Best New Zombie Tales Trilogy (Volume 1, 2 & 3)

by James Roy Daley

  Until Amber told me she was pregnant.

  I snapped. I couldn’t help it. I didn’t want any explanations or consolations. I just wanted things to be like they were before Amber made her little confession. That, of course, wasn’t going to happen.

  It was like she was flaunting my own inadequacies in front of my face. I’m not normally the type to lose my temper, but this was different. This was a problem I had been struggling with for a long time, and here Amber was announcing that she was going to have a baby. Of course, she didn’t know about my problem. It’s not something I had ever discussed with her.

  It was something we would never get the chance to talk about. Even now, thinking back, I don’t remember putting my hands around her neck. But I must have done it. The marks around her throat told the story well enough.

  Once Amber stopped flopping around the deck I panicked and threw her into the ocean. It’s not the sort of thing you usually do to a loved one. Then again, neither is choking the life out of them. In the span of a few minutes I had done both.

  All my life I’ve dealt with a certain gift, and I briefly considered using it as Amber bobbed up and down in the water like a fisherman’s cork. I could have fixed everything, made everything right again. All it would have taken was a simple touch of my hand to send life flooding back into Amber’s body.

  So why didn’t I?

  I suppose it’s complicated. A man doesn’t really think too clearly when his head is full of booze and murderous thoughts and feelings of inadequacy. I guess the bottom line is that I panicked. It’s not everyday that I murder someone in cold blood and throw them out to sea to be nibbled on by hungry fish.

  It’s not everyday I go fishing for corpses either.

  Do you have any idea just how many dead things are in the ocean? Even I wasn’t really aware of how monumental this task would be until the dead started emerging from tidal depths like bits of driftwood washing onto the beach.

  To make things a little more clear, I have a certain affinity with the dead. Not in that ‘I see dead people’ kind of way, but in a different symbiotic way, like the relationship between a mind and body, one depending on the other. Mostly them depending on me. I can feel them out there, waiting to be used again, waiting to be filled up with a soul and a spirit. That’s why they respond so well to me. I whisper promises to them, vowing to give them life and purpose again, and they come to me.

  I’ve never called on the dead on such a grand scale as I’ve been doing for the past three days. Given the number of bodies lying at the bottom of the ocean, I wasn’t even sure how to start or what to expect. What I didn’t expect was to see the half-eaten bodies of sailors, fighter pilots who crashed into the ocean, swimmers who became lunch for the sharks, and even the sharks themselves. Some of them even had enough cohesion left about them to actually stagger ashore before realizing that the promises I whispered were mere lies.

  With every new disappointment, I sat as still as I possibly could and listened hard, hoping to hear Amber’s sweet voice calling to me from amongst the waves. Becalmed by the murmurings of the sea, I drew pictures in the sand with a bit of driftwood. The pictures were of Amber and me. And the baby.

  I wonder how I’ll react to the sight of her after days at the bottom of the sea. She won’t look the same. Decay will have likely set in. The fish will have taken their nibbles. Curious varieties of marine plankton may have established their colonies on her skin.

  I’d like to say things will be as they were before; that’s what I hope. But I’m realistic. Things can never be as the same. They can be close. But not identical.

  It will be like making a photocopy. The second chapter in our lives together will be like an incoming fax of the first. At first glance it will look basically the same. But there will be that fuzziness around the edges that makes it a little different, a little more grainy, a little less clear. I’ll know that there’s a baby in Amber’s womb. I’ll also know that the baby’s not mine.

  I won’t bring it back from the dead unless Amber convinces me otherwise.

  As I sit here, hooking and releasing the dead, a dolphin carcass washes ashore. It’s been bitten in half. A shark has likely made a meal off of the poor, defenseless creature. One of its flippers waves to and fro like the hand of a wannabe beauty queen in a small-town parade. I feel sorry for it and kick it into the waters where something can finish it off. One black, forlorn eye stares back at me. I try to ignore it. But, somehow, that blank, lifeless stare reminds me of what the eyes of that unborn child must look like, peering around in that dismal prison that is Amber’s womb, wondering what went wrong. I try to put it out of my mind and do so with some success.

  Eventually the darkness wanes as the moon trades places with the sun. I can see the extent of the carnage I raised from sub-aquatic depths. The water is full of chunks of dead meat and the fins of hungry sharks. Detritus left over from murdered ships floats lazily on the currents. Still, no Amber. I clear my mind of everything and remember the good times we shared. The day we first said ‘I love you.’ The first time she slept in my bed. The first time we had that conversation about the rest of our lives, only to discover that we both had the same optimistic outlook.

  That was all it took to summon her when the other feelings wouldn’t do the trick.

  She emerged from the oily black depths like the princess of some sub-aquatic kingdom, all glistening and wet and fresh like a baby out of the womb. I was a little surprised to see that her stomach was distended when she emerged from the dark water. There had been no indications before I killed her to suggest that Amber was pregnant and I couldn’t figure out why there should be now. The baby wasn’t still alive in there. I hadn’t brought it back from the abyss.

  Then I saw the smile on Amber’s face and realized that she was flaunting her secret in my face. She thought it was funny that this was the way things had turned out.

  Or maybe she was just so proud of the human cargo she carried inside of her that she couldn’t rid her face of the smile that might have only been a death rictus.

  “That’s not mine, you know?” I said, pointing to Amber’s stomach. One milky eye swiveled and turned to follow my finger.

  “Yours,” she hissed insistently.

  “No,” I said. “I’m infertile.”

  Amber looked at me oddly. “Yours,” she said. “And no one else’s.”

  “You just don’t get it,” I said.

  “Why did you kill me and bring me back?”

  And there it was, the very question I had been asking myself. Even now, I wasn’t sure I had the answer.

  “I killed you because I knew you had been unfaithful to me. You betrayed me after all the good times we shared. I brought you back because I wanted you to know why I killed you. I wanted you to realize that I knew you were cheating on me.”

  “I didn’t,” she insisted. “No one else. You were the only one. I loved you.”

  “You’re lying,” I said, but I wasn’t really sure anymore. Amber was dead now. There was nothing else I could do to her. She had no reason to lie at this juncture.

  “You are the only one who could be the father,” Amber insisted. Her blue lips trembled with each word she spoke.

  “I am not physically capable of fathering a child,” I stammered. “Don’t you understand that?”

  “Doctors make mistakes too,” Amber said.

  I wanted to say something else, but I knew she was right. Doctors weren’t infallible. Even the best ones gave faulty diagnoses sometimes.

  “Prove it to me,” I said. “Show me that you’re telling the truth.”

  She took the pocketknife from my hand and slowly inserted it into her abdomen. It reminded me of someone about to segment an orange. The knife was dull, but the flesh was rotten. The blade cut through the skin easily enough. Amber pulled the flaps of flesh back like curtains in front of a window.

  That’s when I saw my son for the first time and realized that Amber was, in fact, telling
the truth. He looked just like me all the way down to the patrician slant of the nose, the prominent chin, and the wisps of black hair. I couldn’t deny him.

  I realized at that moment what I had thrown away in a fit of jealous anger. It seemed impossible that I could be the father of that withered fetus, but there was no getting around it.

  It was like having a ready-made family. The only part needed was a father and husband. That role was mine.

  I ran a trembling hand through my thinning hair and looked around at all the piles of bones that I had summoned from the deep in order to get to this point. I couldn’t help thinking that things would have been a lot simpler had I just taken that extra moment to allow Amber an explanation rather than throttling her to death. I could have had a living family instead of this bone-yard byproduct.

  Nonetheless, this is what I was meant to have. This was my family. These were the people I was meant to be with and love. I just took a circuitous route to get to this point.

  “Can you ever forgive me for what I’ve done?” I asked Amber as tears rolled down my cheeks.

  Amber smiled at me with blue lips. “We’ll work it out,” she rasped.

  I pulled her close to me, barely noticing her rotten flesh and the way it felt like wet Styrofoam. I hardly winced at her saltwater stench.

  “Bring him back too,” Amber urged, putting her arm around my waist. In that moment, I knew what every delivery room father feels like when he sees his child open its eyes for the first time.

  Amber smiled and parted the flaps of skin that covered the baby.

  The little boy––my son––wriggled and squirmed.

  Amber gently removed him from her abdomen and held him to her breast.

  “Do you want to hold him?” she asked.

  Of course, I did.

  Most fishermen cast their lines and throw their nets in search of fish. Sometimes they catch something of value. Sometimes not. I think I beat even the best of them on their most successful day.

  I’ve never met an angler who went out on the water and caught a family.

  Groundwood

  BEV VINCENT

  For a while it seemed like the tide had turned against us permanently. Since that dumb ass down in D.C. had deployed our soldiers to every corner of the planet except where they were needed, it took a while before we could mount a defence. I passed those tense days in front of the TV, tryin’ to decide how to use the five bullets in the magazine of the Walther P38 my daddy brought home from Germany. If those god-forsaken creatures had reached a city, I believe it would have been all over for everyone back then, including Gilbert Marcoux—that’s me.

  After our guys finally got back from overseas, they killed every last one of ‘em. I say “killed” like they was alive—but they weren’t. Not really. Anyway, they stacked those abominations in fields like so much cordwood, under armed guard in case they happened to forget they was dead again. Most folks was afraid they’d come crawling out of the ground if they was buried, and I can’t blame ‘em. Happened once, after all—could happen again.

  On television, smarter people’n me argued over what to do with ‘em. The tree huggers got their panties in a twist when someone proposed burning, going on about poisoning the atmosphere and global warming as if we hadn’t all just almost died on account of something far worse than carbon dioxide and meltin’ icecaps.

  No one had a jeezly clue where the infection came from or how to make sure it was gone for good. Then a politician suggested grindin’ the remains up and turning ‘em into paper, the kind of idea you’d expect in a state covered with trees. The notion took hold. Even satisfied the eco-nutjobs. A green solution, they called it, and everyone was happy.

  I’ve been making paper for nearly thirty years. Dropped out of school after my daddy got blinded by a part thrown from a machine and couldn’t work no more. He didn’t last long after that. At least he didn’t wind up lumbering around with his arms stretched out like a scarecrow. There’s that to be thankful for.

  For the past decade, I worked groundwood, at the back of the second floor of the mill. A dozen lines stood maybe twenty feet apart, each with a metal conveyer belt. After the trees were cut and debarked out in the yard, six-foot lengths—some as thick as a man is tall—were dumped through holes in the roof into the lagoons at the front of the conveyers.

  Two men worked each line, a hauler and a loader. The hauler stood in front of the low wall that kept the water in the lagoon, pulled floatin’ logs close with an eight-foot peavey pole and slid ‘em onto the metal conveyer with a picaroon. When a man found his rhythm, peavey in one hand, picaroon in the other, he kept a steady flow of logs comin’ along the belt. If the log fall jammed, he had to balance on the narrow ledge between lagoons and poke at tons of timber hanging above him, trying to make it fall while praying he’d have time to get out of the way when it let go.

  The loader tumbled logs into four pairs of magazines evenly spaced along the belt. These were metal boxes six feet square, standing three feet out of the floor. They went down another twenty feet to the grinders that turned logs into mulch that got turned into stock and pressed into paper. He filled the magazines from front to back, lining logs up as neat as matches in a box—or bullets in a clip—to keep ‘em from jamming, and then made another pass, buildin’ little pyramids on top to get as many logs into each magazine as possible. If the logs jammed, he had to reach down with a pole and yank heavy pieces of deadwood around while billows of steam used to soften the wood cooked him. I saw more than one man take early retirement because of a wrecked back from doin’ that.

  When all eight magazines were topped off, the team could head over to the cafeteria, grab a nap or whatever. A shift usually alternated forty-five minutes on, forty-five minutes off, dependin’ on how high the grinders were turned up. If we let those bastards run empty, though, we’d spend the rest of the night strugglin’ to keep ‘em fed.

  Maybe there are people in the world who look forward to goin’ to work because each day is new and interesting, but that wasn’t life on groundwood. Still, it wasn’t a terrible way to earn a living for a man who didn’t mind strenuous, steamy, wet, filthy, deafenin’ work. In a way, we weren’t so different from those mindless creatures. We lurched in, punched the time clock, filled the magazines, punched out, and lurched back home again.

  One night management shut down Number Twelve and put up a tarp to keep out pryin’ eyes while they ran tests. A paper mill doesn’t exactly smell like a field of daisies, but the reek that greeted us at the top of the stairs that night ‘bout knocked us off our feet. Reminded me of the time a guy died in the apartment building next to mine and nobody missed him for a while. The day they found him, that stench was everywhere. Once you get a whiff of death, you never forget it. It comes back to you at the strangest times.

  About a month later, management called graveyard shift in half an hour early and told us things’d be different for a while. If anyone thought he’d have a problem stickin’ a pick into those creatures, he’d be reassigned, no questions asked. They knew what they was doing. No one was gonna be a wimp in front of everyone else. The mill chews up and spits wimps out just like the grinders turn timber into mulch. Any man who asked out might as well have moved to Timbuktu, wherever the hell that is.

  On the way outta the locker room there was two boxes—one with rubber gloves and the other with paper masks to cover our mouths and noses. The foreman stood next to the boxes, so we all took some and stuffed ‘em into our pockets, but it seemed pretty clear to me no one had any intention of using ‘em.

  As we climbed the stairs to the lines, the building began to shake and rumble from the grinders startin’ up. I pulled a pair of yellow foam earplugs from my shirt pocket, rolled ‘em up and stuck ‘em in my ears. When I reached the top of stairs, the stench caught me off guard. We only thought it’d been bad before. Remembering the way water from the lagoon splashed in my face during log falls, I pulled the paper mask out of my pocket and pu
t it on. The others around me did the same.

  That night, I was paired with Ernie Hamilton. He liked to pee in the magazines instead of going downstairs, and climbed up on the roof to sleep between loads. Lazy as the day is long. One time he didn’t wake up and I had to get the foreman to help me when the grinders started runnin’ empty. Why he didn’t get a free pass to the unemployment office, I don’t know. His wife must have been stepping out with the supervisor or something. Stuff like that happens in a small town.

  I clambered over the metal stiles that spanned the conveyers until I got to Number Six, took a deep breath, put the new gloves on under my work gloves and turned toward the lagoon for the first time. Mixed in with the debarked logs were naked, decomposed bodies. They floated in the water and dangled behind the grotto ceiling like there’d been a hurricane or somethin’. They was all torn up, with missin’ chunks of skin. I could see their muscles, bones, and innards. Their eyes gaped in what looked like amazement—those that still had eyes, that is.

  Acid churned in my stomach and burned my throat. My flesh ran cold. We’d seen these things on TV, but to be this close was something else. I wanted to take a deep breath to settle my nerves, but the stench made that seem like a bad idea. One of ‘em bobbed to the surface right in front of me. For a minute, I thought it was gonna crawl out of the lagoon and bite me. I took a step back, then I caught myself. I didn’t know who might be watchin’. They’re just logs, I told myself. No different from the millions of others I’ve sent to the grinders over the years. I swallowed hard, took off my helmet—against company regs, but who cared?—put on a little hat made out of newsprint, and wrenched a picaroon out of the overhead beam. Just logs.