Maddie nodded to show she understood.
“He said, ‘If anything happens to me before this mess is cleaned up, Davey, you and Burt and Orrin take over. Bobby’s a good boy, but I think he may have lost his guts for at least a little while… and you know, sometimes when a man loses his guts, they don’t come back.’”
Maddie nodded again, thinking how grateful she was—how very, very grateful—that she was not a man.
“So then we did it,” Dave said. “We cleaned up the mess.”
Maddie nodded a third time, but this time she must have made some sound, because Dave told her he would stop if she couldn’t bear it; he would gladly stop.
“I can bear it,” she said quietly. “You might be surprised how much I can bear, Davey.” He looked at her quickly, curiously, when she said that, but Maddie had averted her eyes before he could see the secret in them.
Dave didn’t know the secret because no one on Jenny knew. That was the way Maddie wanted it, and the way she intended to keep it. There had been a time when she had, perhaps, in the blue darkness of her shock, pretended to be coping. And then something happened that made her cope. Four days before the island cemetery vomited up its corpses, Maddie Pace was faced with a simple choice: cope or die.
She had been sitting in the living room, drinking a glass of the blueberry wine she and Jack had put up during August of the previous year—a time that now seemed impossibly distant—and doing something so trite it was laughable. She was Knitting Little Things. Booties, in fact. But what else was there to do? It seemed that no one would be going across the reach to the Wee Folks store at the Ellsworth Mall for quite some time.
Something had thumped against the window.
A bat, she thought, looking up. Her needles paused in her hands, though. It seemed that something bigger had moved jerkily out there in the windy dark. The oil lamp was turned up high and kicking too much reflection off the panes for her to be sure. She reached to turn it down and the thump came again. The panes shivered. She heard a little pattering of dried putty falling on the sash. Jack had been planning to reglaze all the windows this fall, she remembered, and then thought, Maybe that’s what he came back for. That was crazy, he was on the bottom of the ocean, but…
She sat with her head cocked to one side, her knitting now motionless in her hands. A little pink bootie. She had already made a blue set. All of a sudden it seemed she could hear so much. The wind. The faint thunder of surf on Cricket Ledge. The house making little groaning sounds, like an elderly woman making herself comfortable in bed. The tick of the clock in the hallway.
“Jack?” she asked the silent night that was now no longer silent. “Is it you, dear?” Then the living-room window burst inward and what came through was not really Jack but a skeleton with a few mouldering strings of flesh hanging from it.
His compass was still around his neck. It had grown a beard of moss.
The wind flapped the curtains in a cloud above him as he sprawled, then got up on his hands and knees and looked at her from black sockets in which barnacles had grown.
He made grunting sounds. His fleshless mouth opened and the teeth chomped down. He was hungry… but this time chicken noodle soup would not serve. Not even the kind that came in the can.
Gray stuff hung and swung beyond those dark barnacle-encrusted holes, and she realized she was looking at whatever remained of Jack’s brain. She sat where she was, frozen, as he got up and came toward her, leaving black kelpy tracks on the carpet, fingers reaching. He stank of salt and fathoms. His hands stretched. His teeth chomped mechanically up and down. Maddie saw he was wearing the remains of the black-and-red-checked shirt she had bought him at L. L. Bean’s last Christmas. It had cost the earth, but he had said again and again how warm it was, and look how well it had lasted, how much of it was left even after being under water all this time.
The cold cobwebs of bone which were all that remained of his fingers touched her throat before the baby kicked in her stomach—for the first time—and her shocked horror, which she had believed to be calmness, fled, and she drove one of the knitting needles into the thing’s eye.
Making horrid thick choking noises that sounded like the suck of a swill pump, he staggered backward, clawing at the needle, while the half-made pink bootie swung in front of the cavity where his nose had been. She watched as a sea slug squirmed from that nasal cavity and onto the bootie, leaving a trail of slime behind it.
Jack fell over the end table she’d gotten at a yard sale just after they had been married—she hadn’t been able to make her mind up about it, had been in agonies about it, until Jack finally said either she was going to buy it for their living room or he was going to give the biddy running the sale twice what she was asking for the goddam thing and then bust it up into firewood with—
—with the—
He struck the floor and there was a brittle, cracking sound as his febrile, fragile form broke in two. The right hand tore the knitting needle, slimed with decaying brain tissue, from his eye-socket and tossed it aside. His top half crawled toward her. His teeth gnashed steadily together.
She thought he was trying to grin, and then the baby kicked again and she remembered how uncharacteristically tired and out of sorts he’d sounded at Mabel Hanratty’s yard-sale that day: Buy it, Maddie, for Chrissake! I’m tired! Want to go home and get m’dinner! If you don’t get a move on, I’ll give the old bat twice what she wants and bust it up for firewood with my—
Cold, dank hand clutching her ankle; polluted teeth poised to bite. To kill her and kill the baby. She tore loose, leaving him with only her slipper, which he chewed on and then spat out.
When she came back from the entry, he was crawling mindlessly into the kitchen—at least the top half of him was—with the compass dragging on the tiles. He looked up at the sound of her, and there seemed to be some idiot question in those black eye-sockets before she brought the ax whistling down, cleaving his skull as he had threatened to cleave the end table.
His head fell in two pieces, brains dribbling across the tile like spoiled oatmeal, brains that squirmed with slugs and gelatinous sea worms, brains that smelled like a woodchuck exploded with gassy decay in a high-summer meadow.
Still his hands clashed and clittered on the kitchen tiles, making a sound like beetles.
She chopped… chopped… chopped.
At last there was no more movement.
A sharp pain rippled across her midsection and for a moment she was gripped by terrible panic: Is it a miscarriage? Am I going to have a miscarriage? But the pain left and the baby kicked again, more strongly than before.
She went back into the living room, carrying an ax that now smelled like tripe.
His legs had somehow managed to stand.
“Jack, I loved you so much,” she said, “but this isn’t you.” She brought the ax down in a whistling arc that split him at the pelvis, sliced the carpet, and drove deep into the solid oak floor beneath.
The legs separated, trembled wildly for almost five minutes, and then began to grow quiet. At last even the toes stopped twitching.
She carried him down to the cellar piece by piece, wearing her oven gloves and wrapping each piece with the insulating blankets Jack had kept in the shed and which she had never thrown away—he and the crew threw them over the pots on cold days so the lobsters wouldn’t freeze.
Once a severed hand closed upon her wrist. She stood still and waited, her heart drumming heavily in her chest, and at last it loosened again. And that was the end of it. The end of him.
There was an unused cistern, polluted, below the house—Jack had been meaning to fill it in. Maddie slid the heavy concrete cover aside so that its shadow lay on the earthen floor like a partial eclipse and then threw the pieces of him down, listening to the splashes. When everything was gone, she worked the heavy cover back into place.
“Rest in peace,” she whispered, and an interior voice whispered back that her husband was resting in pieces, and t
hen she began to cry, and her cries turned to hysterical shrieks, and she pulled at her hair and tore at her breasts until they were bloody, and she thought, I am insane, this is what it’s like to be insa—
But before the thought could be completed, she had fallen down in a faint, and the faint became a deep sleep, and the next morning she felt all right.
She would never tell, though.
Never.
“I can bear it,” she told Dave Eamons again, thrusting aside the image of the knitting needle with the bootie swinging from the end of it jutting out of the kelp-slimed eye-socket of the thing which had once been her husband, and co-creator of the child in her womb. “Really.”
So he told her, perhaps because he had to tell someone or go mad, but he glossed over the worst parts. He told her that they had chainsawed the corpses that absolutely refused to return to the land of the dead, but he did not tell her that some parts had continued to squirm—hands with no arms attached to them clutching mindlessly, feet divorced from their legs digging at the bullet-chewed earth of the graveyard as if trying to run away—and that these parts had been doused with diesel fuel and set afire. Maddie did not have to be told this part. She had seen the pyre from the house.
Later, Gennesault Island’s one firetruck had turned its hose on the dying blaze, although there wasn’t much chance of the fire spreading, with a brisk easterly blowing the sparks off Jenny’s seaward edge. When there was nothing left but a stinking, tallowy lump (and still there were occasional bulges in this mass, like twitches in a tired muscle), Matt Arsenault fired up his old D-9 Caterpillar—above the nicked steel blade and under his faded pillowtick engineer’s cap, Matt’s face had been as white as cottage cheese—and plowed the whole hellacious mess under.
The moon was coming up when Frank took Bob Daggett, Dave Eamons, and Cal Partridge aside. It was Dave he spoke to.
“I knew it was coming, and here it is,” he said.
“What are you talking about, Unc?” Bob asked.
“My heart,” Frank said. “Goddam thing has thrown a rod.”
“Now, Uncle Frank—”
“Never mind Uncle Frank this n Uncle Frank that,” the old man said. “I ain’t got time to listen to you play fiddlyfuck on the mouth-organ. Seen half my friends go the same way. It ain’t no day at the races, but it could be worse; beats hell out of getting whacked with the cancer-stick.
“But now there’s this other sorry business to mind, and all I got to say on that subject is, when I go down I intend to stay down. Cal, stick that rifle of yours in my left ear. Dave, when I raise my left arm, you sock yours into my armpit. And Bobby, you put yours right over my heart. I’m gonna say the Lord’s Prayer, and when I hit amen, you three fellows are gonna pull your triggers at the same time.”
“Uncle Frank—” Bob managed. He was reeling on his heels.
“I told you not to start in on that,” Frank said. “And don’t you dare faint on me, you friggin pantywaist. Now get your country butt over here.”
Bob did.
Frank looked around at the three men, their faces as white as Matt Arsenault’s had been when he drove the ’dozer over men and women he had known since he was a kid in short pants and Buster Browns.
“Don’t you boys frig this up,” Frank said. He was speaking to all of them, but his eye might have been particularly trained on his grandnephew. “If you feel like maybe you’re gonna backslide, just remember I’d’a done the same for any of you.”
“Quit with the speech,” Bob said hoarsely. “I love you, Uncle Frank.”
“You ain’t the man your father was, Bobby Daggett, but I love you, too,” Frank said calmly, and then, with a cry of pain, he threw his left hand up over his head like a guy in New York who has to have a cab in a rip of a hurry, and started in with his last prayer. “Our Father who art in heaven—Christ, that hurts!—hallow’d be Thy name—oh, son of a gun!—Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it… as it…”
Frank’s upraised left arm was wavering wildly now. Dave Eamons, with his rifle socked into the old geezer’s armpit, watched it as carefully as a logger would watch a big tree that looked like it meant to do evil and fall the wrong way. Every man on the island was watching now. Big beads of sweat had formed on the old man’s pallid face. His lips had pulled back from the even, yellowy-white of his Roebuckers, and Dave had been able to smell the Polident on his breath.
“…as it is in heaven!” the old man jerked out. “Lead us not into temptation butdeliverusfromevilohshitonitforeverandeverAMEN!”
All three of them fired, and both Cal Partridge and Bob Daggett fainted, but Frank never did try to get up and walk.
Frank Daggett had meant to stay dead, and that was just what he did.
Once Dave started that story he had to go on with it, and so he cursed himself for ever starting. He’d been right the first time; it was no story for a pregnant woman.
But Maddie had kissed him and told him she thought he had done wonderfully, and that Frank Daggett had done wonderfully, too. Dave went out feeling a little dazed, as if he had just been kissed on the cheek by a woman he had never met before.
In a very real sense, that was true.
She watched him go down the path to the dirt track that was one of Jenny’s two roads and turn left. He was weaving a little in the moonlight, weaving with tiredness, she thought, but reeling with shock, as well. Her heart went out to him… to all of them. She had wanted to tell Dave she loved him and kiss him squarely on the mouth instead of just skimming his cheek with her lips, but he might have taken the wrong meaning from something like that, even though he was bone-weary and she was almost five months pregnant.
But she did love him, loved all of them, because they had gone through hell in order to make this little lick of land forty miles out in the Atlantic safe for her.
And safe for her baby.
“It will be a home delivery,” she said softly as Dave went out of sight behind the dark hulk of the Pulsifers’ satellite dish. Her eyes rose to the moon. “It will be a home delivery… and it will be fine.”
SPARKS FLY UPWARD
by Lisa Morton
Lisa Morton is a horror author and screenwriter. Her short fiction has appeared in a number of anthologies, including Mondo Zombie, Dark Delicacies, Dark Terrors 6, The Museum of Horrors, and Horrors! 365 Scary Stories, among others. Her work has also appeared in magazines such as Cemetery Dance, including her story “Tested,” which won the Bram Stoker Award. In addition to her fiction writing, Morton has also authored two books of non-fiction—The Halloween Encyclopedia and The Cinema of Tsui Hark—and edited the recently released A Hallowe’en Anthology: Literary and Historical Writings Over the Centuries.
Morton feels that many writers who have tackled the theme of zombies have fallen into a trap trying to “out-taboo” each other with extreme sex. So when it came time to write a zombie story of her own, she asked herself what taboos were left that could be dealt with in a zombie tale. “My answer was political ones,” Morton said. “It’s hard to imagine a more heated political topic than abortion, and when I thought of combining that with a tale of survivors carefully rationing out their resources, it all fell into place.”
My breath is corrupt, my days are extinct,
the graves are ready for me.
Job 17:1
Blessed and holy is he that hath part in
the first resurrection…
Revelations 20:6
June 16
Tomorrow marks one year ago that the Colony was begun here, and I think just about everyone is busy preparing for a big celebration. We just had our first real harvest two weeks ago, so there’ll be plenty of good things to eat, and as for drink—well, the product of George’s still is a little extreme for most tastes, so Tom and a few of the boys made a foray outside yesterday for some real liquor.
Of course I was worried when Tom told me he was going (and not even for something really vital, just booze), but he said it wasn�
�t so bad. The road was almost totally clear for the first five miles after they left the safety of the Colony, and even most of Philipsville, the pint-sized town where they raided a liquor store, was deserted. Tom said he shot one in the liquor store cellar when he went down there to check on the good wines; it was an old woman, probably the one-time shopkeeper’s wife locked away. Unfortunately, she’d clawed most of the good bottles off to smash on the floor. Tom took what was left, and an unopened case of good burgundy he found untouched in a corner. There are 131 adults in the Colony, and he figured he’d have a bottle for every two on Anniversary Day.
It’s been two weeks since any of the deadheads have been spotted near the Colony walls, and Pedro Quintero, our top marksman, picked that one off with one shot straight through the head from the east tower. It would be easy to fool ourselves into thinking the situation is finally mending… easy and dangerous, because it’s not. The lack of deadheads seen around here lately proves only one thing: That Doc Freeman was right in picking this location, away from the cities and highways.
Of course Doc Freeman was right—he’s right about everything. He said we should go this far north because the south would only keep getting hotter, and sure enough it’s been in the 80s here for over a week now. I don’t want to think what it is down in L.A. now—probably 120, and that’s in the shade.
Tomorrow will be a tribute to Doc Freeman as much as an anniversary celebration. If it hadn’t been for him… well, I suppose Tom and little Jessie and I would be wandering around out there with the rest of them right now, dead for a year but still hungry. Always hungry.
It’s funny, but before all the shit came down, Doc Freeman was just an eccentric old college professor teaching agricultural sciences and preaching survival. Tom always believed Freeman had been thinking about cutting out anyway, even before the whole zombie thing, because of the rising temperatures. He told his students that agriculture in most parts of the U.S. was already a thing of the past, and it would all be moving up to Canada soon.
The Living Dead Page 34