The Zombies Of Lake Woebegotten (35 page)

The remote didn’t look like much, just a garage door opener that had undergone some impromptu open-compartment surgery, and it was held together mostly with lots of electrical tape. “Just turn it on and you’ll see a red light, get within range, press the button, the light turns green, that means it’s active, press it again, and kaboom,” Cy said.

“You’re a warrior for God,” Edsel said, and clapped Cy on the back.

“After we stop the invasion, maybe we can smash the moon right out of the sky,” Cy said.

“It’s good to dream big,” Edsel agreed.

Next, Father Edsel raced to Mr. Torkelson’s farm and hammered on his screen door. Torkelson ambled out, wearing overalls, with manure on his boots. “See you, Father,” he said. “Springtime, huh? Uff da. Gonna have a lot of piglets here soon. Some guys might say you can’t have too many pigs, but me, I’d have to think about it.”

“I’d like to take some of those pigs off your hands, Mr. Torkelson,” Edsel said.

“Oh yeah? Planning a barbecue then?”

“Something like that,” the priest replied.

“They’ll trample up the field,” Torkelson said, backing the big truck up to the Larry “Old Hardhead” Munson Memorial Baseball Field, which was fenced off pretty good. “It’s all muddy and snow melted in there anyway. Some folks might not like so many pigs as this running around on the baseball field.”

“They’ll like it fine,” Edsel said, looking into the field. Four bases, and a pitcher’s mound. And under all four bases and the mound were who knew how many pounds of explosives. Molded into blocks and buried. “We’ll put some pigs in the bandshell, too,” Edsel said. “And over by the statue of the Hypothetical Viking.” There was a lot of explosives under those, too, Cy had assured him.

“Good way to get pig shit all over the bandshell, that,” Torkelson said.

“That’s just an unimportant side effect.”

“It’s your money,” Torkelson said, and Edsel almost laughed. He was giving the man all the money in the church coffers for his pigs. As if money still mattered. Well, whatever made the farmer happy. Edsel suspected he was mostly happy to get rid of some of the pigs.

Stevie Ray came trotting over to the truck from the direction of the police station, with Julie and Dolph in tow. At least Eileen wasn’t with them. “My fellow councilpersons!” Edsel boomed. “Mr. Torkelson is here to help us with our little zombie problem.”

Stevie Ray just gaped at the horde of pigs streaming onto the community baseball field, and Dolph looked utterly confused, but Julie began to laugh, and slowly clapped her hands.
 

Mr. Levitt didn’t have quite the merry band of zombies he’d hoped for since he had to abandon his plan to dig up the other cemeteries, but that was okay. The great thing about zombies was, they were self-replicating. Out here on the outskirts of town, there were a few farmhouses, and because people were banding together to share resources and heating oil and just generally crowd together in sheeplike masses, those houses were packed with people, and every one was a beacon to his zombies. All Levitt had to do was lead his merry band of zombies within sight of a farmhouse, and the horde would peel off, bash in windows, and make short work of the occupants. It was a beautiful thing, even from the vantage point of a backhoe loader—the screaming, the breaking glass, the people trying to run away. There were escapees here and there, but who cared? Let word of Levitt’s coming spread out before him. Once the zombies finished off a house and the new dead rose, they inevitably came back toward Levitt, following his lead, hoping to eat him, unable to understand that he was their benefactor. Ah, well. Why should zombies be any more grateful than the living?

After hitting three houses, the ranks of Levitt’s zombie army had tripled, to well over a hundred shambling, bent-necked, bloody, undead Minnesotans. Enough to do serious damage at the elementary school and the bar and the diner, and once they got a decent foothold in town, they’d multiply exponentially, and that would be that. Maybe Levitt’s brood would spread across the whole Earth and devour all the living.
 

The backhoe rumbled just fine across the frozen fields. Levitt was avoiding the roads, since the radio was full of squawkings from Rufus and the morons in his old coterie, the Anti-Zombie Etc. There was a silence on the part of Stevie Ray and Father Edsel, the only remotely formidable people with power, and he might have construed that as ominous, but he was leading a horde of zombies to the center of town; the only ominous thing around here was
him
.
 

If they’d made him mayor, he would have gotten to ride in the fourth of July parade. They’d turned on him, though, the ingrates, so he’d been forced to organize his
own
parade.
 

“Grand Marshal of the Zombies!” he shouted, and then downtown was in view. The baseball field, the park, and then—the school. The bar. The diner.

The buffet.

Daniel parked his car near the elementary school and put his head down on the steering wheel and just let himself shake.
Lord,
he prayed,
your poor servant can bear no more. So much death. So much destruction. So many invitations to sin. Just, please, can’t you grant me a little peace
?

Daniel got out of the car and started walking, planning to cut across the park and go to the police station so he could tell Stevie Ray about the zombie bear, and the zombie mayor, and all his other failures. But there was a strange noise and milling-about from the baseball field, and he walked over, and saw hundreds of pigs snuffling and running and rooting around on the diamond. The pastor leaned over the fence, looking in at the pigs, trying to understand what was happening. Were they transforming the park into an old-style town common? Letting the pigs graze? Did pigs even graze? If so, what were they grazing on a baseball field?

Seeing the pigs reminded him of his conversation with Edsel, when Edsel had insisted that zombies were demons possessing the bodies of the dead, as the demon Legion had taken over the body of the pigs. Was this some plan of Edsel’s? Was he, ha, planning to do an exorcism, as he was rumored to have done at his old parish in Texas? To drive the demons from the dead into the bodies of these pigs, and then drive the pigs into the lake, as the pigs infested by Legion had fled downward to the sea?

Could something like that actually
work
?

A mechanical rumble caught Daniel’s attention, because it was so out-of-the-ordinary, and he looked to see a backhoe loader coming across the park. Was that Julie driving it? If so, why was she here, and not digging a grave for her grandfather? What was—

Then he saw the zombies. Scores of them, hordes of them, a wall of them, shambling, dropping bits, wearing funeral finery ground with mud, the relentless opening and closing and gnashing of their jaws audible even over the rumble of the backhoe, and, what was that, someone shouting? Someone shouting “No!
You’re going the wrong way! Morons! Stupid dead morons!”
 

Daniel was frozen, watching the wall of the shambling dead approach, hemming him in from the back and both sides, and he vaulted the wall of the baseball field in a demonstration of athleticism he could never have repeated in the absence of such total fear-fuelled adrenal panic. Daniel ran through the pigs, kicking them out of his way, stumbling, making them squeal, trying to get to the bleachers, trying to get away, but when he looked back, the zombies were climbing over the wall, and then climbing over the
other
zombies who were climbing the wall, and attacking the pigs, and the squealing was unspeakable, and Daniel prayed,
Dear Lord, oh Lord, oh Jesus, take me away from all this.

Stevie Ray wished for his binoculars, but he had to make do with the scope from his hunting rifle, which was like looking through a porthole onto a stormy sea. They were watching from what Edsel assured them was a safe distance, and they’d done their best to make sure there were no people anywhere near the park or the baseball field, and they’d moved the kids out of the elementary school, but Stevie Ray couldn’t help feeling like things were too sloppy, too sudden—not that you necessarily got a lot of time to plan for a zombie invasion. He squinted through the scope. “Levitt’s not going for it. He knows something’s wrong. Oh heck, he’s out of the tractor, he’s running the other way, off toward the lake.”

“I’ll go after him,” Julie said. “It’s time he was finished.”

“I’ll go,” Dolph said. “Please. Let me. I… need to do this. And Julie, you’re needed to help clean up the cemeteries, you’re better at organizing people, doing sweeps, all that stuff. But I’ve been a hunter. I can go after one guy.”

“If you’re sure,” Julie said, but then the radio crackled, and Rufus said, “Guys, I’ve totally got this. I’m on that side of the lake right now, I thought he might loop around and try to sneak into town from this direction. I’ll, uh, you know. Capture him.”

“You need to kill him, Rufus,” Stevie Ray said, not an ounce of doubt in his voice, or, surprisingly, in his heart. “He’s too dangerous. He can’t be left alive.”

Silence, a crackle of static, then, “You got it, boss.”

“I’m going to go anyway,” Dolph said. “You know. Just in case.”

“Probably for the best,” Stevie Ray said. “Father, I think all the zombies are on the baseball field. I don’t see any stragglers.”

“Then let us call down the fires of heaven,” Edsel said, and pushed the buttons on his little remote.
 

Stevie Ray wasn’t thrilled to discover a lunatic had put explosives in the heart of his town, but he had to admit, in this particular instance, it sure came in handy.

The zombies, and the zombie pigs, were nearly upon Daniel when he saw the light. He thought it was heaven opening, the Lord himself sending a golden chariot of fire to bear Daniel to heaven. He went on believing that as the full explosive power of a great many pounds of C-4 was unleashed, vaporizing the dead nearest the bombs, and turning the remainder into smoking gobbets of flying flesh. Daniel’s last thought was probably supposed to be “Blessed are the meek,” but in the voice he heard inside his head it sounded more like, “Blessed are the meat,” and what exactly his brain meant by that, who can say?

Daniel was right near second base. He pretty much became vapor. He would have been glad to know he didn’t contribute overmuch to the mess.

“It actually smells kind of good,” Stevie Ray said, or rather shouted, since he could barely hear anything over the ringing in his ears. The baseball field and bandshell had become pillars of fire, and now a few trees were burning, and chunks of meat were raining from the sky. Most of the chunks were pig—there’d been a lot of pigs, enough teeming living pigs to exert an unstoppable biotropic pull on the horde of zombies, enough to distract them from all other potential targets—but a not-insignificant portion of the chunks, Stevie Ray knew, were the remnants of the recently reanimated corpses of townspeople who’d been buried by their loved ones in the cemeteries of Lake Woebegotten. “Smells kind of like pulled pork barbecue.” Stevie Ray turned his head and vomited. Then he wiped off his mouth, looked at Julie, and said, “Guess we should head over to the cemeteries and kill whatever zombies are left.”

“Sure,” Father Edsel said. “Leave the cleaning-up here to the man of God. Story of my life.”

“I’m pretty sure you’ll just call the nuns and tell them to deal with it,” Stevie Ray said.

“It’s like you read my mind,” Father Edsel said.

12. Spring Ice

A
s he ran through the forest in pursuit of his quarry, Rufus was thinking about the idea of the Zombie Master. You saw it a lot in zombie movies and video games and collectible card games and roleplaying games and even in books, because the fact was, as his Zombies as Metaphor professor had explained, zombies didn’t make the most relatable sort of villain. Any story of man-versus-zombie was, really, a story of man-versus-nature, because zombies were mindless killers—they might as well be hurricanes or volcanoes for all the intentionality they had. Even in a story of man versus man-eating-tiger or man-eating-shark, you could anthropomorphize the animals, make them seem to have comprehensible emotions or motivations, but zombies—despite
being
almost human—were much harder to ascribe human motivations to. So you had the concept of a Zombie Master: a zombie who retained his ability to think and plan, and usually a zombie who could control other zombies—the kind of zombie who could give sadistic speeches and cackle like a supervillain and, generally, add that almost-human touch to a story, creating a villain you could really love to hate, in a way you couldn’t love to hate an act of nature like a flash flood or a tornado or a cave-in.
 

Well, this was real life, and there weren’t any Zombie Masters, unless you wanted to count Mr. Levitt, which is what Rufus had decided to do. Because Mr. Levitt was lacking some essential human qualities. Empathy. Sympathy. A conscience. He just had urges, and he acted on them, however he might rationalize his behavior. He basically
was
a Zombie Master, an engine of need with a brain on top of it, and as if to prove the point, he’d actually led an army of zombies against the living. That was treachery. Collaboration. And Rufus had played enough WWII-era video games to know what you did with collaborators.
 

He’d spotted the old man running off toward the lake, covering ground pretty good, wearing a camouflage hunting jacket that would work well in the autumn but didn’t help too much when there was still a fair bit of snow on the ground and the only green was the needles on the evergreens. Rufus went after him, pistol in hand, trying to be stealthy, hoping the old guy would get winded and pause for a rest and then, bam, Rufus would walk up on him and shoot him in the back of the head. Not very sporting, but if you gave Mr. Levitt a fair chance, the thing was, he’d
win
, and he didn’t give a rip about fairness himself.