It Was a Dark and Stormy Night...

by Kurtz, Matt; McKenzie, Shane; Strand, Jeff

  He knocked her to the floor with one swipe of a massive forearm. Her head smacked into the wall, leaving her vision peppered with spots. Gwen could feel the zombie’s cold, meaty fingers wrap around her throat. His face was only inches from hers, covering her in his fog of rot. She was almost glad she couldn’t breathe because it saved her from the stench. Her hands convulsed and searched around her, looking for anything she could use to defend herself.

  As her vision clouded even more, getting darker and darker, she could see Fara behind Clarence jumping in excitement, spirit fingers fluttering above her head. Gwen’s fingers closed around something smooth and sharp. She lifted it, still keeping more of an eye on the celebrating cheerleader than on the monster killing her. Turning her attention back to Clarence, it barely registered to her when the Trekkie grabbed Fara by one shoulder and yanked her back. An arm came off in their struggle, thumping to the ground. Fara screamed in rage.

  Gwen shifted, focusing solely on Clarence. His mouth was pulled into a gruesome smile with his cheeks bunched so tightly, liquid seeped from the mangled side. Bile pushed its way into Gwen’s throat, but she couldn’t gag around the zombie’s tightening hand. Her arms and legs were beginning to feel heavy from the lack of oxygen. She knew if she was going to save herself it would have to be now or she wouldn’t have the strength. Lifting her arm, she shoved a large shard of glass through Clarence’s left eye. She felt the orb pop under the pressure, sliding the glass past where the eye had been and into the man’s brain. Suddenly his hand was gone. She dragged a breath into her lungs, relishing the fire searing her throat.

  Clarence stumbled back, falling on his ass and looking stunned. He sat there for a moment, shaking his head and seeming not to know how to react. Then his laugh filled the apartment. He wrenched the glass from his eye, letting it clatter to the ground as he got to his knees and stood. His whole body shook with laughter.

  Gwen gathered her shaky legs under herself and stood up. She stayed by the wall, pressing her palms against it to keep herself stable.

  What? He should be dead. I’ve seen all the movies. You have to destroy the brain to kill a zombie.

  As if he could read her mind, Clarence said, “You stupid girl. I’m not like those zombies.” He gestured to the posters hanging on the walls. “I was born in cyberspace. I’m indestructible.”

  Gwen didn’t understand how something could come from the computer but be so tangible, so solid. Clarence was real: cold and fleshy, but he was saying he wasn’t. Gwen didn’t understand.

  A shuffling in the center of the room drew Gwen’s attention away from the butcher and her swirling thoughts. The Trekkie had Fara in a headlock and was trying to drag her across the room, toward the computer desk. The cheerleader was cursing and screaming as her feet dug into the floor and she gouged at him with her hands. With a grunt, the Trekkie got the advantage and threw her into the computer chair. Her head rocked back, missing the computer screen by centimeters. Fara smiled and then sprang from the chair. The Trekkie blocked her attack, sending her flying back into the computer desk. As her head smacked the monitor, cracking the glass, her face fell with disappointment, before it disappeared into the computer. Gwen’s eyes opened wide in surprise as Fara was slurped into the monitor as if she were a slushy from the Kwik-E-Mart.

  Ducking under Clarence’s outstretched arms, Gwen bumped into the Trekkie in the center of the room. He looked at her, his face long and morose.

  “What was that?” she said, her voice barely below a scream. He simply shrugged and turned toward Clarence, who was looking around the room, a stunned look on his face.

  “Fara?”

  “She had to leave. You know, important things to do on the internet.”

  A grumbling roar erupted from the butcher as he put his head down and launched himself forward. Gwen easily sidestepped him, watching as the large zombie smashed into the Trekkie. The slighter zombie tumbled to the floor. Not stopping to see what kind of destruction he’d inflicted, Clarence turned toward Gwen and came at her again, a bull on a rampage.

  Seeing his head was still down, shoulders hunched, Gwen shook her head. Stepping easily out of his path once again, she stuck her foot out. Clarence barreled ahead, staying on his original course, and went flying when he tripped over her foot. His arms pinwheeled as he struggled to regain his balance. Unable to, he smashed into the computer desk and slipped into the monitor, just as Fara had.

  Blinking at the empty space where Clarence had been a moment before, Gwen turned back to the Trekkie. He lay on his back, unaware or uncaring of the debris and glass poking him, and just stared at the ceiling. When Gwen took a step toward him, he turned his head to look at her and gave her a half smile.

  “Well, that was exciting,” he said.

  “I guess you could say that.”

  “Or not.”

  “No, not really.”

  The two looked at each other a moment, the silence stretching between them. Gwen cleared her throat.

  “You’re not going to try and eat me, are you?”

  “No.” The Trekkie shook his head as he said it, the glass crunching beneath him.

  Leaning down, Gwen grabbed one of his hands and lifted him to his feet. Once standing, he brushed off his uniform, pausing for a moment to inspect a fresh gouge in the material and the flesh beneath.

  “Oh well. Guess it can’t be helped now,” he said to himself. He smoothed the material back into place and looked at Gwen. His lips pressed together tightly. His brow furrowed.

  “Um, sorry about all this.” He spread his hands out, indicating the ruined room.

  Gwen looked around. There were dents and holes in the walls where Clarence had pounded his fist. Romero was lying very still, mewing quietly from time to time. Slimy tracks marked the place where Fara had sat on the counter. Books and DVDs were strewn across the floor, mixing with the glass.

  “Yeah,” she said.

  The Trekkie shrugged, putting his head down and looking defeated. He headed toward the computer desk, one hand outstretched.

  “Wait.”

  The Trekkie turned, his hand only inches from the screen.

  “Why didn’t you try to kill me?”

  “We’re friends, remember?” He lifted an eyebrow and a smile spread across his face. “And I’m full.” His hand flattened itself on the computer monitor and he was gone in a blur of white light and blue glow.

  Safety Boy

  by Eva Glynn Stephens

  I think I must have been about ten years old when I first realized I wasn’t quite like everyone else in Pleasant Valley. Of course, according to the clowns at school who made a game of pushing me into the lockers and donkey punching me in the back of the head, I should have known that all along.

  The first time it happened—and I’ll explain what it is in just a moment, if you can bear with me that long—was the night of my birthday. As a matter of fact, I know it was my tenth birthday because that was the year my aunt sent me a plaid earflap cap and a magnifying glass through the mail. I could really dig on Sherlock Holmes at the time. My parents were great watchers of PBS back then and I became inexorably drawn to the brilliant detective and his faithful sidekick, Watson.

  My own Watson just happened to be a red-haired, freckle-faced kid named Thomas Horr, whose last name, as you might imagine, caused him a great deal of problems. He had large buck teeth and lived down the road from me. To add to the suffering of a tremendous, rabbit-like overbite and being cursed with a wretched last name, Thomas also had terrible eyesight and fought chronic hay fever, even in the dead of winter. He always came armed with pockets full of soggy, wadded-up tissues.

  So, anyhow, there I was at the tender age of ten, standing in front of McCoy Funeral Home, a rambling baby-blue Victorian house with gingerbread trim and white wraparound porch on Aster Lane, where my family occupied the third floor. I peered at some brown autumn leaves through my brand new magnifying glass—just a scrawny kid with scabbed-over knobs for knees,
totally unaware that I would soon encounter my first vampire.

  ***

  My parents had recently given me a bright blue, ten-speed bicycle, but learning to use the hand brakes had proven more of a challenge than I’d bargained for. I’d been flipped over the handlebars so many times that my mother, terrified that I’d knock my brains loose, bought me a hard helmet with an elasticized chin strap and insisted that I wear it, even while looking at the bike. The helmet itself, bright yellow with black racing stripes, wouldn’t have been so terrible, but my mother had plastered it with round, red reflectors. Keep in mind this was 1982, when nobody, except mentally challenged kids, wore protective head gear. Hell, back then, most average, all-American kids were encouraged to play outside until dark—sometimes in traffic. The helmet earned me the title of “Safety Boy.”

  When I told my mother about it, she shrugged, unconcerned, and took her pot roast out of the oven. It was burned and dry-looking—my mother was a crappy cook. “You will either wear the helmet, Brian, or you can park your bicycle in the garage and walk to school. The decision is yours. I won’t have a head injury on my conscience. Besides, I don’t think the helmet is really so awful, do you?”

  That was easy for her to say. My mother, who shellacked her big, frosted hair with Aqua Net hairspray and wore nothing that didn’t come armed with six-inch-wide shoulder pads, didn’t need to wear a helmet. She could have taken a tumble down six flights of stairs, gotten up and brushed herself off, and gone about her business, shielded by her extra-hold hair products and ugly spangled sweaters.

  When I grew tired of examining leaves, I wheeled my bike out of the garage and tossed my magnifying glass in the wire basket hanging between the curved handlebars. My mother was watching from the window, so I put on my helmet, not bothering to take off my plaid birthday cap first. The hat wasn’t really like Sherlock’s, but I had a pretty good imagination back then, so I pretended that it was. I jumped onto my bike, standing on the pedals to make it go, and wobbled my way to the Horr house.

  Thomas sat on his front porch eating a banana as he thumbed through a comic book. He grinned and pushed up his heavy, black-framed eyeglasses as I parked my Schwinn at the curb. He ran down the sidewalk, raised his right hand in greeting, and split his fingers into a wide V-shape, Vulcan style. That cat idolized Mr. Spock. “Live long and prosper,” he wheezed, the thick lenses of his glasses glinting in the late-afternoon sunlight.

  “Hey, Thomas.” I threw my helmet in my bike basket and he whistled appreciatively.

  “Radical hat! Is it new?”

  “Yep. Got it for my birthday.”

  “Tubular. Can I try it on?”

  “Sure.”

  As Thomas pulled my earflap hat down over his flaming hair, I produced the magnifying glass and passed it to him with an air of superiority.

  He gazed through it, and then held it up to his mouth and grinned. At such magnified proportions, his front teeth were terrifying.

  “Wanna search for clues?” he asked, his hot, banana breath fogging the magnifying glass.

  “Sure.”

  I was generous enough to allow him to be Sherlock, and I tagged along as the intelligent, but often overlooked, Watson. After about twenty minutes of looking for clues and talking with really bad British accents, Thomas and I grew bored, so I pocketed the magnifying glass and he handed over my earflap cap, which I pulled on, and said, “What should we do now?”

  “Let’s go over to your house and see if your dad brought any new corpses home.”

  “Nah. I’m not supposed to do that anymore. I got in big trouble the last time.”

  When you’re raised in a funeral home, there are two ways of dealing with it: you either live in fear, knowing that you reside with the dead, or you have a natural (and somewhat morbid) curiosity about the dead. I fell into the second category.

  My dad’s prep room, where he dolled up the dead before they were put on display in the viewing room, was located in the basement where I was strictly forbidden to go. My dad didn’t like me to nose around and gawk at the stiffs lying on the padded tables until they were made up, coiffed, positioned properly in their satin-lined caskets, and dressed. Only when they had been wheeled into the softly-lit, flower-scented viewing room was I allowed to stand at the sides of the caskets and peek at the shells of human life.

  “This is death, son,” he said, his hand resting on my shoulder, “and it’s a natural part of the life cycle.”

  It looked far from natural to me. Flesh, once warm and pliant, had grown hard and waxy and inexplicably yellow; mannequin-like hands were folded primly at the waist and heads were tilted at odd angles. No, none of it seemed natural, but it all seemed quite interesting.

  Thomas and I decided to go down to the basement one afternoon. My father kept it well-lit and well-ventilated, and as we reached the bottom step, a cool breeze blew against our flushed faces and ruffled Thomas’s hair. Always a mouth-breather, he began to pant, both excited and frightened about what we were planning to do.

  I leapt off the landing and glanced back at him. “Well? You coming?”

  “Sure, sure I am,” he wheezed. “Hell yeah.”

  I noticed that Thomas didn’t seem as enthused about the basement as he had when we were upstairs, and he didn’t jump from the landing like I had. He sort of tiptoed.

  But his fears soon subsided when he realized that, aside from the holding and prep rooms, the basement was pretty typical with its white-painted concrete walls and black and white tile floors. My father’s office was down there along with a laundry room with its own half-bath.

  The trouble began when we found Mrs. McCarthy in the holding room.

  She had been the meanest senior citizen on our street. She didn’t like kids and had been known to turn the hose on us if we got near the edge of her lawn. She had a drawn-up, wrinkled face, and her tiny prune mouth was always set in disapproval. She yelled a lot. None of us kids on Aster Lane were all that sorry to see her buy the farm.

  Mrs. McCarthy lay on a table, covered to the neck with a white sheet, her iron-gray hair wild and uncombed. Thomas crept forward, pushing up his glasses, and whistled. “Check it out, Bri,” he whispered. “She has her teeth out. Man, she looks like a witch layin’ here, doesn’t she?”

  I had to agree.

  Thomas sniffed, his face wrinkling in disgust. He waved the air in front of him and pinched his stuffed-up nostrils closed. “P.U. She stinks.”

  I didn’t smell anything but Ben-Gay, so I just shrugged.

  “I’m kinda glad she’s dead.” Thomas leaned down and yelled, “Did you hear me, Mrs. McCrabby? I said I’m kinda glad you’re dead.”

  “Ssh. My mom might hear you.”

  Thomas didn’t say anything else, but he nosed around Mrs. McCarthy, poking and prodding at her. He lifted the sheet for a quick peek at what lay beneath it and grimaced. “Yuck. You should see her boobs. They’re really long.” His homely, freckled face broke into a grin and he pulled one limp, wrinkled, liver-spotted, blue-veined arm from beneath the sheet. He gave it a wiggle, and the old girl’s arthritic hand with the silver dollar knuckles flopped lifelessly as if she were giving a jaunty wave. “You there! Young man,” Thomas screeched in a high-pitched falsetto. “Hi! Hi! Stay offa my grass!”

  I tried to make him stop, but I was laughing too hard.

  And that’s when my dad walked in.

  My mother freaked out when she found out what had happened in the basement. She acted as if Thomas and I had been caught in the act of necrophilia—or something even worse, if you can dig that. She sent Thomas home, and that was when my father came back into the room wearing his somber, dour funeral director face and gave me a dull, long-winded speech about respecting the dead. I was grounded and had my Atari taken away. I missed out on a lot of Frogger and Donkey Kong that week.

  Mrs. Horr stepped onto the porch. She was short and sort of fat with hair the exact shade of Thomas’s. “Brian,” she shouted, “your mother just
called. She said you need to go home for dinner now.”

  “Okay!” I reached for my helmet and put it on, mounting the Schwinn. “See you tomorrow, Thomas.”

  He gave me the sign of the Vulcan and sneezed.

  “Don’t forget to ask your mom if you can spend the night tomorrow.”

  “I won’t.” Thomas blew his nose into a light-blue Kleenex. “See you in the morning, pal.”

  “See ya.”

  I pedaled off, front tire weaving and wobbling, as the setting sun reflected off my helmet.

  ***

  The late September night was warm, so my mother had opened my bedroom window while I slept to let in some air. I’m not sure what pulled me from my deep, dreamless sleep, but I woke up just after midnight. I rolled over, frowning and squinting in the bright, silver moonlight that flooded my bedroom with its gleaming film of shadows and light. The night air had grown colder and my Star Wars curtains were flapping wildly in the breeze.

  Somebody was standing by the window.

  I sat straight up in bed, earflap cap askew, and opened my mouth to scream. My vocal cords seemed to be frozen and I could produce nothing more than a small, high-pitched, “Hee!”

  The man standing by the open window smiled, showing off a pair of long canine teeth that flashed in the moonlight like two pieces of finely honed ivory. He was wearing a navy blue pinstriped suit, white dress shirt, and a carefully knotted red tie. His hair, an unbecoming artificial shade of black, was slicked back from a sharp widow’s peak and lay tightly against his head. The man looked a lot like Bela Lugosi, and as my bulging, fearful eyes grew more accustomed to the shadows, I began to see that he also looked a lot like Mr. Carpenter, who had taught fourth grade math until he’d dropped over from a heart attack.

  My dad had handled Mr. Carpenter’s death just days before. The old codger had been planted in the Pleasant Valley Cemetery just as the substitute teacher was reviewing nines on the multiplication table with his giddy, beaming pupils. My mind told me that Mr. Carpenter could not possibly be standing in my bedroom wearing the burial clothes that my old man had dressed him in, but my eyes told me something else.