Best New Zombie Tales Trilogy (69 page)

Camille sat beside my wife on the floor. My daughter’s face was blank, but her hand still held the weapon. Cold steel tempered in the heat of life. Silver wetted and warmed with her mother’s blood.

Anna wasn’t dead yet. She reached out to me from the floor as I gasped in shock at the tableau. Blood streaked the pale skin of my wife’s fingers; her entreating arm was streaked and spotted with gore. I could see Anna’s lips moving, trying desperately to say something to me as her eyelids fluttered, struggling to stay conscious.

She never got out a word.

Her hand dropped back to the awful, bloody wound on her stomach. The beautiful skin of her belly, that soft flesh I’d kissed and caressed for so many years, looked as if it had been punctured and ground through by a dull can opener. Bloody shreds of skin peeled back and wept life as her fingers grasped and struggled to hold the slippery wound closed. I could see something undulating beneath the skin, beneath the blood.

Something creamy. Something soft and pink.

I gagged as the realization hit. Anna was holding her very guts in.

She wheezed and coughed, then, with her whole body shuddering, a stream of crimson spat from between her lips. A heavier flow sluiced from the ragged slice in her neck, running like thick juice to ripple on the tile. Her eyes held open firmly and locked on mine for just a second, and my heart froze. Then she seemed to shiver, and her pupils rolled back in her head until I could see only white.

A keening, pitiful cry came from her throat before gagging off to a painful, gargling choke. Her beautiful raven hair stirred a broth of blood as her whole body shook. Before I could break my paralysis and kneel to hold her, she was still.

“Anna,” I cried, and fell at her feet and crawled through the warm stickiness of her blood. Ignoring the silent presence of our daughter, I pressed my ear to her chest. There was no sound, no breath.

Her face was still, her features quiet. I looked into her eyes, hoping for some spark of life, but already, their luster was gone. With a fingertip stained red in her blood, I closed her eyelids. At last, I realized my own danger, and looked up.

“Why?” I whispered, sitting back on my haunches to stare at Camille. My daughter sat at her mother’s head. Her empty eyes didn’t stray from my own.

I hadn’t expected an answer and I didn’t get one. I sat there for some time, waiting for the tears to come. But they didn’t. I couldn’t quite fathom that Anna was really dead. This shredded, bloody mess on my kitchen floor couldn’t be her. And the deadly child couldn’t be ours.

I stood up, and started towards the phone to call 911 for the police, or an ambulance, whoever you have to call when these things happen.

My hand was on the receiver when I stopped.

What could I tell them?

That my dead, eight-year-old daughter had brutally murdered my wife with a knife while I was at work? I pulled my hand back and looked at Camille, who scratched at the back of her neck.

How could I explain her? Who would believe me?

“Get away from her,” I yelled at Camille, who had bent over to touch her mother. “Isn’t it enough you killed her? Are you going to drink her blood now, too?”

I walked back around the counter from the phone to shoo her away and stopped.

Camille’s hands were around Anna’s neck.

And in those hands, was the charm I’d bought from Madame Trevail. Camille had not been itching her neck, but removing the magical talisman. She fastened it deftly around my Anna’s throat, and the small sachet of voodoo herbs and magic lay in the wound there, soaking up the blood from her ruined neck like a sponge.

“What are you doing?” I cried and started towards her.

Camille picked up the knife and pointed it at my heart. I backed away to safety behind the counter.

What was she trying to do? First she slaughtered her mother, and then she dressed her with the charm that would bring her back to life? Would it work? Would Camille guard the body until it did? And if it did, then what? Would Anna reborn be as deadly as her daughter?

There were no answers from Camille, whose dead eyes followed me without a blink. We were at a standoff.

It occurred to me, finally, that when I had entered the house, I had done so armed. The tire iron lay on the floor now, abandoned, soaking in the blood next to my wife’s thigh. Slowly, I stepped back around the counter and knelt down at her feet, edging forward, hoping to get close enough to snatch the weapon before Camille realized my intent. She remained at my wife’s head, knife in hand, and watched my progress, but didn’t stir.

My heart leapt with victory; my hand was nearly on the weapon, but I moved too slowly.

Anna’s body shuddered. Her eyes flickered open.

Then my dead wife sat up, blood still oozing sluggishly from the gash in her neck. The salmon loop of her inner organs threatened to spill from the grinning lips of her open belly, but she didn’t seem to notice.

“Anna?” I whispered, backing away from her and Camille until my back hit the wall of our kitchen.

My wife’s eyes met mine, and I knew that I was lost. There was a darkness resident there, the same vacant emptiness I’d seen in our daughter’s. Anna’s hand reached out to grasp the tire iron, and I shuddered.

I fled the room, stopping at the garage door for a split second to look back, to see the ruin of everything in my life that had mattered. To see the tortured, gory body of my wife still staggering toward me, intent on braining me with a tire iron I’d meant for my dead daughter. To see the horrible picture now forever etched in my brain––the image of my daughter, holding a knife still dripping with the blood of my wife.

There was no question of her expression.

Camille smiled.

Not With A Bang But A Whimper

MONICA J. O’ROURKE

This is the way the world ends


This is the way the world ends


This is the way the world ends


Not with a bang but a whimper.

(From The Hollow Men by T. S. Eliot)

Harley sipped his beer—bottle only, no tap; no telling what might be floating in the tap line these days. He threw back his head like he was about to bust a gut laughing but came back up with a poker face. His Stetson was tilted to one side, but that was unintentional. It just flopped that way.

“They’s all rotters, though,” the bartender said as she wiped a shot glass with a bar rag. “No use feelin’ sorry for ’em, Harley.”

He shrugged, and looked somewhat disgusted. “It’s that sort of thinking’s what keeps me sane. But it still ain’t easy when they’re so young. You can’t help feelin’ sorry for ’em, rotters or not.” He took a sip from his bottle. “You never had kids. Did you?” He thought about his own son, now dead. And he thought that maybe the boy’s death had turned out to be a good thing, considering. Not that he really meant it, not really, not at all, but he was grateful that his boy didn’t have to go through this. He chastised himself for allowing that wretched thought to pass through his brain.

Harley nodded, shrugged, added another gesture or two because he really had no clue what else to say for the moment. But then he added “They’re
kids …
that’s the worst of it. They can’t understand what’s happening. Can’t be held responsible. So that really is the worst of it, when you see a kid and you… you gotta put it down.” He finished his beer with a generous swallow. “Like a goddamned rabid dog.”

It was the bartender’s turn to shrug. “No, I got no kids.” She changed the subject back. “They ain’t human no more, Harley.”

He paid his tab and left a generous tip and walked out into the sunlight. Sometimes if was easy to forget he’d been drinking so early, and daylight could be a surprise. Like going to a movie matinee—some things were just better suited for night.

The list jutted from his hip pocket and he pulled it out for the hundredth time that day. Mostly descriptions and possible locations. Names were included but weren’t useful in his hunt—they no longer responded to their names. He hunted, for those parents who wanted their kids back, no matter what condition they might be in. No matter what condition Harley would inflict on them. This is what he’d been reduced to, he’d think bitterly. Goddamn truant officer with a pistol.

He didn’t bother with a motorcycle—which most people assumed he drove—hell, Harley was his birth name, not his vehicle of choice. He climbed into his Ford pickup and headed toward the sticks. Tim Gorman had last been spotted in the Highland Woods area.

He shouldered his backpack, locked the truck and headed into the overgrown forest known as The Highlands. Long pants and heavy work boots protected him from the elements, particularly rattlers. He’d hiked about half a mile in, marking his trail by spray-painting small red Xs on treetrunks, when he picked up the boy’s trail.

He assumed it was the boy. He spotted evidence he’d been here—tatters of a Megadeth T-shirt found draped over shrubs, caught in brambles and prickers. One thing the rotters shared was an uncanny sixth sense, an understanding they were in danger, so he’d surely be hiding. Even with their limited brain function they knew to hide. Until that maddening hunger drew them back out into the open.

“Come on, kiddo,” he said quietly, treading carefully over branches and mulch, drying patches of mud squelching beneath his boots.

He stopped only long enough to wipe his sweaty forehead with a bandana. Harley’s search for the Gorman kid had taken the better part of the morning. Finally he spotted the boy—and Harley thought of the term loosely, because Timmy was almost a man, big and cumbersome in life, now just ogreish in death. Timmy was chewing on something. Something thick, dark; something long and fat like a branch but decidedly hairier and with features not commonly shared with branches.

Timmy was feasting on a human arm, ripping out chunks of flesh with his rotted teeth, pus dribbling from his facial lesions and soaking his meal. Not that he seemed to mind.

“Awww, Christ,” Harley groaned, wiping the spittle out of the corner of his mouth. Bile clawed up his esophagus and into the back of his throat and he swallowed twice, three times to keep his lunch down.

There was no hope for this one. Too far gone, too many days had passed and Timmy was a full-blown rotter now. Carefully Harley aimed, shooting off the top of Timmy’s skull. Enough of his face was still intact so that the family would at least have the comfort of receiving the body in recognizable condition. Unfortunately, head trauma was the only really effective way of dispatching a rotter, and as long as Harley removed a good part of the gray matter, he knew his job was complete.

Harley tagged the body and added the name to his report. When he returned to his truck he called Dispatch, who would notify the Recovery crew. Hopefully they’d get to the boy before animals or the elements—or some other rotter. Normally the crew was timely, but lately business had exploded and they could barely keep up.

Two left on the list for the day. Twin girls. He studied their pictures.

As he drove, he wondered about the survival of the human race. Whatever this was, this disease, this infection that had doomed the children was dooming humanity. Newborn rotters, chewing and clawing their way out of their mothers’ wombs, or children changing into these flesh-consuming creatures…going to bed perfectly normal, parents breathing a collective sigh of relief and falling to their knees in thanks suddenly finding themselves in the middle of the night fighting for their lives against their ravenous monstrosities. No one knew what had caused the disease. Or how to cure it, despite children being studied, examined—autopsied. It was no longer safe to try to keep them alive. They had become too much of a threat.

Harley’s job as a police officer, and his proficiency with his firearm made him the perfect candidate for this detail. A job he despised. Calls from frantic parents had disturbed him at all hours of the day and night at home. Threats. Pleads. He’d heard it all. Warnings that if he killed their baby they would hunt him down and—

But this was all part of the job. So he’d had his phone number changed and unlisted and the calls stopped.

The kids (he could never bring himself to think of them as rotters) tended to take to the woods. They avoided the towns. Maybe it was something instinctive, maybe somehow they felt safe.
Safe
.

Molly and Melissa, age six. Born three minutes apart. Changed into rotters only that morning, and had last been seen heading into the woods behind their house. Woods that covered hundreds of miles, however. One thing about rotters, though—they didn’t move too quickly. They could attack at rapid-fire speed once the illness had advanced, but they tended to travel slowly, as if lost, as if unable to decide where they wanted to go. And the younger ones, the ones who had not yet developed social or coping skills, the ones who had been clumsy in life and were just getting used to their own bodies were even slower.

It took Harley about an hour to pick up their trail. The air was thick in that part of the woods, swampy, almost soupy; hordes of mosquitoes and blackflies assaulted him as he made his way through the dense foliage. A short while later he spotted them in a clearing, huddled together as they rested beneath a weeping willow.

“There you are, girls,” he whispered, catching his breath, closing in on them. He left his pistol holstered as he crept quietly through the bushes and approached them from the side.

One of the girls lifted her head and looked in his direction but didn’t seem to have spotted him. The girls appeared almost normal; the telltale vacuous expression wasn’t usually evident until several days after the change began. But the other signs were there—the oozing sores, the distorted, runny facial features—as if the kids had been dead for days and were walking the earth again. And the animal-like demeanor—the snarls and grunts, their mindless, predacious instinct—cleared up any doubts whether these kids were still human.