Best New Zombie Tales (Vol. 2)

by Youers, Rio

  The ocean beckoned, clean and pure. Nightmares breathed at his back. There was nothing to hold him, this time. The sea called, and for what it was worth, he would answer. Ahead, the ship loomed, a huge, shadowy form on the nearly calm water. It had never looked so good. Turning the throttle to full, he roared into the night. Behind him, the darkness thickened and closed like the final pages of a bad book.

  He was going home.

  The Third Option

  DEREK GUNN

  “I fucking hate dead people.” Deputy William Boyle whined as he reached for his hat.

  Outside the wind howled and threw sand against the windows of the small jail, the sound crackling like bacon sizzling on a pan. “I mean why can’t we just put them back in the ground where they belong?”

  Sheriff Amos Carter waited impatiently for his deputy and tried to ignore the pounding in his head. Boyle was a good man but inexperienced. He also asked way too many questions but he had just become a father yesterday and they had celebrated far too much the previous night. He decided he would allow him a little leeway, but only as much as his throbbing head would tolerate, and his limit was fast approaching.

  “Now, Will,” Carter sighed, “you know as well as I do that the Governor has ordered that these dead folk be left alone until they can decide whether they have a legal right to walk around.”

  “And what if they decide that they don’t?” Boyle pressed him.

  “Then,” Carter sighed and slapped his thigh impatiently, “you can put them back in the ground. Now hurry up. We have to let him know about our town rules before he goes and breaks any of ’em.”

  “I’m coming,” he pouted, “but I still can’t figure out what the good Lord was thinking ’bout when he sent ’em back to clutter up the place.”

  “It had nothing to do with the Lord’s work as you well know,” Carter pushed the younger man out the door where his startled cry was ripped from his mouth by the wind.

  The day was young yet and the sun was still climbing in the sky. Sand swirled chaotically around the two men and forced them to pull their bandanas up over their noses and mouths. Carter cursed as his eyes were assaulted by the sand and he hunched up further as the wind snapped at him. It was June. Normally the sun would already be hot enough to fry an egg but the sand was so thick after a dry month, that the wind had whipped it up easily and it was blocking most of the heat. He squinted upwards but could only see a vague outline of the sun through the storm, and the weak glow cast the town in an eerie diffused light.

  The two men hurried over towards the saloon and Carter was thankful that the storm cut off any further questions that Boyle might have had. The whole subject of the dead walking around was confusing enough to him without having to come up with answers for an over-eager deputy as well.

  Of course it would be easier to just kill them all, but one of the buggers had petitioned the Governor that the dead still had rights. He had argued that the fact that they no longer breathed did not necessarily change their legal status and the Governor’s legal experts did not have any counter to that argument. So, until the lawyers got their act together they would have to put up with their share of visitors, although few of them came this far upstate.

  It had all started two years ago as an act of final defiance by an Indian Shaman before his tribe had been kicked off their land. Nobody knew for certain what had happened. The accepted version was that an Indian Shaman had put a curse on the white man stating that ‘the dead would rise and ravage that which he held most dear’. Carter assumed that the Shaman had meant for the dead to kill the living but something had gone wrong. The dead did crave that which the white man held most dear, there was no argument about that, it was just that the Shaman had miscalculated on the white man’s priorities. It wasn’t life the white man held most precious. Out here in the west, it was gold men lusted after. And gold meant power.

  Of course some idiot had gone and killed the Shaman in the meantime so the curse could not be reversed. So, for now at least, they were stuck with the dead folk.

  The two men reached the wooden boardwalk that stretched from Tracy’s Hardware all the way up to the hotel. The saloon was about half way along, past a barber shop, a few houses and the doctor’s office. The path boasted a wooden canopy so they were shielded from the brunt of the storm as they continued walking. Unfortunately this also meant that it afforded Boyle the opportunity to launch into another question and, as if on cue, he did just that.

  “It’s kind’a weird don’t you think?”

  “What’s that?” Carter rolled his eyes and reminded himself that Boyle was the only able bodied man in the town willing to work for the wages that the state paid.

  “This gold thing.”

  The dead craved gold and needed it to survive. They needed it as surely as man needed food.

  “Is there anything in particular or is it everything in general that you find weird?”

  Well why do they drink it?”

  Carter could understand the young man’s confusion. He had been incredulous himself when he had heard it. He had since found out that hundreds of years ago Kings and Queens in Europe frequently took gold in the same fashion, believing that anything so expensive must be good for them. The problem now was that the living also coveted gold, and so trouble had begun almost as soon as the dead’s cravings became common knowledge.

  Carter sighed and stopped. Boyle didn’t notice for a moment and continued on and had to hurry back. He smiled sheepishly. “Look. These things are dead. If we left them alone they’d eventually rot away and solve all our problems. Unfortunately that Shaman worked some weird shit and gold slows their rotting. And before you ask I don’t know how.” Carter put his hand up to enforce his statement. “Anyway their teeth ain’t as strong as they used to be so they have to take it in a drink or as a handful of finely shaved dust.”

  Carter had had enough questions. “Bill,” he placed a shoulder on the young man’s shoulders. “I’ll handle this, you go on over to Muriel in the hotel and let her know that the Governor will be here later today and no doubt he’ll want his usual suite.”

  “That’s the fourth time this month,” Boyle grinned lasciviously. “Those bedsprings must be bust by now.”

  “The Governor’s sexual antics are no concern of yours,” Cater admonished him and then grinned. “Mind you keep your mouth shut though, if his wife finds out he’ll probably fire us just for spite.”

  The younger man grinned and headed off towards the hotel giving Carter a moment to collect his thoughts before he entered the saloon.

  * * *

  He pushed open the battered swinging doors to the saloon and winced as the hinges creaked and sent pain stabbing through his already delicate head. He stood for a moment and breathed a sigh of relief as he brushed dust and grit from his clothes. Outside, the town church began summoning the faithful to worship and the incessant tolling of the bells reverberated painfully in his head.

  He looked around the saloon taking in his surroundings in a practiced glance. He hadn’t survived twenty years as a lawman by being stupid and he had long ago perfected the ability to read the occupants in a room by their stance, or the look on their faces when he entered a room, even when he was suffering from a hangover. Long slabs of wood lay on top of numerous barrels and dominated the room in front of him. The wooden planks acted as a bar until the new one arrived from St. Louis. The owner had promised the town a beautiful mahogany bar, with brass fitting, though Carter would miss this beer-stained monstrosity when it went, it had a certain charm. Large ornate oil lamps hung from a low ceiling and they burned merrily and cast deep shadows into the corners of the room. Tables lay scattered around the room in a chaotic jumble that seemed to have no plan other than to fit as many customers as possible into a relatively small space.

  His eyes were drawn immediately to three Mexicans in the corner. The three men leaned in on the table conspiratorially with their elbows on the edges. Their quick, furtive glances
towards Peterson behind the bar intimated some illicit activity, though their harsh accented voices and guttural laughter were far too loud to suggest anything he needed to be involved in.

  They were probably looking for somewhere to ride out the storm and had their own bottle hidden under the table rather than pay the exorbitant prices Peterson charged. Their clothes were simple and of poor quality and they did not appear to have weapons of any kind. He eyes continued to scan the room.

  It was early yet so only two girls prowled the floor. Their gaudy colors and heavy makeup were more suited to the dim lighting of the evening. The morning’s brightness, though somewhat subdued from the storm, still illuminated their tired faces and lusterless hair more than they probably would have liked. They looked up with hope in their eyes as the doors creaked and announced his entry but they quickly lost interest when they saw him. The ‘moral majority’ in the town constantly put him under pressure to run the girls out but the law still tolerated their profession. Until that changed he could do nothing, though he did make sure that he was seen as neutral and that meant keeping his distance from both groups.

  John Peterson stood behind the bar in his usual boiled white shirt and brocaded vest. He sported an over-large moustache as if to compensate for the lack of hair on his head and his ruddy complexion hinted at an addiction to the liquor he sold. He rubbed furiously at a glass and moved his head towards the far corner of the bar. Carter nodded and glanced over towards the indicated table near the window where a lone man sat quietly.

  He spent another moment casually brushing dust from his clothes and used the time to look the stranger over. The man’s boots and jeans were almost the same color as each other, with the natural fading of the materials and the dirt encrusted liberally over them both. He wore a dark blue shirt of good quality, though the material was worn in places and the collar was frayed. A black vest with three silver buttons, dulled from lack of attention, completed the man’s wardrobe. He also wore a matching black hat that cast a shadow over his face but Carter could see that he was relatively clean-shaven and that his hair was still quite short, the ends only curling slightly above the frayed collar.

  Not dead that long then, he mused as he continued to study the figure. It had become somewhat of an accepted method of judging the duration of a dead person’s existence. Hair seemed to grow for quite a while after death so many of them had long hair and uneven, scraggly beards. The dead seemed to have no interest in hygiene after death so most of them smelled foul, somewhere between rotten meat and an open sewer, and their hair was usually matted and infested with all kinds of parasites.

  Carter came to a stop at the table. The man moved his head slowly and regarded him with a cool appraisal of his own. The man had a strong jaw line but his desiccated skin was pulled too taut over the bone. This made the man’s face angular rather than strong. His nose seemed too long and narrow with the flesh having receded in death, giving him a hawkish appearance that threw shadows over his already sunken eye sockets. His eyes bore the hallmark of the dead. Skin stretched tightly at the sides making them appear as if they were constantly squinting. The high cheekbones, where the bone protruded and stretched the skin around his mouth, gave the stranger an insane-looking grin. It was unnerving to look at someone who grinned constantly at you. But it was the eyes that held him, as they always did.

  They were entirely yellow with a small bead of black in the centre of each. There was no sense of life in those eyes as they regarded him, nothing but dark ovals of purest black.

  The recent Civil and Indian wars had left thousands dead and the graveyards full to capacity. So, when the dead had begun to rise, there had been no shortage of corpses. Suddenly towns and cities were filled with ambling corpses that, while they seemed to pose no immediate threat to the population, did make everyone very uncomfortable. The first response had been to kill them. Thousands died, again, but the dead did not simply stand still and let it happen. Once they got over the shock of finding themselves walking around, the dead began to regain their wits and began to protect themselves. They were also bloody difficult to kill. They could survive almost any wound and only finally died when their brains were destroyed.

  The figure nodded to him and Carter nodded back as he finished his appraisal. The man might be dirty and rotting but the two colts strapped to his sides were in beautiful condition. Even the holster shone with a recent oiling and the weapon’s worn bone handles testified to long years of use. He also noted that both guns were tied low on the man’s thigh. A gunfighter, Carter cursed his luck. He was not slow on the draw himself but he just knew as he looked into the stranger’s eyes that he would be no match for this man. Dead or not, this man exuded competence. The dead tended to move more slowly than they had in life––something to do with the blood stagnating in their veins he had been told––but this corpse did not look slow. He had moved with an easy grace when he turned to face Carter and not the exaggerated slowness of many of his kind. Carter also noted that the man had cut his fingernails short to accommodate a fast draw and he felt his heart beat faster.

  People had begun to grow worried when the dead began to defend themselves. It was assumed that, strange as it was, the phenomena was still an isolated incident and once they killed off the walking corpses, things would return to normal. But once they realized that even those who recently died rose again, they knew things had gone to hell. The government had been forced to call for a cessation of hostilities on both sides until something could be done.

  The most popular solution seemed to be that a reservation, similar to that put in place for the Indians, would be provided and everyone seemed to calm down while plans were laid. The subsequent discovery that the dead needed gold to survive threw everything into chaos though and hostilities broke out again. It had been at that point that one of the dead had written a legal paper citing that the dead still had rights and as such should have access to all the protection that the law could provide. The paper also called for the return of all the dead’s assets.

  The banks disagreed. The banks had gotten used to keeping the money and assets that the dead left behind them, where no beneficiaries were involved, and they did not want to have to give these assets back. Cases were brought against the banks by a growing number of dead people but until the question of their basic rights was addressed there could be no decision on who owned the money. This of course meant the dead had no means of purchasing the gold they required to survive. That left the dead with few choices. If they wanted to continue to exist they only had two options; either they earned their money or they would have to steal it.

  Most of the living would not employ the dead so many of them were forced into crime to survive. It was this fact that branded all of them as criminals. This had the result of the dead being shunned and violence had a habit of breaking out regularly when they came to town. While Carter was not allowed to simply throw the dead out of his jurisdiction, just because they were dead, he did make sure to warn any that did come through that he took a dim view of anyone causing trouble in his town.

  He took a deep breath and addressed the man.

  “Morning,” Carter managed finally, pleased that his voice didn’t break. The corpse nodded back, his mouth still grinning insanely at him. As a law officer he was not allowed to merely kill the stranger on a whim. Until the lawyers ruled one way or the other, this corpse had as many rights as any of the town’s citizens. His hands were tied. Only the elite Texas Rangers could kill without recourse, and they hardly ever came this far north.

  The Governor had made the Rangers exempt in an attempt to mollify his richest supporters. He had dressed it up in fancy language extolling the Ranger’s proud history and supporting their judgment when on missions. It just wasn’t practical, he had stated in his address to the papers, to force these men to check in before they acted. It would be suicide for these trusted men to be second-guessed for every decision.

  The result was that the Rangers had become
untouchable. But Carter had heard stories of Rangers combing the state and quietly executing the dead. It seemed that the Governor was making sure that whatever may be decided by the Government about the issue of the dead’s rights, that it would not have an impact on the Governor’s own finances.

  The stories were becoming more and more frequent of Ranger death-squads sweeping the state trying to accomplish their mission before the lawyers came to any decisions. Carter didn’t really care one way or the other. The dead were dead. Who cared if they were put back in the ground? Carter knew more than most about the current situation because the Governor’s mistress lived in his town. Each time he came to visit Carter made sure that he got an update from the Governor’s bodyguards.

  Carter shifted on his feet nervously. Most of the dead he dealt with were easy prey and he could intimidate them easily. But this corpse seemed far too confident. He had never seen such confidence in the dead before, and it worried him. He cursed himself for letting Boyle go on to the hotel. He could have done with the younger man’s support.

  Outside the bells finally stopped tolling and he sighed in relief as the pounding in his head began to subside. The sun flared briefly outside in momentary relief from the wind and its glare blazed through the glass and reflected off something on the man’s chest.

  Carter frowned as he blinked and then the glare suddenly stopped as the wind picked up and sand once again drew its veil over the sun. He studied the man’s chest and saw that there was a badge there of some sort. Was he a lawman too? That would certainly make things easier. A lawman, even a dead one, would understand his predicament. He looked harder at the badge; the edges were not pointed like his own and it was more rounded just like…