“What?” Donna asked. The concern she felt for him bubbled up like a warm gush of water. She crushed her cigarette out in the ashtray and shifted closer to him.
“I was just… no!” Dale said, shaking his head. “Nothing. Just let me hear the rest of the tape. If you really don’t think you can handle it, why don’t you go back to the drug store? I’ll come and get you when I’ve finished.”
Donna considered for a moment, then she shook her head. “No,” she said, taking a deep breath. “I think I can handle the rest of it now.”
Dale nodded and pressed reverse for a second, then play. After a second or two of Larry’s crazy laughter, he started to speak again.
“They’re turning them into zombies and then he’s selling them to a couple of the local landowners who use them for harvesting. Brilliant, huh? Cheap labor that doesn’t need to sleep or eat or anything. Just mindlessly work out there in the fields, day and night, when you have to get the harvest in. I don’t know for a fact, but I suspect they send them south to rake blueberries in July and August, and to pick apples before the potato harvest. It’s just so… so fucking wild! I can’t believe it myself… but my contact says he’s positive of it, and oh, shit!”
Larry’s voice suddenly cut off. The car’s engine whined, and there was a dull thump that rattled the speaker. After a blast of static, there was a loud crashing sound.
“That must be when he dropped the tape recorder out the car window,” Donna said.
“Or threw it out,” Dale said softly. “More likely, he pitched it out the window, hoping someone would find it in case he didn’t survive.”
“You think he knew he was going to die?” Donna asked.
Dale looked at her and frowned. “Come on, Donna. If the same car that chased us was chasing him, then, yeah, I think he knew he had to get away but if he couldn’t, at least to try to save his report so someone might find it.”
Donna’s teeth were a pearly white as she ran them over her lower lip. She jumped when the static on the tape suddenly cleared, and they heard a tremendous explosion. Dale quickly spun the volume down.
“That—” he said, but his voice choked off.
“—was the car, hitting the rock on Casey’s Curve,” Donna finished for him.
They had no doubt they had heard the fatal crash, but as the tape played, they suddenly became aware of some other sounds on the tape. Though faint with distance, Dale and Donna clearly heard another car, the car that had been chasing Larry and caused the accident, skid to a stop. There was a harsh, skidding sound as the tires ran off the road into the gravel. Then they heard the sound of three car doors opening and slamming shut.
“Hold it there! Not so fast!”
The voice spoke on the tape recorder so clearly Dale had the fleeting impression there was someone else in the car with them.
“Tell me that didn’t sound like Rodgers!” Dale said, nailing Donna with a glance.
Faintly, they could hear the sound of heavy, trudging footsteps sounding like several people walking away from the tape recorder, dragging their feet in the roadside gravel with long, shuffling strides.
“Don’t touch him! I have…”
There was a low, mean-sounding laugh that faded with distance. And sounding even further away, a chorus of heavy, grunting noise was audible sounding like something out of one of those horror movies Donna had mentioned not so long ago. The throaty growls rose sharply in intensity, filling the car with unworldly noise and sending waves of chills through both Dale and Donna. But the voice assumed a deep, commanding shout. It had to be Rodgers, Dale was sure.
“Don’t touch him. You can feed later! I have a special little treat in store for this one!”
The small speaker in the tape recorder rattled with the rush of sounds that split the lonely quiet of the night like a hatchet blade. Insane hoots and guttural grunts, wild, winding laughter and low, animal snorts, issued from the tape recorder. Then the noises moved away from the microphone.
What do these sounds mean? Dale wondered. Anger? Joy? Pain? Fear?
He closed his eyes, trying to imagine himself there, on that stretch of road last Friday night: Larry’s car is crumpled in the woods more than thirty feet off the road. Larry, probably already dead from the impact, but maybe… just maybe still alive, is hanging through his smashed front window, his body tattered and bleeding. Smoke is rising from the crumpled hood; diamonds of glass are scattered all over the ground, sparkling in the bright headlights; and six or more hulking figures are chattering and gibbering as they shamble toward Larry’s lifeless body. Their arms are raised stiffly as their cold, dead fingers reach for him, eager to peel him off the car’s hood and tear him apart!
This isn’t real! his mind screamed, and he looked frantically at Donna for some kind of anchor to pull him back to reality. This couldn’t really have happened!
“It is real,” he whispered, his voice so constricted it sounded like someone was speaking from outside the car.
Donna was as freaked out as Dale was, and she looked at him with a silent pleading to say something to make everything just go away, to make it all a dream. We can wake up now—please. What she wanted was for them to have a chance to see if what had started could develop into the kind of relationship she hadn’t expected ever to find again.
Dale stiffened. The fingers of his hand holding the tape recorder were starting to ache. He took a long, shuddering breath and eased back into the car seat, bringing one hand up to his forehead. He was slick with sweat.
“I know what we’ve got to do,” he said hoarsely.
Donna looked at him, pleading silently that he couldn’t say what she most feared.
“Did you pick up what Larry said earlier in the tape?” he rewound the tape and played it. Larry’s voice on the tape would soon be lost in insane laughter, and then, seconds later, be silenced forever. As the tape played, Larry’s frantic tone chilled the interior of the car.
“… ’cause I was at the home between eleven and eleven thirty.”
Dale pressed stop and looked at Donna, waiting for her reaction. His breath was rasping as loud as metal scraping metal.
“I know what we have to do,” she said after a moment of silence. “We have to take this tape to the police. Turn it over to Winfield.”
“And tell him what?” Dale said angrily. “What are the cops gonna do?”
“Maybe it’ll be enough for them to I don’t know, start an investigation or something. What do they do in a situation like this? Christ, Dale, I’m just a friggin’ secretary! I don’t want to get involved in anything like this!”
“So you believe at least some of it? Enough so you’re scared, right?”
“Sure I’m scared. Christ! Who wouldn’t be?” Donna shouted, pounding her clenched fist on the dashboard. “There’s something weird going on, all right, but I don’t think we should get involved any deeper than we already are. This is something for the cops to handle.”
Dale snorted and shook his head. “You just don’t get it, do you? For all we know, the cops, Winfield and all of ’em, for miles around here, are up to their fucking eyebrows in this! Rodgers, if he is doing something with these dead people, even if it isn’t turning them into zombies, he’s gotta be getting help from some other people. Larry said as much on the tape! If we go to the cops with this, we could both end up like Larry.”
Donna shivered as she looked over her shoulder out on the cold night. The yellow traffic light in the center of town winked on and off. A silence seemed to fill the town. A dead town! Wasn’t that what she had called it ever since she could remember? A God-forsaken, wasted, dead town! And it didn’t take too much of a stretch of her imagination to picture dozens of workers from the potato fields, their eyes and brains dead, shuffling down the streets, looking for…
“What do zombies eat, supposedly?” she asked, her voice wound wire-tight. “That voice on the tape said ‘you can feed later.’ ”
Dale snorted. “If I remem
ber correctly, they eat the brains of living people,” he said, his eyes shifting to follow Donna’s gaze up the dark, deserted street.
After a short pause, Donna shook her head and said, “I really think we could trust Jeff with this. I’ve known him all my life. He wouldn’t get hooked up in anything like this!”
Dale shook his head. “You haven’t known Rodgers all your life, though. You didn’t listen to what Larry said, did you? He said ‘I was at the home’… the home! Not home, as in his mother’s house. The home, as in, maybe, the funeral home!”
“Oh, Christ, Dale. Let’s just drop it. Look, I could move down to Augusta. I’m sure I could find a job there. We could be together. We could go pick up Angie, swing by my sister’s and get my stuff, and be a hundred miles away from here within two hours.”
“Donna…”
“It’s just—just that, I don’t want any part of this! It’s not our problem. And if it’s like you think, really organized, it’s way too big for us. Why can’t we just leave it behind?”
“You think you could do that?” Dale asked, his voice low and intense.
Donna shook her head. “No, not really,” she whispered. “But I know I’m not going to like what you’re going to say.”
Dale forced a tight smile across his face and nodded. “That’s right, babe. I think we should take a drive out to Mr. Franklin Rodgers’ Funeral Home and see if we can get in there and take a look around.”
Donna sighed, her breath a long sputter. “I think we’re making a mistake. I think we should talk to Jeff first.”
“After we have a little look around out at Rodgers’,” Dale said firmly. He popped the cassette out of the recorder, slipped it into his pocket, and started up the car.
PART THREE
“… graves have yawn’d; and yielded up their dead;
… and ghosts did shriek and squeal about the streets.”
—Shakespeare
Chapter Seven
“Back to the Home”
I
All during supper and television time afterward, Lisa was unusually quiet. Her appetite, even for cheeseburgers and fries, just wasn’t there, and her grandmother repeatedly asked her if she was feeling all right. She lied every time, telling her she still had an ache where she had banged her forehead on the pavement. In truth, there was a steady pounding in her head that felt as though someone was pounding the back of her skull with a jackhammer.
“I’ve still got some homemade vanilla ice cream in the freezer,” Mrs. Appleby said, looking up from her knitting as the closing credits of ALF rolled.
Angie was up like a shot and already halfway to the kitchen before she turned and saw that Lisa was still sitting in the beanbag chair in front of the television.
“You want some ice cream?” Angie asked. She once had a beanbag chair and had never liked it because it made her feel like such a clod whenever she tried to get out of it.
Lisa looked over her shoulder at Angie, and when she did, a white stab of pain jabbed her behind the eyes. She wasn’t sure if it was the pain that stunned her or if it really had been a visual effect. For a flickering second, the entire living room looked as bright as if it were flooded by spotlights—million-watt spotlights.
“You all right, dear?” Mrs. Appleby said, her voice edged with concern.
Angie waited, leaning on the kitchen doorway. She was still wallowing in the guilt of having caused her new friend such pain, and it sickened her to see Lisa looking so drawn and pale.
“Of course I am,” Lisa said as she bravely struggled to get to her feet. The hammering in the back of her head puzzled and scared her.
Why in the back? she wondered. I hit the front of my head.
Then she unexpectedly fell forward, reaching blindly with her hands to break her fall. Her knees hit the floor first, then her hands. She was indistinctly aware of the impact because the sparkling pain in her head was so demanding.
“Lisa!” Mrs. Appleby said, louder and more anxious.
“Must’ve slipped on the rug,” Lisa said as she got her feet under herself and stood up. She had to move slower than she wanted to prove to her grandmother that she was all right; but no matter how slowly she moved, the pain pierced through her body.
Angie waited in the doorway, feeling as helpless now as she had when Lisa had fallen on the street. She wished earnestly that it had been her, instead of Lisa, who had taken the fall. But she realized that there was an element of selfishness in that thought: if she had been the one hurt, at least then she would have something concrete to deal with. She wouldn’t have to stand by, watching helplessly.
Lisa was standing up straight, smiling widely in spite of the pain in her head. But then, just as she turned to follow Angie in the kitchen, the white light came again, and this time, there was no doubt about it: it was as though a brilliant white bolt of lightning flashed across the room right in front of her. She staggered, turned, and walked straight into the wall.
The impact shook the wall and knocked one of her grandmother’s oil paintings askew. Lisa bounced off the wall like a basketball and, arms waving wildly, fell backwards. Luckily, she landed on her back in the beanbag chair, but she didn’t know it. All she knew was that the insides of her eyes stung from the jolt of light, and her ears were ringing as though a concussion of thunder had erupted right beside her.
“Oh my God!” Mrs. Appleby said, throwing her knitting aside and rushing over to Lisa. Crouching beside her, she felt her granddaughter’s face. It was cold and clammy, almost like touching someone’s who’s… Mrs. Appleby couldn’t finish the thought.
“Angie!” she shouted as she wiggled her hand under Lisa’s head and cradled it gently. “Call the doctor. The number is next to the phone!”
Only for another split second was Angie frozen in horror and guilt as she looked at her friend. Then she rushed to the antique phone and dialed the emergency number, waiting for an eternity for the old-fashioned black rotary dial to spin around.
Mrs. Appleby, meanwhile, was leaning over Lisa, looking down at her face. Lisa wasn’t unconscious; her eyes were open, and there was even—still smiling, God love her!—a faint smile on her lips. But her face was so pasty white, Mrs. Appleby had the impression there was a thin layer of translucent wax over it.
Lisa’s eyes looked like glazed sky-blue pottery as she looked up at her grandmother. She opened her mouth and tried to speak, but her grandmother hushed her and gently stroked her cheek.
In her mind, Mrs. Appleby was doing two things: she was reciting every prayer she had ever learned or said in church, and she was thinking about all the loved ones she had seen die: her mother, her father, two uncles and an aunt, her husband, and worst of all, one of her own children. She tried to turn away from those thoughts, and only send her ardent prayers upward, but the light in Lisa’s eyes looked as though it was fading. She seemed to be trying to focus on her grandmother’s face, but her pupils kept rolling back and forth with a sludgy motion. The whites were sharply veined with red.
“You just relax, honey,” Mrs. Appleby cooed, not even sure if Lisa was hearing her nor not. “You just relax and take it easy. The doctor’s on his way.”
Angie suddenly appeared in the living room. She came and knelt down on the other side of Lisa. Her hands were folded in her lap, and she was squeezing her hands so hard, the knuckles were aching and turning white.
“Is she okay?” Angie said.
“She’ll be fine, I’m sure,” Mrs. Appleby said, although really she felt no such assurance. “Did you reach the doctor’s office?”
Angie nodded. “Doctor LaChance wasn’t in, but he has a helper working for him. He said he was a physician’s associate or assistant, something like that. Anyway, his name’s Stephen Wayne, and he said he’d be right over.”
“Good,” Mrs. Appleby said, never bothering to look up from her granddaughter’s waxy, pale face. “The doctor’s helper is coming, honey. He’ll take care of you.”
II
“Any connection with the funeral home across the street from it?” Dale asked, but even to his own ears his attempted joke sounded flat.
He made a conscious effort not to slow down and stare at the funeral home as they drove past it. He did notice there was a light on around back, and two of the cellar windows glowed with dull yellow.
“It’s getting past nine o’clock,” Donna said. “Any traffic on Main Street after nine o’clock will probably be noticed.”
“Especially if Rodgers knows we’re on to him, huh?” Dale added.
Donna shivered. “I don’t like to think about it,” she said tightly. “And I still say we should just go find Winfield and tell him what we think. We shouldn’t be fooling around like this!”
“I’m not fooling,” Dale said as he shook his head and slowed to turn off into the narrow dirt road Donna had pointed out to him up ahead. He was beginning to think like a true paranoid, he noted, with only slight amusement, as he doused the headlights and turned the car around so he could back into the road.
“Wait a second,” Donna said. “Let me get out and direct you in. There’s no sense scraping up your car.”
Dale smiled, thinking if all they got tonight was a few scratches on his car, they’d be lucky… damned lucky!
“So, what do we do now?” Donna asked once Dale shut off the engine. Through the screen of trees, they could still make out the lights in Rodgers’ Funeral Home. Dale sat there, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel as he tried to remember what he had seen of the home when he went there with Winfield. He hadn’t had the chance to see much more than the front office and visiting rooms.
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