4 Hardcore Zombie Novellas (11 page)

“The work I’ve been doing?” Jake cocked his head.

“Disabling the dead. So they’re not so dangerous.”

“Hell, that ain’t work. That’s too much fun to be work. Besides, I just stayed for the barbecue. Fixing to move on. But thanks for the invite. How many you got holed up in that church?”

“Ain’t but thirteen of us,” said the short guy with tinted glasses.

“Lucky you,” said Jake. “If it was me, I’d be moving on. Get as far from Arizona and her bordering states as possible. No offense but this little town ain’t no more than a bump in the road. Got to be greener pastures somewhere else.”

“Not according to what we heard on Luther’s shortwave radio,” the tall one said. “That’s why there’s not any more TV. Things went bad fast all over. We heard that even the president turned zombie. And the plague virus is spreading like wildfire. Ain’t nowhere to hide. Only thing to do is pray and get right with God.”

Jake was about to make an unkind comment about the president turning zombie when Amanda screamed inside the eatery.

It was a gut-wrenching scream that shook Jake’s toughguy persona to his boots. He stood frozen with the three churchmen watching him as if withholding harsh judgment.

Her second scream set him in motion. He spun on his heels and ran back into the brick barbecue joint with the Magnum up like a steel boner and ready to rock.

Amanda was crouched in a corner, using a chair like a lion tamer to fend off the biggest, scariest zombie Jake had ever seen. The ghoul was a ginormous nightmare, going on seven feet tall in his stocking feet (with several fungus-encrusted toes sticking out of a hole in his sock) and with well over three hundred pounds filling out his stout bloodstained overalls.

Then Jake saw what had ripped the terrible screams from Amanda. Her boyfriend’s head rested in a plate of leftover barbecue pork, while his body lay on the floor on the other side of the table, blood still leaking from the stump of his neck. Todd’s left eye looked at Jake over the mushy pile of red-sauced pork.

It blinked.

Whether it was a knowing wink or a dying reflex, Jake didn’t take time to contemplate. He yelled, “Hey!” and put a .357 slug in the center of the giant zombie’s face, making a crooked-toothed mush of his mouth, as well as taking off the tip of his long nose. The back of his head came off and decorated the wall behind his hulking bulk with brain bits and skull chips and black blood.

Amanda took advantage of the zomboid giant’s distraction and dashed from the corner to the doorway, where she stopped and turned to see what would happen next.

Jake fired again and took out the monster’s right eyeball. Even though his mouth was no longer much of a threat, he was big enough to crush Jake in a bear hug and obviously strong enough to tear off his head (as evidenced by Exibit A, Todd’s bodiless noggin), but if Jake blinded the sonofabitch, they could avoid his clutches and disable his arms and legs at their leisure. Or just leave him to go bump in the eternal night.

Jake put the gun’s muzzle in the zombie’s face and blew out the other eyeball, taking off most of the rest of the back of the head and turning the wall behind him into as fine a piece of zombie art as could be found anywhere, in Jake’s less than humble opinion.

The mammoth zombie shambled and shuffled with arms outstretched as if in a bizarre burlesque of Karloff’s most famous monster. Now he was about as scary as a slow-moving mummy in one of those old black & white flicks from the 1940s.

Jake left him to his blind ramble and escorted Amanda outside.

“Sorry about your boyfriend,” he said with his arm around her shoulder.

“He wasn’t really my boyfriend.”

“Yeah, well …”

Jake removed the empty shells from the Magnum’s cylinder and replaced them with live rounds as he addressed the three men in suits. “He’s big but I blinded him and blew out his mouth. You could chop him down with an axe or cut him down to size with a chain-saw, if you’re of a mind to. Me and the lady here are heading out for Savannah, Georgia. Good luck to you.” Just like that it was decided. What the hell, he couldn’t let her go alone, could he?

“We heard pilgrims were gathering in Savannah,” said the short churchman, getting a sour look on his face. “Something about a female savior?”

“Something wrong with that?” Amanda said with her hands on her hips and fire in her eyes. Jake was glad to see the flash of angry defiance in her. She was going to need that kind of fire to get through what was coming. They all would.

“Uh, no ma’am,” said Shorty, casting an uneasy glance up at the mystic eye in the sky.

“There ya go,” Jake said, saluting them with the Magnum’s muzzle. Then he holstered it and offered Amanda his arm.

“Miss Amanda,” he said.

She locked her arm in his and they walked with as much dignity as they could muster to the waiting Mustang.

“Godspeed,” somebody said.

Jake opened the passenger door for her and said, “Whatever the world’s got waiting for us, we’ll greet it with a grin and a big god-damn gun. And if that ain’t good enough, then fuck it. We’ll go out in a blaze.”

Amanda said, “Amen, Jake Moon Snake.”

Jake said, “Amen.”

“My God, look at that!”

Jake turned to see the three churchmen looking up, the tall one pointing to the sky.

Jake looked up in time to see the great eye blink again.

Then it winked out, leaving only the big empty sky.

David James Keaton’s
short fiction has recently appeared in the Comet Press dark crime anthology
The Death Panel
, as well as
Plots With Guns, Thuglit, Espresso Stories, Big Pulp, Six Sentences, Pulp Pusher
, and
Crooked
. He is a contributor to
The College Rag
and the University of Pittsburgh’s online journal
Hot Metal Bridge
. A graduate student in the MFA program at Pitt, he is also a full-time closed captioner and the ill-fated founder of a Bed & Breakfast where staff would be encouraged to attack the guests. Investors balked. He considers apocalyptic survival scenarios more than most, hopefully.

“Follow me, and let the dead bury their dead.”
—Matt 8:22

We aren’t supposed to start moaning and pounding on the house until the sun goes down, but we’re taking our jobs real serious these days. Over by the fake gas pump, I can see a shadow crouching down, and know he’s finally going to shit in the football helmet. I can just make out the Steelers logo as I watch him fill it up to the ear holes. There is no chance of it being worn this time, even if it’s hosed out again.

Another shadow takes a swat at the one squatting, but the first shadow just hunches over and keeps concentrating, kind of like a cat still trying to get the ham off someone’s sandwich after it’s been busted. He just gets lower and lower and lower with each blow, but never moves to pull up his pants. I hear the second shadow demanding an explanation, and I sigh. I don’t have to see their faces to know who they are. We’ve played this game too many times already.

“It’s my love letter to the city that gave birth to us,” the first shadow explains, now deciding it’s a good time to run.

Our instructions were to display precisely one character trait. This, we were told, was because it is both the most efficient way to make a memory in the allotted time, and because it was so hysterical in
Dawn of the Dead
when they wandered over the hill inexplicably wearing baseball uniforms and ballerina outfits. Most of the boys just want to wear their favorite jersey though, and that means there’s almost always too many sports fans to be bumping shoulders among our small band of the undead.

“I’m just saying,” the first shadow laughs as it backpedals and falls down under a rain of backhands and elbows, “If we already have a Baseball Zombie, we probably don’t need a Football Zombie. But we definitely don’t need
two
Football Zombies.”

“Said the Football Zombie.”

The fight escalates and someone hustles them behind the shed and out of sight. Tonight, everyone’s tired of them already, but I have to admit one thing. The first shadow was right. Pittsburgh was the city that started it all, and it was the reason we were here, if you got right down to it. But it was also hard to see any love in that gesture, and it wasn’t even my helmet. As handy as one of those might be during an actual siege, two helmets were obviously one helmet too many.

“Why would that one be wearing a catcher’s mitt?” we used to complain during our end-of-season, zombie-movie marathon. “Come on, did he get bit during a game?” But our previous Baseball Zombie was ready to defend any criticism:

“It’s not that complicated, man. He put the glove on later, just like me, right after he died. He’s just pretending.”

“Then why can’t I have roller skates with this catcher’s mitt?”

Because we were told very sternly by our employers never to mix and match. You couldn’t wear a cowboy hat and carry a hockey stick, for example. You couldn’t wear a Hawaiian shirt and a Santa Claus cap. You couldn’t fumble around with a book while wearing a KKK cloak, not just because books are like Kryptonite to the Klan, but because, obviously, what the fuck would a Library Zombie wield? And you couldn’t stand outside a window slowly and comically figuring out how to aim your gun all over again if you were a Face-Painted Big Game Zombie. Yes, it would be hard with a giant foam finger anyway, but that was the Cop Zombie’s job, always would be. This rule was particularly hard to follow for our own Cop Zombie, since it was always so tempting for him to make fun of my nervous cough, something I’ve been afflicted with all my life, but also a trait that makes little sense for him or me.

Especially me, the Truck Zombie.

“Shouldn’t it be ‘Hit-By-A-Truck Zombie?’” someone’s always asking.

At one morning meeting, I tried to explain that it was a result of the impact of the grill of that imaginary 18-wheeler that crushed my chest. I even showed them the cookie-cutter impression, Jesus on the cross, that I’d pressed deep into my skin to simulate a hood ornament. But everyone just scoffed and said that coughing was for the Cigarette Zombie, not me, and I should just continue to hold mine in. As if I could.

I suppress my first cough of the day as my earphone informs me the first couple is already heading for the basement. This means that they will be confronting our first “plant,” the hysterical yet tyrannical businessman, followed soon after by a reveal of his wife and their injured daughter. This is about an hour ahead of schedule. The sun isn’t even down yet.

I pound harder, furious that they’ve never seen
Night of the Living Dead
, or the hundreds of imitators like us, or they would know that running to the basement always means doom. At the very least, they should remember that the trip to the basement comes at the end of the goddamn movie. Even
Day of the Dead
, despite that deceptive title, only displays approximately nine minutes and seventeen seconds of total sunlight throughout its entire running time. Almost that whole movie takes place in a basement. It’s no accident that it’s considered the logical end of the series.

I let my legs give out, start crawling toward the next open window, then snap back up. Sometimes I play it like my legs are broken. Sometimes I even put my pants and shoes on backwards to pretend my body has been turned around completely below the waist from some sort of massive impact. But tonight I decide that backwards shoes won’t be enough of a hindrance. I turn them back around when no one is looking.

Here’s some trivia. I actually knew the actor who got hit by the truck in the ’90s remake of
Night of the Living Dead.
Okay, he was a friend of a friend, but I heard that he had no sweat glands and, legend has it, had to smear chap stick all over his head if he was stuck out in the sun too long during filming. I wish he could play this game with us, because, with that kind of dedication, I know he would probably take it just as seriously as I do, maybe even shame me into turning my shoes back around for good.

I punch through the window and everyone squints as glass showers faces, forearms, and chests. Cowboy Zombie stops moaning for a second to hold the eye up off his cheek and glare at me. Then he flicks a glass shard from behind a sticky blue ear and starts to pound again, face slack, all business. Baseball Zombie shakes his head, brushes his jersey with his catcher’s mitt, and waits patiently for me to notice him. Then he gives me a shrug under his perpetual slouch, jaw still swinging, but the assault momentarily forgotten. I shrug back, then turn away to grab a pink and panicked hand before the wood covers the hole and a deafening burst of hammering finally displays some respect for their situation.

Beyond the hand, I catch a glimpse of some weary eyes inside the house, and I’m glad to see they’re finally realizing how long this game might last.

They got the idea by trying to be the last bed and breakfast in the phone book. Mags came up with the name “Z B & B” specifically to trump Youngstown’s Country Inn. And it was this name and the meaningless “Z” that started her boyfriend, now husband, Davey Jones, thinking about zombies, of course. Soon after, as an experiment, they were involved in an altercation at an Italian dinner theater/fake wedding combo that was touring the Midwest, “Tony Baloney’s Reception.” It was a gimmick that Mags called, “vaguely racist bullshit,” although she did eventually admit that getting shoved into a ten-tier cake while Mafioso caricatures staged a fist fight might be a good story to tell a party after enough time had passed.

“Tragedy plus time equals comedy and all that,” she reminded Davey the morning after his headfirst Pete Rose cake slide.

“But wait!” he exploded over corn flakes, bloody twist of toilet paper popping from his nostril. “What if zombies were trashing the shit out of that wedding reception? Would you pay to see that? I’d pay to see that! Hell, I’d pay to
do
that.” And
pow!
they suddenly found themselves with an untapped gold mine of couples who would rather spend the night of their honeymoons pretending they were hiding from zombies instead of tapping glasses with forks to encourage some failed actors to stage a kiss.