Best New Zombie Tales Trilogy (14 page)

Kirk threw himself at the front door, fumbled with the knob, threw it open, and stumbled through the screen door. He could not get out of the house fast enough. He heard Natalie laughing again, until Mrs. Kobylka closed the front door.

The Durango was parked in front of the house, and when he saw it, Kirk broke into a run.

- TEN -

1.

Officer McCready never returned with further questions for Kirk, Randy, or Liz about the disappearance of Natalie’s body. The
Record Searchlight
hinted at a connection between the brutal murder of convicted drug dealer Wyatt Parks and Natalie’s disappearance, but gave no details.

Dad called Bobby and learned that the Sheriff’s Department was baffled. At first, they’d sweated Dicky Parks, but he had a solid alibi. Forensic technicians found on Wyatt Parks’ mutilated body necrotic tissue specimens foreign to his DNA. The tissue was found to have come from a decaying human corpse. Because Natalie’s body had been stolen from the Richmond Funeral Home recently, the tissue was checked against DNA material taken from Natalie Gilbert’s hairbrush, and there was a match. Natalie Gilbert’s corpse had been on Wyatt Parks, or Wyatt Parks had been on the corpse, on or around the time of his death. When questioned about it, Dicky was able to account for every second of his time the night Natalie Gilbert’s body had disappeared, and he had witnesses. Someone in forensics got the bright idea of checking the bite marks on Parks with Natalie Gilbert’s dental records. Another match, but this time it made no sense at all. Natalie Gilbert was already dead––she could not have bitten Wyatt Parks. Had someone manipulated her body to make it appear she had?

They did not have the answers yet, but they had plenty of questions, and a deputy came by one day to ask a few. He asked Kirk if Natalie had been friends with Dicky or Wyatt Parks. Kirk said he and Natalie knew them, but weren’t close. He said Natalie had tried to help Dicky get a job when he dropped out of high school, but he hadn’t been interested.

Randy and Liz told the deputy the same thing.

After that, the Sheriff’s Department lost interest in them.

2.

Mom worked miracles with the house, particularly Kirk’s bedroom, and the pool-house. It took her a few days––she even took a couple days off work to do it––but she got rid of the smell. She never mentioned it to Kirk, or anyone else. For Mom, that took considerable effort––she loved nothing more than having a good cleaning-disaster story to tell.

Dad said he’d told her “a version of the truth.” He said he would be surprised if she ever brought it up.

By the end of the week, the Christmas tree was up and the house smelled of the silvertip pine.

3.

Kirk and Randy and Liz continued to spend time together, although that time slowly decreased. They enjoyed the Wyatt-weed, usually before going to a movie together. In the car, they played music. They didn’t talk much anymore. Or maybe they simply said more when they talked, and talked less.

June came, and they graduated, and suddenly they were no longer students for the first time in twelve years.

They slowly grew apart that summer. Randy got a job at a large hardware store and lumberyard. Liz went to Eureka early and found an apartment with a roommate––she’d decided to take a couple classes at Humboldt during the summer to familiarize herself with the campus. Kirk did not do much of anything that summer.

Kirk saw Randy now and then and he was worried about him because he was drinking a lot. Too much. They saw Liz in early August and were surprised by how skinny she was––she had lost at least twenty pounds she could not afford to lose, because Liz was a very slender girl. Kirk suspected she had developed an eating disorder, but it never came up in their brief conversation.

Kirk did not sleep much. When he did sleep, he heard Baltazar’s shrieking, piglet-like squeal and Natalie’s endless screams. He saw the bird tearing her puckered nipples from her deflated breasts, eating her filmy eyeballs. The Wyattweed helped, while it lasted.

One evening in early August, while Kirk was playing a game on his computer, Dad came to his room.

“Have you decided what you want to do with yourself, Kirky?” he asked. “You can take some classes at Shasta College, or get a job––whatever you want.”

“I want to be able to sleep again.”

“You will. It’ll just take time. Meanwhile, you’ve got to get back on your feet. You’ll be living with this the rest of your life.”

“Randy’s drinking a lot. I think Liz is bulimic, or something. I’m just… numb.”

“Then you’ve got to snap out of it now while you still can,” Dad said. “Mom and I are worried about you. Even Kevin has noticed something is wrong.”

“I keep thinking… what else is going on out there that I don’t know about?”

Dad frowned. “What do you mean?”

“Mrs. Kobylka really
is
a witch who can raise the dead. Zombies are real. So what
else
is true that I’ve been laughing at my whole life? Are there space aliens? Werewolves? Vampires?”

“Kirk, you can’t think that way. It’ll make you sick. You’ve got your future to think about. Whatever Mrs. Kobylka did, whatever that was, it was… wrong, unnatural. If it weren’t, we’d all be doing it. It’s not a part of our lives, it has nothing to do with our world, so there’s no reason for you even to think about it. What happened… just think of it as a bad dream. Put it behind you. And do it quickly. Because if this keeps up… well, you won’t be able to get any counseling, because you can’t tell anyone what’s bothering you. You have to snap out of this, Kirk, because you don’t have a choice.”

The next day, Kirk went to Rite-Aid and bought a picture frame. At home, he put on some music he and Natalie had liked. He found a picture of himself and Natalie taken at a spring dance. He put the picture in the frame and placed it on his bedstand.

He started looking for a job. He got a catalog of the classes being offered at Shasta College and browsed through it.

He went to bed every night hoping he would be able to sleep. But he did one thing differently.

He closed and locked his window every night, the window Natalie used to climb through to come to bed with him. Kirk could not help wondering how many dead pets were wandering through the night, how many dead loved ones were shuffling around with an insatiable hunger to feed. It did not feel safe to leave the window open anymore. He no longer knew what was out there.

Feeding Frenzy

MATT HULTS

The restaurant stood less than forty feet away, small and unimpressive in comparison to the encompassing forest landscape, but also the blackest thing in sight on an otherwise bright and sunny day.

Ron parked the rental car just outside the entrance to the parking lot, pulling to a stop amid a small pile of animal bones that crunched beneath the tires.

He switched off the engine. “Not exactly the first impression I was hoping for,” he said.

Beside him, Greg seemed undeterred. Minus his beer-gut and his rapidly receding hairline, the older man looked like a six-year-old kid on a jackpot Christmas morning. “Don’t worry about it,” he replied. “They told me the property was a little messy. Look at the building, though! Are you sure this is the right address?”

Ron nodded to the realty sign standing to the left. “This is the place, all right.”

“Jeez… It’s in great shape!”

Maybe, maybe not
, Ron thought, but he decided to hold his tongue. They were already falling into their usual mode of operation, Greg seeking out the sweet deal while Ron remained ever-watchful for the lemon that could sour it.

They got out of the car.

Outside, the smell of dry oak leaves instantly enveloped them. Ron drew in a long breath of it, cleansing the stink of the rental company’s pine-scented air freshener from his sinuses. He glanced behind them, to the dirt lane that tethered the old restaurant to the highway, frowning at the distance. It couldn’t have measured more than fifty yards in length—he spotted traffic blinking between the trees—but the silence here made it seem immeasurably farther than it looked.

“It’s kind of out-of-the-way, don’t you think?” he asked.

Greg had already reached the building and was tugging at the locked doors. He glanced over his shoulder. “Are you kidding? This is a prime location. We’re surrounded by farmland and national forest. We’ll get all the traffic between Brainerd and Clearwater Creek. Cut down some of those trees and we can put up a sign that’ll practically be on the highway!”

Farmland and forest
, Ron thought, but again he kept his comments to himself.

“The realtor must be running late, huh?” Greg asked. He cupped both hands over his face and leaned forward, trying to find a chink in the plywood armor that covered the building’s windows.

Ron strolled across the lot. He studied the dimensions of the restaurant, guessing that the original owner had attempted to emulate the layout of a traditional fast-food business but with a slightly higher-scale motif, to set it apart from the larger chains that dominated North America’s roadways.

He’d never seen a fast-food joint with a black slate-shingled roof and widow’s walk. Or wrought iron lampposts shaped to resemble a cluster of entwined tentacles. Still, despite its unorthodox appearance, Ron thought the building looked good and sturdy. That, coupled with the rock-bottom price tag, opened a world of possibilities for improvements. Nevertheless, he didn’t want to get too excited too fast.

Focused as he was on the drive-thru, Greg had failed to notice the giant hole in the wall of trees beyond the restaurant, or the enormous four-lane road that extended off the parking lot, stretching to a pinpoint in the far depths of the surrounding forest.

Greg gaped at the sight. “Holy, shit!” he laughed. “And you were worried about being too far from the highway!”

Ron ignored the comment and approached the road. A gust of wind ushered a group of dead leaves across the concrete, but, other than that, the vast avenue appeared as vacant as a desert wasteland.

They headed back toward the car. Ron let Greg lead the way, lingering behind just long enough to cast one last glance at the unusual forest road. They’d walked only a short distance, but from his new perspective he noted how the trees shielded it from sight, the branches interlacing overhead, enclosing it like a tunnel.

Greg threw a hand against his chest, halting him in his tracks.

“God bless the locals!” his friend said. Then, before Ron had a chance to get his meaning, the man resumed walking, stealthily adding, “Be a pal and let the single guy do the talking… ”

Ron followed his line of sight to where he spotted the realtor exiting her vehicle.

Dwarfed by the SUV she’d arrived in, the petite young woman looked in need of a climbing harness to get from the driver’s seat to the ground. On the contrary, she moved with an athletic grace, seeming to flow from one position to the next. Out in the open, her long blonde hair caught the full radiance of the sun, contrasting with the black material of her pants and jacket, which hugged the trim contours of her body.

He thought of Diane back home, so far away, knowing that if they did indeed buy the restaurant he’d become a local himself for the first several months of operation, overseeing the renovation and training all the staff.

Ahead of him Greg looked back, twitched his eyebrows.

Ron shook his head and followed.

This is business
, he opened his mouth to say before the other man was out of earshot, but stopped short when his gaze once again shifted to the girl. She still stood next to the open door of her sport utility, a blatant expression of perplexity creasing the skin across her brow. Her full attention remained focused straight ahead, staring at the restaurant, and she didn’t even notice Greg approaching until he’d closed within the last ten feet of her.

She spun to face him as if suddenly realizing she was in the shadow of a grizzly bear.

“We’ll take it!” Greg declared before she had a chance to say anything.

Ron watched the look of fear mix with another fleeting flash of bewilderment, and then she was laughing with embarrassment. Her voice sounded melodic in the open woodland air.