Book of the Dead: A Zombie Anthology (7 page)

“I want to repeat,” the young reporter said, the fire-spots of his acne standing out on his forehead and chin like stigmata. His mouth and cheeks had begun to twitch; the microphone in his hand shook spastical y. “I want to repeat that a bunch of dead people have just lunched up on the president and his wife and a whole lot of other political hotshots who were at the White House to eat poached salmon and cherries jubilee. Go, Yale! Boola-boola! Boola-fuckin-boola!”

And then the young reporter with the fiery pimples had lost control of his face entirely, and he was screaming, only his screams were disguised as laughter, and he went on yel ing
Go, Yale!

Boola-boola!
while Maddie and the Pulsifers sat in dismayed silence until the young man was suddenly swal owed by an ad for Boxcar Wil y records, which were not available in any store, you could only get them if you dialed the 800 number on your screen, operators were standing by.

One of little Cheyne Pulsifer’s crayons was on the end table beside the place where Maddie was sitting, and she took down the number before Mr. Pulsifer got up and turned off the TV without a single word.

Maddie told them good night and thanked them for sharing their TV and their Jiffy Pop.

“Are you sure you’re al right, Maddie dear?” Candi Pulsifer asked her for the fifth time that night, and Maddie said she was fine for the fifth time that night (and she was, she was
coping
for the first time in her life, and that real y
was
fine, just as fine as paint), and Candi told her again that she could have that upstairs room that used to be Brian’s anytime she wanted, and Maddie had declined her with the most graceful thanks she could find, and was at last al owed to escape.

She had walked the windy half mile back to her own house and was in her own kitchen before she realized that she stil had the scrap of paper on which she had jotted the 800 number in one hand. She dialed it, and there was nothing. No recorded voice tel ing her al circuits were currently busy or that number was out of service; no wailing siren sound that indicated a line interruption (had Jack told her that was what that sound meant? she tried to remember and couldn’t, and real y, it didn’t matter a bit, did it?), no clicks and boops, no static. Just smooth silence.

That was when Maddie knew—knew for sure.

She hung up the telephone slowly and thoughtful y.

The end of the world had come. It was no longer in doubt. When you could no longer cal the 800 number and order the Boxcar Wil y records that were not available in any store, when there were for the first time in her living memory no Operators Standing By, the end of the world was a foregone conclusion.

She felt her rounding stomach as she stood there by the phone on the wal in the kitchen and said it out loud for the first time, unaware that she had spoken: “It wil have to be a home delivery. But that’s al right, as long as you remember, Maddie. There isn’t any other way, not now. It wil have to be a home delivery.”

She waited for fear and none came.

“I can cope with this just fine,” she said, and this time she heard herself and was comforted by the sureness of her own words.

A baby.

When the baby came, the end of the world would itself end.

“Eden,” she said, and smiled. Her smile was sweet, the smile of a madonna. It didn’t matter how many rotting dead people (maybe Boxcar Wil y among them) were shambling around on the face of the world.

She would have a baby, she would have a home delivery, and the possibility of Eden would remain.

The first news had come out of a smal Florida town on the Tamiami Trail. The name of this town was not as colorful as Wet Noggin, but it was stil pretty good: Thumper. Thumper, Florida. It was reported in one of those lurid tabloids that fil the racks by the checkout aisles in supermarkets and discount drugstores.
DEAD COME TO LIFE IN SMALL FLORIDA TOWN!
the headline of
Inside View
read. And the subhead:
Horror Movie Comes to Life!
The subhead referred to a movie cal ed
The Night of the Living Dead
, which Maddie had never seen. It also mentioned another movie she had never seen. The title of this piece of cinema was
Macumba
Love
. The article was accompanied by three photos. One was a stil from
Night of the Living
Dead
, showing what appeared to be a bunch of escapees from a lunatic asylum standing outside an isolated farmhouse at night. One was a stil from
Macumba Love
, showing a woman with a great lot of blond hair and a smal bit of bikini-top holding in breasts the size of prize-winning gourds. The woman was holding up her hands and screaming at what appeared to be a black man in a mask. The third purported to be a picture taken in Thumper, Florida. It was a blurred, grainy shot of a human whose sex was impossible to define. It was walking up the middle of a business street in a smal town. The figure was described as being “wrapped in the cerements of the grave,” but it could have been someone in a dirty sheet.

No big deal. Bigfoot Rapes Girl Scouts last week, the dead people coming back to life this week, the dwarf mass murderer next week.

No big deal until they started to come out everywhere. No big deal until the first news film (“You may want to ask your children to leave the room,” Dan Rather introduced gravely) showed up on network TV, creatures with naked bone showing through their dried skin, traffic accident victims, the morticians’ concealing makeup sloughed away either in the dark passivity of the earth or in the clawing climb to escape it so that the ripped faces and bashed-in skul s showed, women with their hair teased into dirt-clogged beehives in which worms and beetles stil squirmed and crawled, their faces alternately vacuous and informed with a kind of calculating, idiotic intel igence; no big deal until the first horrible stil s in an issue of
People
magazine that had been sealed in shrink-wrap like girly magazines, an issue with an orange sticker that read
Not For Sale
To Minors!

Then it was a big deal.

When you saw a decaying man stil dressed in the mud-streaked remnants of the Brooks Brothers suit in which he had been buried tearing at the breast of a screaming woman in a Tshirt that read
Property of the Houston Oilers
, you suddenly realized it might be a very big deal indeed.

Then the accusations and the saber rattling had started, and for three weeks the entire world had been diverted from the creatures escaping their graves like grotesque moths escaping diseased cocoons by the spectacle of the two great nuclear powers on what appeared to be an undivertable col ision course.

There were no zombies in the United States, Tass declared: This was a self-serving lie to camouflage an unforgivable act of chemical warfare against the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Reprisals would fol ow if the dead comrades coming out of their graves did not fal down decently dead within ten days. Al U.S. diplomatic people were expel ed from the mother country and most of her satel ites.

The president (who would not long after become a Zombie Blue Plate Special himself) responded by becoming a pot (which he had come to resemble, having put on at least fifty pounds since his second-term election) cal ing a kettle black. The U.S. government, he told the American people, had incontrovertible evidence that the only walking dead people in the USSR had been set loose deliberately, and while the premier might stand there with his bare face hanging out and claim there were over eight thousand lively corpses striding around Russia in search of the ultimate col ectivism,
we
had definite proof that there were less than forty. It was the
Russians
who had committed an act—a
heinous
act—of chemical warfare, bringing loyal Americans back to life with no urge to consume anything but other loyal Americans, and if these Americans—some of whom had been good Democrats—did not lie down decently dead within the next
five
days, the USSR was going to be one large slag pit.

The president expel ed al Soviet diplomatic people… with one exception. This was a young fel ow who was teaching him how to play chess (and who was not at al averse to the occasional grope under the table).

Norad was at Defcon-2 when the satel ite was spotted. Or the spaceship. Or the creature. Or whatever in hel ’s name it was. An amateur astronomer from Hinchly-on-Strope in the west of England spotted it first, and this fel ow, who had a deviated septum, fal en arches, and bal s the size of acorns (he was also going bald, and his expanding pate showcased his real y horrible case of psoriasis admirably), probably saved the world from nuclear holocaust.

The missile silos were open al over the world as telescopes in California and Siberia trained on Star Wormwood; they closed only fol owing the horror of Salyut/Eagle-I, which was launched with a crew of six Russians, three Americans, and one Briton only three days fol owing the discovery of Star Wormwood by Humphrey Dagbolt, the amateur astronomer with the deviated septum, et al. He was, of course, the Briton.

And he paid.

They
al
paid.

* * *

The final sixty-one seconds of received transmission from the
Gorbachev/Truman
were considered too horrible for release by al three governments involved, and so no formal release was ever made. It didn’t matter, of course; nearly twenty thousand ham operators had been monitoring the craft, and it seemed that at least nineteen thousand of them had been running tape decks when the craft had been—wel , was there real y any other word for it?—invaded.

Russian voice
: Worms! It appears to be a massive bal of—

American voice
: Christ! Look out! It’s coming for us!

Dagbolt
: Some sort of extrusion is occurring. The port-side window is—

Russian voice
: Breach! Breach! Suits!

(Indecipherable gabble.)

American voice
: —and appears to be eating its way in—

Female Russian voice
(Olga Katinya): Oh stop it stop the eyes—

(Sound of an explosion.)

Dagbolt
: Explosive decompression has occurred. I see three—no, four—dead—and there are worms… everywhere there are worms—

American voice
: Faceplate! Faceplate!
Faceplate!

(Screaming.)

Russian voice
:
Where is my mamma? Where
—

(Screams. Sounds like a toothless old man sucking up mashed potatoes.)
Dagbolt
: The cabin is ful of worms—what appears to be worms, at any rate—which is to say that they real y
are
worms, one realizes—they have extruded themselves from the main satel ite—what we took to be—which is to say one means—the cabin is ful of floating body parts. These space-worms apparently excrete some sort of aci—

(Booster rockets fired at this point; duration of the burn is seven point two seconds. This may or may not have been attempt to escape or possibly to ram the central object. In either case, the maneuver did not work. It seems likely that the chambers themselves were clogged with worms and Captain Vassily Task—or whichever officer was then in charge—believed an explosion of the fuel tanks themselves to be imminent as a result of the clog. Hence the shutdown.)
American voice
:
Oh my Christ they’re in my head, they’re eating my fuckin br
—

(Static.)

Dagbolt
: I am retreating to the aft storage compartment. At the present moment, this seems the most prudent of my severely limited choices. I believe the others are al dead. Pity. Brave bunch.

Even that fat Russian who kept rooting around in his nose. But in another sense I don’t think—

(Static.)

Dagbolt
: —dead at al because the Russian woman—or rather, the Russian woman’s severed head, one means to say—just floated past me, and her eyes were open. She was looking at me from inside her—

(Static.)

Dagbolt
: —keep you—

(Explosion. Static.)

Dagbolt
: Is it possible for a severed penis to have an orgasm? I th—

(Static.)

Dagbolt
: —around me. I repeat, al around me. Squirming things. They—I say, does anyone know if—

(Dagbolt, screaming and cursing, then just screaming. Sound of toothless old man again.) Transmission ends.

The
Gorbachev/Truman
exploded three seconds later. The extrusion from the rough bal nicknamed Star Wormwood had been observed from better than three hundred telescopes earthside during the short and rather pitiful conflict. As the final sixty-one seconds of transmission began, the craft began to be obscured by something that certainly
looked
like worms. By the end of the final transmission, the craft itself could not be seen at al —only the squirming mass of things that had attached themselves to it. Moments after the final explosion, a weather satel ite snapped a single picture of floating debris, some of which was almost certainly chunks of the worm-things. A severed human leg clad in a Russian space suit floating among them was a good deal easier to identify.

And in a way, none of it even mattered. The scientists and political leaders of both countries knew exactly where Star Wormwood was located: above the expanding hole in earth’s ozone layer. It was sending something down from there, and it was not Flowers by Wire.

Missiles came next.

Star Wormwood jigged easily out of their way and then returned to its place over the hole.

More dead people got up and walked.

Now they were al biting.

The final effort to destroy the thing was made by the United States. At a cost of just under six hundred mil ion dol ars, four SDI “defensive weapons” satel ites had been hoisted into orbit by the previous administration. The president of the current—and last—administration informed the Soviet premier of his intentions to use the SDI missiles, and got an enthusiastic approval (the Russian premier failed to note the fact that seven years before he had cal ed these missiles