Best New Zombie Tales Trilogy (111 page)

The blow-dried head’s adversary cut him off—”But isn’t it just slavery under another name? Aunt Mildred kicks the bucket and her family gets a quick thousand to ship her off for processing, regulator implanted in her skull and the next day she’s making widgets, free labor.”

“Well certainly there will be some birth pains—they are all but taking over the unskilled job market. Ultimately it will bring us all a higher standard of living. People are going to have to become better educated, more skilled workers.” He leaned back and chuckled. “I know no zombie could do my job, though I’m not so sure about Chet here.”

Harold clicked the television off before Chet could reply.

He sat the empty bottle on the table. “You know it wouldn’t be so bad if the controls were followed. They’re supposed to be burning ninety percent of the bodies, strict protocol for the regulators, but—”

“But they’re greedy,” Val finished his sentence.

Harold nodded. It was an old topic for them “Trucking them up from the border. Who knows how cheap their circuits are. Business, it’s greedy, and the government’s turning a blind eye to it. I guess you can’t blame them down south for selling the bodies off—even if they get five hundred dollars each, it’s more than most of those folks see in a year.”

Val let her hair loose, rubbing her neck.

Harold felt a small hitch in his chest when he realized her brown eyes were shiny with tears.

“I can blame them. Look what we’ve become,” her mouth softened. “We’re sinking into hell and all anyone cares about is ‘can I make another dollar on this?’” She slumped, “There was a time when you would just work. You could go to work and care for your family. If you were willing to work hard, it was enough. You could raise your family and have a decent life.”

“Well, we did that. We had a decent life before…” He lost steam, fumbling over the right words. “I’m sorry,” Harold said and he hoped she knew what he meant.

“I just don’t know” her voice hiccupped, “I just don’t know how it can keep moving. The world. I don’t know how we can keep moving.”

“I don’t see we have a choice. I know Stephen—”

Her voice rose, cutting him off, “Don’t.”

~

Later, in bed, he splayed a hand across the swell of her hip, her nightgown cool beneath his fingers. Her breath caught and he knew she wasn’t asleep, but she kept her eyes closed and turned her back to him, burrowing her head into the pillow. Harold’s hand dropped.

He knew better than to say their son’s name in front of her. She would spiral down for days, breakfasts and dinners with a palpable wall of silence separating them. Her eyes glossy and staring past him, mouth, cheeks and forehead creased with hard shadows.

He was already gone, Harold thought. He knew it. The dried blood, the dirt and twigs, yet still that part of his mind which took such sadistic delight in waking him deep in the night, asked the question again and again. Was he? Was he really? How fast did you bring the shotgun up Harold? Didn’t you see a glint, just a flash of awareness in his eyes?

He’d buried Stephen in the soft ground of the garden along the back fence. Zipped his near headless corpse into a day-glow orange mummy bag and shoveled dirt over him, blocking out Val’s wailing from the house, letting her anguish blend with the braying sirens, the clattering Strykers and staccato bark of AR-15s filling those first days of the Epidemic.

No man should have to bury his son with his own hands.

Harold turned over. Outside a low warbling siren grew closer. Revolving red and blue light seeped through the cracks of the heavy plantation shutters bolted to their windows.

He rose and levered the shutters open, filling the room with muted moonlight and the oscillating flash of an emergency vehicle. A sheriff’s SUV, blue and white, stopped at an angle across his street. The virus, the infection—whatever had caused the dead to walk was still in the air, weaker, but enough to keep the crematoriums busy.

About every third corpse now became infected and sometimes people died alone in their homes, no one to strap them down or phone their death into the CDC.

A Barney shambled along the street, an old man, eighty-five or ninety, sloped shoulders and sunken chest curled with wisps of white hair. His flaccid belly jiggled with his stiff-legged walk, toothless mouth gaping and his pee-soaked pajamas falling off his scrawny backside.

A second sheriff pulled up in front of the Barney. The competing headlights threw perpendicular shadows on the ground. The first SUV’s door opened and an officer stepped out, shotgun at port arms. He circled around the Barney, who had stopped as the second set of lights washed over him, circled until the other officer was free from his line of fire. In what could have been a replay of Harold’s movement earlier in the day the Sheriff took two quick steps, nestled the shotgun in the back of the old man’s head, and pulled the trigger.

Before the echoes rolled off down the street and the Barney’s frail body hit the pavement, Harold snapped the shutters down, not sure if he should get back in bed, knowing there’d be no more sleep tonight.

~

The next morning Harold slipped into his usual parking space at the plant. Val hadn’t woken when he’d told her goodbye. Or if so, she’d done a good job of hiding it, keeping her breathing slow and regular. He’d snipped a rose from one of the bushes out front and left it in a tumbler of water on the kitchen table with a scrawled “I love you,” on the back of an envelope.

Harold tucked his thermos under one arm, lunch box swinging from the same hand, when he saw Bert, one of the QC’s, striding across the parking lot. Bert’s fingers beat a rapid tattoo against his pant leg and the muscles in his jaw bunched like he was swallowing a pair of marbles.

“Knocking off already?” Harold smiled and squinted into the rising sun.

Bert unlocked the door to his Chrysler, his eyes feverish, burning in their sockets. “Knocking off for the rest of the week, Harold—shit I guess knocking off for good.”

“You’re quitting?” Bert’s time was as short as Harold’s.

“Not quitting,” Bert’s gaze skittered around the parking lot filling up for the morning shift. He nodded his head at the pebbled cement walls of the processing plant. “Listen, I got to get out of here before I do something stupid. Go talk to that sonofabitch yourself if you want the story. Tell Levi he better hope I don’t see him on the street. Kick his fucking teeth down his throat if I do,” his hands shook as he opened his car door. “Tell him that if you see him.”

~

“It can do the job, Harold. Don’t see why you’re so worked up.” Harold had button-holed Levi near the end of the wrapping line, packages of 8-piece fryers slipping along. A Barney stood at the line’s end, head jerking left to right as the packs rolled before him. “It’s not like I didn’t offer Bert another job—he’s just too proud to take it”

“Back on the gut crew—swilling out eviscerators at the end of the night, half as much money—what’d you think he would do?”

“It can do the job, watch,” Levi grabbed one of the shrink-wrapped packages off the rollers. He tore loose an edge of the cellophane, pulled a drumstick half out, and set it back on the conveyor. As the fryer crossed in front of the Barney his head jerked down and he snatched the damaged pack off the rollers, dropping it in a bin at his feet, his sunken, milky eyes unblinking as more clicked by. “Now why would we pay someone eighteen bucks an hour when we’ve got him?” He slapped the creature’s shoulder. “They’re just tools, Harold. If a business is going to make money you can’t be afraid of tools.”

“Christ, Levi, don’t you remember? It hasn’t been so long. Don’t you remember being boarded up in your own house, watching your friends, your family torn apart? Don’t you think about what they are—what they were?”

“It’s progress Harold. It’s the new order of business. People like you had their way we’d still be living in caves, shitting ourselves during a thunderstorm.”

He made a point of glancing at his wristwatch. “You been on the clock now for about half an hour? Maybe you ought to be worrying we aren’t training one of these guys to watch for green lights to go blinking off.”

Through the rest of his shift Harold fought to stay focused, watching the Z -crew as they gutted the chickens, but his mind hiked out on its own tangents. Had they really forgotten what brought these things forth? He raised the Mossberg and sighted along the backs of their heads. The regulators winked green at him over and over. What if they hadn’t found a way to control them in the first place? Would it have been better if they all burned?

Levi’s words echoed in his head. Maybe he ought to be worrying about his own job, never mind Bert’s. He was a secondary warning system, nothing but another set of eyes, where the technician in the control room leaning over the transponder board had the ability to turn the regulators on and off at will.

Harold straightened his leg from the stool, wincing at his knee. The Mossberg held five shells and he carried another twenty in his utility belt. He could shoot them all right now, walking along, firing and reloading. They wouldn’t blink. Each would keep pulling at its chicken guts until he put the barrel against their skull, squeezed the trigger. What would they do? Fire him, maybe charge him with destruction of property?

They’ve forgotten what they are, he thought.

The clean-ups come so easy in the middle of the night now, sanitary. Two cops in front of his house. The old Barney falling limp like a string-cut puppet. It’s like the entire world had forgotten.

He avoided Levi the rest of the day.

~

Val’s Honda was still in the driveway when Harold came home.

He threw back the deadbolts and stopped, one foot on the rug. The swamp cooler wasn’t running. The television wasn’t on. His breathing echoed through the still rooms, the heavy air.

“Val?” In the kitchen the water glass stood empty, a flower stem on the table and a small pile of petals on the floor. Beneath his scribbled note Val’s spiky, handwriting filled the bottom of the envelope.

––I’m so tired, Harold. Tired and sorry. I know I haven’t shown it but I never blamed you for Stephen. I just couldn’t say it to you. You did the right thing and you’ve carried that awful burden alone. I pray you’ll do the right thing again if you have to. With all my heart––

Harold read the note a second time, tracing fingertips across the words. “No, Val, you couldn’t have,” he whispered. “You wouldn’t do that to me.”

He couldn’t leave the kitchen. The rose petals were soft, wilted, curling in on themselves in the heat. The only dishes in the sink were his from this morning, a coffee cup—brown stained porcelain as he’d forgotten to rinse it—and a bowl and spoon with flecks of shredded wheat gluing them together. He filled a glass with lukewarm tap water and drank it down. Rinsing the coffee cup and bowl, he gazed out the window at the vegetable garden.

Stephen was down there, bones wrapped in down-filled nylon.

The second tumbler of water was cooler and he passed its cold curve across his forehead, hearing the faint pops and creaks of the old house as it expanded and eased in the evening warmth.

After what seemed hours, as cool blue shadows crept across the back yard, Harold opened the hall closet and grabbed the Remington pump, the one they’d left loaded by the front door through all these years after the Epidemic.

He walked heavily to the bedroom door, twisted the knob and cracked it open. With shades drawn tight the room was cave-dark, cooler than the rest of the house.

“You didn’t do this to me,” he whispered again, but the air in the room carried a sour undercurrent, vomit and urine. He took in Val’s still form, the comforter pulled to her armpits, the empty brown Valium bottle on the nightstand. She lay turned on her side, back to the door and one hand splayed on her thigh.

Harold eased himself onto the bed, shifting quietly as if he might wake her. He held the Remington awkwardly in his left hand and thumbed the safety off. With his right hand he grasped Val’s cold, slack fingers, interlaced them with his own.

He knew the accepted thing was to block the door and call the CDC, the police. They’d be out in minutes, zipping her up and whisking her away to the crematorium, but he also knew the virus had waned over the years. There was a better-than-even chance Val was dead, dead and gone. At some kind of peace now. He couldn’t bear the thought of some group of haz-matted strangers clomping through their house, tumbling her body into a rubber-lined bag.

“In the morning, Val. I’ll call them in the morning.” He closed his eyes and tried to conjure memories of their first days together, her quick step and the bright sparkle in her eyes.

The bedside clock read 11:45 when her fingers clenched hard on his. Her back arched and her heels drummed into his thigh.

“It’s alright,” he whispered, and canted the Remington across his chest, barrel pressing into her skull. He pulled the trigger before a sound could escape from her writhing lips.

Harold spent the night lying in the dark, ears ringing.

~

“Harold, didn’t you call in sick?” Sally at the front desk smiled at him as he stumbled by. “Jonas’s been on your shift three hours.”

“A bug, but I’m better now,” Harold mumbled. He stepped quick down the corridor to the locker rooms. How long before Sally phoned Levi and the little prick came snooping around for him?

In the echoing tile-floored locker room he tugged on his vest and pulled the Mossberg from its brackets, thumbing the red cartridges into the magazine. In his locker door’s seam he had tucked a photo of Val and Stephen, taken some twenty years before at Lake Powell. They both wore goofy, sunburned grins, squinting into the camera lens, framed by placid blue water and smooth sandstone cliffs.

“It’ll be okay,” he slipped the photo into his shirt pocket.

Would this make any real difference? Deep down he had the answer. One man can’t shift the world’s balance. But people needed to know—to remember what happened. He couldn’t be the only one who thought like that.