Best New Zombie Tales Trilogy (18 page)

Thoughts clashed in his mind, from the question of whether or not Wendy had returned to the real world and was even now trying to find help, to the idea that a reanimated corpse was driving cross-country with four boxes of god-knew-what, bound for his family.

Wings

JESSICA BROWN

I was sitting on my porch enjoying an unusually frosty September sunrise, coffee in hand, when the dead came back to life. At least I think it was then. I hadn’t noticed the weird stuff before those few minutes before the sun came up, but it was dark and I could be mistaken.

I don’t think I am, though.

The first thing I noticed was a rustling in the leaves under my half-dead apple tree. There were a few jerky movements and suddenly a head peeked up from under a wet brown clump of fallen foliage. It was a bird. I watched as it stretched out, clumsily regained its balance, and tried to fly. It couldn’t, its wings being nothing more than the hollowed quill-ends of feathers stuck precariously to fragile bone, and it soon fell over on its side in the exact same place it had reanimated. Only, at the time, I didn’t know it was a moving corpse. I just thought it was sick.

That’s why I jumped off the porch and went running to it, thinking my mind was playing tricks on me in the near dark. Maybe it had just fallen from a branch before I woke up, or had dropped out of the sky mid-flight. I found it quickly by following the wheezing gasps it made, its mouth open like a starving chick. I scooped it up and held it, cupped in the palms of my hands. No, there was no mistaking it. I could see bone in its wings and on its chest and half of its skull was showing. I screamed and went to drop it, but it clasped my fingers in its beak and held on tighter than I thought it should have been able to.

It broke the skin.

I shook it off and went flying back into the house, running my hands under hot water and scrubbing them god knows how many times. As I pressed a paper towel to the open cut I looked out the kitchen window. Shadow, my neighbor’s black Labrador, was walking down the street on her way to their house. Shadow had been dead since the early summer, hit by a carload of drunken college kids. Their daughter had screamed and thrown rocks at the disappearing car, and tried to half carry, half drag the dog home, but she’d died out there on the street. She’d been buried at the pet cemetery down the road. And now, here she was, most of her face worn down to the bone, and all the vertebrae of her tail exposed.

I saw the Stevensons’ front door open and their kid, Susie, come running out to see her dog. She was only five, and I doubt she even knew Shadow had been dead. I remember my mother telling me my hamster had “gone to heaven” when I was about that age and I can still recall the feeling of utter confusion I’d had since I hadn’t known where this place she was telling me about even was. Was it in Ohio, near Grandma’s house?

She was down by the end of the driveway before her parents got out the door and started following her, Shadow running around the corner of their yard. She was laughing and smiling and opened her arms wide, when the dog jumped up in a giant puppy hug––

And tore a chunk out of her shoulder. He got a bit of her neck too.

I grabbed some duct tape out of the junk drawer and wrapped it around the paper towel, sealing it off, and ran out the front door. Janet Stevenson was holding her daughter, screaming, kicking at the dog that was still howling and snapping its jaws. By the time I got across the lawn to them David, her husband, had come running around the garage with a shotgun under his arm. “Get away! Move back!” He raised the gun and fired and Shadow’s head came off. He fired a second time, and then a third, and finally a fourth until there wasn’t much left of the dog but pieces of fur and bits of bone and decomposing flesh. “Janet, get Susie in the house and call an ambulance!” He looked at first at my face, then my finger, which was seeping blood out from under the tape, and then back up to my face again. “You okay?”

I nodded.

“All right, help me out here then.”

I took a hose to the mess in front of his house, washing all the blood and junk down the street and into the drain at the corner. Once I was satisfied all traces of the dog were gone I rolled up the hose and walked into their house. God, my finger was aching. Susie was laying on the kitchen table in her underoos and a Doodlebops t-shirt, her bloody clothes in a pile beneath a chair. Janet was pressing a towel to the open wound across her shoulder. She was swearing quietly into the phone and her fingers were trembling. “David, it’s still busy.”

“What the hell? They have multiple lines for this kind of shit!”

Susie started to cry. “Mommy, it hurts. It hurts so bad… ”

Janet’s lip trembled. “I know, honey. I know. Just try to hold on for a little bit longer while we get you to a hospital, okay?” She was trying to sound reassuring but I could see she was holding back tears of her own.

David took the phone from her. “I’ll keep trying them. Get some good clothes on her and lay her down or something.” He looked at me. “Can you help her out? Thanks.”

I held Susie while Janet ran to get some clothes for her. I was cradling her, her eyes barely even open, when I noticed a strange feeling in my arm. Something was poking me. I turned her over slightly and noticed a strange bump on the back of her underpants. It was like something was growing out of her tailbone. “What the hell are you doing?” David hollered at me.

“Uh, nothing really.” His eyes were accusatory, burning holes into me as he glared. “I just––”

Janet came running down the hallway. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing, nothing. Shit! It’s still busy! It’s been busy for fifteen minutes straight. Honey, get her dressed and ready, we’re driving to the hospital.”

I left their house and went running down the street, my legs moving faster than they’d ever moved in my entire life. I slammed my front door behind me and locked it, then dead bolted it. I locked and secured every other door and window I had. I peeked out the window to the porch and saw a half-decomposed butterfly perched atop the coffee cup I’d left outside. It was missing an antenna and its wings were thin and transparent as tissue in places, nothing more than fragile colorless framework in others.

Scampering up my trees were a half dozen nearly skeletal squirrels, their bushy tails connected to bleached hipbones. Most of them didn’t have eyes left and I stood there, shocked, wondering how in the hell they could even make it up and around the boughs in the condition they were in. The worst part of all was the howling noise that came from the road up above my house. It was like a pack of wild dogs starving to death, prowling for food.

No, that’s exactly what it was. Little dogs, big dogs, the newly dead, the long-since-buried––they all came walking down my street. The pet cemetery had yielded up its charges and they were heading my way.

I watched the Stevensons’ car go flying out onto the highway and wondered if they’d seen the dogs that would no doubt be rounding my corner any moment now. I peeked through the window on my heavy front door and saw them, twenty or so, stop and look up at my house. I kept stock still, not even blinking, until they started walking again. Then I grabbed my little portable TV, my cell phone, and my laptop, and headed for my Panic Room.

It’s not really a Panic Room, to be honest. It’s just one of those attics accessible by yanking a cord in the ceiling of my walk-in closet, but I can remove the cord and lock it from the inside and nobody can get to me. It’s air-conditioned up there and I have a couch and some power outlets if I need them.

I’ve been holed up here for two days now. This is where I turned on the little TV and found that it wasn’t just the pet cemetery that had expelled its residents. It was every cemetery, every morgue. I saw footage of a half-burnt body walking from a crematorium on some late night show. People who haven’t evacuated to somewhere else (wherever that may be) have all been barricading themselves inside their homes, hoping to avoid contact with the dead.

They brought in a scientist on one of those shows, a molecular biologist I think they called her. She had some long-winded theory about viruses and saliva and mutating DNA and some other stuff. It seems a lot of people who came into contact with the dead have been changing, usually people who came into contact with non-human dead. Apparently whatever is causing the dead to move might also be causing bitten people’s DNA to change its structure to match the original host body. That would mean that little Susie, if she’s even still alive, probably has a tail by now. We’re all fucked.

I’m turning off the TV and I’m going to try to sleep now. I’ve been up for over forty-eight straight hours, living off ramen noodles, caffeine, and fear. I need to lie down. I don’t know if I’ll be able to sleep, though. My finger’s throbbing and my body is a mass of aches. I think I might have some sort of fever, and my shoulder blades hurt like hell.

The Man Who Breaks the Bad News

KEALAN PATRICK BURKE

“Samuel! Answer the door!” Linda shrieks and Sam levers himself out of the easy chair with a moan. The simplest of movements are beginning to feel too much like hard work these days and he longs for some peace, or at least a place where he can get some.

He opens the door and gives the well-dressed stranger on the stoop a suspicious glance. In this neighborhood, and with Sam’s increasing financial concerns, a man in a suit can only be the bearer of bad tidings.

Sam raises an eyebrow and flips through a mental index. Friday? What happened three days ago to warrant the interest of this dapper visitor? Nothing, he decides, unless it was some meager traffic violation—perhaps changing lanes where he shouldn’t or clipping a curb. But wouldn’t that have summoned the police? The man on the porch doesn’t look much like a cop. In fact, if anything he looks more like a mortician, dressed in a black three-piece suit and blue silk tie. His silver hair is pasted down on both sides of his gaunt skull, enhancing the impression of things funereal. Coral blue eyes glimmer with intelligence.

Definitely not a cop.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Thomas,” Sam says indignantly, hoping that his use of the man’s first name will be enough to offend him.

Wilder fishes a black leather wallet from his inside pocket and Sam has the terrible feeling he’s dealing with someone far more important than a cop.

F.B.I? C.I.A? I.R.S?
Uh-oh.

Wilder flips open the wallet, exposing his identification. Sam’s squints at the miniature rendition of the man’s face, a grim smile beneath a stern black acronym. “U.S.S.R.D? What the hell is
that?
You a Russian?”

The other man gives a patient sigh. “Mr. Bradley, let me put your mind at ease. I’m not here to arrest you or to issue any papers. You’re not in trouble, but it is important that we speak immediately and iron out a few… um… details.”

* * *

Sam opens the door. He isn’t surprised to see Wilder still standing there.

“What does U.S.S.R.D stand for? And before you get cocky, I’m only asking so I know what to tell the cops when they ask for specifics.”

“United States Special Retrieval Division. And calling the police wouldn’t do you any good. They are well aware of our operation and support it one hundred per cent.”

“Some nut,” he calls back and picks up the phone. He dials and waits patiently to be put through to the Harperville Police. Eventually a bored voice answers: “Sergeant Stapler speaking. How can I help you?”

“Sergeant Stapler. Hi, this is Sam Bradley on Oak Street.”

“Right,” Stapler says, sounding as if he has no idea who Sam is and doesn’t much care. “How can I help you, Sam?”

“Well, there’s a guy at my door harassing me. He’s an old guy, dressed in black. Says he’s from something called the United States Recuperation Department or something.”

“Yes?”

Sam frowns. “He says I’m dead!”