Infernal Corpse

by D. J. Goodman

  “Over here,” his voice coming from near the front cash register. Very close, Angie realized, to the light switches. “I just thought it might be a good idea if we had one of the maps in case we need to go too far from…”

  “Don’t move!” Angie called. The entire museum went quiet for a few seconds. Then she said, “Where are you?”

  “Um…”

  “Doesn’t matter! Just do. Not. Move.” She’d turned off the phone, so she had no idea exactly how much time had passed. Had the moment the voice predicted already come and gone, or was it going to happen any second now? And how did they know the voice hadn’t been lying about when exactly it would happen? It might be a good idea for all of them to just stand here in complete silence for several minutes until they were positive the predicted moment had passed. Of course, that might have just been a ruse to ensure they were sitting ducks when the zombies did come.

  “Are you anywhere near the light switches?” Angie asked.

  Even from across the floor Angie could hear his audible gulp as he realized what she was afraid of. “Uh, yes. I think they’re, like, a foot away from me.”

  “Okay. Step away from them. Slowly. Navigate your way through the displays as best you can until you reach…”

  She heard all the sounds with perfect clarity. A thunk as his foot hit a table leg. Something small toppled over onto something larger, which in turn hit something that caused a creak and scrape, the sound of something large and glass as it tipped over from it place in a display.

  The old lighthouse mirrors.

  Johnny yelped as the mirror hit the floor and smashed behind him. Shards of glass flew everywhere, although Johnny managed to duck the worst of them this time. Angie could sort of see this because each tiny shard was sparkling, reflecting light from the small sliver of exposed glass at the bottom of the front door.

  If the phone had still been on, Angie suspected it would currently read thirty minutes and thirty-nine seconds exactly.

  “Run! Everyone to the back door!” Angie screamed. Keeping quiet no longer seemed particularly important. She heard shouts and thumps around her as people jarred the displays and one another in their desperate rush to reach the back office. It no longer seemed like such a great idea to have removed the batteries from the flashlights.

  “I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” Johnny said as he stumbled up next to them. Angie didn’t particularly blame him, since it had been a mistake none of them had predicted.

  “Maybe that wasn’t it,” Kevin said. “Maybe the zombies didn’t see…”

  There was a heavy thump at the front door, like someone’s fist hammering against the glass. Angie thought she’d heard the glass crack, but she couldn’t be sure from here.

  Johnny and Kevin, Angie thought. Those were the ones who were supposed to die now. If she could keep them alive specifically, maybe she might be able to change everything else as well.

  Rudy reached the back office and turned on the light, no longer bothering with trying to stay hidden. For at least a couple of seconds that proved to be a mistake, as all of them flinched at the sudden intrusion of brightness and slowed down. Two more thumps hit the glass up front with differing amounts of force, making Angie think there was no longer just one zombie there. The glass groaned, obviously ready to give way with just a little more provocation. Everyone piled into the small, cramped office and struggled to get around the administrator’s desk to the emergency exit on the other side.

  “Rudy, you have the keys. Keep them ready so we can get into the garage and then the bus ASAP,” Angie said. “Johnny and Kevin, you two go out the door first. I want you as far away as possible when those zombies get in.

  Rudy nodded, making sure the keys were ready in his hand. Johnny pushed through the others so he was right at the door. Kevin, sounding slightly out of breath, trailed behind.

  Before Angie could give any more orders, Johnny opened the door. Immediately, a zombie hand reached through and grabbed his hair. Johnny screamed and tried to pull back, yanking the zombie that had him inside just enough for Angie to see that it was Louis, the town deputy. A second pair of zombie hands scrambled through the crack in the door, the fingers grasping at the air as though they thought there was supposed to be something there and were confused by its absence.

  “Pull him in! Pull him in!” Angie screamed. Johnny screamed right along with her, a scream that only grew more frantic as Louis’s mouth came down on his arm. Rudy and Kevin tried pulling him away from the door, but the second pair of hands stopped searching for their own target and instead grabbed his shirt.

  As Louis took a bite out of Johnny’s arm, Angie saw the spot immediately begin to smoke, the flesh around where Louis’s lips latched, instantly blackening as though his arm had been shoved into a roaring fire. He let go with his teeth to grab Johnny with a firmer hold, and then yanked. Johnny fell out the door. Rudy didn’t hesitate to pull the door closed behind him.

  “What are you doing?” Kevin yelled. “We could still have got him!”

  “No, kid, we couldn’t,” Rudy said. Kevin looked at him with horror for a few seconds before the truth dawned on him. Rudy was right, Angie thought. Johnny was gone.

  “Everyone get away from the door,” Boris said.

  “No, that door only opens from the inside,” Angie said. “They can’t use it to get in.”

  “And at the same time we can’t use it to get out,” Boris said. “They were waiting for us. It was an ambush. The voice told us what it did knowing we would go this way.”

  Angie couldn’t deny that, nor could she deny that this was her fault for not considering that. The time to blame herself would be later, though, after they got out of here. If they got out of here. Angie no longer had much faith in the voice’s predictions.

  There was a crash from the front of the museum. Broken glass, but not so much that it could have been the whole door. The zombies had probably punched about a fist-sized hole in it. They’d break the rest away any second.

  “Keep the lights on,” Angie said. “No sense trying to fight them off in the dark. Everyone back into the museum!”

  They rushed out of the office, spreading out all over with no obvious plan. They hadn’t taken any time to decide what they were going to do if they needed to stand and fight. Jasmine still had her revolver and Angie still had the useless pistol. The museum, lit only by what was spilling out of the office, looked like nothing but a jumbled mess of shadowy artifacts.

  Many of which, Angie decided, would work as weapons.

  “Grab things to defend yourselves!” Angie said. If anyone planned on asking her what exactly she thought they could use, they didn’t get the chance. That was the moment the last of the front door shattered, a zombie flying through the glass as though he’d been thrown. Actually, that was exactly what had happened, Angie saw as a few more stepped through behind him. Several of the zombies had been using the other, who looked like it might have been Archie, as a battering ram. Archie slowly stumbled back to his feet as the others shambled in. Seven of them in total, it looked like, with who knew how many more still outside at the back door.

  The light from the office was just enough for Angie to see most of the obstacles as she ran over to the wall and pulled down the murder shovel. The blade wasn’t terribly sharp but it would work well enough as a bludgeon. Boris followed suit, grabbing the broken propeller and hefting it, grunting at its surprising weight. Unlike the shovel, the ends of the propeller did look sharp enough to cause some serious damage. Everyone darted around looking for anything at all that might be used to bash or bludgeon, but the two of them had already gotten the best weapons. That, Angie realized, meant they had to be the front line of the attack.

  “Do we have a plan?” Boris asked her as all seven zombies shambled around the counter. The massive amount of clutter in this place was just as much a hindrance to them as it was to the living.

  “Don’t die,” she said.

  “Maybe some
thing a little more specific?” Boris asked.

  Angie responded by calling back over her shoulder to Rudy. “Are there any other exits out of here?”

  “If there are, I don’t immediately know where,” Rudy said. “Bert was the employee here, not me.”

  “Okay then, I have a plan,” Angie said to Boris.

  “And that is?”

  “We walk out the front door.”

  She knew if she gave Boris any more time, he would question the sanity of such a plan, so before he opened his mouth she walked forward, moving quickly but carefully around Mukwunaguk’s forgotten junk. It was the only plan that had any sort of chance at working. They had a slightly better chance when they vaguely knew what they were up against rather than the back, where every single of person in town could be waiting as a zombie and they wouldn’t know.

  Of course, that meant she would have to walk straight through seven dead people with a taste for flesh that could burst into flame at any moment. With only a shovel and an empty pistol. It was a good thing she didn’t have time to actually think about any of this.

  Holding the shovel like a baseball bat, she ran down one of the narrow aisles with a wordless scream straight for the nearest zombie, the one they’d named Jughead. The zombie paused, like she had honestly not expected one of her victims to get this aggressive, if she was capable of expecting anything at this point. Right before Angie swung the shovel, though, she pulled back slightly, suddenly remembering what had happened when Bert shot Becca. The blade of the shovel hit the zombie’s outstretched left hand, the side going into the flesh and partially severing her smallest finger. Angie backed up, half-expecting Jughead to burst into flame, but the finger just hung there on a chunk of gristle, not even smoking as it leaked reddish-black fluid. So just general damage to the zombies wasn’t enough to send them in napalm mode. Good to know.

  She wasn’t sure if Boris saw this or if he had just forgotten the possible danger, but he himself didn’t hesitate to jab the sharpened propeller end at the next closest zombie. Angie recognized this one as Jodie, one of the volunteer firefighters who would have been at the cabin. Maybe that was where they needed to go to stop this, she thought for a moment. It was apparently where all this had begun, so maybe there was a way to end it there. She thought about that eerie voice on the phone, though, and then the strange footprints burning the pavement. The voice was obviously the one responsible, although Angie still couldn’t imagine how, and she had a hunch that the voice and the owner of the footprints were the same person. If that was the case then this mystery woman probably wouldn’t be at the cabin anymore. She was somewhere in town, watching over the mayhem she had somehow caused.

  Jodie took the propeller blade directly to her chest, stopping her slow shamble just long enough for her to look down at the metal protruding from her breasts and then back at Boris as though to say, “Seriously?” Boris yanked it back out, causing a fountain of sludge that smelled like burnt ashes to spurt from the wound. Jodie only slowed for a moment, though, before stumbling forward again. They all came, slow and shuffling and random, only showing rhythm when they busted out the occasional dance move. It was kind of difficult for Angie to maintain an air of grim determination when they did that.

  Angie and Boris backed up. “This isn’t going to work unless we can find some kind of weakness,” Boris said.

  “We can’t shoot them in the head, but they can lose body parts without bursting into flame,” Angie said. “They can’t grab us if they don’t have hands, and they can’t follow us they can’t walk.”

  Boris nodded. “They can’t dance either, so I’d call that a perfect situation.”

  “Everyone else, we could use some help here!” Angie called back behind her, although she wouldn’t look back and take her eyes off the approaching corpses.

  “On it!” Kevin called back. “Just buy us some time!”

  That was any easy thing for him to say on the other side of the building without a bunch of zombies getting ready to munch on his skull. Archie came up behind Jughead with an amount of speed that Angie didn’t think should be possible.

  “For the love of God, stop doing that!” Boris screamed at the zombie as he jabbed with the propeller. He just barely missed. “There’s supposed to be rules that zombies follow! They’re not supposed to be slow one second and fast the next.”

  Angie didn’t bother to argue again about the wisdom of expecting real-world zombies to obey fictional rules, although she herself was getting annoyed that she couldn’t be certain what any given zombie might do next. Maybe that was the point. The voice had made it sound like she had designed this particular zombie strain, so why would anyone intentionally trying to cause havoc do it in the way everyone expected?

  She swung the shovel again, this time getting more aggressive and aiming at Jughead again. She thwacked the zombie across the face with the flat of the shovel blade. The zombie staggered and then moaned something in protest. It took Angie a second to realize it was suspiciously similar to Vincent Price’s first lines in Thriller.

  “Any time now, guys,” Angie called back to the others.

  “We’ve almost got it,” Kevin said. “We just need to…oh shit, Kim, watch the glass!”

  There was a crash as something broke.

  “I’m not sure I want to know what they’re doing,” Boris said.

  Angie heard a strange metallic sproing like a breaking spring.

  “I meant to do that!” Jasmine called.

  Angie changed tactics and took a different grip on the shovel handle, holding it now like a spear and jabbing it directly at Jughead’s neck. The metal went deep into her flesh with a sound Angie didn’t want to think about. When she pulled the shovel out, Jughead’s head fell back like she was a human Pez dispenser, giving Angie way too clear of a view of the viscera inside. Even though the shovel had severed most of the meat in her neck, Angie could still see the spine attached. Jughead kept walking toward her, although with even less coordination than before.

  “Coming in for the assist!” Boris yelled, whipping the propeller at Jughead’s head like the zombie was a tee-ball. Angie almost told him to stop, worried that the head damage would ignite the zombie. The propeller hit right in soft meat of Jughead’s neck, ripping apart the last of flesh and bone to send the head tumbling. The head bounced off the cash register and fell out of sight behind the counter, taking several Gordon Lightfoot CDs with it. Jughead’s body continued to fumble around for a second as though it thought it might be able to find and reattach the head before it was too late, then it toppled over to twitch on the ground. After a few seconds, it was still.

  Neither the head nor the body burst into flames.

  “Nice!” Angie said. “There’s your weakness!”

  She swung at Jodie, the shovel slicing a gaping hole in her belly which caused some of her intestines to fall out, but Jody didn’t seem to notice.

  “Okay, here we go!” Kevin yelled. “Angie, Boris, get out of the way! Quick!” Angie didn’t think she had the time to turn and see whatever fool thing they were about to try. Instead, she dove over some of the tables, knocking dioramas everywhere. Boris must have done the same because she heard a terrible clattering nearby. No, wait, that wasn’t coming from Boris. It was coming from farther back in the museum, back near the…

  Tables and display cases flew aside and toppled as the Model-T came barreling down the aisle. Angie only had a quick glimpse of it before she tumbled out of its view, but it looked like the others had haphazardly loaded the tree cross section on the front and, with all of them pushing it from behind, turned it into a battering ram. Glass broke and metal screeched and several zombies made sounds that were suspiciously like surprise. These were followed immediately by multiple squishing noises, like sponges being squeezed and spurting fluid everywhere.

  Angie stood up and saw the remains of the Model-T, which had hardly been designed for this kind of thing, in a decidedly bent and broken state next to the fro
nt door. It wasn’t as broken as several of the zombies, though. Angie could see the limbs of at least one zombie sticking out from between the tree cross-section and the wall. Other zombies were sprawled all over the front, dazed even for walking corpses, many with limbs bent in the wrong directions but only the one that had been smashed was dead. Angie thought she saw the cross-section smoking as something heated it up from the other side.

  “This place is about to go up!” she screamed. “Everyone out!”

  She recognized that their window of opportunity was short, but Angie refused to be the first one to run out the front door. She needed to make sure that everyone else made it first. This wasn’t too hard, considering almost everyone was already there, having helped push their makeshift battering ram. As they went for the door, though, Angie saw one suspicious absence. Megan, up and walking but still unsteady on her feet, was still halfway back down the museum. She hadn’t been able to keep up with the others, nor did she look like she understood enough of what was going on to be much help even if she had spontaneously gotten better.

  “Megan, come on!” Angie yelled. She seemed to become a little more present at the sound of Angie’s voice, at least enough to realize that whatever the hell was going on, it might be a case of life or death.

  “Angie?” she asked, looking around at her environment as though this was the first time she’d realized she was in the museum. When she saw the zombies trying to stand up, though, she understood enough to stumble in Angie’s direction. Angie ran back to her and grabbed her arm, hoping that Megan would be steady enough to keep her feet as Angie pulled her along. Megan stumbled a couple times but kept up. The rest of the group was out the front door already, and just in time. Archie was back to his feet, and with him Betty and Veronica. Angie thought she had seen some scary librarians in her time, but none that wanted to eat her brains.

  Actually, she thought, not a one of the zombies yet had made any indication that they preferred brains over any other tasty body part.