by T L Barrett
“It’s all right, sweetie-pie. Momma’s here. Momma won’t let anything bad get you,” she repeated this over and over again. At some point the boy slept in her arms. She did not. When the sun rose, she laid him in her bed and began to pack their suitcases.
***
Gale and Andy were packing the car when John Belle, a fat man with a moustache, drove up and got out of his car. A little league coach and father to five children, including Lydia, John was well known by most of Bearfield. He wore sweatpants, a stained t-shirt, and sandals.
“Excuse me, Ms. Cooper, Andy, have you seen or heard anything about where my Lydia might be?”
“No, I haven’t, John. Is she missing?” Gale asked.
“We woke up this morning, and she wasn’t in her bed. There isn’t a note or anything. Do you have any idea where she might have gone to?” Andy shook his head.
“Are you guys going away on vacation?” He asked, looking at the car which had been filled with an odd assortment of belongings.
“Yes, we are. Things have been tough for Andy this summer. I thought if maybe…we could just get away from things for a while…” Gale said.
“So, you’re sure you wouldn’t have any idea about where she’s gone?”
“No, I’m sorry, John,” Gale said. She walked up to him, could see the frustrated tears threatening to break and fall from his cheek. Her eyes misted up. “Here,” she said and held out her father’s crucifix. Stepping very close, she reached up and placed the crucifix over his neck. “Wear this, always.” John must have heard something unsaid in the gesture.
“Oh no,” he gasped and started to sob. Gale put her arms around the big man then, and held him. Andy, on the curb, put his head down and wept silent tears. After a long minute, Gale stepped away from her neighbor and went to her son. They both got in the car. John stood in the street and looked down at the crucifix on his chest. Then he looked up and the morning sun glinted on the tears of his cheeks. He stood and watched Gale drive down Spring Street, round the corner and disappear.
Gale drove them out of Bearfield and took Route 7 to Interstate 91. She drove south for hours. In the midafternoon, they stopped in Greenfield, Massachusetts. She looked at her son. His eyes were swollen; his face was pale. Gale wondered how she could have not known that such a horror was happening to her son. She hoped it would not be too late to fix what had been broken.
“This looks like a nice town,” Andy said, as they passed a bridge and drove by a quiet neighborhood.
“Let’s stop here for lunch then, little man,” she said.
“Mom, do you think I’ll ever have good dreams again?” Andy asked. Gale’s eyes began to mist up. She swallowed.
“That’s what we’re going to aim for, you and me both, okay?” she ruffled his hair. He nodded and gave her a small smile.
It was a start, and that would be enough for now.
The Secret to Survival
Uncle Sam and I were sitting on top of the old Republican Block apartment building, keeping an eye on the zombies over on Cherry street and waxing all deep and philosophical when we saw the weirdest thing. At first we didn’t recognize it for what it was, because, like I said, we could get pretty deep.
“As a great philosopher once said: ’Always look on the bright side of life’,” Uncle Sam said and stroked his gray beard.
“Which philosopher was that?” I asked.
“Eric Idle,” Uncle Sam said.
“Eric who?”
“Eric Idle…from Monty Python. How old are you anyway, three?”
“No, but I’m a hell of a lot further away from adult diapers, you old hippy,” I said. He flipped me the bird.
“Think of something positive about all this…” he ordered waving his assault rifle toward Cherry Street. “Go on, you have to. I think you’ve hurt my feelings, Lucky.” Lucky isn’t my name. Uncle Sam is the only person I’ve ever known to call me that. Of course, everyone else I know is dead or undead. At first I thought it was an Irish thing, and then I realized Uncle Sam was just trying to be ironic. I took off my camouflaged took that hid my bright red hair and scratched my head.
“I’m blank, buddy, sorry. You go first.”
“Well,” he sighed and tugged his beard again. It was a wonder it stayed on his face. “I’m grateful that the façade that was capitalist America has fallen, and now the consumers are seen for what they are, except now the corporate hegemony can’t control them.” Satisfied with his answer, he tugged his beard some more. Uncle Sam isn’t really his name, either. I’ve forgotten what it really is. I named him that. It takes two to dance the ironic tango. “Now you go, Lucky.”
“Well, I’m glad I finally have purpose. I never had one before. But now, I just want to die a natural death, and not come back. You know: fall off a ladder, have a car accident, or something. I want to die clean.”
“Okay, that’s great. You kids really are entirely too cynical these days.”
“Can you blame us?” I asked, pointing my rifle at the zombies swarming about a public works building on Cherry Street.
That’s when we saw the weirdest thing. A guy walked straight down Cherry Street. He had a gun slung over his shoulder and just marched and whistled to himself, Whistled! This was the darnedest thing: the zombies didn’t even really take notice of him. The ones that could turned their heads, but quickly returned to trying to break in and eat whoever had decided that the public works building would make a great hideout.
We watched him walk within grabbing distance of the zombies and just keep on going. We booked it on down to the street to follow him. Of course the minute we did so the damned zombies came after us, as they always do. We made it to the van without wasting too many bullets, but I don’t know how many of the undead you can drive over before your shocks go to hell.
We caught up with the guy as he left town to the south. He seemed like a nice fellow, sort of mellow and winsome like.
He asked us if we had heard about a big stockade of folks down near Hanover. We told him we had heard of it, but that we personally didn’t like the idea of being around so many would-be zombies. The man said that he understood.
We asked him how he could walk through a crowd of the things and not become dinner. He said it was a secret that an Indian up north taught him. We asked if he would share this secret with us. He said he would, we just had to drive him a ways out of town so that we wouldn’t get interrupted. This seemed like a fine deal to Uncle Sam and me, so we drove out to an old cornfield down by the river. The whole time I wondered if it was some kind of mental focus thing, like walking on coals, the power of positive thinking, and all that Oprah stuff.
We got out into the field and waited, as he just smiled at us, peacefully.
“There is one test you must pass in order to prove yourselves worthy of the secret.” We nodded and waited.
“One of you has to kill the other,” he said. We looked at each other.
“Oh, man, another fruitcake,” Uncle Sam said. “Look, you can take your survivalist, right wing-” Faster than I could see, the stranger leveled his rifle and shot Uncle Sam through the head.
I stared in shock at my friend’s brains in the grass. I looked up and the guy had his gun trained on me.
“You see, that’s the trick. If you want to live with the zombies, you have to think like a zombie. You have to eat like a zombie. They must smell it on you, you know, after you eat long-pig.”
I guess he must have mistaken my teary-eyed look of shock for confused questioning.
“People. You have to eat people. Then the zombies will leave you alone.”
That’s when I made my move. He pulled the trigger. There was a click. I got lucky; so much for irony. I grabbed the gun from him, and beat him down with the stock. I didn’t stop until he stopped twitching.
Afterward, I buried my dear friend, Uncle Sam. I wept over him, wishing I had a Stars and Stripes to wrap him in. That made me laugh through my tears.
I started
a fire as the night came and cooled things off. I took a big chunk off that crazy bastard and cooked it on the end of a stick over the fire. I figured it couldn’t hurt to give it a try.
The Ghost-Eater
The frenetic lights outside drew me to the window. I looked for my phone and spotted myself, across the room, staring at the ceiling.
“I’m wigging out. I’m wigging out,” I whispered. How could I be standing by the window in the dining area and simultaneously sitting in the big easy chair at the far end of the living room? I scanned the room, trying to collect my thoughts. I’d been having a party, because my folks had gone to a wedding in New York for the weekend. The others: Doug, Jami, Jason, Jason’s girlfriend, and Clem had all just been here, drinking beers and periodically gathering on the porch to smoke cigarettes, hadn’t they? The discarded beer bottles lay on the living room carpet and stood on the bar-counter that divided the kitchen from the dining area.
“It was the weed,” I stated. Doug had got it from the Haitian guy who had been dating the woman who ran the coffee shop in town, the one with the huge chest and the voice of an old times blues singer. He said it was the best of the best. Clem had just kept saying it was laced over and over again and wigging out.
I remembered feeling all woozy and knocking a couple of beers over. I remembered calling Jason’s girlfriend by his old girlfriend’s name. That hadn’t been good. I remembered declaring rather too loudly that when your friend brings a different girl around every week, it was a little hard to keep them all straight. That hadn’t been good. Jason had left with the girl, sure, but I didn’t remember the others leaving. I was rather hoping that Jami wouldn’t leave. Things had been going pretty well, I thought, between us. We had gone to the movies as friends twice in the last few weeks, and last week, at Doug’s camp, she had hung out half the night with me by the water and talked about childhood memories.
I must have fallen asleep, and no one could wake me up. Why did I have to drink so damn much?
I looked up and saw myself still sitting there, looking real pale with my mouth hanging open and my eyes staring at the ceiling.
I took a step toward, what I realized, with growing horror, was my body, my corpse.
Maybe I was dreaming. If so, I had never had a dream like this before. I looked back toward the window and could see the strange flickering lights twirling about the moon and stars. It reminded me of that painting that Mrs. Tremblay had up in her classroom last year, by that painter who cut his ear off for a girl; ‘Starry Night’, I think she called it. Looking at that made me feel all peaceful. It took me a lot of concentration to turn away from that light and look back to my body.
Maybe, I was really out of it and was having one of those out of body experiences I had always heard about. Maybe I just had to will myself back into my body, and everything would be hunky dory. I hoped so. Heck, I would have taken the awful hangover I was due, if only I’d wake up out of this. So, I focused my will and shut my eyes.
I opened them and found myself still staring at my body, staring with its idiotic expression at the ceiling. Maybe I had to jump back into my body. I rushed forward and then pulled back at the last moment. I put my hand out slowly and placed my hand on my shoulder. My hand passed through my t-shirt and into my arm. I didn’t feel any heat there, I didn’t sense any movement. I leant forward and studied my skin. I looked for a pulse. I did not feel anything. I was dead.
“Why would the others leave me?” I said to the empty house. A feeling of anger toward my friends coursed through me. I tried to remember what had transpired. What else had I said? Had I said anything to Jami, to Doug? I supposed I could have.
Could I have told them to get out? I didn’t remember. My anger started to fade, and panicky fear seeped in to replace it. Could I have died, and they thought I had passed out? Could they even have tried to get me to bed, but I had fought them, and then died? I remembered when we had been Freshmen and the other guys had joked about how I had gotten drunk with them up at the Quarry and had passed out, snoring with my eyes open. They might have thought I was just doing that.
“I’m dead,” I said. I tried to understand that. I went into my room, and looked at the brochures from colleges that lay on my bedside table, the brochures that I had neglected to go through like my father had asked. “Well, I won’t be going to college,” I said. That really didn’t affect me. I had never gotten my mind wrapped around the whole concept anyways. I always figured that it was something that was just going to happen. I looked at my video game console.
“I’ll never play those games again,” I said. That did it. I ran back out to the living room and tried to rouse my dead body. “Breathe!” I screamed. “Do something! Wake up!” I started to cry.
I imagined my parents getting back from the wedding, coming though the kitchen door, and seeing the mess. My father would suck in his breath, my mother would start cleaning. Who would look up first to see me sitting there dead in the living room? Would I already be covered in flies, decomposing?
“No! No! No! No!” I shouted and curled into a little ball beside my dead body. “I’m just dreaming. I’ll wake up any second. I’ll wake up. I’ll wake up,” I kept telling myself.
I got up and drifted toward the back of the house. I looked out the window. The back yard inclined to the woods. To the left, a line of trees separated the lawn from Old County Road. To tell you the truth, I didn’t even realize that I was looking out the window. It was as if I had been drawn there.
A grotesquely fat and pale man stood in the back yard and stared at me through the gloom of night. Strange tattoos ran down his arms and across his enormous pallid gut. His meaty hands hung down to his sides, ending in awful nails. His eyes shone out of his fat face with an impossibly black brilliance. Those black eyes bored into mine, despite the dark and the distance. The fat man’s awful mouth turned up into a smile.
Despite the figure’s unearthly appearance, I knew instantly who he was. This was Guy Larue. When I was ten he had murdered his own family and that of his neighbor’s before killing himself a few miles out of town. The police had found him with the decapitated heads of his victims. Our small town had never forgotten the horrible tragedy when the nation’s media had descended upon our town for two weeks; nor had I forgotten the wide, grinning face of the monster from a family portrait the media had used in its coverage.
Larue had been an occultist, some said, and had made a deal with the devil. Some said the deal had gone wrong. Others said that Larue had gotten exactly what he wanted.
Looking at his grinning spirit on the other side of the back lawn, I would have been inclined to believe the latter. Larue raised one fat arm and pointed a claw at me. He had time to begin a leisurely stroll toward me before I turned and fled in a blind terror. Before I knew it, I had passed through the house and sprang onto the front yard. I ran down the long drive. At the bottom I turned my head and saw myself one more time through the window, sitting there, staring vacantly toward the ceiling. That was where I had died; what remained was a flap of terror that was loose to run through the night.
When I turned back, I came close to running into another figure that was coming up the drive. I skittered to the side and fell over in my fright.
“Joe!” the figure called, and I looked up. It was Jason. His pallid face was full of worry and dread. “Joe, you have to help me! I had an accident. Oh my God! Christina and I were fighting, you know, and I wasn’t paying attention. We went over a bank. I guess I flew out of the car, but Christina didn’t. I can’t wake her up, and I can’t get anybody to stop and help! We’ve got to do something!”
At that moment, a car drove by on the road below. Its headlights washed across the bottom of the drive. As the light passed over the figure of my friend, it passed through him, casting no shadow. Jason looked transparent and washed out against the starkly illuminated trees and lawn.
Jason was dead, too, but apparently did not realize this. He rushed forward and grasped my
arms, pulling me to my feet. I felt his hands against mine, could feel his fear and panic emanating off him in waves. It made me want to pull away.
“Jason! Someone’s after me! We have to run!” I shouted.
“Joe, aren’t you listening? I had an accident. Christina’s hurt, bad. It’s all my fault. We have to get her help!” he shouted back.
“He’s coming!” I shouted. “Larue! Got to run!” I said.
“Why are you pulling this, Joe? This isn’t a joke, man!” Jason yelled and grabbed me hard. Feeling Jason like this made me realize that I could be hurt by another spirit, and I quailed at what Larue could do to me. I looked back and saw Larue coming down the drive toward us, his terrible moon face lit by an awful grin. I shoved Jason. Surprised, he stumbled back. I took off at a sprint around him.
“Who the hell are you?” I heard Jason ask as I got to the bottom of the drive. As I turned and began running down Clarkson Avenue toward town, I heard him begin to scream.