by Anthology
"It's Gutierrez from maintenance. Open up!"
Jack unbolted the door, and the tech behind him screamed again. Gutierrez, pale as a sheet, entered the room, followed by two of the security people. One of them clutched an injured arm and slumped into the chair as soon as he entered. The other bolted the door.
Gutierrez went straight to the circuit breaker box and popped the switches into the on position. The lights in the control room came back on and the monitors gave off a faint azure glow. Gutierrez smirked with satisfaction. "I told Oskar we might need the fuses, but he insisted that while we were connected to his state of the art generator, we'd never have a surge. Hah." He said it in a daze, as if it was a litany to keep from thinking of other things. Then, he turned to Claudia, his face a mask of fury. "It was you. You did this to us!"
"What? Me? Why? What happened out there?"
"Everyone's dead. We ran into . . . things."
"What kind of things?"
"People things. Things that bullets didn't stop, things that attacked the security detail with their bare hands and tore them apart like they were made of paper. Dead things that are alive now. Those kind of things." He glared at her as the shocked realization of what he was implying hit her.
"No," she whispered. "That's impossible."
"Tell it to them!" he spat, and pointed at one of the security monitors where a group of men and women, completely nude, walked haltingly down the corridor.
Jack's stomach did a backflip as he recognized a cadaver that they'd been mining for memories that very morning. "Oh no . . ."
The tech in the corner spoke again, his voice still strained but far from his earlier hysterics. "That camera, what does it show? Where are they?"
As if in answer, the metal door of the control room began to rattle. A solid blow struck it, denting the metal. They all shuffled to the far end of the room.
"Don't worry," Gutierrez told them. "That door will hold against anything short of a cannon shot." He chuckled ruefully. "Funny how you scientist types never seem to want to face the consequences of your actions. If life was fair, I'd send you out there to find a way to stop these things. As it is, you're sitting behind the low-tech armored door I insisted on installing. And that Oskar guy was just as bad . . . and look where it got him. I would be very surprised if even one of his precious computers survived the blowback."
"Oskar's dead, you jerk," the tech said.
"So are a whole bunch of people with a lot less blame in this mess than he had," Gutierrez snapped back.
"So what do you suggest we do?" Jack asked.
"Not much we can do. Just sit tight and wait for someone to come get us out. Pity the EMP took out the phones."
They relaxed as well as they could with the unholy things on the other side banging on the door.
No one spoke.
* * * *
"Listen," Claudia said two hours later. "Can you hear that?"
"What?"
"The pounding. It's stopped."
She was right. The noise had stopped. It wasn't the first time there had been a pause in the beating, but it had never lasted for ten full minutes before.
"Look," Claudia said, pointing at the monitors. The screen that had been showing the unholy nightmares pounding on the now well-battered door displayed nothing but an empty corridor. "Where'd they go?"
Gutierrez glanced at his watch and grimaced. "Not good," he said. Seeing that the others were awaiting further explanation, he continued. "It's nearly six o'clock. The night shift should be starting to arrive. And they're not locked inside an impenetrable room." He punched the console in front of him, frustrated.
"So they mindlessly go after the nearest human they can get to?" Jack asked.
"Oh, I wouldn't call it mindless. When they came after us before, the first thing they did was attack the cops with guns. Only when they'd taken all the guns away did they come after us."
"Good," Jack said, ignoring the looks he received. "I think I know how to kill them off, then. I've been thinking it over and I have a plan that might work, but only if their minds still function to some degree."
"That's fantastic, but why didn't you tell us earlier?"
"Because the plan called for us to be on the other side of that door. I supposed that if I'd suggested going outside, you'd have lynched me."
Gutierrez chuckled. "Probably," he admitted.
"But now, if we hurry, we might be able to set a trap for these dead people. Tell me, can you patch a recording to the big viewscreen in the cafeteria?"
"I already told you, my equipment's running fine! Oskar was the one who got all his stuff fried."
"Here, then." Jack handed the other man a media drive. "Find the file named 'Johnson 1999' and run the images from the fourth flag."
Gutierrez looked doubtful, but nodded.
"Thanks," Jack said. "Now, does anyone know where we keep the fuel for the generator?"
The tech in the corner raised his hand timidly. Jack groaned. "Anyone else? I need to go outside, kid. I just don't think you're up to it."
The kid swallowed but when he replied, his voice was strong. "I can do it. And besides, only Oskar's people know where he kept the supplies for the generator."
Jack looked over to Gutierrez, who gave him a sour look and shrugged. "He said that the thing was designed to last for decades without maintenance. He also explained that 'without maintenance' specifically referred to the fact I wasn't supposed to poke my nose into it."
"Okay. It seems you're it, then. What's your name, anyway?"
"Augustus," the tech said.
"You're kidding. Oh, well, it'll have to do. Come on, let's see if we can get this door open."
* * * *
Jack'd been spotted. The lumbering, ponderous footsteps behind him were a clear sign the once-frozen corpses were intent on catching him. He'd been appalled at the way they looked: pale white skin spattered with human blood. Unthinking expressions, unseeing eyes.
But the eyes did see. They'd seen him as soon as he'd seen them.
Nothing that had been dead as long as these people should have been able to move that quickly. As he sprinted back, he reflected he couldn't really blame them for having killed everyone they'd come into contact with since being revived; he wondered how he would have felt if he'd been reanimated after centuries on ice. So he ran faster than he'd planned back towards the cafeteria, where he'd left Augustus preparing their little surprise. He hoped the tech would be able to finish before he barged in with a few dozen dead people running after him. He was also hoping the whole group had followed as opposed to just some of them. It would be very difficult to set another trap once this one was used up.
On reaching the door to the cafeteria, Jack didn't stop. He only paused slightly to make certain the man-height screen was showing the images he'd asked Gutierrez to display, and splashed through the two-hundred-foot--long chamber. Only when he was well out of the liquid did he break off his run to look behind him.
The dead were just beginning to enter the cafeteria, moving more cautiously now, as if they suspected something was amiss. Seeing nothing out of the ordinary, they began to charge towards where Jack was standing, praying that his idea would work.
About halfway across the chamber, the charge faltered. It was a small thing at first; one of the pursuers happened to catch a glimpse of the screen and slowed for a closer look. As more and more of the unholy things turned to see what was happening, the charge lost most of its momentum. Soon, all of the creatures were watching, completely mesmerized.
"Now!" Jack yelled.
Augustus emerged from the shadows on one side of the room, quickly lit a match and carefully threw it onto the edge of the liquid pooled over most of the floor of the cafeteria. The liquid---generator fuel---ignited immediately.
Jack tensed, ready to run. He thought the crowd, realizing it was being cooked alive, would immediately turn on its tormentors.
But the undead horde stayed right where it w
as, even as the flames consumed their lower extremities. They seemed to be in no pain.
They're already dead, Jack thought. What could possibly hurt them?
Augustus walked cautiously around the blazing pool, coming to a halt right beside him. He shook his head in wonder. "It worked. I thought you were crazy, but it worked. What are they watching? What are those things with the children?"
Jack smiled. "That's how the world used to look before the dictatorship. They're watching a recording taken from the memory of one of the bodies. I flagged it because I believed it was a happy memory. The green stuff is a form of vegetation known as grass, and I believe the large expanse was once called a park. The things with the children are called dogs."
"Dogs?"
"Yes, we believe they used to be kept as companions for families a few centuries ago. Some records show they were all eaten in the economic disaster after the change of government."
"Dogs," Augustus mused, his face illuminated by the flickering light of burning flesh.
In the center of the room, one of the things, still staring at the screen in rapt bliss, fell to the floor as a charred leg collapsed. It shifted slightly so that its eyes faced the screen, and continued to burn in silence.
* * * *
Homeless Zombies
by
Vincent L. Scarsella
I saw Joe Reed sitting in a booth in the back of Harvey's Bar & Grill, sipping a beer, minding his business. Problem was---Joe was dead. Killed by a heart attack six months ago. He was only forty-five, my age. I attended his funeral.
After squinting back there for a minute or so, I shrugged it off. I waved the bartender over for another beer and tried watching a ball game on the small color TV on a shelf above the bar. But every now and then, I couldn't resist glancing over my shoulder at the Joe Reed look-a-like.
Finally, it was time to take a leak. The men's room was in the back of Harvey's off a small hallway just past the booth occupied by the Joe Reed look-a-like. As I strolled by, I gave him a crosswise glance.
While pissing into an old urinal in the narrow john, I marveled how much the guy truly resembled Joe. The same Joe whose corpse I had seen only six months ago in a brass coffin at O'Connell's Funeral Parlor, lifeless as a department store mannequin. On the return trip from the john, I couldn't help myself: I stopped at the booth and gave the guy a long, hard look.
"Joe?" I mumbled. "Joe Reed?"
He turned to me with a blank stare. Joe and I had once been best friends. But after high school, we had gone our separate ways. By the time we each got married and settled down into family life and lousy jobs, our friendship was a cold memory, nothing more than a couple of faded photographs of grinning, swaggering teens in a worn out photo album. The day I learned of his death, I hadn't seen him in over five years.
"Joe?" I said and laughed.
But the guy didn't move. He just blinked.
"It's me," I said. "Don Kaminski."
When nothing came except a cold stare, I straightened and stood for a moment at his booth. I tried explaining to the guy as coherently as I could without slurring too much why I was bothering him---that he looked just like a friend of mine who had died a few months back. But the nameless guy just sat there, staring forward with those blank eyes.
"Well, screw you," I said and walked away from him.
Joe Reed was dead. Six feet under. I had seen his casket at the grave. I even cried when the priest uttered those last somber words, "Ashes to ashes, dust to dust." I ate bacon and eggs and sipped orange juice and coffee at his funeral breakfast in the back room of O'Leary's Restaurant. Then, I downed several shots of bourbon with his brothers, Tom and Bill, long into the afternoon after everyone else had gone home.
I returned to my barstool. After gulping down the rest of my beer, I called the bartender over.
"You know that guy?" I asked, gesturing behind me with a thumb.
"What guy?"
"The guy back there," I said. "In the last booth before the john."
The bartender squinted that way. "What f'n guy?" he asked.
I swung around.
The booth with the Joe Reed look-a-like was empty.
* * * *
"A ghost," Betty said. "What you saw was Joe Reed's ghost."
She smiled, tucking me under the covers, glad that I had not stayed out all night and spent half my paycheck in some gin mill. Betty had become a plump and lonesome housebound woman as she approached her forty-sixth birthday. In high school, she had been a beauty. Blonde and tart. Once, back then, she had dated Joe Reed. She said he had hands as swift as water and as rough as sand, and that she was not that kind of girl. She'd dumped him flat and started dating me not long after. But she had cried real tears at his wake and it made me wonder if she regretted not putting up with his swift hands and that crooked, daring smile all the other girls seemed to blush over.
"No," I insisted. "I saw him."
I must have sounded like the complete drunk I had become.
"Joe Reed" I slurred.
Betty patted my head and smiled knowingly.
"Optical illusion," she suggested as she rose up and headed out of the room. (We hadn't slept together in years.) As she turned out the light, she added, "Sweet dreams."
I fell into a deep, dark sleep. No dreams. I didn't wake up until about ten the next morning. The smell of coffee and bacon wafted up from the kitchen. I heard Betty humming to herself.
I stumbled downstairs, the hangover not all that bad. Betty smiled as I fell into my chair at the kitchen table.
"You okay?" she asked. "Hungry?"
"Starved," I said.
I slurped up the eggs, over easy, with a slice of toast lathered with too much butter, and the bacon she placed in front of me. I gulped it all down with a strong cup of coffee.
Betty sat down across from me with her own cup just as I was soaking up the last of the eggs. "Still think you saw Joe Reed?"
I looked up, explaining what I had seen, how closely the guy resembled Joe, even his voice.
"I dunno," I said with a shrug, thinking maybe it was just the booze after all.
"What where you doing all the way out there, anyway?" Betty asked with a doubtful look. "In the old neighborhood? At Harvey's of all places?"
I shrugged and slurped more coffee. I hadn't been to that old joint in maybe ten years. We used to live in a dump around the corner before I got the job at Ford and we moved out to the suburbs.
Actually, I had gotten depressed after a couple of drinks at Dixie's, my usual stop after my three-to-eleven shift with some of the guys from Ford. I craved the old days, old faces. Somehow, I had ended up at Harvey's staring into the face of a dead man.
"I dunno," I said. "Missed the place, I guess."
"But as for seeing Joe Reed there . . ." Betty said with a wave of her hand. Then she was staring off out the kitchen window, thinking of something. Joe Reed, perhaps.
* * * *
That night, a Saturday, I told Betty I was going to the store for another six pack. I went back to Harvey's instead. And there he was, Joe Reed, sitting at the back of the place in the same corner booth as the night before.
After gulping down a shot of whiskey, I hopped off the barstool and strode up to him.
"Mind if I sit down?"
He regarded me without a hint of recognition. His eyes had that cold, empty look, same as yesterday. It was as if he was only half-awake.
I sat down anyway.
"You're Joe Reed, aren't you?" I was sure of myself, persuaded.
But he remained noncommittal. Didn't even shrug, just sat there circling the lip of his glass of beer with his right index finger, around and around. It was something the real Joe used to do. I shuddered with the sudden recollection.
Finally, our eyes met. That gave me a fright. They were certainly Joe Reed's eyes, blue and wide, but full of loss, not bright and confident as I remembered them.
He swallowed the rest of his beer and abruptly slid
out of the booth. Without a word, he started toward the front of the bar.
A moment later, I followed him.
He was a shadow walking down Maple Avenue when I first caught sight of him. It had rained earlier, and the wet pavement and dark puddles glistened in the cold glare of the street lamps.
Staying a safe distance behind and out of sight, I tried to remember the way Joe Reed had walked. This certainly wasn't it. He walked deliberately now, programmed, stiff, as driven by something outside his control.
I stayed with him as he meandered down a series of narrow side streets. Old, grungy clapboard houses hulked so close together in the shadows of this old neighborhood you could almost reach between them. At last, he rounded a corner onto Colton Avenue. I knew the area from the old days when Betty and I had rented a flat in one of the clapboard monstrosities the next street over.
Joe abruptly stopped in front of one of the old houses---111 Colton---turned sharply to the left, and started up a narrow walkway. Crouching behind a tree across the street, I watched as he stepped onto the porch, opened the front door and went inside.
Something warned me against following him into the place. But, of course, I had to do it. I knew I wouldn't sleep again if I didn't find out how Joe Reed had come back to life.
I started down the dark, narrow pathway, tip-toed up the front steps onto the porch and stopped a moment at the front door. Finally, I turned the knob and was completely surprised when the door creaked opened. Despite a torrent of misgivings, I entered an old, musty foyer. The immediate smell of decay instantly drove me back. It was as if I had opened a tomb and had inhaled the dust of dead men. I hesitated a long moment, struck by the silence and foreboding of this place. But I fought off the dread, stood my ground.
Instead of retreating, I heard myself shout: "Hello!" My call reverberated off the high ceilings of the foyer and long-abandoned inner rooms. I crouched tensely, waiting.