Disturbed Graves: Tales of Terror and the Undead

by D. Allen Crowley

  With a sinking feeling, Larry slowed down and it dawned on him that he was down to his last bullet.

  “Shit,” he said, realizing he had to make the next one count.

  Larry slowed down and tried to steady his hand. As the zombie growled at him hungrily, Larry squeezed the trigger again. This time, the zombie’s head rocked backwards and Larry saw that he had shot true.

  The giant slumped over dead.

  As morning dawned, Larry found that his troubles were only just beginning.

  Surveying the situation as soon as he could see, he found himself trapped between the two grates in a space about six feet long. In the aftermath of the fight, the zombie had died against the second grate, pinning it closed. Larry immediately tried pushing the corpse clear, but soon gave up.

  The massive bulk of the zombie was holding the grate in place and there was no way Larry was going to move the corpse’s four hundred or so pounds of dead weight.

  He half considered suicide and the idea of shooting himself seemed oddly comforting. But that comfort was quickly discarded because he couldn’t even do that. He was out of bullets.

  “If you didn’t have bad luck, asshole,” Larry said in frustration, “you’d have no goddamn luck at all.”

  Larry spent two days trying to move the corpse, the grate, and even the grate at his end of the pipe. There was no chance of escape. What was worse, he began to get alternately cold and hot on the second day after the fight in the pipe. He realized with growing dread that his arm had become infected.

  Larry was sitting under the portal, looking at the stars above when he heard the moans overhead. Before he could move, a shape blocked out the night sky in the portal and an arm shot down into the pipe. It grabbed his hair with cold, dead fingers.

  Larry screamed and jerked away hard enough to pull his hair out by the roots. He scrambled back to his side of the tunnel and cowered as he heard the growls of a zombie through the portal. He flicked on his flashlight to see that another zombie had found him.

  It had once been a woman. What was left of her reached for him with clawed nails, snarling and growling at him. Her once beautiful face was pressed against the grate of the portal and she grimaced with blood stained teeth at him. The grate rattled, but Larry knew it would hold. He had been trying to break it for three days. There was no way one zombie was getting through.

  He laid awake most of the night, drinking whiskey and listening to her snarl and growl for his blood and flesh.

  It had been two days since the zombie had found him and she hadn’t given it up. She could smell him in the pipe and she was going to wait him out. He had taken to calling her Lydia because he could see the woman she had once been and that woman reminded him of Winona Ryder from Beetlejuice.

  “Well, Lydia,” he said to her, “I’ve got to get some sleep tonight. What do you say you shush and give me some peace? I’ll hook you up with my buddy Scott. He’s just your type; tall, dark, and dead.”

  Lydia snarled at him and he shrugged as he dug out his second from last MRE. He was feverish and didn’t really want to eat, but he figured he needed his strength to make another try at the grate. He had been spending the last twelve or so hours trying unsuccessfully to file through the grate at his back.

  “That attitude’s not going to get you my vote for homecoming queen.” He said.

  He pulled out his Leatherman tool and flipped open the file. He went back to work on the grate. It was the only option he had left as he couldn’t get to the one the giant zombie blocked. Lydia prevented that. She could get enough of herself into the pipe that he couldn’t go that way for fear of getting bitten.

  That night she wandered away just after dark. He slept fitfully for a few hours and had strange dreams. Larry awoke later that night to the distant sound of small arms fire. He flipped on his Maglight to see Lydia leaning against the grate looking at him. She had an almost mournful look on her dead face as she looked back.

  “Thanks for the sleep, honey,” Larry said. When she said nothing, he turned the light off and went back to sleep. Occasionally, he would hear her moan, but he found it oddly reassuring. It was almost like the snoring of a lover in the bed beside him.

  “She wasn’t as pretty as you, Lyds,” Larry continued as he worked on the grate with the file, “But man, oh man, was she a wildcat in bed. My dad always said that Catholic girls were the wildest ones out there, but I’d never believed it until her.”

  Lydia cocked her head at him and he smiled. He almost wondered if she understood what he was saying. He stopped sawing as he was wracked with a harsh, gurgling cough.

  The cough had started that morning and he was finding it harder and harder to work. His coughing went on for almost a minute and when he was done, he found himself dizzy. As he fought waves of nausea, he made the mistake of leaning towards the other end of the pipe.

  Lydia saw him draw nearer and growled, swiping at him with a clawed hand.

  “Ah, ah, Lydia,” Larry said, jerking back out of her reach, “Don’t go grabbing at me. I told you, we’re just friends. Maybe when I get out of here, we’ll hook up.”

  Larry started to saw, “Anyway, I was telling you about Heather and how crazy those Catholic girls are…”

  The file broke later that afternoon, but Larry was beyond caring. He barely had the strength left to keep working. It was a losing fight anyway. It was mostly done to keep himself busy. He was lying on his back, his backpack under his head, and he was shivering from fever and infection.

  He began coughing again and rolled to his side. After a long moment the hacking stopped and he hawked out a glob of bright blood.

  “Well, crap, Lydia,” he sighed, wiping a hand across his bloody mouth, “I think I might have hurt myself in that crash worse than I thought. That or I got a wicked infection. Whatever it is though, it’s probably not as wicked as whatever it is that makes you keep walking around when you’re CLEARLY DEAD!”

  He started coughing violently again. In the distance, there was the rumble of thunder.

  Lydia moaned and he was certain there was a look of concern in her inarticulate expression.

  The rain started shortly after nightfall and went through the night. Larry awoke, feverish and almost incoherent to find himself pushed against the grate at the far end of the tunnel. The rivulet of water that had constantly been running through the pipe had turned into a torrent and swept him past Lydia. The water was getting deeper and he struggled to keep his head above water, but he was too weak from infection and illness.

  In his fevered mind, he had dreamt that Lydia was a new girl he had been dating and he was unaware that she was long since dead.

  “Lydia!” he called, choking on the water, “Lydia, help me!”

  Lydia watched him from the grate with the same expressionless and cloudy eyes she had watched him with from the beginning. She snarled and reached for him, but he was still just out of her grasp. The rain washed her dark hair into her eyes and cleansed her face of the blood and gore that had stained it. In his delirium, Larry thought she almost looked beautiful.

  The next morning, the sun came out and Lydia struggled up from the grass where she had fallen when the wind and rain had reached gale force. She returned to the hole where Larry had eluded her for days and snuffled as she tried to find the scent of his warm body and the meat it bore. She pushed her face to the grate as she normally did, but now things had changed. There was no longer the smell of blood and meat.

  A blue, dead hand reached through the grate and touched her face. She didn’t jump in surprise, as she was incapable of surprise. She simply reached for it with her own hand and held the fingers of the other zombie for a moment or two.

  There was no sentimentality to the act. It was only a vestigial response driven by what she had once been. She eventually stood and shambled off into the woods, leaving Larry’s reanimated corpse in its tomb.

  Lydia was hunting for blood and meat again.

  Frost Bite

&
nbsp; Frost Bite started as a screenplay idea back in college. Myself and several friends decided to try our hand at filmmaking and it – like many of our schemes – was never seen to fruition. However, Frost Bite was the culmination of that failed attempt. At the initial time I wrote it, I had been reading quite a bit of Poppy Z. Brite, and I still see the affect her work had on me in this story. It’s been worked on and revised over the years and I love how the weather is just as much an antagonist as the monsters that dear, sweet, virginal Carrie meets on that dark, lonely and snow-covered road. - DAC

  Carrie trudged through the deepening drifts and pulled the collar of her jacket tighter around her neck. All about her, snow fell heavily from the blackness of the night sky, floating and dancing like fluffy dust motes. She shivered in the near zero weather and squinted in vain.The dark road before her was obscured by the near whiteout conditions. She turned back in the direction she had come, but found that she was even unable to see the flashing hazard lights of the car she had left dead a half mile or so behind her.

  Cursing, she rubbed her hands together, trying to keep them warm. Goddamn car, she though for the hundredth time that night. If she had still been there, she would have kicked it. She thought about turning around, but was uncertain if that was the best choice.

  She had been making good time on her trip, and the map had shown that this country road was a more direct route to her destination than the interstate. She had made the decision to change her route at a rest area two hours earlier. Of course, the sky had been clear then and the temperature had been hovering around thirty-five degrees. Now though, her once trusty Ford Escort lay dead behind her and Carrie found herself struggling forward in a snow storm, some forty or so miles outside of Toledo. At least a foot of snow had fallen in the last hour and Carrie had yet to see any other cars or even a farmhouse. Any sign of humanity would have been welcome.

  The decision to walk had been one of self-preservation. She had run down the car’s battery trying to start it, and the cold had driven her out. She had been given a bleak choice; freeze to death in the rusty, old Ford or freeze to death trying to walk into a blizzard. Her chances of finding a farmhouse or another motorist had seemed to be the better of the two choices at the time, but she had yet to see either.

  The realization that she was in trouble came on like a freight train on an unmarked intersection. She had always considered herself a strong, self reliant woman - but that belief was now being seriously tested. Any other woman would have started crying a long time ago, she thought, as she felt a lump in her throat and the stinging burn of impending tears. She put her head down to protect her face from the stinging wind and pushed on, willing herself forward.

  Suddenly, she realized that the darkness around her had lightened somewhat and she heard the sound of a car approaching. “Thank God!” she said, her breath pluming like cotton candy in the chill air. She spun and began waving her hands like a mad woman, almost sobbing as she saw a pair of headlights approaching through the thick snowfall.

  The car grew closer and closer, and then went on past her. Carrie cursed in disbelief as tears finally fell for real on her cold mottled cheeks. The thought of sitting down in the snow and letting herself die seemed suddenly very reasonable to her. She might actually have done it had she not seen the red glow of the car’s brake lights through the white ahead. She pulled her backpack tight against her shoulders and ran towards the welcoming cherry glow ahead, slipping and sliding on the icy road.

  As she drew near to the stopped car, she saw that it was an old Oldsmobile that had seen better days. It had rusty, salt covered quarter panels, an Ohio license plate, and a bumper sticker that had been placed on the trunk lid crookedly. Glancing at it as she passed, she read it quickly. The trite message said, ‘Salesman do it on the road.” She ran around to the passenger side and pulled open the car door, looking in with gratitude.

  “Howdy, there!” the driver said as he patted the seat beside him, “Climb on in, young lady. This is not the night to be out fer a stroll, that’s fer sure!”

  Carrie slid into the seat, luxuriating in the warm car interior. Her benefactor was a middle age man in a brown suit that was several years out of style. His unbuttoned jacket showed a paunch that crept over the edge of his worn brown belt and a loosened tie that was wide enough to paint murals on. He was a big man, with a balding pate and ruddy cheeks.

  He smiled at her with tiny white teeth and quickly reached to clean the seat of several empty candy bar wrappers and a half full bottle of Yoo-Hoo. This refuse was unceremoniously dumped in a back seat that was packed with similar detritus.

  Carrie sighed deeply as she unbuttoned her own parka and slid her hands out of her mittens. “Thanks for stopping,” she said gratefully.

  “That’s all right, sweetie,” he said as he turned down the radio, relegating Peter Frampton to background music. On the floor at Carrie’s feet was the worn cassette case from Frampton Alive! She vaguely remembered it as one of her dad’s favorites from her childhood.

  Her traveling companion cleared his throat phlegmatically, “My name’s Ed, by the way. Pleased to meet ya.”

  “I’m Carrie.” she replied. As she did so, she placed her backpack between her knees. She busied herself with opening the front pocket and putting her gloves inside. She saw out of the corner of her eye that Ed was appraising her in that way that most middle-aged men did when around a pretty young woman. Beside her gloves, she saw the glint of the heavy duty industrial stapler she used for hanging flyers for her Pro-Choice advocacy group at college. She decided to err on the side of caution with Ed and left the bag open - just in case.

  Ed nodded, testing her name on his tongue like a piece of candy, “Carrie? Carrie. Hmmm... Carrie. That’s a pretty name. So what’re you doing out here on a night like this, Carrie? Your car break down?”

  “Yeah,” she responded, “I was on my way to Ann Arbor and I got stuck in the storm. It wasn’t like this when I started out.”

  “Ann Arbor, huh? You want me to drop you at the next town so you can call a tow truck or something?”

  “That’s all right, Ed. I just want to get up to Ann Arbor. The stupid car can rot for all I care. Besides, there’s probably nothing open at this time of night, anyway.”

  “I’ve had a few of those kinds of cars in my time. You drive ‘em until they’re lame and then shoot ‘em like a wounded horse,” Ed laughed and Carrie smiled. He went on, “Good thing I came along, though. I’m on my way north myself, so I can drop you in Ann Arbor.”

  “Thanks, I’d really appreciate it” Carrie said, turning towards the window. Outside, the snow flew by and she shivered again, still not quite warm from her walk.

  “What’re you going there for? Got family in Ann Arbor?”

  “I’m going up to see my boyfriend. He’s going to school there. It was supposed to be a surprise.”

  “Where ya coming from?”

  “Ohio State. I’m a student at their medical college.”

  “Well ain’t that something,” Ed remarked as he digested this new piece of information, “Gonna be a nurse, huh?”

  “No,” Carrie said, “I’m actually studying medicine. I’m going to be a doctor.”

  Ed’s brow furrowed as he thought about that, “Hmmm. That means your probably pretty smart, huh?”

  “Not as smart as you’d think. Tonight showed that.”

  “Me, I’m a salesman. I’m on my way to a convention in Flint. You’re gonna be a doctor, huh? That’s neat. I’d have figured you for a cheerleader.”

  “No. Just a student, Ed.”

  Carrie leaned back and closed her eyes. Maybe if she feigned sleepiness, Ed the salesman would stop talking to her. She was grateful to him for picking her up, and she realized that it probably got pretty lonely selling encyclopedias, or vacuums, or whatever it was that Ed sold; but she also was a little offended by some of his comments. Besides, the Olds’ heater was making her a little drowsy. She hazarded a glance at him
through slitted eyes and saw him looking at her chest where it peeked through her unzipped coat. He continued, “Yep. You betcha! Not a night fit for anyone to be out.”

  The Olds fishtailed slightly and Ed slowed. He lapsed into silence and Carrie felt herself start to doze. A minute or two later, though, she woke with a start as Ed jerked the car and cursed. She had opened her eyes only quick enough to catch a glimpse of someone beside the road, a backpack or something slung across their back. The headlights lost the person just as quickly, and they sped on.

  “Shoot!” Ed said, breathing out.” That guy came from outta nowhere! Almost hit him. Too bad for him, though. Only one hitchhiker per night here!”

  The tape ended and there was a moment of silence, punctuated by the thrum of the wiper blades as they swung back and forth on the windshield. Ed cleared his throat and went on, tentatively, “You know, this weather gets much worse, neither of us are gonna make it to Ann Arbor.”

  Carrie shrugged, “That’s fine, Ed. If you want, you can drop me at the next rest area and I’ll call my boyfriend to come get me in the morning.”

  “There’s no need for that. I ... I know a hotel up where this highway meets I-75. We could stop... get a room. Together.”

  Carrie, at a loss for words, reached into her bag, pulling out a piece of gum. She used the moment it took to unwrap it to think quickly. After placing the piece in her mouth, she sighed heavily, “Ed. I appreciate the ride. That’s all I’m looking for, though. Like I said, just drop me at the next rest area. I’ll make it from there.”