Dark Rain: 15 Short Tales (28 page)

“Mr. Dingly!”

I fell back, and his snapping jaws just missed my face. As I fell, I raised my foot and launched him up and over me. He went sprawling somewhere behind me. As I tried to scramble to my feet, a clawing hand reaching up through the ground—someone got to the party fashionably late—grabbed my shoulder, but I rolled to my right and broke loose, and broke off a few fingers, too.

I soon found my feet—and saw a clear path to the Haunted Tree.

I took it, running hard.

I was at the tree.

Except I couldn’t see clear enough to look for the keys. Yes, there was a full moon out, and yes it enabled me to see the zombies presently closing in on me, but unfortunately a fat lot of good the full moon did under this massive oak. My phone had a flashlight app…

Oh, holy shit!

Tommy had it. We’d swapped earlier.

But I had
his
iPhone and I swiped it on. Immediately the area under the tree was lit in a soft, bluish glow. I ignored the fact—or tried to—that just outside of the bluish glow was an approaching nightmare.
Many
approaching nightmares, with their own eyes aglow.

“Help me, Lord,” I whispered, sweeping the phone around.

There! Shining in the dim light was his wad of keys, partially hidden under some leaves, no doubt kicked up from our desperate flight to the truck. A truck that suddenly seemed very far away.

I grabbed the wad and faced what I knew was coming.

And there were a lot of them. More than I had anticipated. Worse, I didn’t see an opening through them.

Tommy’s cell phone rang.

I nearly shit my pants, but managed to hang on to it. I fumbled with it, swiping it on.

“Jesus, man. What’s taking you so long? The fuckers are everywhere. They’re banging on the glass.”

“I’m surrounded, too.”

“Well, figure a way through, dammit.”

“Easy for you to say,” I said, and stared at the closest zombie, who was now not more than twenty feet away and closing in fast. Well, kind of fast. There were others behind him. Dozens and dozens of others, and they formed a formidable wall of the undead. Very soon I was about to experience what it would be like to have something take a healthy bite out of me.

“Oh, fuck fuck fuck!” Yeah, that was me.

I ran to the other side of the tree. More undead. A wave of them, in fact, all lurching toward me, all gnashing their teeth, all with that bizarre light in their eye. I had a feeling that the last thing I would see on this earth were those fucking lights staring down at me, before I was consumed alive.

There had to be a way.

“Hurry, Billy!” screeched Tommy. “One of them just picked up a rock. Who knew zombies could problem solve!”

Why I still had Billy pressed to my ear, I didn’t know. Maybe I didn’t want to be left alone before I died. Maybe I wanted company. Maybe I had forgotten I was holding the phone because a wave of the undead was rolling toward me.

But I looked at it now.

And had an idea.

“If there’s an app to
raise
the dead,” I said. “Maybe there’s one that will send them back, too.”

“Yes, sure. Look for it. Geez. Why are you fucking telling me?”

And so I did…doing my best to figure out the damn iPhone…so different than my own Samsung. There. I was in the App Store. Something grabbed my shoulder, chomping loudly in my ear, and I screamed like a girl. I did the only thing I could think of, I turned and punched it in the face with everything I had.

Turns out this had been someone’s little old grandma. She went down in a heap, but was soon picking herself up again.

I typed quickly in the app store search bar, fingers fumbling:
“Return the undead.”

Nothing came up.

“Fuck.”

The sound of chomping filled the night air.

“Zombie reversal.”

And there it was. And it was from the same makers of the original app. Something powerful grabbed my shoulder, squeezing. I dropped and rolled and saw them above me, closing in. From the ground, I clicked “download.”

It asked for a password.

“Oh, fuck! Tommy, what’s your password?”

“You need my password?”

“Yes, goddammit, I need your password!”

“Why do you need my password?”

“I’m downloading the reversal app, you idiot!”

“Good thinking.”

“Goddamit, tell me your password.”

“Um…”

“Tell me dammit!”

“It’s, ah,
Billysmomhassexylegs
. All one word.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No, I’m not. And she does. Just ask anyone—”

“Nevermind that.”

A hand grabbed my ankle. Another grabbed my hair. I screamed as I finished typing in the password, even as I was lifted off the ground…and pulled toward the open mouth of a living skull.

And from the iPhone issued out a man’s voice. The same man’s voice we’d heard earlier, speaking the same unintelligible nonsense.

The skeleton lowered its face to mine, intending, I was certain, to take a bite from my cheek and forehead. And, indeed, I was looking deep into its ghost eyes, alight with hellfire.

But then the zombie paused.

In fact, the entire graveyard went silent. The gnashing teeth stopped. Hovering just inches above me, the light in the creature’s eye socket winked out.

And then I was dropped to the ground, where I witnessed the second strangest thing I’d ever seen. The zombies went back to their graves. Whether or not these were the correct graves, I didn’t know. But I watched as one by one, they each stepped down into their respective pits and even had the common courtesy to rebury themselves.

“Sweet mother of God.”

We were in Tommy’s Ford Explorer.

The cemetery was quiet. We probably should have headed out of there as fast as we could, perhaps only stopping when we ran out of gas. But…the worst seemed to be over.

“Someone’s going to know something,” said Tommy. “All the grave sites will have freshly turned soil.”

“I suppose so.”

“I mean, word is going to get around that something happened here.”

I nodded. My upper arm still hurt where a skeleton had recently gripped me tightly. Had this hillside really been filled with the walking dead? “Am I dreaming?” I asked.

“No, brother. That shit was real, and I’m going to complain about that app, leave it a bad review or something.”

“It’s gone,” I said. I had been looking at Tommy’s phone a few minutes earlier.

“What do you mean it’s gone?”

“Both the summoning and reversal app are gone.”

We both thought about that, looking at the now-empty cemetery. The Ghost Christmas Tree swayed in a small wind, multicolored streamers hanging limply.

“So what do we do?”

“Play dumb,” I said. “And never talk about it again.”

“I’m good at playing dumb,” said Tommy, and started his SUV.

I glared at him. “And you’re never to look at my mom again, dammit.”

Tommy grinned and pointed the Explorer out of the cemetery. “Like
that’s
ever going to happen.”

Author’s Note:
“Merlin’s Tomb” was, in fact, the opening scene to a much bigger screenplay that never happened. That screenplay was going to be an epic, Indiana Jones-esque adventure about the search for the Holy Lance, or the Spear of Destiny. Except something funny happened along the way to the studios: my Hollywood agent and I had a falling out just as I began the screenplay. I left the agency, and never went back to writing screenplays.

For those of you who don’t know, the Holy Lance is the very lance used by a Roman Centurion long ago to pierce the side of Christ as he hung on the cross. The lance, or spear, is purported to give great power to its owner. In fact, according to legend, the owner of the lance can rule the earth.

Fun stuff.

Napoleon supposedly owned it. And so did Adolph Hitler. Or so the legends go. I mention Hitler here for a reason, as you are about to find out.
Der Fuhrer
was going to play an important role in my screenplay, and I had thought it might be fun to introduce him in the opening sequence as a lad. Except the screenplay never got written.

Or, rather, never got
completed
.

The opening sequence was indeed written, a sequence that, I think, can stand alone. A sequence that features one very popular wizard, too. That opening sequence has now since been turned into an easy-to-read short story, which I present to you here now.

—J.R. Rain

he cathedral is majestic. But in young Clifton’s mind, when you’ve seen one stained-glass window, you’ve seen them all.