Daniel got out of the car and started walking, planning to cut across the park and go to the police station so he could tell Stevie Ray about the zombie bear, and the zombie mayor, and all his other failures. But there was a strange noise and milling-about from the baseball field, and he walked over, and saw hundreds of pigs snuffling and running and rooting around on the diamond. The pastor leaned over the fence, looking in at the pigs, trying to understand what was happening. Were they transforming the park into an old-style town common? Letting the pigs graze? Did pigs even graze? If so, what were they grazing on a baseball field?
Seeing the pigs reminded him of his conversation with Edsel, when Edsel had insisted that zombies were demons possessing the bodies of the dead, as the demon Legion had taken over the body of the pigs. Was this some plan of Edsel’s? Was he, ha, planning to do an exorcism, as he was rumored to have done at his old parish in Texas? To drive the demons from the dead into the bodies of these pigs, and then drive the pigs into the lake, as the pigs infested by Legion had fled downward to the sea?
Could something like that actually work?
A mechanical rumble caught Daniel’s attention, because it was so out-of-the-ordinary, and he looked to see a backhoe loader coming across the park. Was that Julie driving it? If so, why was she here, and not digging a grave for her grandfather? What was—
Then he saw the zombies. Scores of them, hordes of them, a wall of them, shambling, dropping bits, wearing funeral finery ground with mud, the relentless opening and closing and gnashing of their jaws audible even over the rumble of the backhoe, and, what was that, someone shouting? Someone shouting “No! You’re going the wrong way! Morons! Stupid dead morons!”
Daniel was frozen, watching the wall of the shambling dead approach, hemming him in from the back and both sides, and he vaulted the wall of the baseball field in a demonstration of athleticism he could never have repeated in the absence of such total fear-fuelled adrenal panic. Daniel ran through the pigs, kicking them out of his way, stumbling, making them squeal, trying to get to the bleachers, trying to get away, but when he looked back, the zombies were climbing over the wall, and then climbing over the other zombies who were climbing the wall, and attacking the pigs, and the squealing was unspeakable, and Daniel prayed, Dear Lord, oh Lord, oh Jesus, take me away from all this.
Stevie Ray wished for his binoculars, but he had to make do with the scope from his hunting rifle, which was like looking through a porthole onto a stormy sea. They were watching from what Edsel assured them was a safe distance, and they’d done their best to make sure there were no people anywhere near the park or the baseball field, and they’d moved the kids out of the elementary school, but Stevie Ray couldn’t help feeling like things were too sloppy, too sudden—not that you necessarily got a lot of time to plan for a zombie invasion. He squinted through the scope. “Levitt’s not going for it. He knows something’s wrong. Oh heck, he’s out of the tractor, he’s running the other way, off toward the lake.”
“I’ll go after him,” Julie said. “It’s time he was finished.”
“I’ll go,” Dolph said. “Please. Let me. I… need to do this. And Julie, you’re needed to help clean up the cemeteries, you’re better at organizing people, doing sweeps, all that stuff. But I’ve been a hunter. I can go after one guy.”
“If you’re sure,” Julie said, but then the radio crackled, and Rufus said, “Guys, I’ve totally got this. I’m on that side of the lake right now, I thought he might loop around and try to sneak into town from this direction. I’ll, uh, you know. Capture him.”
“You need to kill him, Rufus,” Stevie Ray said, not an ounce of doubt in his voice, or, surprisingly, in his heart. “He’s too dangerous. He can’t be left alive.”
Silence, a crackle of static, then, “You got it, boss.”
“I’m going to go anyway,” Dolph said. “You know. Just in case.”
“Probably for the best,” Stevie Ray said. “Father, I think all the zombies are on the baseball field. I don’t see any stragglers.”
“Then let us call down the fires of heaven,” Edsel said, and pushed the buttons on his little remote.
Stevie Ray wasn’t thrilled to discover a lunatic had put explosives in the heart of his town, but he had to admit, in this particular instance, it sure came in handy.
The zombies, and the zombie pigs, were nearly upon Daniel when he saw the light. He thought it was heaven opening, the Lord himself sending a golden chariot of fire to bear Daniel to heaven. He went on believing that as the full explosive power of a great many pounds of C-4 was unleashed, vaporizing the dead nearest the bombs, and turning the remainder into smoking gobbets of flying flesh. Daniel’s last thought was probably supposed to be “Blessed are the meek,” but in the voice he heard inside his head it sounded more like, “Blessed are the meat,” and what exactly his brain meant by that, who can say?
Daniel was right near second base. He pretty much became vapor. He would have been glad to know he didn’t contribute overmuch to the mess.
“It actually smells kind of good,” Stevie Ray said, or rather shouted, since he could barely hear anything over the ringing in his ears. The baseball field and bandshell had become pillars of fire, and now a few trees were burning, and chunks of meat were raining from the sky. Most of the chunks were pig—there’d been a lot of pigs, enough teeming living pigs to exert an unstoppable biotropic pull on the horde of zombies, enough to distract them from all other potential targets—but a not-insignificant portion of the chunks, Stevie Ray knew, were the remnants of the recently reanimated corpses of townspeople who’d been buried by their loved ones in the cemeteries of Lake Woebegotten. “Smells kind of like pulled pork barbecue.” Stevie Ray turned his head and vomited. Then he wiped off his mouth, looked at Julie, and said, “Guess we should head over to the cemeteries and kill whatever zombies are left.”
“Sure,” Father Edsel said. “Leave the cleaning-up here to the man of God. Story of my life.”
“I’m pretty sure you’ll just call the nuns and tell them to deal with it,” Stevie Ray said.
“It’s like you read my mind,” Father Edsel said.
12. Spring Ice
As he ran through the forest in pursuit of his quarry, Rufus was thinking about the idea of the Zombie Master. You saw it a lot in zombie movies and video games and collectible card games and roleplaying games and even in books, because the fact was, as his Zombies as Metaphor professor had explained, zombies didn’t make the most relatable sort of villain. Any story of man-versus-zombie was, really, a story of man-versus-nature, because zombies were mindless killers—they might as well be hurricanes or volcanoes for all the intentionality they had. Even in a story of man versus man-eating-tiger or man-eating-shark, you could anthropomorphize the animals, make them seem to have comprehensible emotions or motivations, but zombies—despite being almost human—were much harder to ascribe human motivations to. So you had the concept of a Zombie Master: a zombie who retained his ability to think and plan, and usually a zombie who could control other zombies—the kind of zombie who could give sadistic speeches and cackle like a supervillain and, generally, add that almost-human touch to a story, creating a villain you could really love to hate, in a way you couldn’t love to hate an act of nature like a flash flood or a tornado or a cave-in.
Well, this was real life, and there weren’t any Zombie Masters, unless you wanted to count Mr. Levitt, which is what Rufus had decided to do. Because Mr. Levitt was lacking some essential human qualities. Empathy. Sympathy. A conscience. He just had urges, and he acted on them, however he might rationalize his behavior. He basically was a Zombie Master, an engine of need with a brain on top of it, and as if to prove the point, he’d actually led an army of zombies against the living. That was treachery. Collaboration. And Rufus had played enough WWII-era video games to know what you did with collaborators.
He’d spotted the old man running off toward the lake, covering ground pretty good, wearing a camoufl
age hunting jacket that would work well in the autumn but didn’t help too much when there was still a fair bit of snow on the ground and the only green was the needles on the evergreens. Rufus went after him, pistol in hand, trying to be stealthy, hoping the old guy would get winded and pause for a rest and then, bam, Rufus would walk up on him and shoot him in the back of the head. Not very sporting, but if you gave Mr. Levitt a fair chance, the thing was, he’d win, and he didn’t give a rip about fairness himself.
The trees got thicker as they neared the lake, and he lost sight of the old guy, and Rufus was feeling a little winded himself, so he paused by a tree and looked at the ground for footprints, and that was weird, because there were footprints in the patchy snow, but they just stopped at the base of that tree, so where—
A great weight slammed into Rufus’s head, driving him to the ground. Rufus tried to roll over, but something was pressing on his back, bolts of pain ripping through him, and suddenly his back felt warm, then cold, and he thought he knew how a leaky pool toy must feel: all the air inside leaking out. But this wasn’t air. He was pretty sure it was oh heck it was blood.
Mr. Levitt, who’d jumped out of the tree onto Rufus’s back, leaned forward and whispered in his ear: “Don’t worry. I won’t let you come back as a zombie.” He rolled Rufus over onto his back, and Rufus groped for his pistol, but it was somehow no longer in his hand. Mr. Levitt looked down at him with no more interest than Rufus would show an ant scurrying across a picnic table. “Don’t fall asleep, now,” Mr. Levitt said. “Open those eyes wide. That’s my direct route to the brain.”
Rufus’s final thought as the point of Mr. Levitt’s very long, very bloody hunting knife descended toward his eye was, Game over.
Mr. Levitt limped away from Rufus’s corpse. Jumping out of the tree had certainly been nice and dramatic, but it hadn’t done his body any good, and his knee in particular was twinging every tenth step or so in a way that worried him mightily. His plan to assault the town hadn’t worked out, though he consoled himself that there was no way he could have prepared himself for exploding pigs. There just wasn’t a contingency plan for something like that. He decided departure was the better part of valor. Now that the weather was getting warm and travel was less dangerous, he could hole up for a few days, get his strength back, and then escape town, steal a vehicle and see what was happening in St. Elmer or Anoka or someplace, maybe even get down to the cities and see how things were faring there, if some humanity was holding on or if it was pure zombie free-for-all. Lake Woebegotten had been his home for a long time, and it would’ve been satisfying to destroy it, but Levitt was not a sentimental fellow. He could turn his back and head for less hostile pastures without a backwards glance.
But first he needed a place to rest. The day’s activities had taken a toll on him. There were a few fishing shacks around the lake, and Gunther Montcrief’s at least would be uninhabited, and might even still have some supplies laid in. Levitt wasn’t a hundred percent sure where Gunther’s shack was, but the lake was there on his left, still iced over though it would begin breaking up soon, and if he just followed around the shoreline he was sure to find Gunther’s place or some other.
The police radio he was still carrying crackled. “I just found Rufus’s body,” Dolph said. “Mr. Levitt, if you’re listening, I’m coming for you, and you won’t like it when I find you.”
Morons. Wonderful morons. “Why, thank you for warning me,” Mr. Levitt said. “Imagine what you could have done if you’d retained the element of surprise. Idiot.”
Levitt knew his trail wouldn’t be too hard to find—even when he avoided walking in snow, the patches of bare earth were soft and muddy and took footprints, too. So if he couldn’t hide, he’d just have to prepare a little surprise for Dolph.
And, ah, right there, that was Gunther’s shack, must be, all gray-weathered boards and a tin roof. Maybe there’d be something useful inside. Like chains, or rope.
Dolph had not been especially close to Rufus, but the boy had seemed about as nice as you could expect for a guy who had a tattoo of a spiderweb on his neck and looked like he might wear eyeliner if he thought he could get away with it. Seeing him bled out on the snow, all cut up, had turned Dolph’s stomach, but it had also stiffened his resolve.
Of course, telling Levitt he was coming for him maybe hadn’t been the smartest thing, but Dolph wasn’t a man-hunter by training. He was just blundering along. He’d have to hope that blundering was good enough.
Dolph wasn’t an exceptional tracker, either, that was more Stevie Ray’s gig, but Stevie Ray and the rest of the town’s forces were cleaning up stray zombies and securing the cemeteries, since even the ones Levitt hadn’t dug up needed to be sanitized—eventually the zombies would claw their way out of the thawing ground even without help from a backhoe. Really, Levitt was just one guy, a small target, and he was Dolph’s responsibility now. Fortunately the trail wasn’t at all tricky to follow. Nobody had gone walking in the woods lately, so that one set of footprints leading away from Rufus’s body was pretty obvious. Dolph didn’t follow right on top of the footprints, ranging off to one side or the other of the track, trying to be quiet, holding his gun—one of Cyrus’s ridiculous little machine guns that looked almost like a toy but most certainly wasn’t—at the ready.
Then he saw the shack, looking like it was held together by duct tape and superglue. Mr. Levitt was probably in there, judging by the tracks that led right up to the door. Well, Dolph didn’t need any heroics. He pointed the gun at about chest height and pulled the trigger, and though it made a noise like a sewing machine it bucked in his hand like a living thing, and stitched a swooping line across the side of the shack. Dolph held the gun with both hands, braced himself, and sprayed another shower of bullets into the shack, back and forth, up and down, trying to cover every possible corner and nook inside. There were no screams, but a headshot or heart shot wouldn’t give you time to scream, right? Dolph went cautiously to the shack and pushed at the door with his foot. Having been shot half to pieces, the door didn’t so much open as disintegrate when his foot touched it. Inside there was only darkness, but was that a mound of blankets or a body in the back—
Something flashed down past Dolph’s eyes and then something tightened around his throat and he was jerked backwards off his feet, gun flying from his grip. He scrabbled at his throat and felt coarse rope. Somebody had lassoed him! He twisted and turned his head and there was Mr. Levitt holding the other end of the rope, whistling, and throwing one end of the rope in the air over a handy tree branch. “Never hung somebody before,” he said conversationally. “It’s good to expand your repertoire though.” He hauled on the rope, and the pressure on Dolph’s throat was unbearable. He struggled to his knees, then to his feet, gasping breaths in the brief moments when there was slack in the rope, trying to get the noose off over his head, but Levitt pulled relentlessly, and Dolph went up on tiptoes as the old guy grunted and strained. “Just need to get you an inch or two off the ground, and I can tie this end off and let you strangle,” Levitt said. “Darn cheap rope has too much give in it, keeps stretching, should’ve known that drunk Montcrief wouldn’t have any decent rope out here—”
Dolph thought the blood was being cut off to his brain, resulting in hallucinations, because an unlikely pair came out of the trees behind Mr. Levitt then: one of them was Eileen, but a zombified Eileen, not pretty at all, wearing a torn blouse and bloody skirt with gaping eyes.
And walking by her side, big as you please, was an obviously dead and equally bloody black bear.
Mr. Levitt must have heard them—which meant it wasn’t a hallucination, and that was interesting, although, Oh, Eileen, you were tough and kind of crazy but I cared about you once—because he looked back and let go of the rope and stumbled away. Dolph collapsed to his knees, coughing and gasping and pulling the rope off over his head. Then he got to his feet, and ran as hard and as fast as he could away from the zombies and Mr. Levitt. Julie had e
xplained the whole biotropic situation to him. All things being equal, the zombies could come after him or Mr. Levitt, they were both equally appealing, but zombies tended toward whatever target was closest, and Dolph wanted to make that choice obvious. He paused by a tree about fifty yards away and looked back to see if he’d managed to escape Eileen and her bear-friend’s notice.
Mr. Levitt was running, too, straight away from them, in the direction of the lake, and Eileen and the bear were following him, not very fast—zombies were never very fast—but implacable. And Mr. Levitt wasn’t going to break any land speed records himself. In fact, he was limping and favoring one leg and firing a pistol pretty much blindly behind him. Dolph didn’t think much of the old murderer’s chances. He leaned up against a tree to watch the show.
A bear. A zombie bear. How nice it would have been to lead that beast to the center of town! But having the bear come after him was less satisfying. Mr. Levitt was pleased to see that his mayoral rival Eileen had gotten herself killed at some point, but it was cold comfort when she wanted to eat him. If it was just Eileen he’d have stood his ground and taken aim and shot her in the head… but there was that bear. Bears had small heads in relation to the rest of their bulk, making it a trickier shot. Bears were just generally a lot tougher than people, and it seemed faster than human zombies, too. He aimed a few running shots at them, hoping to get lucky, but wasn’t surprised when the gun went empty with his pursuers still on his heels.
The bear, frankly, worried him, but he had an idea. Get some distance between them, and then lob a grenade. Tough or not, the bear wouldn’t survive that. At least he’d stumbled into some kind of clearing, the ground was snowy and slick with ice but there were no trees, and that made it easier to put on a burst of speed despite that twinge in his knee. The prospect of onrushing death did have a way of tapping into your body’s hidden resources, he’d found. He looked back, and judged they were far enough away to risk his Hail Mary move.
The Zombies of Lake Woebegotten Page 28