The Zombies Of Lake Woebegotten (17 page)

“But to lock him up, and let Mr. Levitt go free—”

“Come look at this,” Stevie Ray said, rising. He walked across the office, to the big deep-freezer they’d put in the corner. It wasn’t plugged in or anything, they weren’t going to waste their meager generator power on that, but it was replenished with ice and snow every couple of days. He lifted the lid carefully, just enough for Eileen to look inside, and she gasped.

“How… how many?”

“Seven,” Stevie Ray said. “A couple of suicides, a heart attack, the three bus crash zombies he caught, and one fella who died of exposure, a drifter maybe.” There were actually eight heads in there. The other was Clem’s, the first zombie Levitt had killed without destroying the brain. But Stevie Ray didn’t want to tell Eileen that. The severed heads in the freezer began snapping their teeth—they always got more lively when the lid was open. He let the lid drop. “Levitt brought them all. He’s protecting the town. Not for good reasons, but… he likes it, and it needs doing, and who else is going to volunteer to walk around in the cold with a machete, looking for monsters?”

“But why keep the heads?” Eileen asked, horrified.

Stevie Ray hesitated. “In case things do get better, the government comes back, all that, we thought, maybe they’d be valuable for scientists, you know, to study.” That’s what Levitt had told him, and it had the ring of the plausible, but… Levitt liked keeping trophies. Stevie Ray was pretty sure the heads were his trophies now.

“How do you know he’s not just finding lost living people in the woods, killing them, waiting for them to rise as zombies, and then beheading them?” Eileen asked. Like Stevie Ray hadn’t thought of that.

“He doesn’t get a moment when he’s not being watched—even if he
thinks
he’s not being watched,” Stevie Ray said. “Don’t worry about it.”
 

“And what if he becomes mayor?” Eileen said. “You’ve heard the rumors that he’s running as a write-in candidate, I’m sure. Should I worry
then
?”

“You have my permission to worry then. Heck, I’ll even join you.”

3

R
ufus sat snoozing in the police station on his first ever solo shift, head resting on the surface of the desk. He’d been reading a graphic novel by the grainy gray light coming in through the windows, but in retrospect
The Walking Dead
hadn’t been a great choice—he’d expected it to give him some tips or some insight, but it had only served to depress him, and Mr. Levitt’s persistent snoring from the cell in the back of the room had an oddly soporific quality, and Rufus’s head had drooped, drooped, drooped. Stevie Ray would get mad if he found Rufus sleeping on duty, but getting fired from a job that included no pay and excessive responsibilities and proximity to a creepy old murderer wasn’t the worst thing that could happen. Rufus only agreed to remain a special deputy because the alternative was spending time at home with his mother and her increasingly strained-looking eternal smile.
 

A thumping, scraping noise at the door woke him, and it took a moment of staring at the pool of drool on the wooden desk before Rufus remembered where he was. “It’s open!” he called, but the thump-scrape-thump just continued, like someone wearing oven mitts was trying to work the doorknob while simultaneously attempting to batter the door down in a leisurely fashion.
 

“Coming!” Rufus called, rising from the desk. Mr. Levitt was awake, too, drifting over to the bars of his cage. Rufus tried to ignore him. The old man treated the world like it was a half-interesting soap opera that he’d watch a little bit, just until something better came on.
 

Rufus turned the doorknob and the door swung inward and his uncle Otto half-crawled in, eyes wide and red-rimmed, and Rufus struggled to help him up without falling over himself. “Otto, are you okay? What happened?”

“Dog bit me,” Otto said, voice slurring. “Fuggin dog bit my fuggin leg.”
 

Rufus eased Otto into the room and helped him sit down on the bench. Otto leaned against the wall, breath coming raggedly, eyes now half-closed, and Rufus bent to look at his leg. The pants and long underwear over Otto’s right ankle were shredded and soaked in blood, the flesh a mass of ugly punctures. Rufus whistled. “I think there’s some rubbing alcohol here, but you need stitches, Otto. I’ll call Morty.” Morty was a paramedic and, since Doctor Holliday’s unfortunate death by zombie bite (Rufus had joked that, like the historical Doc Holliday, the town’s own Doc Holliday had also died of consumption, of a sort, but nobody seemed to think it was funny) and re-death by gunshot, Morty was the town’s ranking medical man.
 

“Fuggin dog,” Otto said. “Ugly little bastard. Bit my…” He trailed off, head nodding.

“Was that my dog?” Mr. Levitt demanded. “My Alta?”

“Miniature pissant,” Otto muttered.

Mr. Levitt cackled. “Shut up,” Rufus said, sorting through the cupboard for the first aid kit. “Why’d you name your dog Alta anyway? What’s it supposed to mean?”

“It’s a little town in Utah,” Mr. Levitt said. “Where I killed my first police officer. I named my dog after the town as a remembrance, because I didn’t get to keep a trophy that time. And now Alta’s killed a lawman himself. Good dog.”

“He’s not dead, it’s just a bite,” Rufus said, frowning. If he’d gone after Alta that night when the dog first escaped from the cooler, Otto wouldn’t have gotten bitten.
 

There was the first aid kit, a white-and-red painted metal box, but the latch was rusted shut, wasn’t that always the way, made you thank the good Lord for the invention of plastic. He started hammering the kit on the edge of the counter, bits of oxidized metal flaking off, but the latch stayed pretty much welded closed.

“It’s just a bite from a
zombie
dog. You know how they say a dog’s mouth is cleaner than a human mouth? I’m guessing that’s not true when it’s a zombie dog. And when I said your uncle’d been killed, I wasn’t being metaphorical or talking about some inevitable future—he’s dead, and, oh, looks like you missed that little grace period you get between when they keel over dead and wake up again hungry, because here he comes.”

“Very funny, old man—it’s sad to see a sadist like you reduced to the old ‘Look out behind you!’ trick.” Rufus tried again to pry up the latch, tearing his thumbnail and sending a bolt of bright white pain through his hand. “Crap in a basket!” he shouted—just a few days back in his mother’s house, and his casual college profanity had been replaced by the habitual euphemisms of his youth—and sucked the thumb.
 

“Murrung,” his uncle said, or something similar, and then there was a crash of metal and breaking glass, and Rufus turned.

Otto had gotten his feet tangled up in the desk lamp’s cord, and he was jerking one foot over and over trying to get loose, but all he’d done was pull down the gooseneck lamp and break the bulb. Drool poured out of Otto’s mouth like a sludgy waterfall, and when he lifted his head, his eyes were bloodshot and blank, his mouth ceaselessly moving. He reached out for Rufus and lunged, managing only to trip and fall face first, landing two feet from his nephew. He reached out his hands and started dragging himself forward. Rufus screamed—like a girl, just a little girl, Mr. Levitt would later say, with some justification—and danced out of the way, chucking the first aid kit at his uncle’s head, which didn’t seem to be much of a deterrent.
 

Rufus rushed to the desk and pulled open the drawer with jittering hands, taking out the service revolver Stevie Ray had told him to absolutely not touch except in case of dire emergency, viz., zombies in the cop shop. Meanwhile Otto had untangled his feet and was making his slow implacable way over to Rufus.
 

“Stop, uncle Otto! Stop right there!”

“That’s not your uncle anymore.” From his bored tone, Mr. Levitt might as well have been watching a scene on TV. Maybe he was—maybe in his messed-up brain, other people were just objects moving for his amusement, the world nothing more than a picture show populated by imaginary beings. “Bullet in the brain, son, that’s the only way.”

Rufus lifted the pistol, but—but—it was
Otto
. His uncle. Sure, they’d gotten on each other’s nerves in recent years, but when Rufus was a kid, Otto had been his favorite uncle, teaching him to play cards, pulling quarters from his ears by magic, taking him out fishing, showing him how to shoot a gun—how to shoot a gun—how to shoot a gun—

How could Rufus kill the man who’d taught him how to
shoot
a gun
with
a gun? How could he be expected to do this?

In the zombie movies and books Rufus had studied, there was pretty much always a scene where a loved one became a zombie, and the other characters always had a hard time with it, sometimes broke down completely, or killed themselves, and Rufus had always thought:
Nah
.
Even if it was my own mother, I’d just point and shoot.
But his hands wouldn’t stop shaking and he couldn’t even get his finger under the trigger guard and Otto was closer, his mouth opening—the mouth that used to tell Rufus dirty jokes when no other adult was around, the mouth that had kissed his forehead when Rufus was just a tiny little thing, the mouth that had whispered,
You’re the man of the house now
when his Dad died—Otto’s mouth was opening to take a bite out of him, and, well, so be it. Who wanted to live in a world full of zombies anyway? Better to be a zombie yourself. Join the winning side. At least that way, if you had to kill someone you loved, you wouldn’t love them anymore.

Rufus closed his eyes, and Otto’s outstretched hands touched his chest.

The harsh crack of a gunshot went off, followed by another, and Rufus jumped, eyes popping open, expecting to see Stevie Ray in the doorway—but there was no one new in the room. His uncle Otto writhed on the ground, legs bent funny, knees shredded and white and frothing red.
 

“Saved your life, son,” Mr. Levitt said.

Rufus looked at the prisoner, who still leaned casually against the bars, but now held a pistol in his left hand. “You—where did you get a gun?”

Mr. Levitt nodded at Otto. “You might want to step away from your fellow deputy there. He’s still lively, and they don’t feel pain.”

Rufus stepped away from Otto, and away from Mr. Levitt, too, putting the desk between all of them, for what that was worth. “Where did you get the gun?” he repeated.

“You so-called lawmen did a piss-poor job of booking me, you know that? Didn’t remember my Miranda rights, and I never did get searched. I know Harry had a lot on his mind, but still, I expected a
little
better of him. Had the pistol on me the whole time, from when I was killing zombies at my house. Been keeping it under the mattress in here.”

“Then why haven’t you used it to escape?”

Levitt shrugged. “Seemed like inside a jail cell was a pretty safe place if the zombies were coming. But I’ve been in here long enough, and safety is boring. I’d like to get out now. What do you say you unlock the door and set me free?”

“And if I don’t? You’ll kill me?” Rufus still had the pistol, and he didn’t think he’d have as much trouble shooting Mr. Levitt as he had shooting Otto… but he knew Mr. Levitt would have absolutely no trouble at all shooting
him
, and the old man was probably a better shot, too.

“No,” Mr. Levitt said. “If you don’t let me go, I’ll
wound
you. Kind of like I did with him.” He nodded to Otto, who was trying to get moving again even though his knees were just bulges of shattered bone now. “I’ll let the two of you crawl around on the floor together. Since you feel pain, and he doesn’t, I’m guessing he’ll get to you before you can get away.” He lifted the gun.

Stevie Ray will kill me
, Rufus thought, but he nodded, and got the keys to the cell, and unlocked the door, and opened it wide.

“Good lad.” Mr. Levitt put a bullet in Otto’s head in an offhand sort of way. He sat down at Stevie Ray’s desk, grinned, and said, “Why don’t you call your boss man, son? I’d like to offer my services to the town. Killing zombies isn’t as good as killing ordinary people, but it’s a lot better than killing nothing at all. I’d make a good zombie-hunter general. And since I just saved your life, you’ll vouch for me, won’t you?”

4

“B
ut what are we supposed to do with him?” Dolph said, in that whiny tone Eileen couldn’t stand—she’d had one whiny husband, and a whiny lover didn’t much interest her, especially when he was asking stupid questions.

“You shoot him in the head, sweetie.” Eileen shifted around, but it was pretty much impossible to get comfortable when sitting on a stack of boxes of frozen fishsticks. Still, there was something reassuring about being in the back of Dolph’s grocery, surrounded by supplies. Being close to the man who had more food than anyone else in town was a pretty good position, even if he was a whiner.

Dolph gestured helplessly to the closed freezer door. “But it’s
Clem
!”

“It
was
Clem. Now it’s a zombie.” Eileen contemplated a flat of milk cartons. That stuff would go bad soonest, so maybe they should donate it to the town, get the priest and the minister to distribute it to the townspeople, as a gesture of goodwill, make everybody like them before they learned they’d have to
really
pay for canned goods and everything else once they got good and hungry.
 

“I don’t know how you can do that,” Dolph said. “Just… make that distinction. The way you shot Brent tonight…”

“He would have hurt people. Brent didn’t want to hurt people.” Except her. But even then, he hadn’t so much
wanted
to hurt her, as much as he’d just been
indifferent
to whether he hurt her. “In a way, shooting Brent like that is exactly what Brent would have wanted.”

“You aren’t… torn up about it?”

She shrugged. “He was my husband. I’m still pretty much in shock, I guess. But you know things haven’t been good between us in a long time. That’s why I’ve been spending so much time with you.” She sighed. “In a few months I guess we can tell people we’ve started dating, if you want. Assuming all this blows over.” Eileen didn’t think it would blow over, and she was making plans for the eventuality of the zombie apocalypse becoming an ongoing thing, but better not to dizzy up poor Dolph’s head with all that now. “In the meantime, you should take care of business, and open that freezer door, and kill Clem. What used to be Clem. Or do you want me to do it?” Eileen hadn’t exactly developed a taste for blood, like some kind of tiger that eats one little Javanese boy and can’t abide the taste of anything but sweet sweet manflesh after that, but she’d discovered she could kill both deliberately and in the heat of the moment if the job needed doing. Killing was just another necessary chore, like cleaning the gutters or scrubbing mildew off the tile in the bathtub. Leave it to a man to bitch and moan about something instead of just going ahead and getting it done.