At first I attempted to record the sounds with my pen, but it was quickly clear to me that I lacked the holographic lexicon for such an undertaking. (Looking back at my notes now, I see that I got as far as “XXthoxx Nthuxxx. XXthoxx Xthulu Xthulu Fghthxxxn. Xthulu Xthulu Fghthxxxn” before giving up.) Resolved that the sound of the magical words should not be lost, I rose from my chair with the intention of retrieving our audio recording device.
“No!” cried the Mambo, suddenly shaken from her trance. “But I must record this,” I insisted.
“You must learn it,” the young woman countered forcefully. “Then I must sing the second chant while you sing the first. Record that if you want to.”
Her reticence frustrated me. I desired to record all parts of the chant—the separate parts and then both of them sung together. However, I glanced over at the sickly Knecht, and he waved his hand to indicate that I should indulge the Mambo.
“Very well,” I told her. “Begin again, and I shall attempt to learn the song.”
The Mambo’s eyes rolled back once more, and the horrible, guttural song recommenced. For several minutes, it remained an unintelligible cacophony. However, as time passed, I began to recognize phrases that recurred. I began to memorize them and sang along with the Mambo each time they came around. Before half of an hour had passed, I was singing along more often than not. After a full hour, I was copying the Mambo precisely. I even snapped my hands in perfect time to her own.
As our voices and hands fell into perfect synchronization, the Mambo stopped. She came out of her trance, and her eyes focused on mine once again.
“Good,” she said softly. “Very good. You have learned it well. Now you shall sing it alone, and I shall sing the second chant on top of it.”
“Very well,” I said and began the series of guttural noises and clicks I had just memorized. As I did so, Knecht slowly rose and made his way back upstairs to fetch the recording device. Moments later, the Mambo began to sing the second part of the incantation—and my god!—though I would have deemed it impossible, it was even more guttural and gravelly sounding than the first! Had I not known better, I would have guessed the Mambo was imitating a large animal in the final stages of childbirth (or at least copulation).
As we sang our strange noises together, I began to notice an eerie organization to it. The Mambo was clearly timing her incantations to my own. There were moments where our two voices seemed to answer one another, like a conversation. At other moments, we spoke a phrase or made a sound identically—our voices melding as one—before once again diverging into horrible dissonance. We sang together in this manner for several minutes.
Moving very slowly under the weight of his fever, Inspector Knecht eventually returned with the recording device and set it next to us. With a ponderous hand, he adjusted the spools of tape and depressed the pertinent button to begin recording. At that very moment, the Mambo stopped her song.
She looked up at me and smiled an evil smile.
When it was clear she would sing no more, I stopped my chant as well.
“We are recording now,” I pointed out to her, indicating the spools with my finger. “Please continue the song so we may preserve it . . . or have you forgotten what I said about your teeth and fingernails?”
She only smiled at me. It was a confident smile. The smile of one with secret knowledge.
“Continue the song!” I demanded. “I command you, in the name of the Third Reich, to continue the song!”
“Unnecessary,” retorted the Mambo. “It has already been effective.”
At this insolence, I rose from my chair and struck her across the face as hard as I could. (Though her hands were now free, she did not flinch or block my blow. I hit her powerfully in the cheek.)
“Continue the song, now!” I shouted.
She only smiled icily. I drew the Luger from my waistband. I fully extended my arm and pressed the barrel hard against her forehead.
“Continue!” I cried. “Continue the—”
And here I stopped, for the sound of an unexpected blow echoed across the room. It was as though something had been thrown hard against the shuttered window facing the field.
The Mambo’s smile brightened.
Then—kramm!—the sound of another blow echoed off the window. Then a scraping sound. Then silence. Then a powerful blow again.
The Mambo threw back her head and laughed, exposing a row of glistening white teeth.
“I believe your guests have arrived,” she said.
“What nonsense is this?” I asked. I stalked over to the window and threw open the shutter.
The sight that greeted me is difficult to describe.
I found myself staring into the face of a zombie. He was ancient, covered in mud, and missing his nose and teeth. He emitted a roar from lungs that had not drawn breath in many years. I involuntarily flinched away and discharged my weapon into the wall.
But that was not all that I saw.
Beyond the zombie, in the field, were many others like him. A least a hundred. All of them looked positively ancient—decades dead, at least. Some were so decayed and desiccated that it was hard to recognize their forms as human. Some crawled or scuttled on the ground like insects or crabs. Others slunk forward slowly, on legs stiff as stilts. They were deformed. They were horrible to behold. Each of them that could moan, moaned. Every single one of them had turned to face (or, in some horrible cases, “face”) the house.
The ground on which they stood—formerly a placid field, empty and pristine—was now a mess of upturned earth. In a horrible shocking instant, it became clear to me that not only had our song awakened the dead, but that they had heard our siren call whilst underneath the very earth itself!
“Europeans are idiots, each in their own way . . . but you Nazis take the cake!” cried the Mambo gleefully, as if our dire predicament were only a joke to her.
I trained my Luger on the zombie in the window and fired several times into his head. He moaned and fell to the ground, unmoving. Another stepped up and took his place almost simultaneously.
“Only the world’s biggest fools would choose the house next to the old Grangou burying ground in which to interrogate Mambos on the art of raising zombies!” the young woman cackled from behind me.
“That isn’t helpful!” I shouted, and then emptied the Luger into the field of zombies. At least two others fell; but, again, more zombies quickly took their place. It was clear the house should soon be swarmed if I did not improve my firepower.
“Knecht!” I cried to my colleague. “Thank God you opened that crate! We must fetch those machine guns and grenades immediately.”
Suddenly, behind me, I heard a door slam.
“Knecht?” I cried and swiveled around.
The inspector was still sitting at the foot of the stairs, looking more overcome by his fever than ever. With an effort that clearly required great exertion, he lifted his arm and pointed to the chair. It was now empty. The Mambo had apparently untied her legs whilst my back was turned, and had just run out of the house and into the forest. The door was still ajar.
I wondered for a moment if Knecht and I ought to follow her. I approached the half-open door, intending to stick my head out and look beyond. No sooner had I grasped the handle than a moldy, teetering zombie stuck his head around the corner. It had no eyes, but it clearly sensed my presence and snapped at me with a jaw full of crooked teeth.
I recoiled in horror, kicked the door shut, and locked the zombie outside.
“Knecht,” I shouted, “we are under siege! Where have you put the crate of armaments?”
My fellow inspector, who seemed on the verge of passing out from weakness, managed to point to the room at the back of the house where he had made his office.
I bounded over to the little room and found the crate under-neath a blanket. I grabbed one of the MP 40s and began shoving grenades and ammunition clips into each and every pocket (and even down my trousers).
“Ge
hrin,” my colleague moaned from the other room. “I think they are breaking through the window.”
I raced back to the front of the house to find that Knecht was not exaggerating. A whole platoon of zombies seemed to be gathered around the window overlooking the field. They had smashed the glass, broken through the storm shutters, and now several sets of flailing arms reached inside. The smashing glass and gnashing teeth were not the only noise they made. The zombies emitted low moans. Now and then, they almost seemed to form coherent words. It was profoundly unnerving.
I pulled out my submachine gun and began firing into the mass of arms and teeth. I uttered a war cry that I hoped was worthy of a man of the Reich and watched as my bullets riddled the wriggling zombies. I tried my best to aim for their heads, but the mass of body parts and limbs writhed and thrashed violently, making precise aiming a near-impossibility.
As you may be aware, my Obergruppenführer, the clip on an MP 40 exhausts itself after only a few seconds of constant fire. I was forced to expend several clips before I had pushed the crowd of zombies back enough that it felt safe to lob a grenade through the window.
“Take cover!” I cried to Inspector Knecht and flattened myself against the floor.
“You fool!” he coughed. “The walls of this house are far too thin for that.”
No sooner had he issued his warning than the ensuing blast conspired to prove him right. The grenade detonated—handily dispatching the remaining platoon of zombies lurking just outside the window—and tore a man-sized hole in the side of the house.
Dirt and dust rained down for a moment, and then all was silent. I stood and inspected the hole. It did not seem possible to repair with any haste. Looking beyond it, I saw the pile of dead zombies I had just created, but also dozens more still lumbering toward the house from across the field.
“Damn and blast,” I cried. “Now they will overrun us if they reach the house. We must not allow that to happen. I’m going up to the roof through the hatch in the second floor. My only hope is to pick them off before they reach the opening. Knecht, you must go to your office and bring me the rest of the ammunition and grenades!”
“I can hardly stand,” Knecht protested.
“All the same, you must do it!” I called, racing past him up the stairs. “Think of the Führer and be inspired.”
As quickly as I could, I raced to the attic of the two-story house and popped open the hatch that allowed for access to the roof. Luckily, the slope of the roof was quite gradual, allowing me to stand and balance myself easily. The moonlight revealed a field filled with lumbering zombies. I would have to eliminate them one by one.
Seeking to conserve ammunition, I began by throwing grenades at places on the field where the zombies were clustered. This produced good results. Whether the zombies were unaware of my grenades or simply did not care about them, they proved almost entirely incapable of evasive action. This made my work as easy as a soldier’s training exercise. Again and again I threw the grenades at the stumbling worm-eaten corpses that groaned and gnashed their teeth. Again and again, they failed to take cover, and were blown apart. Limbs, heads, and (on occasion) entire zombies were lifted into the air by the force of the blasts, and they rained down upon the field.
This grenade lobbing was highly effective, but it was still a challenge to explode the zombies before they reached the house. The field was very large, and I could only throw the grenades thirty or forty yards without losing my footing under the force of the throw. (And I could not throw the grenades too close to the house, or, as we had just seen, the structure itself would be damaged in the blast). Sooner than I liked, I had thrown my last one. Where was Knecht?
“Knecht!” I called into the roof hatch as I prepared my submachine gun. “Come quickly with more grenades!”
I fell onto my stomach, extended the collapsible stock of the MP 40, and braced the weapon against the edge of the roof. I then fired several rounds at the zombies nearest the house. Hitting the slow-moving fellows was no problem, but it proved maddeningly difficult to achieve the head shots required to bring them down. My natural inclination was to aim for the torso. By correcting this, and seeking to aim only for the head, I often overshot the shambling corpses. In most cases, I expended an entire clip of ammunition in the course of bringing down a single zombie. This was no way to work.
I was quickly down to my final clip, and still no sign of Knecht.
I stared hard into the field, where many zombies remained upright. Should I begin shooting with my final clip, or should I wait before expending it? These walking dead showed no signs of stopping. If I did not do anything, they would soon start entering the first floor of our house.
Suddenly, I detected a slow, lumbering movement right below me. Assuming—in that startled instant—that a zombie had risen from the dirt at the foot of the house, I hastily turned my gun on it and loosed a single round. No sooner had I done so than I realized the figure was not a zombie but Inspector Knecht.
He dropped the ammunition in his hands and slowly crumpled to the earth.
“Knecht!” I cried.
He did not respond.
Abandoning my plan of a rooftop defense, I scuttled back through the hatch and raced down to the first floor of the house and leaped out of the grenade hole through which my colleague had stumbled. There I found Knecht, facedown in the soil. The ground beside him was littered with the grenades and clips he had been carrying. I took a knee beside him and flipped him over. He moaned.
It appeared that my shot had only nicked his leg.
“Knecht, can you walk?” I asked urgently. Zombies were approaching from several directions, some less than ten yards away.
“For you . . . ,” Knecht moaned and squirmed, attempting to gesture to the grenades and SMG clips he had carried. Obviously, I should never have sent him to fetch ammunition. How I regretted this horrible mistake!
I gathered as many of the grenades and clips as I could, and then I lifted Knecht over my shoulder (thank goodness he is a relatively light and wiry man). No sooner had I done so than a dusty zombie lumbered to within an arm’s reach of us. I leveled the SMG at him and fired until his head disintegrated.
It was difficult to replace the clip while holding Knecht, so I set him back down. (He was close to babbling from the fever—and, doubtless too, from the stress of the attack—and seemed only marginally aware of what was happening to him.) No sooner had I replaced the clip (and was ready to once again hoist Inspector Knecht over my shoulder) than another zombie drew within ten feet of us. This time I was more careful with my ammunition and brought him down with a single blast to the forehead. Then another directly behind the first lumbered forward, and I laid him back to the earth in similar fashion. Then yet another.
It soon became clear that carrying Knecht back up to my rooftop perch would be a dangerous (and probably impossible) undertaking. In a trice, I decided to make my stand then and there, in front of the house.
The fighting that followed was long and exhausting. To the bats that occasionally passed overheard and looked down on the scene below, it must have appeared that the remaining zombies circled around me the way water circles around a drain. The walking dead men seldom moved in a straight line, but always they found a way to careen or corkscrew in my general direction. As they stumbled within my range, I dispatched each one as quickly and efficiently as I could. As the night wore on, spent clips littered the ground around me, and the bodies of the zombies encircled me from all directions.
Finally—in the culmination of an effort I do not overstate as nearly superhuman (for, as the Führer reminds us, we Aryans are supermen)—I dispatched the final zombie. It was a frail Haitian girl, teeth gnashing and eye sockets gaping obscenely. I shot her through the forehead with what was nearly my final bullet. The sun had just begun to rise.
Utterly exhausted, I fell cross-legged on the ground next to Knecht (who was nearly buried underneath dead zombies). I tried to work up the strength to enter
the house and get a glass of water. I surveyed the empty field as I sat. Before, it had been as smooth and green as the pitch on a golf course.
Now it was a no-man’s-land of muddy craters where the dead had risen from their slumbers and clawed up through the broken earth. Nothing moved on this strange, blasted moonscape. I was thankful—at least—for that.
Then, unexpectedly, something did.
At the far edge of the field—over a hundred yards away—I saw two humanoid shapes. I had not noticed them before because they were unmoving, but now they turned to face one another. I could not discern if they were zombies or humans. One was a smaller, lithe-looking black woman. She looked not entirely unlike the Mambo we had just met. The other was Caucasian and had a hulking, almost-planetary carriage that closely reminded me of Inspector Baedecker’s.
I took up my SMG and readied myself for the eventuality of dispatching two more zombies. And yet the figures made no move to approach me. After seeming to converse for a few moments, they simply turned and walked away. In a moment, they passed over the horizon and were gone.
Thus concludes my account of our first successful participation in the creation of zombies.
While we were not able to record the dual-voiced song that seems to be the secret, we now understand that this auditory phenomenon is a salient part of the ceremony, and that the rest is, as they say, window dressing. The potential for weaponizing this in the cause of the Reich is grand indeed. I envision zeppelins—equipped with great loudspeakers—broadcasting the chants across enemy territory. (When our enemy’s armies are exhausted from fighting their own dead, then we shall strike them with the full might of the Reich! In their weakened and spent conditions, we shall annihilate them utterly!)
I have been able—I believe—to perfectly recall my half of the guttural chant, which I have reproduced on the enclosed spool of tape. Given that we now know exactly what we are looking for, I am optimistic about our chances of quickly capturing a second Bocor/Mambo and inducing them to divulge the second voice for our recording device.
I am also happy to report that Inspector Knecht is making a slow but steady recovery from his tropical fever. He was well enough on the day after the events described to assist me as I dragged the dead zombies into a great pile and set them aflame.
The Ultimate Book of Zombie Warfare and Survival Page 19