The Zombies of Lake Woebegotten

by Harrison Geillor

  Rufus closed his eyes, and Otto’s outstretched hands touched his chest.

  The harsh crack of a gunshot went off, followed by another, and Rufus jumped, eyes popping open, expecting to see Stevie Ray in the doorway—but there was no one new in the room. His uncle Otto writhed on the ground, legs bent funny, knees shredded and white and frothing red.

  “Saved your life, son,” Mr. Levitt said.

  Rufus looked at the prisoner, who still leaned casually against the bars, but now held a pistol in his left hand. “You—where did you get a gun?”

  Mr. Levitt nodded at Otto. “You might want to step away from your fellow deputy there. He’s still lively, and they don’t feel pain.”

  Rufus stepped away from Otto, and away from Mr. Levitt, too, putting the desk between all of them, for what that was worth. “Where did you get the gun?” he repeated.

  “You so-called lawmen did a piss-poor job of booking me, you know that? Didn’t remember my Miranda rights, and I never did get searched. I know Harry had a lot on his mind, but still, I expected a little better of him. Had the pistol on me the whole time, from when I was killing zombies at my house. Been keeping it under the mattress in here.”

  “Then why haven’t you used it to escape?”

  Levitt shrugged. “Seemed like inside a jail cell was a pretty safe place if the zombies were coming. But I’ve been in here long enough, and safety is boring. I’d like to get out now. What do you say you unlock the door and set me free?”

  “And if I don’t? You’ll kill me?” Rufus still had the pistol, and he didn’t think he’d have as much trouble shooting Mr. Levitt as he had shooting Otto… but he knew Mr. Levitt would have absolutely no trouble at all shooting him, and the old man was probably a better shot, too.

  “No,” Mr. Levitt said. “If you don’t let me go, I’ll wound you. Kind of like I did with him.” He nodded to Otto, who was trying to get moving again even though his knees were just bulges of shattered bone now. “I’ll let the two of you crawl around on the floor together. Since you feel pain, and he doesn’t, I’m guessing he’ll get to you before you can get away.” He lifted the gun.

  Stevie Ray will kill me, Rufus thought, but he nodded, and got the keys to the cell, and unlocked the door, and opened it wide.

  “Good lad.” Mr. Levitt put a bullet in Otto’s head in an offhand sort of way. He sat down at Stevie Ray’s desk, grinned, and said, “Why don’t you call your boss man, son? I’d like to offer my services to the town. Killing zombies isn’t as good as killing ordinary people, but it’s a lot better than killing nothing at all. I’d make a good zombie-hunter general. And since I just saved your life, you’ll vouch for me, won’t you?”

  4

  “But what are we supposed to do with him?” Dolph said, in that whiny tone Eileen couldn’t stand—she’d had one whiny husband, and a whiny lover didn’t much interest her, especially when he was asking stupid questions.

  “You shoot him in the head, sweetie.” Eileen shifted around, but it was pretty much impossible to get comfortable when sitting on a stack of boxes of frozen fishsticks. Still, there was something reassuring about being in the back of Dolph’s grocery, surrounded by supplies. Being close to the man who had more food than anyone else in town was a pretty good position, even if he was a whiner.

  Dolph gestured helplessly to the closed freezer door. “But it’s Clem!”

  “It was Clem. Now it’s a zombie.” Eileen contemplated a flat of milk cartons. That stuff would go bad soonest, so maybe they should donate it to the town, get the priest and the minister to distribute it to the townspeople, as a gesture of goodwill, make everybody like them before they learned they’d have to really pay for canned goods and everything else once they got good and hungry.

  “I don’t know how you can do that,” Dolph said. “Just… make that distinction. The way you shot Brent tonight…”

  “He would have hurt people. Brent didn’t want to hurt people.” Except her. But even then, he hadn’t so much wanted to hurt her, as much as he’d just been indifferent to whether he hurt her. “In a way, shooting Brent like that is exactly what Brent would have wanted.”

  “You aren’t… torn up about it?”

  She shrugged. “He was my husband. I’m still pretty much in shock, I guess. But you know things haven’t been good between us in a long time. That’s why I’ve been spending so much time with you.” She sighed. “In a few months I guess we can tell people we’ve started dating, if you want. Assuming all this blows over.” Eileen didn’t think it would blow over, and she was making plans for the eventuality of the zombie apocalypse becoming an ongoing thing, but better not to dizzy up poor Dolph’s head with all that now. “In the meantime, you should take care of business, and open that freezer door, and kill Clem. What used to be Clem. Or do you want me to do it?” Eileen hadn’t exactly developed a taste for blood, like some kind of tiger that eats one little Javanese boy and can’t abide the taste of anything but sweet sweet manflesh after that, but she’d discovered she could kill both deliberately and in the heat of the moment if the job needed doing. Killing was just another necessary chore, like cleaning the gutters or scrubbing mildew off the tile in the bathtub. Leave it to a man to bitch and moan about something instead of just going ahead and getting it done.

  “No! You shouldn’t have to go through something like that, Eileen, after what you’ve already done tonight. I guess you’re right. I should put Clem out of his misery. But… what do I tell his mother?”

  “Tell her he died bravely fighting a zombie.”

  Dolph considered. “I doubt she’d believe that. I mean, this is Clem we’re talking about. The closest he ever came to brave was stupid. I’d like to kill that dog that bit him. It’s still out there, and it’s only a matter of time until it bites someone else.” He sighed. “I think I’ll call Stevie Ray, tell him about Clem being locked up in the freezer, make it into his problem.”

  Eileen knew when to push, and when not to, so she just nodded, though she thought, Weak. For her purposes, though, Dolph being weak could be okay. “Good idea. Hard to believe Harry’s dead and Stevie Ray’s the law in this town now.”

  “Stevie Ray’s all right. He’ll do what needs to be done.”

  “Going to ask him to take care of that zombie in the back of your truck too?”

  Dolph grimaced. The limbless zombie—the object lesson for that horrible disaster of a town meeting—was still in his pickup, twitching and moaning. “No. That one, I can shoot. It’s not anybody I know.”

  “I noticed that. Who is it, anyway?”

  Dolph cleared his throat. “Harry said we shouldn’t tell anybody, before he got killed I mean, he was afraid there’d be a lynch mob—like you could muster up a lynch mob in Lake Woebegotten, it’s an uphill battle to whip us into a big enough frenzy to form a bowling league or a pickup softball game, everybody’s so damn Norwegian and self-sufficient and inward—but I guess I can tell you if you’ll keep it a secret… We found a bunch of dead bodies at Mr. Levitt’s place. Dead bodies up and around and attacking people I mean. And Mr. Levitt pretty much admitted he’s just… no two ways about it a serial killer, like you’d see on a TV show. Except old. That zombie in the back of my truck, he’s one of Mr. Levitt’s victims, some drifter I guess.”

  Eileen whistled. Mr. Levitt didn’t enter her orbit very much—he was Catholic, so there was no church connection and he drove a Chevy so there was no car dealership connection—and though he’d been superintendent when her children were in school, she’d never had occasion to talk to anyone up that high in the chain of command, but she knew him, a harmless-enough-seeming old man. Just went to show you people had hidden depths. Eileen guessed maybe she was a serial killer herself, in a way, having killed twice in the past day, though maybe it didn’t count since she’d killed the same man twice, once with car exhaust, once with a gunshot to the head. Maybe she oughta kill another one just to confirm her status.

  “Might as well go ou
t and kill the zombie in your truck now, honey, I don’t imagine he’s going to start smelling any better. What are we supposed to do with… zombie bodies? Come to think of it, what did they do with Brent?”

  “Stevie Ray said they were hauling all the bodies to the funeral home basement until they figure out what to do with them. Did you want Brent, ah, buried?”

  “We have to be practical now,” Eileen said. “I imagine burning the bodies is the smartest thing.” She hopped down off the fishsticks. “Let’s go out and kill that poor thing in the bed of your truck, I hate thinking of it out there.”

  Eileen was wondering how best to go about convincing Dolph to let her be the one to put a bullet in the things’s head—he didn’t want to do it himself, but he had his manly pride, so she’d have to ease her way up to the suggestion gently—except once they got into their coats and gloves and went out back of the store where Dolph was parked, the zombie was gone. Just stumps for arms and legs, sure, but it had managed to flop and twist and bend its way out of the truck bed and slither off into the darkness and the woods that pressed right up against the town. They could see the trail in the snow, like some kind of horrible giant worm had slithered away, and Dolph cursed. “Should we go in after it?”

  Eileen had already tracked one zombie through the trackless wilderness, and had no desire to do so again. “No, honey. Let’s make that Stevie Ray’s problem, too. What kind of trouble can it get into anyway, with no arms and legs? What’s it going to do, bite somebody’s ankle?”

  “Clem died of a bite to the ankle,” Dolph said, tone all dark and broody, and there was no point listening to him anymore when he got like that, so Eileen kissed his cheek and let him escort her home, but didn’t let him come inside, looking forward to her first night in the blessedly empty bed of a widow.

  5

  “I just can’t see the point in keeping you here.” Stevie Ray pushed the bowl of mixed nuts—all the cashews had been picked out already, of course, that was always the way, it was pretty much nothing but peanuts and miscellaneous nut-dust now—across the desk toward Dolph.

  Dolph, who was usually a big bluff man, and one of the loudest voices at any town meeting on any subject that came anywhere close to involving his store in particular or commerce in general (his jeremiad against the installation of a parking meter fifteen years back was still the stuff of local legend), was hunched and quiet tonight, shoulders up halfway to his ears, head down, voice all a-mumble. “Just throw away the key. Lock me up and throw away the key.”

  “You and me both know I’ve let a lot worse than you out of this jail because they can do some good in this town.” Stevie Ray took a sip from his bottle of snow-cooled beer—he shouldn’t be drinking on the job, but given that he was pretty much on the job every waking hour and on call all the sleeping ones, that would entail not drinking at all, and he hadn’t gotten a part-time job at a bar where he was paid primarily in free drinks because he didn’t like a cold one now and then. He had to keep it under control, yes, and so far he was, and he had a little twinge over what Harry would have said at the sight of him with a bottle of Bud at his desk (probably something like, “I’m ashamed of you—you can’t at least drink Krepusky’s Red Ribbon Beer, support our local brewmaster?”), but if there was ever a time he needed a drink, it was now, when a criminal he wanted to release was refusing to leave. Stevie Ray made another run at the situation. “It was a terrible thing, but it was an accident—”

  “Wasn’t any accident. I aimed. I pulled the trigger. I hit what I aimed at. I’m a murderer.” Dolph stared at the bowl of mixed nuts—be honest, call it a bowl of peanuts now, and barely that—but didn’t eat. He hadn’t eaten since what Stevie Ray continued to think of as a terrible tragedy, but not a murder. Not exactly. “You should hold me here until a judge sets bail.”

  “You and me both know there’s no telling when we’ll get a judge through here. Nobody’s heard from the group we sent to the cities for help. For all we know we’re the last town standing.”

  Dolph shook his head, a stubborn look on his face, which was an improvement at least over looking as blank as a fresh-dead walleye. “With the weather so bad, they could just be holed up somewhere, waiting for a break in the storm to come back. There’s going to be a judge. There is. There have to be consequences for what I’ve done.”

  “Well, fine, then, in time you’ll stand trial and get all the consequences you can eat, you betcha, but you aren’t exactly a flight risk, Dolph. I can let you out of here. I know where you live. I know where your store is. I can let you go on your own recognizance. We could use you in this town.”

  “I can’t. I can’t face them, anyone, I can’t… Just leave me in jail, won’t you? I won’t cost anything, you can feed me out of my own store, all right?”

  Stevie Ray sighed. “What am I supposed to tell Eileen? She’s been calling for your release, making like I’m the Gestapo and the KGB and the Spetsnaz all rolled up into one, trampling over your constitutional rights. You want to tell her you refuse to leave the jail?”

  “No!” Dolph was truly animated now. “Don’t tell her I want to stay, she’ll think I’m a coward, tell her it’s your idea, that you think it’s the best thing, will you do that for me, Stevie Ray? I’ll throw in all your meals, too, and a case of Michelob, just don’t tell her—”

  Stevie Ray held up his hands. “Whoa, there, Dolph. It’s all right. We’ve known each other a long time. You gave my mama credit at the store when she lost her job at the battery factory. I owe you for that still, and I like to think we’re friends. I’ll tell Eileen whatever you want, but why?”

  Dolph put his head in his hands, and Stevie Ray figured this was one of those things a man had to say while not looking directly at the man he was saying it too. Sometimes it seemed life was full of those kinds of conversations. “I can’t be what she wants me to be, Stevie Ray. Eileen. She’s… ambitious. I bet Brent never wanted to be mayor, I think it was Eileen who steered him toward it, because she wants me to be mayor now, a big man in the town, king of the hill sitting on a hoard of food, using my supplies to make people do what I want—except I don’t want people to do anything, and I don’t know what she wants people to do. I’m sort of scared to find out. I was going to go along with her, too, I’m ashamed to say, it’s not very Christian of me, I know, but she has a way of talking about power that makes it sound like a pretty good deal. Then the—accident, no, murder, the thing I did—that happened, and I guess it gave me a new sense of perspective and I don’t like her plans anymore. Just leave me here, would you, until the world starts making sense again?”

  Well, well. Dolph and Eileen. Stevie Ray had figured they were just good friends, which just goes to show he didn’t know everything, and that was a bad quality in a police chief—Harry had sure known everything, and known when to keep it secret, too. Stevie Ray wondered if Eileen and Dolph had been… so close… before Brent got zombified. Better not to think about it. You could stay friends with people better if you didn’t know all their secrets, probably.

  “All right, you can stay here, but I’m only locking you in that cell when Eileen or one of the special deputies is around, you hear? And you’re going to help me keep this place clean, too, no freeloading.”

  “You’re a true friend, Stevie Ray.” Dolph yawned hugely. “I’d like to sleep now, if I can. Tell the truth I wish I could hibernate, like a bear. When was the last time we had a bear down here? Used to see them from time to time when I was a kid.”

  “Been a couple years,” Stevie Ray said. “Still a lot of black bears farther north and east though. Might be some in the woods around here nobody sees, I guess. I hope not. Just our luck the bear would die and rise back up and come shambling through town, and if there’s a sight I don’t want to see, it’s a zombie bear.”

  “A zombear. I guess that might make my top ten list of things I don’t want to see, too,” Dolph agreed.

  6

  BigHorn Jim tromped through the
snow with his Viking battleaxe (which he’d had made special for a pretty penny) over his shoulder, in case he should encounter a draugr—the ancient Norse word for the angry spirits of the dead, and the nearest thing in his worldview to match the shambling zombies he’d heard about and so briefly glimpsed at the town meeting. Mainly he was out to hunt firewood, though. His lodge up past the lake got cold when the winter wind came whipping down the prairie, and though he’d laid in a lot of wood, you could never have too much.

  He paused by a cleft of rock, leaning toward the snow-heaped opening and sniffing. He couldn’t smell anything besides the burning cold insides of his own nostrils, but he liked to imagine he could smell bear. He’d seen a small black bear, a solitary male, in the fall, gorging itself for the winter, and he figured it was denned up here for the winter, sleeping, wouldn’t wake up until late March or early April, probably, coming out hungry and pissed-off in springtime. When it did come out, BigHorn Jim would be waiting with his axe to bring the bear down, and would fashion a cape from its skin. (Maybe also some slippers, if there was enough fur left over.) There weren’t many chances for valiant battle out here in Central Minnesota, even during the early days of Ragnarok when draugr wandered the earth, but he thought killing a bear in single combat might be enough to get him an eternal free ticket to the mead-and-roast-boar hall of Valhalla in his appointed afterlife. The greatest Viking warriors, known as berserkers, had worn bear skins or wolf skins to battle—even the name, berserker, came from bjorn serkr, bear shirt. Some said berserkers even transformed into bears on the field of battle. BigHorn Jim needed a bear shirt of his own. He would slay the bear and wear its skin, and be filled with the beast’s power then. A grizzly would have been better—Vikings had not fought Minnesota black bears, he was fairly certain—but he knew Odin would appreciate his effort, and Jim would take his place alongside the einherjar in this, the doomed battle of the last days.