Zombies

by Otto Penzler

  “You got your gun on me, Alton?” Cory whispered.

  “That’s right, Bud. You ain’t a-trompin’ up these tracks for me. I need ’em at sunup.”

  A full minute passed, and the only sound in the blackness was that of Cory’s pained breathing. Finally:

  “I got my gun, too, Alton. Come home.”

  “You can’t see to shoot me.”

  “We’re even on that.”

  “We ain’t. I know just where you stand, Cory. I been here four hours.”

  “My gun scatters.”

  “My gun kills.”

  Without another word Cory Drew turned on his heel and stamped back to the farm.

  BLACK AND LIQUESCENT it lay in the blackness, not alive, not understanding death, believing itself dead. Things that were alive saw and moved about. Things that were not alive could do neither. It rested its muddy gaze on the line of trees at the crest of the rise, and deep within it thoughts trickled wetly. It lay huddled, dividing its new-found facts, dissecting them as it had dissected live things when there was light, comparing, concluding, pigeonholing.

  The trees at the top of the slope could just be seen, as their trunks were a fraction of a shade lighter than the dark sky behind them. At length they, too, disappeared, and for a moment sky and trees were a monotone. The thing knew it was dead now, and like many a being before it, it wondered how long it must stay like this. And then the sky beyond the trees grew a little lighter. That was a manifestly impossible occurrence, thought the thing, but it could see it and it must be so. Did dead things live again? That was curious. What about dismembered dead things? It would wait and see.

  The sun came hand over hand up a beam of light. A bird somewhere made a high yawning peep, and as an owl killed a shrew, a skunk pounced on another, so that the night-shift deaths and those of day could go on without cessation. Two flowers nodded archly to each other, comparing their pretty clothes. A dragonfly nymph decided it was tired of looking serious and cracked its back open, to crawl out and dry gauzily. The first golden ray sheared down between the trees, through the grasses, passed over the mass in the shadowed bushes. “I am alive again,” thought the thing that could not possibly live. “I am alive, for I see clearly.” It stood up on its thick legs, up into the golden glow. In a little while the wet flakes that had grown during the night dried in the sun, and when it took its first steps, they cracked off and a little shower of them fell away. It walked up the slope to find Kimbo, to see if he, too, were alive again.

  BABE LET THE sun come into her room by opening her eyes. Uncle Alton was gone—that was the first thing that ran through her head. Dad had come home last night and had shouted at mother for an hour. Alton was plumb crazy. He’d turned a gun on his own brother. If Alton ever came ten feet into Cory’s land, Cory would fill him so full of holes he’d look like a tumbleweed. Alton was lazy, shiftless, selfish, and one or two other things of questionable taste but undoubted vividness. Babe knew her father. Uncle Alton would never be safe in this county.

  She bounced out of bed in the enviable way of the very young, and ran to the window. Cory was trudging down to the night pasture with two bridles over his arm, to get the team. There were kitchen noises from downstairs.

  Babe ducked her head in the washbowl and shook off the water like a terrier before she toweled. Trailing clean shirt and dungarees, she went to the head of the stairs, slid into the shirt, and began her morning ritual with the trousers. One step down was a step through the right leg. One more, and she was into the left. Then, bouncing step by step on both feet, buttoning one button per step, she reached the bottom fully dressed and ran into the kitchen.

  “Didn’t Uncle Alton come back a-tall, Mum?”

  “Morning, Babe. No, dear.” Clissa was too quiet, smiling too much, Babe thought shrewdly. Wasn’t happy.

  “Where’d he go, Mum?”

  “We don’t know, Babe. Sit down and eat your breakfast.”

  “What’s a misbegotten, Mum?” Babe asked suddenly. Her mother nearly dropped the dish she was drying. “Babe! You must never say that again!”

  “Oh. Well, why is Uncle Alton, then?”

  “Why is he what?”

  Babe’s mouth muscled around an outsize spoonful of oatmeal. “A misbe—”

  “Babe!”

  “All right, Mum,” said Babe with her mouth full. “Well, why?”

  “I told Cory not to shout last night,” Clissa said half to herself.

  “Well, whatever it means, he isn’t,” said Babe with finality. “Did he go hunting again?”

  “He went to look for Kimbo, darling.”

  “Kimbo? Oh Mummy, is Kimbo gone, too? Didn’t he come back either?”

  “No, dear. Oh, please, Babe, stop asking questions!”

  “All right. Where do you think they went?”

  “Into the north woods. Be quiet.”

  Babe gulped away at her breakfast. An idea struck her; and as she thought of it she ate slower and slower, and cast more and more glances at her mother from under the lashes of her tilted eyes. It would be awful if Daddy did anything to Uncle Alton. Someone ought to warn him.

  Babe was halfway to the woods when Alton’s .32-40 sent echoes giggling up and down the valley.

  CORY WAS IN the south thirty, riding a cultivator and cussing at the team of grays when he heard the gun. “Hoa,” he called to the horses, and sat a moment to listen to the sound. “One-two-three. Four,” he counted. “Saw someone, blasted away at him. Had a chance to take aim and give him another, careful. My God!” He threw up the cultivator points and steered the team into the shade of three oaks. He hobbled the gelding with swift tosses of a spare strap, and headed for the woods. “Alton a killer,” he murmured, and doubled back to the house for his gun. Clissa was standing just outside the door.

  “Get shells!” he snapped and flung into the house. Clissa followed him. He was strapping his hunting knife on before she could get a box off the shelf. “Cory—”

  “Hear that gun, did you? Alton’s off his nut. He don’t waste lead. He shot at someone just then, and he wasn’t fixin’ to shoot pa’tridges when I saw him last. He was out to get a man. Gimme my gun.”

  “Cory, Babe—”

  “You keep her here. Oh, God, this is a helluva mess! I can’t stand much more.” Cory ran out the door.

  Clissa caught his arm. “Cory, I’m trying to tell you. Babe isn’t here. I’ve called, and she isn’t here.”

  Cory’s heavy, young-old face tautened. “Babe— Where did you last see her?”

  “Breakfast.” Clissa was crying now.

  “She say where she was going?”

  “No. She asked a lot of questions about Alton and where he’d gone.”

  “Did you say?”

  Clissa’s eyes widened, and she nodded, biting the back of her hand.

  “You shouldn’t ha’ done that, Clissa,” he gritted, and ran toward the woods. Clissa looked after him, and in that moment she could have killed herself.

  Cory ran with his head up, straining with his legs and lungs and eyes at the long path. He puffed up the slope to the woods, agonized for breath after the forty-five minutes’ heavy going. He couldn’t even notice the damp smell of mold in the air.

  He caught a movement in a thicket to his right, and dropped. Struggling to keep his breath, he crept forward until he could see clearly. There was something in there, all right. Something black, keeping still. Cory relaxed his legs and torso completely to make it easier for his heart to pump some strength back into them, and slowly raised the 12-gauge until it bore on the thing hidden in the thicket.

  “Come out!” Cory said when he could speak.

  Nothing happened.

  “Come out or by God I’ll shoot!” rasped Cory.

  There was a long moment of silence, and his finger tightened on the trigger.

  “You asked for it,” he said, and as he fired the thing leaped sideways into the open, screaming.

  It was a thin little man d
ressed in sepulchral black, and bearing the rosiest little baby-face Cory had ever seen. The face was twisted with fright and pain. The little man scrambled to his feet and hopped up and down saying over and over, “Oh, my hand! Don’t shoot again! Oh, my hand! Don’t shoot again!” He stopped after a bit, when Cory had climbed to his feet, and he regarded the farmer out of sad china-blue eyes. “You shot me,” he said reproachfully, holding up a little bloody hand. “Oh, my goodness!”

  Cory said, “Now, who the hell are you?”

  The man immediately became hysterical, mouthing such a flood of broken sentences that Cory stepped back a pace and half-raised his gun in self-defense. It seemed to consist mostly of “I lost my papers,” and “I didn’t do it,” and “It was horrible. Horrible. Horrible,” and “The dead man,” and “Oh, don’t shoot again!”

  Cory tried twice to ask him a question, and then he stepped over and knocked the man down. He lay on the ground writhing and moaning and blubbering and putting his bloody hand to his mouth where Cory had hit him.

  The man rolled over and sat up. “I didn’t do it!” he sobbed. “I didn’t! I was walking along and I heard the gun and I heard some swearing and an awful scream and I went over there and peeped and I saw the dead man and I ran away and you came and I hid and you shot me and—”

  “Shut up!” The man did, as if a switch had been thrown. “Now,” said Cory, pointing along the path, “you say there’s a dead man up there?”

  The man nodded and began crying in earnest. Cory helped him up. “Follow this path back to my farmhouse,” he said. “Tell my wife to fix up your hand. Don’t tell her anything else. And wait there until I come. Hear?”

  “Yes. Thank you. Oh, thank you. Snff.”

  “Go on now.” Cory gave him a gentle shove in the right direction and went alone, in cold fear, up the path to the spot where he had found Alton the night before.

  He found him here now, too, and Kimbo. Kimbo and Alton had spent several years together in the deepest friendship; they had hunted and fought and slept together, and the lives they owed each other were finished now. They were dead together.

  It was terrible that they died the same way. Cory Drew was a strong man, but he gasped and fainted dead away when he saw what the thing of the mold had done to his brother and his brother’s dog.

  THE LITTLE MAN in black hurried down the path, whimpering and holding his injured hand as if he rather wished he could limp with it. After a while the whimper faded away, and the hurried stride changed to a walk as the gibbering terror of the last hour receded. He drew two deep breaths, said: “My goodness!” and felt almost normal. He bound a linen handkerchief around his wrist, but the hand kept bleeding. He tried the elbow, and that made it hurt. So he stuffed the handkerchief back in his pocket and simply waved the hand stupidly in the air until the blood clotted.

  It wasn’t much of a wound. Two of the balls of shot had struck him, one passing through the fleshy part of his thumb and the other scoring the side. As he thought of it, he became a little proud that he had borne a gunshot wound. He strolled along in the midmorning sunlight, feeling a dreamy communion with the boys at the front. “The whine of shot and shell—” Where had he read that? Ah, what a story this would make! “And there beside the”—what was the line?—“the embattled farmer stood.” Didn’t the awfulest things happen in the nicest places? This was a nice forest. No screeches and snakes and deep dark menaces. Not a story-book wood at all. Shot by a gun. How exciting! He was now—he strutted—a gentleman adventurer. He did not see the great moist horror that clumped along behind him, though his nostrils crinkled a little with its foulness.

  The monster had three little holes close together on its chest, and one little hole in the middle of its slimy forehead. It had three close-set pits in its back and one on the back of its head. These marks were where Alton Drew’s bullets had struck and passed through. Half of the monster’s shapeless face was sloughed away, and there was a deep indentation on its shoulder. This was what Alton Drew’s gun butt had done after he clubbed it and struck at the thing that would not lie down after he put his four bullets through it. When these things happened the monster was not hurt or angry. It only wondered why Alton Drew acted that way. Now it followed the little man without hurrying at all, matching his stride step by step and dropping little particles of muck behind it.

  The little man went on out of the wood and stood with his back against a big tree at the forest’s edge, and he thought. Enough had happened to him here. What good would it do to stay and face a horrible murder inquest, just to continue this silly, vague quest? There was supposed to be the ruin of an old, old hunting lodge deep in this wood somewhere, and perhaps it would hold the evidence he wanted. But it was a vague report—vague enough to be forgotten without regret. It would be the height of foolishness to stay for all the hick-town red tape that would follow that ghastly affair back in the wood. Ergo, it would be ridiculous to follow that farmer’s advice, to go to his house and wait for him. He would go back to town.

  The monster was leaning against the other side of the big tree.

  The little man snuffled disgustedly at a sudden overpowering odor of rot. He reached for his handkerchief, fumbled and dropped it. As he bent to pick it up, the monster’s arm whuffed heavily in the air where his head had been—a blow that would certainly have removed that baby-faced protuberance. The man stood up and would have put the handkerchief to his nose had it not been so bloody. The creature behind the tree lifted its arms again just as the little man tossed the handkerchief away and stepped out into the field, heading across country to the distant highway that would take him back to town. The monster pounced on the handkerchief, picked it up, studied it, tore it across several times and inspected the tattered edges. Then it gazed vacantly at the disappearing figure of the little man, and finding him no longer interesting, turned back into the woods.

  BABE BROKE INTO a trot at the sound of the shots. It was important to warn Uncle Alton about what her father had said, but it was more interesting to find out what he had bagged. Oh, he’d bagged it, all right. Uncle Alton never fired without killing. This was about the first time she had ever heard him blast away like that. Must be a bear, she thought excitedly, tripping over a root, sprawling, rolling to her feet again, without noticing the tumble. She’d love to have another bearskin in her room. Where would she put it? Maybe they could line it and she could have it for a blanket. Uncle Alton could sit on it and read to her in the evening— Oh, no. No. Not with this trouble between him and Dad. Oh, if she could only do something! She tried to run faster, worried and anticipating, but she was out of breath and went more slowly instead.

  At the top of the rise by the edge of the woods she stopped and looked back. Far down in the valley lay the south thirty. She scanned it carefully, looking for her father. The new furrows and the old were sharply defined, and her keen eyes saw immediately that Cory had left the line with the cultivator and had angled the team over to the shade trees without finishing his row. That wasn’t like him. She could see the team now, and Cory’s pale-blue denim was not in sight.

  A little nearer was the house; and as her gaze fell on it she moved out of the cleared pathway. Her father was coming; she had seen his shotgun and he was running. He could really cover ground when he wanted to. He must be chasing her, she thought immediately. He’d guessed that she would run toward the sound of the shots, and he was going to follow her tracks to Uncle Alton and shoot him. She knew that he was as good a woodsman as Alton; he would most certainly see her tracks. Well, she’d fix him.

  She ran along the edge of the wood, being careful to dig her heels deeply into the loam. A hundred yards of this, and she angled into the forest and ran until she reached a particularly thick grove of trees. Shinnying up like a squirrel, she squirmed from one close-set tree to another until she could go no farther back toward the path, then dropped lightly to the ground and crept on her way, now stepping very gently. It would take him an hour to beat arou
nd for her trail, she thought proudly, and by that time she could easily get to Uncle Alton. She giggled to herself as she thought of the way she had fooled her father. And the little sound of laughter drowned out, for her, the sound of Alton’s hoarse dying scream.

  She reached and crossed the path and slid through the brush beside it. The shots came from up around here somewhere. She stopped and listened several times, and then suddenly heard something coming toward her, fast. She ducked under cover, terrified, and a little baby-faced man in black, his blue eyes wide with horror, crashed blindly past her, the leather case he carried catching on the branches. It spun a moment and then fell right in front of her. The man never missed it.

  Babe lay there for a long moment and then picked up the case and faded into the woods. Things were happening too fast for her. She wanted Uncle Alton, but she dared not call. She stopped again and strained her ears. Back toward the edge of the wood she heard her father’s voice, and another’s—probably the man who had dropped the brief case. She dared not go over there. Filled with enjoyable terror, she thought hard, then snapped her fingers in triumph. She and Alton had played Injun many times up here; they had a whole repertoire of secret signals. She had practiced birdcalls until she knew them better than the birds themselves. What would it be? Ah—blue jay. She threw back her head and by some youthful alchemy produced a nerve-shattering screech that would have done justice to any jay that ever flew. She repeated it, and then twice more.

  The response was immediate—the call of a blue jay, four times, spaced two and two. Babe nodded to herself happily. That was the signal that they were to meet immediately at the Place. The Place was a hide-out that he had discovered and shared with her, and not another soul knew of it; an angle of rock beside a stream not far away. It wasn’t exactly a cave, but almost. Enough so to be entrancing. Babe trotted happily away toward the brook. She had just known that Uncle Alton would remember the call of the blue jay, and what it meant.

  In the tree that arched over Alton’s scattered body perched a large jay bird, preening itself and shining in the sun. Quite unconscious of the presence of death, hardly noticing the Babe’s realistic cry, it screamed again four times, two and two.