The Zombies of Lancaster

by Frank Weltner

  He went through the front door, grabbed the first person walking by who happened to be a mother of four on her way to the store. He pulled her inside and buried his face in her stomach, pulling her guts out of her intestinal wall and feeding hungrily from them. He was famished, and no matter how much he ate, he wanted more and more of her.

  He bit into her throat and noticed the fountain of blood pulsing from her neck which he stopped with his mouth. Danny forced her fluids into his aching stomach that was so in need of food that it immediately stopped hurting as soon as her fresh red claret entered it and covered its walls, dissolving the acid and bringing his stomach into conformity.

  The pain left immediately, giving Danny a great deal of relief.

  Now, Danny supped more slowly from her, ripping off her clothes and tasting whatever pieces of the woman that he could rip out of her with his teeth. She was delectable. He had never tasted anything so delicious. The odor of freshness was exuded from her body, because she was an uninfected human, which was exactly what zombies like Danny wanted to smell, taste, and ingest. She was wonderful. The name in her wallet read Janet Polsen, but Danny had no idea what the letters were or meant. All he wanted was flesh, and the woman's wallet neither tasted nor felt like flesh, so he discarded it as soon as he realized his mistake. He corrected it by tearing off a large and delicious mouthful of Janet's hind quarter.

  Um. It was so pleasant to feed.

  #

  Janet Polsen awoke, if she could call it being awake. She had forgotten who she was, why she was there, and how to stand up. It was difficult to do anything. Her arms were flailing about as were her legs. It seemed to take her forever just to stand up the first time.

  She ambled down the hall and out into the street, when a car hit her. The driver's name was Maurice Winters. He emerged, asking Janet, "Are you all right?"

  Janet lifted her hand toward him, and as he reached down to help her up, she lunged and bit him tearing out a huge triangle of skin and muscle from his groin. The material hung from Janet's mouth like the red insides of a dead cat.

  Um. It was so good.

  She bit him in more places, pulling him apart from many angles. He was delicious no matter where she bit into him, and she considered him a national culinary treasure, even though no words appeared in her mind, and all she felt was the joy of his bloody tastes. This was just what Janet wanted, and she tore into him from a number of angles, each bite tasting better than the other.

  #

  Maurice Winters staggered down the street. He had been torn and eaten in several places by the newly infected mother of four named Janet Polsen. Maurice had never been so hungry in his life, nor had he ever felt this sick. His stomach was about to barf. It was filled with an irritating liquid, probably acidosis or bile, and, as it belched, the odor that emerged was horrific. Maurice only knew one thing and this was that he must eat something, and soon.

  Lacey Tarleson entered the store, and ran into Maurice whose mouth awaited whatever came its way. She felt herself collapse into darkness as his teeth tore into her. The last thing she saw before she woke up a changed person was her blood flying out of her where Maurice Wilson had first bitten into her stomach.

  It hurt so painfully that Lacey Tarleson couldn't even scream. As she lost consciousness, she heard Maurice Winters growling as he consumed the pieces of her that he had been gathering inside his mouth. His head jerked here and there inside her bleeding thorax causing pieces of her flesh to take off to the left and right right where he was holding the biggest parts of her intestines between his painfully eager teeth.

  "Oh, God," Lacey thought. "So this is how it feels to die." She had no intention of surviving even for a moment. All she wanted was death and dying so that she could be free of this.

  She got death all right. She woke up in under an hour as a resurrected zombie newbie from the Amish infection that now ran through her. Suddenly, she realized she was dead. Eternally dead. When her eyes opened onto her brave new world, she had no way of knowing whether or not the pain would leave her in peace. Maurice Winters continued chewing on parts of her. "Get over it, bitch," he half-thought in a kind of strange zombie sing song, but no sounds issued from his dead lips. These words were probably the last ones he would ever have in his dying brain, because Maurice Winters had already lost whatever meaning language had held for him.

  #

  When Lacey Tarleson awoke, she hobbled back to her automobile where she'd left her children and mother-in-law. She tore the door off its hinges before they got a look at the horrible new mother Lacey Tarleson had become in her new zombie incarnation. Her flashing teeth tore into them, ripping pieces of them away. The bites were so primal, she never knew she even had children much less that these were them. She only knew an overwhelming hunger for their sweet human flesh.

  She saw several persons looking at her, as she stumbled toward them with blood, drool, and flesh hanging from her face.

  "Did you see what she did to them kids?" Mrs. Gracy Lassiter said. "I'm going to call Family Services on you, Lacey Tarleson!" Lacey grabbed Mrs. Lassiter and tore out her throat before she ever said another word. Next, the tore a chunk out of her husband, Arnie Lassiter, who had stepped forward in an attempt to protect her. Arnie saw his vision blur into blackness as Lacey Tarleson tore away his side and ripped out his intestines. "Is Lacey Tarleson really eating my guts?" his fading mind asked as he rolled in the street and screamed for someone to help him.

  No one came. They were too busy being attacked and chewed by other drooling zombies who suddenly seemed to be more numerous than normal people. No sooner was one person bitten and harvested, than they awoke feeling a great hunger for the blood and flesh of drifting scores of humans who had not yet been infected with whatever virus this was that had hit Lancaster County with a vengeance.

  Mr. and Mrs. Vernon and Betsy Lassiter had finally found the answer of how they were going to spend their retirement and how it would be paid for. They staggered to and fro grabbing for their neighbors. "I've never tasted anything this delicious," each of them thought. Their senses were non-verbal. Just those wonderful perceptions of fresh delicious blood rolling in across their dead tongues. Whatever concepts they perceived, if they were conscious ideas or not, the words were deadly silent and as non-existent as their dying minds as the darkness opened before them. Only the perception of taste and absolute hunger sailed through their deadened and resurrected brains.

  #

  Soon, Vernon and Betsy Lassiter staggered into the Whoopie Pie Festival where the sheriff and his family were enjoying the sumptuous over-reach of their various sugar highs. The orchestra was playing German Dance Music for the citizens and Amish farmers of the town when commotions here and there broke out, which was not unusual when there was a large crowd. People would yell and laugh and tussle themselves. That was just normal human behavior. Two blocks from the festival, the Lassiters ate out the throat and intestines of a little girl on the sidewalk. They could not remember anything about their old life. All they wanted from now on was blood and guts.

  The Lassiters were covered with that same blood when they stumbled into their Pentecostal Church and trapped the worshipers in the big hall. Soon, people were screaming for Jesus and speaking in strange tongues as the Lassiter's tore into them along with the twenty other harbingers of Christ's return who had dragged themselves zombie-like through the streets right behind them like a herd of madcow dumbly following whatever leader was up ahead of them. Soon, the congregation was still, and Vernon Lassiter stood at the podium, posing like a minister in blood drag, raising his hands above his head as the first minister had done when he was torn to shreds.

  After they left, and broke down doors into other homes for continued feedings, the dead in the church were resurrected in the perfect Christian bodies they had been promised. Now, they were alive again, young forever with pieces of their intestines hanging from their thoraxes. The countless saved moved like vague spiritual shadows of the
mselves, pouring like oatmeal into the street in search of sweet tasting flesh from uninfected humans. They had come for prayer, confession, and renewal. This single time they had found it. They shambled through Lancaster pulling the frightened Amish from their taxis and eating not only them but their horses, until everything and everyone was either running away, dying, or coming into eternal zombie heaven when they resurrected right there where they had been eaten alive. What was left of them rose up and walked. They extended their hands forward, reaching for what none of them understood, but aiming what was left of their bodies and eyes forward. Their legs hobbled beneath them, barely able to keep them upright. The restlessness was everywhere as the zombie horde moved constantly forward, backward, right, left, turning, arms akimbo, and always reaching for the next throats that might still be filled with warm delicious vitality.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Zombie High School

  Aiden and his friends were in history class when the first zombie entered their room. The first thing they noticed was the splattering of red blood trailing from his face, chest, and pants all the way down to his feet.

  "May I be of help to you?" their teacher, Miss Mary Sheldon asked. The creature stared right through her.

  "He doesn't seem right, Miss Sheldon," Gary Evans told her.

  "No, he doesn't." She looked at the intruder. "I'm afraid I'll have to ask you to leave this room, sir," she told him.

  Instead, he staggered into the middle of the students and grabbed Lucy Xavier by the neck and lifted her toward him. She screamed as his bloodied mouth bit into her neck and then into her stomach. Her escaping blood exploded high into the air from her wounds. The strange creature pulled her bloody intestines from her shuddering body as she lapsed into a final coma of painful regrets.

  "Do something, Miss Sheldon!" Gary Evans yelled. "He's killing her!"

  "Stop it!" the teacher yelled. "Leave that girl alone!"

  It was to no avail. He continued chewing on her flesh. The blood continued to drain from her, some of it still spewing into the air and across the students' faces. Many of them were now screaming and moving away.

  Aiden had seen enough. He jumped the man, and wrestled him to the floor. At that, the man's mouth began biting at Aiden who was careful to stay clear of his teeth. Aiden held him down and spread eagled so he couldn't use his arms. There was also no way he could hurt Aiden with his legs.

  "Listen, fucker!" Aiden yelled into his zombie captive's deathly ill face. "Stop your shit."

  The girl was already dead, and Miss Shelton was talking to the Principal's secretary on her phone saying, "Get the police over here right way. One of my girls is dead, and if it weren't for the sheriff's son, Aiden, holding him down, he'd be killing the others in here. No, I'm not joking. This is darned serious."

  One of the students produced some rope that they used to tie the man up with. They tied his hands to a window separator so that he couldn't move more than a few inches from the wall. The ghastly looking freak continued biting at the air, and the stench of death from his breath was starting to sicken the students.

  The door suddenly opened again and three more zombies entered the room and grabbed hold of a boy in the front and bit clear through his throat. His blood gushed out and hit most of the students in the front three rows. No matter where they were, the strong bursts of his hot blood reached out and splashed them. They screamed and tried to get away, but the room was so small there was no escaping the pellets of blood that sailed their way like bad dreams as all three zombies drank from the frothing arterial rupture in his torn neck.

  "Run!" Miss Shelton screamed. "Get out! Save yourselves! Now!"

  The class bolted into the hallway only to find more zombies staggering toward them with their arms outstretched like bad robots, their mouths biting and human blood covering their blood-stained clothes. The first three out the door met their fates immediately as they were grabbed, ripped open, and taken down to the floor where the zombies reached into their youthful thoraxes and pulled out their guts and organs and stuffed torn segments of their flesh into their mouths.

  Aiden ran to his locker as did his friends, where they grabbed their baseball bats and returned, beating back the walking dead who showed them their blood stained chins and shirts. The sounds of breaking bones filled the emptiness in between the screams, but it didn't stop the fiends from doing their thing. In desperation, the students began crushing their skulls with their bats and instantly discovered that was actually the only way to kill them. Aiden was the first to notice this.

  "Crush their skulls!" Aiden yelled. "It kills them!"

  So, the jocks with the bats went about the crazy business of dispatching the zombies with head strokes, when the principal, Mr. Bailey, showed up, he told them to stop. The principal tried interfering in the batting mayhem, thinking that the zombies were living beings, when they were actually merely hungry, animated corpses. For his efforts, a zombie grabbed the principal and took him to the ground, bit into his neck, and pulled out his arteries and voice box. The antics of the principal were ended, and the boys continued flailing at the zombies' heads, felling them like broken statues onto the hallway floors.

  By now, students were running into the classes and hauling out many of their classroom desks to dam up the hallway and stop the approaching mass of zombies, several of whom were their own fellow students who had resurrected and were walking through the halls with dead eyes, holding their grasping hands forward as they dragged their imperfectly operating legs down the hallway in search of food stuffs, mostly the torn intestines of other high school students. A virtual wall of desks was building up trapping both the walking dead and the screaming students caught inside their deadly march. There was nothing to be done to rescue them. They were already trapped and could not be reached without endangering their would-be rescuers.

  They began to notice that some of the dead students suddenly opened their eyes and came to life. They were lost in the hordes of zombies where they, too, stumbled about looking for living humans to kill and consume.

  "This is not good," Aiden said. His friend Ricky agreed.

  "They are resurrecting," Rick said. "So, what do we do now?"

  "Let me think," Aiden said. "I'm not sure."

  "Maybe we need to crush the skulls of everyone the dead ones bit. It must be an infection passing from the dead ones to their victims," Ricky said.

  "What if we are wrong?" Aiden said, "And we kill a student for no reason."

  "I saw several of them get up and start after us, even after their guts were ripped out. So, we know they were dead. That has to be the answer. The dead ones wake up and become like them."

  At that exact moment three or four dead students inside the pack of zombies awakened and stood up.

  "Did you see them get up like that?" Rick said.

  "Sure did," Aiden replied.

  "So?"

  "We need to stomp their heads if they are dead?" Aiden asked.

  "Yes."

  "I can't do that," Aiden said.

  "What would change your mind?"

  "A few more," he answered. "Another ten dead students walking about biting at us. Then, I'll think about doing it. I still don't know if I can do that."

  "Me, either."

  Very shortly, they counted more than fifty additional students who were freshly killed who had arisen and were trying to kill others. They told their fellow students and teachers who were manning the halls and pointed to the faces of the dead students who were now walking about trying to kill others.

  “Look! These students were dead a few minutes ago!” Aiden yelled. “Now, they have come back as the walking dead, and they are trying to kill us, too! I think that we have to agree to kill them before they wake up and come after us! Let's vote on this now!”

  They took the vote. The students agreed by raising their hands that they needed to silence the dead by crushing their skulls to protect themselves and all others. They all agreed this was a life or
death situation.

  However, none of them was as yet brave enough to become the first one to smash a bitten student's skull. Soon, it was so desperate that they had to take really drastic action to save themselves. The students began clubbing the skulls of the reawakened dead all of whom were fellow students, but it was already too late to matter. Nothing could turn the tide as hundreds of students stumbled about with torn intestines and rushed at them, feeding from their throats. The battle in the hallways had become a hopeless horror scene from a bad movie so that they knew the school would have to be evacuated or they would be overrun.

  "We have to do it," Aiden said.

  "Yes," Rick agreed. "I'm ready."

  "Let's do it then."

  That was the moment when almost all students began bashing in the heads of every zombie. Even those who had been their closest friends and were now just more of the walking dead.

  #

  Word came to the students that fifteen or more bleeders had followed some fleeing girls into the girl's rest room in another hallway and were killing them. Several of the football players swung into action.

  In the back of the rest room, girls were all alone, fending off the zombies who were pushing against their toilet stalls trying to get to them. Three girls already lay dead and mutilated on the floor, their stomachs torn open. Their fresh blood trailed across the floors and into the stalls where girls were still trying to keep from being bitten. Each dead girl had been viciously assaulted.

  One biter was standing on top of the toilet in a stall adjacent to three girls who screamed nearly in unison and crouched just below his struggling reach. His blood covered hands grabbed down at them inside their crowded stall. The flimsy metal wall wobbled precariously but still held as it barely protected the girls. When the boys entered, the entire stall was showing signs of giving way.

  "Get that mean looking bastard!" Sher Kennedy screamed. "He's pulling my goddam hair! Stop him!"