The Zombies Of Lake Woebegotten (14 page)

“I’d like to call this meeting to order.”

Edsel rose instantly to his feet, but Daniel just blinked in surprise at Stevie Ray, the part-time bartender, part-time cop, who’d taken the microphone at the lectern in the center of the stage. “Thank you all for coming,” Stevie Ray said.
 

“Yes, thank you.” Edsel tried to shoulder Stevie Ray aside, but the cop turned and said, “You’ll get your turn to speak, Father, but first I need to make some public safety announcements, and that’s my job, not yours.”

“I think it’s Harry’s job,” Edsel said.

“Harry’s dead.” Stevie Ray nodded into the wind generated by the collective gasp in the room. “Which is part of what I’m here to talk about. Take a seat, Father?”

Edsel frowned, but he was clearly smart enough to know the crowd wouldn’t respond well if he tried to steamroll Stevie Ray before they got to hear details about that particular bombshell, so he sat down with all the grace of an embarrassed cat.
 

Stevie Ray rattled a sheet of papers that looked to Daniel like printouts from websites, complete with little banner ads frozen in grayscale and margins running off the page. The officer cleared his throat. “At approximately 3:45 Eastern time this morning an astronomical event of an undetermined nature was observed over the skies in most of the continental United States. Some of you may have seen it—a great burst of light, like the biggest falling star you’ve ever seen. Scientists…” He moved a page around, and cleared his throat again. “Scientists are unsure of the…” Stevie Ray looked around the room, sweat running down his forehead, and the crowd looked back at him. Maybe in New York City people would have been on their feet shouting, demanding answers, asking about Harry—Daniel was pretty darn curious about that himself—but here in Lake Woebegotten you let a man have his say, even if it took him a little while to get around to it.
 

“I’m sorry, folks,” Stevie Ray said, putting the pages down. “The situation is this. The dead have come back to life, and they’re dangerous. Just like in some kind of horror movie or video game. When the corpses rise, there’s nothing human left in them, as far as I can tell, just a terrible hunger. Harry and I went to the funeral home to deal with the living dead there, and Harry… he wasn’t fast enough… one of them got him. I’ve been trying to get in touch with the sheriff, the state police, even the National Guard, the military, anybody, but I’m not having much luck. Some of you may have noticed communications are breaking down, the internet’s not too reliable, it goes in and out even though we plugged everything back in at WoBoCo, and cell phones don’t seem to be working at all really, maybe because of something in the atmosphere, something related to that explosion in the sky last night, I don’t know, and I don’t even know if that has anything to do with the dead coming back to life, but…”

There was a rumble in the room now, people talking to their neighbors, in low voices, not exactly impolite, but it might as well have been open insurrection as far as portent goes. Edsel was just smiling all self-satisfied, happy to see Stevie Ray floundering, but Daniel set his eyes on the greater good and got to his feet. The room went silent. “It’s true. What he says about the dead. I saw the widow Mormont myself, on her deathbed, and after she passed, her eyes opened, she stood up, and she killed Doctor Holliday.”

Another group gasp.
 

“I sort of thought people might have their doubts,” Stevie Ray said, nodding at Daniel gratefully. “So I arranged a, ah, demonstration, but… maybe it’s better if parents with children take the children outside, I don’t think they need to see this…”

Reluctantly, parents argued over who had to take the children out into the freezing cold, and it took a few minutes, but eventually the broods were rounded up and led out of the room, and Stevie Ray looked off to the left and beckoned, and Daniel followed his eyes, and there was Dolph the grocer, pushing a wheelbarrow, and in the wheelbarrow was—was—

“An abomination.” Father Edsel pointed at the armless, legless, endlessly mouthing thing that Dolph wheeled to center stage and tipped up so everyone could see. The crowd moved forward, everyone staring, and finally old Ingvar Knudsen said, “Yep, that’s the living dead,” and he was such an old and staid and established voice that nobody else in the audience seemed to question it after that.
 

Edsel had gone from zero to wild-eyed prophetic preaching mode in seconds, striding up and down the stage, shouting, “This is a thing thrown back up from the depths of Hell!”

“More like the depths of old man Levitt’s basement,” Dolph said, but under his breath, so only those on stage heard it. Stevie Ray shot him a deadly look, and Daniel wondered what
that
was about. He’d find out. It was hard to keep secrets from a community’s spiritual leaders.

“This is what we face, my children.” Edsel gripped the lectern with both hands like a shipwrecked man clinging to the only available piece of flotsam. “The great night star was the Star Wormwood, and these are the end times. These walking dead are the shocktroops of Hell, and Armageddon will follow on their heels.”

“I don’t know about all that,” Stevie Ray said, plucking the microphone from in front of the priest. “Harry—before he succumbed to zombie bite—was of the opinion that this was a temporary problem, and something we could weather, if we pull together as a community. You see, there just aren’t that many fresh corpses in Lake Woebegotten, if you see what I mean. The ones in the funeral home have been taken care of, at some cost, I know, but they’re gone now. And the widow Mormont, I trust, was handled too?”
 

He looked at Daniel, who nodded queasily, and said, “Doctor Holliday, as well.”

“So that’s probably about the extent of them.” Stevie Ray was loosening up now, warming to his subject. He gestured to Dolph, who wheeled the limbless corpse back offstage. “The town’s been through tragedies before. Blizzards, and floods, and fires, and even lion attacks after that circus train wreck back in the ’70s. We’ve always endured, and we’ll get through this, too. It looks like we might lose power, but we’ve got generators, and there’s plenty of fuel in town, and when that runs out we’ve got fireplaces and woodstoves and candles, and those that are running low on supplies can reach out to their neighbors, and we’ll all help each other. Apart from the walking dead and all, it’s just apt to be another pretty bad winter. Right?” He coughed. “I guess, I’ll take questions?” He looked very much like he hoped there wouldn’t be any questions.

And there weren’t, not right then, because the doors at the back swung open with a creak, and everyone turned to look, expecting to see some children sneaking in to get a peek at the forbidden goings-on, but instead it was all the children running in and screaming, which made people get to their feet, and if not for his elevated position on the stage Daniel wouldn’t have seen what they were running from, which was: the lurching form of Brent Munson, car dealer, Lutheran deacon, duly elected mayor, and limping zombie. He just paused in the doorway, his blood-crusted head swinging from side to side at all the people backing away from him, like a starving man at a buffet who can’t decide whether to start with the popcorn shrimp or the chicken wings.
 

“Everyone stay calm, they’re slow, just keep a safe distance!” Stevie Ray shouted, but then one of the women at the back—Daniel didn’t know her, she must have been a Catholic—tripped and went sprawling, and zombie Brent saw his chance, and advanced upon her, reaching out with clawed hands, jaws opening and shutting, great ropes of drool spilling over his lips, bending down to grab her ankle, and Daniel could pretty much see the future, Brent picking up the woman by her leg—he knew the dead were hellishly strong—and taking a bite out of her calf like a man chowing down on a drumstick.

But suddenly Eileen Munson, Brent’s wife, head of the Lutheran Women’s Circle, walked against the flow of panicking pig farmers and forty-year-old grandmothers and former factory workers and rest home attendants and unemployed snow machine enthusiasts and mechanics who refused on principle to work on foreign cars and professional dishwashers and relatively honest contractors and gas pump jockeys and fry cooks and roadside fruit stand proprietors and truck drivers, and everyone parted before her, like she was Moses parting the Red Sea (only this was the redneck sea, Daniel thought, with an uncharacteristic lack of charity toward his parishioners, and Father Edsel’s too), and Eileen even outstretched her hand like she should have a staff twined with serpents in her grasp, but instead she had a pistol, and she stepped right up to her undead monster husband before he could take a bite out of that poor woman’s flesh, and pressed the barrel of the gun against the side of Brent’s head soft and deliberate as a kiss, and pulled the trigger.
 

The noise was less startling than the other gunshots Daniel had heard today—he must be getting used to them—and it had the odd effect of calming the panicked crowd down. A gunshot in a still room makes people panic, he thought, but a gunshot in a panicked room might just be the sound of order being restored by force.
 

Eileen lowered her pistol and turned to face the crowd, and the new center of the room’s attention bowed her head for a moment, then lifted her face, her eyes shining, and said, “I love this town. I’d do anything to save it. I’d even shoot my own husband—the thing that used to be my husband—in the head. I trust everyone else in this room would do the same. Because you are good people, and you are my neighbors, and you are my family, and you are my friends.” Then her eyes rolled back and she fell to the floor, though Daniel thought she landed awfully well for a woman in a dead faint, sort of gently crumpling instead of falling and banging her head on a chair or something. But she was probably just lucky, and the good Lord knew she could use some luck after what happened to her husband, though exactly how he’d gotten killed in the first place was something of a mystery. Still, why would you fake a faint in a situation like this?

16. An Odyssey
of Theodicy

N
obody had much of an appetite for the lemon bars and chocolate squares after Eileen killed her husband, not even once they got the remains of Brent cleaned up, but everyone in the room certainly understood the gravity of the situation, and Dolph the grocer got Eileen up and took her off to grieve—Daniel would have to counsel her later—and after a while everyone went home with promises to keep their eyes open, to check up on each other regularly, and to use the buddy system if they had to go out.
 

Afterward, Stevie Ray and Father Edsel and Daniel were the only ones left in the community center, Glenda Dreier having cleaned everything up with impressive efficiency, all things considered.

“That could have been better, but if could have been worse,” Edsel said, standing with his hands clasped behind his back, looking out over the sea of empty chairs. “I’m afraid your Pollyanna vision of normalcy returning will prove false, but maybe it’s better to let people ease into the facts of life in the time of tribulations. No need to panic them all at once.”

“I hope you’re wrong, Father,” Stevie Ray said. “I don’t much want to be the only cop in a town abandoned by God.”

“God does not abandon us,” Daniel said. “Never that. He only tests us.”

“We’re pretty much the town government now, I suppose,” Edsel mused. “Wouldn’t you say so, Stevie Ray? Or are you planning on instituting a more secular form of rule?”

“Father, I’ll take all the help I can get, and give you all the weight you can carry.” He yawned hugely. “I guess we’ve got a lot to talk about, but I need to get some food and some rest. Can we have a meeting tomorrow morning?”

“Of course,” Edsel said, and then turned, and smiled. “I just have one small question. Who was the dead man in the wheelbarrow?”

Daniel gaped. He hadn’t even thought about that—the object lesson, the demonstration of truth, the
evidence
… He’d been a person. A stranger. They certainly hadn’t ordered him from the Zombie Proof Catalogue.

“I was hoping to save that for tomorrow. But you might as well come over now, Father. He asked to speak to you anyway.”

“The zombie?” Daniel blurted. “They can talk?”

“No, sir. Not the zombie. The man who killed the innocent boy who became the zombie. Lake Woebegotten’s very own serial killer, former school superintendent Martin Levitt. He’s the reason I found out about the zombie uprising. All the victims in his basement got up and decided to come upstairs.”

“I see,” Edsel said. “Well, well. The Lord does indeed work in mysterious ways, his wonders to perform. Shall we go stare into the face of Evil, Daniel?”

“I don’t believe in evil,” Daniel said, trying to process. Old man Levitt? The man who had the best Halloween decorations every year, tasteful, very harvest-y, not at all Satanic, who gave the boys and girls apples and toothbrushes? That old man Levitt, a killer? “Not the way you mean, not capital-E-evil, there are just misdirected appetites and misguided people who—”

“Yes, yes,” Edsel said, as if soothing a fussy child. His condescension might have enraged Daniel if he’d had the emotional resiliency to feel rage after this long day. “I’m sure you’re right. How can we go wrong with moral relativism, after all? Zombies just have misguided appetites, that’s all.”

“If you two plan to have a theological debate, I’ll leave you to it,” Stevie Ray said. “Or do you want to come minister to a diseased mind? I promised him a priest to talk to, Father, in exchange for some information he gave us. Not that it would hurt my heart to break a promise to that man, after seeing what he’s capable of, but it doesn’t cost me anything, if you’re willing.”

“Everyone deserves the opportunity to receive counsel from a man of the cloth,” Edsel said. “Besides, a human murderer makes a nice change from zombies. At least people have
motives
. Zombies are no more spiritually interesting than typhoid fever or exploding gas lines.”