Best New Zombie [3] - Best New Zombie Tales, Vol. 3 Page 16

  Something heavy hit her, knocking her to the floor. At the same time, a sharp pain exploded between her neck and shoulder. She shoved the end of the bat under the dead woman's head and pushed. The creature fell back, blood and green slime running from its mouth. Sheila looked at her shoulder; a piece of skin the size of her fist was missing.

  The zombie swallowed and leaned in for another bite. Sheila brought the bat up again but the woman was too heavy; despite only having one arm, her extra strength forced the bat down towards Sheila's neck.

  Then the weight was gone.

  Shelia sat up and saw her attacker struggling with someone in an ugly brown jacket.

  John!

  Her husband grabbed the woman's misshapen head with both hands and pulled. The entire thing came free, tearing from the neck in a staccato series of snapping bones. Without pausing, John put his shoulder into the next zombie, an old man in blue pajamas, and knocked him into the teenage zombie. All three of them went down but John rose almost immediately, moving just as fast as she'd seen him do on the racquetball courts for so many years. He grabbed a carving knife from the butcher block and stabbed each of the monsters in the eye. The damaged orbs collapsed inward and stinking yellow fluids gushed out.

  The zombies collapsed. Neither rose.

  Dropping the knife, John turned to her. "Are you all right?"

  She started to answer, but then the room seemed to swim.

  Everything went black.

  ~

  John carried his wife into the living room. He heard the children shouting and pounding at the door, but for now Sheila occupied his thoughts.

  He laid her on the couch and tore her blouse away, exposing the damage done by the zombie's teeth. Blood still oozed from the wound. Staring at it, he found himself wanting to put his mouth to it, to taste the blood, feel the flesh against his teeth, tear her open with----

  No!

  Backing away, he dug pieces of intestine from his pockets and gulped them down. In a moment, the feeling passed and he was able to touch his wife without thinking of her as food.

  Her eyes opened.

  "John?"

  "It's me, honey. I'm here."

  "But you're..."

  He nodded. "I don't remember how it happened. But I'm okay, as long as I..." He stopped, unable to tell her that the only way he could remain human was with a constant supply of human flesh.

  "One of them bit me." Tears welled in her eyes as she said it.

  He held her hand. They both knew what it meant; the only question was how long before she turned.

  "Will I be like them or you?"

  He smiled. "No, I'll make sure you're like me. We'll do what we have to. I won't lose you."

  She started to reply but her eyes closed and her head fell back onto the pillow. He touched her neck. No pulse.

  She'll be hungry when she wakes up. Have to keep the kids safe from her.

  Only one way. Now, before his own hunger came back.

  The monsters don't eat their own kind.

  He went to the cellar door. "Bobby? Stacie? It's me, Dad."

  "Dad?" Their voices, so eager, so innocent.

  It's for the best. After, I'll bring them food.

  Hopefully they'll understand why I had to do it.

  "I'm opening the door. Everything's going to be fine."

  The Way of Things in Fly-Over Country

  AARON POLSON

  The search beams crossed in front of the gate when my buddy Dan----broad and strong like a spit of granite----hunched over on all fours, making a little scaffold out of his back for me to climb. I scrambled over his shoulders, flopped over the gate, and dropped to the ground on the other side. The first over, Davin, was waiting for me with his shotgun poking out into the kill zone. Once I dusted off a bit and straightened my glasses, we waited for the lights to swing by again before tossing Dan the rope; I held the outside end steady while he climbed. Davin kept me covered. I was scared, shaking like chimes in the wind, but Davin held steady.

  Once Dan dropped to the ground I reeled in the rope, and the three of us hunched in the shadow of the big gate while the lights swung by once more. Davin looked at Dan and me, smiled crookedly, and nodded. The lights rotated away and we sprinted for the shadows at the edge of Old Town. I figured the guards probably saw dumb kids like us half the time, but no one ever fired a shot.

  So there we were: seventeen, full of piss and stupidity, creeping through ruined streets on a Friday night with a couple of jars of Uncle Jeb's homemade booze, our guns, and an ache to celebrate Dan's eighteenth birthday. One week later, hopping the fence would land Dan in the stockade---a crime believed to endanger the whole village, but this was coming of age, our ritual. Plenty of other dumb bastards snuck out of the compound before they officially became men; Dad even admitted to sneaking out just before his brother's eighteenth.

  I glanced over my shoulder at the wall: randomly fused sections of steel, brick, concrete, and stone. Originally a desperate measure against the walking dead, that wall had stood for something like eighty years. For boys raised in captivity the world outside the wall reeked with mystery, and we devoured grand lies that became our motivation to hop the wall---a man's right to be free, all that crap. The older men in the compound filled us with stories, baiting us like a lantern to a moth, knowing we'd bite, go over, and look for danger. The stifling closeness behind the wall pushed us, too---personally caught me in the throat. "What'll it be, boys?" Davin asked once we found the shadows. The moon shone pretty bright that night, drawing the silver out of the world. Davin shimmered like a bit of fresh aluminum.

  "Hell, I'm itching to splat a couple tonight." Dan walked ahead a few steps with long, loping strides, the pinnacle of our small triangle.

  "Old man Jantz says we have to check out the church. Says it's beautiful, sacred ground. Inside the building, with a moon like this, the whole place lights up like a rainbow." Davin stopped and cocked his head to once side, pointing toward the hill that led to the little building. We all knew about the church, the center of so many stories. Supposedly, that building remained mostly intact after all these years; a vestige of old superstitions lurking in our new ones kept folks from smashing it up.

  "Fine, but I want to show you guys something first. Something my brother told me about." Dan pointed the barrel of his shotgun into a thick patch of inky shadow and strode forward.

  Most of the big trees in Old Town were gone, knocked down for safety, but saplings, crooked grass, and snaking weeds groped toward the sky all around. I was surprised at how well I could see with just the moon. With the bright searchlights back at the wall, the rest of the night world look as black as spent oil, but the hunched backs of old houses, broken business, and other buildings rubbed against the blue night and field of stars in plain detail as we walked through Old Town.

  I'd heard some stories, mostly from Grandpa, that the bigger cities had drained the plains of their population long before the end. In the meantime, the big corporate farms finished off the aquifers and sucked the land dry. Without water, there wasn't much reason to live in the flat land. Without too many people out here, there couldn't be too many of them, the zombies. Hell, I'd only seen maybe a dozen in my life, but they left the taint of decay smeared across everything. You could see it all over Old Town.

  As we stumbled down the split asphalt of an ancient street, Dan reached into his pack, rummaged around, and produced a jar of booze. It was nothing but rot-gut moonshine, but it was all we had because most drivers wouldn't risk a run through the wastelands just to drop off some beer for a bunch of hold-out hicks. That's the way Grandpa painted it, anyway. The scavengers in the wastelands seemed worse than a whole stockyard of zombies. Dan screwed off the lid, tossed back a swig, and shook his head. "Not bad, boys." He slowed, passed the jar to Davin.

  "No," Davin said, waving Dan off with the barrel of his gun. "Not until I'm kicked back in the church."

  "Nate?"

  "Sure," I said, cuppi
ng the jar in one hand while clutching my shotgun in the other. The gun had been my great-grandfather's. Grandpa said he used it on birds---quail and pheasant, mostly---as a boy. I'd only fired the thing a few times myself, typically at wooden targets that wouldn't bite. The guns did make me nervous; we were warned against using them as the report would rouse any undead in the area. I tossed back a swig from the jar. Damn, that shit tasted awful, but the warm humming feeling that grew out to my fingertips after a few swigs kept me going.

  "Did hear about Stacy's cousin over in New Colby?" Dan asked, reaching for the jar.

  "Yeah," Davin muttered.

  "Gawd, I never want to see another burning in my life." Dan spat on the street. Davin's eyes narrowed. "I don't want those superstitious old bastards to set me on fire when I kick off."

  I shook my head and fingered Dad's old lighter in my pocket, fighting a shiver born of too many burnings. Mom, for one, after Melina was born. Too much blood, not enough medical knowledge, a bad mix of both. Dad tried to explain the need for a burning, the whole ritual, but I wanted none of it. I know you can't just bury the dead anymore---paranoia, hysteria, and the real likelihood that the undead will sniff out a fresh corpse. When I was five, watching my mother burn to black ash, none of that rationalization amounted to a hill of shit. Grandpa whispered something about Viking warriors in my ear that day, trying to cheer me. "Great big pyres, big as a house," he said, "it was pride, not fear and shame made 'em build those pyres."

  Dan clicked on the lantern he'd taped to the barrel of his gun. "Here we are fellas. Used to serve food here. C'mon." The light reached out, starting to grope the heavy shadow inside a mashed up brick building. I'd never heard anything about that particular spot, and I couldn't figure what he wanted us to see.

  Rows of benches stretched down a tiled hallway; some broken with bits tossed askew to the grid. Across a counter to our right sat the old kitchen, a steel grill and some broken cash machines. A few coins littered the floor, shining on the floor like dead minnows. The whole place rested under a thick dust like frost on a January morning.

  "Ssssh." Dan, walking just ahead of us, waved back with one hand. My heart started pumping against my ribcage until I thought it would spring free and skitter across the floor. I heard why Dan shushed us then, I could smell the thing, too----a rotten, fishy stench mixed with mud.

  Davin pushed forward, raising his gun. "Dan, give me a little," he whispered, and Dan obliged, poking his flashlight around the corner."

  Use a baton," I whispered, fearing gun's report and its siren song to other zombies. I reached down to my side and fingered the black rod hanging on my belt.

  Davin glanced back at me and uttered a low, "Naw."

  Then I saw it, a little thing, bobbing its matted blonde head up and down as it munched on something---most likely a rat or stray cat. Davin clicked his tongue to get its attention, and the thing rotated to face us. It was a girl, six or seven maybe, although she could've been six or seven for years now. The undead didn't age like us. Her little mouth, blotted with blood, opened and a little moaning sound trickled out. I closed my eyes for a moment and saw my sister's face.

  Davin raised the gun, butted the stock against his shoulder, and said, "bye, bye sissy." The building shook with his report, frozen for an instant in a muzzle flash, and settled under Dan's dim yellow beam. Its body slumped over on the ground, headless.

  "Nice shootin', Tex." Dan thumped Davin on the back. Davin nodded, fished in his pocket for a folding knife, and carved a notch in the stock. I staggered to bench and held my head.

  "You alright, ya pansy?" Dan kicked my boots.

  "Yeah. Fine. Hand me the jar, okay?" After Dan and I swallowed a few more swigs, he led us out back, to the barrels. In my mind's eye, every shadow grew arms and reached for us. All the warnings about the guns materialized in my imagination.

  "This is what I wanted to show you boys." He leaned his shotgun against the grey boards of an old fence, a little shelter that hid two black-steel drums. "My brother told me about this shit. Says they used to cook food in it, but even the rot-bags won't touch it." His hands worked one of the lids free, and it dropped to the ground with a dull THUNK. The barrel looked to be half full of thick oil, black as midnight blood. The smell---heavy and sweet---knocked me back.

  "Can you believe people used to eat this?"

  ~

  The world started spinning while we humped over to the church. Not the whole world, just my piece of it---my brains sloshing around inside my skull, knocking against my ears. I thought maybe it was the booze; loads of stories circulated about bad home-brew. Dan seemed fine, striding ahead like usual, and Davin hadn't touched the drink.

  "Gawd, you're a pansy." Dan called after I stumbled and called for a break. I didn't wallow on his insult, but the shadows started poking their fingers at me. I kept seeing that little girl's face, smeared and dead, hissing at us as Davin sprayed her brain matter across the dusty tile. We slipped from the relative safety of the compound, only to find our freedom rotten and decayed.

  I staggered to my feet after a few minutes. We made the church while the moon was still high, floating overhead like a glowing bobber in a still, blue-black pond. I huffed and puffed up the hill a little more than I'd like to admit. My stomach and head still danced, but I knew once inside we'd loiter a bit and I could lounge, letting my guts come to a rest. Davin spotted something ahead and sprinted out in front of Dan.

  "Mother fuckers," he hollered.

  "What?" Dan jogged to his side. I stumbled behind, nearly slipping to the ground on a patch of fresh mud.

  "They chained the god-damn door." A heavy chain was wrapped in repeated loops around the handles, and Davin tapped it with the stock of his gun. "Somebody cries about a few 'bags and they lock down the fucking church." He was a small guy, but swelled when angry, his skin burning through a few shades of red. The compound militia had done it; they must have locked up the place.

  Davin and Dan took a few steps back. Davin raised his gun like he was going to take a shot at the chain, but lowered the barrel a moment later. This was a thick, coiled bit of steel; a blast from his shotgun wouldn't scratch it, and we weren't prepared with anything that could get at the lock. If it was anything but the church, we'd quickly smash up the windows and hop in. All the stories were about the beauty of those windows, and I doubt any of us wanted to smash those stories.

  "Give me the jar," he called to Dan.

  I stood apart from the other two and glanced into the night behind us, half expecting a few lumbering undead to stumble from the paper-thin shadows. The waiting, the not knowing, grabbed and twisted at my stomach. I turned back to the church, admiring the long windows decorated with faint images. Grandpa called them stained glass. Almost every other hunk of glass in Old Town had been shattered many times over by guys like us, but something in the artistry of those high panes kept them from harm. I thought how odd and almost blank they looked from the outside, when inside they supposedly burned color across everything.

  I looked around at Davin as he tossed an empty jar to the ground, having polished off the last bit. He reached down, palmed a hunk of rock, and stared at the building. "Nobody tells me what to do," he muttered, taking a few steps closer to the big windows.

  The next moment leaked into my eyes slowly, like the whole planet groped through molasses. Davin's arm sprang forward like a little catapult; the rock tumbled end over through the air, and struck a window dead on. The glass cried out, split, and crumbled in a tinkling heap. It had been the picture of a lady in blue with a little kid on her lap---Mary and Jesus, I think. The frame held, but most of the glass fell, just leaving this odd grey outline of a woman suspended across the opening.

  Davin went pale; I think he was struck by how easy the whole thing crumbled. The low buzz of night bugs and bullfrogs slowly swelled to fill the silence. I scanned the slope behind us. Nothing.

  "Damn, Davin. Nice toss. Well, might as well head back. Fun's over, I suppose."
His voice fell flat, like he couldn't really disguise his disappointment. We'd all expected something else out there, maybe legions of undead that would make us happy we stuffed our pockets with shells. Dan trudged downhill, back toward the road leading to the gate. I followed, still queasy and a little unsteady. Davin's boots crunched against the gravel behind me, and then stopped. I turned and looked at him, this flat emptiness across his face.

  "No."

  "No?" My palms started to sweat. The little guy had a temper. I remember one time he knocked Dan flat, bloodied his nose, just because Dan gave him shit about being so short. I'd seen Davin drop a handful of other guys the same way.

  He looked at the moon for a moment, and I caught the shine shimmer off the whites around his eyes. "No, I'm not done yet. The whole world has gone to hell." He flashed around, hurried up the hill to the side of the building, and tumbled inside the rectangular entrance left by the broken window.

  I cupped one hand against my mouth and called down the hill. "Dan!" He stopped about thirty yards away, turned, and moved toward me.

  "What? Where the hell is Davin?"

  I pointed to the church.

  "That little bastard," Dan said, and strode uphill.

  Shotgun blasts rocked from inside the church. Dan passed me and paused at the side of the building. All I had was the moonlight, but some of the glass glistened a bit, wet with what I confused for oil or some of that grease in the old barrel. Dan and I kicked in the rest of the window, hopped inside, and found our buddy reloading his shotgun, his face covered in a mix of sweat and blood.

  "Fucking bullshit, all of it." He raised the shotgun again, pointing at the large windows opposite us. Five more shots in rapid succession rocked the inside of the chapel, shattered the windows, and brought years of dust and debris raining from above. Sheets of bright glass cascaded to the floor.