The Zombies Of Lake Woebegotten (16 page)

When Rufus finally finished—or not so much finished but ran down like an old-timey watch that needed winding and didn’t get it—Julie began methodically refilling sugar containers, speaking almost as if to herself. “Old man Levitt. Huh. They say it’s always the quiet ones, but he
loves
to talk. Never expect something like that to happen around here though. Serial killers I mean.”

“The Midwest is full of them,” Rufus said, and why was Otto not surprised his nephew, who didn’t know anything about repairing carburetors, replacing water heaters, snaking drains, or pretty much any other manly art, would nonetheless know about serial killers. “There’s John Wayne Gacy, and Ed Gein, and that guy in Cleveland, the Butcher, and—”

“But the thing about the zombies is more interesting,” Julie said, as if Rufus hadn’t spoken at all, which was a response to the boy that Otto would have to give a try himself. Then she reached out and brushed a lock of Rufus’s stupid hair out of his eyes, making him freeze, and giving Otto a sudden starburst of jealousy right in the middle of his chest. “Who do you think is right? Harry, who says we’ll make it through fine, or old man Levitt, who says we’re doomed?” She turned her head toward Otto, including him in the question too, and since Rufus was still apparently paralyzed at being touched halfway tenderly by an attractive young woman—though she was in her thirties so from Rufus’s point of view she’d be an older woman, and wasn’t getting older just a bitch all around?—Otto jumped into the breach.

“Hard to say. It’s tough to get your mind around. Can’t really imagine the end of the world. Sort of thing you see in the kind of movies I don’t much like to watch. Doesn’t seem like something that could happen here.”

“There were some scientists who did a study. Computer models.” Rufus was twisting a paper napkin in his hands, and his voice was serious and thoughtful in a way it wasn’t, usually. Otto wondered if Julie’s quiet seriousness was contagious. It would be nice if something like that was contagious, as opposed to just things like the Ebola virus and, he supposed, zombie-ism. “I read about them in this class I took, a class about zombies, you know how they were so popular a few years back, turning up in books and movies all the time, people doing zombie walks where they dressed up, all that. Well, this epidemiologist named Muntz or Bunz or Munz or something, he figured out that the way zombies work in movies is similar to the way infectious diseases spread—people get bitten by a zombie, turn into a zombie, and start biting other people. Just like spreading, I don’t know, an STD or a cold, only instead of sex or coughing, it’s biting.”

He had the good grace to blush furiously and look down when he mentioned STDs, though Otto still had to quell the urge to smack him upside the head. Talking like that in front of a woman. Talking like that in front of anybody. Talking like that at all. But he listened.

“So Munz decided to sort of put the movies to the test, see if people—not like individual people, but
society
, the human race—could survive a zombie uprising. He got a team together and they made a computer model of a city with a million people, and dropped just one zombie into the simulation. Pretty much the classic zombie rules—you get bitten by a zombie, you turn into a zombie yourself within a day. Then they just let the program run.”

“How’d it turn out?” Otto said.

Rufus shook his head. “After seven days, ten at the outside, everybody in the city was either dead or a zombie.”

They all pondered this. “Not such a good deal,” Otto allowed.

“Munz tried some variations,” Rufus said. “Locking the zombies away, quarantining them—that didn’t work, either. It just added a few more days until the end of the world. So he worked in a cure for zombies, and that didn’t help a bunch, either, it only saved ten or fifteen percent of the living, but it wasn’t a permanent cure, since after you got cured you could get bitten again and turned back into a zombie.”

“Doesn’t sound like there’s going to be a cure for this one anyway,” Julie said. “It’s not so much a disease as just getting up out of the grave, right? Unless you figure out a way to cure death, and in that case, we’ve got a whole bunch of other problems.”

“Right.” Rufus nodded. “The researchers only found one winning strategy: all-out war. As soon as you see a zombie, you kill it. Systematically wipe them out. Bring in the army. Show no mercy. Burn ’em out. Which happens in the movies, too. Hell, in some of the George Romero movies, the military just nukes the center of the outbreak, killing the zombies and survivors and everybody else.”

“Lake Woebegotten isn’t a city of a million people though,” Julie said. “We’re a lot smaller, and I think that works in our favor. And it sounds like we have been killing every zombie we see, right?”

Otto thought of the armless, limbless zombie, but what harm could
that
thing do? They still oughta put it out of its misery. And then there was that zombie dog… “Right,” he said.

“And you don’t become a zombie just by getting bitten. You become one when you die, so as long as the zombie doesn’t kill you, you’ll be fine. I’m inclined to be hopeful.” Hearing the calm and certainty in Julie’s voice made Otto feel better for the first time all day.

“I think you’re wrong.” Rufus sounded grim. “If a zombie’s biting you, there’s a good chance you’ll die. I saw it happen a few times this morning—God, was it only this morning?—and they take you down hard and quick. And another thing—if you just drop dead of a heart attack, you come back as a zombie. Get in a car wreck? Zombie. Take a too-big bite of Frito pie and choke to death? Zombie. The only thing that seems to stop them is destroying their brains.”

“That is a nasty little wrinkle,” Julie agreed.

“And there’s another thing.” Rufus sighed. “I hate to mention it, and I can’t know for sure if I’m right, but… We’re not talking about a city of a million people with one zombie dropped in the middle. We’re probably talking about all the dead people on the entire planet getting up and trying to pull down the living. All of them. Everywhere. Before the internet went down, I was seeing reports from all over the place—Iran, China, India, Australia, Europe, Mexico… I think it’s all over. The human civilization thing. I think it’s just a matter of time. We can’t live like this. Not for long.”

Julie took a pack of cigarettes from under the counter, put one in her mouth, and held the pack out toward Otto. He hadn’t had a smoke for fifteen years, Barbara had hounded him into quitting, but he took one anyway, a little surprised his hand wasn’t shaking. Rufus took one, too, even though Otto knew he liked to smoke those nasty all-natural tobacco cigarettes, like sucking smoke into your lungs was healthier if there was a picture of an Indian chief on the package. Julie flicked open a Zippo—it had some kind of military insignia on it, which meant it had belonged to her grandpa, Otto assumed—and lit them up. “Well, just because the world’s ending doesn’t mean Lake Woebegotten’s going anywhere,” she said, after blowing a column of smoke toward the ceiling. “Everybody living here’s got a gun, pretty much. We can keep the zombies down. Maybe the cities are burning down, and maybe there won’t be satellite TV and Amazon.com and TiVo anymore, but this town was founded by a bunch of people terrified in the middle of marshy nowhere. Half of them didn’t survive the winter, but half of them
did
, and they made something here. We can do it, too. Even if we lose power, and the outside world. Lots of us have got no use for the outside world anyway. We’ve got the town. That’s enough.”

“But what’s the point?” Rufus said. “If the world’s ending, if humanity is doomed, then why bother holding on? Why not just get drunk every day until we run out of booze and then blow our brains out so we can die a zombie-free life?”

“Because suicide’s a sin,” Otto said promptly, and then gritted his teeth when Rufus rolled his eyes.

“There’s always hope, Rufus,” Julie said. “There was a bottleneck in human history, did you know that? I read about it. I used to read a lot when I was… traveling. There was a time, maybe 150,000 years ago or more, when the climate changed, and the total population of humans got squeezed down to a few thousand, only a thousand of them capable of breeding. They hunkered down on the shore and ate shellfish because all the animals they used to eat instead were gone, and they managed to survive until things improved. Every single human being on this planet is descended from that group of a thousand breeders. Maybe this zombie thing is temporary. Maybe that star just let off some strange radiation, and when the radiation dies down, things will get better. And won’t you be glad we didn’t all blow our brains out when that happens?”

“So you’re saying we’ll have an, ah, responsibility to repopulate the human race?” Rufus said.
 

“You might better stick with gathering shellfish for the rest of us to eat,” Julie said, and ruffled his hair in a distinctly big-sisterly way, which gave Otto’s heart a little boost. “There’s another thing you see a lot in those zombie movies of yours. You know what that is?”

“What?” Otto said.

“A green zone.” Julie’s eyes had a strange light to them, and Otto wondered about her past, who she was, really, where she’d gone when she left town, why she’d come back, besides her grandfather getting sick, if there was anything besides that. “A place where the living are protected from zombies, and where civilization continues.” She took another drag on her cigarette, let the smoke out, and smiled. “We’d better get started making Lake Woebegotten into a green zone, don’t you think?”

Emperor Torvald lifted his head. “If we can make it through the winter,” he said. “There won’t be a lot of green here until spring, and there’s a lot of winter between here and there.” He paused, then said, “Maybe you could give a guy one of those cigarettes, Julie?” and then they all sat and smoked a while until Julie gave them all free sandwiches to go, including a tuna fish for Mr. Levitt that she opened up and spat in right in front of all of them, and then she closed up shop and kicked them out into the cold.
 

“I think I’m in love,” Rufus said as they got into the truck.

Otto grunted in a fairly disapproving way, but he was thinking,
Maybe me too
.

Twenty-Some-Odd
Scenes From the Winter,
In No Particular Order,
Certainly not Chronological

1

T
he day after the murder, Stevie Ray called another town meeting, and this time he advised people to institute a basic call-and-response test for finding out if someone was a zombie before shooting them in the head. “I recommend you just say something like, ‘Are you a zombie?’”

“And what are you supposed to say back if you’re not a zombie?” called a voice from the front row.

Stevie Ray sighed. He was so tired; he’d never signed up to be the only law east of the prairie. “I imagine you can say pretty much anything at all, because zombies can’t talk. So even if they say ‘Yes, I’m a zombie,’ don’t shoot. If they say ‘Ungh’ and lunge at you, then you can shoot them.”

“But it’s probably best if you don’t say ‘Yes, I’m a zombie,’” Pastor Inkfist said. “People are a little bit jumpy.”

“Funeral services are tomorrow,” Father Edsel rumbled. “It’ll be closed-casket. Obviously.”

2

A
fter her latest pointless visit, Eileen Munson slammed her hands down on Stevie Ray’s desk. “How long are you planning to keep Dolph locked up?” she demanded. “For a simple mistake?”

“He killed a man, Eileen,” Stevie Ray said, in the weary tone of one who’s answered this question before. “He thought he was killing a zombie, so I’m not saying it’s necessarily murder, but it’s still voluntary manslaughter, or negligent homicide.” He cleared his throat. “That’s for a judge to decide.” Actually he wasn’t even sure what negligent homicide was, but it sounded official.
 

“Judge,” Eileen said, sneering. “Like there’s going to be a judge coming through here any time soon. Dolph could be stuck in that jail forever!”

“It’s not such a bad jail,” Mr. Levitt said, leaning on a stool near the door, his eyes half-closed. “Quite cozy, in fact. He’s safer in there than the rest of us are out here.” That dry old lizard voice still made Stevie Ray’s hindbrain want to crawl down his spine and out his butt and run away.
Levitt
belonged in jail, and Stevie Ray wanted to tell everyone what a monster he was, but for the time being, he was more valuable to the town roaming free.
 

“Nobody asked your opinion, old man,” Eileen said.
 

Levitt grinned at her, then looked ostentatiously at his watch. “I should get another patrol in before dark, Stevie Ray. There are enough seats on that bus to fit thirty-six people, not counting the driver’s seat, and we don’t know how many of them were occupied. Could be thirty more zombies out there for all we know.”

Stevie Ray ground his teeth. “There were only fifteen bags on the bus, so at most there are a dozen zombies left, and they’re probably stuck buried in a snowdrift somewhere.”

“Snow will be melting soon,” Levitt said. “It’s almost March already. Spring’s only a month away by calendar time. We always find the damndest things when the snow melts, don’t we?”

“Just go.” Stevie Ray flapped his hands at Mr. Levitt, who smiled his skull smile, gave a salute, put on his coat, and strolled out into the cold.

“Somebody should kill that man,” Eileen said.

“I keep hoping a zombie will get him myself,” Stevie Ray said. “No such luck so far.”

Eileen took that as an opening. “You need to let Dolph out. It’s killing him. You can tell.”

Stevie Ray swiveled slowly in the big chair and looked into the cell, where Dolph lay on the bunk, facing the wall. Which, with one or two exceptions, was pretty much all he’d done ever since the accident, or murder, or whatever you wanted to call it. “I think killing a man accidentally is what’s killing him, Eileen. Not being locked up in here.”