Necrophobia - 01

by Jack Hamlyn

  NECROPHOBIA

  Book #1: Wake the Dead

  By

  Jack Hamlyn

  “Given the greater number of dead than living on this earth,

  a revolt of the dead against the living who had buried them

  would certainly end in defeat for the latter."

  —Ornella Volta

  CLOSING IN

  It was the end of July and the air was hot and thick like boiled molasses. Ricki was in the kitchen whipping up some breakfast and I was in the living room, sweat running down my face as I tried to wire in the new air conditioner. I had just fished a Philips screwdriver from my red toolbox when I heard the screaming.

  It went through me like a knife.

  It was loud and cutting and absolutely shrill. It didn’t even sound human. More like an animal being flayed alive. I stood there for maybe three or four seconds shocked into inaction, then I stepped out onto the porch.

  By then, Ricki was at the screen door looking out. “What is it, Steve?”

  “I don’t know. I heard screaming.”

  “So did I.”

  But what I saw in the neighborhood was…nothing.

  Absolutely ordinary. Old Lady Hazen was out tending to her flowerbeds. Jimmy LaRue was up on his roof, hammering. Cars were passing in the street. The mailman was walking up the sidewalk with his bag of letters, pausing now, maybe listening as well. Jimmy LaRue was pounding too goddamn loud, so he didn’t hear anything. Mrs. Hazen…well, she couldn’t hear cymbals crashing next to her ear let alone dogs barking.

  I looked over to the mailman.

  He had put his earbuds back in and went on his way.

  The scream came again and it was wet and gurgling. By that time, people up and down the block were out on their porches wondering what in the Christ was happening.

  “Should I call 911?” Ricki asked.

  “I don’t know. Maybe I better go look.”

  “Steve…”

  “I’ll be right back,” I promised.

  Then I ran up the sidewalk, listening for the scream, and it came again. Though this time it was weak and broken, more liquid than anything and I didn’t care for that much. It was coming from Rommy Jacob’s backyard. I was sure of it. Rommy was a widower. He lived for his garden. He made offerings to us each summer of tomatoes and cucumbers and snap peas. I jogged around the side of his house, almost tripped over a wheelbarrow full of black soil, and that’s when I saw him.

  He was lying on the ground, twisting and squirming. It looked like someone had painted his throat and face a bright, Technicolor shade of red. He saw me. He looked right at me and there was more than agony in his eyes, there was horror. Sheer horror. His red-stained fingers were at his throat and when he opened his mouth to speak, blood came out. It bubbled out of the side of his throat…which was missing, I saw, like a tiger had taken a bite out of it.

  I just stood there.

  My stomach rolled over and I got dizzy. The smell of blood was heavy, sweet, metallic in the air. I don’t have a weak stomach. I spent a year in Iraq with a Stryker Brigade. I saw men die. I saw them die in numbers. I pulled pieces of them from Hummers when they caught IED flak. Yet…to see it here, in my neighborhood…it made it all that much more brutal and devastating and unreal. I had to force myself to move. Rommy was my friend, for godsake. But this was more than I could handle. He needed medical attention right away.

  “Hang on, buddy,” I told him, part of me wanting to run home for my cell to call 911 and another part telling me I should stay because Rommy wasn’t going to make it until an ambulance showed and I didn’t want him to die alone.

  That’s what was going through my head.

  Then I heard something behind me and Rommy’s eyes, which were beginning to get the glazed look of near-death, widened. I turned and there was a man standing there. His skin was horribly pale, mottled with gray patches, his eyes white, completely white. He was smiling at me: lips shriveled back from narrow teeth. It was no smile, it was a rictus grin. He came at me, snapping his teeth like a crocodile rising from a river, pushing a black wave of damp decay before him. It smelled hot, nauseating.

  He opened his mouth to say something.

  Rommy made a gurgling sound.

  I took one step backward, shaking my head.

  You see, that thing reaching out for me, I knew him. His name had been Bill DeForest. He’d been buried nearly a week before. Now he was back and he was no longer human.

  “Bill…” I heard myself say, knowing it was ridiculous and pointless, but I couldn’t help myself. Bill had been my next door neighbor. When Ricki and I moved into the neighborhood six years before, Bill was the first one to knock on the door to see if we needed anything. He came over with a six-pack and a strong back. His wife, Pearl, showed with fresh-baked cookies and a good heart. Bill helped me re-shingle the roof. He did wiring and windows for me. When I was in Iraq, he made damn sure that Ricki and Paul never went without.

  Six days ago, we’d buried him. Heart attack.

  I was one of the pallbearers.

  Now he was back.

  He went right for my throat with bared teeth. I tried to push him back, then he lunged. He almost put me down. He was trying to bite me, to get at my throat. He was wild and snarling and stinking of the grave. I shoved him away and he came right back at me. I had no choice. I hit him. I hit him hard. He staggered back and went down to one knee, staring up at me with a feral, fixed hatred. He didn’t just want to kill me. He wanted to slaughter me. He wanted to gut me and lap up my blood.

  He came again and I hit him.

  He fell back again, but I knew full well we couldn’t play this game all day. This wasn’t Bill DeForest. Bill DeForest was dead. This was a dead thing that wanted to feed. There was only one way to stop it and I knew it. But I needed a weapon. That’s when I saw the shovel leaning against the fence. I picked it up. I held it over my head, ready to swing. But if that would have had an effect on a sane mind, it meant nothing to Bill. He was a thing of hunger. He understood nothing but feeding.

  When he came again, some kind of slime hanging from his mouth, I swung the shovel. The blade hit him square in the face. It opened up a gash from the bridge of his nose to the crown of his skull. But it did not stop him. It made him take a few foundering steps back and then he came again. I swung the shovel, putting all my strength and weight behind it. Bill’s head split open like a ripe muskmelon. The impact drove him to his knees. He looked at me with those weird glassy eyes. A slop of brains had oozed down his face.

  I swung it again and his head came apart.

  He dropped face-first into the grass. He trembled, but did not move again.

  I stood there, panting, the shovel in my hands, staring at the gore-spattered blade. None of it seemed real. Everything had taken on the dusky shades of a nightmare. I staggered back until I was in the alley. I stood there, just breathing, trying to get the world to stop spinning. When it did, I looked down the alley and the alley beyond that which terminated at the gates of Cedar Hill Cemetery.

  I saw three, then four and five figures moving slowly, steadily in my direction. By the way they were walking with that loose-limbed sort of shuffling, I knew who they were and what they wanted.

  There was no getting around it.

  The dead were coming.

  SHOCK TROOPS

  When I stepped back in the yard, Dick Nickersen from across the street was standing there. Dick and I weren’t real close. I didn’t respect him or like him and I’m sure that went both ways. Dick was our neighborhood pain-in-the-ass. He knew all the city and municipal regulations and routinely reported people if their garages weren’t up to code, if they forgot to cut their grass or rake their leaves in a timely manner or didn’
t keep their sidewalks ice-free in the winter time. He was fond of frivolous lawsuits. He had unsuccessfully sued Jimmy LaRue for allergies he’d suffered because of adverse reactions to smoke coming from Jimmy’s backyard barbecue pit and he’d gone after Mitzy Streeter because the leaves from her maples clogged up his rain gutters and made his roof leak. He had motion lights strategically placed around his yard to halt vandals, but it never stopped the local kids from soaping his windows on Halloween or stealing his lawn ornaments.

  Dick wasn’t known as “Dick the Prick” or “Prick Dickersen” for nothing.

  Right then he was staring at me.

  He saw what his paranoid mind wanted to see: two badly-used bodies and me standing there with a shovel in my hand. I could see the fear on him: it made beads of sweat pop on his face. “What…what…what…”

  Though I didn’t want to touch it, I flipped Bill DeForest’s body over so he could see it real good. “It’s Bill,” I said. “He came back. He killed Rommy. I hit him with the shovel.”

  It was obvious that he wasn’t believing me. “Bill’s dead,” he said, immediately ascertaining the obvious as he always did.

  “The dead are coming back,” I said.

  He shook his head from side to side. He didn’t want to believe that. He preferred to think I was a nutbag who just did in two of my neighbors. “The dead…no, the dead are just dead.”

  Before I could stop myself, I said, “I saw it before, Dick. It happened in Iraq five years ago. Now it’s happening here.”

  He looked at me like I was crazy. Maybe I was. As far as he was concerned, I was nothing but some fucked-up war vet. I was shell-shocked. I had PTSD. I wasn’t in my right frame of mind. I wanted to grab him and shake him and tell him everything I knew about Necrovirus and what it could do and the assurances I’d been given in Mosul that it was all over with.

  Instead, I dragged him right out into the alley and he looked like he was going to have a stroke. I turned him and faced him so he could see the others down the alley. There were not four or five now. There were a dozen of them and they were closing in fast.

  Dick just stared.

  Then he looked at me. His eyes were moist. “This…this has to be some kind of joke, Steve.”

  “It’s not a joke, Dick. You better get home. You better lock your doors,” I told him. “They’re coming out of Cedar Hill.”

  “But, Steve…”

  “Get home, Dick. When they come after you, they’re insane.”

  “It’s Halloween shit. Zombies. Nothing but Halloween—”

  “Dick…go home.”

  But he couldn’t leave. He came right up to me and put his hands on my shoulders as if he were trying to ground himself in my physical reality. “But this is Lincoln Park,” he said, as if that made all the difference in the world. “This isn’t Iraq. This is fucking Yonkers.”

  “Go home,” I said again.

  He turned and jogged away. It wasn’t easy for him to take. I think, all things considered, he would have been far happier if I had killed him with the shovel. Dying knowing the dead stayed dead and God still made little green apples would have done his heart a world of good.

  But I didn’t have time to worry about that shit, the dead were coming and I had to protect my family. I cut back through Rommy’s yard, thinking I should say something or do something but there simply wasn’t any time. When I got around front, I heard screams in the distance. Then barking. A wild, frantic barking and yapping.

  Old Man Castleberry’s beagles.

  Had to be. Castleberry was retired and had found a hobby: beagles. He raised them in a kennel in the backyard. Hunting dogs. Sold them for pretty good money. Problem was, when one started barking, they all joined in. And that could be at two in the afternoon or two in the morning.

  But this was not your ordinary barking: this was the dogs going haywire, trying to alert any and all to a most unnatural threat.

  The dead weren’t just coming up the alley.

  They were in the streets.

  And they had found the mailman.

  He was knocked on his ass. Letters were flying and drifting earthward like goose feathers. A corpse in a black burial suit was biting into the poor guy’s arm. His blue uniform shirt was red with blood and he was screaming something terrible. I made to go to him and then two more zombies came through the shrubs, a teenage boy whose face was more skull than flesh and a little girl in filthy cerements. They both looked right at me with their graveyard eyes and then, passing me, they set on the mailman like hyenas on a fresh kill.

  I had tossed the shovel so I had nothing to fight with.

  The teenage boy was gnawing on the mailman’s legs, the little girl was going for his throat. Poor guy was writhing and twisting, trying to beat them off, trying protect his face, screaming for help. The little girl seized one of his hands in her jaws and began to shake it like a chew toy. I could hear his finger bones snapping.

  Shit!

  Was anybody else seeing this?

  I looked for a weapon, something, anything. The ice-chopper. It was on my porch. I still hadn’t put it away and for once my incurable procrastination was going to come in handy. It was just a broomstick with a sturdy iron blade on the end, but it was better than nothing. I ran up and grabbed it. In the distance, I could hear screams rising to a fever pitch and I knew the dead were attacking the living. And not just here on Holly Street but all over town.

  I made it far as the sidewalk with my ice-chopper.

  That’s when the little girl left the mailman to the others and turned on me. She wore a white dress gone gray with mildew. Her face was like wax melting off the bone below. She held her arms out to me like she wanted a hug. Her eyes were glowing hot and savage, teeth barred, tangles of saliva dangling from her mouth. I waited for her. When she got within three feet, I gave her a swift kick that sent her rolling in the grass.

  She made a hissing sound and came right back.

  She crawled through the grass, grinding her teeth.

  She looked like some human insect.

  When she came at me again, I swung the ice-chopper. The flat edge of the blade caught the top of her skull and there was a hollow, wet, cracking sound like a baseball bat striking a soft pumpkin. I hit her in the head again until her brains splashed down her face. She trembled in the grass and stopped moving.

  Up and down the streets the dead were shambling about.

  Some were up on porches pounding on doors and windows.

  How could it have amplified so fast?

  I ran for the mailman, the ice-chopper held up and ready to strike. A couple zombies shambled past me. They snapped their teeth at me. One of them—a woman wearing what looked like a hospital gown—reached out and I cracked her in the head with the chopper. It made no difference to her: she just shambled away. I might as well have hit a stump.

  I reached the mailman about the same time as Jimmy LaRue.

  Jimmy had brought a .22 semi-auto rifle with him. As I got into range, Jimmy shot the teenage boy through the head. He staggered comically back a few steps and then folded up, blood and brain matter leaking from a hole in his skull. Jimmy shot the man in the back, which did absolutely no good. He turned on us, his maw dyed red, feral as any wolf. He made a growling sound in his throat. As Jimmy took aim again, the dead man snatched one of the mailman’s arms he had chewed free and tried to walk off. Jimmy cracked off two more shots. By luck or design, one of them went through the back of the zombie’s knee. He hit the pavement, dragging himself forward in a slime trail of ooze and rot, refusing to drop the arm.

  Jimmy popped him in the head and that was that.

  “What the fuck’s going on here, Steve?” he wanted to know. His eyes were wide and shocked, his face white as the hair on his head. “These aren’t people…they’re fucking corpses. Goddamn zombies like on the late show.”

  I was looking down at the gored remains of the mailman. “That’s exactly what they are,” I said.

&nbs
p; The mailman’s throat was torn out and his belly had been hollowed, his mangled viscera spilled over the sidewalk. Everywhere he was red and ripped and partially-eaten.

  I turned away, my stomach rolling over.

  Jimmy said, “I…called the police…there was no answer…”

  I looked down Holly Street, dozens of other zombies were moving in our direction. They were making moaning sounds. An army of the dead had been set upon Lincoln Park.

  Jimmy started shooting again, dropping three more of them with perfect head-shots.

  It was insane.

  But it was happening.

  A bloated, naked woman whose flesh was mottled with green patches of mildew had Mrs. Hazen by the throat, was dragging her corpse off through all those carefully-tended azaleas, petunias, and morning glories. Her body flattened them as she was dragged into the backyard. I was going to go to Mrs. Hazen’s rescue, but I could see she was already dead. A big, one-armed zombie with a face like a nest of black moss climbed up onto a porch and dove through the screen door. A car came winging down the road, hit the zombie of a young woman with a resounding thud that sent her rolling to the curb. A guy got out and two zombies took him down, began savagely biting at his face and throat. People came out on their porches and the dead went after them.

  Everywhere now you could hear screaming and shouting and frantic pleas for help. Gunshots in the distance.

  It was madness.

  Shouting, sirens, gunfire.

  A naked woman came strolling out between two houses. She was tall and leggy, flaxen-haired, and was probably very attractive in life. But in death she was a sheer horror and Jimmy shot her dead. I turned and a fat man greasy with rot and drainage came at me, jowls drawn away from teeth that were stained red. I went at him with the ice-chopper like a man possessed. I didn’t even let Jimmy draw a bead on him. I charged in, swinging, like some bloodthirsty barbarian with drawn sword. I hit him six or seven times until he went down and I kept hitting him, landing that blade on his head, until he rolled over in the grass, from the neck up nothing but raw hamburger.