the clicking make you nervous. This measures any sort of ionizing radiation—alpha, beta, gamma, all down the line. The number of clicks is the number of ionization events detected. See?” He showed the chief the dial. “No giant ants.”

  Delaney furrowed his brow. Was Steckler funning him? Were they going to have their old country-mouse/city-rat argument again?

  “Not to worry,” said Steckler. “We’re not going to start glowing in the dark or anything. But I want to wipe this thing down and bag some samples for residue, just in case.”

  “In case of what?”

  “Well, we know spacecraft reentering the atmosphere heat up due to friction with the air, three thousand degrees or better. That’s usually good enough to sterilize this little capsule or probe or whatever it is.”

  “Burned off all the decals or serials,” said Delaney. “But you’re right—this is ours. Just look.”

  The object resembled a nose cone about two feet in diameter. Shiny, still-warm factory-rolled steel with the kind of rivets you see on jet airplane wings. Contact with oxygen at high speed had burnished the metal and left sooty charcoal-colored streaks. The underside was concave and featured a scorched docking collar (it reminded Delaney of a septic tank join) girded by concentric, tubular metal ribs. Stamped on the outermost rib was MADE IN USA.

  “So you think there’s a possibility this might have some kinda germ or bug or virus inside?” said Delaney.

  “Not likely,” said Steckler. “This looks like a detector, not a collector. Like Sputnik Seven. Like those testing sensors for the MIDAS missile early warning satellite program. You ever hear of Thor Agena B, or Thor Ablestar?” He grinned gamely at the chief’s incomprehension. “I used to like to watch the launches. The blastoffs.”

  “In Russia?” Delaney
said. “I mean, you did just say ‘Sputnik,’ right?” The telltale brow lines returned as he squinted, not really suspicious, just … careful. The sheriff was no fan of Commies.

  “No, I only read about those. They were interesting because several of them were off-world probes. The Venera series. Most of them failed to separate or blew up. But one of them made it all the way to Venus, no foolin’.”

  Both men were now regarding the capsule with respect, as though it could hear and judge them.

  “This may be the most exciting thing that’s ever happened around here!” said Olnee Strats, butting in, unable to contain himself.

  “Olnee,” Delaney said in his best parental tone, “now I don’t want you getting people all upset prematurely. Hysteria is the last thing we want.”

  Olnee kept snapping photos, looking vaguely chastised, but nothing could dampen his verve right now.

  “We’re going to be famous,” Dr. Steckler said out of one side of his mouth. He took off his glasses and polished them. It was something to do with his hands to buy a small moment of time, now that he had stopped smoking.

  “Or infamous,” said Delaney, who did not cotton to any loss of control. His town. His people. His call. “This is gonna be one of those all-day, all-night deals; I can just smell it.”

  “We can always bring those large-sized coffees back here from Diane’s,” Steckler ventured.

  “Exactly what I was thinking, Doc.”

  * * *

  At 4:21 p.m. that afternoon, the late Paul Brickland—“Sonny” to his intimates—opened his eyes and tried to sit up on the stainless steel drawer inside the Williamson General Clinic’s morgue, locker #2. He banged his head on the low-clearance vault but felt no pain. His eyes were dull full moons of cataract. His movement was not impeded by the excavation of autopsy, which had left the usual crudely tucked, Y-shaped stitches across his chest. His overall temperature was about thirty-nine degrees, none of it self-generated. Inside the constricted space he heaved his naked body forward to thump his yellowed feet against the barrier of the locker door, just as his neighbor in #3, Dolores Whitaker, began to stir.

  Casey Fields, a strawberry-blonde candy striper who had transitioned directly to clinic work after graduation, loitered in the ground-floor corridor waiting for the shift change at 4:30 that would bring intern Kyle Fredericks downstairs. At 4:30, Lenny Rana would clock out of the morgue and soon thereafter, Casey and Kyle could steal some time to get recreational out of the sight of their coworkers. Casey wore the regulation thick-soled white shoes and unflattering white pantyhose to complete her eponymous uniform, but in her case the cotton panel part of the pantyhose had been scissored out to liberate her carefully manicured pubis, also strawberry blonde. A little weed, a little vigorous fornication; it had become a semi-regular break routine for her and Kyle, who was going to be an actual doctor soon, so they would never have to worry about money.

  Kyle, Scandinavian of jaw, a gray-eyed wonder with superhero hair, showed up right on time, complete with boner. Casey’s hand went straight to his groin for reassurance and she smiled, catlike, almost evilly.

  “Lenny’s still on the desk,” she said, flashing forward to when she might be mounted on the same desk. It wouldn’t be the first time.

  “I’ll hustle him up,” said Kyle with a wink, bumping through the swinging doors.

  Her insides felt restless, a term she loved using. Butterflies in her heart chakra. A silvery, plunging anticipation shot through her stomach.

  But by then, Kyle was screaming. Not hollering, but screaming, raw-throated and primal. Casey pushed open the doors just as fresh blood pooled forth to besmirch her spotless white shoes. She had unwittingly foretold the future: neither she nor Kyle would ever have to worry about money again.

  * * *

  Dr. Steckler put down the counter phone at Handelmeyer’s. “There’s some kind of problem at the clinic,” he told Sheriff Delaney.

  “Go,” said Delaney. “Go deal. You’ve got your samples, right? Take care of business. Nothing else is gonna happen here tonight.”

  “Thanks for the coffee.”

  “That’s nothing; I’ll buy you a real drink when we wrap this up.”

  Steckler passed Emmalene on his way out. She seemed to bear heavy news; her usually sparkling eyes had gone flat with purpose.

  “Sheriff?” she said to the room at large. “Apparently there are army trucks lining up near the Kendrick slaughterhouse, and Lester Collins just called the paper to find out what’s going on because he says he saw more army guys on the other side of town, near his soybean farm.”

  “What the hell…?” Delaney muttered. He turned to the proprietor of the hardware store. “Brice? Lemme have that phone.” His deputies were still mugging for Olnee Strats’s camera. “Lester, Bob—off your asses and get ready to roll.”

  Another uniform, Chet Downing (the youngest cop in Williamson), bustled through the push-bar glass doors looking mildly shell-shocked. “Joe?” he said to his superior. “You’d better come have a look at this.”

  Halfway down Main Street, near the intersection with Grapeseed Road (no stoplight), somebody covered in blood was lurching down the center of the street, weaving as though drunk or wounded. A good quadrant of his head was absent. Flies touched down on macerated brain matter and exposed, splintered bone.

  “Holy shit, that’s Ricky Coverdale!” bleated Chet, his voice cracking. Ricky had been a freshman the year Chet graduated Williamson High.

  Like iron filings to a magnet, onlookers and bystanders gravitated from Handelmeyer’s to this new attraction. There were close to twenty citizens hanging around with nothing better to do, much like flies themselves. They filled the air with dry-mouthed fear, astonishment, and easy loathing amid much natter about who to summon or what should be done; Sylvia Perkins was in the middle of unnecessarily saying call an ambulance when she barfed all over the corner mailbox. Chicken salad and red wine, from Diane Crispen’s diner.

  Several hardier locals rushed to steady the blood-drenched, nearly Impressionist apparition in the middle of the street until the late Ricky Coverdale chomped a huge, wet bite out of the nearest helping hand.

  More screaming.

  Tyler Strong, entrepreneur of the 76 gas station two blocks away, fell on his ass with three fingers missing from his right hand, his voiceless, gape-mouthed reaction very similar to someone who has just witnessed an inexplicable magic trick. Then he found his voice and began to howl, crabbing backward as Ricky bit off the nose of Ace Baldwin, a car customizer and wrench who was also Tyler’s best drinking buddy. (It was Ace Baldwin who had restored Jason Lowwens’s ’35 Woodie for a pretty penny two years back, before that asshole had married it to a power pole and destroyed it beyond reclamation, barbecuing himself in the deal.)

  Four gunshots, shakily aimed but nicely grouped, drove Ricky into a rearward stagger and finally eliminated the rest of his head in a puffball of crimson mist. What was left of Ricky collapsed in a moist pile of unrealized youthful potential. The living sprang back to avoid getting nastiness on them. Sheriff Delaney caught up just as Chet fired the kill round from his .357 revolver. He put his hand atop the hot weapon to caution his panicked deputy to put the gun down, now.

  * * *

  Out at the clandestine pot farm, Kersawani proclaimed they had all witnessed a bona fide miracle when the supposedly dead Lorena came back to them. They were all sure she had been devoid of heartbeat, pulse, or breath, but they had all read Poe. Never mind that her formerly bright eyes were now the tint of dirty dishwater, and did not seem to see Buddy directly even as he rushed to be first to embrace her. Her joints cracked loudly. She smelled not dissimilar to badly cured pork. She wrapped her arms around him and gnawed about a pound of live meat directly out of his neck. Kersawani was next. Lorena pulled his voice box right out of his throat and ate it while he dropped to his knees, drowning in his own blood. The organ imploded like a dog toy, gushing fluid. Tammy was yelling incoherently at the
top of her lungs while Buddy’s brother Bernardo fumbled the shotgun and almost blew off his own foot. The tube was full of deer slugs. Bernardo got the weapon up and fired, point-blank. The slug was about the size of a stack of five nickels, a subsonic round that hit with the force of a speeding train. It blew a hit single—that is, a 45 rpm–sized window—through Lorena’s middle in a thundercloud of desiccated tissue. But Lorena kept groping toward Tammy, so Bernardo fired once more. Lorena’s head violently detached and shattered a window on its way outside. Her body caved in like a clipped puppet. Bernardo and Tammy ran for the pickup truck, trying desperately to formulate a new life-ethos.

  Eighteen-year-old John Pickton, Jr., had decided to take his pony Teabiscuit out for an afternoon tear among the sheaves. Both John Junior and the horse loved to breeze along the rows of wheat at full gallop; to them it was the sensation of earthbound flight, zipping down a half-mile with wheat feathering your arms and legs, then cranking a turn and gobbling up another row faster than a clown could blink. Straight line from the elbow to the bit; cue with the reins and push with the leg so the horse turns around your leg in the desired direction. With practice, pro rodeo was not out of the question; John Junior had not inherited his father’s love for the harvest.

  There was a woman striding down the wheatrow, toward him.

  Correction: there was a naked, redheaded woman with D-cup titties and big nipples and long legs striding toward him, and she did not bridle or flee at his appearance. She kept right on coming, nearer.

  Teabiscuit, however, bridled.

  John Junior wasted vital final moments still trying to process the naked lady from nowhere. The rearing horse failed to slow her attack. She went right for the forearm portion of the front leg, and as John Junior came unsaddled, only then did he notice that the naked lady was kind of … well, dusty and crooked.