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

by James Roy Daley

  The Augusta morgue pulled bodies from no less than eight different small towns in the immediate area. There had been seven deaths during the past two days. An Edward Needleman from White Falls, Marlene Marcus and a John Doe from Augusta, a Jen Seigel from Wiscasset, and the lovely and talented Denise James (currently starring in Lifestyles of the Rich and Dead, right outside your door)—those were the names he remembered. There were others. Maybe more than seven in here, behind those locker doors, waiting patiently for their time on the slab.

  Or waiting for something else. For some reason his mind flashed to a scene he’d imagined many times over the past three years, his Emma, the love of his life, dead of an overdose that should have been his, lying silent and still inside a coffin buried six feet underground, her arms crossed on her chest, her body collapsing into itself, lips and eyes slowly melting away to nothing. Waiting.

  “It’s…where we store all the corpses,” Bobby said. He hesitated, staring at the nearest bare toes peeking out from under the sheets. Feminine toes, still painted pink. “You don’t think…”

  “Let me see your hands,” Rocko said. He stuck the gun in his pocket and pulled out a metal flask.

  “Why—”

  “Just do it.”

  Bobby stuck out his hands, palms up. Rocko unscrewed the flask and poured liquid over them. The smell of high-proof alcohol burned Bobby’s nostrils. Rocko rubbed it into his skin. “Everclear,” he said. “Gets rid of the residue. Where’s the baggie?”

  “In my pocket.” Bobby started to reach for it, and Rocko slapped his hand away.

  “Don’t touch it,” he said. “Did you reseal the bag?”

  “I think so. Why? What the hell’s going on?”

  Rocko didn’t look at Bobby, and at first it seemed it might be out of embarrassment, but then Bobby realized he was watching the corpses. “I’m not exactly J.D.’s best friend, you catch my drift. I knew what you guys were doing here. Smuggling blow inside of dead bodies? Fucking genius, I said. But J.D. didn’t like me cutting in. I had to get creative.”

  “You killed him,” Bobby said.

  “No, I killed his partner, like I told you. That part was true. They were faggots, you know. J.D. drew down on me. I needed leverage.”

  “What kind of leverage did that get you? Why wouldn’t J.D. just kill you?”

  “Because he was in love with the guy, and I was the only one who could get the stuff that would bring him back.”

  Bring him…? Bobby shook his head. “You’re crazy,” he said. “Plain as vanilla, shit-house nuts.”

  “Oh yeah? What about Denise out there,” Rocko said. “She a figment of my crazy imagination?”

  “I…” and then he understood. “It’s the powder,” Bobby said. “That’s right, isn’t it? Some of it got into her, down there.”

  “Regular Shiloh Holmes,” Rocko said, and Bobby didn’t bother to correct him. It didn’t matter.

  What mattered was that the flask was back in the man’s pocket, and the gun was out again.

  And what was worse (much, much worse, in fact) was that said gun was pointing directly at Bobby’s face.

  A bullet between the eyes might not slow down Denise James, Bobby thought, but he was pretty damn sure it would put a real damper on his future plans.

  “Here’s the deal,” Rocko said in a low voice. “That woman’s been dead too long for her to do more than stumble through the dark. Her bulb’s burned out, you catch my drift? And they need a little more of that Gravedigger powder every few minutes to keep walking around. I haven’t heard a noise from the other room in a while now, which makes me wonder if maybe she just fell back down dead again.”

  He was right, Bobby realized; the thumping at the door had stopped.

  “What do you want from me?” he said.

  “I want you to open up that door, real slow, and stick your head out to see what’s going on. You do that, and if it’s cool, I’ll let you leave. You don’t, and I’ll shoot you in the leg first, before I throw you out there. They love the smell of blood. You can play spin the bottle with Denise. Or something else. Maybe she’ll give you one of those special blowjobs, on the house.”

  Bobby looked at him. Rocko smiled, but his eyes were still dead. He motioned with the gun. “Get out there, hotshot, before I change my mind.”

  * * *

  By the time he’d gathered up his courage enough to crack open the door, Bobby had it all pretty much figured out; Rocko was smuggling something way beyond regular old blow, something that might just be goddamned near the holy grail. Live forever, even if you’re dead. Where it came from, who the hell knew, but J.D. must have had a pretty good idea of how the stuff worked for him to believe his partner could be resurrected. Whether he was in on all this from the beginning or not didn’t really matter.

  The simple fact was, this stuff was worth a lot more than any other shipment that had ever come through here. And that meant it was way too valuable to let little old Bobby live to tell the tale.

  So you’re a dead man if you stay in here, and you’re very likely a dead man if you go out there. Pick your poison.

  Bobby ached for a little bit of something to calm his nerves. Just a little pinch would make all this go away for the wet parts, or at least not matter as much. But that wouldn’t really help him, now would it? No. So what if it dulled the pain when Denise started ripping out his throat. The end was the same.

  Rocko tapped the gun barrel against the back of his head. Bobby took a deep breath and cracked the door.

  The room outside appeared empty. He could just see Damon’s shoes, speckled with blood. No movement.

  He pushed the door open a little bit wider, heart hammering in his throat, and got a full view of Damon’s bloody corpse lying on the floor. No sign of Denise.

  As he peered into the other room, Bobby was aware of a familiar sense of loss. He wasn’t quite sure what the feeling meant, only that it was about himself and who he was and why he’d ended up here, of all places. Always wondered if I had a death wish. Way I grew up, always into trouble, like I was looking for it every place I went. Drugs, using and dealing, sort of like dying and coming back to life and then dying again. Little deaths. Waiting for the wrong guy to come along and put a bullet in me. Or maybe just waiting for the wrong pills to fry my brain into oblivion, a dog to tear off my face.

  Emma had been his lifeline, or so he thought. They would get married, move out of his shitty trailer, he’d take a steady job and they’d have some kids. She was supposed to make it all better. But somehow they’d never gotten there, and now she was dead, just like he would be if he didn’t think of something pretty damn fast.

  He swallowed and pushed the door all the way open. He could see the dusting of powder that had spilled from the bag when he took it from his pocket. He could not tell whether it had been disturbed. Had there been an entire pile of it before, or just…

  “What’d you call that stuff?” he said. “Gravedigger powder?”

  “Keep moving,” Rocko said at his back. Bobby inched out into the room and scanned right and left. The woman was not there. Equipment was scattered across the floor; bone saws and shears, dissection knives, lab pans and trays, exam gloves spilling from an open packet, Mayo stands tipped like drunken soldiers. Blood from Damon’s carotid artery had sprayed like a whipping fire hose across the wall and high window and speckled the storage closet doors, deep sink and centrifuges, making the entire scene look like some kind of surreal modern art exposition in gore.

  The door to the hallway was standing wide open. Bobby could just make out what looked like a single faint footprint in blood near the threshold.

  “I don’t think she’s here,” he said, legs shaking with relief as he turned back to Rocko. “I think maybe she—”

  He heard a sudden scraping noise, and turned to find the naked dead woman exploding out of the storage closet,

  (not so stupid after all, now is she)

  gray mottled breasts flapping,
hitting him low around the waist, like a free safety coming up to stuff the run, and he was flying backward and into Rocko as the gun went off and stitched the ceiling, scattering plaster chips and dust. The impact took him off his feet and drove them both through the door and back into the refrigerator unit, the woman already scrabbling at him as they hit the floor hard and came to rest below the nearest gurney.

  Bobby rolled over, then felt his bladder let go with a warm rush as the dead woman’s cool, dry fingers ran over his face and neck. He kicked at her and tried to scramble away. He could smell the chemicals on her, the dead flesh already beginning to rot. She bared her teeth, but her hands kept moving lower, and at the same time he became aware of a strange film in the room, coating his face and softening the light until he could see nothing but haloed shapes.

  He blinked to clear his sight, and looked down to see Denise James licking white dust from his jacket with a long, gray tongue, her eyes rolled back to whites as her body shuddered as if in release.

  Oh, God. God, no. She’d hit him full speed right at the jacket pocket level, and what remained of the bag of gravedigger powder had burst all over him and into the air.

  Rocko had smacked his head against the tile floor and was lying motionless, the gun somewhere out of sight. A trickle of blood ran from his mouth. Bobby shoved the woman away from him and tried to get to his feet, but she grabbed him by his legs and began to pull herself up his body with claws as strong as iron. Her wrinkled buttocks clenched, bare feet scrambling against the tile, and he thought of a possum he’d seen as a kid that had been run over in the road, its hind legs crushed, dragging itself across the asphalt.

  The powder was everywhere.

  He managed to get a hand on the edge of the gurney table, and he was almost upright when something brushed against his fingers. He looked down at his hand to see naked toes wiggling against him from under the gurney’s white sheet.

  Near hysterics and summoning more strength than he knew he had left, he drove his knee upward and caught Denise James smartly under the chin. Her head snapped back and her grip loosened, and he lashed out at her again in a roundhouse kick, catching her flush on the temple with the top of his shoe. She went down hard, her head hitting the floor with a sickening crack.

  Her tongue her tongue is severed bitten right through—

  The tongue lay on the tile like a fat, purple worm, wriggling of its own accord as if trying desperately to reach him. At that point Bobby very clearly felt one corner of his mind unhinge, and he grinned through what appeared to be a reddish mist that had begun to descend over his eyes. He realized that he’d been wrong before; it wasn’t a possum she reminded him of, but a dog. A big, mean bastard that liked to rip into flesh. One with a taste for human blood. He’d seen that dog before, in fact it had haunted his dreams for years; that dog had had a taste of him and found it good, and now it was back for more.

  “Gimme back my face!” he screamed, and as she tried to rise he stomped down on her head with everything he had, feeling something crack and give, and then he stomped down again, and this time the feeling was like stepping on a rotten pumpkin out in the field, a bit of resistance and then soft, gooey sickness. He raised a red, dripping sneaker and brought it down one more time, until Denise James’s skull was nothing but a shuddering, oozing pulp of cartilage, teeth and muscle. Dimly he heard himself shouting, the sound of a damned man, and through that sound a single clear thought cut its way to the surface: maybe his was not a death wish at all, maybe he was the dead one, maybe death was your mother’s trailer in Indian Road park with cinderblock front steps and a clothesline in the back, and a job cutting up corpses with a sociopath for a partner, a fiancé lying cold in the ground from your own bad stash and $75 in the bank with no real way to pay the bills other than smuggling the very thing that had nearly suffocated him before the dog’s jaws finally brought him to his knees.

  Maybe death was having nothing ahead of you, and nothing behind.

  Or maybe it was the face of the stranger that stared back at you from the mirror every morning.

  “Gimme back my face,” he muttered again, and stumbled backward, away from the ruin that had been Ms. Denise James. Her foot twitched on the tile. He tried not to look at it. His pact with God earlier was no good, he realized now. Because God was dead too. He had to be, if this was how the world ended up.

  The wetness of his urine had grown cold and his pants stuck uncomfortably to his skin. He became aware of other sounds in the room. Wet, ripping sounds, and other draggings and hollow thumps. He looked up to see the young, naked woman from the gurney (Jen Siegel from Wiscasset?), her of the pink, wriggling toes, her back to him as she sat astride the jittering body of Rocko. She lowered her face to tear at his neck, and if Bobby hadn’t known better, he might have thought it was a lover’s embrace and tender kiss.

  Gravedigger…

  He glanced around the room to see the two other corpses (Edward? Marlene?) rising up off their gurneys like puppets pulled by invisible strings, and he could now clearly make out the sounds of other things thumping against the closed and latched doors of their lockers, the sound like someone beating the hull of a wounded submarine.

  Bobby DeCourci screamed.

  Jen Seigel’s head whipped around at the sound, and she hissed back at him like a cat before leaping to her feet. Edward and Marlene were up and moving now too (Edward had a bum leg, which made him limp in death as surely as it must have in life), and Bobby stumbled backward, sobbing helplessly now, until he was up against the wall.

  It’s funny now that I’m facing my own end for real, I find out I wanna live.

  Jesus, yes, he did.

  I want to live.

  He looked around desperately for an opening. There, under the third gurney, was Rocko’s gun. As Jen Seigel leaped at him he went low in a baserunner’s headfirst dive, sliding across the bloody tile on his stomach and then pulling himself the rest of the way with his arms until the gun was in his hand. Then he rolled out from under the gurney, scrambled to his feet, turned to Edward Needleman and pulled the trigger.

  Nothing happened.

  Check the safety, you idiot…

  He pressed the orange button on the side and then pulled the trigger again.

  The gun bucked in his hand and Edward stumbled. He turned to fire twice at Jen Seigel, who had almost reached him now, and she fell sideways. Marlene hung back, watching him warily, a glint of intelligence in her eyes. Was she the freshest corpse? Bobby wondered. He tried to recall what Rocko had said. Something about Denise James being dead too long to remember…

  Edward and Jen were back on their feet and coming at him again. He didn’t know how many more bullets were left in the gun, and there were too many of them between him and the door. There was no way out.

  Something nagged at him as he waved the gun from one to the next, trying to figure out which one to shoot, something about how these people were acting, not quite like animals, but as if they had some semblance of intelligence; Denise James biting off Damon’s cock as if it retaliation for his earlier violation, her hiding in the closet and waiting for just the right moment to jump him, and now Marlene looking almost as if she were trying to plan a path of attack.

  But it wasn’t until Rocko stood up that his way out clicked into place.

  And even then, the sheer magnitude of what he was about to do nearly overwhelmed him. He had lived the past few years swearing on his mother’s grave he would never touch the stuff again, and yet his body always ached for it. Even now, he felt that ache deep in his belly. Once he stepped back on that path, there was no turning away again…

  (…that to start up again would mean death, that he would not be able to stop, no matter what happened to him, and that sooner or later he would end up on one of these tables, with someone else sticking the line into his veins to drain him dry.)

  But what choice did he have? If he tried to make it to the door, they would rip him apart. None of the corpses seemed t
o have any interest in each other; for whatever reason (and did the why really matter?), they were interested only in the living. That and the powder that kept them animated.

  “Gimme,” Rocko said. His voice sounded like he’d swallowed an aquarium full of gravel. His throat was half torn out. One eye was gone, in its place a bloody socket touched with the white gleam of fresh bone. He stumbled forward, silver buckles on his biker jacket tinkling. “I can smell it. Gimmmmeeee…”

  Bobby stared at Rocko’s ruined face and wondered if he had perhaps lost his own mind. Yes, in fact, that seemed to be a distinct possibility. He put the gun on the gurney, then dug into his jacket pocket and withdrew the popped baggie. A bit left in one of the corners. Then he dumped a small amount of the powder into his other palm and took a deep breath.

  Well ain’t this ironic, Bobby my man? You spent every waking hour the past three years trying to keep from stuffing blow up your nose and ending up feet first to the furnace, and now it’s the only way for you to stay alive. After a fashion, anyway.

  He chuckled. Ironic, all right. And as he lifted his palm to his nose, he found himself wondering what Emma might look like after three years in the ground.

  The rush hit him almost immediately, that great, sweeping rush, prickles running up and down his limbs and turning his blood to glass. The red haze that had obscured his sight returned, and with it came an almost unbearable itch.

  When he opened his eyes again they were almost upon him.

  Bobby DeCourci didn’t hesitate. He swept the gun up and pressed the barrel to his own chest directly over his heart.

  He figured he had just enough powder in him to find J.D. and the source. After that, maybe he’d pay Emma a visit. He wondered again how bad she might look after three years. And after that long, was there enough left of her brain to make her function again after some of this gravedigger powder?