The Zombies Of Lake Woebegotten (12 page)

Stevie Ray cleared the door, followed shortly by Harry, who also had his back turned, and a pair of bloody men shambled out. It was the Mathison Brothers, one in a long black plastic apron, the other in his black undertaker’s suit, but otherwise identical right down to their piggy little eyes and swept-back gray hair and, now, their incessantly opening-and-closing blood-streaked mouths.

“Well dip me in manure and call me a chocolate caramel,” Gunther said. “It’s not just the fish.”

“Who the heck?” Stevie Ray said, starting to turn, but Harry yelled, “If it’s talking a bunch of nonsense, it’s not a zombie, so eyes front, soldier! Fire at will!”

Stevie Ray shot Matthew, the brother on the left, and his head pretty much disappeared, replaced by a reddish mist, though bits of bone and brain pattered off the wall, and, more disturbingly, off his own brother. The now-headless body fell straight to the floor like a dropped sail. Gunther spoke, quite conversationally, saying, “Harry said to fire at Will, but you shot Matthew instead. Can’t you tell them apart? Will’s the one in the plastic apron.”

Harry lifted his spaceman gun to his shoulder, sighted on Will Mathison, and pulled his own trigger. He didn’t hit Will quite as square-on, so only half of the head disintegrated, leaving the other half standing alone, like the last bit of a wall in a bombed-out building, but apparently half a head was just as useless as none, because that body fell, too. Harry looked behind him now, sighed, and said, “Gunther, get out of here, this is a crime scene.”

“They’re just like the fish, aren’t they?” Gunther said. There was a word for the dead who came back to life. What was it? “Zomboes,” he said assertively. “They’re zomboes.”

Harry appeared to mull that over, shook his head, and turned to Stevie Ray. “We got the two naked corpses, that must have been the original dead ones waiting to get worked on, and the WoBoCo kid, and now the Mathison Brothers—that’s all of them, right?”

“I knew there were two bodies here for sure,” Stevie Ray said, rubbing the side of his bald head, where he had a gash already crusting up with dried blood. “From that accident over on Big Hole Road. But there could be others. Like—”

“What about the ones on ice?” Gunther said, trying to be helpful. “Don’t they keep a bunch of dead bodies down there when the ground’s frozen, to bury in the spring?”

Harry didn’t tell him to go away again, which was nice, but just shook his head. “There’s a statute now, says cemeteries have to allow burial in the winter, too, decided it was cruel to make people wait months to get their loved ones in the ground, so people don’t get put on ice like that as much.”

Gunther shook his head. Everything changed. Well, what could you do?

“Yeah,” Stevie Ray said slowly, “but the law also says the families have to pay the extra costs for winter burial, like propane heaters to warm up the soil and all that, and a lot of people are pretty frugal, so we might want to check down in the funeral home’s cooler, just in case somebody decided Uncle Ole or Aunt Lena could wait until springtime to get buried on the cheap.”

“All right,” Harry said. “You’re probably right. Let’s go.”

“I’m coming too.”

“Gunther, go home and dry out,” Harry said.

“It was my idea!” Gunther protested. “And you’d send me out there with the zomboes and everything without even a spaceman gun?”

“You’re drunk. And even if you weren’t drunk, you’re a civilian. Go home.”

Gunther grumbled and went for the door, but he didn’t step outside, because it was cold out there, and cold in his fishing shack with the cracks stuffed with old newspaper, and truly the cold bothered him more than the dead headless bodies of the Mathison brothers, since he’d seen his share of bodies back when he was in the service, even if the guns were a lot fancier now. He watched as Harry and Stevie Ray headed through the office toward the stairs that led into the morgue below, and cocked his head for the sound of gunshots, which came along as he’d expected—must have been a couple fellas in the coolers after all, probably pretty annoyed at being laid out in an ice-cold drawer, and he wondered if the cold made the zomboes more sluggish, but no, they were still warm-blooded, and it was cold-blooded things that got sleepy in the cold, except they were probably already embalmed and in embalming didn’t they replace your blood with formaldehyde or something? Judging by the third gunshot, being embalmed didn’t keep you from coming back as a zombo.
 

Gunther thought that fact must be significant, and he was staring off into the middle distance trying to figure out
why
that fact tickled his brain when Stevie Ray came running out of the office, wild-eyed, no longer holding his gun, front of his beige uniform shirt all covered in blood. He stumbled to the table and grabbed onto it as if to steady himself, and since feeling unstable on your feet was something Gunther could sympathize with, he said, “You all right?”

“No,” Stevie Ray said, and puked.

Harry led the way into the morgue, where Will Mathison had probably been working on embalming a body when the body sat up and took a bite out of him. The room was all tan-colored tile, with big metal sinks and metal tables and weird hoses and cupboards and harsh bright lights overhead. Harry’d been down here before, of course, but it never failed to give him a shiver. For one thing it was
cold
. For another, it looked like the setting from one of his survival horror games, the kind where you crept around the hallways of an abandoned mental hospital with nothing but a rusty pipe for a weapon and the loudest noise on the soundtrack was your avatar’s own ragged breath. And now there really
were
zombies.
 

At least I’ve logged all those hours playing zombie-killing games
, he thought, though he knew it didn’t really work that way. Still, while spending time on a firing range was probably nothing like actually shooting a person, people said the practice made the actual act easier, more automatic, so he hoped maybe some similar principle would apply here.

The morgue cooler was a big, shiny, four-drawer affair bolted to one of the walls. “All right, Stevie Ray. You want to open, or you want to shoot?”

“Shoot,” he said without hesitation.
 

Harry considered challenging him to rock-paper-scissors, but what did it matter? His shoulder hurt from the recoil on that automatic shotgun anyway. “All right, but use your pistol, that shotgun makes too big a splash.” He went to the first drawer, opened the door, and pulled out the sliding tray, looking at the cold blue feet wiggling and twisting. As soon as the zombie—Lord, it was Missy Hohlt, the first one would have to be someone he knew, and her so young, but she’d always had those seizures, she was bound to hit a big one eventually—saw the light or smelled the air or who knows what, it started twisting and trying to sit up, and Stevie Ray was there, putting a bullet right into her head, dropping her dead. After a moment’s thought, Harry slid the drawer closed again. Why not?

He opened the next drawer, saw more bluish feet, this one an old man’s he didn’t know, and once again the zombie started to get up, and once again, Stevie Ray made it lie down again.

“This isn’t so bad,” Harry said, opening the next drawer and grinning at Stevie Ray. “I’ve had more trouble killing rats—”

“HARRY!” Stevie Ray shouted, and Harry felt a searing pain on his arm, and looked over to see that, in defiance of all consistency, this corpse had been slid into the drawer
feet
first, so its head was right there, and in fact its teeth were sunk in Harry’s arm, and now it was reaching for him, and Harry tried to get his pistol but his right arm was in agony and his left was his stupid hand and the zombie had his throat, and Lord, it was strong, an old lady with wispy grey hairs and a face wrinkly like a desert canyon seen from an airplane but a grip like a circus strongman.

The zombie pulled him down, and its jaws unclamped from his arm, and Harry said “Oh thank you sweet Jesus” in the sudden lessening of pain, but then the zombie’s teeth found his neck, and he felt his hot warm life pumping out of him, and he thought,
No save point, I lose
.

“It jumped up out of the drawer like a flea off a dead dog,” Stevie Ray said, swaying. “We put down the first one, and the second one, too, without much trouble, but the third one reached out and grabbed Harry and pulled him off balance, and Harry started screaming, but he was between me and the body in the drawer so I couldn’t get off a shot, and then Harry fell on the ground and his throat was all red and torn-up and when I tried to help him the zombie in the cooler came at me, knocked my gun away, and I wound up fighting it hand-to-hand, managed to twist it off my hip and smash its head into the big industrial sink, just kept smashing it and smashing it until it was just in pieces, and then this terrible hammering started up, it was a four-drawer cooler and all four drawers must have been full and the last dead body was
excited
, I guess it heard the commotion, I couldn’t stand the noise, and I—I just
ran
.” He lifted his gaze to Gunther, and his eyes were as bleak as the sky at the end of the shortest day of winter. “I’ve been a soldier. I’ve killed men in combat. But these
things
, and seeing what they did to Harry, I just couldn’t, I had to get away…”

“No shame in it,” Gunther said. “We all get to a breaking point if we live long enough. What matters is what you do next.” What Gunther had done next was get stinking drunk and arrange to stay that way for the foreseeable, but no use mentioning that. “But what about—”

Harry
, he was going to say, but then Harry came out of the office, dragging one leg, big bite taken out of his throat, face all gray, eyes blank, and he was a zombo, sure enough, killed and come back. Poor guy. He’d always done right by Gunther, just stuck him in a cell if he needed drying out, never gave him an ass-kicking, just a talking-to.

Stevie Ray was in no shape to cope, and he didn’t have his weapon anyway, so Gunther reached into his big old overcoat and took out his pistol, thumbed back the hammer, looked past Stevie Ray’s astonished face, took a two-handed target shooter’s stance, and put one right in the middle of old Harry’s face.
 

The revolver didn’t make heads disappear like those spaceman guns did, but it appeared to get the job done, because Harry died for the second time.

Stevie Ray looked at his dead boss, then back at Gunther, and said, “You told us you didn’t have a gun!”

“Said I didn’t have a fancy spaceman gun like yours.” Gunther put his pistol away. “Just my lousy old sidearm from when I was in the service. Hadn’t fired it in years.”

“You always carry that thing around?”

“I’m an old man. I live alone. I sometimes black out. Gotta protect myself.”

Stevie Ray stood up from the table and looked down at his dead boss. “Oh, shit, Harry, what am I supposed to do now?”

“Guess this makes you the chief,” Gunther said. He paused. “Want to buy me and you a drink to celebrate your promotion?”

14. Snow Creamed

A
s Eileen trooped through the snow on the trail of her insufficiently dead husband, she thought about when the twins were little and how they used to make snow cream right after the second snowfall. Never the first snowfall, because she’d always felt the first snow was dirty, no matter how clean and white and fresh it looked—snowflakes were like little lint brushes falling through the air, attracting all the particulates and pollutants and nasty things that normally floated around over your head, so by the time the flakes started piling up on the ground they were steeped in invisible grime, and who would want to eat that?

But after the second snowfall, Brent would go out with a big metal mixing bowl and come back with it full of fresh fluffy snow, and Eileen would mix in the milk and sugar and vanilla until they had a big old batch, and the twins would sit on the barstools at the counter bouncing up and down they were so excited, and they’d all eat the snow cream pretty fast, before it could melt, but not so fast they got ice cream headaches, so it was a delicate balancing act that required a fair bit of attention. One time Todd, the younger of the twins by a whole two minutes, had looked at them in big-eyed alarm, holding his spoon, and said, “Little kids in Africa don’t ever get to eat snow cream, do they?” and Brent had said, “Never mind the African kids, think about the little kids in Florida! It doesn’t snow there either. They have to make do with
alligator
cream!” And the twins had laughed, the way little kids do at absurd things, and Brent had laughed, as he always amused himself, and Eileen had laughed, too, and that memory was like a warm coal she carried around with her in the snow, a moment of loveliness in the past rescued and revived here in the icy present. They hadn’t made snow cream this year, or the year before, or the year before that, not since the kids were much younger, and they hadn’t even missed it, none of them; just a little tradition that withered away from lack of attention.
 

Pretty much like the rest of her marriage.
 

Walking along with the gun in her coat pocket, a weight that bumped against her side with every step through the ankle- and sometimes knee-deep snow, unseen underbrush branches scraping at her legs, she thought maybe she’d done the wrong thing, deciding to kill Brent. It wasn’t remorse, exactly, unless it was like buyer’s remorse; she wasn’t appalled by the fact of the choice she’d made, she just thought maybe she could have made a better choice. She could have walked out on him. Or even divorced him. Surely his intimate relations with a car were sufficient cause. But killing him had seemed so much better. Planning the murder had given her something to do. It was her hobby. The fantasy she retreated to when things were bad. Of course it hadn’t worked out, but that was life, wasn’t it? Her father used to say “plan” was a four-letter word, which she hadn’t understood for the longest time, it was like saying “dog is a four-legged animal,” just a factual statement, but eventually someone had explained it to her, how four-letter words were swear words, and she felt dumb, but started using the expression herself a lot in dark secret hopes that she might make someone else feel dumb and get to explain it. Hadn’t happened yet, but time went on.