Nights of the Living Dead

by Jonathan Maberry

  We couldn’t get the door open. Tiny did a great job of creating a disturbance and distracting the dead, but the damn door wouldn’t budge. The dead bolt turned, but when I pulled the doorknob, nothing happened. John tried it next, and then both of us, but no luck. Then, as we watched, the dead bolt slid slowly back into place.

  “She doesn’t want to let us out,” I whispered.

  “Fuck that.” John raised his voice. “You hear that, bitch? Fuck you and your house.”

  He dashed upstairs. Tiny and I ran after him. When the windows wouldn’t open, John smashed one of them out with the butt of his rifle. Before we could stop him, he clambered out onto the roof and climbed over the side, dangling from the gutter. Then he let go and dropped to the ground. For a few harrowing seconds, we couldn’t see him, but then he appeared, weaving and dodging the dead like a football player going for the touchdown.

  The opposing team sacked him a few yards later, and howled as they tore him apart.

  He was far enough away that it’s hard to know for sure, but I think I saw his mouth and eyes moving after they’d eaten the rest of him. And his head is still there, even as I write this. What if the dead are aware? What if part of John is still conscious inside that decapitated head?

  The next day, we found all of our water bottles poured out on the kitchen floor.

  Tiny and I vowed not to sleep, but I did anyway, slumped against the wall. It was the shotgun blast that woke me up.

  I don’t know if he killed himself or if the ghost did it for him. At least the blast took off most of his head, so I didn’t have to worry about him coming back to eat me.

  Now it’s just me and the dead. The dead outside and the dead in here with me. I’m beyond scared. Beyond panicked. At this point, I’m just numb. I can’t sleep. I’m thirsty.

  Cherie and I used to go to the movies a lot, before Pete Junior was born. I remember this one time; we saw a haunted house flick. On the way home, Cherie asked why the people inside the house didn’t just leave. It was a good question. But now I know why. They didn’t leave because the ghost wouldn’t let them. I’ve tried a couple times since Tiny killed himself, and the ghost won’t let me open the door.

  The corpses outside are restless. And me?

  I’m just sitting here watching the door, waiting to see if it opens by itself.

  DEAD RUN

  by Chuck Wendig

  No one’s ever woken my ass up with smelling salts before, so when Billy does it, it hits my nose and hits my brain like a herd of cattle going over the edge of a cliff. My head whips back and the world goes full-tilt boogie for the better part of five seconds.

  But it’s only my head that moves. My hands? Bound behind me. My feet are fixed beneath me. Takes me a second to figure that out: I’m tied to a goddamn chair. Held fast by a generous swaddling of duct tape.

  Billy’s face roams into view: those scrubby cheeks, that wild hair, that grin that shows off his one cracked canine.

  “I got you, brother,” is the first thing he says.

  I got you, brother.

  He says it like it’s a good thing. Like he’s taking care of me.

  (Ain’t that ironic.)

  “Billy, you shit, let me go.”

  “Maybe soon,” he says. “Maybe soon.”

  He pats my cheek, pat pat pat, way a parent condescends to a child.

  I think to ask him where we’re at, but my eyes adjust quick enough and tell me true: we’re at Mom and Pop’s cabin up near Lake Wallenpaupack. Cobwebs haunt the corners like ghosts. Everything’s got a greasy sheen of dust on it. An Amish hex hangs above the door. One of Grammy’s quilts hangs above that old leather couch. Kitchen to my right. Hallway and a pair of bedrooms to my left. All around are windows and beyond the glass is the black of night.

  On a nightstand, I see it:

  My gun. It’s a Smith & Wesson 327. Big grip .357 Magnum with the stubbiest two-inch barrel you’ve ever seen. Like a thumb that’ll pop the brain out the back of your head. I keep that in the truck with me always, just in case. Never know what’s out there on the road, from coyotes to carjackers. And now, so much worse.

  “Why are we here, Billy?” I ask, struggling.

  “You know why, Max. You know why.”

  “Truck’s outside?”

  “Truck’s outside. Trailer, too.”

  “Then let me free. We gotta go. This isn’t a time to fuck around, Billy. Things are bad out there. Something’s happening—”

  “Something’s happened.”

  “Whatever!” I bark, angrier-sounding than I mean. “Let me go.”

  “I can’t do that.” He’s pacing, now. Back and forth, back and forth, like he wants to wear a rut in the ratty rug on the wooden floor. Every step creaks like the troubled dead. “You know I can’t.”

  “You’re high.”

  “A little. Just pills. It’s a good high. I’m thinking straight.”

  Goddamnit. I try to sand down the bumps in my voice, try to speak calmly—I can’t razz him, or he’ll just recoil further. “Billy. I came to get you because—because I wanted family to be together in this. We’re the last of what we got. Just you and me, now. I saw what was going on out there—not just on the news, Billy, but I saw it on the highway, I saw it in neighborhoods—and I knew I had to come get you.” My mother’s voice rises up in me like an echo bouncing through a cavern: Take care of him, he needs you. Care of him, he needs you. Care of him, needs you …

  Billy stops. He’s got a smile hanging between his cheekbones but it’s not a happy one. A sadness lives there. Or maybe died there. “I know, brother. I know. But I also know what you wanted to do. And I couldn’t let you do it. This isn’t about them. This is about us.”

  “We can help people.”

  “We need to help ourselves.”

  “Billy, goddamnit!” That’s when I lose my cool. I feel heat go to my cheeks. Spit wets my lips. I yell at him. I call him names. I don’t mean to. He’s weak and confused and never had his shit together and I’m here taking him apart like I’m whittling twigs with a hunting knife. Every word hurts him, and I can tell because he flinches like he’s taking punches. Finally I guess he just has enough, because next thing I know, he’s pulling out a toolbox from under the side table and drawing a band of duct tape from the roll with a sticky stutter—he wraps it around my head a couple times to shut me up. It only makes me madder, but eventually I’m glad to just hear myself stop yelling. But it leaves me to my thoughts.

  And in my thoughts, I think about them.

  * * *

  First one I saw was on the road. Girl came running up out of the woods along 80, running right out in front of the truck, arms pinwheeling, dress caught in the wind. My foot jammed the brakes. Hydraulics screamed as the truck lurched to a halt—all the while me praying to whatever god that governs the highways that I wouldn’t jackknife my truck. It didn’t. She staggered, fell at the shock of seeing my Peterbilt coming at her.

  Then something came out of the woods.

  I say something, because that’s what it was. It was human-shaped. But it damn sure wasn’t human. It came slow. One leg hanging limp like a piece of meat it had to drag along instead of use, a sharp bone coming out of its thigh—broken like a broom handle you snapped over one knee.

  As it stepped into the light from my truck, I saw that its face was mostly gone. Forehead just a red rotten mess. Scalp ragged. The jaw was still intact, but off-kilter, like it had been set a couple inches too far to one side, and it worked the air with a kind of eager, malevolent hunger. Everything about it was gray. Gray like old meat.

  I like to think I got out of that truck, a hero, and saved the day.

  But I didn’t.

  Best I could muster was lying on the horn hard. And the Peterbilt has a good one—sounds like a boat coming in through the fog. It woke the girl up, got her back up and running in the direction she was going.

  The thing out there, that dead thing, the horn got its attention
.

  It turned toward me. That jaw opening wide, too wide, like a snake thinking on swallowing a fat hare whole. Its tongue flipped and flopped.

  I hit the gas. Truck like mine doesn’t leap when it’s kicked—it’s not quick to rouse. But it hissed and it lumbered to a hard and certain roll, and the thing ahead of me didn’t seem to think twice about it. A pair of hands reached for the truck as the lights swallowed it. Like the fucking thing thought it could catch me or something, like it could just reach up and pluck me out through the glass. It couldn’t. The truck rolled over it. The bumper thudded dully against its head. I felt every tire of the truck and the trailer run over the thing’s body, thump, whump, badump. One after the next.

  Looking back in the rearview, I saw it in the hell’s glow of the taillights—still moving around even though it had been flattened there like a squirrel. Arms up, reaching for nothing, as if to pull itself up by grabbing hold of the light of the moon.

  That thing wasn’t human.

  And neither was the scared sound that rose up out of me.

  * * *

  Second one I saw, I saw in a Giant Eagle parking lot. There by the shopping carts, one of the dead things was lying across a person—still alive, I think—eating out of the back of the guy’s head like it was a soup bowl. Problem is, the dead thing had no bottom. Its torso was gone—all spine and loops of bowels, so as it ate, whatever it ate came back out the bottom. Like it was just making sausage.

  The man screamed. I threw up.

  * * *

  I saw more that night. More of them.

  Saw them out there in the woods along the road. Across the highway. Stumbling across overpasses. I hit a few more with my truck. Didn’t stop. Plowed forward. My tires turned them to slop and I kept on keeping on.

  That’s when I had the plan.

  My trucking company has me doing runs for the store, Giant Eagle. Grocery runs. Not refrigerated, no, but stuff from the Emp-Ag food company—Emp-Ag owns a whole lot. A fifth of what you see on shelves probably comes from one of their companies. They own cereal, soup, spices, soda, bottled water. They own organic brands and store brands. They own highfalutin hipster locavore small-batch bullshit and they own the stuff only poor people can buy. They own it all.

  And I carry it all.

  I don’t just carry one thing at a time, either. It’s not just a truck full of cereal. It’s pallets of everything. Food and water, the two core components of survival since fish walked out of water and grew getaway sticks. Cereal and soda. Beef jerky and lemonade. I got every last bit.

  And as the fire sirens went off, and as the radio went dead, I knew this was something big and bad and I knew that maybe one day it would be okay again, but that day wasn’t today, and that meant I had to survive whatever this was and whatever was still coming down the pike.

  But I don’t believe in surviving alone. Being a truck driver, sure, you’re alone, but you’re part of something. You’re a blood cell in the American artery. I move things from Point A to Point B. You want to see the country fall apart, you take out the truckers first. Wanna save the country, you save the truck drivers. We’ll keep it all together.

  So I said to myself, you ain’t taking me out.

  I thought, I’m gonna take this show on the road.

  I know the highways. I know the back roads.

  I know the towns with good people.

  I know who needs help.

  The vision bloomed like a flower in my head, made me feel mad and giddy like I was high on something other than my own pants-shitting fear. I’ll drive around. I’ll give out food and water. Maybe I’ll find a town to hunker down in, help the people there. The Peterbilt can get me there. It’ll get me through all these suckers. Mow ’em down, one by one.

  But first, I thought, I needed my brother.

  * * *

  Billy wakes me up by talking. I didn’t even know I fell asleep, but I did—nose whistling as the tape pulls hard at my stubbled cheeks. My chin had dipped to my chest and when I yank my head back pain shoots through my neck just from sitting in a bad position for so long.

  “Climate change,” he’s saying, like I missed the first part of the thought. “Thawing everything out. You get reindeer thawed out and then you get anthrax coming back. Maybe it’s anthrax or something like it.” He looks at me, then says, “Oh, you’re awake,” like he knew I was asleep but just kept talking anyway. “I was just saying, it’s climate change. We did this to ourselves. Warmed everything up and diseases are rampant.”

  He comes over, rips part of the tape off my mouth—the flap hangs loose, so when I talk, it flutters like the wing of a moth. My cheeks burn like they’ve been slapped.

  “It’s not a disease,” I say, wincing. “Diseases don’t do this.”

  “You don’t know that. I read things. You never read much.”

  “I read comic books.”

  “There’s your problem,” he says, snapping his fingers. “I read like, books books, brother. You know there’s a fungus that turns ants into zombies? And wasps that can control roaches by messing with their heads? There’s that cat-shit parasite, too. Changes the way you think of things. Makes rats wanna fuck cats. Turns humans into hoarders. We haven’t even cracked the case on what microbes and parasites can do.”

  “Doesn’t matter what it is,” I say. My voice sounds like I’m humming through a jar of gravel. “You and me aren’t going to fix it. But what we can do is help people.”

  “We help each other. We’re family.”

  “We can help other survivors, too.”

  “They aren’t family.”

  “They don’t have to be.”

  “Yes they do!” he says, hurrying over, his jaw so tight I’m afraid he might crack a tooth. “They do. Mom and Pop said family was everything.”

  “Dad was a police officer. He knew it was bigger than that.”

  Billy leans back then. Smug, somehow. Arms folded in front of him all protective. “And where’d that get him, huh?”

  It got him dead, Billy. We all know that.

  “Fuck you, Billy. You weak-ass piece of shit.”

  He slaps the tape back across my mouth. “You’ll thank me,” he says. “You’ll figure out soon enough that we only need each other.”

  * * *

  Pop, he died from being a cop. Not like you think. He didn’t get shot or anything. He was on a routine stop on the highway, standing there writing a ticket for someone who had been speeding—and a drunk driver in a brand new Camaro came whipping past. Front end hit his hip, twisted him up like a corkscrew, shattering most of what was inside him. He died there on the road, bleeding out like that thing with its lower half missing.

  Mom, well. She went slower. It was her lower half, too, though: colon cancer had been cooking her bowels low and slow for months, years, who even knows how long. We got to talk a good bit because that kind of death is bad in part because it takes so damn long.

  Her face was like paper. Her eyes shot through with blood. She held my hand tight, though, with surprising strength, when she talked about Billy.

  “He’s not like you,” she said.

  “I know that. But he’s fine.”

  “He’s not fine. He doesn’t have it together.”

  “Not yet.”

  “He shoulda, by now. He’s past thirty.”

  I shrugged and just told her that it seemed people didn’t grow up as fast as they used to. An excuse, I knew. In part because Billy was all of our fault. He was hers and Pop’s and even mine. He was what he was because somehow, we made him that way. Either through how we treated him or through whatever we had crawling around in our DNA.

  “You’re the older brother,” she said, almost an accusation.

  “I know that.”

  “When I die—”

  “We don’t know you’re going to die,” I said at the time even though I knew at the time she was. We all knew it. On the simplest level, we all die. That’s not a thing you get away from.
But her? She was coming up on it faster than most. Driving right toward that cliff and yet there I was pretending it was a road ahead and not a thousand-foot drop.

  “I’m dead already, my brain just hasn’t caught up. When I die—no protests, now!—when I die, you take care of him. You take care of him! He needs you. You listening? Billy can’t do this by himself. Take care of him.”

  “I will, Mom.”

  “You better.”

  “I will.”

  “You’re a good boy, Max.”

  “You were a good mother.” Were, I said. Not are. There I was, betraying exactly what I didn’t want to tell her—made me feel like a right shitty coward saying that to her. I saw her face tighten as it came out of me. It stung her. But whaddya gonna do. I said what I said and I couldn’t reel it back in and say it differently. Best I could do was smile.

  And I made her that promise.

  Take care of Billy.

  That’s why I went to get him that night.

  * * *

  I didn’t give him long to pack. He wanted to take time and put together a whole suitcase, but I said we didn’t want to mess around. I’d seen those things in his neighborhood. I heard screams coming from down the block, where those rat-ass condos were, where those hillbillies sell weed and meth. As he packed his shit, I told him the plan. Get in the truck. Drive around. Help people. Like the ice cream man of the fucking apocalypse, I said all manic like. He didn’t respond to that so I tried just small talk—

  Was he still with that girl, Jasmine?

  (No.)

  He still have that job at the pawn shop?

  (No, and blah blah blah it was their fault for losing him.)

  Well, he paying his bills okay?

  (Yes, of course, he said too defensively—meaning he wasn’t.)

  I told him I could get him a job maybe at the trucking company—Billy’d gone and gotten his CDL same as I had, and used to drive a dump truck for the quarry, so he knew how to handle a rig.

  He was done, we went out to the truck.

  He picked up something off his lawn.

  I turned, saw him there with a clay pot that contained a set of dead geraniums. He had it raised above his head.