The Zombies Of Lake Woebegotten (22 page)

Now of course he hadn’t heard from his children or grandchildren in some time, most of them having chosen new homes in typical former-Minnesotan fashion: by going someplace where it didn’t snow. He hoped they were all right. He hoped they were surviving the very new year, the Year of the Zombie maybe it should be called, someplace safe and warm, but who knew? He didn’t much expect to survive long enough to hear from any of them. He was now the second-oldest-man in town, outranked only by Emperor Torvald, who was much younger in spirit and mind, having reverted in his nineties back to somewhere around his early teens, complete with undisguised lusting over women a considerably large fraction of his age. Even without the town’s only doctor dying he wasn’t a prospect for longer life, speaking strictly by statistics, though he still got around all right so long as he didn’t hurry, and had never smoked a day in his life, and didn’t drink much, and didn’t even eat much meat, having grown up in times when meat was a luxury. Still, even without extraordinary abuse, normal wear and tear would get him soon enough. He was just sad he was going to die alone. His wife had passed the year before, and this had been his first Christmas a widower, and his children had actually pulled together and planned to return to the frozen north of their youths—their own kids, not knowing any better, were excited by the prospect of a white Christmas—so Ingvar wouldn’t have to spend it alone. He’d laid in an epic quantity of supplies, from food to extra fuel for the generators to lots of extra heating oil because his children, after so long in warmer climes, were apt to be overly sensitive to the sort of cold which would merely make Ingvar himself shrug and put on another sweater. He’d always been a thrifty man, but he’d intended to throw caution and parsimony to the wind in order to host a great family fete… And now he was alone in his big farmhouse with an undecorated Christmas tree waiting for the worst to happen.

Then one day not long after the New Year pastor Daniel Inkfist knocked on his door. “Hello, Ingvar, how are you holding up?” he asked. The college boy, what was his name, Randy? Something silly and modern like Rumpus? was there too, holding a rifle and looking around, which was probably prudent but still made Ingvar uncomfortable. He’d been in a war—two of them, actually—and didn’t like the sight of an armed vigilant man—or boy—in his front yard. It brought back unpleasant associations.
 

“Oh, not too bad, can’t complain,” Ingvar said, which was exactly the same response he would have given if he’d been in the jaws of a mountain lion or actually on fire or being tortured in an Iron Maiden at the time, though it was also the answer he would have given while bathing in the fountain of youth just prior to reclining on a pile of fluffy thousand-dollar bills while being waited on hand-and-foot by doe-eyed maidens in gold bikinis.
 

“You mind if we come in?”

Ingvar ushered them in, got them seated on the couch—still covered in plastic, as his wife would’ve wanted—and offered them coffee, which they accepted, because as cold as it was, who wouldn’t want something hot to sip?

After fifteen or twenty minutes of conversation about the weather, the state of the town, the upcoming mayoral election, and confirmation that no one had heard anything from the outside world at all, Daniel said, “Let me get right to the point, Ingvar. Since we lost contact with the outside world, some of our townspeople have been struggling. They don’t have enough oil for heat or enough wood laid by, and we’ve had one house fire—”

“I heard about that,” Ingvar said. There was no 911 to call now. No fire engines came screaming in. Lucky it was winter or the woods around the house might have caught too.

“Well. Things are rough for some of our people. And then there are all the ones who live alone, we’re trying to get people to move in together, share resources, but—”

“I’ve got plenty of room here,” Ingvar said, shrugging. “Enough fuel to get me through the winter even if I make it 68 degrees night and day.” Next winter was a different story, but he could gather wood next fall, assuming he lived that long. “Enough food to feed a battalion, assuming you’ve got somebody who can cook—I’m not much good if it gets beyond making a hamburger or some eggs. Enough gas to keep the gennie running for a good long while if I’m careful.”

Pastor Inkfist’s eyes went wide. “Oh, Ingvar, we were just coming by to see if you maybe had some canned food or fuel or old blankets you could donate, we’ve been going door-to-door and—”

“No need. Got a lot of room here. Could use the company. Send anyone who needs a place over. We’ll work it out.”
 

Rufus spoke up: “You sure you can handle it? I mean, we could send ten, fifteen people today, are you really up to dealing with them, getting them settled, working out the, uh, bathroom situation? I mean, that’s a lot to do for… for anyone.”

For someone so old
, Ingvar thought, with more amusement than anger. To be so young that you thought being young and inexperienced somehow made you
more
qualified to deal with life’s problems; it was a kind of stupid that pretty much everyone suffered from at one point or another. “I raised eight children in this house, son. And ran the biggest family farm in Drizzle County while I did it. I imagine I can handle having a few of my neighbors visit.”

And that’s how what came to be known as Ingvar’s House of a Thousand Orphans got started. In truth there were only two orphans, the six- and eight-year-old kids who lost their parents in the fire, but the name seemed to fit anyway, since Ingvar opened his door to pretty much anybody in need, putting rollaway beds in hallways and cots in the basement, with whole families sleeping in double beds in his guestrooms. The bathroom was a bit of an issue, but with severely limited hot water nobody much wanted to shower, and when everybody kind of smelled equally bad you got used to it.
 

The townsfolk of Lake Woebegotten didn’t like to impose or take charity, so pretty soon every little minor repair he hadn’t gotten around to yet was done, and far from making more work for him, Ingvar’s open-door policy meant he pretty much didn’t have to lift a finger—coffee was made in the morning, supper was set before him at the long (and very crowded) big table every night, and the only chore he held onto (and even that took some effort to retain) was dusting his wife’s teapots. The bustle had a restorative effect on Ingvar, too. A house full of jostling people made the long winter seem a lot shorter, and it was always easy to get a game of euchre going, and having kids around gave him hope for the future. He felt like he might not die so soon after all, that he could live a good long while, that in a way letting all these people into his house and—though he’d never say so out loud—his heart had given him new life, and better yet, a reason for life. The kids all started calling him Grandpa Ingvar. Life was good.

Of course, all that was before the bus crash, and what came after.

14

B
igHorn Jim found the squirming limbless zombie in the woods north of the lake, humping along at great speed—considering its relative lack of arms and legs—in pursuit of a ground squirrel that really should have been snug in a hollow tree for winter by now. The snow had iced over, creating a sort of armored snow that didn’t want to break unless you really hammered your boot down, and the limbless zombie was sort of sledding on its belly, head lifted, jaws snapping, propelling itself by undulations of its abdominal muscles and flailings of its leg stumps.

BigHorn Jim was pretty sure the little beast was taunting the zombie, or else the cold had made it stupid, because the squirrel could have easily shot up any of the nearby trees and been completely free. Jim’s religion included tales of Ratatoskr, the squirrel that ran up and down the trunk of the world tree Yggdrasil, carrying messages from the nameless eagle at the top of the great ash to the dragon who dwells beneath the roots, telling lies and spreading gossip and gnawing at the tree’s bark as he goes. The squirrel was not quite a trickster figure, more of a low troublemaker, but in a battle between old rat-tooth and a
draugr
, BigHorn Jim knew which side he’d take. He took the throwing axe from his belt, hefted it in his hand, and judged the angle. Throwing the axe and hitting a rapidly-moving prone object would be difficult, and only severing the head or damaging the brain would stop a
draugr
, so he reluctantly put the axe away. He was a fearsome enough warrior, he knew, but some feats were beyond him.
 

Thinking of Ratatoskr made him think of spreading trouble and sowing discord, though, and how such things could be used to achieve good ends—like shaking the townspeople out of their complacency. None of them seemed to want to face the new facts of their existence: that Ragnarok was upon them, and the world soon to burn. They were still going to the store, going to the cafe, going to the bar, getting haircuts—they were even going to have their Christmas pageants, as usual.
 

Jim, who’d been a Lutheran himself once not so many years ago, and was a lifelong Minnesotan, knew that a certain dogged perseverance was a defining trait of many of his fellow residents, for better or worse, but in this case, it was worse, because if they didn’t realize the monsters were
here
, and that they had to
fight
, they’d all be stoically standing their ground while the
draugr
ate their guts, saying, “Well that’s not too good a deal” as the teeth sank into their throats, and that was no way to die. They were all going to die
anyway
of course—Lutheranism and Norse Paganism shared few beliefs, but predestination was one point of intersection, and what was going to happen was going to happen—but the
way
you died mattered, and if BigHorn Jim could shake them from their stupor, he’d be doing them all a service, and making new warriors for the feasting hall in Valhalla, maybe.

He uncoiled the length of rope from around his waist, crept up on the zombie, slipped the rope up under its thighs and around its belly, braced the rope over his shoulder, and began dragging the wriggling protesting zombie behind him. Jim wasn’t sure what exactly he was going to
do
with the zombie, but he was sure he’d come up with something suitably shocking.
 

The squirrel chittered at Jim angrily as he departed, but that was squirrels for you.
 

15

“I
thought you had a tracking bracelet on him?” Rufus said, fidgeting with his pistol—Stevie Ray
really
wished he wouldn’t do that, but the kid was unteachable, he thought weapons in real life worked like they did in video games, never going off by accident, and if they did, it was no big deal, and infinite ammo was just a cheat code away.
 

“Put the gun away!” he snapped. “It’s not a toy!”

Rufus looked startled, then sheepish, then tucked the weapon into the holster at his belt, closing the snap over it. “Sorry, boss.” The “boss” was only a little bit sarcastic, which, by Rufus’s standards, meant it was damn near sincere.

“It’s all right. I just don’t want you shooting yourself, or me, or anybody else. As for the bracelet—yes, Mr. Levitt has a bracelet on his ankle. It has pretty lights on it, and he comes over here regularly to plug it in and charge it up again off the gennie. As far as he knows, it works, and we can track his every move… but it doesn’t work. We never even got the tracking software installed, and now I can’t find it. Harry bought a bunch of stuff when we got a big bunch of Homeland Security anti-terrorist money, fancy guns and good vests and those house-arrest bracelets, but we never
used
the bracelets before. It’s a shame. I hear they’re pretty much impossible to tamper with.”

“So we’ve got a serial killer, just wandering around unsupervised?”

“Two things.” Stevie Ray held up a forefinger. “He
thinks
he’s being monitored, which is almost as good. And I’ve got someone following him and keeping watch pretty much every minute he’s awake. The perfect guy for the job: the most paranoid person in Lake Woebegotten.”

“Father Edsel’s watching him?” Rufus said, frowning.

“Okay,” Stevie Ray said. “Point. I should’ve said, the second most paranoid person in Lake Woebegotten.”

16

“A
ll right!” Stevie Ray shouted. “Everyone settle down. Thank you all for coming tonight. We’re going to hear speeches from our two mayoral candidates. First up we’ve got Eileen Munson, and then we’ll hear from Julie Olafson. They’ve both got some real good ideas about what we should do, as a town, going forward, so I’m sure we’ll—”

“We want to hear from Mr. Levitt!” Cyrus Bell shouted from the back of the hall, and, if the temperature inside the town meeting hall hadn’t already been so cold as to make the distinction entirely academic, Stevie Ray’s blood would’ve run cold. Cyrus was supposed to be on
their
side—but a man who thought the zombies were part of a conspiracy perpetrated by aliens who lived inside a hollow spaceship moon was, by definition, apt to be unreliable. “He’s our man!”

A few scattered shouts of “Yeah!” rang out in the crowd, and someone shouted, “Bring out the hero of the bus crash battle!” and “Let him run!” and other similar exhortations.
 

“Listen,” Stevie Ray said, “It’s nice to see you all so excited about the political process, it means we’re a healthy community, but we had a process, and people interested in being mayor had to put their names in last month and get their platforms written up for those flyers we handed out, and Mr. Levitt just didn’t get his name into the ring in time, so I’m afraid—”

“Levitt!” shouted Cyrus Bell, and the survivors from the Knudsen farm—the ones who hadn’t seen
everything
that happened that day, of course, but who’d seen the bits that looked heroic, from a distance, at least—took up the call too. “Leh-vitt! Leh-vitt! Leh-vitt!”

Cyrus
. He’d been assigned to look after Levitt, to partner with him on patrols most days and watch him from afar with some of his assorted spy equipment on other days, and now he was supporting the man’s bid for mayor? Stevie Ray would have to sit down and have a talk with Cyrus, even if that did entail exposing himself to the man’s high-octane crazy.