The Zombies Of Lake Woebegotten (33 page)

“Pull your foot out!” Julie said, and Dolph tried, but the zombie was like a snapping turtle. Dolph knew a fella once who had snapping turtles in his pond, and the way he cleaned it out was, he stuck a broomstick into the pond, and a bunch of snapping turtles bit down on the stick, like they’d bite down on anything, and he pulled the stick out of the water with a bunch of turtles hanging from it, dangling, all their weight hanging from their jaws, but they wouldn’t let go, and the fella just took a machete and whack, whack, whack, separated the heads from the bodies, and the shells just thunk, thunk, thunked on the ground. Jaws held onto the stick for a minute after the heads were severed, too, he said, though Dolph was never sure if he believed that part. He wished he had a machete now, though.
 

“No, pull your
foot
out! Of the boot!” Julie said, and this time Dolph got it, curling his toes away from those grinding teeth—which hadn’t parted the leather, quite—and kneeling to untie the laces, his fingers stupid and stumbly and cold, finally getting the laces limber enough that he could pull his foot, clad in a thick wool sock, free.
 

The zombie chewed on the boot for a moment, lashing its head back and forth like a puppy with a chew toy, before it realized it had lost the chewy center, and it lifted its head. This time Julie stomped down on the back of its neck—Dolph shuddered to think what would’ve happened if she’d stomped like that with his foot in the zombie’s mouth, the impact would have cost him toes for sure—and the thing stopped moving, except for its head. A zombie with a broken spine was still a cranky biting thing, but the lack of mobility made them a lot less dangerous.

“We have to get back to town,” Julie said. “We have to warn everyone. Stevie Ray, Eileen, Father Edsel, all of them. Levitt is coming. And he is bringing zombies.”

“I’ll get the car—” Dolph said, then remembered the car was a smoking wreck. He reached down and tried to pull the boot out of the zombie’s mouth. The zombie didn’t want to let go. Dolph sighed. “Give me a hand with this? I can’t walk back to town with just one boot on.”

9. A Pastor and a
Politician Walk
Into a Bear

N
ot long after the meeting at Julie’s house, Eileen decided the other woman had to die.
 

It was nothing personal. Not that Eileen liked Julie personally, because she didn’t, but the need for killing was strictly political, and occasionally secular rulers had to do such things, had to take—what did they call it in thriller novels? extraordinary sanctions?—well, they had to kill people, that’s all. Julie had lost the mayoral race but she was still sticking her nose in, researching zombies, babbling about green zones, and making Stevie Ray and Father Edsel dance to her tune. And the worst of it was seeing Pastor Inkfist making those moon eyes at the woman all during lunch. Disgusting. Sure, Eileen often found the pastor exasperating, but she was his right-hand woman, the head of the Women’s Circle, the person in his congregation who actually got things
accomplished
. Unlike Julie, who didn’t even come to church. Maybe she wasn’t Lutheran. She wasn’t Catholic, either. Being Catholic wasn’t as good as being Lutheran but being neither one was even worse, that was for sure.
 

Julie was a threat to Eileen’s security. Since Eileen didn’t have a black-ops team of special forces soldiers at her disposal—though that was one of her fantasies, only in the fantasies the muscular, devoted young men served her in the bedroom and battlefield both, not that she’d ever admit to such imaginings in a hundred million years—she had to take care of business herself. So be it.

Eileen had access to guns, but a gun was no good. A gun implied a human hand, and Eileen couldn’t have that. Not that Stevie Ray was up to doing a complex investigation with ballistics and forensics and such, but why even make him suspicious? You could get away with murder in this town—obviously, look at Mr. Levitt, Eileen was going to have to do something about him soon, couldn’t have people like that walking around loose, no matter how much dirty work they were willing to do—but it was better by far if no one suspected you of murder in the first place. So Eileen threaded her way through her house full of noisy guests, going into the garage.

Ah, the garage. With Mustang Sally still sitting there, shiny and red. The other woman who happened to be a car. The garage should have been the site of Eileen’s first great triumph, but things had gotten so messy here. She’d learned from her mistakes though. Her next murder would go a lot more smoothly. Eileen went to the workbench and considered the items there, finally choosing a huge red pipe wrench. The weight in her hand was considerable and reassuring. She slipped the wrench into her purse—the handle stuck out, but so what, who was going to see it?—and went out to the driveway, climbing into her little car (she had a gas ration, for town business, which this was) shouting to the woman smoking a cigarette on the front steps to put that thing out, there were kids around, and then reversing out of the driveway and heading for Julie’s.
 

She had plenty of time to think about her plans on the drive over. They were pretty simple. Get into Julie’s house. Get Julie to turn her back. Bash Julie over the head with the pipe wrench. Throw her body down the basement stairs, and just shut the door behind her. Zombies were no better at climbing stairs than they were at using doorknobs, probably, so she’d stay down there with the other zombie. Sure, somebody would no doubt come over and check on Julie eventually, and they might encounter the basement zombie and get killed, and yes, Julie’s grandfather who’d been a nice old man was sure to die in his sickbed of the neglect and subsequently become zombified himself, but those problems could be dealt with later. Getting rid of the threat to Eileen’s power was the important thing.

Eileen pulled into the farmhouse’s driveway. Julie’s truck was there, which was promising. Such a big house, and nobody in it except Julie herself, who hadn’t taken in even one single boarder, who’d never offered, and, when asked, had simply said she couldn’t do it, because she needed her privacy. No explanation, no apologies, and while Minnesotans were deft at applying social pressure, Julie seemed completely immune, even indifferent, to such pressure. It just wasn’t fair that Eileen’s house was crammed with refugees and Julie’s was empty. It made sense now—Julie had a secret zombie R&D lab in the basement—but that was no excuse. Once Julie was dead, Eileen could have the town seize the farmhouse and turn it into a refugee camp. Move everyone out of
her
place. That would be satisfying. Julie would finally do Eileen some good in her death.
 

Eileen went up to the front door with her pipe wrench in her purse and knocked on the door.

It opened a crack, then all the way—and Pastor Inkfist was there, hair disheveled, eyes wild. He grabbed Eileen by the arm and pulled her through the door, slamming it shut and locking it behind him. “Did you see the bear?” he asked.

“Bear? What bear?”

Pastor Inkfist went to a window across the living room, passing by a—was that a puddle of
blood
? What had happened here after Julie showed them the zombie? Was she already dead? “Where’s Julie?” she asked.
 

“Gone with Dolph.” He looked out the window, head turning ceaselessly back and forth, a motion that reminded her uncomfortably of a zombie’s automatic movements.
 

“Ah. Dolph? Pastor, what’s going on?” She wanted to slap him, shake him, and make him answer her, but the pastor was easily befuddled. He could be moved the way you wanted him moved with a little patience though. “Please, you’re scaring me.” Eileen wasn’t scared—annoyed, yes—but he
expected
her to be scared, and if she did as he expected, he might do as she wished.

He turned from the window, running a hand through his hair, which didn’t make it any less messy. “Of course, Eileen, mayor, that is, I’m sorry.” He took a deep breath. “Julie’s grandfather died. Became a zombie. Julie killed him. I came over to talk to her about some, ah, town business—”
 

Eileen ground her teeth at that.
What
town business? Any town business should go through
her
.

“—and I found her and Dolph getting ready to bury the old man. I was going to help dig the grave, but the ground was too frozen—”

“We’re supposed to burn bodies,” Eileen said. “We agreed.” Julie, flouting the rules, as if they didn’t apply to her!
That
could get her kicked off the council, at least. Since it didn’t look like Eileen would be able to murder her today. At least she could remove the woman from influence.
 

Pastor Inkfist looked at her as if she were an idiot, and she wanted to smash him across the face with her pipe wrench, but instead she just returned his stare, and he cleared his throat. “Be that as it may. Dolph and Julie went to get a backhoe from the elementary school construction site so they could dig a grave with it, though they’ve been gone a while now, and anyway, I was staying with the body, it’s a Jewish rule, that the body not be left unattended—”

Jewish? Who the heck was Jewish? Eileen supposed she’d probably met Jews, once or twice, though she couldn’t have said when exactly.

“—and so I’ve been hiding in here ever since,” the pastor said.

Eileen realized she’d missed something. That Jewish business had thrown her. “Since what?”

“Since I saw the
bear
.” The pastor was no good at hiding his exasperation. “The zombie bear with a hatchet in its head. It’s still out there somewhere, and if it’s biotropic like the human zombies are, it’s going to be
twice
as interested in us now that you’re here. Though at least it hasn’t touched the corpse, Julie would be so angry if that happened, a real bear might be interested in a dead person, but I suppose zombie bears don’t stoop to, well, I hate to say ‘carrion,’ but a body is a body, but then again aren’t you supposed to play dead if a bear attacks you, or is that only with grizzly bears?” The pastor shook his head, sharply—had he, wonder of wonders, realized he was babbling? He usually
never
realized that, especially not when he gave his sermons. “Oh, I hope Julie gets back soon,” he said. “She can help us, she can take care of all this—”

“We don’t need Julie,” Eileen snapped. “We can certainly handle this ourselves.” If there even
was
a bear, which Eileen would want to see before she believed.

She got her wish.
 

While it’s true that zombies lack the fine motor skill to open doors, bears never had those motor skills anyway, so zombie bears don’t feel the lack. This particular zombie bear, which was probably not the only zombie bear in the world but was certainly the only one in Lake Woebegotten at the moment, could sense the life inside the farmhouse. All it wanted was that life, to consume it, to take it into itself. The bear wasn’t a bear anymore. It wasn’t even a dead bear.
 

It was total need in the
shape
of a dead bear.
 

The zombear stopped ranging around the house, came up on the porch, stood upright, put its paws up on the big window there, and pushed in toward the life.
 

The window shattered, and a few hundred pounds of undead bear crashed through it. The bear had some trouble getting the back half of its body over the sill, lacking the coordination of the living, and Pastor Inkfist—in what might have been bravery, but was more likely panic—snatched up a standing lamp and rushed the bear, swinging the long wooden pole and smashing the bear on the head with the lampshade. The bear had a
hatchet
in its
head
, surely it was pretty close to having its brain destroyed anyway, so if he could slam the lamp down on the hatchet—though the blade was
huge
, it was like the snapped-off top of a battleaxe—maybe he could drive it deeper into the creature’s head, like hammering a wedge into a piece of wood. Get it deeper into the brain, destroy enough to make the darn zombie lie down already.
 

The bear didn’t take much notice of the lamp, and managed to clamber over the sill, making Daniel move back. He whacked it across the head with the lamp again, and this time only succeeded in dislodging the hatchet completely. The wound in the bear’s head didn’t even look that serious, there was a little bit of white skull peeking out, but no gray of brain. The blade clattered to the floor, and Eileen snatched it up. “Amateur,” she said, sniffing. “Get out of the way and let a professional do the killing, would you?”

Daniel stared at her, still holding his lamp-club—the shade was totally destroyed, the bulb shattered, he hoped Julie wouldn’t be annoyed—and thinking,
Professional what?
Eileen was probably a good housewife and was certainly a ferocious organizer, but neither of those things qualified her as a zombie bear killer of particular note. Though she
had
killed her zombie husband, which indicated a willingness to do the deed, at least, so he stepped aside.

Eileen walked up to the bear, pretty as you please, and raised the hatchet up high. If looks could kill the undead, the bear would have dropped over right away. The contempt on Eileen’s face was
scorching
.

But the bear didn’t care. It reached out with one giant paw, almost lazily, and swatted Eileen to the floor. Dazed, she said, “What—what—” and the bear lowered its head and took a big bite out of her belly.

Daniel screamed and ran for the front door, snatching Julie’s keys off the wall, and climbed into her truck—even though he knew she’d never beat him again, not after such a transgression, no matter how dire his straits, he was leaving her grandfather’s body unattended, too, that was even worse—and started driving toward town as fast as he could. If he could get to Stevie Ray, get Father Edsel, they could get the Anti-Zombie Society into action, they could kill the bear, and Eileen, Eileen too, if she rose, oh, what a horrible thought, a zombie
mayor
, the town’s
second
zombie mayor, nobody was going to want to run for office next time, no sir.