The Zombies Of Lake Woebegotten (25 page)

For no reason Dolph could comprehend, as the danger was now over, a couple of the people who’d emerged from the bar began to scream and carry on, and Stevie Ray was there pointing a gun at him and telling him to put down the rifle
right now
and put his hands behind his head, and that was Dolph’s first real inkling that he might have made the worst mistake in a lifetime that already included some pretty bad ones.

24

“Y
ou’re cut off,” Ace said, taking the glass from in front of Gunther Montcrief’s spot at the bar. “There’s only so much whiskey in the world now until I can convince Stevie Ray over there to let me set up a still, so I’m keeping you to a five-drink maximum.”

“Sumbitch,” Gunther said.

“You know I won’t be sworn at in my own bar. Now get on out of here.” Gunther stared at the bar for a long moment, sniffed, and decided against arguing further—it never did any good with Ace. The bar was packed pretty full—everybody wanted a drink, and why not, they were in the time of the zomboes now—and he had to shove his way past a lot of quiet people drinking by candlelight. He stepped out into the cold air, and it was bracing, but not particularly sobering, and he stumbled on the curb, which seemed to have been moved some distance higher than it usually was, probably part of the zombo plot, make people trip and bust their heads and come back to life as monsters. He regained his footing and set off down the center of the street, trying to remember if he had enough to drink at his fishing shack, and then he saw Dolph from the grocery store coming toward him, and though the store was closed by now and only sold beer anyway, well, beer was better than water, and maybe Dolph could be convinced to nip into the store and open up and sell him a case or two or three.
 

Gunther lifted his hand in a wave, and then Dolph lifted a rifle to his shoulder, and Gunther thought with uncharacteristic clarity,
Oh, he thinks I’m a zombo the way I’m stumbling around, shouldn’t have drank so much
, and then he didn’t think anything more ever again at all.

25

M
r. Levitt took off his earflap hat, and his earlobes instantly went numb. Winter was easing up—it was no longer so cold your extremities would turn blue, then black, and then fall off shortly after being exposed unprotected to air—but it was still a long way from the warmth of spring. If you were quiet and you listened—two things Mr. Levitt was pretty good at—you could hear the creak and squeak of trees swaying as the ice on their branches melted, easing their burden of cold.
 

This was the oldest cemetery in the area, so it wasn’t as active as the newer one closer to town, but some of the older families buried their kin here with their illustrious descendants who’d founded the town. The earliest dead white people in the area were the denizens of a fur trading post populated mostly by drunken Frenchmen who’d died in a fire—though some had frozen to death afterward because it was winter and their shelter had burned down—but as far as Mr. Levitt knew none of them were buried here. Then there’d been the Utopian community where it turned out the leader told all the young girls that his flesh physically transformed into the flesh of Christ every night in a sort of full-body transubstantiation, and that by sleeping with him while he was suffused with the holy spirit, they might have the chance to bear the new Messiah. Winter killed most of them before sexually-transmitted diseases could. There were a few of those Utopians buried in a corner of the cemetery, but they were far too old for Mr. Levitt’s purposes. This ground held the earliest Lutheran settlers, too, though, and many of the names on the memorials here would be familiar to anyone driving through the area, as those surnames adorned various roads, nature trails, baseball fields, and primary schools. Plenty of them adorned the idiot living descendants of those proud and brave—or, more likely, stubborn and self-effacing—settlers, too. The dead around Lake Woebegotten easily outnumbered the living. As would become apparent in a few more weeks, Mr. Levitt suspected.

The old man scouted out the newest-looking headstone and crouched down on the frozen earth, ignoring the twinge in his back—flesh as a general rule was weak, he’d proven that again and again, but he didn’t like to think about the weakness in
his
flesh—and pressed his ear to the soil. The numbness in his ear was replaced by an icy fiery pain that soon vanished into a dull throb. He might lose an ear to frostbite yet if he wasn’t careful, but he couldn’t help it; the sound was so
wonderful.

Scratch. Scratch. Scrabble scrabble thump scratch. Scratch. Scratch.

Mr. Levitt grinned, sat up, glanced at the name on the headstone, and said, “Hell-o Erlene Mildred Borgerson, devoted wife and mother. You must be getting pretty hungry down there. I imagine you’ve smashed through the lid of your casket by now, and you’re just clawing at the dirt, aren’t you? I bet you even made a little progress, but it’s hard as a rock now, isn’t it? Those last few feet of soil are a bitch. But don’t worry—spring is coming. The ground will thaw. You’ve probably scraped your fingers to the bone by now, but I have faith in you. You can use your wristbones for spades. And then you can go looking for some food. And I’ll make sure you find it.”

He put his earflap hat back on, pausing at a few other tombstones, listening for scratching. He didn’t hear much, but that was okay. The newer cemeteries were more recently occupied, and sounded a lot livelier.
 

He kept trying to estimate how many dead might rise from the town’s Lutheran and Catholic graveyards, but the math defeated him—there were too many unknown variables. He mulled it over again. He knew the annual death rate in America—pre zombie-apocalypse—was about 0.8%. There were around 2,000 people in Lake Woebegotten and environs, so say 16 people died a year. If they were all embalmed and buried locally—some were cremated and some wound up elsewhere but this was a back-of-the-envelope thing—and if he assumed that any bodies buried within the last ten years could rise from the dead, there were about 160 zombies underground desperately trying to go out for breakfast.

Who knew how accurate that estimate was, though? The number could be half that, or double. Though Mr. Levitt had created a lot of dead bodies in his time, he didn’t know very much about the mortuary sciences, as his interest in the bodies ended more or less when they became corpses. Still, he knew embalming techniques had come a long way in the past decades, and had heard stories of embalmed and be-coffined corpses dug up many years after death that looked remarkably lifelike, apart from being yellowish and saggy. On one of his cemetery visits yesterday he’d heard scratching from one grave with a headstone that bore an end date over fifteen years in the past. As long as the bodies had brains in their heads and ligaments and tendons bound to their bones, he suspected, they’d come climbing out of the ground once spring was sprung. There was a pet cemetery, too, but pets weren’t embalmed, so they were surely all bones, which was too bad, because the sight of Rover and Snowball and Spot attacking their former owners would have cheered him up, especially after what he’d been forced to do to Alta, but you couldn’t have everything.

Levitt had figured out the danger posed by the town’s graveyards months ago, but no one else seemed to have even considered the threat from below. Morons. He’d planned to tell the townspeople about the cemeteries, detail men to surround the areas with guns or some of Cyrus Bell’s more exotic weaponry—he had at least two flamethrowers—and become even more of a hero when Rising Day came and the dead were easily defeated thanks to his leadership. Of course, he’d expected to be mayor in that scenario, riding an easy tide of victory after pretty much single-handedly killing all the bus crash zombies who’d attacked Ingvar’s house. Sure, a few others had died in the process, but it was a chaotic situation, and as far as anyone knew for
sure
those deaths were accidental. Damn Dolph and his hearsay evidence and heartstring-tugging little girl testimony anyway. He should have checked under the table for witnesses. Still, some little girl’s word shouldn’t have been enough to turn the people against him. They should have voted him mayor anyway, instead of a
woman
.
 

But the people of Lake Woebegotten had foolishly decided to go another way. And as far as he was concerned, they could go on all the way to Hell. He wasn’t planning to tell anybody about the scrabbling dead below their feet. Quite the opposite. He was going to arrange a feast for them. He just needed to figure out how best to maximize the carnage. If he couldn’t get into politics, he had to amuse himself some other way, and the total destruction of the town would definitely be amusing. Afterward, he could light out, find another town, and offer his services. He thought he could play the role of brave, tragic sole survivor beautifully. He patted Erlene Mildred Borgerson’s headstone and said, “See you soon, darling. Save the last dance for me.”
 

He walked off, whistling, wondering where he might find a backhoe and the diesel fuel to run it.
 

The First Day
of Spring, More or Less:
Nice Weather, Shame About
the Zombies Though

1. Eileen vs.
the Great Beast

E
ileen woke, as she did every morning since becoming mayor and having no choice but to prove herself a woman of the people, to the sound of screaming children. She sat up on the air mattress in her laundry room—which was really just a
room
now that she mostly washed her clothes in the bathtub instead of the washing machine in order to conserve generator power, and she didn’t like to think about what she’d do when the propane was entirely gone and she couldn’t even run the power long enough to operate the pump to pull up water from the well. The
room
was tiny, with just enough space on the floor for her air mattress (leaky, of course) to fit between the wall and the useless white appliances, and it smelled of ancient fabric softener and drifting molecules of lint and distant mildew. She’d hated this room when she was married, seeing it as a sort of concretized symbol of her domestic servitude and the endless drudgery of being a wife, and she hated it now, though it served at least as a sort of inner sanctum, a space she could claim completely as her own, though largely just because it was too small to squeeze another cot or pallet in here.
 

Eileen got up, did an impromptu dance to get rid of her by now us
ual morning leg cramp, splashed her face with some cold water from the big industrial sink where she’d once rinsed out poop stains when her children were babies, and blood stains when her children played hockey, and puke stains when her children were teenagers. She dipped her toothbrush in a dish of baking soda and scrubbed her teeth and gums vigorously, because Lake Woebegotten didn’t have a dentist, and the thought of Morty the paramedic attempting dentistry based on a book from the library was too horrible to contemplate.
 

She spat into the sink, steeled herself, dressed in the least-smelly clothes from the pile she kept inside the dryer, and went out to greet her constituents.

The kitchen was crammed, but at least it was warm from the woodstove. There were five children on and around the big butcher block table eating instant oatmeal noisily and messily, and seven adults lounging at various points staring dolefully into their strictly rationed half-cups of instant coffee. Eileen knew all their names, had known most of them since she was a girl, but she thought of them all simply as
the great beast.
When she’d decided to run for mayor she’d picked up a few books from the library about politics and read about Alexander Hamilton, who’d responded to his rival Thomas Jefferson’s comments about the greatness of the people by saying, “Your people, sir, is nothing but a great beast.” Hamilton had never become President but he’d gotten his face on the ten dollar bill, and that was pretty good, though on the other hand he’d been shot and killed in a duel so he was probably a poor figure to model yourself after. He definitely had a point about people being beastly, though. Especially when they were crammed in your house and you had to let them in because they were too dumb to lay in enough fuel in their own houses and you were the mayor now and such largesse was expected and oh, of course the old married couple should get to sleep in the master bedroom while you went to sleep in the laundry room because the kids’ old rooms were filled with bunk beds and rollaways and cots to accommodate the who-can-even-remember-how-many-children are living here now in a house that had felt too crowded for her taste with just two inhabitants.
 

“Morning mayor!” they chorused, and that was some small thrill, though it was smaller every day. Being mayor had never meant a whole heck of a lot in Lake Woebegotten—her husband had managed the job, after all, and he could make a mess out of falling out of bed in the morning—but she’d foolishly expected the public perception of the office to change now that the town was an outpost alone on the frontier of a hostile world, in dire need of leadership. Leading Minnesotans was tricky business. They mostly just wanted to do things on their own, and they’d nod at you and listen and be polite and shrug and then go on doing whatever they thought was best.
 

Eileen elbowed her way to the stove and poured the last of the hot water into a cup with a pitiful half-spoonful of coffee crystals. There was no peaceful place to sit and sip, no unoccupied chair, so she smiled and nodded and refrained from screaming and throwing elbows and made her way toward the living room and the door that led out to the porch. If she wanted privacy at all in her waking hours she had to go outside into the cold. It would be so easy to poison them all, she mused. Slip some rat poison in with the instant coffee, that would do it in no time. Though then she’d have a house full of zombies, which would be even worse, marginally.
 

She’d finally gotten the house to herself by killing her husband, and it had been a blissful little while of sleeping diagonal in her bed and not having to pick up anyone’s dirty underwear and doing dishes for one, basically a kind of solitary paradise—leaving aside the whole zombie situation and dwindling fuel and lack of electricity and Dolph’s cowardice and imprisonment and subsequent release and decision to just plain flat out ignore her from now on—until Ingvar’s house burned down and all his dozens of refugees started looking for new homes and, as the leader of the town, Eileen had really had no choice but to open her doors to them. They’d been living with her for nearly six weeks now.