The Zombies Of Lake Woebegotten (31 page)

Then the pastor was alone, with the shrouded body of Julie’s grandfather, out in the warmer-than-usual but still, objectively, rather cold day, wishing he’d asked if it would be all right to take the body back inside, or if that would be disrespectful. He didn’t know a lot about Judaism, but he didn’t look down on the faith, especially—if it was good enough for Jesus, it certainly wasn’t his place to criticize it. Though the emphasis on burying bodies so quickly did make for a hectic day. Hardly time to organize a get-together after the funeral and get some hotdish and lemon bars for the survivors this way. Seemed kind of uncivilized.

Daniel stood watching the snow melt and thinking about the words he’d say once the body was finally in the ground, maybe something tying into springtime and renewal and things like that, working up some pretty good phrases that he could maybe use in his next service too, nothing wrong with a little recycling, assuming he was allowed to hold services what with the whole biotropic issue of zombies being attracted to large crowds of people, but that was a worry for another time.

Then a zombie bear with what appeared to be a hatchet stuck in its head came ambling around the side of the barn, lurching and stumbling, all crusty with blood and dirt and various oozing things, and Daniel suddenly had a worry that was very much of the moment.
 

7. Backhoed

M
r. Levitt had originally planned to do the morning patrol with Cyrus, and then either convince the lunatic to drive him over to the construction site or just dispose of him, but with Rufus running around and sounding the alarm, Levitt had to move up his timetable. He got to the ruins of the old elementary school much earlier than anticipated, which ran the risk of throwing off his timing—he’d planned to lead the zombies into town right around evening mealtime, ringing a dinner bell as he went—but so what if the zombies arrived in town in time for a little lunch instead of their supper? A meal was a meal.
 

Rufus’s continued habit of drawing breath was a trial and a vexation to Mr. Levitt. He didn’t usually leave his victims alive—sort of negated the whole point of them being victims—but Rufus had been a bit tougher than Mr. Levitt had expected. Truth was, Levitt’s heart was still beating hard and uncertainly, like he’d eaten too many cheese balls and bratwurst and ridden too many spinny rides at the state fair. The kid had managed to hurt him, and Levitt didn’t like to think about how close Rufus had come to killing him before Levitt made his escape—an escape fueled by bluff, bluster, bullshit, and good luck. A small part of Levitt’s brain thought,
You know, mostly you’ve killed people who trusted you, sneaking up on them from behind, or else you’ve killed zombies, which is no harder than chopping the head off a chicken once you get the hang of it, so maybe
you’re
not as tough as you think you are
, but a lifetime of utterly assumed superiority quickly overwhelmed any self-doubt. The little punk Rufus had just gotten lucky. Lousy shot, too. Using a handgun wasn’t even interesting, it was too
easy
, and the kid had even flubbed that, from a distance of just a few feet. You had to make an effort to be that terrible at something. Besides, leaving Rufus alive for now meant Levitt could feed him to the zombies later. A little treat. He’d have planned it that way in the first place if he’d given the subject any thought.

Levitt nosed the truck through the gate, busting the chain there, and drove through the fence, which was topped with barbed wire to keep out trespassers and would-be thieves, as if you got many of those in Lake Woebegotten. In the old days, nobody had bothered to lock up. Made it so much easier to get into people’s houses back then…

Levitt parked behind the remains of the old school—in his years as school superintendent he’d suppressed the reports about the asbestos and such, not because he gave a damn about the cost to the county to fix it, but because he thought it was funny that the new generation of marching morons under his ultimate care were soaking up poison—and closed the gate again, looping the busted chain around to make it look, at first glance, like it had never been open. Then he did a walk-through around the construction site to see if he had everything he needed to do the job.

The spot was pretty isolated, surrounded by fields that wouldn’t get planted this year if Levitt’s plan worked, which it would, of course, so he took his time, figuring it was unlikely he’d be spotted. And if he was bothered, well, he’d gotten some goodies from Cyrus, most of which he’d had to leave behind at the house when he fled Rufus’s assault, but he had a few things secreted in the pockets of his hunting jacket, including a few ancient but probably still potent fragmentation grenades, a pistol—currently unloaded with the clip in another pocket, which was why he hadn’t pulled it out to use on Rufus—and a knife or three, naturally, for any close-in work. He didn’t want to think about why he hadn’t pulled one of
those
on Rufus. Mr. Levitt couldn’t countenance the idea of cowardice in himself; he preferred to think of it as discretion, if he thought of it at all.

Mr. Levitt hummed as he collected materials. Some pieces of sheet metal, a roll of chicken wire, baling wire, tin snips. The big dirty yellow backhoe loader was all well and good, and he knew how to run one—he doubted the controls had been changed noticeably in the decades since he’d worked construction as a young man, burying his first victims in the foundations of buildings in St. Paul—but it wasn’t exactly zombie-proof. An hour of snipping, heaving, bending, banging, and binding improved that situation a lot, though: once he was done, the open cab was enclosed on three sides with sheet metal, with slit windows messily cut and covered in chicken wire so he could see where he was going, and for the front opening he just made do with the chicken wire alone, with lengths of rebar woven through the links to provide some reinforcement. He festooned the hood and every other projecting surface with barbed wire to tangle up any would-be zombie boarders. The result was a kind of backhoe/tank that didn’t even look half-assed—maybe one-quarter-assed at best—but it didn’t need to be pretty, just moderately zombie-proof. In his various encounters with the creatures, Levitt hadn’t been able to determine exactly how they sensed their prey, but they certainly seemed able to sniff out the living somehow, and if he was the only breather-in-residence, he figured they’d come at him. In fact, he was counting on it. He just needed to make sure they didn’t
get
to him before he had the chance to lead them to a nicer sort of buffet.
 

Levitt climbed into the cab, pulling the sheet-metal door shut after him and twisting it closed with stiff metal wire. He put his hands on the controls. The keys were still in it, at least. So people hadn’t
totally
lost all their trust. Be funny if he’d gone to all this trouble and the thing didn’t have any gas, but when he cranked it up, the fuel gauge needle moved to three-quarters full. That would be fine. He wasn’t going to be covering ground quickly in this thing, but the nearest graveyard was only a half mile away, and from there he’d work his way in toward the town, hitting the other graveyards, and, he hoped, building quite the little following along the way. Now, unfortunately, he had to sit in the thing for a while to let it warm up, since it hadn’t been run all winter, and until some oil got circulating, he’d risk the thing seizing up and dying on him if he tried to make it do too much. He couldn’t remember if it was safe to
drive
the thing while it warmed up, if he only had to worry about using the boom arm and dipper stick and bucket, because it had been so long since he’d done this kind of work, but he figured he’d better err on the side of caution. Waiting twenty minutes wouldn’t kill him, but it was an unnecessary delay—he should have gotten the machine started while he was doing all his upgrades, but he hadn’t thought about it for some reason, and now he had to pay the price by… sitting here, being bored, something he’d never been much good at doing.
 

That treacherous part deep in his brain said,
Getting harder to think, isn’t it? You’re getting tired more easily but you aren’t sleeping much at night, you have to pee all the time, there are aches you never had before, you need reading glasses, you put things down and forget where you put them, that mind like a steel trap you were always so proud of is starting to go rusty, you’re getting
old.

Well, darn it to heck, if he was getting old, he was going to end in a blaze of bloody glory. If he was going to die soon—time moved on, and it wouldn’t wait for him, much as he wanted to believe otherwise—he was going to take as much of the world with him as he could. If Mr. Levitt was going to cease to exist, so was the town of Lake Woebegotten.
 

After ten minutes he couldn’t stand it anymore, so he started up the backhoe and began trundling through the site, cursing because he’d forgotten to undo the gate and then just busting through it, because, what the heck, who cared? The bucket on the machine’s front—like the scoop on a bulldozer—hung onto a chunk of the fence so he moved it up and down a couple of times to dislodge the metal. There. Free and clear. He turned left on the road and pushed the machine up to its top speed, which was all of about 25 miles per hour. Ah, well. He’d get there in time. The backhoe snorted and rumbled and vibrated fit to make his butt go numb, belching out diesel exhaust as it went.
 

Mr. Levitt couldn’t help it: he whooped. There was something wonderful about piloting a big machine on an errand of devastation.
 

“Where the heck’s the backhoe?” Dolph said, scratching his head.

“Judging by the smashed-open fence, I’d say someone stole it.” Julie walked around the side of the road a bit, peering at the ground. The snow was melting, but there was still enough to show tracks, and she pointed. “There, see? It was driven out of here, and turned left. Away from town. Odd.” She sniffed. “I can still smell the exhaust in the air, can’t you?”

Dolph sniffed, and she was right. The air had been so pure since the zombie apocalypse started, he should have noticed the sweet chemical tang in the air right away. “Yep,” he said. “Why would someone steal the backhoe? I mean, I know
we
were going to, ah, borrow it, but, no offense, I doubt there’s another family that needs to do a Jewish funeral real quick.”

“It does seem improbable,” Julie said. “I’m curious. Aren’t you?”

“You bet.”

“Then let’s follow the trail. Even on a snowy road, we can go faster than a backhoe loader, don’t you think? If we can still smell the exhaust, it can’t be far. If it’s someone on a legitimate errand, we’ll wait our turn to borrow the machine. And if it’s something more nefarious…”

Nefarious
, Dolph thought.
What a woman
. “At least we know zombies can’t drive tractors,” he said.

Julie nodded. “True. But living humans are much more dangerous than zombies. It’s just, zombies are
always
dangerous, and the living are only
sometimes
dangerous. It can be confusing.” She got back into the car, and Dolph followed.
 

Mr. Levitt got to the Ebenezer Lutheran Cemetery—the biggest one in town, so the most important one to hit—and got to work right away. He maneuvered the backhoe toward one of the areas that had seemed the most active during his reconnaissance earlier in the winter, worked the levers, and—after a few false starts that knocked over headstones and threatened to tip over the whole loader—he got the backhoe extended out to pretty much its maximum, dipped the bucket into the earth, and started scraping the first few feet of soil off a whole row of graves. He dumped the dirt and moved on to the next section of graveyard, not bothering to see if his work had done any good. He figured the zombies had probably smashed through the tops of their coffins already, and just needed a hand getting through the hard earth above them. If he dug down
too
deep, or went over the same spot more than a couple of times, he’d risk hitting zombies who’d already dragged themselves partway to the surface, and though dismembered undead were highly amusing, they weren’t much good for his purposes.
 

After scraping half a dozen rows of graves, he noticed some movement out of the corner of his eye and turned to look through one of his slit windows.
 

There. A dirt-streaked hand reaching up from the ground in the iconic rising-from-the-grave zombie style, beloved of movie posters and cheap paperback book covers. A corpse dragged itself out of the earth, looking shriveled but basically whole, wearing a filthy black suit. Looked like it had been an old man, but zombies didn’t suffer the aches and pangs of the elderly
living
—one advantage Mr. Levitt had to admit they had over himself. There was other movement in the dirt, so he turned back to his work, running the backhoe a fair distance away. The loader was slow, but he could give a bunch of even slower zombies a pretty good runaround, and do a couple of circuits through the graveyard at the end to attract any stragglers to him. They’d follow him to the next graveyard, and the next, and then to the center of town, and then… buffet time. Even on an ordinary day there were always people in the bar, and the Cafe during the increasingly few hours when it was open, and people lined up taking the last of that idiot Dolph’s giveaway supplies, and getting together at the community center, and who knows, on a day like this, spring beginning to peek out its head, there might even be people in the park in the center of town, or on the Larry “Old Hardhead” Munson Memorial Baseball Field, having a slightly snowy pickup game. And, of course: there was the new elementary school, built some years back to replace the old one. Closed all winter, of course, in light of the emergency, but the town council had pushed to get it going again, drafted some teachers—who seemed to like having something to do—and managed to get the little ones out from underfoot. He wondered if zombies liked children better than adults—if they had more life, if they were tastier. Mr. Levitt didn’t have any particular interest in children—they were too easy to scare, they didn’t pretend to be brave, it was dull—but he knew unleashing zombies on them would thoroughly unhinge any of the townspeople who managed to survive this onslaught.