Zombies: Shambling Through the Ages

by Неизвестный

  By that time, Sophie Kilpatrick was deader’n a doornail.

  We stopped outside the jagged edge of what had been her north wall and stared at her just lying there amid the wreckage. Her bed was smashed flat, the legs broken; the dresser and rocker were in pieces, all the crockery in fragments. In the midst of it, still wearing her white nightgown and bonnet, was Sophie, her arms and legs spread like a starfish, her mouth open like a bass, her goggling eyes staring straight up at Heaven in the most accusing sort of way.

  We exchanged a look and crept inside.

  “She looks dead,” he said.

  “Of course she’s dead, Pat; a comet done just fell on her.”

  The fire was out but there was still a bit of green glow coming off her and we crept closer still.

  “What in tarnation is that?”

  “Dunno,” I said. There were bits and pieces of green rock scattered around her, and they glowed like they had a light inside. Kind of pulsed in a way, like a slow heartbeat. Sophie was dusted with glowing green powder. It was on her gown and her hands and her face. A little piece of the rock pulsed inside her mouth, like she’d gasped it in as it all happened.

  “What’s that green stuff?”

  “Must be that comet they been talking about in the papers. Biela’s Comet, they been calling it.”

  “Why’d it fall on Sophie?”

  “Well, Paddy, I don’t think it meant to.”

  He grunted as he stared down at her. The green pulsing of the rock made it seem like she was breathing, and a couple of times he bent close to make sure.

  “Damn,” he said after he checked the third time, “I didn’t think she’d ever die. Didn’t think she could!”

  “God kills everything,” I said, quoting one of Father Callahan’s cheerier observations. “Shame it didn’t fall on Mean-Dog Mulligan.”

  “Yeah, but I thought Sophie was too damn ornery to die. Besides, I always figured the Devil’d do anything he could to keep her alive.”

  I looked at him. “Why’s that?”

  “He wouldn’t want the competition. You know she ain’t going to Heaven, and down in Hell . . . well, she’ll be bossing around old Scratch and his demons before her body is even cold in the grave. Ain’t nobody could be as persistently disagreeable as Aunt Sophie.”

  “Amen to that,” I said, and sucked some whiskey out of my sleeve. Paddy noticed what I was doing and asked for a taste. I held my arm out to him. “So . . . what do you think we should do?”

  Pat looked around. The fire was out, but the house was a ruin. “We can’t leave her out here.”

  “We can call the constable,” I suggested. “Except that we both smell like whiskey.”

  “I think we should take her up to the house, Peg.”

  I stared at him. “To the house? She weighs nigh on half a ton.”

  “She can’t be more than three hundred-weight. Catherine will kill me if I leave her out here to get gnawed on by every creature in the woods. She always says I was too hard on Sophie, too mean to her. She sees me bringing Sophie’s body home, sees how I cared enough to do that for her only living aunt, then she’ll think better of me.”

  “Oh, man . . . ” I complained, but Pat was adamant. Besides, when he was in his cups, Paddy complained that Catherine was not being very “wifely” lately. I think he was hoping that this would somehow charm him back onto Catherine’s side of the bed. Mind you, Paddy was as drunk as a lord, so this made sense to him, and I was damn near pickled, so it more or less made sense to me, too. Father Callahan could have gotten a month’s worth of hellfire sermons on the dangers of hard liquor out of the way Pat and I handled this affair. Of course, Father Callahan’s dead now, so there’s that.

  Anyway, we wound up doing as Pat said and we near busted our guts picking up Sophie and slumping her onto a wheelbarrow. We dusted off the green stuff as best we could, but we forgot about the piece in her mouth and the action of dumping her on the ’barrow must have made that glowing green chunk slide right down her gullet. If we’d been a lot less drunk we’d have wondered about that, because on some level I was pretty sure I heard her swallow that chunk, but since she was dead and we were grunting and cursing trying to lift her, and it couldn’t be real anyway, I didn’t comment on it. All I did once she was loaded was peer at her for a second to see if that great big bosom of hers was rising and falling—which it wasn’t—and then I took another suck on my sleeve.

  It took nearly two hours to haul her fat ass up the hill and through the streets and down to Paddy’s little place on DeKoven Street. All the time I found myself looking queer at Sophie. I hadn’t liked that sound, that gulping sound, even if I wasn’t sober or ballsy enough to say anything to Pat. It made me wonder, though, about that glowing green piece of comet. What the hell was that stuff, and where’d it come from? It weren’t nothing normal, that’s for sure.

  We stood out in the street for a bit with Paddy just staring at his own front door, mopping sweat from his face, careful of the bruises from Mean-Dog. “I can’t bring her in like this,” he said, “it wouldn’t be right.”

  “Let’s put her in the cowshed,” I suggested. “Lay her out on the straw and then we can fetch the doctor. Let him pronounce her dead all legal-like.”

  For some reason that sounded sensible to both of us, so that’s what we did. Neither of us could bear to try and lift her again, so we tipped over the ’barrow and let her tumble out.

  “Ooof!” she said.

  “Excuse me,” Pat said, and then we both froze.

  He looked at me, and I looked at him, and we both looked at Aunt Sophie. My throat was suddenly as dry as an empty shot glass.

  Paddy’s face looked like he’d seen a ghost, and we were both wondering if that’s what we’d just seen, in fact. We crouched over her, me still holding the arms of the ’barrow, him holding one of Sophie’s wrists.

  “Tell me if you feel a pulse, Paddy my lad,” I whispered.

  “Not a single thump,” he said.

  “Then did you hear her say ‘ooof’ or some suchlike?”

  “I’d be lying if I said I didn’t.”

  “Lying’s not always a sin,” I observed.

  He dropped her wrist, then looked at the pale green dust on his hands—the glow had faded—and wiped his palms on his coveralls.

  “Is she dead or isn’t she?” I asked.

  He bent, and with great reluctance pressed his ear to her chest. He listened for a long time. “There’s no ghost of a heartbeat,” he said.

  “Be using a different word now, will ya?”

  Pat nodded. “There’s no heartbeat. No breath, nothing.”

  “Then she’s dead?”

  “Aye.”

  “But she made a sound.”

  Pat straightened, then snapped his fingers. “It’s the death rattle,” he said. “Sure and that’s it. The dead exhaling a last breath.”

  “She’s been dead these two hours and more. What’s she been waiting for?”

  He thought about that. “It was the stone. The green stone—it lodged in her throat and blocked the air. We must have dislodged it when we dumped her out, and that last breath came out. Just late, is all.”

  I was beginning to sober up and that didn’t have the ring of logic it would have had an hour ago.

  We stood over her for another five minutes, but Aunt Sophie just lay there, dead as can be.

  “I got to go tell Catherine,” Pat said eventually. “She’s going to be in a state. You’d better scram. She’ll know what we’ve been about.”

  “She’ll know anyway. You smell as bad as I do.”

  “But Sophie smells worse,” he said, and that was the truth of it.

  So I scampered and he went in to break his wife’s heart. I wasn’t halfway down the street before I heard her scream.

  I didn’t come back until Thursday, and as I came up the street smoking my pipe, Paddy came rushing around the side of the house. I swear he was wearing the same overalls and look
ed like he hadn’t washed or anything. The bruises had faded to the color of a rotten eggplant, but his lip was less swollen. He grabbed me by the wrist and fair wrenched my arm out dragging me back to the shed, but before he opened the door, he stopped and looked me square in the eye.

  “You got to promise me to keep a secret, Pegleg.”

  “I always keep your secrets,” I lied, and he knew I was lying.

  “No, you have to really keep this one. Swear by the baby Jesus.”

  Paddy was borderline religious, so asking me to swear by anything holy was a big thing for him. The only other time he’d done it was right before he showed me the whiskey still.

  “Okay, Paddy, I swear by the baby Jesus and His Holy Mother, too.”

  He stared at me for a moment before nodding; then he turned and looked up and down the alley as if all the world was leaning out to hear whatever Patrick O’Leary had to say. All I saw was a cat sitting on a stack of building bricks, distractedly licking his bollocks. In a big whisper, Paddy said, “Something’s happened to Sophie.”

  I blinked at him a few times. “Of course something’s happened to her, you daft bugger; a comet fell on her head and killed her.”

  He was shaking his head before I was even finished. “No . . . since then.”

  That’s not a great way to ease into a conversation about the dead. “What?”

  He fished a key out of his pocket, which is when I noticed the shiny new chain and padlock on the cowshed door. It must have cost Pat a week’s worth of whiskey sales to buy that thing.

  “Did Mean-Dog pay us now?”

  Pat snorted. “He’d as soon kick me as pay us a penny of what he owes.”

  I nodded at the chain. “You afraid someone’s going to steal her body?”

  He gave me the funniest look. “I’m not afraid of anybody breaking in.”

  Which is another of those things that don’t sound good when someone says it before entering a room with a dead body in it.

  He unlocked the lock; then he reached down to where his shillelagh leaned against the frame. It was made from a whopping great piece of oak root, all twisted and polished, the handle wrapped with leather.

  “What’s going on now, Paddy?” I asked, starting to back away, and remembering a dozen other things that needed doing. Like running and hiding and getting drunk.

  “I think it was that green stuff from the comet,” Paddy whispered as he slowly pushed open the door. “It did something to her. Something unnatural.”

  “Everything about Sophie was unnatural,” I reminded him.

  The door swung inward with a creak and the light of day shone into the cowshed. It was ten feet wide by twenty feet deep, with a wooden rail, a manger, stalls for two cows—though Paddy only owned just the one. The scrawny milk cow Catherine doted on was lying on her side in the middle of the floor.

  I mean to say what was left of her was lying on the floor. I tried to scream, but all that came out of my whiskey-raw throat was a crooked little screech.

  The cow had been torn to pieces. Blood and gobs of meat littered the floor, and there were more splashes of blood on the wall. And right there in the middle of all that muck, sitting like the queen of all damnation, was Aunt Sophie. Her fat face and throat were covered with blood. Her cotton gown was torn and streaked with cow shit and gore. Flies buzzed around her and crawled on her face.

  Aunt Sophie was gnawing on what looked like half a cow liver, and when the sunlight fell across her from the open door, she raised her head and looked right at us. Her skin was as gray-pale as the maggots that wriggled through little rips in her skin, but it was her eyes that took all the starch out of my knees. They were dry and milky, but the pupils glowed an unnatural green, just like the piece of comet that had slid down her gullet.

  “Oh . . . lordy-lordy-save a sinner!” I heard someone say in an old woman’s voice, and then realized that it was I speaking.

  Aunt Sophie lunged at us. All of sudden she went from sitting there like a fat dead slob eating Paddy’s cow to coming at us like a charging bull. I shrieked. I’m not proud; I’ll admit it.

  If it hadn’t been for the length of chain Paddy had wound around her waist she’d have had me, too, ’cause I could no more move from where I was frozen than I could make leprechauns fly out of my bottom. Sophie’s lunge was jerked to a stop with her yellow teeth not a foot from my throat.

  Paddy stepped past me and raised the club. If Sophie saw it, or cared, she didn’t show it.

  “Get back, you fat sow!” he yelled, and took to thumping her about the face and shoulders, which did no noticeable good.

  “Paddy, my dear,” I croaked, “I think I’ve soiled myself.”

  Paddy stepped back, his face running sweat. “No, that’s her you smell. It’s too hot in this shed. She’s coming up ripe.” He pulled me farther back and we watched as Sophie snapped the air in our direction for a whole minute, then she lost interest and went back to gnawing on the cow.

  “What’s happened to her?”

  “She’s dead,” he said.

  “She can’t be. I’ve seen dead folks before, lad, and she’s a bit too spry.”

  He shook his head. “I checked and I checked. I even stuck her with the pitchfork. Just experimental-like, and I got them tines all the way in, but she didn’t bleed.”

  “But . . . but . . . ”

  “Catherine came out here, too. Before Sophie woke back up, I mean. She took it hard and didn’t want to hear about comets or nothing like that. She thinks we poisoned her with our whiskey.”

  “It’s strong, I’ll admit, but it’s more likely to kill a person than make the dead wake back up again.”

  “I told her that and she commenced to hit me, and she hits as hard as Mean-Dog. She had a good handful of my hair and was swatting me a good un when Sophie just woke up.”

  “How’d Catherine take that?”

  “Well, she took it poorly, the lass. At first she tried to comfort Sophie, but when the old bitch tried to bite her Catherine seemed to cool a bit toward her aunt. It wasn’t until after Sophie tore the throat out of the cow that Catherine seemed to question whether Sophie was really her aunt or more of an old acquaintance of the family.”

  “What’d she say?”

  “It’s not what she said so much as it was her hitting Sophie in the back of the head with a shovel.”

  “That’ll do ’er.”

  “It dropped Sophie for a while and I hustled out and bought some chain and locks. By the time I came back, Catherine was in a complete state. Sophie kept waking up, you see, and she had to clout her a fair few times to keep her tractable.”

  “So where’s the missus now?”

  “Abed. Seems she’s discovered the medicinal qualities of our whiskey.”

  “I’ve been saying it for years.”

  He nodded and we stood there, watching Sophie eat the cow.

  “So, Paddy, me old mate,” I said softly, “what do you think we should do?”

  “With Sophie?”

  “Aye.”

  Paddy’s bruised faced took on the one expression I would have thought impossible under the circumstances. He smiled. A great big smile that was every bit as hungry and nasty as Aunt Sophie.

  It took three days of sweet talk and charm, of sweat-soaked promises and cajoling, but we finally got him to come to Paddy’s cowshed. And then there he was, the Mean-Dog himself, all six-and-a-half feet of him, flanked by Killer Muldoon and Razor Riley, the three of them standing in Paddy’s yard late on Sunday afternoon.

  My head was ringing from a courtesy smacking Mean-Dog had given me when I’d come to his office, and Pat’s lips were puffed out again, but Paddy was still smiling.

  “So, lads,” Mean-Dog said quietly, “tell me again why I’m here in a yard that smells of pigshit instead of at home drinking a beer.”

  “Cowshit,” Paddy corrected him, and got a clout for it.

  “We have a new business partner, Mr. Mulligan,” I said. “And she
told us that we can’t provide no more whiskey until you and she settle accounts.”

  “She? You’re working with a woman?” His voice was filled with contempt. “Who’s this woman, then? Sounds like she has more mouth than she can use.”

  “You might be saying that,” Pat agreed softly. “It’s my Aunt Sophie.”

  I have to admit, that did give even Mean-Dog a moment’s pause. There are Cherokee war parties that would go twenty miles out of their way not to cross Sophie. And that was before the comet.

  “Sophie Kilpatrick, eh?” He looked at his two bruisers. Neither of them knew her and they weren’t impressed. “Where is she?”

  “In the cowshed,” Pat said. “She said she wanted to meet somewhere quiet.”

  “Shrewd,” Mean-Dog agreed, but he was still uncertain. “Lads, go in and ask Miss Sophie to come out.”

  The two goons shrugged and went into the shed as I inched my way toward the side alley. Pat held his ground and I don’t know whether it was all the clouting ’round the head he’d been getting, or the latest batch of whiskey, or maybe he’d just reached the bottom of his own cup and couldn’t take no more from anyone, but Paddy O’Leary stood there grinning at Mean-Dog as the two big men opened the shed door and went in.

  Pat hadn’t left a light on in there and it was a cloudy day. The goons had to feel their way in the dark. When they commenced screaming, I figured they’d found their way to Sophie. This was Sunday by now, and the cow was long gone. Sophie was feeling a mite peckish.

  Mean-Dog jumped back from the doorway and dragged out his pistol with one hand and took a handful of Pat’s shirt with the other. “What the hell’s happening? Who’s in there?”

  “Just Aunt Sophie,” Paddy said, and actually held his hand to God as he said it.

  Mean-Dog shoved him aside and kicked open the door. That was his first mistake, because Razor Riley’s head smacked him right in the face. Mean-Dog staggered back and then stood there in dumb shock as his leg-breaker’s head bounced to the ground right at his feet. Riley’s face wore an expression of profound shock.

  “What?” Mean-Dog asked, as if anything Pat or I could say would be an adequate answer to that.