Zombies

by Otto Penzler

  LEAGUE OF THE GRATEFUL DEAD!

  Despite the fact that it was three o’clock in the morning and bitter cold, the corners of State and Madison were as crowded as they had ever been at noon. Men and women avoided each other’s eyes as they milled in a mass for safety. The thing was mad, impossible—still, there was no explanation but the fact that it was so. Hell was loose in the streets of Chicago and the devil roamed the by-ways.

  Twelve blocks down the street, past VanBuren, in a cheap South State Street bar, Doctor Meredith stared with solemn eyes at the headlines of the paper in which he had just invested the last three cents he had. A glass of five-cent beer sat on the bar in front of him—untouched.

  The paper made no exaggerations. It merely stated fact. Since disappearing from the police commissioner’s office in a harmless fusillade of lead, Satan had not been seen. . . . Contradictory witnesses testified he had disappeared into the ground—stepped into a cab—walked briskly north on State Street. . . . A mysterious fire had developed in the suite of offices that he had used in the Braddock Building. . . . The corpse of Max Boderman, said to be resurrected, was not in its tomb. . . . According to the infallible fingerprint department of the F.B.I. the prints sent them by the C.P.D. were those of ten men who had been executed in the State of Illinois within the last two years. . . . A ragged derelict, once one of the city’s most respected surgeons, had made wild and unsupported accusations against a prominent citizen whom the paper allowed to remain unnamed. . . . The derelict, believed to be insane from drink, had disappeared. . . . It was known to be a racket of some kind. . . . It was known to be the truth. . . . Several noted clergymen were holding special services in an effort to re-establish the city on a normal spiritual keel. . . . The thing couldn’t be. . . . It could be. . . . Responsible citizens were beginning to report to the police that they had recently seen men and women on the streets who were known to that department to be dead. . . . The grief-stricken families of the men and women specified had sworn that it wasn’t so.

  “And it all boils down,” Meredith told his glass of flat, stale beer, “to the fact that no one knows a damn. No one even suspects the truth but me, and they say I’m mad.”

  “You say something?” the barkeep demanded.

  “No, just thinking aloud,” Meredith shook his head.

  “Then drink your beer and get out,” the barkeep ordered. “You bums make me sick. You come in here and soak up a night’s warm lodging on a nickel beer.”

  Meredith walked to the door and stood staring out into the night. It had begun to snow again and the curbs had piled high with the drift. He wondered what he ought to do. Perhaps he was crazy. Perhaps the man was Satan.

  He fished in his pockets for a cigarette, found one in his coat pocket, put it between his lips and fumbled for a match.

  His hand stopped halfway to his pocket. He took the cigarette from between his lips and stared at it. It was an expensive Turkish brand. It was the one that Satan had given him in his office. His eyes grew suddenly cold.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” he said. “I will be damned.”

  He put the cigarette carefully back into his pocket. Then he strode out into the night, his shoulders squared. He knew where he was going—and he knew what he had to do.

  • • •

  THE BUILDING ITSELF was attractive and comparatively new. It had been built in the boom of ’29 as a hotel, sold in the slump of the early ’30’s to Doctor Meredith for a private hospital, and at his mental collapse had been absorbed in the general debris of his estate. Later, an undisclosed syndicate had bought it as a residence club house, and as such it was now used.

  A liveried doorman stood at the door, but few members came or went. Those who did went out the back way and at night. The neighbors were normally curious, but no more. It was obviously a rich man’s club and as such held little place or interest in their own busy, narrow lives.

  Outside the heavily curtained first floor windows, a lone watcher crouched behind a tree for meager shelter from the wind and snow. From time to time he raised his eyes to contemplate the bright white light that shone through the skylight window on the top and seventh floor in what once had been an operating room.

  Inside the heavily curtained windows of the club house, the air was thick with smoke and conversation. The lounge was filled with old men, young men, rich men, poor men; colorful with red-lipped youthful girls whose eyes were too bright; drab with pursed-lipped, prim old ladies; tempered with well-dressed matrons, and all had one bond in common.

  Most of them were living dead. Most of them had died, been buried, and were resurrected. All were in debt to Satan. All had sold him their souls for life. All belonged to the League of the Grateful Dead.

  The League rules themselves were simple. There were only three of them. They were:

  1: Thou shalt Eat, Drink, and be Merry for thou hast been dead and buried and now thou shalt live forever.

  2: Thou shalt converse with no one but a fellow member of the League concerning thy resurrection under penalty of returning to the grave.

  3: Thou shalt remember thou hast sold thy soul to thy master who is Satan. When he speaks thou shalt obey.

  ON THE SECOND floor of the club house Yoshama the Oriental rapped softly on a paneled office door.

  “Come in,” the voice of Satan called.

  Yoshama turned the door knob then stepped politely to one side.

  “Please to proceed,” he bowed.

  The florid faced, white-haired man in the doorway nodded curtly, took his younger, golden-haired companion by the arm and walked into the office.

  It was similar to the office where Satan had held his consultations in the Loop but even more elaborate. Purported hell flames flared against the entire background of the wall. The air was heavy with incense.

  “Yes, Mr. Green—?” Satan asked. “Yoshama says you want to see me.”

  The dead banker nodded glumly.

  “I do.”

  Satan indicated two snow white chairs with legs of gleaming human thigh bones, seats of interlaced human ribs, and backs of tibias webbed with human clavicles, each corner tibia posted with a human skull.

  The resurrected banker sat down heavily.

  “I want to get out of here,” he said grimly.

  Satan raised his neatly arched black eyebrows.

  “That is possible—for a price.”

  “But we’ve given you almost everything we have,” the golden-haired girl protested. She began to cry. “Oh, if I’d only known that it was going to be like this I never would have come to you the night Sam died. I’d have let him stay in his grave.”

  Satan shrugged.

  “If it is Mr. Green’s desire it can be arranged that he return to his grave.” He smoothed out the pages of an early morning extra that featured a picture of the four mummified corpses. “I have sent three of our League members who grew garrulous down to hell within the last two days.”

  “No. Not like that,” the banker shuddered. “I don’t want to die. I want to live. But I want to leave this awful place—this club house. How much for Gwendolyn and me to leave here?”

  “Money,” Satan mused, “is the root of all evil, and I am evil.” He considered. “Suppose we say the customary plastic surgical operation that I insist upon whenever a member leaves, your promise to report to me once every month, and five hundred—” He stopped short in the middle of his sentence, listening.

  “Yes, Master—?” Yoshama asked him tersely.

  Satan pointed to the wall.

  “I thought I heard something just outside the window there, something that sounded like leather scraping on rungs of steel.”

  “Is perhaps somebody climbing up fire escape.” The Oriental smiled evilly. A long, thin, glittering knife appeared in his hand. “You please to excuse me, Master.”

  Satan listened thoughtfully for a moment, then shook his head.

  “No, Yoshama.” He rose from the chair behind his desk, nodde
d curtly to the man and girl in front of it. “You two will leave now. We will discuss the matter later.”

  The elderly man got up wearily from the gruesome chair on which he sat and helped his still weeping companion to the door.

  “Yes, Master,” he said quietly.

  Yoshama closed the door behind them, pulled a switch that killed the crimson hell flame, and parting an asbestos curtain on the wall, looked out and up through a window.

  “Is man,” he announced in a whisper. “One man. Is almost up to fourth floor now and climbing higher.”

  Satan lighted a cigarette, smiled thinly.

  “He is welcome, Yoshama. Being Satan, I am intuitive. It must be the one man in all this city whom we might have reason to expect.” He placed one long ivory finger to his forehead in mock psychic thought. “Yes. I should say it is the once-great Doctor Meredith who has grown over-anxious to become a member of the League of the Grateful Dead.”

  He chuckled evilly, without mirth. Yoshama ran his thumb nail the length of his glittering knife blade, chuckled with him.

  FROM WHERE HE clung to the last steel rungs of the spidery fire escape, slippery with ice and sleet, the crawling lights of cars on the street below looked like toys. And the wind was stronger here. Jim Meredith braced his weight against the ladder and blew on the tips of his gloveless fingers to warm them.

  It would, he thought, be so easy to just let go. He put the thought from his mind. He was the one man in Chicago who knew who the devil really was. It was up to him, for Tim Murphy’s sake, if nothing else, to prove it—kill him if he could. He clutched at the icy steel rungs with his bleeding fingers.

  “Up we go,” he grunted.

  With the last of his strength he pulled himself over the bulge of the roof. He lay there in the snow for minutes, breathing hard.

  The skylight window, only feet away, lighted the snow around it. Too tired to stand, he crawled across the flat roof through the snow to where he could look inside. It once had been his own private operating room. It was as he remembered it with no new equipment added. Only the scrub nurse, the third nurse busily picking bloody sponges from the floor, and the anesthetist were new. They were, he decided grimly, probably members of the League of the Grateful Dead.

  The corners of the room, lighted only by the powerful dome light over the operating table, lay in shadows. He stared long at the operating surgeon’s back. He was performing a difficult operation on an elderly white-haired patient, and was bungling every move. The devil was attempting, probably had attempted hundreds of operations, that only six or seven surgeons in the world were qualified to do.

  Meredith got slowly to his feet and peered through the blinding snow to locate the kiosk of the trap door that he remembered led down through the roof. It was piled high with the icy drift but was unlocked. Painfully, with bleeding fingertips, the once-great surgeon picked the ice and snow away. It was then he found the bar. It was of steel, thumb thick, and two feet long. A pry bar, forgotten by some worker, it was a murderous bludgeon in the hands of a determined man.

  The surgeon laid it down again where he could find it and tugged gently at the door. It opened slowly, outward. Then he picked up the bar again, stepped into the darkened stairwell and closed the door behind him.

  The familiar odor of antiseptics filled his nostrils. He smiled wryly. He was only a few steps from his own operating room. He had come back as Tim Murphy had prophesied. But not in the manner Tim had meant. He had come to take life, not to save it.

  “For God’s sake hand me that adrenaline syringe,” he heard a thin voice say. “Quick. The old goat’s dying on the table.”

  “He’s gone,” a male voice Meredith decided must be the anesthetist’s answered. “I can’t feel any pulse at all.”

  “Well, take him away, then,” the thin voice said impatiently. “And send up another case.” Meredith could visualize the thin lips smacking.

  Meredith waited where he was until he heard a swinging door sway shut and the soft suck of the rubber tires of a stretcher on tile fade down the hall. Then he stepped out of the stairwell, stared with hard, cold eyes at the door of the operating room presided over by the bloody butcher who posed as a human being.

  “Wish me luck, Tim,” he said quietly.

  Grasping the bar firmly he strode across the hall and in through the swinging doors.

  The surgeon looked up, smiled.

  “Well, so you got here,” he said thinly. “You’re just in time. I’ll take you next. I guess I’ll do a trephine on you in an attempt to find your brains.”

  Meredith stood where he was, the bar tensed in his hands, his muscles poised to spring. Then two figures stepped out of the shadowy corners of the room.

  “Drop that bar!” a sybilant Oriental voice hissed in his ear. “Drop that bar or else you are a dead man!”

  Meredith gritted his teeth against the pain as the sharp point of an eager knife sank experimentally for a good half-inch into the thin flesh between his ribs.

  Then the soft voice of Satan chuckled.

  “Your English composition is very poor, Yoshama. Doctor Meredith is a dead man whether or not he drops that bar.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  THE DEAD DIE ONCE

  Meredith hadn’t a chance, and he knew it. But he resolved to die hard. With a surgeon’s knowledge of anatomy, he knew that the slanting thrust of the knife blade where it was started would be painful, but not necessarily fatal. At least not immediately. The Oriental was expecting him to draw away. But he didn’t.

  Meredith literally spitted himself on the knife as he lunged, sideways, felt the blade slip into his flesh and twist from Yoshama’s hand. Then the swinging steel bar in his own right hand curved in a vicious arc and he heard a satisfying crunch of bone as the Oriental’s skull caved in.

  “Stop him! Stop him!” the white-faced surgeon behind the operating table screamed.

  Panting on one knee in the corner where the force of his blow had sent him, Meredith thought desperately. A wire ran around the baseboard of the operating room. If he could break that wire, plunge the room into darkness—he hooked the curved end of his bar in the wire and yanked. The wire snapped in two, its insulation frazzled. But the lights still burned.

  “Ripping out the outside telephone wire won’t do you any good,” Satan smiled. “We don’t need to call for help.”

  He walked slowly, warily, an automatic in his hand, toward the panting figure crouching on one knee. He didn’t dare to fire for fear of hitting his compatriot in evil. Before he could, Meredith again did the unexpected. He ducked in under Satan’s guard and swung the short steel bar at the terror-stricken surgeon’s head.

  It missed its mark by a hair’s breadth as the screaming surgeon jerked back his head and the bar slid off his shoulder to fracture his upper arm just above the elbow.

  That was the last that Meredith remembered. The whole back of his skull exploded and Yoshama’s dead face came up from the floor to meet him.

  When he recovered consciousness he was surprised that he wasn’t dead. He hadn’t expected to open his eyes again. He looked around him blearily.

  He was still in the operating room, lying in the shadows in one corner. In the full glare of the dome light Bill Agnew sat on the operating table on which he had but recently killed a man while the anesthetist set his fractured arm, arranged it in a splint, and bound it to his body.

  Jim Meredith smiled grimly. It was at least a compound fracture. He’d done that much. Bill Agnew wouldn’t operate for months, if ever.

  The man who claimed to be Satan was the first to notice that the man on the floor had come to. He walked over and kicked him in the teeth.

  “You die hard, don’t you?” he said.

  Meredith spit out a mouthful of blood.

  “Yes,” he admitted, “I do. Perhaps,” he added quietly, “it’s because I’ve been dying for the last two years.” He looked at the man on the table. “You did that to me, Bill.”

&n
bsp; His former assistant scowled.

  “Just you wait until Breen, here, finishes fixing my arm. Then I’ll fix you.” He toyed with the scalpel in his hand.

  “No,” the man on the floor shook his head. “You can’t do anything more to me than you already have.”

  But for the dome light over the operating table the rest of the room was in darkness. Meredith moved uneasily. He seemed to be lying on something sharp. He found it was the ripped end of the phone wire and hunched himself up to a sitting position against the wall. The knife was still in his wound. He drew it out and mopped ineffectually at the oozing blood with his hand.

  “Knowing what I know now, though,” he continued, “if I had that phone at your unfractured elbow for just five minutes, and could talk to the Commissioner of Police, I believe I could send both you and Satan, there, back to hell where you belong—via the electric chair!”

  DOCTOR AGNEW SLASHED viciously at the cord of the useless phone with the scalpel in his hand, then hurled the heavy instrument at the man who had been his superior. It struck Meredith on the temple, fell, the mouth-piece one way and the receiver another while the severed cord lashed across his eyes like a whip.

  “Certainly you may have it,” he taunted. “Go on and call the police. They wouldn’t believe you if you could.” He chuckled obscenely despite the pain of his fractured arm. “The great Doctor Meredith.” His face sobered. “But what caused you to suspect me? That new saline anesthesia on which we were working when your patients started to die?”

  “That’s right,” Meredith agreed. He hunched himself back to a sitting position, his hands behind him. “I dropped it as too dangerous. But you added several new ingredients, didn’t you, broke it down into a powerful gas, piped the gas into tiny vials and put them into cigarettes? All your victims had to do was light them. The heat dissolved the gelatine and they sucked the gas down into their lungs with the smoke. In five minutes they were dead . . . mummies, all the juices in their bodies burned into atomic matter.”