Dead Rain: A Tale of the Zombie Apocalypse

by Joe Augustyn

  Emma tried to remember where the nearest Sheriff station was… then realized it was not a viable option. I can’t trust the Sheriff. Or his deputy. They were both in on it.

  She flashed back, reviewing the entire incident, starting with her 911 call. She thought of the operator who took her call and connected her to the Sheriff. They all might be in on it. But why?

  She considered going to the local hospital, but knew she was physically unharmed, just severely shaken. And if she told them what happened, what then? They’d undoubtedly assume she was on drugs, and probably call in the law. If that evil Sheriff didn’t show up, one of his cronies might.

  I can’t risk that. I just need to go home and get my head together. There must be someone I can trust. Maybe the FBI. Maybe the state police.

  But how will I know?

  I’ll call Uncle Johnny. He was an officer in the Navy. He’ll know what to do. Who to call.

  But will he believe me? What can I possibly tell him to make him believe what I’ve seen?

  5

  As the Ford crashed through the iron gate, dozens of walking corpses turned toward the loud metallic clang. Their senses were dulled by death, but they responded to overt sensory cues. The sound of the gate crashing open rang like a titanic dinner bell.

  Their moldering retinas saw the fleeing taillights of the car, glowing like giant red eyes. Like jackals tracking a wounded lamb, they instinctively followed.

  Feet dragging over the gravel drive, they passed through the broken gate and shambled eagerly down the narrow moonlit road, their direction dictated by the tightly tangled woods on either side.

  Fog swirled around them with its chilly embrace. But they felt nothing. Nothing but hunger. Insatiable, all-encompassing hunger.

  6

  “Sheriff, this can’t go on. It’s not right. It can’t be. Not in the eyes of the Lord.”

  Sheriff Dan Leeds gave his deputy a long hard look. They were back at the Lenape Creek Sheriff Station, savoring a fresh pot of coffee and some homemade sticky buns. “Look, Zack,” the Sheriff said softly, “We didn’t start this. We’re only doing what our families have always done, for going on three hundred years now. And the Lenape Injuns did it before them, before they were driven from the county. The preachers never talked against it. They know what God wants. It’s part of His plan. One of His many mysteries. The people He raised from the dead are the righteous. Just like Lazarus. The resurrected are holy. And that cemetery sits on holy ground.”

  Zack had heard that explanation before, many times, in sermons at their tiny local church. A long line of preachers had passed it down through the ages, along with other eccentric traditions of their unique fundamentalist faith. The little community of Lenape Creek was as tightly knit as the thorn-choked woods around it. The families were all connected through marriage and history and religion.

  “We’re only respecting our ancestors as the Good Lord intended. That’s why we had to zap that girl. So she couldn’t hurt old Granny Leeds. She’s your kin too. Don’t you want her, and all our loved ones, around for the Second Coming?”

  “But how can this be of the Lord?” Zack asked. “They’re monsters. Flesh-eating monsters.”

  “They might look like monsters now, Zack. They might even act like monsters. But this is just a phase of the Resurrection. God’s way of putting the dead to good use before He restores them to their former glory.”

  “But that girl… her family…”

  “People go missing all the time. A pretty young thing like that, everyone will think she ran off with some boy. Isn’t it better to let them go on thinking that? Would the truth be better for her folks to bear? Would it help them to know that’s she’s dead?”

  “But it’s not right. She has a family somewhere who love her. So do the others who were with her.”

  “Listen, son. It ain’t our fault they stumbled into someplace they never should have been.” Leeds made a mental note: Better tell Jonesy not to mention our little detour scheme. Some secrets needn’t be shared. “And you need to stop fretting over strangers. They aren’t like us. Our people are the Chosen ones. The true descendants of Israel. The only true Christians. We’re marked for salvation. That’s why our people were drawn to this Promised Land. While other settlers took the easy ground, ours came here. They endured the hardships… mosquitoes and disease… they filled in the swamps.”

  “But we’re killing people. I can’t get my head around that.”

  “There’s bound to be some collateral damage in any important undertaking, son. This thing works fine most of the time, just like the Good Lord intended.”

  Zack was starting to bend. Leeds could see it in his eyes.

  “How many innocent lives have we saved by getting rid of our trash out there? Gangbanging spics and nignogs and drug addicted wiggers. It’s nature’s magic garbage disposal. For disposing of human garbage. Think of all the pimps and pushers no longer preying on naive young girls because God gave us this special blessing. All the hip-hop turds we’ve flushed down the cosmic toilet. Overall it does a lot more good than bad for the world. You can see that, can’t you?”

  Deputy Hayes was silent. It’s true that they were doing the world a favor by cleaning up the gene pool. The dead didn’t care what color their food was. Brown, black or white, it all tasted good to the resurrected. They didn’t care what kind of drugs their dinner guests had consumed that day, or had peddled to others. Or what kind of crimes they had committed. Pushers and rapists and scammers and welfare cheats had ended their iniquitous days at the cemetery. And there seemed to be an unending supply.

  It was less work to drive the criminal scumbags out to the cemetery and taze them than it was to fill out reams of annoying paperwork and go to trial, where some candy-ass judge would give them a fatherly lecture and turn them loose to continue their wicked ways.

  And during the slow winter months when the crime rate dipped low, they simply had to check their files for local repeat offenders and snatch one off a dark street. As long as they were discreet and cleaned up the mess at the cemetery each morning, they had a good thing going. Sure, once or twice a year some innocent would end up on the cemetery menu. Like the Sheriff said, they were collateral damage.

  But something about the look on the girl’s pretty face had gotten through to Zack. He wouldn’t sleep much that night. Even less than he normally did. His dreams were filled with faces of terrified people. And faces of the walking dead.

  “Think about it, son,” the Sheriff said gently, like a father explaining some sad but necessary fact of life to a backward child. “We’re simply doing God’s work. If He didn’t want us doing it, He wouldn’t have given us this incredible opportunity. He made the dead rise. He hallowed that ground. He brought our families to it, and made us its keepers. It’s our legacy. Our sacred responsibility. So stop your worrying. We’re blessed to be part of it. Be thankful. Otherwise you insult the Lord by disparaging the honor He bestowed on us.”

  Zack nodded complacently.

  Sheriff Leeds is right. As always. He’s a righteous man. A good man.

  8

  Emma pulled the vintage Ford into the driveway of her family home and cut the engine. She sat silently, her mind reeling, still struggling to make sense of the nightmarish evening. It had been just minutes since she’d commandeered the car and the faint relief she’d felt after escaping Russell’s clutches hadn’t lasted long.

  The heavily wooded access road from the cemetery had dumped her out onto a highway she knew all too well—on the edge of the town she lived in. She had passed the overgrown mouth of that road thousands of times and always assumed it led nowhere other than an interstitial pocket of undeveloped South Jersey wilderness. The cemetery had to be New Jersey’s best-kept secret. Although it was only a few miles from her home, Emma hadn’t even known it existed before this night.

  She peered through the steamed-up windshield. Her family’s rundown bungalow sat before her, a gloomy clapboard
box rising from a carpet of fog. It was set fifty feet off the road, on a lot surrounded by woods. She lived there alone with her mother, ever since her father grew tired of dealing with his wife’s hair trigger temper and ran off with a barmaid from Wildwood.

  Even on clear moonlit nights, the place was eerily dark. The community’s low-powered streetlamps barely lit the sparsely used roads. Tall trees separated the house lots. Thick woods hemmed the back yards. Light spilling from house windows on the street helped dilute the pervasive darkness, but not much.

  Emma shivered, afraid to get out of the car and cross the short distance to the house. She gazed at the slowly drifting fog and the black woods beyond. Those things might be out there now… all around me. They can’t just exist in that cemetery… could they?

  Maybe they can. Maybe it’s some kind of cursed place. If not, why haven’t they been discovered?

  How is it they can be so close yet nobody knew about them? If they roamed the roads, someone would have spotted them. Someone would have to know about them by now.

  Someone other than the Sheriff and his deputy.

  9

  Mary Ellen Ettinger pulled her collar tight as she exited the mini-mart, where she’d stopped to gas up her car and buy a few hoagies. She’d worked late at the liquor store and was anxious to get home and rest her feet. She was too tired to cook and her boys would be hungry. The delicious submarine sandwiches would be a treat.

  Traffic on scenic Route 47 was bumper to bumper all summer, when streams of tourists passed through on their way to the beach towns of Wildwood and Cape May. Autumn was much less busy, but weekends brought a modest influx of city folk who enjoyed the off-season solace of their summer homes. Only when the deep winter weather hit would the weekender traffic stop. Business would drag to a halt and Mary Ellen would coast a few months on unemployment.

  No time to hit the gym tonight, she told herself as she hurried to her car. My forty-year-old ass will have to wait ‘til tomorrow. But I will be in bikini shape this summer.

  Her aging Civic sputtered to life. It desperately needed a tune-up, but her brother-in-law Billy had been swamped with work and wouldn’t be able to get to it for another week. She knew if she gave in to his not-so-subtle advances he’d be all over it, but she couldn’t do that to her sister.

  Still, she couldn’t say she wasn’t tempted. Bill was ruggedly handsome, and she longed for the touch of a man. It had been two years since her husband was killed in a freak accident, and she’d always had a high sex drive.

  ***

  Five minutes later she rolled into the driveway of her modest suburban home.

  Seventeen-year-old Ryan opened the door to greet her.

  “Jesus Christ, mom. I was about to send out the Mounties. I thought you got lost in the fog.” He was joking, but the hint of genuine concern in his voice pleased Mary Ellen.

  Ryan was a good son. Smart and obedient and easygoing. Unlike his freckle-faced brother, he’d inherited the Italian good looks of his maternal grandfather.

  “Sorry,” Mary Ellen said as she stepped from the car. “Ross made me restock the shelves for the weekend. The city folks must have their booze.”

  Grabbing the bag of hoagies she hurried into the house, eager to shed the nippy fog. Shrugging off her coat she gave Ryan a kiss on the cheek, then glanced at her younger son Kevin, who was sitting on the living room floor playing X-box. “I got you guys hoagies for dinner. Ham and cheese with the works for your brother, Italian for you.”

  “With extra peppers?”

  “What’s an Italian without extra peppers? Hot, sweet and roasted, just like your mom. How was school today?”

  “School is school,” Ryan shrugged.

  Mary Ellen smiled as she saw the lone dimple curl one side of his mouth. With his clear skin and dreamy brown eyes he could be a model. A real dreamboat, as she and her schoolgirl friends would have said, a long, long time ago in what seemed another lifetime.

  “I talked to the coach about playing basketball. He said I can try out but there’s no guarantees.”

  “Of course not,” Mary Ellen said sourly. “You’re white.”

  Ryan grinned. He found his mother’s marginal racism somewhat laughable but disturbing. He worried she might go over the deep end someday. She used to be a diehard liberal, but after his dad died and she became the breadwinner, she started devolving into some kind of reactionary. Bitching about how Section Eight housing was destroying the country. How welfare was passed down from one unwed mother to the next. Her ranting got worse in the dead of winter, when the heating bill decimated her savings. He’d tried to nip her new attitude in the bud by making her watch John Stewart and Bill Maher on TV, but her rightwing co-workers bombarded her with daily propaganda in the guise of humorous emails.

  Mary Ellen pulled her dinner salad from the bag and handed the sandwiches to Ryan. He deciphered the scribbling on the wrappers and tossed one to his eight-year brother.

  “Think fast!”

  Kevin caught the sandwich with one hand, never taking the other off the game controller.

  Mary Ellen rolled her eyes. “Hey. I just vacuumed the rug before I left for work this morning. I don’t want to spend my evening cleaning up a mess.”

  But she was secretly impressed with her young one’s reflexes. Kevin was nimble, with eagle eyes and lightning hands. He had a good chance to make the school football team when he started junior high next year. Maybe she had another Joe Flacco on her hands. A budding local hero who would finance her retirement in the comfort she felt she deserved.

  The boys unwrapped their hoagies and began stuffing their faces, filling their cheeks with prodigious bites of cold cuts and veggies and good crusty bread.

  Happy that they were satisfied, Mary Ellen checked the trash container under the kitchen sink. Candy wrappers and banana peels spilled from the top of the can. “Jesus, Mary and Joseph. Is it too much trouble to help with the trash?”

  “Sorry,” Ryan mumbled through a mouthful of half-chewed sandwich. “I f’got it was trash day.”

  Sighing wearily, Mary Ellen gathered the edges of the trash bag and tugged it carefully out of the can.

  “I’ll get it,” said Ryan contritely, making a half-hearted effort to rise from the couch.

  “Forget it. Eat.” Opening the door she stepped outside. The fog was thicker than before, the October air frigid and damp. She thought about getting her coat, but with the trash already in hand she decided to make a quick run to the curb and hurry back inside.

  Hurrying across the slippery dew-soaked lawn she deposited the trash bag at the edge of the road and paused to catch her breath. Jesus I really need to hit the gym.

  Something moved in the bushes across the road, in a tract of protected woodland. Whatever it was, it seemed big—rustling heavy shrubs as it moved.

  Mary Ellen peered through the fog and shivered. It wasn’t just the cold weather; a creepy instinctive feeling took hold of her. She lingered a moment longer, scanning the woods for a glimpse of whatever or whoever was there, then turned and scurried back to the house.

  She stopped in her tracks halfway there. Someone was standing in the shadows, just beyond the light spilling from the half-open front door.

  “Hello?” she called out. “Can I help you?”

  The shadowy figure turned to face her. It was a man, moving with an unsteady gait, as if he was confused, or possibly injured or drunk.

  Something about him was vaguely unnerving. Mary Ellen thought he might be an elderly man with Alzheimer’s, who had somehow gotten out and got lost in the fog. But there was an equal chance he was a prowler, and no telling what he might be after. Stragglers were rare in the area, but the influx of New Yorkers migrating southward as that city became too expensive and the NYPD began enforcing heavy-handed policies had brought an influx of strangers and a rise in the local crime rate.

  Mary Ellen paused to gather her courage, then decided she needed to act boldly and with confidence. She str
ode towards the front door, ready to shout for Ryan if she had to. As she drew closer she kept a wary eye on the stranger, hoping he was just some harmless vagrant looking for scrap to salvage. It is trash night, after all, she assured herself.

  The man stepped forward as if to intercept her.

  Mary Ellen paused as he blocked her way. “I said, can I help you?” she called firmly, her voice a bit louder than necessary in hopes of intimidating the stranger and alerting her teenaged son through the open door. But the blaring sounds of Kevin’s videogame spilling from the house told her she’d probably have to scream her lungs out to bring anyone to the rescue.

  The shadowy man stepped closer, growing more solid and real in the swirling mist.

  “What, are you deaf?” Mary Ellen challenged, her heart beating quicker and her nerves flaring. “What are you doing here? This is private property.”

  Suddenly the man was right in front of her. His sudden lurching movement disturbed the fog, unveiling his countenance. Mary Ellen’s throat clenched as she saw his disheveled suit and the cold look in his eyes. He seemed torpid and dreary, but there was something incongruously feral about him. Something vaguely predatory in his manner.

  “Ryan!” She stepped back as the stranger took a wavering step forward, raising his arms to grab her. “Ryan, get out here!” she yelled louder.

  She took another step back—and felt a hot jolt of terror as someone grabbed her from behind. She screamed and tried to wrestle free—but as she broke from the gripping arms behind her the first man stumbled into her, knocking her back into the second man’s arms.

  “Ryan!” Her voice rang out loud and desperate. Pinned between the mysterious strangers, she sucked in her breath to scream again, and their fetid odor overwhelmed her. She gagged as the cloying stench filled her lungs, making her dizzy and nauseous.