Pestilence reached down and grabbed Angie by the throat. She lifted Angie up with a strength that shouldn’t have been possible with her fire-shriveled body. “Except now it is personal. Now I actually want you dead.” She held Angie up so that Angie’s toes only barely touched the ground. The fingers around Angie’s neck burned and she thought she could smell the cooking of her own flesh. “You don’t have the slightest idea what and who you’ve really been messing with tonight.”
“No, and we don’t care!” Jasmine yelled from behind Pestilence. Before Pestilence could turn to look at her, Jasmine had leaped and wrapped something around Pestilence’s eyes. Pestilence dropped Angie in confusion, sending another fresh wave of agony through her, but she landed so that she could clearly see what Jasmine had done. She’d taken the nasty strip of flypaper that had been stuck in her hair and wrapped it around Pestilence’s eyes, pulling it tight so the sticky brittle paper adhered to the Horseman’s eyeballs themselves. Pestilence howled and threw Jasmine off her back, but the flypaper stayed even as it smoked and caught fire on Pestilence’s face. Jasmine plopped and rolled in the snow, but even though she didn’t look hurt she didn’t move, instead defiantly staring at Pestilence and yelling for the Horseman to come get her.
“No,” Angie muttered, not even having the strength to raise her voice. “Jasmine, don’t.” She couldn’t let this happen. She had become their leader. Their protector even in some ways. If Aunt Jasmine let Pestilence kill her, then Angie would have failed.
Megan stooped next to Angie, grasping her hand. “Don’t move,” she said quietly. “It’s our turn to protect you.”
As Pestilence turned and blindly took several steps toward Jasmine, the soft explosion of a gunshot pierce through the wind. Pestilence staggered back a couple feet in the direction of the burning lighthouse. Angie looked to her right to see Kevin, Jasmine’s gun now in his hand and pointing at Pestilence’s chest. Pestilence looked for just a moment like she was in pain. Apparently, she didn’t have the same ability to shrug off bullets that her zombie creations did.
Megan pulled the gun out that Angie’d been keeping her in her pocket. After making sure the safety was off, she too took up a position with Pestilence between her and the lighthouse. She fired a few more shots and Pestilence’s left breast exploded, spraying a viscous red and orange fluid that looked suspiciously like thinned-out lava. Pestilence staggered back again, nearly falling to her knees yet just barely managing to stay upright. That was actually to the Horseman’s detriment rather than benefit, as she wouldn’t have been able to go any farther back if she had been on the ground. Instead, she crouched and then sprang at them.
Kevin and Megan both unloaded their guns into Pestilence, sending her flying back and crashing through the straining wall of the lighthouse.
Pestilence vanished into the flames and writhing zombies. She must have hit something load-bearing inside, because the second floor caved in on top of her, then the roof. The entire middle section of the lighthouse collapsed.
They all stood and sat there silently in the snow for several minutes, waiting to see if she would come back out. By the time they were certain she was well and truly gone, the wind had died down and the snow had eased back to flurries.
Seventeen
On their way back into town, they found the zombies that had escaped in their pursuit of Doug. Whatever force had been keeping them hot and animated must have disappeared right along with Pestilence, because they had collapsed and been mostly drifted over with snow. One of the zombies, thankfully covered up enough that Angie couldn’t identify the person, looked like it had frozen and fallen over while trying to do the Moonwalk. The only one Angie could see clearly was Archie, a strangely goofy grin now permanently frozen on his face. His frozen body was still reaching out for something, as though he thought it was still possible to get his severed arm back.
“It’s kind of sad,” Megan said. “I mean, I know we didn’t know him like we did everyone else who died, but he was still a person before Pestilence got him. Do you think he was a librarian like the others?”
“I thought I heard Old Bert say on the day they came to town that this guy was actually a lawyer.”
“Oh,” Megan said. “Maybe that’s not quite as sad as I thought.”
As a group, they had trudged as far as the first warehouses at the end of the harbor. Although they had all decided they still needed to leave town and get help from the outside world, it had been agreed that they no longer needed to get there on foot. Nor did it seem like they needed to do it immediately, now that they were certain the zombies were all gone. That was a good thing, too, because none of them were in any condition for a long hike. At best, several of them were cold and getting dangerously close to hypothermia. Beth was still groggy and stumbled around, but she managed to keep going with the help of her husband, who lovingly caressed her hair as she leaned on him.
Angie was in the worst condition. While some of what she had initially thought were broken bones turned out to be less serious, she still believed she had at least one cracked rib and any attempt to put weight on her left foot made her hiss in pain. Once they saw the zombies frozen in place, she agreed to let the others go on ahead. They could find a vehicle they could all use and then come back for her. Then the five of them would leave Mukwunaguk, possibly forever. They still had no idea what story they were going to tell the authorities, but even in the unlikely event that people believed the town had been the site of an abortive zombie invasion the town would still likely be on lockdown, one giant crime scene that they wouldn’t want to return to even if they could.
While Angie insisted that they all go on ahead, Megan would hear nothing of it and stayed behind as the others went back into town. They found a relatively dry place under the overhang of one of the warehouses and sat down on the pavement. Angie had to lower herself gingerly, Megan by her side the entire time and squeezing Angie’s hand anytime the pain became too great. Finally, after much uncomfortable shuffling, they were sitting next to each other against the wall. It took Angie several seconds to realize how close they were to each other. She supposed she could try telling herself they were just doing it for the warmth, yet she knew that wasn’t true.
“I’m sorry, Megan. I’m so sorry,” Angie croaked. Her throat was raw from all the smoke from the lighthouse. Ironically, it made her crave nicotine, but she had somehow lost the last of her smokes in the mad dash through the lighthouse.
“Sorry about what?” Megan asked. Her voice was soft and distant. Angie had no doubt that Megan knew exactly what she was talking about.
“If you don’t want to talk about Kim—”
“No, I don’t,” Megan said sharply. Tears welled up at the corner of her eyes. “I’m not ready to talk about that, okay? It’s just…my relationship with her was already a complicated Hell. It’s, uh, probably going to be a long time before I can talk about it at all.”
With that she broke down crying. Angie made no more effort to push the subject. She just hugged Megan tight to her side, ignoring the shooting pain in her ribs, and let her cry into her shoulder.
Megan cried herself out after a few minutes. For a little while longer, they both sat in silence. Finally, Megan said, “I have to tell you something.”
“Yes? What?”
“Um, I’ve always had a crush on you. Ever since I started to realize I wasn’t into men.”
Angie nodded. She wasn’t terribly surprised. What did surprise her was that Megan, oh so timid Megan, took that moment to lean forward and kiss Angie gently on the lips. Angie was so caught off guard that she barely had time to try returning the kiss before Megan pulled away.
“Just in case,” Megan said.
“Just in case what?” Angie asked.
“Just in case you decide anything you said or did tonight didn’t count. You know, because we were in danger. I just wanted to enjoy it one last time.”
Angie’s only response was to take Megan’s chin in h
er hand, turn the young woman back to face her, and plant a much longer kiss on Megan’s lips. It didn’t become anything more. There was no deep passion behind it, at least not now. That might come later. For now, they were both exhausted and in various degrees of mourning. A make-out session would have to wait until later, at least until after Angie didn’t feel like she had knives sticking throughout her entire body.
Something barked at them and they both pulled away from each other, startled at the sudden intrusion into their quiet moment. Angie looked in the direction of the noise and saw Doug happily trotting toward them. The arm they had previously seen him absconding with was gone, but Angie noticed that his front paws were covered with dirt and snow. He had probably buried the arm somewhere like a prized bone. Someone, at some point in the near or distant future, was going to go digging in the wrong place and find an unpleasant surprise.
“Doug!” Angie called to him. “Good boy! Come here.”
She’d expected the little dog to walk to his customary distance from her and then stay there, yet instead he walked right up to her and let her scritch him behind the ears. It occurred to Angie that, whoever Doug’s actual owner might have been, that person had to be dead.
“Who’s a good boy?” Angie said as he cuddled up between the two of them. He cocked his head at her as though he was desperately curious to find out. “You are! But I still won’t sleep with you.”
“Huh?” Megan asked.
“Never mind. Long story.”
“So, uh, what happens next?”
Angie had no response. She didn’t have the slightest clue what any of the survivors would do now. She didn’t know where they would go or how much truth they would tell about tonight. She didn’t know what would become of her and Megan, or even if she would keep Doug. She only knew one thing for certain, and that knowledge was too terrible to share with Megan in this tender moment.
She knew that Pestilence had only been one of four.
Epilogue
The sun is up, just peeking over the horizon. It’s been several hours since the final confrontation at the lighthouse, and it will be several more before the first federal investigators show up trying to make sense of all this. They won’t succeed in much, although in the following days the media will make much of all this, insisting it was a terrorist attack. Why terrorists would bother with a town the size of Mukwunaguk will never be explained. A few sharp armchair warriors out there will start to put it all together, although they will usually mix it in with their favorite conspiracy theories and steer the narrative far away from the truth.
For now, though, the remains of the lighthouse are quiet. The storm has stopped completely, but every so often the wind off the lake picks up enough to rattle some of the loose charred timber sticking up from the ruins at odd angles. This is what appears to be causing the shifting of burned wood and blackened zombie bones for several seconds, but it goes on for far too long to be anything other than something beneath it all trying to get out. After many minutes of this, a hand finally claws its way out of the soot, shifting the debris until the hand’s owner is finally able to pull herself above it all, and Pestilence rises.
Then Pestilence promptly falls, tumbling out of the piled ruins and sprawling ignominiously in the snow. Her body temperature is no longer enough to melt the snow around her. Her glow has dimmed to practically nothing, and any terrible beauty she might have once had is gone. Instead, all that remains is something that looks suspiciously like the blackened zombie corpses around her. She moves weakly, trying to crawl away from the lighthouse remains. It’s not obvious where she thinks she’s going. Maybe she’s fully aware she’s not going anywhere.
Finally, when she’s on an open patch of ground, she stops and takes a deep breath. Her lungs wheeze and her breath makes a whistling sound through the bullet holes in her chest. Her zombie creations might have been immune to such things, but she is not.
Then she speaks. “I know you’re there.”
Nothing responds to her but the wind and sounds of waves on Lake Superior crashing against the shore.
“Yes, you. You who’ve been watching and listening to this whole thing. I know you’re listening to me now. I know what you are.”
You stare across the worlds and realities at her, curious what she’s doing.
“You and the rest of the Legion. All of you can hear me. Did I give you what you wanted? Didn’t all that death and mayhem entertain you?”
Pestilence’s arms start to crumble as she reaches out for you, but obviously the distance between is too far for that, not even measurable in any terms currently known to the human world.
“Please, you can’t let this happen to me. This can’t be how it ends.”
Her hands crumble to dust. Her arms are following, and so are her feet.
“Were the zombies too fast? Too slow? Not traditional enough? I can do better next time. Just let me come back in my next form. I swear, if you let me do this again it’ll be amazing. Please…”
She loses too much integrity to speak in anything more than garbled screams, but even as she collapses into nothing, her eyes continue to stare across the vast spaces of the world right at you. Pleading. Asking for another chance to entertain you and the rest of the Legion.
Then she’s gone. The wind blows away her ashes and all that remains is a single, hard, round object. The closest thing the twisted being had to a heart.
There is just enough heat in it to melt the snow underneath. Once it touches the ground, the dirt appears to liquefy beneath it, allowing the Horseman’s core to vanish into and join with the Earth, possibly to never be seen again.
Or maybe it will be.
The End
Read on for a free sample of Jake’s Law: A Zombie Novel
1
April, 15, 2015 Florence State Prison, Florence, AZ –
The cloying stench of death and the reek of the unwashed dying permeated the air. It clung to his clothing and seeped through the bandana covering his mouth and nose in a failed attempt to stifle the foul odor. A century of death and decay wept from the limestone walls like a miasma, joining this new source of foulness. Levi Coombs fought down the nausea gripping his stomach and grabbed the legs of the body, while Howard ‘Ax’ Axleman wrestled with the corpse’s arms. Together, they flung the corpse onto the cart as they would a bag of manure. The body meant little to either of them. He was a convict like them, and cons meant nothing to anybody, people who society had disaffiliated, dismissed, and discarded. After three years behind bars, Levi had lost all respect for his fellow man and his fellow inmates. He had seen the worst society had to offer, all crammed onto a few acres tucked away out of sight behind high walls and razor wire, guarded by men with guns.
“Whew! He’s ripe,” Ax commented, wiping his hands on his pants and wrinkling his nose beneath his handkerchief mask.
“He didn’t smell much better alive,” Levi said. “Bastard’s farts stank up the entire cell block.”
Ax chuckled. “Yeah, Andrews was a piece of shit, all right. Still, it’s a nasty way to go.” He paused before glancing up at Levi. His brown eyes peering over his handkerchief looked troubled. “He might be the lucky one.”
Levi glanced down at the corpse. The raw, ragged wound in Andrews’ neck where a Staggerer had ripped out a fist-sized chunk of flesh might have killed him, but he was a dead man anyway. Like most of the population, Andrews had the Staggers, coughing up his lungs and crying like a child for his dead momma. The neat round bullet hole in his head had been added shortly after death by one of the few remaining guards to prevent Andrews from turning zombie like the others.
“None of us are getting out of here alive,” Levi said. “The guards had rather see us dead than outside roaming free.”
As they rolled the cart down the corridor, the squeaky wheels created ghostly echoes reflecting from the walls in the nearly deserted cell block, sounding like the moans of the dead. A few residents peered warily through their unlock
ed cell doors but elected to remain inside, choosing the relative safety of their cells over the freedom of movement. Just outside the cell block door, they dumped Andrews’ body unceremoniously onto the growing pile of corpses ripening in the sun, disturbing the flies crawling over the bloated flesh. The flies rose from the corpses in a dark cloud, buzzing obscenely.
Andrews was the last body in Unit 8, at least so far. Death had become so prevalent, so expected, that no one in the unit held out much hope for their chances of survival. Most of them simply waited for their inevitable death. Levi wasn’t that complacent. He wasn’t going to join the pile of cremated corpses.
A guard stood outside holding a red plastic can of gasoline in one hand and a 9 mm Colt Carbine in the other. He eyed the corpses and the two men with equal disdain.
“Stand back,” he yelled, waving the barrel of the Carbine at the two men.
Levi raised his hands as a gesture of submission and stepped back. Ax did the same. Both knew better than to argue with the guards. No one questioned whether a corpse was a Staggerer or a con who had failed to obey a guard’s orders quickly enough. The guard emptied the two-gallon container over the pile of corpses, backed away several yards, and pulled a road flare from his back pocket. From past experience, Levi knew what was coming and retreated to the open door of the Unit 8 cell block. He glanced at the death house next door where legal executions had once taken place. Now, anywhere would suffice. Any execution carried out by a guard was legal. No one questioned their reasoning. No one cared.
The guard struck the flare on the concrete sidewalk and tossed it onto the stack of corpses. With a sudden whoosh, the bodies became a blazing funeral pyre, to be cremated without fanfare or ceremony, simply trash to be disposed of on the rubbish heap. The guard, his duty done, turned and left, walking past several blackened stains on the concrete from previous pyres. He paid no more attention to Levi or to Ax. His fellow guard in the tower at the corner of the wall had them in his sights. To the guards, the two cons were just pieces of meat awaiting disposal.
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