Nights of the Living Dead

by Jonathan Maberry

  Then he brought it down on mine.

  Next thing I knew, I woke up here in Mom and Pop’s cabin.

  * * *

  Billy’s eating dry ramen noodles like that’s a thing you do. He’s not even breaking bits off—he’s eating it like it’s a fucking biscuit or something. Taking big bites right out of it, crunch crunch crunch. He must see the way I’m looking at him because he says, “I saw corn chips but the pallet was in the back.” All he would’ve had to do was move them around, but Billy’s always been a lazy fucker. I try to tell him what he is.

  “Mphlaby pphhggr,” I fail to say behind the tape.

  He rolls his eyes, comes over, peels the tape off again.

  “You want some?” he asks, holding the ramen package at me. The wrapping crinkles and crunches.

  “No. I could use some water, though. Throat’s dry as a bone.”

  He nods, goes and gets me a Coke. “I have one open.”

  It’s warm and fizzy and it burns my throat, but it’s something, and I gulp it greedily. I gasp as I finish and pull my face away. “Billy, listen. It’s dangerous being here. We’re in the middle of nowhere—”

  “Exactly. Nothing’s gonna find us here.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “What’s even around? Nothing.”

  “Nothing? Two campgrounds in five miles. Plus the old Methodist church up past the bend—they got a damn graveyard.”

  “This is a disease. A disease doesn’t affect the already dead.” He laughs like I’m the idiot. Like he’s the expert at something other than being a bona fide fuck-up.

  I steel myself. “Here’s what we do, Bill. You and me, we get back in the truck. We forget everything that happened here. We won’t stop anywhere. We don’t have to help people. Just you and me on the road. Mobile. Ready to go at a moment’s notice. Truck cab has a bunk. The trailer is safe, locked up tight. It’s like a mobile fortress.” It’s a lie, in part. I’m not abandoning my mission. I just need him to believe it. If he buys it, I’ll knock the teeth out of his mouth and drag him wherever I want him to go—or leave him here in the woods to get eaten by them.

  He swallows visibly. “You wanna go out there?” Billy waves me off. “I hit you too hard, big brother. Knocked some seeds loose in that gourd of yours. Out there is where they are. We’re safe here. Besides, this is our cabin. Our family’s cabin. Remember?” His eyes go foggy as he stares at an unfixed point. He smiles. “Remember coming up here. Bag of marshmallows for the fire outside. Hatfield hot dogs. Pop with his pipe. Mom with her wine. You and me out there, messing around—hah, you remember that time you took pinesap and rubbed it in my hair? Mom had to cut off a whole hank of it—had to shave my head to hide the bald patch!” And now he’s laughing, braying like a mule until he’s wheezing and damn near crying. His mirth dissolves into something more like maudlin grief before he slumps against the couch arm, staring off at nothing.

  I’m about to tell him I remember, and I remember that time he ran off without telling everyone and we were worried all day. I remember the time he almost burned the cabin down with one of Pop’s old cigarettes. I remember the time he threw my Walkman into the lake because—I can’t even recall why he did it, just that he was mad at me for some stupid shit.

  But I don’t get to say it.

  Because we both hear the sound.

  A sharp snap outside. Like a branch breaking clean in half.

  He gasps. Then immediately he’s saying, “It’s nothing. Just a deer.”

  A shushing shuffle follows. Like feet through leaves. Slow. Deliberate. A hissing susurrus.

  He holds a finger to his lips.

  “The gun,” I hiss.

  He mouths one word: What?

  “The. Gun.”

  Billy swallows hard, looking around for the revolver—I gesture toward it with my head but he finally sees it on his own. He fumbles for it and holds it in a trembling grip.

  Could just be an animal, I think. Maybe he’s right. Or maybe it’s a survivor. And that creates its own worry, because not every survivor is going to be someone looking for shelter or someone looking to help. You get a disaster like this, more people want to help than hurt—but you always have people who want to take advantage, who want to steal, rob, rape, kill. Then my mind runs away as I start thinking that whatever is really going on, the real danger isn’t in what’s coming but what’s already here.

  Silence stretches out like a hangman’s rope.

  “Billy,” I whisper as loud as one can whisper. “Come cut me free.”

  His answer is again holding a finger to his lips.

  I’m about to chastise him—

  But I don’t get the chance.

  The window behind me shatters. Glass clatters at my feet. I can’t see what’s happening because I’m facing the wrong damn way, but a new shadow enters the room and I hear the gassy, wet gurgle behind me—the pawing, the scraping, the viscera gush, and I see that reflected in Billy’s eyes. Eyes struck wide with fear. Gun up. Hands shaking.

  I’m screaming at him to shoot, shoot—

  He pulls the trigger.

  Click.

  Shit.

  He never loaded it.

  I don’t keep it loaded. Not legal to keep it loaded. I keep the speed-loader under my seat and of course Billy didn’t think to look—he’s not stupid, but he’s high, and he never checked the damn gun—

  Something grabs at me from behind—rotten, soft hands on my shoulders, and with it comes a smell like you get when you drive past a dead deer on a summer day: sickly sweet, pickled death, rancid as hot puke. I cry out and do all I can do, which is rock hard to the side—

  The chair goes down as I slip from the thing’s grip. Bam.

  My shoulder cracks hard against the floor. I crane my neck just so. And it lets me see what’s come inside our cabin.

  It’s a man. Or was. Gray cheeks striated with wine-dark stains. Eyes like fat corks straining against the mooring of their puffy sockets. Fluid leaks from cracked lips and black blood crawls from puckered nose holes. I try to imagine who this man was once: a polo shirt soggy with stains, a pair of cargo shorts ripped and ruined, a set of boat shoes muddy and gory. A camper, maybe. A family man, maybe. Doesn’t matter.

  Whoever he was isn’t who he is now.

  That man is gone.

  What’s left is death and hunger, grotesquely intertwined.

  The thing lurches toward me. I don’t know what else to do so I shift my hips and the chair judders along the floor—the thing’s legs step into the tangle of the chair’s legs and then the dead thing comes toppling down—

  Right on top of me.

  Its mouth is right over me. Shriveled teeth inside gummy sockets. Tongue like a separate thing, like a snake trying to escape its handler.

  Then it’s gone. A thudding sound fills the air and it rolls away. Billy drags it off of me. He gets on top of it and brings a side table with a lamp down onto the thing’s head. Then he lifts it up and does it again.

  And again.

  And again.

  Until soon it’s all just mess. Like a raccoon hit by a score of cars and trucks. Tires turning it to a pudding of hair and organs and mess.

  * * *

  Billy lets me go. He’s upset. Rattled by what just happened. So am I, but I’m keeping it together better.

  “We’re not safe here,” he says, packing up his bag. His voice is shaking. Not even shaking: vibrating. “You were right.”

  “It’s okay,” I say.

  “We do it your way.”

  “Okay, Billy, okay.” I swallow a little pride and I say, “You saved me. I won’t forget that.”

  He offers me a weak, mushy smile. “When Mom died,” Billy says, “she told me to take care of you. Said you needed me.”

  I can’t help but laugh. I don’t bother telling him she said the same damn thing to me. I just nod and tell him he’s right. I do. That’s why I came to get him, because I needed him.

 
“I’ll take care of you,” he says.

  “And I’ll take care of you,” I say back.

  Then on the way out to the truck, I see it. Along the underside of his right forearm—two half-moon injuries. Bite marks. The damn thing bit him. My gorge surges. All the stuff Billy said about diseases and parasites comes back into my head and I look down at the gun in his hand and I think to the speed-loader full of rounds under my seat.

  And Mom’s voice hits me again:

  Take care of him.

  Take care of him …

  . .

  LONE GUNMAN

  by Jonathan Maberry

  – 1 –

  The soldier lay dead.

  Mostly.

  But not entirely.

  And how like the world that was.

  Mostly dead. But not entirely.

  – 2 –

  He was buried.

  Not under six feet of dirt. There might have been some comfort in that. Some closure. Maybe even a measure of justice.

  He wasn’t buried like that. Not in a graveyard, either. Certainly not in Arlington, where his dad would have wanted to see him laid to rest. And not in that small cemetery back home in California, where his grandparents lay under the marble and the green cool grass.

  The soldier was in some shit-hole of a who-cares town on the ass-end of Fayette County in Pennsylvania. Not under the ground. Not in a coffin.

  He was buried under the dead.

  Dozens of them.

  Hundreds. A mountain of bodies. Heaped over and around him. Crushing him down, smothering him, killing him.

  Not with teeth, though. Not tearing at him with broken fingernails. That was something, at least. Not much. Not a fucking lot. And maybe there was some kind of cosmic joke in all of this. He was certain of that much. A killer of men like him killed by having corpses piled on top of him. A quiet, passive death that had a kind of bullshit poetry attached to it.

  However, Sam Imura was not a particularly poetic man. He understood it, appreciated it, but did not want to be written into it. No thanks.

  He lay there, thinking about it. Dying. Not caring that this was it, that this was the actual end.

  Knowing that thought to be a lie. Rationalization at best. His stoicism trying to give his fears a last handjob. No, it’s okay, it’s a good death.

  Except that was total bullshit. There were no good deaths. Not one. He had been a soldier all his life, first in the regular army, then in Special Forces, and then in covert ops with a group called the Department of Military Sciences, and then freelance as top dog of a team of heavily armed problem solvers who ran under the nickname the Boy Scouts. Always a soldier. Pulling triggers since he was a kid. Taking lives so many times and in so many places that Sam had stopped counting. Idiots keep count. Ego-inflated assholes keep count. A lot of his fellow snipers kept count. He didn’t. He was never that crazy.

  Now he wished he had. He wondered if the number of people he had killed with firearms, edged-weapons, explosives, and his bare hands equaled the number of corpses under which he was buried.

  There would be a strange kind of justice in that, too. And poetry. As if all of the people he’d killed were bound to him, and they were all fellow passengers on a black ship sailing to Valhalla. He knew that was a faulty metaphor, but fuck it. He was dying under a mountain of dead ghouls who had been trying to eat him a couple of hours ago. So … yeah, fuck poetry and fuck metaphors and fuck everything.

  Sam wondered if he was going crazy.

  He could build a case for it.

  “No…”

  He heard himself say that. A word. A statement. But even though it had come from him, Sam didn’t exactly know what he meant by it. No, he wasn’t crazy? No, he wasn’t part of some celestial object lesson? No, he wasn’t dying?

  “No.”

  He said it again, taking ownership of the word. Owning what it meant.

  No.

  I’m not dead.

  No, I’m not dying.

  He thought about those concepts, and rejected them.

  “No,” he growled. And now he understood what he was trying to tell himself and this broken, fucked-up world.

  No. I’m not going to die.

  Not here. Not now. Not like this. No motherfucking way. Fuck that, fuck these goddamn flesh-eating pricks, fuck the universe, fuck poetry two times, fuck God, fuck everything.

  Fuck dying.

  “No,” he said once more, and now he heard himself in that word. The soldier, the survivor, the killer.

  The dead hadn’t killed him, and they had goddamn well tried. The world hadn’t killed him, not after all these years. And the day hadn’t killed him. He was sure it was nighttime by now, and he wasn’t going to let that kill him, either.

  And so he tried to move.

  Easier said than done. The bodies of the dead had been torn by automatic gunfire as the survivors of the Boy Scouts had fought to help a lady cop, Dez Fox, and some other adults rescue several busloads of kids. They’d all stopped at the Sapphire Foods distribution warehouse to stock up before heading south to a rescue station. The dead had come hunting for their own food and they’d come in waves. Thousands of them. Fox and the Boy Scouts had fought their way out.

  Kind of.

  Sam had gone down under a wave of them and Gipsy, one of the shooters on his team, had tried to save him, hosing the ghouls with magazine after magazine. The dead fell and Sam had gone down beneath them. No one had come to find him, to dig him out.

  He heard the bus engines roar. He heard Gipsy scream, though he didn’t know if it was because the hungry bastards got her, or because she failed to save him. Impossible to say. Impossible to know unless he crawled out and looked for her body. Clear enough, though, to reason that she’d seen him fall and thought that he was dead. He should have been, but that wasn’t an absolute certainty. He was dressed in Kevlar, with reinforced arm and leg pads, spider-silk gloves, a ballistic combat helmet with unbreakable plastic visor. There was almost no spot for teeth to get him. And, besides, Gipsy’s gunfire and Sam’s own had layered him with actual dead. Or whatever the new adjective was going to be for that. Dead was no longer dead. There was walking and biting dead and there was dead dead.

  Sam realized that he was letting his mind drift into trivia. A defense mechanism. A fear mechanism.

  “No,” he said again. That word was his lifeline and it was his lash, his whip.

  No.

  He tried to move. Found that his right hand could move almost ten inches. His feet were good, too, but there were bodies across his knees and chest and head. No telling how high the mound was, but they were stacked like Jenga pieces. The weight was oppressive but it hadn’t actually crushed the life out of him. Not yet. He’d have to be careful moving so as not to crash the whole stinking mass of them down and really smash the life out of him.

  It was a puzzle of physics and engineering, of patience and strategy. Sam had always prided himself on being a thinker rather than a feeler. Snipers were like that. Cold, exacting, precise. Patient.

  Except …

  When he began to move, he felt the mass of bodies move, too. At first he thought it was simple cause and effect, a reaction of limp weight to gravity and shifting support. He paused, and listened. There was no real light, no way to see. He knew that he had been unconscious for a while and so this had to be twilight, or later. Night. In the blackness of the mound he had nothing but his senses of touch and hearing to guide every movement of hand or arm or hip. He could tell when some movement he made caused a body, or a part of a body, to shift.

  But then there was a movement up to his right. He had not moved his right arm or shoulder. He hadn’t done anything in that quadrant of his position. All of his movements so far had been directed toward creating a space for his legs and hips to move because they were the strongest parts of him and could do more useful work longer than his arms or shoulders. The weight directly over his chest and what rested on his helmet had not moved a
t all.

  Until they did.

  There was a shift. No, a twitch. A small movement that was inside the mound. As if something moved. Not because of him.

  Because it moved.

  Oh, Jesus, he thought and for a moment he froze solid, not moving a finger, hardly daring to breathe, as he listened and felt for another twitch.

  He waited five minutes. Ten? Time was meaningless.

  There.

  Again.

  Another movement. Up above him. Not close, but not far away, either. How big was the mound? What was the distance? Six feet from his right shoulder? Six and a half feet from his head? Something definitely moved.

  A sloppy, heavy movement. Artless, clumsy. But definite. He could hear the rasp of clothing against clothing, the slither-sound of skin brushing against skin. Close. So close. Six feet was nothing. Even with all of the dead limbs and bodies in the way.

  Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.

  Sam did not believe in Jesus. Or God. Or anything. That didn’t matter now. No atheists in foxholes. No atheists buried under mounds of living dead ghouls. There had to be someone up there, in Heaven or Hell or whatever the fuck was there. Some drunk, malicious, amused, vindictive cocksucker who was deliberately screwing with him.

  The twitch came again. Stronger, more definite, and …

  Closer.

  Shit. It was coming for him, drawn to him. By breath? By smell? Because of the movements he’d already made? Five feet now? Slithering like a snake through the pile of the dead. Worming its way toward him with maggot slowness and maggot persistence. One of them. Dead, but not dead enough.

  Shit. Shit. Shit. Jesus. Shit.

  Sam felt his heartbeat like a hammer, like a drum. Too fast, too loud. Could the thing hear it? It was like machine-gun fire. Sweat stung his blind eyes and he could smell the stink of his own fear and it was worse than the reek of rotting flesh, shit, piss, and blood that surrounded him.

  Get out. Get Out.

  He twisted his hip, trying to use his pelvis as a strut to bear the load of the oppressive bodies. The mass moved and pressed down, sinking into the space created as he turned sideways. Sam pulled his bottom thigh up, using the top one as a shield to allow movement. Physics and engineering, slow and steady wins the race. The sounds he was making were louder than the twitching, rasping noises. No time to stop and listen. He braced his lower knee against something firm. A back. And pushing. The body moved two inches. He pushed again and it moved six more, and suddenly the weight on his hip was tilting toward the space behind the body he’d moved. Jenga, he thought. I’m playing Jenga with a bunch of fucking corpses. The world is totally insane.