Levels: Fantastic and Macabre Stories

by Nathan Shumate

  All contents © 2015 by Nathan Shumate

  Smashwords Edition License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Cover photograph by Janusz Gawron, freeimages.com

  Cover design by Nathan Shumate

  Published in print and ebook by Cold Fusion Media

  http://www.coldfusionmedia.us

  Table of Contents

  Somewhere in Nebraska or Maybe Colorado

  Bookmobile Day

  An Eldritch Correspondence

  The Burial of the Dead

  Party Favors

  Forbidden Aisles

  Love Among the Kryil

  Special Guest Stars

  The Night Children

  On the Demise of Rory Calloran

  The Flooding of River Home

  Other Duties

  Story in a Bar

  The Straightest Road in Maine

  In the Plantation House

  Trading With the Ruks

  Wait

  Credits and Acknowledgments

  Somewhere in Nebraska or Maybe Colorado

  A decapitated zombie is actually good company—just the head, not the body. The way I figure it, when whatever it is brings them back, it’s their meat and muscle that makes them mean. Maybe it hurts or something. Whatever it is, it’s stronger than their brains, and they end up shuffling around and moaning without words and biting people, and that’s nasty. But when you get rid of the whole rest of the body, then the head can be... not “normal,” exactly, but it doesn’t get all moany and chompy, and there’s enough brainpower left that it can actually be well-behaved. I didn’t figure all that out by myself, but I heard some and I guessed some. I’m good at figuring things out.

  That’s why I had two zombie heads strung on the back of my backpack to keep me company. Plus, they smelled like zombies, so other zombies—the moany chompy kind—mostly left me alone. Like I say, not the best traveling buddies, but every damned place in America smells like zombies now, practically, and anyway some days I can’t smell them above myself. Candy was easy to tie on; she’s got long hair, so I just tied that around one of the straps. Bud was a little harder, because he had short hair and was half-bald anyway. I finally discovered that ear cartilage is surprisingly strong, so I strung a rope through loops in both ears and put him up beside Candy. They’re not the people I’d most want to travel with in the whole wide world, but they’re someone to talk to, and since I could go weeks without seeing another living person—and then they’d shoot at me, like as not—it kept me from going crazy. At least as far as I can tell. They used to call me “Crazy Mary” sometimes. Now nobody called me anything except the heads, and they just called me “Mary,” or sometimes just “Hey.” I don’t know what Bud and Candy’s real names were; I guess coming back after you die kind of messes with your memories, or maybe it’s having your head chopped off. So I named them, because I had to call them something.

  I’d been slogging west across Nebraska, though I could have been into Colorado by now, or maybe even Wyoming, and it’s been peaceful and quiet and boring. The roads were mostly still good, but walking on the asphalt day in and day out can be murder on the feet—and I was a waitress, so I know aching feet—so sometimes I liked to just cross some of the fields that are all going back to long grass. It was easy to imagine the buffalo coming back and covering the whole land from horizon to horizon with fuzzy brown, if there are any buffalo left to start having little buffaloes.

  And Bud said, “Hey, Mary. Where are we?” His voice sounded like a grunt because he had no lungs, so he just grunted in the back of his throat. Candy did, too. I had closed up the bottoms of both their necks with tied-on plastic bags, and sometimes when the wind was blowing they sounded like kazoos, but I didn’t do it for the sound; I just didn’t want their crap smearing on my backpack.

  Now, the answer hadn’t changed in days, but Bud kept asking me. I think his brains were finally rotting. I just said, “We’re in the late, great United States of America, Bud,” and he thought on that. Or at least he shut up. Bud was more talkative than Candy. Candy only spoke when she had something to say.

  Which was now, I guess. “Where we headed?” she said.

  “West, like I told you,” I said.

  “We’re already west. Gonna keep going until you hit the ocean?”

  I didn’t really want to answer, because where I wanted to go, that’s a sincere thing, not just making conversation, and I didn’t feel like discussing sincere things with a couple of dead heads. I was just thinking that, in all this land of robbers and raiders and the living dead and the dead dead, there’d got to be somebody somewhere who’d got their act together. Someone who didn’t let themselves go to hell when the dead started rising. Me, my money was on Utah. Mormons out there, they knew how to come together and get things done. It’d been a couple of centuries since they wagon-trained it to the Rockies, but I bet they still knew how to keep their crap together and make life worth living. And if I had to join their religion to be a part of that, I was game.

  But I didn’t want to say all that because I might have honestly started crying when I realized I’m telling to a couple of rotting heads strung up on my backpack, so what I said instead is, “Hey—some of have to do the walking, and some of us have to breathe too, and all this talk ain’t helping.” So then they shut up, and I kept going west and a little bit south, keeping the road in sight but walking on the softer fields.

  When the sun started setting ahead of us and getting in my eyes, I went back to the road, cutting off whole armfuls of dried grasses and weeds with my machete as I went. On the blacktop, where I wasn’t going to start a huge prairie fire, I twisted the grass into ropes and started a little fire to warm up some ravioli left over from that morning’s can. I had about four cans of food left, an unopened box of crackers that I sure hoped was still good, and about a quart of water.

  I unhitched Bud and Candy from my pack and propped them up on the opposite side of the fire. Bud saw me take a swig of water and smacked what was left of his lips.

  “My mouth is dry,” he said.

  “Yup. Has been for months, Bud. Ever since you died. Gonna be like that till you fall apart. You should be used to it by now.”

  He clacked his tongue around his mouth experimentally. His tongue looked like the leather tongue of my dad’s old Sunday shoes.

  Candy said, “Mary, can I talk to you a minute?”

  I said sure and picked her up by the hair and walked farther from the fire where Bud was still clicking his tongue.

  “Bud’s getting stupid,” Candy said.

  “Yeah, I was afraid of that.” Whatever brings the dead back and keeps them going for so long isn’t permanent. The brain takes a while to go sour—the whole nervous system is like that, I think—but his was finally turning to pickle juice.

  Candy said, “He’s going blind, too.”

  “Really?” I said. “I hadn’t noticed anything. How can you tell?”

  “Sometimes we talk, he and I, when you’re walking and don’t want to talk to us. I notice things, and he can’t see them.”

  For some reason, that struck me as funny: the two zombie heads, dangling from the back of my pack, shooting the breeze in grunts quiet enough that I can’t hear ’em. It was funny, but I kept
it all inside. Candy wouldn’t have understood. Even with zombies that aren’t moany and chompy, a sense of humor is one thing that just doesn’t survive death too well. Believe me.

  I took Candy back to the fire—just glowing bits of hay now—and stomped it all out, then unrolled my blanket on the shoulder of the road with all of the unburnt grass beneath it for padding, and Bud and Candy facing opposite directions on the road, keeping watch through the night because the dead don’t sleep anyway. Though I guessed Bud wasn’t going to do much good if Candy was right.

  ***

  In the morning I didn’t bother lighting a fire. One of the cans I had was peaches, so I opened that and ate half the can cold. It left my fingers sticky, and I could only spare an extra teaspoon of water to rinse them. I needed to find some more to drink soon, and real luxury would have been to have enough to wash my feet and my armpits and the back of my neck.

  After I ate I crimped the can shut as best I could, rolled up my blanket, strung Bud and Candy back onto my backpack, and started off down the road, staying on the blacktop for a while just for variety. I’d been walking for a couple of hours straight down the yellow line when Candy said, “Mary, look to your right.”

  I looked, and I could see a few trees way out on the plain, and maybe between the trees I thought I could see a house.

  “Damn. Good thing you saw that, or I would have trotted right by it.”

  Bud said, “What do you see?”

  Candy ignored him and said, “I don’t know if I can see a house or just an old barn, but the trees mean there might be water.”

  “I see it! I see it!” said Bud.

  “You can’t see anything, so shut up,” said Candy.

  So I left the road and hiked across country, through a couple of old tumbled-down barbed-wire fences, and maybe an hour later we got to the trees, and there was a house, with a couple of small barns and outbuildings around it. And the place looked good, like someone’d been keeping it up a little. There was a small corral or pen by one barn with no grass growing in it, and it smelled like sheep, although I didn’t see any. Only one window in the two story farm house was broken, and it’d been covered up with cardboard or something from the inside.

  The trees had been planted long ago to separate the lawn from the fields, and I stood at the edge of the ring of trees and shouted, “Hello! Hello in there!” And then I listened for an answer. I wasn’t impatient; if someone was living there, they could have been checking me out from an upstairs window, maybe even sighting me with a rifle, and I didn’t want to do anything that would give anyone reason to decide against me.

  After a few minutes I called again, and waited. And then I called a third time, and waited. And I figured that if anyone was going to hear me, they’d have heard me, so I started walking, slow and gentle, up the rutted dirt lane to the farm house.

  I could see before I stepped onto the front porch that the door was wide open, and I started to lose some of my hope, because nobody but nobody in the world now leaves their front door open, no matter how far out in Nebraska or wherever they live. I got closer and I saw that the door had been locked from the inside with a heavy bolt and was pried open so hard that the bolt tore away part of the frame and bent it out so it couldn’t close again. Someone had been living here up until recently, but someone else got in and took what they wanted. Raiders.

  I don’t blame raiders; everyone’s got to do something to get by, and anybody holed up and hoarding what they can isn’t being any more Christian than those that are out stealing what they need. If there ain’t enough to go around, then there ain’t no right or wrong in trying to get what you gotta have to live. I even tried to join up with some raiders a few months ago, but they laughed at me, this bunch of ex-cons and gangsters, and hit me and made me leave, even though I was the toughest damned truck stop waitress you ever seen. They never saw me the time I took down the meth head with the knife with nothing on my side but a coffee pot. Tied the poor kid into knots and had him begging for mercy without even breaking a sweat. That’s why they called me “Crazy Mary” for a little while after that. Other folks wanted to call me “Mary Warrior Princess,” but that one didn’t stick; no princess had thighs like I had. They’ve slimmed down a lot since, though.

  So raiders meant that the kitchen would probably be empty, and I was right. The cupboards had been cleaned out. But there was still furniture in the living room, including a chair that I swear was softer than any chair I’d ever sat in, before or after everything changed. I only meant to sit in it for a second, just to try it out, but it felt so good that I must have been there twenty minutes. I had slung my backpack on the floor before I sat, and Candy just watched me while Bud made retarded comments about the wallpaper.

  When I realized that I was in danger of falling asleep I forced myself to get up, and went outside to see if there was a well or a pump. Right behind the house was a bright red pump set in a concrete slab almost hidden by long grass, and I almost cried when I heaved on the handle and water came out after only a few tries. I tried to get my mouth under while I pumped, but of course that’s practically impossible with a long-handled pump, so I ran back inside to grab a bucket I had seen from the kitchen. I took it back outside, pumped the bucket full, and then lifted it up and had a good long drink from it, and then washed my hands and rubbed my wet hands all over my face. I may have been crying, or that may just have been the well water.

  I took the bucket back inside, found the bathroom, put the plug in the tub, and dumped the water in. It took me six more trips to get enough water for a bath. I didn’t care that it was cold; I enjoyed the shock of climbing in and sitting down. There wasn’t a cloth or soap, so I just rinsed out one of my socks really good and used that to scrub every inch of my body I could reach. When I was done, the tub looked like it was full of old dishwater.

  I got out, drained the tub, put some of my clothes back on, and took the bucket back out for another couple of fills. Then I took my clothes back off, put them in the water in the tub, and stomped on them, trying to work out some of the dirt and sweat. Then I wrapped myself up in my sleeping blanket—funny how I didn’t want to be naked clear out in the middle of nowhere, and especially not in front of Bud and Candy—and took my wet clothes out to the back porch, where the sun was shining down. I stretched my clothes on the rail to dry.

  Back in the house, I went upstairs and found one bed with a mattress on a bedframe, but no blankets. They might have been grabbed by the same raiders that took the food. It didn’t matter. I lay down on the mattress in my sleeping blanket and sighed and felt weird and alien all over, like I didn’t remember what it felt like anymore to be clean and lying down on something that wasn’t dirt. It was only about noon, but I fell asleep right away and slept most of the afternoon.

  When I got up my clothes were mostly dry, so I put them on then hauled my backpack onto the kitchen table so we could have a pow-wow without untying the heads.

  “I think we can stay here until maybe tomorrow,” I said. “But I don’t want to push it. The raiders know about this place, so they could come back here if they need a place to stay or if they remember something else they want, or if they just want to fill up their water.”

  “Where are we, Mary?” said Bud.

  “We’re in farmhouse at the tail end of Nebraska or some damned state,” I said.

  “It’ll probably be good for the night, then take some water and leave tomorrow,” Candy agreed.

  “I just wish I could carry the mattress with me,” I said. “Maybe there’s a small cart or a kids’ wagon in the barns that I can take more stuff with me. At least it won’t be so hard on my shoulders.”

  “I like the wallpaper,” Bud said.

  “We could ride in the wagon,” Candy said. “I don’t know how much we weigh, but I bet we get pretty heavy after twenty miles.”

  “You got that right,” I said.

  Bud said, “Where are we, Mary?”

  Candy rolled her eyes,
which is about the most hideous thing a zombie can do, and made me remember that if I hadn’t cut her body away from her head, she’d be just as chompy and moany as all the rest of them.

  I said, “We’re in the late, great United States of America, Bud.”

  ***

  So I decided to check out the barns right then, grab anything good that was left behind, get it all together tonight, and then set out bright and early tomorrow. If I found a wagon, then the next thing I’d want is something to carry water in, because water’s heavy and I could only carry so much on my back.

  I was walking around the barns, checking them out before going inside, when I heard something like a whimper from the west side of the westernmost building. I pulled out my machete. It could have been nothing, it could have been a kitten, but it also could have been a person, or a dog—when they’ve gone feral, they’re worse than all our bedtime stories about wolves.

  I rounded the corner of the barn, where the sunset was starting to paint everything a burny color, and there he was: a man nailed to the side of the barn like he’d been crucified, except his feet weren’t one on top of the other, they were spread out, so he looked like he’d been caught in the middle of a jumping jack. But there were nails through his feet, and nails through his wrists—huge ten-inch nails with wide rusty heads.

  He saw me, and it took a couple of seconds before he could get his head to turn toward me. His eyes were as sunburned as his stubbly face, bright angry red that practically glowed in the sunset, and oily crusty gunk coated the edges of his eyelids. His lips were cracked like wax. I couldn’t even hear any sound out of him, but I could tell the shapes his mouth was making: “Water.” I had my water bottle slung around my neck—even here with the well, I would have felt naked to leave it behind—so I held it up and let him have a dribble and moisten his mouth, then another swallow that made him choke and cough.