Best New Zombie [3] - Best New Zombie Tales, Vol. 3 Read online

  Like trying to pick out one raindrop's splash in a thunderstorm.

  How did I deal with this? What was I thinking?

  A white paw batting black grapes across a pink rug... a marmalade tail... two lidless marble eyes rolling across my mind, the slices of darkness in the middles spinning like the propellers of a plane that can't take off...

  The road to the store was deserted as the sun slid down. The Egg Festival signs hung with bright pictures of Chickens from poles along the way. There was a poster for an omelet-eating contest in Gentry's Mercantile's window. I parked and saw the store's front door swing back and forth.

  No breeze.

  Something had just walked through.

  Out or in?

  I entered slowly. Vegetables were stacked in display cases, some covered with colorful mold resembling coral reef formations. Cans lined the shelves orderly as barcodes. Rotten eggs were on prominent display in a small refrigerator. A thin layer of sawdust like wooden snow had been recently disturbed by shoe tracks. Each step I took announced itself with a thud. I walked back to the front and looked out at an empty street.

  I'd never looked for pet food at Gentry's before, but I figured it must be in the back.

  I passed the frozen meats when I heard ice falling.

  Mr. Gentry wriggled from a refrigerated display case the size of a child's coffin. His skin peeled off in lasagna strips, tiger-striping his face deep purplish red. One eye was missing. The other gaped unblinking as a cave mouth. I ran to the back and grabbed a case of cat food. When I turned round he was halfway out, massive torso hanging down towards the floor and head just an inch above it. He'd forced his three hundred pound, six-foot-five body into the five-foot long frozen meat case. His legs were smashed and twisted completely around and he'd got his toes caught under something.

  "Needed cold," Gentry coughed wetly. He lashed out at the ground and thick bloodstreams dripped from his open mouth.

  I stepped back in shock, more at hearing him speak in that state than seeing him that way. The shelf came down. Steel bars cut hot into my back as I hunched over and shielded my head with my hands.

  Through the ringing in my ears I could hear footsteps.

  I shifted into a push-up position beneath my burden. Sticky blood ran into my eyes and I could feel the lumps growing on my head.

  One Mississippi...

  Something scratched at the floor before me.

  Two Mississippi...

  Moaning from above.

  Three Mississippi...

  I pushed myself up and scrambled out from under the shelf, tripping over scattered cans and standing up right before stumbling over the mess of Gentry's head.

  A case or two had landed on it and one eye lolled like a panting tongue. Another loose can had hurled smack into the middle of his over-ripe face and the bottom stuck out of there, where mouth and nostrils had been. Even then a noise percolated in his throat and his bloody scabby hands were like two red crabs having epileptic fits, clawing at the floor with overlong nails.

  Don't panic. Think: white whiskers tipped black at the ends... gray ears erect like teepees... soft body warm as cup of tea curled on lap...

  Twin headaches burst out from the epicenters of my temples. I picked up another case and walked toward the streetlight shining through the front door.

  One foot away from the exit I remembered the footsteps...

  I spun around to an empty room.

  Something tapped me on the scalp. A blood-drop. A widening dark stain spread across the ceiling. I heard footsteps again. They came from above.

  Floorboards hit me seconds before the bodies. Two women with dead meat faces knocked me on my back. They didn't seem to notice me as they faced each other over my legs. They lay on their bellies, each on a pillow of red guts spilling from their open stomachs. Without lifting their skeletal arms they bit at each other's mouths. No tongues. No lips. I'd never seen lesbians before. The stench of their hisses and grunts was unbearable.

  I shifted my hands behind me and pulled myself to the door. The movement caught their attention and they tried to bite my legs, but when I saw I couldn't sneak away I jumped up, knocked them down, and ran to the truck. Night had fallen, blue and cool as a freshly washed sheet.

  About to turn the key in the ignition, I asked myself what I was doing in this nightmare.

  I wanted to feed those cats. Small mouths lined with sharp teeth. Rough tongues coated in medicinal saliva.

  Looking up I saw lights in the houses, and figures shuffled back and forth past the windows. I heard things crashing to the ground in the apartments. Still bodies must've started stirring at once. I took a crowbar from the truck, determined to get that food.

  It seemed hundreds of lost shadows crossed the street, thrown by zombies in the windows. I walked through them to the store and kicked open the door, crowbar in hand.

  As other doors creaked open and doorknobs rattled in the street behind me I breathed deep and plunged in.

  The two fallen women feasted on Gentry's entrails by the frozen meat display case. They ignored me, and I managed to get a lot of cases to the truck before I could see the rest, coming for me like sleepwalkers from all directions. They were a block away.

  Everyone I'd ever known.

  I sped off as their strangled calls rose in the cold night where chimney smoke once coiled and broke apart.

  Ooh ooh ooh ooh ooh... Were they crying "blue," asking the sky why it had turned on them?

  The next day I stored the food in the attic and put a can out near the porch. I found myself in the rocker waiting for Peg Leg to come again. I laughed with a strange sense of amusement, as I realized I'd given him a name. I'd never named anything before, and I used to wonder how the pet owners I knew chose from so many options. Now I saw: names just appeared from nowhere, like purple zombie-making skies.

  The pain in my head and my sides shut me up fast.

  He did not come that day. November bugs laid their eggs in the food and I had to throw it out.

  The next morning I sat with my coffee on the porch. There was a trace of coming rain in the air, so the screen doors gave off a pleasant metallic odor. I watched an old clothesline suspended from the third story to a tall oak tree guarding the border between the yard proper and the woods. A faded red scarf hung by the side of the forest, clothes-pined to the line. It was put there to dry by my mother. It might've been the last thing I'd seen her do.

  A rustling drew me from the cloth. I raised the shotgun I now kept near by at all times. A cat approached the fresh food I'd put out when I woke. The cat sniffed the ground, head moving side to side and rubbing his chin on the earth as he crawled, like a solider advancing under enemy fire.

  His coat was confederate gray but it might've once been white. Under his nose was a black mustache smudge. I wondered if he was blind, as he didn't look up at me, but seemed to have found the food by scent alone. He ate rapidly. Then thunder pealed, and he raised his head with taut masticated ears. He had no eyes. A shiny BB gun pellet was lodged in one socket.

  The rain fell hard and he zigzagged in a crazy pattern toward the trees, more like a fly without wings than a cat. The sky turned the color of his coat.

  But my thoughts ran to friends and family. Perhaps the rain would melt them away like a herd of wicked witches of the west. Or perhaps having forgotten what rain is they would seek its source and come up the hill to look for it, finding me instead of clouds.

  Why not? Weirder things have happened.

  The days grew colder. It became my daily ritual to sit on the back porch, waiting for cats to get the food I'd put ten feet from my seat. I'd wait with anticipation to see who would arrive, cleaning my shotgun to kill time. I found if I left five or six cans I could get as many as ten cats to come up to the house. Sometimes it was Bandito (as I started to call the mustached cat). Other times he'd not appear for days. I also named Pickle, Jester, Streak, and Crush, orange tabbies like my mother's Charlie; three Calicos call
ed Mike, Jesse, and Bombay; gray tigers (Lee and Max were my favorites), and a striking dark chocolate brown cat I think belonged to a friend of my cousin. I called him Friend Lee. They tended to remain quiet. I didn't see Peg Leg for weeks.

  Then one frosty December morning I woke with him sitting on my chest.

  His eyes were a pale violet I'd never seen on any feline. Of course, I never looked face to face with a cat before. I pet them now and again. But the cats weren't mine, and you don't look eye-to-eye with what isn't yours. But still, they seemed unusual.

  He must've come in through the torn screen door on the back porch, although he would've had to be smart enough to figure out how to lift the loose piece of screen up before slipping in. I couldn't help but think he wanted something from me, and was waiting for me to understand.

  "What do you want?" I asked, for the first time talking to an animal, as I'd seen so many people do before.

  We locked eyes.

  Black slices of darkness in the middles of his eyes like propeller blades on a plane resting between flights...

  I wasn't sure what to do. Though I'd been around cats plenty, I'd never picked one up. They even made me a little uncomfortable. Winston slept near me, but only when Joy was there to stroke her and make her happy. My presence in the bed was incidental.

  As if sensing my discomfort, Peg Leg jumped off. I heard claws jutting from three feet patter on the wood floor, and the hinges on the back-porch screen door move as he slid out.

  I didn't see him again for a long time.

  The first week of December the snow started, slow and light. The house gets frigid at this time, as it's in a real shambles. One afternoon a thud drew me to the attic. Part of the roof had fallen in. Squirrels nested in a corner next to a steamer trunk filled with old curtains and doilies. I thought the house might not last the winter once it gets going.

  Through a hole in the attic roof I noticed a knot of activity down in the town center where the Queen of the Egg Festival would've been crowned atop a massive hen-shaped float, all yolk-blonde tresses and shell-white skin. On Festival day the sky went purple at two o'clock----an hour before the ceremony----so this would be the first year with no Queen. Now the bodies gathered there, moving more rapidly than I'd seen before, walking in duck-duck-goose circles.

  Remember what Gentry said?

  Needed cold.

  They wanted it to snow.

  I moved the cans of cat food to the back-porch, where they would be shielded from the wind and snow. I would then sit behind the screen door in the rocker with my coffee and watch from that warmer vantage point. None of these cats figured out how to get through the screen door like Peg Leg, so I didn't worry about them getting in. Peg Leg seemed smarter than the rest. But I didn't know cats enough to be sure.

  To my surprise the number of visitors to my porch increased as snow fell in earnest. I worried there wouldn't be enough cases to last the winter. The cat food was looking pretty good to me now as my own supplies dwindled.

  I always liked Crumble-Down Farm in December; the gray wood outhouse, the tool-shed, the caved-in barn, the wet, black trees covered in the same blanket of snow, the yard a picture of quiet stillness. But now intermittent cat-movements invaded the calm. Paw prints Rorschached the snow, and I heard their steps up the porch stairs, and aluminum cans clanging into each other as they ate in a hurry.

  It was a strange sight from the third story window. I saw the dark shapes of the cats set in the whiteness below, some still and washing up or scratching, others jumping after squirrels or birds, and most going somewhere unknown to me.

  Usually I didn't look toward town, but I'd hear them, like demented backup singers in some dead pop star's insipid love song.

  Ooh ooh ooh ooh ooh ooh ooooh...

  Near month's end I saw fewer cats as heavy snowstorms swept over this part of Connecticut. The town was nothing but a blank valley and the moans stopped---or else I mistook them for the wind living in the skeleton trees. I imagined the yard was drowned in all the envelopes lying around the post office, great piles of white that hid messages forever undelivered. Congratulations, greetings, apologies, love... The snow drifted five feet high in some places there, which I guessed made cat-travel difficult, if not impossible. And the other night I spied a fox eating cat frozen food that had sat untouched for days. I let him finish it; then I threw out the cans and stopped the attempts at feeding.

  Until this morning.

  My isolation must've got to me because I spoke out loud to myself for the first time ever (So many firsts lately: First cat fed! First thing named! First lesbian sighting! First cat seen eye-to-eye! First zombie knocked over! First day of the end of my life!). My exact words were:

  "Thank God, they need me. God bless those cats. Thank God. Thank God..."

  See, now I had cats like everyone I ever loved... and I knew a little of how they must have felt having their cats, and it meant that in some way I still shared my life with those people, like they weren't really gone.

  There was a herd... I counted at least twenty----some reddish, some black, some brown, some white and barely distinguishable from the landscape. They crept up the hill, no doubt risking sinking with each step. I thought I recognized some, but not all. I figured they were starving smaller cats----they had to be light as balsa to tread on such fragile ground. I got the food out in expectation of their arrival.

  Not long after I saw Peg Leg.

  I'd gone to the cellar for some dwindling firewood. I was about to hit the attic, to use fallen roof for tinder, when the cat stepped out from behind a rusty old wheelbarrow. He didn't say anything, just looked at me with those violet eyes, now dyed a deeper purple.

  He had a muzzle of blood.

  I put down the logs.

  "I bet you've been living down here all this time, haven't you?" I asked.

  If he'd stuck around the house it would've been easy for him to get down to the cellar. After all, he knew how to get through the hole in the screen door, and there were mice to eat living in the walls.

  Peg Leg hobbled closer and sat down, looking up at my face.

  "What do you want?" I asked him, stooping down to his eye level.

  He kept staring at me. Then he got up and went over to the trapdoor that led outside.

  I followed him and opened it outward. Snowy air blew in and stung my face. The cat climbed up the ladder leading to the eastern side of the house with difficulty, pulling himself up by front paws and swinging one back leg after him. I followed when he'd reached the top.

  We stood in a few inches of snow. That side of the house is protected by an awning where there was a porch ages ago. All round the sheltered area were five and six foot high walls of glimmering snow.

  And the cats.

  Fifteen lay at our feet glazed with frost. Friend Lee was missing, and the cat with no eyes, too. They were huddled together, as if still trying to keep warm in death.

  The snow came down----they'd be buried in a few hours.

  "Is this what you wanted me to see?" I asked Peg Leg.

  He looked at me with a quiet I could feel. It choked my heart.

  Raised his little face to the endless dark air.

  I saw the herd of unknown cats I'd expected. They crawled to the awning as though drawn to Peg Leg. But something wasn't right.

  Cats have heads and eyes and tails and legs. These were just oval mounds of fur moving over the snow.

  The wall before me burst open in a cocaine sneeze explosion as a co-worker of mine staggered out. I'd thought the auburn hair atop his head was a rusty tabby I used to see sometimes. But it was Vitolo the guitar-playing mailman walking through the snow.

  Under it.

  They got stronger with the cold, and now they had enough energy to make it up the hill...

  I lifted my shotgun and fired. The shot went through a gaping hole in his chest and into the snowbank behind him. He stopped as though startled. Purplish-black blood sprayed from the snow as another zombie
appeared behind the first. It was a little girl with no head. She kept treading forward, her pale flesh flapping like she was made of tattered surrender flags.

  I raised the gun and pumped it. The girl pushed Vitolo forward. He slid onto the gun so the barrel stuck out his back, and threw blue arms around me. If shit could take a shit, he smelled like that. I thought he winked at me but it was a black beetle crawling around in his eye. He tried to speak but had no lower jaw and wretched a spluttering sob, repeated over and over like one stuttered word. I kicked his feet out from under him and he fell spread-eagled, taking the shotgun down with him.

  Its barrel pointed up at my mouth.

  The headless girl tumbled onto Vitolo's body and the one finger left on her tiny dead hand curled around the trigger and tightened.

  I stepped back and threw a hand out to knock the barrel away.

  Wave good-bye, hand.

  The shot clanged in my head. My face stung as though a thousand angry bees had been loosed from the barrel. I started down the ladder and tried to use both hands. One was a phantom and the floor came up hard against my cheek.

  Above, the zombies broke through the pristine snow. Their putrid shadows fell in first and then their bodies. I heard a broken melon noise as one crashed headfirst.

  I ran for the door and up to the attic. Crumble-Down Farm's spongy gray steps shook and groaned. I'd never treated the stairs that way. I felt I was stomping on my mother's face. Noise in Crumble-Down farm! Another first. My, how things had changed...

  I shut the attic door as well as I could. Through the holes in the roof the freezing storm blew against me. Snow lay in heaps round the room. I grabbed an old shovel, and piled it against the door. Packing it with one hand was slow painful work.

  I couldn't tell how smart they were. Maybe if I'd made it up fast enough, they wouldn't find me.