Best New Zombie Tales Trilogy (28 page)

While he eats I remove the stained apron and strip off the gore-streaked gloves, tossing them into the bone-bag. Holding a can of Glade air freshener, I fan the air until the room reeks of lemons. I step toward the stairs, more than ready for a scalding hot shower, when the doorbell chimes.

I freeze at the bottom of the steps, listening.

The bell rings again.

“You stay right here,” I needlessly tell Andrew. I hurry up the steps, wondering who the hell it could be. It’s not my evening to stand sentry at the subdivision gates––

The bell rings again as I hurry through the kitchen and across the carpeted expanse of the living room to the foyer. I flick on the porch light and peer out through the peephole.

Allan Sprouse and Richie McCaslin’s distorted faces stare back. For a moment, a freezing terror envelopes me.
Somebody’s finally seen Andrew while I was away,
my mind yammers,
and they’ve come to take him.

They’re both staring at me. For a crazy moment I’m sure I’ll look down and see the dripping butcher’s apron still tied around my waist.

“No, no. Come on in, guys. You both just come off shift?”

“Yeah,” Richie says, “Bert and Hal drew the graveyard this week.”

“They’ll probably blow each other’s heads off,” adds Al cheerfully. “Those two couldn’t find their asses in the dark with both hands.”

I fetch three bottles of beer––chilled, no less––and we sit on the teal sectional couch that Shelly damn near crucified herself picking out. Nobody turns on the thirty-five-inch Sony to watch the Emergency Broadcast messages and laughable Center For Disease Control warnings that play endlessly on two of the three networks. Good old TBS, however, is still serving up Eastwood westerns, Cary Grant thrillers and Shirley Temple.

“You know, buddy, you should move in with Claire and the kids,” Al ventures softly. “It’s not good, you knocking around by yourself in this big house.”

“That’s kind of you to offer,” I smile, “but I’m okay. Really.” I can imagine watching Andrew playing with Brad and Al Jr., can imagine Al striding toward them across the grass, shouting and waving them away, leveling the sawed-off shot-gun––

“Really.”

They finally leave an hour later; the most unbearable, nerve-shattering hour of my life. Sitting on my dead wife’s sofa, making macho small talk and waiting to hear Andrew start moaning or banging his pan against the concrete basement floor––

If good old Al and Richie had stayed ten minutes longer I think I would have walked calmly into the kitchen, removed the gun from the counter drawer and shot them both.

I lean against the door for several moments, counting backward from one hundred, until my stomach settles. Then I hurry to the basement.

* * *

Later I sit in Andrew’s room, a Scotch in hand, watching him draw pictures. Besides the other obvious differences, the plague has apparently accomplished what a platoon of high-paid specialists could not; the Savant Syndrome no longer guides his chunky little hands.

A fraction of all autistic children exhibit an island of stunning, inexplicable talent. Andrew isn’t––wasn’t––a lightning calculator or calendar savant. He couldn’t play an opera score after hearing it once. He didn’t build painstaking scale-models of nineteenth-century sailing ships like James Henry Pullen, the celebrated idiot-genius of Earlswood Asylum.

Instead, he would sit hunched over a child’s drawing table for hours, sketching impossibly detailed, dynamic pictures. Trees, horses, a Greyhound bus. Some fantastic imaging system inside his mind required only the briefest glimpse of an object to imprint it forever in his memory. The horse gallops from view, the smoke-farting city bus grinds away into traffic, but not to Andrew. These images persisted in a three-dimensional freeze-frame of time, to be accessed in full clarity a day, a month, a year later.

Then the plague virus escaped from some lab, or hitched a ride on a shuttle flight, or simply mutated on its own. Shelly never made it home from Andrew’s routine doctor’s appointment, probably sacrificed herself to save him. She had driven him because, as always, I had a full roster of patients to see and couldn’t escape from the office. And somehow he found his way home with nothing worse that the tip of one finger missing.

“May I look at this, Andrew?”

Three vaguely human figures with balloon-heads and disproportionate limbs stand on a crayola-green lawn. The sun is a crude mandala with radiating beams of light. A month ago the people would have been rendered in near-photographic detail and perspective, every anatomical detail exact.

“This is
wonderful
, Andrew.”

He doesn’t acknowledge this praise, but continues to squint at the paper and slow-moving point of his crayon. From the looks of it, he’s trying to sketch a deer, but his hand, stripped of its unearthly deftness, is producing what more resembles a mutated, horned dog.

“Who are these people in your picture?”

Andrew continues his tortuous rendering of the dog-deer. The crayon––burnt sienna––suddenly snaps in two. For a moment Andrew stares at the stump of crayola in his clenched fist, and I see (or imagine I see) an expression of confusion, loss and fear cross his solemn gray face.

Only it’s not my imagination. You don’t have to be a neurologist to see that the virus hasn’t had the same effect on Andrew it has on people whose brain chemistry functioned normally in life. The little boy once irretrievably lost is emerging from his inner world, a bit more each day.
My son.
All I need is a little more time.

After I strap Andrew in bed I shuffle down the hall to the bathroom. Too tired for even a shower, I reach for the Extra Strength Tylenol behind the mirrored cabinet. I see my drawn, haggard reflection and stop.

During the hot, unspeakable hour it took me to butcher the undead woman in the basement, I must have absently wiped away a drop of sweat. Smeared across my right eyebrow is a thin comma of dried blood.

* * *

I pad up to the door and peer through the tiny lens. Al Sprouse’s face glares back, eyes gleaming with hatred and fear, lips pulled back in a feral grimace. The lawn is filled with men carrying high-powered flashlights and weapons.

“We know what you’re feeding in the basement,” Al bellows, only inches away. “That thing isn’t your kid. Not anymore. You know the law, Frank.”

I back up, trembling uncontrollably.

“It’s not natural,” Richie chimes in. “And by harboring it you’re endangering all of us. We all signed the agreement.”

So sue me, you chicken-shit asshole. My son’s not dead.

I blink, realizing I’ve spoken the words aloud, angrily. “If I could just show you,” I add, ashamed of the waver in my voice, “you’d understand. He’s not like the others.”

“Okay, okay,” Al’s voice drops to a soothing, diplomatic tone. “Unlock the door and we’ll take a look at your boy. If what you say is true, he needs to be checked out by doctors. You have my word on that, Frank.”

Shaking now from anguish and rage instead of fear, I step back toward the door. Al and his mob believe my son is a mindless monster deserving of nothing more than a bullet through the brain. And like all the so-called specialists and CDC witch doctors, he doesn’t even have the guts to come out and say it.

I remove the handgun from my robe pocket and cock it. On the other side of the door, I hear Al grab the doorknob eagerly, thinking the click is the door’s deadbolt being retracted.

I fire once, point-blank. Al screams and I hear a body fall. Shouts follow. A shadow crosses the picture window and I fire twice, shattering glass. Richie screams and falls.

Someone opens fire on the house. Splinters of wood explode from the door. A bullet drones past my right ear and an invisible hand tugs at the hem of my bathrobe. A flaming bottle pinwheels through the gaping hole in the window. It smashes against the coffee table and sprays liquid fire across the sofa and carpet. From beyond the kitchen, a hollow booming and metal screech as the garage door is breached with ball-peen hammers and axes.

I turn and flee up the stairs, hearing more shouts and gunfire. At least they’ve stopped beating against the door.

Upstairs I burst into Andrew’s room and bolt the door shut, breathing in great huffs of air like an asthma victim having an attack. Andrew is struggling to sit up, his eyes wide and alarmed. I can’t begin to imagine what my face looks like. I unstrap him and set him on the floor behind me.

Grunting with the effort, I pry loose the plywood panel covering his window and peer out. The lawn below is a sea of bobbing lights. A shout goes up and pale faces stare up at me. I duck, but no one fires. After a minute I peer down again.

Several men are lighting crude torches and tossing them through the shattered living room window. They’re not going to drag us from the house and chance eating a bullet. They’re simply going to burn it to the ground.

For God knows how long I can only stare out at the milling people on the lawn, hypnotized by fear.

Then the smell of smoke begins to fill the small room. I strip the sheet off Andrew’s bed and stuff it into the crack below the door. Still, it isn’t long before the air turns acrid and I start coughing.

For a moment I entertain a fantasy:
I see myself pluck Andrew up from the floor and tuck him under one arm like a Hollywood firefighter. I unlock his bedroom door, ignoring the searing heat lapping at the other side, and force it open. Dodging crackling walls of flame, I carry him down the steps and navigate the fire-engulfed house to the garage. We pile into the Taurus, Andrew curled in the back seat and me behind the wheel. I key the engine and we rocket through the remains of the garage door in an explosion of plastic and metal, scattering men like bowling pins as we roar off into the night––

But that’s strictly Ambrose Bierce “Incident at Owl Creek” bullshit. The house is going up like a Roman candle and a mob of armed men surround it.

Suddenly the exhaustion hits me and all the strength drains out of my legs like water. I feel a deceptive, defeated calm. There are five shots left in the pistol. Better a quick bullet than the agony of fire.

I can hear the inferno below us, consuming the house and the last remnants of our old life. The floor is growing hotter, beginning to smoke.

I sit beside Andrew and draw him into my arms, resting his head against my shoulder. My hand is shaking so bad I almost drop the gun. Then my son’s expression registers and it falls to the floor with a clatter.

Andrew is looking at me. Not
through
me. His small, sad eyes are filled with confusion, like those of a child that has just awoken from a long, fitful sleep. In that galvanizing instant every atom of my being cries out with joy that the long-awaited connection has finally been made.

“
Daddy?”

And in the next, the house collapses around us.

Sign of the Times

JOHN GROVER

Monroe Massachusetts Daily Gazette

Excerpt from page 5B:

Public Awareness Editorial

Today marks the one-year anniversary since the horrible accident at the Brickner Laboratories that unleashed the plague. This airborne virus spread wildly across the United States bringing the recently dead back to life. The undead stalked and killed many citizens creating even more victims like themselves.

With official orders from the President, the National Guard, along with armed swat teams, contained this unholy threat, ridding the country of most of the walking dead. Some managed to escape the martial efforts but were seen as little threat as public awareness of the epidemic grew and Americans took the necessary precautions to protect themselves.

Today very few of these walking threats have been spotted but undoubtedly there are a few that remain among us. Although the virus is no longer spreading, the dead still rise. Anyone who dies presently rises and attacks the living. For this reason it has become common practice to see brick fireplaces or cremation fires in the backyards of most American homes.

A new law has been formed that states any human being in the United States, be they friend, relative or family member, who passes on must be burned and cremated within the hour. This is of the utmost importance, citing the hazardous implications that may occur. Government and church officials have bestowed the right of family to give their loved ones the last rites in the case of death and properly dispose of the body.

Funerals as we know them have become non-existent. It is now commonplace to witness a family quietly praying in their backyard as they place a white sheet wrapped form into a fiery resting place.