“Elmer, I think we oughtta—”
“Shut up and take another look,” Elmer said, cutting off Charlie midsentence.
Charlie did, and let out a startled gasp. Although the strangers were still several hundred yards away, there was no disguising their torn clothing or the suspicious dark stains on their shirts and pants.
“Sonuvawhore.”
“Now you believe me?” Elmer didn’t wait for an answer. “Delbert, tell Roy we’ll try to hold ’em off long’s we can.”
“You want us to run all the way into town?” Delbert asked.
“Yes, and hurry your asses, ’less you want those brain eaters to catch you.”
“What if there’s more in the woods?” Nate asked, his face so pale his freckles stood out like chicken shit on snow.
“Dammit, boy, lookit how slow they are,” Charlie answered. “You kin run faster than them with one leg. Now git!”
The two boys took off down the dirt driveway, already moving at full speed by the time they went past Charlie’s ancient Ford pickup.
“I’ll git the guns.”
“Bring more beer, too,” Elmer said, opening a can. “Once we start shootin’, we ain’t gonna have time to get it.”
“Smart thinkin’.”
“That’s why I’m the brains around here,” Elmer muttered to himself as he watched the zombies, which by then were close enough that he could make out their features.
Of the thirty or so shambling, stumbling corpses that had come out of the woods, all but a handful were covered in blood. Although he couldn’t hear them, Elmer saw their mouths moving, and in his head he heard the gibberish noises the monsters in the movie had made as they shuffled through the streets, searching for human brains. Just like those movie creatures, the zombies in Charlie’s field walked like they were still learning to use their feet. The lumps and bumps in the pasture, hardened by several nights of autumn frost, seemed especially troublesome. Every once in a while one of the corpses would trip and fall, and several leaned on each other for support, like drunken sailors after shore leave.
Covered in dirt, with torn clothing and mussed-up hair, they could be easily pictured digging themselves out of their graves and attacking unsuspecting people in their houses. Elmer wondered how many of his friends were already dead or turned into monsters, and if he’d have to put them down, too.
“Ain’t gonna catch me by surprise,” he said, tossing the empty beer can into the yard, where it joined dozens of its relatives. “No dirty zombie’s gonna eat my brains.”
The screen door slammed open as Charlie shouldered through, his arms filled with an assortment of battered, rusty rifles and shotguns. Boxes of ammunition bulged in his pocket.
“Which one you want?” he asked, dropping the guns between the two rocking chairs.
“Start with the rifles,” Elmer said. “Remember, you gotta hit the head, or else they’s just gonna get up again. We’ll save the shotguns for the close-up work.”
“Gotcha.” Charlie handed over a long-barreled .30–06 rifle.
“Hey, ain’t this my gun?”
“Yeah.” Charlie loaded a clip into a vintage Browning automatic rifle he’d snuck into the States after the Korean War. “You left it here t’other day when we was jackin’ those deer.”
Elmer paused in loading his gun and stared at Charlie. It was no secret the other man had been after Elmer’s Remington since the day he’d seen it in Elmer’s truck back in ’68. In fact, he’d tried to steal it twice before. For a moment, Elmer considered putting a bullet in Charlie’s head.
I could always say he turned into a zombie and I had to do it. Then he remembered the two dozen or so real zombies that by then were halfway across the pasture. He needed Charlie’s help.
I’ll deal with him later. Maybe next time we’re hunting he’ll have one of them “unfortunate” accidents they’s always talkin’ ’bout in the newspapers.
“Lookit their faces.”
Lost in his thoughts, it took Elmer a moment to understand what Charlie was talking about. Then he noticed how pale all the dead people were and he laughed.
“What’d you expect, you moron? They’s dead! Shit, looks like some of ’em is starting to go green already.”
“They’s gettin’ closer.” Charlie was nervously fingering his rifle.
“Yep. I think we got just enough time for ’nother beer before we gotta start shootin’.”
“Holy mutherfucking moly, I fergot the beer!” Charlie set his gun down and hurried back inside.
“I swear,” Elmer called after him, “you’d forget your goddamned ass if wasn’t stuck to your legs.”
Charlie returned with a large bucket piled high with beer cans. “Yeah? Well, I ain’t the one that couldn’t finish fifth grade.”
Pulling the tab on a Falstaff, Elmer glared at his longtime friend. “I coulda finished if I’d wanted to. Jes so happened I had better things to do.”
“Like what? Git drunk with your daddy?” Charlie snorted laughter and beer foam.
“No, mister funny man. I had me some big plans back then. Coulda made me some money, if anyone’d listened.”
“Yeah? Well, now the only thing you can write is your name, and you can’t read worth a shit.”
“Readin’ and writin’ ain’t important. Hell, Einstein couldn’t read or write, you know.”
“Really?”
Elmer gulped down more beer and belched. “Sure as shit. And he’s so famous they put his face on posters now.”
“Damn.”
“That’s right. It’s ideas that’s important, and I got a million of ’em. You stick with me, we’re gonna be rich someday, too.”
“Just like that Einstone fella?”
“Richer.” Elmer pointed at the zombies, who were less than two hundred yards away by then. “You see them fuckers? Think how famous we’re gonna be when people find out we killed ’em all and saved the town. We’re gonna be goddamn heroes. Prob’ly get to meet the president.”
Afraid Charlie might ask him who the current president was, Elmer finished off his beer and tossed the can over the rail, then waved his gun at the zombies.
“Hey, you fuckers! Get ready to taste hot lead!”
To his surprise, several of the zombies reacted, pointing at him and waving their arms.
“Shit,” Charlie said. “They seen us.”
Noises reached them from across the field, garbled sounds and words like when Gladys got the phone lines mixed together and all you heard was static and pieces of different conversations.
“What are they sayin’?” Charlie asked.
“Beats the shit outta me. I don’t speak zombie.” That set them both to laughing. Elmer opened another beer, placed it on the railing, and raised his gun. “You ready?”
Charlie nodded and knelt on the warped planks of the porch, using the railing to support his rifle. “Ready.”
Elmer fired a round and one of the zombies, a fat man in a bloodied suit, went down, his head exploding like a rotten tomato.
“Gotcha, motherfucker!” He could barely hear his own shout over the ringing in his ears from the gun’s explosive report. Another blast sounded, making him jump, and Charlie let out a war cry as a second zombie tumbled over.
“Wahoo! I got one!”
Elmer swallowed a mouthful of beer and then fired again, sending a third zombie to the ground. This time, the others finally reacted. Several of them stopped walking, while others frantically waved their arms back and forth. All of them were making their strange zombie sounds.
“It’s like they’s tryin’ to talk,” Charlie said as he fired again. The bullet caught a tall man in the arm and spun him around. He fell but almost immediately got to his knees and started crawling in the opposite direction.
Elmer threw his empty can at Charlie.
“Ow! What was that for?”
“The head, dummy. I told you, ya gotta hit the head or they don’t die.”
“I’ll g
it him this time.” Charlie fired another shot, and the injured zombie collapsed, red goo spraying from its shattered skull.
Elmer’s next shot went wide, and he cursed. “Now you got me all messed up.”
“Sorry.”
Taking careful aim, Elmer sighted in on a skinny woman wearing tan pants and a matching jacket. Except for the grave dirt on her face and in her hair, and the bloodstains on her shirt, she might’ve been pretty. Even from this far away, he could tell she had nice titties. He pulled the trigger and had time to see a black hole appear in her forehead before she fell.
“Got the bitch that time.”
Charlie dropped another and then paused. “How come I don’t recognize none of them? If they’s coming from the graveyard, shouldn’t we know ’em?”
“You know everybody buried in the graveyard? Besides, how do we know where they came from? Could be from another town, or maybe some kinda secret military base. That’s what happened in the movie I saw.”
“They sure is scared now. Lookit ’em run!”
Elmer fired two more times and a fat zombie lady with a big purse tumbled over. Many of the zombies were moving in different directions. Some had even turned and were heading back to the woods. “Yup. Guess they ain’t all stupid. We better shoot faster, or some might get away. Then they’ll just make more.”
Charlie’s gun went off three times, and two zombies fell. Elmer took two more down, aiming for the ones running away. Only a few were still moving forward, screaming their gibberish as if someone alive could understand it.
The two men paused to reload, and Charlie asked how the zombies make other zombies.
“All they gotta do is bite you,” Elmer said after chugging down another beer. “You get all infected, and then you die. Couple hours later, you wake up again like them.” He pulled the trigger and what had once been a young boy went down, the left side of its skull blown away. A heavyset female zombie went to its knees next to the little one and fell on top of it.
“Damn,” said Charlie. “They even eat their own kind.”
“They’re worse than animals,” Elmer agreed. “How many are left?”
Charlie put his gun down and counted, folding over a finger for each one. “One, two, three, four . . .” When he reached ten, he made a mark on the railing with his fingernail and then opened his hands again. “One, two . . . two plus ten is twelve.”
“They’s almost out of range. We’re gonna have to go after ’em with the truck. Grab the shotguns.” Elmer set his rifle down and picked up the beer bucket.
Two minutes later they were bumping across the pasture, Charlie hootin’ and hollerin’ behind the wheel, Elmer in the pickup’s bed, a double-barreled shotgun loaded with double-aught buckshot under one arm. With his other hand, he was alternately hanging on to the open cab window and drinking a beer.
“Here comes number one!” Charlie shouted, pulling up alongside an old woman who was trying to run in high heels.
Shows how stupid they are, Elmer thought as he dropped his beer and raised the shotgun.
“Pomoshh!” the zombie shouted. Bruises and bloody cuts covered her dead flesh.
Elmer pulled the trigger and the monster’s face disappeared in an explosion of red.
“Wheeha!” Elmer hollered, then had to drop the gun and hang on with both hands as Charlie wheeled the truck around in a long, skidding slide and headed after another. The shotgun went off, blowing a four-inch hole in the rusted side panel of the bed.
“Watch out, you fuckin’ moron!” Elmer pounded on the roof of the truck. “You’re gonna get me kilt.”
“Sorry!”
Elmer reloaded the shotgun, feeling a strong temptation to put a round into the back of Charlie’s head, except that would probably just lead to the truck overturning. With a sigh, he grabbed his beer, which was rolling around and spraying foam all over the bed of the pickup. After sucking down the last remnants, he banged the empty on the roof.
“Pass me another!”
He grabbed the beer from Charlie and then dropped it as the truck approached another corpse, this one a middle-aged man wearing his burial suit.
“Time to die for good, motherfucker!” Elmer brought the shotgun up as Charlie slowed the truck.
“Net pozhalujjsta! Net—”
The rest of the zombie’s garbled words disappeared as heavy buckshot tore its face away, sending skin, bone, and brains across the dark soil. In the cab, Charlie whooped again and threw an empty can at the headless body.
“Head for the trees,” Elmer called out. “We’ll get the furthest ones first and then come back for the others.”
Charlie gave him the thumbs-up and sent the truck bouncing down a row. Elmer opened his beer, laughing as the highly shaken can sprayed foam across the top of the truck and through the back window.
“Watch it!” Charlie let go of the wheel and wiped at his sopping neck with both hands, flinging beer suds everywhere.
“Jesus, look out!” Elmer made a grab for the edge of the truck bed as the old pickup hit a rut and slewed sideways, but it was too late. A second bounce pitched him out of the truck, his gun and beer close behind.
He hit the ground hard enough to knock his breath away, could only watch as bald tires crunched over dead grass and semifrozen soil inches from his legs. Then the truck was past him, skewing wildly from side to side as Charlie fought to get control. Elmer tried to call out, but all his lungs produced was a raspy croak.
“Son of a bitch,” he muttered, each word accompanied by a wheezing noise. He got to his knees and picked up his beer, figuring a cold drink would ease his tight chest.
Movement to one side caught his eye, and he looked up to see a man standing not five feet away.
Not a man! A zombie!
“Huh-huh-huh—” the thing said as it reached toward him with bloody hands.
“Oh, no, you ain’t eatin’ my brain!” Ignoring the rocks and sticks that cut at his palms, Elmer crawled to his gun, thanking the good Lord it hadn’t gone off when it hit the ground. Although it only took a few seconds, he imagined the creature coming up behind him, its bacteria-filled mouth open and ready to bite. When he reached the gun, he didn’t even bother standing, just turned and fired.
The zombie was farther away than he’d expected, but it didn’t matter. The load of buckshot caught it right where the neck and shoulders met and blasted the head clean off the body. It hit the ground and rolled over, ending up facing Elmer. The eyes blinked several times and then went still.
“Goddamn!” Elmer let out a laugh. “Popped him like a cork!”
The roar of an unmuffled engine alerted Elmer to Charlie bringing the truck around.
“I lost the goddamn muffler!” Charlie yelled as he pulled up.
Elmer’s already frayed temper gave out as he realized his old drinking buddy had no idea of what he’d done. Instead of climbing back into the truck, he stuck his shotgun through the window. Charlie cried out as the barrels smashed against the bridge of his nose.
“You dumb fuck!” Elmer shouted. “You almost got me killed! I oughtta blow your drunk-ass head right off’n your shoulders!”
“Hey, I’m sorry!” Charlie held his hands up. “I came back soon’s I saw you were gone.”
It took all of Elmer’s control to stop his finger from tightening on the trigger, especially when he recollected that Charlie’d stolen his favorite hunting rifle. But a quick look at the field showed several more zombies left, and he’d need Charlie to help him kill them all.
Then it’s his turn.
“Never mind. Let’s finish this before they make it back to the woods.”
They managed to put down the rest of the zombies without any further incidents, and by the time they finished, Elmer was sufficiently drunk to reconsider his private vow. After all, he and Charlie had helped themselves to each other’s stuff plenty of times over the years. Including their wives. Besides, good drinking buddies were a lot harder to come by than guns.
“It’s the good stuff,” he said. “My cousin made it just last week.”
“Hell yeah.” Elmer sat down in his rocker. “Now all we gotta do is wait for the sheriff to get here.”
Charlie’s voice barely reached from inside the house. “You think we might get a reward or—gaah!”
The sound of glass breaking accompanied Charlie’s startled shout, but Elmer didn’t pay much attention. Charlie was all thumbs when he was sober; after a dozen or so beers, it’d be surprising if he didn’t drop something. Hopefully, it wasn’t the sour mash.
Then a loud, pain-filled scream cut through the air, and Elmer knew something was wrong.
Very wrong.
After grabbing a shotgun from the pile, he made his way slowly down the narrow, windowless hallway. Something thumped and bumped in the kitchen, and more glass broke. Gun up and ready, Elmer jumped the last few feet, hoping to surprise whoever—or whatever—was in there with Charlie.
Sure enough, one of the zombies was kneeling on the floor, fresh blood on its mouth and hands.
“Shoot it!” Charlie shouted.
Elmer didn’t hesitate. His finger pulled the trigger, sending a load of buckshot into the creature’s head, which blew apart like a watermelon filled with dynamite.
The headless body fell over with a thud, and Elmer turned his attention to Charlie.
“What happened?”
Charlie let out a groan and shook his head. “Goddamn thing got me when my back was turned. It said something in zombie-talk and I hit it with the bottle. Then you came in.”
“Did it bite you?” It was obvious something had happened. A big, red stain covered one shoulder of Charlie’s shirt.
After a brief pause, Charlie shook his head. “Uh, no. It got me with its nails. Like fightin’ a cat. But it didn’t bite me. Tried to, but I held it off.”
Elmer stared at Charlie but the other man wouldn’t meet his eyes. “Uh-huh. That’s good.” Relief showed on Charlie’s face at Elmer’s words, and Elmer knew the truth right then. He’d been friends with Charlie more than long enough to recognize a lie.
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