Best New Zombie Tales Trilogy (78 page)

The stunned patron blubbered out a string of half-coherent pleas for release as Jimmy seized him by the lapels of his jacket and plucked the phone from his pocket. His pudgy hands flew up to ward off Jimmy’s attack, leaving his pants and underwear to collapse at his feet.

“Please, Mister, don’t hurt me!”

But even as he said it, Jimmy unlocked the bathroom, shoved the phone-owner into the hall, and yanked the door shut again before his bare ass hit the floor.

“It means Sheriff Pickett came by this morning and told Harrington not to ship the corpse over to HCMC for cooking, that’s what! Some homicide detective called about him last night, and he’s on his way here right now to ID the body. If he’s right, our illegal amigo might actually be a Navaho serial killer!”

“I don’t give a damn!” Jimmy replied. “I need you to pump my stomach!”

“I don’t know how to do that!”

“You’re the goddamn medical expert here, you gotta do
something
!”

Rather than go for the door, Jimmy kicked through the window at the back of the room and jumped into the alley, landing in a filthy puddle of dumpster runoff when he dropped to the ground.

6.

That night Jimmy tossed and turned.

He’d gone to a roadside motel off the interstate rather than chance returning to his trailer, and he spent the better half of the evening waiting for the police to show up.

Finally, around two a.m., he lay down on the bed. Sleep came in short spurts, but only out of exhaustion, and during the times when he dozed, he dreamed of the finger sloshing around in his stomach, refusing to digest.

Or trying to crawl out the way it went in.

Jimmy moaned at the thought, not wanting to recall it.

He’d chugged a whole bottle of FiberAll for dinner in an attempt to be free of the thing, followed by half a package of Exlax that he picked up at a small market adjacent to his hideout. So far, neither had worked.

Earlier, he tried to call Stuart but the bastard never picked up. On the contrary, his stolen cellphone rang about two dozen times, its display glowing with the names and numbers of callers he didn’t dare answer.

He finally drifted off to sleep as the first red rays of sunlight bled over the horizon.

7.

When Jimmy awoke he went straight to the bathroom.

The day had come and gone while he slept, and he felt confident that the long rest had given the meds time to generate some results. Much to his disappointment, however, he spent nearly twenty minutes on the toilet straining/praying to shit out the finger, all the while secretly fearing that he’d crap a whole hand.

Back in the bedroom, the television droned. He’d left it on last night to escape the burbling sounds produced from his gut, and now some sitcom gave way to the ten o’clock news.

He watched the report in a state of stupefied captivity as the newscaster went on to explain how the county’s medical examiner had found the morgue’s autopsy room in disarray earlier that evening, a discovery that led him to a second scene of destruction inside the cooler. There, the perpetrator(s) had stolen the decapitated remains of a body that was being held for forensic testing as part of a murder investigation by authorities upstate. According to sources, the room’s stainless steel door had been torn off its hinges in order to get at the body.

Jimmy dropped down on the end of the bed as he listened.

The events of the last few days spiraled through his head, chased by the dread of whatever new miseries the future might hold, and all at once, he thought his wish to be rid of the thing in his stomach was about to come true.

He clutched his midsection and ran for the bathroom.

The lurching started even as he leaned over the sink. He seized the faucet handles to stabilize himself while the tremors passed through him, then sagged in despair when the convulsions concluded with nothing more than a foul-smelling belch.

He rinsed out his mouth, and was about to leave when he glimpsed movement in his peripheral vision. He glanced to the left, facing the room’s tiny window.

And saw a dog staring back at him.

Two yellow eyes glinted in the dark air outside the motel, reflecting the light from the bathroom, and Jimmy leapt backward in shock even as his over-stressed brain realized that the eyes had to be at least six feet off the ground.

The window exploded in a hailstorm of glass.

Blood-splattered arms reached through the frame.

Jimmy shrieked as the attacker clutched fistfuls of his shirt, each hand a skeletal mess of torn flesh and exposed bone, as if the person outside had recently clawed his way out of a grave—or through a stainless steel door. Then, in a split-second moment of hyper-awareness he saw that the assailant’s smallest left-hand finger ended in a clean, circular stump.

The missing stiff from the morgue
, he thought.
Oh, Jesus, it can’t be!

He punched at the restraining limbs, struggling to break free. Several of the meatless fingers tore through his shirt, and he mewed in disgust when the cold bones touched his skin.

Then the man leaned through the window, into the light.

And Jimmy’s shouts of repulsion died in his throat.

Somewhere in his brain the information being sent from his eyes failed to find a rational point of emotional reference, and terror, bewilderment, humor, and awe collided together with a paralytic affect.

Unlike before, the corpse was no longer headless.

At the point where the man’s neck should’ve started, a railroad of thick stitches connected the severed head of a coyote to the human skin of his torso.

Jimmy shook his head in denial, unable to escape the glare of the animal’s yellow gaze as it stared down at him over a lipless snout filled with jagged white fangs. It pulled him to the edge of the window, inches from its reeking flesh, where a legion of maggots explored the bare patches of skin that dotted its fur.

“It was an accident!” Jimmy heard himself repeating again and again.

The chemical stink of formaldehyde wafted out from the thing’s dripping maw when it opened its jaws, and a new degree of terror pushed Jimmy’s mind to the edge of insanity as the monster started to laugh.

“Yee-nadlooshii!” the undead nightmare declared, speaking each syllable with perfect clarity despite the mouth that produced them.

Its putrid breath gusted into Jimmy’s face, but the ghastly state of the creature’s physical composition no longer compared to the terror of facing an intelligent being with supernatural strength and a malevolent spirit.

Suddenly the back of his head crashed into the wall.

A swarm of fireflies swirled across his vision, but when they cleared he saw the monster towering before him, still only halfway through the window, holding two equally shredded halves of his tee-shirt in its boney hands.

Jimmy patted his bare chest, just then realizing that he’d braced both feet against the sink in an effort to escape the creature’s grasp and must have torn clear through his clothes!

The coyote-headed horror roared, spraying spittle through the air.

It gripped the edges of the window frame and with the gunshot noise of cracking timbers it yanked a five-foot section of the wall into the night.

Outside, in the parking lot, a blue convertible sat idling in the space reserved for the room next to Jimmy’s, trunk open, front end facing away from the building.

Jimmy jumped into the driver’s seat without even touching the door and left twenty feet of burnt rubber smoking on the asphalt as he peeled away from the motel with the accelerator mashed to the floorboards.

8.

Stuart’s house emerged out of the murk.

Jimmy drove the stolen car right up on the lawn and left the engine running when he hopped out and hurried to the door. No lights glowed in any of the windows, but he pounded on the door and franticly thumbed the ringer.

9.

Jimmy pushed through the police department’s front door at ten minutes to midnight.

Deputy Vern Ferguson was eating a late dinner behind the long counter that separated the lobby from the offices, and Jimmy ignored the kid’s muffled commands to halt as he tried to speak through a mouthful of ham sandwich.

“Hey!” the young officer shouted when Jimmy let himself through the partition.

He found Sheriff Picket sitting at one of the desks in the open central area of the building known as the bullpen, and even from a distance Jimmy noticed the frown beneath his storm cloud of a mustache.

And he wasn’t alone.

A tall American Indian man in blue jeans and a suit coat (cop casual, Jimmy called it) stood off to the left. A roadmap of fresh cuts crisscrossed the man’s face, some linked by dozens of black stitches that looked all too reminiscent of the patchwork monster he’d faced at the motel. The sight stopped him in his tracks, and he had to make a cognitive effort to refocus his thoughts on what he’d come here to say.

Pickett let out a short bark of laughter and raised his hands as if surrendering to Jimmy’s statement. “What a surprise!” he added with sarcastic flare. “Tossing a feller outta the john with his pants around his ankles and stealing his phone wasn’t enough fun, was it? Ya just had to find something more interesting! Alright, then, Cooley, enlighten us; what the hell did you do with a half-mutilated corpse?”

Pickett glared at the younger officer like an executioner with one hand on the power switch, ending the amusement. He then redirected his attention at Jimmy with equal intensity.

“This is Detective Riverwind,” Pickett said, motioning to the American Indian with the lacerated face. “He’s the one you’re going to have to make friends with if you don’t want to spend the next decade in prison.”

A phone rang at the desk. Vern answered it.

“Now listen up, Cooley,” Pickett continued. “If it wasn’t for the detective’s investigation I’d can your ass right now and Judge Morton would put it on the shelf ’till winter. So if you have some serious information—and I mean it better be a goddamn treasure map with a big fuck’n X at the end of it—then start talking.”