by Tim Lebbon
“Score,” Hadley muttered.
“Eat that, Stockholm,” Sitterson said.
Beside him, Hadley sighed. Sitterson checked more dials and readouts, then he glanced to the left where he’d seen movement on one of the other monitors. Hadley had seen it as well.
“Oh,” Truman said again. “She’s...wow.”
Any moment now, Sitterson thought. And just for a moment he looked away from the screens, allowing himself a moment to close his eyes and compose himself, readying himself for what was to come. He almost told Truman to do the same.
But like he’d had to do, the kid would need to learn the hard way.
•••
Curt rolled her over and slid his hand into her panties, his fingers expert at touching her where and how she most desired. She groaned out load and looked up at the tree canopy, her left hand freeing him from his jeans as he worked at her, her right hand splaying out on the ground and clasping a handful of the scented, warm moss.
I wonder where the stars have gone? she wondered.
Something slammed into her hand and she could no longer move it. It felt warm, then suddenly cold again.
Curt’s fingers were inside her, but she no longer felt them. She grew cold again. The ground pricked against her bare skin.
And then the pain bit in and she screamed, looking at her hand and seeing the thick rusty blade that had passed through her palm and pinned her to the ground.
“Curt!” she screamed, bucking him off, because nothing else she saw around her made any sense. “Curt/”
SIX
For the first few seconds Curt could not move, or speak, nor could he feel his heart beating. Like him, it was frozen in shock.
When it did kick back in he almost collapsed from the impact, coughing as it pummeled his ribs, trying to rise from his knees, and painfully aware that the love of his life was about to die in front of him.
They were being attacked, but not by people. These things might once have been people but now they were...
Dead, Curt thought. They must be, because they’ve got things crawling out of their mouths and holes in their skin, their faces, their heads, and—
And Jules was screaming for him again, almost naked and sitting up, trying to pull away from where a skinny, small boy had impaled her against the ground with a fucking knife! The boy—
—Zombie! Curt thought, That’s all they can be, what they must be— —wore old-fashioned clothing, had long hair caked in mud, and when he glanced back at Curt his eyes were milky white and terrifying.
He held Jules’s wrist and tugged his rusty blade from her hand, eliciting a scream that chilled Curt to the core.
Behind her, a lumbering, fat woman reached around and pressed the rusted teeth of a saw against her throat.
Staring at his lover’s terrified, screaming face Curt could not avoid seeing what happened just behind her, as the zombie woman’s stomach seemed to flap open and spill three burning coals from a cauterized interior. They tumbled onto Jules’s head and fell down her back, and the pleasant country air was suddenly alive with the stench of burning hair and scorched skin and flesh.
The woman pressed herself against the back of Jules’s head and pulled the saw across her neck. The teeth snagged on skin and parted it with a terrible ripping sound, like wet cotton being torn.
And Curt shoved aside his shock and leapt forward.
He dove past Jules and knocked the zombie woman aside, seeing as he did so that there was a huge third shape lumbering toward them from the shadows.
“Fuck away from her!” he screamed. The mother-zombie fell aside, saw twanging/ at the air. Jules’s scream had died out and she was leaning forward, but as he turned to help her the kid-zombie’s arm swung and the knife’s rusted blade buried itself in Curt’s arm.
He roared in fury, shock keeping the pain at bay for the precious few seconds it took him to try and pull it out. He couldn’t, so he grabbed the kid-zombie’s arm instead and tugged hard. The thing came close, no expression at all on its face—and that was the worst thing right then, worse than the shock and Jules’s crying and the idea What the fuck is going on here?— the complete lack of expression on the faces.
No signs of life, Curt thought, and he grimaced as he punched the kid-zombie in the face with his left hand.
He felt the nose give way and parts of it crumbled off. It didn’t seem to faze the kid-zombie at all, but it did shove him back so that he let go of the blade.
Curt stepped in front of Jules and tugged the blade free of his arm, screaming as he did so, bending to see how bad the damage was, mind working at twice its normal speed as he tried to figure out just what the fuck he was going to do next. Carry her no can’t carry her too slow fight them all maybe but that punch didn’t—
He heard a chain rattle, looked up, and saw that big-zombie had arrived. He was maybe six and a half feet tall, almost that around, and unlike the others he did exhibit some basic human emotion.
He grinned.
Something dropped from his hand and hit the ground at his feet, connected to his hand by the chain Curt had heard rattling. It was heavy, and metallic, and though the trees filtered the moonlight Curt could still see the ugly teeth of an old-fashioned bear trap, broken, just one jaw left. As he wondered what had happened to the other jaw, big-zombie swung the makeshift mace and chain with terrifying speed. Curt fell forward and tried to protect Jules, but the heavy metal whacked the side of his head. He fell, grunting, seeing the shadow of the weapon pass by above him as it ricocheted from his skull. Flat side not teeth side, he thought with vague relief, trying to rise to protect himself from another blow. But dizziness hit him and he stumbled, blinking blood from his eye and mumbling, “Ju... Jules...”
“Curt!” she shouted, and her throat sounded raw.
In front of him, Curt saw Jules trying to stand, reaching for him with one hand while the other clasped the bloodied mess of her throat. Her nudity made her pathetic now, and their loving seemed a million years away as he watched the bear trap swing around again and bury its teeth in her back.
She screamed and arched forward, reaching back to try and pry the thing loose, blood spewing from her ripped throat and down across her chest and stomach. And when she fell forward Curt thought it was because she was trying to walk toward him, but her legs would not obey
He shook his head and cleared his vision, dashing forward to grasp her hand but only just missing as big-zombie started to haul her backward.
Her fingers dug into the earth and rucked up furrows of rotting leaves and damp soil.
Curt lunged forward again... and then felt the cool sharpness around his throat. He snapped his head back from the blade, connecting with something dry and soft that crunched as it broke, and then the blade was pulled tight against his throat, something hard pressed against his back, and he was pivoted from his feet. He struggled and thrashed, thinking of Jules’s gashed neck and trying to protect his own, but there was nothing he could do.
Not even scream.
He could only watch as big-zombie stomped on Jules’s back and pried the bear trap from her flesh, blood gouting into the night air. She was pleading and whimpering now, bubbles forming at her throat as she did so, and as the kid-zombie grabbed her hair and pulled back her head, she was looking directly into Curt’s eyes.
It’s holding me so I can see this, and then it’ll kill me.
Mother-zombie held the broken saw blade against Jules’s throat again, and Curt thought, This is when it ends, the joke, the trick, some freakish new TV show maybe, and the guys will come out from the cabin laughing at how easily we were taken in by a bunch of fucking zombies coming out of the woods and—
Mother-zombie began sawing at Jules’s throat. She struggled, her eyes rolling back and mouth working but saying nothing, but she was held fast. The saw hacked through skin and flesh, and Curt heard the flow of blood as her carotid artery was severed. Then he heard the first hard scrape of rusted metal teeth ag
ainst bone.
“Oh God,” Curt whimpered, unable to close his eyes however much he tried, “oh God, oh God, oh—”
•••
“—God,” Truman said, “oh God, shit, shit, shit...”
The sounds coming through the speaker were turned up, because it had to be that way. Wet, tearing sounds. The bubbly hiss of the girl’s last breath. The saw tearing into bone, catching, jarring.
From Hadley and Sitterson, only the uncomfortable shuffling of men who had seen this before, but who could never quite get used to it. Sitterson was looking down at his hands, which were hovering above the keyboard in case any last-second tweaks needed performing, though he knew from all he had seen and heard that all was going well.
The girl had stopped making those noises because her throat and windpipe had been cut through, and now came only the terrible scraping sound.
“This we offer in humility and fear,” Sitterson intoned, “for the blessed peace of your eternal slumber. As it ever was.”
“As it ever was,” Hadley echoed softly.
Sitterson pulled at the thin leather thong around his neck, lifting the pendant from beneath his shirt. It was made from white gold, cast into the shape of a five-pointed symbol. Not a pentagram, but something more arcane, something older. He glanced at it briefly, concentrating on one small arm of the deformed star, and then kissed it before dropping it against his chest once more.
From the corner of his eye he could see Truman watching, but he did not turn to face the young man. Why should he? There was nothing on offer there.
Behind him, Hadley had crossed to the mahogany panels at the far end of the room, built into the plain concrete wall and the ancient rock of the ground behind them. Sitterson turned slightly and watched his friend open the first panel, sliding it back on smooth runners, to expose the ornate brass apparatus. Without hesitation Hadley grasped the lever and eased it downward, pushing against pressure, and kept his hand on it until it clicked into place against the lower pin.
And deeper down in a place that could never be seen Sitterson knew what was happening: in the mechanism older than Man, a small metal hammer struck a glass vial, cracking it from top to bottom and releasing the blood retained inside. The blood ran into a brass funnel that extended into a long, long pipe, running even deeper through rock and dark spaces, emerging eventually into a place deeper still.
Here, the blood poured onto a slab of marble leaning against the wall, and in the total blackness it began to fill the intricate image carved onto the marble slab’s surface.
Sitterson opened his eyes, not aware that he’d been daydreaming. His heart was thumping.
I mustn’t go down there, he thought, not even in my dreams!
“The boy,” Hadley said, and Sitterson nodded, sniffed, wiped his hands across his face. He had to get himself together. This had only just begun.
•••
Calm, Curt thought, looking down at the blood-spattered leaves at his feet, and realizing with detached shock that his dick was still hanging out of his trousers. That seemed somehow sad. Stay calm, stay still, let them think I’ve given in, that’s my only chance...
The kid-zombie and mother-zombie were ambling toward him, kid holding the rusty blade, mother holding the saw that glimmered with Jules’s blood. Beyond them he could see her body, the ruin of her head and throat hidden by the big zombie. He was moving strangely, but Curt couldn’t see what he was doing. He was glad. But not seeing didn’t mean that he could not imagine, and every zombie movie he’d ever seen gave him hints.
The small zombie and the woman zombie hissed as they drew closer, giving their faces inhuman expressions for the very first time, and then they raised their blades.
Curt—the sportsman, the football star, the fit guy who all the girls loved to love—grabbed the father-zombie’s arms and heaved himself up, planting a foot on each of the approaching monsters’ chests and kicking hard. They sprawled to the ground, and Curt fell back onto the zombie holding the scythe at his throat. He used the momentum to roll backward, head slipping out from beneath the blade and his feet landing on the ground just past the zombie’s head. Jumping upright, amazed at his own escape, he stared at Jules for a couple of seconds, aware that big-zombie was turning to look at the commotion. On his face, blood.
Curt turned and ran. And just as he thought his legs had helped him escape and that he might actually make it—back to the cabin, back to friends, where they could pull together and defend themselves against these bastard things—the scythe sliced into the leg of his jeans, opened the skin across his ankle and tripped him.
Curt cried out as he hit the harsh, spiky ground. He wondered what saw teeth would feel like when it was tugged murderously across his throat.
•••
Little Nemo in Slumberland was hardly the height of literary endeavor, but Marty liked the little dude. There was lots about Marty that the others didn’t understand, and lots they probably couldn’t, even if they bothered putting their minds to it. But he was a guy who, with the aid of mind-enhancing drugs, understood himself completely. And there weren’t may people who could say that.
Like Curt, for example, with his close-cropped hair and square jaw, defined muscles and eyes that said, Love me, please. Or Jules, sweet Jules with her pert little titties, ever-changing hair and an awareness of herself that stretched only so far as others saw her. Friends, but distant from him.
Dana, maybe. Dana had come closer than anyone, their friendship a complex thing but one which he relished, and treasured.
“Nemo, man,” he said, “you gotta wake up. Your shit is topsy-turvy.” He sighed and dropped the book to his chest. “Ah, I feel ya, Neems. Gotta ride that bed.” He stretched, and through the roaring of blood in his ears as he yawned—
“I’m gonna go for a walk.”
The voice wasn’t his.
Marty sat up, eyes wide. He looked around his room. Bed, chair, cupboard, weird picture on the wall, that was it.
“Okay, I swear to fucking God somebody is talking.” He ran his hands over his eyes, weary. Yawned again. Just that, he thought. Just me yawning.
But there’d been that time earlier, when the others were arguing and he thought he’d heard a whisper on the air...
“Or I’m pretty sure someone is... ah...” Marty shook his head.
“I’m gonna go for a walk.”
Marty stood and looked around the room, arms waving about his head as if to flick away an annoying fly.
“Enough! What are you saying? What do you want? You think I’m a puppet, gonna do a puppet dance— fuck all y’all! I’m the boss of my brain, so give it up!” He waited for something else, but there were no more voices, no presence in his room. He snorted. “I’m gonna go for a walk.”
He slammed his door behind him and stalked along the corridor. The large room beyond was subtly lit with candles and the newly-stocked fire, and for a second Marty stood at the end of the hallway and watched Holden and Dana. They were kissing, and it was the sweetest thing he’d ever seen, soft and passionate. It didn’t seem to fit their surroundings.
There’s something old and hard here, Marty thought.
“I don’t wanna...” Dana muttered. “I mean I’ve never... I don’t mean never, but not on the first...” “Hey,” Holden said, “nothing you don’t want.” He leaned in to kiss again and Marty had to turn away, walking across the room and heading for the outside door. To his left the hatch into the basement remained firmly closed, but he couldn’t help thinking that something had come out of there with them.
To his right, the lovers on the sofa glanced up at him with coy surprise.
“He’s got a husband bulge,” Marty said, frowning, not quite sure where that had come from. Jealous much, dude? Then he pulled open the door and stepped outside, gasping momentarily as he met the cool air. The door closed behind him and the cabin’s interior was instantly far away, a memory of someone else walking across that room and saying that strang
e thing. Who the fuck calls a boner a husband bulge? he thought, and though the memory of where he’d heard that phrase was fresh, he did his best to avoid it.
He walked on and left the cabin behind, pausing at the first stand of trees. It was quiet, and he looked up between the trunks.
“I thought there’d be stars.” He sighed, smiled. “We are abandoned.” He unzipped and started pissing, watching the swirls and whorls of steam as it drifted off between the trees, lit by weak light from the cabin.
Behind him, a breaking twig.
Marty stopped in mid-stream and looked around. Just trees. He glanced left and right, remembering something about peripheral vision being better at night. Nothing moved, and there were no more sounds.
He sighed again, looking forward to getting back inside and rolling a new joint, and as he finished pissing and zipped up Curt barreled into him.
“Run! Fucking run!” He was clasping Marty’s arms too tightly, hurting, bunching up his shirt and tugging hard as they danced on the spot and Curt tried hauling him toward the cabin,
“What’s—?”
“Go!” Curt yelled again. He looked a mess—blood on his arm, head cut and bleeding somewhere, leaves, dirt, and he looked fucking terrified. As Marty was sizing him up Curt changed tactic, letting go and pushing Marty toward the cabin instead.
His panic caught, and Marty ran.
From the shadows to their right, a figure darted at them. It was... a girl, but there was something wrong. One arm was missing. And in her other arm, she carried a hatchet. Her hair was long and lank, clotted with leaves and mud, and her face was all wrong. Marty skidded to a halt, staring, trying to make sense of what he was seeing, but Curt put on a burst of speed and swung his arm across the girl’s throat. She flipped backward and sprawled, never letting out a sound.
“Dead bitch!” Curt shouted. He span around, grabbed Marty’s arm, and pulled him up onto the porch.
“Curt, your dick’s—”
“Inside.” Curt flipped the catch and booted the door open.
•••
He’s got a husband’s bulge, Marty had said, echoing the weird language in the diary from downstairs. At the time Dana had thought it strange, but as soon as Marty had closed the door Holden had held her again, pulling her close and cupping the back of her head as he kissed her sweet and deep.