Best New Zombie Tales, Vol. 3

by Anthology

  “Harold, head up to H.R. Fill out your incident report and clock out. Take the afternoon off.”

  ~

  Traffic on the drive home was light early in the afternoon, giving Harold time to ponder. At Federal and 12th panhandlers stood four abreast, some made eye contact, others kept their heads lowered, shuffling alongside the cars trapped at the stoplight. WILL WORK FOR FOOD—HARDWORKING DISABLED VETERAN—ANYTHING HELPS—and the last—ZOMBIES TOOK MY JOB.

  Harold did his best to ignore them and fight the guilt at the same time… there but for the grace of God and such. He caught the left turn signal at 17th as it flipped to amber. These blocks had taken it hard during the Epidemic, lot after vacant lot, the burned foundations poking through the weeds. There’d been talk of rebuilding, townhouses or something, but there were too many empty houses now. Why build more?

  Though fifteen years had passed since the Epidemic began, since the first corpses clawed their way from their black rubberized body bags in Houston, Harold still marveled at the way society slipped back into normalcy.

  The first dark days were right there if he closed his eyes––the world in chaos, round-the clock coverage on all channels, the cities burning with soldiers rattling through the streets in their Humvees. He and Val had worked hard and furious when the reports first started, screwing plywood over the windows, double nailing closet doors horizontally over the front and back entrances, listening to the relentless thump, thump against the wood.

  The tanks and APC’s at last roaring into the city to restore some semblance of order, of safety.

  And then Stephen had come home.

  Harold rubbed at his dry eyes, willing the memory away. He knew the Z’s must have some vestigial intelligence down there under their all-consuming hunger. Maybe that’s what had brought Stephen north from Colorado Springs, to their doorstep.

  All the blood and terror of those first days boiled down to mere seconds on his front porch.

  “And look now,” he muttered as he made the wide arc around Custer Park. A Z-crew shambled about the grounds, running push mowers back and forth, their overalls spattered green to the knees. Two city foremen and three Rustlers watched them. Another bent over his transponder board, eyeing the regulators’ discharge.

  One foreman turned his head as Harold’s truck rattled by, a shotgun propped on his hip and the sunlight winking from mirrored sunglasses. The city crew looked in bad shape, skin sloughing and lips pulled back in rictus grins. At the plant, after the second shift, all the zombies were herded downstairs and into the safe room, where the day’s offal bins were rolled. They were locked up and the control boards shut down, letting them come alive, plunge into the viscera, gobbling it down. Harold had watched a time or two on the security monitors. The technicians waited until the offal was gone, until the first Barney tried to take a bite from his neighbor, and then flipped the regulators back on, leaving them all shuffling aimlessly, stupid, staring at the cement walls.

  Such quick and loose use of the regulators was prohibited if a company was using Z-workers. The CDC would shut them down in a blink if they caught wind of it, but Levi and the management thought it worth the risk. The workers lasted longer if they could feed. Still, maybe flipping the regulators on and off weakened them, the way taking too many pain pills eventually stopped helping with the arthritic grinding in his knee.

  ~

  “You’re early today.”

  Harold twisted the bolts on both locks and dropped the counterweighted bar, snugging it against the steel sheathed front door. Val sprawled on the couch, one hand working the remote and other rubbing her bare foot. In the back room the swamp cooler thrummed, pushing damp air through their little rambler. She had unzipped the front of her polyester cleaning blouse, and few strands of hair hung loose at her temples. Sweat beaded on her neck and the bags under her eyes were so dark they seemed purple.

  “Had one the Betties flip over today,” he rummaged a beer from the refrigerator. Recounting the afternoon’s events between swallows, he tried to sound casual, not mentioning how the flesh crept along his scalp as he slid under the carousel, how his guts sloshed as he thought the others were going to flip over, or the dry crumbling of the Betty’s brains spraying across the chickens.

  “Levi threatened your job? Really said that to you?”

  “I tell you Val, they’re cutting costs across the board. Bring in those Z-crews on the cheap. I know they couldn’t have been certified. They’re setting themselves up for one big mess.”

  Val thumbed the mute button, sighed, and rubbed the inside of her wrist across her forehead. “Well, it’s a hell of a day for us, I’ll tell you that.” She looked off in the distance as she always had when bringing up bad news. “I lost the Chavez Building account today. They came at me with a bid—well damn—so low I would’ve had to clean the whole place myself to make any money. It was my biggest account. I had to let Esmeralda go. She’s got kids, too, you know—it was hard. Said I’d bring her back if business picked up, but there’s not much out there.”

  “Cheap,” Harold ran his finger around the bottle top, moisture rippling up in a tiny wave. “Were they—”

  “Yep, some outfit out of Greely. I guess they can make ‘em push a mop, empty trash cans. Can’t think they’ll do a decent job.” She was silent for a moment and when she spoke again her voice quavered. “Those… things. Those goddamned fucking things.” She tossed the remote on the coffee table. “You know, it seemed the world went to hell overnight and then we pulled it back up, but it’s just sinking again, in a different way.”

  Harold glanced at the mantle, at the picture of Stephen in his cadet uniform, so bright and earnest, the world at his feet. He wished, not for the first time, Val had been the one to look through the peephole that night. Would she have only seen her son? Would she have turned a mother’s blind eye to the twigs in his hair, the dirt rimmed lips and nostrils, the dried bloody tendrils snaking from his scalp and ears. Maybe it would have been better than all this, better if she had opened the door wide and let him lurch into the house, better to have had it all end then.

  On the television two talking heads shared a screen, below them the words—A Shifting Economy?—crawled. Harold turned up the volume. “This has the potential to skyrocket the GDP, vault us over Asia and Europe––”

  The blow-dried head’s adversary cut him off—”But isn’t it just slavery under another name? Aunt Mildred kicks the bucket and her family gets a quick thousand to ship her off for processing, regulator implanted in her skull and the next day she’s making widgets, free labor.”

  “Well certainly there will be some birth pains—they are all but taking over the unskilled job market. Ultimately it will bring us all a higher standard of living. People are going to have to become better educated, more skilled workers.” He leaned back and chuckled. “I know no zombie could do my job, though I’m not so sure about Chet here.”

  Harold clicked the television off before Chet could reply.

  He sat the empty bottle on the table. “You know it wouldn’t be so bad if the controls were followed. They’re supposed to be burning ninety percent of the bodies, strict protocol for the regulators, but—”

  “But they’re greedy,” Val finished his sentence.

  Harold nodded. It was an old topic for them “Trucking them up from the border. Who knows how cheap their circuits are. Business, it’s greedy, and the government’s turning a blind eye to it. I guess you can’t blame them down south for selling the bodies off—even if they get five hundred dollars each, it’s more than most of those folks see in a year.”

  Val let her hair loose, rubbing her neck.

  Harold felt a small hitch in his chest when he realized her brown eyes were shiny with tears.

  “I can blame them. Look what we’ve become,” her mouth softened. “We’re sinking into hell and all anyone cares about is ‘can I make another dollar on this?’” She slumped, “There was a time when you would just work. You c
ould go to work and care for your family. If you were willing to work hard, it was enough. You could raise your family and have a decent life.”

  “Well, we did that. We had a decent life before…” He lost steam, fumbling over the right words. “I’m sorry,” Harold said and he hoped she knew what he meant.

  “I just don’t know” her voice hiccupped, “I just don’t know how it can keep moving. The world. I don’t know how we can keep moving.”

  “I don’t see we have a choice. I know Stephen—”

  Her voice rose, cutting him off, “Don’t.”

  ~

  Later, in bed, he splayed a hand across the swell of her hip, her nightgown cool beneath his fingers. Her breath caught and he knew she wasn’t asleep, but she kept her eyes closed and turned her back to him, burrowing her head into the pillow. Harold’s hand dropped.

  He knew better than to say their son’s name in front of her. She would spiral down for days, breakfasts and dinners with a palpable wall of silence separating them. Her eyes glossy and staring past him, mouth, cheeks and forehead creased with hard shadows.

  He was already gone, Harold thought. He knew it. The dried blood, the dirt and twigs, yet still that part of his mind which took such sadistic delight in waking him deep in the night, asked the question again and again. Was he? Was he really? How fast did you bring the shotgun up Harold? Didn’t you see a glint, just a flash of awareness in his eyes?

  He’d buried Stephen in the soft ground of the garden along the back fence. Zipped his near headless corpse into a day-glow orange mummy bag and shoveled dirt over him, blocking out Val’s wailing from the house, letting her anguish blend with the braying sirens, the clattering Strykers and staccato bark of AR-15s filling those first days of the Epidemic.

  No man should have to bury his son with his own hands.

  Harold turned over. Outside a low warbling siren grew closer. Revolving red and blue light seeped through the cracks of the heavy plantation shutters bolted to their windows.

  He rose and levered the shutters open, filling the room with muted moonlight and the oscillating flash of an emergency vehicle. A sheriff’s SUV, blue and white, stopped at an angle across his street. The virus, the infection—whatever had caused the dead to walk was still in the air, weaker, but enough to keep the crematoriums busy.

  About every third corpse now became infected and sometimes people died alone in their homes, no one to strap them down or phone their death into the CDC.

  A Barney shambled along the street, an old man, eighty-five or ninety, sloped shoulders and sunken chest curled with wisps of white hair. His flaccid belly jiggled with his stiff-legged walk, toothless mouth gaping and his pee-soaked pajamas falling off his scrawny backside.

  A second sheriff pulled up in front of the Barney. The competing headlights threw perpendicular shadows on the ground. The first SUV’s door opened and an officer stepped out, shotgun at port arms. He circled around the Barney, who had stopped as the second set of lights washed over him, circled until the other officer was free from his line of fire. In what could have been a replay of Harold’s movement earlier in the day the Sheriff took two quick steps, nestled the shotgun in the back of the old man’s head, and pulled the trigger.

  Before the echoes rolled off down the street and the Barney’s frail body hit the pavement, Harold snapped the shutters down, not sure if he should get back in bed, knowing there’d be no more sleep tonight.

  ~

  The next morning Harold slipped into his usual parking space at the plant. Val hadn’t woken when he’d told her goodbye. Or if so, she’d done a good job of hiding it, keeping her breathing slow and regular. He’d snipped a rose from one of the bushes out front and left it in a tumbler of water on the kitchen table with a scrawled “I love you,” on the back of an envelope.

  Harold tucked his thermos under one arm, lunch box swinging from the same hand, when he saw Bert, one of the QC’s, striding across the parking lot. Bert’s fingers beat a rapid tattoo against his pant leg and the muscles in his jaw bunched like he was swallowing a pair of marbles.

  “Knocking off already?” Harold smiled and squinted into the rising sun.

  Bert unlocked the door to his Chrysler, his eyes feverish, burning in their sockets. “Knocking off for the rest of the week, Harold—shit I guess knocking off for good.”

  “You’re quitting?” Bert’s time was as short as Harold’s.

  “Not quitting,” Bert’s gaze skittered around the parking lot filling up for the morning shift. He nodded his head at the pebbled cement walls of the processing plant. “Listen, I got to get out of here before I do something stupid. Go talk to that sonofabitch yourself if you want the story. Tell Levi he better hope I don’t see him on the street. Kick his fucking teeth down his throat if I do,” his hands shook as he opened his car door. “Tell him that if you see him.”

  ~

  “It can do the job, Harold. Don’t see why you’re so worked up.” Harold had button-holed Levi near the end of the wrapping line, packages of 8-piece fryers slipping along. A Barney stood at the line’s end, head jerking left to right as the packs rolled before him. “It’s not like I didn’t offer Bert another job—he’s just too proud to take it”

  “Back on the gut crew—swilling out eviscerators at the end of the night, half as much money—what’d you think he would do?”

  “It can do the job, watch,” Levi grabbed one of the shrink-wrapped packages off the rollers. He tore loose an edge of the cellophane, pulled a drumstick half out, and set it back on the conveyor. As the fryer crossed in front of the Barney his head jerked down and he snatched the damaged pack off the rollers, dropping it in a bin at his feet, his sunken, milky eyes unblinking as more clicked by. “Now why would we pay someone eighteen bucks an hour when we’ve got him?” He slapped the creature’s shoulder. “They’re just tools, Harold. If a business is going to make money you can’t be afraid of tools.”

  “Christ, Levi, don’t you remember? It hasn’t been so long. Don’t you remember being boarded up in your own house, watching your friends, your family torn apart? Don’t you think about what they are—what they were?”

  “It’s progress Harold. It’s the new order of business. People like you had their way we’d still be living in caves, shitting ourselves during a thunderstorm.”

  He made a point of glancing at his wristwatch. “You been on the clock now for about half an hour? Maybe you ought to be worrying we aren’t training one of these guys to watch for green lights to go blinking off.”

  Through the rest of his shift Harold fought to stay focused, watching the Z -crew as they gutted the chickens, but his mind hiked out on its own tangents. Had they really forgotten what brought these things forth? He raised the Mossberg and sighted along the backs of their heads. The regulators winked green at him over and over. What if they hadn’t found a way to control them in the first place? Would it have been better if they all burned?

  Levi’s words echoed in his head. Maybe he ought to be worrying about his own job, never mind Bert’s. He was a secondary warning system, nothing but another set of eyes, where the technician in the control room leaning over the transponder board had the ability to turn the regulators on and off at will.

  Harold straightened his leg from the stool, wincing at his knee. The Mossberg held five shells and he carried another twenty in his utility belt. He could shoot them all right now, walking along, firing and reloading. They wouldn’t blink. Each would keep pulling at its chicken guts until he put the barrel against their skull, squeezed the trigger. What would they do? Fire him, maybe charge him with destruction of property?

  They’ve forgotten what they are, he thought.

  The clean-ups come so easy in the middle of the night now, sanitary. Two cops in front of his house. The old Barney falling limp like a string-cut puppet. It’s like the entire world had forgotten.

  He avoided Levi the rest of the day.

  ~

  Val’s Honda was still in
the driveway when Harold came home.

  He threw back the deadbolts and stopped, one foot on the rug. The swamp cooler wasn’t running. The television wasn’t on. His breathing echoed through the still rooms, the heavy air.

  “Val?” In the kitchen the water glass stood empty, a flower stem on the table and a small pile of petals on the floor. Beneath his scribbled note Val’s spiky, handwriting filled the bottom of the envelope.

  ––I’m so tired, Harold. Tired and sorry. I know I haven’t shown it but I never blamed you for Stephen. I just couldn’t say it to you. You did the right thing and you’ve carried that awful burden alone. I pray you’ll do the right thing again if you have to. With all my heart––

  Harold read the note a second time, tracing fingertips across the words. “No, Val, you couldn’t have,” he whispered. “You wouldn’t do that to me.”

  He couldn’t leave the kitchen. The rose petals were soft, wilted, curling in on themselves in the heat. The only dishes in the sink were his from this morning, a coffee cup—brown stained porcelain as he’d forgotten to rinse it—and a bowl and spoon with flecks of shredded wheat gluing them together. He filled a glass with lukewarm tap water and drank it down. Rinsing the coffee cup and bowl, he gazed out the window at the vegetable garden.

  Stephen was down there, bones wrapped in down-filled nylon.