The Zombies of Lake Woebegotten

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The Zombies of Lake Woebegotten Page 13

by Harrison Geillor


  Otto thought of the armless, limbless zombie, but what harm could that thing do? They still oughta put it out of its misery. And then there was that zombie dog… “Right,” he said.

  “And you don’t become a zombie just by getting bitten. You become one when you die, so as long as the zombie doesn’t kill you, you’ll be fine. I’m inclined to be hopeful.” Hearing the calm and certainty in Julie’s voice made Otto feel better for the first time all day.

  “I think you’re wrong.” Rufus sounded grim. “If a zombie’s biting you, there’s a good chance you’ll die. I saw it happen a few times this morning—God, was it only this morning?—and they take you down hard and quick. And another thing—if you just drop dead of a heart attack, you come back as a zombie. Get in a car wreck? Zombie. Take a too-big bite of Frito pie and choke to death? Zombie. The only thing that seems to stop them is destroying their brains.”

  “That is a nasty little wrinkle,” Julie agreed.

  “And there’s another thing.” Rufus sighed. “I hate to mention it, and I can’t know for sure if I’m right, but… We’re not talking about a city of a million people with one zombie dropped in the middle. We’re probably talking about all the dead people on the entire planet getting up and trying to pull down the living. All of them. Everywhere. Before the internet went down, I was seeing reports from all over the place—Iran, China, India, Australia, Europe, Mexico… I think it’s all over. The human civilization thing. I think it’s just a matter of time. We can’t live like this. Not for long.”

  Julie took a pack of cigarettes from under the counter, put one in her mouth, and held the pack out toward Otto. He hadn’t had a smoke for fifteen years, Barbara had hounded him into quitting, but he took one anyway, a little surprised his hand wasn’t shaking. Rufus took one, too, even though Otto knew he liked to smoke those nasty all-natural tobacco cigarettes, like sucking smoke into your lungs was healthier if there was a picture of an Indian chief on the package. Julie flicked open a Zippo—it had some kind of military insignia on it, which meant it had belonged to her grandpa, Otto assumed—and lit them up. “Well, just because the world’s ending doesn’t mean Lake Woebegotten’s going anywhere,” she said, after blowing a column of smoke toward the ceiling. “Everybody living here’s got a gun, pretty much. We can keep the zombies down. Maybe the cities are burning down, and maybe there won’t be satellite TV and Amazon.com and TiVo anymore, but this town was founded by a bunch of people terrified in the middle of marshy nowhere. Half of them didn’t survive the winter, but half of them did, and they made something here. We can do it, too. Even if we lose power, and the outside world. Lots of us have got no use for the outside world anyway. We’ve got the town. That’s enough.”

  “But what’s the point?” Rufus said. “If the world’s ending, if humanity is doomed, then why bother holding on? Why not just get drunk every day until we run out of booze and then blow our brains out so we can die a zombie-free life?”

  “Because suicide’s a sin,” Otto said promptly, and then gritted his teeth when Rufus rolled his eyes.

  “There’s always hope, Rufus,” Julie said. “There was a bottleneck in human history, did you know that? I read about it. I used to read a lot when I was… traveling. There was a time, maybe 150,000 years ago or more, when the climate changed, and the total population of humans got squeezed down to a few thousand, only a thousand of them capable of breeding. They hunkered down on the shore and ate shellfish because all the animals they used to eat instead were gone, and they managed to survive until things improved. Every single human being on this planet is descended from that group of a thousand breeders. Maybe this zombie thing is temporary. Maybe that star just let off some strange radiation, and when the radiation dies down, things will get better. And won’t you be glad we didn’t all blow our brains out when that happens?”

  “So you’re saying we’ll have an, ah, responsibility to repopulate the human race?” Rufus said.

  “You might better stick with gathering shellfish for the rest of us to eat,” Julie said, and ruffled his hair in a distinctly big-sisterly way, which gave Otto’s heart a little boost. “There’s another thing you see a lot in those zombie movies of yours. You know what that is?”

  “What?” Otto said.

  “A green zone.” Julie’s eyes had a strange light to them, and Otto wondered about her past, who she was, really, where she’d gone when she left town, why she’d come back, besides her grandfather getting sick, if there was anything besides that. “A place where the living are protected from zombies, and where civilization continues.” She took another drag on her cigarette, let the smoke out, and smiled. “We’d better get started making Lake Woebegotten into a green zone, don’t you think?”

  Emperor Torvald lifted his head. “If we can make it through the winter,” he said. “There won’t be a lot of green here until spring, and there’s a lot of winter between here and there.” He paused, then said, “Maybe you could give a guy one of those cigarettes, Julie?” and then they all sat and smoked a while until Julie gave them all free sandwiches to go, including a tuna fish for Mr. Levitt that she opened up and spat in right in front of all of them, and then she closed up shop and kicked them out into the cold.

  “I think I’m in love,” Rufus said as they got into the truck.

  Otto grunted in a fairly disapproving way, but he was thinking, Maybe me too.

  Twenty-Some-Odd

  Scenes From the Winter,

  In No Particular Order,

  Certainly not Chronological

  1

  The day after the murder, Stevie Ray called another town meeting, and this time he advised people to institute a basic call-and-response test for finding out if someone was a zombie before shooting them in the head. “I recommend you just say something like, ‘Are you a zombie?’”

  “And what are you supposed to say back if you’re not a zombie?” called a voice from the front row.

  Stevie Ray sighed. He was so tired; he’d never signed up to be the only law east of the prairie. “I imagine you can say pretty much anything at all, because zombies can’t talk. So even if they say ‘Yes, I’m a zombie,’ don’t shoot. If they say ‘Ungh’ and lunge at you, then you can shoot them.”

  “But it’s probably best if you don’t say ‘Yes, I’m a zombie,’” Pastor Inkfist said. “People are a little bit jumpy.”

  “Funeral services are tomorrow,” Father Edsel rumbled. “It’ll be closed-casket. Obviously.”

  2

  After her latest pointless visit, Eileen Munson slammed her hands down on Stevie Ray’s desk. “How long are you planning to keep Dolph locked up?” she demanded. “For a simple mistake?”

  “He killed a man, Eileen,” Stevie Ray said, in the weary tone of one who’s answered this question before. “He thought he was killing a zombie, so I’m not saying it’s necessarily murder, but it’s still voluntary manslaughter, or negligent homicide.” He cleared his throat. “That’s for a judge to decide.” Actually he wasn’t even sure what negligent homicide was, but it sounded official.

  “Judge,” Eileen said, sneering. “Like there’s going to be a judge coming through here any time soon. Dolph could be stuck in that jail forever!”

  “It’s not such a bad jail,” Mr. Levitt said, leaning on a stool near the door, his eyes half-closed. “Quite cozy, in fact. He’s safer in there than the rest of us are out here.” That dry old lizard voice still made Stevie Ray’s hindbrain want to crawl down his spine and out his butt and run away. Levitt belonged in jail, and Stevie Ray wanted to tell everyone what a monster he was, but for the time being, he was more valuable to the town roaming free.

  “Nobody asked your opinion, old man,” Eileen said.

  Levitt grinned at her, then looked ostentatiously at his watch. “I should get another patrol in before dark, Stevie Ray. There are enough seats on that bus to fit thirty-six people, not counting the driver’s seat, and we don’t know how many of them were occupied. Could b
e thirty more zombies out there for all we know.”

  Stevie Ray ground his teeth. “There were only fifteen bags on the bus, so at most there are a dozen zombies left, and they’re probably stuck buried in a snowdrift somewhere.”

  “Snow will be melting soon,” Levitt said. “It’s almost March already. Spring’s only a month away by calendar time. We always find the damndest things when the snow melts, don’t we?”

  “Just go.” Stevie Ray flapped his hands at Mr. Levitt, who smiled his skull smile, gave a salute, put on his coat, and strolled out into the cold.

  “Somebody should kill that man,” Eileen said.

  “I keep hoping a zombie will get him myself,” Stevie Ray said. “No such luck so far.”

  Eileen took that as an opening. “You need to let Dolph out. It’s killing him. You can tell.”

  Stevie Ray swiveled slowly in the big chair and looked into the cell, where Dolph lay on the bunk, facing the wall. Which, with one or two exceptions, was pretty much all he’d done ever since the accident, or murder, or whatever you wanted to call it. “I think killing a man accidentally is what’s killing him, Eileen. Not being locked up in here.”

  “But to lock him up, and let Mr. Levitt go free—”

  “Come look at this,” Stevie Ray said, rising. He walked across the office, to the big deep-freezer they’d put in the corner. It wasn’t plugged in or anything, they weren’t going to waste their meager generator power on that, but it was replenished with ice and snow every couple of days. He lifted the lid carefully, just enough for Eileen to look inside, and she gasped.

  “How… how many?”

  “Seven,” Stevie Ray said. “A couple of suicides, a heart attack, the three bus crash zombies he caught, and one fella who died of exposure, a drifter maybe.” There were actually eight heads in there. The other was Clem’s, the first zombie Levitt had killed without destroying the brain. But Stevie Ray didn’t want to tell Eileen that. The severed heads in the freezer began snapping their teeth—they always got more lively when the lid was open. He let the lid drop. “Levitt brought them all. He’s protecting the town. Not for good reasons, but… he likes it, and it needs doing, and who else is going to volunteer to walk around in the cold with a machete, looking for monsters?”

  “But why keep the heads?” Eileen asked, horrified.

  Stevie Ray hesitated. “In case things do get better, the government comes back, all that, we thought, maybe they’d be valuable for scientists, you know, to study.” That’s what Levitt had told him, and it had the ring of the plausible, but… Levitt liked keeping trophies. Stevie Ray was pretty sure the heads were his trophies now.

  “How do you know he’s not just finding lost living people in the woods, killing them, waiting for them to rise as zombies, and then beheading them?” Eileen asked. Like Stevie Ray hadn’t thought of that.

  “He doesn’t get a moment when he’s not being watched—even if he thinks he’s not being watched,” Stevie Ray said. “Don’t worry about it.”

  “And what if he becomes mayor?” Eileen said. “You’ve heard the rumors that he’s running as a write-in candidate, I’m sure. Should I worry then?”

  “You have my permission to worry then. Heck, I’ll even join you.”

  3

  Rufus sat snoozing in the police station on his first ever solo shift, head resting on the surface of the desk. He’d been reading a graphic novel by the grainy gray light coming in through the windows, but in retrospect The Walking Dead hadn’t been a great choice—he’d expected it to give him some tips or some insight, but it had only served to depress him, and Mr. Levitt’s persistent snoring from the cell in the back of the room had an oddly soporific quality, and Rufus’s head had drooped, drooped, drooped. Stevie Ray would get mad if he found Rufus sleeping on duty, but getting fired from a job that included no pay and excessive responsibilities and proximity to a creepy old murderer wasn’t the worst thing that could happen. Rufus only agreed to remain a special deputy because the alternative was spending time at home with his mother and her increasingly strained-looking eternal smile.

  A thumping, scraping noise at the door woke him, and it took a moment of staring at the pool of drool on the wooden desk before Rufus remembered where he was. “It’s open!” he called, but the thump-scrape-thump just continued, like someone wearing oven mitts was trying to work the doorknob while simultaneously attempting to batter the door down in a leisurely fashion.

  “Coming!” Rufus called, rising from the desk. Mr. Levitt was awake, too, drifting over to the bars of his cage. Rufus tried to ignore him. The old man treated the world like it was a half-interesting soap opera that he’d watch a little bit, just until something better came on.

  Rufus turned the doorknob and the door swung inward and his uncle Otto half-crawled in, eyes wide and red-rimmed, and Rufus struggled to help him up without falling over himself. “Otto, are you okay? What happened?”

  “Dog bit me,” Otto said, voice slurring. “Fuggin dog bit my fuggin leg.”

  Rufus eased Otto into the room and helped him sit down on the bench. Otto leaned against the wall, breath coming raggedly, eyes now half-closed, and Rufus bent to look at his leg. The pants and long underwear over Otto’s right ankle were shredded and soaked in blood, the flesh a mass of ugly punctures. Rufus whistled. “I think there’s some rubbing alcohol here, but you need stitches, Otto. I’ll call Morty.” Morty was a paramedic and, since Doctor Holliday’s unfortunate death by zombie bite (Rufus had joked that, like the historical Doc Holliday, the town’s own Doc Holliday had also died of consumption, of a sort, but nobody seemed to think it was funny) and re-death by gunshot, Morty was the town’s ranking medical man.

  “Fuggin dog,” Otto said. “Ugly little bastard. Bit my…” He trailed off, head nodding.

  “Was that my dog?” Mr. Levitt demanded. “My Alta?”

  “Miniature pissant,” Otto muttered.

  Mr. Levitt cackled. “Shut up,” Rufus said, sorting through the cupboard for the first aid kit. “Why’d you name your dog Alta anyway? What’s it supposed to mean?”

  “It’s a little town in Utah,” Mr. Levitt said. “Where I killed my first police officer. I named my dog after the town as a remembrance, because I didn’t get to keep a trophy that time. And now Alta’s killed a lawman himself. Good dog.”

  “He’s not dead, it’s just a bite,” Rufus said, frowning. If he’d gone after Alta that night when the dog first escaped from the cooler, Otto wouldn’t have gotten bitten.

  There was the first aid kit, a white-and-red painted metal box, but the latch was rusted shut, wasn’t that always the way, made you thank the good Lord for the invention of plastic. He started hammering the kit on the edge of the counter, bits of oxidized metal flaking off, but the latch stayed pretty much welded closed.

  “It’s just a bite from a zombie dog. You know how they say a dog’s mouth is cleaner than a human mouth? I’m guessing that’s not true when it’s a zombie dog. And when I said your uncle’d been killed, I wasn’t being metaphorical or talking about some inevitable future—he’s dead, and, oh, looks like you missed that little grace period you get between when they keel over dead and wake up again hungry, because here he comes.”

  “Very funny, old man—it’s sad to see a sadist like you reduced to the old ‘Look out behind you!’ trick.” Rufus tried again to pry up the latch, tearing his thumbnail and sending a bolt of bright white pain through his hand. “Crap in a basket!” he shouted—just a few days back in his mother’s house, and his casual college profanity had been replaced by the habitual euphemisms of his youth—and sucked the thumb.

  “Murrung,” his uncle said, or something similar, and then there was a crash of metal and breaking glass, and Rufus turned.

  Otto had gotten his feet tangled up in the desk lamp’s cord, and he was jerking one foot over and over trying to get loose, but all he’d done was pull down the gooseneck lamp and break the bulb. Drool poured out of Otto’s mouth like a sl
udgy waterfall, and when he lifted his head, his eyes were bloodshot and blank, his mouth ceaselessly moving. He reached out for Rufus and lunged, managing only to trip and fall face first, landing two feet from his nephew. He reached out his hands and started dragging himself forward. Rufus screamed—like a girl, just a little girl, Mr. Levitt would later say, with some justification—and danced out of the way, chucking the first aid kit at his uncle’s head, which didn’t seem to be much of a deterrent.

  Rufus rushed to the desk and pulled open the drawer with jittering hands, taking out the service revolver Stevie Ray had told him to absolutely not touch except in case of dire emergency, viz., zombies in the cop shop. Meanwhile Otto had untangled his feet and was making his slow implacable way over to Rufus.

  “Stop, uncle Otto! Stop right there!”

  “That’s not your uncle anymore.” From his bored tone, Mr. Levitt might as well have been watching a scene on TV. Maybe he was—maybe in his messed-up brain, other people were just objects moving for his amusement, the world nothing more than a picture show populated by imaginary beings. “Bullet in the brain, son, that’s the only way.”

  Rufus lifted the pistol, but—but—it was Otto. His uncle. Sure, they’d gotten on each other’s nerves in recent years, but when Rufus was a kid, Otto had been his favorite uncle, teaching him to play cards, pulling quarters from his ears by magic, taking him out fishing, showing him how to shoot a gun—how to shoot a gun—how to shoot a gun—

  How could Rufus kill the man who’d taught him how to shoot a gun with a gun? How could he be expected to do this?

  In the zombie movies and books Rufus had studied, there was pretty much always a scene where a loved one became a zombie, and the other characters always had a hard time with it, sometimes broke down completely, or killed themselves, and Rufus had always thought: Nah. Even if it was my own mother, I’d just point and shoot. But his hands wouldn’t stop shaking and he couldn’t even get his finger under the trigger guard and Otto was closer, his mouth opening—the mouth that used to tell Rufus dirty jokes when no other adult was around, the mouth that had kissed his forehead when Rufus was just a tiny little thing, the mouth that had whispered, You’re the man of the house now when his Dad died—Otto’s mouth was opening to take a bite out of him, and, well, so be it. Who wanted to live in a world full of zombies anyway? Better to be a zombie yourself. Join the winning side. At least that way, if you had to kill someone you loved, you wouldn’t love them anymore.

 

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