The Zombies Of Lake Woebegotten (28 page)

Which brought him to the last of his provisions before he set out from his shack. He took a bucket of sludgy old oil, a heap of dirty rags, and a few lengths of wood too big for kindling but too thin to be properly called logs. Thus armed, he tromped in snowshoes out to the bear’s lair. The walk was cold, what with him wearing a wolfskin and not much else, but the snow was reduced to patches on the ground and there was a definite hint of springtime in the air. A good day for killing, Jim thought, though he’d never really encountered a bad day for killing, and indeed one of his favorite things about killing—which was still a pretty abstract subject for him, at least vis-à-vis single combat, though he’d done his share of hunting—was that killing was versatile. On a good day, you killed with joy. On a bad day, you killed to make yourself feel better. After all, however bad things were, whether your wife had left you or a forklift operator had accidentally dropped a crate on your head at work or whatever, you could always go out and kill something and think to yourself,
At least I’m not dead
.

Such happy thoughts kept Jim company as he navigated to the bear’s lair. Once upon a time a glacier had crawled across the land here, Jim imagined, tearing up the ground, and when it receded it left the bones of the earth exposed. Like this spot, a jumble of bare rocks—bear rocks, ha ha, they’d love that joke in Valhalla, assuming they spoke English nowadays and could get puns—with a dark hole in the center, mostly clogged with leaves and branches. Jim poked at the opening with one of the pieces of stovewood, clearing it out, and peered into the blackness, but he couldn’t see anything except the aforementioned blackness. In storybooks bear lairs were vast, people going deep into caves and finding bears at the back, and maybe sometimes their dens were like that, but in Jim’s experience as a woodsboy and -man, bears mostly penned themselves up in spots not much bigger than they could turn around in. If he poked the stick in there, he might even hit the flesh of the black bear inside, and that would probably be enough to wake the beast. But he was going to do something more dramatic, as befitted the beginning of an epic battle.
 

Jim unstrapped his axe and leaned it against a handy tree. Then he wrapped a bunch of dirty rags around a piece of wood, tying up a nice bundle, and smeared sludgy used oil on the cloth. He took out his Zippo—flint and tinder would’ve been better, or better yet just a couple of sticks, or better still a coal from a lightning strike carried around in a bucket, but he was in a hurry and couldn’t go around waiting for lucky thunderstorms—flicked up the flame, and lit the rags. They whooshed into life with alarming speed, a sudden bright heat in his face that made his eyebrows want to retract into his head, and he held out the torch at arm’s length.
 

“
Bjorn
!” he shouted, and threw the torch into the dark hole of the bear’s lair.

Then he waited. He didn’t have to wait long.

When a bear awakes in the spring, it tends to be in poor humor. Bears don’t truly hibernate the way some animals do, shutting down non-essential functions and going into a dormant state, and they’re more active than you might think—they tend to wake up a little and move around in their dens from time to time, finding a new position and falling asleep again, pretty much the way restless people do at night, though in this case the night lasts all winter. The females even give birth during hibernation, and as any mother can tell you, having babies is a difficult experience to sleep through. It doesn’t take extraordinary measures—like being hit with a flaming torch—to wake up a hibernating bear, usually, though they tend to be a little foggy at first, like you or me before our coffee or shower, and at least one bear researcher accidentally fell on top of a sleeping bear and lived to tell the story of how she took about eight minutes to wake up entirely. But they don’t eat or drink at all or poop and pee much, so when they
do
wake up for good and all, they’ve got a lot of bodily demands fighting for their attention: they’re hungry, really hungry, profoundly hungry, and they’ve got a lot of body to be hungry with. They’re thirsty, too, and that makes anybody foul-tempered. Plus, they have to pee like the dickens. Add to all that some fool human trying to set you on fire—rapidly accelerating the wake-up process—and you have a recipe for definite unpleasantness.
 

This particular bear—a male, fortunately, or it would have been even worse, as female bears who are new mothers are not renowned for their patience and lack of aggression, though females tend to be smaller, so that’s also a factor—burst out of the den in a fury, fur smoking from the torch’s impact, rather large and impressive teeth bared. At its fully-fed autumn weight the bear would have run well over 500 pounds, but it was only in the 400s after the long winter, though for a 200-pound human, the difference between being hit by 550 pounds of angry omnivore as opposed to 450 pounds of the same is probably negligible.
 

Jim had his opening move all planned, and he held his long axe in a good two-handed grip, ready to smash the bear right between the eyes with the butt of the weapon.
 

Here’s how it went in his head: on impact the bear stopped like a sparrow hitting a window, went cross-eyed, and fell stunned to the ground. Then Jim could lop off its head with an axe blow or two and skin it at his leisure. Bear steaks all winter long. A bearskin cloak that would allow him to consign his suspicious wolfskin to throw rug status. Odin would be impressed. Thor would buy him a tankard of mead. He was a little fuzzy on the last bits, but a definite sense of community was involved.

Here’s how it went in reality: The axe handle didn’t hit the bear smack in the face, that being a relatively small target and Jim being rather more stunned by the emergence of his adversary than he’d expected, making minute adjustments of stance impossible. Instead, the handle hit the bear in the right shoulder, and, having a flaw deep in the wood that Jim didn’t know about and the weaponsmith either hadn’t known about or hadn’t cared about, the handle shattered for its last two feet, leaving him holding an incredibly unwieldy and poorly-balanced hatchet. Barely holding, at that, since the impact of the bear sent a shudder down the axe and through Jim’s arms and shoulder and body in general that made the recoil of a double-barreled shotgun seem like a lover’s butterfly kiss in comparison. Jim had his feet planted pretty well but when an unstoppable bear hits you, you’re unlikely to stay an immovable object for long, and Jim went right back over, legs under him, and subsequently under the bear. Whether the bear connected Jim with the fiery wake-up call or just wanted to vent its anger on whatever living thing it first encountered didn’t much matter, practically speaking, because it was all claws and teeth and mauling. To his admittedly temporary shame, Jim’s dismayed shout upon realization of his impending death was not
swina bqllr!
(that’s “pig penises!” to you and me) or
meyla krafla mikli thur syr!
(son of a stinking sow corpse, loosely) or even the pithy
kamphundr
(corpse-eater, though that had the advantage of being both a nasty insult and a description that was going to be true in a minute or two) but a simple childhood exclamation he’d always favored: “Oh shitballs!”

He’d been living the life of a Norse warrior—as well as he could in central Minnesota where his neighbors were all either Lutheran or Catholic—long enough to know that how you died mattered. He would not die with fear in his heart—with crap in his underpants, yes, but not fear in his heart. And he wouldn’t die alone. He still had the axe (well, hatchet) in his hand, and he used the last of his strength to swing his arm and plant the axe right in the bear’s neck. Blood gushed in a warm wave over him, and the bear voided its bowels, too—a smell that made an impression even on Jim’s fading senses—and slumped its considerable weight on his body. Jim worked the blade out, and crossed his eyes to see where he was aiming, and forced the nearly dead weight of his arm to strike again, this time at the bear’s head. He hit his mark, and got the blade right between its eyes, sinking into the bone and sticking there, and that was it for Jim’s valiant enemy.
 

“See you in Valhalla,
bjorn
,” Jim said, and closed his eyes, and waited for the Valkyries.

But before Jim died, the bear stirred, and Jim opened his eyes again—his eyelids felt made of cement, but taking a look seemed important—and the bear, dead-eyed and oozing various things from its wounds, opened and closed its mouth on whatever bits of Jim it could fasten onto. That wasn’t right. Jim had struck the bear in the head specifically to avoid this outcome. Head strikes were supposed to kill zombies. Though maybe bear skulls were thicker than he’d expected. Or maybe it wasn’t enough to nick the front of the brain, maybe you had to destroy more of it. Or maybe animals were different, maybe it was all about the hindbrain for them. Jim could have come up with various theories, if he wasn’t being eaten at the moment. Whatever the cause, he knew what he was dealing with:

Draugr bjorn
.

Jim was pleased with himself for thinking that entirely in his adopted language, but then it occurred to him that he was likely to become a
draugr
himself too in a minute, which was depressing.

Fortunately the bear took a nice big bite out of the side of his head, making zombie-hood impossible, not that Jim was able to appreciate the accidental mercy, since he was dead.

4. Levitt or Leave It

B
ecause Cy had the runs and couldn’t leave his cabins without making a fuss and a muss both, Rufus had been assigned to spy on Mr. Levitt for the day, something Stevie Ray took a lot more seriously—and he’d never taken it lightly—since the accusations against Levitt at the town meeting. He was trying to get Eileen and the rest of the council to appoint a judge so they could bring Mr. Levitt to trial, Stevie Ray being uncomfortable with notions of summary execution, which Rufus as a recently-liberal college student could appreciate in theory, though in practice the old guy had never stopped giving him the creeps, even if he
had
saved Rufus from getting eaten by his own uncle.
 

Except when Rufus knocked on the old guy’s door in the morning, Mr. Levitt was not happy to see him. “Where’s Cy?” he snapped.
 

“Probably in the toilet,” Rufus said, stepping back. “He’s sick. I’m, uh, supposed to go with you on patrol.”

“I’m supposed to babysit you as well as kill zombies now?” Levitt scowled, and he looked suddenly so
old
to Rufus, neck all thin and scrawny, like a chicken’s. Why couldn’t he fall off a snowmobile and snap that chicken neck and save everyone a lot of trouble?

“We haven’t even seen a zombie since the day Ingvar’s house burned down.” Rufus frowned. “And, uh, I don’t need babysitting.”

Levitt snorted. “The price of liberty is eternal vigilance, boy-oh. Well, come in, I need to finish getting ready.” He turned and headed back into his house. Which, last time Rufus had entered it, had led to a scene of destruction and chaos reminiscent of a Hieronymus Bosch painting or a close-out sale at a wholesale footwear outlet, complete with chainsaws and blood.

“I think I’ll just wait out in the truck,” Rufus said, and took a step back off the porch.

From inside the house, Levitt sighed. “All right,” he said after a moment. “I’m coming.” He emerged zipping up a fleece jacket and holding a long steel pry bar.
 

“What’s that for? You decided to start beating zombies to death?”

“No, it’s for beating
you
to death,” Levitt said, and swung the pry bar overhand like he was attempting to split a piece of wood. But he was standing on the top step while Rufus was at the bottom, so Rufus took the quick-thinking action of dropping to his butt, and Mr. Levitt missed him by a mile. The old guy overbalanced, too, the weight of the bar pulling him over, and he fell off the steps with a squawk, landing on top of Rufus, weapon sprawling away.
 

Please break a hip
, Rufus thought, but then the old guy started rabbit-punching him in the side, right below his ribs, and snarling at him, and snapping his teeth not unlike a zombie, only with more profanity. There was a lot of “ruining everything” and “snot-nosed kid” and “have to kill you twice” in there before Rufus realized he’d better start fighting back, or the old man was actually going to kill him
with his bare hands
.

Rufus had some things in his favor. Old man Levitt was formidable, and wiry, and had that kind of stringy muscle that some old men develop, and he’d also had a lot of practice with hitting people and hurting people, and he didn’t hesitate. But most of the time he took his victims by surprise, or poisoned them, or drugged them, or he was fighting zombies, who—though they had many terrifying qualities—were not particularly skillful hand-to-hand combatants. Rufus wasn’t a karate kung-fu type either, but he was better than a zombie. Moreover, Rufus outweighed the old man by probably thirty pounds, and while he didn’t have that psychotic fire in his belly, he
did
have the adrenal system of a healthy young man of not yet twenty, which meant somewhere deep in his reptile brain he knew how to fight back ferociously, and his glands pumped him full of the sort of chemicals that enhance your strength and slow down your subjective time sense and generally give you an edge in battle. Once upon a time Rufus had been somewhat couch-potato-like, but a winter in the zombie apocalypse, with lots of hauling firewood and shoveling snow and going on patrol and even fighting the occasional undead monster, had improved his physical condition considerably.
 

A psychopathic and relatively healthy seventy-year-old versus a more-or-less ordinary and physically fit nineteen-year-old does not have a completely foreordained outcome. Craziness and experience count for a lot, but so does youth and desperation.

Which is why Rufus just plain dead-lifted old man Levitt off himself, grabbing hold of the man’s torso and pushing, lifting that snapping spit-dribbling face a good foot away from his own, and then tossed the guy off to the side—the side
away
from the wrecking bar, too, for good measure. Rufus rolled toward the bar in time to avoid getting kicked by Mr. Levitt—who was up already, he was fast as a greased squirrel with rabies—and rolled over the pry bar and picked it up as he rolled. He managed to block Levitt’s next kick with the bar, sending the old man hopping backwards and cursing. “What are you doing!” Rufus shouted, because he was at heart more of a talker and less of a fighter. “We’re supposed to be on the same side here!”