“This is sick.” Rufus came in from the hallway, holding an old-fashioned bag of the sort country doctors once used, when the world was a better place and people made house calls and nobody knew what HMO stood for and you could pay your medical bill with a bushel of corn or maybe a couple of chickens. Of course they didn’t have polio vaccine or chemotherapy back then, so maybe the changing times weren’t all bad. “It’s all full of finger bones.”
“That’s a good boy, get those fingerprints all over everything.” Levitt cackled again. “Not that it much matters, but in case the civil authorities do get things under control and avert the apocalypse and take me to trial, I appreciate any crime-scene contamination you want to do.”
Rufus dropped the bag and moaned, wiping his hands on his shirt. “I went down in the cellar, the dirt’s all soft, and there are gaping holes where I guess these zombies came climbing out.”
“I always meant to pour concrete down there, cover them all over, I figured, I’m an old man, I’m retired, why do I need my own little personal burial ground anymore? But I just couldn’t do it. What if somebody came to the door all alone one afternoon with a petition, nobody else on the street, where would I put him when I was done?”
“Just shut up, please.” Otto pressed down on the back of Mr. Levitt’s head with the palm of his hand.
A hard rap came at the door. “Come on in!” Dolph said, and the town policemen, Harry and Stevie Ray, entered. Both wore beige uniforms, but the similarities ended there. Harry was in his early fifties, and his big beer gut preceded him wherever he went, and he had enormous muttonchop sideburns as if hoping to disguise the fact that he was going bald on top. Stevie Ray was one of Lake Woebegotten’s few black residents, in his late twenties, and he’d done a stint in the Marines and still kept up a good exercise regime, so he didn’t have a gut so much, and he had a shaved head, which always made Otto feel cold in sympathy, especially in winter like this. He was a part-time police officer, and also worked as a bartender (and, when the need arose, drunk-remover) at the Backtrack Bar.
When Stevie Ray saw Dolph’s gun, he unholstered his pistol and pointed it at him.
“Don’t point that at me!” Dolph yelled, setting the rifle down by the couch, barrel pointed up and away. “Point it at old man Levitt! I told you on the phone, he’s a serial killer! He’s dangerous!”
“He doesn’t look like much of a threat right now.” Stevie Ray’s eyes did a quick scan of the room, taking in the various dead bodies, the signs of struggle, the bloody chainsaw, and all the rest without any obvious reaction. “We got a mess in here,” he said at last. “Otto, get up, let me put handcuffs on Mr. Levitt, that’s a little better than you sitting on him.”
Otto rose, and Stevie Ray slid right in, pressing a knee on Mr. Levitt’s back. “If this is a mistake, you have my apologies in advance,” Stevie Ray said. “But for the time being it seems like everybody’d feel better if you didn’t have your hands free.” He snapped the bracelets onto Mr. Levitt’s bony wrists.
The elderly killer lifted his head from the carpet and said, “I never did a black one. None ever came wandering by, and there are so few of you in town I knew any of you’d be missed. Oh well. Hope springs eternal.”
“I’ve got you on threatening a peace officer if nothing else,” Stevie Ray said, rising. “Why don’t you just stay there on the carpet?”
“How can you be so calm?” Dolph said, outraged. “There are chainsaw murder victims in here! Undead monsters! Lake Woebegotten’s answer to a geriatric John Wayne Gacy—”
“Gacy!” Levitt was outraged. “A clown, and worse, a buffoon! The only thing we have in common is where we bury the bodies, and—”
“Everybody calm down.” Harry’s voice was slow and deliberate, and his oxlike expression and measured tones made people assume he was the stupid one and Stevie Ray was the smart one, but in fact they were both pretty smart. “Stevie Ray, you want to make sure the area’s secure? I’ll see what I can ascertain about the, ah…”
“Zombies?” Rufus offered.
Harry sighed like an inflatable couch sagging under the weight of one too many fat relatives at Christmas. “Yep. I guess that’s it. Who here knows the most about them?”
“Me,” Rufus said. “I’ve seen lots of them today. They were all over the cities this morning. I drove here to warn people, you know.”
Harry nodded. He strolled over to the limbless zombie and said, “You ever play that zombie game Left 4 Dead?”
Rufus, sounding surprised, said, “Sure, man, all the time, but mostly the sequel lately, it’s harder, but so much scarier.”
Harry nodded. “Thing I never understood about that game is, it’s the zombie apocalypse, and everything’s gone to heck, and there’s those piles of guns and ammunition and painkillers and gas cans and stuff just sitting there all over the place for people to pick up.”
“The game wouldn’t be much fun without guns and explosions though.”
“You got me there. Not much fun at all.”
“How can you be talking about games?” Otto said. He’d played Pong a few times when Rufus was a kid but couldn’t see the point. You might as well go out and just hit a real ball around, why not? And now there was some kind of zombie killing game? Well, so what? How was that supposed to be any help to anybody? Playing Pong wasn’t going to make you a good tennis player, so killing zombies in some video game probably wasn’t too effective as training for killing zombies in the real world.
Harry didn’t pay him any attention, just went on talking about the game. “The thing that really gets me, though, is the syringes of adrenaline, you know, you inject them in the game and you can run faster and fight harder? If it was me, and I saw a full syringe laying on the ground in some burned-out grocery store surrounded by the hungry dead, I’m not so sure I’d just up and stick it into the first vein in my arm I came across.”
“I might,” Rufus said. “But I’d probably be hoping it was something other than adrenaline. Something that would put me out of my misery.”
“That’s a thought,” Harry said. “Why don’t we put this one out of his misery?” He nudged the limbless zombie with his boot.
“First, I don’t think he’s miserable,” Rufus said. “I don’t think he’s feeling anything, other than hungry. And second… he’s proof. Of what’s happening. A real live… well, you know… a real zombie.”
“Guess there might be some value there,” Harry agreed. “Shouldn’t be any harm in it as long as you stay clear of his teeth. So you’ve seen these fellas in action. What can you tell me?”
“They’re slow. They don’t feel pain. They don’t stop until you mess up their brains. Even if you take a head off, it keeps moving, though the body stops.”
“They contagious? Like, they bite you, you catch it?”
“I don’t think it’s a disease,” Rufus said. “It’s just… the dead rising. These bodies were already dead, nobody bit them, they just woke up. So it’s contagious, but only because a zombie can kill you, and when you’re dead, you become one too.”
“Well all right, then.” He hitched up his belt, though it slid back down under the weight of his gut. “Seems like we’ve got a fighting chance then.”
“Against the end of the world?” Mr. Levitt said. “How do you figure that?”
“There’s about 1,000 people in this town or in the farms just outside,” Harry said. “Some of them went down to Florida for the winter, or they’re off visiting family for the holidays, so it’s not quite all of them, but it’s enough. And if it’s just the dead waking up and walking around, not like a real plague, well… How many corpses do we have laying around here on any given day, do you think? If you hadn’t been keeping dead folks in shallow graves in your basement, Mr. Levitt, we might not have even noticed the zombie situation until one of the old folks passed on and tried to eat their relatives. Now maybe in the cities there’s hospitals and morgues full of dead folks and people getting shot dead f
or their tennis shoes by gangbangers and people overdosing on marijuana and guys jumping off roofs because they can’t stand the pressure of their CEO jobs anymore, but around here things are different. Most winters we only lose a handful of folks, and one of those is usually an unmarried agrarian Norwegian who puts a gun in his mouth, and not to be insensitive, but somebody who blows his brains out is solving any future personal zombie problem right then and there. I’d say it’s definitely a manageable situation here. We’ll call a town meeting, warn everybody to be on the lookout, and we’ll just be careful until this whole mess blows over.”
“It’s not just people turning into zombies,” Dolph said. “I think, anyway. We saw this dog, half run over, and it was still trying to bite…”
“What dog?” Mr. Levitt said. “Alta? Here, Alta, come to Daddy!”
“Your dog’s a zombie dog now,” Otto said. No point trying to pretend something else was happening here now. Hard to admit Rufus had been right all along, but there it was, and he was man enough to admit it.
Mr. Levitt began weeping quietly into the carpet.
“Can I see this zombie dog?” Harry asked.
“It’s in a cooler in the truck, I’ll go get it.” Rufus hurried outside, but he returned a moment later, shaking his head. “The cooler was tipped over, and the lid was open. Alta got away. There was a trail in the snow, going around the house, but, ah…” He looked a little sheepish, but then, Otto thought he always looked a little bit like a sheep, it ran on that side of the family.
“You didn’t want to chase a zombie dog unarmed and there were no handguns and ammo just laying around in the driveway.” Harry’s voice was bland and non-judgmental. “Can’t say I blame you. Sounds like a job for animal control anyway.” He sighed. “Which, of course, is me.”
A great crashing and shouting came from deeper in the house, followed by a scream and a gunshot. Harry had his pistol out in no time, and Dolph lifted his rifle, but Otto just considered reaching for the chainsaw and then changed his mind. He’d be just as likely to cut off his own leg as to do any good. Better to just stand behind the people holding guns.
Old man Levitt lifted his head from the carpet, and smiled despite the tears running down his face. “Sounds like the other officer decided to see what I had hidden up in the attic. Guess he found out. That’s where I keep the ladies’ auxiliary. Seemed wrong to keep the men and women together. Heh heh heh.”
9. Freezer Burned
“We should have called the police,” Pastor Inkfist said, and Father Edsel just grunted, driving too fast, tapping his fingers on the steering wheel, and humming something that sounded sort of Wagnerian, only more bombastic.
The priest stopped humming, said, “The days of worldly authority are at an end, my boy. Listen.” He flicked the radio on and twisted through the channels the old-fashioned way, turning a knob, no “seek” or “scan” to light the way, but even though he turned slowly there was never anything but the hiss of static. “You see? Nothing but empty air. The dead have risen. I don’t truck with that Protestant business about the Rapture, but I believe in the end of days, the revelation of St. John the Divine—”
“Now, I don’t know, I think that was all metaphor,” Daniel said, a bit weakly at first, but gaining strength as he went on, feeling on solid ground. “The Great Beast 666 was a Roman emperor, John was writing about the evils of his own time, not giving us a glimpse of something terrible to come.” He paused. “Plus, of course, he was probably eating the wrong sort of mushrooms. I hear those can give you all sorts of ideas.”
“There’s evil afoot, Inkfist—Hell itself disgorging the dead, demons possessing the corpses, I don’t claim to know all the details, but surely you admit Satan had a hand in this?”
“I guess, I suppose you’d say, as for Satan, I think for myself I’ve always seen the church as more practical, ministering the sick, offering spiritual guidance, sure, but mostly—”
“You doubt the existence of demons?” Edsel’s eyes were fiery. “There’s biblical precedent for this situation exactly. Do you recall when Jesus found men emerging from tombs possessed by a demon, and the demon said his name was Legion? And our Lord cast the devils out of the bodies of the men and into a herd of pigs, and those pigs drowned themselves in the sea of Galilee? We have that very same thing here—demons in the bodies of men!”
“I always took the story of Jesus facing Legion to be a parable for the anti-Roman resistance of the time,” Daniel said. “That would explain the inconsistency in the way various apostles—”
“We must be warriors for Christ,” Edsel interrupted. “Armed with our faith, but also armed with shotguns and baseball bats and flamethrowers, if we can get them.”
“Ah. But we can’t, of course.”
“Nonsense,” Edsel said. “Of course we can. And I know just the place. But first, we need to gather the people of the town, and tell them what’s happened. The sooner the better, before we’re overrun by the dead.”
“How do you propose we notify everyone? Go door to door?”
Edsel glanced away from the snow-spattered road to give Daniel a look of complete contempt. “Are you serious? Go forth and harness the mighty power of the Lutheran organization, man. Call up the Women’s Circle and get them to unleash the awful majesty of their phone trees!”
“I was thinking to myself, in a horror movie, the black guy always dies first,” Stevie Ray said. Otto and Rufus and Harry were all jammed in the hallway, with Stevie Ray looking down on them from the attic opening in the ceiling. Dolph and his rifle were out in the living room watching over old man Levitt. “So I was thinking, Not me, and I had my gun out. Still scared the crap just about right out of me when the girl-zombie started moving. She’s wrapped up in about fifteen layers of heavy-duty plastic, though, so she was mostly just rolling a little bit. I probably could’ve saved the bullet, but I put one in her head anyway. Couple other girls up here in plastic, too, but they look like they’re pretty much just bones, so they’re not moving.”
“Good to know,” Harry said.
Rufus coughed. “The black guy doesn’t always die first in horror movies.”
Otto rolled his eyes, but he figured Rufus felt compelled to weigh in, as this was an area in which he had some expertise.
“In the original Night of the Living Dead movie, a black guy’s even the hero.”
“Does he make it out alive in the end?” Stevie Ray asked.
“Well. No.”
“Mmm hmm.”
“Back to the matter at hand.” Harry sniffed. “I thought most serial killers liked just one kind of victim. You know, they like to specialize.”
Stevie Ray grunted. “I figure old man Levitt decided he needed to kill a couple of girls now and then just to convince himself he wasn’t a homosexual. You know how it is for people of his generation. They have a hard time admitting things like that about themselves.”
“Yup,” Harry said. “I could see how you may be right.”
As always when the subject came up, Otto wondered in a rush of worry if maybe he wasn’t secretly gay. He’d never been attracted to men, really, but what did that prove? He wasn’t attracted to most women, either. Then Stevie Ray said, “Shit, something else is moving up here,” and a moment later he shouted, “Good GOD it’s a zombie raccoon, look out below!” and Otto was thankful to have something else to worry about for a couple of minutes.
Dolph wanted to go by Eileen’s house and make sure she was okay, that she hadn’t fallen victim to a rampaging zombie min-pin or anything else, but was afraid it would look suspicious, so he’d better wait until nightfall, when he’d be less likely to attract notice. The thing about a town as small as Lake Woebegotten was that everybody knew your business, no matter how much you might wish it was otherwise. Still, they’d been discreet, and as far as anybody else knew, Eileen was just one of his customers, nothing special to him, and it was important to maintain the fiction.
Unless, of course, Harry wa
s wrong, and the zombie apocalypse really was going to forever change the very basic structure of life and society, in which case, all the old rules about infidelity might just cease to apply. Probably the few remaining survivors would need to get started repopulating the Earth. Possibly Dolph would have to inseminate a great many women in order to do his part to restore the species to ascendancy. Now wasn’t that a pretty thought?
The zombie in the bed of his truck thumped, which was nerve-wracking. They’d weighed the thing down with chains and thrown a tarp over it, and it didn’t have any arms or legs, but Dolph could imagine it wriggling its way toward the cab of the truck, silently sliding open the window with its teeth, and sinking fangs into his neck…
Dolph shuddered and stepped on the gas a bit, though he was following Harry and Stevie Ray’s squad car, so he couldn’t go any faster than they were. They finally reached the police station, which was really just a wing of the town hall, though it did have a jail cell, and Dolph watched as Stevie Ray frog-marched Mr. Levitt in through the side door. Harry came over, as did Otto and Rufus, to peer into the bed of the truck where the zombie struggled. “What do we do with him?” Dolph said.
“You got that big walk-in freezer, right?” Harry said. “You mind tucking him in there until tonight’s meeting?”
Dolph stared at him. “You want me to put an undead monster in my store?”
“Just for a few hours.” Harry’s face was totally bland and vaguely pleasant, and Dolph’s outrage melted under his calm gaze. “It’s just I’m going to be a little busy trying to contact the county sheriff and the state police and booking a multiple murderer and trying to organize a town meeting, so I’m stretched a little thin. You don’t mind helping out?”
The Zombies of Lake Woebegotten Page 6