The Zombies of Lake Woebegotten

by Harrison Geillor

  “Ish,” Ingvar said. He was seventy and looked a hundred, and even though he wore patched bib overalls everybody knew he was sitting pretty, having turned his already-successful family farm into an even more lucrative sand and gravel quarry. Otto didn’t think it was right shipping off so much of the town’s land, since land wasn’t something you could get back, but Ingvar’d bought a new scoreboard for the high school baseball team so you couldn’t say he wasn’t generous, though he could’ve tried a little harder to be anonymous about it. Just asking for the gift to be anonymous wasn’t enough. Word got around. Made people uncomfortable to be around him, since you were afraid he might be afraid you might ask him for money, as if you would, that’d be the day.

  “Everybody’s always upset about something.” Otto sipped the coffee, which wasn’t as good as in the days when Julie’s grandfather did the brewing, but it was hot, and since winter was just getting underway hot was the important thing. “Probably too many people trying to get a talking muppet doll for their kids, that kind of thing, people forget the true meaning of the holidays.”

  “It’ll blow over soon, whatever it is,” Julie said. “Too cold to be out on the street making a fuss anyway.”

  “Yep.” Ingvar hunched a little more over his coffee as if to warm himself, probably thinking of that big, cold, empty farmhouse of his out on the edge of the prairie, his children moved away, wife dead these fifteen years, and all his farmland transformed into pretty much a great big hole in the ground where there used to be gravel and where there was, now, just empty space and some iced-up black water. Otto was a farm equipment salesman, not a farmer himself, but he knew it took a special kind of used-up old and tired to turn your back on the land that had sustained your family for generations and let a company come in and rip the land up to spread on driveways and road projects. Ingvar might have gotten a little richer out of the deal but Otto wondered what he did with himself all day now.

  The bell over the door jingled, and Otto hunched instinctively against the blast of winter cold that came bursting into the diner. He wasn’t about to spin around on his stool to see who’d come in, but the look on Julie’s face was enough to make him twist a little and glance back, casually, as if just checking to see what the weather was doing.

  His nephew Rufus stood in the doorway, winter coat unzipped and spilling feathers from a long tear in the sleeve, shirt torn half off, hair and eyes wild. Nobody said anything, until finally Julie said, “Get you something?”

  “I can’t believe you’re just sitting here,” Rufus said in that tone he had, the one that broke his poor mother’s heart, like everybody around him was dumb as a bunch of chickens and he couldn’t bear their company. “Haven’t you—haven’t you watched the news?”

  “Heard there was a commotion in the cities,” Otto said. “Some kinda riot.” He paused. “You get caught up in that?”

  Rufus laughed, shook his head, and took a stool on the other side of Ingvar, who was still contemplating his coffee. “You mean you don’t know? I guess the media’s trying to cover it up, or else they don’t believe it…” He shook his head. “I drove here as fast as I could once I got away, to make sure you and mom and everybody was okay, but I should have known, in this town, who would even notice if the dead started walking? You saw a zombie you’d probably just ask him what kind of gas mileage he got in his hearse.”

  Ingvar turned his head slowly to Rufus. “Zombies, huh? Your uncle was telling us about them. People dress up funny and act dead.”

  “I’m talking about people who are dead acting like they’re alive,” Rufus said. “My girl—” He shot a glance at Otto. “A friend of mine, she’s a junior, studying social work, she’s been volunteering at the hospital in the hospice unit, and she told me it started down in the morgues, the—you know, the cadavers—they started getting up off the tables and…” He shook his head. “Attacking people. Killing people. And then the people they killed got up and started killing other people. My friend went into the hospital first thing this morning and said it was all screaming and craziness, and she saw a man she knew, who’d died of cancer just the day before, come running down the hallway as fast as a dog chasing a car. Tried to take a bite out of her, but he didn’t have any teeth.” Rufus covered his eyes and started laughing. “A zombie with no teeth, can you believe that? Like he might gum you to death? So she ran away and there were police running around and shooting and yelling and…”

  He uncovered his eyes. “So she came to see me. Campus was normal, no dead people, I guess the skeletons in biology lab don’t count, maybe you have to have some muscles left to get up again, I don’t know. I told her I’d bring her here, where it was safe, but we had to stop for gas right off the interstate, and she went to pee, and she didn’t come back, and when I went looking for her there was blood coming out from under the bathroom door and something inside that sounded like chewing. I thought maybe I could save her, so I pulled the door open, and there was a mechanic in greasy overalls with a big dent in his head and blood all over him and Winnie, she—my friend—she was trying to stand up on a leg that looked like a shark took a bite out of it and her eyes were all glassy and they were both reaching for me.” He plucked at his coat. “Almost got me. But I made it to my car, and drove here as fast as I could, and…” Another laugh. “You’re just sitting here drinking coffee. The dead have risen from their graves to kill the living, just like in the movies, and you’re just sitting here drinking coffee.”

  “Well,” Ingvar said after a moment’s contemplation. “That sure is different. A guy could get pretty worked up about something like that.”

  3. Rapture Ready

  Pastor Daniel Inkfist sat at his desk with his feet up on a pulled-out drawer saying “Hmm” and “You don’t say” and “Don’t that beat all” and other sorts of things to fill the gasps when his friend Pastor Cantor had to take a breath in the midst of yelling. Eddie Cantor had always been excitable, ever since seminary, but “excitable” usually meant getting worked up about the Twin’s chances at the pennant or the sorry state of the offering plate these days or how short skirts were getting every summer, wasn’t it shameful, like to make a man lose his mind.

  Only now Eddie was yelling about the End Times and the Rapture and other things that, generally speaking, Lutherans didn’t put much stock in, since if you actually sat down and looked at the Scripture there wasn’t much to support the idea of a time of tribulation and the Antichrist becoming president and legalizing gay marriage and marrying the Pope and carving 666s and swastikas and bar codes into people’s foreheads. Eddie had a Southern wife and Daniel supposed she’d been gradually filling him up with Pentecostal hellfire and brimstone over the years and, for whatever reason, it all came bubbling up today. Eddie usually called to talk sports and complain about the challenges of ministering to a flock in St. Paul and to wax nostalgic about their time in the seminary when they’d talked more about theology and the calling and wrestling with matters of faith and less about bake sales and choir robes and Christmas pageants. Now he was talking about the dead rising to smite the unbelievers.

  “Now when you say the dead are rising,” Daniel finally said, “am I to take that as some kind of metaphor?”

  “No, Daniel, you’re to take it as me saying that dead people are wandering the streets and attacking anyone they can reach and when people run away and slip on the ice and fall the dead people fall on them and start trying to eat them. And it’s not just people. I saw a run-over dog start dragging itself around even though it had a tire tread mark right across its belly, snapping at people. It’s the end times, Daniel! But there’s no Christ taking us into heaven! The Lord swore he’d never destroy the Earth with a flood again, and most people assumed that meant next time it would be fire, but it’s not fire, it’s just teeth!”

  “Okay then,” Daniel said. “So you give Pearl my love then.”

  “You think I’m crazy, don’t you.” Eddie’s voice had gone hoarse and quiet. “I�
��m locked in my office, afraid to come out, because we were having a memorial service here and the corpse sat up in the coffin and took a bite out of his great-granddaughter’s throat. I’m calling you up to warn you. For gosh, Daniel, don’t you have any dead people in Lake Woebegotten? Step on a cockroach or something and watch it come back to life if you don’t believe me!”

  “A lotta guys in a situation like that might call the police,” Daniel said.

  “You think I haven’t tried? The lines are jammed. You call 911 and you don’t even get a busy signal, you just get a drone. It started last night, did you see it, the shooting stars? I thought I might talk about it in my Christmas sermon in a couple of weeks, about how it reminded me of the star that heralded the birth of Christ, but I think it heralded the coming of the Antichrist, it… you… no time to… before it’s…”

  “Eddie?” Daniel said, but the connection turned to fuzz and squeals and static. He sighed and dialed Eddie’s home number, hoping to catch Pearl and let her know her husband could use a visit right about now, and was maybe a mite under the weather, but he just got a recording saying all lines were busy.

  After thinking for a while, Daniel went down to the church basement/rec room/storage area, checked to see that no one else was around, and slid aside the eye-wrenchingly painted backdrop from a never-to-be-repeated vacation bible school performance of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. That revealed a concealed door that led to a corridor cut into the living rock, though he’d never really understood the term “living rock,” since rock was neither alive nor dead, and saying “living rock” seemed kind of animistic or even pagan, like something BigHorn Jim who lived in the woods and worshipped Odin might say, except he mostly said “By Thor’s Mighty Beard!” and similar exclamations. Daniel picked up the lantern from the floor of the corridor and lit it with a kitchen match, then slid the door shut behind him. He reached up and tugged the cord running along the low ceiling overhead, and though he couldn’t hear anything, he knew a bell would be ringing elsewhere.

  Daniel walked down the corridor, marveling as always at the steady temperature of about 55 degrees, whether it was muggy summer or bleak winter up above. The floor was rough but mostly even, and though the walls got awfully close together at a few points, it was never so tight he had to turn sideways. No one knew when or why this tunnel had been carved, though there were plenty of theories bandied about by the few who knew of its existence, notably: secret interdenominational love affairs; ill-fated attempts at smuggling liquor; a guy getting bored halfway through digging out a basement and wandering off; and a well-meaning but unworldly minister deciding to take part in the Underground Railroad for runaway slaves despite Lake Woebegotten being too far north to be much use, but it was the thought that counted, anyway.

  These days it was mostly just used as a shortcut to avoid going outside in the winter, though it had been useful for negotiating the peace during the Great Lutheran-Catholic Bake Sale War of 1979.

  When Daniel reached the other end of the corridor, which opened out into a little stone room with a scrounged couch, a wobbly desk, and a couple of folding chairs, Father Edsel was already waiting for him. The priest was wearing four sweaters and an earflap hat. He’d been assigned to Lake Woebegotten from Galveston, Texas, twenty years before and had never gotten used to the weather. He was known to wear mittens well into spring, and if the parishioners hadn’t complained, he would have kept Our Lady of Eventual Tranquility “a balmy 85 degrees” year-round, and expected the flock to pay his heating bill.

  “I suppose you’ve heard then,” Edsel said in that grizzled old-timey prospector voice of his.

  “Heard what?”

  Edsel sat at the desk, pulled open the drawer, and began laboriously laying out his preferred accoutrements of sin: a pipe, pouch of tobacco, and several small pipe-cleaning implements. “The dead are coming back to life. Hell unleashed on Earth. You didn’t hear? It’s all over the radio.”

  By “the radio” Daniel assumed Edsel meant the online radio stations on his computer, because normal radio stations you could hear in Lake Woebegotten didn’t carry the kind of conspiracy theories Edsel thrived on: tales of reptilian overlords, the secret machinations of the Batrachian Illuminati (a branch of the Bavarian Illuminati populated solely by the immortal survivors of the lost city of Atlantis), consensual alien abductions, brainwashed sleeper agent Congressmen, and secret military units devoted to exploding the heads of mountain goats by will alone. If pressed, Edsel would admit that he didn’t believe in aliens or Atlanteans or reptoids, but he did believe in Satan, the Adversary, the Prince of the Morning, Big Red, Lucifer, Shaytan, the Lord of the Flies, the Father of Lies, Old Nick, Mr. Scratch, the Tempter, the Old Serpent, the Lord of this World, Old Hob, the Prince of the Powers of the Air and Darkness, Mephistopheles, the First of the Fallen, Mister Dis, Old Gooseberry, the Angel of the Pit, and the Author of Evil, AKA the Devil. All the workings of various conspiracies could be traced back to Satan, and everyone who saw aliens or reptile-men or Sasquatches or Mothmen was really seeing Satan and his minions.

  The rumor was Edsel had even taken part in an exorcism, a real pea-souper, back in the days before the church frowned on such things.

  Daniel was less sure about the existence of the devil, though Martin Luther, the namesake of the Lutheran church, had been unequivocal on the subject—he’d encountered the Devil frequently, often while sleeping or having a bowel movement, and found arguing with Satan no more remarkable than bickering with his wife, once going so far as to tell Satan to suck the shit out of his anus. (Early Lutherans were an earthy bunch.) Nevertheless, most Lutherans Daniel knew tended to be more worried about the price of seed corn and diesel fuel than the perils of direct Satanic influence, which, all in all, was the sensible position.

  “I had a strange phone call from a colleague,” Daniel admitted. “Saying the dead were rising and attacking people. I thought I’d come to see if you’d heard anything odd from your contacts in the cities.”

  “The archdiocese doesn’t even remember I’m out here. This parish doesn’t show up on any of the maps because the bishop from back when the organizational charts were drawn up hated the priest here. Ever since then Lake Woebegotten has been a kind of Siberia for priests. Though I fought for the placement, myself. I had too much meddling down in Texas, and it’s nice to be left alone.” Edsel filled his pipe. “As for the dead coming back to life, that’s easy enough to test. Come with me to see Mrs. Mormont. She’s not long for this world. The doctor just called and said I should come over when I have a moment to administer last rites, if it’s not too much trouble, maybe if her house is on my way to someplace I’m going already. I was just on my way out when you rang the bell.” The bell system had been installed during the Bake Sale War when the Catholic and Lutheran ministers had been unable to contact one another directly for fear of reprisal, and so they’d worked out a way to hold clandestine meetings in the tunnel that connected the two church basements. “If she wakes up with a hankering for brains, we’ll know the stories are true.”

  “I’m not sure it’s appropriate for me to be at the deathbed of a woman of another faith. It might be seen as an attempt at… poaching, I guess.”

  Father Edsel grunted and puffed his pipe, clouds of sweet-smelling smoke rising. Daniel had never smelled tobacco like Edsel smoked anywhere else, and he wondered sometimes if it was tobacco, but wasn’t prepared to address the question. “Widow Mormont hasn’t been conscious for days. I don’t think anyone’s too worried about a deathbed conversion. What do you say?”

  “Well, I suppose I could ride along. I don’t think there’s anything to all this about the living dead, mind you, but if it would help set your mind at rest, I’ll come.”

  “It’ll do you good to grapple with Satan,” Edsel said. “The soul’s like a muscle. You have to make it work to make it strong.”

  4. The Sixth

  Commandment

  Dolph, proprietor of
Dolph’s Half Good Grocery (so called for its slogan, “It Isn’t Half Bad!”), stood out back on the loading dock and made cryptic hand gestures meant to guide the delivery truck driver in. Though the driver had done this every week for years, he still came in at a slant or scraped his bumper on the railing by the steps half the time, and today he was even unsteadier than usual. “Running late today!” Dolph called when the driver emerged with his clipboard, keeping his voice cheerful, though he was actually mad enough about the delay to eat lead and spit bullets.

  “Sorry,” the driver said, handing over the clipboard and raising up the sliding door at the back of the truck. “Traffic like you wouldn’t believe on the freeway past the warehouse, some kind of pile-up, biggest I’ve ever seen.”

  “Hope nobody was hurt.” Dolph ran his eyes across the inventory sheet on the clipboard while the driver began hauling boxes out and setting them on the loading dock, willing the man to move faster, faster, faster.

  Instead the driver paused, looked Dolph in the eye, and shook his head once. “I saw at least five cars. Three of ’em upside down. There’s not a lot of traffic out there in the middle of the day, and the roads were fresh plowed, so I don’t know what happened. There were a couple of wreckers and an ambulance and three police cars off on the side, and somebody’d moved the cars out of the way, but there wasn’t a soul in sight.”

  “Probably just inside the ambulance trying to get out of this cold,” Dolph said meaningfully, glancing up at the sky, which was the steel-gray of a dignified old patriarch’s hair.

  “Could be,” the driver said, and went back to work double-time, passing boxes over to Dolph, who heaped them haphazardly on the dock. “I heard some funny stuff on the radio, though, apparently all heck’s breaking loose over in St. Paul, some kind of epidemic—”