Best New Zombie Tales Trilogy (10 page)
Read Best New Zombie Tales Trilogy Online
Authors: James Roy Daley
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Anthologies & Literary Collections, #General, #Genre Fiction, #Horror, #Anthologies, #Short Stories
Kirk said, “I don’t know.”
“Neither do I,” Randy said.
“Me, neither,” Liz said.
“We didn’t have anything to do with that,” Kirk said.
“Well, course ya didn’t,” Wyatt said. “I’s just wonderin’if they’d found her yet. That’s a terrible thing, her gettin’stole like that.”
Kirk nodded. “Yeah, we think it’s pretty… sick.”
They talked with Wyatt awhile longer, but Dicky never showed up. Kirk said they were planning to see a movie.
“Good idea,” Wyatt said. “Get your mind off it all. Have a toke with your popcorn.”
They spent another five minutes thanking him for the pot, then he walked them out to their car. They were just getting in when they heard the thumping.
“Hungry! Hungry!” The word was muffled, but Kirk recognized it.
Wyatt said, “What the fuck was that?”
3.
Liz dropped into her seat, pulled the door closed, slipped the key into the ignition, and started the car. Wyatt knocked a knuckle on Liz’s window. She pressed the switch and sent the glass humming down.
“Who’s in your trunk?” he said. Kirk started to get into the back seat on the other side of the car, but froze when Wyatt shouted, “
Kirk
, Goddammit, who ya got in that fuckin’trunk?”
Kirk stepped away from the car and ran a hand through his hair.
“Tell him,” Randy said. “Wyat’ll keep it to himself.”
“Keep
what
to myself?”
Liz rested her forehead on the backs of her hands on the steering wheel and said, “I wanna go home.”
“What the fuck’s goin’on here, guys?” Wyatt said. “Is Dicky involved in this, whatever the fuck it is?”
“No, no,” Kirk said, shaking his head. He went to the rear of the car and said, “Okay, come on, Liz, open the trunk.”
Thump-thump. Thump-thump-thump
. “Hungry! I’m hungry!”
Liz killed the engine, got out, and joined Kirk. She unlocked the trunk and it popped open.
“Natalie wasn’t stolen from the funeral home, Wyatt,” Kirk said. “She walked out.”
Natalie swayed a moment, then stood straight, her sunglasses crooked. Kirk took the sunglasses off her face and revealed her milky eyes sunken deep in their sockets.
Wyatt’s reaction was almost comical. He slapped his right hand to his chest and staggered backward. He coughed for awhile, then laughed, then he stood still and stared with naked horror and disgust at Natalie, who kept tugging on Kirk’s arm and saying, “Hungry. I’m hungry.”
Kirk began to tell Wyatt the whole story. As Kirk spoke, Wyatt slowly came closer to them, a step or two at a time. Kirk was explaining what had happened to one of Mom’s ferrets when Natalie pounced like a jungle cat.
She hit Wyatt and wrapped her arms and legs around him, and he stumbled backward. He fell hard on the rough lawn that grew in patches around the mobile home. Wyatt grunted when his back hit the ground, then gurgled and kicked and tried to pry Natalie off his body. A bright arterial spray arced in the air and spattered over the clumps of grass. Again and again and again.
It all happened so fast, but when Kirk moved to react, he felt as if he were moving slow, so slow. The blood continued to spurt from Wyatt’s throat. His kicks slowed down until his legs were barely moving, and his arms fell still at his sides.
Kirk and Randy and Liz were rushing toward Wyatt and Natalie, but Kirk stopped suddenly and said, “No, wait. We shouldn’t go near the body.”
“What if he’s not dead?”
The spray of blood had stopped. So had any movement. Natalie made sloppy chewing sounds as she buried her face in Wyatt’s throat.
“Don’t go near the body. Let’s go back to the car and just… wait.”
“
Wait?”
Randy said. “What the fuck are we waiting for?”
“For Natalie to finish eating.”
4.
Liz got back in the car, put her elbows on the steering wheel and her hands over her ears. Kirk and Randy paced slowly together and avoided looking in Natalie’s direction. But they could still hear her.
She had ripped off Wyatt’s T-shirt and chewed into his belly. Now she was smacking her lips sloppily as she ate, but they did not want to know what she was eating, so they did not look.
“God, I hope Dicky doesn’t get here before we leave,” Kirk said.
“I can’t believe we let her do this,” Randy said. His voice was hoarse with emotion. “I really liked Wyatt.”
“You think I didn’t? There was nothing we could do, Randy. If you’re spurting blood three or four feet into the air from your neck, it’s over. It didn’t take long, either. She tore his throat out. She just bit down and––”
“Stop, I know, I was there, remember? Look, I’ve been thinking. What if we bury her?”
“Alive?”
“You can’t bury her alive, Kirk, she’s dead.”
“Yeah, I know, but… the way she is?”
“What do
you
wanna do, load her up with NyQuil?”
“I don’t know, I… I-I-I…” Kirk stopped pacing and took a deep breath. “Do you realize we’re talking about a girl who, at this very moment, is eating the guts out of a friend of ours? I liked Wyatt, too. What are we going to––”
“No, she’s not,” Randy said.
“What?”
“Listen. She’s not eating anymore.”
They turned to her slowly. Natalie was lying on her back on the grass a few feet away from Wyatt’s gutted corpse.
“Natalie?” Kirk said. “Are you ready to go home?”
An enormous farting sound came from her direction. Several seconds later, she sat up. “Home,” she said as she got to her feet. She walked unsteadily toward them.
“Wait a second,” Kirk said. “She can’t get in the car like that. She’s covered with blood.”
“What? You want her to wash up?”
Kirk looked around until he spotted a garden hose curled up at a front corner of the mobile home. A green spray-nozzle was attached to the end of the hose. He went to Natalie and said, “Hold it, stand right there. Don’t move.” He got the hose.
As he hosed her off, Natalie did not make a sound, but wore an expression of shock––eyes clenched shut, mouth yawning open. When he tried to wash the blood off her face, the water’s pressure was strong enough to completely collapse Natalie’s nose.
5.
“That wasn’t very nice,” Randy said as Liz drove them back up Churn Creek Road.
“What do you mean, not very
nice
,” Kirk said. “It’s not Natalie, Randy. I was just trying to get all that blood off her.”
“She won’t be able to wear those sunglasses anymore,” Randy said.
Kirk sighed. “We’ve established that, Randy.”
Kirk had tried putting the sunglasses on Natalie just before they left the Parks house. The glasses had fallen off her face each time because there was no longer anything there to hold them up.
“It’s like a belly button,” Liz said. Every few seconds, she glanced in the rearview mirror at Natalie. “It went from being an outie to an innie.”
Her nose had collapsed into her face. Natalie said it hurt. She kept saying, “Ow.” Something about the fact that she felt pain disturbed Kirk. How could she still feel pain if she were nothing more than a reanimated corpse?
They could hear her in the trunk of the car. Every time Natalie said, “Ow,” it was difficult not to laugh––because of her collapsed nose, she sounded a little like a duck, and they found that hilarious. They’d been futilely fighting the laughter since Natalie had first spoken after her nose collapsed. “Ow.”
“Where am I going?” Liz said.
“My place,” Kirk said.
- SEVEN -
1.
Natalie seemed to remember the pool-house well enough––she went into the bathroom and sat on the toilet seat.
“Maybe she’ll stay in there,” Kirk said.
Randy and Liz sat on the couch and she snuggled into the crook of his arm.
Kirk paced. “I should probably give her a shower.”
“A shower?” Randy said. “What the fuck are you talking about, like a
baby
shower?”
“No, you dink, a
shower
, to get the rest of that blood off her.”
“Yeah, but what else is gonna come off?” Randy said. “Is she in any shape to take a shower?”
Kirk shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know. For all I know, it might make her smell better.”
“Then do it,” Liz said.
Kirk did not relish the thought of bathing Natalie’s corpse. He decided he only wanted to get the blood off her face. The rest could be covered up with clothes. He did not want to draw attention when they took her back to Mrs. Kobylka, which Kirk intended to do. If necessary, he would threaten to burn down her house with her in it unless she helped him. But he never got the chance.
He got Natalie undressed and into the shower. “Wash your face, Natalie.”
She said, “Let’s do it here. It’ll be exciting.”
“No, we won’t be doing it. Just wash your face, okay? Can you remember how to wash your face?”
“Too… hot.”
“The water’s too hot?”
She nodded once and stepped back away from the stream.
Kirk leaned into the shower and adjusted the temperature a little. Once again, he was disturbed to know that she could feel pain. He grabbed a washcloth off the shelf over the toilet, got it wet, soaped it up, then put one foot in the shower and said, “Okay, turn around, face me.” He had to tug on her shoulder to get her to turn around. He put the other foot in the shower––so what if he got a little wet?––and put his left hand on the back of her head. He pressed the soapy washcloth to her left cheek, and Natalie’s face collapsed beneath the weight of his hand with a breathy crunch, like a delicate mask. Kirk gasped when he realized what he’d done. He cried out and pushed her away when he saw the maggots crawling out of her destroyed nose. He tripped out of the shower backward, nearly fell, but steadied himself with a hand on the edge of the sink.
“She’s coming apart,” he said.
“What?” Liz said in the other room.
Kirk left the bathroom. “I said she’s––”
The pool-house door opened and Dad came in. He stopped just inside the door and stood there in his suit, with a copy of the
Sacramento Bee
tucked under his left arm. “What is that God-awful smell? Kirk, what’s going on in here?”
2.
Kirk’s mind froze up. He could think of no fictitious explanation, but would Dad believe the truth?
“Let’s do it in here, Kirk!” Natalie called from the bathroom.
“Oh, Jesus, no,” Dad said as he crossed the room and stepped through the open bathroom door. “Oh, no!” Kirk had never heard Dad sound as emotional as he did when he cried out those two words in the pool-house bathroom. He sounded at once angry and afraid. He turned and came out of the bathroom, looked pleadingly at Kirk. “I asked you if you’d done anything foolish, Kirky. I asked if you knew anything about her disappearance. You lied to me.”
Kirk nodded. “I’m sorry, Dad. But you don’t know the whole story. When you hear it, you’ll understand why––”
“I told you to stay away from her, didn’t I?” Dad said. “How many times did I tell you to stay away from that old woman, to leave her alone? Why didn’t you?” He stepped over to Kirk and let his newspaper drop to the floor as he put his hands on Kirk’s shoulders and shook him violently a few times. “Why
didn’t
you, Goddammit?”
The bottom fell out of Kirk’s stomach. Dad knew what he had done, he knew about Mrs. Kobylka. But Kirk could not imagine how.
“How did you know?” Kirk said.
“How do you think? I guessed as soon as I saw her.” He pointed at the bathroom doorway, where Natalie stood naked, the left side of her face crushed. What looked from that short distance like a couple small globs of mayonnaise on her face were actually clumps of maggots coming out of her left inverted nostril.
Kirk said, “But how did you know about Mrs. Kobylka?”
“You think you and your friends discovered her?” Dad said. “She’s been around a long time. My dad used to say she looked old when
he
was a kid. When I was a kid, my friends and I used to make up stories about her to tell each other. We used to scare the crap out of ourselves. So did all the other kids. Creepy old Mrs. Kobylka on Witch’s Hill.”
“Did you ever hear the one about the dog?” Kirk said. “Some say it was a Doberman, others say it was a German shepherd.”
Randy said, “I heard one version where it was a St. Bernard, like Cujo.”
“It was a German shepherd,” Dad said. “His name was Duke, and he was the best dog in the world. He was smart, and funny, and loyal. One day, he just stopped playing. We took him to the vet, and he had cancer. We had to have him put to sleep. I didn’t want to. I begged my mother to let me take him home and take good care of him so he could get well. I was only ten at the time. All I knew was, I wanted my dog. But I couldn’t have him. Mom explained that if we did not have Duke put down, he would die soon anyway, and in a lot of pain, which would be cruel. But I couldn’t accept it. I got the idea maybe thirty or forty minutes after we buried Duke in the back yard––if Mrs. Kobylka is really a witch, why not enlist her services? See, when I was a kid, the story was that she had brought back some kid’s dead cat. So, why not my dog?”