"Yeah?!" Tom replied.
Harry stared at Helen, but he still didn’t say anything, and she was more than happy to take advantage of his indecision.
"If Judy would come downstairs for a few minutes," she hollered, looking at her husband and daring him to overrule her, "Harry and I could come upstairs."
"Okay, yeah!" Tom answered, sounding pleased. "Right away!"
Harry looked down, his lips pressed so tight that his mouth disappeared into a thin line — he looked like a sulking child.
Helen elected not to voice that particular observation...
On the ground floor, Tom walked over to Judy where she sat on the arm of the sofa. Bending forward, hands on his thighs, he asked, "Will you do it?"
Anxious, she asked, "Do I have to?" She had been a nervous wreck when they separated before and she wasn’t in a hurry to leave his side again — with those deranged people running around, she didn’t want to let him out of her sight!
"Look, honey," he reasoned, "nothing’s gonna get done with them down there and us up here." He touched her shoulder. "Do this. For me."
Judy sighed. "Okay."
Tom returned to the basement door. "Okay! Open up."
Judy followed him, her stride less than enthusiastic.
Cooper opened the door and Judy stepped inside. He stared at her, but she was relieved that he did not rant this time like he had before. She didn’t like him very much, but she did like his wife, and it was as much for her as for Tommy that she descended those dark stairs once again.
She found Missus Cooper holding her sick daughter’s hand, that poor little girl. Seeing those fever-dampened locks gave her another reason to go along with this exchange.
"I’ll take good care of her, Helen," she said, barely remembering to call the older woman by her first name.
Missus Cooper nodded, but did not stand up immediately. She stroked her daughter’s left arm — the good one, the one that hadn’t been bitten by that crazy woman. Finally, she said in a low voice, "She’s all I have."
Judy wasn’t sure how to respond to that. She could tell that the Coopers did not share a happy marriage, and felt (strangely enough) almost guilty for the strong bond she had with Tommy. Instead, she settled for, "Why don’t you go upstairs now?"
Missus Cooper patted her daughter’s good arm, stood, offered Judy a weak smile, then headed for the stairs.
Judy took her post, adjusting Karen’s blanket and sitting at her side, but the little girl gave no acknowledgment of her presence or her mother’s departure...
Harry exited the cellar first, looking around as though he half-expected the lunatics to have already broken through every nook and cranny. His hands clenched and unclenched, his fingers performing a nervous little dance, feeling for the weapon he was no longer carrying. He looked back at Helen, and tried to put some fire into it.
You see? he tried to say with his eyes. You see how dangerous it is up here? You see why I hustled us down into the cellar in the first place? You see that I’m right?!
But all Helen saw was his fear. And she realized that Harry wasn’t all bluster this time, wasn’t just wanting to prove himself right over everyone else. That might have been a part of it (he was Harry, after all), but he was sincerely, deeply afraid to be up here. He honestly did think the cellar was safer, really was trying, in his harsh way, to protect his family as best he could.
Then he turned away and stalked across the room to inspect the boarded windows. Helen started to follow him, but then she noticed the young woman on the sofa. Not much older than Judy, the blonde woman was slumped so far over she was almost lying on her side. She was running her fingers over the doily on the arm of the sofa, seemed fascinated by it — which, given the situation they were all in, sent up a warning flag to Helen right away.
Then Tom stepped forward and confirmed her suspicions. "Her brother was killed."
Before Helen could reply, a voice called from elsewhere in the house, "Hey! Give me a hand with this thing!"
Tom apologized, "I gotta go help Ben with the television," before leaving the room.
Harry was still running his inspection tour, so Helen approached the young woman ... but then stopped short. She had intended to join her on the sofa, but the girl’s obsessive focus on every intricate detail of the embroidery made her a little nervous. How would the girl react if Helen just plunked herself down right next to her?
Instead, Helen sat in a nearby chair. She would try to talk to the girl first, before getting too close to her. Except she wasn’t certain what to say.
So she sat in the rickety chair and watched the blonde girl. Watched her run her fingers over the doily, tracing every line, every curve. Helen soon found herself fidgeting with her wedding ring, and decided that she needed a cigarette. God, did she need one!
Pulling a pack from her coat pocket, she struck a match and lit up. Funny enough, while the blonde had ignored Harry’s tramping around and Helen’s creaking chair, she looked over right away when the match sparked to life. At first glance, her expression came across as rather bland, but upon closer inspection, Helen decided that the young woman was actually riding along the edge of a precipice. She was terrified beyond her ability to process it.
Having seen one of those lunatics take a bite — a bite! — out of her daughter’s arm, Helen could understand why.
"Don’t be afraid of me," she said in a soft voice. "I’m Helen Cooper. Harry’s wife."
The blonde just stared. Had Harry bothered to introduce himself before? Probably not. But then she realized that the young woman was staring at something specific — her still-burning match.
Helen shook the match out, and as soon as the flame died, the blonde lost her focus. She turned back to the doily.
Then Harry clomped back into the room. "This place is ridiculous! Look at this!" He marched over to one of the windows. "There’s a million weak spots up here." He tugged on one of the boards, which did indeed give some under his grasp.
Then he spotted Helen’s cigarette and hustled over to her side. "Give me one of those." He yanked the pack from his wife’s hand — she gave him a dirty look for his rude behavior, then realized that the only witness to it wasn’t exactly paying attention.
Harry glanced at the blonde as he lit his own cigarette, and she relayed, "Her brother was killed."
Harry thought about that for a moment, then nodded as though to say, Sure he was, whatever. All that was missing was a shrug.
Helen looked away from her callous husband.
Then he sighed and was off again, pacing around the room. "And they talk about these windows. I can’t see a damn thing!" He turned back toward Helen, still pleading his case. "There could be fifteen million of those things out there. That’s how much good these windows are."
Then Harry was pacing, pacing and smoking. He was behind her, mostly, so she couldn’t see him, but she could feel him. Finally, she snapped, "Why don’t you do something to help somebody?!"
Harry ignored her, but she knew damn well he’d heard her.
Then Tom and the other man — "Ben," she thought Tom had called him — appeared, carrying a large, old television set into the room.
"I have it," Ben told Tom. "Drag a couple of those chairs together."
Tom hurried to do so, excited — Helen noticed that even the blonde sat up and paid attention. Tom grabbed two chairs, then said, "There’s a socket over here," and placed them opposite the sofa.
Grunting from exertion, Ben lowered the television into place and reached behind it to plug it in.
Harry moved around until he was near the sofa. Out of nowhere, he bent over the blonde woman and said, "Now you’d better watch this, and try to understand what’s going on."
Ben straightened up behind the television and gave Harry a dark look.
Harry threw his arms into the air; half-exasperation, half-I wasn’t doin’ nothin’! "I don’t want anyone’s life on my hands."
Embarrassed, Helen aske
d, "Is there anything I can do to hel—"
But Harry’s attitude had already set Ben off. He stood, fuming, and pointed at Harry. "I don’t want to hear any more from you, mister. If you stay up here, you take orders from me! And that includes leaving the girl alone!"
Then Tom drew all of their attention to the television. "It’s on. It’s on!"
"There’s no sound," Harry pointed out in typical Harry-fashion.
Tom turned more of the old-style dials.
"Play with the rabbit ears," Harry instructed.
Ben stepped around and touched them, and after a few short bursts, the sound synced up to the image.
Not that there was much to see. The anchorman — no one famous or familiar, just a bespeckled talking-head who had been available at the time everything went to hell — sat reading copy as other employees bustled around in the background and machines rattled away noisier than usual.
"... incredible as they seem," the anchorman was saying, "are not the results of mass hysteria."
" ‘Mass hysteria’," Harry scoffed. "What, do they think we’re imagining all this?!"
"Shut up!" Ben shouted, and Helen grew keenly aware of the rifle in the man’s hands; not that she could blame him for his frustration with Harry — she wanted to tape his big mouth shut, too!
Ben pulled a chair around to the front side of the television, and then everyone in the room settled in and fell silent.
"The wave of murder which is sweeping the eastern third of the nation," the anchorman told them, "is being committed by creatures who feast upon the flesh of their victims. First eyewitness accounts of this grisly development came from people who were understandably frightened and almost incoherent. Officials, and newsmen, at first discounted those eyewitness description as being beyond belief. However, reports persisted. Medical examinations of some of the victims bore out the fact that they had been partially devoured."
Helen looked at Harry. She thought of that bitch taking a bite out of their little girl’s arm. If they hadn’t gotten away ... she shuddered to think about it.
But none of them said anything; they huddled closer to the television.
"I think we have some late word, now just arriving, and ..." the anchorman leaned back to take some sheets of paper from one of his colleagues, "... I interrupt to bring this to you." The anchorman read the top sheet, pausing before he continued, "This is the latest disclosure in a report from National Civil Defense headquarters in Washington. It has been established that persons who have recently died ... have been returning to life, and committing acts of murder. Wide-spread investigation of reports from funeral homes, morgues, and hospitals, has concluded that the unburied dead are coming back to life, and seeking human victims."
A deep chill ran through them all. Each of them, even Barbra in her inhibited way, thought about what they had experienced this night — Barbra, the man in the cemetery; Ben, Beekman’s Diner; Tom, the lake; the Coopers, their assault on the road — and it finally made sense.
Except that it didn’t make "sense" at all, not in any way! They were under siege by the living dead? Their collective perception of reality was being blown to bits by silent, staggering bombs, the fallout leaving them speechless.
And yet ... hadn’t each of them, especially Ben, already considered this possibility, however impossible, far back in the depths of their minds? The way these things moved, the way they looked, the way they smelled, that empty, inhuman hunger in their eyes — and don’t forget how difficult it was to stop them, how one of them kept coming even after being shot through the heart!
None of them had voiced these suspicions before, not even to themselves, and they said nothing to each other now, did not even exchange looks of disbelief. They just ... listened.
The anchorman had paused again, looking uncomfortable — almost embarrassed. "It’s hard for us here to ... believe what we’re reporting to you, but it does seem to be a fact." He fell silent once more, then took a deep, steadying breath and continued, "When this emergency first began, radio and television were advising people to stay inside, behind locked doors, for safety. That situation has now changed — we’re able to report a definite course of action. Civil defense machinery has been organized to provide rescue stations with food, shelter, medical treatment, and protection by armed National Guardsmen."
At this, text appeared at the bottom of the screen: Youngstown — Township Municipal Hospital
"Stay tuned to the broadcasting stations in your local area for this list of rescue stations. This list will be repeated throughout our news coverage."
More text: Sharon — Central Fire Department
"Look for the name of the rescue station nearest you, and make your way to that location as soon as possible..."
Ben, having finally regained his speech, turned to the group. "So we have that truck; if we can get some gas, we can get out of here."
Tom said, "There’s a pump out by the shed!"
"I know," Ben said in frustration, "that’s why I pulled in here. But it’s locked."
The text at the bottom of the screen now read: Mercer — Municipal Building And it continued to change as the news marched on.
The anchorman continued, "... called this afternoon by the President. Since convening, this conference of the Presidential Cabinet, the FBI, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the CIA, has not produced any public information.
"Why are space experts being consulted about an Earthbound emergency?"
Now the group did exchange glances. Space experts? Ben vaguely recalled that NASA had been mentioned on the radio earlier, but he had been so focused on boarding up the house, he had tuned most of it out by that point.
"So far, all the betting on the answer to that question centers on the recent explorer satellite shot to Venus. That satellite, you’ll recall, started back to Earth but never got here — as the space vehicle which orbited Venus and then was purposely destroyed by NASA, when scientists discovered it was carrying a mysterious, high-level radiation with it.
"Could that radiation be somehow responsible for the wholesale murders we’re now suffering?"
I doubt that, Ben mused. He was no expert, but he knew enough from teaching the odd science class that, whatever the source, hard radiation would destroy flesh before doing anything so bizarre as to reanimate it. It was a ludicrous theory.
Have you got a better one, smartass?
No. He didn’t.
Ben suddenly realized that Cooper had risen from the sofa and was now hovering just over his shoulder. He latched onto his irritation, as it was something familiar and known, and had nothing to do with the dead attacking the living. He said, "It’s obvious our best move is to try to get out of here."
Cooper returned, "How are you gonna get over to that pump?"
Before Ben could answer, Tom blurted, "Look!"
On the television, the image had cut from the newsroom to the field, where a group of reporters were hustling after some high-ranking military officer, accompanied by two men in suits, as he strode down the sidewalk. Both the radio and television had reiterated "Washington" more than once, but this footage appeared to be taking place in daylight, so Ben assumed that it was being shot somewhere on the west coast — perhaps Washington State?
One reporter got in closer than the others. He asked, "You’re coming from a meeting regarding the explosion of the Venus probe, is that right?"
The officer gave the grudging answer, "Uh, yes ... yes, that was the, uh, subject of the meeting."
"Do you feel there is a connection between this and the—"
The officer started to answer in the negative, but one of the suits with him, a balding, bearded man, answered, "There’s a definite connection. A definite connection." This earned him a hostile look from the military man.
The reporter pushed, "In other words, you feel that the radiation on the Venus probe is enough to cause these mutations?"
"There was a very high degree of radiation—"
&n
bsp; The officer broke back in, though he sounded no more confident than before. "Just a minute. Uh, I’m not sure that that’s certain at all. I don’t think that has been, uh..."
Now the other suit, a shorter man in an overcoat, spoke. The reporter had to redirect his microphone, so all that really came through was, "... explanation that we have at this time."
The officer now gave that man an exasperated look — regardless of his rank, he did not appear to be in command here, and it clearly frustrated him.
From the reporter, "In other words, it is the military’s viewpoint that the radiation is not the cause of the mutation?"
Trapped, the officer stopped walking and replied, "I can’t speak for the entire military at this time, gentlemen."
Night of the Living Dead Page 12