The Zombies Of Lake Woebegotten (24 page)

Rufus occasionally felt torn between his status as the town’s only surviving special deputy—which made him second-in-command in the town police if you wanted to be grandiose about it—and his membership in a quasi-legal vigilante pest removal hunting club-type organization, but this wasn’t one of those times. “Unless zombies have started driving heavy machinery and holding demolition derbies, that wasn’t a zombie. Sounds more like a car accident, which means we need the police, and Morty. Let me see the radio.”

Joe, who hadn’t yet had the opportunity to shoot at something human-shaped even once, scowled and handed over the radio. There were only a handful of police radios available, nowhere near enough for everyone to have them, and only Stevie Ray and Father Edsel—as head of the Anti-Zombie League—had radios full-time. “Stevie Ray, you there, think we got a car accident out near Andersen Road, right by the highway turn-off. Maybe get Morty and come check it out?”

“On my way,” Stevie Ray crackled back.

“He didn’t even say ‘over and out,’” Joe said. “How’re you supposed to know if he’s done talking?”

“When he doesn’t say anything else, it’s probably a safe bet. That must be it up there.” Rufus pointed at the flash of sunlight off a windshield in the distance. “Something off in the ditch there.”

“Funny time to be driving,” Joe said. “Don’t see a lot of that anymore.” Gas was precious, as the town had only one gas station and its tanks hadn’t even been full when the outside world stopped communicating, and Stevie Ray had strictly rationed gas—even the Interfaith Anti-Zombie Coalition had to depend mostly on their own stores, but fortunately they were mostly farmers, and had a decent supply of fuel put aside amongst themselves.
 

“It looks like they came off the highway off-ramp and took the curve wrong and went into the ditch,” Rufus said, shading his eyes. Looked like two vehicles in the ditch now, one big, one smaller, and that was just mind-boggling—the chance of there being two vehicles out here at the same time, and them actually managing to collide, had to be smaller than the chance of finding intelligent alien life on the surface of the sun.
 

“If the driver died, we could be looking at a zombie-type situation,” Joe said. He pulled off the side of the road about fifty yards back, on the same side as the accident, but he managed to stay out of the ditch. By now the shape of the vehicles was clear: a big truck that was probably black before it got coated in twenty kinds of ice and road grime, and a yellow school bus, the short-bus kind, both tipped over on their sides in the ditch. Joe opened the door, letting in a blast of cold air, and said, “I’ve been waiting for this. Wish I had a couple of pistols, but my deer rifle will do.” He climbed out of the truck, reached toward the rifle hanging on the gun rack behind the seat, then screamed and fell. From where Rufus sat, it looked like Joe’s feet had slipped, and there was a loud crack as Joe’s head hit some part of the truck as he went down.

“Joe!” Rufus scooted across the seat… and saw the zombie, a slender girl in her twenties maybe dressed in a puffy gray coat, with her neck bent at a funny angle, down in the ditch, from where she’d reached to grab Joe’s ankles and drag him down. She climbed up his body and bit down on his neck, and Joe screamed, a sound even louder than the noise of the crash had been.

Rufus thought
Gun, gun
, and started fumbling in the glove compartment where he’d stashed his sidearm. He got the pistol in his hand and aimed it with a wavering hand at the zombie eating Joe, pulled the trigger, and nothing happened, oh God, he was doomed, oh wait, the safety was on, there, take that off. Rufus fired, the crash of the gunshot the loudest thing yet in an uncharacteristically loud morning, but he missed completely, just gouging a hole in some snow a good two feet to the left of the zombie, which paid no attention to the sound. The zombie lost interest in Joe, who shivered all over, then pushed himself up to his knees, eyes glassy and blank, mouth working.
 

“Crap!” Rufus shouted, firing another shot that didn’t hit anything—Stevie Ray had been on him to practice shooting more, but Rufus had honestly believed all his hours of dual-wielding pistols in video games had given him a pretty good understanding of the rudiments of shootistry. Guess not. Joe and the zombie who’d killed him were taking an interest in Rufus now, and three other zombies were coming down the ditch from the direction of the crash, all with big chunks of flesh missing from their necks like they’d been bitten to death, and so he slammed the truck door shut and locked it and stepped on the gas and drove past the crash, trying to decide if he was cowardly or smart or some heretofore unexperienced combination of the two, and the back of the truck fishtailed around because he’d accelerated too fast on the ice and if he went off into the ditch he’d be just another bus crash zombie in minutes, so he eased off on his panic and the accelerator and pumped the brakes and got things under control.
 

Rolling so slowly past the crash was terrifying, but it gave him time to see the situation, if not to entirely understand it: The truck was hitched up to the short bus, and had been towing it, and when one of them—who knew which—went off into the ditch, the other one went with it. They’d probably been driving on the highway, coming from who knows where, and for whatever reason this was the exit they’d decided to try, maybe in a search of more food or fuel. They could have been refugees, but Rufus didn’t figure they were a rescue party, not in such a ramshackle vehicular arrangement as that.
 

He finally remembered his radio as the zombies became dots in his rearview. “Stevie Ray! It’s a bus crash, and there are zombies, at least four, and they got Joe, so make that five, I—I don’t know what to do!”

The radio crackled. “On my way. I’ll call Mr. Levitt and the rest of the League.”

“Should I, ah… Try to take some of them out?”

“Wait for backup. We don’t need you being a zombie too.”

Rufus closed his eyes and thanked the Lord, and never mind he’d been an atheist since about five minutes after starting college. “Yes, sir.” He twisted around to look out the back window. The zombies were wandering away from the crash, off across the field beside the ditch. He counted five, six, ten, fifteen, maybe, black spots against the snow. Lurching into the woods, spreading out, not staying together. He could take a rifle, climb up on the roof of the truck, and pick them off one at a time… if he were playing a video game, and had a sniper rifle. He knew he’d just make a lot of noise and probably hit nothing if he did it, here, and might even attract their attention.
 

“We’ll round them up,” he said. “They won’t get far.” So he just sat there, and watched the zombies disappear into the woods.

19

“H
e’s in here,” Dolph said, gesturing at the freezer door.

“Haul it open then.” Mr. Levitt held a machete in one hand and a pistol in the other.

Dolph took a deep breath, grabbed the handle of the walk-in, and pulled. Mr. Levitt stepped forward, there was a meaty
thunk
, and then silence.

“Are you all right?” Dolph stood behind the door, trying not to think of it as a shield.

“Mmm hmm,” Mr. Levitt said. “Clem’s not even bleeding much, probably because he’s been dead so long. Whoo-ee, he tore up a lot of the meat in here. Ah, here’s some that’s not gnawed on.” Mr. Levitt came out, pistol holstered, machete at his belt, holding a few steaks tucked under one arm, and Clem’s severed head, held by the hair, in his other hand. Clem’s eyes rolled and his teeth snapped. “I’ll take these.”

“What?” Dolph said, staring at Clem’s head.

“The steaks. Much obliged.”

Dolph didn’t say anything, not even, “Who do you think you are?” or “That’s shoplifting,” just watched until Mr. Levitt was gone, then looked at the headless, motionless body of his former employee laying in the middle of the walk-in among the wreckage of frozen food. Dolph tried not to think—to become a sort of zombie himself, in fact—as he went about the grim business of cleaning up.

20

“Y
ou were a good puppy,” Mr. Levitt said, stepping on his beloved Alta with his foot, and then shooting him right in the brain. He looked up at Stevie Ray. “Satisfied?”

“I can’t believe he came when you called,” Stevie Ray said, shivering, and not just from the cold. They were out behind Dolph’s store, by the trash bins and the loading dock. “Do you think he just responded to the
noise
, or…”

“He heard his master’s voice,” Mr. Levitt said. “Now, where do you want to burn the bodies? Because now that I’m on the job, there are going to be a
lot
of bodies to burn.”

21

M
r. Levitt surveyed the scene of the bus crash and clucked his tongue. “I could have killed them all when they were bunched up here together. Anyone could have. But your deputy pissed himself and ran away instead.”

“He’s just a kid,” Stevie Ray said mildly.

“Eighteen years old. I was fighting in Korea when I was eighteen. Might say it’s where I learned my trade.” Mr. Levitt cracked his knuckles. “Still, nice to know there’s definitely something to hunt now. I was getting awfully sick of killing zombie dogs and cats and porcupines. You notice there aren’t any bird zombies? I wonder if it’s a mammal thing. Hunting zombie birds… that would at least pose an interesting challenge. Anyway, I’ll round up the boys, we’ll go out hunting, bring in a few more heads for the collection. Rufus said there were at least fifteen?”

“He wasn’t sure, but he thinks so.”

“Not a big bus, but even a small bus can hold a lot of people.” Mr. Levitt walked around the wreckage. “Probably only one or two died in the crash, but then they woke up and attacked the other ones, judging by all the blood splashed around in there. I’m not inclined to believe anything Deputy Pisspants says, so until I know otherwise, I’m going to assume there’s a zombie for every seat on that bus. It’s the only way to be safe.”

“You’re the zombie killer,” Stevie Ray said. The evil old man had a knack for the job, that was for sure, and according to Cyrus, Mr. Levitt hadn’t yet killed anyone who
wasn’t
a zombie, so the fragile arrangement was still working. “So go do your job.”

“It’s good to have a purpose,” Mr. Levitt said. “See you tonight with my bounty.”

That night, Mr. Levitt returned with only three heads. “The rest are who knows where, off in two dozen different directions for all I know. We’ll find them in time, I’m sure. Let’s hope it’s me who finds them and not one of the patrols—they’re apt to end up a bunch of Interfaith Zombie Chow if they’re not careful.” He tossed the heads into the freezer one by one, and Stevie Ray winced at every
thunk
.

22

“O
h, heck, it’s on fire,” Stevie Ray said, staring at the flames in the lower windows of Ingvar’s House of a Thousand Orphans. People—mostly kids, none dressed warmly enough—were streaming out into the late February cold. They’d gotten the call from Rufus, whose patrol had encountered a terrified child a quarter mile from Ingvar’s farm, talking about how a big pack of zombies came wandering up to the house and started breaking windows and biting people. It had to be the bus crash zombies—even by conservative estimates there were a dozen unaccounted for—and Stevie Ray had no idea how many people were staying in the big rambling farmhouse… and no way to know how many of them had already fallen to zombie attacks, only to join the ranks of their attackers themselves.

“You and Deputy Diapers round up the survivors.” Mr. Levitt climbed out of the truck, holding his machete. “I’ll go in and kill the dead ones.”

“By yourself? Are you crazy—” But the old man was already loping toward the front door, distressingly spry, as always. There were probably survivors inside, and what would stop Mr. Levitt from just killing them for fun and saying they were zombies when he found them? With luck, he’d have his hands full with
actual
zombies. And with a little more luck, Mr. Levitt would be overpowered, or get trapped inside and die in the fire, or in some other way cease to be the problem that plagued Stevie Ray all night and most of every day.
 

And then Stevie Ray saw a zombie come lurching around the house, chasing a woman clutching a baby to her chest, and he got out of the car with his service revolver and started shooting as the members of the Interfaith Anti-Zombie Cavalry pulled up in the driveway behind him.
 

23

D
olph carried a rifle with him as he walked down Main Street at twilight, head full of sound and fury and shame and self-loathing and disappointment. That filthy murdering old man Mr. Levitt had more guts than Dolph did, and Mr. Levitt was
scum
. Clem had cooled his heels—and the rest of him—in Dolph’s freezer for days, with Dolph unable to get up the nerve to do what was necessary, and finally Stevie Ray sent over their new resident zombie killer, who did the job as easily as Dolph would unload a box of cheese crackers. What would Eileen say? She already thought he wasn’t much of a man, since he was hesitant to put himself forward as mayor—but why would he want to be mayor? He had a store to run! The town’s only stockpile of supplies! It was a big important responsibility! Which, he thought glumly, he’d probably find a way to screw up too.

And now he had to go tell Clem’s family that their boy had been laid to rest… and hope they didn’t ask to see the body, since Mr. Levitt had kept the head. Stevie Ray was setting up a place outside town for bodies to be burned, so maybe he could just tell them the body was already ashes… a lie, a cowardly lie, but Dolph was a coward, wasn’t he?

Dolph sensed someone ahead of him, and looked up, and saw a zombie lurching unsteadily down the middle of the street, stumbling and staggering but making his way inexorably toward Dolph, who froze, and then remembered his gun.

I won’t be a coward this time
, he thought. The zombie reached out one arm toward Dolph, who lifted the rifle to his shoulder, took aim at its head, and fired. The zombie spun, dropped to the pavement, and lay unmoving, and people began to emerge from the Backtrack Bar in response to the gunshot as Dolph lifted his own arms in victory and shouted “It’s okay, I got him!”