Infernal Corpse

by D. J. Goodman

  Angie thought of that pill bottle that had fallen out of Megan’s pocket earlier. She surreptitiously checked the pocket again, feeling the outside to be sure it was still there without Kim hopefully realizing it. There was a reason Megan needed it, after all, and she didn’t want Kim to find it and throw it away when no one was looking.

  Assuming Megan still needed any medication at all after tonight. That would require her to remain alive right along with the rest of them.

  Deciding that this line of questioning wouldn’t do her any good until Megan was again capable of speaking for herself, Angie stood up and went to find Johnny, Rudy, and Jasmine. Boris followed her.

  “Just watch your hands in the dark, buddy,” she said. “I feel them touching anything they shouldn’t and they’ll become the next display in a pickle jar.”

  “Jesus, I’m not going to touch you without your permission,” Boris said. “I’m starting to think you have the wrong idea about me.”

  “Oh really? So that wasn’t pickup artist techniques you were trying on me earlier? What, did you just accidentally read The Game and think doing those things would make you just a generally more likeable person?”

  She turned her flashlight on him to see that he was blushing. Apparently, she’d struck a nerve. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Maybe that wasn’t the right thing to do.”

  “Oh no, using techniques designed to lower a woman’s self-esteem just so she’ll sleep with you is definitely the moral thing to do. I see it now. How could I have been so blind?”

  Boris sighed. “Look. I’m sorry. I just didn’t know what else to do to make you into me.”

  “You can’t make someone fall madly in love with someone else. Or just make them desperately want to have sex with you, if that’s all you’re really wanting from me. Is it?”

  “Well, um…” He didn’t say anything else. That was all the answer she needed.

  “Instead of playing mind games you found on the internet, did it ever occur to you just once that the best way to approach me about casual sex might be to just ask me?”

  He looked surprised. “Would that work?”

  “You’re never going to know unless you try.”

  “So, uh, you ever think about having sex with me?”

  “Oh hell no.”

  He frowned. “And that’s why I didn’t ask that way originally.”

  “News flash. It was never going to happen one way or the other. I’m just not into you. But you would have saved yourself a lot of embarrassment if you had just acted like a decent human about it from the beginning.”

  He stopped and let her go the rest of the way through the museum until she got to one of the back storage rooms. From the sounds coming from behind the thin wall nearby, Kevin and Beth were enjoying their alone time together but at least doing everyone else the courtesy of trying to keep it down. Neither Johnny, Jasmine, nor Rudy seemed to hear it, or if they did they pretended not to.

  “So, how’s it looking?” Angie asked them.

  “I don’t feel so hot,” Johnny said. Angie wondered for a moment if that had been an intentional pun, given what they had all just witnessed, but he didn’t appear to have the energy left for even that lame attempt at humor.

  “I pulled out what pieces of glass I could,” Jasmine said. “And I found this gauze to wrap around his face as much as possible. But he needs stitches.”

  Angie shook her head. “He’s probably not going to get them. Even if we find a way out of all this and we somehow get someone on the outside to believe us, there’s a time limit on how long there can be between a cut and getting stitches. We wouldn’t be able to get him to a hospital on time.”

  “Has anyone thought to try calling emergency services?” Rudy asked.

  “Um, Rudy?” Angie asked. “Don’t you remember? You did.”

  “Okay, but that was just the local dispatch. We’ve all got cell phones here, don’t we? Has anyone tried calling someone outside of town?”

  It was such a simple idea that Angie was ashamed it hadn’t occurred to her earlier, but at least she wasn’t alone in her boneheaded moment. She pulled her smart phone out of her coat pocket and went through her list of contacts. The problem was she didn’t know too many people that lived outside of town. She supposed she could try 411. Or maybe there was a phone book somewhere around here with additional emergency numbers outside of town.

  After a couple of seconds of fiddling with the phone, though, she realized something was missing. “I don’t have any bars.”

  “Really?” Jasmine asked. “I didn’t think the museum was in one of the dead spots.” She patted herself down, looking for her own phone, then shook her head. “I must have left it in the diner.”

  “Don’t look at me, I’ve never owned one of those damned things in the first place,” Rudy said. “Never saw the point.”

  “I don’t know, Rudy,” Angie said. “I kind of see the point right now, don’t you?”

  Rudy grinned sheepishly. “I suppose. What about you?” he asked Johnny. “You’ve got to have one on you, right?”

  He didn’t. Johnny had also left it behind to burn up in the fire. Angie didn’t think that would be too much of a problem, though. With nine other people in the building, at least one of them had to have a cell phone that worked.

  She went to ask Boris, who glumly told her that he’d left his at home in the charger. Once she thought Kevin and Beth might be finished, she politely knocked on the door of the broom closet they’d hidden in and asked if either of them had one. Beth did, which she handed out the door and then closed it before Angie could get any idea what state of dress either of them might be in. It didn’t do any good, however, since Beth’s phone wasn’t getting a signal either. She finally checked Meghan’s phone. Nothing. It wasn’t just a matter of individual phones not being powerful enough, and they should have been in a part of town where they could all receive a signal. If they couldn’t get the signal, that meant there was no signal at all.

  “But I don’t understand. How can there not be a signal?” Kevin asked. He was walking up to the rest of the group, which had convened again near the register. Beth was right next to him, looking for all the world in the dim flashlight beams like she had just spent hours in front of a mirror, all her hair and makeup completely in place. The only sign that she might have been up to something was the thin sheen of sweat on her forehead, an interesting feat considering the entire building was at the lowest temperature it could go without freezing. Kevin, on the other hand, had his shirt half tucked in and half out of his pants, which were only zipped part way up. He apparently realized this as he approached, hiding his crotch behind one of the tables just long enough to zip the rest of the way. His words came out labored as he was still trying to catch his breath from something. Angie looked at Beth, who gave her a shrug and a peculiar half smile that seemed to say, “My secret techniques are my own. Don’t ask for them.”

  “If you had blood going to your brain rather than other body parts right now, maybe you’d figure it out,” Rudy said. “It’s the cell tower. Something must be wrong with it.”

  “But cell towers don’t just fail,” Beth said.

  “They do if someone sabotages them somehow,” Angie replied.

  “Are you implying that the zombies are deliberately cutting off communication?” Boris asked. “They can’t do that. They don’t have the intelligence.”

  “We need to stop making assumptions about what zombies can and can’t do,” Angie said. “Just because George Romero made a movie in the sixties and everybody copied him without using their own imaginations doesn’t mean that’s how it’s going to work in real life.”

  Boris snorted. “And yet somehow they know traditional zombie dance moves.”

  Jasmine nodded. “You noticed that too? I thought I was just seeing things.”

  “Maybe we’re just relying too much on modern technology,” Johnny said. While his words were still sluggish, especially since his face wa
s covered in bandages, he gave every impression that he might be stable for the moment. “Even if someone somehow took out the cell tower, there’s still landlines, right? Especially in a place like this that hasn’t really been updated for the twenty-first century.”

  Angie started to look around for a telephone but Rudy stopped her. “They disconnect the telephone service here during the off season. Maybe if we were in another building, we might be able to get something.”

  She was noncommittal about that. Sure, maybe they could, but she had to wonder. If someone or something was capable of taking out a freaking cell tower somehow, then it seemed in the realm of possibility that they would also have thought about the land lines. Which only led right back to the question of who could possibly do this.

  Kevin seemed to have the same thought, as that look of post-coital bliss on his face instantly disappeared. “Think we should tell them?”

  Everyone stared at them both.

  “Well, kind of have to now, don’t we?” Angie said. “We can’t exactly hide the fact we have a secret when you’ve just admitted to everyone.”

  “Oh. Uh, right.”

  “Well?” Boris asked. “Are you going to tell us or not?”

  “Is this about whatever you saw with the dog?” Jasmine asked.

  “I don’t get why you’re so reluctant to tell us,” Rudy said. “It’s not like anything you saw could have possibly been crazier than zombies.”

  Angie and Kevin let those words hang in the air.

  “Oh Christ,” Rudy muttered to himself.

  “Please just end the suspense and tell us what you saw,” Jasmine said.

  “I’m not even sure what we saw,” Kevin said. The two of them took turns giving details of the footprints trailing away over the sidewalk, footprints that were both strangely human and not at the same time, footprints so hot they could damage concrete. When they finished, no one spoke for a long time.

  “Okay,” Boris finally said. “Under normal circumstances, I would try saying there was some kind of scientific explanation for what you saw. Except I’m just going to skip that step for now. Because, you know, zombies and everything already. Why the hell not add burning footprints from Hell?”

  “Is that what you think they were?” Jasmine asked with a raised eyebrow.

  “I don’t know what to think, but sure. Why the hell not?”

  “As in, like a demon or something?” Johnny asked. “I don’t know I can believe that.”

  Beth shrugged at him. “And I don’t know that I can believe in zombie tourists doing dance moves from old 80s videos right before they burst into flames.”

  “Point taken,” Johnny said.

  “We can’t make assumptions, though,” Angie said. “We have no way of knowing for sure if whatever caused the footprints has anything to do with the zombies.”

  “Angie, this may be a town where we believe we have haunted lighthouses and lake monsters,” Rudy said, “but it’s not like this is a town at the center of the Twilight Zone. If two separate horrible and bizarre things are happening at the same time, they’re probably related.”

  “A demon, though?” Boris asked. “Years of pop culture have prepared me for the acceptance of zombies, but I’m not sure if I’m ready to mix that up with demons. Too many subgenres at once.”

  “…not…demon.”

  The words were so faint that they were almost lost in their intense conversation. It took Angie a few seconds to realize they hadn’t come from any of the people who had already been speaking, but were in fact coming from closer to her feet. Angie shone her flashlight down at Megan and Kim to see that Megan’s eyes were open, even if they were still unfocused and blurry. Angie kneeled down next to her and put her ear close so Megan wouldn’t have to strain herself.

  “What was that, Megan?”

  “Not a demon.”

  “What’s not a demon?”

  “Not, uh, really. Don’t think so.”

  “Megan, this is important. If there’s anything you know, you need to tell us. It could be the only thing that could keep us alive.”

  “So sleepy, though.”

  “Yes, I know. But this is important. Please. What happened to you? Where were you? How did this happen?”

  “Need to rest some more…” Her voice trailed off. Unconsciousness was obviously close again.

  “Megan, please. Anything you can give us. Anything at all.”

  Megan muttered something incoherent, then the words stopped. Just to be sure, Angie checked that Megan was still breathing. She was, and at a much more normal pace than she had been earlier in the café. Her skin temperature was about the same, though. A quick check of her wound showed that it was leaking puss which, while disgusting, might have actually been a good sign. That might mean it was healing. Of course, Angie didn’t think it was possible for this kind of grievous wound to heal that quickly. Megan still looked like she would make it through the night, providing of course that the rest of them did as well. Angie didn’t think she would be getting any more info out of her for the time being, though.

  “She,” Beth said. “Whoever did this to her was a woman.”

  That wasn’t enough information for them to learn anything, but something else had been tickling at the far corners of her mind. Angie thought back to the recording they had found on the phone. She didn’t know off the top of her head how long a phone would keep recording video if left to its own devices, but she remembered that it hadn’t still been recording when she’d pulled it out of Megan’s pocket. Megan had accidentally started recording when she’d put it in, but what had caused it to stop? Either she had bumped it in just the right way again, or…

  “Someone turned it off,” Angie whispered.

  “What was that?” Jasmine asked.

  “Her phone. It was recording in her pocket, but it wasn’t recording when we took it out to look at it. Someone turned it off.”

  “Maybe it was just Megan, though,” Johnny said.

  “Why would she think to turn the recording off if she didn’t even know it was on?” Kevin asked.

  Angie pulled out Megan’s phone again and looked at it. This time she didn’t care whether or not it had any bars. She went back to the video it had captured earlier.

  “Please don’t make us listen to that again,” Kim said.

  “Don’t you guys see?” Angie asked. “We never finished it. None of us wanted to keep listening to that scream so we turned it off. But the video wasn’t over yet!”

  She started the video again. As before, the picture gave them nothing useful, but they listened even more carefully than earlier to the muttering in the audio. Angie still couldn’t make out what was being said, but she let it keep going even as Megan’s awful scream reverberated through the museum. Once it cut off, though, Angie let the video keep going. Everyone moved in closer to see if the tiny screen showed anything new. For several seconds, it didn’t. All sound from the phone cut off and Angie thought maybe that really was the end of the video after all. Then the picture moved.

  The blurry view of the inside of Megan’s pocket turned gray, the color the sky had been that afternoon. The waves of Lake Superior, previously hushed by the fabric of Megan’s coat, were now clearly audible. There was the sound of fumbling as someone moved the phone around. Angie prepared herself to see something vital any second, but the camera stayed pointed up, directly at the sky. They obviously weren’t going to get anything useful out of the video after all. The audio, on the other hand…

  “Hello,” a voice said through the phone. It was raw and scratchy, similar to what Angie’s sounded like after a night of nervous chain smoking, but it was at least clear enough that they could all tell it belonged to a woman. “If things have gone as I’ve foreseen, and there’s no reason to think they haven’t, then the person currently holding this phone should be Angela Zwiersky.”

  Angie dropped the phone like it had burned her. She looked up at the others, hoping they hadn’t heard th
e same thing she had. From the looks on their faces, however, it hadn’t been some kind of auditory hallucination. The person who had held this phone hours earlier had very clearly called her by name.

  The voice chuckled, a strangely ugly sound that somehow managed to evoke the noise of two pieces of coal being rubbed together vigorously. “Go ahead and debate this turn of events among yourself for a few seconds. I’ll wait for you to pick the phone back up.”

  “Holy shit,” Kevin said. “No way.”

  “Turn it off,” Kim said. Angie would have expected her to sound panicked at this point, but her voice was oddly calm, as though this kind of bizarre thing happened to her all the time. Who knew, Angie thought. In Kim’s mind, maybe it did. “Just turn it off so we don’t have to listen to it.”

  “Let me just interject and say you’re not going to turn it off,” the recording said. “I’ve seen that much, as well.”

  “This can’t be happening,” Johnny said. “There’s no way.”

  “Maybe we should turn it off,” Jasmine said. “Especially if whoever that is thinks we won’t.”

  “I don’t think we should,” Angie said. “I think we might need to hear whatever she has to say. Maybe she has some answers.”

  “Oh, I do,” the recording said.

  “Stop that!” Beth said. Angie expected the recording to say something in response. It would have been the perfect chance to taunt them, after all. Yet the voice ignored that golden opportunity.

  “I don’t think we really have much choice but to keep listening,” Angie said.

  “And since all of you have followed Zwiersky around so blindly all evening, I know this is the point where I can now start explaining again,” the recording said. “Not that I actually intend to explain everything. That would rob me of my spectacular moment later.”

  “I, uh, if we ask you questions right now, will you respond?” Angie asked.

  “If I so choose. Then again, maybe I won’t. It’s much more fun sometimes to keep you all guessing.”

  “This can’t be happening,” Johnny muttered. “There’s no way.”