Nights of the Living Dead

by Jonathan Maberry

  So that’s what we did—me, John, Tiny, Phil, and Marko. We went in disguise. Later, if the witnesses described us, they would have said the four perpetrators were two superheroes, an alien, and a clown. Tiny stayed out in the car, so he didn’t wear a costume. We walked up to the registration area, displayed our guns (which the other attendees had mistaken for props), and took all the cash. The girls behind the counter—their nametags read KAREN and ALICIA—seemed to have trouble believing it was happening. Karen kept saying, over and over, “But this is a comic book convention.”

  We got a nice haul, and we didn’t have to kill anybody.

  The killing began soon after, and we weren’t the ones who started it.

  I’m not a bad guy. Well, okay, maybe I’m a bad guy, but I’m not a bad man. I’ve got a wife and kid—Cherie and Pete Junior. He’s only two years old, and folks say he looks like me, but I don’t think that’s true. He’s got his mother’s same big, beautiful brown eyes. You do what you have to do to provide for your family. Some people go to work at the Harley-Davidson plant. Some work at the paper mill. Others go to an office or some sales job to feed their family. Me? I’m a stickup man. I’ve never hurt anybody. I’m not some shithead mugger, robbing people of whatever’s in their wallet. I’ve only ever stolen from big places—the type of joints that have insurance to financially protect against people like me.

  I miss Cherie and Pete Junior. I hope they’re okay. I hope things are different where they are … but then I go upstairs and look out the window at all those dead people, and that hope fizzles.

  Anyway, robbing the convention was smooth and easy. Things didn’t start falling apart until we got outside. We heard police sirens, and I remember thinking it sounded like they were racing in different directions, rather than converging on our location. We heard some ambulance sirens, too. Yes, they sound different. Folks like you probably can’t tell the difference, but in my line of work, I need to.

  Thinking back on it now, the cops never did roll up on us. That wasn’t the problem I mentioned. No. What went wrong was Tiny. We’d been so intent on planning and surveillance and mapping getaway routes, we hadn’t bothered to make sure Tiny checked the car. That was his job. His one fucking job. Get us a car with valid tags, registration, and inspection sticker. Make sure the headlights and brake lights worked. Make sure there was absolutely nothing about the car that could get us pulled over by some cop out to make his ticket quota. And Tiny did all of those things, and did them well, because we’d told him to. It never occurred to us we’d have to remind Tiny to gas up the fucking fuel tank as well.

  We ran out of gas four blocks away from the Holiday Inn where the convention was taking place, near the outskirts of town. There was lots of cursing and name calling and threats, but in the end, we just sort of accepted our situation with grim resignation. Marko tried to carjack a passing station wagon, but the driver merely gaped at the sight of a clown waving a gun at him, swerved around Marko, and sped away.

  John shouldered the backpack with the money and led us down an alley and along some railroad tracks. He cursed Tiny a few more times. Phil echoed him, punctuating John’s swearing with some profanity of his own. Marko cursed the driver of the station wagon. I stayed quiet, figuring I’d save my breath in case we had to run. Tiny stayed quiet, too, but I think that’s because he was embarrassed and frustrated with himself and trying very hard not to cry in front of us.

  We heard more sirens, and at one point, somebody shrieked, but the sound was far away, and had nothing to do with us. More troublesome were the occasional gunshots, echoing from different directions.

  “The fuck is going on?” Phil muttered. “That can’t be for us.”

  “Maybe we’re at war,” Tiny suggested.

  We reached an abandoned factory—something that’s as common in Pennsylvania as trees or convenience stores—and ditched our costumes. I was grateful to take off the mask. My face was covered in sweat and my glasses kept fogging up while I’d worn it. The area around the factory smelled rancid. I assumed that there must be a dead animal nearby, maybe down on the train tracks. I didn’t bring it up with the others, but I noticed Tiny and Phil cringing at the stench. We dropped our disguises into an old fifty-five-gallon drum of waste oil, and debated what to do next.

  That was when we saw the first dead guy.

  A chain-link fence rattled to our left. We all turned. The fence surrounded the factory’s parking lot. The asphalt was cracked and pitted, and limp brown weeds thrust up from the fissures. The fence itself was rusty and sagged in some places. The dead guy slumped against it.

  How did we know he was dead?

  Well, the best indicator was the fact that his fucking throat had been slit from ear to ear. Blood caked the guy’s shirt and pants. The wound wasn’t clean and neat. Not the kind of cut a razor would make. This looked more like somebody had been at him with a hacksaw. The cut looked kind of like a smiley face, as if he had a second mouth beneath his chin, and was grinning at us with it. I’d heard rumors that the cartels were moving into our area, and wondered briefly if it was related to that. But then I focused on the more important matter at hand—namely, how the hell the guy was up and walking around, despite his condition.

  He stared at us, unblinking. I think his eyes were more unnerving than his injury. It was his eyes that cemented it for me. This guy was dead. Nothing living has eyes like that. Except for maybe a shark.

  The fence rattled again as he lurched toward us on wobbly legs. His movements were disjointed. He opened his mouth but no sound came out. I saw something move deep inside his wound. Vocal cords, maybe? I don’t know. It bothers me just to think about it.

  Surprisingly, we didn’t run. I don’t know why. I can’t speak for the others, but in my case, it just didn’t occur to me. I stood there, staring at him the way you slow down to gawk at a car crash, until he was almost upon us. I don’t even remember feeling afraid or in danger. Instead, I was noticing things about him—how he smelled (it had been him, rather than a dead animal, that I’d noticed upon our arrival), the color and texture of his skin (like light gray cheesecloth), but mostly those eyes. He was dead, but there was still emotion in them.

  Hunger.

  Phil pulled his pistol while the rest of us stood gaping.

  “Don’t come any closer, asshole,” he warned.

  The dead guy’s mouth worked pitifully, lips mashing together, but still no sound came out.

  “I mean it,” Phil said, stepping closer.

  When the dead guy didn’t stop, Phil strode up to him and shoved the barrel of his pistol against the man’s chest. The dead guy lunged, wrapping his arms around Phil’s neck. Shouting, Phil squeezed his trigger. The shot was muffled by the dead man’s body. Then Phil fired two more rounds. The dead guy stumbled and jittered as the bullets tore through him. For a second, I thought he’d lose his grip on Phil, but instead, his head darted forward, and he clamped his teeth down on Phil’s neck.

  Phil screamed. Then the rest of us joined him.

  The dead man jerked his head back. A piece of Phil’s skin dangled from his mouth. Blood bubbled from the wound, and then sprayed, as if someone had turned on a garden hose inside of Phil. Still shrieking, Phil dropped his gun and beat at his attacker. The dead man chewed his prize and stumbled backward. He grasped at Phil, those dead eyes focused in on the pumping blood. Phil dropped to his knees, hands clasping his wound, trying desperately to staunch the blood flow. He opened his mouth to plead with us and blood bubbled out.

  John and Marko opened fire, drilling the dead man. This time, the shots weren’t muffled. My ears rang from the sound. Empty shell casings pinged on the dirt and asphalt. The dead guy twitched and stumbled, but then plodded forward again, reaching for Phil. He didn’t stop until one of them shot him in the head. Then he dropped, as if a switch had been turned off.

  I ran over to Phil and knelt beside him, searching for a pulse, while Marko prodded the attacker with the toe of his shoe. I
felt a hand on my shoulder and almost screamed again, but then I realized it was John, crouching down behind me.

  “Is he…?”

  “I don’t know. It’s hard to feel anything beneath all this blood.”

  John clutched Phil’s wrist and checked for a pulse there, while I slid my fingers along the uninjured side of his throat.

  “Nothing,” he reported.

  I shook my head.

  “We gotta do that CPR shit,” Tiny urged. “Maybe we can keep him alive long enough to get him to a hospital.”

  John stuffed his gun into his waistband, then hissed because the barrel was still hot. He jerked it out again.

  “We gotta do something,” Tiny repeated.

  “He’s dead, Tiny,” I said. “Nothing we can do.”

  “We need to get out of here,” John said. “I guarantee somebody heard all that shooting.”

  Marko nodded. “Let’s jet.”

  He and John headed for the train tracks. I hesitated, cast one glance back at Phil’s corpse, and then trotted off after them.

  “Come on, Tiny,” I said. “They’re right. Only thing we can do for Phil now is to not get caught.”

  We had just started down the embankment when Phil got up again. He groaned and shook, and moved like a toddler just learning to walk. For a moment, I wondered if we’d been wrong—maybe he hadn’t been dead. But then I noticed two things. His wound had stopped bleeding. And his eyes …

  This time, it was me who pulled his gun first. Taking a lesson from what had finally dropped the first living dead man, I aimed for Phil’s head. The first bullet tore out what was left of his throat. He stumbled forward, moaning. My second shot hit him above the left eye. Part of his brains splattered out behind him, steaming on the asphalt. And with that, Phil died again.

  Then we ran, following the railroad tracks into the woods.

  * * *

  By the time we stumbled across this house, we’d picked up quite a following of dead people. They loped along behind us, slowly rotting with each step, shedding body parts and organs as easily as you or I shed our clothes. Luckily, they couldn’t run, so we were able to stay ahead of them. The only thing we couldn’t outrun was their stench. Not all of them stank, mind you. At least, not the fresh ones. But the ones who had apparently been dead for a few days? They were like walking roadkill. It didn’t help matters that it was the height of summer. The heat and humidity only added to the reek. With no breeze blowing, the stink sort of sat in the air like a mist.

  Just as it had with Phil and his attacker, the only thing that seemed to work against the dead was damage to their brains. We saw corpses missing arms and legs, disemboweled, or suffering horrific injuries, but they kept on coming. At first, we wasted a lot of bullets trying to pick off our pursuers. Shooting someone in the head, from a distance and with a pistol, looks easy on television, but it’s much harder in real life. Worse, the gunshots attracted more of the fuckers. Eventually, we just focused on evading them.

  I won’t spend time describing the house. If you’re reading this, then you already know what it looks like. Just another crumbling farmhouse, abandoned out in the middle of the woods, like so many other rural properties in this part of the country. Unlike that collapsed chicken coop outside, or the barn that’s leaning heavily to one side, the house was in surprisingly good shape. No broken windows or holes in the roof. We thought it might be occupied, since the doors were unlocked, but once we got inside and saw the dust and cobwebs for ourselves, we knew it had been a long time since anyone lived here.

  We swept old, musty books onto the floor and shoved the dust-laden shelves in front of the windows, and pushed a moldering couch against the front door (after locking the dead bolt). We blocked the kitchen door with the refrigerator, and then barricaded all the other windows on the first floor. Then, for the first time since entering the comic book convention, we had a moment to breathe and collect ourselves. Eventually, the dead found us. We didn’t have to see them to know they had arrived. Their smell and sounds gave them away.

  Those first few hours were nerve-wracking. Groaning and hissing, the corpses banged on the walls and windows and fumbled at the door, but our fortifications held. After a while, we relaxed enough to explore the rest of the house. Tiny was sent to guard the back door and Marko stood watch in the living room, while John and I took inventory. The electricity was out, but there was plenty of canned food and dry goods in the cupboard, and we found six cases of bottled spring water downstairs, along with two cases of soda. We wouldn’t starve right away, and as long as we conserved, we could make the water last a bit.

  Oddly, the previous tenants had apparently left in a hurry, leaving their belongings behind. Framed family photographs still hung on the walls, and keepsakes and mementos lined shelves and crannies. All of their clothing still hung in the closets, musty and mildewed, but otherwise in decent shape. The food in the refrigerator had long since rotted (as we discovered when moving it to form the barricade), and the dirty dishes left behind in the sink were almost as revolting as the things outside. They’d even left their guns behind. We found a beautiful wooden gun case on the second floor, with ornate glass doors and a storage shelf beneath. Inside were two deer rifles, a shotgun, and a pistol. John took a rifle, and I kept the shotgun, and we gave the other weapons to Tiny and Marko. I won’t lie. Somehow, just holding that shotgun made me feel better about our situation in ways my handgun hadn’t.

  Unfortunately, that feeling didn’t last very long.

  * * *

  Tiny saw the woman first.

  We slept in shifts—two of us on guard downstairs while the other two bedded down upstairs. John and I were on watch, sometime around two in the morning. The dead were still clamoring outside. I’d found a jar of instant coffee in the kitchen, and was just about to stir the crystals into a bottle of water, when Tiny started screaming.

  John and I both ran upstairs. We nearly collided with Marko, emerging from his bedroom bleary-eyed and confused. Tiny was sitting up on the bed, staring at us with wide-eyed panic, babbling nonsensically. When he finally calmed down, he told us that he’d felt somebody sit down on the bed. He even heard the box spring squeak, as if a weight had been placed on it. When he sat up, he saw a depression on the mattress, as if someone were sitting there—but there was nobody else in the room. Then, the springs squeaked again and the depression disappeared. Footsteps sounded slowly across the floor. As Tiny watched, a woman appeared. She opened the door, glanced back at him with what he called “terrible eyes,” and then vanished.

  All three of us chalked it up to a bad dream. Tiny insisted it wasn’t. He said he couldn’t sleep, and offered to switch with me. Tired as I was, I accepted. The guys left my bedroom door open. Marko went back to sleep and John and Tiny headed downstairs. Sighing, I lay down in the bed with my clothes still on. I was so exhausted, I barely remembered to take off my shoes. The pillow, despite its musty odor, felt like heaven.

  Then my bedroom door slammed, hard enough to rattle the hinges, and I bolted upright in bed, instantly awake again. I heard Marko curse on the other side of the wall, and John and Tiny shouting queries from below.

  I didn’t sleep the rest of the night.

  Throughout the next day, we were all presented with evidence that what Tiny had seen was, in fact, not a bad dream. Doors and cupboards opened and closed at random. Footsteps echoed throughout the house. Something knocked repeatedly on the coffee table. The spigots on the kitchen sink turned by themselves. We felt like we were being watched—all the time.

  On the third day, Marko saw the woman, as well. She appeared at the top of the stairs and vanished about halfway down. He looked at the portraits on the wall and pointed to a woman in several of them, insisting that was her. Tiny confirmed it was the same woman he’d seen, too.

  That night, something pushed Marko down the stairs. At least, I’m assuming he was pushed. Marko was a big guy, but despite his formidable size, he was never clumsy. He wa
s on his way to the second floor, intent on looking out the windows and seeing how many dead people were outside. We suspected, judging by their clamor, that reinforcements had arrived, perhaps attracted by the noise from others. I remember watching him ascend. John made some wisecrack, and Marko glanced back at him, his mouth forming a reply, and then wham—he flew backward, feet leaving the stairs, and tumbled to the bottom. Like I said, it looked like he was pushed. Marko was never able to verify for us what happened, because he broke his neck in the fall and was dead by the time we reached him.

  He got back up a few minutes later, moaning just like the rest of those rotten fucks outside. John put him down again. The sound of the gunshot seemed to stir up the dead. None of us slept. We sat huddled together in the living room, desperately trying to come up with a plan.

  By morning, John had decided to go for help. Tiny and I weren’t crazy about the plan. We didn’t like the idea of being left alone in the house with this … well, let’s call it what it is. A ghost. And we definitely didn’t want to open the door, even for a second, and risk letting the hordes inside. But John, just like always, convinced us. He talked us into it, just like he’d talked us into the heist. He even said he’d leave the money from the heist with us.

  The plan was he’d sneak out the front door. Tiny would distract the dead, rattling a window to draw them away from the door. We’d open it only for a second, giving John just enough time to get out. Then we’d bolt it shut again and slide the couch back in place. He figured he could outrun the corpses, and lose them once he got into the woods. Then he’d find help. But, just like it had after the robbery, things quickly went to shit.