The Zombies Of Lake Woebegotten (36 page)

The trees got thicker as they neared the lake, and he lost sight of the old guy, and Rufus was feeling a little winded himself, so he paused by a tree and looked at the ground for footprints, and that was weird, because there
were
footprints in the patchy snow, but they just stopped at the base of that tree, so where—

A great weight slammed into Rufus’s head, driving him to the ground. Rufus tried to roll over, but something was pressing on his back, bolts of pain ripping through him, and suddenly his back felt warm, then cold, and he thought he knew how a leaky pool toy must feel: all the air inside leaking out. But this wasn’t air. He was pretty sure it was oh heck it was blood.
 

Mr. Levitt, who’d jumped out of the tree onto Rufus’s back, leaned forward and whispered in his ear: “Don’t worry. I won’t let you come back as a zombie.” He rolled Rufus over onto his back, and Rufus groped for his pistol, but it was somehow no longer in his hand. Mr. Levitt looked down at him with no more interest than Rufus would show an ant scurrying across a picnic table. “Don’t fall asleep, now,” Mr. Levitt said. “Open those eyes wide. That’s my direct route to the brain.”

Rufus’s final thought as the point of Mr. Levitt’s very long, very bloody hunting knife descended toward his eye was,
Game over.

Mr. Levitt limped away from Rufus’s corpse. Jumping out of the tree had certainly been nice and dramatic, but it hadn’t done his body any good, and his knee in particular was twinging every tenth step or so in a way that worried him mightily. His plan to assault the town hadn’t worked out, though he consoled himself that there was no way he could have prepared himself for
exploding pigs
. There just wasn’t a contingency plan for something like that. He decided departure was the better part of valor. Now that the weather was getting warm and travel was less dangerous, he could hole up for a few days, get his strength back, and then escape town, steal a vehicle and see what was happening in St. Elmer or Anoka or someplace, maybe even get down to the cities and see how things were faring there, if some humanity was holding on or if it was pure zombie free-for-all. Lake Woebegotten had been his home for a long time, and it would’ve been satisfying to destroy it, but Levitt was not a sentimental fellow. He could turn his back and head for less hostile pastures without a backwards glance.

But first he needed a place to rest. The day’s activities had taken a toll on him. There were a few fishing shacks around the lake, and Gunther Montcrief’s at least would be uninhabited, and might even still have some supplies laid in. Levitt wasn’t a hundred percent sure where Gunther’s shack was, but the lake was there on his left, still iced over though it would begin breaking up soon, and if he just followed around the shoreline he was sure to find Gunther’s place or some other.
 

The police radio he was still carrying crackled. “I just found Rufus’s body,” Dolph said. “Mr. Levitt, if you’re listening, I’m coming for you, and you won’t like it when I find you.”

Morons. Wonderful morons. “Why, thank you for warning me,” Mr. Levitt said. “Imagine what you could have done if you’d retained the element of surprise. Idiot.”

Levitt knew his trail wouldn’t be too hard to find—even when he avoided walking in snow, the patches of bare earth were soft and muddy and took footprints, too. So if he couldn’t hide, he’d just have to prepare a little surprise for Dolph.

And, ah, right there, that was Gunther’s shack, must be, all gray-weathered boards and a tin roof. Maybe there’d be something useful inside. Like chains, or rope.

Dolph had not been especially close to Rufus, but the boy had seemed about as nice as you could expect for a guy who had a tattoo of a spiderweb on his neck and looked like he might wear eyeliner if he thought he could get away with it. Seeing him bled out on the snow, all cut up, had turned Dolph’s stomach, but it had also stiffened his resolve.

Of course, telling Levitt he was coming for him maybe hadn’t been the smartest thing, but Dolph wasn’t a man-hunter by training. He was just blundering along. He’d have to hope that blundering was good enough.

Dolph wasn’t an exceptional tracker, either, that was more Stevie Ray’s gig, but Stevie Ray and the rest of the town’s forces were cleaning up stray zombies and securing the cemeteries, since even the ones Levitt hadn’t dug up needed to be sanitized—eventually the zombies would claw their way out of the thawing ground even without help from a backhoe. Really, Levitt was just one guy, a small target, and he was Dolph’s responsibility now. Fortunately the trail wasn’t at all tricky to follow. Nobody had gone walking in the woods lately, so that one set of footprints leading away from Rufus’s body was pretty obvious. Dolph didn’t follow right on top of the footprints, ranging off to one side or the other of the track, trying to be quiet, holding his gun—one of Cyrus’s ridiculous little machine guns that looked almost like a toy but most certainly wasn’t—at the ready.
 

Then he saw the shack, looking like it was held together by duct tape and superglue. Mr. Levitt was probably in there, judging by the tracks that led right up to the door. Well, Dolph didn’t need any heroics. He pointed the gun at about chest height and pulled the trigger, and though it made a noise like a sewing machine it bucked in his hand like a living thing, and stitched a swooping line across the side of the shack. Dolph held the gun with both hands, braced himself, and sprayed another shower of bullets into the shack, back and forth, up and down, trying to cover every possible corner and nook inside. There were no screams, but a headshot or heart shot wouldn’t give you time to scream, right? Dolph went cautiously to the shack and pushed at the door with his foot. Having been shot half to pieces, the door didn’t so much open as disintegrate when his foot touched it. Inside there was only darkness, but was that a mound of blankets or a body in the back—

Something flashed down past Dolph’s eyes and then something tightened around his throat and he was jerked backwards off his feet, gun flying from his grip. He scrabbled at his throat and felt coarse rope. Somebody had lassoed him! He twisted and turned his head and there was Mr. Levitt holding the other end of the rope, whistling, and throwing one end of the rope in the air over a handy tree branch. “Never hung somebody before,” he said conversationally. “It’s good to expand your repertoire though.” He hauled on the rope, and the pressure on Dolph’s throat was unbearable. He struggled to his knees, then to his feet, gasping breaths in the brief moments when there was slack in the rope, trying to get the noose off over his head, but Levitt pulled relentlessly, and Dolph went up on tiptoes as the old guy grunted and strained. “Just need to get you an inch or two off the ground, and I can tie this end off and let you strangle,” Levitt said. “Darn cheap rope has too much give in it, keeps stretching, should’ve known that drunk Montcrief wouldn’t have any decent rope out here—”

Dolph thought the blood was being cut off to his brain, resulting in hallucinations, because an unlikely pair came out of the trees behind Mr. Levitt then: one of them was Eileen, but a zombified Eileen, not pretty at all, wearing a torn blouse and bloody skirt with gaping eyes.

And walking by her side, big as you please, was an obviously dead and equally bloody black bear.

Mr. Levitt must have heard them—which meant it wasn’t a hallucination, and
that
was interesting, although,
Oh, Eileen, you were tough and kind of crazy but I cared about you once
—because he looked back and let go of the rope and stumbled away. Dolph collapsed to his knees, coughing and gasping and pulling the rope off over his head. Then he got to his feet, and ran as hard and as fast as he could away from the zombies and Mr. Levitt. Julie had explained the whole biotropic situation to him. All things being equal, the zombies could come after him
or
Mr. Levitt, they were both equally appealing, but zombies tended toward whatever target was closest, and Dolph wanted to make that choice obvious. He paused by a tree about fifty yards away and looked back to see if he’d managed to escape Eileen and her bear-friend’s notice.

Mr. Levitt was running, too, straight away from them, in the direction of the lake, and Eileen and the bear were following him, not very fast—zombies were never very fast—but implacable. And Mr. Levitt wasn’t going to break any land speed records himself. In fact, he was limping and favoring one leg and firing a pistol pretty much blindly behind him. Dolph didn’t think much of the old murderer’s chances. He leaned up against a tree to watch the show.

A bear. A
zombie bear
. How nice it would have been to lead
that
beast to the center of town! But having the bear come after
him
was less satisfying. Mr. Levitt was pleased to see that his mayoral rival Eileen had gotten herself killed at some point, but it was cold comfort when she wanted to eat him. If it was just Eileen he’d have stood his ground and taken aim and shot her in the head… but there was that
bear
. Bears had small heads in relation to the rest of their bulk, making it a trickier shot. Bears were just generally a lot tougher than people, and it seemed faster than human zombies, too. He aimed a few running shots at them, hoping to get lucky, but wasn’t surprised when the gun went empty with his pursuers still on his heels.
 

The bear, frankly, worried him, but he had an idea. Get some distance between them, and then lob a grenade. Tough or not, the bear wouldn’t survive
that
. At least he’d stumbled into some kind of clearing, the ground was snowy and slick with ice but there were no trees, and that made it easier to put on a burst of speed despite that twinge in his knee. The prospect of onrushing death did have a way of tapping into your body’s hidden resources, he’d found. He looked back, and judged they were far enough away to risk his Hail Mary move.

He took the grenade from his pocket, pulled the pin, and tried to think of something nasty to say, but, heck, they were
zombies
, it wasn’t like they’d appreciate his wit. So he just chucked the grenade at them and waited.

What a beautiful throw. Levitt had played a lot of baseball in his youth, and he still had the arm. The grenade actually bounced off the bear’s back, Levitt saw it, and then—boom. A flash of white, a lot of smoke, and pieces of bear scattering far and wide. Pieces of Eileen, too, for that matter. “Yes!” Levitt shouted, actually jumping in the air in his excitement, though that wasn’t such a good idea, because when he landed his knee twisted, and he went down pretty hard. The ground was uncommonly hard and cold here, and—

Oh, heck.

You’re on the lake, idiot
, that small treacherous part of his mind whispered.
You thought you were in a clearing, you were just running blind, you ran out on the ice, and it’s
thin ice
, and you just threw a
grenade
onto that thin ice—

The noise of ice on a lake breaking is unlike any other noise. It doesn’t just crack, it squeaks, and sighs, and moans, and it was doing all of that now, a chorus of icy disinterested death. The remains of Eileen and the bear vanished as the ice gave way beneath them, black water splashing, and as black cracks raced through the ice toward him, Mr. Levitt tried to get to his feet and run, to make it to shore, but his knee was too bad off, and the ground gave way beneath him, and there was the water, as cold as his heart, as merciless as himself, as welcoming as only death can be.

Mr. Levitt sank into the freezing water, and he couldn’t think of any good last words, not that there was anyone around to hear them anyway.

The voice in his head had a last word, though. That word was
Moron
.

Dolph watched Mr. Levitt fall into the ice, and radioed Stevie Ray to tell him what had happened—including the sudden appearance of Eileen and a bear—and what he planned to do. Stevie Ray told him to be careful, but that it sounded like a good plan. So Dolph picked through the ruins of the fish shack and found, miraculously unshattered, most of a bottle of bourbon, hidden so deep under the little pallet there that even the owner had probably not known of its continued existence. Dolph took a few bits of blanket, chose a spot on the shore of the lake where the ice was all broken up, and sat on the blankets, and sipped the bourbon, just a bit. He didn’t want to get drunk. He just wanted to savor being alive.
 

After about an hour, the water rippled. A head emerged. Then a torso. It was a zombie, walking up out of the water, face nibbled by fish—maybe even zombie fish—skin blue from the cold. A familiar face, though, even blue and fish-gnawed. A hateful face. Mr. Levitt’s face.

Dolph stood up, lifted his gun, took careful aim, and put a bullet right into the center of that face.

The twice-dead body fell back into the water and floated there.
 

Dolph took another sip of his bourbon, smiled at the world in general, and started the walk back to town.

Epilogue:
A Pretty Nice Night

A
fter the town meeting that evening, Stevie Ray, Father Edsel, Julie, and Dolph sat in a booth in Cafe Lo sipping instant coffee by the light of a couple of camping lanterns.

“There’s still a lot of work to do,” Stevie Ray said. “We need to get lookouts up on the grain elevator night and day. We should probably build some barricades, maybe even a wall around downtown, if we can manage it. Maybe dig some trenches. It shouldn’t be hard to keep zombies out, but now that the weather’s changed, we might have to worry about other things—gangs of survivors, Road Warrior type stuff, you know?”

“They won’t find us easy pickings,” Edsel said. “We have Cyrus Bell’s stash. Which, ah, you might want to seize. A man who plants explosives on the baseball field shouldn’t have ready access to that kind of weaponry.”

“
You
explain it to him, then,” Stevie Ray said. “Convince him it’s a good idea to keep the weapons at the police station. I’m sure not storming up there threatening to trample on his right to bear arms, even if they are illegal arms.”