The New Dead: A Zombie Anthology (32 page)
Read The New Dead: A Zombie Anthology Online
Authors: Christopher Golden
They moved steadily down the street, always slowly. The sun was heading toward the western part of the sky, and it would be dark in four or five hours. Benny knew that they could never make it home by nightfall. He wondered if Tom would take them back to the gas station, or if he was crazy enough to claim an empty house in this ghost town for the night. If he had to sleep in a zombie’s house, even if there was no zombie there, then Benny was sure he’d go completely mad-cow crazy.
‘There he is,’ murmured Tom, and Benny looked at the house with the red door. A man stood looking out of the big bay window. He had sandy hair and a sparse beard, but now the hair and beard were nearly gone and the skin of his face had shriveled to a leather tightness.
Tom stopped outside of the paint-peeling white picket fence. He looked from the erosion portrait to the man in the window and back again.
‘Benny?’ he said under his breath. ‘You think that’s him?’
‘Mm hm,’ Benny said with a low squeak.
The zombie in the window seemed to be looking at them. Benny was sure of it. The withered face and the dead pale eyes were pointed directly at the fence, as if he had been waiting there all these years for a visitor to come to his garden gate.
Tom nudged the gate with his toe. It was locked.
Moving very slowly, Tom leaned over and undid the latch. The process took over two minutes. Nervous sweat ran down Benny’s face, and he couldn’t take his eyes off of the zombie.
Tom pushed on the gate with his knee, and it opened now.
‘Very, very slowly,’ he said. ‘Red light, green light, all the way to the door.’
Benny knew the game, though in truth he had never seen a working stoplight. They entered the yard. The old woman in the first garden suddenly turned toward them. So did the zombie in the bathrobe.
‘Stop,’ hissed Tom. He held the pistol close to his chest, his finger lying straight along the trigger guard. ‘If we have to make a run for it, head into the house. We can lock ourselves in and wait until they calm down.’
The old lady and the man in the bathrobe faced them but did not advance.
The tableau held for a minute that seemed an hour long.
‘I’m scared,’ said Benny.
‘It’s okay to be scared,’ said Tom. ‘Scared means you’re smart. Just don’t panic. That’ll get you killed.’
Benny almost nodded, but he caught himself.
Tom took a slow step. Then a second. It was uneven, his body swaying as if his knees were stiff. The bathrobe zombie turned away and looked at the shadow of a cloud moving up the valley; but the old lady still watched. Her mouth opened and closed as if she was slowly chewing on something.
But then she, too, turned away to watch the moving shadow.
Tom took another step and another, and eventually Benny followed. The process was excruciatingly slow, but to Benny it felt as if they were moving too fast. No matter how slowly they went, he thought that it was all wrong, that the zombies - all of them up and down the street - would suddenly turn toward them and moan with their dry and dusty voices, and then a great mass of the hungry dead would surround them.
Tom reached the door and grasped the handle.
The knob turned in his hand, and the lock clicked open. Tom gently pushed it open and stepped into the gloom of the house. Benny cast a quick look at the window to make sure the zombie was still there.
Only he wasn’t.
‘Tom!’ Benny cried. ‘Look out!’
A dark shape lunged at Tom out of the shadows of the entrance hallway. It clawed for him with wax-white fingers and moaned with an unspeakable hunger. Benny screamed.
Then something happened that Benny could not understand. Tom was there and then he wasn’t. His brother’s body became a blur of movement, as he pivoted to the outside of the zombie’s right arm, ducked low, grabbed the zombie’s shins from behind, and drove his shoulder into the former Harold Simmons’s back. The zombie instantly fell forward onto his face, knocking clouds of dust from the carpet. Tom leaped onto the zombie’s back and used his knees to pin both shoulders to the floor.
‘Close the door!’ Tom barked, as he pulled a spool of thin silk cord from his jacket pocket. He whipped the cord around the zombie’s wrists and shimmied down to be able to bring both of the zombie’s hands together and tie them behind the creature’s back. He looked up. ‘The door, Benny -
now
!’
now
!’
Benny came out of his daze and realized that there was movement in his peripheral vision. He turned to see the old lady, the two little girls and the zombie in his bathrobe lumbering up the garden path. Benny slammed the door and shot the bolt, then leaned against it, panting as if he had been the one to wrestle a zombie to the ground and hog-tie it. With a sinking feeling, he realized that it had probably been his own shouted warning that had attracted the other zombies.
Tom flicked out a spring-blade knife and cut the silk cord. He kept his weight on the struggling zombie while he fashioned a large loop like a noose. The zombie kept trying to turn its head to bite him, but Tom didn’t seem to care. The biting teeth were nowhere near him - though Benny was still terrified of those grey, rotted teeth.
With a deft twist of the wrist, Tom looped the noose over the zombie’s head, catching it below the chin, and then he jerked the slack so that the closing loop forced the creature’s jaws shut with a
clack
. Tom wound silk cord around the zombie’s head so that the line passed under the jaw and over the crown. When he had three full turns in place, he tied it tight. He shimmied farther down the zombie’s body and pinned its legs and then tied its ankles together.
clack
. Tom wound silk cord around the zombie’s head so that the line passed under the jaw and over the crown. When he had three full turns in place, he tied it tight. He shimmied farther down the zombie’s body and pinned its legs and then tied its ankles together.
Then Tom stood up, stuffed the cord into his pocket, and closed his knife. He slapped dust from his clothes as he turned back to Benny.
‘Thanks for the warning, kiddo, but I had it.’
‘Um . . . holy sh—!’
‘Language,’ Tom interrupted quietly.
Tom went to the window and looked out. ‘Eight of ’em out there.’
‘Do-do we . . . I mean,
shouldn’t
we board up the windows?’
shouldn’t
we board up the windows?’
Tom laughed. ‘You’ve listened to too many campfire tales. If we started hammering nails into boards, the sound would call every living dead person in the whole town. We’d be under siege.’
‘But we’re trapped.’
Tom looked at him. ‘
Trapped
is a relative term,’ he said. ‘We can’t go out the front. I expect there’s a back door. We’ll finish our business here and then we’ll sneak out nice and quiet and head on our way.’
Trapped
is a relative term,’ he said. ‘We can’t go out the front. I expect there’s a back door. We’ll finish our business here and then we’ll sneak out nice and quiet and head on our way.’
Benny stared at him and then at the struggling zombie, who was on the carpet.
‘You-you just . . .’
‘Practice, Benny. I’ve done this before. C’mon, help me get him up.’
They knelt on opposite sides of the zombie, but Benny didn’t want to touch it. He’d never touched a corpse of any kind before, and he didn’t want to start with one that had tried to bite his brother.
‘Benny,’ Tom said, ‘he can’t hurt you now. He’s helpless. ’
The word
helpless
hit Benny hard. It brought back the image of Old Roger - with no eyes, no teeth, and no fingers - and the two young women who tended to him. And the limbless torsos in the wagon.
helpless
hit Benny hard. It brought back the image of Old Roger - with no eyes, no teeth, and no fingers - and the two young women who tended to him. And the limbless torsos in the wagon.
‘Helpless,’ he murmured. ‘God . . .’
‘Come on,’ Tom said gently.
Together they lifted the zombie. He was light - far lighter than Benny expected - and they half carried, half dragged him into the dining room. Away from the living-room window. Sunlight fell in dusty slants through the moth-eaten curtains. The ruins of a meal had long since decayed to dust on the table. They put him in a chair, and Tom produced the spool of cord and bound him in place. The zombie continued to struggle, but Benny understood. The zombie was actually helpless.
Helpless.
The word hung in the air. Ugly and full of dreadful new meaning.
Tom removed the envelope from his pocket. Apart from the folded erosion portrait, there was also a piece of cream-colored stationery on which were several handwritten lines. Tom read through them silently, sighed, and then turned to his brother.
‘Restraining the dead is difficult, Benny, but it isn’t the hardest part.’ He held out the letter. ‘This is.’
Benny took the letter.
‘My clients - the people who hire me to come out here - they usually want something said. Things they would like to say themselves, but can’t. Things they need said so that they can have closure. Do you understand?’
Benny read the letter. His breath caught in his throat and he nodded as the first tears fell down his cheeks.
His brother took the letter back. ‘I need to read it aloud, Benny. You understand?’
Benny nodded again.
Tom angled the letter into the dusty light and read:
My dear Harold. I love you and miss you. I’ve missed you so desperately for all these years. I still dream about you every night, and each morning I pray that you’ve found peace. I forgive you for what you tried to do to me. I forgive you for what you did to the children. I hated you for a long time, but I understand now that it wasn’t you. It was this
thing
that happened. I want you to know that I took care of our children when they turned. They are at peace, and I put flowers on their graves every Sunday. I know you would like that. I have asked Tom Imura to find you. He’s a good man, and I know that he will be gentle with you. I love you, Harold. May God grant you His peace. I know that when my time comes, you will be waiting for me, waiting with Bethy and little Stephen, and that we will all be together again in a better world. Please forgive me for not having the courage to help you sooner. I will always love you. Yours forever, Claire.
Benny was weeping when Tom finished. He turned away and covered his face with his hands and sobbed. Tom came and hugged him and kissed his head.
Then Tom stepped away, took a breath, and opened his knife again. Benny didn’t think he would be able to watch, but he raised his head and saw Tom as he placed the letter on the table in front of Harold Simmons and smoothed it out. Then he moved behind the zombie and gently pushed its head forward so that he could place the tip of his knife against the hollow at the base of the skull.
‘You can look away if you want to, Benny,’ he said.
Benny did not want to look, but he didn’t turn away.
Tom nodded. He took another breath and then thrust the blade into the back of the zombie’s neck. The blade slid in with almost no effort in the gap between spine and skull, and the razor-sharp edge sliced completely through the brain stem.
Harold Simmons stopped struggling. His body didn’t twitch; there was no death spasm. He just sagged forward against the silken cords and was still. Whatever force had been active in him, whatever pathogen or radiation or whatever had taken the man away and left behind a zombie, was gone.
Tom cut the cords that held Simmons’s arms and raised each hand and placed it on the table so that the dead man’s palms held the letter in place.
‘Be at peace, brother,’ said Tom Imura.
He wiped and folded his knife and stepped back. He looked at Benny, who was openly sobbing.
‘This is what I do, Benny.’
They left by the back door, and there were no problems. Benny’s tears slowed and stopped, but it took a while. They walked in silence, side by side, heading southeast. Miles fell away behind them. They passed another gas station, where Tom greeted another monk. They didn’t linger, though. The day was burning away.
‘We’ll be back in an hour,’ Tom said to the monk after gifting him with vials of cadaverine and a wrapped package of jerky. ‘We’ll need to stay the night.’
‘You’re always welcome, brother,’ said the monk.
They walked on for another fifteen minutes, through a grove of trees that were heavy with late season oranges. Tom picked a few, and they peeled and ate them and said almost nothing until they reached the wrought-iron gate of a community that was embowered by a high red-brick wall. A sign over the gate read SUNSET HOLLOW.
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