Best New Zombie Tales (Vol. 1)

by Strand, Jeff

  The dark sky grew darker. Mrs. Kobylka turned on the lights in her back porch, then a bright light over the porch door that cast a pool of illumination on Natalie and Baltazar once night fell.

  Kirk was cold and nauseated. He vomited and it dribbled down his chin and spattered onto his denim jacket because he could not bend over.

  After peeling off and eating her eyelids, the bird seemed to linger over the eyeballs.

  Kirk watched as Baltazar broke open her skull with many patient but fierce blows of its beak to get to Natalie’s brain. He picked off the maggots one at a time with rapid-fire precision, using both beak and tongue.

  When it was over and he was released from the spell of mute immobility, Kirk collapsed to the ground and lost consciousness.

  - NINE -

  1.

  Kirk was out no more than a few seconds, but was momentarily confused when he regained consciousness. Was he dreaming? Having a nightmare? A few feet away, beside Natalie’s clean skeleton, Baltazar released a squealing shriek and fluttered his fleshy wings, and Kirk knew he had not been dreaming.

  Dad helped him to his feet. “You’re going to be okay,” Dad said.

  Kirk felt as if his brain had been run through a meat- grinder. He ached all over, especially in his chest, where the ache felt bad enough to kill him. But he knew, with regret, that it would not.

  “Can… can I go home now?” Kirk said.

  “Not yet,” Mrs. Kobylka said. “You have work to do.”

  “Come on, Dad,” Kirk said, “can’t I go home?”

  “I’m afraid not, Kirky. You’re not finished here yet.”

  Kirk looked around but did not see his friends. “Where are Randy and Liz?”

  “They went to the car,” Dad said. “They couldn’t watch anymore. I’m going to take them back to Liz’s car at our place. I’ll need to have a talk with your mother. Then I’ll come back here.”

  “You’re leaving me here?” Kirk said.

  “The worst part is over, Kirky. Just do what Mrs. Kobylka tells you, and put it behind you as quickly as you can.” Dad turned and walked around the corner of the house.

  Mrs. Kobylka stepped in front of him and smiled. “You finish up now, eh? Come.” She turned and headed for the back porch. She called, “Balty, come!” and the hideous bird followed her in. Kirk followed the bird.

  “Wait here,” she said on the porch. She and the bird went inside the house.

  The porch was well lighted. There was a rocking chair and a table with magazines on it at the far end. There were no throw-rugs or mats, the concrete floor was bare. Near the door leading out to the back yard was a large mortar and pestle next to a bright blue plastic bucket with a small matching blue plastic shovel, a child’s beach toy. Nearby on the floor was a small sledgehammer. Next to that, a gunnysack lay in a heap.

  Mrs. Kobylka shuffled back out on the porch. “Come into the kitchen and wash up.”

  He went inside, washed his hands and face at the sink, then went back out on the porch with her. She pointed at the back yard. “You take the sack out there and bring all the bones and the hammer in here. You use the two hammers to break the bones up into small pieces here on the floor. Then you use that––” She pointed to the mortar and pestle. “—to crush the bones up. It will make a sticky paste. You put the paste in the bucket and bring it in to me. One bucket at a time. You don’t stop until the bones are gone.”

  Speaking more to himself than to Mrs. Kobylka, Kirk said, “That’ll take all night.”

  “It will take as long as it takes.”

  “I’m hungry and thirsty. Could I have something to––”

  “I bring you a drink. You will eat soon.” She went back in the house. She came back out a couple minutes later with a tall cold glass of lemonade.

  Kirk drained the glass with a few gulps, then did as he was told.

  2.

  When Kirk went in the back door with the first bucket of pale-pink gravelly paste made of Natalie’s ground-up bones, Mrs. Kobylka directed him to the dining area attached to the kitchen. A rectangular table had been covered with newspapers and a large cookie sheet had been set out. Waiting at the empty cookie sheet was Baltazar.

  “Put it on the sheet for Balty,” Mrs. Kobylka said. She sat in the kitchen, in front of the oven, on a chair from the dinette set. She had the television on the TV tray in front of her and she was crocheting.

  Newspaper crackled beneath Baltazar’s talons as the bird paced near the cookie sheet. The bird watched Kirk carefully while pacing. Baltazar stopped for a moment, shifted weight back and forth from one foot to the other, then started pacing again. As soon as Kirk started scooping the paste out of the bucket with the small plastic shovel, Baltazar moved in close. As much as he had eaten already, the bird was anxious to get started on the crunchy paste. When the bucket was empty, Kirk went back out on the porch.

  It was messy work. Bone marrow splattered, and Kirk had it all over his shirt, and on his face and arms. The only thing that allowed him to do it was his newfound ability not to think about what he was doing. He thought about the pot Wyatt had given them and looked forward to getting his third of it and getting hugely stoned. He thought of Christmas and wondered what he would be getting this year, and of school starting again, and he thought about whether or not he wanted to go to college after he graduated from high school, what he wanted to study. Liz planned to go to Humboldt to study speech therapy, but Kirk and Randy hadn’t decided yet. He thought of anything, anything at all––except what he was doing, what he had been doing, what he had done.

  The next time he walked through the back door he was greeted by a pleasant aroma. Mrs. Kobylka was baking something.

  Kirk went to the cookie sheet on the dining table. It had been licked clean. He scooped more of the crunchy goo out onto the sheet.

  “You like oatmeal cookies?” Mrs. Kobylka asked as he was on his way out.

  His stomach gurgled with hunger. “Yes, I do.”

  “They will be ready soon. Mrs. Kobylka makes delicious brown-sugar oatmeal cookies.”

  As he went back to work breaking up and crushing Natalie’s bones, Kirk could think of nothing but Mrs. Kobylka’s cookies. Did she really think he’d fall for it? It was so obvious. He was supposed to think Baltazar was eating the bonepaste, when in fact Mrs. Kobylka had been making cookies out of it. Why would she want him to eat Natalie’s bones? Was it part of her magic?

  I don’t think you realize exactly how dangerous that old woman is, Dad had said. If you did, you never would have gone to her.

  Kirk worked as fast as he could, and as soon as he had another full bucket, he went into the house. Cookies were piled on a plate on the counter, and another batch was in the oven.

  Before emptying the bucket, Kirk stood beside Mrs. Kobylka as she crocheted and watched television, and he said, “There’s no fucking way I’m going to eat Natalie’s bones.”

  Startled, she looked up at him and said, “You are a lunatic, you know that? You’re all crazy, all of you. You watch too much TV, that’s what it is. TV has made you all crazy. Go put it in on the cookie sheet for Balty.”

  Once again, Baltazar paced anxiously, waiting for the next serving.

  “Bring a chair over here,” Mrs. Kobylka said as she went to the refrigerator. She got a carton of milk out, poured some in a glass. She put the carton back, closed the refrigerator. When he was done, Kirk carried a chair over from the table and set it next to hers. He put the bucket down on the floor. “Sit,” she said. Once he was seated, she handed him the glass of milk and offered the plate of cookies. “You think I make your girlfriend’s bones into cookies for you to eat? Don’t be stupid. Too much TV.”

  A horrible sound rose up from the dining table––a slurping, sucking, snorting, snarling sound. Disgusted, Kirk looked over at Baltazar as the bird ate. He did not look long.

  He took one of the cookies and sniffed it. It smelled like oatmeal and brown sugar. “These are real cookies?�
��

  She frowned. “Of course they’re real cookies, dammit. Take some; eat them. You said you were hungry, that’s why I baked them. Who makes cookies out of bones, you don’t even know how stupid that sounds. You break your teeth on those things.”

  Kirk bit into the cookie. It was delicious. So was the cold milk. He took two more cookies from the plate before Mrs. Kobylka put it back on the counter.

  Kirk’s knees and back ached from kneeling on the concrete floor. He was so tired, he came close to nodding off while sitting there eating cookies. He had no idea what time it was, only that the night was wearing on. He did not want to know––knowing what time it was would only make the time pass slower.

  Mrs. Kobylka picked up her crocheting from the chair, sat down, and went back to it. There was a game show on the small black-and-white television. Baltazar continued to make nauseating sounds while eating, and Kirk avoided looking at the bird.

  “What kind of bird is Baltazar?” Kirk asked.

  “No kind of bird you ever heard of before.”

  “Well, I’m no expert on birds––these cookies are delicious, by the way––but as far as I know, Baltazar doesn’t exist. I think I would’ve caught Baltazar on the Discovery Channel or Animal Planet by now.”

  She stopped crocheting and looked at him. “You did not believe I could raise your girlfriend until it happened, did you? No. You thought, she’s a crazy old woman, and there’s no such thing as magic. But now, I’m not so crazy, eh? And you’ve seen my magic work, so you know there is such a thing. You see Balty right over there. How can you say he does not exist?”

  Mrs. Kobylka put her crocheting in her lap and took the plate of cookies off the counter, offered it to Kirk again, and he took a couple more. They were delicious, and he was ravenous.

  “There are worlds that exist all around us that most people will never imagine, to say nothing of seeing,” Mrs. Kobylka said. “You’ve seen a little bit of that. A glimpse. Are you going to deny it to yourself now? Bury it?”

  Kirk was too busy eating cookies to respond, but he was listening carefully.

  “Why not let it open your mind,” she said, “change your perspective? Eh? But… no. You’re all alike. You prefer your Martha Stewart dreams to the wonders that are all around you.”

  Kirk gulped some milk and she offered him the plate again. He took a couple more cookies.

  “Eat those, then go back to work,” she said. She sounded impatient with him.

  3.

  It had rained during the night, but the porch was dry. When Kirk was finished, he knew something was not right. Something was missing. There were no more bones on the concrete floor of the back porch, but he was missing one. He had not taken either of the hammers to the skull, had not even seen it. He flipped on the outdoor light and went out and searched the patch of ground where Natalie had been staked.

  She had been staked there, spread out naked and helpless.

  She had screamed as that bird had eaten her, and Kirk had watched every second of it.

  Kirk had so successfully preoccupied his mind all night long that he’d rid it, for a while, of the awful memory of what had happened earlier. It all rushed back and Kirk’s knees gave way beneath him. On his knees in the rain, his hands in the mud, he sobbed and asked Natalie to forgive him. He clutched at his stomach with one hand, but the pain was too deep to reach. It was much deeper than his stomach. His soul was ripped open and hemorrhaging.

  “Get out of the mud!” Mrs. Kobylka shouted from the porch door.

  Kirk slowly got to his feet and went into the porch, collected himself. “I can’t find the skull.”

  “It’s on top of the microwave,” Mrs. Kobylka said as she went into the house. “Wash the mud off your hands.”

  Kirk followed her in and sure enough, the skull was sitting upright on top of the microwave oven. Kirk washed his hands in the kitchen sink.

  “Take it down the hall to the room at the end,” she said. “Keep walking straight across the room to what looks like a cabinet. There is a key in the lock. Turn it and open it. Go in and put the skull on a shelf.”

  Kirk carried the skull on his left hand down the hall and into the room at the end. He groped for a light switch and found it, turned on the light. It was a small, impossibly cluttered room, and directly across from him was what appeared to be a double-doored cabinet of shiny dark wood. A small brass key was in the lock above the handle on the door on the right. Kirk turned the key, pulled on the handle. Both doors opened outward and revealed a walk-in closet. Inside, the walls were covered with shelves, and on the shelves were skulls, two rows on each shelf: human skulls, dog skulls, cat skulls, tiny baby skulls, bird skulls, even what looked like a monkey skull. There had to be a couple hundred of them at least. He could not tell how deep the closet was because the shelves disappeared into darkness on the far side. Kirk felt like the skulls were staring directly at him, each one of them. He quickly squeezed Natalie’s skull onto a shelf between two dog skulls, turned and got out of the closet. He closed the doors, turned the key, and noticed his hands trembling. He turned the light off on his way out of the room and hurried back up the dark hall.

  Mrs. Kobylka was waiting for him. She stood at the end of the hall with hands on her hips. “You saw my collection, yes?”

  Why did she want me to see that? Kirk wondered. He did not have the answer, but the question gave him the creeps.

  “That is so you’ll know,” she said.

  “Know? Know… what?”

  “When you came to me and told me your name, I knew exactly who you were, who your father was. I remembered his dog, Duke. I remembered your father’s father. And all their wives. You think when you come to me, you were doing something no one had ever done before, yes? Well, now you know better. I know everyone in this town. I know their secrets. They come to me for my magic, but when they see me on the street, they look the other way. And they all think they are the only one to think of coming to me. Now… you are a part of my big family. You’ve seen my secret collection, something I show no one.” She moved closer to him. “You will tell no one what you saw in there. Ever. If you do, I will know. The second you tell someone, the instant the words leave your mouth, I will know, and I will take from you whatever happiness you have. And you know now that I can do this, yes?”

  Kirk did not take a moment to think about it, did not hesitate for a second. He nodded and said, “Yes, I do.”

  “Good. And now that I have done this for you, maybe someday I ask you for a favor.” Her mouth curled into a sneer as she looked him up and down. “But I doubt it.” Mrs. Kobylka went over to the table and held out her arm. Baltazar hopped up on it and she carried him to his cage in the corner of the living room. “You can go home now, Kirk Mundy.”

  Baltazar got into the large black cage and she closed the door.

  “I can?” Kirk said.

  “Your father is parked outside, waiting for you.”

  Kirk hurried out to the back porch and snatched up his down jacket, then hurried back through the house. He stopped in front of the old woman. He did not know what to say. “Thank you” did not seem entirely appropriate.

  “I don’t know what to say,” he said.

  “Say goodbye,” she said.

  He slipped on his jacket and headed for the front door. Daggers of ice stabbed into his chest when he heard Natalie’s loud, bouncy laughter behind him. Kirk spun around and faced Baltazar’s cage in the corner of the living room.

  “Kiss me, Frog Boy,” the bird said in Natalie’s voice.

  Kirk clenched his fists and groaned.

  “Let’s do it here, it’ll be exciting.”

  Mrs. Kobylka went to him, put a hand on his shoulder and turned him around. “Go,” she said.

  “Kirk! Kirk!” Baltazar cried in Natalie’s voice.

  Kirk threw himself at the front door, fumbled with the knob, threw it open, and stumbled through the screen door. He could not get out of the house fast eno
ugh. He heard Natalie laughing again, until Mrs. Kobylka closed the front door.

  The Durango was parked in front of the house, and when he saw it, Kirk broke into a run.

  - TEN -

  1.

  Officer McCready never returned with further questions for Kirk, Randy, or Liz about the disappearance of Natalie’s body. The Record Searchlight hinted at a connection between the brutal murder of convicted drug dealer Wyatt Parks and Natalie’s disappearance, but gave no details.

  Dad called Bobby and learned that the Sheriff’s Department was baffled. At first, they’d sweated Dicky Parks, but he had a solid alibi. Forensic technicians found on Wyatt Parks’ mutilated body necrotic tissue specimens foreign to his DNA. The tissue was found to have come from a decaying human corpse. Because Natalie’s body had been stolen from the Richmond Funeral Home recently, the tissue was checked against DNA material taken from Natalie Gilbert’s hairbrush, and there was a match. Natalie Gilbert’s corpse had been on Wyatt Parks, or Wyatt Parks had been on the corpse, on or around the time of his death. When questioned about it, Dicky was able to account for every second of his time the night Natalie Gilbert’s body had disappeared, and he had witnesses. Someone in forensics got the bright idea of checking the bite marks on Parks with Natalie Gilbert’s dental records. Another match, but this time it made no sense at all. Natalie Gilbert was already dead––she could not have bitten Wyatt Parks. Had someone manipulated her body to make it appear she had?

  They did not have the answers yet, but they had plenty of questions, and a deputy came by one day to ask a few. He asked Kirk if Natalie had been friends with Dicky or Wyatt Parks. Kirk said he and Natalie knew them, but weren’t close. He said Natalie had tried to help Dicky get a job when he dropped out of high school, but he hadn’t been interested.